Do fans of Hoarders call themselves “Hoarders”? Or “Hoarderers”? In any case, the series is back for its second-season premiere tonight on A&E, and it’s an unsettling doozy, about a toothless, stubborn woman in Louisiana named Augustine. Her house is a hoarder-nightmare. The amount of filth, the layers of rotting food, mountains of dirty clothes and kitchen utensils, and the occasional dead animal found crushed in these rooms is truly amazing and appalling (I brought up her teeth because her lost, false set of choppers plays a part in tonight’s episode):
You can read my review of the Hoarders season premiere here. I worry about the emotional damage this angry, suffering woman has inflicted upon herself and her grown children, both of whom interviewed here seem to be intelligent, likable people.
As for Intervention, which begins its eighth season tonight: This has got to be one of the more dramatic entries in the series. It tells the story of Linda, who worked as an extra in Hollywood until her addiction to painkillers ruined her looks and overtook her day-to-day existence.
So I ask you: Will you watch Intervention and/or Hoarders? Do you find these shows depressing, voyeuristic drags, or educational and sometimes even inspiring?
On Monday night, ABC will air How The Grinch Stole Christmas. On Tuesday night, ABC will air A Charlie Brown Christmas.
So even though Thanksgiving is barely past, it’s time to stake a claim:
I think Grinch is a superior cartoon showcase for its characters than Charlie Brown is for its pint-sized protagonists. Here are my reasons.
A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) was produced and directed by Bill Melendez, based, of course, on Charles Schulz’s beloved characters in the comic strip Peanuts. It featured a voice-cast of mostly “real” (i.e., not professional) children. It had a jazzy music score by Vince Gueraldi. By all reports, Schulz himself liked the half-hour.
But to me, A Charlie Brown Christmas sentimentalized Schulz’s characters in a way that Schulz himself rarely did in his comic strip — at least, during the first half of his comic strip’s run. I admire the fact that the TV cartoon includes quotations from the Bible (and specifically the King James Version, the way to go in Bible translations, by my standards), making it one of the few cartoons that actually acknowledges the religious tradition behind the holiday. (CBS was freaked out about this element, but such was Schulz’s power then, that he prevailed.) However, A Charlie Brown Christmas over-simplified Charlie’s character — he’s just a sap, a victim, a whiner. Beyond this, I also dislike the music. The pop-jazz score is indeed unusual, but it’s also intrusive and irritating. Who, before this cartoon aired, ever read a Peanuts comic-strip collection and heard jazz in his or her head? Classical music, maybe — that’s what Schroeder was there for. But more likely, blissful silence would have been better. And I think the silly dance in Christmas, with many of the characters wiggling around, is just a foolish time-waster. A Charlie Brown Christmas is sincere and well-meaning, but it doesn’t come close to equalling that Charles Schulz pulled off regularly in his comic strip: funny melancholy.
By contrast, How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), co-directed by Chuck Jones and Ben Washam, is both faithful to the Dr. Seuss source-material and opens up new avenues of pleasure. The narration by Boris Karloff is superb, a great example of a marvelous voice enhancing Seuss’ impeccable rhymes. And the music score by Albert Hague, including songs such as “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” adds to my pleasure, unlike Charlie’s score, which for me is a distraction. I also think the work of Jones, the veteran Warner Bros. animator and creator of classic Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Road Runner cartoons, is more finely detailed than the stiffer animation overseen by Charlie Brown co-producers Melendez and Lee Mendelson.
Don’t get me wrong. I think A Charlie Brown Christmas is a perfectly fine entertainment. I’m not trying to set up one of those “Charlie Brown sucks, Grinch rules!” pseudo-”controversial” posts. I’m just putting it out there: When it comes to choosing between these two works of popular art, I prefer Grinch as the superior work.
Well, James Franco has completed his first week on General Hospital playing wealthy artist Franco. As I wrote after Franco’s debut appearance, I’m not going to pretend I watch GH regularly; fans can help me out with context in the comments section below, if you like. But I am intrigued by how Franco plays Franco, a one-time poor graffiti artist who’s become rich making art such as mock-crime-scene installations for an art-gallery opening that seemed to last all week on Hospital.
Wednesday’s episode featured Franco only in one character’s fleeting flashback. That hour wheeled in lots of what I presume are old familiar GH characters, gathered to wish fans a happy Thanksgiving. But the rest of the time, Franco delivered a lot of tough-guy romantic dialogue that sums up his character’s philosophy of life.
So I’ve assembled the best of what I’ll call Franco’s Filosophy.
• “The secret to life is, everyone can die at any time… don’t live by rules or boundaries, and take what you want, when you want.”
• “People always think there’s some deep dark secret pushing my soul to create [but] I just like it.”
• “Art is all about the dialectic… the contrast between two opposing forces, life and death.”
• “Any commitment longer than an evening would make me break out.”
Finally, Franco has been playing tonsil-hockey with some blonde named Maxie. In between smooches and mattress sessions, he’s treated her to comments such as these:
• “I’m willing to believe that self-pitying drivel didn’t just emege from your lovely mouth.”
• “Maybe you woke up too many Sundays hating the person in the mirror.”
When Maxie asked whether such pearls of wisdon were how Franco “charms the pants off” his lovers, he riposted, “Your pants are already half way down your thighs.”
“Wow, that’s deep,” said Maxie. “This has to be the worst come-on I’ve ever heard.”
Have you been watching Franco on General Hospital? What do you think of Franco’s Filosophy?
It’s being reported that a couple being considered for Bravo’s upcoming Real Housewives of D.C. crashed a state dinner at the White House on Tuesday night. Michaele and Tareq Salahi, a Virginia couple, got past multiple security points to hobnob with Vice President Biden and other government officials.
According to The New York Times, Bravo has been filming the couple as possible “personalities” for its Real Houseves of D.C. series, the latest in its Housewives franchise.
Guess who’s going to interview the couple on Monday night? You got it: the Salahis will be on Larry King Live. Their quest for fame is already paying off!
Let’s see, non-creative people desperate to be on TV cause media stir: Sounds a little like the “balloon boy” incident, doesn’t it?
These two well-dressed loony-birds don’t seem to have intended any harm to anyone at the White House party, other than destroying some of their own brain cells in their addled yearning for fame.
But can we start agreeing that reality TV has gone too far? And that if people trying to “audition” for junk like the Real Housewives shows can do this, there’s a possibility that less benign, more dangerous people are going to start pulling stunts that can’t be dismissed as trivial or laughable?
The Good Wife continues to pay off on its premise. It does not shy away from the anguish and uncomfortableness that Juilanna Margulies’s Alicia suffers in the aftermath of her husband’s sex scandal. It may be one of the most downbeat scripted shows in network prime time, yet it pulls in big ratings. Aren’t we frequently being told that viewers are seeking out upbeat, escapist fare these days? Why is The Good Wife doing so well?
Because it’s damn good, and because all that ageist stuff about how people don’t want to watch shows starring people over 40 is pernicious hogwash.
Last night’s episode was a prime example. We saw more about the woman with whom Chris Noth’s Peter flung. We saw a very clever, very realistic way this woman might promote herself in the aftermath of such an affair — in this case, by going on Chelsea Lately.
The episode covered a lot of ground and an impressive range of tones. The Chelsea Handler segment — viewed by everyone, including Alicia’s children, on their computers the morning after it aired — was depicted exactly a viral phenom such as this would take hold in the pop culture.
And the show’s subplot, in which we finally met the globe-trotting law-firm partner, played with shaggy belligerence by Kevin Conway, was another example of the way The Good Wife renders office politics fresh and surprising.
I can’t say that I was startled by the hour’s final scene, which had been promoted as a “shocker.” Alicia kissing her husband — out of relief for getting the mistress at least temporarily out of their lives; out of surrender to sheer emotional exhaustion and genuine affection — made sense, on the terms The Good Wife has set up.
Although it has arrived packaged as a lawyer show combined with Law & Order-style headline-chasing, The Good Wife is proving, week by week, that it is its own distinctive creation.
At the risk of sounding like a blood-lusting savage, boy, was I looking forward to watching SAMCRO inflict some damage on the League, and last night on Sons of Anarchy, we pretty much got the battle we, or at least I, had been waiting for. (Read full post)
Adam Lambert, speaking on CBS’ Early Show this morning, admitted that his American Music Awards performance “got the most of me.”
Lambert said his onstage moves “came from an improvising place… they were not rehearsed.”
“I got carried away,” he said. “It was not what I intended.” Of the controversy that ensued, he said, with an impish smile, “I have a tendency to divide people.”
Lambert even has a tendency to divide TV networks. He was booked to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America to explain his sexually provocative performance, but GMA disinvited him, releasing this statement to EW: “Given his controversial American Music Awards performance, we were concerned about airing a similar concert so early in the morning.”
That was strange in itself. Did GMA really think Lambert isn’t canny enough to dial it back for a morning-show interview? A ratings miscalculation, methinks. Anyway, CBS and The Early Show got Adam-as-pussycat, not Adam-as-rebel.
Pressed by cohost Maggie Rodriguez as to whether he felt “some responsibility” for the children viewing him in prime time, Lambert was admirably direct: “I’m not a babysitter.”
Granted, there was a certain coyness to Lambert’s Early Show answers. Asked why he didn’t think about children who might have been watching his outrageous performance, he said, “Children — it didn’t enter my mind. Sometimes I forget there’s a camera on. I come from the theater; I look at the audience in front of me, which was filled with adults.”
Really, Adam? Oh, you shrewd little devil: For a guy who seemed to possess an almost supernatural sense of which camera was trained on him during his American Idol performances, this was rather hard to believe.
Asked if he’d do anything differently, Lambert said, “I’d sing a little bit better… it wasn’t my best vocal performance.”
TV doesn’t get much more manipulative than Find My Family, which premiered last night after Dancing With The Stars. The first episode was a repulsive mixture of aggressive agenda-pushing and teary uplift. The show suggests that every adopted person should want to meet his or her biological parents, and every person who gave up a child for adoption is obliged to yearn to meet that child.
How does the show know? Well, in part because its co-hosts, Tim Green and Lisa Joyner are both adoptees, and as Lisa tells one young woman, “I’m adopted myself, so I know exactly how you feel?” Really? Exactly? I doubt so personal a matter can ever be completely understood by another, especially by two people (interviewer and interviewee) brought together solely by TV.
Find My Family operates a kind of benign blackmail. You can have the FMF team help you locate your long-lost child, but in return, you have to appear on-camera, bare your most intimate feelings, and then go and stand under the show’s jaw-droppingly hokey “family tree” — “a very special place where we bring families together,” says Green. Once there, you must have the first seconds of your reunion filmed.
It was telling that one of the most articulate of the people profiled last night, a grown adoptee in Wisconsin named Jennie, said after being reunited with her birth parents, “I don’t know for sure where things are going to go.”
For a series that’s all about the primacy of tears and emotions over clear-headedness and privacy, it’s a wonder that this mild, restrained comment was edited into the broadcast. “I will be here for you to begin again,” go the lyrics to the sappy theme song of Find My Family. Great. And will you be here a year from now, when some of these people may decide — as a few of them surely will, don’t you think? — that this reunion was a complicated, sometimes troubling and upsetting experience that they may regret was filmed for public peeping?
“I feel like it’s been taken from us, from me and the kids.” Kate Gosselin was talking about Jon & Kate Plus Eight, the TV series that ended this week after five seasons due to the disagreements between Jon and Kate. The hour mixed direct-to-camera, separate interviews with Kate (“The kids are already missing [the show]“) and Jon (“I became more educated about myself… I felt like I was free [after the separation]“).
The last edition followed its now-usual format: separate activities with each parent. Kate took the kids to an organic farm where cows were milked. Jon organized a lemonade stand to raise money for the local fire department. In a repulsive moment that typified why this series had to end, the older kids, twins Mady and Cara, started bickering and complaining as they worked on signs for the lemonade stand. One of them whined, “I like stuff we do with Mommy.” Jon, as though stung by this, immediately snapped, “Alright, you’re gonna go into the house. Both of you… You’re unappreciative.” Only the sextuplets were allowed to go to the firehouse and sell lemonade. The punishment didn’t fit the crime.
At one point, the fireman raised a truck ladder high into the sky and we heard one of those comments that used to make Jon & Kate such a pleasure. As the ladder rose, one of the kids chirped to a fireman, “You’re gonna hurt the birds!”
Many of you have asked why I continued to write about this show week after week. First, let’s be honest: It’s partly because so many of you wanted to talk about it in the Comments section. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Gosselins inspired a lot of response.
But there’s another reason. I started watching the show during its first season. I was just a casual viewer; the series didn’t have a season pass on my DVR. But if I was home or in a hotel room and an episode came on, I’d find that I’d always end up watching the entire thing, because the series was (hard as this is to believe now) completely charming. I remember most of the episodes they showed this last night in a quick montage, whether it was family movie-night, or the clan’s once-annual walk to the local Fourth of July parade, the little ones waddling along behind Jon and Kate like ducklings. The kids were adorable and funny, and the interactions between Jon and Kate seemed unguarded, fresh, often amusing, and sometimes provocative.
Provocative because Kate’s strict rules about order, discipline, cleanliness, and healthy nutrition sometimes smacked into Jon’s more laid-back, what-did-I-get-myself-into attitude. But the yelling and the bickering was always the exception, not the rule.
I would guess that the majority of those of you who’ve written negative comments about Jon & Kate here only started watching less than a year ago, after the episode in which Jon and Kate renewed their marriage vows in Hawaii. You’d probably read something that was just starting to emerge on-camera: the fighting was more intense, it was bitter. It was reality TV that wasn’t a goof or a lark; these weren’t (yet) wealthy celebrities; these weren’t zonked-out, pampered pop stars, or spoiled-brat L.A. or Manhattan twerps. These were suburban parents trying to come to terms with the dissolution of their union and their sudden fame as tabloid figures.
All that stuff ruined Jon & Kate Plus Eight. Some old-faithful viewers dropped out in disgust. But I and many, many people who were charmed by the initial seasons couldn’t help but see it through to the end. Think of it like, oh, like being a fan of Heroes — there’s a chunk of its audience that’s hanging in there, because those viewers feel they’ve put in the time and want to see how it ends.
Well, this week, we saw how Jon & Kate Plus Eight ends. Parents in separate places, justifying their behavior, when they should be worried about just one thing:
Whether or not they’re going to hurt the kids — hurt those “little birds.”
Please feel free to comment on the finale, or offer your general feelings about Jon & Kate Plus Eight. Thanks.
I admire the way my colleague Michael Slezak has analyzed the shortcomings of Adam Lambert’s AMA performance. He writes like a first-rate music critic, breaking down the ways in which Lambert’s vocals, the show’s sound system, the song itself, and the over-the-top performance failed, from Michael’s point of view as an expert of the American Idol aesthetic.
I have to say, however, that as a TV viewer, I thought Lambert’s performance was a gas, a delight, a blast of brash vulgarity in the midst of merely ordinary vulgarity.
Lambert was an event unto himself. The song he was singing was beside the point — and the point was, “Here I am, Adam Lambert, freed from the shackles of American Idol, I’ll push this dancer’s face into my crotch if I feel like it, isn’t it funny to lead human beings around on leashes, and can you believe how high I got my hair to stand up under these lights?”
As a post-music pop star in the manner of Lady Gaga, music takes a back seat to spectacle. Lambert’s AMA climax wasn’t a commercial for his new album; it was, in the Norman Mailer phrase, an “advertisement for myself.” As he did on Idol, Lambert simultaneously connects himself to pop history (his look, demeanor, and his multiple vocal styles gather together Elvis, Elton, Labelle, Pin-Ups David Bowie, with a dash of Lou Reed circa Transformer and Rock N Roll Animal) and disconnects himself from any earlier tradition.
A day after the AMA broadcast, he’s all anyone wants to talk about, and his was the only performance worth considering in multiple ways. Conventional measures of “good” and “bad” went out the window for a few moments. Flouting convention: how rock & roll. Using TV instead of music as a way for a singer to maintain prominence: how pure pop.
Nice job, Lambert.
UPDATE: Barbara Walters and Elisabeth Hasselbeck just slammed Lambert on this morning’s The View (Elisabeth: “there was a sexual aggression there”). I repeat: Nice job, Lambert.
