Ready for ‘Flight’: Bret and Jemaine are back to rock the party, even without their instruments.
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A bigger hit, in its small but world-spanning way, than I am sure anyone connected with the show expected it to be, “ Flight of the Conchords” is finally back for a second season on HBO.
The series, which spent 2008 replenishing its tanks, tells the story of Bret ( Bret McKenzie) and Jemaine ( Jemaine Clement), a New Zealand folk-rock-pop-rap-soul duo seeking fame, or at least a paying gig, in the city of New York, New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere; but they can’t make it there, or anywhere.
Mixing the ironic whimsicality of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ with the premise and structure of ‘The Monkees,’ filtered through a downtown New York sensibility, ‘Conchords’ was twice as delightful when it landed for being so completely unexpected and unpredictable. It ended its first season with a sort of cliffhanger -- which would have worked as well as an ending -- in which Bret and Jemaine split the band into two, each with a new partner, who then quit them to form their own group, the Crazy Dogggz, which became internationally famous. The Flight of the Conchords, meanwhile, are all but abandoned by their manager Murray (Rhys Darby) and their single obsessed fan, Mel (Kristen Schaal).