So, the last episode of the comic book stylised, guns and girls touting tale of mis-adventure known as ‘Tainted Love’ dropped on Thursday 6^th June (we covered the first episode here and the Tainted Love website can be found here). Tainted Love is brought to us by powerhouse studio Machinima which boasts over 7 million subscribers on YouTube (indeed, Machinima’s various channels gave it the fourth most subscribers on the site as of December 2012). Machinima focus primarily on video game based content and is behind such shows as Portal referencing ‘Aperture R&D’ (which we talked about here) and nerd zombie survival show, ‘Bite Me’.

Written by ex MADtv writer and performer, Orlando Jones (who also produces and stars as Barry, a.k.a ‘Black Berry’), Tainted Love blends the broad comedy stylings of the ‘heavily put upon sensible guy’ together with a highly stylised graphic novel approach ala feature film, ‘Scott Pilgrim Vs The World’. It certainly had a promising start. The budget seemed sizable enough to fully realise the aspirations of a living comic book, and the self confident swagger of the show strutted around like a peacock that has just won the sexiest tail feather award at the Universal Bird Contest. So, did it manage to maintain this high standard?

Kind of. The problem throughout the 6 episode run of Tainted Love was that of consistency, especially in the characterisation. If the first episode was to be believed then Barry was a normal guy comfortable in the low levels of criminality. After finding out that he was going to soon be the father of a tiny human courtesy of recently pregnant girlfriend, Jezabel, they both decide to try to rob a convenience store. The abject failure of this attempt appeared to indicate that the show would contain good-natured but ineffectual japes towards the general aim of getting some green.

Episode two (‘Baby Got Back’) starts with a well acted and comfortable scene between Barry and Jezabel involving a belly button bagel that helped instil some genuine affection for these characters. But the tone takes a major shift once the first death splatters across the camera with great galloping geysers of blood; courtesy of Jezabel’s rather illogical plan to steal from Barry’s dangerous crime lord boss, Lucas. When, in later episodes, Barry is inexplicably revealed to be an utterly lethal bullet slinging hard-ass it somewhat detracts from the genuinely funny ineffectiveness that was established in episode one.

That isn’t to say that this alternative approach isn’t also funny, because it is. However the type of humour pivots wildly like a swingball set in a hurricane. On the one hand there is some sharp dialogue and writing. I particularly enjoyed Barry’s habit of talking himself in knots, such as in a Mexican standoff moment where, whilst holding his gun in the mouth of the guard in front of him (but conscious of the gunman behind him) he confidently states, “He may have his dick in my ass, but I got my dick in your MOUTH,” before pausing to admit the stupidity of what he had just said. I also loved the flash ‘biographies’ of characters that decorate the screen briefly when a character is introduced, such as ‘Tiny Tim’ (Fun Facts: ex-male stripper, only has one nipple). Such info blasts show some thought has gone into rounding out the bit part players in Tainted Love, even if most of them do get punctured by bullets and spurt copious amounts of blood only moments later.

I think my biggest problem with Tainted Love is that it focuses so much of its energy on being cool (think Pulp Fiction causal violence meets Scott Pilgrim style animation overlays). While the show is undoubtedly very cool, unfortunately the humour element ends up taking a back seat with each episode ending painfully abruptly. This is a huge shame, because Tainted Love is very funny when it remembers to try. Not only does the dialogue mostly sparkle (including some great ‘I’m a black guy, she’s a white girl’ stereotype riffs), but in addition the combination of stylisation, groove heavy music, kinetic directing and great comic timing performances (including a superb bad guy from actor Eric Roberts and one hell force to be reckoned with in actress Deanna Russo) make for a thoroughly well put together package. If Jones could just double up the actual jokes then this show could fully live up to its potential, but despite being a slight disappointment Tainted Love is still tons of fun and I highly recommend you tune in.

Tainted Love – Episode 2: Baby Got Back