Trump's 100 days. Who thought we'd make it to that milestone after that dystopian Inauguration speech? But here we are (actually day 105 now, a number reminiscent of a really bad fever), with a president already bored with running the country. Trump said in an interview April 27 (roundly panned by every pundit on cable news) that he feels like he's in a cocoon, he misses driving (who knew he ever drove in New York City?) and, wait for it, he didn't know being president would be so hard.
He didn't know being president would be so hard. Cue Hillary Clinton's head exploding.
"I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier," Trump whined. Oh, the privilege, oh the idiocy. Trump said this aloud to an interviewer. (We urge people to read the transcript of Trump's interview with the AP. If it doesn't send you fleeing to your nearest Resistance protest, nothing will. Scary, scarier, scariest.) There are some other interesting tidbits from CNN's Maeve Reston on their new newsmagazine State, which debuted April 28. There's more dissent than one might think. Check it out at CNN.com.
One of Trump's essential entitlement cuts in his budget is getting rid of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, most notably PBS and NPR, despite the federal funding being minuscule. We understand that not everyone appreciates BBC series like Downton Abbey or documentary programming like Frontline and American Masters, but several generations of poor kids who wouldn't otherwise have access to pre-school have learned their letters, numbers and how to behave in the world from the Muppets on Sesame Street.
Did you know Trump was a featured character on Sesame Street? Ronald Grump arrived one day attempting to build "Grump Tower" in the trash-can alley inhabited by Oscar, Elmo and the Cookie Monster. Watch the clips on YouTube. Priceless. Trump sure can carry a grudge.
The long-awaited prize interview NBC-newbie Megyn Kelly has nabbed, which was rumored to be Vladimir Putin, has turned out to be Kim Kardashian, according to a breaking scoop from TMZ on April 28. Oh. We know folks are still watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians 13 seasons in, but when Kim is on Instagram and Twitter 24/7, plus the E! reality series, what exactly could we be missing? And do we really care? It's not quite the same as the two-year follow-up interview with Caitlyn Jenner and Diane Sawyer on ABC, which actually had some news value.
Or the tidbits revealed by Bravo on April 28, about Jenner, which included that Wendy Roth, a coordinating producer for Good Morning America, where then-Bruce worked as a field reporter, was purchasing lingerie, dresses and wigs for then-Bruce. Caitlyn made a debit account under Roth's name so that no women's clothing would be traced to Bruce's account. We should all be so fortunate as to have friends like Roth was to Jenner, who will keep our secrets when they could easily be sold to the highest bidder.
So the Kim Kardashian interview? Not the auspicious and serious debut we were expecting from Kelly. Shouldn't she at least have tried for a post-firing Bill O'Reilly tell-all?
Speaking of Fox News, we are thrilled to report that as of the April 28 numbers, Tucker Carlson has lost more than a third of O'Reilly's audience in just one week, down from nearly 5 million to a mere 2.8 million. Sad. Especially when the queers on cable are doing so well. Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow are all way up in ratings.
Speaking of ratings, F/X did wonderfully well with Ryan Murphy's Feud: Bette and Joan, grabbing the highest ratings of any F/X series since Murphy's 2016 Emmy blockbuster The People v O.J.Simpson: American Crime Story. If you missed Feud, which ended April 23, take the time to binge-watch. We've thought a great deal about Feud over the course of its eight-week run and how deeply it delved into the lives of these two women and into what Hollywood did and has done to women over the last century.
Jessica Lange, one of the most underrated actresses in America, delivered a tour de force performance as Joan Crawford, particularly in the final two episodes as her life and body begin to fall apart and she's forced from her palatial Beverly Hills mansion to a tiny apartment in New York. Susan Sarandon delivered her best performance since her Oscar-winning Dead Man Walking. Do put it on your list of musts if you haven't seen it. Witty, sharp, incisive, poignant.
Fuller up
So not everyone has Starz, because premium channels are premium channels, so you might need to wait to binge-watch American Gods on Hulu, or break down and subscribe, but you will definitely want to watch gay showrunner Bryan Fuller's interpretation of Neil Gaiman's novel, which debuted on Starz April 30 and runs for eight episodes. There are about 15 trailers on YouTube, which will, like the dealer on the corner in our hood, give you a free taste so you want more.
We love both Gaiman's work and Fuller's, so of course we were primed for American Gods. Fuller last charmed us with the intensely, viscerally homoerotic Hannibal, which ran for three incredible seasons on NBC until it was cancelled in August 2015. American Gods has some of the same tone and quality as Hannibal: visually sumptuous, extremely violent, perfectly scripted, superbly acted. Oh and yes, homoerotic as Hannibal.
Fuller, who has such a cult following his series and films are referred to as the Fullerverse, told Variety on April 27 that the election crushed him, and working on American Gods made him feel just a little less lost. "The powerlessness that I felt after the election is offset in some small way by being able to work on this show and have a multicultural, multi-faith exploration of what it is to be an American citizen at a time when we're in huge conflict with ourselves."
It was icing on the FU Trump cake that the book was written by an immigrant after he moved to America and is deeply invested in the American Immigrant Story, highs and lows. American Gods is a melding of fantasy, Fuller's metier, and faith, which he has touched on briefly before, and gritty history. It's fundamentally a story about men, their desires and deepest, most complex needs �" physical, psychological, spiritual.
Starz describes the series as focusing on Shadow Moon, a man serving three years in prison and about to be released when a family tragedy gains him early release. Shadow is played with incredible nuance by British actor Ricky Whittle. Whittle is known to American audiences via his shirtless forays on Mistresses and on the CW's terrific sci-fi series The 100. He played a series of gay characters on British TV and was a model and a soccer player until injury sidelined him.
So yes, Whittle's Shadow is beautiful to watch. His body and blackness are very much on display here as the story of blackness in America is assessed via a black lead in a genre not given to allowing non-white characters the central spot. The interplay of race, sexuality and faith are woven beautifully into Fuller's lush rendering of Gaiman's tale.
Once out of prison, Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), an aging con artist who is in need of a bodyguard, and the two embark on what appears to be a road trip, but which is anything but. Mr. Wednesday is actually the god Odin, and this ain't your grandpa's road trip.
Mr. Wednesday/Odin is traveling across America gathering all the old gods, who have incorporated themselves into 21st-century American life to confront the New Gods, including Media and Technology, who grow stronger. This is very much, like Hulu's newly released and phenomenal The Handmaid's Tale, a story written well before our current travails but which totally evokes their nascent perils.
American Gods proffers a fabulous premise, and Fuller is so there for it. The cast includes some of his former faves: Kristin Chenoweth, Pablo Schreiber, Crispin Glover, Orlando Jones and Gillian Anderson, among others. Oscar- and Emmy-winner Cloris Leachman, now 90, is also featured. Mousa Kraish (Jinn) provides a strong gay character. McShane (Lovejoy, Deadwood), still amazingly charismatic and sexy at 74, is nothing short of brilliant as he and Whittle embody Odin and Shadow.
This is high-toned as well as visceral stuff. There are some difficult and highly provocative scenes, from a slave rebellion to an orgy to a lynching. Like Hannibal, American Gods is not for the weak-stomached viewer, but as with Fuller's previous series, nothing feels gratuitously violent or sexual.
Whether you do or do not believe in God/gods, American Gods will lure you with its topicality. The gods are all immigrants coming to America from Africa, Ireland, Norse countries, and some do better than others in the New World. This is a fresh, deeply engaging story from one of our most provocative showrunners.
Provocative is an apt descriptive of the opening five minutes of the April 27 episode of ABC's TGIT series The Catch. Sonya Walger's Margot is bisexual with a hunger we've rarely seen on TV. Usually bisexual means "we want to put a couple of pretty women together and have them pretend kiss each other." But Margot likes her men and women with the same voraciousness. She likes them pretty, buff and energetic.
Last season we watched Margot's bisexual brother Rhys (played fabulously by British actor John Ronald Simms) shoot �" and we presumed, kill �" his and Margot's lover Felicity (Shivani Ghai) when he discovered her duplicity. But then last week Felicity turns up on Margot's doorstep in the last minute of the episode, and Margot just had to give her a really good welcome the following week.
This wasn't the usual cut-to-commercial lesbian sex. This was intense, MA-17-rated real lesbian sex. And we were so appreciative of every lovely lusty second.
Margot thought Felicity had gone off to do another job since that's what Rhys told her at the end of last season. So Margot knew nothing, except now Felicity has a scar just to the left of her heart where Rhys' bullet hit her. Felicity also isn't naming names, which makes us wonder exactly what's up with her. She and Margot pulled a heist at a casino, where we were reminded of how much straight men like to watch lesbians or bi women kiss in public. Felicity is clearly here for the duration, or until she takes another bullet, but who she's playing remains to be seen. Rhys thinks she's dead, and how she escaped death has yet to be revealed.
We also weren't expecting a lesbian storyline in Lifetime's fabulous new series Mary Kills People, which debuted April 23, but we are happy to have it. It's an intriguing complication for Mary (Caroline Dhavernas) when her older daughter Jess' (Abigail Winter) girlfriend Naomi (Katie Douglas) ends up in the ER after sampling some of Mary's euthanasia drugs. Where it will lead is yet another story in this multi-faceted series. The exchange between the girl and doctor in the ER leads us to believe that Naomi will blackmail Mary again, as she does even as she is recovering from a near-overdose. Mary is unaware of her daughter's lesbianism, so that's yet another card the devious Naomi holds.
Devious is one of many words to describe Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and Christina Ricci has made the complexities of the real-life wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald come alive in the Amazon series Z: The Beginning of Everything. April 27 it was announced the Emmy-nominated series will return for a second season, which is excellent news for the compelling period piece based on the novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. The series also stars David Hoflin as Fitzgerald, and Jamie Anne Allman, David Strathairn, Corey Cott and Holly Curran. Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin created the series and executive produce. Ricci, Pamela Koffler, and iconic lesbian producer Christine Vachon also executive produce, with Fowler.
Shows you don't want to miss in the next weeks include John Ridley's Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992. This debuted April 28 on ABC, but is available at ABC.go.com and is incredibly compelling, as Ridley does for Los Angeles riots what won him an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. This is essential historical viewing that mesmerizes like scripted drama. Having covered the Rodney King riots under our other reporter hat, we can say this is a vivid, gut-wrenching explication of where racial tension has taken us in America. Someone send Jeff Sessions the video.
We also can't stop watching The Americans and The Leftovers, which both seem hyper-realistic right now. And can we say, Scandal has found a way to deal with an illegitimate presidency, why can't we?
Finally, happy anniversary to Ellen DeGeneres and to all of us. April 26 was the 20-year anniversary of Ellen coming out and changing the TV landscape forever. She was the first to break that ground. Yes, there had been gay characters before on TV �" though not many and most very stereotypical �" but there had never been an out TV actor before she came out on Oprah, and came out as a character on her sitcom Ellen.
Ellen changed our lives that day, and in her years on daytime TV she has done more than perhaps anyone to normalize gayness in America with her mere presence every afternoon in America's living rooms. Thank you.
So for the dystopian and the dramatic, the comedic and the complex, and for those who had to stay hidden in all the years before Ellen blew the door off with her courage, you know you really must stay tuned.