We need TV. Dramas, sitcoms, dramedy, the occasional reality TV series. RuPaul's Drag Race provides the best escape, although we do not like two eliminations in one week. The cooking shows always make us feel like we aren't quite up to par when eight-year-olds are making ceviche or bird's nest soup. No more MSNBC, which has become a mirror image of Fox News: all white, all in the bubble. We miss Melissa Harris-Perry, the last black commentator, who was forced out two weeks ago. It's been a slow, sad break-up with Rachel Maddow, but we realized we wouldn't have stayed this long if she hadn't been a lesbian.
The presidential primary season has been grueling and has produced some of the worst TV we've seen in a while. We were actually pleased that Donald Trump gave the order of no more debates on the GOP side, since we have just had enough. On March 18, our fave GOP presidential race dropout, SC Sen. Lindsey Graham (when is he going to come out?), leveled one of his deadpan comments. We loathe Graham's politics, but he's a funny, acerbic guy, and we wish he'd made it to the main stage just for that. In January, Graham described the abject loathing of TX Sen. Ted Cruz this way: "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate and the trial were in the Senate, nobody would convict you." Now Graham's in the unenviable position the rest of America's in of deciding which GOPer is more repugnant. Asked by MSNBC's Maddow whether he preferred Cruz or Trump as the Republican nominee, Graham said, "It's like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?" But pressed by CNN on March 18, Graham acknowledged he's been forced to the dark side of tepidly supporting Cruz. Graham said Cruz is "certainly not my preference," and he's "had many differences with" him, but "Trump is worse." And so Graham is supporting Cruz. No more bon mots in the foreseeable future.
Comedy has been thin with regard to the presidential campaign, perhaps because we are so weary of some of the players. Even the SNL skits have worn us down, despite the superb stylings of out lesbian comedian Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton, Larry David as Bernie Sanders, and Darrell Hammond as Donald Trump. McKinnon doing Hillary doing Sanders was also good.
We're already tired of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, and we've been over Bill Maher and his Islamophobia for a long time. We can still get it up for Larry Wilmore and The Nightly Show. And one of our late-night faves is James Corden and The Late Late Show. But the former is a far better rep of Jon Stewart's legacy than Colbert, whom we can no longer watch. And Corden is the gayest non-gay man in the history of TV. If you haven't seen his Carpool Karaoke, time to sit down and watch. We're still laughing from Sia �" yes, Corden wears the same wig. In a video for EW this week, Corden said until Mariah Carey agreed to do it, everyone turned him down. But after her, everyone wanted to do it, including the great Stevie Wonder and Justin Bieber at his most adorable.
Corden told EW, "The guest who surprised me the most was Stevie Wonder, because we were told very strictly that we only had an hour, and we just shot for two-and-a-half hours because he just kept saying, 'I'm having a great time, let's do another one!'" Corden has starred in a few musicals and can actually sing, and is just so sweet and naturally, ebulliently funny, he's a joy to watch. How is he not gay?
Corden notwithstanding, the big joy of late night these days for the political and non-political is Samantha Bee. We're not sure why it's taken our entire lifetime for there to be a woman with a late-night political/comedy show, but it probably had something to do with the patriarchy and misogyny. But we digress. Samantha Bee is the true heir to Jon Stewart. The 46-year-old Bee spent 12 years as a "correspondent" on The Daily Show, and she cut her teeth on politics. One of her signature roles was getting people to make themselves look ridiculous while talking about their careers or passions. In a spot called "Tropical Repression," Bee hoisted Ed Heeney, a Florida politician running his campaign for the House of Representatives based on opposition to gay rights, on his own petard.
Heeney says, "I want to be known as an average guy." He goes on to explain how "the gays are an alien army within," and are moving up from Miami to pollute the heteronormativity of Ft. Lauderdale. Bee asks if he's homophobic. He says he's "homonausic." Gays make him sick. It gets better as he explains how lesbians have taken over both the pool tables and the women, because their "creamy white skin" is "predatory.' Bee manages to keep a straight face throughout.
Another fave perfect for this election season is NILFs (News I'd Like to F#@k ), which deconstructs news anchors based on sexiness. "CNN has the wholesome girl-next-door NILFs, the kind you can bring home to meet your mother. MSNBC has the dirty-over-30 NILFs. Fox has the filthy NILFs who will report anything. They're the Hustler of NILFs."
Bee's new show on TBS, Full Frontal, is nearly perfect. Bee brings all the tricks of the trade she mastered on The Daily Show and uses them to full advantage. It's fabulous. After so many years of having no voice on late night, women finally have Bee, who is not afraid to say the f-word, feminist. Her show's theme song is Peaches' "Boys Wanna Be Her." Yeah.
No shade to Chelsea Handler, who did have her Comedy Central show Chelsea Lately for seven seasons, and whose new show Chelsea will premiere on Netflix in mid-May. Handler was the bawdy, foul-mouthed, laugh-out-loud bad girl for a long time, but never got the same attention as Bee, possibly because when her show debuted a decade ago, people still weren't ready for "a woman." Hmm, where have we heard that? (Handler also has a four-part documentary series, Chelsea Does, that dropped on Netflix in January.)
Bee has taken on the GOP, especially Trump, and on one episode held a funeral for the Republican Party. A native-born Canadian, she celebrates having just become an American citizen and has told interviewers she's excited about voting in her first election. As for whom she supports, she's cagey about that, but told Rolling Stone, "I think it's very dismissive to assume people are just voting [for Hillary] with their vaginas. But, you know, we're all very used to being dismissed, so it sort of makes sense."
On her March 14 show, Bee did a segment, "Greetings, Trump Supporters!" in which she took on a group of Trumpers. The well-educated kind, not the Duck Dynasty ones. It's hilarious. Discussing Trump cancelling a rally for fear of violence, Bee says, "Having left his balls in his other pants." Bee is told by one of the Trumpers, "He's got sort of a simplistic but evocative language that I think speaks to a lot of people at almost a limbic or a primal level." Limbic. To which she replies, "So you acknowledge that Trump is speaking to our lizard brains?" Eventually, she is driven to drink. You don't have to have a vagina to watch. Bee brings it.
Spring forward
Lucky for us, since we need TV right now, there's more than just Bee to look forward to. Now there are multiple TV seasons, including one called "Spring," which never existed before. A few new shows and some old faves are worth a look.
The season finales of American Crime and How to Get Away with Murder left us shaking our head. We don't want to spoil anything for those of you who might have missed either, but these were two of the best gay male storylines of the season, and in the case of American Crime, possibly ever.
We're caught up in The Family, which is dark as hell but utterly addicting. We really wish it hadn't been moved opposite The Good Wife, but that's why the DVR was invented. The many layers raise questions about what constitutes desire and where the lines between desire and criminality get breeched. We were queasy initially that viewers would read the pedophilia as homosexuality, but we think the show makes the distinction clear. Andrew McCarthy is extraordinary as Hank Asher, the pedophile, and Alison Pill does yeowoman work as Willa Warren, the daughter who takes over the management of her family at 13. The whole cast is strong, the layering of the story is compelling, the questions of what constitutes right and wrong and the myriad of grey areas leave the viewer thinking about each episode long after.
We have not been keeping up with Hulu as much as we would have liked, but one series we are watching is the limited-series dramatization of Stephen King's novel 11.22.63. The science fiction thriller is executive produced by the stellar J.J. Abrams and King himself, as well as Bridget Carpenter, who developed the project for Hulu. The series stars the still-sexy James Franco as Jake Epping, a recently divorced English teacher from Maine who is given the chance to travel back in time to Texas circa 1960, where he attempts to prevent the assassination of JFK. Once in the past, Epping becomes attached to the life he makes there.
This series is primed for the election season and has many dark twists, this being Stephen King. The cast includes some standout actors like Oscar winner Chris Cooper, Tony winner and out lesbian Cherry Jones, and Emmy-nominated out gay actor T.R. Knight. Well worth watching.
Another limited series debuting April 19 on AMC is an adaptation of John Le Carr�'s The Night Manager, which has been updated to the present day, and which looks riveting. Former British soldier Jonathan Pine (the always superb and, here, surprisingly sexy Tom Hiddleston) is recruited by Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), an intelligence operative. He is tasked to navigate Whitehall and Washington, DC, where there is an alliance between the intelligence community and the secret arms trade. He must infiltrate the inner circle of arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), Roper's girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), and associate Corkoran (Tom Hollander).
The series is written by British playwright David Farr and directed by Oscar winner Susanne Bier, who's given the show a dark and brooding look as befits the subject. Laurie, whom we loved to hate for years on House, fairly leaps off the screen here as the larger-than-life Roper. "War is spectator sport," Roper tells us, and we see the wheels turning. This is a man who is always plotting. When Roper says, "Anyone can betray anyone," we know he means anyone can be pushed beyond the limits of decency to whatever lays on the other side. We have missed Laurie a lot as an actor, and here he's a much more complicated villain than the emotionally stunted yet brilliant House. And he isn't forced into an American accent like he was on House. This is definitely not one to miss. Set the DVR.
Which you will have to do anyway, since another compelling new series debuts in exactly the same time slot on the CW, April 19. Containment is another thriller, of a different stripe. The series takes place in Atlanta and focuses on what happens when a vast urban quarantine takes place following a mysterious, deadly epidemic. Based on the top-rated Belgian series Cordon, Containment gets top billing in the network's prime timeslot behind ratings giant The Flash. This is definitely one to watch, though it's unsettling as hell. Seeing how life is altered under the circumstances of unseen, unknown, yet deadly contagion reads as both metaphor and reality, given the world of dirty bombs and biological warfare and new viruses appearing out of the bush all the time. This one will be hard for many of us who lived through the deadliest wave of the AIDS epidemic to watch, but it's a cautionary tale for our time.
So for the endless politics, the sometimes funny, sometimes poli-comedy shows, for new and returning dramas and some spot-on entertainment, you know you really must stay tuned.