Mia Kirshner and Ben Savage enjoy Chinese food in Love, Lights, Hanukkah!
If Hallmark’s Love, Lights, Hanukkah! (2020) is your maiden exposure to Jews and our religious customs, you will think we’re unfailingly cheerful moth people, strangely drawn to lights. And, perhaps more confusingly, that we’re obsessed with rudimentary math. The film’s cozy Jewish family, the Bermans, spend an inordinate amount of time counting and beaming while staring endlessly at candles and electric menorahs, the balance of their energy devoted to gently bickering while schmearing bagels and eating brisket. There are evangelical Christians somewhere in the United States who reluctantly watched this and thought to themselves, “Oh, so that’s why they’re all accountants!”
Our first groan of “Oy!” arrives immediately: Hanukkah! opens with closeups of spinning dreidels. You would never guess from this movie that most children are not enthralled by dreidels and that few Jewish women collect and display dreidels like Precious Moments figurines. Or that it would be kind of odd for a grandma to excitedly announce that the gifts are beside the menorah—Hanukkah gifts aren’t akin to Christmas gifts and menorahs are not like Christmas trees. If they were placed too closely together, at least in my childhood home, it would’ve taken about two seconds before my brother and cousins accidentally set everything aflame with their roughhousing.
Mia Kirshner (seen here in The Black Dahlia) tearfully asks God, “Why can’t I catch a break?”
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that the L.A. Times is questioning whether killing Jenny Schecter on The L Word will drive viewers away from the show? As much as I hate to defend any of the decisions made by the hackety-hacks (don’t talk back!) who write for The L Word (assuming it isn’t written the way I’ve long suspected: by putting typewriters in front of oversexed zoo animals and handing the resulting drafts to the criminally insane for polishing), aren’t they finally, after five long years of mind-boggling mediocrity, giving the viewers what they want by killing Jenny, one of the most widely loathed central characters in the history of television?
Mind you, I watched Big Love last week instead of the season premiere of The L Word, so I can’t comment on the particulars of this “Oh my God, they killed Jenny! You bastards!” plot development yet. It just seems obvious that the viewers who have faithfully watched (and almost as faithfully complained about—not that it ever stopped them from watching) this train wreck for the last five seasons aren’t tuning in for the storytelling.
Grouse as they might at the prospect of Jenny’s death spurring a season-long game of Clue, these viewers come from hardy stock, having suffered through missteps including but not limited to voyeuristic roommate guy; drag king Ivan; the Max debacle; the Betty invasions; Jenny turning into a self-harming stripper/Talmudic scholar when repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse came to the surface (she wasn’t really a Talmudic scholar, but I still laugh when I think of her breaking out the Hebrew); Dana’s death; Alice fucking a vampire; Tina’s ill-fated return to man-cock; Kit getting pregnant at the age of 87; Shane having sex with every woman she meets (and not seeming to care when it’s hinted that one of them is an arsonist); and freaking Papi.
In other words, the people who watch this show—and I know because, sadly, I’m one of them—have no respect for their own intelligence. They don’t care about decent writing or acting (if they wanted quality actors, they wouldn’t have spent so much time complaining about Mia Kirshner and Marlee Matlin on message boards over the years and they wouldn’t have been so invested in the Tina/Bette pairing), and they only watch The L Word because lesbian characters are almost impossible to find anywhere else.
Hell, the writers could probably kill off several more characters and while viewers would complain, they’d keep tuning in as long as the occasional hot actress appeared and, to borrow a phrase from an SNL sketch, hugged another woman with her legs in friendship. No, the real crime in all of this (if the character is actually dead) might actually be that Jenny wasn’t killed off years ago, which would have served the dual purpose of pleasing viewers and freeing Mia Kirshner to pursue more work with directors like Brian De Palma and Atom Egoyan instead of visionless goofballs like Ilene Chaiken.
