Tag Archives: Television

I can't hear you – my ears are full of fat

29 Tuesday Dec 2009

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Hello from Laura and Caitlin’s living room.  You can’t see what I can see, so let me tell you about it.  This, my friends, is a grownup house.  First, it’s actually a house, not an apartment.  Second, there is a guest bedroom.  And an office.  And paintings.  Like I can see one right now of a lake.  There are Christmas decorations.  And a real dining room set.  I just don’t even know what to do with this besides take comfort in the fact that the coffee table is the same one that Cait and I had in our apartment four years ago.  (And that her dog has calmed way the hell down.)

I’m also pretty sure that, Sunday, we didn’t move from the couch (them) and the chair (me) at all.  It’s hard to move when you’re glued to a marathon of various reality TV shows.  Also, Caitlin and I have revived our pizza roll tradition, which perhaps cognitively mesh with hanging quilts of snowmen.  For those of you who didn’t spend that kind of time in the meth apartment or the one I moved into after I peaced out on that lease, the pizza roll tradition is where we make the entire giant bag of pizza rolls and eat them.  All.  Sometimes it includes a mid-eating re-heat.  Before Saturday, I hadn’t had a pizza roll since August of 2006, after Little Ashley and I kept the tradition alive the summer she lived in my dining room.  There comes a point where there can be no more pizza rolls.

But then there comes a time when the pizza rolls must come back.  Round one?  Caitlin couldn’t hold up her end.  But, as a direct result, learned that you can reheat them the next morning for breakfast.  Good to know.

As I said previously when I first ventured over into Jon and Kate territory, I’ve never made the reality TV tour.  We eased our way with the episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8 where the family goes to Hawaii.  Then we took a tour of Toddlers & Tiaras.

I have never felt so gross in my entire life.  Have you ever been to a dance recital or a cheerleading competition and the youngest set of girls crosses that imaginary line of what’s age-appropriate and you feel like you a) might get arrested and b) need a shower that involves bleach and a brillo pad?  The entire show feels like that.  I was waiting for the FBI to bust into the house and arrest us.  That was horrifying.  One episode turned out to be way more than enough for me.

Which led us to The Real Housewives of New York City.  I’ll go ahead and own the fact that I now love (love) this show.  I’m serious.  That is the most delightful experience.  We were watching from the second season, so I’m not entirely caught up on the backstory of the women involved, but there are few things I enjoy more than over-privileged women who don’t have back fat. And I do appreciate all of their philanthropy.  It’s nice to do things for other people while you fight with your friends.

I’m debating on how I feel about The Real Housewives of New Jersey.  It’s interesting that the New Jersey women are actual-sized human beings.  And cleverly covering whatever mob activity might be happening off camera.  (Also, if you could forget some of that cash on my front stoop, I wouldn’t cry about it.)  The Real Housewives of Orange County is a little too California for me, but I did enjoy the mother-daughter plastic surgery recovery.  And that the poor economy does, in fact, hurt every level of our society.  (Laura: “They literally say nothing in an entire episode.”)  The Real Housewives of Atlanta actually has women who aren’t white.  Also, one of the women says that she’s the mother and her children are the children.  NO ONE ELSE DOES THAT ON THESE SHOWS.  They are all sisters or best friends.  Quiz question: why do women in Atlanta wear more clothing than women who are living in New Jersey and New York?  (No one in Orange County wears clothes at all.  It’s just nakedness and screaming.)

Overall, normally I don’t like when TV shows treat me like I’m a moron, but I love that, with each character change, we’re reminded who she is.  Mostly because I can’t tell anyone apart, especially in New York and Orange County.  Thanks for the hook-up, Bravo!

Had I not seen any of these, I’d still grab a seat for The Real Housewives of Washington, DC.  Why would I not?  If I were to ever live in a parallel universe in which I would be part of one of these shows, I’m on the ball with the Washingtonian lifestyle.  Everyday millionaires.  Check.  I will not, however, keep my cell phone on perpetual speaker phone.  Just a boundary I’d like to keep in place.  I’d finally get the boobs I’ve always dreamed of, too.

(Caitlin requests that she and Laura get a reality show as a direct result of this blog entry.  Maybe their neighbor with the tricked out van of Redskins paraphernalia will get the spinoff series.)

You’re just jealous.

To push myself back into this

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

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Last-ish month, Glenn Close wrote a piece for The Huffington Post on speaking out about mental illness.  In it, she discusses her relationship to mental illness, both within the people in her life and the rolls that she’s played.  Close is concerned about the treatment of mental illness in popular culture insomuch as that the mentally ill are portrayed as violent, something to be afraid of.  She writes about how test audiences for Fatal Attraction felt that Close’s character needed to be punished for being crazy.  (Not mentioned in the article, but the treatment of lesbians in popular culture runs a strikingly parallel course.  The more you know.)

Close writes,

It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness. This month, for example, NFL players are rumbling onto the field in pink cleats and sweatbands to raise awareness about breast cancer. On December 1st, World AIDS Day will engage political and health care leaders from every part of the globe. Illnesses that were once discussed only in hushed tones are now part of healthy conversation and activism.

Yet when it comes to bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia or depression, an uncharacteristic coyness takes over. We often say nothing. The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance.

OuyangDan, in a blog post over at Bitch, discusses the public consumption of Britney Spears’s bouts with mental illness.  She writes,

Something that the public chewed up was Britney’s bout with mental illness. Anyone who has ever been diagnosed with mental illness can tell you how much they long to keep it private, because mental illness carries with it a social stigma. Any woman who dares reveal to anyone that she has any degree of mental illness runs the risk of having that person use that information against her in the future. We have all heard the story of the Ex who has “Mental Issues” and that is why she is unreasonable and shouldn’t be allowed to have children, you know. But Britney didn’t get to keep her mental illness private in any sense of the word, because every major or respected news organization and Fox followed her every move, because that is what they have always done.

Labor Day weekend when I was sixteen, I sat on the couch in Lindsey’s basement.  She, Allison, and I were having an end-of-the-summer sleepover, Flashdance on the TV, open tubs of chocolate frosting and boxes of Teddy Grahams.  At nine, I took a little green pill out of my pocket and held it between my fingers.  Please, God, let this work, I prayed as I slid the pill into my mouth and swallowed it down with a swig of Cheerwine.

I’ve Please, God, let this work several times since.  Thanksgiving morning, I tried again for the first time in four years.  Something new, something different.  I can feel the rise of panic during my days and the squash of the medication that follows.  I’ve spent most of the past week and some change thinking about the mix of creativity and crazy, decisions that need to be made now, decisions that will need to be made later.

Both Glenn Close and OuyangDan are quite right in what they’ve seen with regard to mental illness as represented by popular culture and as ridiculed by the media.  But there are also some positives that need to be acknowledged.  Aside from Lifetime movies, a favorite go-to especially for eating disorder movies, it’s been my experience that teenage shows are the ones making the gesture to reach out to the mentally ill.

On 90210, we’ve watched as Silver comes to, and deals with, a bipolar diagnosis.  Degrassi is probably the bastion of mental illness and teenagers, dealing with depression, cutting, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, PTSD – on and on and on.  Problem of the week?  Sure.  But it gives notice to what people everywhere, not just teenagers, deal with.  And I applaud that.  Someone has to.

To find my way back home

01 Sunday Nov 2009

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AllyMcBeal

In 1997, I got into Ally McBeal from episode one.  I don’t even know how I found out about it, how I managed to win the TV battle with my sister.  (Only TV battle against her to date?  Party of Five over Dawson’s Creek.  Suck it, Dawson.)  Also, I’m not entirely sure why I liked it.  I was fourteen.  Not exactly the show’s demographic.  (Or the soundtrack’s, which I still have on cassette somewhere.)

But by the second season, I wasn’t as impressed.  The quirky things that would have been fine in moderation (dancing baby?) went full-force somewhere in season two, and by season three, they had lost me all together.  (That didn’t, however, stop me from watching the series finale years later and crying anyway even though I had no idea what had transpired in the intervening years.)

Every once in a while, when I did DVD checks, I never saw Ally McBeal.  There was a best-of type, but not a complete first season.  (Like other good shows, it happened in Europe before it happened here.  Explain?)  And then, and then, a few weeks ago, there it was!  First season and a complete box set of the entire series.  So, since that day, the first season has been sitting on my coffee table, waiting for me to actually have the time to sit on my futon and enjoy it.

Which I did on Saturday.  Oh, my goodness.

It took a minute to switch from Calista Flockhart as Kitty McCallister back to Calista Flockhart as Ally McBeal, but, once I got there.  Excellent.

All of the love came right back.  Even at fourteen, I knew I was a neurotic ball of mess, prone as Ally McBeal to fantasizing about various forms of destruction mid-conversation, a perpetual voiceover narrating my every move.  The other characters that I enjoyed so much were there as well – nebby Elaine, smart-mouthed Renee, Vonda Sheppard singing at the bar, the unisex bathroom, and all the hilarity that appropriately ensues.

And it was in that first episode that new things appeared that would have made sense one way at fourteen that make a totally different level of sense at twenty-six.  In that episode, Ally says, “I feel like the clients look at me like I’m a little girl, and I feel puny.”  A week or so ago, though this happens with some regularity, I was discussing with one of my classmates the problem with being a small woman: you forever see yourself as a little girl and can’t help wondering if people who are younger, but bigger, maybe see you in the same way.  I automatically hand over authority to those larger than I am, even if, at the time, or in retrospect, I know it’s often ridiculous.

I also recently had a conversation with a professor about the realities of being a female in academia, even in 2009.  And so, if Ally McBeal wants to offer me commentary about being a woman in the real world, and the way some things never change, I’ll accept.  I’ll take any guidance I can.  Especially nuggets like this one: “The more lost you are, the more you have to look forward to.”

I look forward to a lot.

And now that this DVD dream has come true, I put in a bid for Boston Public.  Anyone else with me?

Tuesday night is the perfect drinking night

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m co-host for a weekly student reading series here in graduate student land.  Said event takes place at a local bar, which exponentially increases the number of times I’ve ever hung out in a bar.

Even as a hostess (a bad one at that; last year, Billy rocked the house, and no one can compete with Billy.  Also, until this week, I’ve been coming from lit class, where I spend the entire three hours trying not to cry.  Not the best mindset to be in when a microphone is in your face), I pretty much bolt once the readings are done.  I get up at five, get work done, go to two classes, so by the time ten, ten-thirty rolls around, I’m more or less convinced the world is crashing on my head.

We switched venues and days this week.  This particular venue doesn’t kick us out at ten-thirty and allows us to have our event on a night other than Monday.  No one likes hanging out on a Monday.  (Not that Tuesday, our new day, is much better in terms of drinking stigma, but most creative writing classes are done after Tuesday night.)  Also, various fiction people already go to this venue on Tuesday nights to drink after class.  Bonus = automatic audience members.  Plus, I’m in a substantially better mood after fiction than I am after lit.

So we had our inaugural night, which was supposed to be a revival, but people outside of the fiction class more or less failed to understand that, in order to revive, one must show up.  But, first things first, the fiction folk don’t fool around with their beverage orders.  Pitchers are five bucks at this bar (Pittsburgh also not known for fooling around with their frosty beverages), and they use that price to their advantage.  After the reading (including a dramatic rendition of Updike’s “A&P” wherein the girl inexplicably had a British accent), people filtered out except for five quite fun fictioneers, two other nonfictioknights, and one nonfictionknight’s fiancé.

And then we talked massive amounts of shit.

Perhaps you do that with most of your time.  It’s one of my favorite hell-bound activities.  But, see, and I say this lovingly because I do adore my classmates, nonfictioknights, on the whole, are Nice People.  They do not talk massive amounts of shit, especially not in a group setting.  Words get exchanged in pairs or trios, but only when there’s significant cause.  They do not have the rowdy fun banter that you might enjoy in a bar scene in How I Met Your Mother or the incessant arguing of the gang on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  (New goal in life, by the way, road trip in the back of a U-Haul.  Complete with campfire.  It’s going to happen.)

I’ve been thinking lately about the underrepresentation of twenty-somethings on television.  Teenagers get a huge share of the market.  Thirty-somethings seem to get a good deal of the grown-up shows.  Sometimes, when shows like Beverly Hills, 90210, grow up and up and up, wind up with a show about twenty-somethings.  Mostly, though, we get the what-the-hell-do-we-do-now movies like Reality Bites, Garden State, and St. Elmo’s Fire.  (Also, by the way, Jessica and I are no longer friends because she loathed St. Elmo’s.  Banished!)

According to the fine folks over at We Feel Fine, twenty-somethings have the most feelings on the Internet.  Perhaps we could translate some of those feelings to the TV?  Or at least to the bar on Tuesday nights.

National Coming Out Day

11 Sunday Oct 2009

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In honor of National Coming Out Day, I present to you some of my favorite TV gays.

Ellen, of course, gets first mention.  There were a handful of lesbian kisses and characters prior to Ellen’s “Puppy Episode,” but both actress and character made a vast change in the television landscape.  Unfortunately, the last season of Ellen takes a tremendous dive, and the show was cancelled.  I remember being in the ninth grade and one of my fellow cheerleaders saying that her family stopped watching the show upon Ellen’s outing, which was confusing at best.

Kerry Weaver’s journey to lesbianism on ER proved to be of apt timing in my own life.  (Thanks, TV!)  Unfortunately, YouTube does not seem to have my absolute favorite Kerry gay moment, wherein she comes out to Romano in the men’s bathroom.  What I love about that moment, and about the characterization of her sexuality in general, is that, for the first time, the audience gets to see a very vulnerable side of the abrasive doctor.

Will and Jack can’t go without a nod, either.  “Bacon and Eggs” is my favorite episode of the entire series.  Sure, this isn’t the gayest clip in the world, but, c’mon, it’s dancing around with Kevin Bacon.  What more do you want?

For all that Ellen did once upon a time, The L Word stepped it up even more.  The writing was terrible, the acting mediocre, and too many naked scenes wound up in the realm of uncomfortable because most of the actresses had back ribs.  Yet vast communities of women (and some men) rounded up for thirteen Sundays every winter to watch the goings on of the West Hollywood gang.  Lesson learned from The L Word: kill of the most beloved character (Dana) in the name of teaching women a lesson about the perils of breast cancer.  But, before I.C. killed her off, goofy Dana had her moments as seen in this clip.

Two shows I wish I had as a teenager: Degrassi and South of Nowhere.

First, Degrassi.  YouTube and teenagers being what they are, I neither have the time nor the inclination to wade through eight million tribute videos to find actual show clips.  But I can tell you that the first time Marco and Dylan went on a date and kissed, I squealed.  As a sort of grown person.  Little did I know at the time that bad girl Alex would join the ranks of the gays at Degrassi, even scoring herself a relationship with popular girl Paige.  For all their adorable girlyness, the moment that solidifies Alex’s spot in the rankings is post-first-break-up with Paige and she says to her ex-boyfriend, “I’m not bi, I’m not confused. I’m a lesbian. An actual lesbian. Who just broke up with her first girlfriend, and it sucks.”

For three seasons, Spencer and Ashley sat in the center of the ensemble cast of South of Nowhere.  The show starts as Spencer and her family arrive in LA from Ohio, as is always the case on television.  From the very first episode, Spencer begins the long (and sometimes torturous) journey into coming out and surviving a high school lesbian relationship.  The same YouTube rules apply for this show as Degrassi, though I did manage to find this tiny little bit.  What I really wanted was the Pride episode where Spencer’s evangelical mother finally reaches out to her daughter.  Tears.

We’ve talked recently about Kurt coming out to his dad on Glee.  So for this, I offer you a really bad quality YouTube video, but, if you haven’t watched the show, stick with it anyway, and you’ll be hooked.  The moment is so wonderful, how could you not be?

Lastly, Kevin and Scotty on Brothers and Sisters.  They’re just so damn normal, especially compared to the rest of the Walker clan.  And this moment?  Well, it almost makes me want Calista Flockhart to officiate my future wedding.

OMGlee

04 Sunday Oct 2009

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(Turns out Jessica and I had the same topic in mind for today’s blog entry.  For another take on this topic, one from someone who doesn’t get misty-eyed at the end of Grease, click here.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with Mary and she asked if I had been watching Glee.  No, I moaned, because of my aforementioned TV-watching problem.  “Girl, you have to watch,” she said.  “Dean and I love it.”

Which is pretty much the story I’d been hearing from everyone whose opinion vaguely matters to me, as well as a great deal of my Facebook Stalker Feed.  I actually had intentions to watch it as I have an unfettered love of all things Jane Lynch.

GleeJaneLynch(Seriously.  I know she plays Jane Lynch in everything she does, but that’s a character-type I can support.)

I’ve mentioned before the great joy I get in movies when we all overcome adversity with a few dance moves.  I’d, perhaps, be lying to you if I told you I didn’t sometimes watch the final dance scene, without watching the entire movie, from Dirty Dancing just to feel good about the day.  And, you know, I didn’t totally hate High School Musical, either.  It was one of the less insipid teen-ish movies I had seen in a while.  (Fun fact: Matt totally bought the High School Musical version of Mystery Date, and someone at the board meeting didn’t think it through that two of the characters are brother and sister.  And you’re totally able to wind up with the sibling as the Mystery Date.  Brilliant.)

Glee

Glee has some weirdly dark things lurking in its corners.  The glee club director’s wife is faking a pregnancy; he’s cheating on her anyway with one of the more neurotic people on television.  (Great character work on that, by the way, the way she’s always cleaning the most random things, like individual grapes.)  There’s also some standard high school fare, but it’s, dare I say, interesting?  Sure, it’s always the abstinence-only girl who winds up pregnant, but Glee makes this somehow seem entertaining and fresh.

And, of course, I love, love, love adorable gay boy, Kurt.  Stereotype away, but I got teary when he came out to his dad, and then didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or both when his gruff dad said he had know Kurt was gay since he was three and asked for “a sensible pair of heels.”  (Answer: both.  Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but I’ve been reading/listening to a couple of Judy Blume interviews this afternoon, and I just decided in this instant that she could probably write the best gay teen book ever.  She writes straight teen books that remain awesome through the decades; she could totally do it.  Perhaps some letter writing is in order.)

To top off the wonderfulness of this show, every week, I get at least one moment of happy-sigh-the-world-is-good.  Don’t believe me?  Watch this and tell me you’re not feeling better about your day:

(I would pay a substantial amount of money to see my football players do something like this.)

I heart Brothers and Sisters

30 Wednesday Sep 2009

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This, I know, is cheating because my love of Brothers and Sisters goes deep already, but do you really think I’d pass up the chance to write about one of my favorite shows on television?  Fair warning that I’ll spoil everything I possibly can.

In the pre-episode excitement, I tweeted Renee my wish that Sally Field might adopt us.  She responded that we’re too normal.  She, clearly, has not spent enough time with me to realize just how high I can turn up the melodrama.  I mean, come on, I watch Lifetime movies and perhaps download them in segments off of youtube.  If that doesn’t scramble your brain, I don’t know what will.  (Speaking of, one of my new classmates is a fan of Lifetime movies and speaking ill of others; therefore, we are new bffs.)

This season of Brothers and Sisters starts like those car insurance commercials that I hate.  The calm, lovely drive, and then the sudden threat of crash.  Our victims this time are Justin and Rebecca, who, as you might remember from last season, are back together and getting married.  The cut to Justin’s baby pictures is done entirely to make your heart stop for a nanosecond at the thought of him being dead after he’s overcome so much to get where he was by the time he took that drive.

It’s cool, though, cause it’s forty-eight hours earlier, and we won’t actually get to know the outcome of the car crash until the end of the episode.  (Spoiler: all is well.  Narrow miss.  I yell at the TV for doing that to me, and yet continue to love the show anyway.)  My friend Jess once said that watching this show is like having the flu; there are some nights I don’t disagree.  Like when Kitty is getting a huge needle jammed into her neck while Nora talks elsewhere about how she doesn’t need to worry about her kids.  Sob.

But, as I told Matt on the phone later Sunday night, the season premier was actually at that wonderful balance between drama and humor that the writers sometimes forget exists.  They also remembered that Saul and Scotty are delightful characters and should have much more screen time than they got last season.  So in addition to almost-car-crashes and one of those awful switch-scenes like they did last season for Robert’s heart attack, we get Marion Ross back as Nora’s mother and quips from Scotty like, “I’m terrified when your mom finds out, she’ll want to be the surrogate for us.”  Also, Holly and Nora have to try to explain how Justin and Rebecca met, and there’s nothing like almost-incest for a good laugh.

Oh, I totally gave you that line from Scotty and did not properly pause to squeal over the prospect of him and Kevin having a baby.  (Squeeeeee! Dear writers, please do not screw up Kevin and Scotty’s relationship ever.)

Final wonderful moment of this week’s episode?  Ryan and his creepy pale face are nowhere to be seen.

It is so wonderful to have my Sunday nights with the Walkers back again.  Happy sigh.

Finding mercy

29 Tuesday Sep 2009

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Before I can write anything, I carry the words in my head, compulsively spinning them before they fly out in a similar jumble.  Running and driving long distances are particularly conducive to this, and it’s been in these chilly fall mornings that I’ve run the back street of my neighborhood, turning plots of ER with each thwap of my sneakers.  I’m trying to work through an essay about ER, depression, anxiety, and the general brilliance of Sally Field.  So to say I’ve been missing the show has been a bit of an understatement.

Wednesday morning, before my run, The Washington Post suggested that I might enjoy watching Mercy to fill the hole left in my heart TV schedule with the loss of ER.

This TV season, and some from the summer, has been awash in nursing/medical shows.  We talked about this a little bit upon the start of Nurse Jackie.  HawthoRNe also rocked the summer season, but I never got around to giving it a whirl.  Somewhere, Grey’s is dying a painful death.  NBC is trying for a medical two-fer with Mercy and Trauma.  House is being his House-y self somewhere.  Is Scrubs still on?  (I’ve only ever watched that in syndication.)

The start of medical shows sometimes grates on me like the endless conversations about writing we have at school.  Yes, I realize I’m in school for writing and thus should probably have many discussions about the topic, but sometimes it feels like the same conversation in summer rerun hell.  And the same goes for medical shows, where we wax poetic on what it means to face death, to save lives.

Which is what I loved about ER.  Yes, those conversations happened, especially upon the introduction of a med student who’s actually going to stick around for a while.  (See, for instance, Dr. Greene and Dr. Carter, who then gives the same speech to Dr. Gallant upon Dr. Greene’s death.)  But what I loved is how those themes played out, unsaid, in the lives of the doctors and nurses.  (See, for example, all episodes pertaining to Abby and her mother.)

Mercy

All this to say, I’m at a maybe on Mercy.  Stephanie messaged me with “2 minutes in and Mercy may be the next ER…”  On the surface, the show is very pretty.  The actors are shiny and skinny and the kind of people who can expect to wind up on the cover of magazines and drooled over appropriately.  Cast-wise, I will admit to being excited about Guillermo Díaz (Weeds).  And perhaps Michelle Trachtenberg (The Adventures of Pete & Pete?  How you’ve grown up, Ms. Trachtenberg.  And, yes, I realize she’s been in other things since her days on Nick.)  Most favorite person on the show without her having to say a word is the actress Margo Martindale, who appears in just about everything as the witty woman hanging out in the background.  I really, really hope she gets to have more screen time than I’ve seen her in other things.

What looks like will be the most compelling part of the show is the back story behind Veronica (played by Taylor Schilling).  She’s an Iraq vet who has come back to a decimated home life.  I’m very interested in the use of veterans in television shows, especially female characters.  (See Tasha on The L Word and, especially, Justin on Brothers and Sisters.)  The rest, so far, kind of seems like the same old same old (with some funnier lines of dialogue than the rest).

(After thought: now Tom Shales is telling me to watch Trauma.  Look for my thoughts next week.)

Did you catch Mercy or any of the other medical shows currently on the air?

He gets his own show?

28 Monday Sep 2009

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ClevelandShow

Once upon a time, my parents were fans of The Tracey Ullman Show, wherein they delighted in animated sketches about a grumbley yellow family.  They loved it and quickly tuned in when The Simpsons got their own show in 1989.

In the winter of 1989, I was in the first grade and desperately wanted to see what was so funny.  Besides something about the show not being appropriate for someone my age (something my parents conveniently forgot by the time my baby sister was six), my sister and I had a strict eight p.m. bedtime (something else my parents forgot for the baby).

After I was supposed to be in bed on Sunday nights, I could hear my parents laughing from the living room, and it just called to me.  I knew this was a show I was supposed to be watching.  On my braver nights, I’d inch, inch, inch out of my room, only venturing far enough so as to be able to see the TV.  If caught, as I always was (never been a quiet laugher), I’d try to lie my way out of it, saying I had to go to the bathroom.

But eventually the bedtime and the ban lifted, and I found myself in glorious animated hilarity, which grew exponentially the more I learned from school and the world around me.  In high school, the first Monday discussion we had in our corner of the newspaper office was always about The Simpsons.  Those were good days.

And then Family Guy came.  Torn.  The show was funny.  Really funny.  Could it possibly supplant the brilliance of The Simpsons (who, by that time, had started becoming less consistent in their brilliance)?  Some days, yes.  But, like the show before it, there’s never a bad episode, just one that’s not as good as the others.

(Side note: Family Guy as if done by old school Disney is among the funnier things I’ve ever seen.  Also, Washington Post political cartoon shout-out.  I should probably just stop listing things now because, goodness gracious, this episode is fabulous.)

(Shows not mentioned, but still watched on occasion: Futurama, King of the Hill, and American Dad.)

So now we have The Cleveland Show.

The Cleveland Show starts with the Family Guy gang at the Drunken Clam, Cleveland’s divorced finalized with him having nowhere to go and custody of Cleveland Junior (who sounds a little Fat Albert-esque).  It’s another bathtub incident, landing Cleveland naked on his lawn, that leads him to make the decision to move to California.  (Except not because he’s moving to Virginia.  I’ll stick around for that.)

The beginning of the episode does what shows like Family Guy do best – meta commentary.  (It’s funny, I don’t much care for meta anything except on television.)  He quickly calls out Peter for the characters (and thus the audience) not knowing anything about him, not knowing his dreams, but expecting him to follow along in any of Peter’s ridiculous schemes (such as forming their new A-Team).

Cleveland, though, is a straight man, and thus can’t carry a show.  So The Cleveland Show’s success depends entirely on the rest of the animated cast, which puts him exactly where he was on Family Guy.  What will be interesting, however, will be how animation takes on racial issues.  (I say this as a little white girl and thus with no qualifications whatsoever to address this topic.)

Pinning the show between The Simpsons and Family Guy will probably, more than anything else, ensure that I stick with watching for the time being.

How did your Sunday night of animation go?  (Or are you one of those fools you dismisses the whole enterprise?)

Quick fix: Sweet Valley High

23 Wednesday Sep 2009

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Because my friends are awesome, my Facebook wall and inbox got insta-flooded when news broke that Diablo Cody obtained the rights to Sweet Valley High.

This is both super exciting and super unsettling.

I’ll go with the latter first.

Diablo Cody is responsible for Juno.  Have we talked about Juno?  I don’t think so.

I hated it.

Really, I wanted to love it.  Love it for its cute and quirky indie kids and snappy dialogue.

Remember how Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t actually about anything, but that didn’t matter because it didn’t pretend to be about anything?

Juno, at least I’m assuming, appeared to be about something, except it never really was.  The whole thing just left me sad inside.

As faithful readers, y’all know how much I love Sweet Valley.  The opportunities could be outstanding.  True-to-original 1983 falsified teenage life?  Weirdly-dating-itself-anyway 2008 revision?  Camp-tastic?  Or just another movie we’ve already seen before?  (Please don’t let it be the last one.  You don’t obtain the rights to the most satire-ready series and then blow them on dreck you could have done on your own.)

I mean, I’m not particularly worried about a movie being awful.  Did you perhaps watch the TV show circa 1994?  I did.

Indulge yourselves:

The show was hilarious.  But entirely on accident.  (Actually, not unlike how the books were hilarious on accident, but plus bad acting.)

So, what are your hopes and dreams for Cody’s latest project?  Will you come see the movie with me opening night?

(If I don’t answer to your comments right away, it’s because I’m jamming to the aforementioned show’s soundtrack in my car.  Yup, I bought it then and still own it now.)

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