Mr. Coogans Thursday Groove Tube Update 03.24.04

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Two weeks ago, Fox debuted two new shows to the television viewing audience, “Playing it Straight” and “Wonderfalls,” that really are complete opposites: Not only are they completely different in the format (the former being a reality show and the latter being scripted), but they are wildly dissimilar in the tone, delivery, and, unfortunately, overall quality as well.

“Playing it Straight 8:00 PM Friday (Fox)

Let’s look at the 8:00 PM timeslot first where Fox viewers will see the newest reality/game show to hit the air, “Playing it Straight.” The concept is fairly simple. Jackie, an auburn-haired, tan skinned, Midwestern, young college student with a great, big white smile is brought to the “Sizzling Saddles” ranch in Elko, NV to take part in a “Bachelorette” style competition. While there, her goal is to pick the man of her dreams while the 14 men in the competition wear cowboy hats, tight jeans, and cowboy-esque shirts that I think came from the pink and yellow “Marty McFly Collection” from Back to the Future Part III. They also get to compete in various mundane “ranch” tasks where the winner(s) get(s) to spend extra time alone with Jackie. However, besides the poorly dressed cowboys, there is a twist to the match making show that (is supposed) to turn it into a “Survivor”-esque game involving skill and strategy:

Not all the guys are straight (hence the catchy show title)

If Jackie can sniff out the gay contestants and find herself a straight man to fall in love with, then the two lovebirds will evenly share a $1 million grand prize. However, if the belle of the competition chooses a gay man as her love connection, then she gets nothing and he gets to keep the entire $1 million for himself.

What’s fairly interesting about the concept is that the producers and casting people did an excellent job of finding men that do not necessarily exude “gay” characteristics (and when I say that, I think of the typical stereotypes seen primarily on shows like “Will and Grace”). So, since all the men come off as chiseled straight fellows vying for the affection of the lovely Jackie, it makes the game more difficult for her. Exactly how hard that has been to this point has been obvious through the first two episodes as Jackie has eliminated four men and only one of them has been gay. While the exact ratio of gay to straight men in the competition was not revealed initially, seeing as three straight ones have already left the ranch, it creates a higher probability that she’ll be saddled (excuse the pun ) with a gay man and losing the money. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks. The question is: “Do we want to?”

To quote another maverick beer drinking kind of cowboy involved with World Wrestling Entertainment: “Hell No!”

Similar to many other reality shows, “Playing it Straight” has “confessionals” where the contestants/cast members can comment alone and in private on the action going on in the game and tell the audience what they are thinking as events unfold. Well, since the object of the game is to determine if a player is gay or straight and then get him out of the competition, all the guys appear to spend all of their time in the confessionals giving half-assed reasons as to why another particular player is gay and constantly labeling one guy as gay and another as straight. While it’s fun to casually turn on your “gaydar” (the part deep in your brain that helps determine a straight person from a gay person), spending an hour in primetime forcing us to do it with poor Jackie isn’t fun, it’s annoying. Therefore, this is a game that doesn’t have all that much strategy and isn’t all that interesting. If one of the gay players can act well enough to fool Jackie, he will win. If not, then he won’t. In the mean time, everyone else just labels each other as gay as if it’s a nasty, soul drenching crime.

Speaking of that

“Playing it Straight” reminded me of some of my classroom experiences. I have studied some communication theory and part of that is the school of thought known as “cultural studies.” I couldn’t come up with a terrific explanation so this page from Blackwell Publishing helped me out. The page stated that cultural studies is:

Cultural studies (CS) is concerned with subjectivity and power–how human subjects are formed and experience their lives in cultural and social space. CS blends methods and issues from economics, politics, media and communication studies, sociology, literature, education, the law, science and technology studies, anthropology, and history, with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality in everyday life.

So, there’s a lot going on in the field of cultural studies. From a cultural studies point of view, what I see with “Playing it Straight” is that being gay labeled as “evil” and “bad” and that those people need to be “gotten rid of.” Technically, that’s the idea of the game: to get rid of those who are gay. However, the message that could be interpreted is that while the straight man and woman can walk into the sunset holding hands, a million dollars richer while the homosexuals slither off to the caves they came from.

Is that the idea of the show? I highly doubt that anyone affiliated with the show is thinking in a derogatory manner about the homosexual lifestyle. If anything, the people at the Fox network are merely taking advantage of the fact that being gay has been largely accepted and is almost “chic” as opposed to dragging down gay people in general. However, I did see that “gay = evil or bad” message loud and clear and while people in cultural studies rarely, if ever, label anything as “right” or “wrong,” I will say that I don’t think that’s a good message being sent. This coupled with the sheer unbearable simplicity of the game being played and boring players simply labeling other players as gay or straight makes the show a DUD.

“Wonderfalls” 9:00 PM Friday (Fox)

When a new show with a fairly edgy concept is stuck on a lousy night with a terrible lead in, it’s going to be pretty difficult for it to catch on with the audience. Unfortunately, for the new Fox “dramedy” (part comedy, part drama) “Wonderfalls” that appears to be the case.

It’s amazingly difficult for a show to secure high ratings on Friday nights for obvious reasons. That’s the beginning of the weekend, so people are either out on the town enjoying their lives or are (going) out of town so they can enjoy different and exotic locations outside of their living rooms and what the media feed to them. Also, if a network provides a potentially disastrous lead in (i.e. something unproven), then it’s even harder to get people to stay tuned for another new show.

So, this is the plight of “Wonderfalls.” While that may be the case, the show still shines bright like a poorly attended, but well written off Broadway production. The program revolves around Jaye Tyler (Canadian beauty, Caroline Dhavernas), a 24-year-old “Gen Y’er.” Her goal since high school has been to “end up over-educated and unemployable” and she’s done a pretty good job of accomplishing that goal. She has a Philosophy degree from Brown University and has chosen to take her career into the direction of retail clerk at the “Wonderfalls” gift shop in her hometown of Niagara Falls. All this while she makes her home to a trailer that’s been compared to the inside of “Jeannie’s bottle” (an obvious comparison from “I Dream of Jeannie”).

In the mean time, as the beginning of the series’ second episode neatly reminds us within the storylines, the family are all superstars in society. Jaye’s father, Darrin (William Sadler The Shawshank Redemption), is a successful surgeon who’s a music composer on the side. Jaye’s mom, Karen (Karen Scarwid), is a successful travel guide author and local celebrity (complete with the unnecessary snooty attitude). Meanwhile, Jaye’s sister, Sharon (Katie Finneran), is a successful immigration lawyer and her brother, Aaron (Lee Pace), won a prestigious fellowship and is pursuing a PhD in a religious course of study. So, Jaye either has a lot to live up to or rebel against. She chooses the latter constantly. These characters constantly exude the surface definition of “achieving in life” and the way they are written (and acted), the audience is reminded who “does the most” and who “does the least.”

In addition to her family, the other main characters in the story are Eric (Tyron Leitso) and Mahandra (Tracie Thomas) who both work at Jaye’s favorite drinking spot, a dive bar/restaurant known as The Barrel. Mahandra works as a waitress at The Barrel and is one of the few close friends Jaye has in the Niagara Falls area. Unlike Jaye, she loves the area and doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon. Meanwhile, Eric ended up as a bartender at the bar after catching his new wife “being intimate” with the bellboy at the hotel that were staying at for their honeymoon. He cried at the bar and then got a job there Logical progression.

These aren’t necessarily all the characters in the show. During the pilot, Jaye begins receiving cryptic messages dispensing advice from various animals. Some are wax, some are stuffed, some are plastic, but the bottom line is they are all animals/objects that shouldn’t be talking and delivering mysterious messages to anyone. Naturally, Jaye is pretty freaked out by the prospects of various fake animals talking to her. However, it turns out that the animals are actually revealing relevant, albeit vague, information that is meant to assist Jaye in helping people that randomly come into her life through chance meetings.

The Fox network advertisements really don’t do the show any justice at all. In a way, they make the show come off TOO quirky and may be driving people away instead of getting to watch. After all, it’s kind of difficult to make the argument that watching a show with talking fake animals is going to be worth an hour of a viewer’s time.

That’s why it’s very important to give “Wonderfalls” a chance and not dismiss it as trite dribble because it is entertaining and just quirky enough to make it original but not too foolish either. Take the second episode aired on March 19th as an example of a beautifully written, well-developed hour of television programming. The show began with Jaye engaging in a wildly disappointing dinner with her family that has led her to The Barrel doing shots of tequila when a fish on the wall (one of those dopey singing fish I presume ) tells Jaye to “Help her get her words out.” She ends up befriending a girl with a very noticeable stutter named Bianca (they become friendly when she steals Jaye’s wallet and returns it to her). Since Bianca has the stutter, “help her get her words out” could mean that since she stutters so much, Jaye needs to finish her sentences for her.

However, the story goes much deeper than that when Bianca makes Jaye a pet of sorts and starts to mirror the Jennifer Jason Leigh part in Single White Female by attempting to look and talk like Jaye. After our protagonist breaks into the van that Bianca was living in, it appeared her worst fears were realized. However, it turned out Bianca was just an aspiring journalist looking to write a story on what it’s like to be a “Gen Y’er” (Generation Y – referring to the age group of people post-baby boomers and post-“Generation X”) and wanted to get as much information out of Jaye as possible. So, as Jaye answered the questions and Bianca took notes, that also helped Bianca “get her words out.”

Unfortunately, Bianca liked Jaye’s life a little too much and wanted to remain there, even getting Jaye fired from the “Wonderfalls” shop. However, Jaye came to the rescue again by writing the “Gen Y” story for Bianca and again “helped her get her words out.” Once the story is published in a national magazine, Bianca is gone, presumably for good.

So, if you’re keeping track at home, that episode started out as a cry for help answered by Jaye and then morphed into the plot of Single White Female and then turned into a commentary of “Generation Y” people, which briefly reverted back into the Single White Female plot again, ending with the cry for help being met, but in a dramatically different way than when the show began. By the end of the episode, so much has happened, it feels like Bianca was two different people. Through it all, Jaye “helped her get her words out” in three completely separate, yet intricately related ways.

While a several-hundred-word description of a show plot does not do it justice the way seeing and experiencing it would, the comments summing up the episode and the way one vague sentence can take the story in multiple directions, really demonstrate the depth in the writing in “Wonderfalls.” That’s why it’s worth giving a chance. The stories aren’t typical, the characters aren’t ordinary, the storytelling method isn’t conventional by any stretch, but it is imaginative and rich. That’s why this show deserves a chance to shine and is a STUD.

Finally

I admit it I made a dopey mistake.

If you’ve read my Weekend Groove Tube Update posted this past weekend, you might remember this line when dispensing odds on where the next “The Real World” would end up since they pulled out of Philadelphia:

3. Atlanta 5:1 – The weather is nice all-year-round, there is a lot of industry there, and their Viacom sister network CNN is based down there. I am sure the cast members could do SOMETHING at the network. Maybe get Lou Dobbs a cup of coffee (black)?

Well, Eric S. caught me on my mistake in his latest wrestling news report saying:

Memo to Coogs: CNN is owned by Time-Warner, not Viacom.

I was hoping to get “pimped” by him at some point, but I wish it was for the job I was doing, not for screwing up a fairly simple fact like that. I got so caught up in the city odds and trying to come up with potential “The Real World” storylines, I made a dopey mistake. For that, I apologize and I assure you, the readers, that I will do my best to make sure all future columns are free of any errors (spelling and grammar included).

Reminder – Since I won’t be around this weekend in my normal format, this will be all you’ll see of me until next week. Feel free to email me through the link below though. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can

So, in the mean time

Enjoy the show!

— Coogan