There are no answers on display, just her breasts as she rides the ugly actor in his small car. He pulls out a razor blade and we think he's going to cut or kill her. Instead, self-obsessed, he cuts his little finger and then, apparently under the influence of Devendra Banhart's "Foolin'" video, he uses his finger to smear blood on the woman's shoulders.
Woman: You're so weird, Roman, but I like it.
Roman: Shh. You don't know my name.
Moon-jawed Bill Skarsgard is not just ugly, he has a way about him that screams yokel out of Deliverance. He also has a nose -- or the early growth of one. It's as though you're watching "The Eye of the Beholder" episode of The Twilight Zone.
But you can't think about that too much because suddenly it's a high school classroom and the teacher and student Brooke are exchanging meaningful looks. Both, like the woman earlier, appear to have stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine. The student ends up waiting for the teacher that night by the railroad tracks where, instead of getting it on, she gets violently killed by someone or something.
Quickly we see the great and talented Lili Taylor and Famke Janssen quickly followed by Landon Liboiron leaving us to yet again wonder: Where do they get these ugly men?
In Landon's case, Canada.
Disgusted, we're moving away from Netflix's new 'original' series Hemlock Grove. We're streaming Alpha House, Amazon's 'original' series which opens with a shot of a woman jogging, breasts a-bouncing. And yet again, we're reminded that Alan Menken and Tim Rice may have won the Acadamy Award in 1993 for "A Whole New World," but when we look at the world of entertainment, we don't see much difference.
Amazon tells you, "Alpha House was written by Academy Award nominee and Pulitzer-Prize winner Garry Trudeau (Doonsebury, Tanner '88) and features John Goodman (Roseanne, Argo, Treme), Clark Johnson (The Wire), Matt Malloy (Six Feet Under, Law and Order), and Mark Consuelos (American Horror Story: Asylum, Guys with Kids)."
We'll tell you: Alpha House is unwatchable crap.
It doesn't help that the 'funny' lines aren't funny or that the scenes fall flat. Some will be generous to the show in spite of that and we have to wonder why? The show isn't generous. It's an attempt to mock Republicans repeatedly.
Garry Trudeau got a 'created by' credit and was an 'executive producer' on Tanner '88. No one in the world should have believed those credits were earned. Tanner '88 was Robert Altman's baby. The HBO mini-series starred Michael Murphy, Pamela Reed, Cynthia Nixon, Kevin J. O'Connor, Daniel Jenkins, Jim Fyfe, Matt Malloy, Ilana Levine and Veronica Cartwright.
Right away, that screams Altman. It doesn't scream Trudeau.
Because Robert Altman's films had women in them. Garry Trudeau has done an overrated cartoon strip that won a Pulitzer in 1975 over 38 years ago.
Robert Altman also never believed Democrats weren't worthy of mocking. And the equal hand is why Tanner '88 featured a wide variety of people playing themselves including Studs Terkel, Kitty Dukakis, Linda Ellerbee, Bruce Babbitt, Ralph Nader, Robert Dole, Pat Robertson, Sidney Blumenthal, Mickey Leland, Ed Markey Rebecca De Mornay and Kitty Dukakis.
An Altman project is also an improvised project. The script is an indicator, not sacred text. So dispense with the idea that Garry Trudeau did any heavy lifting on that HBO mini-series.
What you're left with is Doonesbury, the tired strip Trudeau's done since 1970. It sparks occasional interest -- not for anything funny or clever. But it can still prompt outrage. Last year, the outrage was over a week's worth of comics about abortion.
Trudeau probably feels real proud of that and that he angered some conservatives. He shouldn't feel proud at all.
Women did not applaud this comic. The idea that he would do an abortion comic and the natural thing for him was to have a scared and frightened woman be at the hands of a man repeatedly who tormented her?
How is that comic or funny?
Many pro-choicers, including us, found the cartoon highly offensive and indicative of his history as a cartoonist. Women don't matter. He's in his fifth decade on that tired comic strip and he still can't point to any moment in all those years where women were featured prominently and were in control of their own agency. Five decades.
And now, in 2013, he creates a sitcom and women are sidelined again. But he will feature their tits in what can only be seen as a further embrace of sexism.
That's far from the show's only problems. Seth McFarlane had struggled to create live action fair. With the film Ted, he may have finally licked that problem. Trudeau faces the same problem but doesn't appear to even be aware of it. So you get stylized scenes without the direction or the visuals to stylize them and it just looks unnatural. There's a world of difference between a comic panel and a live action show, even if that never occurred to Trudeau.
Meanwhile, what if you're a promising film director who has one original movie to your credit but you hate women and don't want to do a sequel with the actress who starred in your sole film of acclaim? You move over to television where you're a hired gun with nothing to do but shoot-to-order.
Amazon describes Michael Lehmann's awful Betas as "Set in the land of Silicon Valley start-ups, Betas, written by Even Endicott and Josh Stoddard, follows four friends as they attempt to strike it rich with a new mobile social networking app. Michael Lehmann (True Blood, Dexter) directed and produced the pilot along with Emmy Award winners Alan Freedland and Alan Cohen (King of the Hill), and Academy Award nominee Michael London (Sideways)." The sitcom revolves around Joe Dinicol, Karan Soni, Jonathan C. Daly, Charlie Saxton and office 'stud' Tyson Ritter. For those puzzling over "Karan Soni," that is a man's name.
If your idea of hilarity is a fat f**k with a scraggly beard asking a woman online if she's wet while he's using his laptop in a laundromat or throwing out references to "Katy Perry's rack," then this is the show for you.
Is your idea of a show to watch is a I-couldn't-complete-the-assignment-on-time one that tells you what you're watching will be different if Amazon picks up the pilot for a series, the whole thing will be filmed in stop-motion? In other words, you're wasting your time enjoying what's before your eyes because a bigger budget means they will do the show differently than Dark Minions is the show for you. Amaazon says: "Written by Big Bang Theory co-stars Kevin Sussman and John Ross Bowie, Dark Minions is an animated workplace serious about two slackers just trying to make a paycheck, working on an intergalatic warship." Workplace comedy? It has seven regulars and the only female Jamie Denbo is listed last and as a supporting actor. Even the sixties-set Mad Men has better representation than that.
Then there's Those Who Can't which Amazon describes as, "Written by Andrew Orvedahl, Adam Cayton-Holland and Benjamin Roy (Grawlix), who were discovered through Amazon Studios' online open door process, Those Who Can't is a comedy about three juvenile, misfit teachers who are just as immature, if not more so, than the students they teach." Unlike the previously mentioned pilots Amazon's serving up, this one is actually funny. Like when three teachers plot their revenge on an annoying asshole of a student:
Adam Cayton-Holland: And what does Bryce love more than anything? And what can't La Cross players do?
Andrew Orvedahl: Play baseball
Benjamin Roy: Have consensual sex.
Adam Cayton-Holland: Both good guesses. The answer is drugs. Student athletes have to be drug free.
In a small role, Erica Brown makes a real impression as the school secretary Tammy.
What registers in Zombieland -- from the creators of the film -- is that, despite a strong (and funny) opening scene, it follows in the footsteps of Private Benjamin, Baby Boom, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and other failed attempts at turning films into TV shows. From that funny scene of two office workers at their desk complaining about the day's problems while behind them zombies attack and are attacked, the show toes into one long, talky scene after another. Not only do the characters sit around and talk far too much for a show with "Zombie" in the title, we're also stuck with a voice over.
Oninon News Empire isn't bad. It's from The Onion, after all. But it's biggest problem is that the news industry is already skewered in Aaron Sorkin's unintentionally camp The Newsroom. In fact, Onion News Empire plays like a spoof of The Newsroom from the cold bitch at the top to the underwritten female characters lower down the chain. Equally true, considering the state of news today, a 'news' network focusing on ratings gold like "the bear mauling at the porn star celebrity car wash" doesn't really seem that different from what they actually do today.
Browsers finds a newer target and provides fresher laughs. Amazon describes it as, "Written by 12-time Emmy-winning comedy writer David Javerbaum (The Daily Show) and directed by Don Scardino (30 Rock), Browsers is a musical comedy set in contemporary Manhattan that follows four young people as they start their first jobs at a news website and features actress Bebe Neuwirth."
Four interns go to work for Arianna Huffington. They don't call Bebe's character that but let's be honest, four interns go to work at The Huffington Post for Arianna. Marque Richardson lists reasons he likes her ending with "And so pro-gay." Leading Brigette Davidovici to ask, "Didn't she marry a gay man once?" Richardson replies "So pro-gay." They call her Julianna Mancuso-Bruni and the webpage The Daily Gush.
While supposedly pro-gay, she's off to lunch with a homophobe -- again, it's Arianna. And Bebe is hilarious in her role. Also hilarious is Supanatural: "Supanatural is an animated comedy series about two outspoken divas who are humanity's last line of defense against the supernatural, when they're not working at the mall. The series was written by Lily Sparks, Price Peterson and Ryan Sandoval and, the pilot was produced by Jason Micallef (Butter) and Kristen Schaal (The Daily Show)." Lucretia (Jameeliah Garrett) and Hezbah (Lily Sparks) work at the mall when not trying to save the world from the supernatural, fight the Vatican to get them to make good on a hot check. and use Chili's when a guest blows out their toilet.
A whole new world
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no or where to go
Or say we're only dreaming
If only the theme to Aladdin were true. But it's not. Online, it's not even the same old world, it's worse. Amazon offers eight sitcom pilots, not only do five of them leave women on the oustide but of the three in which woman do offer something other than their boobs, only one revolves around women (SupaNatural). And when you lump Amazon's offerings in with Netflix's Hemlock Grove and its earlier House of Cards, something else becomes obvious.
An ugly, an overweight, an untalented male -- or even an ugly, untalented and overweight male -- can and will be cast as lead in these shows. But a woman has to be talented and gorgeous to get cast and she better, like film star Famke Janssen in the 13th episode of Hemlock Grove, had better be ready to do full nudity.
Netflix offers three series (Arrested Development debuts with new episodes next month) and all are male dominated shows -- a detail that never enters their mind. Amazon offers eight sitcom pilots -- sitcom, the genre Lucille Ball dominated and defined -- yet only one of those pilots was created by women.
In Hemlock Grove, after declaring that Pennsylvania leads the nation in hate crimes and Ho-Ho consumption, Penelope Mitchell asks Bill Skarsgard to guess what she's thinking. We were hoping he'd guess, "What happened to the rest of my nose?" Instead he guesses, that she's wishing summer would never end. He's wrong and so are we. She explains, "I'm thinking that it's time to go home."
It's definitely time to go elsewhere, somewhere other than Netflix.