–Bored to Death has my favorite opening credits sequence in ages. I have a feeling that I ought to find the show itself flimsy and overly self-infatuated, but two episodes in, I sort of enjoy it. The amateur-private-detective angle is tired, and Jason Schwartzman, in the lead role as writer and series creator Jonathan Ames’s hangdog alter ego, executes slapstick like someone who thinks that if he does it as if he were just barely considering making an effort during dress rehearsal, he won’t make himself look ridiculous and we’ll still appreciate the effort. But Zack Galifianakis is such a terrific, natural sidekick that he doesn’t even seem to need someone to play sidekick to. And Ted Danson had slipped so gracefully into his silver-fox elegant buffoon phase that it’s as if the guy who showed up at the Friar’s Club in blackface with a watermelon under his arm to roast Whoopi Goldberg never even happened. Id probably like it more if Schwartzman weren’t on it, but I’ve always thought that I’d like living on this planet more if Jascon Schwartzman weren’t on it. If I managed to accommodate myself to the one, I should probably be able to accommodate myself to the other.
–Watching Courtney Cox in the eyeball-mangling, eardrum-piercing sitcom Cougar Town after seeing Schwartzman in Bored to Death raises the question, which is more tolerable: seeing someone do a self-protectively half-assed job at playing physical comedy, or watching someone throw herself into it when she’s so devoid of talent, skill, or even physical grace that you wish she’d be content to just sit on a folding chair in the middle of the set and read aloud from a script in her lap? I’m giving this one to Schwartzman on points. Cougar Town is about a 40-year-old divorcee who complains with her girlfriends about how hard dating is for women in their situation, which means that it gives you the chance to see people who’ve spent their whole adult lives, and in some cases more time than that, in the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry trying to address a subject of interest to actual residents of planet Earth. The results are a show in which it’s a given that any middle-aged unmarried man is beating nubile college girls off him with a stick and the teenage boys are so dazzled by the discovery that Cox’s character is a sexual being that they begin stealing the reality signs off her lawn so they can masturbate to her picture, as if they were starved for material to feed their horny imaginations and couldn’t for the life of them figure out how to Google “Megan Fox.” Cougar Town even begins with a scene in which Cox examines her sagging body parts, including her tummy, in close-up. This scene is quickly followed by a scene in which, wearing nothing but her bikini underwear beneath her robe, she marches out into the street and finds an excuse to flash a kid on a bicycle. The real reason for it, of course, is that it’s simpler and cheaper than having the network send a mass email to everyone who might have seen the show to let us know that the flabby thing we saw earlier wasn’t really Courtney’s midsection, which in the flashing thing looks as if John Badham could use it to play “Moby Dick.”
Cox herself has a teenage son in the show. He is played by a kid whose distracting resemblance to Corey Feldman really should have disqualified him from work in the film and TV world.
–Dan Humphrey and his high school pals on Gossip Girl are in college now, and all the beautiful literature-besotted trendies who must have been hiding behind the barn when I was in college–there’s one on Californication too; she tells David Duchovny’s “bad boy novelist” that “words” are her “drug of choice”–want to be Dan’s groupies because he was in The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 20″ special issue. I take this to be a fantasy issue of that magazine that published work by twenty writers under the age of twenty. Has any publication that generally targets a more adult audience than the market demo of Cricket (my own grizzled age may be showing–do they still publish that?) ever even dreamed of such a thing? Am I the only one who, upon learning of this wrinkle in Gossip Girl‘s fantasy of what New York is like, experienced a full-body shudder at the very thought? I guess it’s conceivable that twenty residents of our planet might be able to produce one small piece of writing each that one might read while the coffee cooled without inducing violent retching, though I know all too well that I would never have been one of them. They’d have needed intense training and coaching from a serious, exacting mentor and literary adviser, though. Those who stopped in on Gossip Girl during its previous season may remember that Dan Humphrey himself learned everything he knows at the knee of special guest Jay McInerney–who probably thinks that he should have been given the editorship of The New Yorker before he was twenty.
–Speaking of Californication: I watched a few episodes of this when it started a couple of years back, and though I remember having bailed on it because I thought it was just horrible, somebody told me that I should give it another chance and see how it had evolved. Most of Showtime’s original series are conceived as a game of capture-the-flag to see who can push the envelope farthest, and Californication, which had an edge on the competition as soon as it got christened with that title, may be the one that passes furthest into the black hole of self-parody. David Duchovny spent most of the ’90s playing a character who was meant to be simultaneously brilliant, sexy, and celibate. (Fox Mulder’s fixation on pornography would have been a lot less funny if he’d looked like somebody who might plausibly have had a problem getting laid.) This turns out to have been the ideal groundwork for playing a self-styled artist who’s a congenital horndog with verbal diarrhea as smugly and insufferably as possible. (In Duchovny’s quest to achieve unparalleled heights of facile loathsomeness, it helps that he directed the season premiere himself, so there would be no filter between himself and his self-admiration.) Californication badly wants to be a new, cutting-edge provocation, but it’s tethered to an image of the writer as untamed cocksman and wild man that is most appealing and convincing to people who don’t read. Duchovny is meant to be summing up both his character and his character’s vocation when he says, “So I’m an asshole because I say what everybody else is thinking?” Nobody on the set seems to have thought about it long enough to recognize that anybody who would come up with that line, or have frequent need to cite it, would actually have his own shock radio show now.
New additions to the cast include Kathleen Turner as a sexually voracious literary agent, giving to talk of coming like a gorilla and such. I can understand why Turner would have refused to speak the lines written for her, but whose idea was it to have her dubbed by Harvey Fierstein?
Next week on Californication: Duchovny meets special guest Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl! I anticipate scenes that will do for smug dissipation what Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant’s scenes in Coppola’s Dracula movie did for arch sneering.
–And two broadcast episodes and a week after my post making cruel sport of its premiere, The Beautiful Life has been declared the first cancellation of the new TV season. If only I could use my powers to create instead of to destroy…
–Phil Nugent
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