September 2004 Archives

Extreme makeover shows kind of gross us out. Any time there’s the potential to look at someone on the screen and use the words “swollen,” “seeping” or “livid” to describe them, we’re switching over to the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet. At least there, most of the vertebrates featured on-screen aren’t volunteering for whatever mauling they’re about to receive. That’s inherently more dignified.

So The Swan had that going against it from the first episode. Its second strike was its home network: Fox. This is not the network you turn to when you want a classy aesthetic attached to your reality TV. The show was crippled by its DNA, born of the unholy union between a network that confuses opera-level culture with regional dinner theatre and calls sparkly the new “tasteful” and cosmetic surgeons that call immobile the new “youthful.”

But the show’s third strike was what caused us to revolt en masse and declare it the worst show of the season.

That strike was not the premise itself: we don’t find the idea of a post-op beauty pageant all that offensive, because beauty is already unfairly and inherently competitive. It comes down to good bones, time and money, and none of those are ever distributed equally among the lumpen masses. Rare is the person who doesn’t apply the protestant work ethic to personal appearance, internalizing and paraphrasing cosmetic tycoon Helena Rubenstein’s quote, “There are no ugly [people], only lazy ones,” and passing judgment accordingly. So why would we look down on people who are openly fishing for pulchritudinal intervention instead of stubbornly maintain the ruse of natural good looks? And why would we look down on anyone who’s participating in a publicly-broadcast version of the furtive comparisons we all make?

(Well, we’d do it because we think of nearly everyone on any Fox realty show as a born sucker just asking for our derision. That’s a wholly different principle than the one we’re not objecting to.)

Nor do we object to the idea of pathologically self-loathing women mutilating themselves in a desperate effort to gain self-realization through external approval. Frankly, it doesn’t seem that different from pathologically self-centered attention junkies starving on an island or eating bugs if that’s what it takes to get on television. There is an audience for anything on television, and an executive recognizing this isn’t inherently evil.

We’re not particularly galled by the stripperesque aesthetic Fox thinks is “beauty,” because like we’ve said before, this show’s on a network that couldn’t recognize good taste if it was writhing in its lap wearing twirly pasties and a capped-teeth smile.

Nor do we object to the hilariously hypocritical concession that maybe the self-hating swans didn’t need huge saltwater breasts so much as they needed a firm sense of self-esteem derived from something other than their looks. Each episode’s brazen, brief attempt to pretend anyone cared about the Swan’s mental health was usually delivered via “lifestyle coaching” from a woman who made Jennifer Coolidge’s A Mighty Wind impresario look like a model of clarity and coherence. Nely Galan’s hilariously irrelevant and useless monologues on internal transformation set a comedy benchmark most of the contestants on Last Comic Standing wish they could hit, so we can’t find flaw with any excuse to bring her on for a quick babble.

What really irked us, what really got our goat, was that The Swan completely missed the boat on good television. At this point, makeover reality TV is boring, tired old genre. Transformation is not interesting TV anymore, especially when it’s someone else doing all the transforming of the titular heroine. Half of America’s been accosted by teams of self-styled experts who will clean or redecorate your house, force you to lose weight and exercise, cut your hair, toss your wardrobe, or stage an intervention if some nosy nellie in your life has a problem with you.

If The Swan had wanted to be good, riveting, train-wreck reality TV, what they should have done was shifted the show’s narrative from the operation-and-recovery process — which is boring and played, what with Extreme Makeover and TLC’s A Personal Story plowing that field — to the post-reveal. It’s easy to look like an anesthetized call girl when you’re living in a Fox-sponsored bubble, but the real fun and games probably began once all the Swans went home and tried to maintain the manicures, hair extensions and 1200-calorie-a-day regimens in the conditions that probably contributed to their lumpy, downtrodden, pre-transformation state. Let’s watch the Swans handle husbands who still ignore them — or better, let’s watch the Swans figure out how to handle spouses who suddenly can’t get enough of them. Let’s see how job-hunting goes. Let’s see how long the beauty project lasts in lives that include housework, jobs, parenting and — one hopes — community work, hobbies and socializing with friends. Let’s actually get a show with a narrative structure that lets us see the Swans over several weeks, so we can get to know them and begin rooting for or against them.

Corollary to this: the so-called competition on The Swan really wasn’t. The good competitive reality-TV shows work because they ultimately force the subjects to display a mix of personal traits and strategic thinking, and because there’s actually something at stake. The Swans weren’t called upon to do the former, and the latter was a patent lie: each Swan had already been the beneficiary of several thousand dollars’ worth of surgery and personal training, so they were already winning everything they wanted. The pageant prize was merely icing on the cake. If The Swan producers wanted a decent competition, a beauty pageant wasn’t the way to go — at least, not a pageant immediately after transformation. But try back in six months and see how the Swans held up — there’s a much more interesting pageant, and one that forces the Swans into the conditions that let us separate the real competitors from members of the plumb lucky club.

Instead of putting on an original show, Fox defaulted to a model where the Swans were merely passive pawns in a wholly uncompelling narrative and an artificial competition where the stakes were negligible. Plus all the surgery close-ups were kind of ooky. And for having such splendid potential, then squandering it in a series devoid of narrative tension or any entertainment value whatsoever, they were the worst show on TV.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

It’s not easy picking out a Worst Host. Oh, it’s easy to find a bad one — they litter the airwaves like so many reality show contestants. But how do you pick the absolute worst?

The first thing to do is to weed out the people who host uninteresting shows, because if we don’t watch your program, we’re unlikely to develop a deep and abiding hatred for you. It’s possible, mind you, but in general, if you’re tucked away on a triple-digit cable channel, you’re probably safe. This is why former VJ Kennedy’s name didn’t show up, even though we hear she’s hosting a show on the Game Show Network that’s based around the Prisoners’ Dilemma. You have to at least make it onto our radar.

It also helps if we have reason to think you could be doing better. The full name of the award is The George Gray Award for Worst Host, because when Gray replaced the brilliant Robert Llewellyn as host of TLC’s Junkyard Wars, he heralded the show’s slide from essential to unwatchable. Last we heard, Gray was hosting the syndicated version of The Weakest Link but he didn’t win his own award. Why? Because we already knew we didn’t like him, so we weren’t surprised. Besides which, see point one: you’d have to be pretty bad indeed to be the worst part of the phrase “daytime syndicated version of The Weakest Link”. (Gray is now hosting the latest loss of dignity from ESPN, I’ll Do Anything — which could really be the title of every reality show, couldn’t it?)

Third, even if you meet all the above criteria, you still have to really impress us somehow. There are many, many candidates we can pick from, so we prefer someone who really goes the extra mile to demonstrate just how bad a host they can be.

One candidate who got a lot of support from our panel of experts was Ryan Seacrest. This was a little surprising, because it’s not like Seacrest is new; he’s been annoying American Idol fans for years now. And when you think about what American Idol fans are capable of enjoying, that’s no small feat. But this was the year that Seacrest decided to push his limits: not only did he start (and stop!) hosting a second show (called “Ryan Seacrest Sucks Up to Celebrities” or something like that), he introduced a catch-phrase: “Seacrest, out.”

It is unclear what he hoped to achieve by this. He had been going along doing a fairly inoffensive job, depending on whether you felt he was being mean to your favorite Idol candidate. His main job was rattling off the instructions for text-messaging your vote, and he seemed competent at it. He’d even won his own mini-reality show when Brian Dunkelman got fired, leaving Ryan as the only surviving American Idol host. And then he decided to start calling attention to himself with “Seacrest, Out.” This, of course, was a mistake.

But on reflection, Seacrest, as obnoxious as he is, was not the worst host of 2004. That honor goes to the inimitable Joe Rogan.

Rogan continued his run of hosting Fear Factor as though we were half personal trainer and half really annoying personal trainer, encouraging people to eat bugs and pick locks underwater. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this, I guess, as long as you’re already resigned to the collapse of Western Civilization. Anyway, we’d become used to it. But last year, Joe Rogan took over as host of Comedy [sic] Central’s The Man Show. As you might remember, Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla took off for Hollywood (where Kimmel tried his best to win this very award), leaving the show to Rogan and Doug Stanhope, of whom I had never heard.

And here’s the thing: the show got worse. It was just as misogynistic as before, had just as many poop and fart jokes as before, and involved just as much drinking as before. The only thing that changed was that Kimmel and Carolla were out, and Rogan and Stanhope were in. And in less than a year, the show went from “Gets good ratings for a basic cable show” to “Cancelled”. In other words, Joe Rogan could not fill the shoes of Jimmy Kimmel. How bad do you have to be in order to be an inadequate Jimmy Kimmel fill-in?

Bad enough to win the (George Gray!) award for Worst Host of 2004.

Now, you might ask why we expected anything different. The answer is that Joe Rogan used to be on a little show called NewsRadio. When it was on, we loved it. Heck, we still love it through the magic of A&E reruns, although now that we’ve seen all the episodes a million times, we have to admit we’re getting a little tired of it. And when Joe Rogan was on as the conspiracy-theorizing electrician “Joe,” he was funny. So forgive us if we thought he might be funny outside that context.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, have you noticed the general career trend of people from NewsRadio?

Dave Foley: Now hosting Celebrity Poker Showdown while getting really, really liquored up.

Maura Tierney: On ER and also showed up on Celebrity Poker Showdown, probably to show Foley what a working actor looks like.

Stephen Root: Still the voice of Bill on King of the Hill; his appearance in Dodgeball suggests that he might have been sucked into the Wilson/Stiller/Vaughn Comedy Vortex.

Vicki Lewis: Her last job was as a voice in Finding Nemo, and she apparently lives with Nick Nolte. Yikes!

Khandi Alexander: On CSI: Miami, which sounds like a good job until you realize the majority of her scenes are with David Caruso.

Andy Dick: Is still Andy Dick.

Phil Hartman: Well, you know.

Jon Lovitz: Hey, he was on Las Vegas this week, wasn’t he?

Our point is that a very funny ensemble has mostly been dispersed to the four winds, with the most successful people being the ones who fled to the world of drama. And, of course, Joe Rogan, who demonstrated an ability to stink up two shows at one time.

Congratulations, Joe!

Additional contributions to this article by: Monty Ashley.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter.

Maybe it’s a ballgame, where a batter facing a full count keeps fouling off pitches until the pitcher finally tosses one well outside of the strike zone. And that walk triggers a rally that pushes what turns out to be the deciding run across the plate. Or maybe it’s the point in preparing a meal where you’ve got to decide just how much seasoning to use on that salmon filet. Too much and you overwhelm the flavor of the fish, too little and you and your loved ones will be spending the evening dining on flavorless swill. But on this particular night, you settle on exactly the right amount, and the meal turns out to be one of the best you’ve had in a long time.

It probably didn’t feel like when the batter was spoiling pitch after pitch or you were trying to figure out just how big a pinch of Old Bay seasoning should be, but those seemingly innocuous things wound up playing a big part in the outcome of those events. And it’s like that in pretty much any form of human endeavor — ultimately, the success or failure of most any operation hinges on how well the little things are handled.

Sort of like what Tony Shalhoub does on every episode of Monk.

Pick any episode of the quirky cable TV series about a crime-fighting detective who just happens to suffer from the worst case of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the annals of medicine — we’ll go with “Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month” just because it’s fresh on the brain — and you’ll find Shalhoub carrying off some subtle business in the background of a scene that further fleshes out and humanizes his lead character. In the “Employee of the Month” episode, Monk investigates a murder at a Wal-Mart-esque mega-store. Poking around the crime scene, he inadvertently steps on some bubble-wrap, popping a few dots on the wrapping; without skipping a beat, Monks picks up the bubble-wrap and begins popping the rest — it all has to be the same, you see — while the scene around him continues.

It’s a funny detail — and one a lot of actors might not bother to even include. Then again, not a lot of actors are as talented as Shalhoub, who inhabits the character of Monk so thoroughly and so convincingly, that his performances come across as effortless and natural as… well… an obsessive-compulsive detective popping bubble-wrap at a crime scene.

The strength of Shalhoub’s performance is crucial to Monk’s success, especially after the novelty of the show has worn off. Monk runs the risk of becoming a one-note character — hey, what uncomfortable situation can we stick this guy in this week — unless you turn the role over to an actor who can add multiple layers to the basic concept. Under Shalhoub’s steady hand, Monk is a character, not a caricature. The depth he provides adds punch to the comic scenes (Monk on a TV game show! Monk forced to eat unappealing and possibly unsanitary appetizers!) and poignancy to the show’s more dramatic moments (Monk still mourning the death of his wife or longing to rejoin the police force).

That’s more important than ever since, as we mentioned when handing this award over to Shalhoub last year, writing is not Monk’s strong suit. Let’s just say that if you’re unable to figure out the whodunit portion of the show before the third commercial break, you had best table that dream of pursuing a career in criminal justice for another time. And the problem of transparent plotting has only gotten worse in more recent episodes.

Maybe that’s why Shalhoub scored a repeat win while facing some fairly tough competition. Anthony LaPaglia turned in a second straight solid season of appropriately understated work on Without a Trace. Vince Curatola — that’s Johnny Sack for those of you scoring at home — inherited the Big Bad Guy role on The Sopranos from Joe Pantoliano (decapitated by Tony Soprano on the show and neutered by the producers of The Handler in real life) and brought his own special brand of menace to the table. Victor Garber deserves whatever acting kudos we can offer for his performance on Alias, as does Jason Priestly for what he did on Tru Calling. (Yes — we are being serious. Without Priestly’s midseason arrival to liven things up, Tru Calling would have been as D.O.A. as the stiffs that out-act Eliza Dushku each week.) And we’d hate to overlook Ian McShane’s performance as cussin’ saloon-keeper Al Swearengen on the potty-mouthed Deadwood — mostly because he’d probably tell us to go fuck ourselves.

The difference is that all of these other actors — OK, not Priestly — receive some sort of back-up, whether it’s from other performers or great writing or a distinct aesthetic. There’s some decent supporting work on Monk — most notably, from Ted Levine, who will one day be able to appear on our TV screens without one of us wisenheimers sniggering about putting the lotion on our skin — but, by and large, Tony Shalhoub is flying solo.

Monk rises or falls as a series based on how Shalhoub performs. And this season, Monk rose because its lead actor continued to deliver the most complete performance on television, thanks in no small part to the attention he pays to the little things — and the big rewards that means for viewers.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

You may be familiar with the children’s book Bunnicula, in which it is discovered that a pet rabbit must suck the juices out of vegetables. For most, it’s a shaggy-bunny tale; for us, it created an indelible image of vegetables conscripted in an army of the undead.

This is relevant to this year’s Worst Actor award because David Caruso inevitably makes us think of vampiric carrots. It’s an unfair association, we know, but we can’t shake it. However, Caruso’s not getting this award because he causes us to conflate our Bram Stoker and Betty Crocker references — on purely aesthetic grounds, he’s no uglier than, say, Neal McDonough or James Van der Beek or the grown-up Fred Savage. He’s getting the award because it’s his acting that inspires vampire associations.

For those of you fortunate enough to find something else to do with your Monday nights — leading a life of quiet religious fulfillment or rambunctious, debauched emptiness, mastering such complicated technology as the “play” button on your TiVo, turning in early so you can milk Flossie and the other girls at 4 a.m. — here’s a quick explanation of what Caruso’s doing to earn our contempt. He’s playing the lead investigator on CSI: Miami, a preening, supercilious blowhard with a messiah complex that most religious cult leaders can only dream of cultivating.

In the abstract, we don’t object to Caruso’s Horatio Caine as a character. If every protagonist were a selfless moral exemplar, shows would be boring. Flawed protagonists are interesting protagonists, and if Caruso played Horatio as someone who is deluded, self-important and tolerable only because he’s useful around a corpse, he wouldn’t be getting this award. Instead, Caruso plays Horatio as God’s chosen detective, someone who read Lewis Carroll’s “‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’ said the cunning old Fury: ‘I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.’” and thought, “There’s my role model.” His Horatio is moral monomania accessorized with a number of creepy tics: hovering over other characters like a vulture who can’t decide whether or not he’s hungry; standing around looking as if he’s minutes away from using a laser death stare on whomever irritates him, and drawling in a bored and contemptuous tone. The whole package is off-putting — and weirdly out of kilter with the way the character’s written; read a CSI: Miami script, and Horatio comes off as someone who’s smart, self-aware and genuinely driven by his character flaws. Watch the same episode and you’re waiting for Horatio to take a shortcut to a crime scene by trotting across Biscayne Bay. Caruso gives the impression that he either can’t stand the character or can’t stand his job, and doing his best to share the pain with the rest of us.

Even worse, he contributes nothing to the show’s ensemble. When we gave Marg Helgenberger the nod for Best Actress two years ago, it was not, as legions of rabid William Petersen fans accused, because we were blinded by her snoobs. Instead, it was because she was the crucial element in making that ensemble cast gel and in bringing out the best in her coworkers. Caruso had the potential to impress us all by rising to the challenge and lifting the CSI: Miami cast beyond its biggest handicaps: Worst Actress winner 2003 Kim Delaney and two-time Worst Actress winner Emily Procter. We know he could have done it: he was the only watchable thing in Proof of Life, and he has turned in fine ensemble work in other pieces.

Yet instead of contributing to the cast’s greater good and using his talent to elevate the show as a whole, Caruso’s managed to leave CSI: Miami’s largely unremarkable cast drifting on its own while simultaneously tainting every scene he’s in. If Marg Helgenberger’s the chocolate sauce at the CSI fondue party — making her fruity castmates even better while remaining the best thing about the course — then David Caruso’s the tabasco at the spin-off’s fiesta night: properly used, in the right doses, he could be a real asset. Now, however, he’s ruining the taste of everything else.

So for misinterpreting his character and dragging down everyone else, we give Caruso the Worst Actor award. Would that it were actually a stake through his carroty-vampire character instead.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

We blame it on the boob.

That’s a simplification, perhaps. After all, the 2003-2004 television season was off to a lackluster enough start long before Janet Jackson — aided and abetted by slack-jawed goon Justin Timberlake — decided to give the Western hemisphere some up-close-and-personal time with one of her mammaries. By the time the Super Bowl rolled around, the vast majority of an uninspiring crop of new fall shows had careened into the gutter, while an equally uninspiring crop of midseason replacements waited in the wings for their turn to fail miserably. Nearly 12 months after these shows debuted, we’d be hard-pressed to recall a single detail about any one of them — wait a minute, someone tried to Americanize Coupling? — and not because they were terrible (well… the Americanized Coupling was), but because they were so aggressively forgettable.

But who can blame the creators of such transitory pap like Happy Family and The Handler and whatever mediocrities ABC unleashed upon the world this year? After all, these days, “pedestrian” and “workman-like” are the hallmarks of successful network programming. The No. 1 show in the country last season (C.S.I.) was a by-the-numbers crime drama where the storytelling has become so predictable, it wouldn’t surprise us if the authors of the For Dummies series of books were trying their hand at episodic television. The most-watched comedy (Friends) officially celebrated a half-decade of being past its prime; its long-overdue departure from the airwaves leaves a handful of aging sitcoms (chief among them Everybody Loves Raymond and the wheezing Will & Grace) fighting for the abandoned title of Best Show to Overstay Its Welcome. Even the top-rated reality program (Survivor) wrapped up its season with an ill-considered All-Star edition, assailing us with that most hateful of reality-programming side-effects — the over-exposed contestant (the thrice-damned Rupert) who won’t get off our TV. Ever.

That was the climate in the TV world, just as Janet Jackson’s wardrobe was planning to malfunction — a landscape fraught with creative cowardice and focus-group-spawned compromise, where show-runners ran from risk like five-year-old-boys fleeing from cooties. So you can imagine that once Jackson’s nipple made its cameo appearance to a secretly-titilated-though-publicly-aghast-for-the-children’s-sake world, any chance we had of seeing anything remotely provocative or risky on television for the remainder of the season disappeared faster than the halftime show participants’ dignity. And things only figure to get even more tepid and watered-down for years to come.

Thanks, Janet and Justin. Thanks a lot. We’ll think of you every time we see John Goodman firing off stilted punchlines to the laff-track’s canned delight from now until the ending of time.

Not that the here-and-now is much of a paradise for your TeeVee pals. This is about the time of year when we dole out some virtual hardware to the both the very best and very worst of the past 12 months as part of our annual TV awards. And as we scoured the airwaves for programs that either scaled the heights or plumbed the depths of what this medium has to offer, what we discovered was an industry content to ride a wave of non-threatening mediocrity. Forget about aiming high and missing — most network shows aren’t even bothering to aim at all. In our search for television’s superlatives, all we found was sameness. And that’s not very good for those of us in the business of handing out fake awards.

Maybe you noticed this, too. And maybe you’ve noticed a few more tumbleweeds than usual rolling by TeeVee during these sleepy summer months, with the site being updated with all the frequency of an L.A. weather report (sunny… 72 degrees… how’s about that UPN…. Zzzzzzzzzz…..). There are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations for this — we’re not as young and spry as we were back when we started this online punditry gig in 1996. Some of us are raising kids now, others of us have more responsibilities at the day jobs, and still others are beginning to realize that writing online articles about television when the only rewards are no pay and the occasional e-mail from complete strangers complaining about your spelling errors may not be as rewarding a way to spend your free time as it seemed eight years ago. Plus, Michaels drinks a lot.

But the main reason for the precipitous drop-off in TeeVee content over the past few months? Television is really, really uninteresting nowadays. Obviously, great shows are always welcome on our TiVo hard drives. And memorably bad shows — the Single Guys, the assorted Fox Network train wrecks, anything from the Tim Curry or Tony Danza canons — they don’t faze us as much as you think. What we just can’t deal with ‘round these parts, however, is pure, unadulterated, utterly undistinguishable blandness. There’s just so much we can do when the programs we’re supposed to write about are so interchangeably subpar.

We tried. Oh man, how we tried. Last fall, we were filled with ambitious plans about the 2003-2004 season. We were going to review every new show and revisit every returning show and have insightful and original things to say about every last one of them.

Then we actually sat down to watch some of these shows. And it wasn’t long before that plan fell by the wayside.

Take this one show, Happy Family — perfect example. It was about… um… well, we don’t remember exactly and it’s not really germane to the point. Let’s just say it was about this family who bickered and fought and got themselves into situations from which there arose comedy (or so was the plan). You’ve seen that show a thousand times in one form or another. You’ve seen it so much you could probably write such a show yourself. Hell, maybe you even wrote this particular show and have just blotted the experience from your mind. We can’t say we blame you, but again, this isn’t that germane to the point.

That point is this: Happy Family wasn’t all that good, but it wasn’t what you would call rotten — sort of on the bad side of average. The actors were vaguely competent, if laboring under the impression that they had each been cast in different shows. The writing wasn’t particularly inspired, but it gave the impression that it at least came from the laptops of tool-using humans instead of monkeys conscripted to a lifetime of servitude in the basement of the Kaufman-Bright-Crane production offices.

After watching three installments of Happy Family, the above paragraph was the assessment we were prepared to write, give or take a rambling introductory paragraph or three. And then we made the mistake of watching some of the other new fall shows — and damn if our reaction wasn’t exactly the same.

Well, there’s only so many times you can write 500-to-1,000-word reviews that all basically say, “Meh,” while making that wavy “not-so hotso” hand gesture people use when they’re describing a so-so meal at a middling restaurant. So you wind up doing what we did — toss the review in the trash, flip on American Idol and reach for another handful of Cheetos.

That’s our explanation for how things got away from us during the 2003-2004 television season. But it’s not an excuse for putting the annual TeeVee Awards on permanent hiatus. The show must go on, after all, even if that show is an NBC sitcom/vanity project for Whoopi Goldberg in which the former comedienne celebrates an entire decade of being painfully unfunny.

Besides, things may be grim on the TV front right now, but it’s not like we’re another Jason Alexander sitcom away from urging the television networks to just drop all pretense and run test patterns. (We’re two Jason Alexander sitcoms away from doing that. Three tops.) We found more than a few programs worthy of our completely made-up honors. And, while this may come as a complete shock to readers accustomed to our kind and generous natures, we even found a few woeful programs, actors and actresses to gripe and complain about.

Television isn’t completely dead — not as long as we can still find fantastic programs like Scrubs, Without A Trace, The Amazing Race and Arrested Development somewhere on the dial. And so the TeeVee awards aren’t either.

But don’t be surprised if halfway through these things, one of us whips out our boob to spice things up, OK?