Wednesday, March 10
From Feb. 3 through March 5, the networks were doing anything they
could to get your attention–Monica and Barbara sat around and talked
on an ABC stage set; Martin Short acted nuts as the Mad Hatter; Hitler was
on the History Channel and sharks were in the waters of the Discovery
Channel; ABC even aired consecutive new episodes of NYPD Blue . But
now, nothing. Shows that were fresh in the fall–like the Dharma
& Greg episode featuring Floyd (Red Crow) Westerman, the
lachrymose Native American of the 70’s anti-litter ad–are served
up as TV leftovers now. [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]
Even public television doesn’t care about you now: Tonight at 11:30
P.M., in the guise of “empowering television for viewers like
you,” Channel 13 broadcasts an infomercial-like pep talk full of
psychobabble called Suze Orman: The Courage to Be Rich .
It’s a repeat, no less. [WNET, 13, 11:30 P.M.]
Thursday, March 11
y Call it improvisational programming. Billy Crystal went by The
Daily Show last week to plug his new movie, Analyze This . Host
Jon Stewart spoke to him for four minutes, the standard interview length
for the show, and then thanked him for coming by. But Mr. Crystal refused
to leave. Don’t you people want more of me? he said–and
the audience cheered him on.
So Mr. Stewart kept going. And every time he tried to go to a
commercial, Mr. Crystal jumped in with another bit. The host finally
succeeded in taking a break only after rolling tape for 14 minutes.
The show’s producer, Madeleine Smithberg, and Eileen Katz, Comedy
Central’s vice president of programming, conferred: If they had only
eight more minutes, they would have a separate half-hour special. Mr.
Crystal agreed. And now, with The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Interview Special: Billy Crystal , cable viewers can learn even more
about Mr. Crystal and his hit movie. Thank you, Comedy Central. [Comedy
Central, 45, 10:30 P.M.]
The exhibitionist dating show Change of Heart is proving
to be a syndicated success; it’s given WPIX its highest numbers for
the 1 A.M. time period in more than a decade, and its rating among women
aged 18 to 34 is up 146 percent from the same slot in November.
The show takes a real couple and screws with their minds by matching up
each person up with a date who is different from their usual partner. (Call
it Eyes Wide Shut , the TV show.) Then all four people join together
to share their experiences (and insult each other) for the camera. After
that, the original couple decides if they want to stay together or break
up. It’s both embarrassing and engrossing, and everyone who watches
has the same question: Who are these people? Why would anyone risk
being dumped on national television?
Many viewers assume the couples are actors, and that’s usually
correct. But that doesn’t mean the show is faked; Change of
Heart is taped in Los Angeles, so wannabe stars are always looking for
TV time, even if they’re playing themselves. According to executive
producer Scott St. John, guest coordinators for the
show–”professional party people”–hit the clubs every
night, along with swing dance classes and movie premieres, to recruit folks
for the show, both couples and singles.
Mr. St. John said participants are paid a standard game-show fee of
$200. “Honestly, the majority of couples have been dating for about
five months,” he said. “They’re not going to go to a
marriage counselor or professional help. With us, the bets are off for one
night, and you can see what it’s like to date someone else.”
About half the couples end up staying together. Occasionally, only one
person wants to stay together. That scenario, of course, makes for the best
TV. [WPIX, 11, 1 A.M.]
Friday, March 12
Sweeps are over and your network is not getting out of sixth place
any time soon. Quick–what’s the next move? Do you: (a) show
reruns of programs that nobody watched the first time; (b) spend 50 grand
or so for some old Tom Cruise movie like, maybe, All the Right Moves
or Cocktail ; (c) get people from all over the country to send in
videos of their pets and slap some dumb title on it–oh, I don’t
know, you could call it America’s Greatest Pets –and
let it run for a hour of cheap TV? If you chose (c), you have the makings
of a UPN executive. [WWOR, 9, 8 P.M.]
Saturday, March 13
Even public television doesn’t care about you now: Tonight at 8
P.M., under the guise of “cultural diversity,” WNET yet again
turns to that mad Irishman, Michael Flatley–and this time he’s
got 84 dancers with him in a “dancing adventure” called
Feet of Flames . Mr. Flatley, as the Lord of the Dance,
dance-fights the Dark Lord (Daire Nolan). Some are calling it “the
dance of the decade.” We call it crap! [WNET, 13, 8 P.M.]
Sunday, March 14
For parents of small, screaming children, there will be household
tranquillity on a Sunday night, made possible by a special 7:30 P.M.
episode of Blue’s Clues (“Blue’s Big Treasure
Hunt”). With host Steven Burn (who’s exactly between Mister
Rogers and Pee-wee Herman) and guests Rue McClanahan, Carol Kane and
Gregory Hines. [Nickelodeon, 6, 7:30 P.M.]
Some shows are declared hits even before they go on the air. Remember
Felicity ? There was a lot of hype, including an Entertainment
Weekly cover, and then … and then the show came out. It turned out
to be all right–kind of like a slightly sexier version of
Relativity –and now it regularly finishes fifth in its time
slot. (Remember Relativity , by the way? It was a stately hourlong
“romantic drama” on ABC that was a hit among critics for its
brief run during the ’96-’97 season.) Anyway, now the hype’s
rolling for Futurama , the soon-to-debut cartoon from Simpsons
creator Matt Groening and Simpsons executive producer David
Cohen.
Despite the pedigree, Futurama could be a flop. But that
hasn’t stopped devotional Web sites from sprouting up all over the
Internet. They have names like “Futurama-Rama” and
“Futurama: A Kick-ass Page for a Kick-ass Show.” There are even
Futurama Web sites that keep track of the other Futurama Web
sites. In addition, the launch of Futurama is getting coverage in
publications that don’t usually cover TV: Wired (those techies
love The Simpsons ) and Mother Jones (Mr. Groening’s a
lefty).
It’s nice to get the word out, but hype comes with its price.
“No matter what show we put on the air, we’re fully expecting
reviews along the lines of ‘It’s fine, but it’s no
Simpsons ,'” Mr. Cohen said.
Soon after The Simpsons debuted in 1990, there seemed to be Bart
Simpson merchandise on every street corner. Fox’s licensing and
merchandise division plans to start selling Futurama junk this fall
as part of the effort to make Rupert Murdoch even richer.
Mr. Cohen is already toying with potential catch phrases along the lines
of Bart Simpson’s “Don’t have a cow, man!” One
character on the show is Bender, a chain-smoking, pornography-loving robot.
His first line on Futurama sounds T-shirt-ready: “Bite my shiny
metal ass!” Tonight on the Simpsons repeat: Homer drops
out of society, becomes a hippie. [WNYW, 5, 8 P.M.]
Monday, March 15
For all the strides women have made in the television industry, a
gross imbalance remains: genitals. Cable television loves female nudity,
but generally shies away from the male organ. Tonight, though, HBO presents
more information about and images of the penis than you ever wanted to
see, “Private Dicks: Men Exposed,” on America
Undercover . It sounds like the bad idea of a freshman sociology
major: Collect a diverse group of men to sit naked in a studio and talk
about their penises. The experiment works, though, because of the honesty
of the subjects: a 57-year-old musician who proudly admits to his two-inch
erection; a porno actor; an ad director, paralyzed from mid-torso down; a
retired professor who contracted syphilis and gonorrhea during World War
II; a transsexual; a gay man with a generously sized package; three
immature frat boys. They talk frankly about sex and sexuality, virility and
mortality. “I was amazed,” said co-director Meema Spadola.
“I had never heard men talk that way before.”
Ms. Spadola, 29, found her subjects by distributing questionnaires in
bars and doctors’ offices with queries like “Describe your
relationship with your penis (e.g., sidekick, friend, enemy, simple body
part).” When she taped her subjects, she found some of their
stereotypical male responses shocking. “They weren’t
soft-pedaling reality,” she said. “Some of them said sex is
‘about the pound’–about being aggressive and getting off,
and not about the emotional connection or valuing the person you’re
with. It wasn’t comfortable to hear.”
HBO, she said, fully supported her decision to show penises. “If
you make a documentary about trains, you want to see the trains you’re
talking about.” But erections were verboten . “I don’t
think it’s legal,” Ms. Spadola said. “But it’s not an
issue for us. I didn’t want to have a segment where guys jerk off for
us, either.”
In addition to the penis video, Ms. Spadola’s main documentary
credit is a similarly themed video called Breasts. What’s next?
Assholes ? “I’m off body parts,” said Ms. Spadola, who
will next be making a documentary about the children of gay and lesbian
parents. [HBO, 32, 11 P.M.]
Tuesday, March 16
Tonight’s Spin City is not a repeat. There must
be a catch, right? On tonight’s episode, the staff grumbles over
having to work on “Oscar Sunday”–and guess which network
will be airing the Oscars on Sunday, March 21. ABC! And guess who owns the
movie that was nominated 13 times. That’s right, Disney-ABC. The
scoundrels. [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]
Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week
With the meaning of celebrity becoming ever more ambiguous, and Andy
Warhol’s notorious prediction coming true that eventually everybody
will be famous for 15 minutes, the touchingly delightful 1954 George
Cukor-Garson Kanin-Judy Holliday-Jack Lemmon satirical New York comedy
about fame, It Should Happen to You [Sunday, March 14,
Turner Classic Movies,
82, 1:30 P.M.; also on videocassette], now
seems not only still most relevant but also absolutely prescient. Kanin,
who wrote the original screenplay, initially called the picture (far more
appropriately) A Name for Herself , but the studio thought it could
do better and didn’t. Jack Lemmon, whose beguiling debut in pictures
this was, has always blamed the movie’s lackluster box office on its
meaninglessly general title.
The plot is that a slightly askew young woman known as Gladys
Glover–beautifully incarnated by the wondrous Judy Holliday–wants
to make a “name for herself” so she buys a huge billboard at the
old (pre-Coliseum) Columbus Circle and has her name printed on it in
gigantic letters: “Gladys Glover,” and that’s all. The loony
idea, which her would-be boyfriend–a young, idealistic documentary
filmmaker played with heartwarming innocence by Mr. Lemmon–thinks is
awful, works ! People want to find out who Gladys Glover is, and
pretty soon she’s famous as “the woman who put her name on a sign
at Columbus Circle.” Among the hazards of notoriety that come her way
is an ace lothario businessman, perfectly cast with Peter Lawford in
probably his best performance. Eventually, Gladys comes to understand that
fame by itself without real achievement (and sometimes even with it) is
hollow, meaningless: a message for the 90’s!
Although Judy Holliday, the most original screen comedienne since Carole
Lombard, was to make only four other films before her tragic death from
cancer in 1965 at age 43, It Should Happen to You was the last
thoroughly satisfying one. Her swan song, the Betty Comden-Adolph
Green-Jule Styne musical Bells Are Ringing (1960), directed by
Vincente Minnelli, was likable and remains fun, but she and the show were
far better on stage, there being a strain to parts of the movie, which
there never is to It Should . Nor, indeed, to any of the other three
comedy classics she did with director George Cukor, each written by Garson
Kanin–two co-written with his brilliant wife, Ruth Gordon:
Adam’s Rib (1949), in which Judy almost stole the picture from
Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; Born Yesterday (1950), the
movie version of her breakout stage success as Billie Dawn which won her
the Oscar for best actress over Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard ;
and the little-known gem The Marrying Kind (1952), an often
dramatic, deeply human look at a working-class marriage, introducing Aldo
Ray in a superbly artless performance. The chemistry between him and
Holliday is as affecting as that between her and Mr. Lemmon in It
Should , in which the complex charm emanating from them
throughout–and especially in their lovely improvisational scene
singing at the piano–is rare and memorable.
But then Cukor’s dazzling success with newcomers (like Holliday,
Mr. Lemmon, Katharine Hepburn, Angela Lansbury, etc.) is as continually
impressive as his control over stars (like Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, John
Barrymore, Ronald Colman, etc.), and has resulted in an amazing number of
films that hold up to the old test of time far better than many more
“cinematically” flamboyant jobs. Though often damned with
appellations like “woman’s director” or “studio
man,” Cukor had remarkable versatility: There is little more evocative
work on real Manhattan locations than that found in the Cukor-Holliday
comedies–especially those lovely Central Park sequences in It
Should Happen to You , which now bring a sharp clutch of nostalgia for
much simpler days from the middle of the 20th century.
