skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Today, I'm moving on to a more lighthearted look at "family", after the somber, personal musings of my previous entry...
As some readers have guessed, I don't watch a lot of television. It's more of a timing thing, as I have so many other likes, hobbies, and responsibilities. I tune in for movies, news, special live broadcasts, ad retro stuff.
I had never watched a full episode of the ABC family comedy "Modern Family", in spite of media raves and the urging of friends, until earlier this week. Mark received the Season 1 DVD at a holiday office-party gift-exchange.
Since then we watched the first six episodes, and now I am hooked.
"Modern Family" breathes contemporary life into the traditionally crowd-pleasing but recently tired and pandering sitcom genre. Using recent techniques like roving camera, into-the-lens interviews, and characters stealing sly glances right at us, this show remembers the conventions that made the family comedy so comfortable and so funny.
It is filled with hilarious situations, mining today's culture for honest and satiric observations that make us laugh in recognition. It offers recognizable locations, and actual establishing shots. The characters are funny and foibled, but have a warm center of humanity, and we love spending time with them. It is filmed and directed with impeccable care, and the tone is consistently sunny yet does not blink from the embarrassments of real life.
I have not laughed so hard at a TV series in years.. Nor have I loved the characters in quite the same way. I have developed a real affection for the foibles of these characters, so sharply written and so precisely and joyously performed by a talented cast.
I especially love Ty Burr's lovable but fumbling "cool dad", Sofia Vergara's fiery and fun-loving Colombiana with Rico Rodriguez as her precocious son, and the amazingly rare and warm portrayal of a male couple in Suburbia (Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet) as the newly adoptive parents of a South Asian baby girl. In fact, the entire cast, rounded out by Ed O'Neill, Julie Bowen, Nolan Gould, Sarah Hyland and Ariel Winter, are all fabulous.
Best of all: All of the characters are related, either by blood or marriage, with surprising and funny connections.
The show pokes fun at everyone and everything that forms part of our middle-class culture: multi-cultural households, middle-age and beyond, parents as buddies, kids and their gadgets, gay drama queens, Costco, female competition, and male bonding. And that's just the first six episodes.
I can't wait to finish Season 1, and devour Season 2 as well, and report on it later!
"Just sit right back and hear a tale...
...Of a lovely lady...."
Once these songs get into your head, you're hooked for life...
"Gilligan's Island", and "The Brady Bunch"....Two of arguably the most recognizable sitcoms (and theme songs) in American television history. Both still have lives of their own, still going strong in syndication, decades after their original broadcasts. Both were the creations of Sherwood Schwartz, who died this week at age 90.
Schwartz, who gave up the study of medicine to write jokes for Bob Hope in the 1940's, went on to great success in television. He created these two popular shows from the 1960's and early 1970's. Schwartz also wrote the lyrics to the theme songs which laid out the premise of each situation. The ideas and their finished products were simple and simplistic, but nonetheless brilliant for being so memorable and so iconic. Schwartz lived and worked in a time when it was admirable to reach as large an audience as possible, when appealing to a broad common denominator was respectable, even desirable, and inclusive.
"Gilligan's Island" sent six hapless characters adrift after their "three hour tour" boat is shipwrecked. The fun of the show was watching such disparate characters; a millionaire couple, a starlet, a genius, a girl-next-door, a birdbrained captain and his bumbling mate--survive all kinds of wacky incidents, and coexist. It's a slapstick version of "Lost" and "Survivor", before this premise took itself so darned seriously. The episodes bore no resemblance to "reality", and everyone knew it: that was part of the innocent fun. Mind-numbing yes, and for me, a little went a long way. And yet, a lot of respectable people grew up enjoying this stuff, and regard it with pleasant nostalgia. It is part of our pop-culture fabric.
"The Brady Bunch" is perhaps even more well-loved. Two single, widowed parents, each with three children, get married, and the children's initial resentment eventually turns into a bond, and mischief ensues. The fun of this show was also how these two families, along with their wisecracking housekeeper, got into dilemmas that were neatly resolved in a half hour. Even though it was a "contemporary" look at a typical middle-class family, everyone knew even then that it was all sugar-coated absurdity, not at all a reflection of real families. And therein lay its appeal, the same as comfort food, not always nutritious, often bland, but predictable, safe, and good for some laughs.
As far as innovation and groundbreaking television was concerned, these were barely passable shows in general, but they were harmless, and fun. They never went beyond the mildest level of tension, and that predictability was appreciated.
And many regard them with a lot of affection, as a symbol of an era where folks across generations and demographics could enjoy something knowingly cheesy; and everyone across the country had these shows in common, and bonded over them.
(You didn't have to vote people "off"; no one was humiliated except in a gently comic way; no one feared having to see a ripped open corpse, or suffer through "hip" banter that elicits the laughter of degradation instead of joy. The public did not require TV to establish its "street cred" in order to be acceptable, and TV didn't pander to that idea, either. We knew it was fake...we loved it for its artifice.)
And everyone was in on the joke, producers and audiences alike. These shows have a following unlike anything that is currently broadcast. And nothing on TV now, I predict, will have anything like the longevity or staying power of Shwartz' creations.
Perhaps you have heard the trivia regarding the little boat in "Gilligan's Island" called The S. S.Minnow...It was an in-joke, named after former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow, who, in a 1961 speech about media, ranted about the state of television, and coined the now-famous phrase "Vast Wasteland" to characterize it.
Well, if Newton Minnow could do today what he urged media experts to do then, which is to spend an entire day in front of television with no other form of media input, he might find the reruns of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch" to be welcome oases in a wasteland he could not have imagined 50 years ago.
I suppose if I were older when these shows were released, I would have cast a jaded, snobbish eye on them. But then, things are different now. Maybe I like these shows because they have, in all of their innocence, endured, and are pleasing new generations of viewers.
Fellow blogger Andrew of Encore 's World of Film and TV has asked readers to select their favorite episode of a "scripted" show from this past season. You know what? I honestly can't think of one. But if I said something like "The Minnow would be lost", or "pork chops and applesauce", a lot of folks could launch into an entire song...or give a complete episode description.
The question that begs is: which of this season's episodes--and TV theme songs--will everyone remember, fondly and completely, after 40 years?
Every time it comes on TV it makes me want to cry a little.
It's that "Trouble" ad, for an insurance company, featuring that expressive little white dog who wants to protect his prized possession, a rawhide bone.
The soulful theme song, and the effective narrative in which that rascal is sleepless with worry, stirs up primal feelings in me.
It reminds me of my belief that dogs must never worry. It reminds me that one of my best purposes in life is to make a comfortable world for our animal companions.
No matter...The world always, always, takes these friends from us. Canine, feline, avian... they are with us for such a short time... And they are gone in spite of our love, and our best efforts to keep them with us forever.
So many animals have been a part of my life. The ad causes me to think of those times when I helped my beloved animals out of their troubles: my St Bernards, Tippy and Cassie; my cockatiel Cookie; and all of the other dogs and cats I cared for, past and present.
I mourn for for the creatures that we have all loved, and inevitably lost.
I miss our basset hound Maggie, and how she would dig a hole in the garden with her front paws, drop in her bone, and cover it by pushing the dirt back over it with her snout. She would always dig it back up a few minutes later.
I laugh thinking about how she would lay in front of the couch and whine, until we moved the couch to find a little piece of kibble, which she must have flung across the room weeks ago until it lodged there.
Her comfort and safety always came first.
When she ran away once, Mark was frantic, until he found her across the street, sitting with a bunch of kids as they all watched a soccer game.
When she was bothered by her digestion, or itchy ears, or allergies, or arthritis in her bent little legs, we were consumed by healing her. When July 4th fireworks frightened her, we tried all kinds of comforting remedies, from tranquilizers to distracting play, until we discovered that her beef bone kept her pleasantly oblivious.
She was never mean, never snapped at us, but if we came too close to her bone, she only picked it up and ran from us a short distance.
No matter how much we loved her, it still came down to her last day, and the impossible task of saying goodbye.
And when I see the little white dog in the ad, with "Trouble" on the soundtrack, and his profound little worries, I regret all the trouble Maggie had in her life.
She would not see it that way, of course. In spite of her having forgiven us (I am convinced), the ad still makes me a bit melancholy.
In older times it was said that the Jester was the only person who could tell the truth to the King. Honesty, tempered with humor, worked then, and just might save us now.
I wondered why are there are no conservative counterparts to the satire of Comedy Central's liberal-leaning Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert? I decided that conservatives have no sense of humor; if they did, they would see how funny they are. If they weren't so dangerous, they might even laugh at themselves.
Mark and I have become habitual viewers of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show", and Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report" (both of the "t" s are silent!). If you have not experienced these programs on Comedy Central, or you live in an area that does not broadcast them, I invite you to check out both links for some thoughtful American satire and a lot of laughs.
Stewart is one of our smartest and wittiest pundits. His sly honesty and irony have attracted an audience of well-informed truth-seekers to "The Daily Show". Polls suggest that a large number of young viewers derive most of their knowledge of current events from Stewart (and Colbert). Stewart doesn't pander; he is informative, and allows viewers to understand the events of the day, while mocking the pomposity, corruption and incompetence of those in power (and their media stooges). He trusts the intelligence of his fans, who find the show funny because they know the score. And Stewart is smart. He is well-read, and is gently humorous even in his pointed and well-planned interviews. He is the iron fist in the velvet glove. I love it!
Stephen Colbert's satire is even more wicked. He hosts "The Colbert Report" in the character of an ultra-conservative commentator, who is just smart enough to speak to the issues, but clueless enough to render foolish the very people his alter-ego imitates (like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck). Because of his on-air persona, Colbert can get away with even more outlandish hijinx. His devastatingly funny commentary and features might be considered hard journalism on the likes of FoxNews. His "political incorrectness" is understood by those who get the joke as a slam and a put-on. He is the Ultimate Jester, and boy is he fun.
I have been following with amusement their joint rally, which takes place tomorrow (Saturday October 30) in Washington D.C. At first, they were "competing" events (Stewart and Colbert are good friends, with similar ideologies; Stewart even helped Colbert, a former cast member on "The Daily Show", to launch his own show). Stewart created The Rally to Restore Sanity to counter the anger and irrational behavior that has characterized recent American politics, encouraging the blowhards to "take it down a notch". Colbert offered his own "March to Keep Fear Alive", a pointed reference to what has been a Republican method of generating enthusiasm among their voter base. Although they claim otherwise, both of these events are a parodied response to Glenn Beck's August 28 "Restoring Honor" gathering.
Mark and I "feared" that we were "too sane" to drop everything to travel to the Capitol to take part in the festivities. We actually wished we could participate, and lend our support to what promises to be a boost to rational political discourse.
Then, today, I learned that Chicago is holding a rally of its own on Saturday. In Grant Park from 11-2, there will be a rally and march, with a closed-circuit broadcast of the East Coast revels. We will be there!! I invite all of you to join us here in Chicago if you can't make it to Washington. It will be less crowded, and I believe there are plenty of hotel rooms!
Now, for "your moment of zen", here's an excerpt from an article in the Huffington Post:
Angie McMahon, of Chicago's Chemically Imbalanced Comedy, started off with an innocent Facebook post in support of Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" in the nation's capitol this weekend.
The event snowballed into a satellite rally that McMahon found herself at the helm of, as the Sun-Times wrote in detail earlier this week.One of the myriad headaches she's faced has been dealing with permits from the city. On Thursday night, the Park District denied her a permit for the rally based on "insufficient documentation."
Still, the District instructed her on how to go forward with the event, and even offered to provide some services, under McMahon and the group's First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.
Reports on Friday morning suggest that she may have finally secured the proper permit from the city; security arrangements were likely altered because Governor Pat Quinn has announced that he'll be speaking at the event.
What: Rally to Restore Sanity Chicago Satellite
When: Saturday, October 30, 11 a.m. - 2 p.m.
Where: Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park
235 S Columbus Drive, Chicago
Price: Free!
Many of us have heard of the Peabody Awards for excellence in electronic media. Yet few know the interesting history of the award, nor the especially rich archive of winners in radio, televsion, and now internet broadcasting and web sites.
This past Wednesday, the Award recipients were announced from the Organization's home in Atlanta, where the prize was first established in 1940. Broadcast networks and news organizations from all over the world have been cited for their merit for 2009: CBS with "60 Minutes", WFLD-TV in Chicago, BBC World News, npr.org, "Modern Family" and "Glee", "Late Night With Craig Ferguson (interview with Desmond Tutu), ABC News, "Sesame Street", GMA Phillipines and Korean Broadcasting, HBO with "The No, 1 Ladies detective Agency", stories from Appalachia and Afghanistan, PBS Frontline and the Madoff Affair, and Independent Lens, The Sundance Channel...In short, a terrific array of work, worthy of recognition and preservation.
Click Here for a complete list of this year's winners. The official ceremony to honor the recipients will occur in New York on May 17. Host Diane Sawyer will be honored as well for her work on a story filmed in Appalachia.
Here's an award with a rich history. The list of past recipients forms a valuable and entertaining record of broadcasting at its finest. Those who enjoy the art of broadcasting, or care about the industry, or are entertained and enlightened by electronic media, or even those of us who follow show-business awards, really gain a lot by knowing more about the Peabody organization and the work that has been recognized by it. I would love to see this kind of award achieve the popularity and dialog often lavished on more commercial award events.
The complete and incredible list of all winners since 1940 can be found by Clicking Here. I find it as interesting as the Oscar and Tony Award Archives, as it provides a great timeline to popular culture and zeitgeist year by year.
Here is a brief history of the Peabody Awards taken from the organization's website, http://www.peabody.uga.edu/
In 1939, the National Association of Broadcasters formed a committee to recognize outstanding achievement in radio broadcasting. Committee member Lambdin Kay, manager of WSB in Atlanta, thought the award would be more credible if it were academically sanctioned and independently administered. He approached John E. Drewry of the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady School of Journalism, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea.
The Peabody Award was established in 1940 with the school, now the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, as its permanent home.
The awards, long considered among the most prestigious prizes in electronic media, recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by radio and television networks, stations, producing organizations, cable television organizations and individuals. Though there is no set number of awards, no more than 36 have ever been presented in a single year.
George Foster Peabody, born in 1852 in Columbus, Georgia, moved with his family to New York after the Civil War. Largely self-educated, Peabody became a successful banker and supporter of humanitarian causes, especially education. He helped finance a library, a forestry school, and a classroom building at the University of Georgia and was the school’s first non-resident trustee. In appreciation, the University awarded him an honorary degree and named the new broadcasting award for him.
