PLAYBOY'S out, WHITNEY'S in, We All Lose

For a kid with more experience on the TV side of entertainment, it’s comical that I hate television.

Not the art of it no; I grew up on TV, needed it to go to sleep. The sounds of silence were frightening and if I was still awake as my sleep timer started counting down I’d pop up, frantically jockeying for another half hour, please, Jesus, don’t leave me alone with silence and darkness.

I associated wholesome fun with THE DICK VAN DYCK SHOW before Mary Tyler Moore left to have her own melancholy, successful (and true to her time) ditty to spinsterhood. Al Bundy has been my idea of what a good, tortured husband should be during my courtship and now the early years of my marriage. “All of our failures and disappointments [paraphrasing] are shared and I couldn’t imagine going on without you” or “I haven’t asked for much and God knows I’ve gotten it” as well as the legendary hooter-filled sessions at the Nudie Bar.

I moved to California because of BAYWATCH and the original BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 (and GLEAMING THE CUBE but that’s neither here nor there). So maybe when I say I hate TV it's because everything I loved about it – the balls and the trash, the campy, low-grade kitsch and the raunchiness has been ironed out, erased by desire to cater to an increasingly prudish public and the fact that the TV network development game is more afraid of pissing people off than actually making a viable, funny new statement (MODERN FAMILY excepted).

To start off, I love women and believe in equality as much as the next person. But even DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES had balls. Women sleeping with high schoolers, Stepford murders and suicides, hot middle-aged women boiling with repressed passion paired with dashing (and/or douchey) men. But perhaps that age is all past.

I’m not including cable in this because it seems that all the good TV has migrated there and not just male voices, either. MAD MEN has old-fashioned whiskey-filled cheating, derogatory playboys but it also shows the early steps of feminism and even more, shows how far the world has come from swinging dick dinosaurs – and brings up the question of whether those good old days were better or worse (my wife, for one, would appreciate a society in which I didn’t take pride in the fact that she supports me financially). Showtime has nothing but strong, dynamic women – funny without pulling the punches. And of course there’s Dee from IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY – God Bless Dee’s crazy strength, the girl playing with the boys and beating at their own depraved games.

Where does this rant come from? From the recent pick-up of the dreadfully unfunny comedy WHITNEY and the cancellation of the misdirected PLAYBOY CLUB.

First off, PLAYBOY CLUB – Hef, how the fuck did you let this happen? They made a TV series about your legendary clubs – the birthplace of free-wheelling sexual liberation – and there’s no sex. What the fuck? Why do we care about a bunch of girls in weird rabbit outfits except as a universal icon of the sexual revolution? Setting a show in the PLAYBOY CLUB without sex would be like setting a TV show in Beverly Hills without rich people. There’s no reason and that’s the problem. The writers, the development execs, everybody put together a TV show set in the Playboy club that could be set in a fucking P.F. Chang’s in Mission Viejo. And why did they do this? Because they’re scared to death of what ma and pa in Middle America will think about network TV full of sexuality, of edginess. Even the murder scene was so subdued that Al Bundy’s rematch against Bubba Smith (look it up) looked much more tense by comparison.  No wonder nobody watched – I find my wife’s J. Crew catalogs more titillating. And why the fuck would you watch a show about THE PLAYBOY CLUB other than to be titillated?

On the other hand we have WHITNEY, one of the least funny comedians ever to take up a chair on  CHELSEA LATELY who somehow convinced people to watch her show and to even give it a pick up 2 episodes in. The crux of her comedy is in her funny, witty observations of co-habitation – and the comedy is so subdued and childish that the laugh track makes me feel angry. Oh wow, she and her boyfriend don’t know how to shower together. Oh, she’s so anorexic and severely-featured and so forward-thinking. Here’s the key to WHITNEY – it presents itself as cutting edge and “raunchy” when really it’s as clean as an episode of FRIENDS (which, unfortunately, does not hold up – loved it when it was on but try watching it now and you’ll find yourself wondering “Can these spoiled brats BE any more annoying?”). But somehow nobody has noticed.

Perhaps we should blame THE SIMPSONS. Once they figured out they could get away with anything in animated comedy, all the live-action network stuff decided to play it safe. No more dysfunctional families, everybody loves each other, everybody’s a good guy, nobody degrades or insults any person, race, gender, sexuality, disease, animal, geographical location, Facebook group, student union club, so on.

TV started as a way to get us the news of the times. To show us how everybody else is living. But that changed. What they call “reality” is little more than an elaborate human version of a rat's “elevated plus maze” experiment. And what they call “entertainment” is a clipped hawk told to pretend to fly with blinders on to double ensure no actual airborne action ever occurs. It was originally supposed to be a reflection of the times or a reflection of another contrasted against our own. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN reflected the growing brokenness of society just as DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES did many years later. BAYWATCH represented the unabashed embrace of schmaltz and big-breasted sexuality that defined the 90’s. MURDER SHE WROTE told old people they could still contribute to society (which, while not a favorite of mine, I can respect it – and it’s one of the top grossing shows of all time).

What the fuck did PLAYBOY CLUB tell us – that the legendary Playboy clubs in the 60’s were full of lots of dispassioned talk and looked like the security control room in the Josh Duhamel / James Caan show LAS VEGAS but without that show's eye-catching sexuality? Good riddance to this crap and shame on you, Hef.

But what the fuck does WHITNEY tell us – that it’s weird, clean fun living with somebody of the opposite sex and that in this age, where knowledge and experience have never been more accessible, twenty-and-thirty-somethings have reverted to the communication, survival, and social knowledge previous generations picked up their second year of high-school? In one of her billboards, she proudly proclaims “Whoever invented morning sex didn’t think of morning breath.” No Whitney, that’s not it. Whoever invented morning sex was grown up enough to realize people can have sex without kissing. Apparently she and her boytoy don’t know any position other than missionary. Which explains why her jokes sound like something a 5^th grade girl would write when dared by her friends to “get raunchy”.  But what does that say for the development execs, writers, and producers who shepherd this crap through 8 months of planning?

Network television has always been little more than a way to get people to watch commercials. And as the consumers of said commercials, we need to demand more than this canned crap they’re trying to pass off as network TV.Otherwise, the only people responsible for the "lack of advertiser money" and dropping viewership will be their own conservative, unimaginative selves.

- Ryan