Posted
by Audrey Ference
on Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 12:22 PM
Legalizing gay marriage in New York has not only made the state that much more civil rights-ful, it's made the city big wads of cash—an estimated $16 million in revenue in just a year, with a $259 million overall bump. Just like Homer in the classic Simpsons episode There's Something About Marrying, gay weddings have been a huge paycheck the city. So what other great advice for NYC is hidden in show's 24 (!) seasons? Lots! Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo, sit yourself down and let TV teach you a thing or two.
(Note: apologies for supplying images and not clips. Hulu doesn't give any of the good stuff away for free.)
Chloë Sevigny's new show Hit & Miss — the one you've probably heard made Sevigny "cry every day" of filming since her role as a male-to-female transgendered assassin required the daily application of a prosthetic penis — premiers tonight, to much fanfare and mixed reviews. However, DirectTV has put the first episode up to watch early and free online, the better to entice viewers with. And yes, you get to see the prosthetic penis almost immediately.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Mon, May 14, 2012 at 1:32 PM
It was the second episode that got me hooked. A hitman had tried to kill Bridget—who was pretending to be her sister Siobahn, who had faked her own death, only Bridget thought she was really dead—but Bridget-as-Siobahn had managed to kill him instead. But then what to do with the body? She left it in the downtown Manhattan loft space Siobahn's husband was paying to renovate, and then decided maybe she shouldn't pretend to be her sister after all. But she got sucked back when her "husband" announced he'd throw a party—at the loft! And proceeded to try to win over new investors to his struggling hedge fund, all while a dead body was right under their noses. The episode was positively Hitchcockian (and I don't toss that adjective around) in its playful, increasingly urgent cliffhangers at every commercial break—there's blood seeping out of the trunk in which she hid the body!—climaxing with the one that made me laugh out loud: when the dead man's cell phone started ringing in the middle of Siobahn's husband's speech. How's she gonna get out of this one? I had to know.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:03 PM
I don’t say this lightly, but “And the Buttercream Cupcakes” was the worst episode of 2 Broke Girls yet. It was so bad, in fact, that I couldn’t even keep track of the stink bombs that were coming out of Oleg and Caroline’s mouths. Instead, I took five screencaps from the episode, so you, too, can feel misery. And hey, did I mention Peach, quite possibly the single worst character on TV, is back? BRING BACK THE HORSE.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 1:40 PM
New York's most beloved media figure, and perhaps its most beloved resident, is moving to Williamsburg, Brownstoner reports. NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan and his wife just purchased the three-floor townhouse on Bedford Avenue, near N. 9th Street, for just over $2 million—a possible record for a single family home in Williamsburg, a source in the brokerage community tells the site. The home's unglamorous exterior—that vinyl siding!—belies the remodeled interior: the "professional chef's kitchen," the spacious back garden, the four bedrooms and 2.5 baths.
"A little uncomfortable with the level of detail in coverage," Kiernan tweeted earlier today, "but that will pass."
Posted
by Mark Asch
on Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 12:16 PM
Dick Clark, "the world's oldest teenager," who died yesterday, built an enduring business and media persona through his perpetual immersion in youth culture. American Bandstand, his flagship, was on the air from sockhops up through 1989—through, that is, the rise of a dominant youth culture, the splintering of genres, and the formation of a viable independent underground in the 1980s. Which means that, as much as a sinkhole of Boomer solipsism (which, by filming regular kids dancing, Clark helped invent), American Bandstand was an enduring study in the limits of the American music industry's adaptability. And it's that outer limit where all the really retrospectively fascinating and amusing stuff happens, as we hope to demonstrate with this clip show. (Thanks to Josh Kurp, who found about half of these.)
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:25 PM
“And the Messy Purse Smackdown” ends not with a smackdown between two messy purses (insert Oleg joke here), but with Max HEROICALLY filing her taxes on April 15th, just SECONDS before deadline. It was thrilling, chilling, and suicide pilling, as in I wanted to kill myself when Max got an entire post office to assist putting together her W-2s. It was kind of like The Silence of the Lambs, but actually not at all.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:12 PM
It’s tricky business, differentiating between TV shows that are autobiographical and TV shows that seem autobiographical, but are in fact mostly fiction. For instance, Bored to Death. The HBO series, about a writer named Jonathan Ames, seems like it came from experiences had by its creator, Jonathan Ames. But he’s said that the show is mostly invented—in his words, “It's like I take beads from my life and put them on each of the characters' necklaces.” Another Brooklyn-based HBO program, Lena Dunham’s Girls, about twentysomethings living in New York (more about that here), also necessitates putting the prefix “semi” before “autobiographical.” In honor of Girls, which premieres this Sunday, the 15th, and has been getting rave reviews, here are nine more good-to-great TV series based in reality.
After 37 years of shows rife with lesbian jokes, Saturday Night Live has finally hired its first openly lesbian cast member, Kate McKinnon. The hire is nothing short of a celebration for gay women in comedy, but coming to SNL after its history of using gay women as comedic fodder is kind of like showing up to a party where everyone has already been talking about you. The show might have meant well, even when making jokes about the LGBT community, but the situation is still a little awkward—especially when watching a "lesbian" Charles Barkley in a dress come out to her disbelieving friends. Here are five lesbian sketches SNL's newest cast member might have to politely laugh off.
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:48 AM
Oxygen asked irate locals to wait until Brooklyn 11223 actually aired before accusing it of insulting southern Brooklyn, women and Italian-Americans. But I can't imagine what the cable channel hoped to gain from that strategy, because this show is everything its premature critics alleged it would be. It smudges the distinctions between communities—Coney Island, Bay Ridge, Gravesend, and others—turning the southwestern corner of the borough into one enormous "neighborhood"; it's a show full of women who almost never talk to each other about anything other than guys; and nearly every character is an Italian-American stereotype who, rather than get fleshed out, instead has their stereotypes reinforced: there's the debate about crab meat (is it better than lobster, or does it need some sauce?); or that time two brothers come near to blows because one said the other's bedroom was messy. One character actually says, "fuhget about it." "I am full Italian, and I'm from fucking Brooklyn, so I have absolutely no problem, no problem, fucking somebody up," another says. More than one seems to have a close family member in the mob.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:26 PM
Tonight is the series premiere of Oxygen’s Brooklyn 11223, a show just as obnoxious as its “This Ain’t Jersey” tagline would have you believe. The series focuses on Christie, who believes that her former BFF, Joey Lynn, slept with her now ex-boyfriend, and follows the two women and their respective crews throughout Gravesend, Bay Ridge, and Coney Island. It’s well shot, and certainly more Brooklyn than 2 Broke Girls, but the premise rests entirely on whether you care about forced relationship drama and loud conversations paired with Coronas, which I don’t.
However, because it was shot in Brooklyn, I’m still fascinated by it, which is why I watched the first episode (available on Hulu) and noted 14 things that 11223 taught me.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 10:20 AM
It wasn’t until the new Mrs. Don Draper sang a siren song at her husband’s awkward birthday party that Mad Men felt like it was really back. It brought all the characters into one uncomfortable setting, with some revealing too much of their real feelings after having a drink too many (Peggy), while others ogled and mentally undressed their co-workers wives (pretty much all the men). But mostly: that song, “Zou Bisou Bisou.”
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:00 PM
As you might have heard from, oh, every website on the Internet or seen on AMC every three seconds, Mad Men returns this Sunday—but you won’t be hearing any Dusty Springfield during the season premiere, as was Matthew Weiner’s intention.
Springfield’s slinky 1967 hit “The Look of Love,” written by Hal David and composed by Burt Bacharach for the Casino Royale soundtrack, was originally played in the episode, until it was screened for journalists, who pointed out that the track wasn’t released until six months after the episode takes place.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 12:19 PM
If last night’s episode of 2 Broke Girls had aired in 2008, it would have been hailed as groundbreaking. Cupcakes? NEVER HEARD OF ‘EM. Bacon? REVOULTIONARY. Gay people? How CHIC. Bacon cupcakes made in a gay couple’s apartment in Williamsburg? *HEAD EXPLODES, Scanners-style* Lucky hypothetical head-exploding me. He didn’t have to watch all of 2 Broke Girls.
Posted
by Mark Asch
on Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 2:32 PM
I watched the first three episodes of Lena Dunham’s Girls on a DVD screener, so I can’t tell you if there were merely big laughs or outright whooping and hollering when the SXSW darling returned in triumph to preview her new Apatow-produced HBO sitcom at the 1,200 seat Paramount. But the format suits Dunham well, as even critics who disliked Tiny Furniture’s quippy assessment of milliennial malaise had anticipated—Girls is a savvy, snappy half-hour pay-cable sitcom that happens to be based out of a demographically resonant place.
"Budding sexuality" isn't a topic unfamiliar to Lena Dunham, creator of the upcoming HBO series, Girls and 2010 film, Tiny Furniture. In 2007, Dunham directed a web series called Tight Shots exclusively for Nerve.com that dealt with a house full of art students working on a film project and eventually sleeping together.
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:27 PM
How can something so right go so wrong? Last night’s episode, “And the One Night Stand was full of sex jokes, made mentioned of ice cream and baseball, and even featured a visit to a prison—yet it was no better than any other episode of 2 Broke Girls. Which is to say it was terrible. But in a delightful way!
Posted
by Henry Stewart
on Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 9:45 AM
The cast of Stereotype Conflict Reality Drama #644
In October, word spread through Bay Ridge that a reality show for the Oxygen network was filming around town. Locals were livid. Sixty-three percent of respondents to a poll in the local newspaper answered, "Bay Ridge is not the Jersey Shore!" (The show agrees; it's tagline: "This ain't Jersey. It's Brooklyn.") Friends from the neighborhood approached me vis-à-vis my capacity as a journalist. "You need to do something about this," wrote one in an email. "They’re not even from Bay Ridge."
Brighton Beach residents went through a similar headache last summer, when Oxygen's competitor Lifetime aired Russian Dolls, a reality show about Russian immigrants in that part of Brooklyn. "The Russian community look like idiots," one resident told the Times then. "Why don’t they show doctors, lawyers, the Russian intelligentsia?”
Posted
by Josh Kurp
on Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 1:17 PM
After all the Hitler jokes that have been made this season, it was only a matter of time before 2 Broke Girls went to South Williamsburg to deal with THE JEWS. Orthodox Jews, at that. Mercifully, there weren’t any jokes about bike lanes (maybe in season four?), but don’t worry, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t totally offensive and lazy anyway.
