If you've never heard of Revenge, you most likely listen to Fresh Air. That's where TV 'critic' David Bianculli is forever humping the leg of some man. He's the primary TV critic for Terry Gross' bad show. He's been doing TV criticism since 1975 so his sexism is already well and widely known. In reviewing 2011, he had to attack Snooki, a personality on the 'reality' TV show Jersey Shore.
Snooki?
That's the worst thing about television?
Or did David forget to zip up and did his sexism get exposed yet again. Snooki didn't create Jersey Shore. If you loathe the show that much, one would assume you'd feel that the creators or the network (MTV) were the worst things about TV in 2011. So when you instead attack Snooki, you're really just exposing your own sexism.
And sexism isn't considered a bad thing on NPR or Fresh Air. In 2010, women made up only 18.546% of the guests on Fresh Air. One of NBC's hit sitcoms from the fall is Up All Night. It stars Christina Applegate, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph. This is Christina's third successful sitcom and Maya's first. It's Will's attempt to recover from the disaster that was Running Wilde. So two women and one man in the cast, who did Terry interview from the show?
If you were stumped, you are obviously very smart and demonstrate this by refusing to listen to Fresh Air. Will Arnett. Of course it was Will Arnett. He's a man.
Which isn't to say that that Terry and David can't mention women at all. Come on like a stereotypical lesbian in a fifties women prison drama but do it in a minor role on a TV show -- giving the exact same performance you gave in that bit part you had in Practical Magic -- and Terry wants to interview you! And David wants to rave over you! But the honest truth is, you give the same non-performance in every role you play -- bit part or supporting -- and it was the writing that put the character over the top, not your 'minimalist' acting.
Time and again, the interviewed and the raved are men. And that's not just an issue for Fresh Air. Morning Edition, for example, manages to reach new levels of sexism every time their (male) TV critic feels the need to try to 'understand' women. (Which usually requires -- as with his review of Oprah's network -- his spending some air time vouching for his own manliness.) Men and masculinist women made up the '00s Water Cooler. And that's why women were reduced to nothing on the small screen over and over until a number of women and men began fighting back. The Water Cooler Set can't deliver ratings, never has been able to pick out a hit. They like wordy. Overly wordy. And male casts with few or no women.
And so time and again, shows that actually are quality shows and/or enjoyable ones are left without champions while the Water Cooler Set works overtime to explain to you why Mad Men really isn't sexist and why Louis CK really isn't a homophobe. Sometimes, as Terry did, they'll 'prove' Louis is not a homophobe by playing a clip of his show where a gay man is at a poker game . . . and called the f-word . . . repeatedly by Louis and friends. And they'll laugh at the clip, Louis and Terry.
And no one's ever supposed to object or call it out.
Just like you're supposed to nod along and pretend it's normal for David to pick The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for his "Top 10" news programs of 2011. No, that's not acceptable. The shows may be entertaining and may even provide commentary that reaches levels of satire, but the news reports. Ideally, that includes investigative reporting. News is supposed to be things that matter and effect our lives. Though those Comedy Central programs may make you chuckle, if you mistake them for news, you are a Fan Boi, but you're not a TV critic.
A TV critic would be all over Revenge. "But it's like a soap opera!" Do you not pay attention to the Water Cooler Set? The Water Cooler Set is all about the soap opera -- as long as the show's cast is mainly men. It's as though HBO's Oz birthed this crowd back in 1997.
Emily VanCamp plays Emily Thorne who's really Amanda Clarke. When she was a little girl, she saw her single father David carrying on with Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) and then saw Victoria turn on David. Though she'd promised David he would be free, Victoria stood with her husband Conrad Grayson in framing David for terrorism. While her father went to prison, she went to foster homes and then to juvenile detention. Victoria didn't lose touch completely, she paid off a prison psychiatrist to torment Amanda.
The television series is loosely based on The Count of Monte Cristo. In the Alexandre Dumas classic, Dantes is imprisoned falsely and could be consumed with despair were it not for Abbe Faria befriending him. In Revenge, it's not a fellow prisoner that steers Amanda out of despair, it's Warden Sharon Stiles (CCH Pounder). It's Stiles who points out she can keep fighting with Emily (Margarita Levieva) or make a friend of her and then be in control.
Upon her release from juvie, Amanda learns her father is dead and he's left her his estate. She also learns something she knew as a little girl but was forced to let go of (forced by, among others, the psychiatrist Victoria controlled): Her father was innocent.
Now she wants revenge. She flips identies with Emily. And she begins trailing her targets to learn about them. Then she moves to the Hamptons, first renting then purchasing the beach house next to the Graysons' summer home. When Daniel (Joshua Bowman) falls for Emily, she's back on Victoria's radar. There's something about this Emily that she doesn't trust and she certainly doesn't want her around her precious son.
And maybe Victoria could do something to stop Emily . . . if Victoria wasn't constantly dealing with upsets. First up, Victoria learns that Conrad (Henry Czerny) is having an affair with her best friend Lydia (Amber Valletta). This discovery, part of Emily's handiwork, not only upsets Victoria and Conrad, it also takes on Lydia who betrayed David Clarke and had been his secretary. Emily's working from her enemies list and, time and again, people (or pawns) around Victoria keep getting taken out.
Only one person believed in David while he was in prison, Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann). They were business partners and Nolan visited him every week. He's the one who tells Emily (as she emerges from juvie) that her father was innocent. He's the closest thing she has to an ally. His affair with Tyler (Ashton Holmes) demonstrated he wasn't her puppet.
Nolan worries about Jack (Nick Wechsler) who has been in love with Amanda since they were both kids, taken her dog Sammy when she was forced into foster care and still wonders what happened to Amanda. He feels like he knows Emily. (Sammy knows who she is.) And he can't understand the attraction to this woman seeing and then engaged to Daniel Grayson. That attraction's momentarily forgotten when Amanda Clarke (really Emily -- remember they switched identities when both became adults) comes to town. She's not quite the way Jack thought she'd turn out but with everything that's happened . . .
Jack is the only way Emily can be hurt. Thus far, she's even willing to sacrifice Nolan. But she forever attempts to ensure that Jack is safe.
That's not always easy to do because her plans to take out certain targets often also result in harming bystanders. For example, a reporter visited her as a little girl in juvie. He told her he would prove her father was innocent. She trusted him and let him videotape their interviews (he videotaped all of his interviews). She told him about Victoria visiting the house. When he confronted Victoria and Conrad, he made it clear that money was sorely missing in his life. The Graysons were happy to find money for him. Years later, he's on the enemies list. He shows Nolan and Emily his home and brags about how he writes his books on an old typewriter, not a computer, and doesn't even keep carbon copies. Later, Emily will bust into his home, steal all the videotapes he made while interviewing people about her father and then torch his home -- ensuring that the only draft of his almost-finished book went up in flames.
That was the plan and he's crying and screaming as she expected.
But she didn't expect that Victoria, assuming 'Amanda Clarke' did the break in and torching, would send thugs over to Jack's and Jack would get beat up. She didn't expect that she'd watch a video of her father explaining he could prove his affair with Victoria because Charlotte Grayson is actually his daughter.
All these surprises and many more make it hard for Emily to stay focused on just revenge. And Nolan's always appealing to her to give up this quest. But his most recent attempt fell apart when Daniel returned from confronting Victoria about Charlotte's father being David Clarke.
Daniel told Emily that Victoria admitted it but that she got pregnant as a result of David raping her. Emily had been willing to send Daniel away, to let him out of her plans, but hearing him repeating the lie that her father raped Victoria is too much.
It's a show with many twists and turns, so many that Rebecca's called it the "omg" show. It's fiercely crafted, immensely enjoyable and highly addictive. Madeleine Stowe and Emily VanCamp are giving breakout performances. For the fall season, there were no other actors who could touch them. Only the cast of NBC's Smash can match Stowe and VanCamp. Yet this is a show that viewers share with other viewers. No one goes on Fresh Air and talks about the talented performances or the intricate plots. Had Emily/Amanda really been Eric/Allen, the show would have Water Cooler buzz. Especially if Eric/Allen could have been forty-ish. Forty-ish is really important to the Water Cooler Set -- not as important as a penis, but important still.
As if to prove that reality, over the next two weeks you're going to hear that a new show called Awake is amazing. It's not. It's crap. Not even adding Laura Innes to the cast in the second episode improves it. It stars an actor eleven years older than the woman playing his wife, though he looks 25 years older than her. Trophy wives aren't anything new on TV. But the man's a police officer, not a wealthy executive. Maybe he started out, in his 20s, as a crossing guard and met her when she was starting pre-K?
By the way, his wife, she's dead. Sometimes. He switches back and forth between alternating worlds. In one, the craggy man and his wife emerge alive from a car crash that takes their son's life, in the other world, the son survived but the wife died.
NBC's airing it, just like they aired the earlier one-man-two-lives bomb My Own Worst Enemy. The Water Cooler Set raved over that 2008 show and managed to prop it up for its first episode but approximately half of the viewers left in subsequent weeks.
The Water Cooler Set loves these little conceits and tricks. Audiences? Not really. Take a look at Fringe which no longer altnerates between World 1 and World 2, but this season has taken Peter (Joshua Jackson) to Worlds 3 and 4 and, in the process, run off the bulk of the audience. All the audience wants is Peter back with World 1 Olivia. They're not oooh-ing and aaaaw-ing over the conceit.
Time and again, in the last 12 years, the Water Cooler Set has hyped crap and ignored quality. They've jaw boned and gas bagged over every episode of the lamest and most retrograde TV shows in the world. And hyping these bad TV shows has left them no time to champion the shows that needed it. While they gas bagged over a lot of useless and derivative crap, shows that could have used the buzz, most noticeable with The New Adventures of Old Christine, were left buzz-less and easy pickings for a network uncomfortable with leading actresses. That the Water Cooler Set hasn't used each week to buzz over Revenge is only surprising if you haven't grasped that Boiz Club exists to propagate and promulgate itself.