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Last night's season finale of 30 Rock wasn't the best episode
of the season—the A and B plots didn't hang together especially
well—but the episode provided some of the best lines of the year. The
Liz Lemon plot revolved around... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Kerry just noted the problems with the "poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative"; I've got issues with another recession story line, the Americans-want-to-be-comforted-by-crappy-entertainment-now-that-we're-poor meme. It's in full effect in Alessandra Stanley's piece about CBS's Rules of Engagement, a supremely middling sitcom that, after a long hiatus, begins airing on CBS tonight. In the piece, Stanley contrasts "new economy shows" like 30 Rock, which continue to bomb in the ratings, with successful "Old-economy hits" like Two and a Half Men. She says our preference for the latter "suggests that nowadays network viewers prefer comforting comedy to high-wire satire." (Successful satire The Office does not figure into her formulation.)
My problem with this assertion has to do with that nowadays. 30 Rock has been bombing in the ratings since 2006, when most Americans still thought the value of their house could only go up, up, up. Meanwhile, the admittedly execrable Two and Half Men has been the most popular sitcom in America since 2005. In other words, it's not just nowadays that Americans have preferred the "comforting comedy" of Two and a Half to the "high-wire satire" of 30 Rock—it's most days. So has the recession really pushed Americans to rediscover lame sitcoms? Or has it just given journalists a specious way to explain our bad taste?
Another Times piece, about the resurgent movie business (ticket sales are up 17.5 percent this year—it's not that we aren't consuming more entertainment in this recession, it's that what we're consuming is just as crappy, or just as quality, as always), argues, "Helping feed the surge [in box office] is the mix of movies. [They] have been more audience-friendly in recent months as the studios have tried to adjust after the lackluster sales of more somber and serious films."
In other words, more people are going to the movies because the films are not somber and serious. Well, it's January and February, historically the season for Hollywood's least promising projects—people willing to take in a thoughtful movie couldn't find one at the multiplex. If they could, can the Times really be sure they wouldn't go? Last year's biggest film, The Dark Knight, was hardly light and peppy. Next weekend's Watchmen is expected to do huge business, but given that it deals with an enormous weapon going off in New York City*, "somber and serious" sounds just about right. If it succeeds, I wonder how many articles will suggest we "embraced" it because it "speaks to our troubled times."
*Correction, March 3, 2009: The original version of this post incorrectly described the weapon that goes off in Watchmen as a nuclear bomb.
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At the beginning of this year, Tropicana redesigned its packaging, replacing its decades old logo—the highly identifiable straw-impaled orange—with an artistically framed cup of juice and a sleek, vitaminwater-esque aesthetic. Orange juice drinkers and grocery store goers the country over were aghast, universally agreeing that that the makeover sucked, badly. Customers were so horrified that they complained to Tropicana directly, telling the company, according to the Times, that the new packaging was "'ugly' or ‘stupid,' and resembled ‘a generic bargain brand' or a ‘store brand.' "
Tropicana, heeding the advice of its "most loyal consumers" and recognizing that it had "underestimated the deep emotional bond" between juice drinkers and juice containers, decided to trash the new look and return to the old favorite. Yay! Victory for the people! They really told that Tropicana how to ... sell juice to them better?
The new packaging does stink and I'm glad to see it go, but there's something unsettling about consumers getting together to complain about a company's crappy ad campaign—no one should care this much about something created expressly to manipulate them. Beloved packaging is, it turns out, just like a beloved TV show: Some people will sign petitions, send letters and make phone calls to save them both. It renders the standard complaints about product placement incredibly quaint—how can anyone get aggravated when a show like 30 Rock maybe pushes McFlurries to its audience, when, in all likelihood, a certain segment of that audience would happily advise McDonald's on the best way to sell said ice cream, especially if the company was doing it wrong?
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I'm firmly in the "Tina Fey can do no wrong" camp, and while her acceptance speech was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise snoozy and self-congratulatory Golden Globes, it always strikes me how uncomfortable she is when embracing accolades. When she accepted her Emmy last year, Fey said, "I thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities." Then last night upon receiving her second Golden Globe for best actress, she said, "If you ever start to feel too good about yourself they have this thing called the Internet and you can find a lot of people there who don’t like you.”
I'm well aware that self-deprecation is pivotal to Tina Fey's humor, and that's what makes her so relatable to so many women. Though I may be making too much of this, I wonder if a man in her position would always publicly downplay his own talent. Last night, Tina allowed Tracy Morgan to make a speech when 30 Rock won for best comedy for the second year in a row. Again, that was one of the funniest and best parts of an otherwise mind-numbing three hours, but if "Lorney Mikes" had been the executive producer, writer, and director of the show, would he have let Tracy make that speech? Is it more just Tina Fey's personality to shy away from the overwhelming press attention she's been receiving in the past few months? Is she savvy enough to know that America may be experiencing Tina Feytigue and so she's backing off so we don't get sick of her? Or does it have to do with her gender?
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Noreen, I haven't read the Vanity Fair profile of my girl crush Tina Fey yet—maybe it makes me a new-media traitor, but I like my Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and other long-form journalism best when I can read it on paper instead of my computer screen. With that caveat, I do think that Tina Fey herself is acutely aware of and conflicted about her babification. 30 Rock regularly addresses how women try to look right for their jobs, whether it's in politics or TV. In one episode, Alec Baldwin's character tells his congresswoman girlfriend, who confessed that reconstructive surgery after a bizarre accident left her "much better-looking," that he "thought she made love like an ugly girl. So present, so grateful." One story line in Season 2 addresses how a lead actress' weight gain will affect her career, with Baldwin's corporate exec character advising, "She needs to lose 30 pounds or gain 60. Nothing else has a place in television." (He gets all the best "so-wrong-but-so-funny" lines ... I hope you'll add me to your quote-swapping list, Noreen!)
Even more fascinating in 30 Rock is how Fey portrays herself. Her character, Liz Lemon, is mocked by her superiors and subordinates for her clothes (her shoes are called "bi-curious," her favorite necklace is a broken rape whistle, her date-night dress makes her friend think she's headed to a funeral), her poor social skills, and her body. ("Are you finally going on a diet?" someone asks her in one episode.) It seems that Fey might have become a hottie, but she still writes like she's the awkward girl in the ugly dress. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Jezebel's Jessica, who has argued that "Tina Fey's self-deprecation is good for women," but I do like to see the two sides of Fey battling on-screen—her relatively new good looks and the lingering sharp wit and bitterness cultivated not necessarily by being ugly, which I don't think she was, but by being a bit different, a big awkward, a bit uncomfortable.
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