television
Things That Look Like Other Things IV-1
by Josh K-sky on May.16, 2010, under Movies, television
On Glee a few episodes back, Rachel produces a revival of 70’s story-song “Run Joey Run” as part of a plot to vamp up her reputation. What Puck (or any other participant) doesn’t know is that she’s not just casting him alone as the love object, but instead has enlisted all three of her male attractors. The final video shows Rachel in a doomed romance with a boy played alternately by Puck, Finn and Jesse.
Since Rachel introduced her project with a suggestion that her audience might not have all the necessary film vocabulary to appreciate her project, I was prepared for some kind of winking acknowledgement of That Obscure Object of Desire (previously here). But instead, Rachel’s advanced film knowledge was just a jokey reference to her use of bad iMovie effects, and everybody got mad at her for showing how many boys she had revolving around her.
I thought it was cool. Buñuel vs Lea Michele! ¿Quien es mas macho?
Playing Straight
by Josh K-sky on May.09, 2010, under television
I wouldn’t have heard of this stupid, question-begging Newsweek article if Kristin Chenoweth’s skewering hadn’t lit up everyone’s Facebook page. Ramin Setoodeh argues that gay actors like Sean Hayes in the musical Promises, Promises and Jonathan Groff on Glee can’t convincingly play straight characters. Chenoweth writes in defense of her co-star Hayes, saying “yes he can” which is about all you can say to someone who, knowing that an actor carries the dreadful gay, can no longer suspend disbelief (what if he’d rather do me than little Kristin Chenoweth? Shudder). But the response still dignifies his argument far too much.
First, Groff on Glee. Speaking as a straight man experienced in the ways of high school musical theater, talented musical theater high school boys are pretty fucking queer. We haven’t quite learned the ways of conventional masculinity, which leaves us freer to express ourselves on stage but also never terribly persuasive as leading men. My h.s. drama apotheosis was playing Henry Higgins, who as an educated British man is queer enough. My other big lead role was as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, for which I played up my shrimpiness and probably put a little too much Yid inflection on So Sue Me. Frank Sinatra was a subtler Nathan. The romantic lead role, Sky Masterson, was played with much more convincing masculinity in that production by a boy who was out to a few friends even back in 10th grade.
Groff’s high school champion vocal stylist carries an ineluctable whiff of queer? We all did. Chalk a point for verisimilitude.
Missing from the article is any sense that a little queerness might give an actor some performance-inflecting insight into the crude construction of straightness. Missing is any nuance whatsoever into the last-legs binary of gay and straight at this fragile historical moment. America loves Glee, people. “Straight” is in decline. For the killing blow, look to the straightest man on television, How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson, played by America’s number one gay, Neil Patrick Harris. Harris’s Barney, a priapic epicure, is as much a straight man as the leads of Absolutely Fabulous were straight women.
This will be a hard lesson for the 27 members of Facebook’s Barney Stinson is NOT gay! group to learn. Their cri de coeur after the jump.
Chuck Fans Lose Their Goddamn Minds
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.10, 2010, under television
Yesterday I headed over to Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV blogger, to check out his predictably entertaining recap of Chuck from the night before…and there was already a bit of a kerfuffle kicking up in the comments section. By yesterday afternoon, the argument was almost 300 vituperative comments long and so heated that Sepinwall felt obliged to do an interview with the Chuck head writers, which in turn led to another 150 or so angry comments.
The source of all the anguish? Chuck kissed a girl other than Sarah, and Sarah got a back rub from Clark Kent.
Look, I remember hanging out on the Television Without Pity boards and complaining at great length about the last 1.5 seasons of Gilmore Girls, and I’ve ranted myself about the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, so I’m not one to deny fans the right to get upset at their favorite TV shows.
Here, though, I think we have a clear case of shippers gone berserk. No, this week’s episode of Chuck was not particularly good, but the season up until now has continued last year’s strong run. (We got Buy More Fight Club and Captain Awesome on a mission. That’s pretty good right there.) It reminds me of all the people on the TWoP boards who weren’t so much upset that the new showrunner in Gilmore Girls season 7 turned Lorelei into a simpering, inarticulate freak as they were that she married Chris instead of Luke. But as long as the characters remain reasonably true to themselves and the writers are telling good story, who the hell cares how they’re paired up?
The sad thing is that Chuck is such a marginally rated show that even the defection of a small, crazy segment of its audience could doom its chances for a fourth season.
Um, Of Course I Watched ‘Jersey Shore’
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.09, 2010, under television
She may not have been lucky in love on the “Jersey Shore,” but Snooki has found herself a man – and he’s just her type.
“He is just like my typical guido juicehead with like a good personality,” Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi told RadarOnline. …
He is freaking banging.”
Can somebody maybe write a zombie movie called “Juiceheads?” I would probably watch it.
Storyboard TV
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.05, 2010, under television
A friend emailed to ask me to help promote something, so here goes:
Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, producers, and tv enthusiasts, launched its website this week with a script competition awarding $5,000 to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging enthusiasm for their story. Membership to Storyboard TV is free and open to all, and all members will be able to read, critique, and vote on their favorite pilots.
More about Storyboard TV:
Storyboard TV believes in the power of the television drama to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better. Storyboard TV’s mission is to move show selection and pre-production away from the networks and directly to the web. Established in 2009, Storyboard TV endeavors to cultivate new writers and TV scripts, to nurture the connection between the scriptwriter and the fan, and to shepherd new television drama into production during the Internet age.
Dollhouse: The End.
by Joshua Malbin on Jan.30, 2010, under television
Dollhouse was the anti-Battlestar Galactica.
Dollhouse couldn’t have been anything good as regular episodic TV, as evidenced by the mostly crappy starts to both of its short seasons, but it turned out pretty great once it began to ignore all of those requirements and focused on building a single, long plot arc culminating in a thoroughly satisfying finale. In fact, looking back from the finale makes me think of the whole show as rather better than it probably was on average. They made me care what happened to Topher. That took some doing.
Battlestar was entirely plotted, a single continuous fabric of narrative that started to unravel as it approached its finale. In fact, its finale was so godawful that it ruined all of what came before it for me.
Part of the difference, I suppose, is that Dollhouse gave up on mystery by its midway point. Epitaph One, the conclusion to season 1, told us exactly what was in store and pretty much what it meant. Season 2 gave us more context and background, but based its climax on its characters. Battlestar, on the other hand, multiplied its mysteries season by season, and then at the end waved them all away with a completely bogus explanation.
Glee Episode 7: “Throwdown”
by Josh K-sky on Nov.28, 2009, under music, television
I’m still getting caught up on Glee. Episode 7, while entertaining enough, has a number of flaws that highlight what the show does so well.
1: You can have too much of a good thing. Jane Lynch is one of the best things about the show. But her over-the-top villainy plays better as a force of nature than in sustained interactions with other characters. An episode like Preggers, where the Glee club’s success threatens Sue’s television perch, uses her centrally without overdoing it, but Throwdown puts her and Mr. Shuster in continuous battle, which taxes the necessary suspension of disbelief. In general, the adult world outside of Will Shuster is so absurd that it needs to be secondary to the fortunes of the Glee club, and the show works best when it uses the adult world as the B plot or makes Will overwhelmingly central.
2. Narrow your focus. Sue’s exploitation of the minority students’ alienation was tonally inconsistent. The satire of “minority status” was too absurd in its broadness to be pointed, and came off as mushy and hesitant. Glee hasn’t entirely found its voice with regards to satire; this is most clearly found in the attempts to soften Terri even as she moves forward her fabricated pregnancy and baby-switching plot. With Terri, I’m glad to see that the show doesn’t want to treat her as an outright villain, unsympathetically desperate in her baby-madness; with a one-episode theme, however, it’s better to stake out your target more clearly.
2. Glee it up. Too many of the songs in this episode were solo numbers with only incidental choral touches. Consider “Hate On Me”:
There’s no doubt that Amber Riley’s Mercedes can deliver the goods, but solo performances weaken the show. We’ve already seen her do “Bust Your Windows” on her own. The show does a good job of pairing pop songs with the characters’ emotional states, but it only soars when they get their peers to join them in their heightened, musical state. To me, that’s the central proposition of Glee, the truth of which Rachel tries to persuade Quinn in this episode: we all know how much it hurts; you’re not alone.
Hoary Old Joke
by Joshua Malbin on Nov.02, 2009, under television
This, while funny, is not new:
Here’s Steve Allen doing exactly the same joke more than 50 years ago:
Dollhouse: That Was Better
by Joshua Malbin on Oct.24, 2009, under television
Well, we were promised an improvement this week and we got it. There are several obvious reasons for that improvement: the complete absence of Tahmoh Penikett, who’s been seemingly at a loss this season about what to do with his character; the near-absence of Eliza Dushku; the uninterrupted focus on one story rather than the usual TV convention of breaking the week into A and B stories; the fact that that story built on a larger continuing arc rather than trying to be wholly self-contained.
Most of all, though, it succeeded because it gave the characters conflicts (in which they must resolve two competing, incompatible desires) rather than merely challenges (in which the achievement of an uncomplicated desire is blocked by some external obstacle). There’s a pretty low ceiling on how interesting one can make a mere obstacle. (Okay, there’s Iago. Still.) It was a real risk to center that conflict on Fran Kranz, who I wouldn’t have thought capable of shouldering an episode based on his overly ticcy work last season, but he absolutely pulled it off.
As a side note, if Dichen Lachman and Enver Gjokaj don’t get leading roles in something good based on their work on this show, there’s something seriously wrong with the world’s casting agents.
I read that we’ll see the next six episodes over three weeks in December, and the last three who knows when. Maybe next summer.