Sprung: Season One
May 5, 2023 2:01 PM - Season 1 (Full Season) - Subscribe

Greg Garcia (My Name Is Earl, Raising Hope) returns with another show about dirtbags with (somewhat) hearts of gold. This time, it's some ex-felons who get released in the early days of the pandemic and get to stealing from bad people.

Jack (Garret Dillahunt) is a criminal savant. Gloria (Shakira Barrera) is a con woman. Rooster (Philip Garcia) is a fuckup, but his mom Barb (Martha Plimpton) has a house. Together, they put together a plan to steal from a Congresswoman who's insider-trading, insurance-frauding, and generally horrible.

"It’s still a solid blend of coarse, lowbrow humor and well-executed sentiment, featuring a great ensemble cast. Sprung also, it must be warned, has a COVID-19 backdrop and mostly uses the pandemic for humor." -- Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter

"You might not love Sprung, but maybe that’s OK. In a world full of deadly germs, economic hardship and nasty congresspeople, sometimes being OK is good enough." -- Marah Eakin, IndieWire

"[Garcia] somehow gives characters like Jack a conscience that feels organic and not just a ploy." == Joel Keller, Decider

Sprung streams in the US via FreeVee on Amazon.
posted by Etrigan (8 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I like both of those shows, and Garret Dillahunt is going to be one of the great character actors of this [gestures widely] generation. Or already is. I dig the premise, too. Thanks for spotting this!
posted by rhizome at 5:30 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]


Loved My Name is Earl and Raising Hope. I hated Dillahunt's characters in Deadwood so much (not just one character! Two totally loathesome characters!) it took the better part of the first season of Raising Hope for me to stop disliking him on sight.

Definitely need to check this out. Hadn't heard anything about it before seeing this on Fanfare...
posted by jzb at 10:35 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


The premise reminds me of "Knights Of Prosperity", a one-season wonder from 2007 about some blue-collar folks who team up to plan a robbery of a rich person's NYC penthouse.

The working title of the show was "Let's Rob Mick Jagger".
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:45 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Greg Garcia makes good TV, and this is no exception… just watched the first episode and it is great, now have to resist binging them all tomorrow night….
posted by rozcakj at 8:34 PM on May 14, 2023


Um, how do I watch this? I can't seem to find episodes, just the front page. Seems to only be for people with press credentials and a login?
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:38 PM on May 21, 2023


Perhaps this will work.
posted by Etrigan at 6:24 PM on May 21, 2023


Thank you, on it now!

I'm so weirded out that Garrett and Virginia are NOT a couple in this one. It feels like reshuffled Raising Earl, or something like that. (I guess Greg Garcia Has A Type in show tastes.)
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:25 PM on May 21, 2023 [1 favorite]


Okay, I finished it and I really enjoyed it. Greg Garcia clearly has a certain sort of style/types he goes for (cheerful/sweet/dumb criminals), but he makes it work. I liked that Jack was somewhat smarter than average on that topic, between getting some kind of degree and learning from other inmates.

This obviously didn't get a second season, but it wraps up well with fitting happy endings for everyone, and that's adorable. I thought the plotlines involving Barb's Internet dude and Jack's confronting the guy who sent him to jail in particular went well. Wiggles and Rooster were adorabdumb and it worked. Barb and Stan getting sexy? Surprise also worked.

About the only thing that didn't work chemistrywise was Jack and Gloria--never saw it--but whatever, it didn't have to work out there.

The show is what I'd call pandemic-light--it remembers one is going on periodically but most of the time everyone's running around like normal---but then you'd occasionally get giant bubbles or something like that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:17 PM on May 28, 2023


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