Better a little early than a little late, right? That's what people say. And we suppose it's true as long as you're not the person opening up and their "little early" isn't arriving before you've had time to unlock the doors and turn on the lights.
We're about 22 days early. In 22 days, we will have been covering the media here for 20 years. And maybe it's time to reflect on that. No, this isn't a clip job where we pull paragraphs from various pieces over the years and call that writing.
Raison de'etre.
A French term that details our reason for existence.
One reason we're here at this site covering media is to note things worth catching APPLETV+ has PALM ROYALE. We don't know that it works as a comedy. It's funny but it's also a drama. Carol Burnett's five episode, 1986 mini-series FRESNO was more of a sitcom than PALM ROYALE.
So what is this new series? It a comedy-drama blend about Maxine Dellacorte (Kristen Wiig) and her need to push herself into Palm Beach society in 1969 while dragging her husband Doug Dellacorte (Josh Lucas) along with her. His aunt Norma Dellacorte (Carol Burnett) is a social queen in Palm Beach who has suffered a health setback. Robert Diaz (Ricky Martin) is a Korean War veteran, bartender and pool boy or "pool boy" for Norma. Laura Dern is also in the cast as Linda who is really Penelope the daughter of Skeet Rollins (Laura's real life father Bruce Dern) and the step-daughter of Skeet's second wife Evelyn (Allison Janney). Along with Julia Duffy, Mindy Cohn, Leslie Bibb and so many others, it's a first rate cast that really delivers. Kristen and Carol were both nominated for Emmys and more than deserved it. PALM ROYALE also got a an Emmy nomination for Best Comedy.
Last month, Stan wrote "Tonight I hand out the Emmys" noting some of his picks for the best in TV this year. Along with naming PALM ROYALE best comedy, he noted the programs AMERICAN SPORTS STORY: AARON HERNANDEZ, MATLOCK, ELSBETH, ENGLISH TEACHER, THE NEIGHBORHOOD, NIGHT COURT, ORPHAN BLACK: ECHOES, THE PERFECT COUPLE, BILLY JOEL: THE 100TH LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, EVERYBODY STILL HATES CHRIS and the NETFLIX movie FIGHT NIGHT: THE MILLION DOLLAR HEIST. We join Stan in recommending those programs. We also recommend NETFLIX's film THE SIX TRIPLE EIGHT starring Kerry Washington, Kerry Washington's UNPRISONED whose second season started last July (HULU has canceled the series), PARAMOUNT+'s LANDMAN and THE AGENCY, DISNEY+'s AGATHA ALL ALONG, PEACOCK's LAID, NETFLIX's CARRY-ON, MARIA and BLACK DOVES, AMAZON PRIME's EXPATS, MGM+'s FROM, STARZ's THREE WOMEN (and let's jump the gate and note THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR which premiers next month is really worth watching), APPLETV's SUNNY, BAD SISTERS, DISCLAIMER and LOOT, and HBO-MAX's GET MILLIE BLACK.
That's part of our reason for being here -- to praise programs worth watching. Praise is a part of criticism -- it's not all of negative.
But, yes, there is negative criticism and we offer that as well. Sometimes, we can offer negative and positive. Like last week when Nate Bargatze had two comedy specials debut. The one on NETFLIX? YOUR FRIEND, NATE BARGATZE, by all means catch that. It's hilarious and completely the type of strong comedy we expect from Nate. But the one CBS offered? NATE BARGATZE'S NASHVILLE CHRISTMAS? It was garbage. It had a few bits of Nate's comedy but really didn't seem to know what it was. There was no real theme or structure. We were puzzled by that but what we found more puzzling was two CBS friends in management who couldn't understand why the audience for the first airing fell off in large numbers about ten minutes in.
Did they watch the program? If they'd watched the program they would have understood that was part of the problem. At our advice, they went and watched it. They then agreed that the segment that aired should not have been included in the broadcast. Nate's a funny man, a very funny man. He's also comes off warm and friendly. So to have him and a country music star (we'll be kind and not name her) show up on this Christmas love and together special to tell the audience watching that they could visit Nashville but that Nashville didn't want them moving there?
What fool thought that 'joke' fit on a Christmas special or fit Nate's type of comedy.
It never should have aired. The whole special was questionable but that segment is what had people -- a large number of people -- turning off when it originally aired.
Sometimes we can use the podium to note a surprise or an improvement with regards to someone we've previously had to slam.
Take George Clooney. In a month shy of 20 years of media coverage here, we have offered praise. We've also offered negative criticism. Due to APPLETV+'s WOLFS, we can offer some praise again. He's very effective in the film, he turns in a great performance -- possibly his finest ever. At 63, he looks comfortable onscreen. We should also note that he looks so much better than his two year younger co-star Brad Pitt. The face sags, the body's pudgy and the skin is a nightmare. Way too much drinking, way too much, has destroyed the leading man. This is not a new development. And we find it curious that if a woman looked like that after a few decades in the business, every review, every write up would be pointing out that the looks are gone. Completely gone. Ava Gardner also lost her looks to booze but when she died at the age of 67, she still looked better than Pitt does today.
It's a visual medium so, yes, it does matter.
Equally true, Brad's never been box office himself. He's been eye candy since THELMA & LOUISE. And he's given the same performance over and over. AMAZON's lousy film RED ONE (now available for streaming as it slowly limps out of theaters) is a failure for many reasons but chief among them is that, at 43, Chris Evans is too mature to play the young kid to The Rock. Seven years ago, at the age of 30, Zac Efron was barely able to pull it off. Both Chris and Zac can act. But they are no longer convincing playing the young man in need of a life lesson from The Rock.
That's the character Brad keeps trying to play and he should have cut it out at the age of 35. This late in life, with so little talent and with a face which now looks like his liver is rotting, Brad Pitt really needs to get in rehab, find an acting teacher and grasp that the days of coasting on his looks ended about 15 years ago.
Evening the boards -- making sure that men don't get a pass -- is another reason we've spent almost twenty years here. We offer a feminist critique -- not the feminist critique. There are many feminist voices and we have never claimed to be the sole voice of feminism.
Many years ago, Muriel Rukeyser observed, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."
That's correct and we try to keep that in mind. The late Nora Ephron was not the first female media critic but her work at ESQUIRE covering the media remains a benchmark that the rest of us strive for. Feminism includes calling out media lies.
Journalism is supposed to be accurate and truthful.
So when Joan Jett lies about "I Love Rock And Roll" making it to number one on an 'indy label' and being sold out of the back of her trunk. (In reality, the version that went to number one was issued by Neil Casablanca's BOARDWALK label and copies were shipped to stores.) In that instance, NPR did correct the lie that Joan had told them. Yes, it had already aired but they added a correction to the web page where the story remains.
We have to do that all the time. And we shouldn't have to. As we've noted repeatedly, entertainment journalism tries to act as though they can lie about anything -- as though it doesn't matter because it's just entertainment. Sorry, NEW YORK TIMES, if you decide your outlet's covering entertainment, getting the facts right remains a necessity. Otherwise, it's not journalism.
Documentaries are supposed to be works of journalism. And they're supposed to be factual. But, as we've long and repeatedly documented here, that's rarely the case.
We were reminded of that yet again over the weekend when we made the mistake of streaming Stanley Isaacs's MEL BROOKS: SERIOUSLY . . . WELL ALMOST. You can stream the abomination on AMAZON.
We have no idea why you would want to.
But then again, we have no idea why anyone would put Mel Brooks on camera. A notorious liar on just about every topic really shouldn't be able to present facts. And if you're making the documentary and you present the lies as facts, he's made you a liar as well.
Let's do a bit of a transcript and see if you can spot the lies on your own. Mel's talking about his film SILENT MOVIE.
Mel Brooks: I came to him with the idea to make SILENT MOVIE. He said, "In YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN you took away color. Now in SILENT MOVIE, you took away sound. So what are you going to do? Is this picture going to be -- you're just going to hold up photographs? Is that going to be the movie?" I said, "No, it's going to be a satire of a silent movie." I said, "It's important stuff, Laddie. It's important." He said, "What do you mean?" I said we're-we're in a financial rate of art. STAR WARS, the picture that you made, that no one else wanted to make, Laddie, STAR WARS made so much money -- and this is what my-my late wife Anne explained this to me -- this was her theory -- that big business didn't give a s**t about movies -- didn't give a damn about plays or movies suddenly saw, "Holy s**t, you can make a billion dollars with this celluloid junk?"
Mel Brooks: So suddenly TRANSAMERICA takes over PARAMOUNT, Coca Cola takes over COLUMBIA. Suddenly big financial corporations are taking over studios that used to be run by Harry Cohn, by Jack Warner, by Louis B Mayer, by immigrant Americans who loved making movies, who loved art, who knew how to make movies and they just were bean counters and bottom line people. So that's where I got SILENT MOVIE from. I said, "But I'll make it funny. Don't you worry. I'll get Dom Deluise and Marty Feldman -- we'll all squeeze into a little yellow Morgan and will try and get our SILENT MOVIE made so it's like breaking the fourth wall with you. And I'll get the greatest comic that ever lived that I worked with for for ten years, Sid Caeser, I'll make him the studio chief smoking two cigars at a time and flying around under his desk. And I said, "It's going to be funny, I can tell you that." It's all about ENGULF & DEVOUR which, of course, which of a satire, a take off on GULF & WESTERN which took over PARAMOUNT -- PARAMOUNT which made THE GODFATHER -- PARAMOUNT which made the Cecil B DeMille movies [. . .]
Mel Brooks: When we were writing it, they asked me, "Well what are we going to call it?" And I said, "We're going to call it HIGH ANXIETY." I said, "There's no such term. It sounds like a real term. It sounds like a real word. And when there was -- after it came out -- there was a cover in TIME MAGAZINE about Wall Street and it said "High Anxiety." I -- we -- we made up the word. I made up the term.
You can view the cover here -- it's the October 15, 1990 issue of TIME.
Mel Brooks did not make up the term. It was not invented or coined in 1978. The term goes back many, many years. December 1971 is when it was most utilized in the press. Newspapers were filled with stories about "high anxiety." Bernard Weinraub's "Psychologist Reports 'Anxiety Level' High In Japan, West Germany, France" is widely syndicated that month. It contains sentences such as, "Lynn's high anxiety countries are Japan, West Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Belgium."
A newspaper search notes many more examples. And goes back decades. For example? THE SALT LAKE CITY DESERT NEWS, September 4, 1954 edition carried the syndicated column by Dr A E Wiggam* entitled "Let's Explore Your Mind" (syndicated by Chicago's NATIONAL NEWSPAPER SERVICE) asks a series of questions and then provides this answer to the third one, "How do high anxiety and low anxiety students scholastically?"
1954. No, Mel Brooks did not invent the term "high anxiety."
He did lie about it on camera and Stanley Isaacs did include the lie in the 'documentary' thereby popularizing the lie.
MAGA won the 2024 presidential election as a result of racism (racism itself is a lie, no race is better than any other) and sexism (sexism is also a lie, a refusal to believe in equality). MAGA nuts like Roseanne Barr believe the lie that Donald Trump is a secret avenger for children sold into sex slavery and they spread this lie. They spread so many lies.
On an awful episode of HOT IN CLEVELAND, we called it out here because Melody found a letter from a lover of Abraham Lincoln's and decided, at the end of the show, to destroy the letter to preserve Lincoln's reputation -- nearly two centuries after his death. We called that crap ass storyline out.
You have to call out the lies. Media critics especially have to call out the lies. And that's probably been our biggest raison d'etre since we started covering All Things Media Big and Small.
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Dr A E Wiggam is the billing for the column in the print version of the newspaper. In books (such as his 1949 collection of LET'S EXPLORE YOUR MIND columns), he often went by Albert Edward Wiggam. Noting his use of "high anxiety" is not an endorsement of his work. For example, he was a proponent of the pseudo science of eugenics -- a fake and false science that we do not endorse.
