It's the most awkward tube time of the year, truly a weird limbo. Some shows are new, some repeats, some cancelled temporarily for holiday specials.
What has been consistent is interviews and press conferences regarding the Iraq Study Group. It was odd seeing three simultaneous interviews with James Baker and Lee Hamilton on the networks the other night (magic!). And it was pathetic watching Tony Blair make his final plea for poodledom in a joint press conference with Bush. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
What is always so sad about watching Blair perform to Bush's puppetry is that he sounds like a statesman and looks like a statesmen, so how can he not be a statesman? And yet there he is, parroting the worst nonsense of Bush as if it had real meaning. All the code words are there: democracy, war on terror, those who want to steal freedom from the Iraqis, and so forth. All that's missing are the stumbling, bumbling and made-up words. What the hell happened to him? He should go see The Queen.
It's sadder than Tiny Tim. Sadder even than Marley's ghost.
It may even be sadder than watching George Bush, Sr., hitting the skids with his constant crying jags over his useless and monomaniacal sons. Last week, clips of Bush cracking up — we meant to say, breaking down — during a speech, sobbing as he told of a 1994 election loss Jeb had suffered, were so painful to watch that it went beyond car-wreck status. Somebody remind him he used to be President! Walking around sobbing (Marley's ghost had more dignity) just looks crazy and embarrassing, like the last days of Warren G. Harding. It's not endearing. Barbara needs to give him a good, hard spanking.
Speaking of embarrassing moments for the Bushes, ThinkProgress reports: President Bush likes Will Ferrell's Bush impersonation, but the warm feelings aren't mutual. Ferrell says he has twice turned down invitations from Bush to perform. "In both cases, I especially did not want to do the inevitable photo op afterwards where we are all holding hands. That would have been a gesture of support." We loved Ferrell on SNL, and no one does Bush like he does. Now we like him even more.
Meanwhile, has Nightline bought stock in Barack Obama? We wonder simply because he is their new poster boy for all things political. Every poll we've seen puts Hillary Clinton way out in front of the Democratic pack for 2008, a good 40 points ahead of Obama, who ranks with John Edwards. So why does Nightline ignore her completely? It's not that we don't like Obama, of course we do. And we know we will like him even better when he has more than two years of Washington policy-making under his belt. But right now, we can't quite imagine him as a heavyweight contender. And so we do question the shift in attention. If we believed in conspiracy theories, we'd think it was about diverting attention away from a front-runner in order to skew results in the near future.
We'd remind the three new anchors who took over for Ted Koppel: this show isn't ET, Extra or some other tabloid program. It's news. We don't want to see Britney Spears' panties (or lack thereof) on Nightline. Nor, at a time when there is so much news in the world (albeit, all mostly horrific), do we want to see re-runs. If that's the way this show is heading, then we are going to go back to skipping between Letterman and Leno, like everyone else.
Speaking of news, we were just horrified last week to see an entire segment of the evening news on ABC devoted to women and guns. No, not women arming themselves against rape and inner-city crime. (Although we disapprove of that, too.) But women taking up hunting. Yes, hunting.
Cut to the scene of women (all white, ranging in age from teenagers to middle-aged) in orange vests in one of those bird lots where they let birds (in this case, gorgeous pheasants) out of cages just to be shot. And women exalting over how good it feels to make your first kill. In Maine.
Yuck. You don't have to be in PETA to find this execrable. Why not just tie the leg of the bird to a post and have the women come up and shoot them with AK47s? Then the follow-up: Hunting shops countrywide are stocking gear made especially for women who want to kill — er, hunt.
Diamond life
On a more elevated note, we were pleased to see Oprah doing a turn with Leonardo DiCaprio about his Oscar-buzz film, Blood Diamond . DiCaprio, one of the quiet leftists as well as a true mover and shaker in Hollywood, has long been active in the environmentalist movement, spending the majority of his time working against global warming and touring with scientists discussing ways in which ordinary folks can make a difference environmentally.
DiCaprio doesn't get a lot of press because he tends to live a quiet and forthright life. (And keeps his panties on.) But he's one of the good guys, generous, self-effacing and using his celebrity to only one end: bettering the world for everyone. More of him for Christmas, please.
Can we just say how tired we are of all the entertainment shows devoting hours to Britney Spears' underwear, or lack thereof? Is the issue here really whether she does or does not cover her Brazilian, or is it that the paparazzi are out there with their zooms up her skirt? And why do we care? The girl is 25, she's allowed to go bottomless with that bottom. And she's fully capable of embarrassing herself, she does not need help from the paparazzi.
But we did have to howl when Courtney Love told the tabloid shows that she didn't want to pass judgment or anything, but that for the first year of her daughter's life (this would be Frances, who has been regularly placed in temporary custody of people other than her rabidly addicted mother), she was home almost every night. Well! Let's give her the Joan Crawford memorial good-parenting award, shall we?
Speaking of Joan Crawford awards for parenting, we can't wait to see more tabloid exposés of Mary Cheney's pregnancy. We'd be happier if we didn't know she was breeding for Daddy's Reichstag.
Speaking of other low-life awards, we'll comment further in our best and worst column at year's end, but Dick Wolf is really living up to his name. The December 8 episode of Law & Order provided yet another evil woman guilty of murder. But with a twist: she was CEO of a company that, in ripped-from-the-headlines fashion, wasn't even attempting to be anything but Hewlitt-Packard. Except in this version, Patricia Dunn's "character" is bitchy, heartless (she fires an executive for not spending enough time at the office when he is working from home because his wife is dying of cancer), and — drumroll, please — lesbian.
She's not just any lesbian, however. In Susan Misner's portrayal, she's a vicious, inhumanly cunning dyke who will stop at nothing to get what she wants: her job and the Brazilian beauty and former prostitute who is her kept woman in a $9,500-a-month pied a terre in Manhattan. Together, they kill a man who threatens to out them.
Okay, Wolf already has more women murderers on the L&O franchise than there are in real life. But does he have to add insult to injury by creating such a despicable lesbian murderer character? This was low, even by Dick's standards. It's past time to protest this trend on his shows, we think.
The obverse of the L&O situation was the focus of the past two weeks on Boston Legal. A lesbian thinks she may have murdered her lover, she's mentally ill and has black-outs. The seemingly emotionless new lover of the murder victim might also be the killer. So: not one, but two lesbian murderers.
Except (spoiler alert), the woman actually committed suicide, and the ex-husband reconfigured the scene to make it look like a murder to get the life insurance benefit. Both lesbians were exonerated in the murder. Since this followed a case in which an over-the-top crazed queer committed a series of murders and then a kidnapping of Candace Bergen's character, we were pleased. Next week, a transvestite character from previous shows (big and black) returns to try and work at the firm. This should be good.
We like BL a lot, and we like the way the show always adds in political commentary. That subtext has been uniformly pro-queer. Plus, James Spader and William Shatner are the best couple on TV.
Former Golden Girl Betty White has left her limited run on BL and taken up residence on CBS' top-rated soap The Bold and the Beautiful, where she is playing evil rather than fun-loving or good. It's a superb performance, well worth tuning in for. The show is focusing on child abuse and its life-long consequences with her storyline. She plays the mother of Stephanie Forrester, the show's matriarch, played by the multiple Emmy-winning Susan Flannery.
Children's hour
We are just not sure what to think about All My Children and their new transsexual storyline. We are always happy to see the terrain broadened on daytime. The Young and the Restless is currently dealing with the Holocaust (the mother of a main character is a camp survivor), post-partum depression and deafness, all important issues. But on AMC, the storyline seems a tad forced.
First of all, why was this soon-to-be, but at that point utterly unaware MTF transgendered person, still in his obviously male body, kissing Bianca, the show's lesbian character who has not been allowed to kiss a woman in more than two years? And why is his name Zarf, like some Star Trek alien?
We want Zarf to have a storyline. We want Bianca to have a storyline. We do not want them to have an intersecting romantic storyline. And just for the record, it's truly pushing the envelope to expect daytime's viewers to understand that a man who thinks he might be a woman would be falling in love with a lesbian. We're not saying that daytime viewers aren't sophisticated — after all, we are daytime viewers. But we are saying that outside of San Francisco and West Hollywood, this is difficult for folks to understand, even in the queer community. It makes no sense that Bianca, who has always made it clear she is utterly gay, would be attracted to Zarf, who is not a woman. Zarf wasn't even clear himself about his gender dysfunction until well after the kiss. Does she have TG radar as well as gaydar?
As we said, a stretch. Which means we kind of agree with others objecting about this storyline (as much as we hate agreeing with anything the conservatives have to say) being a ratings ploy. It seems lazy on the part of AMC to keep Bianca out of a lesbian relationship.
Speaking of tertiary queer characters, we really like the neat way everything happens on NBC's fabulous Heroes. Including how Claire handled the verbal gay-bashing of her queer best friend, Zach. Nicely done, Miz Superhero! We also loved how Zach said he was perfectly comfortable with who he is. This subtext of high school bullying of queer students was not lost.
With the holiday whirl in full swing, it might be good to set the VCR now for the debut of ABC's new sitcom, The Knights of Prosperity (Jan. 3, check listings). Originally titled Let's Rob Mick Jagger, this show looks to be the most delightful entry in the new season. It stars the irrepressible Donal Logue (ER, etc.), who is always fabulous. We can't wait for this one and its high-camp premise.
Finally, a note of holiday good cheer and goodwill to all our faithful readers. We wish you a holiday season filled with joy and compassion. Our wish for you is what we all need most: peace and justice for all.