Glee, my favorite silent musical

Like many of you, I watch Glee.

Although the program is a musical, I generally watch it with subtitles. It's not that I don't think that Lea Michele and her young cohort aren't talented. I just don't need to hear them sing again. I'm aware that some of the song selections are meant to be ironic, and I believe I can better appreciate that irony if I don't have to hear the non-subtle singing. I get a lot out of the program on mute, and I take it off mute whenever Jane Lynch appears.

Repulsion television

Recently, I developed a strange form of insomnia. I began waking up in the middle of the night, plagued by repetitive, obsessive thoughts, unable to return to sleep, unable to stop thinking. The only thing that seemed to stop me from thinking and eventually lull me back to sleep was to turn on the television.

At one in the morning, my favorite telenovela is repeated with fewer commercial interruptions. I watched the Magic Bullet commercial dubbed in Spanish several times. I developed a fondness for the commercials for Time-Life CD anthologies, in particular Soul Hits of the 70s. But my programs of choice, the ones that could stop obsessive thoughts in their tracks, were more often than not what a friend of mine calls “trainwreck television,” what I call repulsion television.

As the number of television networks grows, the audience has splintered, and those networks have to fight to keep sufficient numbers of people watching. And one way to lure people in is by going for the gross out.

The king of all repulsion television, among so many worthy candidates, has to be A&E's Hoarders (or TLC's Hoarding: Buried Alive, which premiered later in March 2010), which chronicles the stories of people on the verge of a personal crisis as a result of their compulsive hoarding. Some people have always been hoarders and have just gotten worse over time, like the man who shows his apartment to his girlfriend for the first time, and she is horrified. She tells him she can't continue their relationship if he continues hoarding, but he can't or won't stop.

Other people become hoarders as the result of some personal tragedy. One woman loses her husband just as he was about to retire from the police force. Not only can she not throw away anything acquired during the time he was alive, she also begins to purchase items representing plans that she and her husband made for his retirement.

Although Hoarders and Hoarding are two separate shows, I tend to think of them as one show, given their similarity, and even though TLC easily edges out A&E for the honor of the Home of Trainwreck Television. It’s my particular favorite because it satisfies the “need” for repulsion, but not in any empty way; each show features an intervention and a makeover, an extreme Extreme Home Makeover, which gives the show a genuine narrative arc, as opposed to, "Yeah...she popped out another kid."

And Hoarders/Hoarding is genuinely heartbreaking. Given the visual nature of the disease, it is particularly suited to television. My skin literally crawls when I see the homes of the hoarders.

TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras invites, even demands an intervention. It's a look into baby beauty pageants. The level of manipulation by the mothers in order to get their little girls to participate in the pageants is astonishing, and if the girls don't want to participate, the mothers can be outright cruel. One little girl comes to her mother and says she doesn't want to be in the pageant and her mother literally pushes her away, saying, "Get away from me."

For all the money, which many of them do not even have, that the mothers spend on their daughters' appearances for the pageants, and time spent on primping, the mothers themselves on the whole do not take very good care of themselves, presentation-wise. One can't help but think, let your daughter be a kid, and spend some of that time and money on yourself to take care of yourself better.

The Millionaire Matchmaker (on the Bravo network) takes shows like The Bachelor and adds a twist of Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous and a heaping helping of revulsion. The matchmaker, Patti Stangis, is loud and vulgar in demeanor and appearance (excessive collagen implants in those lips) and appears to hate all of her clients - with good reason! So many of these wealthy men have no manners whatsoever and they treat their dates with no respect. The women just throw themselves at these boors, ignoring the men's callous remarks, no doubt thinking only of their money. The only real spark of romance I saw on the show was between two men Ms. Stangis fixed up. The only genuinely attractive, well-groomed men I'd seen on the show, they had champagne and strawberries on the beach and kissed. Sweet.

1000 Ways to Die features simulation segments (which I love) of shocking demises, like getting hit by a meteor, or sucked into a jet engine, or even weirder, hooking up a cow heart to a car battery to make it pulsate and then fucking the cow heart - oops, electrocuted! See ya.

Anyway, I finally figured out that my insomnia was actually being encouraged by the repulsion shows, that on some level I wanted to wake up and watch them, so I canceled that part of my cable package, and now I sleep great.

Has Gossip Girl jumped the shark?

Gossip Girl has jumped the shark, I'm afraid.

It may have already done so last season, but I was willing to suspend judgment while the Constance Billard/St. Jude's kids adjusted to college, although just based on their college selections alone, it was hard to believe that all the members of such an ambitious crew would stay in New York City, and not one of them called in a favor to get into Yale or Brown.

The first season of GG was phenomenal - a portrait of power brokers in training as young men and women. Living in New York, I was more susceptible to its charms than The O.C., which to me just looked like undifferentiated TV Southern California - I could have just as easily been watching a rerun of CHiPs! (Okay, maybe not). By contrast, NYC was depicted in a glorious light - hey, look, there's the Agnes B store! Wow, Central Park in the fall is gorgeous! - and if there were minor gaffes - there they go making Williamsburg and DUMBO into one neighborhood again! - they could be easily overlooked because the underlying message of the show straddled the line between suggesting that children need their parents no matter what the income bracket, but with enough money, a child can override the need for parenting to some extent, as in the case of Chuck Bass.

So now Serena is back with Nate, a union that has about as much fizz as day old Fresca with the cap left off. One of the conundrums this show faces is that there are few men that can hold their own with Serena and succeed in containing her to some extent. I thought Aaron Rose was a decent foil for her, but the show is dead in the water if Serena is happily hooked with someone, so they got rid of him, awkwardly. The rest of her swains? Boring, boring, boring, zero chemistry. It might be good if she discovered that she had some bizarre (but telegenic) fetishes. Such fetishes are plausible given that she killed someone "by accident" during a drug-fuelled threeway.

It seems that the show's writers don't know what to do with Serena anymore. Given her haphazard mothering by Lily, she really should be completely adrift and trying to figure things out, preferably with a shopping and/or drug addiction. Let her be a glorious, entertaining mess for a while. But no, Jenny gets to do that, and I find her escapades with the Belgian drug dealer, etc. totally boring. Sorry, she just doesn't have what it takes (looks, alpha-femaleness) to be top girl, and I resent the show continuing to assert that she is. She's a cool beta-female who isn't afraid to blaze her own trail, but that thread of her character seems to have been lost.

The latest insertion into the show of Billy Baldwin is another mixed bag. The device by which he was introduced into the show (only Dr. van der Woodsen can save his ex-wife from cancer!) was one step short of evil amnesiac robot twins, and I deplore the show's decline from a smart, accurate depiction of upper middle class/upper class New York City life to third rate telenovela. Baldwin is Serena's long lost father and I was always under the impression that he was out of her life because he was off partying. Suddenly it's revealed that he's a saintly physician for Doctors without Borders...or is he really an evil doctor manipulating his sick ex-wife's prescription in order to win her back (or not? who knows? Tune in next week!)

I'm happy to see that Billy Baldwin, as he's gotten older, has grown into a comic persona quite similar to his older brother's, and it really might be fun to have both Baldwins go head to head on 30 Rock, but his cartoony, seemingly villainous, seemingly altruistic Dr. van der Woodsen is badly out of place of Gossip Girl. GG has never been about irony or humor, and Baldwin's relish in playing such an ambiguous character is sadly out of place on this show, which has truly lost steam. Hang it up before it becomes any more ridiculous than it already is.

I REALLY love Lucy

I think I actually was sick the day that I discovered I Love Lucy, and not playing hooky from school as I would do from time to time later just to have the pleasure of staying at home in bed watching Lucy and eating ice cream.

Everyone has a favorite episode - the chocolate factory, Vitameatavegamin. When I mentioned this post to a friend, her eyes lit up and she said, "What about when Lucy goes to Paris, determined to get a designer dress, and she gets a dress made out of a burlap sack?" I don't know if my favorite episode was the one that hooked me that first time I was home from school, but it's "Lucy and the Loving Cup." Lucy puts a trophy on her head just to spite her husband, Ricky, who is going to present the trophy that night, but then she can't get it off. She spends the rest of the episode wandering New York City trying to get the loving cup off her head. I loved the fact that the trophy has two handles that correspond to where Lucy's ears would be, thus making Lucy appear as if she were some type of robot, a very hapless robot at that.

By the time I discovered I Love Lucy, I had already watched The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy when I was in pre-school, which I guess is like watching The Godfather II and The Godfather III before you've seen The Godfather. I don't remember either show very well, but when I discovered the real deal later in I Love Lucy, it all made sense - the dizzy demeanor, the slapstick humor - as did the realization that in watching the later two shows first, I'd missed seeing her in her prime, but much like seeing a retired racehorse going around the track, she still had plenty of the sparkle that had made her a star.

The Lucy Show is the story of Lucy, and her two children, and Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon), Lucy's insufferable, pompous boss at the bank. I had a limited understanding of what Lucy actually did at the bank, but I had very positive feelings about banks as a whole. Banks smelled nice and that they played breezy, easy listening music featuring lots of perky pizzicato strings, although that may have been my own internal soundtrack echoing the theme music of the opening that I unconsciously played in my head as we waited in line for a teller. Banks dispensed money and equally importantly, miniature rolls of five flavor Life Savers to young passbook saving account holders. It was a shock to discover later on that not all banks distributed candy.

There were several different opening montages for The Lucy Show, I think I enjoyed the show most for the "kaleidoscope" opening montage. Beside being kaleidoscopic and therefore cool and worthy of my appreciation even now, the opening montage was easier to understand than the actual dialogue and situations simply because it was repeated with every viewing and was purely visual/musical.

I remember Here's Lucy even less. I know that her real-life children played her television children. Again, I was hooked into the opening montage, featuring a claymation Lucy in a top hat and tails dancing with a cane, and I was always hoping that there would be a show that would stick to that format, claymation, even imagining the ultimate showdown between claymation Lucy and Mr. Peanut (who I planned to marry at that time), who dressed similarly - maybe a dance-off?

What was clear to me, however, was that Lucy seemed to be unencumbered, free. In The Lucy Show, there was never a man telling her what to do, except for Mr. Mooney, and Lucy's goal seemed to be to drive him nuts, which seemed entirely worthy. It seemed to me that she worked because she wanted to or she liked to.

But Lucy's antics are best when she's trying to shake off boredom or she wants to misbehave (and sometimes both), and as wonderful as Gale Gordon was in Lucy's shows, he was not the ideal foil for her. Lucy feels derision for Mr. Mooney, but at heart, she's transgressive, and transgressive types are not looking to misbehave with people for whom they feel derision. That gets boring. Transgressive types need someone for whom they feel a mixture of fear, respect, and maybe even love.

By the time I got to I Love Lucy, I had an ironic sense of understanding about the fate of Desi Arnaz, having already watched unfettered, liberated Lucy, and every time his character, Ricky Ricardo, wouldn't let her sing at the Tropicana, I thought to myself, "You won't last, my friend."

It took me a while to appreciate how good a foil Ricky is for Lucy and just why it works so well. Ricky keeps Lucy on a short leash, thus creating Lucy's boredom. She yearns to be his equal, the ultimate public acknowledgment of which would be singing and dancing at his side at his nightclub. Ricky is smart, funny and quick-witted on his own, and his constant no! to Lucy's please? only spurs her on even further. She loves him, fears him, and respects him, thus giving her transgressions a deeper core than mere derision. That zesty, unstable power struggle rooted in genuine love and physical attraction is what drives Lucy, and if he claims she drives him crazy, we all know he's just as addicted to the dance.