2009, as seen on TV Posted by Nancy Franklin

December 9, 2009
2009, as seen on TV Posted by Nancy Franklin

This was quite a year for reality TV, in all its fake-real, hard-to-tell-how-real, and really real realness. The world provided us with more than enough drama, comedy, tragedy, and farce, and most of it was televised. Here are some of the people and events that stood out:

President Obama's Inauguration

I watched it on TV, regretting that I hadn't gone to Washington to be part of the huge crowd that cold day in January. Of course, if I'd been there in person I wouldn't have seen, up close—or at all—the OMG moment when Chief Justice Roberts won the Unfortunate Utterance trophy, which is awarded to those who make an embarrassing mistake in front of an unimaginable number of people. Anything under five hundred million doesn't count. England has had the trophy for almost thirty years, since Lady Diana Spencer got the Prince of Wales's name wrong—it's Charles Philip Arthur George—when she recited her vows at their wedding. At the inauguration, Roberts flubbed the oath of office, causing Obama to flub it in turn. To satisfy those who wondered if Obama wasn't really President if he hadn't spoken the oath correctly, the ritual was repeated, indoors, the next day, and began with Joe Biden making a joke about Roberts's flub, to the obvious disapproval of President, or President-ish Obama, insuring that the Unfortunate Utterance trophy wouldn't be leaving the country anytime soon.

A well-known political commentator sent an e-mail to a friend about my piece, which was passed along to me, saying that he was there that day, "in the thick of the crowd, surrounded by civilians" and felt that he missed the "collective national experience" of the occasion because he hadn't watched it on TV. I understand that, but when I think about that day, the phrase "I watched it on TV" sounds so much less thrilling than "I was there."

Don Hewitt and Walter Cronkite

The man who did more than any other to shape television news and the man who did more than any other to shape viewers' expectations of television news died a month apart this summer. Don Hewitt, a CBS News producer and director since the late nineteen-forties, could take some credit for the election of John F. Kennedy, Jr., in 1960—he produced the Nixon-Kennedy TV debates that year, the first televised Presidential debates. It's now a well-learned lesson by all prospective candidates for office that you should never let 'em see you sweat, as Nixon did on television. Hewitt says that Kennedy, who was tanned from campaigning in California, didn't need makeup and turned down the producers' professional services; Nixon, who was tired-looking that day, did, too, relying just on concealer to cover his five-o-clock shadow, a product provided by his own camp. Kennedy, the tanned, handsome, relaxed man in the dark suit, did well that night; Nixon, the sweating, pasty, tense man in the ill-fitting light suit, did not. "That election turned on makeup," Hewitt later said. (He emphasized that an election shouldn't turn on makeup, just that this one did.) The other achievement of his career is the creation of "60 Minutes." Hewitt, who was himself a charming raconteur, said many times over that his approach to his job was simple: "Tell me a story." (In fact, he used that phrase as a title for one of his books.) The legacy of his gift for entertaining storytelling is a mixed one; ever since Hewitt concocted the smooth blender drink of Vladimir Horowitz mixed with corporate cover-ups and foreign dictators, it has become ever easier for news producers to get our attention, and ever harder for them to keep it.

Walter Cronkite was the first person have the word "anchorman" attached to him, and he struck most viewers as being rock solid, trustworthy, reliable, genuinely good. Nothing happened in his long career to upset that notion, and that speaks to his professionalism as much as do the handful of career highlights that were shown (endlessly) after his death. The two clips played most often, of Cronkite announcing, with visible emotion, the death of President Kennedy, and enthusiastically reacting to the moon landing in 1969 ("Oh, boy," he said, shaking his head and smiling), illustrated his appeal: he was a consummate adult, and knew what he was about, and was fully present on camera. A year before the moon landing, Cronkite gave his assessment of the war in Vietnam. He had returned from a reporting trip there, and at the end of his evening broadcast—after first acknowledging that his analysis was "speculative, personal, subjective"—he delivered a carefully thought out, well written speech, a speech that clearly gave him no pleasure: "To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion…. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." He later said it was his proudest moment.

Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos

On December 21st, the day before her sixty-fourth birthday, Diane Sawyer will take over as the anchor of "ABC World News." Get ready for all the stories saying that what makes it a big deal is that it isn't a big deal. It's true, in a way—only three years after Katie Couric became the first woman anchor, it's not news that now two of out of three network-news anchors are women. The non-newsworthiness may just be an indicator that the job isn't seen as being as prestigious as it used to be, and perhaps networks no longer consider their anchorperson to be the face of the network, a cornerstone of its identity. (Brian Williams, however, is key to NBC's identity, because he's a genuine star, and the network sure needs one. Williams moves from news reporting to comedy to talk shows and back again with George Clooney-like nimbleness, confidence, and charming self-deprecation, and while that kind of approach to a job can raise questions, there's certainly no question that it extends his brand and the network's as well.) Get ready also for no one to make a big deal out of the fact that Sawyer was an aide to Richard Nixon, both when he was in the White House and afterward, when he was writing his memoirs, and that she helped him prepare for his interviews with David Frost in 1977.

Sawyer's departure from "Good Morning America" leaves a big hole, and ABC has given George Stephanopoulos the chance to fill it. Stephanopoulos, of course, has political roots as well, having made his name as a key aide to Bill Clinton during his first Presidential campaign and then in the White House. He left after Clinton was elected the second time, and cunningly capitalized on his experience by publishing a memoir while Clinton was still in office. That led eventually to his plum position as the host of ABC's Sunday-morning political talk show "This Week." Moving to "Good Morning America" looks like a bad idea for Stephanopoulos and a bad idea for ABC. Which means that it will probably happen.

Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Jeff Zucker

NBC's pinheaded, business-minded decision to give Jay Leno the 10 P.M. slot five nights a week was one of the notable events of last year. This year, the fruits of that decision arrived, and they weren't tasty. The message that NBC sent out regarding the success of the variety show was that it didn't need the show to do that well. Woo-hoo! Let's hear it for low expectations! Leno's show seems desperate and uninspired, and the show is just no fun. The network sacrificed Jay Leno in order to keep Conan O'Brien, who took over as the host of "The Tonight Show" this year. O'Brien's tenure has not gone particularly well, either.

It's this kind of failure of leadership and imagination—and there's so much more!—that has marked the tenure of Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal's president and C.E.O. Last week, it was announced that the deal for Comcast to take over a majority share of NBC Universal will go through; it's a thirty-billion-dollar deal, with much at stake. The leader of the new company will be J.Z. No, not Jay-Z—though he would probably do a pretty good job.

David Letterman

Last year in this space I declared my love for Letterman. Now, a couple of months after he revealed that he was the victim of an extortion attempt and acknowledged on the air that he had had sex with some of the women who have worked for him over the years, I'm left feeling not much of anything. It's fine for Letterman not to be the person I thought he was; I'm good with that. Nevertheless, I'm now almost uninterested in him, and there's probably no going back. I did tune in Thanksgiving week to see the annual pie-guessing segment he does with his mother, who's back home in Indiana, and I'll turn it on when he has a guest I want to see. But I don't turn it on anymore just to see him. That's not quite true; my inner creepy person turned the show on last Monday night to see how Letterman would handle the Tiger Woods story, which had echoes of his own story and was too big to ignore. Damn—it was a rerun. This week, Letterman was back with new shows, offering a "Top Ten Ways Tiger Woods Can Improve His Image"; looking over at Paul Schaffer, his bandleader, before reading the list, he said, "Maybe I'll learn a little something here myself." Among the items were "Change name from 'Tiger' to more adorable 'Puppy' " and "Fix this whole health-care mess." The No. 1 way for Tiger to improve his image was—drum roll, please—"Blame Letterman." Comedy—it ain't even a little pretty.

Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert

The Scottish lass of a certain age was not a TV phenomenon in this country as much as she was an Internet phenomenon. The video clip of her singing "I Dreamed a Dream" on "Britain's Got Talent" now has eighty million hits. In the clip, when Boyle says that she wants to be a professional singer, the camera goes to an audience member for a reaction shot. A young, dark-haired, heavily eye-linered woman duly grimaces and rolls her eyes in response to the frumpy lady's obvious delusions, then looks to the side at a friend in the audience, so that we see her full pitying, mocking face. That was before Boyle started singing and the cameras showed us the audience standing and clapping and cheering. But the camera never returned to that poor young woman, who had the misfortune to be caught expressing what everyone was thinking—in fact, she helps "sell" the clip as a narrative of how wrong we limited human beings can be sometimes. She's a pawn of the producers and editors, and now she's been watched more than eighty million times. Your parents were right: if you make that face, it'll stick.

The other second-place finisher in the news was Adam Lambert, who released an album the same day in November that Susan Boyle did and made the ritual media rounds. The "American Idol" runner-up, not the first gay contestant but the first to "do" anything gay, performed on the American Music Awards, on ABC, and went a little over the top, kissing a male dancer and mimicking oral sex. Then, on CBS's "Early Show," a replay of the kiss was fuzzed out (as was the oral-sex bit), as if this were 1909 and not 2009. Then ABC disinvited Lambert from Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show (sorry if I'm laughing at the idea that Kimmel's show upholds any standard other than mediocrity) and "Good Morning America," and a tentative booking on "New Year's Rockin' Eve" was scotched. No one knows exactly where the line is anymore when it comes to what you can say and show on TV, but, wherever it is, it's already been a crossed many times in recent years by headline-hungry heterosexuals acting in terrible taste. There's a word for CBS's and ABC's hot-potato treatment of Lambert, and it's either "hypocrisy" or "homophobia."

Tom DeLay on "Dancing with the Stars"

What was this, and why did it happen? I don't know; I just knew I didn't want to be part of it, so I didn't watch, missing, I'm sure, some important cultural grist for the mill. I missed Balloon Boy, too, but only because my TV set happened to be off for a few hours one afternoon. That'll teach me to leave the couch.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson's death, at the age of fifty, was shocking and yet, given what the world already knew of his weirdness behind closed doors, not completely surprising. We now know that it was almost inevitable, given the kind of medical "care" he was receiving for his sleep problems. (His death has been ruled a homicide, though no one has been held legally accountable yet.) The story broke not on TV but on the Internet, on TMZ.com, and the sleazy site was first to confirm Jackson's death. Most of what we saw on TV was from a helicopter—hours of driveways, entrances, and rooftops. The first sight of Jackson's body was when it was transferred from a helicopter to a van on the roof of a hospital. He was wrapped in a white sheet and seemed pathetically thin.

The tribute to him locked down a good part of Los Angeles and brought together his mega-dysfunctional family and some stars, but missing that day were two of Jackson's famous and longtime champions, Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross, who could never have imagined that she would outlive the little boy with the big smile, the sweet voice, and the happy feet, whom she discovered forty years ago. For the first time, the public got a real look at his three children, whose heads had almost always been covered with some sort of shroud or mask when they appeared in public. It's possible that the children will have a more normal life than they would have if they'd remained in their father's bizarre bubble.

Jon & Kate plus hate

As the only person I know who watched all of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" as it ran, and didn't have to scramble to catch up with them as the Pennsylvania couple—for reasons that no one will ever understand—became the most talked-about pair of splitsvillians in the country this year, I can be forgiven (can't I?) for writing about my interest in them here last year, declaring, after admitting that I wasn't even really sure why I watched the show, that "the lure of 'Jon & Kate Plus 8' is that their children are multiples—twin girls who are now eight years old, and sextuplets who are now four—and happen to be as cute as kittens, and that the parents are extremely articulate and entertaining about the challenges of dealing with a large family. They're also very clear about their aims as a family; there's such coherence to their lives (at least, as they appear on TV), even amid the nonstop activity, that watching the show is peculiarly relaxing. One's inclination to make judgments about such a procreatively in-your-face couple is in harmonious balance with one's admiration for how well they do the job they've taken on."

Yeah, I know: "such coherence to their lives," "admiration for how well they do the job they've taken on." The joke's on me. All that was true, though, as of last year, and the joke really was on the viewers. I wrote those words assuming that the parents would have the sense to end the show themselves when the younger kids entered kindergarten and took their place among the regular kids of the world—the ones who aren't followed around by cameras all day. The fact that Kate barked at Jon and that Jon took it, and seemed only occasionally to resent it, seemed pretty normal given that they had eight small children to deal with. Stuff has to get done, after all. The two of them had some chemistry together, and if it wasn't a sexual chemistry, that hardly distinguishes them many couples who only have two or three small children to deal with. And Kate really does have a screen presence. She appeared to be a person with good judgment, though even by last year there were signs that that wasn't the case. At a certain point, Jon seemed have made a decision to be a stay-at-home father, and Kate seemed to be travelling more in the service of one of the books that she'd produced about the family's life. They weren't really working, just living off their freaky situation, and more and more it was life in the freebie lane. The obvious, embarrassing phoniness was everywhere. The family moved into a gigantic house, and practically an entire episode was spent on Kate showily cleaning a disgusting fridge that the previous owners had left behind. You knew darn well that it was an act, and that as soon as the cameras stopped rolling, the fridge would be heading to the dump, its place to be taken by a brand new, and undoubtedly free, Sub-Zero.

The tabloid tumble the couple took this year needs no retelling, and I'm happy to say that the show is now off the air. I watched the last episode, and in it Kate expresses disappointment that the series is over. Weepily, she says that it's "too soon." "I feel like it's been taken from us, from me and the kids." Her sense of entitlement—which, carefully edited, is what makes her good TV—is now out of control. It should be noted that TLC, which I've called The Leering Channel, with such shows as "Addicted to Food," "I Eat 33,000 Calories a Day," "750 Pound Man," "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," "Mermaid Girl," and "Paralyzed and Pregnant," acted consistently amorally throughout the drama; it got drunk on the ratings and announced its intention to keep the show going as long as the couple wanted. It was Jon, the straying, jerky husband, who walked away and finally put an end to things. Now maybe the eight children have a chance of having the off-camera life that they deserve—if, that is, TLC reconsiders the show it's planning with just Kate and the kids.

Glenn Beck

Fox News hoses the country with the cherubic hatemonger's toxic waste every weekday at five, his books are on the bestseller lists, and he has a successful road show, taking aim at every aspect of the Obama Administration. He's a loudmouthed truth-twister, and sometimes he's worse. (He called Obama a racist a few months ago.)

I wrote about Beck last month, and now I've reconsidered my opinion of him and what he has to offer. I got a letter from a reader—not a letter, exactly, but my own piece torn from the issue and written on with black magic marker—that makes me realize how blind I've been. I don't know the reader's name or sex, only that the envelope was postmarked Little Rock. With the kind of tenderness that John Adams expressed in letters to his wife and the wit of Mark Twain, the reader wrote: "Hey Nancy Liberal ass holes like you ought to pay some attention to what Glenn Beck—as well as Rush Limbaugh and other right wing people have to say. People in Fly over country don't buy your kind of bullshit. You don't have a Fucking clue to how the real world works. Have a nice rest of the year idiot!"

Thanks, you, too! Too bad there was no return address—I could have told my dear reader that I myself have never used the term "flyover country," and that not only did I not I not fly over his country this year, I flew to it. That's right, I went to Arkansas. By choice. On vacation. I spent a week there, and went to Little Rock, Fayetteville, Eureka Springs, Fort Smith, and Hot Springs. So there. Also, there should be a comma before "idiot."

Oprah

Last month, Oprah Winfrey announced that she would end her talk show in 2011, and it will be fascinating to see what she does next. There's a cable network in the works—OWN, for the Oprah Winfrey Network—for one thing, and surely other enterprises will follow. Her good works will continue, but it's hard not to wonder whether her ability to inspire and move people will ever be quite the same. This is, after all, the woman who helped elect Barack Obama President. There's now an opening for "the next Oprah," the leading candidate supposedly being Ellen DeGeneres. But come on—there won't be a next Oprah, not ever.

One aspect of Winfrey's departure, sad to say, illustrates the size of her ego. She said that the date of her last show would be September 9, 2011, the day after its twenty-fifth anniversary. How neat, and how sweet—except that it's somewhere between a regrettable oversight and major gaffe to have an attention-getting celebration for yourself just two days before the tenth anniversary of September 11th. It's also avoidable. The last show is still more than a year and half away, and there's plenty of time for Winfrey to move it to a different week. I hope she does.
2009, as seen on TV: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/2009-as-seen-on-tv.html
http://snipurl.com/tv5vr