While the sun has long since set on the British Empire, its legacy lingers at a cul-de-sac near you.
“You have people like me to blame for that,” confesses Gary Stefanoni, director of sales for Pulte Homes’ New Jersey market. They know that northern New Jersey bears little resemblance to the Yorkshire Dales and that Detroit-upon-Michigan is a far cry from Stratford-upon-Avon, but judging from the names of these so-called “communities,” they don’t care. Want to snuggle up with royalty? Head to Buckingham at Queensbridge in Las Vegas, Nev., or Regency at Kingsgate in Woodstock, Ga. At a crossroads in your life? Try Southwyke at Victoria Crossing in Manassas Park, Va., or Canterberry Crossing in Parker, Colo. (But don’t go looking for canterberries; they don’t exist.)
These are the American suburbs, served up by Pulte Homes, K. Hovnanian Companies, Ryan Homes, Toll Brothers, Inc. and a handful of other corporations responsible for America’s McMansion housing developments. “Aristocratic British names are popular, they’re safe, no one complains about them,” says Stefanoni. “With ethnic names there’s problems with pronunciation. Usually we try to use something that relates to the area. We try and find out who owned the property, if there was a manor or estate, we look at old maps. We might spend three months researching a name.” Stefanoni took this formula to New Jersey and came up with “Brettonwoods of Paramus.” “Well, there’s woods nearby,” he explains, “and I found the name of an old English estate in a book.”
Despite the snarling anthems of the Sex Pistols, the stark social realism of contemporary filmmakers like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and literature from D.H. Lawrence to Hanif Kureishi — despite all this and the Spice Girls, Americans still associate status, wealth and propriety with all that is English. Anglophilia runs deep in American culture, but it’s been particularly useful in helping Americans lay out a fantasy for how they want to live, a measure of wealth and success that’s guided urban planners for a century. But as companies like Toll Brothers and Pulte Homes consolidate the business of suburb building — much the same way McDonald’s consolidates the business of hamburger making — Anglophilia has graduated from cultural tradition to powerful branding tool.
We anoint our suburbs with the names of invented British estates out of insecurity, nostalgia and a love of fantasy. America’s Buckingham at Queensbridges and Canterberry Crossings are, in the words of “Geography of Nowhere” author Jim Kunstler, “only part of the growing abstraction that is necessary to sell the suburbs. It’s a place without a past and without a future that leads to anxiety and depression. It’s through those cracks in the damage, that the marketers fill a void.”
But marketers fill this void haphazardly. Take for example Brandywine at Thornbury, a K. Hovnanian property in West Chester, Pa. The name is a hybrid of a nearby street and a famous local battlefield; the development’s black-and-white logo features a line of 18th century soldiers firing volleys into the sky. Are they colonial patriots or the king’s henchmen? The logo does not specify. It doesn’t matter that the Battle of Brandywine was one of George Washington’s bloodiest defeats and that it led to the British capture of Philadelphia. Two hundred and twenty-five years after the Declaration of Independence, America’s quaint revolution resonates as a marketing gimmick first and a historical reality second.
British names give suburbs an air of, well, suburbanity — the promise of a retreat from city life, with a connotation of the landed class. This association has been selling subdivisions since the 19th century. Take this excerpt from the original promotional pamphlet for Riverside, Ill., America’s first suburban development, designed in 1869 by Frederick Law Olmsted:
“A life at Riverside involves no banishment from all that is good in city life, but is rather the elegant culmination of refined tastes which cannot be gratified in the city, and is the proper field for the growth of that higher culture which finds in art, nature, and congenial society combined a greater variety of pleasures than can be found between the high walls of city houses.”
This notion — that the city is not a place for the wealthy to live — was born out of the Puritan revolution in England, when wealthy citizens fled the filth and fires of London for a purer country life. Meanwhile, those who couldn’t flee the city developed similar tastes, thanks to urban planners like Olmsted who brought the countryside downtown, dotting urban America with Central Parks — a slab of British countryside in the middle of midtown Manhattan.
In the late 20th century, suburbs promised more than just the fantasy of life in an English manor; they offered peaceful distance from America’s racial strife. “The suburbs have always traded on fear of the inner city,” says Andrew Ross, chairman of the American studies program at New York University and author of “The Celebration Chronicles.” Americans fled the city to places where racial conflict, poverty and other urban realities didn’t exist. And they gave them names to match.
Steve Katz, a former real estate marketer and founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, says the English names are a way of masking our uncomfortable proximity to each other. “Everyone is in denial, pretending we’re living in splendid isolation in some English manor when we’re really existing cheek by jowl next to our neighbors.” It’s an advertising white lie that’s become increasingly handy to developers as suburbs — between the traffic problems of sprawl and the paltry lot size of individual homes — live up less and less to their original promise of a rural idyll.
Houses aren’t sold on names alone, but a good one helps. Pseudo-British fantasy names don’t just convey a class association and a history, they settle themselves in our brain just like any other brand, and like loyal consumers, we come back to them. “You would be surprised how many people in their 40s are buying their seventh home,” notes Stefanoni. It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one. So cementing a brand name helps keep the houses filled. Residents of Ryan Home developments like The Hamptons at Victor in upstate New York feel a certain sensation of homecoming upon encountering another Ryan development called The Estates at Windsor Forest in South Carolina.
Real estate branding guru David Miles says, “When a customer identifies with the personality of a home or community and finds it attractive, he or she transfers that personality by buying and using that product.” The British names merely function as part of the corporate personality, just as names like Beverly Hills or the Upper East Side add brand equity and recognition, but don’t affect the actual appearance or amenities of the individual home. Who cares that your bathtub is in the kitchen, when you’re living in the hipster headquarters of the East Village?
But according to Miles, this endless rehashing of pseudo-British estate names reveals little more than a lack of creativity. “We don’t need any more Willow Creeks in the world,” he complains.
America may not need another Willow Creek, but it does need, according to Miles, a “Trailmark” (with a logo stamped in leather for a rugged western flavor) a “Reunion” and a “Provenance.” The message here isn’t British landed gentry so much as “Little House on the Prairie,” but it serves the same need: Miles’ names reflect a longing for a collective past, one that’s probably fictional (how exactly does one have a Reunion with a structure still reeking of plaster and paint?) but whose associations are potent.
Say we kicked the Anglophilia and gave our suburbs names that more accurately reflected their surroundings. Would people drive home to Arby’s Overlook? Balmoral-upon-Interstate 90? Probably not; we name places after our highest hopes for them; they reflect our faith in the American dream of upward mobility. Gretchen Gerzina, professor of English at Vassar College, speculates that moving into a development like Cheltenham Estates is an American version of purchasing a title. Buying into the Anglophile’s Brit fantasy satisfies a longing for historical and cultural rootedness, a social structure that cements our unfixed class distinctions and gives us a narrative to replace the one we’d rather forget.
“No Logo” author Naomi Klein describes branding as a corporate strategy wherein commodities “divest [themselves] of the world of things.” When we convert a flat stretch of former farmland into row houses and christen our creation “Tuscana” (an archaic rendering of “Tuscany” cribbed from an antique map), the farmland, the flatness and the miles of geography, culture and history that divide this former American Indian hunting ground — this Civil War battlefield, this cotton plantation — from scenic northern Italy no longer matter. All that matters is our hope for this new place, our latest vision of a new American destiny, packaged and up for sale.
There are a few times of year when network television can typically be relied upon to be as interesting as cable: The fall, when the networks vomit out dozens of new programs; February, when the networks cough up a dozen or so more; and May, when all the series that have survived the year try to end in spectacular fashion. During this last period, season-finale time, couples couple, get married and have babies; characters quit, get fired and die; disasters occur; buildings explode; guns blaze; hatches are discovered and protagonists are left dangling off cliffs, both actual and metaphorical. It’s the TV equivalent of blockbuster season, and like blockbuster season, it can and should be fun. Though in recent years cable shows have been responsible for a disproportionate number of the “Holy crap, did that just happen?!” finales (hello, Gus Fring and his brand-new face!), network shows are usually good for at least some insanity, some drama, some transcendent event that will get people talking around the storied watercooler. Not this year. Nope, this year, season finale season has been a bust.
The dearth of enjoyably over-the-top finales both is, and is not, a coincidence. Some of the shows that went big in the past opted to take a more low-key approach this May. Last year “The Good Wife” ended with Alicia and Will finally smooching outside a hotel room; this year it ended with Kalinda sitting in her apartment, gun in hand, waiting for her front door to open. Last year, “Community” wrapped up with its balls-to-the-wall, two-part spaghetti-western paintball extravaganza; this year it ended with a relatively understated episode about Evil Abed, leaving everyone to talk about Dan Harmon’s firing instead.
What isn’t a coincidence, is that there are very few good, tentpole network dramas, and it’s those dramas that usually provide the crazy come finale time. The two long-running series that ended this year, “Desperate Housewives” and “House,” both ended quietly, which is to say in exactly the mediocre fashion they’ve been plodding along in for years. For either of these shows to have had must-see finales, they would have had to wrap up seasons ago, before they got creatively stale. Meanwhile, many of the new shows that started the season with the sort of mythologies that tend to make for the most memorable finales flamed out in one way or another: The mediocre “Alcatraz” and “Terra Nova” were canceled, “Person of Interest” exists in the CBS procedural ghetto, and very few people watch “Awake.” The only show left that could plausibly deliver a juicy season-ending event is ABC’s super-soap “Revenge,” which finishes tonight. Its creator has promised someone “important” will die. My fingers and toes are all crossed.
Even the shows that have heeded the command of finale time — go big — have felt flat. On “Castle,” the show’s longtime will-they-won’t-they couple finally fornicated, following a very by-the-numbers “here I am on your doorstep all wet from the rain, at long last ready to have sex with you” moment. Last year had an equivalent event, when “Bones’s” longtime will-they-won’t-they couple Dr. Brennan and Booth paired off, but in a stranger and therefore more interesting way. Without so much as an on-screen kiss, Brennan told Booth she was pregnant with his baby. As far as twists go, surprise baby trumps emo sex against a wall.
One show that did bring its A-schlock game to its finale was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which stranded six major characters and a pilot in the woods after a serious plane crash, and crushed one to death underneath the fuselage. (At the time the episode was written, the cast members had yet to re-sign their contracts. Presumably, had they failed to sign, there would have been more fatalities.) This amount of carnage would have been a lot more stupendous if extreme violence wasn’t a staple of “Grey’s,” which had a grieved and crazed gunman shoot up the hospital and its staff two finales ago. The characters have long since taken to calling their workplace “Seattle Grace Mercy Death,” a joke about the number of horrible coincidences that have befallen them there (car accidents, fatal bus crashes, shootings, suicide attempts, exploding bombs, etc.). At this point, I wouldn’t bet against a dirty bomb showing up in next year’s finale. Which, come to think of it, sounds just insane enough to be spectacular.
A recent episode of NBC’s “Community” floated the possibility — debunked by episode’s end — that the seven main characters had not spent the previous three years navigating life, each other and paintball fights at Greendale Community College, but instead, had only been imagining them. In the episode, the recently expelled Greendale Seven found themselves in a group therapy session with a nefarious shrink, keen to keep them away from their college using any psychological means necessary. The therapist temporarily convinced them they had spent the previous years in a mental institution and that everything they remembered happening at school, except their friendship, had been a collective fantasy, a “shared psychosis” dreamed up in the asylum.
As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.
As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.
Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?
Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?
Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.
“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.
And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.
Confession: I have a case of “Community” fatigue. “Community,“ NBC’s low-rated, but passionately beloved, sitcom returned to the NBC lineup last night. It had been pulled from the schedule in December, kicking off another round of anxiety among fans, critics and the cast that the Greendale Study Group might not be back for a fourth season next fall. In the lead-up to last night’s episode, the “Community“ faithful hectored anyone and everyone who appreciates good television to help save the show and boost “Community“ to the ultimate goal, that longed-for TV state: six seasons and a movie.
“Community” is a wonderful, unique television show, ambitious and rare beyond measure, astonishing for the ways that it has bent and busted the limits of the genre and for the unflagging, unending energy with which it has done so. But the passion in certain parts— the parts where a TV critic spends her time— has reached such a pitch that just liking ”Community” feels inadequate. I imagine it’s a little bit like attending an N’ Sync concert in the late ’90s if you only sort of enjoyed “Bye Bye Bye.” Everyone around you would be screaming, fainting, eager to explain why this was the best boy band ever, and ready to get in a fist-fight if you had a bad word to say about Chris Kirkpatrick’s hair or how he seems a little fundamentally unlikable. (Please understand, I don’t mean to insult “Community” or its fans by comparing either to the boy band of yore. Have you seen what teenage girls are capable of, passion-wise? If “Community” had that kind of support, we’d be talking 20 seasons and eight movies.)
All this zeal is exhausting. And it makes me feel like a Grinch for saying that last night’s low-energy episode, “Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts,” wouldn’t even make it onto the third volume of “Community’s” greatest hits. (But Britta’s hair did look very nice!)
In an interview “Community”-creator Dan Harmon did with the AV Club about last season, he confessed that in making 22 episodes of TV a year, some of the episodes just get crammed through to meet the schedule’s insane deadlines. (Keeping up with this frenetic pace is something all shows deal with.) Because last night’s was the first after such a long hiatus, and so carefully riffed on the show’s reputation for weirdness, it’s unlikely that this was one of those episodes, and yet … it played like one. Not every episode of “Community“ has to be a send-up of all action movies, created entirely in claymation, contain multiple different realities, or be a gonzo riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” but they are all supposed to be funny. I chuckled out loud twice (and actually clapped when Theo Huxtable danced to “Motown Philly”).
In many ways the episode was a very savvy, good faith, if probably not very successful, attempt to appeal to new viewers. The plot was as unalienating and classic as a comedy plot can be: It ended in a marriage. Shirley and her ex-husband Andre decide to get hitched again, just as Shirley and Pierce decide to start a sandwich business together. Britta ends up planning the wedding and realizes she’s very good at it; Jeff has to give the toast and realizes he’s very bad at it; Annie runs around trying to help people; and Abed and Troy decide to be “normal.” It is this last subplot — Troy and Abed’s attempt to “de-whimsify” themselves — that provides this episode with “Community’s” standard dose of meta-narrative. Troy and Abed are standing in for the show as it tries to behave in a “normal” way.
But just as Shirley’s husband, Andre (“The Cosby Show’s” Warner), doesn’t buy Troy and Abed’s attempts at normalcy — “Hey, man, you don’t have to be sarcastic,” he says to Abed — I’m not sure a newer viewer would either. By the end of this episode Britta is sobbing about how she’s destined to get married because it’s in her DNA (“This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers”); Jeff is sobbing about how marriage is a lie; Pierce, in the Gordon Gekko outfit he’s been wearing all episode, is cackling drunkenly on his father’s grave; and Troy and Abed are talking like characters from “Inspektor Spacetime.”
“Community” is not normal, and being not normal is what it does best. However well executed the more muted episodes are, the big, insane spectacles are what make “Community” so special. At this point, it should play to its base, the people who know and love it for being so unconventional. Thankfully, at the end of the episode Troy admonished Abed, “We need to be weird!” So, presumably “Community“ will be back to full-weird and whimsy next week. I’ll rest up for it.
Dear Reader,
After writing yesterday’s column, and before heading out to watch “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” at the Sundance Kabuki (and before trying to figure it out), I saw a Dec. 12 “Vanguard” piece on Current TV about Occupy Wall Street in which correspondent Christof Putzel moves into Zuccotti Park. I was quite moved by a sequence about Fetzer Mills, a retired Naval officer from a small town in Lauderdale County near Memphis, Tenn. It brought home the economic devastation that many people are experiencing firsthand.
So as my wife and I turned onto Geary Boulevard on our way to the movies, I thought about what it must be like to be living in a small town and watch the destruction of factories and stores that have been there your whole life. I realized how lucky I was to be employed and going to the movies. It occurred to me that my ideas about how an unemployed professor might cope with joblessness and “social death” may sound hollow to somebody who’s out of a job and has watched his whole town fall apart.
It’s fine to help an individual cope, but where is the solution? Are all America’s jobless supposed to just sit and meditate and read sociology until things change?
It is not enough to just survive joblessness. We must work for collective political solutions.
My role at Salon is to write about how individuals face crises. But individual crises have roots in political conditions. I don’t share the belief that we can alter our fate simply by visualization, or chanting, or that it’s enough to get into therapy to cope with our misfortune. Bad things happen to good people for political reasons. Good people get screwed over by indifferent strangers thousands of miles away because laws and regulations allow it.
The capitalist world is full of peril. Government’s proper role is to regulate capitalism so its most savage effects are managed and its worst excesses prevented.
That’s what politics is for.
I am employed. I live in a house. One day soon it may be time to crawl into a tent and spend some time with my spiritual brothers and sisters on the front lines of a new and just movement for human dignity and reform. That’s how I feel about it.
Now on to today’s letter.
Cary, please help me.
I loved your latest column because I face a similar issue, but I am at a different phase in my life. I’m 26, married and unemployed. I’m not depressed; I enjoy life and my hobbies, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have two degrees, some decent experience and no idea what I want to do. I don’t know exactly what I’m good at, so I go by what my husband and some people that I’ve worked with have said. They say I’m good with people — a relationship builder. I’m a good communicator as well. I am articulate with a great vocabulary, and have worked a lot on my verbal presentation skills. I’ve also been told I’m a decent writer. I’m good at figuring things out and getting them done — a quick learner.
Well, what are my passions? Aside from reading a lot of advice columns, I want to become enlightened, I want to help people, and I want to help the creatures and plants on this earth. Being drawn to sunlight and plants, I worked at a greenhouse in high school, and later as a community garden coordinator (my first “real job”). I learned a lot in the two years as a garden coordinator because I was the only employee. I did fundraising, grant writing, community building, press stuff, and the basic work of the organization. It was a great experience, but I became cynical and soured quickly.
I have a BFA and an MBA, but I don’t have a passion for art anymore, and the business degree I got in order to help with the nonprofit administration, which I clearly didn’t continue with. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the things that I value in a job. I liked the readings that you linked to, especially the whole “work for meaning vs. work for money” dichotomy in “So what’s work?”
I have thought a lot about that, because I’ve never made enough money to survive in my entire life. (My social conditioning says that is pathetic, a comment I try very hard to ignore.) My husband makes enough money that we live comfortably and I’m extremely grateful for that. He thinks it’s safer not to be completely dependent on one income, and I agree.
It is for this reason that I want to work, but also because I want to contribute. I want to participate in life. I know above all, I want to work with nice people … but I need direction. I thought about getting a degree in horticulture, because that is the only thread I can follow in my very short “career.” But what in the hell am I going to do with that degree?
I’ve thought a lot about economics, which perplexes me, and I’ve thought about trying to change the entire field from the ground up. I have only taken one very basic course in this subject, mind you, so I’ve considered auditing some classes in the subject. I want to start a municipal compost program in my city, but I don’t work for the city, and I am a bit daunted by the task that I don’t know anything about, and the fact that there is no one lined up to pay me for it. So I’ve come up with some grandiose ideas about things I want to do, but “practically speaking” it just seems like a crazy fantasy that has nothing to do with an income. Cary, what should I do with my life?
In a Morass
Dear In a Morass,
You like gardens. You like helping people. You like working with money.
Gardens. People. Money. I suggest you follow a path back into the garden, where there are people and also money. There may also be education there. What if you could combine gardening, money, people and education? What if you could teach people about money using the garden as a foundation? What if you could create a nonprofit organization that teaches people how to manage their money by using the garden as a metaphor or experiential teaching ground? That would be interesting.
That’s one idea. There are lots of ideas. But you are in a prime place to do something extraordinary. You don’t have to limit yourself to dull, salary-making activities. Now is the time to dream up something unique and wonderful.
It’s not always going to be like this. Anything could happen. You could have a kid. Your husband could lose his job. One of you could become ill. This is a golden opportunity. So get with somebody who can help you plan and do the paperwork, and come up with something original and wonderful.
Now, ideas are cheap. Advice is cheap. This advice, in matter of fact, is free. And there’s a lot of advice on the Web. One thing I do that others don’t is I try to bring your attention to small events and decisions that may have long-lasting consequences. I look for the little swerves in life that we don’t realize we’re making.
For instance, your disheartening experience with community gardens. You may think that you simply came to some conclusions — that the nonprofit world sucks, that people are insane, etc. — but you may also have unconsciously plotted a path away from the very thing that makes you happy. So it is crucial to look at this two-year community garden thing you did. First, appreciate it for how great it was. Really. It’s one of the coolest things imaginable. You may have understated just what an accomplishment it was.
Next, ask yourself exactly what happened. Were there conflicts with others? Did you get in a power struggle? Were you blindsided or betrayed in some way? Did the project fail, and did you experience feelings of grief and hopelessness at its failure? Did you see other people behaving in ways that are dishonorable, and did that sour you on working with others? Tease it out. It might help to write it out, maybe in the form of a 12-step inventory.
I really think you will benefit from examining in detail what happened, rather than closing it off as simply an experience that soured you and made you cynical.
Besides, if we look at the origins of cynicism, we see it taught that “the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature.” So when you became “cynical,” it may be that you are seeing into the true nature of people — that they can be duplicitous, shallow, manipulative, mean-spirited, self-destructive, conniving, etc. True enough. Welcome to humanity. People are like that. That doesn’t need to make you bitter or dispirited.
The question is, How, therefore, shall I live?
You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity right now to create something new, fun and wonderful, and to be in charge of it. I’ll bet there are foundations that would willingly fund an innovative program for helping people learn how to manage their money, meet their neighbors and grow vegetables at the same time.
Like I say, it’s just one of many ideas. The main thing is, follow what you love. It will lead you to what you need. And you’ll end up helping others along the way. As you work, you will experience setbacks. At times, nothing will make sense. At times, you will wonder if you’ve done the right thing. No one job or path is going to eliminate worry or uncertainty or random misfortune. But your best bet is to seize the opportunity right now and follow what you love.
Should you have ever believed that there couldn’t possibly be any more entertainment barrel yet to be scraped, remember this: NBC has just approved a pilot for a remake of “The Munsters.” Yes, the sitcom about a wacky monster family, a show that has been off the air since 1966, is returning at last. Naturally, this new version will “have a darker and less campy feel” than the Vietnam War-era original. Well, that makes it sound awesome. And NBC is the network that put “Community” on ice while giving “Whitney” a pickup — so I, the viewer, trust its taste implicitly!
It might be a hopeful sign that the show will be overseen by Bryan Fuller, who created the imaginative, not completely awful “Pushing Daisies.” Less hopeful: Fuller is also developing a show based on “Silence of the Lambs.” This undoubtedly essential “Munsters” update comes in the midst of an unprecedented glut of reboots and reimaginings, all thick with the promise that No, really, this will be very different. It will creepy and full of action and with a feminist theme. You know what’s really different? A stinkin’ original idea.
We have already endured the small-screen update of “Charlie’s Angels” and the cinematic revival of “Footloose” – both of which, by the way, died on the vine. Broadway is now almost exclusively revivals, “jukebox musicals,” and stuff based on old Whoopi Goldberg movies. We will soon be treated to both a new “21 Jump Street” and “Dark Shadows.”
Other classics also up for a fresh look: “Godzilla,” which you may recall, fared so well last time someone attempted it. “The Crow.” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” “Woody Woodpecker.” Leonardo DiCaprio is currently considering a “Six Million Dollar Man” remake. Oh, and “rehearsal is for fags” impresario Brett Ratner may be redoing “The Last American Virgin.” I know I don’t catch everything going on with the young folk, but has there been a great national longing that translates into “Give the people another ‘Last American Virgin’!”? Have you seen the original? It’s no “Porky’s.” Quite frankly, it’s not even “Zapped!”
Tired old ideas aren’t just spawning like Duggars, they’re being cloned. There are currently two “dark and less campy” television dramas based on old fairy tales — “Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time.” There are two competing Snow White movies coming out in 2012, “Snow White and The Huntsman” and “Mirror Mirror.” Both, of course, feature a totally kickass Snow White who doesn’t waste her time trilling to little birds. She’s busting heads! Even “The Munsters” will find itself vying for NBC’s attention against another pilot the network has approved: “Frankenstein.” (Not to be confused with the movie of “I, Frankenstein,” also currently in the works.) There are 300 million people in America. And four ideas.
Humans have always had a natural inclination toward returning to the same stories. It’s why the plays of Aristophanes continue to be performed, why vampire tales still ignite the imagination, why “Doctor Who” never goes out of style. I’m not convinced, however, that’s why remakes of “Get Smart” and “The A-Team” happen. Every time a television show or movie gets underway, millions of dollars and hundreds of careers are on the line. It’s understandable that a seemingly sure thing would have more allure than something riskier. (Again I say, “Community.”) And sure, Hollywood has had a self-sucking parasite for eons. That element of terribleness existed even before Ernest made that “Beverly Hillbillies” movie all those years ago.
But all you have to do is sit through the trailers at the next movie you attend, or read what the network midseason replacements include, and you’ll feel a little bit of contact death of the soul, a plague emanating from somewhere deep in the bowels of L.A. But I can’t be alone in saying that I don’t want to watch a movie because I saw it 20 years ago. And I sure as hell don’t want to watch it because it was a crap TV series 20 years ago – no matter how edgy anyone promises that reboot of “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” will be.
Gabriel Mann and Emily VanCamp in "Revenge" 
Dan Harmon (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles) 
Alison Brie as Annie (Credit: NBC/Jordin Althaus) 
(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon) 
More Cary Tennis.
The Munsters (Credit: IMDB) 
