I just wanted to check in and let you guys know that my roommate is watching America’s Got Talent in the next room, and an opera singer is singing Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” but she skipped the chorus and also has back-up singers, and also everyone loved it?
This should tell you everything you need to know.
In the interest of full disclosure, I start an honest-to-god job in reality television on Monday. I’ve been working in and around a prominent reality personality on and off over the past couple months, and I like to think that I’ve gained a lot of perspective on how the butt-padding sausage is made. I’ve been witness to full story lines being plucked from thin air, PAs running around to get props that are supposed to be found in the cast’s homes, and lines being fed to 13-year-olds for them to repeat to the camera. As someone aspiring to the television industry (and as a bit of a nerd), the transparency has been a rewarding experience. As someone who sometimes finds herself watching reality shows, it’s kind of shattered the glass.
Jersey Shore is entering its fourth season, and for a grandchild of The Real World, it’s sort of unprecedented that it has maintained its original cast. And I’m certainly not the first person to point out that, by now, Snooki and The Situation are international celebrities, and that they know exactly how they come off after the show gets edited. Them being paired up this season - in a storyline that stinks of “beat sheet” - is basically like the producers finally just throwing up their hands and hooking up, like, I don’t know, Chandler and Joey.
At this point in the series, this season premiere is about as formulaic and segmented as a chemistry textbook. The impromptu avant garde genius of Snooki’s season one bon mots are only echoed by poor attempts. The girls are driven to Newark airport by Deena’s dad for some reason. They’re living in a Florentine villa, but they still have to share two bedrooms. Only Vinnie bothers to learn any Italian. Blah blah blah, ad infinitum.
To make matters worse, the cast’s fame peeks through in the strangest ways. For instance, J-Woww (is that the correct amount of W’s? I don’t want to check) seems to have lost something like 20 pounds, and now she looks like she should be hosting an MTV reboot of Tales From the Crypt. I fully expect her bizarrely-lined face to also be the host of my nightmares for at least the next couple weeks. At least Ronnie’s back on his steroid cycle, so now we can all go back to fearing for his health and also wondering how he fits through doors.
Also, this was the first episode I’ve seen with Deena, last year’s new addition, and her sad attempt at a catchphrase (“The Jersey Turnpike” (n): a dance move that involves her sticking her ass in dudes’ faces) makes her the closest thing that reality TV has to Cousin Oliver.
Welcome back, our little gremlins. Now we can recommence the countdown to one of you getting injured in some manner.
Oh man, I hate Gordon Ramsay so much. I hate his open misogyny and his yelling and his orange face and his horrible boy band hair. Sometimes I actually find his shows really hard to watch, and not just because they’re awful. Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe it would be healthier if I explored this in my sex life rather than my TV viewing choices. Whatever, America, I got Hulu and a dream so here goes.
I’m not going to recap the results shows because enough is too much, so I’ll quickly note here that Ashley and Chris were sent home last week. I thought that was a pity because 1) Ashley deserved to go further and 2) I don’t like when they eliminate both members of a couple. See, when they eliminate people from two different couples, the survivors get paired up, and then we get to see a new dynamic. If Community has taught us, as a society, anything, it is that all TV shows should mix and match their characters in different episodes because it is delightful. Anyway, this season, SYTYCD has only eliminated whole couples, and it’s boring and I hate it.
Whoever writes Cat’s material was fucking with her tonight. She got stuck describing the first two choreographers (Melanie LaPatin and Tony Meredith) as “doyens of the paso doble.” Good on her for keeping the fear in her eyes to a minimum. Sasha and Alexander danced this paso doble, and it seemed pretty good, but then they ruined it by kissing after the dance was over. Everybody is kissing this season, and it’s such a desperate grab for votes. It depresses me.
Next up, Travis Wall has choreographed a dance “about women who take advantage of weak men.” Oh, Travis, don’t do that. Jordan and Tadd dance it, and although I haven’t been Jordan’s biggest fan, I have to admit that she really kills it here. Still, this is one of my least favorite Travis routines, and not just because of the theme. The lyricism of Travis’ usual choreography appeals to me, and this routine is more disjointed. It feels like the choreographers are playing to Sonya, who is one of tonight’s judges; both dances so far have really suited her sensibilities. But all of this is nitpicking because the main problem with this routine about an exploitative woman and an exploited man is that HE KILLS HER AT THE END. He defeats her, and I think that’s supposed to be a thumbs-up positive thing, but the defeat takes the form of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE OH GOD OUR CULTURE IS SO FUCKED UP.
Ryan and Ricky do a Broadway routine that is all right. Whatever, moving on.
Caitlynn and Mitchell are dancing Congolese child soldier-themed hip-hop. Yes, really. The theme, which is explained in the clip package, doesn’t come through in the dance at all. Maybe it’s good to mention issues like violence in the Congo, even in passing, but this sort of thing always feels weird to me. It feels cheap and insulting to treat a real tragedy like gold leaf, a little gravitas gilding the show’s frivolous core. Everyone can put on their serious faces and talk about the Congo for thirty seconds, but ultimately, Caitlynn and Mitchell are going to make silly faces and hold out their fingers to indicate that you should call TEMPO-ZERO-FOUR to vote for them.
Then Melanie and Marko tango. It’s good. Next.
Clarice and Jess are doing a hip-hop routine about a dude telling a lady to have better self-esteem, which is an entirely unproblematic idea, definitely. Between the grating concept, the fact that it’s set to “Just The Way You Are,” and the routine’s lack of energy, I did not like it. The judges did, though.
This week, each couple is dancing twice, so we return to Sasha and Alexander, who are dancing a Broadway routine by Tyce DiOrio. It’s good. Then Jordan and Tadd have a Broadway number choreographed by Spencer Liff. It’s not as good. And why did the producers stick two Broadway dances back to back?
Ryan and Ricky dance a cha-cha.
Then back to Travis Wall, who has choreographed a 70s-ish jazz number for Caitlynn and Mitchell. The dance starts with Caitlynn slapping Mitchell in the face. Travis, honey, what is going on?
Then Melanie and Marko dance a nice piece that is introduced really poorly. In the clip package, choreographer Dee Kaspary says, “This piece is about couples slipping in and out of light. Melanie is trying to convince Marko that the light is a good place, because he’s in a dark place.” Yup. Genius. It is good that this dude usually speaks through movement.
The show concludes with Clarice and Jess doing a jive by Melanie and Tony. I don’t usually give Clarice much thought, but she’s very good.
Why isn’t there just a TV show that’s dance performances by professional companies, without the judges or the competition or any of this tacky nonsense? I just want to watch dancing. PBS probably has this, right? I should look into it.
I hate reality TV, like most people with two eyes and a heart, but whenever I have time to kill, whenever I am feeling far too lazy to do something productive or intellectually stimulating – all of a sudden, it’s who’s the chef who can get yelled at the best or the fashion designer who makes the ugliest clothes or the drag queen who meets some standard of RuPaul’s that frankly after three seasons I still don’t understand that I want to kill an hour of my life with.
I am explaining this because this is the reason why, somehow, somewhere, I ended up watching The A List. I don’t remember how. I remember thinking “I just had a three hour class and walked for an hour. I have the second season of Deadwood and the first season of Mad Men on my computer. Let’s go see what’s streaming on LogoTV.com.” It didn’t even look good. Having seen ten episodes, it now looks even worse.
This show, you guys. This stupid fucking show.
Anyway. Johanna (wearing groucho marx glasses, natch) and Jackson start things off with an “on this episode of 19 Kids and Counting”. Those kids are too cute. They should just do all of the talking heads from here on out.
After the credits, Jim Bob asks Michelle to give him a hair cut, because he won’t be able to coat his hair in a metric ton of product during a quick visit to El Salvador. They’re going to El Salvador, you see, the lobby the government to ease their international adoption regulations.
This actually surprises me quite a bit, because while certain circles in the Evangelical Christian world love them some international adoption, the leader of the Duggars’ particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity, Bill Gothard, does not believe in adoption. Strange!
We quickly recap the Duggars’ missionary trips to El Salvador over the past couple years. Apparently Jim Bob really wanted to take Michelle this time, as they’ve never been together. Oh, I see. Jim Bob and Michelle just want to fuck without their 19 million kids cockblocking them! I can’t fault them for that. Though they could probably find an excuse that doesn’t involve pressuring a sovereign country to ease their adoption procedures so that more American families can indoctrinate children into being perfect Christian soldiers.
We’re treated to a bit of honest casual affection between the two of them. Apparently Jim Bob only trusts Michelle to cut his precious hair. You know, they are terrible people, but I do believe they genuinely love each other. So I guess there is that.
Of course, Jim Bob immediately micro-manages his wife’s every decision regarding the haircut, and my world is righted.
Michelle says she’ll be leaving “Jana, Jill, Jessa and Jinger in charge” while they’re are gone. So, absolutely nothing will change from the family’s standard operating procedure.
4:45 am the next day. Jim Bob is blow-drying his hair. He really fucking loves his hair, you guys.
8-year-old Justin is spotted wandering around the house in khakis and a polo shirt, ostensibly to see his parents off, but I wonder. Every once in a while the camera will linger on one of the younger ones sleeping in their day clothes in a random part of the house. I get the feeling the family has lost the ability to structure sleep time for the under 10s.
Most interestingly, Jackson interviews that while his parents where in El Salvador, Jana was “back home” taking care of the kids with help from her sisters and the seemingly inexhaustible Grandma. Has Jana flown the coop? God, I hope so. Run, Jana, run.
Jessa tries to keep the kids in line during school for the day (the family homeschools), but she doesn’t seem to get much farther than establishing the rules before Anna swings by to teach the kids how to make ice cream. At least that kinda involves food chemistry?
Cut to one hour later. “Anna was having….trouble making the homemade ice cream.” Jackson interviews with a dickish smirk. Love that kid.
The next day they take the kids go-karting. Jana stays behind to take care of Josie, who has developed a fever.
That night, Josie’s oxygen monitor starts beeping. The girls ready themselves to take her in to the doctor, but Josie has a seizure and they call 911.
Jana’s twin brother John David, a volunteer firefighter, interviews that his pager went off to respond to the call, and he goes to the house to help. So John David is also possibly living elsewhere. Iiinteresting.
Jim Bob and Michelle say they feel totally helpless from El Salvador. Josh interviews at the hospital that this was “really one of the first major scares we’ve had” as his sisters are shown calming Josie. At one point Jill is filmed with Josie in a rocking chair, in a moment more tender and loving than anything I’ve seen with Michelle and any of her kids.
I briefly entertain a fantasy wherein the parents stay in El Salvador, forever, and the kids do just fine on their own.
But they don’t. And when they get back, Jana is there with Josie. Michelle closes with a ditty about how grateful she is to god to have such wonderful kids and how happy she is to be back at home. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.
Previously on Luther: A masked man went on a killing spree. Luther helped his murderer pal Alice escape from detention in a mental hospital. Luther also kidnapped a prostitute to save her from prostitution. Ripley, Luther’s detective underling, got kidnapped by the masked serial killer. Kidnappings are all around us.
Ripley is being held in the soggiest hallway in the world (is he on a boat?) and tortured by the masked baddie. Luther’s team is trying to find the serial killer and save Ripley, but Luther has a distraction in the shape of the hooker he recently kidnapped. She is being illegally detained in Paul McGann’s living room. Her name is Jenny, incidentally, and I’d like to think that’s a reference to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Jenny.” Perhaps Luther’s condescending, fetishizing attitude toward sex workers is also a reference to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny.” Fuck that poem, and fuck this show.
Jenny’s mother (who, in the last episode, guilt-tripped Luther into saving her daughter from the den of iniquity) is visited by Jenny’s angry pimps. They demand to talk to Luther. Luther, who isn’t in the middle of a serial killer manhunt or anything, goes over to the mom’s house. The pimps nail his hand to a table. The boss (played by the wonderful Pam Ferris) accuses Luther of theft and calls Jenny her “property,” so she’s clearly a bad person, not one of those nice multimillionaire pimps. She tells Luther that he has to prevent a witness from testifying against her grandson Toby. If Luther refuses, “the slut child dies.” I think the phrase “slut child” is supposed to further indicate that Pam Ferris is horrible, but it just sounds like run-of-the-mill Twitter lingo to me. Luther pulls the nail out of his hand and leaves, dripping blood and Christian imagery.
Luther, Paul McGann, and Jenny set off to vandalize a cop’s car so that Luther can sneak into a safehouse and threaten the protected witness. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, the witness is persuaded. Jenny gives Luther a BIG hug, because this show thinks she is a child, and he is her new dad.
Meanwhile, in the world of police who do police work, Luther’s boss has found the man who forged identity documents for the serial killer. The petty criminal folds like a neglected soufflé; he tells the cops that the serial killer bought a bus and volatile chemicals in addition to new papers. Luther swans back in to work and uses his free association profiling skills to infer that the serial killer would not use chemicals to make a bomb. Then, in another amazing logical leap, Luther concludes that the serial killer is going to kill a lot of children and use the chemicals to dispose of their bodies.
Cut to: the serial killer driving a school bus. He’s wearing sunglasses in what I assume is an attempt to look less suspicious. This strikes me as a particularly silly touch.
Ripley frees himself and calls Luther. Together, they quickly find the serial killer because technology. After catching the bad guy and saving the children, Luther returns to adult babysitting duty. He takes Jenny back to her mother’s house. Her mom is an asshole, and Jenny begs Luther not to leave her there. He leaves her there.
You may have noticed that my favorite character, Alice the zany murderer, has been missing from this entire episode. I’m not gonna lie: it’s been tough going. But here she is, waiting for him back at his apartment, and I am so happy to see her. As per always, she chews the scenery and is more fun than the rest of the show put together. She asks Luther to run away with her, which he absolutely should. He declines because he is a snore golem. After Alice takes off, Luther goes back to Jenny and agrees to let her live in his apartment. Is Alice off the show? I hope Alice isn’t off the show.
The reason I watched this show was stupid and so was this show. We are coming on three years now from when I watched the entire series, beginning to end, in a couple of weeks or so, and I basically wish I hadn’t because it pretty much never comes up in conversation.
If they gave BAFTAs for Most Mugging for Camera, I am convinced that Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley (both excellent in Spice World, incidentally) would sweep them every time they do another series. This was, I think, the worst thing about the show. The characters would deliver a joke, then continue bobbing their heads around and making faces as the STUPID BRITISH AUDIENCE brayed like crazy.
In fact, the show is a perfect example of how a multicam sitcom can make people hate multicam sitcoms. There are some EXCELLENT ones (you don’t need me to name them, right?), sure. But the form’s critics focus on the wrong thing. They’re all “the laugh track was annoying, etc, etc.” Usually it is a live audience, sometimes not, but those are really only annoying when the jokes are bad. The thing a multicam sitcom can do wrongest is play to the studio audience in a way that alienates the audience at home, and that is exactly what the Most Mugging Award is given for, ugh.
Also all the characters are crudely drawn stereotypes and the stories are character-driven which is a damn shame considering the beginning of this sentence and a very young Idris Elba is on one episode and they’re gonna make another series starting filming in August and I may just skip that one.
The episode starts with some fast cutting, so we know shit is going to be exciting. Douche is at a luxury car rental joint, having a dick-measuring contest with an Other Guy over who gets to drive the sexy electric car. Douche wins, for his dick is the dick of legend. But then he lets the Other Guy take the car. Douche explains to a Lady employee that this means the influential Other Guy owes him one. And then he explains why the contrived contest makes Other Guy feel indebted. Heaven forbid this show trust the audience to understand even the most obvious implied motive. In Suits there is no subtext, only text.
I’m not even going to sum up the A-story this week. It is stupid and boring and best left unexamined, like the contents of this box.
The B-story involves Non-Douche and two Ladies. Back in the pilot, Non-Douche’s best friend was an unscrupulous weed dealer named Other Guy. Other Guy’s girlfriend, Lady, had no idea that her snugglebunny sold drugs until the end of the episode, when Non-Douche showed her the contents of The Briefcase. (You know, the one in drug subplots of TV shows.) Lady was absent in the second episode of the show, so I thought she was gone daddy gone. But now she is back, and she is slapping Non-Douche in the face. She is also using the phrase “throwing his life away” in two consecutive sentences. This show is a garbage monster.
Suits is bringing this Lady back in order to create some heavy-handed romantic tension. Non-Douche’s main love interest is clearly a Lady paralegal who works at his firm, but since they’re not going to get together immediately, they need a placeholder Lady. So we get treated to not one, but two shots of Non-Douche receiving a call from one of these Ladies while he is hanging out with the other one. He is so torn, you see!
Non-Douche is having dinner with paralegal Lady when he gets the call from the other Lady; the discussion over their meal is a good example of why Suits’ dialogue confuses and bothers me:
Non-Douche: That looks kind of funny.
Lady: So does an egg roll.
I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to mean. In what way does an egg roll look funny? The writing on this show is rhythmically very similar to snappy TV repartee, but it seems to be missing… content? Wit? Something. I’ll admit that there were two decent lines in this episode: “Because my face is hideous” and “Have you ever considered writing for Hallmark?” Better in context, probably. But not great in context. Refreshingly not-horrible, though.
In addition to those two lines, there’s an okay scene between Not-Douche and his old friend Other Guy. They are at odds over the dealing drugs issue and the wanting to bang the same Lady issue and maybe some other issues besides. Not-Douche gets his ass kicked, and that’s a nice touch because he’s otherwise such a Gary Stu. How’s that for a backhanded compliment?
I have no idea how many feminist pinko commie vegans watch 19 Kids and Counting. Probably less than the number of exurban republican DIY homemaker bloggers who list Michelle Duggar as one of their inspirations. I’m guessing.
I’m not proud. But I also can’t stop watching the show. You see, I used to be a member of a conservative Christian church. Nothing like the Duggars, but very few denominations are. And watching the Duggars, the best way I can describe it, is like how a childhood friend’s mother would put her husband’s spent cigarette butts in her mouth while she vacuumed.
“I quit years ago,” she’d tell me, “but sometimes I just need the taste again, just for a minute.”
The show is full of patriarchal bullshit, brainless extremist politics and hopelessly intractable ennui, but I watch it because of those things, not despite them.
And with that cheerful introduction, let’s see what our merry band of failbots have been up to this season!
