Not by the Hairs on My Kimmie, Kim, Kim

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!!

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.

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

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

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

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”

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...?

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

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!

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

“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?

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

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

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? .