Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jann’ On Hulu, A Comedy Where Singer Jann Arden Attempts A Career Revival

For decades now, we’ve seen comedians and comedy writers play enhanced versions of themselves. Jerry Seinfeld, Marc Maron, Larry David, Garry Shandling, Amy Schumer… the list is pretty long. There was even a series where chef Emeril Lagasse played himself. But how many singer-songwriters have been willing to put themselves out there? Jann Arden has managed to do just that, and she’s surprisingly pretty good at it. Read on for more…

JANN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An SUV swerves around a snowy back road. Inside, the woman driving is sobbing.

The Gist: That woman is Jann Arden (playing a version of herself), whose singing career has lasted for 35 years, but she seems to be on a downswing at this point. After we see the sobbing Jann swerve off the road and hurtle towards some cows, we go back a few days. An officious woman named Cale (Elena Juatco) is there to inquire about renting Jann’s massive house in Calgary for a big celebrity who will be singing at a cancer benefit at the Saddledome.

Jann, who is settled into her “cottage”, which is also pretty big, goes to visit her sister Max (Zoie Palmer), because she’s baking cupcakes. Their mother Nora (Deborah Grover) tells Jann that Max is pregnant again, despite the fact that her husband Dave (Patrick Gilmore) had a vasectomy. Jann’s got to go to a gig: A parking lot at a farmer’s market. She tells her longtime manager Todd (Jason Blicker) that he needs to get her better gigs, ones that don’t pay her in massive wheels of cheese. That cancer benefit would be a start.

Todd manages to get her on the bill when someone drops out — “I got cancer!” yells Jann — but doesn’t get on stage because Todd still has her pass. When she sees Cale and her big client — Feist — she tries to get them to vouch for her, but all Feist wants to do is be shielded from Jann’s presence. That’s what leads to the sobbing car ride, which attracts the cops, which is why she ends up crashing through a shack. Jann runs, for some reason, and gets her leather pants caught on a barbed-wire fence.

Even though the embarrassing video of her lady bits being exposed under the fence is uploaded to YouTube, it doesn’t get a lot of views. But it does get her a visit from Cale, who thinks she needs a new manager who knows how to manage today’s world of social media marketing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Jann has elements of The Comeback, where the main character seems to lack self-awareness, but it also has a bit of an absurd “sorta like real life” tone of a show like Maron or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Our Take: Believe it or not, I hadn’t really heard of Jann Arden before watching Jann, but my wife, who loves all manner of female singer-songwriters, has a few of Arden’s ’90s-era CDs in her collection. She was surprised that Arden was not only playing a funny version of herself, but that she was shockingly good at it. And, even though I didn’t know Arden’s career at all, I agreed with her.

Jann is funny because Arden, who created the series along with Leah Gauthier and Jennica Harper, is not only surprisingly adept at physical comedy, but isn’t afraid to skewer her earnest singer-songwriter image or put herself in embarrassing situations.

The series, which first aired on CTV in Canada — its two seasons should debut all at once on Hulu — is trying to show how the middle-aged Arden struggles to adapt to today’s music business, with the help of Cale. In the second episode, for instance, Cale gets Arden an influencer deal with a super-absorbent brand of yoga pants, designed to take the place of feminine hygiene products. Just seeing Jann don those absurd pants, then get into her Instagram photos with the help of her mother holding a flashlight and a hair dryer is both funny and a little pathetic. And that’s just what Arden wants us laugh at.

But what I also appreciated about Jann is that it builds out its world pretty quickly. Max is not happy that she and Dave are having another kid, but it turns out that the vasectomy didn’t fail as much as they messed up the recovery. Nora goes to live with Jann and we find out that her cheese is slipping off the cracker a bit, which can come out in funny albeit poignant ways. And Jann just can’t get rid of Todd, despite the fact that her old manager thinks TikTok is the sound a watch makes.

All of this helps the show continue to put Arden in embarrassing situations without it getting repetitive or old. Some of those situations will be due to Jann’s desire to reignite her career, but some of it will just be due to the fact that the TV version of her can be a bit selfish and self-centered. All of it will feel less schticky the more her character is established.

Sex and Skin: None, unless you count seeing Jann Arden hold ice pops against her crotch as she sits in an unlocked holding cell.

Parting Shot: Outtakes of the scene where Jann catches her pants on the fence. We see Jann give “alts”, all of which are pretty decently funny.

Sleeper Star: It feels like most episodes will have a Canadian pop star guest as themselves. Considering what we know about the usually deadpan Leslie Feist, seeing her be a diva-esque pop star was pretty funny, and she pulled it off well.

Most Pilot-y Line: As Jann runs away from the cops who stopped her, one cop says, “Ma’am, we’re not going to hurt you!”, to which Jann responds, “I watch CNN!”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jann Arden is not afraid to skewer an image that she’s taken decades to build which is what makes Jann so funny to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Jann On Hulu