Here we are in week nine of the new dystopia, where so much is happening that every day feels like dog years. Yet it's impossible to look away from this chain-reaction accident and the spin-outs on cable news, comedy and pundit shows. The Americans used to be just one of the top five dramas on TV. Now it's past as prologue. (The new season is incredible. This is a show you should binge watch if you've resisted it.) Scandal used to be somewhat over-the-top Washington insider drama. Now we nod along when we see someone being tortured, thinking: that's probably happening.
One thing we never miss now, after rarely tuning in during the Obama years, are the daily press briefings with Sean Spicer. They aren't so much news (how can you take someone seriously who quotes Fox's Sean Hannity as a source?) as they are such self-parody that they make Melissa McCarthy's sketches on SNL look like straight documentary.
Speaking of McCarthy (be still our hearts), she will be hosting SNL on May 13. McCarthy has hosted SNL before and has been spectacular. There are few comedians as good as she is right now. Her Sean "Spicey" Spicer is genius parody. It's difficult to imagine anyone in the White House press corps doesn't see McCarthy when they look at Spicer, especially given the role of Trump apparatchik he's been playing.
McCarthy also has a new comedy series premiering March 29 on TV Land. Nobodies is about three Groundling alums trying to get one of their famous friends to star in a film they've written. McCarthy and husband Ben Falcone executive produce Nobodies, starring Groundling alums Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf and Rachel Ramras playing versions of themselves.
The show has already been picked up for a second season, so you know it's fabulously funny, and we need comedy so much right now. Upcoming guest stars include the always-hilarious McCarthy pal from Bridesmaids and SNL Maya Rudolph, as well as Jason Bateman, Jim Rash and Nat Faxon.
We aren't sure how much all the satire and comedy about this administration have helped, but the good news is the press has snapped out of their delusional torpor of believing Trump is going to pivot into, well, a president. Now it's "he's lying" all the time. CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, a highly restrained veteran reporter, queried the other night, "Is it time to question the president's rationality?"
Stunning. On St. Patrick's Day we had the twin debacles of the president of Ireland calling Trump out on immigration while Trump was holding a pot of shamrocks, and Angela Merkel giving him dagger eyes for the majority of their messy presser. We always knew Trump would make a woman the leader of the free world. We just thought it would be Hillary Clinton, not Merkel.
Bill Maher took Trump to task on Real Time after the Merkel visit, referring to Trump's nonstop lies and "the rantings of a demented manchild in full makeup." Why does no one ever mention that Trump wears such heavy pancake?
Then Maher sat down with Andrew Sullivan, gay libertarian and former Bush apologist, and Barney Frank, the most prominent gay politician in America, for more slicing and dicing. Maher called out Trumpcare, noting it was proof "Republicans never do anything but funnel money to rich people."
Inevitably all three called out Rachel Maddow, the only lesbian in the pundit class, for her reveal of a portion of Trump's 2005 tax return, which pretty much everyone called the Al Capone vault reprise of 2017, and which we admit we found underwhelming after the 100k-retweet hype on Twitter an hour earlier. Maher declared, "This was worse than a nothingburger. It was a help-Trump-burger."
Sullivan declared Maddow's reveal an epic fail and added his own touch of misogyny, insisting it was made worse because Maddow had a bad attitude while doing it. "There's a giant cloud of smug. Liberals have to be careful not to sound so fucking condescending, smug, as if they know it. And start engaging the other side and pursuing people."
Frank clapped back with, "I think you might want to teach by example on that." Applause.
Maher's bottom line was well-taken, however. "Let's not weaponize Rachel Maddow." Let's not. While we often find Maddow's long preambles to her story like that lecture we really didn't love in college, she usually takes us to a place we need to go. Maddow, a native Californian who graduated from Stanford with a BA in political science before becoming going on to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. from Oxford, is one of the smartest people on TV.
Maddow appeared on The Tonight Show March 15 and talked about the tax return reveal. "Was there a huge, damning bombshell in these tax returns? No. The bombshell here is that some of his tax returns were made public for the first time when he's been trying so hard to keep them secret," Maddow told host Jimmy Fallon.
Our favorite comment du jour about Trump came from Seth Meyers on Late Night. Meyers showed a clip of Trump in Nashville for another one of his weird still-campaigning-even-though-I'm-president rallies, where he led a chant of "Lock her up" for "Auld Lang Syne." In the clip Trump declared he'd probably done more in the first 50 days of his presidency than anyone ever, because hyperbole is his go-to.
Meyers sat for a second, dumfounded, then said, "Trump has done more in the office of president after 50 days the way a toddler helps out in the kitchen," while the photo on the split-screen was of a child covered in food with a spoon and bowl.
Stephen Colbert called out Trump's St. Patrick's Day debacle with the Irish president in which Trump haltingly read what he said was an Irish proverb. Colbert explained that the proverb wasn't Irish, after playing a clip of Trump's reading. "That's very nice, that's a very sweet thought. Only problem: Trump's favorite Irish proverb is not a proverb, it's a poem, and it's not from Ireland, it's written by a Nigerian poet named Albashir Alhasssan. I'm surprised Trump even allowed that poem into the country. But Irish, Nigerian, it's an honest mistake. As the Irish say, 'Que sera, sera.'"
No doubt
Well, we saw this one coming from a mile off: CBS has cancelled Doubt, the legal series starring Grey's Anatomy alum Katherine Heigl and Orange Is the New Black co-star Laverne Cox. The show debuted to low ratings and never got a bounce, but CBS cancelling after only two episodes felt harsh. Surely Heigl and Cox have a fan base that would give the show a respectable moderate rating over time? But no. We admit we were only watching for Cox and what the show might do with her trans character, since she was playing the only trans character on network TV. We saw some glimmers of possibility in a couple of exchanges Cox's character had with clients, but we'll never know where that might have gone.
The show's cancellation does raise some questions for us about expanding casts to include more LGBT characters. Just as ABC's Grey's Anatomy adds a lesbian character for Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) to be lesbians with, and devotes an entire episode on March 16 to the fight by a lesbian couple (one black, one Latina) to save their daughter's life, CBS cancels Doubt and USA cancels Eyewitness.
ABC's The Catch added gay actor T.R. Knight to its cast when the new season debuted March 13, but he's playing a straight character. Fox's 24 Legacy has Emmy winner Dan Bucatinsky (Scandal ) as Andy, who revealed himself to be gay last week in a rather shocking reveal, but we're not sure his character will survive the current storyline. Meanwhile, Cox has landed a different network role in the forthcoming ABC series The Trustee.
The Wrap broke the news and noted Cox will be a lead in the series playing Amanda Jones, "a larger-than-life ex-con finishing out her prison sentence by doing menial tasks for the police department." Sharing top billing with Cox is Meaghan Rath, who plays the detective Eliza Radley, for whom Jones will be working.
According to The Wrap, Cox will not be playing a trans character, which will be a first for her. Cox is six feet tall, much taller in heels. And as we had noted about Geena Davis in The Exorcist (Davis is also six feet tall), height can dominate the small screen, which traditionally has few very tall people, especially not women, on display.
Cox has been very good on OITNB and was very enjoyable in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so we hope this next role works out for her and she gets to expand her repertoire. If Cox is indeed playing non-trans on The Trustee, it will be a big step for network TV.
Week-to-week it feels like LGBT TV remains a relentless game of catch up, which we are not winning unless we believe network and high-end cable don't matter, which they clearly do. While we just weren't the demographic for MTV's queer-laden high school drama Faking It, the show had the first intersex character (played by Bailey De Young), a full-on lesbian storyline, plus a lead gay character. It was charming and engaging in many of the same ways Fox's Glee was. Faking It, developed by out gay showrunner Carter Covington, was cancelled in May after only three seasons and 38 episodes. (Glee ran for six seasons and 121 episodes.)
What was that on one of our fave new shows, NBC's This Is Us? Drop in gay storyline with main character, kill it off with no real closure? This was a big disappointment in an otherwise stellar show whose season finale was March 15. Spoilers ahead.
This Is Us had the opportunity to address an older gay couple with Randall's father William (Ron Cephas Jones), who had been presumed to be straight. Yes, we knew he was dying of cancer from the show's very first episode, and yes, we knew he would die sooner rather than later. But when the show introduced his former lover Jessie (out gay actor Denis O'Hare), we expected that to be a bigger storyline than it was. When Jessie called Randall (Sterling K. Brown) to tell him he wasn't coming to William's funeral, we felt very cheated. That's how we often feel about this LGBT landscape on the tube, like opportunities keep getting missed.
Were it not for reality TV, the inimitable RuPaul and original shows in streaming venues like Amazon and Hulu, we fear there would be fewer and fewer LGBT characters, not more, despite the Emmy-laden successes of Amazon's Transparent, Netflix's OITNB or Fox's Empire, which returned March 22 with a literal bang for the second half of season 3. (Season five of OITNB is set to debut just in time for Pride on June 9, so we can look forward to some binging of the Litchfield lesbians in a few months.)
Finally, we got a little frisson of pleasure on March 17 when, as we tuned in for Nightline's piece on the Manson family, which was chilling, we caught the comedian at the end of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Friday nights Kimmel does reruns of bits from earlier in the week, so we were fortunate to have seen Sam Jay, butch black lesbian comedian making her TV debut. She was hilarious, and her mere presence on our TV gave us such a warm feeling.
At one point Jay talked about the disappointment of the November election. Noting how "everyone kept saying America was so ready for a female president," she paused, then added, "Really? Were we ready for a female president? Because a year ago we weren't ready for a female Ghostbusters ." Truth.
So for a resurgent resistance media (oh, and Erin Burnett and Jake Tapper have been gloves off, slamming it on CNN), fleeting glimpses of LGBT characters, some great drama and the endless Gotterdammerung, you really must stay tuned.