The Spoils of Babylon | |
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Genre | Comedy |
Created by |
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Written by |
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Directed by | Matt Piedmont |
Starring | |
Music by |
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Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of episodes | 6 (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Executive producers |
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Producers |
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Cinematography | Giles Dunning |
Editor | David Trachtenberg |
Running time | 23 minutes |
Production company | Funny or Die |
Original release | |
Network | IFC |
Release | January 9 – February 6, 2014 |
Related | |
The Spoils Before Dying |
The Spoils of Babylon is an American comedy miniseries written by Matt Piedmont and Harper Steele, [a] directed by Piedmont, and starring Tobey Maguire, Kristen Wiig, Tim Robbins, Jessica Alba, Val Kilmer, Haley Joel Osment, Michael Sheen, and Will Ferrell. [2] It is a spoof of the epic-scale "TV event" miniseries adapted from bestselling novels (such as Shogun, The Thorn Birds and Rich Man, Poor Man) prevalent on American network television in the 1970s and 1980s.
The miniseries premiered on IFC on January 9, 2014. [2] The series received generally positive reviews from critics. For her performance as Cynthia Morehouse, Wiig was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.
Patriarch Jonas Morehouse shepherds his daughter Cynthia and adopted son Devon from meager beginnings in the oil fields of Texas to powerful boardrooms in New York City. Cynthia and Devon, entwined in undeniable love, stumble through war-torn battlefields, blazing mansions, filthy drug dens and velvet-sheeted bedrooms on their quest for power and influence. Despite Jonas' best efforts to intervene, Cynthia and Devon's merciless love sets into motion a wave of destruction that crashes down on Devon's graceful wife Lady Anne, his daughter Marianne, his colleague and lover Dixie, Cynthia's hen-pecked husband Chet, her evil son Winston, the scheming Generals and far beyond.
The entire miniseries is presented as if it had been a real miniseries, with a fictional backstory of how it took three years to film and was originally 22 hours long. Each episode is framed with its author/director Eric Jonrosh sitting in a restaurant discussing it; the setting and Jonrosh's erratic speech and behaviour therein are in imitation of out-takes from Orson Welles' advertisements for wine and frozen peas.
The miniseries began principal photography on June 2, 2013 in Los Angeles. [2]
No. | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original air date | U.S. viewers (millions) |
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1 | "The Foundling" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | January 9, 2014 | 0.440 [5] |
2 | "The War Within" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | January 9, 2014 | 0.440 [5] |
3 | "Kicking the Habit" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | January 16, 2014 | 0.155 [6] |
4 | "The Rise of the Empire" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | January 23, 2014 | 0.208 [7] |
5 | "The Age of the Bastard" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | January 30, 2014 | 0.151 [8] |
6 | "So Sweet the Bells" | Matt Piedmont | Matt Piedmont & Harper Steele [a] | February 6, 2014 | 0.077 [9] |
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an approval rating of 81% based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 7.12/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell and a cast of other famous characters make The Spoils of Babylon a worthy watch for comedy fans, satirizing the classic television melodrama miniseries with hilarious visuals and clever content." [10] On Metacritic, the series has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [11]
The series was enough of a success for the network to prompt a second Spoils miniseries, The Spoils Before Dying , which debuted on July 8, 2015. [12]
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