There we were, caught in the plot of a February sweeps soap opera, stuck in a snowstorm back East. Cold, hungry, thirsty, panicked, fearing for our life. Naturally, our thoughts turned to torture.
It's been a few years since we first expressed our revulsion that Fox's 24 was such a hot commodity, because we just didn't like the message the show declaims week after week, season after season. 24 first debuted seven weeks after 9/11, and it has been riding the counter-terrorism wave ever since. Much like George Bush.
It's not that Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of the cast aren't stellar. It's not that the writing and pacing aren't fantastic. It's not that the tension from season to season (season six just began) doesn't rival anything on the tube. It's all good. It's that watching 24 is like watching a promo for torture every week. Is it any wonder that 24 is Dick Cheney's favorite TV show?
We celebrate the First Amendment, so we would never do what the Right does when, say, there are queers on TV. We wouldn't call for the banning of the show. But we can say we don't like it. And we don't like it more this season than ever before. What's the big deal, it's just TV, right?
Not exactly. The problem of 24 and, more importantly, of creator Joel Surnow, is that 24, unlike say Las Vegas or Nip/Tuck, is a message show. And the message is this: The means is always justified, no matter what the end. The means, by the way, in case you don't watch the show, is torture. Always, always, always torture.
Again, just TV, right? Good, old-fashioned entertainment? What's a little light electrocution and water-boarding among friends? How different is 24 from Saw?
It's different because it purports to be about rescuing America. Remember that old axiom about making the world safe for democracy? On 24, there's only one way to stop the bad guys: brutalize them into oblivion or, at the very least, pulp.
It's not like Surnow doesn't have an agenda. He's the flip-side of David Kelley. Where Kelley simply cannot make an episode of the stellar Boston Legal without slamming Bush and Co., Surnow cannot make a TV show without lauding them. But here's the difference. On BL, which is the best-written show on network TV, there are always two points of view. Kelley presents his anti-Bush, anti-religious-right tirades in counterpoint to the opposition, and sometimes the lines are very blurry and grey.
The landscape is utterly black-and-white on 24, Them: bad; us: good; torture: the means to discover who is bad and who is good. The end. We don't like it.
Half-witted
Surnow branched out this week with his new program, The Half-Hour News Hour on Fox. Surnow said, "You can turn on any show and see Bush being bashed. There really is nothing out there for those who want satire that tilts right."
We suppose Surnow missed the jokes about Hillary, Obama and Nancy Pelosi. We suppose he also missed that the jokes about Bill Clinton never stopped even when he left office. Seven years ago.
Of course, when it comes to satire that tilts right, there isn't much to match the Vice President who couldn't shoot straight, or the continuing episodes of The Decider, but hey, we're sure there's something really funny to say about the left, like, "What? There's a left?" (Insert laugh track here.)
Anyway, we caught the first episode to see if Surnow could torture some laughs out of his side of the political divide.
Who says conservatives don't have a sense of humor? They voted for George Bush, didn't they? Their icon is Rush Limbaugh (who, in the words of Craig Ferguson, proved that all fat people aren't jolly, and all junkies aren't thin). They had Ted Haggard and Mark Foley in charge of family values. They obviously have a sense of humor. It just wasn't evident on The Half-Hour News Hour.
Before the Log Cabinettes get their asses in a sling (oh wait, they're assimilated; they don't do that sort of thing) saying we are just spouting the usual liberal cant, let us just note for the record that we can laugh at something that's funny no matter who it lampoons. (Although we are very over the astronaut in a diaper. That was just tragic.) We were in tears when SNL did their S/M debut of Nancy Pelosi. And not just because the slave's safe word was "Palomino."
But the Surnow Hour just isn't funny. It's stupid, sophomoric and overblown, much like the right themselves. First, Rush Limbaugh as President isn't funny. It's too much like the real Presidency to be a lampoon. Then, premiering BO magazine (you know, like Oprah's magazine O, except BO, for Barack Obama), particularly after the scandal when Sen. Joe Biden talked about Obama being clean: yeah, that's funny. Ouch.
And those were the uproarious bits. Clearly, Surnow just can't get enough of torture. The Half-Hour News Hour, which debuted February 18, runs Sunday nights on the Fox News Channel.
Speaking of comedy that tilts right, at a press conference on Valentine's Day, President Bush was asked about reports that Iran was providing IEDs to Iraqi insurgents.
"What assurances can you provide the American people," asked the reporter, "that the intelligence, this time, is accurate?"
There was no rim shot accompanying the President's response: "We know they're there," he said, not a trace of irony in his voice.
Doesn't Surnow ever think he might be on the wrong side?
So sorry
Speaking of apologists, there were so many people who did or should have apologized this week, it was difficult to keep them straight. Oh, except for Tim Hardaway. He's definitely straight. Not just straight, but he hates gay people. Or so he said, on the radio, but then what he said was picked up by every TV show — news, tabloid and late-night — on the planet.
The former Miami Heat guard said, "You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people, and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."
Hardaway's comments came after John Amaerchi, another retired NBA star, came out last week, in his new memoir.
Hardaway was asked how he would feel if a player came out while still in the game. "First of all, I wouldn't want him on my team," said Hardaway, who added that the player should not be allowed in the locker room with other men. Then he added, "I think that's nasty [men having sex with each other]. That's not what it should be. I'm gettin' sick just thinkin' about it."
Well, as our mother used to say, "Then don't think about it."
Hardaway's former coach, the illustrious Pat Riley, said he was "shocked" by Hardaway's comments. "That kind of thinking can't be tolerated. It just can't." Go, Pat!
Things only got worse for Hardaway. When NBA commissioner David Stern got the transcript of Hardaway's remarks on Valentine's Day, he moved quickly: Stern banned the homophobe from the NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas. Stern's response was succinct: "It is inappropriate for him to be representing us, given the disparity between his views and ours."
Too bad ABC didn't respond as quickly to Isaiah Washington's comments about T.R. Knight.
Hardaway did seem to borrow Washington's apology virtually word-for-word, however. Is rehab next? Jimmy Kimmel noted, "He will not be guesting on Grey's Anatomy this season."
In case your blood pressure is running too low, you can access Hardaway's full-on rant at ESPN. com.
Meanwhile, some other celebs had some splainin' to do. Like country star Kenny Chesney, who has been battling the rumors he's queer since his marriage to Oscar-winner Renee Zellweger ended precipitously with the actress filing for an annulment based on "fraud." On February 18, Chesney bared all (not really) to 60 Minutes reporter Anderson Cooper (he's everywhere, isn't he? CNN, Oprah, CBS, the National Geographic channel).
Of the rumors, Chesney told Cooper, "It's not true. Period. Maybe I should have come out and said, 'No, I'm not [gay],' but I didn't want to draw any more attention to it. I didn't have to prove to anybody that I wasn't [gay]. I didn't feel like I really did."
Until now, apparently. If you missed it, CBS is running the screaming — oops, we mean streaming — video at CBS.com. Zellweger and Chesney got hitched in May 2005. Neither had been married, although Zellweger had previously been engaged to actor Jim Carrey. Four months into the marriage, Zellweger listed fraud as the reason she was seeking an annulment. An annulment is a judicial declaration that a marriage never legally existed.
Zellweger recently appeared on Letterman, and he asked her about the fraud and annulment. She responded, good-naturedly but firmly, that she was not going to talk about that.
Too bad Anna Nicole Smith's mother never heard of such restraint. In the two-week-long ghoul-fest that has surrounded the sudden death of the beautiful and perennially naive Smith, every cretin who ever knew her has crawled out from under her or his respective rock to slither over her memory and rip their own 15 minutes from her fame.
The Smith story has legs: the tabloids don't really have another story right now except the rehab shuffle. Smith's death even led the national news, proving that some tragedies mimic others in ways we don't expect. Smith reminded many of Marilyn Monroe, with whom America has had a love affair for 50 years. Smith modeled herself on Monroe — in every way, apparently.
Smith always seemed sweet, vapid and delightful. Despite her myriad love affairs, she was no Paris Hilton; she was somehow intrinsically likable. We were very saddened by her death.
And we were outraged for her that her vile mother, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, crawled out to bask in the limelight and cast aspersions on her daughter after her death. The thrice-married Virgie Hogan Hart has insinuated that both Smith's partner Howard K. Stern and Smith herself were to blame for Smith's untimely death. Drugs or murder, according to Virgie, who is now trying to gain custody of Smith's baby daughter and, no doubt, her fortune.
The peril of celebrity is that the glare never goes away. Smith, a former Playboy centerfold model, never finished school beyond the eighth grade, but she made a career for herself on magazine covers, TV and in B-movies. There was an air of wistfulness mixed with insouciance about her that was endearing. Her legendary battles with weight made her very human in a world of stick-figure women. Interviews with her in recent months presented a woman who seemed intensely happy with Stern and her baby daughter, Dannielynn.
Smith seemed in many ways to be a creation of the camera. She seemed always to be turning up on the tube in one or another context, her wild and passionate exploits preserved on video forever.
The most memorable and sweetest TV moment of Smith's life was immediately after the birth of her daughter five months ago. The video of Smith, hair somewhat mussed, and sans make-up, holding her newborn daughter, was incredibly charming. Although we have always loved the wildness and unpredictability of Smith, this is the way we will remember her. Beautiful, poignant and immensely real.
Banks shot
Speaking of celebrities we love, even though it's past Valentine's Day, we want to send special hearts out to Tyra Banks, who has been hounded by the tabloids and everyone else for gaining weight. With headlines like "America's Next Top Waddle," tabloids have published photo after photo of the supermodel as purportedly tubby. At 5'10", Banks weighs 161 lbs., the normal weight for her height. She weighs only 20 lbs. more than she weighed when she was the first black supermodel to make the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 1997.
Banks, host of The Tyra Banks Show and America's Next Top Model (new season starts February 28) and heir apparent to Oprah, told ABC last week (for whom she dressed up in a fat-suit to look like she weighed 350 lbs.) that not only was she not fat, but that making young girls think that they should be rail-thin was causing a multitude of problems, from poor self-image to eating disorders. On her own show, when she addressed the issue, Banks said that all those who had pilloried her for her weight gain could "kiss my fat ass."
Considering that it was just November when Banks came out in nothing but her Victoria's Secret underwear and declared on her show, "It's a panty party!" looking absolutely scrumptious, few would argue with what she has to say, or how she looks.
And speaking of Oprah and role models, tune into ABC's special with Oprah inaugurating her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa on February 26. It's a tear-jerker, but well worth watching. Once again, Oprah proves that one person can make a difference in many, many lives.
Finally, because we just can't get enough left-of-center satire, our quote of the week comes from Conan O'Brien: "Ted Haggard, the minister who was caught with a gay prostitute, has finished his sex-addiction program. He says he is now 'completely heterosexual.' Haggard says he will prove he is completely heterosexual by having sex only with men who are completely heterosexual."
Stay tuned. The next big scandal is as close as your remote.