“The NBC executives get a lot of critique from the press but they should be applauded for putting us on the air in the first place, because we still have a long way to go with equality in this country and around the world.”
via ‘The New Normal’ Star Justin Bartha Talks About The Show’s Cancellation.
I’ll agree with that. Good show. Good actor. Sad it’s gone. I certainly wish NBC had more balls.
Last week, leading up to the upfronts — that’s the time when the networks pat themselves on their backs and announce their new series — news about television was all about what shows had gotten the axe.
Last season I watched a half dozen or so shows on the networks. Here’s what I enjoyed, in rank order:
1. The New Normal
Ryan Murphy’s smartly written comedy about a gay couple who want to start a family. This show got some unfavorable reviews from gay outlets, but I found it simply lovely. Truth be told, this surprised me because I find Murphy’s Glee the most inconsistent show on TV. However, this one was a love note to the celebration of difference. Andrew Rannells and Justin Bartha were wonderful. NeNe Leakes was hilarious and I found the whole thing refreshing. I particularly liked the way Ellen Barkin’s strident conservative grandmother was allowed to change and still hold to her own truth. It was smart. Very smart. No, it was not everyone’s gay experience — we’re not all wealthy Californians with a perfect house and perfect teeth — and maybe you couldn’t quite relate to it, but hey, at least it WAS a gay experience on network television.
2. Happy Endings
The quirky, oddball non-linear new take on Friends full of fast dialogue and underplayed pop culture references to keep you on your toes. The show grew over its time on the air, but it never gelled the way I think it should have. I think Adam Pally was poised on the brink of being a breakout star, but no one seemed to know how to write for his character, which is a shame because I think there was a lot there to be mined. There’s talk that this may end up on some cable network or another. I hope so. It deserves a second time around. Zero bad apples in this gang of six.
3. New Girl
Three guys and a girl share a loft apartment. Zany antics, deftly drawn characters and a healthy dose of heart. And this is on Fox? Zooey Deschanel and Jake Johnson have really shined this season. Max Greenfield is insanely funny and a fearless performer. The show is smart, has grounded itself in a unique worldview and is starting to emerge as more than “just a sitcom.” It’s a delight AND one of the few sitcoms that understands how to maximize its (terrific) guest stars. Two words: Julius Pepperwood.
4. Smash
NBC’s paean to Broadway. Shot in New York and chock-a-block with actual theatre performers. Theresa Rebeck created the show, adapting Garson Kanin’s novel. A writer, Rebeck was also the showrunner and by all accounts the first season was a train wreck backstage and the novel show became nearly unwatchable at the end of season one. Brought back for a second season with a seasoned showrunner who severely retooled it, the storylines got tighter and more interesting to watch, but the network buried it and ratings fell through the floor. A shame, really, because there was some great stuff going on here. Andy Mientus, Jeremy Jordan and Megan Hilty showed great range, Christian Borle made the jump from stage acting to screen acting look utterly effortless and Debra Messing showed a fantastic grounded, dramatic side that we never got to see on Will & Grace.
5. Whitney
An odd little nut of a show featuring interesting comedic performances from some not-so-stereotypical performers. Comedienne Whitney Cummings had her hand in two shows that debuted in 2011: her self-titled one and the CBS diner sitcom 2 Broke Girls. Whitney was a lovely little show with interesting performers while 2 Broke Girls was one extended dick joke. Guess which one is still on the air? Chris D’Elia and Rhea Seehorn were refreshing additions to the landscape.
6. Modern Family
Because it’s consistently funny when you least expect it to be. There’s a lot of talk about the over-the-top performers on this show — like Eric Stonestreet and Ty Burrell — but the real heart of this show is Ed O’Neill who delivers a consistent, grounded, underplayed performance week after week. He’s not recognized for this anti-Al Bundy turn, but he should. Critics who know better should realize that he’s the glue that’s holding the whole damn thing together. Every time I think that MF is close to jumping the shark, it pulls itself back from the edge. Also, as the children have grown, all of them have gotten better and better, particularly Nolan Gould, who plays Luke Dunphy.
And not on the network any longer:
Cougar Town
Courteney Cox leads Bill Lawrence’s band of wine-swilling crazies through an odd Florida town. Axed as an underperformer after two seasons on ABC, it’s found new life on TBS with two 13-episode seasons — one just concluded and one upcoming. If you understand Penny Can, Dime Eyes and Big Carl, you’re onto the shenanigans in the cul de sac. It’s devilishly clever in a truly oddball sort of way. It’s to group-of-friends comedies what Scrubs was to hospital comedies. Makes sense, because they were created by the same warped mind.
Last week, the networks axed numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5. So, I’m done with TV now. The cable company gets a call on Monday and the hundreds of channels with nothing on them but five-year-old reruns of Paula Deen deep-frying bacon-wrapped lard balls in butter and Housewives of (fill in a place) and Kardashians and hoarders and Honey Boo Boo and rednecks in swamps can all go away and I’ll save thousands of dollars over the next year and it will make me ecstatic not to have to pay that money to hellish Comcast!
Besides, most of the stuff that I watch comes from abroad. I watch A LOT of stuff from the U.K. on the computer. I watch a number of excellent independent Web series and even the back-from-the-dead All My Children. With the possible exception of losing out on new episodes of The Big Bang Theory and NCIS (because sometimes you just don’t want to have to think), why do I need cable if I have Hulu and Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and enough minor technical knowledge to sneak behind the occasional poorly built firewall?
And that’s my new normal.
Besides, NBC, any network that pays Matt Lauer millions of dollars to stay ON television certainly does not want me watching.
Emmy Award-winning actress Cady McClain returns to serial drama and to one of her signature roles, Dixie Cooney Martin on the online reboot of All My Children. Photo: cadymcclain.com.
Here’s a cut from Cady McClain. It’s a terrific piece and any soap fan should take a few moments and read it and think about what she’s saying.
I want to talk about the new young people on All My Children, and why I think (and hope) the audience should give them a chance. I am not known for blowing smoke up anybodies hoo-ha, right? Let’s just start with that as a baseline for this conversation!
via Let’s Talk About the Kids (of All My Children!) | Cady McClain.
Alert readers will not be surprised at all to learn that I am an enormous fan of continuing drama and what a powerful medium I believe it to be. I also believe that we are just at the beginning of a new era wherein we can harness the Internet as a new platform to tell stories. We don’t know quite how to do it yet, and that makes it exciting. It’s just as exciting as when the pioneers of television — like Irna Phillips — were figuring out how to take Papa Bauer’s family from mythical radio Springfield to mythical television Springfield and make The Guiding Light into a television program that viewers watched.
Phillips had two protégés in those early television days — William J. Bell and Agnes Nixon. And as influential as Phillips was in early television, one could argue that Agnes Nixon has an even more powerful legacy of harnessing the power of continuing drama to tell stories that have tremendous social impact. In 1962, Nixon penned the story of Bert Bauer’s cancer scare on The Guiding Light, before you could say “cancer,” “uterus,” or “Pap smear” on television. On Another World, she created young troublemaker Rachel Davis, who was seen by many as the prototype for her most famous creation, Erica Kane on her landmark serial All My Children.
Erica Kane (Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler [almost Roy] Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marrick Marrick Montgomery) is the most popular character in the history of daytime drama in the U.S. Erica lied, cheated, cajoled, married, married, loved, lost, shocked the world, forced a bear to stand down, had daytime’s first legal abortion and, after 41 years on the air, she was still the most fascinating character ever created for television.
Skip to the point, please.
Fine. Here it is: people get wrapped up in soap operas. People begin to think of actors as the characters they play because they see them in their homes every single day. People get crazy obsessed. People don’t like some things ever to change.
Cady is making a tremendous case for the young people who are new to playing characters established in the previous broadcast incarnation of All My Children. She’s saying, “Approach this with an open mind. It’s different. But it’s good.” What I’m saying is a little less nice. I’m saying, “Change happens. Get the hell over it.” And if you can’t, don’t watch.
Eighty-five year old Agnes Nixon is working her ass off to deliver a product, a powerful story, in an untested medium. Prospect Park is investing millions of dollars in this experiment. Cady McClain and many of the “old guard” actors are putting their careers on the line for this new venture. The least you can do, if you are, in fact, a fan of All My Children, is to watch with an open mind. You might learn something. You might enjoy it.
And if you don’t? If this venture fails? Well, at least they tried. That’s what artists and innovators do. They try. Again and again and again. And no one thanks them enough for being fearless enough to try.
Me on online soap resurrections (with links to other serial related posts).
Me on annoying recent gay developments in daytime.
3/18/13 — Hulu just released their “Save The Date” trailer. Thought I’d stick it in if you haven’t seen it yet.
Gay web dramas flourish as TV networks cling to the status quo | Television & radio | guardian.co.uk.
Good article in The Guardian about the proliferation of gay-themed content in web series and how this might be the next new content delivery method for this type of entertainment. (Duh.) As Husbands co-creator Jane Espenson says, “We consider Husbands television. It’s just television that arrives in a different box.”
Some us have been ahead of The Guardian in reporting this. Ahem. See many links below. H/T Tommy Heleringer’s Facebook.
(l-r) Hunter Canning, Sasha Winters and Adam Goldman star in the exceptional Web series, The Outs. Photo: Interview/Unusually Fine Photography
Ken Levine: ‘M*A*S*H’ 30th Anniversary Finale: Looking Back On The Event.
Good God. Really? Thirty years? I have a story about this….
I was a freshman in college. My roommate and I had a television — my television — a small back-and-white set from Sears, complete with CABLE (we were on the cutting edge of high tech!!) in our dorm room!
A bunch of friends gathered in our room that night to watch the finale and say goodbye to Hawkeye and BJ and Col. Potter and Klinger and the rest of the 4077th, characters that had defined our childhoods. And just as the program began, the geeks next door, geeks with no sense of collective pop culture, but geeks with a dial-up handset modem for their handmade “computer” fired that sucker up and wrecked our signal. We went crazy, beating on their door, screaming for them to turn it off.
They finally did and declined our invitation to watch with us; perhaps the only people in America that night not tuned in to see the goings-on in “The Swamp” one last time.
Michael E. Knight and Cady McClain as Tad and Dixie on ABC’s “All My Children.” The show returns online next month as one of two former network serials getting another life online. McClain returns to her Emmy Award-winning role as Dixie in the reboot. No word yet on Knight’s participation. Image: originally SoapNet, via Wikimedia Commons. No copyright claimed.
If you know the actress Cady McClain, you are likely a viewer of serial drama. She rocketed to the top of the daytime drama Hot Character Hall of Fame for her portrayal of Dixie Cooney Martin on All My Children on and off from 1988 to the end of the ABC series in 2011. She is also known as the second Rosanna Cabot on As The World Turns in multiple stints for the last eight years that soap was on the air.
McClain returns to Pine Valley as, in classic soap fashion, it rises from the dead for an Internet reboot from the production company Prospect Park and their Online Network. The show will also be available on Hulu and iTunes in 30-minute episodes.
It’s a brave new world for what we used to call “daytime drama,” but dramatic programming on the networks during the day is flagging as the core audience — stay-at-home moms and other women who do not work outside the home — continues to dwindle.
I’ve written any number of times about my feelings about serial drama and how important it can be as a catalyst for societal change. I hope that by making the once venerable and still much-loved serials All My Children and One Life to Live available online, we are seeing the beginnings of a more mainstream acceptance of Web-based entertainment.
Read Cady’s cut below and feel free to click around to stories that I’ve written (or reblogged) about soaps and Web series over the last year or so.
A New Dawn for Daytime | Cady McClain.
Do you remember when your aunt or grandma or mom called you into the living room to look at her soap opera on the TV, screaming, “OH MY GOD YOU’VE GOT TO SEE THIS” and that moment when you frantically queried, “What’s happening? Who is that? TELL ME EVERYTHING!” Well the same thing is going to happen, only now it might be in reverse. Your niece or daughter, or grand daughter might now be the one hollering, “OMG! You’ve got to see this!” while pulling out her laptop, tablet, or smart phone. It’s not so different: it’s still a generational connection that is going to occur, it’s just coming to you via a different mechanism.
PS — There’s likely some overlap in these two categories.
Here’s a screenshot of the EastSiders Kickstarter page. They raised more than $10,000 more than their target. That’s excellent for them — and excellent for those of us who enjoy this type of entertainment. You know, authentic, not co-opted by the studios, thus, well, better.
I’m proud to have been a supporter of this venture. I can’t wait to see the result either.
I tracked and wrote about this Kickstarter campaign HERE. Read it, please. I think it’s an excellent model to use when thinking about funding in this manner.
There’s just nothing about this that I don’t love! Watch the clip.
Anderson Cooper had a special surprise for the New Jersey teen whose impassioned coming out speech at a high school ceremony made him a viral video superstar.
Eighteen-year-old Jacob Rudolph, who identified himself as LGBT while accepting an award for class actor in front of his graduating class, told Cooper that “Star Trek” actor George Takei was his idol.
Fortunately for Rudolph, Takei was waiting backstage. Watch the clip to see what happened!
via Jacob Rudolph, LGBT New Jersey Teen, Meets George Takei On ‘Anderson Live’.
Says commenter “netbird” on this post on YouTube: Jimmy Fallon (and The Roots, and the entire crew, truth be told) managed to bring a breath of fresh air into the arguably pasty late night scene. They changed the late night television panorama so much in these last couple of years — my hat’s off to all of them — and this clip is the perfect example of that.
I couldn’t agree more. I love Fallon, but I can’t help thinking how awesome Brian Williams is, too. I mean, can you imagine Chet Huntley or David Brinkley slow jamming the news? Yeah, me neither.
Are you familiar with RAW at all?
RAW is set in a restaurant of the same name in Dublin, Ireland and is broadcast on RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the public broadcaster – more or less – of Ireland). This clip is from the current series of six episodes now airing in Ireland.
The show is anchored by the truly astonishing Damon Gameau, an Aussie who plays bombastic and often egomaniacal head chef Geoff. In this clip, you see Geoff returning to RAW after a long absence and you see his lover, Pavel, dead in his arms in a brief flashback. Krystof Hadek gave an achingly beautiful portrayal of Pavel. He humanized Geoff and was a soft-spoken anchor for Geoff and the restaurant.
It’s the type of elegant, yet visceral, drama that is utterly lacking from American television. Especially network broadcast television.
One Last Word 