Tom Brokaw hosted Meet the Press today. It was a pretty boring show, filmed in Wyoming for reasons I didn't hear.
In the final segment, Brokaw explained that there wouldn't be an MTP next week because of NBC's coverage of the Wimbledon final. "But we'll see you back the following week. If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press."
In my various anorak confessions yesterday, I didn’t mention what is undoubtedly my favorite medium: television. Yes, when I was planning our London vacation for February 2006, I spent quite a bit of time studying theatrical offerings, but the timing of the trip was determined by TV: I wanted to watch the BBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics. (I also happened to find myself in Britain in August 2004 for the two weeks of the Athens Olympics!)
Once again, in no particular order, some of my favorite shows from 2006:
The Wire. I have a bit of a prejudice against the Sunday night offerings of the premium channels—for some reason, people who don’t normally watch television tune into HBO (and very occasionally Showtime) on the Christian sabbath, deem what they see worthy of their attention, and immediately declare the shows they choose to watch to be superior television—even though they don’t watch any other television, and thus have nothing against which to compare them. Me? I usually watch three hours of telly each weeknight, and probably a little more on weekends, so, believe me, I have something to compare these shows with, and The Wire is definitely superior television.
I don’t understand why The Wire isn’t more popular—its writing is superb, which should win over intellectuals; it’s about gritty situations, which should appeal to fans of “urban” culture (yes, I know, that’s a lazy euphemism, but it’s New Year’s Eve); and the acting is fantastic, which should appeal to, well, everyone. Whatever. I kind of resent the Johnny- and Junie-Come-Latelies who got into the show by watching previous seasons on DVD (we TV hard-core-ists are terrible snobs about folks who watch television on DVD), but that bit of personal nonsense aside, I recommend The Wire to everyone and anyone.
I’ll add just two things: 1) For a show that at least appears to be written entirely by straight white men, it does an amazing job of presenting credible, complicated, and attractive gay, black characters—Omar, Kima, and Snoop (and remember we also once saw Rawls in a gay bar—I wonder if that will be the center of the next series, which will focus on the Baltimore media; you heard it here first, folks). 2) A lot is made of HBO’s ability to use profanity giving its shows an unfair advantage, but Wire writer David Mills made a great point in this Slate dialogue: What’s different about HBO is that writers don’t have to chop their stories into seven pieces. As he put it, “The ability to tell a tale from start to finish without interruption allows for much denser, much more nuanced writing.” He also mentions multiplays—I do appreciate that cable shows rerun new episodes several times over the course of a week—but I was fascinated by HBO’s decision to make episodes of The Wire available on demand six days before the episode went out over the air. I don’t think I ever actually watched a show on Sunday night. I could’ve, but I didn’t want to wait that long for my Wire fix. (By contrast, Showtime’s weird scheduling of the second series of Sleeper Cell, one episode per night over the course of eight days, with all episodes available on demand the day after the premier, just made me think that Showtime didn’t believe that it was compelling enough to bring viewers back week after week.)
The Closer. TNT did something really brave with the first episodes of The Closer—they introduced the character of Brenda Leigh to viewers just as she would’ve appeared to the LA detectives she’d been brought from Atlanta to supervise: like a twitchy, unconvincingly polite, sugar-scoffing weirdo. As she won over the cops during course of the first season, she also won the confidence of viewers—that Southern charm wasn’t entirely fake, but it was a way of disarming people. The second season was even better. Every good long-running TV show follows a pattern, and if it’s well-written and directed, viewers don’t necessarily realize there’s a template. In The Closer, the who/howdunnit of the case she’s working on comes to Brenda when she’s doing something in her messed-up private life. I also loved the two-hour special that aired a month or so ago—well, the plot was a bit silly, and the two hours were out of balance (I guess they were cut up that way so they could be re-run as two separate episodes)—but I loved the beginning when the veterans of Brenda’s squad were so frustrated by Commander Taylor’s lazy, take-the-solution-that’s-available attitude. That had been their attitude before Brenda came along, but she’d changed the way they thought.
Pilot season is my favorite time of the year, but this year I was in a terrible funk about the misogynist, homophobic, and just not funny sitcoms that the networks rolled out. Then came 30 Rock, which has me laughing out loud and nodding in appreciation of the intelligence of the humor (there are often sight gags that you have to freeze the frame to even see). (I did a Slate "Spoiler Special" podcast with TV critic Troy Patterson about the show back in October.) Speaking of superior sitcoms, I’m loving the sophomore season of How I Met Your Mother, which improved by leaps and bounds from the first series. At first, the writers were too stuck on the gimmick of a dad telling his kids about … how he met their mother. They still lean on that crutch from time to time, but it’s now comfortable being a smart series about couples and singles, which is pretty much all of modern life, isn’t it?
When Ugly Betty first started, I was skeptical. Oh, it was fine—likable enough, but inessential somehow. Then I realized that not only was I pretty much always watching it the night it aired (something I do less than half the time), I was also quoting the show to friends who hadn’t seen it. It’s the TV equivalent of an earworm, in other words. Two moments from the show stand out—when camp assistant Marc asked Betty’s fashion- and musical-theater-loving cousin Justin if he got picked on at school, and the outraged tone in which Wilhemina (played by Vanessa Williams) asked Daniel if he'd been looking at her when he suggested a Kwanzaa-themed issue of Mode. Both would’ve been easy to overplay (and, let’s face it, the show might get bigger numbers if they laid things on with a trowel), but they kept things relatively light and subtle.
South of Nowhere. Kids today don’t know they’re born. When I was growing up, there were no homos on television—except that one Sunday when ITV played The Killing of Sister George and the papers were full of outrage. Today’s youth can tune into their own tween channel, the N, and live in a fantasy world where two haut young teens can have a lesbian relationship where the biggest problem is that now Spencer is out to her parents, they never really have time alone together. Their friends all treat their relationship with respect, they get to go to the prom together with nary a raised eyebrow, and when Spencer’s mother freaks out when she finds the girls making out, it’s clear that her response is irrational, ergo homophobia is irrational. (Honorable mention: Noah’s Arc, Logo’s soap opera about a tight-knit group of gay black men in Los Angeles. Also a fantasy, but also a lovely one.)
I avoided the reality-TV trend. Knowing that I’m basically powerless over television, I just didn’t watch them, and when I did catch an episode, hopelessly out of context, the shows always seemed, well, dumb. Then I started to watch Project Runway. I guess the appeal is that even the most hopeless contestants demonstrate vision and practical skills, and the best of them have moments of mind-blowing creativity. I know that the shows are edited for maximum drama, and that they’ll always keep a bitch, a crazy person, and a regular person in the final stages (even if the crazy person’s skillz aren’t that mad), but it’s GOOD! The challenges are usually smart, the catwalk is an awesome climax (much better than the always rather anticlimactic tasting on Top Chef, which I also like), the judges are likable even when they’re bitchy, and Tim Gunn rocks the show.
After the disappointing penultimate season of The Sopranos, I was down on HBO and had low expectations for Big Love, but it won me over. Although the show didn’t ignore the big questions of polygamy (fear of discovery, the rights of the “wives” whose marriages aren’t registered with the state, the abuse of young women bonded to old men, the driving off of the young men of the communities to keep the young women for the old bucks, etc.), its strength was in the psychological portrayal of the characters—especially Bill and the three sister wives—and the representation of faith.
I guess I should also find a place on this list for the shows that I watch every single week, even if I think they’re kind of dumb. Pride of place goes to ESPN’s The Sports Reporters—the guests are often cliché-spouting blowhards, some of whom are so sure that they’re right about everything that you fear for their health (cf John Feinstein’s red-faced rant about the ridiculousness of the World Cup being decided by penalty kicks)—but I stick around for Mitch Albom’s ears, the opportunity to count how many lines from his Sunday Daily News column Mike Lupica can recite on the show, and John Saunders’ Canadianity. Also in this category: On Stage and Theater Talk.
I’ll give the last slot to British detective shows—those short-run series that show up out of the blue on that unfathomable mystery that is the BBC America schedule or on the sickly beast known as PBS. The standout from the last year was, of course, the final Prime Suspect, but the Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Waking the Dead, The Night Detective, and even Rosemary and Thyme get rapt attention in our house. At least a couple of those shows are products of commercial television, but the BBC programs do have that advantage of uninterrupted narrative—that is, no false “now we go to commercial” climaxes to reach every 12 minutes—and rather more robust language than I can imagine hearing on U.S. network shows.
Who knows why A&E—once a channel I tuned into regularly, now a repository for fifth-raterealityshows—“burned off” Season 4 of MI-5 (known as Spooks in its native land). The network showed the first couple of episodes at 11 p.m. on Friday night—a time slot that reeks of “we’re legally obliged to run this on a weekday, but we don’t need to make it easy for would-be viewers to see it.” After the first two eps, it disappeared altogether, without any word of explanation. Then it returned in an eight-hour marathon this Saturday —between the hours of 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. ET—so, yes, I guess there is a worse time slot than 11 p.m. Fridays. Having spent a good part of this weekend catching up with Harry and Adam and Fiona and Zaf and Ruth and the gang, I don’t mind the marathon format one bit, I just wish I knew what A&E was playing at.
Of course, the show isn’t what it was before the original leads—Tom, Zoe, and Danny—were disappeared or killed off; and U.S. viewers see an unsatisfactory filleted version after A&E trims 10 minutes or so for commercial breaks (and such fine ads on Saturday afternoon—lots and lots of Bowflex).
Nevertheless, it’s the last good spy show. I like 24, but it's almost ironic, and MI-5 is far more willing to show the inevitable underside of an agency that spends billions on deception.
I wonder if A&E dumped the show because of its increasing anti-Americanism. There has always been tension between 5 and the CIA (sexual tension in the case of Tom and the CIA officer played by Rachel Corrie’s Megan Dodds), but in Episode 9 of Series 4 it reaches a new level—as the official BBC synopsis puts it, “Harry finally gets fed-up of turning a blind-eye to the CIA acting as though they run the country.” He interrupts the Yanks while they’re in the process of rendering a British subject off to Guantanamo—and as it turns out, his actions prevent the CIA from enacting a dastardly plot to draw the West into a war with Iran.
Who knows if we’ll get to see Season 5, which is currently showing in Britain, over here. If not, I’ll miss seeing the Gherkin (the cinematographers seemed to find a way to get it into every episode), hearing those dire American accents, and finding out if Ruth and Harry ever get together. And as much as I hated losing Tom, Zoe, and Danny, I did like—if not enjoy—the tension that came from knowing the show was willing to kill off any character, no matter how essential they seemed to be. Sure, characters dropped like flies in the last season of 24, but I never suspect that Jack Bauer is going to die a resurrection-free death. In MI-5 anyone is fair game—and that adds a visceral thrill to the show.
New Podcast—The Second Annual TV Theme Tune Scramble
This time last year, I offered a podcast that was also a contest, The Great 2005 Name That TV Theme Tune Contest. I'm happy to report that five of the 10 shows are still on the air (if you count Rome, which isn't currently on the air but will be returning to HBO).
It's that happy time of year once again, so here's the 2006 version. An added bonus for those YST readers who take the long view: Guess how many of these 12 shows will still be on the air in 2007. Closest wins a prize. (My guess? Seven, though only a couple will be considered hits.)
Now, listen to the podcast and tell me which show goes with which theme tune. So, if you think No. 1 is Ugly Betty, your answer would be 1-a). You can send your answers to yousaytomato[at]gmail.com OR if you're a trusting sort, just put them in the comments below.
2006 Pilot Season: Comedies, Part 2, 'Til Death and Happy Hour
TV networks schedule their hottest shows for Thursday nights because that’s when movie studios want to advertise the weekend’s new movies and when stores want to advertise the weekend’s special offers. In the 8-9 p.m. slot this fall, Fox has lined up two new comedies—‘Til Death, a vehicle for Brad Garrett, late of the most inexplicably popular show in TV history, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Happy Hour. This means that the time slot that once featured the women’s-empowerment classic Living Single is now misogyny central.
Happy Hour won’t last long—it’s the latest in a weird sequence of short-term Fox sitcoms featuring young men new to Chicago, dealing with work and apartment quandaries (I liked last year’s The Loop much better). It begins when Henry, who recently left his sweet job managing John Deere inventory in Missouri to live with his girlfriend in Chicago and work in her family’s business, finds himself dumped and therefore homeless, jobless, and loveless. He goes to another apartment in the building where Larry needs a new roommate to replace Brad, who has just moved in with his fiancee, Tina, who has totally—and absolutely humorlessly—castrated and infantilized her man. Larry takes pity on Henry—and even sends him off to a job interview with his old, old friend Amanda, a likable slut with no control over her mouth (the words that come out of it or the deep-dish pizza that goes into it).
Once again, there were zero jokes in the entire show, and although Amanda is somewhat sympathetic (with the emphasis on pathetic), the basic thrust—make that the overt story line—is that women are out to destroy men: Henry’s ex-girlfriend ruins his life, Tina ruins Brad. The only laugh lines—and you have to use an extraordinarily broad definition to find anything that qualifies—are, when Larry sees Tina in the apartment building, “The lesbian lip-waxing meeting is down the hall” (man, homophobic woman-hating is funny!), and, when Amanda is interviewing the shorts-wearing Henry for a job (his ex won’t let him into the apartment to get his clothes): “I can see your balls. … There’s nothing about them I can’t see.” Start engraving the Emmy!
The title of the show refers to Larry’s daily 4 p.m. martini appointment. Happy hour, he believes, is the time between “something bad (work) and something good (dinner). Enjoy it!” Fox’s conceptual problem with these shows about young men in between something easy (living with your parents) and something hard (paying your own way) is that, in real life, happy hour is only fun about one time in five. Usually, you end up feeling worried about something you said, in trouble about something you did, or in really deep trouble about something you didn’t do because you had a wicked hangover the next day.
Happy Hour’s lead-in is even more cynical and misogynistic, if that’s possible, though we do at least see that the women aren’t the ball-busting, fun-killing dragons men say they are. But, boy, do they say it a lot. Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher are Eddie and Joy Stark—a high-school history teacher and a travel agent married for more than 20 years—Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Foster are their next-door neighbors, newlyweds Jeff and Steph. Since Jeff is the new vice principal at Eddie’s school, they carpool together, providing Eddie with much time to lecture Jeff on wives and their soul-crushing ways.
When you see the title ‘Til Death, you can’t help thinking of Til Death Us Do Part, the British show that spawned All in the Family. Yes, Alf Garnett was a wife-berating bigot—but as a million high-school essays have concluded, his intolerance was in the service of counseling tolerance. I couldn’t possibly tell you what ‘Til Death is in the service of—other than paying Brad Garrett’s utilities bill.
Take the time when Jeff believes that he’s going to get a pool table for his new home. No chance, says Eddie, “A pool table is for fun. Men want to have fun. Wives want to walk that fun deep into the woods and shoot it dead. Marriage isn’t about fun. Marriage is more about having someone to drive you to the hospital for your operations.” Or here’s Eddie on what women want: “Even if women don’t actually host dinner parties, they want to believe that they host dinner parties. That’s why you just registered for thousands of dollars’ worth of china. … There’s a reason china rhymes with vagina.” (So why does prick rhyme with dick?)
The vagina monologue is typical of the show’s down-there fixation—Eddie can’t stop pointing out that the kids will have no end of fun with Jeff’s last name—Woodcock—and way too much time is wasted riffing on that, especially when Jeff starts a Web site called mywoodcock.com—oh, hold on, can’t type, stitch! In fact, a lot of the content seems very racy for an 8 p.m. time slot—especially the scene where Jeff, describing how, in a moment of post-coital weakness, Steph agreed to agree to let him get a pool table, does a wife-rogering pelvic-thrust dance around the teachers lounge, while he yells to Eddie, “How about this weekend you can just listen to the sound of me making love to my wife on my brand new pool table.” It’s just gross, and not even vaguely funny. Like the rest of the show.
In TV pilot season, I do something I don’t do during the rest of the year: watch sitcoms. (That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. I watch How I Met Your Mother, Reno 911!, and Weeds—but it’s debatable if the last two shows really qualify as sitcoms.)
The crop of new comedies I’ve seen so far will certainly not affect my long-term viewing habits—they’re all misogynist, derivative, and utterly unfunny.
The worst of the lot was The Class—whose Platonic ideal is Friends. Instead of six pals (including one set of siblings), we have eight pals (including one set of siblings)—young and single and weird in their own special, theoretically endearing ways.
The premise is that Ethan—played by John Ritter’s son Jason—is engaged to a woman he met in third grade. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the day they met, he invites their third-grade classmates to a party. Naturally—because in these shows women are always bitches (unless they’re idiots)—she breaks up with him because he’s way too nice to her, all in the hearing of the reunited class. Cut to a very awkward party. (Awkward is the new funny—except when it’s not.)
The problem with the show—like lots of similar shows these days—is that it’s just not funny. OK, I know it’s not stand-up, so we can’t expect jokes, but shouldn’t there be at least one vaguely comedic situation?
Instead, all the laughs were based on pain. Let’s do a roll-call, or perhaps that should be role-call: Lina hangs up on Ethan’s party invitation call so she can return to reacting to finding her boyfriend in bed with another woman. She’s the kind of person who always wears the wrong thing and says the wrong thing. Lina’s twin sister Kat is a selfish, rude, and apparently pathologically incapable of basic empathy. Duncan is a sweet but immature doofus who lives with—and struggles not to be controlled by—his interfering mother. Nicole, Duncan’s high-school sweetheart is married to a former football star who is much older than she is; they don’t have much in common, and he’s sometimes mean to her. Kyle is gay and apparently in a semi-loving if shallow relationship, but his role is totally undeveloped. Holly is a TV newswoman who’s still mad at Kyle for ditching her for a guy on prom night—the hilarious payoff her is that her husband is very effeminate. (Laugh? I thought my pants would never dry.) Finally, there’s Richie, who was about to swallow a bottle of pills when Ethan called; he and Lina discover an intense connection and see the glimmer of a bright future in their dark, depressing lives. Then, in the final scene of the pilot, he drives his car into her and knocks her down. Hey, even if he just winged her, car accidents are wicked funny, eh?
Other than a life-improving re-connection between Duncan and Nicole, it’s hard to see anything other than misery, depression, and darkness in store for any of the other characters. Toward the end of the pilot, Ethan says something along the lines of: “There were 28 in our class. How many are already stuck in lousy jobs and bad marriages? How many of us have already made that one big, dumb choice we’ll never recover from?” Yay, that’s the attitude! I don’t think watching a comedy is supposed to make you feel even more suicidal than the actors.
PS: The actress playing Lina has a very distinctive, oddly pitched, husky voice. I couldn’t place it, but I knew I’d seen her before. Turns out she’s Heather Goldenhersh, who played Sister James in Doubt. I’m guessing she’ll be free for further theatrical engagements very soon.
There’s a line I never tire of trying to pass off as something I just came up with: “The three best words in the English language? All new episode.” And there’s another phrase that’s even more tingle-inducing: “pilot season.” And I’m not talking plane drivers.
At this time of year, I always open up TiVo with antici—pation!
Everything I read about ABC’s new Anne Heche vehicle Men in Trees (crappy title—for one thing it serves up a too-tempting lob for TV Guide’s Matt Roush, who declares the network is “up a tree” and predicts it’ll “get the chop”) made me think that I liked the show better when it was called Northern Exposure. Like that show, which had a surprisingly short life in syndication, it’s a fish-out-of-water tale of a caustic, know-it-all New Yorker who finds herself in the beautiful wilds of Alaska and sets out on a laughter-and-tear-filled journey through the five stages of adjustment. If I had to make a rash prediction after 44 minutes of viewing, I’d say those stages were going to be: arrogance, anger, awe at the rough-hewn beauty of nature, appropriate shoe buying, and acceptance that even guys with bad haircuts can be haut and that, therefore, she can live in a place where you have to stand in the street to get cell-phone reception.
The thing is, since they didn’t even bother to disguise the debt to Northern Exposure, I almost believed it was an hommage rather than a rip-off. Instead of a goofy young man with a movie fetish and a sexy philosophical guy with a radio show, there’s a goofy young man with a radio show and a sexy, resistant-to-the-lead’s-charms fish and wildlife guy. Instead of a March-December couple running the local bar, there’s a chunky guy and his spunky lady running the local bar. Instead of a white female bush pilot there’s a black male bush pilot. Instead of a crusty old lady running the grocery store, there’s an attractive ho with a heart of gold (actually, that character is pretty original—an undeluded woman who’d like to get out of the “hospitality industry” but hasn’t found an alternative way of supporting her family—yet). But this show is fresh, see, because it features a lame crutch that’s only come into fashion in the last couple of years: the knowing, philosophical voice-over. (Actually, there’s also an echo of an even better show—Canada’s North of 60—in the form of the slide-guitar soundtrack and the presence of North of 60 regular Tim Webber. So, the show is filmed in Vancouver, eh?)
Well, there are a couple of original elements: In the pilot episode, Anne Heche was naked once, “dressed” only in a towel once, and down to skivvies what felt like a couple of times. An Alaska-based drama with more skin than an Australian soap! Now that’s an achievement. (Heche’s arms are like matchsticks, by the way, I sure hope she gets some good organic meat on those too-prominent bones in the coming episodes.) Oh, and there’s a recurring raccoon—I haven’t seen an animal character that lame since the talking cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
The writing is pretty good—speaking of the local men, who outnumber women 10-to-1, the female bartender tells Heche, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd”—and the hook-up potential gives it a sexy edge. (Heche is a relationship coach who realizes that she knows nothing about men, but thinks she can figure them out in this testosterone territory.) I wonder, though, if there are enough women characters for the show to succeed on Friday night, where it’s up against Ghost Whisperer and Nanny 911. Men in Trees is better—smarter, funnier, and less treacly—than either of those shows, but that, unfortunately, often counts for little when it comes to the ratings.
For my second podcast (my first consisted of Emmy predictions, and was posted mere minutes before the start of the Emmy telecast, which a) presumes a greater interest in the Emmys than hard evidence supports; b) wasn’t the best timing), I bring you the Great 2005 Name That TV Theme Tune Contest.
Then I play 10 TV theme tunes. I recorded them off my TV, so the sound quality’s not stellar (Andy, my podcast guru, would be appalled for many, many reasons), but it’s good enough, ya whiners.
What you have to do is match the theme tunes with the shows—so, for example, if you think Theme Tune 1 is Threshold, you would write 1-A, and so on down the list. Each tune is only used once (there’s no trickery involved, in other words), and the music you hear at the beginning and end of the podcasts is just for your entertainment—it’s not part of the contest.
When you have your list, enter the answers in the Comments for this blog entry (if you don’t want the world cribbing your answers, just send them in an e-mail to yousaytomatoblog[AT]gmail[DOT]com). From the no doubt numerous correct answers I receive, I’ll randomly pick one winner.
What’s the prize? Well, you get to choose. You can have a) a slightly used gay-themed T-shirt—not everyone’s idea of sartorial bliss, including me these days, I must admit; b) one of my mix CDs (your best bet); or c) a new hardback book (I’ll choose one for you—I’m as good at matching people with books as the winner will be at matching TV shows with theme tunes).
OK, let’s play Name That TV Theme Tune …
(To subscribe to You Say Tomato podcasts, add http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3+juniocast to your favorite podcasting software. If you use iTunes, for example, in the Advanced menu, select Subscribe to Podcast, and paste in that URL.)
Wow, William Shatner and Frederica von Stade performing the Star Trek theme was really something, eh? I can’t believe I blew my vote on Kristin Bell (though really I was voting for Veronica Mars, which was cruelly underappreciated). Flicka did look disturbingly like a tribble, however, and is it just me, or did she miss her cue after Bill’s big oration?
Best miniseries was won by another show that went completely under my radar—I didn’t even know if the show was The Last Prince or The Lost Prince (turns out it’s the latter), but I liked the woman who accepted the award because she looked like a friend of mine. (Hi, Moira.)
What did Alan Alda have on his lapel? It looked like the iron cross.
Although I fundamentally disagree with the notion of Desperate Housewives being a comedy, I was glad Felicity Huffman was the winner of the Best Actress award—she really has skills, but her speech was a little spiky. It was almost as if she’d be in her children’s ADD medicine. Patricia Arquette was very appealing, and I loved that her words about the hurricane devastation and the soldiers in Iraq seemed very heart-felt and moving.
I do watch Monk (though I’m not sure I’d admit that if the show didn’t win awards), but it’s a very peculiar show—a throwback to the mystery movies of the 1970s. The lieutenant is straight out of (if you’ll forgive the term) Macmillan and Wife, and Monk is Columbo with actual psychoses. Like Columbo, the show is padded with a lot of business for the lead actor, but in both cases, without the business it’d be a short and not terribly fascinating mystery.
James Spader’s victory came as a big surprise to me, since that felt like a strong category, but it must be extra-sweet since the end of Boston Legal’s season was essentially shelved in favor of non-winning Grey’s Anatomy. Spader has a very peculiar affect—as I said last year he’s creepily similar to Arthur in Six Feet Under—but he gave a sweet speech.
The boy from Everybody Hates Chris and his “new friend” were adorable. Charles, from New Orleans, was apparently being directed not to smile, but you could tell that he just couldn’t help myself, and Tyler James Williams came across as a very mature and warm young man.
Ellen glitched at the end, ironically forgetting to introduce her comrades-in-presenting, Hugh Jackman and Whoopi Goldberg. It was definitely an awkward moment, but Ellen had been so chronically underused all night, it’s hardly surprising. (And although she wasn’t given much to do, she does have an understated charm that works very well, and I was very glad that, unlike last year when Garry Shandling chewed up precious speech time with very bad material, she kept things moving. The telecast finished right on time, which is pretty amazing.)
Lost seemed like a good choice for Best Drama—it’s obviously had a big effect on this season’s lineup with lots of puzzle shows on the schedule—but I was shocked by the comedy choice where Everybody Loves Raymond beat Desperate Housewives. For all its flaws and for all the mysteries of its nomination categories, Desperate Housewives is a solid show with some fine actors, and I don’t know anyone who can even stand Raymond. Ah, well, at least its long, befuddling reign is now OVAH!
And so now are the Emmys! (For a full list of winners, click here.)
Oh, man, we’re in the bit where there aren’t many surprises and you’re sitting there waiting for Ellen to walk in on someone in the women’s room. Jon Stewart’s tribute to David Letterman was sweet if rather unconvincingly delivered; Macy Gray seemed to be fighting with Gary Durdain over whether he could hold her hand rather than enjoying his grip; and why so many cuts to Naveen Andrews? (Is it possible they don’t know he isn’t really Iraqi?)
I was SO relieved that Quentin Tarantino didn’t win for his direction of last season’s CSI finale—I know some people whose judgment I respect enjoyed it, but I’m of the belief that you cannot, well, should not change all the characters and motivations in the last episode of the season. Plus I just don’t like him. I was not happy that The Wire didn't win the Drama Series Writing category—I don’t understand why that show doesn’t get respect. It’s by far the smartest, best-written show on television and has been every year it’s been on.
Oy, then we got to the miniseries or movie categories. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—TOO MANY AWARDS! How is it fair that you can run up a whole slew of statue-ettes for something that lasts two hours when many of the best shows on television are consistently overlooked (to name just three: The Wire, Veronica Mars, and CSI). Geoffrey Rush’s words about his wife were lovely, but the movie just wasn’t that good—for it to take three consecutive awards shows how lame that whole category of categories is.
But I’ll relax my disdain for the category thanks to the loveliness and charm of S. Epatha Merkerson’s acceptance speech for Lackawanna Blues (though I miss her dreads). That was one of those classic nervous but sincerely moved victory reactions that you just can’t get enough of. (And I’m so glad that in the age of breast-less supermodels, an actress who’s big and bomb was the one to lose her acceptance speech in her cleavage.)
For the second year in a row, Arrested Development’s Mitchell Hurwitz came across as one of the smartest, wittiest guys in the crowd, and his observation that “the Academy has twice rewarded us for something that you people won’t watch” pretty much says it all for that show. (Let’s face it, the TV sitcom is dead.)
The Blue Man Group did a very cool presentation of the Best Reality Show category—and doubtless drummed up some business for their Vegas show—but I don’t really like presentations by men-machines or animals or puppets or cartoons—it doesn’t feel truly live. What’s more, I couldn’t really tell what other shows The Amazing Race had bested.
I like Blythe Danner as an actress, but having tried to watch Huff and having given up in depressed disgust, I can’t get behind that choice. And did she mean to embarrass Keifer Sutherland by telling the world (or the bit of it that’s watching the Emmy-cast, anyway) that he used to baby-sit Gwyneth (but not her lesser-known son?). Ah, but she provides the first bit of political speechifying of the night, paying tribute to "our kids in Iraq. Let’s get the heck out of there." But she had the smarts to do something I’ve tried on conference calls—if you’ve been a bit abrasive, you end by saying, "Love you all." She might play the therapist’s mom, but she knows a thing or two about psychology.
I don’t think Blythe name-checked Apple, but she started a run of publicly proud grannies. The next award went to Jane Alexander for her role in Warm Springs (which either ran while I was out of the country or few right under my radar—and I would say that "what’s on TV" is one of my areas of greatest erudition), who gave a shout-out to her “six grandkids,” and then two awards later came Doris Roberts who loves her two grandsons so much she brought them up on stage.
I cannot believe the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies won an award—Katie and Bob’s inane commentary alone should’ve made that impossible (I don’t leave the country during Olympiads for nothing), and Jon Stewart’s going to have to come up with a new line—he only slightly reworked last year’s acceptance when he said that when they started the show people said you couldn’t have a late-night comedy show with a staff that was only 80-percent Ivy League-educated Jewish men. Oh, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a prude, but Da Ali G Show went too far in the tape that accompanied their writing-award-nomination.
I was surprised by the massive hand for David Letterman, who came across as a mean, Sean Pennishly humorless mouth-mangler in his buildup to the Johnny Carson video tribute. I’m guessing a lot of the applause was really intended for Johnny. The tribute itself was fantastic—moving and hilarious. I don’t remember ever really watching the show (it was before my American TV days), but now I wish I had.
I have to blog the Emmys “live,” because the standards are so much lower that way. Just as award-show producers get graded on the "live/" curve rather than on "in the can" standards, if you blog while the show’s still running, you don’t have to worry about big themes and grand arcs.
The opening tapes—John Travolta reminding us of his once-famous love for older women (less palatable as he gets older himself, I guess); Candice Bergen re-living the Murphy Brown/Dan Quayle flap; Charles S. Dutton outing himself as a convict, and Billy Crystal conjuring his 700 award telecasts—were a little strange, the sentiment slightly misjudged for the opening moments, but the Earth Wind and Fire/Black Eyed Peas musical number was energetic and fun. (It would’ve been even more fun if I could’ve made out more of the words; I hate to sound like an old fart, but I could’ve used subtitles.) Going out and dancing in the aisles seems like a better way of establishing that the "stars" are good sports than mocking them in the Billy Crystal Oscar-cast fashion. I must admit my negative attitude to Doris Roberts was softened by watching her get down with a Pea; and Marg Helgenberger strutted the stuff that makes it so easy to believe that her CSI character is a former exotic dancer.
Ellen’s opening monologue was a little iffy, but as she said, "It’s an icebreaker, don’t judge me yet." Getting all five Housewives (yes, they included Nicolette Sheridan) to announce the first award set a good tone, though I do tend to think that it’s time for the DH folks to wean joke-writers off the feuding cast meme (though the Eva Longoria bit after the first commercial break was nicely pitched). And as much as I groaned when Brad Garrett got his last Everybody Loves Raymond Emmy, I have to give him credit for getting a topical joke (Britney’s baby) and an impromptu joke (riffing off Charles S. Dutton’s tape) in a short speech.
William Shatner’s win for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama didn’t displease me—though Alan Alda’s apparently embittered expression as he ripped up his acceptance speech was rather too convincing for comfort.
The Donald Trump/"Karen Walker" duet on the theme from Green Acres was mind-blowing—and given Megan Mullally’s chops as a cabaret queen, it was a little odd that the Don was the musical anchor of the number. Was it supposed to be so short?
Hugh Jackman’s win in the Variety or Music Program category was very odd—his performance in the Tony Award telecast beat the televised version of Whoopi Goldberg’s Broadway show, Tracey Ullman Live & Exposed, Jon Stewart for the Daily Show, and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show turn. I imagine more people watch any single episode of the Tonight Show than have seen every Tony telecast in the history of televization. I never thought I’d see Jon Stewart not win an award (and for him not to win for last year’s election coverage!). I guess people really like the Boy From Oz, and television people really feel guilty about upstaging Broadway actors.
Being a New Yorker certainly makes watching the Tonys more interesting, since for once I’d seen several of the nominated works and have the chance of seeing more whenever I can snag tickets.
I think the ceremony set a new high for same-sex kisses and shout-outs, which makes me feel even better about the world of theater. Jerry Mitchell, who won the Best Choreography award (for La Cage aux Folles; he was also nominated for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) had a big smooch with his boyfriend before he went up for his statuette, and he thanked him by name (as bland as that sounds, it’s hard to imagine a winner using his partner’s name on national TV until very recently—even if the Tony ceremony isn’t exactly the Oscar telecast); Edward Albee dedicated his lifetime achievement award to his "life partner," who died last month; and the magnificent Cherry Jones snogged her girlfriend (who she also name-checked in her acceptance speech) when she heard she’d won Best Actress.
It’s funny how worked up we can get strictly on the basis of hype. Since I’d seen just a handful of the nominated productions, it was a little absurd for me to have strong feelings about the winners—but even having only seen The Pillowman among the works in which the five Best Actor in a Play nominees appear, I still had a sharp intake of breath when they announced Bill Irwin over Brian F. O’Byrne. And while I haven’t seen—and have no plans to see—Spamalot, the craptacular number they performed during the Tony telecast confirmed every snobbish preconceived notion I had about the show. I was really hoping for an upset by Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (which I saw and enjoyed much more than I expected to) or The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and I was actually disappointed when Spamalot’s name was called—even though it would’ve been a major upset for anything else to take the trophy. (And talk about a dreadful speech—even the fawning audience at Radio City couldn’t feign amusement at that appalling display; leave the jokes to the professionals, money man.)
Who knew that Prince could be so understated—I’ve never seen him in concert, but everyone I know who has talks about how dynamic he is. Not tonight—he was lower-energy than a refrigerator light bulb, and he had way more trouble with the Spanish and French names/words than he should’ve. (Every heard of rehearsal, P?). Jorge Dexler serenading the academy with a snatch of his award-winning song, followed by a simple, “Thanks. Gracias” was nice—although the severe stoopage caused by the mike setting for Prince was a little awkward.
Sean Penn’s defense of Jude Law proved that he may be a good actor (an amazing actor as it happens), but conceding that you have a “compromised sense of humor,” doesn’t make your humorlessness any more acceptable. (I know, I know, I was complaining that Chris Rock had been too hard on Law, but Penn just came across as a humorless grouch.)
Hilary Swank is to acting what Christian Laetner is to basketball—lucky, lucky, lucky. I can’t resist someone who calls herself a “girl from a trailer park” … well, except in Hilary Swank’s case. Two Best Actress statues at 31, and I challenge you to mention a non-Oscar-winning movie she’s played in (I’ll spot you The Affair of the Necklace, since even if you’ve heard of it, I’ll bet you haven’t seen it).
Ah! Finally, an award I’m excited about. Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside was my favorite movie of the year, and Alejandro Amenábar (now if he’d gone onstage immediately after Prince, there’d’ve been no problems with the mike height) gave a great speech. It was gracious to give one-third of the credit to Ramon Sampedro, one-third to Javier Bardem, and one-third to the producer and crew—especially when Amenábar gave such a one-man-band effort, writing, directing, producing, editing, even writing the (astonishingly effective) music.
How weird was it that Charlie Kaufman had his own second tier of award recipients, with Michel Gondry (the director for chrissakes) and Pierre Bismuth hugging their statues but keeping a distance from the man himself and not even attempting to approach the microphone?
I wasn’t altogether convinced that Jamie Foxx hadn’t practiced that speech, complete with the catch in the voice and fighting the emotion, since it was such a beautifully structured complete thought, but who cares? It was touching and sweet, and he took his little daughter to the Oscars, and how cool is that? Plus, his imitation of Sidney Poitier (conjured for the second time of the night) suggests the subject of his next biopic might be a certain dinner guest …
Julia Roberts (what’s with the happy birthday shout-out—you couldn’t even get away with that on local talk radio) and the couple of old Fokkers seemed out of place (and you forgot your glasses, Barbra, when the whole point of your being there was to read out a name?), but Clint Eastwood is a man of great talent, and he does come across very well when he’s accepting statues, and his mother is 96 years old and at the Oscars, so no complaints.
And perhaps it all just means that Martin Scorsese will carry on making great movies …
(I know this last bit wasn't live, but someone called R right as the Best Foreign-Language Film was going to be announced, so we had to pause, then we had to figure out some moving logistics, but it's not a competition, is it?)
The first bit of shtick in the next section was painful—not Ben Stiller-Owen Wilson as Starsky and Hutch painful, because it was at least schlocky and winking—but Chris Rock should’ve had more comeback than mere eye-rolling to Adam Sandler’s “you’re so sexy, Cat Zeta Jones” chat; and Rock’s reading of “When I was a little girl growing up in Wales” hardly compares with Celine Dion singing “When I was a little nappy-headed boy” in her Las Vegas show …
I hadn’t realized until Alexander Payne thanked his wife that he was married to Sandra Oh. It seems especially odd since, when he spoke after the preview screening of Sideways that R and I attended, he talked about the importance of credible casting—that, for example, Virginia Madsen is all the more believable in that role because she actually looks like a woman waitressing her way through graduate school (unlike, say, Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball).
Beyonce and Andrew Lloyd Webber performing their nominated song from Phantom of the Opera? More like Beauty and the Beast.
The winner for Best Cinematography seemed high, but dedicating his award to the nurses and doctors tending to his mother, in hospital for the last 45 days, was very sweet, so I’ll give him some slack.
Chris Rock’s introduction of Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayak—“You won’t be able to take your eyes off these next four presenters”—was a little tacky, but, I must admit, true. Salma certainly deserves the award for rack of the evening. (I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that. It’s Chris Rock’s influence.)
Salma’s commitment to the “Al Otro Lado del Rio,” the nominated song from The Motorcycle Diaries was a little hard to understand (and for a moment I thought she was wrong in claiming it was the first Spanish-language nominee, because I remember Lila Downs singing a song from her movie Frida in the 2003 telecast—but that was “Burn it Blue,” and the lyrics were in English). I have to give Antonio “El Cigala” Banderas credit for playing the part, but joder, the cock-rock posing from Carlos Santana and Antonio’s Argentine-accented quasi-flamenco vocal stylings were hard to take—especially for those poor souls who lack the TiVo fast-forward button.
Credit to Chris Rock for taking on the second-class award-giving in his nice riff about drive-through awards in the parking lot (“an Oscar and a McFlurry”), but it’s too bad he had to wait so long—I guess he had to wait until he came on after a winner who went on too long, in which regard the gay couple who won the Documentary Short category were happy to oblige.
Poor Jan. A.P. Kaczmarek, composer of the Best Original Score, he thought he was the first person to thank Harvey Weinstein. Actually, in the first section of the show, one of the winners of Best Art Direction thanked ‘Arvey, it’s just that his Italian accent was so strong, it was hard to make it out.
When will folks in the audience learn not to applaud the folks pictured in the In Memoriam section? It leads to uncomfortable displays of relative affection—OK, so Ossie Davis got more applause than Ronald Reagan, but so did Jerry Orbach. And the live music? Love him, but next year I think we should have less YoYo and more ByeBye.
The segment from Costumes to Counting Crows was a bit dull, no? Except for the inspired trip to the Magic Johnson Theater to talk to African-American movie-goers. It wasn’t scientific to ask folks who obviously see a lot of films and who cited movies like Alien vs. Predator, Chronicles of Riddick (a Dame Judi Dench fan?), and White Chicks as their recent favorites if they’d seen the nominated movies (I notice he didn’t ask about Ray, for example), but it was definitely interesting. It was also one of the most incisive swipes at the relevance of the cinematic MSM that I can recall, especially at the Oscars.
Scarlett Johansson, who I really admire as an actress, seemed incredibly awkward both in the weirdly deserted box (later filled with statue-clutching geeks) and in the 10-second film clips from the scientific and technical award ceremony.
Pierce Brosnan did well with Edna Mole (even though she outshone him by several lumens), but his coughing over the nomination tape was distracting. I realize he wants the exposure, but perhaps he really should’ve called in sick.
I loved Chris Rock’s line about Tim Robbins “boring us to death with his politics” when he’s not knocking us out with his acting—good juxtaposition of compliment and burn.
Cate Blanchett was fantabulous, though the line about hoping her son will marry Martin Scorsese’s daughter was a little odd (not to mention heterosexist).
In the weird “let’s try something different each time” method of handing out the “minor” awards (which is exactly why I don’t like it—we all know there are six Oscars that really matter, two or three more that matter quite a bit, and then a whole bunch that we all forget about right after the telecast, but it feels rude to acknowledge it), my favorite so far was the editing award. When announcing the nominees, they didn’t show the people in their seats, but rather in photographs (the first time all night that I’ve really felt like I knew for sure what the nominees looked like), but then the winner got to take the walk of fame and make a speech from the stage. The winner was Scorsese’s longtime editor, who also won for Raging Bull, and he seemed genuinely moved by her dedication to him.
Counting Crows’ version of the second Best Song nominee confirms my view that the acoustics of the Kodak Theater must be bad. I don’t care for the group (though I did once go to the theater with the lead singer—we didn’t go together, you understand, but we both went to the same performance of Assassins at Studio 54), but, like Beyonce, the guy is a talented and creative singer, and he sounded suspiciously off-key.
Oscar night? Is there a more exciting evening in the entire year? This time last year we were in Amsterdam, and thanks to the joys of jetlag, watching the telecast in the wee small hours (I think they ended around 5:30 or 6 a.m.—just about when I’d’ve been getting up if I hadn’t been on vacation), and, boy, does the memory make me grateful to be in the US of A. Not only do the so-far-infrequent ad breaks provide an opportunity for live-ish blogging; they also serve to remind me how awful Jonathan Ross and his crew of overdressed nobodies were last year. (The BBC showed the U.S. telecast, but when ABC cut away to ads, the Beeb cut away to inane—and how!—chatter; it should be compulsory viewing for anyone who assumes that all British television is better than the American equivalent.)
Chris Rock? So far, so fabulous. He seems not to give a crap about offending people, which actually gives the jokes a bit of naughty heft. (When the host really is buddies with the folks he’s poking fun at, or aspires to be in their circle, the punches get pulled and the laughs are pretty superficial.) Still, some of the digs seemed a bit unfair. I loved the “If you want X, don’t settle for Y, wait for X” riff—especially Chris Rock’s offering up of himself as a poor substitute for Denzel Washington—but it seemed too hard on Jude Law. Sure, he was in too many movies this year, but he also happens to be a far better actor than Tom Cruise—the guy producers were supposed to wait for when they were tempted to hire Jude—which made the joke seem undeservedly cruel. (And was it just me, or was the laughter canned at that point—I don’t think actors would laugh at full-on digs at their comrades. Some of the actors who were getting close-ups while Rock was speaking—Kate Winslet, for example—are good pals of JL’s; I’m sure it wasn’t coincidence that there were no audience cut-aways while CR was working that vein of material.)
I loved Rock’s riff about how “there’s no acting at the Oscars,” but the dig about Nicole Kidman’s reaction to Halle Berry’s win seemed too hard. Am I just being too Seattle—I like digs, but only if they’re at people that I don’t like? Perhaps. I certainly had no qualms about the swipe at Michael Moore wishing he’d directed Supersize Me—after all, he’d done the research.
The presenters have all been good so far—though Halle Berry looked like she was trying out for a role as a Catalino Sandino Moreno lookalike, and Renee Zellwegger look way too skinny—that corset seemed to haved pulled her eyebrows up on an unfortunate angle like someone who’s had too many facelifts. She did her job well, but I hated Cate Blanchett being up in the cheap seats while announcing the makeup nominees—apart from anything else, it was just way to hard to know who the actual nominees were because they were sitting with their dates, and it just feels rude to have them give their speeches up away from everyone. I don’t care how long the telecast lasts; I want the winners to give their speeches on the stage.
Morgan Freeman was brief and very gracious. I loved The Aviator’s art director’s pronunciation of “Arvey Westeen.” Robin Williams needs help for his Attention Craving Disorder—when he suddenly interrupted his lame ramblings (gay cartoon character jokes; how original) to ask, “What are we talking about?” I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who had no idea.
Chris Rock is doing a lot of “black” material, but as was NOT the case when Whoopi Goldberg last hosted, it’s absolutely appropriate. His riff about the black version of The Incredibles—The Aiights—and his story of Cate Blanchett giving such a convincing portrayal of Kate Hepburn that Sidney Poitier went to her house for dinner last night were right on. He made a dig at Halle Berry for Catwoman 2; I hope he’ll poke at Beyonce for that rather off-key version of the very lame Best Song nominee from Les Choristes. (If ever a category needed to be retired for lack of decent nominations, surely Best Song is it.)
