Terry decided to bring on one of her many male TV 'critics' (yes, she has more than one) and, as readers Sally, Cameron, Rico and Beverly all e-mailed to note, no woman accomplished a damn thing in 2009. The man was supposedly reviewing the 'year in television' and had much praise for many, many men (including men who had no programs on the air in 2009) but he had not one kind word to say about women.
Could it be true?
We called NPR friends and were informed that was incorrect. Along with the many, many men he praised, he worked in a bit of praise for the very tired Tina Fey.
Of course he did. Fey's been playing for the Boys Club for sometime -- not that it's helped improve the ratings of her awful sitcom any.
In terms of 2009, Tina Fey had nothing to offer. Not one damn thing. She was about as pertinent to this year in TV as Hal Linden. As we thought about the women doing outstanding work since the start of the fall season and grasped that, yet again, they were being slighted, we knew we had to write a look-back piece.
First off, two guest stars stood out in the fall. The first was Martha Plimpton who showed up for one episode of Medium (CBS, Fridays) playing Rosemary -- a woman Alison (the always amazing Patricia Arquette) befriended during her hospital stay whom Allison was now dreaming about. Rosemary dies early on which allows one more scene where Allison has to explain to her that she's dead. Though it was a very small role, the three time Tony nominee Plimpton not only stood out but meshed perfectly with Arquette's own amazing rhythms.
The other guest star who gave a performance worth noting also appeared in only one episode. This time the network was Fox and the show was Fringe (airs Thursdays). Walter Bishop (John Noble) is the 'mad scientist' of that show. He's harmed not only his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) but also FBI agent Olivia Duham (Anna Torv) whom he drugged when she was a child. It's a complicated part and bringing on a woman he had once drugged provided the show with another complicated part. As written, the woman was not upset about the drugging and had fond memories of Walter Bishop and a lasting attraction to him. On the page, the character offered a few laughs, none of them especially deep.
In a casting miracle, Rebecca went to the always amazing Theresa Russell who not only found every nuance on the page, she created a few of her own. She added nostalgia and regret to the underwritten role and, most of all, warmth. When Walter leaves her at her house, viewers are probably filled with more regret than the script intended but that's due to the fact that Rebecca was probably the most lived in new character Fringe came up with this fall.
In a just world, 2010 will see Plimpton and Russell both receiving Emmy nominations for their roles.
Fortunately, they were not the only women giving full bodied performances during the fall season. The best news for TV was that comedy was back. Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to amaze on The New Adventures of Old Christine (CBS, Wednesdays). So much so that two weeks ago a well known stand up comic called us to say he'd finally caught the show, that he'd avoided it (despite our praise) because he really didn't care for her as Elaine (on Seinfeld) but he was amazed to "find something I could actually laugh out loud at" and praised Louis-Dreyfus for creating "a real character." In this decade, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has often been the only woman with the lead in a sitcom and, we'd argue, it's been her amazing work that has consistently reminded network execs that women can be funny and carried on the tradition of pioneering work by women in sitcoms -- women like Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Mary Tyler Moore, Marlo Thomas, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Sally Struthers, Jean Stapleton, Bea Arthur, Marla Gibbs, Nell Carter, Susan Saint James, Jane Curtain, Roseanne, Laurie Metcalf, Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Candice Bergen, Shelly Long, Jasmine Guy, Cybill Shepherd, Helen Hunt, Courtney Cox-Arquette, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Debra Messing and Megan Mullally.
One of those women, Courtney Cox, returned to sitcoms this fall. Cougar Town (ABC, Wednesday) and like most good sitcoms starring women, she's not the 'token.' Jules has two close friends brilliantly played by Christa Miller (The Drew Carey Show, Scrubs) and Busy Philipps. If you haven't caught the show yet, it's hilarious and your first clue to that is the war conducted against it by a certain number of women (none of which are feminists, see Ruth's "Eilene Zimmerman Is No Feminist").
When TWO BIT Guttersnipes come out in packs, your gut should tell you some IDIOT at The New York Times is behind it. In this case it wasn't The Idiot Bellafante (whom ABC never does corrections for), it was The Idiot Warner. Judith Warner's a real piece of a work and, yes, a real Bitch. It takes a Bitch to rip apart a woman for things she never did. Zonked out on who knows what this time, Warner typed:
And, of course, we had Jules, Cox's alter ego, 40-ish, recently divorced, really pretty, really well-groomed, well-dressed and strikingly well-off for a woman paying alimony and selling real estate in bust-time Florida -- and, above all, eager to take her revenge on an unfair world by getting a pretty young man to call her own.
Getting such a man passes for some kind of empowerment on the show and is accompanied by all sorts of pseudo-feminist language. Which is why, I suppose, the temptation to find something meaningful in all the froth feels so compelling.
[. . .]
A woman like Cox's Jules -- visibly vibrating with self-doubt and thinly-veiled self-loathing, is, it's fair to say, probably the least likely figure of fantasy to be conjured by women Cox's age. In fact, she'd be more of a nightmare. But this Cougar beast -- sexually aggressive, ever-available, a woman beating a man at his own game -- is a fantasy that seems to be selling pretty well right now, at least to (mostly male) studio heads and TV execs and advertisers. Maybe that's because she's such a twit: so narcissistic, so superficial, so stunted emotionally,
Poor, Judith, we'll stop her raving there. See, the "Twit"? It's Judith. She's not describing Cougar Town. She's only demonstrating she didn't even watch the first episode (that would be the one she's 'writing' 'about'). Talk about superficial, talk about emotionally stunted.
The New York Times would do well to begin fact checking their TV pieces. Judith Warner would do well to issue an apology for LYING to readers that she watched a show she never watched. If we can't make it through a show, we'll tell you. We'll tell you, we found it so bad, we couldn't watch it. But Warner wants readers to believe she watched Cougar Town when she didn't.
Jules did not end up with a young man in the first episode because she went after him and took him home. Her friend dropped him off at her doorstep. As for being all the things that Warner's describing, Jules is a working woman, the mother and primary care-giver of a teenage son. If someone's life is empty, it may be Judith Warner's but it's not Jules'.
It appears to be 44-year-old Warner's own fears (yes, we've all heard talk about the marriage -- we just didn't know she was aware of the talk) and it's a real shame that she elected to take her own problems out on a TV show.
We don't see a great deal of difference between a hate monger like Judith Warner and one like Terry Gross. In both cases, they're all about hurting women.
Terry brings on 'critics,' 'experts,' in the arts -- including TV, movies and music -- and we're never supposed to notice that Terry can't connect with any woman, we're never supposed to notice that to be an expert in Terry's world is to be a man.
Judith wanted to write about TV and what did she offer? An attack on women.
At a time when women are fighting to regain the positions they had in the 90s on TV, Judith comes along to attack them. To attack with lies. Now she could have hated the show and we would have rolled our eyes but to lie about it? To write a piece that demonstrates she was unable to invest 24 or so minutes into watching the show she's ripping apart?
We slammed Two and A Half Men sometime ago and our warnings came true over the holiday. But we notice there's no cry of "Cancel the show!" And we're reminded that there never is.
Roseanne sings off-key and there are efforts to take her show off the air. Cybill Shepherd and Brett Butler and Lynn Redgrave (among many, many others) are targeted and demonized for being strong women while many of their male peers get caught drunk driving, busted for drugs and much more and it's never, "We must cancel this show!"
You better believe if Julia Louis-Dreyfus had been the one arrested this holiday season, CBS would already be whispering to the press (which would be amplifying it) that it might be time to end the show.
We're not saying Charlie Sheen should be fired or his show cancelled. We've got nothing against Kelsey Grammar or Tim Allen (to note two other men who got away with everything no woman would have) either. We're making the point that men get passes while women get cancelled.
And we're making the point that women who are not feminist -- especially at The New York Times -- repeatedly attack women on TV. Where have they been this decade as the networks followed Bully Boy Bush's lead and 'machoed' up? As women were absented from leads (except the 'straight woman' in a comedy)? Judging Amy, a great show, was cancelled, and where were they?
Oh, that's right, they were picking on Patricia Arquette. They were attacking her and her show. It's really hard to figure out what The New York Times GutterSnipes want women to be because it's never good enough. To read Warner, they want something more along the lines of Patricia's Allison. But Allison was ripped apart. A working woman, a mother of three kids, she failed because it was 'supernatural.' Strangely, the paper's never gone after the show entitled Supernatural. But that show stars men.
And it's a different criteria, now isn't it? No woman ever meets the 'standards' of The New York Times. The character Judith Warner is describing, for example, isn't Jules. It does sound a great deal like Dr. Fraiser Crane but that show (and the lead character) never got ripped apart by the paper.
Jenna Elfman returned to sitcoms this fall with Accidentally On Purpose (CBS, Mondays) and it's a delightful confection. She's wonderful in it and hitting every note required. But the reviews of it were these awful, savage attacks.
For the longest time, we wondered if our own knowledge of the battle she and others with the show had to fight to get it where it is were influencing our judgment of it? Even grasping that opinions can differ, the show we saw and the ones so many critics described were worlds apart. But if you look at those reviews, you grasp they aren't addressing the quality of the show or its merits, the reviewers are all in the midst of their own panic. Which can be entertaining and might even qualify for enlightening . . .
Some other time.
Not now. Not when women are attempting to regain ground. Think about Saturday Night Live for example. This decade it's not considered alarming or appalling that they've done full seasons (including the current one) where only one woman is in the cast. The show that, when it debuted in the seventies, featured three strong women in the cast (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtain and Laraine Newman).
As we've documented here in countless pieces over almost five years, offline we have begged, pleaded, advocated, yelled -- done whatever we could to get various network suits to beef up women's presence on TV. Fall 2009 was probably the strongest fall season for women of the decade. And we watched amazed as critics -- including female ones -- ripped apart shows starring women. We watched amazed as everyone decided they were Maureen Dowd and that what happened onscreen wasn't as important as what it reminded them of from their own lives. Like Dowd struggling to write about politics and turning the entire thing into a joke, the Water Cooler Set demonstrated they couldn't write about TV.
Offline, before the fall season started, we picked the show we were going to support on each network. On ABC, it was Cougar Town and we went to lunches and parties with various ABC suits to talk that show up like crazy. At NBC, we did the same for Mercy. At CBS, we worked Accidentally On Purpose and The Good Wife. We'd go to lunches and parties and we'd talk 'shop' (we have no financial stakes in any of those shows) and, once the fall season began, there would usually be a guest who was passionate about the show we were talking up. We'd be able to point and say, "See, there's an audience. You just need to keep it on the air, you just need to give it a fair shot."
And while we're doing that, the GutterSnipes are going around trashing these same shows. Those 'reviews' would appear and there would be momentary network panic. We'd have to do a walk through on why the Water Cooler Idiot(s) didn't get it. And, in doing so, we probably undercut any power the Water Cooler Set might have had left (good!). At ABC, for example, in programming, they now rip the Water Cooler Set reviews apart worse than we ever have.
And for what reason did the Water Cooler Set attack?
We've already pointed out that Judith Warner's 'critique' of the character of Jules sounded like she was describing Fraiser (she certainly wasn't describing Jules). Why is there this need to rip apart women? Why is there this need to insist that a female character be just like you (Judith Warner)?
Maude never would have stood a chance in today's environment.
Now we chose four shows to champion that we thought held the most promise for women onscreen. If we'd been able to champion more, we would have. And it's a real shame that no one else did. Eastwick, for example, was a very solid show.
Our only negative critique of it (offline) was: "Cut Paul Gross' hair."
It was a fast-paced show with some strong writing and some stronger acting. It starred Rebecca Romijn (hitting all the right notes from her very first scene), Jaime Ray Newman (remember that name) and Lindsay Price. And the three of them not only held their own individually, they managed to get a group rhythm going as well. Our problem with Eastwick (other than Gross' hair -- which did get cut and he looked so much better after) was: Where is this going?
And that's the only thing that may have hurt it with audiences. Some viewers may have felt, "Well the women discover their power, all get pregnant by Darryl and then defeat him." In other words, it was probably necessary to make clear that this was based on the movie but it was not the movie. (It wasn't based on the bad book by the bad writer John Updike.) But viewers who gave it a chance would have quickly seen it was creating its own world.
It really was something to watch (ABC has canceled it) and it could have used support. It didn't get it.
We're not really sure what a Judith Warner or a Terry Gross believes they accomplished this year but we know they made life harder for women. They did that by consistently undercutting women. They did it by refusing to applaud or even note the amazing work of women in front of the cameras.
Along with Cox, Louis-Dreyfus, Elfman, Miller, Philips, Russell, Plimpton, Price, Newman and Romijn there was Julianna Margulies turning in an incredible performance and the Water Cooler Set really couldn't wrap around that, they were too busy dissecting the title (The Good Wife, CBS, Tuesdays). They were too busy telling you what the title meant in relation to their own lives. (Kind of like Warner with Cougar Town.)
Terry Gross and her Posse Don't Pee Sitting Down were trashing Sandra Bullock and The Proposal earlier this year. They were trashing it because they didn't think Sandra was playing a role model and they didn't think it was this or it was that. It's always so amusing to hear a man tell you what feminism is really about.
And as he wound down, smart people noticed that he never drags that same criticism out when he's reviewing the latest Tom Hanks film. He's never concerned about sexism then. He's not concerned about it with any film starring a man. Here's reality boys and girls, feminism matters. Sexism matters. And if you're going to sit there and trash a successful film starring a woman -- in a decade when few women were able to carry a film -- then you better be prepared to also offer a similar critique of the latest film you just loved, you know, the one where the man had a gun and he did this and he did that and the woman had three scenes, an overdeveloped chest and an underwritten role.
That's not how it works, though, is it? A woman's largely ignored unless she's successful -- at which point, she's ripped apart.
And it couldn't happen without a lot of women -- Terry Gross and Judith Warner are only two of them -- taking part.