Salon.com > Cougar Town

Channel surfing: “Scandal” gets all “ZDT” and “American Horror Story” flips the best bird

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:11:00 +0000

My observations of the past week of TV that are too short to stand on their own and too long to keep to myself.

1. It’s often weird how all the shows that air on a specific night seem to be in conversation, as if the writers of every show that broadcasts on Thursday had a secret conversation about making "Treme" jokes all at once. This past Tuesday was identity politics nights over on “New Girl,” “The Mindy Project,” and “Happy Endings”: Schmidt tried to get Winston to share his “blackness” with his housemates, Mindy’s Indian little brother flirted with quitting Stanford to be a rapper, and on “Happy Endings” Max went on a quest to find his particular gay subculture. “New Girl” and “Happy Endings” did a nice — by which I mean funny — job with both of those stories. (Schmidt’s pronunciation of “crack kuh-caine” was wonderful; Winston as the straight-but-not-boring man, finally, really worked; and “Happy Endings'” creation of “optimistic red velvet walruses” was so sweet and funny, I will ignore the fact that Max is pretty much just a bear.) But I found the rapping on “The Mindy Project” to be so distracting I can barely tell if that story line worked. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good. Was it supposed to be good? If it wasn't supposed to be good, why did we see so much of it? If it was bad, why didn't the show say so? The rapping was kind of like the character of Mindy herself: The show doesn’t know yet whether it wants you to like her or dislike-her-while-thinking-she’s-funny and it keeps trying to have it both ways.

“30 Rock” vs “Community”: The pop culture wars

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:25:00 +0000

NBC is currently watching a war unfold within its own ranks: Who can cram the most pop culture references into any given episode of a comedy show? Before this year, the award clearly went to "30 Rock," a program that effortlessly slid between Huffington Post and "Harry and the Hendersons" references without missing a beat. No matter how many times Steve Carell uttered "That's what she said," or "Outsourced" did ... whatever it is that "Outsourced" does…they just couldn't keep up with the culture-consuming writers of Tina Fey's hit, hip show.

But this season, a dark horse appeared on the horizon. While the first season of "Community" dealt with establishing the characters and giving Joel McHale a chance to prove he was more than just a pretty face from "The Soup," the second season quickly moved beyond the sly wink of self-awareness to become a show that reached, as Patton Oswalt describes it, "the ETEWAF* singularity." It was the closest TV has ever come to being the Internet (sorry, Tosh), with in-jokes doubling back on themselves the way a Television Without Pity forum thread might. Nothing was sacred: not Dungeons & Dragons, Charlie Kaufman or the Web itself (which creator Dan Harmon has used on occasion to throw his fans off-track with fake spoilers on his Twitter feed).

The year in celebrity comebacks

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:30:00 +0000

How's that hopey-changey thing working out for ya? Just great, actually. In a year when Mel Gibson raged, Lindsay Lohan went back to rehab and Glenn Beck still had a television show, it wasn't easy to believe that people could embrace progress, whether we were talking about the economy or the Denver Broncos. But in 2010, some people actually did. Once known for their flubs, their misdeeds and their general awfulness, a stalwart few picked themselves up and raised their formerly rock-bottom standards. The phrase that could be considered the year's motto -- "it gets better" -- is certainly embodied by our 10 Most Improved.

Michael Vick

No one will forget his gruesome role in the abuse and killing of canines while running a dogfighting ring on his property. He has failed drug tests and filed for Chapter 11. And when he signed with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2009 after serving 19 months in prison for felony charges, his return to football was greeted with angry protests from animal lovers. Michael Vick knows exactly what it feels like to be one of the most reviled men in America.

The best and worst of the new TV season

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:01:00 +0000

New TV shows usually suck. Take it from someone who watches every single one of them, every single year. Slogging through a herd of untested pilots can feel like speed dating for speed freaks: Twitchy people tell you their life stories in three seconds flat -- they laugh, they cry, they knock over their drinks, stuff blows up, ambulances arrive, roll credits. You're lucky if you escape without a migraine, let alone a venereal disease.

But this year was different. Watching this fall's new shows was like wandering through a magical bar filled with charismatic, funny people and delicious, icy-cold cocktails. Great music was playing, the mood was spirited, and everyone had a charming or poignant or funny anecdote to tell. As long as you stayed away from the ones wearing scrubs and surgical masks -- oh yeah, and the bony, Botoxed cougars -- you were sure to have a great time.

The life of the party this fall is ABC's "Modern Family." In a sea of attractive and witty guests, spewing quips and tossing back drinks, "Modern Family" (9 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC) is that unnervingly funny guy in the corner whose jokes keep making your mojito blast out of your nose. I've been waiting for this show to falter or underwhelm for weeks now, and each episode has been better than the last. Ty Burrell is consistently hysterical as hapless, pandering dad Phil. Here he is in one of my favorite scenes from the pilot:

High-fiving 40-year-olds? Get out of “Cougar Town”!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:06:00 +0000

If aliens learned about our culture by watching our newest television shows, they might assume that planet Earth was terrorized by predatory middle-aged women with hairless, bony bodies and the same blank expression on their overly Botoxed faces, a look of creepy awe at the joys of 20-something tenderloin.

"They're addicted to those botulism injections, which make them jittery and sick," the aliens might hypothesize after watching shows like "Cougar Town" and "Eastwick" and "Accidentally on Purpose." "Their lives are so addled by substance abuse that they pace and second-guess themselves with their googly-eyed, like-minded friends, then giggle and high-five like schoolgirls at the sight of some well-defined abdominal muscles, which are apparently a sign of inner purity."

"Why don't the other humans just snuff them out?" some young alien would interject, but no one would answer him because in the galaxy of Zoron, young men are seen as hopelessly naive and confused and are generally ignored until they hit 35. Besides, all of the older aliens would already recognize that these "cougars" clearly serve as some sort of cautionary tale for female humans, a moralistic narrative that humans refer to, strangely enough, as a "guilty pleasure" -- "guilty" in this case meaning "it makes you want to stick your head in the oven" and "pleasure" referring to the feeling humans get from having their fingernails ripped off one by one.

They are cougars, let them roar

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:01:00 +0000

What’s in a name? Would that which we call a cougar by any other name still be as controversial? With "Cougar Town" debuting tonight on ABC -- a show that Heather Havrilesky has already tarred and feathered, calling it "a comedy that's at once insipid, noxious, offensive, and just plain bad" -- discussion of the trendy term has reached a new pitch. Late last month, the first National Single Cougars Convention was held in Palo Alto, Calif.; it featured a Miss Cougar America Contest, in which one woman was crowned queen of the, um, jungle. And in an article masquerading as a memo in Tuesday's Washington Post, staff writers Monica Hesse and Ellen McCarthy address “all the single ladies of a certain age,” urging them to stop calling themselves cougars. To Gloria Navarro, the newly crowned Miss Cougar America, they write, “Love that spirit, Gloria. But we’re asking it to end. Not the dating of younger men. Please, date the younger men! But using the world ‘cougar’? How ‘bout you don’t.”

Going down in flames

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:29:00 +0000

Ah, the many joys of Los Angeles in August! What's more romantic than a freeway of ants running through the kitchen? What's more exhilarating than thick clouds of brown smoke, billowing in the hills and threatening untold tracts of overpriced, overleveraged real estate below?

It's hard not to have a kick in your step on a day like today, when it's 103 degrees outside, the world is in flames, and even the ants are looting, looking to steal the water that the residents of Los Angeles stole from somewhere else, some lusher place where you nonetheless can't get a spray tan with your morning doughnut.

I wonder if, so many decades ago, the robber barons of Los Angeles paused in their diligent and important work of bloodily oppressing various indigenous and imported brown peoples to gaze across this scrubby desert basin with a sense of awe at what it might one day become: an enormous maze of pavement, thirsty lawns and overvalued stucco. How proud they might be, to see that their selfless efforts to rape the land and disempower the laboring classes have paid off in acre upon acre of foreclosures, punctuated only by auto body shops and shitty Chinese restaurants! Los Angeles, glorious and vast, land of roof rats, home of the Whopper!