April is the coolest month. There are more new shows on the horizon, including the return of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) in Fox's 24: Live Another Day, and an NBC mini-series that is a remake of the classic horror novel and film Rosemary's Baby. The story is set in Paris rather than New York, and Rosemary is played by Latina actress Zoe Saldana, so the marriage is interracial, which adds to the intrigue. Though we aren't sure how one bests the 1968 film.
Last week Neil Patrick Harris ended his nine-year run as Barney Stinson on CBS' How I Met Your Mother with the series' finale. The role won him five Emmys for best actor in a comedy, and helped him be listed as the most powerful actor on TV. (Working that gay agenda.) Next Harris heads to Broadway to star in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as the transgender singer. ET reported last week that Harris lost 25 lbs. for the role, and showed some stills of Harris in drag. Fetching.
Harris has been on Broadway before, has hosted the Tony Awards four times, and won three Emmys for his performances. But he has never stayed away from TV for long, so expect to see him back soon, most likely in a follow-up to HIMYM, which, unlike Breaking Bad, did not leave viewers satisfied in the series finale.
We're not sure what the biggest TV news of the week has been: another mass shooter at a military base, or David Letterman announcing he's leaving late night. They were given equal weight on the national news. We're going to go with our gut and say, the shooting by Ivan Lopez at Fort Hood.
We've heard this story before: mentally ill man with guns shoots a lot of people in a short period of time. TV news and their paid experts deconstruct the events. Everyone asks, "How could this happen?" This time the deconstruction part was on fast-forward. We were stunned by how quickly the story went from horror to acceptance. Within 48 hours, the demonizing of Lopez as someone who had no right to claim PTSD or damage from America's longest wars was solidified by TV "experts."
Here's what we think: War damages people. Long wars damage people longer. People respond to the horror of war differently. Humans are programmed by evolution (creationists cover your ears) for fight or flight. War only offers fight. Anyone who thinks that one can feel safe being in a war zone because they aren't in a combat position, as some "experts" said on ABC's Nightline, must not know how many men and women on delivery convoys have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq. One thing we know for sure: Lopez is not the last man to go mad from war. And really, you don't need a paid expert to tell you that.
Now to that other news item, Letterman's consciously unhosting The Late Show. Letterman's decision was fairly sudden. He'd told CBS last year he was thinking about retiring sometime in the not-so-distant future and had only signed a contract through August 2015. Yet no one really thought he would leave then. His announcement on the April 3 show was poignant as well as funny. The 66-year-old Letterman has been the top-rated late-night host for decades. Most of us have grown up with Letterman and his quirky, acerbic style. No one has been a talk-show host longer; Letterman has hosted Late Night since 1982, more years even than Johnny Carson was on The Tonight Show.
Letterman's show is also his own, produced by his company Worldwide Pants, which also produces The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Letterman has also produced sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond, Sesame Street specials and indie films like Strangers with Candy.
We've always liked Letterman for his slow-burn take-downs of politicians, especially Republicans. One of our personal faves was a couple of years ago when Letterman was quizzing Rand Paul on spending for education and said, "So what you're saying is, you really have no idea what you're talking about." We loved how he taunted Mitt Romney every night during the 2012 campaign for refusing to come on when other politicians, including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John McCain, had.
But what we will never forget was Letterman's monologue after 9/11. After days of every network dropping all its programming for round-the-clock news coverage, when things began to normalize with the return to regular programming, Letterman was who the nation most wanted to see. The late-night comedian in the heart of New York City would be the one to answer the unspoken question we all had: Would we ever be able to laugh again? His opening monologue was somber, emotional and intense. But also said succinctly all that we needed to hear, from someone who sounded as honest and confused by what had happened as we were. Letterman told us that life goes on and we with it, and that despite the hideousness of what had happened, we could still be grateful: for the first responders who took risks few of us could imagine, for a mayor who knew how to calm the populace in the midst of abject terror, for a city full of people who rallied rather than go mad with grief and rage.
Letterman leaving opens the door for someone else to take that slot. Names are being floated, chief among them Stephen Colbert. We'd love to see a woman hosting on CBS, but we're not holding our breath. Julie Chen would be the likeliest candidate. Chen is wife of CBS president Les Moonves and current host of the daytime show The Talk, as well as host of the Big Brother series. But what about someone truly edgy like Roseanne Barr?
Jimmy Fallon's transition into hosting The Tonight Show has been so smooth and ratings so even, it's as if Jay Leno never existed. Fallon is affable and funny, and his bits work. On his April 4 show, he made this quip: "Yesterday, Hillary Clinton said the media treats women with a double standard. Or as the media reported it, 'Hillary shows off sassy new haircut.'"
Comedian Louis CK hosted on SNL last week, and said this in his opener: "We didn't give women the vote until 1920. That means democracy is 94 years old. There are three people in my building older than American democracy."
Fancy feast
Meanwhile, is NBC's Hannibal the most perversely homoerotic show on TV? Gay showrunner, creator and writer Bryan Fuller has outdone himself this season. All the over-the-top beauty, pageantry and pathos Fuller had used in Pushing Daisies he utilizes in Hannibal. But this time, the flowers are part of macabre murder displays. And the way Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal lovingly prepares his cannibalistic feasts is so sensual, it reads like sex. Then he feeds these extravagant meals that look like Dutch still lifes to the men he is so deeply attached to. Oh, the sexual tension as we watch him watch them eat the food he has prepared!
When in the April 4 episode Hannibal sets his sights on Dr. Gideon (played with brilliant range by gay actor Eddie Izzard) because he has colluded with Hannibal's love obsession, FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), we know something terrible and wonderful is afoot. After Gideon's throat is slashed and his back broken in one of the most beautifully rendered assault scenes in cinematic history, Hannibal saves him, only to amputate his legs. But it doesn't end there. We watch Hannibal prepare an elaborate meal that is sumptuous and elegant.
He's roasted Gideon's amputated legs and now intends to serve them to him. Hannibal takes a bite, watches Gideon, who stares at the meat on his fork, then eats it. Human, the other white meat. He turns to Hannibal and says, "My compliments to the chef," in a tone dripping with irony.
Speaking of homoeroticism, for fun there's this loop on Vine promoting HBO's True Detective, with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey talking about how "just flat sexy" each other is: vine.co/v/MevdDvpLxi3. Get a room.
On ABC's Nashville, there's no room, there's no sex, there's just the reality of the gay stigma. Will (Chris Carmack) is flat-out gay. He's in love with Gunnar, but now Will's marrying Layla (Aubrey Peeples) and pretending to be straight. Every time we see him kiss her, we cringe. When Gunnar lies for Will when he's asked by the producer if Will is gay, we cringe. Homophobia is far from over, as we know from real life. Nashville is addressing that reality. But it creeps us out to see Layla lied to by both Will and Gunnar. All over America this same scenario is still being played out. And the curse of the down-low is also responsible for myriad new HIV infections in women whose "bisexual" partners are having unsafe sex with other men because they can't tell the truth to themselves. We'd like to see Nashville work this into the storyline. We also hope they don't keep Will married to Layla, since we all know desire can't be elided. Will wants men. So no matter how fond he is of Layla or how many times he has sex with her, his true desire will overwhelm him. And his career will come crashing down.
Speaking of music careers, Fox's American Idol has its first out contestant in MK Nobilette. The 20-year-old San Franciscan may be voted off the island, but at least she got on there. There could be hope for this show yet.
NBC's The Voice has had previous out lesbian contestants. This season it's Kristen Merlin, butch and country. She's got a hell of a voice, and her coach is Shakira. But is The Voice pulling some lesbian erasure with a butch lesbian? It seems to us like Merlin's back story got short shrift, and the camera cuts away from her a lot when she sings. Maybe we're being paranoid since lesbian erasure is the new black, but we think not.
Our fave TV story of the week involved a commercial rather than a series. The Honey Maid "It's wholesome" ad features different families, including a gay male couple lovingly kissing their baby, and an interracial couple and their children. At commercial's end, it's true modern family. No surprise, the haters flipped out. One Million Moms, who are nowhere near one million, led the campaign against Honey Maid. The company responded with a special art project and video ad that will make you sob. The two young female artists took the hate mail as well as letters of support, and scrolled them so that their messages faced out. They linked them all together into a huge sculpture that reads: Love. If you haven't seen it, it's on YouTube. So for this remarkable story, the last of Letterman and all our guilty TV pleasures like vicarious homosexual cannibalism, you really must stay tuned.