Spotlight: Mark Harris' EW Columns

The back page of Entertainment Weekly is currently split between two columnists: Stephen King and Mark Harris. Obviously, Stephen King gets all the press, the accolades, but he generally just lists stuff that he likes and dislikes and tries to tie it to something else. He’s usually somewhat removed from current popular entertainment, especially regarding music, and I end up disregarding most of his opinions because of this.

But I want to shine a light on the far superior but lesser-known Mark Harris:

His two recent columns, “Unpopular Demand” (Indiana Jones cover/March 14 issue) and “I Love You, Now Change” (Tyra Banks/February 22) were both spot-on. “Unpopular Demand” finally puts into words a concept I’ve danced around a lot recently, noticing how my own television habits have changed: that there are two types of television, Eye TV and Ear TV.

Basically, Eye TV are the shows you sit down for, and when you do, everyone SHUTS. UP. These are the shows you obsessively go online for, to rewatch favorite moments to make sure you accurately caught the right inflection of a command in a pivotal scene, to disassemble plot points, to stridently analyze character motives, to make sure your new favorite quote is letter-perfect. Ear TV is American Idol, or really any reality show: the shows you flip during, catch whenever, and generally watch when you’re in the mood for television.

Most of us have always delineated our television shows by this model unconsciously. Things like news and sports, music videos and reruns are often automatically in this category, but it’s only now with all the different media and entertainment options out there, not to mention the strike, that have really changed how we perceive television and the way we make it fit into our lives.

The truth is, much as we love our Eye TV, due to its intensity and inherent awesomeness it’s hard to have more than a handful of shows that we can dedicate ourselves to. When a show burns us, or falls below our expectations (aka sucks/becomes boring), it can be downgraded to Ear TV, and those are sad days, when we understand that the love has faded and it’s not working out. Ear TV is useful for catching up on things, having a conversation topic, but it’s not very fulfilling; there’s a reason us TV fans live and die by our favorite shows. It’s a catch-22: rare is the person who has the time to full-on devote a good portion of their life to several shows passionately, and frankly, even I find it unbelievable and a little loserish when I come across people like that, but we all want good programming, and we want it consistently.

“I Love You, Now Change” is the rare EW piece that shines a light on national politics, and not just on a show that satirizes national politics. It’s another pro-Obama article, but that’s not what’s important. He highlights a speech Obama gave in Los Angeles on January 31, during the last Democratic debate before, as he terms it, “Superconfusing Tuesday” (heh), where he addresses the ever-pertinent entertainment query of censorship versus artistic freedom, and just who is responsible for what. Like so much of what Obama says, he manages to sound reasonable, bringing both sides together in a way that just feels so natural. He talks from being a parent, facing the choices in monitoring what his children watch, but also places the blame on Hollywood for putting inappropriate advertisements in family programs and settings:

I do think that it is important for us to make sure that we are giving parents the tools that they need in order to monitor what their children are watching…not just what’s coming over the airwaves, but what’s coming over the Internet. […] It is important for those in the industry to show some thought about who they are marketing some of these programs to…”

As Harris so beautifully puts it, “There are rare moments in the political life of an issue when somebody suddenly redefines the center by articulating a position that sounds so much like a commonsense consensus that it becomes very hard for anyone to argue the point, either to the right or to the left.”

Harris continues, Obama “effectively killed the subject of the ‘culture wars’” by being so reasonable, finally saying what we all believe. I would like for such evenhandedness to continue, letting me enjoy my programs in peace at appropriate hours and not be horrified coming across racy material when it's family time.

I like many programs that would theoretically be labeled “adult entertainment” (minus the porn), but I’ve definitely noticed a steady decline in what can’t be said and shown on not just television, but the radio. It boggles my mind that Z100 will edit out words like “asshole” and “drugs” while PLJ, which has just as many young listeners thanks to their parents, does not. Compare early Friends to late Friends and see the difference in their conversational topics, and how risqué (yet how blasé) discussing sex becomes. It’s not because all those young viewers in 1994 grew up; it’s that by 2004 the culture demanded that the only way to make the characters credible was to have them talk dirtier. Friends wasn’t real in any other context, but somehow this change had to happen. Was it to catch up to the rest of the shows on television? To the viewers they were losing? To remain popular? Whatever it is, entertainment and American culture today is much, much coarser than it ever was. Even teen and child stars and programs aren’t immune to this; it can be argued they accelerated the decline. These issues never reached critical mass until preteens had their own culture, until Britney Spears hit the market.

The truth is that it’s probably just going to either plateau, or more likely, get worse. We’re not going to go back to Leave It to Beaver, unless it’s done ironically and Beaver is changed to something less…perverted. Preventing or masquerading the illicit entertainment is hard and inevitable going to fail, but the blame, like most things, is both a societal one and an individual one. We need to be discerning with what we choose to watch, especially in front of young audiences, but we also need to not be paranoid that every children’s show is featuring a teen girl who has a scandalous personal life.

And please, for the love of God, don’t put a television or a computer in your child’s bedroom.

Is Saturday Night Live Endorsing Clinton?

After watching the first two post-strike episodes of Saturday Night Live, the political commentary left me laughing but also wondering if SNL was endorsing Hillary Clinton.

As much as I love Tina Fey’s smackdown of misogynistic voters/Hillary Clinton haters, it’s pretty obvious that she’s for Ms. Clinton. It’s the “Texas and Ohio, it’s not too late!” that really pushes it over the edge. In fact, all the jokes—both that week and the Ellen Page episode—criticized Obama and left Amy Poehler’s Hillary fumbling to get her word out. The much-discussed sketch—referenced by Hillary Clinton in the Ohio debate (5:10 mark)--came across as very much pro-Clinton, since the audience could sympathize with her. She just wants fair treatment. Even though Tina Fey was head writer, it’s hard to tell how much of that particular episode she wrote, and that sketch was written by veteran SNL political sketch writer James Downey. Yet all of a sudden the line between what’s funny and what is actually an endorsement has blurred, in a way I don’t remember ever happening in the other two elections SNL has covered that I’ve watched: 2004 and 2000. This has become a way of measuring if the political comedy is valid, if it is underscored by some sort of favoritism by the creators.

When Hillary appeared on the March 1 episode, there was so much speculation on this topic that she referred to it: “That scene you just saw was a reenactment, sort of, of last Tuesday’s debate, and not an endorsement of one candidate over another. I can say this confidently because when I asked if I could take it as an endorsement I was told absolutely not.” The line elicited laughs and cheers. But while they do skewer her in the sketch, calling out those things that others won’t say, how she’s determined to be “so ingratiating, annoying, and bossy” that everyone will cower to her as president, an argument can be made that the sketch leaves the impression of again pitying Ms. Clinton for how unfairly she is treated compared to the white gloves Obama is given. It’s in the Weekend Update that the zingers are leveled on Hillary, but unfortunately (or fortunately) they are not repeated online; we’ll only see those in reruns this summer.

But it’s the cumulative effect that matters.

So far, over the past three episodes, I’ve found the skewering roughly equal. SNL, like the rest of their media brethren, have focused more on Hillary overall than Obama, mainly due to her visibility and because frankly there’s more to go on: her desperation, her personality, her wonkishness, her husband, her history…Obama’s critiques are even in Clintonian terms, in that they are framed around lampooning Clinton. The opening 3 am sketch—a parody on the red phone ad—was more about Hillary than Obama; it’s her dark vision of the future, but it’s also acknowledging that Obama could be president, and that even if he is, she’s still going to hold the reins, so either way America’s electing her. It’s a very clever skit.

I noticed the Hillary focus last week, too. This time there was no Tina Fey to hold responsible. Maybe it was because I was looking for it, maybe it was because so many other people have Obama blinders on—and certainly, SNL makes sure to remind the world that this is true and the mainstream media have since begun to take pains to rectify that. The show's been a change agent before--in 2000, Al Gore famously used the lockbox sketch [thank NBC Universal for not having old sketches up online for my inability to link it] to correct what his advisers felt was his woodenness on the podium.

Whether or not Tina Fey actually endorses Hillary Clinton is irrelevant. There are some fans who take her character Liz Lemon’s line in 30 Rock (“There is an 80% chance in the next election that I will tell all my friends that I'm voting for Barack Obama but I will secretly vote for John McCain.”) as proof that she has no political allegiances and she’s just trying to be funny. None of the writers on the show have appeared or announced their endorsements and I don’t think they will. It will ruin what they’re trying to do.

SNL will never endorse a candidate and they shouldn’t. But as their political satire has gotten sharper and relevant, they have to pay attention to what they are doing. This shouldn’t make them sissies nor make them hard-nosed on anything, and despite what Tina did on her hosting night, she made one of the most memorable and funny moments on not only the show in a long time but also one of the most pointed. She knew what she was doing, and she didn’t care. If only more people would take such risks.