Notes from the Asylum: 'Big Love's' Last Season Begins, 'Grey's' Pregnancy Issues, 'The Company Men' . . . FINALLY!

Recap #44

Big Love’s Last Season

This is the Henrickson family’s last season on HBO’s Big Love and they started it off with the leader of their clan, Bill, acting like a head-in-the-sand narcissistic who’s suffering from a god complex as wife number one has started hitting the hooch in the middle of the day (in violation of her religion’s dictates), while wife number two threatened a grade schooler on school grounds and wife number three lost her six-figure job because her husband has outed the family as polygamists.

Yeah, about that outing thing, telling the world that he’s a polygamist mere hours after being elected to the Utah state senate, that didn’t turn out to be such a brilliant move. It didn't turn out to be a hit with anyone, not the employees at Bill’s home building supply store who were either quitting or talking smack about his family, not his campaign supporters who felt duped, not his fellow Republicans in the state senate who've vowed to politically isolate him, not the kids who go to school with the Henrickson children and not the Indian tribe which rescinded the Henricksons' contract at the family-friendly casino that was to be the family’s financial life raft.

Now they’re screwed.

While I’m hoping that Big Love’s final season isn’t centered around Bill being ridiculously out of touch, I’m eager to see what happens next. You can read my review of the season premiere on CliqueClack TV, where I’ll be reviewing each episode the day after it airs.


Image credit: ABC

Grey’s Pregnancy Issues

*Warning, spoilers from the recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy ahead.*

This past week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy (I reviewed it here) -- which featured Meredith struggling with infertility, following her miscarriage, and Callie discovering that she’s pregnant with her friends-with-benefits’ baby -- got me to thinking about all the messed up messages that Grey’s Anatomy, and its sister show Private Practice, have sent over the years about pregnancy, child rearing and the medical profession.

Take Meredith “I’ve Got Mommy Issues Up the Wazoo” Grey. Early in the show’s run, she lambasted a pair of workaholic parents who hired a nanny to take care of their child. Burned by the fact that her dad left home when she was young and her mother threw herself into her surgical work and ignored her daughter, Meredith didn’t think she’d ever make a good mother. Until Derek said they should have a child. She got pregnant but before she could tell her husband Derek, he was shot, nearly died and she miscarried. Six months later, she’s having trouble having a baby and was told she has a “hostile uterus.”

When you throw in what happened with Callie Torres, who said she wanted "a dozen" kids since she was married to George O’Malley, plus Addison Montgomery, Mark Sloan and the only working parent on the show, Miranda Bailey, and you’ll see how thorny an issue this has been for Grey's characters. My pop culture and politics column this week is about all things babies and Seattle Grace.


Image credit: Rotten Tomatoes

The Company Men Finally Going to Be Released This Weekend

Fantastic reviews. Great cast. Perfect moment to address a timely issue – the dispiriting effect that layoffs and calloused cost-cutting/outsourcing efforts have on people who devote most of the waking hours of their lives to their jobs only to find themselves unceremoniously unemployed in a lousy economy when no one's hiring. I’ve been waiting and waiting for this much-delayed, Boston area-filmed movie The Company Men to be released. And FINALLY, it’s coming out this weekend.
And unlike the fact that I didn’t get to see The Social Network in the theaters – it’s in my Netflix queue – and I wasn’t able to see the Potter film in the theaters either (holiday madness and swine flu conspired in a sinister fashion to thwart me), I plan to, somehow, go out and see this film in the theaters.

Image credits: Danny Feld/ABC and Rotten Tomatoes.

Golden Globes 2011 . . . Live Blogging

I'll be live blogging the Golden Globes tonight, rooting for all things Mad Men and Modern Family.

Please feel free to join in on the commentary and, if you're reading this AFTER the Globes have aired, I'd love for you to weigh in on the results.

I'm wondering how many times they'll have to bleep out Ricky Gervais' commentary . . .

UPDATE: Ricky Gervais had a glass of beer (or what is supposed to look like beer) waiting for him on the podium. Wonder if that'll be the standard for every person who arrives at the podium?

UPDATE: BRUTALLY going after The Tourist, Sheen, Cruise . . . Sex & the City 2 stars' ages. I'm waiting for them to throw tomatoes.

UPDATE: My son just asked, "Touched what?" I rolled my eyes.

UPDATE: A show of hands, who thinks that Gervais will NOT be asked back as host? (*hand raised*)

UPDATE: Christian Bale won for supporting actor in The Fighter. I was rooting for Jeremy Renner from The Town. But, to be honest, I haven't seen The Fighter.

UPDATE: Oooh, best actress in TV drama series . . . I wanted Margulies . . . but it's Katie Sagal for Sons of Anarchy . . . Can you say UP-set?! She was seated in Orange County, obviously she wasn't expected to win . . .  (Don't like how they cut her off! Better not be a trend for the evening.)

UPDATE: Best mini-series or TV movie. *yawn*

UPDATE: "He's a mean person," my daughter just said when Gervais appeared . . . Ashton Kutcher's dad?! Ouch!

Well Done, Mr. President

It was just what we needed in the wake of the horrific Tucson shooting: An uplifting speech by the president which highlighted the bravery and heroism of the people during that terrible moment on Saturday morning.

Husbands who threw their bodies on top of their wives to try to shield them from gunfire. A congressional aide who darted through the lethal chaos to attend to wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and apply pressure to her wounds. The people who wrestled the shooter to the ground and wrangled his ammo out of his hands, risking their own lives.

We, collectively, were uplifted by the life stories of those who were killed, the woman who volunteered at her church, the high school sweethearts who’d reunited, the young Congressional staffer who had big ideas of how government could help people. We learned that Giffords had opened her eyes for the very first time since being shot. And then there was the 9-year-old girl, Christina Taylor Green whose story President Obama told in such a tastefully poignant fashion that it brought me to tears.

And the president took pains to say that we shouldn’t blame political rhetoric for the actions of a disturbed man bent on violence. Instead of blaming and finger pointing, the president called upon us to lift up one another by communicating our political differences in civil terms and mold ourselves into the kind of nation that the young, idealistic Christina, born on 9/11/01, would have wanted to see in the country of which she was so proud: “She saw all of this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism of vitriol that we adults all too often take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.” When he threw in the line about how he imagined that Christina was “jumping in rain puddles” in heaven, the word that came to my mind: “Beautiful.”

It was a healing speech full of hope -- not anger, not partisanship, not blaming. It was full of tales that remind us that there are many more people in the world who are good and generous and brave and loving and hopeful even in the face of evil. And that’s what we needed to hear, at least that’s what I needed to hear.

Then this morning while watching Morning Joe, I heard that Colorado Senator Mark Udall is urging that during the January 25 State of the Union speech in the House chambers that the members from the Republican and Democratic parties sit amidst and next to one another as opposed to segregated on opposite sides of the room.

“Beyond custom, there is no rule or reason that on this night we should emphasize divided government, separated by party, instead of being seen united as a country,” Udall said in a press statement. “. . . Perhaps by sitting with each other for one night we will begin to rekindle that common spark that brought us here from 50 different states and widely diverging backgrounds to serve the public good.”

That, I think, is a brilliant idea would embody the notion that we are all Americans, no matter our views on tax policy, education reform and keeping troops in Afghanistan.

Notes on Pop Culture: 'Parenthood,' 'Shameless' & My TV Golden Globe Picks

Parenthood: Feelin’ the Guilt

The current Adam and Kristina Braverman storyline on Parenthood -- they banned their 16-year-old daughter Haddie from seeing a 19-year-old recovering alcoholic who has his own apartment and was emancipated when he was 16 -- is playing out in interesting ways.

This week, Kristina was trying to assuage her guilt about making Haddie break up with her boyfriend Alex by making her pancakes and offering to give Haddie's room a make-over. Little does Kristina know that Haddie is continuing to see Alex behind her back.

When Haddie's parents eventually learn that she’s lying to them, I’ll be curious to see what they’ll do to their class president daughter who gets good grades and is otherwise a model citizen, except that she lies to her parents about boys (and has done so in the past). Given that stern, strict parenting isn’t all that in vogue these days, where Parenthood will go with this is an open question.

My review of the latest episode on CliqueClack TV can be found here.

Speaking of Parenthood, I dedicated my pop culture column on Mommy Tracked this week to how Parenthood and other primetime TV shows are depicting the raising of teenagers as a harrowing proposition.



Shameless, Surprisingly NOT a Downer

Take an alcoholic single father of six, Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy), who was abandoned by his wife and is on disability and who drinks all the disability checks at a local pub, and the new Showtime drama Shameless has the makings for one, damned depressing show, especially when Frank is frequently brought home by the cops with urine-saturated pants and left to sleep it off on the floor.

Frank's oldest daughter Fiona (Emmy Rossum) is the only reason why the Gallagher family functions at all and why the children haven't been taken away by child protective services yet. And Fiona's a reckless twentysomething who likes to party hard. Fiona, who totes her baby brother to work with her where she cleans motel rooms, does the family's laundry, cooks and makes sure everyone, even the 8-year-old, contributes money so they can pay their electric bill when Frank's blown his monthly disability check.

So why did the pilot episode of this show surprise me? By the time I got to the end of it, I was smiling. It was actually uplifting to see that children, who are living in poverty and in awful circumstances, are somehow soldiering on, together, as a family trying to care for its own. The Gallaghers, Frank notwithstanding, have a whole lot more heart than, say, the Gavins on Rescue Me.

Processing the Tucson/Giffords Shooting

We all want answers but answers might be hard to come by after a reportedly mentally disturbed 22-year-old opened fire this weekend on a public gathering featuring a U.S. Congresswoman and her constituents outside of a grocery store in Tucson.

We all want it to be easy to be able to point to someone, or a group of people, and say, “There! She’s responsible! She’s the reason why this happened!” or “They did it! Their inflammatory signs made the shooter snap!” or “His parents! They must've been bad!”

But sometimes the uncomfortable fact is that there are no answers because there are unstable people who live in this world who will, one way or another, try to hurt others. And as far as the shooter in Tucson, we might not know for some time whether anything could have been legally or morally done to prevent what happened on Saturday. As we get more information, maybe that question will be addressed more comprehensively. We'll have to wait and see on that front.

In the meantime, it’s sickening to see that the folks who reside on the outer left and right fringes of the political spectrum have their index fingers poised in the pointing position and are blaming the people who hold the polar opposite political beliefs than them for the actions of a mentally unstable individual.

When I was at my daughter’s basketball game on Saturday I was keeping close tabs on the breaking news via Twitter about Rep. Gabby Giffords and the folks who came to see her who police said were gunned down by Jared Loughner. And as news reports were flooding in – many of them containing erroneous information – the blaming started right there on Twitter. It was Sarah Palin’s fault. It was the Tea Partiers. It was talk radio. It was Snooki. (Just kidding, no one blamed Snooki, at least for this incident.) They didn’t wait to see what information we learned about the shooter and his background and whether, in fact, his motivation could be discerned at all. They just impulsively blamed their political foes.

Then the folks on the right got angry and said there was no evidence that the shooter was one of them. Then the finger pointing was returned and the likes of Keith Olbermann and left-leaning bloggers were blamed for THEIR angry words.

Enough.

Seriously.

I hate watching people try to score political points while a set of parents is burying their 9-year-old daughter who went to visit her congresswoman at an event at grocery store and would up being murdered, and while a congresswoman had parts of her skull removed so the swelling in her brain, through which the bullet traveled, won't cause more damage. This is not the time to try to "score" political points.

So when I read David Brooks’ column in the New York Times this morning, I finally found something with which I could agree:

“These accusations – that political actors, contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl – are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.


. . . [T]he political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.”

Brooks seems to share a similar view on how this whole thing has played out as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, he of the famous “Rally for Sanity,” of which we could use a whole lot more. (See his commentary above.) I especially loved the part where Stewart said in his monologue:

“We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine, and by the way that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment. It is toxic. It is unproductive but to say that that is what has caused this . . . that I just don’t think you can do.”

I too want to see more political moderation, want to see the end of the political tactic of transforming and dehumanizing those who don’t believe what you believe into enemies who hate America, ascribing to them all manner of evil (which is why something like a No Labels movement appeals to me). But that’s a discussion for another day. Not today.

I think it’s a sad state of affairs when some of the most sane commentary we’re heard can be found on Comedy Central.

Notes on Pop Culture: Censoring Classics, 'Grey's' Lets Cristina Heal, 'The Middle's' on a Hot Streak

Censoring Classics

My father gave my 12-year-old son Tom Sawyer for Christmas and my 12-year-old daughter To Kill a Mockingbird. Both books were mentioned this week when news broke that a publisher had sanitized Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by removing references to the N-word to make it more palatable to be taught in schools.

The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani wrote a powerful column decrying the new edition’s changes saying that the "original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property" and that "tampering with a writer's words underscores both editors' extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people . . . that all texts are fungible."

An excerpt:

“Haven’t we learned by now that removing books from the curriculum just deprives children of exposure to classic works of literature? Worse, it relieves teachers of the fundamental responsibility of putting such books in context – of helping students understand that Huckleberry Finn actually stands as a powerful indictment of slavery . . . of using its contested language as an opportunity to explore the painful complexities of race relations in this country. To censor or redact books on school reading lists is a form of denial: shutting the door on harsh historical realities – whitewashing them or pretending they do not exist.”

I told my kids when they started reading their books that the N-word will appear there and we had discussions about the word and about what was going on in the point in American history when their respective novels are set. Unsettled as my explanations may make them, I agree with Kakutani that it’s important to tell children about history so they can understand how very much life has changed since then. I’m looking forward to discussions with the kids about those books and, if my son likes Tom Sawyer, may pick up Huckleberry Finn for him next.



Grey’s Allows Cristina to Heal

I was quite pleased that Grey’s Anatomy gave Cristina Yang the room and the time to heal on her own terms, something which finally occurred in latest episode, “Disarm.” While many shows artificially rush a character through something like mourning, fear or anger because they think the fans can’t handle a slow, stop-start emotional recovery from a trauma, Grey’s allowed Cristina to flail around for 10 episodes – impulsively get married, hang out at the mall, do a cruddy job of bartending at Joe’s -- before finally having the character regain her footing. And it was worth the wait.

I reviewed the episode on CliqueClack TV, and express the hope that the ill-advised Teddy-Denny 2.0 marriage doesn’t cause the show to run off the tracks, plot-wise.
 


The Middle's on a Hot Streak


From the spot-on satire of parents who have turned over complete control of their lives to their children – running around to three different fast food restaurants to get each child his or her preferred food, allowing the offspring to take over the “big” TV and retreating to other rooms so the children can watch what they want – to the grade school-aged Brick discovering the internet for the first time (because his parents were refusing to cart him to the library every other day) and learning that there aren’t really single people out there waiting to meet him, the latest episode was thoroughly entertaining.

Following on the heels of its excellent dysfunctional Thanksgiving installment and its scathing Christmas episode, where Frankie battled with her parents over how many presents the children should have under the tree, The Middle is having a good run of it lately.

Image credit: New York Times.

Unlike Most, I Didn't Like 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'

It’s been impossible to not take notice of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. The books have been everywhere with their unusual covers wrapped around what promises to be a compelling tale featuring a butt-kicking leading character in the mysterious Lisbeth Salander. My parents read the first book. My sister-in-law bought it too. A local book club designated it as a monthly selection. The books were turned into films. So, several months ago, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

In fact, you might’ve noticed that in my “Currently Reading” tab on the right-hand column of this blog, the image of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had been sitting there for months. And months. Usually it doesn’t take me months to get through a book, unless of course, I’m having trouble getting through it. Such was the case with this book. Damn did it disappoint me. It completely failed to grab me by my shirt collar and demand that I ignore everything else and read it. (The last time a book did this to me was when I re-read The Great Gatsby last year and couldn’t stop reading.)

As I plodded 100 pages into Tattoo, I was so thoroughly bored that I kept wondering what all the fuss was about. Usually, I love books about reporters, being a former newspaper scribe myself, but with this one -- about a disgraced investigative journalist trying to solve a mystery and a computer hacker/investigator who teamed up with him -- I was struggling to keep my eyes open.

When there finally was some action, I was distinctly underwhelmed. The only reason I stuck with it – other than to find out what actually did happen to Harriet Vanger – was because I wanted to see why this series of book is omnipresent in pop culture right now. Now that I’ve gotten to the end – finished it when I was feeling a bit better as I battled with the flu germs which were harassing me – I still don’t understand why this book is such a hit. (I can’t speak for the other two books – The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – since I haven’t read them and doubt that I ever will.)

Then I read this post from Entertainment Weekly’s Henry Goldblatt who wrote a wry commentary about the phenomenon of the series saying:

“I hate The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. To many, that is the equivalent of saying, ‘I kick puppies,’ or ‘I choke babies,’ or ‘American Idol is the best show in the history of television.’ Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s crime trilogy about crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his hacker lover/pal Lisbeth, in my view, is poorly written, ridiculously plotted and (yawn!) incredibly tedious.”


Anyone else out there find the Tattoo book didn’t live up to the hype?

In the meantime, I’ve started a classic which I’ve never read and, for some reason, think it’s now time that I do: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
I’m also toying with the idea of tackling a whole bunch of classics which I’ve never read this year, or ones which I read in high school and didn’t fully comprehend at the time, but haven’t wholly bought into the idea.

Image credits: Entertainment Weekly and Audio Editions.

Spent Christmas Vacation with 'thirtysomething's' Final Season

When I should’ve been eating too much and being positively merry and jolly during the Christmas/New Year's break, I was instead sick in bed with what my doctor suspected was the swine flu. Its symptoms plagued me for eight days. (If you wish more details on my “Flu-ey Little Christmas,” go here.)
So while my husband and three kids were enjoying Christmas dinner with my brother’s family and my parents, when they were out seeing movies (I again missed out on seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with my daughter) and sledding in the snow, I was in the house feeling like crap.

One small bright spot during the cruddy past week was the fact that I had the fourth and final season of thirtysomething on DVD to keep me company, that and my dog Max who was chillin' on his new L.L. Bean dog bed.

A huge thirtysomething fan, I’d never seen the fourth season because, when it originally aired, I was a senior in college and, frankly, I didn’t have time to watch a lot of TV, plus I did some editing at my college newspaper on the night when thirtysomething was on TV. (This was a looonnng time before DVRs.) I have a vague recollection of a newspaper colleague of mine telling me one night that she was in a hurry to leave the newsroom so she could go to her apartment to watch Ellyn's wedding.

Even when the thirtysomething repeats were aired on Lifetime years later, I never was able to see Ellyn get married, Nancy be told her ovarian cancer was in remission, Gary die in a car accident, Elliot and Nancy pack up and move to California, and Hope and Michael come to the brink of divorce as the drama's marquee pair had become cold and distant with one another soon after the birth of their son Leo.

It was, by far, the saddest two dozen episodes of the show I’d seen, with those post-Gary’s death ones bringing tears to my flu-ey eyes. Sure there were moments of lightness, but they were few and far between in this solemn swan song for the top-notch drama which portrayed life in the ‘burbs on the cusp of fortysomething as dark and plagued by thoughts of mortality and “what-the-heck-am-I-doing-with-my-life” ruminations, much more so than it had in its previous three seasons.

Though I’ve waited all this time to finally see the last season, I’m glad I saw these 23 episodes at the age I am now because now I have much more perspective than I did when I was in my early 20s when the show first aired. The episodes proved more meaningful and, frankly, disturbing on many levels.

Now, if only the folks at Shout Factory who gave new life to thirtysomething would be able to get the third and final season of Once and Again released on DVD . . .

Image credit: Shout Factory.