All due respect to the Notre Dame band and the decades of tradition of playing the “1812 Overture” before the fourth quarter at home games, but there has never been as rewarding a use of Tchaikovsky’s best-known work as the opening moments of “It’s A Disaster.”
There is a risk here, invoking a movie named “It’s A Disaster” to lead off a column on Notre Dame in the midst of a 3-3 season, but skip over those all-too obvious hollerings. Instead, delight in the wonderfully-written comedy starring Julia Stiles, David Cross and America Ferrera being available on Peacock.
If a sitcom fan insists “Frasier” never wasted a line, then “It’s A Disaster” does not waste so much as a word. The script is crafted more tightly than Adrian Monk’s nerves would be if conversing with Sam Malone after a date night, but for one flaw, the one repeated college football reference.
Writer and director Todd Berger clearly is not a college football fan, despite graduating from Texas. When four couples meet for brunch on a Sunday, only to be trapped amid a litany of friendship-compromising conversations due to a, well, disaster, there should be no need for anyone to worry about the score of a Texas Longhorns game. And circa 2013, absolutely no one would have been insisting, “I bet this game is so good, too.”
Three years later and turn brunch into a cocktail hour, then perhaps the men avoiding relationship conflicts could have been checking the score of Notre Dame’s trip to Texas, a 50-47 Irish loss in 2016.
Then again, delaying the movie another four years would have made one of its best lines even more untenable, “Who still has a landline?” “It’s for faxing.”
Berger could not have even intended his black comedy to be set in 2016, given the Irish-Longhorns matchup was not moved to a Sunday primetime showing until a few months beforehand. Nonetheless, from the moment the “1812 Overture” is cut short, this movie alone is worth subscribing to Peacock.
Oh, and Notre Dame’s game against UNLV on Saturday (2:30 ET) is available exclusively via Peacock.
A date this summer asked this scribe to name a favorite movie she would not have heard of. There was no hesitation in suggesting “It’s A Disaster.” That naturally led to watching it the next week, paying $4.99 to buy it via Amazon because this fool did not do proper research.
Turns out, it was on Peacock, which costs just $4.99/month. The only thing dumber would have been putting $65 on Texas in 2013.
A quick sidebar: This column is taking far longer to write than expected because, obviously, “It’s A Disaster” is playing in the background, and the laughs are too delightful and frequent to allow for a writing rhythm.
This is the second year in a row one of Notre Dame’s games is exclusively available on Peacock. That should not be viewed as a disaster; that is a reality of 2022.
Realized this can't be done preemptively b/c the vast majority of those 131 don't have many times/TV broadcasts set yet.
— Douglas Farmer (@D_Farmer) August 16, 2022
But all 14 SEC teams play on ESPN+ this season, with four of them doing so the first week of the year.
Oklahoma upgraded to ESPN+ this year; no more PPV. https://t.co/wLUop0oWpo
Signing up for Peacock need not be a worry, even if you unfortunately canceled your subscription since April’s Blue-Gold Game. All you have to do is click …
THIS LINK RIGHT HERE IN THE BIG BOLD FONT.
Then go download the Peacock app on your respective viewing device just as you would with any other streaming app, like you did with NBA League Pass in order to watch the Minnesota Timberwolves’ season opener on Wednesday.
If wanting to support Irish junior running back Chris Tyree, go ahead and join the Chris Tyree Membership Program, which delivers its members six months of Peacock Premium, in addition to some Tyree-specific perks, part of the NBC Sports Athlete Direct NIL initiative.
What devices and platforms are supported by Peacock?
Assuredly, no corporate overlord expected this year’s “Download Peacock” column to focus on a movie that includes the line, “Y’all have enough rat poison to kill Chuck-E-Cheese.” So take the fact that this was the chosen approach to be the loudest and strongest endorsement of the 89 minutes of laughs, despite that college-football oversight.
It even understands “The Wire,” slipping in a dig on season five, but that’s not a Peacock property, so let’s skip past that.
“Cheers” is, so is “Yellowstone,” though working in a subtle reference to Kevin Costner’s TV-turn might have made this column a bit more violent than would be appropriate. Not to mention “The Office.”
This probably should have been a @peacockTV slogan from Day One ... https://t.co/hfKEHu6yRE
— Douglas Farmer (@D_Farmer) September 6, 2022
Please, Irish fans, take this praise of a little-known, decade-old comedy and do not twist its title into a Notre Dame football commentary. There is a difference between the disaster of the Irish losing to Stanford and the disaster of a brunch devolving as the world begins to end.
“Things are going to degrade very quickly” might apply to Notre Dame football, but then the fast-acting developments of this flick dial things up a bit beyond anything seen on the gridiron. “The rules of society are going to break down. Your life is going to be in the hands of the people you can trust.”
It has been a personal accomplishment not to spoil “It’s A Disaster” in this argument for subscribing to Peacock. Robbing you of the joy of hearing how it ends might risk your psychological fulfillment, a concept you’ll hear about in the first moments of the movie, just as the “1812 Overture” is cut off.
UPDATE: Berger intended for the script to be on a Saturday, but ...
This is a top notch article👇 (also a little behind-the-scenes trivia. The script is set on a Saturday, but one of the actors ad-libbed it was Sunday and we liked the take so much we just kept it in.) https://t.co/DOSi5TVfa1
— Todd Berger (@thetoddberger) October 22, 2022
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