Reporters from The Hollywood Reporter sat down with two groups of leading dramatic TV actors who were surprisingly willing to talk frankly and openly about their work, the challenges of their craft and their own foibles, sometimes in gruesome detail.
Representing the female actors were The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies, Homeland's Claire Danes, The Closer's Kyra Sedgwick, The Killing's Mireille Enos, Mad Men's January Jones and Shameless' Emmy Rossum. Their male counterparts included Mad Men's Jon Hamm, Homeland's Damian Lewis, Parenthood's Peter Krause, Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, Touch's Kiefer Sutherland and Boss' Kelsey Grammer.
I found it curious that the tone of the round-table discussions between the women versus the men was starkly different. Whereas the men seemed to be jovially trying to one-up each other with gross and embarrassing tales while they munched on snacks (like cubes of cheese), the women were deferential to one another and had flowers instead of food on the table in front of them. (The men are allowed to eat but the women weren't?)
My favorite parts of the discussions:
January Jones said that people she sees on the street give her grief for Betty Draper's bad parenting.
Jones said appearing as "fat Betty" during the fifth season of Mad Men was a pain in the neck due to all the prosthetics she had to wear.
Peter Krause admitted to once suffering from sudden gastrointestinal problems while acting on stage in a play.
The Good Wife, Julianna Margulies, struggles with being the "good girl" on her show's set even when she doesn't think she needs to be there all the time, particularly for scenes where she has no lines. Her quote seemed very Katherine Heigl to me, almost a cry for help: "There are days when . . . I had worked until midnight and then I had to go and shoot something else at five in the morning. I looked at my husband and I was like, 'This is why Judy Garland was on pills. I can't keep this up. I need a pill!'"
Jon Hamm was once told he'd never make it as a TV star.
Damian Lewis related an anecdote about getting injured on stage -- sustaining a wound that required multiple stitches -- during a sword fight with Ralph Fiennes yet he continued to act as he bled profusely from the face.
I completely concur with a person who posted a comment on YouTube after the interview with the panel of women who said that this was a fascinatingly interesting discussion, a model for what these types of discussions should be, as opposed to the vacuous fluff that passes for interviews these days.
As it rounds the corner of its final season, Friday Night Lights and its two lead actors, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, have received Emmy nominations for the wonderful conclusion to the series which moved and delighted me. Though it’s highly unlikely that FNL will receive any Emmys -- it’s up against Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter and Game of Thrones in best drama, Chandler faces Mad Men’s Jon Hamm who had a stupendous year while Britton is competing with Julianna Margulies’ powerhouse turn in The Good Wife), it’s nice to see the gang from Dillon, Texas get some props for a change.
And it was a testament to the outstanding high quality of the humor, writing and performances in Modern Family to see that all the parents in the show were nominated for an Emmy, the show is in contention for best comedy (an honor it won last year) and one of its funniest episodes, “Caught in the Act,” is vying for best comedy writing. It’s been nominated for 17 Emmys, deservedly so.
Image credit: AMC.
Then there’s my beloved Mad Men which has been nominated for 19 Emmys. A favorite for best drama, which it has won for three consecutive years, the amazing Don and Peggy-centric episode “The Suitcase” (where they stayed up all night working on the Samsonite campaign) was nominated for best writing, Miss Blankenship (Randee Heller) was nominated for best guest actress and Elisabeth Moss is up for best actress.
All the folks from Parenthood. No nominations. Zip. Nada. I thought for sure that Peter Krause would be on the list for his Adam Braverman (I’m thinking specifically about the episode where he punched the guy in the grocery store for mocking his son who has Asperger’s), or Mae Whitman for her portrayal of troubled teen Amber Holt.
Rescue Me. Its sixth season was strong and powerful and grim as Denis Leary’s Tommy Gavin, like Don Draper, hit his alcoholic rock bottom. (Both depictions were ugly and gripping.) Certainly the series and Leary deserved nominations.
Ray Romano. He proved, in his second season as the put-upon divorced dad Joe with a gambling problem on Men of a Certain Age, that he has acting chops.
Michael B. Jordan as Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights. During these past two seasons, Jordan has given an achingly beautiful performance as the East Dillon Lions’ quarterback who struggled with his previous criminal entanglements with deadly gangs, with his father returning to the fold after serving jail time (and disappointing his son by reverting to substance abuse), his mother’s rehab from drug addiction and omnipresent poverty.
Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation. Just for the episode where he sported dreadlocks. Ron Swanson's Pyramid of Greatness. Seriously. He made me laugh out loud.
The folks from The Middle. I adored the episode where Frankie and Mike Heck attempted to "take back" the house from their kids but, inevitably, failed.
What nominations pleased you? Which omissions annoyed you?
*Warning, spoilers ahead from recent episode of The Good Wife.*
The recent episode of The Good Wife was a game changer, bringing the sex scandal that sent Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) politician husband Peter (Chris Noth) to jail squarely back into the Florrick home.
For several weeks, Good Wife episodes have tilted too heavily for my taste toward becoming a legal procedural with only a little sprinkling of the drama that makes this show different from all the rest of the legal procedurals: A woman rebuilding her life with her children after her husband publically humiliated her with dalliances with hookers. I wanted to see the dramatization of how women (Silda Spitzer, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Edwards) remain in their marriages in the wake of such devastating events.
This week my waiting paid off. The Good Wife prominently featured a hearing to determine whether Peter Florrick could remain at home under home confinement while awaiting trial. Alicia Florrick had to testify during the bail hearing about whether her lying, cheating husband would be welcomed back into their home. Under questioning by the prosecution, Alicia was asked, "So you and your husband would share a room? . . . [Y]ou're saying under oath that you intend to share a bed with a man?"
Alicia then responded that she wouldn't be cowed by the prosecutor's intrusive questions or humiliated and would answer only germane inquiries. In the end, Peter was denied bail and not allowed to go home to the new, smaller apartment his wife had rented in the days following his imprisonment, after selling their home in the 'burbs.
Previews for next week's episode -- in which one of the women with whom Peter had an affair gives TV interviews and depicts Alicia as "frigid" -- seem to indidicate that there's life in this betrayed political spouse/legal procedural yet.
I like Julianna Margulies. And I’m fond of the premise of The Good Wife: A woman -- a wife and mother -- is trying to pick of the pieces of her shattered life after her corrupt politician/husband humiliated her by having affairs with hookers and is now in jail because he was found guilty of abusing his office.
The first few episodes of The Good Wife deftly balanced Margulies’ Alicia Florrick’s attempts to attend to the needs of her children and shield them from the tawdry nature of the allegations against her husband Peter (Chris Noth), with her own personal resurrection as she returned to the professional world as a lawyer after having been out of practice for more than a decade. Alicia was ostracized from her so-called friends and her social circle as a result of the scandal and continues to struggle with her mother-in-law, who moved in with Alicia and her two teenaged children in their new apartment, away from their leafy suburb. The mother-in-law, who frequently defends her son, took it upon herself to bring the two Florrick kids to visit their father in jail for the first time against Alicia’s wishes.
All of that was good material, I thought, as the first few episodes aired and garnered top 20 ratings.
But as more installments have aired, there’s been less and less about Alicia and her family members’ lives, about the impact of Peter’s imprisonment and more emphasis on the legal cases, for which Alicia usually comes up with the miraculous key to winning the case. Don’t get me wrong, her husband Peter’s imprisonment/sex scandal is mentioned in each episode, but it’s becoming a means to an end because Peter was a prosecutor and can assist his defense lawyer wife by providing valuable information.
This is exactly what I didn’t want to see. I was hoping this show would heavily focus on a dramatization of how political wives try to carry on – for themselves, for their children -- after their husbands behave atrociously and were publically chastised for doing so, like so many real life pols (*cough* Edwards, Spitzer, Sanford *cough*). I wasn’t looking for an updated version of The Practice, with a light sprinkling of the life-as-the-betrayed-wife-of-a-lying-cheating-pol tossed in like spice, as added seasoning.
While the latest Good Wife episode “Conjugal” featured, as you might expect from its title, a conjugal visit between Peter and Alicia, the contact between them was verbal and chiefly about a murder case. Alicia wanted information from Peter to be shared privately, away from the guards’ surveillance, and the only way to obtain privacy was via a conjugal visit. Peter did attempt to hold his wife’s hand while she slept on the bed and he on the floor, but she quickly released it.
Maybe things will change and become more focused on the personal once Peter is released from prison and tries to stage a political comeback – and I’m hopeful they will – but I’m disappointed that The Good Wife appears as though it’s in danger of turning into a garden variety legal procedural.
I have a special request for the news media, plus every group or web site that now loosely qualifies as the "news" media: Please cease and desist with the Michelle Obama-wore-shorts-and-oh-boy-what-a-scandal stories. You aren't fooling anyone when you cover the "faux controversy" and try to convince us that you don't understand what all the uproar is all about, yet you're still reporting on it and then soliciting viewers'/readers' opinions on whether it's appropriate for a First Lady to wear shorts.
Michelle Obama is a healthy, active, youthful woman in her forties. It's summer time. She's got young kids. It's damned hot. Give her a break. Who cares that she wore shorts? This is so a non-issue.
Health Care Battle
On to REAL news stories . . . Now that White House sources have indicated that government-run health insurance option may hit the cutting room floor and (possibly) be replaced by subsidized, non-profit health care co-ops in an attempt to move a health care bill forward, President Obama (whose approval ratings have taken a precipitous fall amid the intense health care legislation debates) still has a fight on his hands . . . with fellow Democrats. Liberal Democrats want the government-run health insurance option to remain viable, while conservative "blue dog" Democrats, worried about costs and government "take over" of health care, seem to cotton to the co-op idea. If the Dems can't reach an agreement amongst themselves, there will be no health care reform at all and Obama will be handed a major defeat.
I'll be interested in reading the compromise legislation before it goes to a House-Senate conference committee, if it makes it that far. Then we'll get a better idea of what this'll really mean.
Jenny Sanford Sounds Off
It was serendipitous to discover this week that the new issue of Vogueincludes an interview with Jenny Sanford, the wife of South Carolina's Governor Mark "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" Sanford, looking fabulous and sounding strong. My new pop culture and politics column is about political wives whose husbands have conducted illicit affairs that inevitably devolved into full-blown public scandals, while the spouses and their children proved to be collateral damage.
My essay points to CBS's new fall show, The Good Wife-- starring Julianna Margulies as a devoted political wife whose husband resigned from office and is in jail after he frequented prostitutes and was accused of abusing the power of his office -- which seeks to offer viewers a peek behind the curtains of the homes of these wives (Sanford, Edwards, Spitzer) and show what damage has truly been wrought. Seeing Jenny Sanford pictured in Vogue and spouting off lines that make it sound like she's so unbelievably together, was a step toward reclaiming her life, and the lives of other devastated wives of pols. More power to her.
The dominant news story of the week -- Michael Jackson's memorial service -- was also dominant in my house as I had it playing on TV and am not ashamed to admit that I was moved by several aspects of it, from the displays of genuine emotion from usually polished performers, to the raw, heart-rending pain exhibited by Jackson's 11-year-old daughter. I downloaded some of Jackson's biggest hits to my three kids' iPods this week and have periodically found myself unconsciously humming either "Billie Jean" or "Wanna Be Startin' Something" as I feel as though I've been marinating in Jackson music.
Of course there was also the Sarah Palin bombshell dropped late Friday -- that not only was she not running for re-election, but that she was quitting the Alaska governor's post by the end of this month. I'll have more on that in my next Pop Culture & Politics column. Stay tuned.
In other pop culture/news for the week . . .
TV:
-- I caught up on TNT's HawthoRNe, starring Jada Pinkett Smith and Michael Vartan (Alias). I'm willing to give it a little latitude because I like both Vartan and Pinkett Smith. But other than laudably portraying a strong working mom role model, Nurse Christina Hawthorne seems too good to be a modern leading TV character.
I've grown way too accustomed to seeing leading characters who engage in anti-heroic behavior. Like Gregory House who's an excellent doctor -- someone you'd want to take care of you or someone you love in a medical crisis -- but he's got the social skills of a wasp, is horrifically inappropriate and is hooked on pain meds. (Plus he was sent to a mental institution at the end of the season.) Then there's Showtime's Nurse Jackie who's a dedicated nurse who'll do whatever it takes for a patient even if it means risking her job, but she's got a nasty Percocet habit and she's cheating on her husband. Her flaws make her seem more down-to-earth.
I'm not saying Pinkett Smith's Hawthorne has to start drinking (a la Rescue Me's Tommy Gavin), taking drugs or behaving in wildly inappropriate ways, but I tend to gravitate toward more realistic, flawed character. Let Hawthorne get a little more messy, and I'll be on board. Plus I like Vartan, did I say that already?
-- I watched screeners for two new CBS shows premiering in late September. Loved one of the pilots and need to see more before rendering a judgment on the second.
The Good Wife, starring the always-compelling Julianna Margulies (ER), Chris Noth (Sex and the City) and Josh Charles (Sports Night), is gonna be a regularly DVRed show in my house. I was really disappointed last year when Margulies' gritty Canterbury's Law was canceled after only a few episodes. That show -- set in Rhode Island about a troubled lawyer who was in the midst of divorcing her husband after the pain of their young son's disappearance became too much for them to bear -- was fantastic but the ratings, eh, not so much.
I'm hopeful that The Good Wife has better staying power. It seems to have a timely hook: Margulies plays a lawyer who gave up her practice as a defense attorney in order to raise her two children and to support her husband's -- Noth's -- political career . . . until his career as a state's prosecutor went down in flames following his affairs with prostitutes and criminal charges that he abused his office. After selling the family house to pay his legal fees, moving to an apartment and with her husband incarcerated, Margulies has to re-enter the workforce after having been out of a courtroom for more than a dozen years. She doesn't appear to be planning to divorce her lying and cheating spouse, but the sordid taint of his actions sticks to her professionally and personally. I have my fingers crossed for this one.
Accidentally on Purpose is a sitcom with an on-paper interesting premise: Jenna Elfman's Billie Chase is a thirtysomething newspaper movie critic who, after dating her newspaper's owner (Grant Show from Melrose Place) for three years, broke up with him when he said he wouldn't get married. In short order, she picked up a twentysomething boy toy at a bar and "accidentally" got pregnant. He moved into her tastefully decorated apartment because she didn't think she could, in good conscience, allow the father of her unborn kid to live in his beat-up van. Elfman's character is winningly fast-talking -- a la Lorelai Gilmore -- but the pilot seemed like was trying too hard and larded itself up with forced jokes about cougars and "young candy." The premise reminded me of the Uma Thurman movie Prime, only with too many bad puns. I'm going to wait to see more episodes to see if the forced artifice gets dialed back before I deciding whether this one will earn my regular viewing.
-- In preparation for the beginning of the third season of the exquisite Mad Men, I've been again watching season one episodes on DVD. I realized that I miss Rachel Menken and Midge Daniels. They had a lot more going for them than Bobbie Barrett, a character who I despised and who I think was an overt indication of the swirling despair into which Don Draper was sinking last season.
Books:
I'm almost to the end of my second reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princeand am kind of putting off finishing it. If you've read it, you know why I'm procrastinating. (I'm at the part in the cave, with the green liquid.) Once I've finished with the sixth Potter installment and feel prepared to compare and contrast the book with the film being released next week, I've pulled The Time Traveler's Wifeby Audrey Niffenegger from my bookshelf to re-read because the film's coming out next month. I haven't read it in years, so I'm wondering how much I'll remember.
What's been on your pop culture/news agenda this week?
