Live Like We're Goners? I Don't Think So

Rachel Maddow has it right.

I’ve always hated the idea, personified in Kris Allen’s “Live Like We’re Dying” and Jordan Sparks’ “Tattoo”, that we must always live like every day is our last. These sentiments, these platitudes, are meant to goad us into action, to live bravely, to do risky things like go for that opportunity, to proclaim our love, those moments that we’re scared of that form the climax of the plot in any cheesy, predictable story.

We should absolutely not live every moment as if we’re dying. First, we simply can’t. There are moments in life where we have to do boring things—run errands, go to the bathroom, do homework, clean. These are not earth-shattering moments, and while they might lead us to pursue our dream, they are the necessary drudgework that is part of life. We can’t pretend these moments don’t exist, or consistently infuse them with meaning. We feel sick, we want to sleep in, we spend too much time online or on video games. Not every moment is meant for meaning; it is everything added together that becomes something more. Two, if we tried to live every moment as if it was life or death, we’d be in a constant state of anxiety and heightened emotions, and a person can’t live like that. Necessary things, like sleep and food, would get pushed out, because we don’t have time for petty things if we are dying!In that mindset, everything is short term; there are no considerations for consequences. Yeah, that opportunity might be amazing, but is it worth it after tomorrow? After next year? Is it harmful? Proclaiming your love is always viewed as this thing that, while scary, will always work out…but what if it doesn’t? What if everything goes to pot, and you were better off not doing it? But it doesn't matter, because you have to live every second like it's your last one!

There’s an episode of House where Wilson, after telling a patient that he only a few months to live, realizes that his disease is in remission and he will be fine. The patient is angry and wants to sue Wilson—the expectation that he was dying made his life fun for the short-term, and he was showered with parties and accolades. Now he has nothing to live for. He had lived for the present, and now that it was extended, there was nothing left. If we lived every day like we were dying, we would also feel this way. We told all our loved ones how we felt (nauseatingly), we took our risks, we said FU when it didn’t work out...and eventually we’ll be left with a shell of who we are, since we didn’t listen to anyone and didn’t prepare for the consequences.

So for the love of God, don’t tell me to live my life to the fullest, how I need to constantly run on all cylinders, to make sure that every moment counts. Because not every moment does, and not every moment can.

I’m too busy just trying to get by.

Daria on DVD!

Finally!

I have a few late series-eps on VHS, taped from a marathon before premiering the movie finale (I also have "Is It Fall Yet?"). But nothing compares to the whole season. I hope there will be extras, especially commentary.

I post this mainly to highlight this post on Bitch, a homage to the series. Also noteworthy is the clip from Roseanne. I too loved Darlene Connor, and this scene makes me tear up.

Notes on Blogging, Gender, Technology, House and Julie & Julia

(I posted this here because of the lengthy discussion of Julie & Julia and House. Unfortunately, the House episode is not available online yet, or I would link and quote from it.)

I had a very bloggy week, between watching Julie & Julia and Monday’s episode of House, which both revolved around women whose blogs got the better of them.

Julie & Julia received a lot of press for its portrayal of supportive husbands, on both women’s side. The Times gleefully wrote of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci’s portrayal of middle-aged passion, but Julie’s husband was a “saint”, so much so that he objected to the label. Much is made of the Childs’ marriage, how passionate they were, but I found Paul Child to be supportive, but distant; in fact, both husbands in the movie were quite bland. Maybe that’s the point—they both were supportive characters, meant to prop up the leads, so they usually are less developed than the protagonists.

But other than that observation, it was Julie’s bloggy passion that stood out, in comparison to this week’s House episode, concentrated on a blogger who goes a little too personal with her diagnosis. Both women get caught up in blogging about their lives, neglecting their significant others, who come to resent their girlfriend’s hobby. (Tip: Get a boyfriend who blogs, or who at least likes the medium as much as you do.) This is reminiscent of Emily Gould’s fantastic bloggy piece in the New York Times nearly two years ago, where she recounts how blogging about her personal life wrecked her relationship and her life. All three women had successful blogs, the real-life ones turning into successful writers. All three were transformed by their hobby, sharing their love with others and eventually having their own audience. Both Julie and Laura Prepon’s Frankie worry too much about their audience; Julie, about actually having one, and Frankie, about what they think. She uses her blog as a crowdsource of opinion, on both the large and small decisions of her life, including the many major medical ones she faces in the episode. Their blogs become their lives, their reason for getting up in the morning. Julie’s Julia Child obsession is fueled by her blogging, and without it the structure of her project would fall apart, as she is documenting her progress. Frankie, too, is obsessed with documenting her life, and despite protestations from her boyfriend, feels she would be lying if she did not faithfully record or retell everything. Julie does not feel this way, though she does consent to not publicizing a fight she has with her husband (though by it being in the movie we presume that it is retold in her book).

The issue here, of course, becomes privacy. Sure, on the surface, Julie Powell’s project sounds fun, if daunting, and not particularly invasive; she is in charge of how much she chooses to reveal, and on the surface a cooking blog would not be one to draw readers.

But of course, that’s too simplistic. One of the women mentioned in the film who actually makes an appearance is Amanda Hesser, a New York Times food writer who made a name for herself (at least to this writer) by writing a column in the Times Magazine in the early part of the ‘00s, “Cooking for Mr. Latte”, about her meals and dates with a certain Mr. Latte, later revealed to be the New Yorker writer Tad Friend. “Cooking for Mr. Latte”, a kind of Sex and the City meets food, certainly had enough dish and romantic intrigue to make it more than just another food column, and, though it was on paper, had a bloggy feel to it, as it chronicled their burgeoning relationship. (The column also became a book.)

So why are all these bloggers women? Why is it that women feel the need to emotionally reveal themselves online, to chronicle their lives? Men seem to go about it in a much more analytical, data-driven fashion; Nicholas Felton has designed a number of what he calls “Personal Annual Reports”, yearly compilations of the minutia that makes up his life, and it’s fascinating: all the restaurants he ate at, the countries he visited, his most played songs on iTunes. Every year, the charts and graphs, not to mention what he actually records, get increasingly complex. (The MIT Media Lab has done similar projects, recording and analyzing personal, daily data of students.) Sure, I already know all the comments, the criticism: even a friend of mine, when I showed him Feltron, responded, “I know the irony of what I'm about to say as a man that [sic] Tweets but that's kind of self absorbed.”

Sure, it’s self-absorbed. But it’s a whole other form of diary, a multimedia one, life writ large. The data aspects makes it so much cooler, because it’s objective, and it’s a form that you can’t argue with; maybe that’s why men like it. There are so many ways to tell a story, and neither is completely right, for each time it’s told, it’s done a little differently, and they all give different sides to the same one.

The Internet, in all its lovely possibilities, has also given us a way to be anonymous and solicit anonymous opinions. That comes across in blogging—again with the choosing to reveal what we want. But there’s also the new ChatRoulette and Formspring.me, services that flip anonymity on its head.

ChatRoulette, memorably introduced to many (including me) via this New York article, is a basic service that automatically turns on a user’s webcam and randomly beams you into someone else’s browser, and they you. The only options are to engage, move on, or turn off. Most outlets have connected it back to the days of the “wild, wild Internet”, before it became safe for minors, where everything and everyone was searchable. Here, it doesn’t matter if your name or your face or your home really belongs to you, as you are only known by your face, and there is no tag—there’s not even a record of who you’ve been connected with. There’s no way to track, no searching, no user names, no login information, no password. Glorious freedom. And yet it’s scary and incredibly intimidating, a party game to play.

Formspring.me is a site, a meme if you like, that lets people ask questions of a particular user. The person can use his or her real name, or a version of it, if the person desires, and those asking the questions can also identify themselves, though they usually stay anonymous. People asking the questions are strangers and friends; maybe you’ll get something good. It’s a version of a Facebook application known as the honesty box, which always got someone in trouble; that’s what honesty tends to do. And yet it’s addicting, in a way, to say too much; God knows in this era of TMI that it’s hard to put a lid on. Lying is contagious too, but it’s confusing as hell; being openly honest, too openly honest, can be about connecting or prolonging the awkward, having something to say, maybe just making a funny.

So we have two sides of a coin here: a site where we are expected to divulge secrets to those asking, and another an interface where we are personally faced with random strangers, no accountability. The first is implicitly about accountability, though we aren’t supposed to be pegged; the second, an escape route if we wish it to be.

But of course, we often occupy on the assumption that more information is better, and that notion led to ChatRoulette map, where users’ IP addresses are tracked to see who is using the service at any time. You do not need to be engaged on ChatRoulette to use ChatRoulette map, as I discovered this afternoon. There’s an option to turn this off, for it ruins the fun for some people. Exposing IP addresses always has a whiff of creepiness, as it feels like Big Brother is coming down to watch.

There are plenty of people that say that both will be a fad, and in Internet world, there are few things that have escaped this designation, one being Facebook. The Internet is both a blessing and a curse, causing us both to escape and feel trapped by our past, and we eagerly take up the call whenever we need to do so.

P.S. I have a formspring.me account. Ask questions, readers! Also cross-posted on Notes on Popular Culture.

Men are Stupid, But We Love Them Anyway: A Review of "The Marriage Ref"

Men are stupid.

You will be forgiven for believing this is true if all you watch is American television. American sitcoms routinely portray men as being dumb, selfish, boorish and insensitive, and NBC’s “The Marriage Ref” only perpetuates this, with both the men featured wanting what was portrayed as ridiculous, even creepy things.

Each episode of "The Marriage Ref" spotlights two couples, and three celebrity judges weigh in on their predicament. The host then beams the couples into the studio and delivers the verdict. The premiere episode, aired immediately after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, concentrated on a man who wanted to keep his pet dog stuffed in their home and another man who wanted to install a stripper pole in their bedroom for his wife to use.

The stripper pole guy tried to play off his request as an exercise tool for his wife, and he was eager for his wife to show off for him. She was not thrilled, to put it mildly, and a large part of the humor was derived from the clips of the wives expressing their outrage at the ridiculousness of their husbands’ wishes.

This was underscored whenever Natalie Morales, the NBC "Today Show" anchor, would state statistics at the host’s disposal, like on the number of Americans who stuff their pets every year (1,000, surprisingly low). She would also tack on information about the couple and their particular issue not shown in the clip; the dog in question, for example, was known for being a menace, chewing up furniture, and even peeing on guests.

Of course, even though Morales was there to lend some credibility to the show and to put the situation in context, if not bolster a participant’s argument, her neutrality was quickly swept away by a raft of jokes from the panel and the host. Morales is largely superfluous, as her role can be absorbed by the host or even included elsewhere in the show. Host Tom Papa is not funny, repeating the same standard jokes, the kind of canned lines that anyone with a corny manner can pull off.

Despite all this, the show was quite funny. The premise is simple and easily modified, and it’s clear that the show is well made, that a lot of thought went into it. The opening is a shortened version of how the idea came to pass: A fight between creator Jerry Seinfeld and his wife in front of a friend led him to ask said friend to be the referee. The characters are cartoons, and a baseball theme quickly takes over. Cute. Then we open to the introductions. It appears to be an old-fashioned game show, as the celebrities smile on and joke.

A couple is then introduced, and a series of both partners explain their problem, sometimes in one-on-one sessions with the camera, sometimes in voiceover. There is always a confrontation, and this is the funny part. The clips are always well-edited, and the couples are chosen because they are funny. They have great faces, they have great lines, and in both these cases, it was absolutely obvious that the wives would win.

Each judge weighs in, usually with a joke, and they banter some more. The host joins in, then flips to Morales, then renders judgment. Preview of next couple, commercial, and the process repeats. But there’s still a few minutes left! Why not go to a recap? The sports metaphor reappears, as Marv Albert is announced, and then he appears next to fancy generic sports lettering where he says the typical line about the sponsor, followed by a joke. Then the winning highlights, one from each clip, are played back. But we’ve seen this before, more than once; they are milking the maximum funny potential. It works in this instance, as the expression and the line chosen are meant to be sealed into memory, and everyone laughs again. But it’s filler, nothing more, completely unnecessary. The commercial highlighting the season’s guest stars is much more appealing.

Although this is very much billed as “Jerry Seinfeld’s show”, he doesn’t appear in subsequent episodes, but the mix of NBC-approved stars does look quite fun, and the episode alone is often much funnier and much more amusing than a random episode of any of NBC’s comedies. The disagreements are silly; we don’t think for a minute that either of these unions are troubled, and both couples featured in this episode have been married for a number of years (they also appeared childless). The show actively promotes marriage, as the show opens and closes with a retort effectively saying that these relationships are worth fighting for and that people should stick them out (preferably with a marriage ref on hand).

The wholesomeness works, as does the celebrity panel. Both couples receive a prize at the end, but that’s not really the point; nor does it matter who the refs rule for, as these couples can do whatever they want. But it’s just fun to peek into someone’s else life, and the comments are quite funny. It’s very clear that the show was engineered well, with a broad base, and the issues mined are both current and evergreen. The men try to come across as being respectful to their wives and enlightened in these sorts of things, as even panelist Alec Baldwin jokes, but they are still every much the doofus next door.

"The Marriage Ref" could use a few tweaks, like nixing Morales and possibly the recap at the end, but it will always remain lighthearted, wholesome, and thoroughly middle-American. Congratulations, NBC, looks like you’ve found yourself your next hit.

Why Fox Affiliates May Not Pick Up Conan

So Conan's free to appear on another network. Yay! NBC's not a total douche.

I wondered before why NBC affiliates would rather show reruns than the Jay Leno Show, and the same premise holds for Fox: why wouldn't the affiliates run Conan's show? How could they possibly lose when you compare it to what they air now--reruns of The Simpsons and Seinfeld, a show that completed its run over a decade ago?

This Broadcasting & Cable piece breaks it down:

For the Fox owned and affiliated stations, picking up O'Brien would appear to cause far more pain than gain. The performance of the stations in the Top 10 markets at 11:30 p.m. is largely equivalent to NBC's Tonight Show ratings in the same hour. But the stations keep far more ad inventory in that hour now than they would if they were forced to give it up to Fox. Every half-hour syndicated show offers stations as much as six minutes of advertising inventory to sell, while a half-hour of network inventory typically offers only about a minute.

Sources say Fox brass has asked the Fox-owned stations to run the numbers, and stations have responded that they expect they would lose millions if the local outlets had to give a late-night hour back to the network. The Fox affiliates fall somewhere between lukewarm and intrigued about the notion of O'Brien shifting to their late night air, perhaps at 11:30. Some wonder why he should expect to do better on Fox after posting lagging ratings during his Tonight Show run, while others say he's a rare bankable talent that may be a free agent.

Taste Isn't Everything

The problem with discussing Jay and Conan's shows, as well as the rest of the late night debacle, is that invariably the author inserts his taste, which of course comes across as fact--that obviously Conan is so much funnier than Jay, that Jay is flat-out dry and unfunny. As much as we all do this to some degree, it's particularly irksome in this case, because both men--as well as the rest of the late night group (save for Carson Daly, but no one cares about him anyway)--are all established comics in one way or another. Sure, their humor, style and approach all differ, but that doesn't necessarily make one inherently unfunnier than the other. Jay had a loyal audience and was regularly beating Letterman by 20%--and ratings do indicate that he was popular. Someone was watching him; it may not be those who write the articles and Twitter obsessively, but he had plenty of lower-profile fans.

However, despite the partisanship, this Daily Beast article dissects why Conan's Tonight Show wasn't doing well, and he throws out the timeslot as hogwash:

The problems were fundamental. First is that here in the hangover of the 2008 election, we want political satire. O’Brien doesn’t do much political satire. If you think of the transcendent bits that surfaced on YouTube since Conan began Tonight last June, they’ve come from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, various cable chat shows, even ancient Saturday Night Live.

Conan’s only major contribution to political goofery is Smigel’s (inspired) ventriloquism of politicians like George W. Bush. It’s no wonder that O’Brien’s Late Night ratings plummeted by nearly 700,000 viewers (more than 25 percent) back in 2008, when the nation glued its eyes to the campaign. It should have been an omen: His Tonight Show felt off-topic before it started.

That might not have been so deadly if the Tonight throne hadn’t distorted what made O’Brien funny. The problem is not the old saw that O’Brien’s “brand of comedy” doesn’t play at 11:35 p.m. Carson and Letterman had plenty of inspired wackiness, and Grandma and Grandpa liked them just fine. The problem is that O’Brien is really at his best as a straight man—the guy doing the horrified reaction shot when the masturbating bear runs out on stage. He’s a ringmaster rather than an emotional center of gravity.

This flows from O’Brien’s Harvard Lampoon sensibility, a kind of comedy that is impish and intellectual rather than crusading and heartfelt. (You can never imagine Conan snarling like Jon Stewart.) There’s nothing wrong with this, and it could work within the right show. But when O’Brien sat down at Johnny’s desk, the gravitas seemed to throw off his balance.

He goes on to say that the Tonight Show hadn't figured itself out yet. Well, duh. That's not a huge sin for a show that's only been on a few months, and talk shows--which tend to have hundreds of episodes over a multi-year run--should have even more leeway than other types of programs. They're done on the fly, working simultaneously on several days' worth of episodes. Anyone who's ever watched the same host multiple days in a row knows that they repeat jokes; that is, they exhaust the same stories, news items, and themes day after day. This week every host has been riffing on the Jay/Conan/NBC mess; it hasn't gotten old yet, but the jokes about Harry Reid have. It's the nature of the game, not meant to be watched night after night, but to flip casually among many. As such, some nights are bad; it depends on the jokes, the news, the guests, and if you stick around, you do get glimpses of the style. But each man and his respective staffs put on a show, and the effort is seen. Denigrating either performer for comedic chops is unfair to the work they do.

On Jay and Conan, and This Awful Situation

The brilliant Mark Harris predicted the Leno mess months ago:

But these days, with its lineup zigzagging from football to low-end cheapo reality like The Biggest Loser to botched onetime hits like Heroes to media pets like 30 Rock, NBC’s brand is scattershot. The face of the network, by virtue of sheer omnipresence, is Jay Leno, who, at 59, is not any network’s demographic ideal. He may not be killing NBC, as TV Guide recently speculated, but it’s beginning to feel like he’s participating in an assisted suicide. One thing’s already clear: Remaking an entire prime-time lineup in his familiarly peevish image was a Hail Mary pass, not a long-term business strategy. And one suspects the network knows it. With Jeff Gaspin already working hard to repair NBC’s relationship with the creative community by signing deals with high-profile producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and J. J. Abrams, it’s hard to imagine that he and Zucker are not beginning, very quietly, to consider a Plan B. That could involve paying off Leno and canceling his show, cutting it back to three or four nights a week to give the grid a little more flexibility, or even returning Leno, “by popular demand,” to the Tonight Show. Start sweating, Conan; Leno recently told a trade reporter he’d take that deal if he were asked to—a seemingly offhand comment that sounds a lot like the beginning of a gigantic face-saving maneuver.

TMZ broke the news Thursday that NBC was considering a shakeup in their primetime and late night schedule, an earthquake that only rose as the days continued. It was another powerful coup for TMZ, the first time sticking its tentacles into business matters. Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, both middle-aged white men not usually the sort of target the gossip site goes after, were now the number one story.

It’s a real shame that it all had to end this way. The “failed experiment” of The Jay Leno Show was pilloried online, absolutely brutalized from the moment it was announced. Sure, it sucked for the creative community, but it was an interesting, bold move, and I supported Jay, Conan, and NBC. NBC said multiple times that they would honor the two-year commitment, wanting to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but it was the affiliates—some, like Boston, which was against it from the start—who revolted.

Although NBC liked The Jay Leno Show, they felt they had no choice but to pull the plug, that a reduced load—airing two or three times a week—was not enough. Obviously, they wanted to hang on to Jay and Conan, to everyone, so they came up with their half-hour deal. It was a panacea, the best way they could retain all their talent. It’s a mess, with not enough time for everyone, yet too many holes to fill.

What’s changed so much is the business climate; the shows weren’t given much time to settle in, to get comfortable, showing just how different television is today. The Jay Leno Show hadn’t even been on the air for six months before it was cancelled, and it was performing to expectations. Conan’s Tonight Show was doing ok, but it had only been on the air since June. Conan was up against Letterman, an institution in his own right, and still in the midst of an extortion scandal; Jay’s show was an experiment still in the testing stage. It’s well known that their predecessors had bumpy rides when they first began, all they needed was a little time, at least a year!

Sure, the audiences for each comedian were different—a lot of people who were used to Jay at 11:30 may not have appreciated Conan’s humor, since they rarely saw him when he was on after midnight, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get used to a new face or a new slot. But even those who want to argue that online viewership should matter—Conan’s Tonight Show was the 13th most popular item on Hulu last year—it is an issue that is irrelevant for the affiliates, a group who rarely get the spotlight. Jay Leno’s show didn’t crack the Top 25. This isn’t surprising; while Jay beat Conan in total audience numbers, his biggest fans tended not to be the types of people who watch clips online: middle-aged parents, the loyalists, the people who’ve known Jay for years. Conan’s audience is naturally up later, college-aged and people who aren’t settled into decades-old habits, and will watch the same wacky stuff over and over again, flipping online for the clips they missed.

It’s hard to comment on Leno vs. Conan’s respective shows without getting into taste—and that’s another arena where no one ever wins. Both of them have made several shots at NBC’s expense, as well as riffing on the situation at hand. Alessandra Stanley has an astute analysis (though she does come down on Leno’s side; he is the more polished performer):

[Conan] is considered a younger, hipper comedian, but as it turns out, his “Tonight” show is not very different from Mr. Leno’s. On Thursday they both made the exact same joke about the freezing temperatures in China — so cold that little children can’t get to their factory jobs. (Mr. Leno told his version a bit better.)

(I've noticed repeat jokes among the late-night hosts, too; Jay always comes out on top.)

But truthfully, both men got screwed. While there are plenty of people who say Jay should retire (and should’ve retired years ago), should he really be forced out? His Tonight Show was regularly beating Letterman. Leno himself wants no hard feelings, and was always supportive of Conan. He just wants to do a show. And Conan has worked hard and is great at what he does; he shouldn’t be forced out (though that’s a dominant reading of the situation). Also, Conan upended his life for the Tonight Show; he is in charge of a whole crew of people and their families, and that they moved to accommodate the changes, too. It’s no small thing to a lot of people.

So while it’s not surprising that Conan made the decision he did:

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I've been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I've been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I've been absurdly lucky. That said, I've been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35. For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter. But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it's always been that way.

Yours,

Conan

It still leaves everyone else back to asking, now what? Is Jay Leno back to the Tonight Show? Will everything about his new show be completely forgotten? He had some good stuff in there (like the “Earn Your Plug” game). Whose studio will he use? How will Conan do on Fox, where he is most likely to land? Is the Tonight Show tarnished forever? Will Jay lose a lot of audience share or support? Will those rush-job dramas be ready by March? Will this season be another implosion all-around for television, like it was two years ago? Will the affiliates really be happy? For business buffs, how will this impact the Comcast deal? Is there nothing worth a wait?

Comcast’s pending takeover of NBC Universal is the dog sniffing around the hen. While Jeff Gaspin, Chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment, has said that the pending Comcast takeover has had no effect on the decision, some outlets believe otherwise, citing the PR nightmare that rogue affiliates would cause as further proof of what a stinking egg NBC is. Gaspin, for his part, said that he wanted to wait until September, he wanted to see the numbers for a full television year, but the affiliates threatening to revolt forced his hand.

According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, a third of the affiliates (NBC has over 200) had talked about preempting The Jay Leno Show. I’m not sure what they would put on instead (would reruns really have given them a better boost? Seriously?), because their local news drop-offs were so bad, and advertising rates were plummeting faster than stomachs on a roller coaster. Yes, it is a bad time in media, but that's no longer an acceptable excuse, and clearly neither was waiting. It’s one of the few times that affiliates get to bully their bosses around, and so many, rightfully, place the blame on them.

Over the summer, Leno made his rounds to the affiliates, trying to soothe them that everything would be alright, that losing Law and Order wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And yet, somehow, despite it being on all the other stations, it was. NBC tried mightily—God knows everyone saw Jay Leno’s face everywhere the past several months, something Jay was quick to joke about—but somehow, it felt too little, too late.

Further reading: Ratings info included here; More on NBC's "Midlife Crisis"

Eeeeee!

I can't not post this. One, it's just great news, and two, I absolutely love Emily Nussbaum's writing in this paragraph. Just love.

In other news, I'm downright giddy that Aaron Sorkin will be back with another TV show about a TV show. Not because I liked Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, mind you: I thought the series was fascinating and I watched every single episode, but I was also simply flabbergasted by the solipsistic lunacy of the thing, which amounted to the most grandiose, fancily produced, payback-laden public tantrum thrown in the history of the medium. But Sorkin is clearly fascinated by television itself, as well as social networking, as well as Aaron Sorkin, and these are all obsessions I share, so I look forward to whatever auteurist fantasia is coming our way — and devoutly wish I could walk very fast down the hall with him in pointy heels, debating the matter.

Very, very excited that Emily Nussbaum, a favorite writer of mine for many years, has a blog. I only wish I watched the shows she discusses so I can get on the action...

The Creator Speaks

Matthew Weiner on Mad Men:

[M]y impetus in doing this show was to A) indulge my interest in how history affects people's lives, and B) deal with a piece of history that has been metabolized in a very specific way, in my lifetime.

You know, it's a golden age. It was the time that was talked about when I was growing up. I am Generation X. I grew up in the shadow of this thing. And the reality of it is, is that people's lives are always similar. You know what I mean? Yes, we have a black president, and history has changed, and it's an amazing thing that's happened in this country. But you know, babies are still born the same way. You know what I mean? People get divorced, people get married. Those things don't change.

So I was always interested, from the beginning, in showing the process of people going through tumultuous events, or going through history at all, and what is tumultuous and what isn't. And trying not to indulge the traditional, not just to revise it, but just to not tell the story that way. To tell the story more in the way it feels like it's happening.

[...]

Is it also a factor of the fact that these changes look dramatic in retrospect, but the day-to-day reality was much more gradual?

Absolutely. I do think that. Yeah. And I think that it's always like that: that there are things that are cataclysmic and really do have an influence on us. But there are events happening right now -- I use the example of GM going bankrupt (and that it) may be seen as the turning point in this economic crisis. But no one knows that now. Maybe next year it'll be declared that. And just because it's declared that doesn't mean it's true.

[...]

But history gets used to tell a certain story, and I'm always interested in the story of what it's like to live through these things. Sometimes we feel invested in politics, and sometimes people come along, young people come along, and they are invested and idealistic, and sometimes it's just people trying to be human beings. So that's really the story that I'm telling.

Fox Still Messing with Dollhouse

And some people say Twitter is worthless: Felicia Day tweeted that her episode of Dollhouse will not air on Fox. Entertainment Weekly has the scoop, which again puts the network in a bad light:

It's true. Fox bought and paid for 13 hours of Dollhouse (from sister company 20th Century Fox), one of which turned out to be the scrapped pilot that Whedon wound up reshooting. Which means Day's episode, "Epitaph One," isthe 14th -- which the network didn't buy. And isn't going to buy.

Way to be lame.

I'm still figuring out the show. I'm a Whedon newbie, but it's clear to me that Fox messing with the show from the very beginning only harmed the series, and that many people are sticking with it out of a sense of loyalty to Whedon in the hope that it will be successful. It's only now that Dollhouse is beginning to go somewhere, but it's probably too little too late for a lot of people.

Seems to me that Whedon loves to pull in people with the sexualized content: Every episode showcases Eliza Dushku's feline body bound in some ridiculous bondage or sex kitten wear, and then she runs around and kicks some ass it in, somewhere between the :45 and :50 mark. While it works within the show, sometimes the series just feels like an excuse for having Dushku dressed so laughably, and it always elicits chuckles and raised eyebrows.

Goodbye, ER

I would be remiss if I did not mention ER's passing into the ether of TV history tonight. A Thursday staple, it lambasted the competition for years, despite going through multiple cast changes and enough plotlines to make a TV addict cry.

Far from being the only medical show on television, it ushered in a new way of looking at hospital shows--as an exciting, fast-paced whirl of activity--instead of the folksy, laid-back look of earlier eras. Michael Crichton labored for years on a pilot that confounded executives with its medicalese and rotating storylines, but its hyper-realism not only connected with viewers--ER, always at Thursdays at 10, is the longest-running drama to ever air in the same timeslot--but ushered in a whole new type of programming. Dramas today are gritty and hard-hitting, and even when lighthearted deal less with overall soapy elements than they did in the past.

ER was the first show to bring actual medical students and doctors on as writers and consultants, something that is de riguer now from House to SVU. Michael Crichton himself was a doctor before creating the show, and even his choice of camera styles was revolutionary. The steady cam caught all of the action, from the nursing assistants to the spouses, a technique that was later identified with the walks-and-talks of The West Wing.

For those of us who didn't watch ER, the show was also known by its incredible promos--turning plot twist into an art form, with helicopters, death, near-death, car accidents, and all manner of spoilerific fun.

ER started in 1994, the same year as Friends. It is one of the last, if not the last, true dramatic blockblusters on television, and one without a spinoff or attached steries. That alone makes it unique.

Television is not dying, but the conception of big hits is. ER was big and bombastic, and it will go out with a well-deserved bang.

You Won't Be Watching MadTV

The news was buried in an article on Spike Feresten in the Times on December 20.

MadTV is no more.

Defamer got the scoop.

Always the scrappy underdog to Saturday Night Live, MadTV, though never earning much respect or ratings, still managed to make a pop culture dent. After all, a guy at work did dress up as Stuart for Halloween this year, and my cousin, far from being on the tip of the zeitgeist, is known for having a wicked impression of Miss Swan, two characters that were mainstays on the program.

MadTV never could compare to SNL, partly because it was a taped program. They did not focus on news or politics, but on funky, oddball characters, but their biggest strength was by far their music video parodies, which they were able to be so successful at precisely because the show was taped. SNL copied them with their digital shorts, right around the time Andy Samburg was hired. Madonna, Britney Spears, John Madden, Whitney Houston and Kenny Rogers “starred” in many of their most well-known skits, and they also frequently mocked Apple (see “iRack”). Yet looking back over many of the highlights, a real sense of the pop culture of the last decade shines through, and there were times when they were right on the money—Feist’s "1234", “Trapped in the Cupboard”, and the Abercrombie kids mocked the absurdity that each brand was trying to sell.

Like SNL, the show did have musical guests perform, although the one thing that stood out about them was that they weren’t cool or big enough to go on SNL. Most didn’t make it that far—the artists didn’t upgrade and the viewers switched over or off before the act even began. The acts always seemed superfluous, tacked onto the end because it was some rule that variety shows had to have them. We all knew cast members contorting their voices and bodies to play real stars were far more entertaining.

MadTV had the fortune to start at 11, which meant a half-hour of their best stuff followed by viewers flocking in droves to their cooler counterpart. I’ve lost many arguments comparing SNL to MadTV, but the truth of the matter is, SNL always got the clout, even when they didn’t deserve it. SNL’s best asset, as they showed last year, was in political comedy. MadTV’s best asset was ripping upon the nation’s favorite television shows, music, and celebrities. Despite being on the air for fourteen seasons and having a syndication deal on Comedy Central for the last few, the show never got any respect, even though some of their impressions and parodies are on par if not better than SNL's best. Nicole Parker's Britney Spears, for example, is the best I've ever seen.

I’ve spent quite a few hours in my life amusing myself with MadTV parodies on YouTube. I’m including some of my favorites below.

I never get tired of this, ever.



A newbie but a keeper. Her Hannah Montana is spot-on.



My dad is obsessed with this clip. It's probably one of the most-watched videos in my household.



Again, spot-on dis of the concept and what Christina was trying to do. Purposefully dressing as skanky as she could possibly be for this video was the wrong tactic.



JT was begging for this.



Chingy’s “Holidae Inn” was never used for something better.



Doesn’t make much sense, but who doesn’t love an “Umbrella” parody, especially with Nicole Parker?



The only thing good about “My Humps” was that this was created.



I could have just linked this above, but this is seriously one of MadTV's best.

No, Not All Teen Girls Get Pregnant: Why I Hate The Secret Life of the American Teenager

I came on Facebook a few days ago to see a number of people going crazy over the return of The Secret Life of the American Teenager. I’ve never watched this show. I have no desire to watch this show. From the little I know, the lead teen girl gets pregnant. Because obviously every teenager knows someone who got knocked up if she didn’t herself. I envisioned other contemporary-teen problems, of mean girls and MySpace and blah blah blah. But no, the show is way worse.

With the news that teen birth rates have skyrocketed and that virginity pledges don’t work (which we already knew already), I question the wisdom of having a show—and a terrible one at that—that focuses on teen pregnancy. Oh, you say, but it can serve as a warning! And now that all these girls are getting knocked up, they can relate! Please.

One or two of the articles I read discussing these two studies mentioned the rash of high-profile teen pregnancies, and how that could be seen as “glamorizing” teen pregnancy. I think the spike is a combination of a lot of factors, and I don’t want to discount or endorse that idea. But I absolutely do not think having a show like Secret Life is helping.

Secret Life was created by Brenda Hampton, of 7^th Heaven fame. This should make most normal, rational people quake in their bones. 7^th Heaven moralized, but it did it in the worst way—showcasing certain value sets by letting its characters run amok, behaving badly, generally being abhorrent, amoral people, but it was all ok in the end as long as you waited til you had sex to get married and believed in church and god. It fostered “traditional family values” in the worst way. The Secret Life of the American Teenager, from what I’ve read, does the same thing.

The show was actually passed by FOX. Maybe they thought that the moralizing wasn’t for them, but on the surface, this is a show MADE for them. The show has one hell of a titillating title. Of course it’s going to arrest a certain type of teen and their parents.

But it’s precisely those teens and parents who should stay far, far away. For one thing, I don’t think the title is representative of anything. I think a teenager’s secret life would be far more interesting and far less soapy that what this show’s got going one, what with the pregnant teen marrying a boy that’s not the daddy, cause he’s awesome and the daddy’s not. What teenage boy in his right mind would do such a thing?!?!?

The show is supposed to show all aspects and all consequences of what happens when a teenager becomes pregnant. There are major characters who are religious and vow to wait until marriage. Despite this, the show is filled with stereotypes. The lead, Amy, is a “good” girl who slipped up and had sex with some rowdy playa—except she was too dumb to realize that she actually had sex.

I always feel, watching teen shows, that it’s a must that someone gets pregnant. There’s always a pregnancy scare and some point, and then it happens. But why? I no longer find these plots amusing—on any show. They’re rarely dealt with sensitively or realistically, and it just makes it seem like everyone is too busy having sloppy sex to do anything else with their lives. Yeah, girls get pregnant, and teenagers are stupid. But teenagers are more than that, and it’s insulting to always see it boiled down to the same things. I went to a small high school, and my sophomore a junior girl I didn’t know got pregnant. This was big news, whispered about constantly. But really, that was it. Everyone I was surrounded by was far more worried about colleges and grades and teachers and other mini-dramas that were a world away from pregnancy. And I honestly don’t believe that in this we were that different from millions of other teenagers in the United States. I had quite a secret life in high school, but it certainly didn’t involve me getting knocked up. The fact that the central character gets married is another thing that shown as positive—gotta love those family values!—with no mention of how insane that really is. And at the wedding, there are no adults, and fake IDs are provided for all the high school students...even though several said they wouldn’t drink. Right. But it’s ok, guys—she’s keeping the baby and she’s getting married, to hell with breaking the law and just having a huge-ass bash! Hooray!

A poster on Television Without Pity explains how awful the show is below, saying the show “reads like really bad fanfic written by middle schoolers”:

While I was less than shocked that SLOAT was riddled with stereotypes (my old roommate watched 7th Heaven reruns far into her twenties) I was actually surprised that the show manages to denigrate all stereotypes. According to this show, all Christians are overly preachy and naive, as well as hypocritical and judgmental, everyone in therapy must be considered crazy by not only teenagers but Deputy District Attorneys as well, mentally retarded people hire hookers over the internet to be their friends, teenage girls are universally morons, non-religious people go around jumping into bed with any person they can get their hands on, single mothers are oversexed and don't care about who they sleep with, married man or not, etc, etc. And also? Ben? Is a stalker. For real. He needs serious therapy. Not cool. Not cool at all. This is actually what parents want their daughters to see as an ideal of romanticism? What?

This is no holds barred the worst show on television. Absolutely the worst. No question. I knew it in the first ten minutes of the show... and the whole therapy thing, which was totally weird random and unrealistic, as well as the fact that everyone felt the need to whisper the word "abortion" when they said it at all AND the fact that the show moralizes constantly without being able to figure out what it's moralizing about (condoms are good, but premarital sex is bad; abortion is wrong, but it is every persons personal choice; christianity is good but christians are crazy) has done nothing to prove me (and everyone else on this board wrong).

But this is the part I totally cannot figure out -- I watched all of this monumentally stupid shows monumentally stupid episodes in the last two days. And while I'd really like to plead overwork and exhaustion, I find that argument insufficient to explain my inability to simply turn off the damn television. I know others have faced a similar plight and yet I cannot stop wondering what is the freaking deal? Why can it not be turned off? What weird hold does Brenda Hampton have over the population of the world and is there any way it can be harnessed for good rather than evil?

It’s shows like this that not only give teenagers a terrible rap, but also warp their viewers’ minds. A young kid, a middle schooler—and as this is on ABC Family, there are many watching—will form really weird and potentially damaging ideas about love, sex, and high school. And then when that time comes, they might realize that something isn’t quite right. But while the premise behind The Secret Life of the American Teenager could be interesting if done well, it’s clearly shallow and silly, wrapped in a guise of morals and real family drama that everyone can relate to. At best it’s a silly soap that enthralls a bunch of people for some time, at worst it distorts a real and complex issue, reflecting the mixed-up notions of a nation that just doesn’t know what to do with its teenagers.

Giving Boston Legal Its Due

I tend to be a little grand in terms of storytelling, I've never been limited by anybody's sense of reality.

--David E. Kelley

Boston Legal isn’t a show that gets a lot of press. It’s an adult show, made by adults for adults, and the average age of the cast is somewhere in the late 50s. It’s polemical, and the characters are essentially mouthpieces for creator David E. Kelley’s views on everything and anything political, cultural, historical, legal…you get the picture. His characters are ridiculous, often acting like spoiled children who use the law to spout off their own opinions in the hope to win some ridiculous lawsuit.

Meaning that it sounds very much like many of his other shows.

David E. Kelley has a certain style, one that you either embrace or completely reject for being completely preposterous. It’s apparent in many of his most famous shows—The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Public. The only one of these I’ve never seen is The Practice, another “for adults only” show.

Despite being a huge fan of Ally McBeal back in the day, I would never have sat down and watched Boston Legal on my own because of its reputation as an adult show. My parents watched it, and I got suckered in—surprised by how much I enjoyed the political back-and-forth, the fact that he raised pertinent and topical issues, often “ripped from the headlines” in a much less lurid fashion than is usually implied. Of course, Kelley’s overt statements—half an episode was devoted to why we should vote for Barack Obama—made the show objectionable for many but standout in that it went where shows rarely go.

Probably the best-known aspect of the show is Denny Crane and Alan Shore’s relationship, featured at the end of every episode where they sit on a balcony high-rise overlooking Boston, smoke a cigar, have a drink, and wax philosophically. Bromance is usually labeled onto younger men’s friendships, but in the case of two adult men, the word merely reduces their relationship to something trivial. These are two men not afraid to say “I love you”—over and over again, with endless florid expansions on the subject.

The actors—including the leads Candice Bergen, James Spader (who won the Best Actor Emmy last year in quite the upset), and William Shatner—are very good, making the ridiculous human and believable.

David E. Kelley is the master of the monologue, and only he can take ludicrous premises and make you believe. As he puts it (through Alan) in his fantastic injunction against the Chinese conglomerate that bought out the law firm in “Made in China”, “Did you know the kinds of cases that we argue, week to week? Typically preposterous, mostly unwinnable on their face, and yet we win them, whether we have grounds or not.” That not only sums up Boston Legal, but pretty much any David E. Kelley law show.

In the penultimate episode, Denny Crane (Shatner)—genius lawyer, notorious womanizer, and all-around character, suffering from Alzheimer’s—wants to try an experimental drug that has shown promise. He goes to the Supreme Court to advocate for it. He also asks his best friend, Alan Shore (Spader), another brilliant lawyer, to marry him. Now that homosexual marriage is legal in Massachusetts, he wants to marry Alan so that he can be in charge of all his medical and financial decisions, especially as his faculties deteriorate. The firm he is head of, Crane, Poole & Schmidt, is being bought out by the Chinese, which gives the main characters plenty of time to rail against communism, China’s human rights violations, and the nature of democracy. Oh, and Shirley Schmidt (Bergen), the other partner, is getting married to Carl Sack (John Larroquette), her colleague. Looks like a double wedding!

It’s the first time in 20 years that David E. Kelley won’t have a show on the air—but he’ll be back sometime in the next year, for another law show. Boston Legal had one of the richest audiences on the air, but its “mediocre ratings” caused ABC to cancel it—a fate befalling other shows that have very rich demos and older audiences.

Boston Legal is now rerun on ION, another network that reruns “fuddy-duddy” shows (bring back The Wonder Years!)…which means that it won’t gather many new fans outside of the ones it already has. I watched the last two episodes (aired as one two-hour finale) on ABC.com, and I was struck by how different the “experience” was: The ads revolve around “adult” concerns. Blackberry was the biggest advertiser, followed by Tropicana (it’s healthy!). What a contrast to other shows—perfume, gadgets, junk food! These ads were often silent too, and ABC.com makes you click continue in order for the show to continue, which I dislike—I want my shows to automatically play!

Boston Legal will be remembered as a show that won many Emmys that many people thought were undeserved, partly because it ran against popular fare like Lost, The Sopranos, and 24, and featured a bunch of older actors running ridiculously around a law firm, but it deserves some respect—for showcasing issues and concerns not usually deemed relevant for a television audience.

Note: Check out this Wikipedia description on Candice Bergen's character, Shirley Schmidt:

Shirley is portrayed in the series as the ultimate ideal woman: smart, sexy, graceful, dignified, a great lawyer and businesswoman, phenomenal in bed, easy to fall in love with and impossible to get over.

Love Stories

A couple weeks ago, I wanted to write about how the success of House gives me faith in America. House is a complex show that deals with philosophical issues, about medical ethics, of right and wrong, connecting with people, of how to live. The fact that it is one of America’s top-rated shows—and one that is well-acted, generally well-written, and both a critical and fan favorite—makes me very happy. But I also realized that House does something that is very rare on television shows: two of the main characters, Gregory House and Lisa Cuddy, are both single for a long time.

As most people know, these are two characters who flirt and argue with each other, and often their scenes are fun to watch. They are the standard couple that fans are suppose to root for, and of course they’ll get together at the end of the series, as is television convention. What is notable is that their relationship obstacles are themselves—their own stubbornness, expectations, beliefs, habits, and personality quirks—and not other people. House does not date. Cuddy does not date. This is pretty big for television; most shows have boyfriends and girlfriends and affairs and would-be suitors that rotate out of the main characters’ lives, with various missed chances and misunderstandings. But as House has continued the past few weeks, with Cuddy and House kissing and acknowledging their attraction to each other, there have been those classic television misunderstandings, most notably in last week’s episode, “Let them Eat Cake”, where House is off flirting with a woman he hired to play a prank on Kutner and Taub. Cuddy sees this just as she’s about to forgive him for an earlier incident, since House had done something special for her.

Last weekend, I saw three movies that revolve around “grand” love affairs: Twilight, Australia, and a Bollywood hit titled Fanaa, which means “Destroyed in Love” in English. While it’s true that love stories follow similar arcs—there’s a meet cute, often involving a misunderstanding or a dislike, a gradual time of becoming friends, then really good friends, periods of crisis that draw the two together, the requisite confusing/scared emotions, the obstacles that keep the two apart (whether external or internal, or a combination)—it doesn’t mean that they are particularly interesting, victorious, or that they work at all. A formula does not mean success.

This is why most love stories aren’t good. They just aren’t. They’re everywhere, and that’s one of the problems—love stories are supposed to be special, exciting, meaningful, infused with pain, yet there’s an unbreakable sense of connection, friendship and yes, love, that underscores it all. That’s what the good ones do. You can follow all the rules, and still not have the story matter. Twilight, Australia and Fanaa had many of the standard elements, but none of them were particularly good. What struck me and my compatriots in watching the movies, though, was that there were thematic and tonal similarities: while all of them were over-the-top, the drama was ridiculous in Twilight and Fanaa. There was too much back-and-forth, too much “I can’t live without you!” hysterics. There was too much talk of dying for each other, of “You can’t be with me, because I will get you killed! I will ruin your life! And therefore we must STAY AWAY from each other!” In both Twilight and Australia, there was a scene where one of the leads doesn’t know how to dance and is shy. The genders were reversed, but the dialogue was practically the same in both movies, despite that one dealt with cowboys and the other vampires.

Love stories are overhyped, fit into any story because it’s considered a necessary element of success. Upping the ante by introducing politics, death, illness and other catastrophes is often considered another requirement of epic romances, but it’s not necessary and often takes away from the central story. That’s what happened in Twilight and Australia (although Australia's story wasn’t really about the romance, but was a substantial part of it). These elements are usually so over-the-top that they obscure the real romance and move it into parody, drawing out the movie so we just don’t care any more. That occurred in all three movies.

What’s missing in the movies, and in most love stories, is the friendship behind the leads. In Roger Ebert’s review of Twilight, he says, “They’re in love with being in love.” Bella and Edward spend the movie giving each other smoking, lustful looks and discussing why they can’t be together (he wants her blood too much), but there’s nothing else besides attraction that hold them together.

The central question of any love story should be: why do these two love each other? Why them? The audience needs to see why each cares for the other, why each genuinely likes the other. Most treat this question superficially, glossing over it for the more exciting romantic tension that awaits. But tension is meaningless and not as much fun if the fundamentals aren’t there, if the reason for the tension is perfunctory and silly.

I’m convinced that Michael Patrick King wanted to create a great love story in Big and Carrie in Sex and the City, and that’s the overwhelming feeling I’m left with whenever I see the finale. (I’m excusing the movie here because I feel it retreads a lot of the same ground, but it could work within this framework, since their love ends happily after a massive screw-up.) Here we see why Carrie and Big just have this overwhelming affection for each other—that they can laugh and flirt and just be fun with each other, and each likes the other’s playful attitude, that person’s love of New York City. Despite all their problems, they go back to each other—a controversial point in most romantic relationships, because this tendency can be destructive, hampering the necessity of moving on. Carrie and Big’s epic love story is one thing I take away from the show, and I think he succeeds in creating a lasting, captivating story, one with many believable, heart-wrenching turns.

One of the reasons The Office is such on shaky ground this season is that it doesn’t know what to do with its central couple, Jim and Pam. The show was phenomenal in its second and third seasons partly because it was powered by the unrequited love between those two, and the second season finale “Casino Night”, where Jim confesses his love to Pam and then kisses her, is considered by many to be the best episode of the series. Watching the friendship between the two, Jim’s longing and confusion followed by Pam’s longing and confusion, was at times exhilarating, heartbreaking, and frustrating, and garnered lots of fans of both the show and the characters. By coupling the characters early enough in the series, considered a radical move by many, the show set us up to watch their relationship grow. But the lack of romantic tension, sad to say, was not replaced by genuinely interesting and compelling storylines, but ones that had the potential to be so and then written off. Romantic intrigue was passed onto other characters, poorly, as if one great love story can be substituted for another.

While The Office can and hopefully will bounce back from the stupidity this lackluster season has brought, it could show what many want to see: a full-fledged, real relationship, without the excessive drama that plagues most television and movie romance. It can be done, and it can be done well—it just takes imagination and a real commitment to write a story based around interesting and compelling characters. But too often it just doesn’t seem palatable. After all, it’s very hard to write about a relationship in television or in the movies that’s about the after part of “happily ever after.” The joke is that it doesn’t exist.

As Emily Gould put it recently, when discussing Gossip Girl:

It’s rare to watch a tv show’s writers basically confess that they’ve hit a wall. Imagine if, somewhere around the third season of Friends, Ross had sat Rachel down and said, “You know, we’ll never stay together, because there would really be nothing to hang the misunderstanding-based hijinx of this show on.” When Chuck told Blair that “the game” is “what we like,” he might as well have been staring into the camera and addressing the audience directly. ‘When we finally get together,’ he’s saying, ‘you’ll know that Gossip Girl’s writers have finally gotten that memo from CW headquarters that they’ve got another episode or two to wrap things up.’

But less cynically, or maybe more cynically: the audience basically never gets to watch the ever-after part of romances – it’s boring, we’re given to understand, all that moviegoing and hand-holding. Love affairs have three acts, we know from tv, and even, a little, from our own experience. There’s the thrilling beginning, fraught with obstacles and delicious suffering. And then there’s the middle, the happy normalcy phase that actually maybe doesn’t even exist and is just a slow slide into the mediocrity and boredom that signals the end. Maybe there are just two acts, then.

And when act two is running its course, it’s back to the drawing board again.

(Fully Fleshed Out) Characters Needed

So "Gossip Girl" is hot. I saw ten minutes of it and never went back. But according to Newsweek, lots of men are loving it (Dawn Ostroff wants proof of this, in the form of ratings.) Why? Because it has fully fleshed out male characters.

Well, duh. I don't like buffoons and one-note male characters any more than I like silly and one-dimensional female characters. Joshua Alston notes that the reason why the Sex and the City movie got thumbs-down by men is because the men were "pencil sketches", "a cavalcade of broken men" with a variety of hang-ups ill-suited for their ages. Hey, I agree! One of my biggest problems with that movie was that the men were so underutilized, and their sides of the story (specifically Steve's) needed to be told. Just like women want to see a female character hanging out with the boys (Seinfeld, see anything related to superheroes), men want a male character who doesn't suck in their chick-heavy entertainment.

I knew many males who liked "The OC" back in the day, too. Cause the friendship and the characters of Seth and Ryan was compelling and realistic; it was Marissa and Summer who were boring. Everyone agreed on that, and Seth Cohen's character became an icon for a certain type of male.

There's always a lot of talk about how television dumbs down it's audience. That's true, especially if you watch a lot of "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?", but in creating shows with compelling characters, it pays to make sure that they're interesting no matter the gender or genre.

Sex Is Bad

While I have no interest in watching the new "90210", I read the Times interview with many members of the old cast, and this jumped out at me:

[Executive Producer Charles] ROSIN We did our prom episode, which was written and directed by Darren, and Brenda loses her virginity to Dylan McKay in a hotel room and comes down and tells Kelly that indeed this has happened.

[Creator Darren] STAR The affiliates were scandalized — not because they had sex, but because Brenda was happy about it, and it didn’t have any dire consequences. I was strongly advised to write a show that would address the consequences of that sexual experience. So the first episode of the second season Brenda broke up with Dylan because their relationship had gotten too mature. (Bold mine)

There has been a long history in television of showing negative consequences for teenagers having sex. Pregnancy scares are usually the first plotline, hyped up to get the kids a-watching. For girls especially sex is usually aligned with punishment--something Amy Sherman Palladino tried to mock in "Gilmore Girls" by having Paris have a public meltdown when she discovers she was rejected by Harvard, thinking it's a direct connection to losing her virginity. Of course it's preposterous, but that wasn't the message that came across. If you have sex and enjoyed it, you will pay.

So now we have "Beverly Hills, 90210" to thank. I haven't watched this show in a long, long time--since maybe I was 14--and even then I didn't like it. I found it then to be too slow and painfully boring; I found it hard to believe that this show was so controversial and scandalous. And the episodes I saw were the early seasons. To a viewer with another eight years of teen shows behind her, the old 90210 would only look even more old-fashioned and quaint (those were the words I used then) compared to Gossip Girl, Dawson's Creek and The OC.

But notice: The Dylan/Brenda breakup--which I'm sure was a pivotal, dramatic moment in the history of the show--was necessitated by suits too uncomfortable to show a regular teen girl (albeit in stylish Cali '90s wear) living a regular life. They can't show that! This is a show about teens for teens! What will happen to the youth?!?!? Brenda fell for the bad guy, a guy who was going to lead her down the Wrong Path, and for that they needed to show that she should have waited.

I bet that many, many shows followed in this wake, whether it was because the execs pressured them to, the showrunners felt other pressure to showcase a certain value set, or just because they couldn't fathom doing something different. Teen sex isn't always the best course of action, we know. But to demonstratively prove, time and again, that the woman who is having the sex must be "punished" in some way is sexist and ridiculous. Far too many girls (and even boys) take away messages from the television they watch, both conscious and unconsciously, and for them to fear or worry that sex will always negatively affect them is wrong and irresponsible. I understand where the execs were coming from, especially considering a new network that needs to desperately please advertisers, but too many times the need to moralize is just a knee-jerk reaction. Did Dylan go through any doubts or fears? I doubt it. From the little I can recall, he was an Elvis-type figure, aloof and cool to the extreme. This was before the era of sensitive guys, and it wouldn't have occurred to anyone that he would have any of the hangups that Seth Cohen did.

Granted, I haven't seen the scene, so if someone has, feel free to enlighten me. This also goes for the original "90210" as well, in addition to any examples of teen sex where the plot twisted in a way that made the girl regret she had sex (though if you give me time, I can find some that aren't Gilmore Girls-related).

My Issues with Mad Men

Mad Men, AMC's premiere show, had its second season premiere last night. I watched it warily, because I had watched the first season on and off and because I hadn't sat down to watch an actual show in a long time. It was the most nominated show, and at this point in the summer, the only show that had any buzz.

I also realized why I was so ambivalent about the show last season.

Mad Men is exactly like the Sopranos in that none of the characters are likeable. This shouldn't be surprising, because Matthew Weiner wrote some of the best episodes of that show ("Kennedy and Heidi", where Christopher dies; "The Blue Comet", the action-packed and ultra-suspenseful penultimate episode). All the women in Mad Men are petty, shallow, and mean; the men are boorish, selfish, superficial. One of the points of the show is to comment on and tear apart the shiny facade of the characters, comparing them to the bright and glossy advertising campaigns they work on. Indeed, most of the characters are dressed bright and glossy, shellacked to perfection, meant to offset their inner turmoil.

Some might say this is human nature, that we are all nasty people, and that the people in this business then were that way since they could be. Fine. You can transplant the same characters in any story. But what's missing for me is a character to root for, to care about. For all the mystery surrounding Don Draper, or even his bland wife, Betty, I just don't see it. I don't even care for the actors that much (although I like Christina Hendricks). I think it's also that I tend to like spunkier characters, so those that are quiet or meek without a hint of fire burning underneath are boring to me. I'm all for complicated, nuanced portrayals of characters, but I find the majority of those on Mad Men to not be, no matter what their backstories are.

The reason to watch Mad Men is for the stylistic period details. Matthew Weiner and co. do a tremendous job of paying attention to every little pant crease and dinner dish, and the lush scenery and costumes make the show. It is in these things that we do notice how things have changed, since nobody takes the time to be that careful and put together anymore.

Mad Men has also made me realize that no matter how bad our current situation is in the world, I'm still a million times glad that I live now and not then. The fancy gowns and the free-flowing drinks do in no way make up for the crushing rigidity of the rest of the culture. Part of the fun is the cringe factor in watching the appallingly horrifying remarks and the completely inappropriate behavior that would be a lawsuit in five seconds flat--every time a woman left a room, all the men would ogle her behind in the most vulgar fashion, or when a mother remarks that her daughter has taken to cutting up her food in tiny bits and only eating a fraction of it, her friend responds that "It's good she's watching her weight," and the mother agrees. But this wears thin after a while, when it feels like the characters are just small people who do and say horrible things. Occasionally last season I saw glimpses of humanity from Peter Campbell, Vincent Kartheiser's ruthless young adman who married a terribly spoiled whiny brat of a woman, caught between his wife's wishes, his family's pride and his own dreams. My answer to Betty's loneliness was "get a job", not a nanny, a housekeeper and an equestrian hobby, though I did like that her daughter now has lines. I prefer watching the working environment, catching glimpses of history; it is here that we see how thoroughly researched and written the show is, and how much more interesting it is than Betty's stultifying home life. As Peggy Olsen gains confidence, I'm sure her character will grow on me.

I wonder if Mad Men is a show that will just become knockout good to me later on, when the characters are more fully developed, or if by watching enough, I'll learn to tolerate it and even like a few episodes. It's just a matter of whether I'm willing to invest the time to get that far.

Flashback Time, Part II

It was inevitable.

Last week VH1 aired “I Love the New Millennium,” the most recent entry in their extremely popular and channel-defining “I Love” series. They’ve done three versions of the eighties, two versions of the nineties and two on the seventies (when most of the people involved and a good chunk of the audience weren’t even alive), and specials on toys and the holidays, for the kid inside of us. Obviously there will be an “I Love the New Millennium: Version 2.0” in the future, hopefully in 2010 when they can finish the decade.

VH1 pioneered what is now known as “instant nostalgia”, a term that was thrown around a lot around the time "Best Week Ever" premiered in 2004, with their recaps of the week. Back then it seemed daring, yet kind of glaringly obvious (and for some, a sign of the apocalypse). It was also good (or at least it seemed like it). Now it’s random, low-level actors and comedians jumping in for a quick joke, usually nothing better than what your mom would say. Nowadays, instant nostalgia is a permanent fixation of blogs and a certain type of entertainment media, looking back on what just happened—or what will happen. It’s also a classic oxymoron. Did George Carlin ever do a riff on this?

But VH1 already knows the criticisms of doing a series on looking back on a decade that hasn’t even ended yet, and addresses them in the first line of the first episode: “You think it’s too soon to celebrate the new millennium?” But they know we don’t care. Reliving pop culture is fun—it’s fluffy shared experiences, finding out you share the same opinion as Dee Snider. If you love this stuff (and I do), it dissipates as soon as the clips come in. "Survivor"! Scooters! 2000!

Like the previous version, “I Love the New Millennium” has catchy graphics and a snazzy title sequence, plus the appropriate slang (fo’ shizzle, nice) as interstitials. Interestingly, the format is credited to the BBC. What does that mean? That each “story” is introduced by a video clip and then comedians explaining and joking on it was pioneered by those serious misters of news? Or that they invented the technique of each segment being framed by little one-offs to encapsulate other trivia bits from those years? It’s a very high-minded co-opt.

Despite that, as the series continues it loses some of the fun, because it’s less about nostalgia and more about reliving embarrassing stories that need to stay buried. I don’t recall 2005 being a particularly lame year, pop-culture wise (but who really remembers nowadays?), but that ep’s a clunker. Maybe it was just my excitation taking over, but 2000 was spot-on—though I expected a bit on the “Thong Song”, but it was nicely appropriated as the “hot girls of the decade” segment, although the lists got lamer as the decade got longer. (Jenna Fischer was named in the 2006 edition though, a big surprise).

One of the biggest missteps the show made was in its use of music. It’s beyond obvious that a series like this would only use songs that appeared in that particular year in that segment; at least use songs that were big in the decade, since most people couldn’t pinpoint a song down to its exact timetable. But not only does the show fail in this, but it reuses songs to the point that they become meaningless. Britney Spears’ “(You Drive Me) Crazy”—which charted in 1999—was used in every single episode, to describe something particularly “crazy” that a celebrity or notorious individual did (see: Imus, Mel Gibson). How about a far-better and bigger “Crazy” to illustrate this point: Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 megahit? I guess Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo didn’t want to dilute its potency.

The “Then and Now” segment is a particular waste: In the eighties original, Weird Al compared prices and other contextual clues to show how different things really were. Here, we have Taylor Dayne (who has absolutely no relevance to the current decade—she had a few hits in the eighties and is trying to make a comeback now) saying dumb stuff like “Bobby Brown had a career 20 years ago. Now he just berates Whitney Houston on “Being Bobby Brown”.” Not as cool as hearing how much a Harvard education costs twenty years ago.

I thought the “Liars” segment was particularly novel, pointing out that in this decade we have a serious issue with truth-telling. (Ooh, tying it into the Bush Administration!) Perez Hilton’s inclusion is pointless most years, but the time capsule has its moments. Moby narrates the segment on biggest hits of the year, but he show absolutely no enthusiasm, and I find his confession that he’s never heard of Michelle Branch odd. Again, as the years continue the iPod selections are off-base, whereas 2000 brings me immediately back to high school.

One of the hallmarks of this series is that it features many of the same commentators: Rich Eisen, Stuart Scott, Scott Ian, Michael Ian Black, Chris Jericho. But at this point in the game they can—and do—talk about earlier installments. It’s unnecessary, pretentious, and only interesting to see Hal Sparks’ hair styles. It wastes precious time—so much has happened that’s not VH1 related, and one day they can do “I Love VH1” and get all those cracks in.

Particularly since the show is discussing recent topics, it’s easy to point out what is missing: “Crazy in Love”, the Wii, "The Colbert Report". Apparently a lot of actors didn’t give their permission to show clips, and many other properties were just too expensive. Where was "Superbad" and "Knocked Up", "Grey’s Anatomy" and "Lost"? Some phenomenons that extended over years—or took time to build, like "24" and "Lord of the Rings"—are encapsulated in a particular year. Sometimes mentions were cursory, as a way to include something on the list, like "Brokeback Mountain". The video blogs (and the extras on the web) are meant to include everything they couldn’t show online, although most of them I’m sure are utterly boring. A sizable portion of what they include is questionable: “Fat Actress”, Enrique Iglesias and “Hero”, Andrew W.K. and The Darkness (neither were as big as Soulja Boy), “Stupid Girls”, Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment lawsuit…YouTube didn’t really hit big until 2006 (that’s when it was featured on Time’s “Person of the Year” cover) and Ok Go’s “Here It Goes Again" wasn’t even released until 2006, not 2005, when both of these were included.

One of the challenges VH1 faces is not only how to make the series work, especially in the later years when popular acts like Amy Winehouse are still in the news largely for the same reasons they’ve always been in, but to point out the enduring social and cultural forces that defined the decade. I think the Liars segment succeeds, but the increasing tabloid focus manages both to point out that in some ways that could be one enduring legacy of this decade—a depressing thought—but also that VH1 just didn’t give themselves enough time or resources to do the show properly.

Everyone will joke that there’s no excuse for this show, as all VH1 needs to do is repackage and reedit "Best Week Ever" (or rather, what becomes of it—"Best Year Ever"). But the point of doing this, the point of real nostalgia, is to give perspective on what’s occurred…which sometimes doesn’t work. But premiering the show now doesn’t need to signal that VH1 is desperate for a hit: With a new president in office next year, a part of this decade is ending. The ‘00s are defined by Bushisms—one appears at the first commercial break in every episode—and many of the things discussed in the show relate back to some Bush-era mistake. Will pop culture be as defined by a new president as it has been with the current one? If “I Have a Crush on Obama” is any indication, there might be change in the air, but only in that politics and pop culture will mingle far more than they used to.