Every morning, while the rest of the house sleeps, I lumber around awkwardly in a running-adjacent kind of way until my watch says I can stop. For accompaniment I prefer TV to music. Having exhausted just about every Dateline episode on Peacock, I needed something new.
Sisters was my mom’s favorite show when I was around eight years old. My dad would flee to another room to watch sports whenever it was on and I’d stick around and only half-understand it. (Even then, though, before ever hearing the phrase “wig fur,” I knew Swoosie Kurtz was magnificent.) Now I’m older than my mother was then and figured I’d give it another chance.
The Angels fight crime but tolerate sexual harassment in the workplace.
Recently, for reasons best left between me and the God of your choice (Bea Arthur works for me), I made a major life decision to watch all five seasons of Charlie’s Angels in its entirety.
My familiarity with Angels was so scant that I had few expectations, but one thing I wasn’t prepared for was the grossness of Charlie himself. Okay, sure, the show’s reputation for having an “LOL, boners” sensibility preceded it (everyone’s heard of “jiggle TV”), but who would expect a speakerphone to be pervy?
Remember earlier this month when I speculated that maybe parents of teens and pre-teens in Australia wouldn’t act like fuckheads about the upcoming lesbian kissage on Home and Away? I was wrong. The Australian is now reporting that “Since the lesbian story-line began two weeks ago, 100,000 viewers have turned off and complaints have been flooding in,” prompting producers to edit the kiss, which was reportedly “no more intimate than any kiss shared by a heterosexual couple” on the show, to make it less explicit.
You’d think concerned parents in Australia would have bigger things to worry about than a simple TV lip-lock, but maybe that’s part of the problem—they’re too busy watching TV and bitching about ‘the gays’ to make sure their kids aren’t depressed or pregnant. (It’s almost like they think they’re Americans…)
UPDATED (04/01/09): For some reason it’s making headlines that the controversy-stirring kiss in question aired on Home and Away in Australia on Tuesday as planned. I’m not quite sure what all the hullabaloo is about, as you’ll recall that the original report never said the kiss was being scrapped altogether, just that “some of the more intimate close-up images of policewoman Charlie Buckton and deckhand Joey Collins sharing a passionate kiss” would be cut. That fits with what network honcho Bevan Lee had to say about the episode; from the Telegraph article linked to above: “Home and Away bosses had decided to air the first, more gentle kiss, without the ‘more lusty’ follow up because it fitted better with the storyline.”
In other words, this isn’t much of a victory, it’s exactly what we were told was going to happen back when this first made news, even if Lee maintains the decision to show a tamer kiss was merely “artistic” in nature.
For several days I’ve been waiting to read something, anything, that’s worth writing about here, but nothing was happening… until now. ABC is finally, after eight seasons that had to be horrible since even the commercials made for tedious viewing, killing According to Jim. That will free the show’s star, Curly Sue actor Jim Belushi, to spend more time being unfunny around his family, who will likely decide not to renew his contract when it ends in 2012.
Pam Grier is prepared to defend herself against another Papi-centric story line.
The L Word was put of out of its misery last night after six seasons of unwavering mediocrity, and while I didn’t see the finale (a few episodes into the shortened final season, when it became clear that the writers had again failed to come up with any kind of game plan, I bailed), some guy who did says it sucked. He misspelled Pam Grier’s name in his review, by the way, so I’m not quite sure that he can be trusted, but…Oh, who am I kidding? There’s no way in hell the finale wasn’t every bit as terrible as all the episodes that preceded it. And if you’re looking for a second opinion, Entertainment Weekly‘s Nicholas Fonseca agrees the big denouement left something to be desired, but ends things on a more philosophical note, writing:
But years from now, will it even matter how the show went out in its final hour? It was really the other 69 episodes that made The L Word a TV milestone.
If by that he means a milestone in unbridled—and unrivaled—awfulness, then I agree. But Fonseca continues:
As the retrospective that aired beforehand reminded us, its impact expands far beyond its barrier-busting stories: TV’s first deaf lesbian, its first regularly occurring transsexual character, bisexuals of both genders, drag kings, the US military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, biracial identity, gay parenting, sex/drug/alcohol/gambling addiction, sexual abuse, midlife sexual awakenings, breast cancer…this show took on a lot. Judging by the frequent erraticism of its storytelling, it probably took on too much. In the end, I say, thank goodness it had the guts to take them on at all.
My thoughts are slightly different. Maybe, on occasion, when you know you’re failing miserably at something, you have to stop trying to do it. I know that’s the kind of crazy notion that runs contrary to everything the entertainment industry normally believes in (after all, these are the same brain trusts who thought Freddie Prinze Jr. was a good idea in the ’90s), but can you honestly say that The L Word was successful in its handling of any of those issues?
It didn’t entirely botch the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell story line (which was less effective than it would have been had viewers been given more reasons to care about Tasha, the new character who was the focus of the subplot), and no missteps were made with issues of biracial identity, but the failures of all those other story lines were pretty massive. What The L Word did best was frivolity and froth, and even those episodes (which were mostly the work of writer-director Angela Robinson and not Ilene Chaiken, the show’s demented creator and resident peddler of overpriced L-Word-themed jewelry) were few and far between.
Altogether, this is a series that will be remembered for two things: having a bunch of lesbian characters (which is good) and inspiring eight trillion shitty YouTube fan-edited clips of C-list actresses making out with each other while Sarah McLachlan wails in the background (which is bad). Call it a draw.
And did she kill it before putting it there? I’ve never seen Jane Velez-Mitchell on CNN (or Headline News) before, but it would add to the excitement of the broadcast if there was always the possibility that her hair — which appears to be a roadkill-inspired variation on the Carol Brady shag — might get up and walk away. (That’s the kind of suspense that keeps me watching Frank Cusumano’s sports segments on KSDK, don’t you know.)
The most important parts of yesterday’s New York Times profile of Velez-Mitchell were the following:
Jane Velez-Mitchell is a true-crime author, a television talking head, a lesbian, an animal activist, a recovering alcoholic and a vegan.
and…
Ms. Velez-Mitchell’s hour of water-cooler talk, delivered with heavy doses of opinion, reached an average of 596,000 viewers in February, up 74 percent from the slot’s average for the same month last year, when the conservative commentator Glenn Beck was the host.
That’s fantastic, isn’t it, when HLN viewers prefer a lesbian vegan/animal activist to the insufferable Glenn Beck? The only thing I don’t understand is why the Times had to point out that she’s a recovering alcoholic: I’m pretty sure that “true-crime author” is a euphemism for that, so it was a little redundant.
P.S. If I ever get a gig on CNN, I plan on either wearing a clown wig or a Tina Turner circa Private Dancer wig on-air. Actually, who needs CNN as an excuse? I’m going to wear a rainbow-colored clown wig all day tomorrow just for the hell of it.
“I met three men in a Tiki bar once in Texas who were married to each other.”
So said Chloë Sevigny in a recent Los Angeles Times interview with her Big Love costars Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Ginnifer Goodwin. Here’s the reaction to Sevigny’s remark:
[Silence]
Paxton: Wow.
Tripplehorn: That was a conversation stopper! What do you call that? Gay-lygapous? Gay-lygamy.
Sevigny: They loved the show.
As well they should! By the way, for anyone who has ever asked him or herself “Gee, I wonder what Bill Paxton thinks about gay marriage,” you get your answer here. In response to a question about the Mormon campaign to pass Proposition 8, Paxton says: “I just feel like, God, live and let live. As long as somebody’s not trying to make me live a certain way, or people are consenting adults, I have no problem with it. But I’m a libertine and a liberal.”
So there you have it — the guy from Twister (and my personal favorite Apollo 13 astronaut) supports your right to get gay-married. No word on whether the stars of Volcano, Dante’s Peak and every other disaster movie Hollywood hurled at us post-Twister are of similar minds.
P.S. As a parting bonus, here’s a kind of gross clip of Jeanne Tripplehorn making out with Salma Hayek in Time Code. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s an experimental film in which four story lines are followed by four different cameras simultaneously and in real time with no edits; the audio you hear in the YouTube clip belongs to the action taking place in another quadrant of the screen the YouTuber didn’t bother showing. Tripplehorn plays a typical nutty lesbian character in the movie, which was oddly appropriate given her involvement in Basic Instinct.) If you prefer the retro butch look, you can check out Chloë Sevigny in If These Walls Could Talk 2. A few of the search results will probably be age-restricted, but some of you pervs might like that.
Boy, those musical numbers are really going to go a long way in making people think Hugh Jackman isn’t gay, aren’t they?
“What? Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny?!”
UPDATE (10:04 AM Monday): Holy Bob Hope, was that a boring night. Lots of predictable and undeserving winners, which was par for the course, but the producers didn’t offer anything to make up for it. And most of the speeches were so scripted and awful (still, anytime Penélope Cruz wants a date, I’m free), with the exception of Dustin Lance Black’s, which was the best and most moving of the night.
The insipid New Age-y/Oprah-style “We Speak Your Name” nominee ego-stroking in the acting categories was also problematic; only a few of the presenters (Eva Marie Saint, Whoopi Goldberg and Robert De Niro come to mind) were able to pull it off. Next year I propose having Steve Martin hand out all of the awards. Yes, my love for him is known far and wide, but he excels at taking the piss out of the same pretentious, self-congratulatory nitwits whose approval Hugh Jackman so nakedly desires. And so what if Jackman’s a song-and-dance man? Anyone who has seen Pennies from Heaven and All of Me knows that Martin can cut a rug with the best of them.
If anyone cares, CNN has taken time to recognize a monumentally important moment in the history of the fight for marriage equality crappy soap operas: Bianca “Daughter of Erica Kane” Montgomery’s big fat lesbian wedding to some, uh, other lesbian on All My Children. Enjoy it while you can, because I’m sure within the next few months it will be revealed that Bianca’s wife is an alien or a guy who was cast out of Pine Valley as a teenager and then had a sex change operation so he could return unnoticed and exact revenge on Erica, or something similarly stupid.
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.
