"Daisies" Wilted; "Money" Spent

Word has just leaked that two of our favorite sophomore ABC series—Pushing Daisies and Dirty Sexy Money—have been cancelled! (Also cancelled was Eli Stone, but no one gives a crap about that.) Aside from my excitement over getting to make lame cancellation puns for the title of this blog entry, I am not happy! See, this is what happens when you campaign so hard to keep other great-but-ratings-challenged shows on the air (30 Rock, we’re talking about you with Tina Fey’s recent publicity bonanza) that you forget about the other smaller shows that don’t have the luck of having their star resemble a Podunk, Alaskan vice-presidential candidate. While both shows will be permitted to complete a 13-episode season, this may leave huge unanswered questions hanging in the balance. Will Ned (Lee Pace) and Chuck (Anna Friel) ever find a way to be happy despite their inability to touch? And will Nick (Peter Krause) ever find out the circumstances of his father’s death and whether or not the Darlings were involved?

What makes this decision even harder to swallow is that these two shows bookend Private Practice on ABC’s Wednesday night schedule. Here are the basics of a Private Practice episode:

1. Couple comes to the Oceanside Wellness Group with a beyond-ridiculous fertility request (e.g. “Can you fertilize my eggs with iguana sperm?”; “Can you to make one of my twins retarded in utero so the other twin can use him for organ harvesting later in life?").
2. Dr. Addison Montgomery refuses on the grounds of medical ethics.
3. Dr. Addison Montgomery decides at the last minute she will perform the procedure because, after all, who is she to tell people what to do?

(Why hasn’t the Medical Board of California revoked this broad’s license yet?!)

Enjoy America! This is the kind of crap you like, apparently!

--Ray

P.S.- Sorry I violently forced you to watch these two shows on DVD, Sonia! I really thought they were going to catch on!

Fave 5 - Drama

I’ve finally compiled my top 5 TV dramas! Remember, for a self-professed TV shut-in, picking these was a harder decision for me than Meryl Streep had in Sophie’s Choice.

5. Gossip Girl (The CW) As a dramedy that satirizes the shameless rich and voyeuristic poor (AKA us!) equally, Gossip Girl recognizes the exploits of a few Upper East Side 17-year-olds and their 24-year-old parents as outlandish (their maximalist wardrobes are just as hyperbolic as their personalities—Chuck Bass, I’m talking about you!) but its website-within-a-show concept ingeniously throws the consumerist blame back on us, the audience, the main culprit in this TMZ/Perez Hilton/Us Weekly world where we’re all perpetually trying to move on up to that deluxe apartment (with a Central Park view) in the sky. In a brilliant scene from season one, blue-blooded Blair daunts the bourgeois (and ridiculously underage) Jenny with a martini. Jenny attempts to save face by claiming she doesn’t like vodka. “Well that’s nice, because this is gin, as it should be,” Blair snaps back. “Either swallow that, or swipe your MetroCard back home.” No other rich-kid soap (and there have been thousands) so vividly evokes the great divide of old money versus new money—gin versus vodka—with such cruel yet stylized panache. (Season 2 currently airing)

4. Friday Night Lights (NBC/The 101) While we hate this show right now for signing a deal with DirecTV to air its third season on a satellite channel no one has (it’ll run on NBC later), we have to rate FNL slightly above Gossip Girl just because I’m pretty sure it’s the first teen show ever to not only be set somewhere outside of New York or LA (ew!), but to actually feature small-town, low-income kids (gross!) who don’t wear haute couture to homeroom (oh, the horror!) and don’t look like they just fell out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. (Actually, aside from Landry, they’re all pretty gorgeous.) Tim Riggins’s white trash brother Billy said it best in the first few minutes of the pilot: “This is real life, not Maxim magazine.” Not that we’re decrying the world of Gossip Girl in which it’s feasible for a 16-year-old to own and operate a burlesque club, instead we’re celebrating these two, opposing portrayals of fantasy and reality, the latter of which FNL does to a T. (Season 3 currently airing on The 101, will air on NBC in 2009)

3. Dexter (Showtime) Throwing the audience’s sympathies on the side of a murderer is nothing new. Hitchcock did it decades ago. But being able to keep your audience in a constant state of Hitchcockian suspense every minute of every episode of a 12-part, hour-long series that’s now in its third season sure is. In this TV landscape, where we’re plagued with 8 CSIs, 12 Law & Orders, and countless other inane, basic cable cop shows, Dexter brilliantly subverts the done-to-death cops-versus-bad guys formula by combining cop and bad guy into one with our titular hero/villain—a forensics specialist who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. Jennifer Carpenter as Dexter’s adoptive sister Debra is our absolute favorite bad-ass, post-post-feminist cop who could wipe the floor with that whiny southern belle from The Closer! (Season 3 currently airing).

2. Skins (E4/BBC America) It’s just occurred to me that this is the third show on my list about teenagers and how, perhaps, as someone who hasn’t been a teen for 4 years, I should consider watching more adult-oriented shows. But why would I do that when I can watch these Bristolian badasses engage in shocking levels of substance abuse, pan-sexual intercourse, and everything else American TV kids can’t do because of the pesky FCC? But to say this show is just about sex, drugs, and bad, European techno music would be to completely ignore its incredible heart. The Skins characters aren’t your typical disaffected youth—rather they’re extremely affected by parents who have failed them and teachers who (in Chris’s case) sleep with them. (Season 2 currently airing on BBC America, Season 3 starts on E4 in 2009)

1. Mad Men (AMC) I know, I know, Mad Men is topping every list these days. It’s just as much of a cliché now to refer to it as the greatest show on TV as it was to say the same about The Sopranos for the better part of this decade. But there never was a show more deserving of the abdicated throne of that title than this one—Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner actually wrote 12 episodes of The Sopranos. The genius of MM lies in its ability to subtlety yet effectively comment on basically every important aspect of American culture and how it has changed (or hasn’t changed) in the second half of the twentieth century; family values, capitalism, religion, women’s rights, civil rights, class stratification, politics, and more are discussed via the concept of the advertiser marketing values to the masses. We as viewers are left to wonder how authentic the American identity actually is if so many of our thoughts and opinions are shaped by men in suits smoking cigarettes and munching sandwiches planning out exactly how we’re going to feel about all these issues. Mad Men asks us, Is America just one big commercial? Discuss! (Season 3 starts in 2009)

Honorable mention: Breaking Bad (AMC), Big Love (HBO), Lost (ABC)

Dishonorable mention: 24 (FOX) Season six—also known as the season during which even the die-hard fans stopped watching—was apparently (yeah, I was one of those who ditched!) so bad that even the writers apologized for it and promised to do better next time. After completely sitting out 2008 because of the writer’s strike, 24 will be back this Sunday with a 2-hour TV movie (24: Redemption) that eschews the trademark countdown clock and fills us in on what Jack has been up to lately. (Plus, Jack will be in Africa meaning we might get to see him go toe-to-toe with an angry gazelle!) Then a new and (hopefully) improved season 7 will start in January.

--Ray

Credit Crisis

In my never-ending attempt to conceitedly rate everything, I got to thinking: what are the best and worst TV opening credit sequences out there right now?

Worst: The L Word



The opening of this long-running Showtime series features an interpolation of The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things” by New York City alt-rock band Betty, an inane, nerve-grating composition accompanied by visuals that look like something a student in a night computer class at a community college made on PowerPoint in about 3 hours. It could also be one of those rage-inducing “fan clips” you always see on YouTube in which some 14-year-old shut-in from a single-parent home has set images of Star Wars characters up against his own rewritten version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The theme song lyrics (sample: “Women who long, love, lust/Women who give” WHAT?!) are about as poetic as the nutrition facts on the side of a cereal box. Rodgers and Hammerstein are rolling over in their graves!


Best: Mad Men



As a silhouetted businessman’s office begins to collapse around him and we see him plunge from the top of a building, we suddenly realize this image has been forever emblazoned on our collective national consciousness since 9/11—the destruction of the Manhattan skyscraper—the temple of capitalism and consumerism—that capped off the 20th century, the century in which America became the most powerful financial nation on the planet. It’s no coincidence those skyscrapers are adorned with kitschy, Saul Bass-inspired, period advertisements that celebrate/mock the ultra-American values of youth and vitality. Then there’s the ominous score which sounds like a riff on Bernard Hermann’s Psycho theme. These credits, created over a year ago, incredibly and anachronistically forecasted the new, post-bailout America in which corporate greed and glamour—exactly the kind Don Draper and his cronies proudly practice in this AMC show—have led to the collapse of our financial institutions and a repositioning of our values, an America in which “CEO” has become a pejorative. If only Don could see us now!

--Ray