Moving Forward With "Modern Family"

Damn, it's been too long, folks.  Unfortunately, when you're applying to grad school and traveling and picking up extra jobs to pay them bills, your little-read blog about television is the first thing to fall by the wayside.  That doesn't mean that I haven't had things to talk about, or been building up posts in my head for when I finally have the time to write them.  This season of Boardwalk Empire has been spectacular, and I'll be writing about it some time in the next week.  The Mindy Project is going well, but the real surprise of the new fall shows has been Ben And Kate, which is just a delightful, smart, playful romp every week.  Go On is solidly enjoyable.  Last Resort keeps getting better.  Revolution keeps getting worse.  The Office is, surprisingly, mostly turning it out for their last season, although everyone agrees that making Andy into a horrible monster was a terrible move.  Parks & Recreation is great, of course, although I do have some small nitpicks we'll get to eventually.  How I Met Your Mother is what it is, which is to say a little dull, very repetitive, a nice vehicle to get my Jason Segel fix, and still very staunchly Not Friends, however hard they try.  RuPaul's Drag Race All-Stars is so poorly formatted that not only are the wrong people going home every week, but the show itself is actually boring.  What a disappointment.

But you know what's not a disappointment?  This season of Modern Family.  Oh, there have been some missteps (that stereotypical lesbian couple?  Let's not ever mention that again.) and just last night Jay made a homophobic joke ("If you had a man who wanted to pick out strollers with you, you wouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place" UGH).  But this season seems to be focused more on the individual characters we've developed a relationship with, and less on making lazy jokes about whatever boring archetype they belong to (shrewish wife, trophy wife, nerdy girl, effeminate gay man, etc.).

Why It's Important To Keep Talking About Girls

One of the interesting (read: super depressing) things that has arisen over this whole Girls brouhaha is the backlash against the backlash.  Everyone was fine to talk about it for a week, but to keep talking about it was to "not be able to let things go".  But to not keep talking about it is, in my eyes, to ignore it, and like it or not, ignoring it is not the way to handle the issue.

I admit that my last post on the subject was a bit vitriolic, and my friend said, "It kind of sounded like you just hate the East Coast" which isn't the case at all.  There are many, many, things that I adore about the East Coast, but the tendency of people who live in New York City and produce work for the screen (or write, or blog, or photograph, or paint, or whatever) to be navel-gazingly obsessed with living in New York City and what that means is one of my least favorite things about pop culture in general and the East Coast in particular. I have lived in and spent a lot of time in different states up and down the East Coast and no matter what, my feelings about it always come back to Joni - "I wouldn't want to stay here; it's too old and cold and settled in its ways here".  In California, everyone is from somewhere else.  The importance of old money and history and who your family is and where you went to school fades here; we care about who you are now and where you're going and if your actions will help the world or the community.  Oh, we definitely trade in other weird issues (go watch some Portlandia for examples) and in certain circles all the dumb moneyed social crap still stands, but in my extensive experience, it's not as pervasively a part of the culture out west.

I see this idea of The Way Things Are Done not only in Girls, but in the backlashbacklash as well.  Famous people's children have always had an easier way of it, they say.  Why are you punishing Dunham for writing what she knows? the handwringers cry.  The types of people Hannah and her friends are probably DO only have white friends and it is ridiculous to expect otherwise, I'm told.  And my favorite, why aren't you as mad at any of the other all-white shows out there?  Why has Girls been forced to try to fulfill so many expectations?

Let's address these one by one.

"But...I'm...White..." : Cheers vs Wings

Eeek! Blogging fail. I don't think I've ever abandoned you all for so long. But hey, I've been on vacation and there hasn't been any new TV to provide me with some initiative, so I guess it's up to my weary brain to come up with ideas for good summertime posts. Don't worry, things won't remain at this sporadic pace - once I'm working again I'll be back to writing on a more regular basis.

So, a few weeks ago - or maybe it was a month, I can't keep track - Linda on Pop Culture Happy Hour was talking about how Cheers is on Netflix instant now, and how she spent the whole weekend watching Cheers and how the comedy really holds up. Now, Cheers ended shortly before I became a regular primetime viewer, so I only had a few brief memories of the show when it was on. I decided that this would be a great opportunity for me to educate myself on one of the most classically beloved sitcoms.

It did not go so well. Cheers does not, sorry Linda, does NOT hold up. The only thing that makes the show even remotely enjoyable is Ted Danson's inescapable charm. I have never found him attractive, but damn if he couldn't charm the pants off of anyone he wished. However, basically all other elements of the show are unbearable. Diane is a huge bore whose backstory consists of being abandoned at a bar by her creepy boss with whom she was about to elope, but instead he leaves her to go back to his ex-wife. Wha??? It informs her character not at all except to establish that she is a snob and an intellectual and here she is surrounded by all these boors isn't that hilarious? Not really. Carla, who I remember liking when I was a kid, is instead one of those people that thinks that being tiny allows them to get away with being a violent asshole. It's not cute when you shout in people's faces and punch them in the neck when you don't get your way, EVEN IF YOU ARE SHORT. Now, let me ask: is Coach supposed to be retarded? Nevermind, it doesn't matter, either way he is The Worst. The way he screams "NAAAHHRM!" whenever Norm walks in is so abrasive and awful it boggles my mind that it became a touchstone of the show. Speaking of Norm and Cliff, these characters are not endearing. They are drunks. Barney on The Simpsons is such a great character because he is an exaggeration of what Norm & Cliff would really be like. Anyway, when you come down to it, none of them are likable except Sam.

And here's where we get to the crux of the issue of watching Cheers from a modern standpoint: this is a show about a bar. Everything happens at a bar. Almost all of the characters we see are drunks or at least drink a fair amount - except Sam, who's an alcoholic, and Diane, who is boring. Maybe in 1982 it was normal for people to get off of work and go drink by yourself in a bar every night; these days, that kind of behavior is sad and problematic. Thus characters like Norm, who, at that time might've been the guy who reminded you of your uncle or something, are now just pathetic misogynists who have probably caused multiple drunk driving accidents without even knowing it. Knowing what we know now, it's hard to find any of the Cheers ensemble endearing.

The comedy is also incredibly stilted and old-fashioned. I can see the setup of a joke coming from a mile away, and when the punchline eventually comes, it's painful. I mean, I understand that this is Eighties television we're talking about - I've seen Alf and Family Ties and all that and I get how low the bar was set for a long time. But just because Cheers might've been better than 21 Jumpstreet (and it's not, I watched all of that after-school epic last summer) doesn't mean that it deserves all the love it gets.