TV critics made Roots, The Day After, The Doll Maker, The Burning Bed, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Nobody's Child, A Killing In A Small Town, Evil in Clear Water, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All In The Family and more possible. No, they didn't act in them, write them, direct them or produce them, but they fostered a climate that made them possible.
They took their role seriously, as advocates for entertaining TV, as advocates for better representation by race, by gender, by ethnicity. They took their roles seriously and they made a huge difference.
Today?
Today, we've got TV babies. As Matt Dillon explains in Drugstore Cowboy, "All these kids, they're all TV babies. Watching people killing and f**king each other on the boob tube for so long it's all they know. Hell, they think it's legal. They think it's the right thing to do." We're not concerned with the sex aspect but the violence and the detachment is incredibly troubling.
The finest critic of any genre or medium during the 20th century was Pauline Kael and she didn't praise or practice detachment. A film had to involve her, had to pull her in. Inside jokes, the chuckle in the hand, they meant nothing to her. And as the most prominent critic and writing at the then-still-mattered The New Yorker, Kael had tremendous influence.
Then there's the anti-Kael, distant, detached, catty for the sake of catty and more: Maureen Dowd. Bob Somerby sees Creeping Dowdism everywhere. We think Dowd's writing has sometimes been on the money but more often been intensely troubled and toubling. Unlike Bob Somerby, we know Dowd's body of work which includes more than the New York Times. We're familiar with the bad entertainment articles she's written (and we're talking years before the awful Tina Fey piece). We're aware of all the doctoring a non-New York Times publication had to do when Dowd flirted with an entertainment career.
Most of all, we're aware of the hallmark of Dowd's writing across the board: Errors, errors, errors. And they're not really accidental. Accidental could be caught and fixed after publication. Dowd's form of error is, for example, wanting to compare some man to Sophia Loren so therefore quoting one of Anne's lines from Un homme et une femme . . . even though Anne was played by Anouk Aimee, not Sophia Loren.
Correcting those type of errors renders writing useless because the whole piece was built around them. And what's really amazing is that sort of thing is what ended Dowd's freelance career in the 90s but that sort of thing has never been a problem for The New York Times. What film magazines would not accept, The New York Times allowed to become standardized practice. And from the still popular, if not as prestigious, paper, she's led The Charge of the Niche Brigade.
The Charge of the Niche Brigade is a pack of writers who have a sense of self-importance not warranted either by their body of work or by their stature on the world's stage. But you couldn't reduce serious problems to the trivial if you had any sesne of perspective. They are the Dadaist Hugo Ball's works (and working principle) come to life.
Which explains why so many TV shows are so removed from anything recognizable or remotely lifelike. TV Babies launched The Charge of the Niche Brigade when they should have been decrying 'writers' who seemed to think, for example, stealing Tootsie was creating something. Where earlier writers wrote about experiences they'd had and were going through, TV Babies only know how to write about what they watched, what someone else wrote.
Which is how you get, among other shows, Community. The still struggling sitcom plays like Dowd's scripting it, as though she came up with a (not so great) idea and then grafted elements onto it. As facts don't matter to Dowd, characters don't matter to Community and, as Rebecca has noted, they frequently betray characters such as Troy, Avid and Brita to force a laugh or (copied) plot line.
This happens with no complaints from the TV Babies.
Racism? They encourage racism and homophobia. They pretend otherwise. If they smell blood in the water, if they think a show is destined to fail, they'll suddenly feign interest in racism and homophobia. But if it's one of their pets, they say nothing.
Tina Fey's increasingly hideous show cracks 'jokes' about rape, gays, Jews, African-Americans and women and the TV Babies chuckle as they gather at the Water Cooler. And, in the process, a new generation of TV Babies is sprouting right now assuming this is how you write funny.
Sexism? The only time TV Babies pretend to give a damn about the way women are portrayed is when they're trashing one of those rare shows that stars a woman. Suddenly, they want to pose as feminists then, writers who care about the way women are portrayed. They did nothing to decry the use of women as wallpaper in one male dominated show after another but when their (sexist) sensibilities are offended they will pose as a feminist to attack, for example, the sitcom Whitney.
Or Maya Rudolph's performance as Ava on Up All Night. They're insta-feminists when they rush to assure you that Maya's awful and over-the-top and blah, blah, blah. A clue for the TV Babies of the Water Cooler Set, when you only pose as feminists when you're trying to take down women, no one takes you seriously as a feminist. As for Maya, she's hilarious. She's not playing a secretary on Mad Men (which probably really irritates them), she's playing Ava -- a one-name brand, a daytime TV megastar whose every move is studied and copied. That's who she is playing and she's playing the part beautifully.
Meanwhile, a new development. A stay-at-home parent's life has been taken up by the TV Babies who want a job and more scenes for the parent. It's so different than anything they've wanted before from TV's stay-at-home Moms. Of course, this time the stay-at-home Mom is played by Will Arnett and that explains their sudden concern.
They're concerned for Awake as well. A dreadful show that's bombed in the ratings is spit polished in press releases passed off as press each week while the same group of TV Babies work overtime to trash Ashley Judd and her new series Missing.
Missing is a solid show with twists and turns and spills and chases. If it starred any failed movie actor, the TV Babies would be panting in joy as they furiously darted their hands below the waist. But it stars a woman so they work overtime to destroy it. Here's a bit of reality you may have missed last week if you follow the TV Babies: Missing is ABC's first new Thursday night hit in years.
Their desire to pimp Awake is actually a gift because it comes as they attempt to bury Missing because it allows anyone paying attention to grasp how much they lie. Many times when trashing a show starring a woman, they'll insist, if ratings are strong, that it's actually low in the 18 to 49 demographic the woman's failing to deliver. But Awake? It's got the worst 18 to 49 demographic so when they pimp it and savage Missing, they're revealing yet again how untrustworthy they are.
But you should really be suspicious of them anyway just for their lust over that demographic. CBS is mocked and made fun of because its audience trends older. That hasn't prevented CBS from being the number one rated network. And what does it say about these alleged independt 'reporters' that they write these pieces glorifying or condemning a show based upon the age of the viewer?
It goes to the hollow at their core, the lack of any depth, the destruction of self and others that Hugo Black's work foresaw. They leave no lasting impact because they offer nothing but empty words strung together. If Dowd and the TV Babies were characters in a Woody Allen film, they'd be Dusty in Hannah & Her Sisters -- basing art purchases on how much wall space they needed to fill.
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