The Spoils of Babylon
The Spoils of Babylon
| 09 January 2014 (USA)
The Spoils of Babylon Trailers

It is intended to be a spoof of the epic-scale "TV event" miniseries (such as The Thorn Birds and Rich Man, Poor Man) prevalent on American network television in the 1970s and 80s.

Reviews
Alicia I love this movie so much
Konterr Brilliant and touching
Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life
AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,
Charles Herold (cherold) This parody of old TV romance mini-series has been described as an extended SNL sketch, but I'd actually describe it as an extended Carol Burnett Show sketch in style. They did a lot of these sorts of parodies (most famously a Gone with the Wind sketch), and the broad humor and general silliness remind me more of Burnett than SNL.What makes it more like SNL is that, like SNL, it's really not very funny. There are certainly cute moments, but there's a sophomoric quality to the humor that fails to resonate. Also, while the cast is fairly talented, for most of them this isn't their wheelhouse. These are not Burnett/Conway/Lawrence-style actors, and the very broad writing isn't pushed through by the subtler performance style.Humor is a very individual thing, and for some people this show is hilarious. For me, well, one user review said this show was a poor version of a series I'd never heard of, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which also parodied an old, badly-made series, and I found the first episode of that on youtube. I watched just a few minutes of it and laughed more than during the entire first episode of Spoils (I was almost breathless during the handshake scene). So basically the best thing that came out of watching this is I learned about something a lot funnier.
Lani Parker This show had such promise; promise to be a great stupid comedy, the first great stupid comedy. At first, it was working well. The Eric Jonrosh intros/outros were on the beat and the over the top funny or die style humor of the acting and plot points were eliciting real laughs.However, the ridiculousness of the frame story (not the Jonrosh bookends, but the Devon Morehouse framing) and overemphasized jokes soon wear on the nerves. By episode 3 I was no longer laughing. I stuck it out through all 6 episodes in the hope that it would improve, but beyond a chuckle here and there at jokes that somehow managed to be funny it never really did.The funny or die format may work for 3 minute shorts, but extended out into a 3 hour miniseries it becomes tedious.
mocrash Any fan of the Abraham-Zucker-Zucker send-ups who hated pretentious '70s mini-dramas should find some amusement in "The Spoils of Babylon." There's a ridiculousness to the entire project, including its heavy promotion, that plunges deeply into absurdity. This is parody that produces chuckles rather than guffaws, and the humor is in the details. Effort was expended to make every scene excessively cheesy, although when sustained at this extreme level can dull the senses. An excellent cast can be commended for executing such ludicrous material in the straight deadpan manner required.This is a show that doesn't work for those needing their satire to be clever or witty. Instead, TSOB bludgeons the viewer with the preposterous, from the overblown melodramatic dialog to the intentionally fake props and special effects to the blatant references to previous directorial styles.To best appreciate TSOB, take it at face value and don't expect more than what it is, which is unadulterated spoof without refinement or sophistication.
sheepgrazing Don't waste your time watching this crap I was looking forward to this and was BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with the level of garbage that this show is. I would give it a negative score if it would let me. I have never seen these actors in such awful shows and will never look at them the same again ......stupid, ......childish, ......unadulterated crap ......and then they throw in the inference of incest ....that was enough for me to delete it. I really don't get the American humour. School kids could probably do better. I hope they didn't spend too much money making this tripe. Please excuse me now while I go and scoop my eyeballs and brain out with a melon-baller to try and remove this garbage from my memory.