The thing about spin-offs — if there even is such a thing, if they’re even worth thinking about for more than a few seconds before we get on with our lives — is that they are often in no way thematically, chronologically, or canonically linked to their media of origin, so that while, superficially, the sequel or prequel may seem a distant cousin of the spin-off, the latter is even more shamelessly exploitative in nature than you could ever imagine. A spin-off is more often than not the result of a character or characters from a given show, show-within-a-show, particular episode of a show, or particular skit or segment within a variety-themed show having “tested well” during the original run of that show. So, once the success of a pilot ensures that a given series will run for a given number of months, there still remains the distinct possibility of more garbage spinning off from that trash bin. In this formulation, every potentially forgettable episode of every potentially doomed television show is, in an extranarrative sense, a kind of sub-pilot, prime examples being The Simpsons, which originated as a series of animated segments on the long-forgotten Tracey Ullman Show, and Beavis and Butt-Head, spining off from, you guessed it, Liquid Television.
The Trip, an extraordinarily arbitrary exercise in an already arbitrary genre, saw its metastasization in a violently unrelated project: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom’s “meta-adaptation” of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which Coogan describes in the film as a postmodern novel written long before there was anything modern “to be post- about.” Now, presumably because those scenes in the film featuring the B-celeb bickering of semi-fictionalized “loser” versions of Steve Coogan and Rob Byrdon — Coogan also did this in Coffee and Cigarettes; the joke is never funny because both actors are obviously highly successful — tested well, specifically the now infamous “Duelling Al Pacino Impressions” sequence featured in the film’s closing credits, Winterbottom and the two funnymen saw fit to devote an entire BBC comedy series to meta-Brydon and meta-Coogan’s embedded extranarrative exploits. However, since Americans don’t watch British television, the six-episode series was whittled down to a 90-minute film.
The sad but unsurprising tragedy of The Trip is that its only worthwhile sequence, “Duelling Michael Caine Impressions” — in turn, a spin-off of a spin-off or, if you prefer, a spin-off-within-a-spin-off of the aforementioned Pacino sequence — can and has been widely viewed on YouTube. In fact, you can view it right here. I’ll give you a minute… alright, so that’s pretty much it: what remains is a bit of a trainwreck. Much in the same sense that the final six seasons of Sex and the City were essentially pornography for viewers who enjoyed hearing four stock characters saying stock character-ish things, The Trip is really little more than an excuse to see Coogan and Brydon riff on each other and do voices. Mind you, they’re great voices but… parlor tricks do not a film make.
Save for a handful of banters that only vaguely reach the comedic heights of a 100-second internet meme, the The Trip comprises scene after scene of “spin-off filler,” those many various miserable excuses for “plot” and “character” that pepper the most obscenely exploitative spin-offs, like the underwrought “troubled relationship” (girlfriend, estranged son, etc.) sequences, carried off with a nonchalance of which only non-actors like Coogan are capable. At other times, the film/series turns into an unappetizing parody of a travel-themed Food TV series. And for a certain demographic of middle-aged Americans, such series are a kind of pornography. So… er… in conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY.
