Did the Blonde Really Get a Better Image?

Last Time You'll Hear About These...

2009-10-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

We’ve been on vacation away from the idiot box for two weeks, and it’s taken me a little while to get through the pile-up on the DVR. Thanks to the following three shows for making that task a little easier:

The Beautiful Life. I don’t know why the CW is still so obsessed with finding a companion to America’s Next Top Model: Tyra is rumored to be bored with the show and the current season is enjoying an ever declining viewership. Still, of the many shows jettisoned as a potential ANTM compliment, The Beautiful Life failed the fastest, which is kind of impressive. It’s no wonder: the high point was Mischa Barton reformatting her role as the vomiting ghost in Sixth Sense to a model that goes from pregnant to a runway stick in just six months.

Mercy. Remember how much I loved HawthoRNe? Mercy may actually be worse. I don’t know who convinced Michelle Trachtenberg to go back to the “Who, me?” acting style from her early days on Buffy, but it’s a huge backslide from the diabolically resourceful Georgina Sparks of Gossip Girl.

But the hands-down winner for most disappointing new show would have to be…

Cougartown. Remember how I was rooting for a fast-paced snarkfest? Cougartown delivered a never-ending hangover from the premise that woman have to wear too little clothing and drink too much alcohol to have a good time.

I said, "Meh" to most of the Emmy wins this year, but...

2009-09-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Glenn Close for her Emmy win for her portrayal of Patty Hewes of FX’s Damages!! An amazing show, an amazing character, an amazing actress!

OMFG!

2009-09-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

If you’ll remember, in this post about Entourage, I ridicule the thought that Gossip Girl can make it past the graduation from high school of most of its main characters.

September 14’s “Reversals of Fortune” may as well have begun with credits reading: “We probably should have made them freshmen in season one, but, shucks, the success of this show surprised us as much as it surprised everyone else.”

The show then proceeded to launch into a frenzied effort to build ridiculous sub-plots that have only one purpose: to distract viewers from the fact that all of these kids are supposed to be starting at prestigious Ivy League schools next week, thereby ending the drama their day-to-day contact creates.

Serena (Blake Lively)’s big plan is to taunt her estranged father with paparazzi photos of her in innumerable compromising positions so that he’ll take her calls. Now, I’m with the rest of the world in thinking that Blake Lively may be an escapee from some lab whose purpose is to create the perfect woman, but, you know what, I just don’t see much plot potential here. And that’s too bad, because Serena was in need of some serious growth—-her character hasn’t been interesting in a very long time. But no, the writers have instead decided to rest in the easy stereotype of “daddy issues.”

Add to that a gratuitous sex plot featuring Chuck (Ed Westwick) and Blair (Leighton Meester) that reinforces a stereotypical need of women to belittle their “competition” and folks, we’ve got ourselves a R-E-A-L winner of a season.

Everyone take a deep breath...

2009-09-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Near the end of the second season of The OC, Sports Guy Bill Simmons of ESPN Page 2 fame wrote a fantastic column comparing 90210 to The OC. He gives the ultimate edge to 90210 (which turned out to be the correct assessment—90210 ran for ten years while The OC barely made it four), and one of his reasons is plot development: “At the rate they're going, by Season 4, we'll see Ryan kidnapped by a UFO or something.” Actually season four saw Ryan falling into an alternate universe where, in a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life, he got to see what Newport Beach would be like without him, but still, a pretty good prediction.

I’m worried about Glee already.

Last night’s season premiere, “Showmance,” included the following: the glee club appearing to at least temporarily win over the student body and principal (Igbal Theba), Rachel (Lea Michele) being driven to desperation by her attraction to Finn (Cory Monteith), Emma (Jayma Mays) making desperate plays for Will (Matthew Morrison), Rachel almost making out with Finn, the revelation that Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) is experiencing a hysterical pregnancy, Terri lying to Will about said pregnancy, Sue (Jane Lynch) planting some of her Cheerios on the glee club in an effort to destroy it, Will falling for Sue’s ploy and giving Rachel’s solo to cheerleader Quinn (Dianna Argon—could they cram anymore ex-Heroes into this show?), Emma reaching closure on attraction to Will and agreeing to date Ken (Patrick Gallagher), and Will quitting his second job so far for this series—a nighttime janitorial gig at the school that was meant to finance a new house that he and Terri both decide to buy and abandon the idea of buying in the same episode.

At this rate, Glee might be kidnapped by a UFO this season.

This manic flurry of activity isn’t a good trait in a sitcom, and not just because of the “viewers already feel like they need to watch each episode twice to keep up” factor. The message of instant gratification that the show promotes in its female characters (because its male characters all seem to drift through the action obliviously) is potentially a destructive one: if insta-resolution can’t be reached, the problem is with you!

The show has a lot of built-in, quirky edginess that needs to be allowed to develop, not thrust upon viewers by the mountain-full. It’s okay, Glee, you’ve got more than enough hype and viewership to guarantee that even the Fox guillotine will stick with you for at least one season.

There was a reason that they went away the first time, you know...

2009-09-09T17:37:00.000-07:00

E! Online is reporting that the CW’s remake of Melrose Place only pulled a disappointing 2.3 million viewers.

What?! No takers for filling the vacancies left by the likes of Heather Locklear, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Marcia Cross with tweens with no major acting credits? Really?! It couldn’t possibly be because the people that were originally captivated by this show are now WAY out of your normal demographic, could it, CW?

In fairness, I haven’t seen it, and I’m not likely to. The lack of internet buzz tells me all I need to know.

It was kind of cute when they brought back 90210. But season one’s debut out-performed season two’s debut by a two-to-one margin. Message: people only watched the show to see how Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty aged, and now they’re over it. And in the interim, the CW continues to give teenage girls everywhere adult models that are past the awkwardness of adolescence as prototypes of what it takes to be among the non-tortured elite of your local high school. Way to go, guys, I’m sure you haven’t inspired any eating disorders or desperation to grow up too fast AT ALL.

Start Your Engines...

2009-09-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

It’s the day after Labor Day, which can only mean one thing: Fox and the CW try to conquer the 18-49 crowd’s quota of new TV shows before anyone else can.

I’m prepared to be disappointed, but here are the new shows that I’m excited about:

1) The Good Wife (CBS). I don’t know why, but CBS shows seldom do it for me. But Chris Noth returning to a variation of his role as Mr. Big? You have my full attention. I’m a little worried that the show is going to over-rely on star power, with Mr. Sex and the City and Juliana Margulies of ER fame as the two leads, but I do love a good female reinvention drama.
2) The Modern Family (ABC). I’m hoping that this show will be what In The Motherhood should have been. But given ABC’s track record with the subject (In the Motherhood, Surviving Surburbia…) it’s more a hope-springs-eternal mindset that pushes this show to the number two slot.
3) Glee (Fox). Attention: Fox has finally learned that targeted marketing works! IMDB reports that the show, which is basically a remake of the ill-fated Freaks and Geeks set to music, is currently up 793% in popularity. The gleek in me was already prepared to love this show, and the fact that it gives a home to the genius of Jane Lynch (late of The L Word) and Lea Michele (of the Broadway genius Spring Awakening) convinced me. But Fox? You know how sometimes you get over-excited about the rare potential Nielson success of one of your launches and proceed to pimp the show until everyone is sick of it? The tweet-peats have gotta go.
4) Cougar Town (ABC). It seems to be the year for re-launching the careers of former network stars that enjoyed cult-followings. If that’s going to be the theme, I’m glad that Courtney Cox made the cut, even if it is with playing the reincarnation of Edie Brit from Desperate Housewives. Tons of talent involved in this series—Cox plus Bill Lawrence (Scrubs)’s skills as producer—I’m hoping that the script will reflect it in a fast-paced snark-fest. Hopefully the time slot (9:30 on Wednesday), doesn’t mean that it’s just a placeholder for the return of LOST in January.
5) Eastwick (ABC). I cannot imagine the fabled town of Eastwick without Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher, but for the sake of the tremendous combined talents of Lindsay Price, Rebecca Romijn, and Jamie Ray Newman, I’m going to try. And it would be nice to see ABC be able to expand their woman-friendly line-up into the realm of fantasy.

Sorry, CW. The early premiere didn't work here. You're further down on the DVR prioritizer.

But these, I will miss.

2009-09-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I talked about what shows I was overjoyed to see banished from the idiot box.

Today, I’m mourning fallen shows that, to varying degrees, were interesting for women. Unfortunately, this list is a lot longer:

The L Word (Showtime). I’m actually impressed that The L Word made it as long as it did. The show was a wonderful exploration of the mania of living in a community bound by a life of otherness. And it did so without being preachy. The final two seasons moved away from this exploration in favor of scandalous hook-ups, which proved to be the show’s ultimate undoing. The series’ finale, “Last Word,” was more a manic surrender than anything else.

Lipstick Jungle (NBC): I’ve said it here before: it’s tough to make a show that needs to capitalize on the Sex and the City void to be successful when you have to censor the gratuitous sex and swearing to squeak it through network approval. After just two seasons, Lipstick Jungle finally lost the fight. It turns out that women’s problems that aren’t solved by Jimmy Choo’s aren’t as commercially viable, which is a sad social comment.

Privileged (CW). Privileged might have made it on a different network, but it’s not right for the CW’s demographic, who tune into Gossip Girl, America’s Next Top Model, and 90210. The quarter-life crisis of a Yale graduate just didn’t fit in the line-up. It’s a pity, Megan (Joanna Garcia) was one of the most relatable characters on television for the twenty-something crowd that, like this author, hasn’t quite realized their ambitions for what they want to be when they grow up.

The Starter Wife (USA). This cancellation might be one of the saddest, if only for the realization that, when the boys make fun of the more ridiculous qualities of Hollywood on Entourage, it’s a blockbuster, but when the girls do it on The Starter Wife, it gets cancelled. Plus, I’m a sucker for Debra Messing, and think it’s sad that she’ll probably never find a post-Will and Grace home.

The Unusuals (ABC). This show not finding a following is one of those things that make me think I’m hopelessly out of touch with popular reality. The show was packed with talent like Amber Tamblyn (Gilmore Girls and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), Harrold Perrineau (LOST), and Adam Goldberg (Entourage and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days). The script had a Seinfeld-esque quirkishness that made you laugh, shake your head, and see bits of yourself and your friends in everyone on the screen.

So long, friends! It is with a heavy heart that I delete you from the DVR prioritizer.

I needed to make sure that they were really dead…

2009-09-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

The cancellations of the following shows are victories for all of womankind:

In the Motherhood (ABC). I view this show's inability to gain a viewership as a mark that there is, in fact, still a world worthy of typical collegiate aspirations of saving it. ABC marketed the show as being about the “challenges of juggling motherhood with work and love lives in a complicated modern world.” It was really about an obsessive-compulsive competitive parenter raising children she’s already made into basket-cases, a washed up rockstar that didn’t appear to parent at all, and a working mom that didn’t appear to work or mom. There was no juggling or challenge—just an uninspired reveling in defeat.

Kath and Kim (NBC). Every few years, Molly Shannon tries to make some non-SNL TV comeback. Every one of them gets yanked in a few episodes, probably because her slapstick, flat characters just don’t work in anything but sketches. And it’s generally a bad sign when one of your leads, Selma Blair, tells the media that she’s embarrassed to be seen in her costumes. Here’s to not celebrating mediocrity!

Feel Good Feminism

2009-09-04T11:20:00.001-07:00

Every summer, re-runs and reality television eventually send me running to places like Lifetime, the network specialists in easily consumed moral dramadies. And, honestly, I don’t usually mind. Sometimes I need to be reminded that while totalizing and lasting change is the ultimate goal of feminism, its prerequisite is an individual change in consciousness. Lifetime lets me watch that happen to varying degrees of cheesiness.

And this summer’s Drop Dead Diva was one tasty hunk of cheese. Jane (Brooke Elliot), a plus-sized attorney, is shot and killed (at her office, by the husband of a woman the managing partner is banging—talk about a hazardous work environment). At the same time Deb (Brooke D’Orsay), an aspiring model heading to an audition for The Price is Right, is hit by a fruit truck. Deb arrives in heaven, and is informed that she’s too shallow to warrant heaven or hell. While gatekeeper Fred (Ben Feldman) puzzles over this anomaly (I guess it’s good it doesn’t happen often… right?), Deb hits the “return” button on his computer’s keyboard. She’s returned, but into the newly vacant body of Jane. You see where we’re headed: the gag of making the pretty girl switch places with the fat girl is as old as TV itself, but somehow, set against a backdrop of economic depression, the return to “lookism” takes on a fresher quality than we had any right to expect.

Jane conquers all sorts of social issues: waitresses fired for weight gain (July 19’s “The ‘F’ Word”), wrongful imprisonment (August 16’s “Second Chances”), and starvation plans fraudulently marketed as diets (August 23’s “The Magic Bullet”). And the whole time, Deb is learning what the world is like when you’re not granted immunity from social rules because you’re gorgeous. It’s the kind of show that makes you wish that there really was a way to let people experience discrimination first-hand.

Candace Bushnell, in her newest attempt to prove that vapid materialism is somehow empowerment, 4 Blondes, has a guy that gets laid because he’s rich remark to a prominent editor, “You used to be pretty yourself. Before you got smart.” Drop Dead Diva’s one failure is that it doesn’t touch this either/or dilemma: in fact, it banks on it. Stacy (April Bowlby), Deb’s friend (and the only one who knows that she’s Jane) is routinely stumped by the simplest day-to-day tasks of her career as an unemployed model. Kim (Kate Levering), presented in the show as Jane’s “attractive” counterpart, routinely bests the clearly more capable Jane with her greater feminine wiles. I’m not saying that they have to go Legally Blonde, but some attention to this aspect of “lookism” would be nice, since Lifetime has announced that the show will be back for a second season.

Home Boys Office

2009-07-13T13:22:00.001-07:00

Has anyone else noticed that since the death of HBO’s Sex and the City, any premium cable channel original series that centers on women airs on Showtime?

Entourage, which kicked off its sixth season last night with “Drive,” seems to be a microcosm of this trend. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved Entourage since its premiere for its refusal to take itself too seriously as it satirizes an industry known mostly for taking itself too seriously. The characters are just outrageous enough to be believable, creating the kind of entertainment that makes you shake your head at the state of the world while secretly rooting against a remedy that would make this kind of comedy impossible. I always buy the seasons when they’re released on DVD, and once that first DVD goes in the player, I am dead to the world until I’ve finished the season.

It was actually season five before I started to marvel at how disposable women really are on this series. Maybe I didn’t notice because I was too busy marveling at how Entourage’s writers have done what most series have found impossible: taken a concept that originated in the naïveté of kids that hit it big and allowed them to grow without killing the comedy. I mean, come on, do you really think that Gossip Girl is going to survive graduation?

But this growth seems very resistent to women, who have always been little more than disposable arm candy for the boys. In the season five finale, writers made a lot of Vince (Adrian Grenier) reconnecting with his childhood sweetheart Kara (Mercedes Masöhn), but she now appears to have been a fixture as temporary as Vince’s period of slumming it in Queens.

On the contrary, what allows the show to progress is its return to an unapologetic celebration of dysfunctional fraternity where none of the boys: Vince, E (Kevin Connolly), Drama (Kevin Dillon), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), and even the married-with-children super-agent Ari (Jeremy Piven) want to progress beyond Neverland. And women—-with the exception of the appropriately billed Mrs. Ari (Perrey Reeves) who gets to tag along in a Wendy-like fashion—-rock the fairy-tale boat of lost boys far too much.

I mean, come on. They still dress alike.

I don’t take the terminal relegation of promising women co-stars like Emily (Samaire Armstrong), Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui), Shauna (Debi Mazar) and even Ari’s partner Barbara Miller (Beverly D’Angelo) as misogyny on the part of the show’s creators-—they’ve proven that they’re far too smart for such transparent commentary. Instead, I see a much more subtle comment on the underbelly of Hollywood made by the story’s arc—-the only way it can continue is through a permanent miring in dysfunction that exposes Hollywood’s lingering sexism along the way.

So even though Weeds, the now cancelled L Word, and Nurse Jackie, the brand-new show from longtime HBO property Edie Falco of Sopranos fame all live at Showtime, I wouldn’t say that HBO quit talking about women Sarah Jessica Parker jumped ship.

Why, Jada, Why?

2009-07-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

OK, I’ll admit it: I completely bought into the hype about HawthoRNe that TNT inserted into their never-ending parade of Law and Order re-runs. I like Mrs. Will Smith. Besides, I reasoned, the wife of a man that thwarted his destiny of Fresh Prince syndication hell to become the most popular movie star alive would surely have learned good judgment in picking projects, if only through osmosis, right?

Did you READ the script, Jada? Maybe next time you should let Will take a peek?

TNT has done very well with the summertime lull, hitting consecutive home runs with The Closer, Saving Grace, and Raising the Bar—nice, easily consumable law dramas with very recognizable female leads that serve as nice capstones for the daytime line-up of Law and Order and Without a Trace endless syndication. I guess that HawthoRNe was similarly meant to draw a viewership from fans of their arsenal of ER re-runs. And on paper, the show brings a lot to the table: Jada is half of one of Hollywood’s least-criticized power couples, the show is only the third hour-long series to cast a black woman as a lead, and it’s not like it’s set in an arena that lacks controversy or important issues. I was psyched for a new heroine of the idiot-box to emerge.

Unfortunately, HawthoRNe reaches ER levels only in the innumerable mistakes in the representation of the medicine, the idiotic portrayals of the inner workings of hospitals, and, given these insurmountable technical errors, how ridiculously seriously the shows take themselves.

Jada has said that the project speaks to her because her mother was a nurse. Oh yeah? What does SHE think about the show?

You can almost hear here rationalizations, can’t you? Hey, TNT has provided a productive home for Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter—two more movie stars that everyone’s heard of and no one can remember what they’ve done! Holly Hunter’s won an OSCAR for God’s sake!

It’s my turn, right?

Right?!

The real kicker is, with summer sending the networks into reality TV autopilot, this show had NOTHING to trip over coming out of the starting gate—except itself. And it managed to do just that as it embarked on a confusing set of fractured story lines—each suggesting that something meaningful is looming on the horizon, but none of them actually advancing enough to make us care. The only thing that’s happened so far is a deepening of everyone’s doubts about healthcare and me beginning to wonder if there might be something more engaging in the summer’s onslaught of D-list celebrity mea culpa shows—maybe Kathy Griffin and Denise Richards ARE victims! Maybe Tori and Dean’s marriage will be the first to break the curse of celebrity couple reality shows!

Even Jada looks bored.

Just because we love Buffy around here...

2009-07-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Click here.

Of course she could shut down the most obsessed over fictional character in recent memory. Duh.

And now for something completely different... but not really...

2009-07-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

I don’t usually deal with books here, but Commencement, a first novel by fellow Smith College ’03 alum J. Courtney Sullivan, hit rather close to home.

You can find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Commencement-novel-J-Courtney-Sullivan/dp/0307270742/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246679278&sr=8-2

And it made the New York Times Book Review (no small feat for a first-time author): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/books/review/Russo-t.html

I read this book with the same set of emotions that accompany any serious consideration I do of my time at Smith College: very mixed ones. I laughed at Celia and Bree worrying about gaining “the freshman fifty” after seeing the upper class women (for the record, I only gained thirty and lost it all after spending a semester abroad). I fondly remembered the uniquely engaging controversy over changing the student constitution from “she” to “the student” in honor of trans-gender rights. I smiled at April shaving her head in a euphoric moment of celebrating shock value. I frowned at the enduring experience of displacement that haunts all the characters—in their lives at Smith and beyond. I cried (well, almost) at a fall-out scene between the four friends—it reminded me that Smith created both my most supportive and devastatingly critical relationships. And I resented the idea that such a complicated experience could be contained within a book’s covers.

And, like my Smith education, I’d do it again, even with the benefit of hindsight.

The book risks making a spectacle of the most formative experience of my life—and I don’t hate it for it. And, in my book, that makes it worth a read.

Huh?

2009-07-02T23:06:00.000-07:00

Another moment of shame here: I've always liked Kelly Clarkson. Don't laugh. She's done more with her American Idol win than anyone but maybe Carrie Underwood, and she didn't have the benefit of going through the established publicity factory the show became in later seasons. She even survived From Justin to Kelly. Perhaps most importantly, she doesn't seem to compromise herself: she didn't starve herself even though everyone told her she was fat, and My December told the world quite clearly that she doesn't do what Clive Davis wants. And I'll even admit: I know the words to "My Life Would Suck Without You."

But come on, did she roll out of bed and meander to the So You Think You Can Dance set in a hung-over stupor for tonight's performance? Remember that scene in Blues Brothers where the band crashes a truck stop bar and spends the night singing "Stand By Your Man" and "Rawhide"? She looked like an extra.

Maybe she thinks that getting in touch with her inner honky tonk bar singer is the next logical step in the war she's apparently waging with her commercial success?

A rocky start... Again...

2009-05-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry I’ve been gone so long! I’ve been waiting for Dollhouse to get better…

And waiting…

And waiting…

In the interim, I watched season one of Buffy for the millionth time. The similarities between it and the beginnings of Dollhouse (which, so far, has survived the Fox guillotine) are striking.

1) The writing privileges “tune-in next time” moments over character development.

OK, a show of hands. Who gives a damn about Echo, Sierra, November or Victor?

Anybody?

ANYbody?

Despite the limitations the title may have imposed, Buffy became a very complicated exploration of human nature—particularly the notion of monstrosity. In season two. Season one was all about largely off-screen hooks: Angel, the Hellmouth, the Master. No where near the LOST quotient of the “where the hell is this going?” factor, but the arc of season one’s story line relied a lot more on a viewership’s desire to see what monster showed up next than any investment in the characters.

I’m currently only watching Dollhouse to see what ridiculously skanky outfit they’re going to put Eliza Dushku in next.

2) Incorrect use of the hunky guy.

Remember how the first few episodes of Buffy had the gorgeous David Boreanaz (as Angel) in thick black eyeliner and a 80’s rocker leather jacket, making him look like an overgrown goth geek?

For whatever reason, Whedon can create dazzling heroines immediately. It takes him a while to figure out what do with the male characters. I had some hope for Dominic (Reed Diamond)—but they stuck him in the attic. Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix) hasn’t quite let go of the stiff military quality of his role from The Matrix movies. That goes double for would-be hero Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett): captains of TV star ships (be they Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica) don’t make good romantic interests.

3) The actors aren’t giving enough. At least, not yet.

Sarah Michelle Gellar spoke in a nasally whine tone for her entire first season as Buffy and made little headway in breaking free from her soap opera background. It was clearly David Boreanaz’s first time with a lot of dialogue: the delivery was forced and his cadence was strange. Giles (Anthony Head), Willow (Alyson Hannigan), and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) all lacked depth. It was quite the awkward cast. But they got better, obviously, particularly David Boreanaz, who admits that he didn’t understand his craft in the early days—and channeled that frustration into his character Angel. Boreanaz definitely came the farthest the fastest (and that’s probably why he’s the only one who can still hold down a job), but the entire cast found their stride somewhere in the middle of season two.

Eliza Dushku (who the hell knew should could sing?) and Dichen Lachman (playing Sierra) have demonstrated that they have some serious acting chops in the numerous hats they’ve had to wear so far in Dollhouse. Unfortunately, their supporting cast is dragging them down. Deep.

Which brings us back to waiting…

I didn’t start watching Buffy until season two, and I’ve often wondered if I would have given the show a chance if I’d tuned in for season one.

Whedon uses the TV medium the way it should be, with direct, enjoyable plotlines that are mostly contained from season to season (something LOST and Heroes could stand to try). Assuming the ADD program directors at Fox are still willing to play, I’m sure that the show will find its way, becoming more than the current costume closet parade.

Hallmark (and shoes!) Be Damned!

2009-01-03T20:14:00.001-08:00

Lipstick Jungle certainly came back from the break with a bite (say that three times fast). “Lover’s Leaps,” aired on January 2, 2009, took on relationships (of the meaningful non-one night stand variety) from an angle that other series inspired by a Candace Bushnell novel never quite managed: if the essence of relationships is compromise, where do we factor in the kind of ambition that, if it’s ever to go anywhere, has to be unyielding?

Let’s be clear: I’m really disappointed that Nico (Kim Raver), the most successful one in the bunch, seems to yet again be winding up hitched to an authority figure--the only one she has left, in fact, a very suave Griffin (James Lesure), who runs a multi-billion dollar company but mysteriously has time to babysit Nico when she has a bad reaction to her fertility treatments. We don’t need more media images that women, even highly successful ones, require romantic attachments to male mentors to keep their feet on the ground.

Luckily, “Lover’s Leaps” is about more than office romances and glass ceilings. And it’s even more than American feminism’s elephant in the room: if career advancement comes from wholehearted selfishness (which, let’s face it, it usually does) and relationships succeed through deciding what’s best for a duo, how on earth can you have both? Instead, this episode focuses on the rider that elephant has acquired in the last decade, known as the “two (or more) bodies problem”: in a career playing field that in most cases is continuing to grow wider geographically, how do you stay with “the one”?

The question is asked in the context of the marriage of Wendy (Brooke Shields) and Shane (Paul Blackthorne). The latest drama in the Healy household is the looming offer for Shane, whose career usually takes a backseat to Wendy’s, to join Natasha Bedingfield on a four-month tour of thirty cities. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity that anyone would regret and resent giving up. And yet it’s going to thrust one-hundred percent of the responsibility to keep the family running on Wendy, who will in turn wind up with plenty of regret and resentment of her own.

I love that the show runs from the Hallmark moment where Shane decides to give up his dreams and pretends that the family always more than compensates for the loss in favor of letting him take his shot. And I love that the writers have set it up that we don’t believe for a second that there isn’t going to be some serious mid-life crisis drama in Shane’s notes from the road. And what I really love is how Wendy making more money than Shane didn’t fix everything in Wendy’s life. Sex and the City upheld the mantra that unbridled consumerism and an unlimited shoe budget would fix any woman’s life, and I for one, am glad that even Candace Bushnell appears to have begun to appreciate multiple layers of conflict.

We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programing shortly...

2008-12-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

Like network TV, I'll be taking a short break until January. Happy Holidays, everyone!

He's ba-a-a-ck!! And I am so excited!!

2008-12-14T08:46:00.001-08:00

I first heard about the triumphant return of Joss Whedon (who, in case you're less inclined to worship at the altar of geekdom and are more prone to tune me out periodically, created Buffy) to Fox a few months ago, but I missed this absolute gem forwarded to me by my friend over at Sickpimpin'.

http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2008/11/media-jones-interview-inside-the-dollhouse.html

Because I really needed more reasons to love Joss Whedon.

I sure hope Dollhouse survives the Fox guillotine.

Feminizing the Law and Order Warhorse

2008-12-13T16:35:00.001-08:00

Starring long term in Law and Order or one of its spin-offs has long been a sure route to becoming a B-list celebrity: you’re recognizable, you do commercials, you might even get some bit parts in bad movies. SVU’s Mariska Hargitay, who plays Detective Olivia Benson, epitomizes the Law and Order brand of success. A periodic spokeswoman for various campaigns and cover for women’s magazines, she’s even won a Golden Globe.

I’ve often thought that SVU is worth just a bit more than your usual cop drama for the way it compassionately shines light on the uniquely heinous nature of sexual violence, which most of us would like to forget about. And it doesn’t appear to just be an opportunity for fame for Hargitay, who is the founder and president of The Joyful Heart Foundation, a non-profit that aides victims of rape.

This season, which features Olivia’s post-sexual assault perspective on the job she has performed for seven years, is proving that even the most formulaic television dramas (of which Law and Order is perhaps the epitome) can surprise and impress us. Dick Wolf and his supporting writers seem to have finally realized the limits of the stoic, tough character of Olivia’s partner Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, who plays a great emotionally stunted meathead and little else) and placed him squarely in the background for the majority of the episodes. Lately it has been Detective Tutuola (Ice-T) accompanying Olivia, who is at least written as a less verbose limited range character. The writing finally reflects what has been true for years: Mariska Hargitay carries the show.

Now that Detective Benson is a victim herself, the dynamic between the victims and the police has changed considerably, highlighting the ways that the violence and dominance of sexual assault can be replicated in its very prosecution. “Smut,” aired on December 9, raises this complication in the form of victims drugged to prevent their memory of their assault. In their efforts to stop the rapist, SVU detectives wind up creating victims out of women with no memory of the trauma. Olivia is the only character that pauses to reflect on the unfortunate cruelty of the circumstances… and she’s the one that gets bitch-slapped by one of the new victims when the prosecution goes south.

Rumor has it that Hargitay may be looking to leave the show to spend more time with her new baby. That’s noble, but the show is done when she walks: even the tremendously talented Connie Nielson never really captured the female lead with the range Hargitay shows seemingly effortlessly. And that’s too bad, because it’s one of the only mainstream outlets for promoting awareness of the nightmarish world of sex crimes.

Woman in Crisis

2008-11-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

The "quarter-life crisis," occurring a few years after graduation from college, is usually induced by a sense that all the work you put into your degree and the promises it held let you down: you are not making any discernible progress toward landing your dream job (or even a job that you don’t hate), you are drowning under student loan debt, your latest relationship was a flop while all of your friends are getting married and having babies, you’re withdrawing from your friends because you’re so depressed about the state of your life. This phenomenon seems to attack women much more than men—mostly because of the marriage and baby angle, but perhaps also because of this period’s frantic sense that if you debunk “go to college and get your Mrs.” mentality you really have rolled the dice.

This week’s episode of Privileged, November 11’s “All About Insecurities,” captures the confusion and pressure that comes with women’s mid-twenties really well. Megan (JoAnna Garcia), Yale journalism grad-turned-live-in-tutor, is visited by Caryn (Sarah Drew), currently employed as an assistant flunky at an elitist New York magazine that sounds an awful lot like The New York Review. The trip is meant to be a group commiseration session about their respective failures to launch, but Caryn gets a call on the very first night telling her that she’s been promoted to an assistant editor position. Megan then finds herself in that awful position of being happy for a friend but wondering why it couldn’t have been her: The mantra “The race is long and only with myself” doesn’t provide much solace. The reality is that Megan’s most recent project of writing the biography of her employer, cosmetics giant Laurel Limoges (Anne Archer), was pronounced DOA after she uncovered a terrible secret of Laurel’s. Laurel is now making her miserable, the girls have hired a publicist, Megan’s had a fall-out with childhood best friend Charlie (Michael Cassidy), her most recent relationship was a disaster, and she’s still on the outs with her sister. Juxtaposing these life parameters against Caryn’s phone conference with Pulitzer prize winning Michael Chabon, and it looks like Megan has escalated from crisis to nuclear meltdown.

The continuation of the series leaves no other option than for Megan to stay on in the baffling belief that she will somehow be able to write in Palm Beach, an option she sincerely believes more meaningful employment will somehow preclude. It’s a cheap sitcom solution, but in a lot of ways I like that writer Scott Weinger didn’t attempt to put a verbal band-aid on the situation. The drawn out sense of impending doom is the essence of the quarter-life crisis, which makes this “privileged” generation seem just slightly less so.

The show ends with Megan making out with her billionaire neighbor, Will Davis (Brian Hallisay), who used to date her sister Lily (Kristina Apgar). That should make her life less complicated.

Things Fifteen Year Olds Shouldn't Be Able to Do

2008-11-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

Taylor Momsen scares me.

Even in Buffy there were the “adult-teens:” high school student characters played by actors in their twenties. Charisma Carpenter was twenty-seven when she started playing the fifteen year-old snob Cordelia; Nicholas Brendon was twenty-six when he played the fifteen year-old Xander; even Sarah Michelle Gellar was a few years older than her character Buffy. At some level it makes sense: the awkward, unrefined demeanor of most teens would probably make teen dramas unable to carry a wide enough demographic for commercial viability.

Gossip Girl mostly follows the casting practices of its predecessors. Leighton Meester plays an eighteen year-old Blair at twenty-two; Blake Lively is a twenty-one year-old playing the seventeen year-old Serena; Penn Badgley is a twenty-two year-old high school senior; the list goes on.

I had always assumed that Taylor Momsen, who plays the youngest principle of the fifteen year-old Jenny Humphrey, was another adult-teen. This week I was stunned to learn that the actress that portrays by the character dealing with the most adult situations on the show is the only member of the cast that is not actually an adult: she really is fifteen!

The show has taken the standard protective father vs. edgy daughter conflict staple of teen drama to a pretty dark place: Jenny has moved out in protest of her father (Matthew Settle)’s refusal to let her gallivant all over New York for the sake of fashion. This left her prey to a head-case model, Agnes (Willa Holland—nice to see that out-of-work OC actors are getting a fresh start on the CW), who reacts quite badly to Jenny’s efforts to launch her label without her participation and torches Jenny’s designs. The major snafu to the label launch is Jenny’s age: she needs a parent’s signature on the contracts. When her to efforts to blackmail her father into signing the papers in exchange for her moving back home fail, Jenny goes to the next level, promising to seek emancipation. Keep in mind that Jenny still does not have any discernible means of supporting herself. No wonder they’re currently advertising Gossip Girl as “every parent’s worst nightmare.”

For some reason, adults playing teens caught up in the psychodrama of adult situations expressed through childish relationships isn’t all that disturbing. But how convincing Momsen is in her portrayals of Jenny’s efforts to be soulless and mercenary is downright creepy. All of which begs the question: where are her real parents?

Life As Unremarkable

2008-11-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

This week’s episode of Bones, November 5’s “The Skull in the Sculpture” could not have been more timely with California’s passage of Prop 8, which stripped gays of the right to marry. Angela (Michaela Conlin), the gorgeous artist that does renderings for Dr. Brennan (Emily Deschanel)’s lab, reveals a two-year lesbian relationship with Roxy, who re-emerges in her life as a murder suspect.

Everyone reacts according to their scripted roles: it barely registers for the socially challenged Brennan, it serves as the latest irritation for Angela’s jilted fiancé, Hodgins (TJ Thyne), Cam (Tamara Taylor) acts like she doesn’t know. The one surprise is Booth (David Boreanaz). Sure, his heteronormative biases are immediately revealed when Angela initially tells him, but subsequently, instead of more of the Neanderthal pretending he’s not a Neanderthal routine, Booth becomes genuinely supportive. He explains that his favorite aunt lived with a woman, and once he developed the awareness to understand that they were lesbians, it was a completely unremarkable revelation. “She had box seats to the Phillies,” he explains.

The last moments of the show suggest that the relationship is set to continue as a background plot. But it’s not set to be a source of scandal; it’s just one of those relationships, like Hodgins and Angela were last season. Dr. Sweets (John Francis Daley) kissing the annoying intern Daisy (Carla Gallo) raised many more eyebrows. So Bravo, Bones, you’ve set a plot in motion that embodies the spirit behind the opposition to Prop 8: that relationships among gays don’t inherently need to be singled out for comment.

More on the Political Fate of "Girl Power," etc.

2008-11-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

Judith Warner can really write:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/title/

I was particularly moved by this paragraph: "Theirs [her daughters'] has often looked to me like a world drained of meaning. Girl power put to the service of selling Hannah Montana. Feel-good inclusiveness that occulted the very real conflicts, crimes and hatreds of history."

Let's hear it for finding greater meaning in the everday, and using it to understand and struggle against the inequalities that surround us.

No on Prop. 4 Too

2008-11-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

California has real gems on the ballot this year...

No commentary from the peanut gallery here.

Post-election Follow-up:

Dear Proponents of Prop 4 (also known as law of the fictional “Sarah”):

If you are this concerned about your daughter being able to get an abortion without your notification or consent, I have taken the liberty of making a list of states to which you can move: Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, Virgina, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. Quit costing a broke state more money by attempting to impose a measure they obviously don’t want. Rest knowing that if you do happen to be right, God has the convenient option of punishing us with an earthquake.

No on Prop. 8

2008-11-02T11:00:00.001-08:00

For California Voters

Way to Go Ugly Betty!

Post-Election Follow-Up:

It’s interesting how hypocrisy discolors everything. When president-elect Barack Obama took the stage in Chicago last night, he spoke about change and overcoming discrimination and reinvention. Unfortunately, this historic moment was juxtaposed with the early returns on Prop 8, and the news was very, very bad. As it became clear that more than 1.5 million members of Obama’s California constituency had voted to write discrimination into the constitution of the most populous (not to mention “bluest”) state in the country, I found myself questioning everything this moment was supposed to represent. When supporters gushed about how proud they were to be able to tell their children that they could be president, I found myself thinking, “Well, not your daughters” and “Better first make sure he’s not gay!”

This morning I’ve backed away from my Scully posturing and am allowing myself to enjoy the fact that you are no longer required to be a white male to hold the nation’s highest office. And it is nice that the NY Times could responsibly refer to the election as “post-race.” But if you think that means we’ve dealt with our social injustice issues, or that we can be “post-gender” or “post-sexuality,” you have seriously not been paying attention. The entire nation, not just California die-hards, needs to realize that not every move yesterday was a move forward.

Not by the Hairs on My Kimmie, Kim, Kim

2008-10-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Call me heartless, but I’m of the opinion that Lindsay Lohan has been given enough chances, which is why I wasn’t thrilled to see that she was being introduced as Kimmie Keegan on Ugly Betty. At least Kimmie is not a likable character. She emphasizes what we’ve all observed but want not to be true: being pretty can be a short-cut up the ladder.

The Donnas have a great song, “Fall Behind Me” that has the lyric: “When you skip steps on the way up, the gaps have a way of catching up.” It’s nice when this happens, particularly to a vile character played by a vile actress. October 30’s episode “Ugly Berry” sees Kimmie, who launched to editorial status the week prior for her awesome clubbing skills, leave the show in the grasp of some scary looking security guards. The rumor is that Lohan’s abrupt departure from the show is because Lindsay and America Ferrera couldn’t get along, which Dina Lohan denies, but let’s face it, history is not on Lindsay’s side here (neither is taking responsibility— in case anyone has forgotten the “I was holding it for a friend!” coke arrest).

The show writers made an unconvincing attempt to portray Betty (America Ferrara) as feeling bad about the hand she had in Kimmie’s dismissal—it’s OK that it’s a failure, because we all wanted to see Betty win anyway. And frankly, Betty’s self-flagellations are getting a bit tiresome. Here, we wanted to see the good girl win, by any means necessary.

That Girl is FIERCE!!

2008-10-31T08:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, one of my best friends shoved his iPod touch under my nose while this video played. "Isn't this hella fierce?" he asked.

And I'll admit it. I've got a little bit of hetero-crush on Beyoncé, also from H-town. While she’s probably still thinner than she should be, she’s embraced those curves and she is not afraid to flaunt them! She’s completely in charge of her sexuality and not afraid to go after what she wants. In truth, I’m getting a little tired of Tyra Banks and all the “fierceness,” but when I think about Beyoncé and I watch this video, I get why she likes the word so much.

I also love the minimalism of this video: it says, “I’m show enough. You don’t need anything else to watch.” She’s undeniably sexy, but not because of what she’s wearing (which was described on The Starter Wife as a “nun suit”), but because she owns it—no insecurities, no apologies.

Beyoncé has been a continuous lightning rod for criticism since the 2000 firings of two of the original members of Destiny’s Child: from her relationship with Jay-Z to bad reactions from parents of young fans regarding B’Day, to TMZ.com’s infamous “roboho” comment regarding her 2007 performance at the BET awards. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Her wardrobe has a continual classiness to it, she strives to keep her private life private, and she lacks the antics of a growing collection of music industry bad-girls. Add in that she’s an undeniably talented woman that has made smart decisions about her career that kept her from being a one-hit wonder, and I have to say that if my daughter were going to choose a role-model from a music industry that provides very few, I’d be overjoyed if it were Beyoncé.

2008-10-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

Brooke Shields was a heartfelt recipient of an “attagirl!” from yours truly in 2005 when she took on heartthrob-turned-weirdo Tom Cruise in a very public battle over postpartum depression. She responded to Cruise’s flippant and idiotic “they should take vitamins and exercise” comment to Matt Lauer directly and eloquently in "War of Words," becoming a needed icon to destigmatize the many women that suffer from a completely treatable condition that threatens what should be one of the greatest moments in life.

Which is why it breaks my heart to now place Brooke in the “What was she thinking?!?!” category for her starring role in Volkswagen’s newest ad campaign unleashing their first minivan, the Routan. The campaign is based on the above mockumentary blaming the desirability of the Routan for a population boom “for the love of German engineering.” Ignoring the obvious historical insensitivity of that particular gem, the campaign overtly trivializes the decision to have a child by reducing its motivations to love of a car. All narrated by a woman who took on the world for not taking seriously the potential psychological side effects of that very decision. Obviously, it’s supposed to be a joke (though I don’t know where they found a test group that laughed), but it’s a slippery slope: is proposing Volkswagen interventions really so different than suggesting vitamins?

Thinking About the Feminist Family

2008-10-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve often thought that American feminism, at least American feminism of the variety that traces its intellectual origins to Gloria Steinem, doesn’t wear well on the rest of the world. The thorny independence of its projects and its unwillingness to make concessions have enabled a lot of advances in the American cultural scheme of glorifying the strong individual, but created some pretty rigid (and often polarizing) boundaries for those of us trying to picture a version of ourselves from within its midst. And in cultures not built on overt celebration of the individual, inventing oneself from a location of American feminist isolationism is all but impossible.

This week’s Private Practice, “Past Tense,” which aired on October 29, uses Sharbat (Rome Shadanloo) as a focalizer for confronting this impasse. Sharbat arrives at the practice with her parents, claiming to have been raped. The family is Afghani, and Sharbat’s father has arranged a marriage for her to a rich man that will take the entire family back to Afghanistan. One problem: Sharbat’s sexual violation means that her hymen has already been broken, and she won’t bleed on their wedding night. The family wants Addison (Kate Walsh) to perform a surgery that would repair the damage to her hymen, allowing the marriage to go forward.

The women of the practice are appalled and a lively discussion follows about medical ethics: is the “beneficent” component of the medical ethics standard defined as what is medically beneficial, or what the patient believes is beneficial? Lab results come in during the conversation that complicate things even further: sperm is still present. Addison confronts her about the possibility of the abuse still taking place and Sharbat admits she was never raped—it was a lie to cover her relationship with her boyfriend. She explains that she still wants to go through with the surgery because her love of her parents, who are miserable in America, is the love that gives her the most happiness.

From here, the show settles into one of its “the patients take care of the doctors” moments. Addison extrapolates from Sharbat’s radical repositioning of herself to preserve the love she finds in her family a solution to the on-going background conflict of Private Practice: the power struggle between Sam (Taye Diggs) and Naomi (Audra McDonald). In its pursuit of this story line, the writing has been a little reminiscent of the hackneyed clichés from the first season. Naomi, the woman, is the care-giver concerned with patients and Sam, the man, is the relentless breadwinner concerned with the bottom line. Thankfully this old dance seems to be in intermission for the time being. Addison takes her teachable moment from Sharbat and confronts the entire practice about the need to move on from past wrongs and focus on functioning as a family again. Her speech does nothing for Sam and Naomi, but when it comes time to vote for who will run the practice, Violet (Amy Brenneman), Dell (Chris Lowell), Cooper (Paul Adelstein), and Pete (Tim Daly) block vote to put Addison in charge.

Becoming Trans-parent

2008-10-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

So what do you do when your brother-turned-sister lets you take the fall for attempted murder and then tells you that s/he’s really the biological father of your child (back when she was a he, of course)?

The absurdity of the plot lines on Ugly Betty points directly to its telenovela origins, but have an interesting effect on the social margins the show’s characters have a habit of pushing. It would be easy to write a show where a character’s sex change was the dramatic focal point. But Ugly Betty buried Alexis (Rebecca Romijn) under melodramatic relationships with the show’s other characters, effectively normalizing her as trans-gendered. The latest twist with revealing her paternity of Daniel Jr. (Julian De La Celle), the heretofore assumed illegitimate son of her brother Daniel (Eric Mabius) was the first thing in a while that reminded the viewers that Alexis Meade used to be Alex. The show did the impossible: it made someone who had a sex change just another player in a show of ridiculously intense relationships. In Alexis’s final moments on the show (at least for a while), she was nothing more than a woman who let emotion get the better of her.

If Nothing Else, Epic Dysfunction

2008-10-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

I find the new biblical framing of Heroes a little distasteful, especially since the show now seems intent on interrogating ideas of justice, good and evil. Let’s not hide behind a higher power while we call morality into question, ok?

October 13’s “Angels and Monsters” puts Claire (Hayden Panettiere) in the untenable position of being rescued by Sylar (Zachary Quinto), whose attack prompted her current vigilante streak. To make matters worse, Sylar is working with her adoptive father (Jack Coleman), aptly named Noah for his role of bringing every species of ability to the company, now known as HRG for his famous horn-rimmed glasses (you’d think by now he’d want different frames). All of which happens after she becomes convinced that Stephen Canfield (Andre Royo), the villain that she’s hunted down , is not actually evil but the victim of a tragic misunderstanding of his power to create vortexes. Talk about a confusing day.

Things get a lot worse. Noah, Sylar, and Claire track Stephen. Noah puts a gun to his head and tells him to kill Sylar for what he did to Claire. Now Claire’s a victim and an impetus for murder. Stephen refuses to become a deliberate killer and sucks himself into one of his own vortexes. Claire is now faced with the reality of her father’s complete utilitarianism. Since he was the one person she always believed in, she’s left without any kind of guiding compass. And it looks like there’s going to be another rape in the family, since her biological mother Meredith (Jessalyn Gilsig) was taken prisoner while attempting to track down the vigilante Claire by a man with the ability to control people like puppets. Claire is going to need a lot of therapy.

I read that the writers had heard the complaints of the fans and were now going to simplify the fractured plotlines of Heroes. Maybe they’re getting there, but they’re asking for an awful lot of patience. The Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) storyline is completely divorced from the rest of this episode. Sylar seems to be the only one who likes Mom Petrelli these days. She calmly lets Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) know that he was a science experiment from birth, and she puts Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) in a chemical coma. But maybe the writers have grown bored with the Mom angle: the once-thought-dead Daddy Petrelli is reintroduced at the end of the episode and apparently uses one of his henchmen to make Angela a prisoner in her own mind. So much for simplifying the plot, and so much for peaceful reconciliations.

The dysfunctional relationships are getting absurd and difficult to track. Unless next week’s promised clash between the heroes and villains wipes out half of the cast, it’s going to take a lot more than an hour a week to get back around to all these plot lines. In the meantime, all the back and forth is distracting from any possibility of meaningfully tackling the issues of science versus ethics that the beginning of each episode puts forth.

What the Yale?: A Review of October 13, 2008’s Episode of Gossip Girl, “New Haven Can Wait”

2008-10-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

I wonder what Yale did to the CW television network. It must have been something awful. First, Privileged made one of their graduates a failed tabloid reporter turned nanny/tutor. Then the university became the object of desire for Gossip Girls gone wild. At least Serena (Blake Lively) acknowledges that “Yale is for overachieving bookworms.” Not that you’d know it from the way the university is portrayed in October 13’s “New Haven Can Wait.” Of course, as those of us from other pretentious, ivy-covered universities will quickly tell you, the episode was clearly filmed at Columbia.

Apparently, in Gossip Girl logic, a couple of photos on Page Six and walking in a fashion show on a whim can overcome a C average and almost being expelled from your fancy Manhattan prep school twice (in one season). You could almost hear the phones of Yale’s PR army ringing at 9:01 ET—the university sought out every media outlet that would listen to deny the show’s representation of their ivory tower.

To make things worse, yet again the narrative induced the strange sensation of feeling really bad for Blair (Leighton Meester): the straight A student the Dean finds too boring for his special get-together. But don’t get used to the feeling, the sympathy is dialed back a bit when B blackmails the dean’s assistant, crashes the gathering, and exposes Serena’s role in the accidental overdose of a would-be one night stand (“boring” is measured on a whole different scale on this show). Despite all this scheming, poor B still isn’t offered early admission because she’s not hip enough to turn around Yale’s stuffy image and the show ends with the now familiar, contrived “frenemy” moment between B and S that’s really starting to grate on this season. And, curiously, the show itself seemed to point out this decline: if Blair already feels like "Darth Vader next to Sunshine Barbie" when she’s with Serena, where can it possibly go from here?

Gossip Girl airs on the CW network Mondays at 8 pm.

Sex and the City Minus Sex Equals...?

2008-10-15T07:38:00.000-07:00

When TBS started re-running the HBO hit Sex and the City, I thought that I would finally be able to get my fixes without buying the very expensive seasons on DVD. Wrong. Once you scrubbed down the episodes to make them acceptable for non-premium channels and squeezed commercials into their still hour-long slot, there just wasn’t much left.

As a result, I was admittedly skeptical of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle. The adventures of magazine editor Nico (Kim Raver), studio executive Wendy (Brooke Shields), and fashion designer Victory (Lindsay Ford), three of “New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women,” sounded like the famous foursome with more power and less sex. And let’s face it, no one watched Sex and the City for Miranda (Cynthia Nixon)’s lawyering.

But it appears that Lipstick Jungle has done the impossible: it has made corporate America interesting… sexy, even. And it has done so while keeping in touch with issues that matter to working women: even the very powerful, high-paid ones.

Both Nico and Wendy experience the famous “double-shift”—more responsibility at work without lessening of responsibility at home—in different ways. Nico married one of her professors when she was in her twenties. When she later started succeeding professionally, he got bored and knocked up one of his current students, which Nico learns about while he’s on the operating table for his heart. In “Pandora’s Box,” aired September 24, he dies on the table, and as Nico is going through his affairs, she learns that he has been building a case against her for abandonment (even while he was putting the student up in a love-nest), which if it had been successful would have required Nico to pay him alimony after they divorced. And Nico’s been feeling bad about succumbing to an affair because of his distance!

So now we have a pregnant twenty-something (Megan – Shannon McGinnis) who’s about to lose everything. And we hate her for how nasty she was to Nico just before her husband’s death. In “Help!,” aired October 2, Megan re-emerges and demands financial support—before her lover/Nico’s husband’s affairs are even close to being settled. Nico lets her have it, lawyers, security and all—and we love her for it! How many times do the chips fall to give the jilted wife the upper hand? But as the episode progresses, she starts remembering what it was like being taken in by someone you idolized. In a truly magnanimous move, she decides not to take her anger out on Megan, giving her enough money to cover her expenses and establishing a generous trust for the baby. When Megan asks why she so suddenly changed her mind, Nico responds, “Because I remember what it’s like to be twenty-two.” There’s being a good sister to your fellow woman, and then there’s being the patron saint for developing young women. Guess which one Nico just became?

Wendy actually has children, so she fits the model for the double-shift a little more closely. Problems at home lead her to try to spend more time at home with her children in “Pandora’s Box,” a move that is complicated when her mother Joyce (guest star Mary Tyler Moore) comes to the city. Wendy later finds out that Joyce was interviewing for a job. When Wendy wants to know why on earth her sixty-something mother would want to come out of retirement from her upper-class life in the suburbs, Joyce talks about having to scale back at the height of her career—because of her children. In retirement, the “what might have been” questions have been haunting her.

Wendy’s maternal sensibilities prove to be the ultimate liability in her job. In “Help!,” she learns that the star of her new film biography on John Lennon, Noah Mason (Noah Bean) has a terminal brain tumor. Noah’s a dear friend, and she decides to make it possible for him to play John Lennon (something he’s always wanted to do) by forging a doctor’s signature to his physical form. In October 8’s “Let It Be,” Noah dies during production. When the higher-ups learn of the forgery, they assume it was Noah himself and threaten to go after his estate to recuperate lost production costs. Wendy decides that she can’t let that happen and comes clean, an act of supreme decency that’s rewarded with a firing.

And then there’s Victory. Victory’s company was recently purchased by her billionaire ex-boyfriend Joe Bennett (Andrew McCarthy). Joe wants Victory back, and is determined to do so by keeping her in debt to him. It’s the dependency marriage on a scale of millions of dollars. But the ever defiant Victory starts to date her contractor Rodrigo (Carlos Ponce), a move that sends her publicist, Dahlia (Rosie Perez), into the stratosphere—she doesn’t think Victory can sell high-end clothes with a low-rent boyfriend. At the moment Victory is the least interesting character on the show—she’s Samantha (Kim Cattrall), whose character loses the most when you take the sex down a notch.

Lipstick Jungle’s greatest virtue is that despite their insane amounts of money and power, the characters are grounded, and they’re grounded as women.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Stethoscopes

2008-10-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

I always thought that Addison (Kate Walsh) was the coolest character on Grey’s Anatomy. Like the phenomenal woman Maya Angelou describes, she rises, she rises, she rises. And when she got tired of being the only one around her willing to rise, she had the courage to reinvent herself. I thought that this made a great beginning to the spin-off show Private Practice.

And then I saw the first season.

The writing was absolutely horrific; the characters were uncomplicated clichés. Last year’s writers’ strike was the best thing that could have happened to the show.

But I really thought the show could find its way, so I tuned in for the start of season two. And I’m happy to report that things are looking up! The show seems to have mostly lost interest in Sam (Taye Diggs)’s commercialism and Cooper (Paul Adelstein)’s freaky sex habits, both major improvements to the plot. The show instead has returned to Addison herself and the process of starting over in middle age, which is difficult even if you are gorgeous and a fabulously wealthy double board-certified neo-natal surgeon.

It seems that all of the gorgeous and wealthy professional women of this show are having the same problem. Overwhelmingly, the show is asking an interesting question: when your life doesn’t go the way that women’s are “supposed to”—you find yourself single at middle age, you can’t have kids, you don’t want kids, you don’t want the stable relationship with the great guy—how do you deal? How do you cope with being constantly at odds with the expectations that surround you?

What I like most about the show’s new direction is that it doesn’t pretend that these questions can be answered in forty-five minutes a week. “A Family Thing,” aired on October 1, was messy, and none of the ends got tied up, or even look like they can be. Dr. King (KaDee Strickland) is still not sure if she’s dedicated to her career because she loves it, or because it’s a shelter from having meaningful relationships. Naomi (Audra McDonald) has still added professional failure to her failing personal life. Violet (Amy Brenneman) still doesn’t know how to not live her life in a non-relationship with Cooper.

I hope that they can keep it going. The drama is not as artificial as Grey’s Anatomy, and the characters are just starting to get interesting. Addison’s story has the potential to become one of the most meaningful for women on television at the moment.

Let the Woman Speak!

2008-10-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

Both networks that housed Buffy the Vampire Slayer have since collapsed under the weight of expensive sci-fi shows no one watched and teenage drivel that… well… no one watched. The CW Network, which rose from their ashes, hit a home run with Gossip Girl, which now seems to be providing the boiler plate for every show they intend to produce from now until someone pulls the plug.

Privileged is the CW’s latest of these attempts to make us see celebutantes as human beings worthy of our empathy. And I’ll admit, I was glad to see that Lucy Hale apparently survived the ill-fated Fox American Idol spin-off, American Juniors. The then fourteen year-old brunette, who was named to the show’s prize group for her (hopefully uncomprehending yet scarily suggestive) performance of Blondie’s “Call Me,” was the only member of the resulting group that anyone actually thought could sing. If Fox wasn’t going to deliver on their promise to make her a recording star (which they didn’t), they could at least not suck every last bit of life out of her, like they usually do to their washed up reality show contestants. Way to show uncharacteristic restraint, Fox!

Privileged follows the Gossip Girl template with minimal variation: Prada clad, platinum VISA toting trust-fund twins Rose (the aforementioned Lucy Hale), nice but clueless and spineless, and Sage (Ashley Newbrough), ill-tempered and manipulative, are simply a related version of Serena and Blair. Well-educated, well-meaning, and unwell-financed tutor Megan (Joanna Garcia), a Yale graduate who gets fired from her job as a tabloid journalist (ouch!) and is forced to take a position tutoring the twins in the hometown she fled years before, is a female, older version of Dan.

Like Gossip Girl, Privileged also takes its plot inspirations from teen health textbooks. This week’s episode, “All about Friends and Family,” aired on Tuesday, September 3, tackled pre-marital sex. Megan discovers a porn DVD in the collection the girls ordered in an attempt to avoid their reading list for English. Rose, not embarrassed in the least, says that she intends to use it to “brush up” on her “technique,” because she’s afraid she won’t measure up to the very experienced ex-girlfriend of Max (Andrew J. West), the flavor of the month. Megan confiscates the DVD on the pretext of wanting to talk to her about making smart decisions about who you open your legs for at the ripe old age of sixteen, then learns that Rose gave it up to a different boy entirely four months earlier. There’s a cut to Megan’s usually blank Powerbook screen, which this time bears the bold-faced title “Pornography Happens to Women,” and for a dizzying second it looks like the Yalie might get a chance to say something of meaning. Not on this show! The phone rings, it’s her boyfriend, and the very real ethical grey area surrounding women and pornography never rears its complicating head again.

Instead of hearing more about Megan’s desire to write about meaningful things, we’re distracted by her lack of sexual confidence. Or maybe it’s her sexual confidence and everyone else’s lack of sexual confidence, since she seems to be the only character on the show comfortable with saying when she is ready. Of course, that winds up being by the end of the show, after Rose has a convenient revelation that she isn’t required to have sex with Max just because she’s no longer a virgin. Hey—I’m not unreasonable! That’s an important revelation for teen girls to have. Way to go, Rose!

I haven’t read the book on which this series is based, How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls, written by Zoey Dean. But I’m going to hold onto hope that screenwriter Rina Mimoun can find a way to give Megan, far and away the most interesting character, a real voice, making her more than a sexier version of the voice-over at the end of an after-school special. They don’t have to resolve each issue in an hour. And frankly, the show would be better if they didn’t.

Raining Jane

2008-10-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

“Jane Kaczmarek, the twisted Mom from Malcolm in the Middle, a JUDGE?! Are you SERIOUS?!”

That was all I could come up with when TNT announced the new series Raising the Bar.

To hear the writers (namely Steven Bochco of NYPD Blue, LA Law, and other easily consumed court dramas) of Raising the Bar tell it, the justice system never even comes close to getting it right. And in this universe, the people who screw it up the most are women. The second episode of the series, September 8’s “Guatamala Gulfstream,” sees the exceptionally slimy bureau chief Nick Balco (Currie Graham, who seems to be making a career of playing easily-hated bosses), tell prosecutor Michelle Ernhardt (Melissa Sagemiller) that the biggest problem with women lawyers is that… they’re women! “You’ve all got this chip on your shoulders about playing with the boys. Makes you dumb.” As this remark is made to a woman who has just done everything in her power to prevent a defendant from getting his constitutionally guaranteed fair trial, it’s hard to feel too bad for her, even after we’ve watched her be blatantly sexually harassed by Mr. Balco himself. This week’s weak attempts to humanize Melissa by showing her watching forlornly as her ex-boyfriend Jerry Kellerman (Mark-Paul Gosselaar)—who she broke up with to scheme against his client freely in “Guatemala Gulfsteam”—flirt with the sassy new defender from Brooklyn, Bobbi (Natalia Cigliuti)—whose client she just railroaded—does little to make us feel bad for her. The character most representative of the difficulties some women still face in the workplace happens to be one of the most unlikeable on a show full of unlikeable characters.

Which brings us to Jane, who plays Judge Trudy Kessler, a public defender turned prosecutorial activist judge. NO ONE likes Trudy, whose decisions seem to be based solely on her ambition to become the District Attorney for Manhattan. Her judgments support only public opinion—she literally rewrites the law to be sure that she always comes out in the best possible light. Since in this courtroom the public defenders never seem to bend the rules, no matter what the unscrupulous prosecutors may do, Judge Kessler’s zeal to give the public what they want—more convictions—makes her ambition the very gateway enabling injustice to run rampant in the system. We hate her for going after what she wants.

It’s a bleeding heart series designed specifically to make us hate the system. But it doesn’t just make us hate the game—it makes us hate the players, and on this show, the best of those are women.

Since When Do We Like Blair?

2008-10-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

Wow. Serena (Blake Lively) gets unfairly blamed for burning off the hair of Dan (Penn Badgley)’s new girlfriend, and ten seconds later she goes from the put-upon upper eastside maven unfairly burdened with gorgeous blonde hair, mile-long legs, and an inconceivable fortune to the face of pure over-privileged, under-parented teenage evil. Turns out she really was that simple.

Blair (Leighton Meester)’s self-loathing was a background theme to last season, but all the elements were put into play: her bulimia, her father’s abandonment, her mother (Margaret Colin)’s willingness to throw her under a bus to further her career, the list went on and on. And yet she was just so vile that no one cared. We watched her cronies throw yogurt on her when she passed them at school, and it did nothing but make us feel a little bit better about the standards of teenage girls (even the mean ones). Turns out fashion does nothing to beautify sociopathy.

But with Serena gone glamurderous, sympathetic viewers need an object. Suddenly poor, dejected Blair, whose mother still seems to prefer every dysfunctional teen girl she comes in contact with over her own daughter, looks a little more… well, normal. And hey, she did eventually forgive Serena for sleeping with her boyfriend. We watch as Blair gets thwarted at every attempt to win her friends back by, her mother, the once thought vanquished Jenny Humphrey, and… Serena. It’s hard not to feel bad for the kid.

And then it gets laid on her. Serena has one of those “Gee… I really seem to be pissing everyone off right now. Maybe it’s me” moments that Gossip Girl writers have been so good at cooking up for her. She feels marginally bad that, yet again, Eleanor Waldorf has decided to use her daughter’s best friend to model her designs, instead of her equally beautiful but slightly more conservative (Blair doesn’t appear to do coke like Serena used to) own daughter. But fortunately Poppy, the new it-girl that has taken Serena as her sidekick, has the solution. Poppy says that sisterhood is way over-rated. Particularly when you have sisters with self-esteem issues. Serena agrees and tells Blair to feel worse about herself.

When Jenny gives Blair a pep-talk in : “You might be privileged Blair, but you’ve worked for every single thing you achieved. Just like me.” This just before she announces that she’s quitting her fancy prep school to become an unpaid fashion intern high-school drop-out. Don’t worry B, all is not lost!

I’m not willing to read this show for much more than it is: the latest teen psychodrama fueled by our wanting to peep in on life without meaningful financial restrictions. But there is an unspoken heroine of Gossip Girl: Serena’s mother, Lily van der Woodsen-Bass-would-be-Humphrey (Kelly Rutherford). The newest revelation that she posed for a Magelthorpe nude portrait is the latest piece of a puzzle that’s a revealing a woman in charge of her sexuality, who doesn’t care what other people think, and wants to instill the same in her children. It’s too bad that she likes money so much that she stays married to a man that treats her like one of his many possessions. But on this series, only time can tell…

Barbie Becomes a Little More Plastic, Mommy Dearest Becomes Even More Sinister

2008-10-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

For the record, I spent four years hating Hayden Panettiere for derailing one of my favorite unlikely heroines, Ally McBeal. Her flat performance in the whiny Disney movie Ice Princess shored up that hatred, as the movie preached to millions of little girls that it was perfectly reasonable to blow off a scholarship to Harvard in order to figure skate competitively, even when you’ve never won a competition. I comforted myself by noting that she wasn’t outgrowing her chipmunk cheeks, which meant that her Hollywood career was likely to follow the trajectory of Amanda Bynes. Surely her Sydney White wasn’t long in coming.

But then she became the cheerleader-in-distress whose rescue was required for world safety. The tagline, “Save the Cheerleader. Save the World.” kept me away from the smash-hit Heroes for an entire season, despite my continued yearning for sci-fi in a post-Buffy TV line-up. But last fall I was lonely in Shanghai and succumbed, downloading the entire first season from iTunes. As I sat in my apartment and watched the series on my laptop, the impossible happened: I started to like round-faced, platinum blonde. In her role as Claire Bennet, the high school cheerleader from Odessa with the superpower of regeneration, Hayden Panettiere convincingly plays a young woman rising above impossible circumstances. The first season of the show, through Claire’s character, directly took on issues of sexual violence, the exorbitant pressure adolescent girls place upon one another, and how the adults in their lives always manage to overlook the bad things that the cool kids do. Claire had become the unlikely heroine: a sometimes mind-bogglingly myopic high school cheerleader with a stunning ability to reconcile high-school pettiness with a realization of a higher purpose. To be fair, that’s something Buffy could never do: in the very first season of the series, her higher purpose means that she has to walk away (see season one, episode three, “Witch”).

Claire’s September 22 run-in with Sylar (Zachary Quinto), a thinly veiled metaphor for rape, in the episode “The Second Coming” leaves her a little less human, without the ability to feel pain.
In the September 29 episode “One of Us, One of Them,” she announces her unwillingness to be a victim and her desire to quit high school and fight the world’s villains. But her mercenary biological mother Meredith (Jessalyn Gilsig) who to date has done nothing for Claire but use her to milk her cash cow biological father, a really unlikable character who has been brought back to the series as “protection” for the Bennet family for reasons still incomprehensible to me, shows unprecedented maternal presence and recognizes that Claire’s change in ambition is coming from a much darker place. In a bizarre confrontation in which Meredith becomes a true “Mommy Dearest” by using her ability to produce flame to suffocate Claire and force her to relive Sylar’s violation, she extracts a confession from Claire as to what her sudden change in ambition is really about: “I want to hurt him.”

The newest obsession from the writers of Heroes appears to be mothers (at least we’ve moved on from the love-lost obsession that spawned the torturous second season of the show). Tolstoy is quoted ad nauseum from Anna Karenina for his revelation that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Apparently Tim Kring is trying to spawn the next five seasons from explorations of the unhappy families of Heroes. We find out that Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) is bitterly disappointed in her sons Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) and Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) for reasons that have never really been explained (both have been very successful. Unwilling to commit mass homicide, but otherwise they’re pretty obedient). In a completely ridiculous twist, we have learned that Sylar is her son. Angela, who has always been a luke-warm Mom to Nathan and Peter, now really wants to be a good mommy… to the point that she leaves a woman to be murdered so that Sylar can absorb her ability. Now that she’s in charge of “the company” (we’re back in Odessa, kids), it will be interesting to find out if her new desire to be a super mommy supplements or detracts from her capacity to be a super villain.

NB: Odessa, Texas, has GOT to be the most storied town with nothing to recommend it in history.

Calling All TV Women

2008-10-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

Joss Whedon has said that he created the now legendary figure of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he thought that the blonde that always gets killed in slasher-horror movies needed a better image. This mission was certainly not to his professional peril: the series lasted seven seasons, ranks number ten on Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 Greatest TV Shows, number three on TV Guide’s 2004 list of “Top 25 Cult Shows,” and number forty-one on TV Guide’s 2002 list of “50 Greatest TV Shows.” Buffy herself is number thirteen on Bravo’s list of “100 Greatest Characters.”

But where is that blonde from the slasher flick now, five years after the series finale of the show that sought to give her a better image? .