Salon.com > Bunheads

A mash note to one of “Bunheads’” bunheads

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:13:00 +0000

“Bunheads” finished its first season last night, or rather, the all too brief, eight episode second half of its first season. On the occasion of this hopefully brief interlude in the free flowing of “Bunheads”— I don't want to contemplate the possibility that the show won’t be picked up for a second season— I want to shout out the revelation of the last eight episodes, young Ginny, the bunhead I previously knew only as mini-Megan Hilty but who got so good, so fast I finally looked up her name: Bailey Buntain, breakout bunhead.

In the first batch of “Bunheads” episodes, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino focused on badish-girl Sasha and very sweet girl Boo, giving both Ginny and Melanie, the other two members of the show’s foursome of high-schoolers, short shrift while she figured out exactly what they were good at. This season, she figured it out: Melanie developed an agro streak (producing this, the best sight gag of 2013 TV thus far) and Ginny, well, Ginny turned out to be good at everything.

I’ve missed you, “Bunheads”!

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:41:00 +0000

“Bunheads,” the strangest, most flawed show I am totally head-over-heels for, returns for the second half of its first season tonight on ABC Family. As if to pat us all on the head for waiting patiently, it contains an extended scene of a terrible, depressing, Nevada-based magic show, an Auto-Tune-the-news-style viral video about a mass-macing incident, and a scene that takes place inside a cardboard box that has been wired for electricity and remodeled to look almost exactly like Madam Fanny’s kitchen, except a little smaller. Also, it made me cry. Welcome back, “Bunheads.” Missed u!

When we last left “Bunheads,” Michelle (Sutton Foster) was being run out of town, having accidentally maced a roomful of children just trying to put on a production of "The Nutcracker." Since the show is called “Bunheads,” and not “Caustic and Lonely Middle Aged Woman With Great Legs Tries to Survive in the Las Vegas Area,” the first episode picks up a few months later, at the end of summer vacation, and deftly locates Michelle — now working as a magician’s assistant and living on a friend’s couch, eating all her hummus — and conspires to bring her back to Paradise, Calif., and her bunheads. (For those keeping score, over the summer, Ginny — aka the bunhead who looks like a mini-Megan Hilty — has emerged as the best actress of the bunch, by many grand jetés.)

The year TV broke out in song

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:00:00 +0000

“Nashville” finished up the first part of its season last night with Juliette Barnes dominating a church, Gunnar and Scarlett selling a song, and Rayna Jaymes hesitating to go on tour with her younger rival. (Do it already!) In just eight episodes, “Nashville” has delivered some of the best musical moments on scripted TV this year. So on the occasion of its winter recess — and, also on the occasion of "Suburgatory's" homage to Rebecca Black last night — here is some of the year’s best singing and dancing, from “Mad Men's" "Zou Bisou Bisou” scene to "Happy Endings," with Adam Pally wearing a giant crucifix earring, and of course, because it's a show about a Broadway musical, we have to include a little number from that crazy show called "Smash."

From “Nashville”

“Nashville” has been full of great music, but it’s the duets that have been mesmerizing, more effectively distilling and tracking the characters’ changing emotions than any dialogue. The three best: the first episode’s “If I Didn’t Know Better,” which presaged the inevitable Gunnar-Scarlett puppy-dog love story; the Deacon-Rayna duet “No One Will Ever Love You,” a bit of singing that’s emotionally tantamount to adultery; and Rayna and Juliette’s how-could-I-really-hate-you-when-singing-with-you-is-so-much-fun peace treaty, “Wrong Song.”

Sutton Foster: I have to Google the “Bunheads” script

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Every week on "Bunheads," the ABC Family show from "Gilmore Girls" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, Sutton Foster gives a clinic on delivering dialogue. Playing Michelle, a Las Vegas dancer starting over in a quaint California town, Foster trills reams and reams of lightning fast, reference-laden mood-hopping banter with charm and ease, her verbal and emotional dexterity giving the not-so-plot-heavy (but totally wonderful) "Bunheads" its narrative thrills.

Foster, who has won multiple Tony awards for her work on Broadway, spoke with Salon about the show, how much she relates to Michelle and her love of "Gilmore Girls."

Were you looking to do a TV show?

I wasn't actively looking for a TV show, but I was at a point in my career where I was looking for something new, or just a challenge. And then I took a meeting with Amy. I was such a huge “Gilmore” fan, I remember telling my agent, “My favorite writer is Amy Sherman-Palladino. 'Gilmore Girls' is my favorite show. If she calls, I'd do anything.” I took a meeting with her, and I didn't know at the time that she was writing the pilot for “Bunheads.” About two weeks later, she called and asked for me to read the script and meet the network, and I was like "What?!" And I read the script, and it was the right timing and just perfect, so it was a no-brainer in my mind.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: TV’s funniest woman

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:00:00 +0000

"Bunheads," currently in the middle of its first season on ABC Family, is one of the best new shows of the summer, and certainly the strangest. It's the story of Michelle, a Vegas dancer played by Sutton Foster, who married a man she barely knew and moved into the house he shared with his dance-instructor mother, Fanny (Kelly Bishop) -- only to have the man die in a car accident soon after.

Michelle has spent five episodes very, very slowly figuring out what she's going to do with her life while navigating her mother-in-law (and her mother-in-law's dance students) and tossing off page upon page of lightning-fast, reference-laden dialogue. Such dialogue is a specialty of "Bunheads" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, a pretty terrific talker herself, who previously created "Gilmore Girls" and has, in "Bunheads," made a show with the most delightfully unbalanced dialogue-to-plot ratio I've ever seen.

I spoke with Sherman-Palladino about the series, her preference for character over plot, her love of obscure references, her failed series "The Return of Jezebel James," and those wacky dance scenes.

“Bunheads”: TV’s strangest, sweetest new show

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Amy Sherman-Palladino’s “Bunheads,” which is smack in the middle of its 10-episode first season on ABC Family, is quirky, cute and avant-garde. I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it — that depends almost entirely on your patience for watching hyper-stylized dialogue, just dialogue and more dialogue — but it is up to something unique and strange, having abandoned typical ideas about plot, stakes and forward momentum, and replaced them with talking, endless talking. It's made itself over into the most adorable show with a nihilistic streak probably ever made.

“Bunheads” is a show about nothing. I’m drawing the “Seinfeld” parallel because the entirely different ways in which these two shows are about nothing is illustrative. Each episode of “Seinfeld” took various nothings — like waiting for a dinner reservation, forgetting someone’s name — as the building blocks of an episode’s plot. These nothing-blocks would then be used to construct something very substantial. By episode’s end, one of the blocks would get pulled out, and the whole edifice would come crashing down. The show started with nothings, but with those nothings it always created stakes. By the end of any given episode of “Seinfeld,” the show about nothing, something — something hilarious — had happened.

“Bunheads”: “Gilmore Girls,” take two

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:20:00 +0000

The greatest screwball heroine of the last two decades, give or take a Liz Lemon, had some bad luck. She was condemned to live out her fast-talking days on the WB-turned-CW, that marginalized channel catering to teenage girls, where she never tangled with anything as prestigious as drugs, death or violence -- just a quirkiness so concentrated it makes Zooey Deschanel’s adorkability look watered down. For all these reasons, Lorelai Gilmore, the star of the mother-daughter drama “Gilmore Girls,” doesn’t get nearly enough respect, despite being a plucky, honest, intelligent and idiosyncratic torrential talker and a top-five fictional road trip companion (assuming you could enforce some periods of mandatory silence). She's easily the most compelling TV heroine who has ever been defined first and foremost as a mother.