Take HART TO HART -- one of the most idiotic television shows ever thought up. It survives today on COZY -- survives, not thrives. The only thing that show had going for it was the onscreen chemistry between Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers.
It almost starred Robert Wagner and Linsay Wagner -- ABC suits salivated over Wagner and Wager in HART TO HART. But Lindsay was thin (Stephnie was as well but she was also curvy) and Robert realized he'd photograph fat next to her. That's a Hollywood actor for you -- lose weight or get another co-star? Get another co-star will always be the easy solution.
And he just got fatter and fatter as weekly episodes were filmed.
When the series ended in 1984, he was too fat to be a leading man. Instead of facing that reality, he tried to star in another series. LIME STREET lasted five episodes and no one wanted to admit that Wagner's girth sunk the show.
RJ was never much of an actor. He needed a strongly written character -- usually a dark character -- to come across in a role. What he had, in the fifties and sixites, was killer looks, he was drop dead gorgeous. By the 80s, while women like Anita Ekberg, Ann Wilson and Stevie Nicks were being mocked for their weight gain, there was no effort to even note that a man had lost his looks. Stevie and Ann had (and have) tremendous musical talents but they were reduced solely to the way they looked by the press while a man whose only real claim to fame had been his looks skated by on a pass.
PEACOCK is up and running -- and that's probably the bad news. BRAVE NEW WORLD is a dirty show. Let's be clear, we will always prefer nudity -- and sex scenes -- to violence on the screen (or in life, for that matter). We aren't prudes.
But BRAVE NEW WORLD is a leering, filthy show that uses sex and nudity in disgusting ways.
It's not sensual, it's not sexy, it's just blatant exploitation. And it doesn't have the guts to run with that.
If you're going to be dirty, embrace dirty.
Instead, they try to shore up the female prude of the show and hide behind her. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge really isn't a way to get streams.
BRAVE NEW WORLD is based upon the novel of the same name and whether, like many who worship the books of White males but ignore the works of others, you think it's a great novel or whether you realize it's a clinical and plodding tract that owes a great deal to novels that came before (plagiarism isn't too strong of a term), Huxley at least, in his own clinical way, embraced sexuality.
The series does not. It's dull and plodding -- so they did a careful adaptation. There's only one performance in the whole series: Demi Moore as John's mother Linda. Demi's Linda is drunk, messy, spilling out and spilling over. She nails the character, really brings her to life and Demi is the only high point of the series.
Demi treats the text as only one part of the performance and she's smart to take that approach. Not only is it a smart move from an acting standpoint -- if you don't do that as an actor, all you're doing is on-the-nose performing, you're not getting deep, it's also smart in terms of the writing is awful.
Demi brings the Linda of the novel to life by ignoring the Linda of the script.
It's a sham that the actor playing John didn't do the same.
We're not fans of Alden Ehrenreich. He's fat, he's ugly and he's a bad actor. He sunk SOLO and he sunk RULES DON'T APPLY. That said, we thought, before we watched, that BRAVE NEW WORLD might be the project that saved Alden's career. Watching, however, we realized that being named Alden wasn't the biggest hurdle to success for the actor, his obvious lack of talent was.
You don't have to be good looking to play a sensualist. Jack Nicholson brought Daryl to life in THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK and, though years away from CHINATOWN, he came across incredibly sexy in the process. John is raised outside the BRAVE NEW WORLD and, when he enters this artificial world, he nearly destroys it with his 'savage' ways.
So why is Alden playing John as though he's the most sensitive, little boy in the whole wide world who suffers just for you and me?
Bad writing, yes, we'll agree, but also bad acting.
He could've played the same pathetic scenes with the model with a lust, a glee and not come off as such as sad sack. He could have played the scene where John's challenged and has a prop gun thrown at him as a scene where he delights in the violence.
Instead, he's just a scared little puppy in both scenes. This is the John who will take on the BRAVE NEW WORLD? You don't buy it for a moment.
Again, Alden is not attractive -- his agent should have told him to lose 30 pounds for this project because this really is a make-or-break for the actor after he's notched up a series of bombs. It's not for nothing that he's failed to land a film role since SOLO bombed at the box office. This was it, the last roll of the dice, and if he couldn't act (and he can't) then at least he could have looked his best -- maybe THE CW would hire him to play a 'hip' parents on one of their new shows.
But he showed up, as usual, not having spent a moment working out his performance and not a second, ditto, working out his body.
Even so, he could have used that, he could have used his soft, doughy body in the role if he'd come off lascivious but this is a man who confuses the term "carnal" with "carmel." He's lost in life and he's lost onscreen.
We know why Alden took the role, he had no other offers. We're just confused as to why he was offered the role? Maybe next time, hire some producers who know producing -- know producing in the US -- instead of a Scottish comic book guy, a Brit and an American who has known nothing but failure. And here's one more tip for NBC and it's big, splintered family -- next time you have four producers on one show, take a moment to ask yourself where the diversity is? Four White guys doesn't cut it.
Diversity?
Why are they making this garbage to begin with? The late Octavia E. Butler left a body of work that's screaming for TV and film adaptation. What is about an African-American lesbian that the men at PEACOCK and elsewhere find so scary?
Why are they making this garbage to begin with? Why are they turning it into a series? We love Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, but we're not clamoring for her 1915 novel HERLAND (a utopian -- not dystopian -- work) to be turned into a series. Some books -- especially ones set years ahead of their publication dates -- have aged out.
Did no one get that time has passed Huxley's world by? The only way to make it work was to re-envision it. And grasp that Huxley was not great visionary to begin with. As Anais Nin observed of him in volume six of THE DIARY OF ANAINS NIN, "He is too much the scientist and not a poet. [. . .] I find him too scientific, too literal, too precise." You really need to be a visionary when you write science fiction and Huxley was no visionary -- would he have even been able to write what he did if he hadn't ripped off Yevgeny Zamyatin's WE?
Anais Nin was not a fan of Huxley's but someone who did like his work and did consider him a friend was Anita Loos. The playwright and screenwriter is most famous for creating GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (originally in HARPER'S BAZAAR) and for writing the screenplays to Jean Harlow's RED HEADED WOMAN, HOLD YOUR MAN, SARATOGA and THE GIRL FROM MISSOURI, as well as the screenplays to Joan Crawford's WHEN LADIES MEET, THE WOMEN, STRANGE CARGO and SUSAN AND GOD, and also ANOTHER THIN MAN and SAN FRANCISCO.
In her memoir CAST OF THOUSANDS, she recounts suggesting Huxley to the producer Hunt Stromberg who then made Huxley an offer to write the dialogue to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Loos picks up the story below:
Very soon after the interview, my phone rang; Aldous was calling, with Maria on the extension and their mood was that of gloomy resignation.
"I'm sorry," Aldous said, "but I can't take that movie job."
I wanted to know why not.
"Because it pays twenty-five hundred dollars a week," he answered in deep distress. "I simply can't accept all that money to work in a pleasant studio while my family and friends are starving and being bombed in England."
"But Aldous," I asked, "why can't you accept that salary and send it to England?"
There was a long silence at the other end of the line, and then Maria spoke up.
"Anita," she said, "what would we ever do without you?"
"The trouble with Aldous," I told her, "is that once in a while a genius isn't very smart."
Or very much of a visionary. Which is why his flat novel became an even worse TV series.
Great TV doesn't require brava acting or cutting edge scripts. It just requires some actors that grip you. Back to Robert Wagner. HART TO HART would be his last big hurrah. And you can see this piece we're writing as a note of caution but Wagner's weight gain isn't the only note of caution. HART TO HART got by on chemistry and only chemistry. There was never a quality script for the show. There was never a performance in an episode that blew the world away -- not by a star, not by a guest star. It was corn -- candy corn, sweet and gooey. And, to continue to be successful, it needed to go down smoothly.
When Wagner began trashing Powers publicly, he ruined the chance that the show would garner many new fans. Who wants to watch a pedestrian show when you know the leading man hated the leading woman? We're not saying that Robert Wagner wants to drown Stephanie Powers, we're just saying that anyone who read his hideous 2008 PIECES OF MY HEART: A LIFE would have no reason to ever want to check out HART TO HART. And far from sharing his distaste for Stephanie, most readers probably understood why she decided to stop working with him. TV magic is feather-light and can be destroyed by many things, just ask Robert Wagner.