I’d
like to say before we start that, in spite of all my
professional expectations, the new network season does not suck. It
doesn‘t even nearly suck. Some shows in particular suck, of course, and
some are not so much sucky as just transparent -- cultural placeholders
whose negative effect only equals the time you waste on them. And
though nothing but the will of the really big masses will guarantee
that the better series will not be canceled -- some perhaps even before
this column appears -- overall it really looks this year like the big
boys and, yes, girls are trying to do something more than pick your
pocket.
Of course the season has not
yet been entirely unveiled, but nothing left to come will be any worse
than Hype!, the WB’s
superatrocious, desperately energetic topical sketch comedy (like being
trapped in some local improv house in the privacy of your own home),
and though it really might be the worst show I have ever seen, even
that has not killed my cheerful mood. (Cheerful vis-a-vis television, I
mean; the state of the world is something else again.) The bad and the
ugly do not overwhelm the good, and even a one-joke exercise like The Trouble With Normal -- four
paranoiacs and their babe therapist -- offers the welcome company of
Jon Cryer and David Krumholtz. Even the Everest of trash that is Aaron
Spelling‘s prime-time ubersoap Titans
(another NBC blow against the family hour) is oddly likable, so clearly
a parody of itself that when Yasmine Bleeth turns up in yet another
barely there bathing or sleeping costume, it doesn’t read merely as the
boob-and-navel show it undeniably is, but as a joke we can all enjoy.
My
favorite new show so far this year -- and I hope, in saying
this, I am not according it my famous Kiss of Death -- is Gilmore
Girls, which restores to the WB the good karma Hype! squanders. It is, though you
should not hold this against it, the first series the network developed
with seed money from the Family Friendly Forum, a consortium of
powerhouse advertisers that includes GM, McDonald‘s and Sears, formed
to raise the tone of the so-called family hour -- do you hear me, Garth
Ancier? -- and to reinstate the great American practice of the whole
clan gathering together in front of the set instead of, you know,
fucking off somewhere reading or playing the piano or learning how to
hot-wire a car. The Forum’s goal, according to its original prime
mover, Procter & Gamble marketing exec Bob Wehling, was to help
create programs that young and old ”can watch together -- a mother and
a daughter or son, and a grandmother, and all find it entertaining and
relevant, without having it be embarrassing, particularly, for the
mother or father.“ That it would also create as well a demographically
broad reservoir of viewers in whose ear Forum members might pour
honeyed words regarding burgers and cars and soap was not, you may
suspect, merely incidental to the plan. I haven‘t worked out whether
this deal -- the Forum contributed more than a million dollars to the
WB’s script-developing budget, admittedly a drop in their collective
corporate bucket -- was bribery on the part of the advertisers or
extortion by the network, but in any case it produced, out of eight
scripts and two pilots, a show I am happy to try to make you watch.
In spite of its goody-goody
genesis, the series, created by writer-producer Amy Sherman-Palladino (Roseanne, Veronica‘s Closet), hardly tastes
of apple pie: Its heroine is a 32-year-old never-wed mother with a
16-year-old daughter -- that mama Lauren Graham and daughter Alexis
Bledel are both young is a central conceit of Gilmore Girls -- who are portrayed
as none the worse for their lack of an in-house male. I am made
immoderately happy by this series, and am willing to admit that has
much to do with Graham, whom I have admired from my side of the screen
at least since Townies,
though I remember her being funny on Caroline
in the City before that. (I missed her entirely in this year’s
midseason-replacement replacement M.Y.O.B.)
Never showy and always real, she‘s a life-size actress in the Jean
Arthur/Irene Dunne mode, and she’s been given a part here that rates
her talent. The writing is good throughout -- witty, but not
drawing-room witty -- and provides abundantly the small moments which,
compounded, create a reality.
The show is set in a small
Connecticut tourist town, populated, in the words of some WB
copywriter, by ”an eclectic mix of dreamers, artists and everyday
folk.“ That sounds nothing like Northern
Exposure to me, and in fact it rather misrepresents Gilmore Girls, which, though it
comes with a complement of slightly pixilated and strangely irascible
citizens, exaggerates only around the edges. The central story, to
oversimplify, is all about mothers and daughters (and grandmothers --
there‘s that multigenerational-appeal thing in play), and the right to
one’s own life and one‘s own mistakes. Graham’s character compounds sex
and sensibility, stubbornness and a (largely misunderstood) satirical
tongue. (Creator Sherman-Palladino, whose production company is named
Dorothy Parker Drank Here, has said of herself, ”I‘ve got a big fucking
mouth.“) Screen daughter Bledel, who has a Korean-American best friend
(Keiko Agena) and some new WASPy nemeses at the prep school she started
in episode two, is new to acting but absolutely natural; she’s soulful
and brainy and moody and ironic. On the pixilated tip are Yanic
Truesdale, the snotty concierge at the inn Graham manages;
accident-prone chef and best bud Melissa McCarthy (some first-rate
balletic slapstick surrounds her); Liz Torres, once of The John Larroquette Show, as a
dance teacher; and a scary harpist whose name I don‘t know. Less
pixilated, but still a little strange, is Scott Patterson (a former
Dodger, in this life we call real) who runs a cafe -- though he
disdains caffeine -- and is being slowly set up as a love interest; his
is a choleric-phlegmatic humor, and he reminds me of David Strathairn.
Graham’s parents, who are rich and trouble, but who are right as much
of the time as anybody else is -- nobody in this show gets to be right
all the time, and nobody is ever exactly wrong -- are wonderfully acted
by Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann, who is apparently no longer
allowed to play a character with an income of less than half a million
dollars a year.
Quite in the same conceptual small-town universe is NBC‘s Ed, a romantic comedy in which Tom Cavanagh as the title character, having lost his big-city job and cheating wife in a single day, gets back to where he once belonged -- fictional Stuckeyville, Ohio -- to make a new old life for himself and court the girl he was too shy to talk to in high school (Julie Bowen, from TV’s short-lived Three -- and fluent in Italian, you might like to know), even though she‘s going out with Gregory Harrison. He courts her heedlessly and elaborately and pathologically -- in a suit of armor, for instance. He also buys a bowling alley. Created by Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, both vets of The Late Show With David Letterman (Letterman’s Worldwide Pants co-produces the series), it‘s well-written, quirky and sweet -- old-fashioned sweet, even at times a little too sweet, but ultimately redeemed by the authors’ Late Show absurdity training. Cavanagh, who reminds me continually of The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, if Jon Stewart were stretched on a rack, has an engaging and original manner (except for the Jon Stewart resemblance), and is persuasively quixotic in a Capraesque mode -- he‘s Mr. Deeds come back from town. But Stuckeyville itself is more out of Sturges, the screwball American hamlet of Hail the Conquering Hero or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, rigidly ordered and on the verge of pandemonium (with Michael Ian Black -- Johnny Blue Jeans of Viva Variety! ”fame“ -- as Ed‘s slacker-entrepreneur aide down at the lanes, occupying the approximate William Demarest position). I think it no coincidence that Eddie Bracken, the star of those two films, showed up here as magician Stuckeyville Stan -- happy casting indeed. Bracken was old-pro wonderful, and if the season continues this well I’ll have to give up the criticizing for proselytizing: TV is great! Watch TV! (Ah, but you know it won‘t.) (Will it?) © Robert Lloyd 2000
and 2011
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