Salon.com > Men of a Certain Age

A strong, graceful finish for “Men of a Certain Age”

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 14:15:00 +0000

It might sound funny, given what a laid-back show it is, but I can't wait for the new season of "Men of a Certain Age." As last night's second season finale proved, it's one of the best shows on TV, and it has a humility that's truly endearing. There's a lot of wisdom in it, yet it carries itself as if it's just fumbling around trying to make sense of things. And it routinely demonstrates the sort of grace that Joe (Ray Romano) displayed as he tried and failed to qualify for the senior tour. (And I loved how they kept the camera far back from Joe and let the shots play out without cutting, so that you could see that he was, in fact, a good golfer.)

All three of the major characters are at crossroads, trying to make peace with their vulnerabilities -- by which I mean their age. Joe might have been permanently disabused of the urge to gamble or make book after getting the crap kicked out of him by Manfro the bookie (Jon Manfrellotti) near the end of last week's episode, a scene which confirmed that Manfro isn't one of those cute sitcom bookies, but is in fact a scary man with an explosive temper. (I'm not sure which of his lines was more chilling: his "Look what you made me do!" after knocking Joe's tooth out, or what he said when he returned: "You know you can save the tooth sometimes if you go to the dentist right away. And put it in milk!")

The Everyman charm of Andre Braugher

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:17:00 +0000

How good an actor is Andre Braugher? So good that on "Men of a Certain Age," he almost makes you forget that he became a TV star playing verbose, imperious bulldozers -- the kinds of guys who commanded rooms through sheer force of will.

His Owen Thoreau Jr., the married businessman on "Men," is a bit smarter and more likable than the average person, but in no way dazzling, arrogant or intellectually extraordinary -- a far cry from the characters Braugher played on "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Gideon's Crossing" and "Thief." This is what you might call an Everyman role, in the same wheelhouse as that of this appealing series' other major characters. As you watch Owen shoulder the burdens of his job and flirt with his wife, Melissa (LisaGay Hamilton), leavening wit and charm with worry and irritation, you can almost glimpse an alternate universe in which Braugher is one of the biggest stars around, an African-American answer to Tom Hanks.

The poignant wisdom of “Men of a Certain Age”

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:09:00 +0000

In a time when too many TV shows strain toward significance without knowing what they're trying to say, there's something tremendously appealing about TNT's "Men of a Certain Age." The show knows exactly what it's about, expresses itself with unfussy grace, and organizes its thoughts so elegantly that you might not notice a pattern unless you go looking for one. Last night's episode, "The Pickup," had all of those qualities. It was an unusually mournful hour even for this series. PR material for "Men" shows a vertical line, its endpoints marked "Birth" and "Death," with a spot in the middle labeled, "You are here." That graphic identifies a midpoint, or a median, and not necessarily a happy one. "The Pickup" elaborates, giving us snapshots of major and minor characters stuck in the middle of an awkward situation, or an infuriatingly uncertain phase of life, and trying to find equilibrium.

The sneaky excellence of “Men of a Certain Age”

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:03:00 +0000

If you'd told me 10 years ago that the star of "Everybody Loves Raymond" would be the driving force behind a smart, poignant, laugh-track-free, beguilingly adult comedy-drama, I might have scrunched up my face like Gary Coleman on "Diff'rent Strokes" and asked, "Watchoo talkin' 'bout?" But here we are in 2011 with Romano's' TNT series "Men of a Certain Age" in its second season, building on an already formidable skill set to become a show worth recapping each week.

Last night's premiere had a provocative title: "The Great Escape." I think it was meant ironically, and that you could interpret it in a couple of different ways -- as an ass-backward confirmation that these guys (and the women in their lives) are stuck with each other (I love Romano's Joe and Penelope Ann Miller's Sonia drifting back together) and that there's ultimately no escape from the mundane irritations of life except, well, you know.

“Men of a Certain Age”: Cool is overrated

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:01:00 +0000

The older you get, the less cool you are. The less cool you are, the nicer you are. This is why old people are so nice to each other.

When we're young, we think old people are nice to each other because they're fake. I was walking the dogs with my 14-year-old stepson yesterday and we passed a couple on the sidewalk. "Hi, how are you?" the man said. "Great, how are you?" I replied.

"That was weird," my stepson said. "It's like he says the same thing to everyone."

"OK, have a great weekend!" I replied.

Old people are a little checked out, it's true. But we're amiably comatose. This friendly state of autopilot is the only way we've found to manage our dashed dreams, our growing contempt for the culture, our creeping disappointments, our fibromyalgia. We grind our teeth at night and have vivid dreams about screwing cheerleaders. We resent the unflattering shape of matchstick jeans and daydream about gigantic claw-foot bathtubs we can't afford. Our elbows hurt and our hair always looks bad and we secretly think all electropop sounds like Kraftwerk.

“Men of a Certain Age,” “Community”: The meek inherit your TV

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

Humility is making a comeback. Most of us have been eating humble pie for a while now, but if you're not among our ranks, we'll be happy to cut you a slice and shove it down your throat, posthaste.

Take Tiger Woods. Time was when you could work $60,000 of discretionary whoring into your budget, and no one blinked. That's capitalism, after all. As the demand for luxury porn star hookers with not-ugly faces increases, the supply of super-deluxe star-fucking sea honkies rises in turn. The prices are high, yes, but that's because these luxurious whoring slut monkeys only grab ankle for married, internationally renowned athletes. See how classy?

The truth is, we still strongly encourage supernatural megastars like Tiger to sample a wide range of extravagantly festooned, fat-lipped trollops. After all, what good is international stardom and huge piles of cash if you can't jet off to far-flung locales where exotic sea donkeys frolic, raising their sculpted button noses in the air to sniff out large currency transactions? We want big deal athletes like Tiger to cavort with the rarefied porn porpoises, resting only occasionally to high-five themselves in the bathroom mirror. And we want these pouty harlots to tattle on the guys in tabloid stories accompanied by extra fancy photos of the girls in question bent over pool tables and the like.

In defense of the aging frat boy

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:29:00 +0000

Little-known fact: Frat boys get softer and more lovable as they age. The very traits that make them so odious when they're young -- their masters-of-the-universe overconfidence, their high-fiving, wedgy-giving bluster, their myopic unwillingness to consider other people's feelings -- are replaced by self-doubt and dread in the face of middle age. As cocky dudes and swaggery ass-slappers reach their 40s and 50s, their exaltation in trivia like online poker and fantasy football leagues and who rolled whose ball hairs into a joint back in the day starts to look obstinately coltish instead of flatly uninteresting. Their ogling of hot-bodied younger women feels more understandable as aesthetic appreciation rather than self-deluded horndoggery. Their unrelenting mutual derision -- the "Eat me's" and the "Screw you, butt nuggets" and other faintly homoerotic allusions -- can be greeted as a particularly aggressive flavor of nostalgia, rather than a clear reflection of frustrated homosexual urges.