Robert David Sullivan

Openly gay actors stuck in sitcom land?

In LA Weekly, Patrick Range McDonald wonders how Hollywood, so vocal in favor of gay rights, still keeps actors in the closet:

In 2009, this situation seems incredible to those who have watched the tremendous success of Neil Patrick Harris, who became a star on Doogie Howser, M.D. Harris came out nearly three years ago. His recent widely accepted and positively reviewed hosting of the Emmys seemed almost like a globally televised message from one side of Hollywood to another: It’s okay to cast leading men who are gay, so get over it, studio heads. Harris continues to win audiences over, playing womanizer Barney Stinson on the CBS hit show How I Met Your Mother.

I love NPH, but his post-coming-out career has been limited to comic roles; he plays a silly, superficial womanizer on HIMYM, not a tortured, tragic one. (Even Ted Danson came closer to the latter characterization on Cheers.) And he's been repeatedly passed over at the Emmy Awards.

Harris would really help the gay thespian cause if he landed a big, juicy, award-bait dramatic role -- if not in movie theaters, at least on HBO. I think he's capable of it, but I think a lot of closeted actors are waiting to see his fate after How I Met Your Mother winds down.

Julia Child vs. Don Draper

The hot TV series of the moment, Mad Men, is set in 1963, the same year that Julia Child debuted on public television with The French Chef. Coincidentally, Child is a hot pop culture icon again (not that she ever really went cold), thanks to the book and film Julie & Julia. Would she have any affinity for Mad Men’s impeccably dressed but emotionally hollow protagonist Don Draper?

While waiting for another Mad Men episode, I started in on a “best of” DVD collection of The French Chef, which opens with perhaps her most famous episode, “The Potato Show.” This is the one in which she tries to flip a large potato pancake, which breaks apart on the way down and ends up half outside the pan. “You can pick it up when you’re alone in the kitchen,” she says to the camera as she grabs the errant pieces and puts them back in the pan. “Who is going to see?”

The moment was so ripe for the making of urban legends -- Child’s actual words would be attached to fanciful tales of her dropping, say, an entire chicken on the floor and then blithely putting in on a serving plate -- that her real advice concerning the mishap was forgotten.

“When something like this happens,” she told her viewers after her flip was a flop, “you haven’t lost anything. You can always turn it into something else.” In this case, Child threw some cheese on the failed pancake and said, “We’ll pretend that this was supposed to be a baked potato dish.”

This spirit of reinvention, and the rejection of a fixed identity, would seem to be in sync with self-made man Don Draper. And there are similarities between the fine-cooking game and the advertising biz, given that both emphasize artifice and eye-catching presentation.

Of course, Julia Child became famous for her genuineness, or the lack of artifice in her own appearance and manner even as she showed us how to accomplish culinary slights of hand. Her own hands, by the way, were covered with age spots even at the very beginning of The French Chef's run, and they probably would disqualify her from appearing on today's Food Network.

The French Chef, with its gangly host, cluttered countertops, and squeaky oven door, is pretty much the antithesis of Mad Men and its meticulous set design. And Child's obvious tendency to speak before she's completely thought something through would probably be seen by Draper as a weakness that could be exploited -- an attitude, in turn, that would probably disgust Child. (In "The Potato Show," Child ad-libs that spuds are "queer in their chemical construction," an inadvertent reminder of her apparent homophobia.)

In the end, I suspect that Don Draper would feel more at home with perfectionist Martha Stewart, but I'd love to see his reaction to one of the fastest-rising TV stars of the 1960s. Maybe Peggy can explain Child's appeal to him. 

The 10 shows on my DVR: Winter 2009

Here's what I'm watching in winter 2009 -- while I'm waiting for the return of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and In Treatment. (And don't ask what happened to Battlestar Galactica; I'm behind on my Netflix DVDs for that one.)

1. The Big Bang Theory. I've always had time for a roommate sitcom since The Odd Couple. Appropriately for a show about scientists, the character of Leonard seems to be a genetically improved (for comedic purposes) version of Felix Unger and Niles Crane. His apparent Asperger's syndrome allows him to be even more persnickety and demanding than any of his sitcom forefathers, while still being a believable and sympathetic character. But a couple of the supporting characters need to evolve. Producers: Please kill off Howard's mother and let Raj speak in front of women.

2. Big Love. Another show about people having to live under the same roof (or three adjacent roofs) without driving each other crazy. The polygamy premise likely scared off a lot of HBO subscribers, but it's no less realistic than the idea of co-workers constantly falling in and out of love with each other. (ER has required more suspension of belief than Big Love ever could.) The relationships among Bill Hendrickson and his three wives have a lot more dramatic tension than the monogamous pairings that last for two or three episodes on other dramas -- which means that, unless you're a drama queen, this show is not going to make polygamy seem attractive to you. One criticism: cult leader Roman Grant has served his purpose on the show and needs to die or go to prison.

Big Love: The political party that dare not speak its name

HBO's Big Love is a fascinating series (see a detailed recap of the current season at The House Next Door), in large part because the acting is so understated for a show with such a bizarre premise. The one aspect of the show that is the most difficult to accept is that a seemingly intelligent, self-confident, and "modern" woman like Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) would accept her husband's taking two more wives.

I don't think Barb is so modern, but I suspect that HBO and/or the producers are being cagy with her character. In last night's episode, she crashed a meeting of the Eagle Forum, founded by Phyllis Schlafly, and she seemed pretty comfortable with the group. I'm guessing that Barb, as well as Bill and Nicki, are strongly against abortion, gay rights, and the theory of evolution. In the context of the show, polygamy is as culturally conservative and as "pro-family" as you can get, and Barb's decision to follow "the principle" (albeit with recurring doubts) makes much more sense if you see her as a member of the religious right, complete with antipathy toward the government and disgust toward secular society.

I think Barb can be a right-wing Republican and still be a decent person with humane instincts (to a certain point, as is true of most of us). But HBO probably fears that conservative protagonists* would alienate its upscale, well-educated audience, so I doubt that Barb will be doing much political commentary.

*On The Sopranos, Carmela occasionally showed her Republican leanings -- defending George W. Bush in an exchange with daughter Meadow, for example  -- but, of course, she was already a morally compromised character.

The newest crime drama from CBS?

The New York Times reports that "garbage collectors" have become an important source of information for local police:

Drivers’ tips have led to drug-trafficking arrests, Mr. Henschen said, and to the discovery of a corpse in a home that had gone so long without having any trash that a driver grew suspicious...

Riding high in the cab of a garbage truck, it is impossible not to notice things. Signs of family life are evident in trash: a birth is announced by a crib’s big cardboard box, the aging of children shown in the abandonment of a kiddie pool. Garbage collectors are also informal, hands-on economists, [collector Gary Garcia] said, explaining that when times are good, everyone produces more garbage and that the absence of trash is often a sign of a foreclosed home...

I can't wait to see Dross, a crime drama about a sanitation worker who's also a special consultant to the police, and who can see things in the trash that escape the attention of everyone on CSI. The cross-over episode with Monk should be hilarious.

Mad Men: father issues

At left: Salvador Dali shills for Mohawk Airlines.

Spoilers for Mad Men ahead.

There are some prosaic reasons for the raft of television characters that have difficult relationships with their fathers (as in Lost, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc.). One is that TV writers generally have to work in New York or Los Angeles, so a lot of them have left the places where they grew up and, consequently, have distant fathers in at least the literal sense. Another is that major characters' fathers are often played by "guest star" actors who are then unable to make return appearances, and, in fact, the actor who played Pete's impossible-to-please father on Mad Men last season has since died, so it's not surprising that the writers have given us the ultimate dissolution of the father/son relationship.

But almost every TV drama has gone over this territory, Mad Men did come up with its own twist. After Pete's father dies in the crash of an American Airlines jet, he volunteers to head up an advertising campaign to salvage AA's reputation, and even suggests that his own tragedy makes him uniquely qualified for the job. (Think of Hamlet proving his worth not by murdering Uncle Claudius, but by enthusiastically offering to help improve the new king's poll numbers.) Maybe "something good" can come out of the crash, Pete tells a simultaneously horrified and intrigued AA executive.

This is slimy behavior, but it's understandable. After hearing the news about his father, Pete immediately goes to Don Draper (the man he tried to blackmail last season!) to ask "What does one do?" in such a situation. Pete's wife, mother, and brother are too self-absorbed to provide moral support, so when he's approached to work on the American Airlines campaign, the only one he can think of confiding in is Don, who pretty much tells Pete to shut up and grow up. (Don is pissed off that the ad firm is going to dump one of his prized clients, Mohawk Airlines, to try to win the AA account.)

Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, a writer on The Sopranos, and  I'm getting deja vu reading blog comments to the effect that Mad Men moves just too damn slowly. But I like seeing exactly how Pete ended up doing something that may seem cold-hearted and even vengeful. As Jess Oppenheimer, the head writer for a very different series called  I Love Lucy once explained, "If you motivate your audience in a series of small steps, you can go to absolute heights." (Forgive the altitude metaphor.)