Plasma Pool

The New Adventures of Old Christine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s surprisingly but deservedly successful two-camera, nineties-redux sitcom, now halfway through its fourth season on current ratings behemoth CBS, constantly tackles political issues—especially those related to “family values”—but does so in a way that subsumes political contention beneath traditional, comfortable, two-camera sitcom plots. The series takes up and comments on political questions inveterately, but in a formal and familiar conventional-sitcom environment in which all antagonisms are represented as pressing problems for individual people. Even when the show’s political message is so obvious as to seem artless and tactless, that message is articulated in political terms for neither the audience nor the characters. If these characters are playing politics, we must say that it is a peculiarly personal politics. The particular problems they face are baldly political, yet the sphere of real-world political problems does not substantively concern them.

The speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 1681 poem “The Garden” explicitly exiles women from his garden, asserting that for Adam to have “live[d] in paradise alone” would have been “two paradises” “in one.” What need had Adam of a woman, he asks, ensconced in “a place so pure and sweet” as this “happy garden-state”—especially if the garden itself could provide Adam with a sexual foil?

Between the influence of received stereotypes and the restrictions of censors, gays who did not fit rigid, popularly assimilable molds had little place in nineties network comedy period. NBC’s programming, especially, suffered from this sort of stereotyping, culminating in the unabashedly stereotype-perpetuating, and thus user-friendly, Will & Grace. Now, fifteen years after Jerry’s outing, NBC’s offers us The Office’s Oscar Martinez, a gay member of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton’s three-person accounting department whose character debuts as ostensibly straight. Oscar is revolutionary in network TV comedy not because he defies outmoded stereotypes, which he does, but because his homosexuality—along with what his culturally insensitive boss, Michael Scott, terms his “Mexicanicity”—is kept consistently incidental to his character.

Southland Tales isn’t a film. It’s a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn’t make a movie this bad. That it has moments of searing brilliance is no excuse. Moments like these demand and deserve better movies.

Having sex with as many attractive women as possible is the primary goal of George Findlay, the central character in Ken Finkleman’s stellar CBC comedy The Newsroom (1996-2005). In the series pilot, “The Walking Shoe Incident,” Kris the research assistant (Lisa Ryder) reluctantly confesses to George (the news director, played by Finkleman) that she’s had so much difficulty “learning the computer” that she’s given up trying. “Learning the computer” was important even in 1996—especially in a wired environment like a news station. But George hired Kris to run his personal errands, accompany him skiing, and fuck him. None of these require digital expertise, so he replies, “Oh, well forget that! You know, the whole thing with computers and the internet, you know, who cares! I don’t care. Really. You’re doing great!” George doesn’t have anything against the internet. He would surely prefer that Kris become facile with it. But he’s far more concerned about her facility with fellatio, so he dismisses the internet as irrelevant for his purposes. It is not useful to him.