Warren the Ape (MTV2: premiered Saturday, June 19, 2010, 9:00 PM ET) has the misfortune to be on MTV2 in Canada.  You either have to be on MuchMusic or MTV to catch this country’s basic-cable audience.  The Hard Times of RJ Berger is the priority import, so Warren the Ape is shunted to a digital cable channel.

Warren the Ape deserves better.  This is one of the few intelligent shows MTV has greenlit in years.  MTV used to pull this stuff out of its collective butt in the 1990s and early 2000s – Beavis and Butt-head, Liquid Television, The Maxx, Daria, The Sifl and Olly Show, Clone High, even The Head and Undergrads.  I don’t want to know how MTV got from this to Jersey Shore.

Yeah, fuck you, I sound old.  If you haven’t seen The Maxx, you wouldn’t understand.

Greg the Bunny (voice of Dan Milano) appears in the screener I received from CTVglobemedia.  Without revealing too much about “Abstinence,” which aired in America on Monday, June 21, Warren Demontague (Milano) tries to get eternal naïf Greg laid.  Warren is not to have sex for a month as per Dr. Drew Pinsky’s recommendation.  This proves to be the eternal struggle for Warren, so he tries to imprint Greg with a Warren-esque libido.

Greg acts like a typical comic book nerd, which isn’t quite the characterization I remember from the Fox and IFC shows.  Warren is still Warren on this show, all abruptness and lechery.  Greg the Bunny fans should feel right at home with Warren the Ape.

Warren the Ape isn’t as funny as the Fox version of Greg the Bunny, but that’s due more to MTV than anything else.  Greg the Bunny accommodated Eugene Levy and Seth Green.  Warren the Ape has to work in Dr. Drew.  I don’t care who hates Levy and/or Green.  From them to Dr. Drew is a quality drop.

Luckily, Drew is a peripheral figure.  Warren can obviously carry the show, as his personality traits are recognizably human.  Warren has problems, and he deals with them in the worst ways possible.  He’s still an ape puppet wearing a football helmet, so he gets away with his crapulence.

Warren the Ape parodies celebrity rehab shows, yet doesn’t feel like a rehash of past mockumentaries.  This is a good thing.  WtA feels like a rehash of Fox’s Greg the Bunny, which is a better thing.  Somehow, Warren the Ape maintains Greg the Bunny‘s ability to derive great comedy from social mores, which I don’t expect from any post-Clone High MTV show.

I’ll be honest.  I was expecting the worst from Warren the Ape.  Greg the Bunny is so good that a berth on MTV smacks of illogic, especially given that network’s love for cloning jackass and The Real World.  I wasn’t expecting the best possible outcome for WtA.  If MTV can’t kill Greg the Bunny, nothing can.

American ratings for Warren the Ape are anemic so far.  Great.  It’s 2002 all over again.  WtA‘s too well-written for it to go down this way, but MTV is usually where intelligent humour goes to die – Human Giant notwithstanding.

Here’s a clip from “Abstinence” where Warren attempts to play Dungeons and Dragons.  Not surprisingly, he’s not very good at it.  Watch out for the fat kid summoning the ghouls of…whatever the hell he yells.  He’s summoning ghouls.  That’s all you need to know.

Warning: spoilers.

Teletoon has advertised the final seven episodes of Life’s a Zoo.tv (Teletoon: 10:30 PM ET/PT starting September 20) as “lost.”  No, Teletoon, they’re not lost.  You just haven’t aired them yet.  By that definition, the entirety of The Dating Guy and all [adult swim] shows on Teletoon bar Robot Chicken and Moral Orel are “lost.”  Showcase is airing “lost episodes” of The Foundation and Paradise Falls.  See where I’m going with this?

The channel recently kicked off Life’s a Zoo.tv‘s “second season” by airing the seventeenth episode of the show.  Life’s a Zoo.tv is a reality show satire dependent on continuity, as Dr. D and Minou are not featured in this episode.  If Teletoon isn’t going to air the show properly, just keep it on the shelf.  Teletoon airs Moral Orel in sequence, but not its own shit?  Oy vey.

The episode is by and large a Chi Chi oriented episode.  Chi Chi (Stephanie Jung), the show’s overweight butt panda, becomes sick for some reason.  She shows signs of pregnancy, which explains the episode’s title.  Hilarity threatens to ensue, as the other castmembers bar Rico aid her through childbirth.  The ending, though I won’t spoil it, should be familiar to anyone who’s seen the “Cash” episode of The Young Ones.

Life’s a Zoo.tv‘s basic tenets of Morreski (Stephen Kishewitsch) drinking, Ray (Mike Rowland) acting like a dumbass stoner, Jake (Kurt Firla) acting skeezy and Chi Chi talking stereotype broke English are maintained.  Rico’s (Francisco Trujillo) subplot is darker, as the homosexual crocodilian forces his egg to go through musical theatre.  He even puts a vest on his egg, such is Rico’s iron-clad grip on reality.

I’ve learned to live with the music video portion of Life’s a Zoo.tv.  In this episode, Joel Plaskett’s “Fashionable People” is shown.  To me, that’s a few minutes of torture.  I have never understood why Life’s a Zoo.tv needs music videos, as they are superfluous to the show itself.  I assume the videos are there to bring in revenue and fill time.

The second-season “premiere” of Life’s a Zoo.tv is average.  There have been more clever episodes, although Life’s a Zoo.tv has stuck to its general modus operandi of lampooning reality show clichés.  Writer Brandon Firla does what he can with the premise of “Chi’s Having a Baby,” but there’s only so much mileage one can get out of the “surrogate egg mothers” plot.

I doubt Life’s a Zoo.tv will be renewed past its initial twenty-episode order.  Unless Teletoon decides to renew the show, these last seven episodes will likely be Life’s a Zoo.tv‘s death knell.  It’s been a surprisingly good run, all told – better than Station X, anyway.

Originally I was going to review The Jon Dore Television Show (The Comedy Network: Wednesday, 10:00 PM ET/PT) a day before the premiere.  In typical me fashion, I flaked on the review.  It’s a thing that I do occasionally.

There hasn’t been much press about The Jon Dore Television Show‘s second season anyway.  A few mainstream interviews have appeared in newspapers.  The usual condemnations of the show exist.  Dore isn’t exactly Russell Peters in terms of popularity.

The Jon Dore Television Show knows Jon Dore isn’t a great actor.  His deadpan persona is milked effectively for comedy.  JDTS takes the basic premise of The Sarah Silverman Program. – unlikable protagonist goes through a life issue every episode – and splices it with a TLC documentary.  This conceit actually works, even though there is no way it should.

The second-season premiere of The Jon Dore Television Show, “Jon Fights Discrimination,” features feminist Judy Rebick, media professor Marion Coomey and microbiologist Chris Liu.  They all intersect with Dore’s campaign to end discrimination, a quest borne of Dore having to pay to get into a bar on Ladies’ Night.

Dore does his part to end discrimination by dressing up as a fat, blind, Asian black woman with red hair and a snake for a tail.  Somehow, the show progresses from this to Dore dressing his neighbours up in white bodystockings while he rants on about creating a “pure race of people.”  Some of the jokes in “Jon Fights Discrimination” fall flat, such as a running joke involving black centaurs, but I found Dore as the ultimate minority amusing.

“Jon Gets Horny” continues the comedy trend set by “Jon Fights Discrimination.”  This time, Dore has a constant erection and needs to get rid of it.  Dore talks sex with his aunt Kathy Layton, who is a registered nurse.  He also interviews sex addiction expert “Mike” and “Sex Industy Expert” Kedra Alliard.

Psychotherapist Susan Lynne, who guested as herself several times in the first season, makes her first appearance of the second season here.  She is to JDTS what Chef was to South Park, a voice of reason that Dore plays off of.

Compared to “Jon Fights Discrimination,” “Jon Gets Horny” is comedically limp.  In one week, the show has gone from satirizing the media to making fun of cam whores.  Too many of the jokes in “Jon Gets Horny” are variations on the “Jon humps inanimate object” theme, which is not good.

The Jon Dore Television Show will probably stay a cult item by the end of its second season.  The show’s format is such that it would easily fall apart in the wrong hands.  I’m curious to know how long Dore can keep the show going before it collapses like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  As long as JDTS is funny at least some of the time, I’ll keep watching.