He's just not that into you!

So I was watching Oprah last night, 'cause that's what you do when you come home drunk at 1 AM. And her guest was Greg Behrendt, who is a hilarious stand-up comedian -- or used to be, I guess. Then he started writing for Sex and the City, and now he's written a self-help book based around a line from that show: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys.

Okay, first of all, I thought it was odd that Greg was the only one onstage with Oprah, since the book was co-written with a woman named Liz Tuccillo. Liz was actually in the audience, and Oprah briefly spoke to her, but primarily she was dealing with Greg. I guess she wanted to have just the guy by her side, so he could be the one dealing out the tough love. After all, she worships tough-love men. Remember, she's the one responsible for inflicting Dr. Phil on America. That son of a bitch Dr. Phil! Oh how I hate him.

But I digress.

Oh, and second: why are we not done with Sex and the City now?? The goddam show is cancelled already! There's a book based on a line from it, Oprah's talking about the book and showing clips from the show, and there's that horrible harpy Sarah Jessica Parker in all those freaking Gap ads. That show's another one to file under my list of things I don't get. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: with Sex and the City, HBO was somehow able to create a show so bad that no amount of gratuitous nudity could make me watch. That's pretty damn bad.

Anyway.

The Oprah show primarily consisted of various audience members telling their stories of woe: my boyfriend is great but. I like this guy but. And then Oprah would smugly crow, "He's just not that into you!!"

Here's what I was waiting for -- and this would've been so ingenious, I can't believe Greg or one of the audience members didn't say this, it would've been so frickin' great -- and I didn't catch the last 15 minutes, so maybe it did happen, but I seriously doubt it -- I wanted someone to say:

So, Oprah, has Stedman married you yet? No? Well, guess what, honey!

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU!!!

IN CONCERT: George Carlin

I saw George Carlin at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas last month. And it's taken me a while to get around to writing about it. The basic story is: I enjoyed it a great deal, I laughed a lot, I was thrilled to see my favorite comedian in concert. But he didn't really do an awful lot to merit my positive reaction.

George Carlin is one of my personal heroes. He's been using his comedy to tear apart hypocrisy in religion, politics, race, class, and language itself since before I was born. I've always admired his humor, his honesty, his integrity*, his insight, and even his anger. I admired the way he used his anger to craft scathing indictments** of those in power, the way he focused his rage into productively destructive comedy routines about the ignorant, the greedy, the insincere.

But in the past few years, the anger has seemed to swallow him. His comedy routines have become more and more centered around relishing the pain and suffering of others. His enjoyment of other people's misery and death seems to have become a staple of his act. And it's outrageous, what he says, it's shocking, and it still makes you laugh, startled laughter borne of sheer jaw-dropping amazement at his gall to make punchlines out of, say, terminal diseases, or various methods of suicide.

And I did laugh. Hell, I might've laughed more than anyone else in the theater; there were a number of long, awkward stretches with only scattered nervous chuckles. He was relentless, both in his choice of material and his delivery style -- machine-gunning his words at the audience, a rapid-fire barrage of speech that was magnificent to behold. Whatever quibbles I may express about him, whatever anyone may say about him, there is no question that he is a master craftsman, who has honed the tools of his comedy to razor sharpness, and he is a brilliant artist with the English language, constructing and deconstructing it in a dizzying fashion, using it as a teaching instrument and a weapon. For that alone, I am truly grateful to have seen him live. (He was clearly still developing this particular act, though -- he even told us he was working out routines for his next HBO special; at several points, he referred to written notes, though he never broke stride in his delivery.)

But, as I was saying about his material -- I began to wonder if he even wanted to make us laugh, or if he thought it would be even funnier to make us uncomfortable. I have an angry streak and a pretty sick sense of humor, so I was with him pretty much the whole way. But there were a number of people around me who were clearly discomfited by his dwelling on the death tolls of serial killers or natural disasters, people who probably were expecting him still to be talking about the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". Saying "piss" doesn't shock anyone anymore. Saying you sincerely hope the planet is struck by a meteor does.

But as crazy and outrageous and shocking as he wanted to be -- and he was all those things, to me, and to everyone else in the audience, judging from their reactions -- he also often seemed to be going through the motions. Like he just decided, "This death obsession thing is working, I'm gonna run with it." His bit about the methods of suicide, for example, just seemed to go on forever. I could feel some of the audience slipping away: "Uh-huh, uh-huh, ropes are better than guns... that's kind of funny, in a sick way, but isn't he going to talk about how you can't say 'shit' on TV?" I mean, death isn't all he talked about; he hit on a lot of topics. But at the end, it's the death stuff that sticks with you.

I laughed, but after the show, I wondered if he had really earned those laughs, if I hadn't heard all this same anger before. Because his anger has developed through the years, cycling through targets, growing in scale, and his comedy has developed with it. Until he finally seemed to reach this critical mass of anger a few years ago, when he started hating the human race as a whole, and not just particular people in it. He just seemed to decide no group or groups of people were the problem, humanity was the problem. And he started wishing death to everyone. And where does his anger -- and his comedy -- go from there?

His comedy has gone through two quantum leaps in his career; once, around '69 or '70, from the Ed Sullivan-appearing, tie-wearing straight to the long-haired, foul-mouthed hippie, and once, early-to-mid-'90s, I'd say, from worn-out hippie to revitalized elder statesman, re-energized and refilled with vim and vigor, piss and vinegar. (Possibly that had something to do with getting the IRS off his back -- refer to the link in my first footnote below.) If he's going to remain a viable voice, I think his comedy needs to grow yet again, beyond this rut of death and destruction he's in.

There is no greater comedian in the world than George Carlin. I could not believe that more firmly. In fact, in my eyes, there has never been a greater comedian. Some will argue and suggest Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Bob Saget***, and obviously they're all super-geniuses, giants in comedy and in the world at large. But for me, for my personality, for my sense of humor, for my love of the language, and yes, for my anger, there's only George Carlin. And I believe he can continue to stay on top for years to come. But not if he continues in the same vein as his current act.

---

*Let's just pretend he never made those 10-10-220 commercials. And if you can't pretend, here's his reasoning on why he did those commercials, in an interview conducted with a financial website, of all things.
**Is there any other kind of indictment?
*** That's a typo. I meant Dave Coulier.

TV: Rescue Me

I caught the commercial-free premiere of the Denis Leary comedy/drama Rescue Me on FX on Wednesday, and... I may have built it up a little too much in my head. It was very good, don't get me wrong, but I think I was expecting to be blown away on the level of The Shield's premiere, which is a near impossible standard to meet.

It opened with a great establishing scene, Denis Leary's Full Metal Jacket/Patton-esque speech to a group of NYFD cadets, with Leary setting the overall mood for the episode: a lot of tough talk masking a lot of pain just beneath the surface. We witness the pain almost immediately after Leary leaves the cadets: he gets a visit from his cousin, a firefighter who died at Ground Zero. "You know what they found of him?" he's just gotten through telling the cadets. "A finger. That's all. A finger." His cousin's appearance only externalizes Leary's haunted soul -- and it's well-played. It could've come off as very cheesy, but Leary's cousin -- and other "visitors" -- keep things interesting with the same rough humor and tough-talking bravado of the living firefighters. (In a later appearance, the cousin tries to pop open a beer can. "Dammit," he says, struggling with the task, "it had to be my beer-opening finger.")

Of the tough talk, we get a plethora throughout the show; the cursing pushes FX's already liberal standards, with plenty of racial epithets (wop, jewbag) and homophobic slurs thrown in to boot. The show doesn't shy away from portraying these firefighters in a less than flattering light; they don't take kindly to outsiders, or any variation from their narrow definition of acceptable behavior or appearance. A telling exchange comes late in the episode between Leary and a therapist sent to the fire station to offer counseling to those still reeling from Sept. 11. When she questions him on the lack of female firefighters in the station, he says he'd be fine with one on his team as long as she could do the job. But then he adds:

"You got a Martian, or a cyborg, or a Chinaman that can do the job, bring them on, too."
"Are there any Chinese firefighters?"
"Yeah, probably. Somewhere in... China."

That he would equate a "Chinaman" with inhuman creatures is no slip of the tongue. It's obvious anyone deviating from the norm is going to find some very rough going in this club. It's a bold and probably all-too-truthful way to present the NYFD. I'm assuming this is establishing a baseline mindset which will evolve as the series progresses -- but by small increments at best.

Leary's character is a heavy drinker and is getting divorced -- which isn't a far cry from his character in his previous series, The Job (which was cancelled way too soon), in which he played a pill-popping, philandering cop. The role isn't a stretch for him, and Leary doesn't have the acting skills to stretch much beyond the niche he's built for himself (he co-created both series), but that's fine, because it's an admirable niche. He takes public servants, for which he clearly has a great deal of respect (as evidenced by his charitable contributions), and humanizes them, shows them not only as heroes (a label they wouldn't want to apply to themselves, anyway), but as real and flawed human beings. And he does it with a great deal of dark, even mean, humor. (In Rescue Me, Leary terrifies his fellow firefighters by throwing a child-sized doll from a burning window.)

Where the show didn't hold up for me was in the actual firefighting. It's tough to stage a realistic fire on film, and I think they err on the side of caution here; the one fire the station responds to doesn't convey any of the excitement or danger we've been led to expect. It looks like what it is, a few small flames staged around the actors.

And the rest of the cast, with the exception of Leary's wife (played by Andrea Roth, whom I remember from last year's excellent comedy series Lucky -- which I'm still mad at FX for cancelling), are fairly indistinguishable so far, ranging from the gruff ladykiller to the gruff chief to the gruff... other guy who's gruff.

But these are small complaints. I enjoyed the first episode a lot, and I only expect the series to get better. It's a great addition to the FX library, which is rivalling HBO in great original series on a non-broadcast network. The big networks better watch their asses; by playing it too safe, they're giving viewers like me less and less reason to visit the single-digit channels at all.

TV: What about Grape Ape?

The three-month free preview of certain premium package channels on DirecTV just expired, which means I must once again survive without VH1 Classic. And I don't think I can.

Oh, sweet, sweet VH1 Classic. Get this: it's a music video channel -- that plays music videos! No, I'm serious! (Music videos, for those of you who are under 25, and therefore may never have seen one, are short films built around a particular song, often featuring the song's artists pretending to sing, and, as often as not, buxom women in various stages of undress. And, if you've only seen music videos on TRL, here's the kicker -- actual music videos last the ENTIRE LENGTH of a song, and are NOT OBSCURED by fawning text messages from sub-literate dipshits with computer access in their detention facilities, and are ENTIRELY FREE of screaming idiots in Times Square superimposed over the screen! Hard to believe, isn't it?)

MTV was lost to fans of music videos a long, long time ago. If you want "reality" programming showcasing the most repugnant alleged human beings on the planet, if you want pranks performed by a B-list celebrity on C-list dupes, if you want "news" "documentaries" about breast implants and other real-life issues, as long as they involve tits, if you want millionaires rubbing your nose in your non-millionaire life by showing you their personal bowling alleys and movie theaters and 87 pimped-out Rolls Royces, if you want awards shows that can't even get the major winners to show up to the ceremony, hosted by anyone who once appeared on In Living Color who isn't Jim Carrey, if you want Gideon and Suchin Pak, for Christ's sake... then you want your MTV! If you want music videos, however -- or, even more specifically, non hip-hop music videos -- try checking in at about 3 AM, and maybe they'll throw a Creed bone your way.

The original VH1 is even worse. They rode a minor popularity wave for a while in the '90s, with non-video programming like Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video, but that eventually petered out, and rather than going back to showing the Video Hits that the VH in their name stands for, they went all-nostalgia, all the time. I Love the '80s! I Love the '70s! I Love the '80s Strikes Back! I Love the '90s! Even Best Week Ever, which attempts to manufacture nostalgia for last Thursday. And if it's not nostalgia, then it's crappy, crappy, crappy movies, like Grease 2 or -- and I still can't believe this one -- a heavily censored version of Showgirls. Which, truth be told, is almost as unintentionally hilarious as the original -- the fact that someone actually digitally added bras to all the topless women cracks me up.

MTV2, for the longest time, I thought was the answer to my music video quest. They're all about the music, right? Well, for all I know, they might very well have been -- up until the point that I actually started getting it. Then it turned into a rerun-dumping ground for MTV, broken up by four-hour blocks of hip-hop. Okay, I get it already: the kids love the hip-hop. But I'm pretty sure other music is still being made, check me if I'm wrong. Would it kill you to play a video of one of those songs?

But then there's VH1 Classic. Sweet, sweet VH1 Classic. I would gladly trade the dozens of channels which are devoted to people decorating other people's homes (by force, if necessary) for VH1 Classic. I would give up all 28 variations on the Discovery Channel, I would sacrifice at least 10 of the 12 sports stations, I'd even give them back UPN, if they would only give me my one music video channel that only plays music videos.

And when I tell you they play only music videos, I'm not screwing around: they don't even have commercials. At most, they break for a minute-long promo of something on VH1, or for a VJ to talk about Styx's current album, as though anyone gives a rat's ass about any Styx album more recent than 20 years ago. And then they get right back to playing a music video, all of it, all the way through, no announcer speaking over the beginning or end or anything. And then after that, they play another one. And another. Until you just want to weep for the beauty of it all.

The catch, of course, is that they're all older videos, at least five years old, I'd say, and usually more. The bonus is: no Creed! No Nelly! No Fred Durst! No Britney Spears! No Matchbox 20!

And again: I now have to learn to live without it. The free preview was wonderful, wonderful enough that I'd gladly pay for it -- if I only had to pay for that one channel. Instead, I would have to pay for a whole buttload of channels that I don't give a damn about, because DirecTV loves to screw you like that. "Why can't I pay a fraction of that price and get just the one channel?" I ask DirecTV. "Because sit down and shut up," they respond.

(This is why I don't get HBO. I can't just get the one HBO that has The Sopranos. I have to also pay for HBO2, and HBO West, and HBO East, and HBO Reykjavik, Iceland, and HBO Family, and HBO Sports, and HBO Comedy, and HBO All Fraggle Rock All the Time, and HBO Dance For Us, Clown, DANCE!!!)

So, in summary: crap.

Also, I don't get Boomerang anymore, either, which is okay, because I didn't watch it nearly as much as I thought I would, anyway. I guess my craving for Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat and Wally Gator and Magilla Gorilla wasn't as strong as I thought it was. Oh well.

TV: Emmy Nominations

A few of my takes on the 2004 Emmy nominations:

--Biggest oversight is Michael Chiklis for The Shield. I think it's the best show on television, and he's the best thing about it. I mean, how unfair is it that he gets dropped from last year's list, but Kiefer Sutherland remains? This is just an example of how, when something finally breaks into the awareness of the Emmy voters, it takes a miracle to dislodge it -- apparently, none of them realized 24 became a parody of itself this year (as if it weren't already one last year), just as none of them are willing to admit The West Wing's best days are way behind it now. But The Shield, despite Chiklis's surprising Emmy win in its first season, has never fully penetrated the Emmy voters' groupthink, probably because it's on a non-broadcast network that isn't HBO.

--Also, I'm grateful to see Arrested Development got the attention it deserved, but disappointed that Scrubs continues to be slighted (despite best editing and best writing noms this year). No John C. McGinley as supporting actor? That's just wrong.

--Sex and the City's popularity continues to baffle me, but at least this is the last year it can hog all those nominations. And good riddance to it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: HBO actually managed to create a show so bad that no amount of gratuitous nudity could make me watch it. And don't tell me it's because it's meant for women, and I just don't understand it. I understand a piece of crap when I see it. All those women read Bridges of Madison County, too -- doesn't mean it wasn't still a big steaming pile of horse crap.

--Matt LeBlanc: enjoy your acting nomination. It'll be your last.

--Joan of Arcadia's entry in the best drama category is a bit of a surprise, but maybe it shouldn't be. Emmy voters love that God fella! And Amber Tamblyn's nomination for best actress is amazing (but well-deserved), considering her -- and the show's -- youth.

--On the other hand -- Mariska Hargitay, for Law & Order: One of Those Damn Spin-Offs? Really? Are there that few deserving actresses working in TV these days?

--I wish I still had HBO. Sounds like I'm missing a lot of good stuff. I hope Deadwood comes out on DVD soon.

--Emmy voters, you've given an award to all four Will & Grace actors. You can stop nominating them now. Actually, you should've stopped before Debra Messing won. What was that all about??

--Even sadder than a nomination coming after a show's cancellation -- as with Bonnie Hunt (whom I love), or Futurama -- is a nomination coming after an actor's cancellation. Which is my morbid way of saying, I loved John Ritter and all, but giving him an Emmy nomination he didn't deserve isn't going to make anyone feel any better.

--I find a bitter kind of satisfaction in the fact that after all the hoopla over their respective finales, neither Friends nor Frasier were nominated as best comedy. If only I could say the same about that damn Sex and the City.