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Emily Nussbaum makes the case against Cougar Town in this week’s New York: Courtney Cox’s Jules Cobb is no Samantha Jones. “The Samantha Jones iconography has gone retro, regressing to a Cathy cartoon in heels,” Nussbaum writes. “Jules Cobb, the divorced ninny played by Cox, might date younger men but she’s no cougar. Samantha Jones might have been a cartoon, but she was a cartoon who loved pleasure.” But comparing Jules to Samantha is like comparing a mealy apple to a juicy orange: Yes, one is better, but that still doesn’t make them the same fruit ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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David Letterman’s confession last night that he has slept with women he works with was a perfect window into the twisted psyche of the comic. (Read Troy Patterson’s excellent close reading here.) This is why women don’t want to stay married to comedians (the subject of Judd Apatow’s Funny People). They can’t break form, even in what should be the most shattering and intimate of moments. Even as Letterman is changing our view of him forever he is exactly himself, with his deadpan delivery and self-mockery. There is hardly a moment when you’re totally sure whether he’s joking or not ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Should you doubt that Melrose Place has a unique purchase on
the hearts of longtime television watchers, I direct you to the
following positive reviews: “It’s as fresh as yesterday’s daisy,” “It's
still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about
its badness, you know?” and “[It’s] operating at the same level of
glorious mind gunk as its predecessor.“ No, really, those are all
positive reviews. The new Melrose Place is exactly as bad as the old Melrose Place, and in the special 2+2=5 hours that occur after a long day of work, that’s entertainment ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, this season of Mad Men
has a new tagline—no longer "Where the truth lies," but rather, "The
World's Gone Mad." Things seem relatively normal in the early 1963
moment with which the season begins—though by year's end, we know that
history alone, not to speak of the tangled lives of Mad Men's ensemble cast, will make a sense of cultural and political vertigo inevitable ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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Early in the first episode of NYC Prep, Bravo’s new, Gossip Girl-inspired reality show about New York City high school students that starts tonight, PC, the self-styled Chuck Bass
of the bunch, says to the camera, “In New York City, money flows like
the wind.” It was at this, the moment of the overly knowing, slightly
off metaphor, that I realized it was going to be impossible for me to
hate him. Try as he and the five other teenagers featured on the show
might—and God they try—there is no talk of money, sex, or power, no
uncanny preciousness, no shopper at Barneys, no address on the Upper
East Side, no limo rides, and ultimately no reality show that can turn
these kids into adults. Despite their best efforts, and all of their
privileges, they are in a high school state of mind.
Take, for example, Camille, a senior at tony all-girls school
Nightgale-Bamford, who asserts about her own future: “I will go to
Harvard. Then I will be the business head of a genetics firm. And then
at 40 I will have a husband and two kids.” This is delivered with the
frightening intensity we have come to expect from Blair Waldorf, and is
not, exactly, typical of the average 17-year-old. And yet, it is still
wholly laughable. Check back in a few years, Camille, after life has
gotten in the way.
Even more of the series is taken up with genuinely unprecocious high
school antics, just enacted on the glamorous streets of New York City.
Taylor, a 16-year-old who attends, gasp, public school tells her mother that...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last night's 10-round National Spelling Bee final was a nail-biter, and
an awesome one at that. There were redonkulously hard, beautifully
arcane words (schizaffin, palatschinken, Neufchâtel).
There was heartbreak (heavily-favored Sidharth Chand, last year's
runner-up, crumpled before our eyes in the second round, when he
realized... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ann, the Spelling Bee makes me squirm too,
sometimes. But it also makes me want to jump up and down—kind of like
those hyperactive contestants—and squeal, because I love spelling bees
so much.
Maybe I'm culturally wired for it: As the Washington Post noted on Tuesday, spelling bees have a special place in Indian-American nerd culture. ("In the same way that Hakeem Olajuwon's success in the NBA inspired a generation of Nigerians to take up basketball... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Tonight you can see the finals of the National Spelling Bee on television
and watch as the kids contort under the mounting pressure. They “tug at
their hair and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to
manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates, let alone... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There's a sort of covenant, an unspoken contract, entered into when a
person commits to a television series. Something like, "I, the viewer,
agree to watch this program, to care about these characters, to invest
in this world week after week, because you, the TV creator, agree to
make it fun." Last night, Grey's Anatomy
creator Shonda Rhimes broke this "we watch, she entertains" contract by
engaging in reckless character assassination—by which I mean... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Jess, Bea Arthur's death makes me think about another thing, besides abortion, that's missing from network television: grown ups. I was a kid when The Golden Girls aired, but it was a favorite show of my grandmother's and I watched some of it at her house in Florida, on a set of coral sheets, a few miles from where the Girls supposedly lived. Dorothy, the character Arthur played, was the commanding, scathing, tall one—the straight woman in a house full of lovable wackadoos. Dorothy was extremely, continuously, witheringly judgmental. And though this word has come to be used as an insult ("Don't be so judgey!"), it was this quality, one Arthur oozed, and one that Dorothy shared with Maude, that made those two characters both indelible and admirable, if more than occasionally insufferable.
Maude and Dorothy had opinions. They had opinions about everything. If society, or one's roommates, was behaving badly, it was a person's duty to tell them so even if they didn't want to hear it. Perhaps it wasn't a person's duty to dispatch friends and neighbors quite as scathingly as Maude and Dorothy often did, but then, being right, doing right, was more important than being nice. Niceness was not one of their major concerns. They cared too much to be nice. They cared too much to modulate their judgment.
Looking over the TV landscape, it's hard to find a character, male or female, with this kind of conviction, and certainly not in a comedy. (It's hard to find anyone who even looks like Arthur, who got to be famous when she was already gray, a trick since pulled off by George Clooney and Anderson Cooper, but not by another woman). The socially conscious Norman Lear sitcoms that dominated the 1970s (Maude, All in The Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and more) by grappling with racism, sexism, class and most other -isms have disappeared and, with them, the fully engaged bleeding hearts, bigots and pioneers they starred. Since Golden Girls went off the air, there have been few shows about middle aged people, almost none about senior citizens. Sex and The City, the series that spawned a thousand copycats (SATC with black women, SATC with dudes, SATC for network TV, SATC with three), is really just a copy of Golden Girls (sexually adventurous Blanche is Samantha, sweet naive Rose is Charlotte, etc. etc.) i.e. Golden Girls with 30-somethings. On TV right now, there's nowhere Maude or Dorothy would fit in.
That's not to say either Maude or the Golden Girls is perfect television. Certain old movies momentarily make me feel like the space-time continuum has collapsed. Any notion that we have advanced, become smarter, more modern, more knowing, evaporates upon watching Casablanca—the only thing we know now that we didn't know then is how to film in color. Neither Maude nor the Golden Girls gives me that sense. They're dated, they're earnest, they're not always funny (though, sometimes, happily, they are), the laugh track grates. Yet in both of these shows there's at least person I'd really like to see more of—and maybe not just on TV. She's smart, she's imperious, she doesn't suffer fools, she's engaged with the larger world, she's engaged with her friends, she has opinions she will share, that she will advocate for, that she believes in, and if you banged your head and ended up in the hospital you'd be happy if she was the person they called. She's an adult. She's Bea Arthur.
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On the "How much do you love your favorite TV show?" spectrum, a person could fall anywhere from "Who loves television?" to "If my favorite show was about to be canceled, I would feel duty bound to go to the store, buy a specific product (Tabasco sauce, light bulbs and peanuts were the chosen items for Roswell, Friday Night Lights, and Jericho, respectively), pack it up to United State Postal Service standards, and then pay to have it sent to the head of the network, the person deciding my beloved program's fate." Dedicated fans of Chuck, NBC's critically acclaimed action-spy-comedy show on the verge of cancellation, are on the "We buy Tabasco" end of the spectrum, but they're being both more clever, calculating and cynical than the peanut purchasers. They're not sending anyone anything—they're buying Subway sandwiches. Why? Because Subway had a big product placement in a recent episode. See, Chuck fans do more than just watch, discuss, obsess and debate their show— they actively support their show's advertisers. Best fans ever?
Rather than communicate to executives that Chuck has a passionate fan base by buying useless junk, these fans are buying branded junk. They are demonstrating their willingness to be successfully advertised to. But the advertising isn't working in the old fashioned sense, i.e. making the audience want to buy the thing advertised, it's working because the audience wants something from NBC. The product these folks want isn't a six-inch on wheat, it's Chuck, and they're buying the subs to prove it. (How much do you think Subway cares about their motives?)
Even if the fans are manipulating the typical network-advertiser-consumer dynamic, NBC and Subway are getting what they want—people with open wallets—which is why the strategy could work. Of course, if it doesn't, Chuck fans will have bought a lot of mediocre sandwiches from a huge company hoping to convince another huge company that their sandwich-buying ability amounted to something valuable. That's much more ambitious, and potentially misguided, than sending peanuts.
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Meghan, your analysis of the Susan Boyle phenomenon was very astute, but I think it misses something important about why Boyle went viral. Yes, we identify with the judges and the audience—the haters who get to feel proud and magnanimous when we stop hating—but we also empathize with Susan Boyle, the underdog who knows, even though no one else does, that she's something special.
Susan Boyle isn't just, as you say, the "scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts." And that's because she's also Rocky (or a Bad News Bear or Karate Kid—Who wants to bet that the Susan Boyle Story gets optioned by next week?), the underdog facing doubters. Who can't empathize with that? So when Boyle sings, we're both the judges and the judged. And that means, yes, we got a hit off of her performance as said judges, enjoying the "crude catharsis," psyched to "learn" we're not as shallow and cynical as we thought. But we also got a hit off her performance as fellow underdogs, psyched to see Boyle, an extension of ourselves, triumph over the cynical haters trying to keep all of us down. Boyle plays to our ego on two levels then—by letting us imagine we're more generous and open minded about appearance and age than we thought, while also suggesting that, hey!, we just might rule at the next American Idol tryouts. I'm not sure which is worse.
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Jess, I liked Parks and Recreation as well, and I think it can only get better. It's a great time to be making a show about governance and government. The fact that Parks is about small, silly government, far from D.C., should serve it well, allowing it to be current (Are they going to have budget cuts or get some infrastructure dollars over in Pawnee?) without being too inside baseball or Obama-philic.
I'm also intrigued by the ways it's not like The Office, which, granted, are very few. The Office, set in a dying paper business in a dying town (Scranton), has always been about how regular people cope with this—being a part of a dying business in a dying town—while simultaneously contending with all the other jokers wasting away their lives in the cubicle next door. The American version of The Office has done much to mute the essential soul-crushing, dreariness of this premise, fully explored in the wondrously brutal British series. (Liesl Schillinger wrote a great piece a few years ago comparing different nations' versions of The Office that speaks to the why of this watering down).
Given the relative positivity of the American Office, it's no surprise that when the guys who softened it up were tasked with making a whole new show, they came up with something a lot less inherently depressing. Despite all the ways that Parks is like The Office, it's not about dead end jobs in a dead end place—it's about everyday jobs in an everyday place (where people even have their own offices, like, with doors and stuff). In other words, compared to The Office's Michael Scott, Poehler's Knopes doesn't even rate on the loser scale. She may share Michael's linguistic ticks and social awkwardness, but, in just one episode, by dedicating herself to building a park, she's already done something 100 times more worthwhile than Michael ever has. The fact that Parks is about relatively dedicated, successful people may make it far less indelible, and a lot more standard sitcom, than The Office—or it might just make it that much more insightful in the long term.
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What do you have to do to make a gritty, boundary pushing cop show these days? You can't top The Wire's complexity, soul crushing realism or commitment to unhappy endings. NYPD Blue fully explored unappealing semi-nudity, as well as racist badge holders—an archetype Crash then overdid to the point of absurdism. Law & Order: SVU has been beaming extremely unsettling sex crimes into living rooms for years. The Shield took on corruption and the CSI franchise has a lock on fancy gadgets and newfangled technology. What does that leave for a freshman cop show, out to prove that it's not just old and borrowed, but also something new?
Southland, an ensemble series about working the beat on the mean streets of Los Angeles that premieres tonight on NBC (it's also streaming on Hulu now), has come up with a fairly effective solution: Kill children. Grit cred established.
Television has become so "edgy," and viewers so familiar with the tropes of that edginess, that it's extremely difficult to subvert audience expectations, or more to the point, to make audiences feel something about all the dark events taking place on screen. (Some people unwind to episodes of Grey's and some to SVU. Just depends whether you prefer relaxing to elevator make-out sessions or sexual predators being brought to justice). Tonight's episode of Southland follows a rookie cop who is having a seriously unsettling first day—the kind of first day that involves gun-wielding, trigger-happy gang bangers, a racist, sexist, unhinged partner, a john picking up a prostitute with his baby in the back seat, an innocent teenager shot down in the street for no reason and a missing little girl. In other words, he's having the kind of day that makes him seriously consider quitting—but he's also having the kind of day cops have on cop shows all the time, the kind of day we've all seen before. Until a kid turns up dead. Southland is an extremely well-made, satisfying genre series that's in some ways a throwback to Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue— but to be as cutting edge now, as those shows were then, it has to be that much more brutal.
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It’s a great day to be a gay American. I’ve never been prouder or felt more integrated into the fabric of the life of the nation. What has gotten me so giddy? It’s not the Vermont marriage vote or last Friday’s Iowa court decision; it’s the news that President Obama’s favorite character on The Wire is Omar, the outset, proudest gay American stick-up artist Baltimore never had.
I also hope Obama, who has struggled to give up cigarettes, learned a lesson from Omar’s sad demise: Smoking is very bad for one’s health.
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There's an interesting article in the Times today about a deal the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just cut with Viacom, which owns CBS, MTV, Nick, BET, etc., to create new, socially responsible programs and to insert lessons on healthy living, AIDS prevention, education, and so on into already existing programs. As the Times puts it, the foundation is now paying for "message placement," a variation on product placement where the benefits of organ donation, not Snapple, are being sold to the audience.
The foundation has already influenced story lines on shows like ER, Law & Order, and Private Practice, the idea being that George Clooney, in character as Dr. Doug Ross, is a better salesman for organ donation than the most persuasive educational pamphlet ever written ever could be. The Gates Foundation isn't the only nonprofit using this method—the Kaiser Family Foundation has worked with the likes of America's Next Top Model—but it has taken the rare step of paying for it. The money is, of course, the best way to ensure the Gates' message "gets out" and is taken seriously by the folks who actually write these TV shows, but it still sets an uncomfortable precedent: If the Gates Foundation can buy a "message" on a prime-time drama, so can some other, possibly lesser, organization. Social health issues are way more complicated than Snapple, which is maybe why they shouldn't be for sale.
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Does dating ever change? That's the question hovering around ABC's newest dramedy Cupid, about a man who's either the god of love or a delusional crazy who thinks he is. The show, which premieres tonight, stars Bobby Cannavale as Trevor, the maybe-god on a mission to match 100 couples, and Sarah Paulson as Claire, the supremely grounded love interest/celebrity shrink/court appointed guardian with whom he trades witty banter, heartfelt epiphanies and mixed drinks. The show's central tension isn't whether Trevor's really Cupid (he's probably Cupid), but whether Trevor's faith in the big romantic gesture and love at first sight is a better—more powerful, more helpful, more successful—approach to relationships than Claire's level-headed belief in mutual respect and taking it slow. In other words, does a guy schooled on love and dating 3,000 years ago know more about matchmaking than an MD schooled by the Ivy League and Oprah? The show's answer is usually yes: Claire really needs to lighten up.
But dating has changed—not just in, erhm, the last 3,000 years, but in the 11 years since Cupid first aired. Fourteen episodes of the series, with Jeremy Piven (so charming once!) and Paula Marshall in the lead roles were broadcast in 1998 (you can watch them here). Except for a new cast and a move from Chicago to New York, Cupid has weathered its hiatus more or less intact—and that's too bad, because this little thing called the Internet took off in the interim and it really shook up how lovelorn strangers meet and interact with one another.
In both the original and current series, Claire runs a singles group where Trevor finds the heartsick men and women he eventually pairs off. In the old series that was an acceptable narrative trick. Now it's implausible. If Cupid were a mortal he wouldn't be bothering with small-fry gatherings, he'd be running a dating site. Maybe one called something like... Okcupid.com?
The cloying speech Drew Barrymore gave in He's Just Not That Into You ("I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my blackberry so I texted to his cell, so now you have to go around checking all these different portals to get rejected. It's exhausting") irked, but it was onto something. Technology has made dating, and the manners of dating, newly strange. Cupid gives all this fresh weirdness a pass because it's shackled to 1998, a not-so-distant past that's long gone. Cupid's not lacking all charm (it's made by the same guy who wrote Veronica Mars after all), but it's not nearly as interesting, or relevant, as it could be.
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On the occasion of daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful's 22nd anniversary (the little-recognized molybdenum anniversary) Entertainment Weekly has a slide show counting up super-couple Ridge and Brooke's many jaunts down the aisle. It's not necessary to know who Ridge and Brooke are to enjoy this list, since it perfectly encapsulates soaps' semi-heroic insistence on remaining absurd with or without prior knowledge of BRidge. Since 1990, the two have been the bride or groom in 19 weddings. For some of these weddings they married each other. For some they married each other's relatives. Some were completed, some were interrupted (by presumed dead wives and other inconveniences), and some took place on beaches. Ridge was shirtless for one, unless a lei counts as a top. All but the most recent (which took place in January 2009) have ended, usually in a divorce. (Sometimes you get married because you think you're carrying one guy's baby, but then it turns out to be his brother's, OK?)
Soaps are the television that time forgot. While the networks and, especially, basic and premium cable are churning out better and better shows, soap operas remain fundamentally the same. There have been some technological advances—Guiding Light shoots digitally now—but the plots are still overdramatic and ridiculous—a dead girl's doppelgänger just showed up on General Hospital. (Please don't ask me how I know this.) The form is hemorrhaging viewers because younger audiences just aren’t interested. I have a hard time imagining what soaps would have to do to attract new viewers in large numbers (not pretending marriage No. 12 is perfect and going to last forever and ever might be a start) and so suspect they won't be on daytime TV indefinitely. Laugh while you can.
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June recently pointed out that Friday night has become TV's "butt-kicking women" night thanks to Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and, if you don't use the term butt-kicking quite so literally, Friday Night Lights, as well. With Battlestar set to go out in a blaze of glory this evening, I'd like to nominate another Friday show to take its slot on your DVR—BBC America's Mistresses, an overwrought, gripping little soap opera that's not exactly about butt-kicking women so much as bed-hopping ones.
Mistresses, like Sex and the City, is about four friends who shag and chat about it, though not while wearing designer duds and hardly ever over brunch. None of the women (a married lawyer, a single doctor, a playgirl party planner, and a 9/11 widow) are mistresses in the classic sense, though they do have more experience with adultery than good girls should. If Sex and the City is the Jane Austen take on the four-friend relationship—comedic, funny, money-minded—Mistresses is the Brontë sisters one—overly dramatic and full of secret plot twists and distraught heroines who would almost certainly be running around on the moors but for the fact that they live in London. It's also a good short-term substitute for The L Word, since it shares that Sapphic soap's overall mood and has an experimental lesbian story line to boot. Best of all, since it's British (the second season is airing there right now), all the high drama has to resolve itself in just six plot-packed episodes.
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Josh Schwartz, the guy responsible for The OC, Gossip Girl, and Chuck, has a new Web-series, Rockville, streaming over at theWB.com. Each episode is five minutes long (Schwartz told New York magazine that amount of time "is perfect for my attention span," which explains a whole lot about the recent plotting of Gossip Girl) and takes place in a music venue that is populated by Schwartz archetypes: the nervous talker guy, the chick he banters with, and the surprisingly cool authority figure.
Like Marshall "My So-Called Life" Herskovitz and Ed "thirtysomething" Zwick's Quarterlife, the only other serious "Web drama" made by people with experience making great television, Rockville is not any good (if this showed up on your set, you would groan, loudly, and flip away, which is exactly what happened when Quarterlife aired on NBC), but it is still perversely enjoyable. Schwartz deploys all of his typically charming tricks to ill-effect: Why doesn't his self aware, nerdy banter work on the Internet? Is it the acting? (Yes, it's mostly the acting.) The pacing? The way everyone gets too earnest too fast because they need to provide an emotional payoff in less than 300 seconds? But then before I can get well and truly annoyed, it's over. And I'll probably watch the next episode, because getting a smidge worked up about what's happening on-screen is one of the particular pleasures of TV watching. Plus, this could be the future of television; it's intriguing to watch it work out the kinks.