July 2004 Archives

I both understand and am puzzled by the surge in attention the national media is paying to plastic surgery. It does seem to be all over the TV.

I enjoyed "Shrek 2" immensely but I was flabbergasted by the ending (which I'm about to give away). Shrek and Fiona are a married pair of ogres: Smelly, ugly, unpleasant creatures with, you can be sure, hearts of gold. By magic they've been transformed, though, into what we are to take as incredibly gorgeous humans. All they need to do to make it permanent -- fairy-tale style -- is to kiss before midnight. Fiona waits until one moment after midnight to kiss Shrek, thus leaving them to live out their lives as hideous green outcasts from human society. We're supposed to think of this as the happy ending.

I didn't. I have to say, I identify strongly with Shrek and Fiona. After all, I'm a smelly, ugly, unpleasant creature, and my wife... well, she's... she's a lovely woman, my wife, but....

Anyway, I identify strongly with Shrek and Fiona. But it seems to me if someone were able to magically make me and my wife into fantastically beautiful people, I'd run with it. I mean, what's the downside? I still get to spend my life with the woman I love, plus we get a huge vista of previously impossible to achieve sexual positions, and I can go to the beach and kick sand in the faces of fat, ugly people. Also, I could shop in normal human stores instead of having to order everything through a catalog. ("If you care so little about your appearance that you weigh 300 pounds, you don't need to try clothes on.") Sounds great to me!

That's what makes the idea of plastic surgery so intriguing. If I could, I would. Except, modern as it is, plastic surgery is still so gruesomely primitive. So I understand the obsession with plastic surgery because it's interesting to see people who want to transform themselves, and it probably makes a lot of people feel superior to see how shallow other people can be. On the other side, I'm puzzled because it's just so damned nasty, and the results are never really as good as you'd like.

I'll wait for the magic wand.

The other night I had a free moment to watch TV. Nothing was waiting on TiVo, nothing was on. It was one of those nights. I rummaged through the program guide in search of something and found Plastic Surgery: Before & After: "Extreme Fix" on the Discovery Health Channel.

Now, I’m an avid Nip/Tuck viewer and I’ve seen my share of TV shows on operations, so I feel I could perform some of these procedures myself. Plastic Surgery didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about the actual surgical process, and in fact was a lot less gory than your average Dr. Troy mutilation job. But I did learn a few things from this program.

Our first case was an older gentleman who felt young inside and wanted his outside to match. Therefore he went in for a facelift. We got to see him before and after (hence the show’s second subtitle), and I hope, in addition to feeling young inside, he also feels puffy and immobile, because that’s how he looks on the outside now.

Next up was a woman with enormous breasts looking for breast reduction surgery. Perhaps you, like me, in the past have scoffed at such surgery, thinking it unnecessary. Maybe you saw Christina Ricci after her reduction and thought, man, what a waste of two perfectly good knockers, all so some bimbo can be taken seriously as an actress (she went on to seriously star opposite Jason Biggs. You can see how well that worked out).

Well, scoff no more. This poor woman had 38II breasts. I have to say, the whole idea of cup size, beyond a certain point, gets pretty ridiculous. It’s like the Xes on the cover of a porno DVD — the more the merrier! Once you get past a D cup, I think bra manufacturers just lactate all over themselves thinking up new letters. Triple E! Quadruple T! Seven Zs and the Greek letter theta! In all seriousness, is there some standard measurement to differentiate between a FF and a FFF? I don’t think so.

This poor woman had 38II breasts, and to give you an idea of the size of these, I can say you’d need two hands to lift them. Off the floor. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering the dark recesses of the Internet and I’ve never seen anything like these breasts. If surgery could help her, then surgery it is. That or a facelift, a domain name, a cable modem, and a digital camcorder. Make that a T1 line.

The surgery reduced her down to an E cup — “Still big!” the doctor helpfully assured the anxious husband — and made her very happy. Hooray for everyone, except the Web, which is sad now.

The next person on the dissecting table was a woman who had sustained a back injury. Her surgery and recovery left her unable to move for months, during which time she gained some weight. After being able to move again, she became depressed, and continued to gain weight. Soon, she had doubled her mass. She started out as a bikini contest winner and blimped up to 250 pounds.

At this point, she said on the show, she became embarrassed to leave the house. She was so mortified by how fat she was, she wanted to die. She simply couldn’t live her life any more in such a condition.

I find this somewhat insulting. I am writing this as a six-foot-tall male weighing 314 pounds. I have never been embarrassed to leave the house. Many times I don’t want to go out because I can’t stand all the fit, air-headed bleach blondes who can’t figure out how to work stop lights, stop signs, ATMs, cash registers, walk/don’t walk signs, sidewalks, credit cards, automatic doors, shopping carts, and other accouterments of modern life. But simply being fat has never kept me in the house. Is this woman really that pea-brained?

Why, yes. Let’s go on.

After deciding she could no longer live like, well, 75 percent of America, only with her own in-ground pool, she had a doctor put her on a strict diet and exercise regimen, and soon enough she was back down to her original weight and feelin’ good. Just one small problem.

This is a fairly attractive woman. (Although the more she speaks the less attractive she gets.) She’s fit and trim and healthy again. She’s no longer depressed. What’s bothering her now? Could it be she needs a lesson in proper use of eyeliner? Well, yes, but she doesn’t know that. No: It seems her skin didn’t bounce back all the way. She’s got some extra. It’s a little saggy. Her body is thinking, hey, I spent all this time building a whole bunch of extra skin to cover those big ol’ fat deposits, why waste it?

So what she wants is a lower bodylift. This is a lot like a facelift, except instead of your cheeks becoming your eyebrows, your ass becomes your shoulders. Also, she wants new boobs. Might as well get new boobs while you’re at it.

She gushed on camera about how wonderfully supportive her fiancee was being, too. What a great guy! Not that I saw him getting his gut removed or his hair regrown. But, wow, what a wonderful man, to be so supportive of his wife getting her baggy ass fixed and some new hooters. I can hear the conversation. “Well, honey, if that’s what you need to help your self-esteem, then I’m all for it. Also, if you want to bring one of your girlfriends over for us to have a threesome, shucks, if that’s what it takes to make you feel better about yourself, then, by all means, I’ll make the sacrifice. And, darlin’, if the two of you were to get up the next morning and make me breakfast in bed, gee, if it’ll help you be a stronger person, then I’m with you all the way.”

She gets the surgery and now she can wear that thong she always wanted. Everyone’s happy except me, because I’m still fat and I don’t have a pool.

Our next chick is even more vacant than the last. This one has been emotionally scarred because — are you ready for this? — she has a flat ass. All her life people made fun of her because of her lack of ass. She won’t even take her shorts off at the pool without sitting down first because she’s so ashamed of her ass.

I’ve got something to report. As the show’s second subtitle implies, we got to see her ass before and after. And before, she had a great ass. You’d kill for that ass. I’d kill for that ass. My wife would probably wipe out a small village for that ass. This girl was petite, yes. Very slim. Very pretty. Very, like, you know, not the sharpest spoon in the sink. But definitely very attractive.

But this beautiful girl, who would probably knock an entire science fiction convention unconscious just by showing up; this girl who could probably make a living as a self-obsessed camwhore; this girl who was easily prettier than 99 percent of the people I see every day, this girl was humiliated all her life for her misshapen booty. And she wasn’t going to take it lying down any more!

In fact, she was going to take it standing up, because butt implant surgery leaves you unable to sit down for three whole weeks. That’s right: Despite being attractive in every way imaginable — expect, perhaps, in the brains department (not to mention in the accurate perception of reality department) — she was going to undergo surgery so painful she would be unable to sit down for almost an entire month. How do you go to sleep when you can’t sit down? Do you just walk up to the edge of your bed and fall over on your face? How do you ride in a car? Do you have to sit on your head like Mork from Ork? How do you put your seat belt on? And — I just thought of this — how do you take a dump?

Nevertheless, she went through with the surgery, getting solid silicone lumps stuffed under her gluteus maximus, so we could watch her bring drinks to her shallow, shiftless, worthless friends and they could all, after torturing her her whole life, now approve of her ass.

It was tough watching this whole show, and yet somehow uplifting, seeing these people whose lives were turned around by the miracle of modern medicine. It made me feel… it made me feel… honestly, it made me feel good about being fat and ugly and staying that way. Because here’s what I learned:

• If you are fat and lose lots of weight, you will need plastic surgery.
• If you are thin, you will obsess over some microscopic flaw, and you will need plastic surgery.
• Even if you are thin and attractive and can avoid obsessing over some microscopic flaw, you will get old, and you will need plastic surgery.

I think I’m much happier staying fat and ugly. That way I’ll just be fat and ugly until I’m old and fat and ugly, and then I’ll be dead. It’s a lot easier.

FX's new firefighter series Rescue Me is more dramatic than you might expect from Denis Leary (The Job) and Peter Tolan (Larry Sanders). But as you would expect, it mixes that drama with quirky characters and some pretty funny stuff.

Leary's character is probably more screwed up than the one he played on The Job, but in switching from NYPD to FDNY he's also shifted into a profession haunted by 9/11. And Rescue Me doesn't hide from it. In fact, 9/11 is a major force in Rescue Me, as Leary is haunted by four firefighters from his unit (including his best friend) who were killed at Ground Zero.

But they don't haunt him in a scary way. Instead, he holds amusing conversations with them while lamenting their deaths. Meanwhile, he's fallen off the wagon and is in deep denial about the death of his marriage. And yet, while all these things are serious as a heart attack, we can't help but laugh to keep from crying.

Does Rescue Me cover dark topics? Sure it does. But it mixes that darkness with some real laughs, quirky characters, and genuine emotion. It's the find of the summer TV season.

Dear Scrubs,

I want to keep on loving you, but you're making it damn hard these days. I could almost live with the way you put Elliott and her hair in a blender and hit 'chop' last September, because I figured her coif was symbolic of the way you were systematically butchering her character. And the Elliott/J.D. nonsense only made me roll my eyes and blurt, "God! Is it over yet?" a little. I realize that unresolved sexual tension is fountain of youth for comedy plot lines -- twenty years of Friends and a full half-century of Frasier can't be wrong -- so you keep flogging that plot in the desperate hopes of keeping the show alive through another season. I forgive you that.

But baby, I'm getting tired of the blondes. I figured you stuck Tara Reid in that show because it was your cute, funny way of working out your insecurities, like when I put on a skirt, walk into the living room, and carol at the husband, "Hi, there! It's your worst nightmare! Tell me if this skirt makes me look fat? Please?"

And I then figured you were, you know, just going through a moody period when you insisted on shoving Bellamy Young (AKA "Dr. Grace Miller") down our throats. Because, really, that's the only explanation for Diet Jordan. Dr. Miller added nothing to the cast, she had the screen presence of a used surgical sponge, and time slowed perceptibly whenever she opened her mouth. Again -- I'm totally sympathetic to your desire to stay young and on the air, but bringing in characters who slow time for the rest of us only prolongs the suffering. And what's the point of having more life if it's only going to be miserable? I believe there's even a Queen song to that effect. Perhaps you can use it the next time you dump Dr. Miller on our screen. There's no place for her, there's no time for her.

But now I read that you're bringing Heather Graham on the series for an eight episode run. And baby, I'm sorry, but I can't let my TiVo go out with you anymore. I've got to draw a line. Thanks to the decency crackdown, we're not likely to see Dr. Rollergirl, and Graham has little else to recommend her. The one contribution she's made to comedy is to make Liz Hurley look like a screwball comedienne by comparison, and that perception got us Bedazzled and Serving Sara. Frankly, I'm baffled as to how the woman responsible for that could possibly be good for your show.

So it's over. For now. If I see you socially, I'll be cordial, but baby, we can't even be friends right now.

Come crawling back after you've come to your senses.

It’s rare that I get angry at television shows. I mean, there are things I like and I don’t like, obviously, but most of the time, I recognize that television is a meant to be a diversion, and a rather harmless one at that, so I have my rage for more important things like the Bush administration and the A’s bullpen.

But the Coupling finale — that left me quaking with rage. And it took me a while to be able to articulate why — actually, I’m not sure if I can put it coherently, but I’ll take a stab at it.

I think that by any objective measure, Jeff Murdock is probably the most fully-realized character created for television in the past five years. I’d be willing to entertain arguments that he’s one of the top 10 characters of all time. Certainly, he’s in the top 20, and there’s no real competition among shows of recent vintage.

That probably seems obvious, but it really isn’t. The awkward, horny guy is a staple of TV comedy, and on most shows, it’s a role handled with deadening incompetence. As brilliant a character as Jeff may have been, you make the performance a little more broad and the scripts a little less sharp, and what you’re left with is Screech from Saved by the Bell.

Certainly, Richard Coyle should get a share of the credit for walking that fine line between genius and stupid — hell, we gave him a fake award last year because of it. But Steven Moffat also deserves his share of the credit. He put the words in Jeff’s mouth. He formed Jeff’s particular idiosyncrasies. He created the character.

So I guess I don’t understand why he would treat a character he took great care to create with such contempt.

Because that’s what he did with "Jeffina," a bizarrely chosen dream-sequence version of Jeff trapped in the body of a pregnant (but still Welsh) schoolmarm. He took a fully realized, endearing character and turned him into a toothless punchline. Jeff’s uniqueness, his endearing insecurities, his unique percspective — everything that made him an fun to watch, in other words — got stripped away, leaving us with the run-of-the-mill awkward, horny sitcom guy. Only this time, he comes with his own breasts.

Har de fucking har.

Richard Coyle apparently did not leave Coupling on good terms, not offering to make an appearance to write his character out or even explaining why he refused to return to the show. And really, I can conceive of no other explanation outside of pure spite for why Moffat would turn one of his own brilliantly constructed characters into an overly self-aware ain’t-I-being-clever narrative device. I can't think of a better way to take a parting shot at an actor, than by turning the character he’s most closely associated with into a joke. The trouble is that by taking such pains to belittle Coyle’s contributions to Coupling, Moffat only underscored how badly the show missed Jeff this season.

It probably didn’t help that the actress they had play Jeff’s doppelganger was — in my estimation, at least — screamingly awful. She had no since of timing, no spark of invention — she sounded like a bad stand-up comic churning out a barely recognizable imitation. In the end, she only succeeded at making a bad joke worse.

There were a lot of things to dislike about the last episode. Spending time on the Oliver-Jane and Patrick-Sally storylines killed the pacing. Someone needs to explain to the horrible man playing Oliver that shouting his lines doesn’t make them any funnier. And perhaps if I ever become a father myself, I’ll find the overwrought blather about the transformative power of fatherhood spewed by Steve at episode’s end to be heartwarming and moving. But probably only if, during the delivery, someone hits me at the base of the skull with a bat, turning me into a drooling vegetable. And even then, I’d probably still find the speech a little schlocky.

But all that is forgivable. What isn’t is the stupefying disrespect with which I feel Moffat treated his own creation. That’s his right as creator of the character in question, I suppose. Just like it’s my right as an audience member to wonder why I bothered caring in the first place, since he made it clear to me that he doesn’t.

(Editor's Note: "Coupling" creator and writer Steven Moffat vociferously disagrees with this article, and wrote us to say so. It is Mr. Moffat's stated opinion that he was not acting spitefully toward Richard Coyle or anyone else when he wrote the scene featuring "Jeffina":

This the kind of rubbish that ends up being accepted as true and getting back to the people concerned. And since I have no desire to hurt Richard's feeling... I would be grateful, if you would append to the review a statement that the above reflects your own views and not mine, of which you have no knowledge.

Fair enough. Philip Michaels and TeeVee won't retract the opinions or interpretations of the meaning of Mr. Moffat's work in the piece. But we're happy to make his dissenting opinion clear in this space.)

We've reached the Television Commercial That Currently Enrages Phil Beyond All Levels of Rational Discourse portion of the program. Today's lucky winner -- the McDonald's spot that advertises the fast food chain's new "open-'til-midnight-and-even-later-for-you-urbanites" policy. (Because nothing chases away those night terrors like a hearty helping of McNuggets!)

In the ad, a cadre of hipster doofuses are playing their rock music just a wee bit loud for the post-Witching Hour timeslot, and their neighbor, Ol' Man Grumpus, is shown pounding on their door. As the peppy jingle sings about it being a good time to take a break from all that rocking -- I guess "taking break" is a polite and succinct way of saying "time to flee from the neighbor we've wronged" -- the kids drive to the local McDonald's (Now open late! The perfect antidote for when those drug-fueled munchies hit!) and pick themselves up some sandwiches. The advertisement ends with the young people knocking at Ol' Man Grumpus's door -- they bought him a sandwich, too! And so grateful is he for this Quarter-Pounder peace offering that he joins them as they resume their late-night rockin'-out session.

This commercial hits rather close to home for me, as I currently live in an apartment building inhabited by a good many college students, who -- near as I can tell -- all happen to be slobs and louts and half-wits. They park their cars in other people's parking spaces. They leave their trash in common areas. And they play their music really, really loud at all hours of the night.

In fact, as I write this -- at a quarter of 2, Pacific Daylight Time, on Monday morning -- the upstairs neighbors are playing some sort of tune that's popular with the kids these days at a volume loud enough to drown out jet engines. And on a school night! I am about to make the long trek upstairs to ask them politely, calmly, even sweetly to turn that crap down. And let me just add, that if they show up at my door half-an-hour later holding a bag of McDonald's food, I will not be so touched by their selfless gesture that I will encourage them -- nay, beg them -- to crank their stereo up to 11. Instead -- and I realize that most courts will consider this premediation and sentence me accordingly -- I will murder them.

Oh, I'll eat the Quarter-Pounder. But only after the killing is done.

Forget the Cola Wars. Today's hot battleground is beer, as this fascinating Time magazine article makes clear.

I'm no advertising expert, but if you ask me, Anheuser-Busch's latest set of ads -- direct rebuttals to Miller's "President of Beers" and "Lower Carbs" ad campaigns -- are pretty stupid, especially for a company with such a commanding market lead. Don't they know that by directing their money and energy at refuting their competitor's ads, they're only drawing viewers' attention to those ads and making their competitor seem that much more legitimate?

It smells of desperation to me. At least that's better than Budweiser itself, which smells like cat pee to me.

Is it wrong for me to be pulling for the little person to get kicked off the show? Is it wrong for me to wish harm on the "committed Christians"-slash-models? Is it wrong for me to mock the ugly Americans who think that "thank you" in Spanish is pronounced Grazi, Italian style? Is it wrong for me to love the bizarre not-quite-right accent of Phil Keoghan?

If loving The Amazing Race is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

As the fourth (and presumably final) season of Coupling unspools on BBC America, I've gotten to thinking about another way the U.S. TV networks should follow the lead of their UK counterparts. I've already suggested having the guts to just pick up and run UK shows, at least in the summer.

Recently news reached these shores that the BBC is, after 15 years, reviving Doctor Who. The fact that it took them 15 years to figure out that modern special-effects techniques and the resurgent popularity of science fiction TV shows make their cancelled TV series a sleeping giant just points out how sleepy the BBC is, but at least they finally did figure it out.

The revival of Doctor Who got me thinking about just how fluid the British conception of continuity in their series really are. Take Absolutely Fabulous, a show whose seasons were broadcast in 1992, 1994, 1995, 2001, and 2003. Or Red Dwarf, which had a three-plus year break between its sixth and seventh seasons. I'm sure there are even better examples.

In any event, I have to ask: why must our U.S. TV series be produced in continuous blocks? Only on HBO do you see some divergence from this apparent law of television -- namely the somewhat longer delays between seasons of The Sopranos.

Sure, there are issues with reviving live-action TV shows years later. You'd have to reunite the cast (pricey if it was a big hit -- but if it was a big hit, wouldn't a revival mean big money?), rebuild the sets, and the like. But I have faith that the brilliant minds of our television industry could put it all together.

Sure, reviving any given show would be a longshot, not just financially but creatively. But what if, for example, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld decided they've got enough to say to generate nine more half-hours of Seinfeld? Wouldn't it be fun if every three or four years we saw another half-dozen really funny episodes of Cheers? Or pick your favorite old, cancelled TV show.

In fact, the more tired and wheezing the show was at its end, the better. After a few years off the air, wouldn't there be an opportunity to mine new ground creatively? Wouldn't the noticeable aging of our favorite characters provide an opportunity for a refreshing burst of change to an old premise?

The revival circuit is more likely for animation, if only because the age of the contenders isn't a factor. Family Guy is coming back on the strength of its DVD sales. I am certainly not alone in arguing that a revival of Futurama would be good for Cartoon Network and for viewers the world over. And note the clever twist coming out of Joss Whedon's camp, where they're preparing an animated version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that will provide the show's writers with a much broader canvas for wild special effects while also freeing them to return to the show's seminal high school years.

As the BBC's new Doctor Who points out, the other area ripe for revival is re-boots of solid premises that are just too good to throw away. Why should Fox continue to try and re-create that Friday night sci-fi magic when they could just go back to the date that brung 'em, The X-Files? Yes, that show collapsed under its own ridiculous mythology long before it went off the air. But given several years' airing out and a fresh new cast, wouldn't a New X-Files series be more intriguing than a second season of Tru Calling or another succession of failed pilots?

I'm not saying all of these revivals would work. Some of 'em would probably collapse and die on the drawing board, and others might end up stinking if actually put before a camera. But in an era when the movie studios are mining the weirdest collection of TV trivia for inspiration, why shouldn't the networks take advantage of their old successes? Not in lousy TV reunion movies -- nobody wants to see that. Bring the good shows back in the form they succeeded at in the first place, the TV series. I don't care if you order 20 episodes, 12, or six. Take a chance on bringing back the good stuff.

By which I mean, if you're planning on bringing back Urkel, forget everything I just wrote.