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.
There were three distinct elements of the Seinfeld reunion arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm. I guess you want a SPOILER ALERT for some of the plot details below.
• There were the scenes showing us how the cast got back together again via the Curb universe (it was Curb-Larry’s ploy to get back together with wife Cheryl by writing a role for her).
• There was the episode-within-the-episode we saw on last night’s finale.
• And there was the more-Curb-than-Seinfeld subplot: typical Curb stuff that involved Larry insulting a coffee-stand owner (Mocha Joe, played by the reliably sparky Saverio Guerra); Larry suspecting Jason Alexander of having an affair with Cheryl, and a mildly funny repetition-gag about a drink stain on a wood table (“Do you respect wood?”). (Read full post)
It seemed as though Saturday Night Live was determined to up the energy-quotient this week, perhaps under the impression that if everyone looked as though he or she was working really hard, we might not notice that the work wasn’t all that amusing.
In his opening moments, host Joseph Gordon-Levitt tried to reproduce the “Make ‘Em Laugh” scene from the musical Singin’ in the Rain. Can’t fault J G-L for not having a great singing voice, and he applied some heroic effort to do Donald O’Connor’s walking-up-walls choreography. Gordon-Levitt pulled it off, although in the process making what O’Connor did with deceptive ease look like huffing, puffing hard work.
Don’t tell me: you thought it was great, right? Let’s agree to disagree. Gordon-Levitt’s exertion was what wrung applause from the SNL audience, which is the exact opposite of what movie audiences admired about O’Connor: The idea is to make climbing walls and doing back-flips look effortless. I give G-L an “A” for effort, but instead of making a snide joke about how Singin’ In The Rain is a movie “your grandmother” watches, SNL’s writers should have tried to understand the source-material first.
The “Digital Short” featured Samberg as a hiphop artist collaborating with Reba McEntire — or rather, Kenan Thompson playing a guy who’d found a red wig and had supposedly fooled Samberg into thinking he was Reba. All set to music. If only this convoluted notion had resulted in some sort of funniness about hiphop or country music or something. It was well-shot and choreographed, but again: lots of effort, few moments of mirth.
There was a “What Up With That” sketch, which you may recall from a few weeks ago, starring Kenan Thompson as a singing talk-show host who never lets his guests speak much, if at all. In this new one, Al Gore and The Office’s Mindy Kaling were among the nonplussed guests. Thompson sang and danced up a storm, to much boisterousness and little effect.
“Weekend Update” had quite a few funny jokes, and Al Gore returned with an admirable poker-face to poke fun at his own usual “renewable energy” spiel:
Musical guest the Dave Matthews Band sounded just like the Dave Matthews Band always does. Matthews also did a good Ozzy Osbourne impersonation in a sketch.
And in a shocking breach of tradition, it was the final sketch of the night that was the best one all evening: Gordon-Levitt spoofing Say Anything. Jason Sudeikis was superb as a guy needling J G-L’s John Cusack.
So what’d you think? There’s no denying Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the most energetic host in a while, but did you actually laugh more than I did? Please sound off below.
Jimmy Kimmel Live hosted a scream-filled appearance by Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner last night that proved to be lots of fun even if you’re not a Twilight loyalist. (I refuse to use the term “Twihard” after Jimmy said last night that that was the “worst group name–it’s right up there with ‘Claymates.’”)
As the audience yipped and yelped, Kimmel noted Launter’s pumped-up physique in the movie — he asked the actor if he’d been hit by “gamma rays.” (Kimmel referred to the movie as Vampire Chippendales.) Lautner said the most difficult aspect of his training regime was “putting something in my mouth every two hours.” Tee-hee! Screams! He hastily added that he meant “beef patties,” which really didn’t help the accidental-naughty-factor very much…
Kimmel and his guests, brave souls, allowed the studio audience to ask questions. When one fan, Troy, asked Stewart whether she’d had a swine-flu shot, she said that in fact, she’d just had one the day before, and added, “I’m genuinely freaked out by you right now” for asking such a perfectly-timed question:
Kimmel asked Lautner whether, when he and Taylor Swift are “making out, does Kanye West ever come in and interrupt?”
Jimmy can be forgiven an easy Kanye joke after conducting such an amusing interview.
With tears in her eyes, Oprah Winfrey said on her Friday “live from Chicago” Oprah show that she will cancel her talk show as of Sept. 9, 2011. Pegging her show’s exit to its 25th anniversary, Winfrey said it “feels right in my bones and it feels right in my spirit.” Her voice breaking, she said haltingly that she valued “the yellow brick road of blessings” her show has brought her. She promised to “knock your socks off” with the “18-month ride.” The audience gave her a standing ovation.
Winfrey waited until we’d watched a grim, wrenching segment on a raped and murdered child, plus interviews with Gabourey Sidibe (the star of Precious, a movie to which Winfrey signed on as a co-producer) and with Ray Romano to make her announcement.
Frankly, during the opening segment, I hit the “mute” button as soon as I heard the phrases “sold into sex slavery” and “cigarette burns on her body.” I just don’t have the stomach for this kind of story, and frankly, was surprised that Winfrey still does segments like this.
But Oprah has done a lot of good that far outweighs the questionable stuff on Oprah. Thus, her announcement had the feeling of an American queen stepping down from her throne, or an unelected president resigning from office. And it’s not as though she’s going to disappear any time soon, which only adds to the pop-culture interest here. Unlike the few major broadcast entertainment figures comparable to her, from Arthur Godfrey to Johnny Carson, Winfrey’s decision to make this a long goodbye will yield a new model for how a beloved celebrity leaves the public stage ( …if only until she starts up her next TV project).
Even when she decides to end something, Oprah does it in a uniquely big way.
Did you watch? What do you think of Oprah ending Oprah?
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