On the TV
Max and Ruby: A Rant
If you are a TV-friendly parent to a toddler, with cable or satellite TV, you have probably seen, at one time or another, the awfully-cute show about a pair of sibling bunnies, Max and Ruby. Ruby, 7, is older sister to brother Max, 3, and the show revolves around the ongoing sibling rivalry between the two. The show is awfully tame and often very very sweet, and my Little One loves to watch it. In his eyes, he probably relates to Max, the 3 year old who loves to play in the mud and with his particularly loud wind-up toys, much to Ruby’s chagrin. The show happens in two and three segment bits, each problem being lovingly resolved within the course of each segment.
When we first started watching Max and Ruby as a family, it struck me as a little odd that Max and Ruby’s parents were nowhere to be seen. Oh well, I shrugged it off, knowing that the show was based on a series of books that I’d never read, and assumed that there was sufficient explanation within the books as to their lack of presence in the show. Then we Tivo’d the show, and the Little One began to watch it more regularly.
We watched the Thanksgiving episode. Surely mom and dad had to be around for that? Nope. Just grandma and the kids. Max and Ruby go shopping? No parents. Max and Ruby go to the fair? No parents. Have a yard sale? No parents. Ruby has pajama parties for her friends. No parents. Sure, grandma is a regular character, but she clearly has her own digs down the street.
Now curiosity is getting the best of me. I Google the explanation from Rosemary Wells, the author: “As in most other classic stories, we don’t see Max and Ruby’s parents, because I believe that kids resolve their issues and conflicts differently when they are on their own. The television series gives kids a sense about how these two siblings resolve their conflicts in a humorous and entertaining way”. Okay………I can dig it. As a rationale for a series of books, but translated into a TV show, it still is creepy for me to note the continued lack of parental involvement.
I’m all for kids having the opportunity to problem solve on their own. But when we enter into the territory of everyday family life, as the TV show has, and there is forever no sign of parents having an involvement in their kids’s activities, well, it disturbes me. Particularly considering that Max and Ruby has been reprised for a new season, with new sets of everyday adventures, and still the parents are nowhere to be seen.
Or are they? Once in a while, when Max and Ruby are playing upstairs in the house, we are treated to the sight of a closed bedroom door between Max’s room and Ruby’s room. It is tantalizing, that closed door. I get the almost palpable sense that Max and Ruby’s parents are behind it, and I have to wonder, at this point………………meth lab?
Why I Love Yo Gabba Gabba
Let’s get this straight: I am not a fan of kid’s TV programming. Through the years, I have had friends who thought that Pokemon and the Powerpuff Girls were fantastic, and the Power Rangers and Dragon Ball Z were awesome (we’re talking about adults, here, folks). Not me. Outside of a deep appreciation for Ren and Stimpy, the Simpsons, and Family Guy (which are patently NOT kid’s TV shows), I have not even been much of a fan of anything animated or developed for kids.
So I thought that when I had my own kids, TV programming would be something I’d have to endure. I dreaded the mere thought of having to watch a single episode of Barney or the Teletubbies. I stocked up on DVD sets of old school 70s Sesame Street and Electric Company, just to have something I once adored to add to the mix. What ended up happening, and what my childless self didn’t anticipate, is that you love your kid and you end up loving it when he is enjoying himself. Even when that means he enjoys watching Barney. You’re watching him watch it, and that’s pretty cool. So I did it. I watched all those shows that I dreaded, and anything he enjoyed: new Sesame Street (Elmo and all), Curious George, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go…….and it was OK. Perhaps thankfully, he just never got into Barney OR Teletubbies.
And then one day an orange hat glided past on our TV set.
And in the half hour that followed, my ideas about what is possible in children’s programming changed. The specific episode that I watched, Episode 8 of season 1. What I saw: Yo Gabba Gabba characters Muno and Brobie doing a countdown to launch their new rocket, followed by a chorus of “up, up up, down, down, down”, done with enough childlike enthusiasm to smash to smithereens an entire season’s worth of Dora’s screechy forced-happy speak. Biz Markie (Biz freaking Markie!) doing a short beatboxing segment called “Biz’s Beat of the Day”, encouraging kids at home to follow along with his beats. The band Supernova doing a rendition of “Up and Down”, wearing space suits and jumping on trampolines while performing on stage, for the series’s regular feature, the ‘Super Music Friends Show’, which is always followed by DJ Lance calling out “listening and dancing to music is………awesome!”. And I felt what I hadn’t felt since I was watching shows I loved as a kid: a rush of excitement.
So many of the kids shows that I had been watching were awfully formulaic: identify problem in the beginning, set up a plan for fixing problem, follow through with plan, do dance at the end. And I understand that the task-based, problem-solving approach is de rigeur now in pedagogy, but sometimes it kinda feels like doing chores. Even the “unexpected” twists that the shows sometimes do feel just the opposite — planned. And the interactive element that is also such a prominent feature of pretty much everything that came after the success of “Blue’s Clues” also usually strikes me as hokey. Like Dora insisting that if you do an upwards motion with your hands, you’re actually “helping” her onscreen friend to climb a tree. Hokey and also a little……..misplaced and creepy? And you know what? Her onscreen friend always makes it up that tree even though my Little One doesn’t lift a finger. What sort of strangeness is being taught here? It’s OK not to respond when someone’s asking you for help, ’cause they’ll get by perfectly fine without it?
Despite the edgy underpinnings of Yo Gabba Gabba’s surface image, the values and skill set that it is promoting through its segments are just as basic and wholesome as any PBS show: Sharing, brushing your teeth, making new friends, being scared, taking naps, counting, loving your family and friends, being generous, caring for the earth, and above all…….playing and having fun. At its core, isn’t that what childhood should be about? (our next generation needs another My Baby can Read program like it needs a hole in the head). And the interactiveness that it aims for is a very old and organic formula: through guessing games, teaching new dance moves, encouraging kids to make a funny face. No voice-overs of kids shouting out answers to clueless characters necessary.
The celebrity cameos on YGG alone are worth tuning in for. Aside from the regulars Biz Markie and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, such diverse talents as Jack Black, Laila Ali (Laila freaking Ali!), Elijah Wood, Paul Williams, Andy Samberg, Jack McBrayer have graced the show, always at unexpected turns. That’s one of the main themes with YGG: you never really quite know what to expect. And that turns out to be really, really fun for everyone in our household. The Little One has embraced YGG into his daily life like no other show: He has his own set of ‘cool tricks’, does Biz’s beats, and often breaks out into song that he’s heard on the show. And he’s only two. Take that, My Baby Can Read. My baby can have great, goofy fun.
Wikipedia describes the coining of Yo Gabba Gabba’s title thusly: “Some claim the title of the series is derived from the chant “Gabba Gabba Hey“, first coined by punk rock band Ramones, but any similarities to the Ramones end at the title”. I, for one, disagree. The Ramones came to popularity in the late 70’s with a sound that took its cues from the fast tempo and edgy guitar sound of punk rock, but rose high above both punk and the bubblegum pop radio tunes of the era by delivering music that was basic and accessible and consistently jump-up-and-down fun. Much, I would argue, like Yo Gabba Gabba.
If you’re reading this, and you haven’t actually seen the show yet, I might suggest watching the following clip, which I believe is one of the best to sum up the overall mood of the show: The Aggrolites sing “Banana”. And even if you know the clip and you’ve seen it a hundred times already, go ahead and watch it again……you know you want to.
Yo Gabba Gabba is shown commercial-free on Nick Jr., currently in the noon and 12:30 time slots (cst).
Why I love Hung
“I used to have a family. I used to have a wife, kids, a house, a job. Now I have my dick. A dick and a dream. If that’s not the American way, I don’t know what is”. — Ray Drecker
Ray Drecker is 40-ish and devilishly handsome. He’s smart, patient, loyal, and a talented athlete. A former minor league baseball player turned high school basketball coach and history teacher, he leads a modest life with his twin high school age children in the nice lakeside home bequeathed him by his parents. And oh yeah, as the series title suggests, he has a large penis. And his world is coming apart at the seams.
Like Nurse Jackie, the series takes a look at what good people turn to in untenable situations. In Ray’s case, he’s just hit bottom not only by his divorce, but also the near loss of his home to fire (after his insurance lapsed). As a teacher and coach, he simply does not earn enough money to be able to repair his home, and is forced to live in a tent in his backyard, while he works on fixing his badly fire damaged roof in his spare time. Because of these living conditions, he is unable to provide for his kids, and they must live with his ex-wife, who has gone on to marry a wealthy dermatologist. Emasculated and desperate to earn more money, he ends up at a hokey get-rich-quick seminar. Encouraged to find his “own tool” to market for success, he beds a self-described “poetess”; a former acquaintance and fellow seminar attendee, who, in a fit of rage after he leaves too promptly after sex, shouts “go and market your big dick“! And so a series is born. Ray actually is inspired to market himself to women.
I wasn’t sold on the premise. I realize that any reasonably stable person (and Ray does seem to be such a fellow) has to be desperate and bottoming out in order to go from that particular point A to that particular point B, and he just wasn’t coming across that way. And after all, isn’t the target audience for male prostitution primarily, well, other males?? But I took the leap of faith and stayed with it. I’m glad that I did, because what unfolded this season ended up being a fine Shakespearean tragicomedy. The “poetess”, Tanya, becomes Ray’s pimp, launching an enterprise entitled “Happiness Consultants”. Tanya represents the particularly feminine — the creative, the insecure, the caring and wily and intuitive, which, she insists, is her ace in the hole: she understands women and their needs. Ray, being particularly masculine, doesn’t. And so a partnership is formed, albeit a tenuous one from the start, as neither one knows particularly what they’re doing or getting each other into.
Thus begins a fascinating series of rendez-vous that, each in their own way, provide part of an answer to the question: “what do women want”? And the answer, it turns out, is really quite surprising and complicated. Enough, in fact, to base a TV series on. I got over my initial misgivings of the premise. We do, after all, now live in a Craigslist culture in which one can, in a straightforward line, decide what they want to do for a living and market themselves. And left and right, people being pushed off the edge – out of jobs, out of benefits, out of their homes, have used this Craigslist economy as a life jacket: doing what they have to do to stay afloat. And Hung provides a farcical celebration of this bottom-up culture, set in the symbolic heart of the American 21st century wasteland: Detroit, Michigan.
The cast is populated with deeply rich characters: The beautiful and Machiavellian Lenore, who began as Ray’s first client and wrapped the season as Tanya’s main rival for the helm of Happiness Consultants; Darby and Damon, Ray’s high school age twin children, who have almost shockingly (in a very refreshing way) not-ready-for-primetime looks, and even Tanya’s mother, who only appears briefly during one episode, but the exchange is so very real and palpable that you feel instantly that you really get Tanya’s character.
And despite the farcical underpinnings of the series, it is indeed chock full of these very real and palpable moments; as if the evocation of the penis in the title and in the storyline is a vehicle in which to instantly cut through to the very intimate – to get to what the characters are really like, and what they really want. With an episode, it can provide the depth that would take a regular series weeks of character development to access, and in the very capable writer’s hands, it deftly delivers. This metaphor is reinforced by the opening sequence, in which Ray is walking down the streets of Detroit, beginning in a full suit of clothes. Piece by piece, he disrobes as he walks until he arrives at his house and jumps, nude, into the lake. And the characters in the series tend to follow the same pattern, albeit on their own schedules, of disrobing, at least in the metaphorical sense. And people never seem to be what you’d expect.
Stay tuned to HBO for season two!
Top Chef Masters Finale
Yes, this post is late; I’ve only just watched the finale last night, almost a week after it first aired………..but it compelled me to post anyway. Spoiler alerts abound for anyone out there who hasn’t watched the episode…..
For me, watching it was agony and ecstasy — Ecstasy at the perfect challenge for the final three chefs: An autobiographical meal. Wow. For these chefs, this was truly the perfect device for them to tell the story of their lives and careers and relationship with food. Watching all three meet this challenge was better tv than an entire season of Top Chef. I was positively glued to it. The courses to be prepared were as follows:
- First course: First food memory
- The second: The dish that made you want to become a chef
- The third: A dish related to the opening of your first restaurant
- The fourth: The future, and where it is/you are going
Now, the usual element in Top Chef challenges is to take a chef out of his/her comfort zone in some way; as if to say “yeah, you’re good, but what about with one hand tied behind your back“? (insert evil laugh). This was entirely different. So geared was it towards actually allowing these professionals to naturally shine, they actually delivered each contenstant’s personal sous chef to the set to help prepare the meals.
Here’s the agony: how the hell do you judge this thing? The panel of food critics were the same as the entire season, but no matter how well developed your palette is or how well you can articulate your critiques of food, there is just no clear way to judge the meals that the chefs created. Seriously, these weren’t just standalone dishes, these were exceptionally well told stories. I’m not sure the judges handled the food-as-narrative approach as best they could. The teacher in me wanted a rubric. In any case, I’m fairly certain that in this finale, the chefs outperformed the critics. I could not listen to anything that James Oseland had to say about the food without breaking out into laughter. His singular ability to pick apart dishes was utterly contrary to the mood that the challenge had set, and he had to go to such ridiculous lengths to criticize the food that it was truly comical. “Beautiful presentation, but the individual dishes were a little further apart from each other on the plate than I would have liked….”. (not actually said, but offered to illustrate my point).
So one guy walked away a winner, which meant that his designated charity received a 100k donation. But it felt all wrong this time, liking picking the best scientist from a lineup of Newton, Einstein, and Curie. This is where the show stumbled big for the first time. As an avid watcher of the show, my vote rests squarely on more time devoted to the stories behind the dishes in this challenge, making it less about who wins, because in this case, each chef was truly a winner.
Why I love Nurse Jackie
I hardly know where to start with Nurse Jackie, the TV series in its first season on Showtime. There really is not another show like it that I can think of. Yes, it takes place in a hospital, following the experience of an ER nurse named Jackie, portrayed by Edie Falco. This may sound familiar on the surface. Jackie performs admirably in her job and is respected by her colleagues. Yes, yes, this sounds familiar. ER nurse as saint. Jackie is a 40-something, pill-popping adulteress. Okay, maybe saint/sinner. Still, a little familiar.
Maybe the cognitive dissonace begins when we think of the ideal here….the “saint” portion of the picture. The warm, caring nurse who does everything in her power to assist, as best she is able, the unfortunate souls who end up in the emergency room. At once maternal, tough, nonjudgmental. Now turn this ideal inside out. From Jackie’s eyes: chaos, neverending crises, death, alternately smug and detached doctors, the trenches of a broken system. And it’s her job to hoist up her end of the mast. Is it any wonder, then, that in order to actually perform well in this untenable situation, that she feels a need for enough drugs to kill a small horse?
I recall a radio interview I heard recently with Nick Reding, the author of Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
On drugs, Jackie’s will to despise the situation in which she must perform is dissipated. She ends up in a Faustian bargain, though, as her need to seek out drugs eclipses her need to perform her job well. To create a pipeline to the drug supply, she forms a sexual relationship with the hospital’s pharmacist, even though she is married to a devoted man and has two young daughters. Jackie’s wedding ring comes off her finger before she ever sets foot in the hospital, making her family life secret to all but one confidant at her workplace. She is no longer in control.
As interesting as it is a character study (and Falco performs magnificently), Nurse Jackie is also a scathing indictment of the health care system, and how those in the Emergency Room in particular bear a lot of the brunt when push comes to shove. Equally so, the drug industry, which promises help in a bottle, then we are demonized when the need for help becomes a dangerous habit.
I’ve read some reviews online written by folks who are themselves nurses, and are upset at the portrayal of a nurse as an addict. I can understand that, but I am fairly confident that Jackie is not meant to represent nursing as a profession, so much as to represent the Modern Condition; good people stuck in untenable situations that end up sacrificing the best parts of their lives (in Jackie’s case, her family life, at least so far) in order to force all of the pieces into some sort of workable whole.
It’s not hard to predict that Jackie’s life will indeed fall to pieces, as her behavior is unsustainable. What began as perhaps a bad back (though I’m still unsure as to whether this was invented by Jackie to get an in with the pharmacist, or a real problem) is sure to end in a total and complete fall from grace (and it’s also probably no accident that her eldest daughter is named Grace, so pun intended).
Why I love Top Chef Masters
I am a big fan of Top Chef, the reality series that recently wrapped up it’s 5th season on Bravo. This summer, however, we are treated to the first season of Top Chef Masters, a spinoff of the original series in which already-established chefs at the top of their game are competing against each other in the same types of challenges as the up-and-comers in the regular series.
The majority of the buzz that I’ve read so far on the new series is that it’s a little lackluster in comparison to it’s counterpart. The chefs that are competing in the Masters series are already well established, so the stakes are lower and the usual excitement over the competition is not as robust. I couldn’t disagree more.
The 24 contestant/chefs that have appeared on the show thus far are successful professional chefs already. The individual competitions are not packed with the schadenfreude of the original series, it’s true, but that’s because the chefs on the series have a deep reverence for the craft of cooking, and a healthy respect for each other. In this environment, the focus is on the ingredients, the cooking, and only a little about the personalities behind the dishes. It’s a great pleasure to watch these chefs do their thing amidst the hair raising challenges that they are tossed into. And they take pleasure in watching their colleagues without the backbiting.
(minor spoiler alert)
In last week’s episode, the elimination challenge gave each chef a chance to completely sabotage one of their competitors. It was their job (a la secret santa) to shop for one of their competitors, and the competitor would be obligated to make use of all of the ingredients that they selected. No one took the bait. Each chef showed great care and consideration in picking out a fine assortment of ingredients for his competitor, because, as one chef remarked, he wanted his colleaugue to be able to show his chops as a chef. The grace and camraderie shown by the chefs elevated the entire competition to a celebration of talent and the craft of cookery. Bravo, indeed! Encore!
