In signing up its newest artist to create original TV programming, Amazon has accomplished the seemingly impossible: This week, Woody Allen is trending.
Fans of the 79-year-old auteur noted with alarm that Allen topped the charts on Twitter’s list of hot topics. But it wasn’t obits that were lighting up the circuits.
Out of nowhere, Allen and Amazon Prime’s streaming service announced they had cut a deal for Allen to create a full season of his first-ever TV series. Allen, who doesn’t even watch television, joked in a press release that he had no ideas for the show.
Here’s one: The most radical, surprising, career-renewing choice Allen could make would be to go back to square one. Woody, dare to be funny again.
As a kid, Allen used to come up with dozens of jokes a week just walking home from school. He started sending them to newspaper columnists under a pseudonym (his real name is Allan Stewart Konigsberg) so that the knuckleheads in class wouldn’t know about his comedy career.
His beatnik-era Greenwich Village comedy routines (reissued this week under the title “The Stand Up Years”) are surreal and hilarious, as are his first five films.
Being funny came so easily to Allen that he got bored with it, which is why he moved on to serious dramas and more reflective and mature films about relationships.
Lately, when he has returned to comedy he has often repeated himself: Colin Firth’s misanthropic magician in Allen’s latest film, last year’s “Magic in the Moonlight,” recalled the curmudgeon Allen wrote for Larry David to play in 2009’s “Whatever Works.”
Also in “Moonlight, a scene in which the bantering couple played by Firth and Emma Stone takes refuge from a sudden storm inside an observatory is a virtual copy of a scene in which Allen and Diane Keaton duck out of the rain and into the Hayden Planetarium in “Manhattan.”
So Woody obviously doesn’t have a problem returning to well-trodden ground.
If you’re going to repeat yourself, why not repeat some of your very best material? Why not go back and riff on a the future again, as in “Sleeper,” or on dimwitted criminals, as in “Take the Money and Run”? Fielding Mellish’s career doing ridiculous odd jobs in New York in the opening scenes of “Bananas” could be its own TV show.
Allen usually casts a dewy young ingénue (typically matched with a much older man) in his movies, which is one of the things that’s so played-out about them.
If he really wants to recapture the spirit of youth, the way to do it is to get back in touch with his absurdist side, the freewheeling nuttiness of a chain gang where “the men got one hot meal a day — a bowl of steam” (“Take the Money and Run”) or a coward who says, “I was beaten up by Quakers” (“Sleeper”).
As “Annie Hall” famously informed us, a relationship is like a shark — it has to keep moving or it dies. If Allen wants to keep his relationship with the audience alive, he should move on to something genuinely new and exciting and even daring — being hilarious again.