A rocky start... Again...

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!

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...

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!!

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

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

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

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?