Those of us who stuck with Marc Maron during those brutal days long ago when he was getting fired from Air America three times have been hoping for something like this ever since. Yes, folks, the human version of Henri le Chat Noir (only without the French and the fur, though there will be cats) is coming to IFC in May.

Labels: Comedians, comedy, Marc Maron, pop culture, television

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched Sunday night's episode of Downton Abbey, wait to read the below until you do.

Really, Julian? I mean really? Seriously?

After I've spent nearly a half-season steeling myself for the moment when Matthew tires of Lord Grantham, who in Season 3 has turned into the biggest asshole in the countryside, hits him over the head with the candlestick in the library with the help of Colonel Mustard and is then murdered in prison by Bates' roommate, thereby freeing Dan Stevens to, I don't know, perhaps take over the role of Elder Price in The Book of Mormon, THIS is what you do? I mean we knew that Dan Stevens had tired of wearing a tuxedo all the time and was moving on after this season, so whether he is killed off or goes off to play a footman in a musical review, it will be anticlimactic anyway.

We'd even heard rumblings that Maggie Smith had had quite enough of the Dowager Countess, though Cousin Violet may be the best role Smith has had in her entire career, and while the costumes are unwieldy, how could anyone give up a role where you get lines like these:







But from what I hear, old Maggie can be a bit cranky, so I just figured that the Dowager Countess would be keeling over any minute.

But Sibyl? The lovely Sibyl, she of the harem pants and the sweet disposition and the adorable mini-baby-bump? Sibyl, the heart and soul of the Grantham family -- the only one of the three Grantham sisters that one might actually want to know in real life?

Julian, how could you? And in CHILDBIRTH no less? Is this what you think well-born ladies who marry below their class deserve? A gruesome death from eclampsia? At least the unfortunate Lavinia Swire got to expire prettily at the end of Series 2 in a mist from a partcularly generous spray bottle with nothing seemingly amiss but a lack of mascara.

I've put up with a lot of hooey from you. No suspension of disbelief is enough to compensate for Matthew's miraculous recovery from his manhood-ending war injury, or of O'Brien's nefarious architecting of miscarriage-by-soap, or Lavinia's father leaving all his money to Matthew because even though he treated old Reg's daughter so shabbily, he's a good chap who deserves to be left a fortune anyway. I've also put up with a lot of how you've treated your women characters, aside from the Great Dowager. Poor Edith. I mean, Edith hasn't always been the nicest person; after all, writing the Turkish Ambassador to regale him with the details of his son's demise from Mary the Ice Princess' obviously-not-icy nether quarters. But to have her jilted at the altar was just plain cruel. To leave the lovely Anna moping around for half a season, playing a kind of downstairs Debra Morgan? Can O'Brien really be that evil? And poor Daisy...can't you give the poor dumb girl a LITTLE happiness? At least you haven't killed off Mrs. Hughes...yet. Mary is a cold bitch, Edith is both pathetic and loathsome, Cora is shallow, and Mrs. Crawley is a right-wing caricature of a bleeding heart liberal.

But through it all, there was Sibyl. Beautiful, kind Sibyl, who was even nice to that awful Thomas, and who, give her fifty years or so, would have marched with him at a gay rights parade. Lovely Sibyl, who followed her heart and married the fiery Irish chauffeur, risking her father's wrath for love. And that's where you fell into loathsomeness, Julian. Because in making the wages of sin death as punishment for Sibyl's refusal to adhere to the mores of her class, you showed yourself to be not just classist, but sexist as hell.

I hope Edith takes up wearing trousers and smoking cigars -- just to piss you off. And don't you DARE start getting ideas that she should marry Branson. She's just gotten some meaning to her life, don't you go getting all Henry VIII on her ass.

Labels: Downton Abbey, pop culture, sexism, television

In just over a week, it'll be the eighth anniversary of the day when we turned on the radio at 6 AM to listen to the new morning show on the equally new Air America Radio. The show was, as longtime readers of this blog know, Morning Sedition, and it was the best damn thing to hit radio in years. There'd been nothing like it before, and there's been nothing like it since.

I've written about the hilarious, infuriating, heartbreakingly honest and funny Marc Maron many times since I first started blogging in 2004. Because Maron is so accessible (or so needy), watching his rise, fall, and rise again has been unlike your standard entertainment career death watch and resurrection. Those of us who've followed Maron's career over these last eight years have been probably more pleased, and certainly just as surprised, at the way a project that started out as a failed comedian's attempt to make things right with all the people to whom he'd been a dick over the years, quite possibly in anticipation of a planned suicide, is now one of the most acclaimed podcasts in the country, and this ferociously smart, neurotic-but-working-on-it Jewish man is finally getting the recognition his work deserves. And most importantly, he's not forgotten the people who listened along the way -- the ones who sent encouraging e-mails, and who sent food and cat toys and other gifts and who now show up in droves to see him in rooms that for years he couldn't fill.

So on this day which saw the nightmare possibly come to pass of Jesus of the Rockies bringing his 3-ring circus to town to make a dysfunctional Jets clubhouse even worse, there's some good news that makes me kvell with naches: Marc Maron's weird life is coming to television, from those wonderful people who brought you Portlandia:

MARON (working title)
Premieres in 2013.
Marc Maron has been a comedian for 25 years. He’s had his problems. He was an angry, drunk, self involved, twice divorced compulsive mess for most of his adult life, but with the popularity of a podcast he does in his garage and a life of sobriety, his life and career are turning around. MARON (wt) explores a fictionalized version of Marc’s life, his relationships, and his career, including his incredibly popular WTF podcast, which features conversations Marc conducts with celebrities and fellow comedians. Neurosis intact, Maron is uniquely fascinating, absolutely compelling and brutally funny.

The only way I could be any happier about this is if Lawton Smalls is his next door neighbor. But please. Cats. There must be cats.

Labels: Comedians, Marc Maron, sheer awesomeness, television

When you're alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go
Downton!
When you've got worries,
An Edwardian surrey
Seems to help, I know,
Downton!
Just listen to the music
of the wine glasses at dinner
Linger in the countryside
where Mary's still a sinner
How can you lose?
The lights are much softer there
You can forget all your troubles,
forget all your cares and go
Downton!
things'll be great when you're
Downton!
no finer place for sure
Downton!
Escape is waiting for you

(Apologies to Petula Clark and Tony Hatch for the above)

This afternoon at Casa la Brilliant may have belonged to the Giants (YAY!), but after 9 PM, when the football is over and Mr. Brilliant has turned in for the night, it's all going to be about sober-but-still-awesome clothes and fabulous hats and World War I and the denizens of Downton Abbey.

I remember when the original Forsyte Sage played on American TV for the first time, ushering in what would become Masterpiece Theatre. This was a sprawling, 26-episode, utterly faithful rendition of Jon Galsworthy's six novels. It had sex and intrigue and family strife lo unto succeeding generations. The Forsyte Saga was all about the upstairs and not at all about the downstairs. It had great costumes and British accents and rigid manners -- all the things we now take for granted about costume dramas. But in 1967, there had been nothing like it on American television:



Today this version has lost none of its power, though it does play a bit stagey. But at the time, Forsyte was so successful that it begat Upstairs Downstairs (from which co-creator Jean Marsh insists Downton Abbey was shamelessly stolen), Poldark, The First Churchills, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Brideshead Revisited, and the greatest costume drama of all time, I, Claudius. The best of the Masterpiece dramas have two things in common: richly-drawn characters, and superlative production values.

As we are wont to do in our navel-gazing society, there is much hue and cry over why the very same people who support the Occupy movement are already assembling their tea and scones to enjoy over the premiere of season 2 of a drama that's all about inheritance of a huge English mansion -- the family that owns it and the many people whose purpose in life is to serve them. And let's face it, the people who have been screaming about defunding NPR and cheering Mitt Romney's assertion that Sesame Street is going to have to start advertising Froot Loops, are hardly likely to be planted in front of their local public television station tonight, for all that they have the delusion that if things were only just like they were in the pre- (and this season, current) World War I era, with everyone knowing exactly where s/he stands in the scheme of things, life would be a lot better.

But those of us who ARE glued in front of PBS tonight at 9 Eastern Time know what the attraction is. It isn't that we want to be waited on by people who have no lives other than serving the wealthy. It isn't that we want to, as Lady Mary said in Season I, have no life but going to socials and charity functions and wait around to marry. It isn't that we want to, as Maggie Smith's deliciously haughty Dowager Countess said last season, have no opinions until we marry and then our husbands tell us what to think.

No, the attraction is something far less profound.

It's all about the clothes. And the hats:



After Titanic came out in 1997, there was a rash of interest in Edwardian clothing -- the lace-up boots, the tea dresses, and yes, the corsets. I myself bought one, and while it would be horrifically uncomfortable to wear all the time, there's something about a corset that makes you carry yourself differently -- taller, straighter, and with a rack you could read Shakespeare from. Even among those of us who refuse to take any vacation where we have to dress up, there's something appealing about watching people wear gorgeous dresses to dinner, and outfits with matching hats to garden parties. Even Boardwalk Empire, with it's Scorsesean gangsters and graphic violence, had some of the most fabulous costuming we've seen in popular culture in recent years.

There's something about wearing the clothing of a particular time that gives us a vague sense of what it was like to be there -- the constriction of corsets and hobble skirts. The pointed toes of lace-up boots. The feel of a summer breeze blowing through the straw of a hat festooned with the better part of an entire florist's inventory

The darted sheath dresses, suits, and fedoras of Mad Men have never quite caught on, perhaps because there are far too many of us alive who still remember them from the first time, or because there is nothing about the lives of ANY of the characters on that show with whom we'd want to change places even for a day, for all that we find them so compelling. Nor would we want to trade places with Lady Mary Crawley either, for that matter, despite her gorgeous dresses, because Michelle Dockery so expertly portrays the despair of a woman born just a few years too early for the changes that will come after Season 2 of Downton Abbey ends.

Yes, Downton Abbey may seem like just another Austen-esque thwarted romance story with a big house. But if you ask a fan to dig down deep and reveal what the appeal is, yes, it's about the house p0rn. But more than anything else it's about this:



and this:



So if you're inclined to shop for clothing inspired by this time period, Victorian Trading Company has some lovely garments and accessories.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dress for dinner. Consider this an open thread for All Things Downton.

Labels: Downton Abbey, pop culture, television

We already knew Shatner was funny. But George Takei is funny AND awesome.

Isn't it time for a reunion of some kind? Did they yank S**t My Dad Says yet?

Get on it, Lorre. Angus isn't a fat kid anymore and has actually become kind of cute, and Kutcher is just going to be playing Kelso again. Isn't it time for something new? Shatner. Takei. Get on it. You could even call it "The Odd Couple."

Labels: gay rights, television

The Simpsons couch gag you will never, ever see again on television:

(I didn't know who Banksy was either. Read about him here.)

Labels: television

First of all, whose idea was it that a comedy about outsourcing to India was something that Americans, many of whom are out of work BECAUSE their jobs were outsourced, would ever want to watch?

Second of all, how many ways can said show disrespect Indian culture, people, and food in the first five minutes?

And I'm sorry, painting the Americans as assholes doesn't compensate. Not when you've already had the main character try to pick up the prettiest girl, made fun of a buffoonish nerd who's so far the most likeable character on the show, and made the Indian manager look like an idiot. And it's not even 9:45 yet.

I hope this show is cancelled. Soon. Preferably after tonight. I'm going back to Rachel. Not even for snippets of Indian music will I sit through this.

Labels: dreck, television, trash

I'd never been able to much get into Mad Men, but this season I started watching and found myself getting sucked into it. Part of it is that we're in familiar territory this season, since I was about the same age in 1964-65, when the season takes place, as Don's daughter Sally. But I think much of it is that this season is more about the women than about a bunch of Guys Behaving Badly.

Part of what's fascinating this season is watching the interplay between the women and the men, as the early glimmerings of change start to take hold. Joan, the whispery-voiced somewhat aging sexpot who's the office manager, seems stuck in the previous decade, while Peggy, the secretary-turned-copywriter, sees a glimpse of a new way of being at a boho party, starts to find her own voice and begins to assert herself. I'm not sure that Peggy actually existed in 1965; her rise seems somewhat unlikely until a couple of decades later. But in this week's episode, when Peggy fires a freelance copywriter whose filthy drawing about Joan truly IS beyond the pale, Girl Solidarity backfires right in Peggy's face:

Peggy and Joan are in their own ways trying to find a way in a world that's still very much controlled by men and the rules (or lack of same) that men make.

The feminism for which Joan and Peggy are just a few years too early gave a lot of lop service to being about toughness. It had to. Look at the world that women who were trying to fight their way out of being baby-making appendages lived in. It's no wonder that the Rogers and the Dons and the Joeys of the world laughed at the women who dared to challenge the established order and called them ugly...and they still do.

The rise of Victim Feminists like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell is perhaps a natural consequence of the fatal mistake that the 1960's feminists made -- of not realizing that "the system" that they felt enslaved them in the 1950's also enslaved men. As massive jerks as Don Draper and Roger Sterling and Henry Francis are on Mad Men, it's hard to argue that they're kings of the world. Roger and Henry have young pretty trophy wives, but they're still unhappy. Roger and Don are clearly alcoholics (though Don, being the show's protagonist, is starting to show signs of getting his shit together). These guys, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Revolutionary Road, have lives of mind-numbing sameness that were only marginally better than the stifling lives of 1950's housewives in the suburbs. EVERYONE was oppressed by the budding culture of consumerism that was given life after World War II. But the minute early feminism claimed the mantle of oppression, it lost any semblance to an empowerment movement and paved the way for Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell. That's why I was so disturbed last night to hear Howard Fineman opine that part of the reason for O'Donnell's victory last night was that Mike Castle, known in Delaware as a Really Nice Guy, hammered at O'Donnell too hard and that made women voters upset.

Of course Joan and Peggy don't know about feminism yet, but in the exchange in the elevator, Joan seems to be aware that in firing Joey, Peggy has succumbed to this kind of victimology. I don't know if pornographic drawings of the office manager were a commonplace pastime among the creative department in 1960's ad agencies, but I do know that when I was a secretary in an ad agency as late as 1980, I arrived every morning to find one of the bosses standing by the coffeemaker, mug in hand, waiting for me to make the coffee, and then expecting me to break into meetings any time his girlfriend was on the phone for him (but not if it was his wife). Peggy may think she's sending a message that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated as of today, but I suspect that the remaining assholes in SCDP's creative department are going to be testing their limits, asserting their dominance over Joan (who rightly knows that they see her as a "meaningless secretary" and treating Peggy like a "humorless bitch."

Fast-forward forty years and you have Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, two mind-bogglingly stupid and unqualified women, wrapping themselves in the mantle of poor, put-upon fragile flowers being picked on by mean old men like Mike Castle and others who dare mention the obvious -- that if one is to participate in government, one is at least supposed to be coherent and not sound like the early boot on Survivor, kicked off for being useless in challenges AND around camp. Because for all that Sarah Palin talks about Mama Grizzlies, what stares us in the face is the smoking ruin of feminism -- and it looks a lot like corseted Victorians fanning themselves on fainting couches.

Sarah Palin came into the public eye with her guns and her talk about field dressing a moose and shooting wolves out of a helicopter and her aura of dominatrix. But it quickly became about the imagery of the soccer mom tied to her minivan, the Downs Syndrome mom, the poor widdew goilie being bullied by the "lamestream media." Any scrutiny of Sarah Palin was just mean old media men being mean to a girl. Palin appropriated the mantle of feminism as her own, but she's twisted it into a gargoyle of victimology. Palin feminism isn't about toughing it out in a man's world, and it isn't even about changing that man's world. It's about playing the victim card every time someone dares ask you to play on the same field as the guys. Christine O'Donnell has clearly studied her Sarah Palin very carefully. She looks like Palin (only without the psychopathic eyes), she dresses like Palin, and she won just like Palin -- by playing to victimhood. This is a woman who thinks masturbation is adultery, who checks the bushes outside her house for her political enemies, hasn't held a real job in years, pays her living expenses off her campaign donations, rails against people sucking at the government teat, but is running to collect a taxpayer-funded paycheck herself.

This is what feminism has come to? Last night in her victory speech, O'Donnell threw down the gauntlet when she talked about ordinary people being able to run for office without fear of "character assassination." This is a worthy goal regardless of party, but somehow I get the feeling that this goal is not going to apply to her Democratic opponent, who is a man and is no doubt already wondering how he's going to run against her when any criticism, no matter how minor, is going to be be met with cries of "character assassination." Because in the feminism of conservatism, women are just little fragile flowers, wilting under the slightest breeze.

Labels: faux feminism, Mad Men, pop culture, Sarah Palin, Teabaggers, television, wingnuttia

I really may have to start watching Glee.

(h/t)

Labels: music, sheer awesomeness, television

I'm starting to find myself recording ever more things on the DVR. I used to try to limit myself to two series at a time; maybe Dexter and Lost; or Nurse Jackie and True Blood. Do I really want to find myself on my deathbed wishing I'd spent more time watching television? This means I've missed some really great series, like Rescue Me and the first two season of Mad Men.

But when I go to the supermarket and think "one in five of these people think Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist", and I look at Sharron Angle's and Sarah Palin's lunatic eyes and think that these are major political figures; when I listen to news that isn't NPR and it's all the frothing about Lindsey Lohan, as if they can't wait till a young actress' problems finally put her in a grave so they can say "How could such a thing happen?", the fictional characters of televised series begin to seem far more appealing; even the evil ones, like the deliciously deranged Russell the Vampire King on True Blood. I've even picked up Mad Men this season.

What ties my watching together is that it increasingly seems to be a theme of "women on the verge of a nervous breakdown." It isn't that these are fragile flowers in need of protection; it's that the women of television, armed as they are with awards and nominations (Edie Falco of Nurse Jackie with three Emmys, two Golden Globes, three SAG awards and even more nominations where she DIDN'T win; True Blood's Anna Paquin with an Academy Award before even reaching her teens and a bunch of Emmy nominations; and now The Big C's Laura Linney, with a slew of acting awards for the films You Can Count On Me, Mystic River, Kinsey, The Squid and the Whale, and the HBO series John Adams. And that doesn't even include Weeds' Mary-Louse Parker, because I don't watch Weeds.) Even Mad Men has sucked me in, not because I give a rat's ass about the scumbaggy advertising executive at the center of the show, but because we're starting to see the women begin to get an inkling that there just may be more to life than getting coffee for men who don't appreciate them, and as a result, we're seeing some damn fine performances from the actresses on this show behind their sheath dresses and beehive hairdos. The problem with Mad Men right now is that the cultural upheaval that's coming has never translated well to fiction (see also: Taking Woodstock) without looking absurdly silly, and I'm skeptical as to whether this show can handle it either.

But both cable and broadcast have become a haven of sorts for award-winning film actresses on the far side of 40, and while it's somewhat disturbing that being a drug dealer, a pill-popper, or a woman with cancer, seem to be the only way that a woman over 40 can be interesting in the world of television (at least since Lois Smith as Sookie Stackhouse's lovingly hip and tolerant granny was dispatched in True Blood's first season), when the alternative is to be Courteney Cox on Cougars, we'll take what we can get.

I was particularly looking forward to The Big C, mostly because Laura Linney could read the stock listings in the Sunday New York Times and have her face reveal a universe of emotions, but also because with Oliver Platt and Gabourey Sidibe also on board, how bad can it be? And it's not, but there's something about The Big C that's troublesome. It isn't that it's taking on cancer; cable has done this before, when Emma Thompson grabbed cancer by the balls and shook it like a terrier before expiring with dignity in Wit. And it isn't about being funny, because sometimes laughter really IS the best medicine. And it certainly isn't about being self-limiting, because there's something to be said about even a great show having a finite lifespan (I'll be back to this after we see serial killer/police blood spatter analyst Dexter Morgan be the only husband in history to not be a suspect in the death of his wife on Dexter this season). But while I'll continue to watch The Big C because of its great cast, I won't like myself for doing it.

The biggest problem with this show is the idea that you can somehow keep a cancer diagnosis from your family, especially from your children. This is about the most selfish thing that a person with cancer can do. There are people who are going to still be around after Cathy Jamison dies, and while I'm sure this character wants to be a wild and crazy gal before it's too late, there's something profoundly selfish about hiding this kind of information. This isn't a question of choice, or of self-empowerment, it's about what you owe your children. And no matter how much Cathy Jamison wants to turn cartwheels in the hallway of the school where she teaches, and no matter how much of a sullen asshole and practical jokester her son may be, she owes it to him to start preparing him for life without her. And it isn't about teaching him how to clear a clogged toilet, although it's clear that this kid's father (Oliver Platt) isn't going to do it. It's about giving him something to hold onto after she is gone and only memory is left. And throwing him against a wall and saying "I'm going to raise you so hard it'll make your head spin" isn't the way to do it. Because THAT's what he'll remember.

The other problem with The Big C is that it's just too twee. Lone Scherfig was able to pull this off in Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (review) with the right balance of pathos and humor, but there's something self-consciously adorable about The Big C, with its quirky eco-warrior brother and the insistence that Cathy's education about the value of just living one's life doesn't extend to Gabourey Sidibe's character, who seems to have already learned that lesson but the show feels a need to make weight loss her goal anyway (kind of an odd choice when dealing with a movie about cancer).

The other part of The Big C that's uncomfortable is how eerily it mirrors the real-life struggle of Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams, whose own recent melanoma diagnosis makes Linney's quirky character somewhat less compelling than she might be otherwise.

Still, in a world where stupidity has become the primary currency of real life, it's hard to blame some of us for preferring to step into a world in which women spouting witty repartee can be celebrated instead of spending too much time in the real one, where women who can do nothing but blather incoherently are regarded by the media as qualified presidential candidates and other women spouting the kind of crap that we used to associate with crazy homeless people may receive up to 50% of the vote in a Senate race.

Labels: cancer, pop culture, television, wingnuttia

You just KNEW this was going to happen:

U.S. reality TV show maker Stone and Company Entertainment wants Slater to host a show in which 'various disgruntled workers quit their jobs in extravagant ways', according to celebrity website TMZ.

His lawyer is said to have already received the offer and is discussing it with his client.

Stone Entertainment has produced past reality shows such as The Mole, NYC Prep, Top Design, and Tim Gunn's Guide to Style.

Slater, who was spotted relaxing by the beach following his resignation, has said he is taking time to think about his next move.

This weekend he said: 'There's a lot of things in the works.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1303625/Hero-ex-flight-attendant-Steven-Slater-offered-reality-TV-show.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0wrA514eU

Labels: employment, fifteen minutes, television

It's been a tough month for us Losties. Some of us are so bereft that we start funny blogs that feature vignettes from the lives of the obsessed; while others just still think that a cop show featuring Sawyer and Miles as cops is so awesome that not even the people who appear from early previews to have ruined Shit My Dad Says have ruined that particular conceit.

I'm actually doing OK, having had episodes of Nurse Jackie to watch, and then the unexpectedly excellent finale of The Tudors to watch. But I'd forgotten just how much I adore the awesomeness that is True Blood.

I have a friend at work who's taking her daughter to the midnight opening of the next Twilight movie. I've seen about a half hour of the first one on cable. Now, I like skinny, brooding English actors with cheekbones you can grate cheese on as much as the next girl, but Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen makes me want to smack him across the face like Cher in Moonstruck and say, "Snap out of it!" On True Blood, the vampire hero is the brooding Bill Compton, played by skinny English actor with cheekbones you can grate cheese on Stephen Moyer. He's supposed to be the hero, but with creator/director Alan Ball at the helm, you know the beautiful male quotient of this show is going to be off the charts, and while the character's trying-to-mainstream nature played in the first season as courtliness left over from his human life as a Civil War-era soldier, he all too often seems to be just whiny.

What saves True Blood from being just a Twilight clone is the often meta snark that sneaks through in every episode. Alan Ball has never forgotten that for all the brooding that comes with being an undead creature who never dies, the worst crime a vampire story can commit is to take itself too seriously. Would Bram Stoker's Dracula be as great as it is if Gary Oldman hadn't played it as camp?


In True Blood, most of the comic relief belongs to the stupendously spectacular-looking Ryan Kwanten, an actor of seemingly perfectly normal intelligence who does an amazing job of playing the aptly-named Jason Stackhouse, a character who often seems a few sandwiches short of a picnic:

Kwanten is so ridiculously good-looking that when he extrapolates, as he does in last Sunday's episode, that if werewolves are real, perhaps Bigfoot and Santa are too, the hilarity becomes fall-off-the-chair funny.

...and much of the snark is delivered by Alexander Skarsgard as Vampire Sheriff Eric Northman:

It's hardly surprising, given the barely-veiled gay/AIDS subtext of the vampire vs. human worlds, that the male characters both have more to do and are more multidimensional than the female. Anna Paquin's Sookie Stackhouse is supposed to be the main character, but as the series goes on and other, more interesting, mostly male, characters are introduced, it's hard to be interested in her, even if she can read minds. But the lack of dimensional females notwithstanding, this show has everything -- crazy-ass maenads, dumb southern cops, shape-shifters, a psychobabble-spouting war veteran with PTSD, Christofascists, flashbacks to Nazi vampires, and this season we not only have werewolves played by actual wolves, but Vampire Thomas Cromwell (not really, but James Frain, last seen on The Tudors being subjected to a particularly gruesome execution, joins the cast this season.

If you can handle the gore (and if you sat through The Tudors, you can), then this is why God invented Netflix.

Labels: television, True Blood

I mean, I like Lost as much as anyone, but I recognize that it's a STORY. Unlike some people:

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for
fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Labels: pop culture, Science, television

If you weren't around in the 1970's, you missed the birth of reality television, which took place on PBS, of all places, with "An American Family" -- a documentary series about a California family which disintegrated during the course of the show. This was DECADES before the Gosselins imploded on national television.

But now that there is Nothing New Under the Sun and no more original concepts about which to make movies, and Kate Winslet is reduced to an HBO remake of Mildred Pierce (in the Joan Crawford role -- do you feel old yet?) that very same HBO is, instead of re-running the real thing, doing a movie about the show. Casting is underway, with Johnny Weir rumored to be auditioning for the role of Lance Loud, who came out on national television.

Labels: pop culture, television

The other night I was channel surfing, and landed on an absolutely gorgeous, sweeping, aerial shot of St. Lucia. Now I'm a sucker for just about anything that has the Caribbean in it, so I landed there, only to discover to my horror that what I was watching was The Bachelor. Now, one of my co-workers had told me last week that his wife watches this show, and since he is an intelligent fellow with presumably an intelligent wife, I decided to hunker down with this mess and see what the fuss is about.

Apparently this was the finale, which involved some lantern-jawed guy with pec implants deciding between a pretty, sort-of-normal looking girl with lovely honey-colored hair, and a vapid-faced bleached blond with the gaping mouth of an inflatable sex doll and huge pneumatic fake hooters. That anyone still thinks reality TV is the way to find a life partner is appalling, no matter how gorgeous the location shooting is. But to make a long story short, I'm watching Mr. Fake Pecs describe Pretty Girl as "perfect...warm...loving...would make a great wife", and Big Boobs Blondie as "fun...I feel like a kid when I'm with her", and I immediately knew that Pretty Girl didn't have a snowball's chance in hell with this guy. I had to turn it off when Pretty Girl was driven away from Perfect Location, tears beginning to stain her golden gown, babbling about true love while the cameras were rolling.

It's enough to make you realize what a smart show Survivor is by comparison, even if it IS the show that started all this crap in the first place.

This season, Mark Burnett and the other Powers That Be couldn't resist another "All-Stars" show to celebrate Survivor's 20th season. This was a big mistake the last time, and it's an even bigger one now, because it's becoming more difficult to recruit ordinary people who want to do this, and the show over the last few seasons has been dominated by Los Angeles famewhores that the casting people pick up in bars. That was one of the reasons why the Tocantins season, with its odd and endearing bromance between the wide-eyed and adorable Alabamian James (J.T.) Thomas and the nerdy, anxious New Yorker Stephen Fischbach, was one of the best -- it reminded us of what can happen on this show when the compelling narratives involve people who wanted to play the game, not get into show business. Today, everyone who goes on this show knows the score, and it culminated with the Gollum-like troll Russell Hantz, who sucked up all the oxygen on Samoa (and all the memory in the cameras) by being outrageous last season.

This season needed a different twist, so the theme is "Heroes vs. Villains". The problem with yet another "All-Stars" is that you tend to get the famewhores rather than people you'd actually want to see again. There's no Bob Crowley here, or Yul Kwon. Instead we get a THIRD viewing of Parvati Shallow's vamping and a fourth of Stephenie LaGrossa's scary Jersey Shore eyebrows. And even the players who originally landed on the show by accident have a knowing quality they lacked before. Cirie Fields was the woman who was afraid of leaves, but by her third crack at the show, she was now regarded as one of the game's great strategists. J.T. has clearly found that a million bucks and killer eyelashes are good for getting laid a lot. Instead of endearing, he's now coming across more like John Edwards: The Early Days.

And then there's "Boston" Rob Mariano. No one in the history of reality television, not even Elisabeth Filarski Hasselbeck, has been able to parlay Survivor into a career and a nice little nest egg in quite the same way. For someone who's never won, Mariano is regarded as some kind of evil genius. His real genius is being able to get CBS to pay a guy who's not all that attractive and talks funny to pay him huge sums of money and provide him with all kinds of goodies. This is a guy who met his now-wife, Amber, on the LAST "All-Stars", and got to share in the million bucks by marrying her. This is a guy who got CBS to give them a big wedding at the Atlantis in the Bahamas, complete with bachelor and bachelorette parties, and then a honeymoon someplace else. "Romber" has been on The Amazing Race twice and now, with Amber at home with a new baby, "Boston" Rob is back on Survivor.

Maybe it's because Hantz is as odious as he is, or because Ben "Coach" Wade is such a self-important New Age buffoon, or because at this point I'm seriously thinking Parvati would do well with a few less teeth. Maybe it's because Tom Westman is taking this "hero" crap seriously, and J.T.'s smile has become a smirk, and what the hell is the bland Amanda doing back again, and what show was Danielle on again? -- but this season, Rob Mariano comes across as -- dare I say it? -- likeable. He's hardworking, he's playing nicely with others, he's a strategic player without seeming like a scumbag. When he collapsed last week from a combination of flu and dehydration, I wanted him to recover instead of past seasons, when most viewers would have wanted to watch him expire right there in the jungle.

Perhaps Mariano just needed to grow up. Perhaps he's one of those guys George Gilder used to talk about who need marriage in order to keep him from being completely id-dominated. Or maybe so-called reality TV has become so populated with the loathsome and the outrageous that a mere opportunist looks good by comparison.

Labels: pop culture, television

It's enough to make you long for the days of Disneyland. Unless they partner him with Niecy Nash, I say the hell with it.

Labels: crap, television, The Decline and Fall of America

Here at Casa la Brilliant, we are fairly regular viewers of Family Guy. Mr. Brilliant likes it more than I do, since the show features a fair amount of "guy humor" -- fart and sex jokes. I like it for the Brian/Stewie dynamic. Brian is one of the great cartoon characters of all time -- the erudite family dog who's smarter than the people he lives with, behaves more like a human than a dog, but then will for no reason at all chase a ball or lick his own privates. Brian is Cleo from the 1950's show The People's Choice updated for a more ironic time. And then there's Stewie, the bratty gay aspiring song-and-dance baby of the Griffin family, who used to be homicidal towards his mother, but now is mostly just your standard id-driven baby on steroids. In fact he WAS on steroids in one show. The pair is also prone to bursting into song for no particular reason, and the songs, written for the show, are finely-crafted Broadway-style showstoppers.

The show is definitely twisted. It pushes the envelope so far that it often makes me angry, with its relentless abuse of Meg, the teenage daughter, and jokes about the libidinous Quagmire putting date rape drugs into women's drinks. But I understand what the show is trying to do, and it is some really nasty, wicked social satire.

So when the story line on Sunday involved Chris, the dim-witted Griffin son falling for the mentally-challenged girl at school, and on their first date the girl announced that "my father is an accountant and my mother used to be governor of Alaska", I said to Mr. Brilliant, "So how long do you think it's going to take?"

Now, Fox is ferocous about making sure that none of its properties shows up on YouTube, so I can't show you the clip in question, or indeed any sample clips from the show. But you have to be able to visualize Seth McFarlane sitting at home, watching Sunday night's show, and the minute that line was uttered, looking at his watch and starting to count: "One....two....three....four....", etc. Because if you watch the show, you know that's exactly what he was doing. So for the uninitiated, some Seth McFarlane snark. Here he introduces a censored episode on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim:

And like clockwork, Sarah Palin did not disappoint:

In recent weeks, Fox News analyst Sarah Palin has waged a high-profile war on the “r-word,” calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s resignation after he called liberal activists “f-ing retarded.” Her latest target is the Fox cartoon Family Guy. In a recent episode, the character Chris Griffin dated a girl with Down Syndrome. “My mom’s the former governor of Alaska,” she told Chris. Calling it “another kick in the gut,” Palin and her daughter Bristrol took to Facebook to attack the show:

People are asking me to comment on yesterday’s Fox show that felt like another kick in the gut. Bristol was one who asked what I thought of the show that mocked her baby brother, Trig (and/or others with special needs), in an episode yesterday. Instead of answering, I asked her what she thought. Here is her conscientious reply, which is a much more restrained and gracious statement than I want to make about an issue that begs the question, “when is enough, enough?”:

When hate radio host Rush Limbaugh used the word “retarded” over 40 times on a recent show, Palin gave Limbaugh a pass because “he was using satire.” “I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” Palin told Fox News host Chris Wallace, referring to Limbaugh’s belief that he was just joking. Family Guy is “best known for combining controversial topics with off-color jokes

I can't imagine that the Roberts court would vote the same way, but John Roberts was not on the Supreme Court when Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell was decided in 1988:

Held: In order to protect the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern, the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit public figures and public officials from recovering damages for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress by reason of the publication of a caricature such as the ad parody at issue without showing in addition that the publication contains a false statement of fact which was made with "actual malice," i.e., with knowledge that the statement was false or with reckless disregard as to whether or not it was true. The State's interest in protecting public figures from emotional distress is not sufficient to deny First Amendment protection to speech that is patently offensive and is intended to inflict emotional injury when that speech could not reasonably have been interpreted as stating actual facts about the public figure involved. Here, respondent is clearly a "public figure" for First Amendment purposes, and the lower courts' finding that the ad parody was not reasonably believable must be accepted. "Outrageousness" [p47] in the area of political and social discourse has an inherent subjectiveness about it which would allow a jury to impose liability on the basis of the jurors' tastes or views, or perhaps on the basis of their dislike of a particular expression, and cannot, consistently with the First Amendment, form a basis for the award of damages for conduct such as that involved here. Pp. 50-57.

And for the record, anyone who watches the show on a regular basis recognized that while the character in question was clearly mentally-challenged, and certainly bossy and obnoxious, her mental disability was not even the butt of standard Family Guy targeting. Sarah Palin's outrage is even more disingenuous because she has a daughter around the age of Meg, the show's teenage daughter who gets so much crap shoveled on her by the show's other characters that it's often painful. But there's not as much political hay to be made among Palin's frothing, drooling minions in defending teenaged girls from being portrayed as the butt of "ugly jokes."

Meanwhile, Seth MacFarlane, who's undoubtedly going to be invited onto every late-night talk show this week, is sitting there with that Cheshire-Cat grin. Because you can't BUY this kind of publicity. And his employers, who also employ Sarah Palin, know it.

Bread, circuses, etc.

Labels: faux moral outrage, Sarah Palin, satire, television

Holy shit.

That is all.

Labels: Dexter, pop culture, television

Look, folks, I love True Blood as much as the next person, though Sunday night's episode was one of the most profoundly disturbing hours of television I've ever seen. But I don't care how entrenched in Trash Culture Mutancy you are, this is a bit much:

The once-fictional Tru Blood beverage from the HBO hit series "True Blood" will be coming to life in bottle form this September.

The blood-orange carbonated drink has a slightly tart and lightly sweet flavor that is sure to taste better than the O negative blood consumed by the show's fictional vampires.

Crafted to replicate the appearance of the synthetic blood beverage preferred by the undead in the series, the real-life drink will also be called Tru Blood.

Labels: pop culture, television

And we thought CLINTON was a good schmoozer:



Last night the President showed that he DOES understand the AIG mess. So why the hell is he allowing his Treasury Secretary to foster the very sense of entitlement he knows is a large part of the problem?

Labels: President Barack Obama, television