Who knew there would be so much really compelling TV to watch in rerun season? Perhaps if the San Francisco police had known, they wouldn't have made their own show.
Just like the SFPD, boys didn't fare too well on Survivor: Guatemala this season. Each one macho-ed himself right out of the tribe. Thus we really have to congratulate Rafe, the gay Mormon, on his success as the literal last man standing. Who says nice guys finish last? Cute, dorky and smart enough to make it to the end while singing Backstreet Boys tunes in the jungle. Sweet. Somehow we're sure Rafe won't end up in criminal court like the first queer winner, Richard Hatch.
Then there's the tons of buzz about the new queer film Brokeback Mountain on every tabloid and talk show. As the film debuted on Dec. 9, ABC even devoted a huge segment of their nightly newscast to the film and the controversy surrounding it. (Gorgeous Marlboro men spooning in the woods on the evening news. Swoon or cope.) Hey, if you can't get a good controversy out of the combined efforts of Ang Lee, Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, then you just aren't trying. Catch this cute quote from Brokeback's Australian star, Heath Ledger: "I truly hate when they call actors brave or daring for a role like this. Firefighters are brave and daring. I'm a kid from Perth who's acting."
Also in the news this week: Matt Damon, who does queer very well, too. Damon got married on the sly this week, so now he's officially not gay, after years of rumors.
Meanwhile, that other oft-rumored-to-be-gay hunk George Clooney has been doing the rounds of every talk show on the planet stumping for his new film Syriana (and trashing the Bush Administration for the war, politely but firmly, every chance he gets). Cynthia McFadden grilled him on Nightline, Leno prodded him for connections between the current situation in the Middle East and the film. Clooney sounds like a man with a mission. Do we see competition for Ahnold's job?
The political, the personal and the queer were also on display as Felicity Huffman did the rounds for her new film, Transamerica. Her enthusiasm for her role as a transgendered woman has been a delight. Certainly a new take on the desperate housewife!
We liked the little queer exchange we caught between mom and daughter, Stephanie and Felicia, on CBS soap The Bold & the Beautiful, when Felicia returned home from France with mystery woman Renee. Stephanie asked if this was why Felicia's romances with men had never worked out: She's really a lesbian. Felicia responded with, "Oh, Mother!" (Because she's not actually gay, she's keeping a different secret.) To which Stephanie responded, oh-so-enlightened, that it was fine with her, she just wanted her daughter to be happy. Now if the soaps could just put all this enlightenment into getting a queer character and keeping one.
Closet follies
For months, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing his parody of the R. Kelly R&B opera The Closet, which began as Kelly's commentary about black men on the down low. In Kimmel's final segment this week, comedian Sarah Silverman (Jesus Is Magic ) and Alanis Morissette did a hilarious lesbian take-off on The Closet. We loved Sarah and Alanis running off together, with Alanis as the father of Sarah's baby.
We can't remember a holiday season when there's been so much queer TV. Is Santa gay now? NBC has even chosen Epiphany (Jan. 6) to debut its new series about Jesus and some queers, The Book of Daniel. BoD stars Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn and Aiden Quinn as ministers, and has the hunky Dylan Baker. NBC is heavily promo-ing the lesbian plot-line. The Jesus figure played by Garrett Dillahunt (doing the whole long-haired, non-Semitic Christ) appears in the same promo. Whoa! We can't wait to hear the evangelicals on this one. Move over, SpongeBob!
Although we enjoy a continual dose of queerness on the tube, not all of it works. Law & Order: SVU was priming the queer pump hard this week with an episode that combined schoolyard bullying, Catholic anti-gay agendas, lesbian politics, pedophilia, gay marriage and child custody. If it sounds like too much for one episode, it was. What's more, none of the characters was empathetic, not the dying lesbian mother nor her strident girlfriend, not the homophobic grandmother nor the bullied little girl who was the pivot of the story. Memo to Dick Wolf: Watch a few episodes of Boston Legal. David Kelley does this political-message-meets-empathic-characters thing really well. That's why BL keeps winning Emmys. As our mother used to say, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Speaking of vermin, how's this for a slimy exchange? Donald Rumsfeld, at one of his beat-the-press conferences the other day, opined that "one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks." Lou Dobbs turned to CNN political correspondent Bill Schneider and said, "It's dumbfounding, isn't it?" "It certainly is," noted Schneider.
That wasn't the only reveal on the tube this week. ABC finally announced who will fill the capacious shoes of Peter Jennings. (Jennings' final report, about the failed health-insurance industry in the US, will air Dec. 15 in the ABC PrimeTime slot.) Big shoes they were, because it will take two anchors to take his place: Elizabeth Vargas, who has anchored the news since Jennings first became ill, and veteran reporter Bob Woodruff.
With the announcement of the new team at ABC, the gloves came off in the battle for news supremacy between NBC and ABC. Suddenly it's real news all the time on both networks. (CBS has been totally lost since Dan Rather left.) NBC anchor Brian Williams spent last week in New Orleans, reporting on the criminal negligence still going on there in the disaster that Washington forgot. An entire American city wiped off the map, 600,000 people still displaced, and no one is doing anything. Williams seems as disbelieving as he was during the initial disaster.
NBC disclosed some of the thousands of documents released by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco last week which showed the intensity of the clashes between Blanco and the Bush Administration as she struggled to respond to Katrina. Blanco's frustration and anger over delays in evacuations and the slow delivery of promised federal aid are palpable.
While NBC covers the aftermath of Katrina, ABC strives for attention for the injured and dead from Iraq. Vargas is in Baghdad this week; Terry Moran was there last week reporting for Nightline, which focused on women and the war. The December 8 episode featured women who have returned from Iraq with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Although women are not supposed to be in combat situations, like everything in Iraq, the usual rules don't apply. Thus we now have young mothers coming home as damaged as their husbands. One wonders what will become of the children of all these shell-shocked young war veterans.
Cynthia McFadden anchored a town meeting of Gold Star mothers on December 9 in Ohio, the home of more dead soldiers per capita than any other state. It was a revealing hour in which the wounds of the war were exposed briefly, but painfully. A majority of the mothers support the war effort, although none could actually explain why the US is in Iraq. But an articulate and vocal handful were both angry and bereft. Two mothers felt nothing was worth the lives of their sons. Another was angry that she never received a phone call from the President when her son was killed (you know, like they do on The West Wing). Another respected her son's desire to fight in Iraq, but disagreed with him about the war itself. Yet another felt that the President lied about the reasons for going to war, and wished her son had never gone. ABC deserves kudos for addressing these issues, but we would prefer to see it in prime time, for a wider audience than the rarified one for Nightline .
Yes, the news is back, and so is queer TV. There's more than just a host of cops gone wild and still-delightful Charlie Brown Christmas specials out there this season, so stay tuned.