Han Lee, of '2 Broke Girls'

Last season, television’s most anodyne evening got a shot of hipness in the form of Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King’s new series, 2 Broke Girls. The CBS comedy about young ladies in Brooklyn was an instant hit, kicking off a season-long discussion about girl-women on TV (viz. Girls, New Girl) and getting hailed as a slice-of-life comedy by those who thought that a permanent war over the sartorial choices of “hipsters” coupled with the protagonists’ burning ambition to open a cupcake shop seemed an apt depiction of life in the big city.

But there was another element to the show—something we hadn’t seen in a while. The Tiffany Network’s new Monday night sitcom was brazenly, shockingly, unapologetically racist.

Among the tokenish cast of minorities called upon to behave in baldly stereotypical ways are restaurant manager Han Lee (Matthew Moy), who comes in for mockery for his apparent asexuality and his utter misunderstanding of American culture. (Are his hilarious mispronunciations an homage to Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) Earl, played by Garrett Morris, is a hep-cat jazz musician of the sort one might encounter if whisked back in time half a century or so, or in the reeaal cool fantasies of a white person who’s never met a black person, while Oleg (Jonathan Kite) is a sexually voracious Ukrainian with a pan-Eastern European accent. “You’re so stinky, my mother in Korea called me and said, ‘What’s that smell?’” Han tells Oleg in a typical moment of sparkling repartee. To which Oleg replies with an unkind evaluation of the boss’s manhood.

It’s almost enough to make you long for the days of NBC’s Must-See TV—or even the springtime debates over Lena Dunham’s Girls—when we all complained that prime time was too white!

When asked about 2 Broke Girls’s use of stereotypes, Mr. King offered up his own homosexuality as a sort of license to offend.

“I’m gay,” the producer said at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”

Gay male humor has historically been predicated on an irreverent disdain for propriety—which, in this day and age, has apparently come to include the gleeful bashing of ethnic minorities. After all, if you’re gay, you’re a minority too: it’s a rainbow-colored “get out of jail free” card, per Mr. King’s argument, entitling the bearer to say whatever he likes. “What is or isn’t acceptable as funny in 2012 seems to be a very abstract idea,” Mr. King wrote in a recent essay in Entertainment Weekly (not online). He added that the way he knows that his gags about race do not cross the line is that the live audience at 2 Broke Girls tapings laughs.

The argument makes you wonder where exactly the show recruits its live audience. Just because idiotic racial humor has a fan base doesn’t mean it belongs on prime-time television.

Besides which, there’s a difference between laughing because something is funny and laughing because it is shocking or transgresses certain boundaries of taste. Take the new NBC comedy The New Normal, whose title refers to gay male parenting but could also be taken as an allusion to the increasingly racy and race-conscious television landscape. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, whose other current network series is the racially diverse, often irreverent Glee, seems to think that bigoted humor is the fabric that knits a family together. In a recent episode, a racist lady-of-a-certain-age played by Ellen Barkin finally comes to accept the gay man (Andrew Rannells) for whom her daughter is acting as a surrogate. They bond over an ethnic joke—something about adopted Chinese babies coming with egg rolls. It’s sort of a heartwarming moment, but not quite. The family that mocks Chinese babies together stays together?

The series’s sole regular minority character is Mr. Rannells’s assistant at his haute TV-production job. She’s a brash, aggressive black woman of the sort that’s been sassing up the small screen forever, or at least since the heyday of Jackée.

Interestingly, the assistant on The New Normal is played by a Real Housewife of Atlanta, NeNe Leakes, meaning that she came to national attention under the watchful eye of Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive. Mr. Cohen, who also happens to be gay, seems to have his own blind spots when it comes to racial humor. A recent leitmotif of his talk show, Watch What Happens, involves the host, lovingly or not, replaying for laughs a local news clip of a heavily accented black woman talking about her house catching on fire. It’s not impossible for ethnic humor to be funny—far from it. But there’s a certain humanity missing from these shows, where the object of humor isn’t other characters but simple stereotypes. And while gay producers certainly didn’t invent narrow-minded humor, they have lately made it their own.

Should we just come right out and call them the Gaycists--those who hold what Lauren Bans of GQ first defined as "the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere"? Let’s. A further definition: Out gay men whose knowing, ironic appropriation of racist tropes, and whose self-aware frankness about their own prejudice, sashays right across a line the rest of us have come to respect.

Race and gay culture have always made for an uneasy mix. The black drag queens of Paris is Burning—exiled even from white gay culture—have birthed generations of gay men who’ve picked up the vocal intonations and mannerisms traditionally associated with black women. (Think of Project Runway champion Christian Siriano, for example, or Will & Grace’s Jack in full finger-snapping dudgeon.) For white gay men, a group perpetually exiled from the mainstream, identification with blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups goes hand-in-hand with a sort of mockery that’s as much about the jokester’s outsider status as it is about the target’s. This isn’t new—using the women of Sex and the City as his mouthpiece, Mr. King set an episode of the show in the milieu of black drag queens, with Carrie Bradshaw, known for her love of “ghetto gold,” screeching in faux African-American patois about her drag-ball-style “twirl.” And the camp humor aesthetic, from Paul Lynde through Will & Grace, has always used its practitioners’ outsider status as a pass for universal derision. It’s all in good fun—isn’t it? But the combined airtime given to 2 Broke Girls, The New Normal, the urbane gay couple of Modern Family (who were, admittedly, created by straight people), with their Spanglish-screeching harridan of a sister-in-law, and Andy Cohen’s bickering Atlanta Housewives (whose antics are somehow always more GIF-worthy than those of their white counterparts in other cities) adds up to a troubling conclusion: Now that gay marriage is a reality, any gay man with some disposable income and a sperm sample can become a parent and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is consigned to the history books, affluent white gay men have finally been granted admittance to the majority culture, and as such, they are seizing on a privilege long-beloved of their straight counterparts: trashing minorities!

They laugh at themselves, sure, but with the apparent belief that their flaws are cute. The gay men of The New Normal are gently chided for their affectations, particularly Mr. Rannells’s fastidious dresser—but they hardly come in for the worst of Ms. Barkin’s slurs. Those are reserved for random bystanders, like a black schoolteacher of whom she asks “Hablo English?” Sure, Mr. Murphy’s trademark nihilism means that he mocks just about everyone through her character—but isn’t it all a bit wearying? “It’s very clear that I have great affection for her,” Mr. Murphy told Vogue of Ms. Barkin’s character. “It’s like what I said about the [Christian advocacy group] Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!”

Indeed. But despite the fundamental conservatism of much of the entertainment industry, no one’s granting the Million Moms the clout to produce a television show casting themselves as the heroes of their own story. Whatever happened in Mr. Murphy’s past, he’s now the consummate insider, with the social cachet to do whatever he likes in his career or his personal life; that Vogue interview notes that Mr. Murphy and his husband are, like The New Normal’s protagonists, considering having a child through surrogacy. He’s portraying the world the way he sees it—with minorities as window-dressing around gay men. (This seems to be a pattern: On Mr. Murphy’s Glee, Chris Colfer’s gay teen embarks on a lovingly portrayed relationship with a fellow singer, while two Asian students’ relationship gets the derisive nickname “Asian Fusion.”)

Mr. Murphy and some of his colleagues don’t mean any harm. And the shows are far from unwatchable: The New Normal earned a rave review from Slate’s television critic, June Thomas, who happens to be a lesbian. “When the whole of America is listening,” she wrote, “it’s tempting to deny the humor. But I admit it: I laughed.”

Meanwhile, 2 Broke Girls’s ratings success, and the availability of Oleg and Earl one-liners immortalized by YouTube users, indicates that there’s a large constituency who enjoy such ethnic sketches as filtered through Michael Patrick King’s tin ear.

That said, not everyone’s so forgiving of The New Normal and its ilk: Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote that the Ryan Murphy show’s jokes “can be momentarily bracing—this show is going there!—but they’re also unremittingly nasty,” while Asian-American cultural critic Andrew Ti wrote on Grantland that “The pervasive crime of [2 Broke Girls’s] Han Lee really boils down to his infantilized speech patterns, thrown in, I assume, just in case his Asian face didn’t drive the message that He Is Not Like You home enough, and you were starting to think of him as some kind of human being.”

But maybe it’s not just the gays who are taking their seat at the table and ingratiating themselves with a rude blast of ethnocentric realness. Take Mindy Kaling’s new series, The Mindy Project, which debuted Tuesday night, featuring the Office star as an obstetrician. While the Indian-American actress, who is also the series’s creator, doesn’t mine her own background for humor, she tosses stones at a Serbian character (a “war criminal”), Gabourey Sidibe (she’s still a punchline?) and her character’s immigrant patient base (“This office is not an inflatable raft!”). Characters like Ms. Kaling’s on The Mindy Project or the gay couples of Modern Family and The New Normal or the two broke girls may belong to groups that have been underrepresented on television until recently, but if they see any irony in their easy mockery of other marginalized groups, it’s not making it to the screen.

That said, The New Normal shows signs of growth; though its most recent episode has Ms. Leakes’s character talking about how black people are always late, and a deeply unsettling joke about Tiger Woods’s lust for white women, the plot, in which the central couple wonder why they have no black friends, manages to play on the edge and actually say something about privilege, rather than throwing jibes at those who don’t have it.

It may not be normal, but it certainly does feel new.

"MAC Archie's Girls" makeup

Gone are the days when you had to choose between Betty and Veronica...now you can be both! (Or you can be like Kevin Keller, the first openly gay character of Archie, and get your own spin-off.) MAC cosmetics has teamed up with Archie Comics and its publisher, Nancy Silberkleit, to create a line of MAC Archie's Girls cosmetics.

There will be a corresponding event for Comic-Con, naturally.

It's been a big year for the Archie brand, which recently announced a crossover with Glee (??) in early 2013.

The makeup line will be available next Spring, and will "will celebrate the iconic beauty looks of Betty and Veronica," according to the publisher.

MAC and Archie will be holding a joint event at Gaslamp near San Diego's Comic-Con to promote the upcoming venture.

Though nothing except the logo has been released, we have an idea that the line will contain some sweet scents...especially if Ms. Silberkleit's scratch-n-sniff business cards are any indication.

Jeff Goldblum as Rachel's gay dad on 'Glee'

If the theater isn't your thing, you might want to reconsider renouncing the Great White Way (thanks, Smash, for making that term ubiquitous again) until after buying tickets for Seminar. Jeff Goldblum, who is second maybe only to Neil Patrick Harris and John Malkovich in self-satirizing, told Jimmy Kimmel last night that he will be taking over for Alan Rickman in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar as the grumpy teacher, Leonard. Oh man, but will he be doing it as drunk Jeff Goldblum??

Mr. Goldblum has recently appeared in exaggerated parodies of his signature acting style (from the Woody Allen method school of stuttering prolifically) in Portlandia and Tim & Eric.

In addition, the Jurassic Park actor will also be appearing tonight in Glee as one of Rachel's two gay dad, which does come as somewhat of a surprise. Can he sing?

Guess we'll find out!

Update: Oh wait, he can sing-talk. Good enough.

Update II: And regular-sings!

Megan Hilty as Marilyn Monroe--gorgeous, but not campy (NBC)

Camp is dead, and you’re invited to its autopsy the Monday after the Super Bowl. That’s when the new NBC series Smash premieres (though it's already available online). The drama takes place behind the scenes of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, following the cast and crew through their various personal and professional travails, and it comes with a reality twist: the musical might actually come to Broadway.

If you took as gospel Susan Sontag’s credo that camp is “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater,” then you’d presume Smash would be the campiest thing on TV, give or take a Glee. But despite its gayish trappings, Smash bears the imprimatur of executive producer Steven Spielberg, the fellow lately known for such solid, accomplished films as War Horse and Munich. Between Smash’s exuberant musical numbers, the show slogs through one grave, brow-knitting plotline after another, among them the question of whether Debra Messing will adopt a baby or not. (Historians may recall that the Debra Messing/baby plotline aggressively straightened up Will & Grace a few years back, ending in the show’s destruction.) Then there’s the question of whether the characters’ low-grade badinage will ever erupt into full-on fireworks. The final number, a sing-off/audition/dream sequence, offers a nicely over-the-top walk-off, but it concludes a surprisingly staid 43 minutes.

“I keep likening it to shows like ER,” said Megan Hilty, one of the two Marilyns manqué. “We’re not doing brain surgery—but you don’t have to be in the know in the theater world to enjoy it.” Still, what makes good sense commercially puts the show’s camp possibilities in intensive care. No scalplel is needed to untangle the layers here. Smash’s intentions are all conscious and overt; everything’s on the surface.. By going after a mainstream, Spielberg-sized audience, Smash does for camp what Schindler’s List did for the camps: It simplifies it, flattens it out, and repackages it for mass consumption.

Sontag’s contention that “Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques” suggests one culprit for the death of camp: The mainstream acceptance of gays—a welcome development, to say the least—seems to have come with an ancillary cost.

If camp is by definition a sort of in-joke, a winking language of signs and semaphores understood by a discerning few, it melts away when a show about battling Broadway ingenues is targeted at the many. The aesthetic sensibility that converted TV’s Batman into a gay icon and "No wire hangers!" into a rallying cry has crossed irrevocably into mainstream culture. It’s available to all and therefore drained of its power.

It’s an tasty irony, but not a campy one.

To wit: We flocked to Ryan Trecartin’s marvelously twisted Day-Glo horrorshow at P.S. 1, and we gawked at Lady Gaga’s eggshell trick at the Grammys. But when camp is understood by everyone, well, what good does it do us? The thrill is gone.

“Everything now is called gay camp,” noted Michael Musto, columnist for the Village Voice, whereas before, “it was all closety and suggested.” He cited the Bette Davis Grand Guignol nightmare What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?—a prestigious-at-its-time film whose sense of gleeful mischief is signaled with winks and nods. “To this day, gays are still swiveling their arms around and saying, But ya are, Blanche.” By comparison, fast forward nearly half a century, and we’ve got a homoerotic freakout like Black Swan—based on the Sontag-certified camp fixation Swan Lake—delighting and horrifying moviegoers of all stripes on its way to the Oscars and the $100 million club.

Back in the day, the ultimate camp icon was Liza Minnelli—a mascara’d trainwreck who was beloved nonetheless for those pipes and that legacy. Today, we've got Christina Aguilera. Sure, she’s a diva who packs on weight, blows her live performances and is at once lovable and tragic, but she’s no Liza, alas—especially now that she’s judging vocalists on NBC’s ultrastraight The Voice. Lady Gaga? Sure, she name-checks Liberace and dresses like a drag king, but she’s more popular than just about any pop star besides the Carmen Miranda-esque Katy Perry, and she’s too controlled, too calculating, to self-aware to be camp.

Even General Hospital has lost its camp appeal—somewhere around the time James Franco decided to turn it into a piece of postmodern performance art.

The cognoscenti are opening their arms to cult art: This month, Raquel Welch will receive a career retrospective at Lincoln Center in February. Sure, fans will turn out for One Million Years B.C. and Bedazzled, but the tough ticket will be Myra Breckinridge, that camp Rosetta Stone (also starring The Observer’s own Rex Reed). On the phone, Ms. Welch recalled the film’s misbegotten ambitions. The director, Michael Sarne, “wanted it to be a Fellini thing, all wild and crazy,” she said. Instead, “It’s a curiosity.” The novel by Gore Vidal “is going to be something that people will refer back to,” she added, “and then they’ll go to the movie and say, what happened here?” That what happened here reaction, taking place at a midnight screening or around a passed-around VHS, is how the brain metabolizes camp; at Lincoln Center, it’s a historical relic.

The campiest thing on Broadway, Hugh Jackman, isn’t campy at all—though he might appear so to the out-of-town crowd. (You'd think that a movie star who rose to fame by brandishing his claws would be a little less earnest.) The great camp hope, Todd Graff, who directed queeny indie flick Camp in 2003, has now gone mainstream with this month’s Christian-choir melodrama Joyful Noise: the gay-musical-comedy equivalent of Dylan going electric. When the campiest diva out there is prestige queen Meryl Streep, whose every performance or awards-show speech feels like a thicker slice of ham, you know you’re in trouble.

And speaking of the Oscars, anyone who doesn’t get enough of Marilyn in Smash—“She certainly is having a moment, isn’t she!” noted Ms. Hilty—can see Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn or in full peroxide glory on the covers of GQ and Vogue. A world in which dressing up as a tragic dead celebrity can score you Oscar buzz instead of a gig at Lucky Cheng’s is a world in which camp has been replaced by good taste.

Camp is borne of passion, but its generally misplaced passion. The creators of camp spectacles are generally the last ones in on the joke. Camp is really a product of the audience, which grasps at these misfit entertainments, endeared by what Sontag called “a seriousness that fails.” Smash, in its pilot, never extends itself far enough to be a failure; it’s too professional to be truly passionate. So, too, are other projects on TV that look campy only when one squints.

Glee, for all its exploitation and explosion of beloved clichés, is at heart a conventional high school show studded with quotation marks. It’s too much of a moneymaker to go garish, and too square to be camp. American Horror Story, another production by gay dynamo Ryan Murphy, is a mashup of every midnight monster movie. It’s pretty liberal-minded, with a gimp-suited demon and a pair of murderous gay ghosts, but its sensibility appeals to the audience’s hyper-awareness of various cultural referents (camp being one of many) more than it does create a genuine mood of astonishment at the unexpected.

“Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful,” Sontag wrote; certain entertainments “want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat.” Sontag might as well have been talking about Jessica Lange’s dessicated-baby-doll performance on American Horror Story. Or the tightly structured reality competition RuPaul’s Drag Race. Or the in-on-every-joke female female-impersonators of The Real Housewives franchise.

All of the above are dressing themselves in the accoutrements of camp—a sort of drag routine, actually—aping the formula for a wised-up audience that has seen everything and can be counted on to “get it,” albeit without the delight of actual discovery that animates true camp. It’s camp in a can.

“The kind of stuff that I watch that’s campy is stuff that was intended to be mainstream—without a wink,” noted Frank DeCaro, the Sirius radio host and author of The Dead Celebrity Cookbook, a collection of dishes favored by various tragic icons. “I don’t want them to do the winking for me. Showgirls is campy. Glee has a big gay sensibility. I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins.”

As gay men have stormed the mainstream, their sensibility has permeated the entertainment industry—but absent the sense of secret, “just us girls” knowledge that always characterized it. RuPaul told The Observer that the Internet makes the process of discovery easier: “Everything is on YouTube,” he said (speaking out of character), recalling a favorite clip from The Carol Burnett Show that someone had copied onto on VHS—routine viewing after a night at the club. “It is completely camp—she really gets it,” he said. But the fact that the clip is now a few keystrokes away tends to reduce its samizdat appeal.

In the crowded media market of today, entertainment companies “get” camp insofar as a certain sly humor helps bring in viewers. It’s a marketing technique, the least subversive thing imaginable.

The recently installed chairman of NBC Entertainment, Robert Greenblatt, is an openly gay man, best known for developing the gleefully profane likes of Dexter and Weeds on Showtime. That’s a very big deal, but the fact that Mr. Greenblatt is betting big on Smash may say less about his personal sensibility than about how gay the culture at large has become in the post-Glee, post-Dancing with the Stars era. Rather than smuggling an outré slant onto the airwaves, Mr. Greenblatt is going where the audience is—or so he hopes.

Camp emerged as a challenge to the traditional power structure, which is one reason it’s so hard to find now that openly gay men have found increasing acceptance. “Occasionally I’ll make complaints like that—things were better when gay was more dangerous and hidden,” said Mr. Musto, only half-seriously. “Oppression can be a pretty good aphrodisiac.”

As entertainers seek slices of an ever-shrinking audience, “camp” is still a dirty word: when we called Joan Rivers’s publicist to arrange an interview for this story, we were stonewalled. “She is not campy,” her publicist told us. (Tell that to the other panelists on Fashion Police!)

Even with all of the legal steps forward for the gay community, RuPaul argued that camp was still needed: “It has always been the refuge for people who are from our perspective,” he said. “Otherwise we couldn’t take all the hypocrisy and bullshit that this world would have us take for face value. With camp, at least we can laugh at it! You can’t take anything seriously.”

But Smash and Glee and American Horror Story and Lady Gaga all take themselves grievously seriously, and not in the failed-art sense that makes Showgirls or Baby Jane so much fun. They’re competent, solid, knowing. Referring to the 2010 Cher musical, Mr. DeCaro said, “If Burlesque had been so much worse, it would’ve been so much better.”

He added, “It feels like there’s a lot more bad-bad than there is good-bad right now, and there’s a lot of good-good too. Sometimes I wonder—is Showgirls once in a generation? Once in a lifetime?”

Camp like Showgirls depends on overextension. It requires mad artists to invest lavishly in a fatally flawed vision. Today, the “bad” in entertainment is execrable—intended for a common denominator devoted to it over the million other options. The “good” is for an audience on whom no reference shall be lost, produced by a corporation that can’t place too many potential risks on its ledger. Why bother making something bad-good in an original way when you can make something good according to formula? “Camp,” the chemical reaction between bad and good, cannot possibly bridge the gap between an Adam Sandler movie and a George Clooney one. Smash could be the most misguidedly ambitious thing anyone would have seen in 1975, but today it looks tame—what tastemaker’s going to watch an NBC drama that aspires to ER?

There are a few minutes where, despite itself, Smash betrays a marvelous ambition to dazzle that is beautiful and sad in a way that feels, well, camp. The camera cuts to a smirking, gorgon-like Anjelica Huston, watching her two pet divas try to outshriek one another. It’s a just a moment, but it offers a brief glimpse of just how good the show might be were it willing to be bad.

Maybe the Marilyn stuff will help. Said Ms. Hilty, of the Monroe appeal: “There’s so many levels to her and her story is tragic and beautiful and her whole life was centered around wanting to be loved. That’s something universal that everybody feels.”

If Smash wanted to be loved more than admired, it’d be an instant camp classic. Alas, it will probably just be a hit instead.

Parks & Recreation: Fan favorite for Commie Liberals!

Are you surprised that New Yorker publications love liberal TV? Not really? That's okay, it's still interesting to read up on the Experian-Simmons survey that measured consumer's TV preferences against their political ideology and then spat out a bunch of shows that determine how liberal or conservative you are. Surprisingly (not surprisingly), most New York media favor the programs only watched by people who voted for Obama and support green initiatives.

For example: Liberals love "sarcastic" comedies like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Office (so basically all those flailing in Thursday night ratings), along with The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (But also: Cougar Town? Raising Hope?)  Those left-leaners were also more likely to be fans of Treme, spend the mornings watching The View and late-night watching Letterman, Conan, or Craig Ferguson.

If you want to see what Conservatives watch (hint: You might be a Republican if you like Leno or Mythbusters), you can check out the incomplete list here.

But more importantly! Comparing this list against two years of New York Magazine's TV picks -- Emily Nussbaum's "Year In TV" last December and Vulture's "Top 10 TV shows of 2011," you'll find 9 instances of overlap (with Community and Parks and Recreations counted twice for each year) with liberal favorites. Only one show --ABC's The Middle--landed as an outlier, as the survey said that it was a favorite of both liberals and conservatives. Time magazine's roundup of best shows in past two years had 3 liberal TiVo'd shows and 0 conservatives.

The Daily Beast had three lib-favorites  in 2010 (their 2011 "Top TV" list isn't up), though they lose Progressive Points for putting Glee in their "Worst" list. The New York Times' 2010 list only had one show on their list that fit the criteria of liberal bias: Treme...but another zero for conservative favorites.

So what does this prove? Mostly that New Yorkers are nonpartisan: the survey didn't even list Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, or The Good Wife in either Conservative or Liberal fan favorites, but they consistently  showed up on every single list we looked at. (So did Parks & Recreation and Community, which were on the lib's list.) When it comes to TV politics, it seems, NYC media is just too cool for either party.

While the crowds might have had something to do with the Glee stars rumored to be stopping by the Intercontinental across the street, a crowd of 30 or so commercial brokers were no less gleeful to learn this piece of news: midtown north asking rents could skyrocket past $100 a square foot as early as 2015. So said Peter Kozel, Colliers International's economic whiz, who explained to the crowd that tourism and entertainment have created a boomlet in the office market on the West Side starting north of Times Square to Columbus Circle. 

In our own building, dear reader, Kushner Companies' 321 West 44th Street, the asking rent is $38 a square foot, with deals being done in that range. Downstairs, a lease is also out for the retail space, said Jared Kushner (The Observer's owner) during the event. Over sandwiches and cupcakes, one broker noted the large windows and high ceilings but lamented the lack of air conditioning and locked hallway bathrooms. Indeed. Perhaps he had not heard, however, of our favorite apocryphal tale about the building: John Lennon recorded "Walking on Thin Ice" here on Dec. 8, 1980--the day he was shot.  

The midtown north availability rate is likely to remain relatively high, around 10 percent, but that may not reflect the amount of desirable space that's available. Add that good news to Boston Properties' planned development at 250 West 55th Street, and it looks indeed like the (north)west may have won. 

lkusisto@observer.com 

It'll be a busy spring at the bookstore for TV's female stars, with Tina Fey's Bossypants dropping in April. Fey's personal essays will be markedly different from Lynch's memoir, surely, but one wonders whether the TV-star book (a requisite duty in the days of Bill Cosby and Paul Reiser) is back in vogue. Credit, or blame, may be due to TV's current top essayist, Chelsea Handler, whose sales Lynch and Fey can only hope to match.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Modern Family will win Best Comedy Series

Glee got all the Emmy love with a series show high 19 nominations -- The Pacific led all nominees with 24 -- but Modern Family was no slouch either. The ABC show seems almost manufactured in a lab with the way it combines the modern conceits of current series with the familiar tropes of classic sitcoms. That warm feeling of nostalgia is why voters will choose Family over fellow flashy newcomer Glee. Besides: Would anyone even call Glee a "comedy series?"

Jon Hamm will win Best Actor in a Drama

All Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston does is win Emmys. But this year, it just feels like there might be a sea change for no other reason than its time for someone else to win. His biggest competiton is likely Jon Hamm and don't be surprised when the dapper Don Draper takes home the trophy. Hamm has the Emmy "heat" -- he also got another nomination as Comedy Guest Star for his hilarious turn on 30 Rock -- and he's clearly worthy because of his performance. Lost fans hoping for a Matthew Fox win because the series wrapped up in the spring, however, shouldn't hold their breath. Don't forget: James Gandolfini didn't win for the final season of The Sopranos. Like Fox-y will?

Amy Poehler will win Best Actress in a Comedy

The beloved Parks and Recreation could only muster two nominations -- one for star Amy Poehler and one for best theme song. And while it does have a great theme song, expect Poehler to take home the one Parks trophy that will matter. There is history here: America Ferrara, Tina Fey and last year's winner, Toni Collette, were first time nominees on rookie-ish shows who won (Parks and Rec had a six-episode season one), and in all cases their victories seemed like a "shock." If Poehler were to win, people would certainly be surprised, but her work on Parks and Recreation -- turning her character from a one-note Michael Scott clone into a layered, well-meaning and original human being -- deserves as many accolades as possible.

Chris Colfer will win Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy

One of the biggest surprises during Thursday's nominations was Chris Colfer being selected for Glee. The young star -- who has no previous television credits -- is a scene stealer on the show as the newly out-of-the-closet Kurt Hummel. That's all well and good, but that Colfer can also flash Emmy voters his scenes from the Glee episode "Theatricality" -- which centered on Kurt and his dad coming to terms with their relationship -- is the cherry on top of what feels like an obvious win. Apologies Neil Patrick Harris: You're great. You just aren't Kurt.

The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien will win Best Variety, Music or Comedy Series

If you were an Emmy voter and had the chance to put Conan O'Brien on NBC one last time -- the Emmys are on NBC this year -- wouldn't you do everything in your power to make it happen, even if Conan wasn't the most deserving nominee? Thought so.

The Oscar-winning actor -- best known for either playing a psychopath or heartthrob, depending on the person you ask -- will reportedly make an appearance on Glee next season. And while this could just be another rumor floating around the series -- OMG, Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele are totally dating -- since there are actually corresponding quotes from Bardem, it simply feels too insane to make up. Said Bardem to EW: "We’re going to rock the house [...] We’re going to do some heavy metal — Spanish heavy metal, which is the worst." OK then!

Bardem's plot will dovetail with the wheelchair bound Artie (played by the non-wheelchair bound Kevin McHale) and will probably feature at least one ridiculous medallion and some leather pants. The story goes that the actor became a "Gleek" (a.k.a. a fan of the Fox series) after watching the first season in a single week and sought out his Eat Pray Love director -- and Glee creator -- Ryan Murphy to beg for a role. Our theory? Columbia Pictures -- and Murphy -- realized that the Julia Roberts-led Eat Pray Love was skewwing older in its tracking and needed to get under-25 girls to the theater. And what better way to do that here in 2010 than to be associated with Glee. Hey, it was either that or vampires...

With all that being said, however, we were still able to find ten favorites—it was just a bit harder than it looks. Here's our list of the best television offerings from 2009.

#10: "I'm On a Boat," Saturday Night Live

There have been more popular Digital Shorts produced by The Lonely Island—"Dick in a Box," "Motherlover," and "Jizz in my Pants" come to mind—but, for us, none top the unbridled joy of "I'm On a Boat." Besides the fact that it's hilarious, catchy and has T-Pain on backup vocals, "Boat"—which debuted during the February 7th edition of Saturday Night Live—has the temerity to name check Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Garnett and Poseidon in its lyrics. We don't want to sound obsessive, but there's a good chance we watched "I'm On a Boat" five times over the course of this paragraph.

#9: Bored to Death

Proof that sometimes all you need is chemistry. With its trendy locales and hipster slant, Bored to Death should have been the twee-pocalypse. But because of Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and 2009 Breakout Star of the Year^TM Zack Galifianakis—all three giving award-worthy performances—Jonathan Ames' soft-boiled detective series overcame the flaws inherent in its premise.

#8: Desperate Housewives

Sometimes it feels like we're the only ones still watching Desperate Housewives. That's a shame because the soap opera continues to offer audiences deliciously twisted cliffhangers—witness the fall finale's plane crash—and Eva Longoria-Parker, who might be the funniest actress on television.

#7: Party Down

A closer sister to the British version of The Office than its American counterpoint, Party Down was, at times, too much like Ricky Gervais' iconic series. But it hit all the right notes of awkward poignancy and, thanks to Adam Scott's beyond deadpan delivery, managed to get some of the unctuous contempt right as well.

#6: Community

We'll say it: Community has the best chance of any comedy currently on television to become the next Arrested Development. It won't, of course—except for maybe the cancelation part—but there are moments when this show is that funny. Why aren't you watching it again?

#5: 30 Rock

When it comes to 30 Rock, the perfect is the enemy of the good. If Tina Fey's hilarious funhouse of television satire doesn't give us the best episode ever, we get antsy and start writing e-mails to friends that begin with "30 Rock isn't funny anymore!"  But, then an episode like "Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001" happens and reminds us that no other show can make us laugh as hard or as loud (just ask our neighbors). So all you haters: sit back, relax and smile... with your mouth.

#4: Glee

Nothing on Glee should work: it's corny, silly, and obvious and features so many hateful characters that you might need an attendance sheet to keep up. That it does work, however, is a credit to both creator Ryan Murphy and the cast, which is top-to-bottom amazing beyond Jane Lynch's already iconic performance as Sue Sylvester. As an added bonus: Glee's fall finale was one of the best episodes of any show this year.

#3: Chuck

The show that lived only so television critics could feel good about themselves! Chuck was famously on the bubble for much of its second season only to be given a last minute reprieve that may or may not wind up serving the better angels of the series itself. Put us in the camp that Chuck should have ended after a near-perfect second season that was filled with enough unrequited love, geeky references and super-spy intrigue to last a lifetime.

#2: The Office

At this point, calling The Office "a comedy" is probably a bit misleading. Much has been written about how this season has been more depressing than seasons past, but, while true, this turn has just made everything feel more legitimate. These are depressing times, people! The tone aside, has any series ever so effortlessly found ways to use its ever-growing cast of characters? Witness Andy and Erin (Ed Helms and Ellie Kemper as the uncool versions of Jim and Pam), who have gone from also-rans to the MVPs of Dunder-Mifflin in just one season. Well into season six, the most striking thing about The Office is that it manages to keep getting better. 

#1: Mad Men

If a top-ten list exists without Mad Men ranked first, does it cease to be a top-ten list? When it comes to Mad Men, there isn't much left to say—how many times can you read about Jon Hamm's brilliance or the show's impeccable writing without going cross-eyed—except for the simple truth that Matthew Weiner has even outdone his mentor David Chase. The third season of Mad Men was better than any season of The Sopranos. There is currently nothing even close to this good on television.