A Taste of GCB

It’s only makes sense that ABC would try to find a series to fill the void that the end of Desperate Housewives is going create in its Sunday night schedule. That show was a ratings juggernaut for its first couple years, maintained a healthy audience over the next few, but has at this point pretty much fallen out of the Top 20. Given that the series lost a great deal of its initial edge and creative steam, that should come as no surprise, but what if the net could concoct something as juicy and fun to watch as Housewives was back in its heyday?

GCB, which sounds like a chain of health food stores, is an acronym for Good Christian Bitches, the title of the bestselling book by Kim Gatlin, upon which the series is based, and the sooner we all forget the sanitized placeholder title Good Christian Belles, which ABC had some time ago considered using, the better. Is it a terrible move to have reduced the profane into something squeaky clean and network TV safe? Hasn’t ABC simply done what fans gabbing on internet message boards will do within hours of the show’s premiere, anyway?

After her Ponzi-scheming husband is killed in a fiery crash (blowjob interruptus, of course), Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb) must move back to Dallas with her two teenage children, and in with her bible-thumping socialite mother, Gigi (Annie Potts, playing yet another version of the same woman she’s been exploring for years). Gigi still lives in the same community she raised Amanda in, and her neighbors are the same girls her daughter tormented in high school 20 years ago. Though Amanda has changed, ladies like Carlene Cockburn (Kristin Chenoweth) and Cricket Caruth-Reilly (Miriam Shor) hold some serious grudges against her, and the new life she’s attempting to carve for herself and her children will be anything but a hayride.

The overt subtext of the series involves heaping loads of hypocrisy, frequently of the religious kind. While the “bitches” attend church every Sunday, their actions are all too often awfully un-Christian. Do unto others takes a backseat to doo-doo onto others, and Carlene is the clear ringleader. The characters’ antics are so over the top it seems unlikely that anyone could take the goings-on too seriously, but then the writers don’t seem to have taken into account (or perhaps they simply don’t care) how sensitive half of the country might be to the show’s repeated condemnation of the double standards of church-going folk.

Part of the key to the success of Housewives was in its bleached approach; the only thing offensive about that show was that it wasn’t even remotely offensive. It was a series that everyone could like. That isn’t the case with GCB, which potentially satirizes a rather large and influential portion of the country. “Potentially” because you never know where viewers will draw the line between seeing themselves and insisting “that’s nothing like me.” It’s anyone’s guess how the religious right is going to react to the show, but I’ll venture out on a limb and say it’s not something they’re going to embrace.

Yet the series is hell-bent on being liked, and as long as you don’t live in Highland Park, the affluent Dallas suburb GCB is lampooning, maybe it won’t be so offensive after all. Tall, tan, and athletic blonde Bibb is an ideal lead for GCB, looking identical to so many women I’ve known throughout the nearly 25 years I’ve lived in Texas. Though the supporting players often come off cartoonish, Amanda is grounded in a reality, and she’s such a thoroughly affable lead, it’s difficult to even imagine her as the high school bitch everyone else knows her as. When roadblocks are put in the way of her career, she sees no shame in getting a job at a fictionalized version of Hooters, despite the fact the Gigi is well enough off to take care of the entire family. When a mystery donor sends her a truckload full of expensive, designer clothing, she sends it all back.

Chenoweth chews every bit of scenery she can get her teeth on, and even her infamous vocals play a sizable role, as she’s a prominent member of the church choir. Carlene commits some pretty loathsome acts, yet given that she was, essentially, bullied by Amanda in high school, you have to sympathize with her on a certain level. Indeed, this is a series about what happens when the bullied strike back, only we’re supposed to side with the bully, which is quite the daring angle to take in this political climate.

On the flip side there’s Jennifer Aspen’s Sharon Peacham, the former high school beauty, now overweight and insecure, and a true grotesque. She’s severely underwritten, and the butt of one too many of the same kind of jokes over the course of the first two episodes. Shor’s Cricket doesn’t fare much better in the pilot, but the second episode reveals something decidedly more complex about her, and she just may be the character to watch over the long haul (and as an unrecognized treasure, Shor certainly deserves it). Rounding out the main cast is Marisol Nichols as Heather Cruz, a woman caught between Amanda and Carlene. GCB doesn’t yet know exactly what it wants to do with her character, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at this early stage of the game. However, by the end of this mid-season run, we really need to see where all of these people are coming from and have a vague idea of where they might be going.   

GCB is the kind of TV programming that snobs like me go into wanting to dislike, and yet cannot because the show, by prime time network standards, is taking some major risks, and also because, well, it’s just so damn much fun, much of which is due to sharp dialogue such as “Why would anyone leave Texas for southern California? I mean, we’ve got the same weather without the liberals.” The show is far from perfect, and maybe it never will be, because of what it is, where it is, and when it plays, but it gets far more right than wrong, which quite frankly, isn’t something I’d have expected from an ABC Sunday night series at this stage of the scheduling and producing game. 

Desperate Housewives: The Complete Fifth Season

It may have been a bad idea to kick off the fifth season of Desperate Housewives with a nasty car accident, because in a lot of ways that’s exactly what the season ended up being. Yet, like any such mishap, it becomes near impossible to look away from. In re-watching the season on DVD, it didn’t seem quite the catastrophe it did upon broadcast, yet I couldn’t get away from the feeling that the show has seen far better days, which is a shame, because the last two seasons were of very high quality. But gone is any real sense of pathos, and the biting humor which has long since been a trademark of the show also appears to have been lost in the shuffle. The fifth season just isn’t as engaging or funny as most everything that came before it, and the characters, which are the core of the show, have ceased to be likable people. In one episode, a character demands her child to fall to the ground while riding his bike so that his father won’t be offended that he learned to ride without his dad’s help. The kid ends up going to the hospital. Yeah, I didn’t find it funny, either. In another episode, a character invades her child’s privacy by posing as a girl on a MySpace-type website and clandestinely woos the kid with poetry. It lacks taste, class, and ends up being just plain creepy.

Read the rest of this DVD review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Desperate Housewives: Season Four

Desperate Housewives is a show that remains so hopelessly square that I’m befuddled by the fact the Parents Television Council continues to keep it high on their list of shows that rampantly promote evil and should never been seen by decent folk. In one episode, Lynette (Felicity Huffman), coping with cancer, is unknowingly dosed by her mother (Polly Bergen) with some pot brownies to help her deal with the pain. She takes the plate over to a charades party where basically the entire adult cast of the show is assembled, and proceeds to get progressively stoned. Just as the other various characters are about to unwittingly partake, dramatic developments interfere with what could have been an arguably hilarious scenario: the entire cast baked and playing charades. Why not take the risk and see what happens? Because Housewives just isn’t a daring enough program to do something that wouldn’t even be all that daring. Further, the brownies are treated as if they were laced with crack cocaine. This is a tame show. In another episode, a string of characters may or may not be passing an STD between them; the STD in question is – wait for it – crabs. When was the last time anyone in TV or film got crabs? Only this show, which so timelessly exists in its weird little bubble, would dare to play the crab card.

Find out if the rest of this DVD review is just as crabby by clicking here to visit Bullz-Eye.

Desperate Housewives - Season Three

After a fairly lackluster Season Two, Desperate Housewives creator and showrunner Marc Cherry must’ve known that the third season of his hit series needed to kick some serious suburban hiney.

Cherry’s ace in hole comes in the unlikely form of dentist Orson Hodge (Kyle MacLachlan). Hodge was initially introduced toward the end of Season Two, where the guy lurked in the shadows and, in the finale, ran over Mike Delfino (James Denton), plunging the hunky plumber into a coma. MacLachlan returns with full-time cast member status in Season Three, and Orson quickly proposes to and marries Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross). But when it’s revealed that Orson may have murdered his first wife, the union gets off to a shaky start.

Read the rest of the breakdown over at Bullz-Eye.

"Evil" Longoria? I think not...

A recent Allure magazine interview with Eva Longoria resulted in an insane amount of negative publicity for the actress. Funny thing is, anyone who actually read the piece would know that much hay was made out of nothing and that the context of it all was changed thanks to the AP. (I have read the Allure article and lived to comment on it.)

Last week, Jeanne interviewed Longoria and gave her the opportunity to comment on everything that's been spread throughout the media in regards to the Allure article (click on this text to read the interview).

I've never met Longoria, but near as I can tell she's a decent lady who's making good use of her 15 minutes and trying to have some fun along the way. What struck me as noteworthy about Jeanne's interview was Eva's assertion that she frankly doesn't care what's printed in any other rag - but when it comes to the city in which she's chosen to reside, she's sensitive to what is said (the E-N reprinted some of the AP nonsense). It's not just the E-N either, I rarely hear anybody say anything nice about her, and near as I can tell, these opinions are always based on gossip and hearsay. I've read a fair amount of the hate mail JJ receives about Eva, and much of it's really ugly. (I will grant that people are more likely to write in with criticism than compliments.)

I'd like someone to explain to me the root of San Antonio's apparent dislike for this woman. Is it because she dates Tony Parker? Is it because she's a latina who's comfortable and aggressive with her sexuality? Is it because people in this town mistakenly believe that she plays herself on TV as opposed to a character?

Don't hate her because she's beautiful folks. I feel for the lady, because were I in her position, god knows what kind of inflammatory bullshit I'd spout that the locals would absolutely abhor. I'd be like Frankenstein's monster with the mob of angry, torch-wielding villagers chasing me to the top of the hill. (Good thing we're short on windmills in these parts.)

San Antonio often times appears to have some very backwards notions when it comes to celebrity. We revel in the fact that the Spurs are "golden boys", but it's realistically only a matter of time until one of them slips up and makes a mistake and the city's going to go apeshit as if it's some kind of crime to be human. Eva Longoria puts forth some very human opinions time and again in the media, and people want to string her up for it, which is unfortunate and shallow. For a city that purports to be this downhome, welcoming, tolerant metropolis, the locals seem to be awfully judgmental when it comes to how other people choose to live their lives. What the city should do is stand behind the people who put us on the map, through thick and thin. If Eva Longoria commits some kind of triple homocide, I won't hold people to that standard, but if she talks about a Brazilian wax in an interview, geez, cut the dame some slack, fer chrissakes.

And then everybody scratches their heads, wondering why the rest of the country views us as a bunch of stupid redneck yokels.

I can understand not liking Desperate Housewives, but that shouldn't equate to disliking Eva Longoria. (I'm not a huge McDonalds fan, but I don't hold it against the girl working behind the counter.) I watch the show weekly because JJ watches it. It's by no means great TV, however, it does a decent job of entertaining for an hour. Like almost every other soap opera ever created, it works on a level of instant gratification. Once you've seen it, no amount of rewatching will provide new insight. It's the kind of show I can easily view every week and enjoy, and yet I'd never sit through the DVD box set for a second helping; in many ways Desperate Housewives ~is~ the McDonalds of TV shows.

Call me silly, but I think it's kinda cool that this woman has chosen to live in S.A. You gotta look at these things with some perspective - I mean, someone like this could take up residence here.