Hacker Cinema
Portlandia
2011 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 8 seasons
Created by Jonathan Krisel, Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein
Satirical sketch comedy set and filmed in Portland, Oregon that explores the eccentric misfits who embody the foibles of modern culture.
4 positive3 negative1 mixed26 neutralfrom 34 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
34 comments on Hacker News
I'm reminded of that episode of Portlandia where the mayor was obsessed with thinking the city was bigger and more important than it actually is.
Krazam is legendary. This first Public Memories episode feels like a cross between Portlandia and Silicon Valley. Looking forward to seeing more!
youtubeTV in my area has a Portlandia channel, non-stop on a loop. Always thought it was strange that was the only marathon channel.
It is nice not to have to pick an episode.
I agree with this entirely, and I think if you've watched some of his other shows you'll understand why. Some of the most consistently funny, well cast comedy on TV has had him behind it. Kids In The Hall, 30 Rock, A.P. Bio, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Documentary Now!, Portlandia and so on and so on.
I'm sure he's quite a handful to deal with, but whatever that entails the end result of his presence on a project is that the project is often a good idea and well run. Don't get me wrong, he's had his money grabs and failed concepts, but the sheer number of hits he's involved with boggles the mind. He's willing to put money behind concepts few others even consider.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
I’ve never successfully made it through a full episode of either Portlandia or Silicon Valley because they’re both just too real for me not in a good way.
Whenever I hear her, I can't help but visualize her as that nerdy girl who appeared in a few Portlandia episodes:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CA-heIfsJ0g/maxresdefault.jpg
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTc2NDg5ODAzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTg1NzY1NDE@._V1_.jpg
That style of speech is deeply engraved to match that personality type in my mind.
I don't think it's really about their audio engineering. NPR just selects for voices that are quirky to signal that they're outside more mainstream journalism.
It's Malcom Gladwell so take it with a grain of salt, but his episode on The Satire Paradox was great:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-satire-paradox
The premise is that despite Satire being an attempt at speaking truth to power, the people who are targets of satire will often think to themselves "I get that it's satire, but don't they make good points".
I don't know that I've actually seen this in real life, but he mentioned lots of conservatives liked the Colbert Report because despite knowing it was making fun of them, they agreed with the messages. I've seen this with myself in Portlandia. I live in Portland, and while I'm not a stereotype of a hipster, I moved to Portland for the "reasons people move to Portland" and I often find Portlandia sketches manage to capture the essence of the very things they're trying to make fun of.
Ultimately I don't think people taking the bee seriously is a bug, it's a feature.
This is what normal people understand right now when someone mentions bicycles: "Portlandia bike clip" [1]. It's a 10+ year old clip but all the better for it, sitcoms like Portlandia were in the vanguard of a lot of class-suppression and gentrifying stuff that we now see as "good for everybody!", not just for the middle-classes from which we're a part of (and which those sitcoms were targeting, self-parody used to be part of our class-related shtick).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nMnr8ZirI
> are you mainly into text
Not at all. :) Well, I'm interested in text, just not just text, but consider myself a visual person.
I should have elaborated, but I am in general just not a fan of photos capturing moments. Whether staged or not, I feel photos are generally just not interesting and don't capture what's "real", so to speak. They capture this one frame of time that really isn't experienced by us in the way it's presented, and so I personally have a hard time finding it interesting or relatable. I highly prefer motion pictures (videos, films, etc.). A particular example that comes to mind is the tank man in the famous Tiananmen Square photo. The video is so much more powerful and meaningful to me. (However in this case, maybe my point is diluted because that photo is indeed a rather powerful one.)
There's a Portlandia skit that also captures a part of what I mean, where Fred and a girlfriend go on this European vacation that was miserable, nothing happened, and they ended up breaking up, but their pictures on Instagram (or something) looked amazing and seemed to capture the time of their life.
Another example are photographs of James Turrell's work. While photographs are indeed interesting, they simply do not capture what it's like to experience his works in person. I do like manipulated photographs though, such as the "drone painting" by Reuben Wu (https://www.instagram.com/itsreuben/).
I think photography kind of stands in this uninteresting arena (for me!) between other static art (e.g., paintings, computer-generated art, etc.) and motion art. Also, it seems everyone and their dog is a photographer now, so that can be a bit of a turn off as well, for better or worse on my part.
Then again, I probably contradict myself on this stance from time to time.
guess where I found the streams for all portlandia episodes which I happen to watch just now.
File under art imitates life: the episode of Portlandia where Fred and Carrie hire Aimee Mann and Sarah McLachlan as house cleaners
Hah! No, it's not. I was playing on stereotypes. There is a stereotype that local farmers-markets are for "liberal hippie" people (see: the television sitcom "Portlandia").
Based on my travels to other countries, local farmers markets are simply called "markets" and there is nothing unusual about them. In the USA, small local markets and co-ops are a fringe thing because we are fed almost entirely by industrial farming through vast supply chains that terminate at enormous multi-purpose grocery stores.
I may have a few facts wrong, but this consolidation started after WWII, and local food co-ops were considered liberal operations because it was "liberal hippies" who were opposed to the industrialization of food.
Seeing extremely far right subsets embracing what has generally been considered far left behavior is just amusing.
Hope this clarifies!
This comment made me realize the original Portlandia episode with Colin the Chicken is a decade old already.
Surprising to me that year-round veggies is so hard even with modern methods/greenhouses.
The quoted line is from the theme song to the TV show Portlandia.
“The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland...”
I really hope this is an allusion to that Portlandia Episode
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6459136/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9C4DhTnuQQ
It happens in Hawai'i, too. I volunteer at a homeless shelter and routinely serve young people. Some of them have nicer clothes than I do.
There is an episode of Portlandia satirizing young homeless people too, so I'd imagine that is another example.
I've been looking at a move to Portland from Chicago for the past year. I've never seen the show, I've lived in Chicago for the past 10 years.
( Online ) Portlanders love to say that people are moving there for the show, are openly hostile to the thought of people moving there, harass people online, and quote things like "Oregon is full" and for some reason seem to think their city is the most expensive in the United States.
You see things like people explaining they're moving to Portland from New York for a job, and people's advice will be: "HAH, good lock affording the rent!", when in reality, rent is much higher in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and the nice parts of Chicago.
I guess my point is: Portland is experiencing what these cities experienced a decade later. It sucks and it's wrong. But blaming a television show and harassing people for moving there isn't really productive.
> Tobias Read, the Oregon state treasurer, stood at a podium before news station cameras and a heaping display of cupcakes to applaud Portlandia for providing the city with $36 million in direct spending, 200 annual jobs, and $18 million spent on in-state goods to Oregon vendors. The show “increased tourism and our city’s notoriety,” he said.
I find it telling that city officials are thanking Portlandia for the tourism money.
There are a lot of good reasons for moving to Oregon besides a television show. Here are mine:
- Better housing. Sure, you can find pretty cheap housing in Chicago, if you're willing to ride the El to and from work at an hour a pop each way ( MINIMUM ). Living in the upscale neighborhoods of Portland cost basically the same amount as living in an upscale Chicago neighborhood ( AKA, has good proximity to work ).
- Less violent crime.
- Better climate. Last year I swore I would not live through another Chicago winter, they are absolutely horrible and never end.
- Proximity to nature. The midwest is boring for nature, especially around Chicago. It's cornfields and nothing else for miles and miles.
- Access to skiing and other active lifestyle activities.
- Portland is legendary for it's biking infrastructure and culture, and has one of the highest pedestrian commuting rates in the country.
- It has decent public transit.
- It's a smaller city, and is not a nightmare to traverse.
- My partner is an architect, and Portland is actually building housing like crazy.
For the sake of fairness, I'll list out the cons:
- Locals seem to be hostile to transplants
- VERY LARGE homeless problem. Not as bad as Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York, though. Problem with this is that you really have to live there for a while to understand the extent of the problem.
- Taxes are higher
- Smaller city, smaller tech scene, less job opportunities
- SAD amount of diversity, and an extremely racist past
- Much fewer days of sunlight.
OK, this comment deserves a Black Mirror episode all its own, or at least a skit in Portlandia, and I don't mind taking the karma nosedive that will result from pointing that out.
I don't think GK hates anyone or anything but I remember the day I completely lost interest in PHC: it was the day an interview ran and the intro explained Garrison lives in NYC.
The thing is sometimes there's not much distance between an homage and a satire. Fred Armisen's Portlandia is a good example of a show that wobbles between gently poking fun and outright mean-spirited mockery.
Once I learned all the Prarie Home Companion episodes were written from New York City it became much easier to see some of those skits as GK laughing at Lake Woebegone residents rather than with them.
Also from the TV show Portlandia, which had an episode about shops selling a single item.
The four-way stop has the virtue that it is easy for Americans and Canadians to understand.
I realize you're being facetious, but that statement is so untrue for the Pacific Northwest of the U. S. that _Portlandia_ even devoted part of an episode to it.
And, surprise, they have trouble with roundabouts, too. Though unlike 4-way stops, it looks like mossbacks are starting to grok roundabouts.
"This kind of agenda evokes the start of a feminist dream sequence, or the basis of a Portlandia episode."
Summed it up pretty well.
Once there is a Portlandia episode where they eat goat it will be all over the place...
I feel similarly I think as an asian mechanical engineer among a group of whites. On my first day, I was subjected to an excruciating conversation with one of them telling me about how he saw a movie "about asians." Yeah, I watched a tv show about whites too. Portlandia. Ugh I'm not a race. I'm a rock climber, long distance cyclist who likes to cook indian food, and read Tolstoy in a messy room. I drive a pickup truck that get shitty mileage but I can sleep in the back.
This serves as good evidence for anyone who wonders if Portland is truly as idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, or just plain insane as it is depicted in the television series Portlandia.
> Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon
That was a Friday!
> Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon
That's a bit unfair -- that was Friday afternoon only.
I don't have any kids in school yet, and I'm not in the US anymore anyway; but I do remember from my HS experience it would have been unkind to force me to complete all homework before any entertainment. School ended at 2:15 (because it started at 7am... ugh), but that's when after school activities started -- and who could have a decent college app without extracurriculars? I worked on the literary magazine, ran track/cross-country, was in a few plays/musicals, and got home either at 4:30 (early bus) or a bit before 6pm (late bus), usually the latter. In theory I could sometimes get some work done during the school day, but when would I hang out with friends, then?
I agree about limits on homework time, and entertainment time; but I think I'd be inclined to make sure they had both downtime and homework time, and if the homework couldn't be completed, so be it.
Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman:
* If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.
* Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization also normalizes for homework load, and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.
* If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.
* If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete.
Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system.
† Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept them up late at night.
while i agree the article is fairly off the mark, i also do not agree with your assumption that a traditional market will emerge.
producing the pilot of Game of Thrones cost $10M, before they knew it would be a hit. you can't make those gambles in an efficient market - ever. in the efficient market scenario, we'll end up with a lot more reality TV and mediocre sitcoms/drama.
the reality check is - the current system ain't so bad, and while I want "independent content" as much as you, I think we have a lot more of it in the current system than you outline... Workaholics? Portlandia? etc.
I have been on 100% travel in the US for the last year, and the three weeks I spent in Oregon were very depressing. It literally rained every single day; the longest period without rain was about 6 hours, or the couple of days it snowed. I would never want to live there for that reason, I was happy to leave.
As for Portland itself, a friend told me to watch the show Portlandia before I went. At first, I thought the show was way too over the top to be funny. After actually spending some time there, it became apparent that if it was any less over the top, it would be a documentary.
On the plus side, Oregon is very nice. Crater Lake is spectacular in the winter, and perhaps the most beautiful area in the US. There are also many awesome Art Deco bridges along the coast.
Blockbusters are not the only movies that get made. Let Hollywood keep Batman. In the meantime, it's not hard to imagine a new way of making and distributing Mad Men and Portlandia.
Reminds me of a Portlandia episode:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/208808/portlandia-ordering-the-chicken-part-1
I didn't see taxes mentioned. Portland is a fantastic place for technology, but you're looking at very high taxation and the city government is rather anti-business. Great place to live, otherwise, though. Especially if episodes of Portlandia don't turn you off (because after 30 years, I can tell you that they're not far off from the truth).