There's an even clearer connection to Liquid Television in Starveillance (E!, Fridays, 10:30 p.m.), from Celebrity Death Match creator Eric Fogel. Fogel's surreal short The Head premiered on Liquid Television before becoming its own full-fledged series, which lasted two seasons on MTV. Death Match, pitting claymation versions of celebrities against each other in often gruesome wrestling matches, proved much more popular, running its single joke into the ground over the course of four years, and has recently been resurrected on MTV2.
Starveillance sticks with the Death Match formula of using claymation versions of celebrities to poke fun at Hollywood culture. As with Death Match, the likenesses and voices often bear little to no resemblance to their real-life counterparts, and the jokes are obvious to anyone who's picked up Us Weekly or, well, watched E!. The idea behind Starveillance is that notable celeb events are caught by hidden cameras, so the first episode recreates the Olsen twins going apartment-hunting, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes celebrating the birth of their daughter and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline planning their wedding, among others.
With such stunning revelations as "the Olsen twins are too skinny," "Tom Cruise is a scarily enthusiastic Scientologist" and "Britney and K-Fed are white trash," Starveillance is lazy, instantly dated and laugh-free, and doesn't even have the amusing blood and guts of Death Match. It assumes that people will laugh merely at exaggerated caricatures of famous people without needing any genuine humor to back them up.
At least Afro Samurai doesn't lack for blood and guts, even if its plot is entirely impenetrable. Jackson's big-haired warrior has a mystical headband coveted by all sorts of evil menaces, and he stalks the countryside set on revenge against the man who killed his father. Lots of confusing fight sequences ensue, with limbs hacked off in slo-mo while Afro glowers meditatively. It's all rather typical anime stuff, sometimes exciting but never outstanding and only really elevated by the presences of Jackson, Ron Perlman and Kelly Hu among the voice-over talent—which is still full of the stilted acting of most dubbed anime. Despite Jackson and a few hip-hop trappings, the show does little to integrate blaxploitation culture into the stock samurai narrative.
It's trying, though, which is more than you can say for Starveillance. If these shows represent Liquid Television's legacy, at least in part, then they still have a great deal to live up to.