'SNL' Had Best Spoof on the Census Yet

I finally caught up with the latest episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Tina Fey and featuring the Teen-Boy-Who-Needs-a-Haircut-But-Doesn't-Shave-Yet.

Thought chocolate husband bit was stupid. Wasn't a fan of the Tiger Woods sketch. Thought the Sarah Palin TV network thing was mildly amusing. (Fey didn't look as much like a Palin Doppelganger this time. I couldn't put my finger on why. The hair, something just didn't look right.) The hot for teacher/Justin Bieber/Fey-wants-to-give-him-a-bath-thing got me to crack a smile amidst my discomfort. (If they did that kind of a sketch with a 15-year-old girl it would be just gross.

My favorite moment? The opening about the census and how it's not a conspiracy by the federal government to pry into your personal life. Priceless.

Tiger Woods & the 'Vanity Fair' Cover

Man, what bad timing for Tiger Woods with thie cover, eh? However the folks at Vanity Fair are likely psyched that they had this Annie Leibovitz photo -- and others which haven't yet been released -- for which Woods posed to accompany the tough cover story by Buzz "Friday Night Lights" Bissinger about the serial cheater's fall from grace.

The Bissinger story concludes with this:

"In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are. [Woods]exhibited the same superhuman confidence off the golf course that he exhibited on it, apparently convinced he would never be caught despite the stupid sloppiness at the end — text messages, voice-mail messages. He deluded himself into thinking he could be something that he wasn’t: untouchable. The greatest feat of his career is that he managed to get away with it for so long in public, the bionic man instead of the human one who hit a fire hydrant."

The online comments accompanying the photo on the Vanity Fair blog and on the Huffington Post, are fairly harsh when it comes to both Woods and the magazine editors' decision to use that particular image for its cover.

On the VF blog, there were comments like, "I am sorry he looks like a CHEATER to me. He has to same look on his face my ex did when he got caught" and "Um, not only is this not what I want to see, but Tiger looks like a thug. Also, I would expect to see a better body on the cover. He looks a little unkempt."

Many commenters on the Huffington Post's Woods/VF blog entry on the magazine cover -- which received over 800 comments -- said Woods deserves this treatment. "I have a feeling the real Tiger is a whole lot closer to this cover, than the Dockers-wearing, pink polo shirt puppet Nike portrayed him as," one person said.

But there were a fair number of people who dissed VF for exploitation. "I'm Vanity Fair's biggest fan, but I think the cover photo is in poor taste and plays to a nasty racial stereotype," one person wrote.

Another chimed in, "More opportunistic exploitation of Tiger by the media; and this time with intentional racial overtones."

Some saw the look on Woods' face and interpreted it as a cry for help. A person writing on HuffPo said: "His expression is one of sadness. Since it was taken pre-scandal you have to wonder. I've seen that expression many times in photographs and it is the look of someone with issues. Obviously that is not very prophetic of me, but after seeing this picture and knowing it is pre-scandal, I actually feel kinda sorry for him."

Back on the VF blog, one person wrote in part, "IMHO, this picture of Tiger does not show 'incredible focus and dedication'. Look in his eyes....and at the set of his mouth. They show a lack of assuredness,intense worry,vulnerability and on-going pain. The picture does not characterize the way he really feels inside. He looks haunted. "

What do you think about VF's decision to run this photo on the cover?

Image credit: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair.

Noteworthy People/Things/Events of 2009

The Notes from the Asylum list of noteworthy people, things and events of 2009, in no particular order . . .

Barack Obama inaugurated. That moment of national pride upon seeing the first African-American president sworn into office seems like a very long time ago. Since that cold January day in Washington, D.C. we’ve seen the president highlighted in the news for:

• The First Family’s search for a dog
• The Professor Gates imbroglio
• The question of whether Obama and the French president actually checked out a teenager’s booty in full view of the media
• A congressman shouting, “You lie” at the president during his address to Congress about the health insurance reform legislation
• The swine flu vaccine debacle (not enough vaccines despite government promises) and nationwide H1N1 scare (aided and abetted by Vice President Joe Biden’s I-wouldn’t-put-my-family-on-an-airplane-right-now comment on the Today Show)
• The contentious debates and town hall meetings about the health care legislation
• A controversial stimulus bill, with federal money being spent on some, um, controversial items
• The likes of AIG honchos getting mega-bonuses while unemployment numbers climb into the double-digits
• The federal government’s attempts to help revive the ailing U.S. automotive industry inspiring the nickname “Government Motors”
• The massacre at Fort Hood
• Tens of thousands of US troops being sent to Afghanistan
• The president killing a fly on camera.

Yes, it’s been a very long, weird freshman year for President Obama.

Sarah Palin, the former VP nominee who resigned the Alaska governorship this year. Hey, who says books are dead? Palin’s autobiography and well attended book tour events says books aren’t quite dead yet. At least all the attention paid to her book and her Oprah interview took the immature daddy of her grandson off out of the news, for a little while.

The season finale of Mad Men. Coupled with “The Gypsy and the Hobo” episode -- where Don finally confessed almost all of his dirty little secrets to his wife Betty -- these two episodes set the bar impossibly high for what it means to deliver intelligent, riveting, quality television. Completely. Besotted.

Morning Joe. The MSNBC talk show, which is always on in the kitchen as I get the kids ready for school on weekday mornings, boasts a lively mix of liberal and conservative ideologies, smart discussion and bar room humor all in one. It has had a great year and has earned my viewer loyalty.

Jon Hamm on SNL. Take note other celeb would-be Saturday Night Live hosts: Jon Hamm may have made being funny in the unevenly written sketch show LOOK easy when he hosted, but it’s not. Just ask his Mad Men co-star, January Jones. Oh, and those two actors being photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair earlier this year . . . those images constituted my favorite photo shoot of the year.

The Gosselin saga. Eight is enough apparently . . . especially when you throw some girlfriends into the mix. This was a sad, sad chapter in American pop culture lore where parents put their eight cute children in front of TV cameras for TLC's Jon & Kate Plus 8 and were then dismayed when those cameras wound up capturing the disintegration of their marriage. One might’ve hoped that this private-moment-made-public would’ve caused other parents to reconsider putting their kids on reality show programs. Alas, it didn’t.
 

Former High-Priced Escort Turns Relationship Columnist

We've all read the grim news, day after day as more professionally trained journalists and columnists are losing their jobs in the mainstream media, particularly in the newspaper business as newspapers close or go online only, shedding jobs along the way.

So when I saw that former high-priced escort Ashley Dupre -- whose dalliances with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer made her famous (and cost him his office) -- had landed a gig as a columnist for the New York Post to write about relationships it made me so very sad for my journalist colleagues.

If newspapers are going to go this route, maybe they should consider giving Bernie Madoff a column where he can answer readers' questions about investments/finances from his jail cell? Maybe Tiger Woods could be the male counterpoint to Dupre, writing a relationship column for the Post? Jon Gosselin could write a parenting column.

Poor Silda Spitzer.

Image credit: Victoria Will/New York Post.

Pop Culture Quick Hits: 'Men of a Certain Age,' TV as Art & the SNL-Woods Controversy

Men of a Certain Age on TNT

Okay, okay TV reviewer people. I’ll program my DVR to record the premiere of TNT’s Men of a Certain Age tonight at 10. It’s a dramedy about three men -- one divorced, one single, one married -- dealing with a variety of dispiriting events that have happened to them as they flounder about in middle age. You critics have convinced me that Ray Romano demonstrates a degree of depth as the sad sack of a guy who’s been left by his wife and is trying to figure out where his life’s dreams went. You've indicated that this program -- also starring Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula -- is worth an hour of my time. You better be right.

The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley said, “Men of a Certain Age is not violent, exciting or fast-paced, but the series has a quiet charm of its own; it is a believable, sharply observed portrait of ordinary men who, through all-too-common bad breaks and missteps, feel that they are backsliding.”

But they had me at Andre Braugher.

TV as Art

When this decade began, I had twin toddlers at home who were joined by a baby brother in mid-2001. Needless to say, the decade was marked by a lot of TV watching in my house as we didn’t want to have to obtain a second mortgage in order to afford babysitting for our very young children. And while I was watching said TV programs, I noticed the same thing that Emily Nussbaum of New York Magazine did, that TV has evolved into art (which is why when people act as though TV’s just for dummies, I bristle. Have they not seen Mad Men?) In New York Magazine’s ode to the decade of the 2000s, Nussbaum penned a love letter to this new generation of TV series, of the ilk that people like me obsess about on blogs like this one:

“. . . [F]or anyone who loves television, who adores it with the possessive and defensive eyes of a fan, this was most centrally and importantly the first decade when television became recognizable as art, great art: collectible and life-changing and transformative and lasting . . . It was a period of exhilarating craftsmanship and formal experimentation, accompanied by spurts of anxious grandiosity (for the first half of the decade, fans compared anything good to Dickens, Shakespeare, or Scorsese, because nothing so ambitious had existed in TV history).”

She continued:

“But as this decade began, it had already begun to dawn on viewers that television was something that you could not just merely enjoy and then discard but brood over and analyze, that could challenge and elevate, not just entertain. And a new generation of prickly, idiosyncratic, egotistical TV auteurs were starting to shove up against the limits of their medium, stripping apart genres like the sitcom and the cop show, developing iconic roles for actors like Edie Falco and Michael C. Hall. As the years proceeded (and technology inspired new styles of storytelling), even network TV could stage an innovative series like Lost. On pay channels, especially HBO, it was a genuine renaissance: Show-runners like David Chase and Alan Ball and David Milch and Michael Patrick King (and his Sex and the City writers) reveled in cable’s freedom, exploring adult themes in shocking, sometimes difficult ways.”

Among the shows Nussbaum singled out as having elevated the craft were some of my favorites: Lost (of course), Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Alias, and a small show I might’ve written about here a few times . . . Mad Men.

SNL-Tiger Woods Controversy

Saturday Night Live went there. With the Tiger Woods scandal. And when they went there, they went, in the opinion of some, too far. With Rihanna, one of this year’s most famous victims of domestic abuse, as the musical guest, SNL had a skit making fun of Woods and domestic violence. The cue cards at the end of the skit where the actor playing Woods had written on the back of them that he was scared and feared for his life at the hands of his abusive wife . . . that was the point at which I was sure they’d gone too far. Several bloggers took umbrage – and rightly so – over the skit and the horrific timing with Rihanna on the show. NYT Arts blogger David Itzkoff has a round-up of quotes from several bloggers who thought the sketch was in poor taste.

What DID I like from SNL this past weekend? The White House party crashers skit. Spot. On.



Image credit: TNT.

Has 2009 Been 'The Year of Women Fighting Back'?

The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana was able to shoehorn Betty Draper, Taylor Swift, Jenny Sanford and Tiger Woods’ wife Elin Nordegren into the same column, lauding them for not taking adverse events that befell them lying down. Dubbing 2009, “The Year of Women Not Taking Sh**,” Dana wrote that Woods’ wife taking a “golf club to his Escalade” was only one among many instances of women striking back.

On Jenny Sanford – wife of the South Carolina governor who famously traveled to Argentina to visit his “soul mate” lover – Dana said that in the wake of the sex scandal, Jenny Sanford “declined to pull a ‘Silda Spitzer’ and saddle up next to her over-tanned Republican spouse for his meandering mea culpa. Instead, she released a sternly worded statement and took off with her sons to a house in the country. She gave a strong, unapologetic interview to Vogue and looked lovely in the accompanying photo. Eventually she packed some boxes, called some friends, and moved the hell out.”

After being dumped by a JoBro and then enduring Kanye West storming up onto the stage to interrupt her acceptance speech at the VMAs, Dana wrote that singer Taylor Swift then landed an SNL hosting gig, enjoyed the mammoth success of her hit CD, won a trunk full of awards and is now dating the werewolf from Twilight.

A woman who didn’t do so well hosting SNL, January Jones, fared better when she inhabited the persona of Betty Draper on Mad Men and “finally left serial womanizing husband, Don.” But, as one person mentioned on Twitter, Betty did leave Don to run right into the arms of another guy.

Other women mentioned as kicking some butt this year:

Kate Gosselin whose estranged husband was openly messing around with the daughter of the plastic surgeon who did Kate's tummy tuck and subsequently told ABC that he "despised" Kate, Bristol Palin soldiering on as a single mom -- using her teen pregnancy as a cautionary tale while the dude who impregnated her is making an idiot of himself, and the wife of the Italian prime minister who wouldn’t put up with his philandering any longer and lashed out at him in public.

Is Dana right? WAS 2009 a good year for women standing up for themselves? Anyone else you could add to her list?

Image credit: Illustration by Dyna Moe/Nobody's Sweetheart.

'Psychological' Problems Landed the Doll in 'Rudolph' on Island of Misfit Toys?

I know, I know . . . Thirty-thousand more American troops are being sent to Afghanistan.

The health care reform bill's still being heatedly debated in the U.S. Senate.

No one knows for sure what REALLY happened with Tiger, the golf club, his wife and his car, although for his "transgressions," he's very, very sorry.

But what piece of news really surprised me today?

My local CBS affiliate in Boston, WBZ, reported on its web site, in response to a viewer's question about the rag doll in the 1964 Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer who cries and lives on the Island of Misfit Toys, that the doll:

". . . [B]arely appeared in the original script, so the author did not explain why she was on the island. But over the years, as the special was revised, the doll got more screen time and lines.

One of the producers behind the special, Arthur Rankin, says he believes her problems are 'psychological.'"
Seriously?

Image credit: WBZ.