REVIEW: A Very Murray Christmas

In recent years, Netflix has been working hard in establishing itself as a legitimate entertainment network, complete with original programming. However, one thing has been noticeably absent from the streaming service's lineup; an exclusive Christmas special. At long last, the gap has been filled with A Very Murray Christmas, Sofia Coppola's festive throwback to the variety shows of old. The question still stands, however; does A Very Murray Christmas have the chops to become a holiday staple? The answer is a resounding "eh, sorta".

The story begins promisingly enough; the city of New York is effectively closed for the holidays thanks to a raging Christmas Eve blizzard. With the streets deserted and the airports closed, there's hardly anyone to attend poor ol' Bill Murray's Christmas special, broadcasting live out of the Carlyle Hotel. It's a strong start; Bill Murray manages to embody pure loneliness and discomfort while still managing to elicit genuine laughs. It gives off the impression that this is going to be a sardonic, cynical Christmas special about making a terrible Christmas special. We get some excellent cameos from the likes of Amy Poehler, Michael Cera, and Chris Rock and the stage is set for a hilariously dour good time, packed to the brim with songs and tinsel. But then it moves into the second act and the tone takes an abrupt, sloppy 180 out of nowhere.

Once a power outage dashes any hopes of actually finishing the special, Bill Murray (along with his sidekick/musical accompaniment for the evening, Paul Shaffer) finds himself snowed in with everyone in the Carlyle's bar. Whereas the first act was dark and funny, the second act is essentially just twenty minutes of celebrity cameos and musical numbers framed around the plight of a young couple played by Jason Schwartzman and Rashida Jones. It's a tonal shift roughly equivalent to an episode of Louie suddenly diverting into A Muppet Christmas Carol; while it's not necessarily bad, it feels like an entirely different kind of special. Act One is Murray lamenting how alone he feels while forcing Chris Rock to engage in a stunning duet of "Do You Hear What I Hear". Act Two is him dispensing schmaltzy, saccharine wisdom in a dimly lit bar. There's no blending between the two, causing the whole thing to feel scattered and disorganized. It's not entirely without merit, seeing as how this segment contained my two favorite songs of the special (a cover of the Beach Boys' "Alone on Christmas Day" by the band Phoenix, and Maya Rudolph putting on a spectacular, powerful rendition of "Baby Please Come Home"), but if A Very Murray Christmas has a low point, it's definitely this.

Things are brought back into focus for the third act, which is composed of an absurd dream sequence featuring Miley Cyrus and George Clooney (the latter of whom got what may have been the biggest laugh of the evening, but I won't dare spoil it here); it feels like this is more in line with what the beginning set up so well, so it's a shame that everything in the in-between ended up plodding along as it did. It hooked me, lost me, then hooked me again, but by then it didn't matter because the special was already over.

A Very Murray Christmas is a perfectly adequate Christmas special. There are parts of it that are good and parts of it that are bad. Everyone seems to be having a nice enough time, turning in good performances, though nothing to write home about. While some of the songs end up feeling somewhat uninspired, there are a few musical numbers here that really steal the show, despite the fact that the cast features only a few celebrities known for their singing ability. A Very Murray Christmas is the kind of thing that manages to be just alright, not by being just alright consistently, but by either being quite good or quite bad in more or less equal amounts. In the end, it averages out to something totally, well, average. I've added a few of the songs to my Christmastime playlist and I absolutely adore that it references The Monument Men more than once, but I don't think this is one that I'm going to be revisiting next year.