Fallon No Longer This Creepy

By Blake Townsley

Howdy folks, and welcome to the weekend. The more astute among my readers will notice that the heat of summer has brought a more irregular schedule to these musings on pop culture, which is a shame because there’s a lot to talk about lately. Let’s dive in, shall we?

I was going to start off with a discussion of Lindsay Lohan’s jail stint, or Mel Gibson’s audio recordings, but it seems like a shame to talk about the mentally infirm in such a public forum. Besides, I’m sure you guys are enjoying the break from all things Lohan as much as I am. If only it could last the full 90 days. No, we’ll be discussing her again soon enough when the post-jail interviews start, and the downward spiral resumes its march towards full frontal gratuitous nudity that’s too sad to enjoy. It’s gonna be Anna Nicole Smith all over again, minus the kids and the bajillion year-old oil geezer. So what’s next on the list if we’re trying to keep it light and Lohan-free? One of the topics I was gonna discuss was which Disney child star is going to end up in jail next, but that skirts the Lohan prohibition, and the answer  is too obvious for an entire posting.
Joe Jonas, I’m looking at you.

Nah, that stuff’s too negative. I’ve been in an irrationally exuberant mood this week, so let’s talk about something positive for once.  How about a discussion on how good the Jimmy Fallon Show has been for the last two or three months? That’s got a nice story to it, bunch of super talented people working on the show, Fallon himself and the incomparable Roots as the house band. But based on the reaction this subject has gotten among my friends when I bring it up, not many of you are watching any more, if you ever were.  I will admit the show started out on a discordant note, with Jimmy visibly nervous for much of the first two months. The nerves showed up during the monologue, but were most evident in Jimmy’s interviewing style, which could easily be described as “below-average first date conversation.” There was no rhythm to the interviews, with each person trying so hard to impress the other one that conversations didn’t have flow well at all. Jimmy frequently booked guests that he knew from his days at Saturday Night Live, which too easily provided the “Remember that time at SNL?” crutch. A conversational tic that quickly grew tiresome night after night.

So what’s changed? Well, in the case of The Roots, not a damn thing, which is perfectly fine since they were one of the only things making the show watchable for the first year. Watching the show is like getting a free mini-Roots concert every night, with the added bonus of seeing how funny the guys in the band really are. From appearances in sketches, to conversations during the monologue, and especially the choices of walkout music for guests, the Roots have proven to be an invaluable addition to the overall comedic tone of the show. And this is before discussing how awesome it is to see them back up random musical guests (Christopher Cross? Rashida Jones and Jimmy Fallon singing “Holiday Road”??!) and have ridiculously talented artists sit in with them like Kaki King, Taj Mahal, Ice Cube, Talib Kweli et al.

But seriously, what’s changed? OK, I’ll get to the point. The most important thing that’s changed is simply the amount of repetitions that Fallon has gotten. It may seem like the ability to host a late show is either there, or not. I mean, come on, Jay Leno’s had the most successful show for fifteen years now; it can’t be that hard, right? And Conan’s show after Leno was pure genius, right? Fallon just didn’t appear to have the chops a year ago, and most people wrote him off as not up to the task.

But what most people used to tuning into Conan’s Late Show and receiving the funny don’t remember the early years of Conan’s show. The story should sound familiar, a young guy handpicked by Lorne Michaels to host, but he really struggled finding his tone out of the gates, and people tuned it out, claiming it was hard to watch and unfunny.  Fast forward almost twenty years and Conan is a maligned genius, right? But even Conan’s transition to the Tonight Show proves the point I’m trying to make, which is that doing these shows well takes time and repetitions. Even if you tune in sporadically, you can tell when a host and supporting cast have been doing a show for a while. There’s a confidence and comfort in the presentation, and a flow and history to the jokes. Loyal viewers are rewarded with sharing the inside jokes that become themes almost accidentally, and new viewers can appreciate the enjoyment the hosts find in placing those jokes appropriately into new situations. The best example of the time it takes was the transition Conan made to the Tonight Show. Seemed like a no-brainer right? Conan would just be in LA and doing the same show as always, despite the somewhat seedy Leno hanging around at the behest of a rudderless and ball-less NBC. But the difference is that the same jokes don’t fly at 10:30 as ones that will at 11:30. Conan was visibly nervous too when the Tonight Show gig started. Hell, he didn’t even live up to his own standard until the surreal and macabre weeks leading up to the show’s demise, and then the gallows humor regarding his own situation were as funny as he’s ever been.
 
So after that lengthy digression, what was the point you were trying to make again, Blake? Simply this, that hosting one of these shows is hard work, and like anything, takes practice. Fallon is growing more and more comfortable in his own skin, and his natural I’d-totally-love-to-grab-a-beer-with-him charm is winning out over his occasional lapses into the SNL storytelling foibles of his past. At least until Conan comes back on, it’s probably the best all-around late night show you’re likely to see. So come on, kids, give Jimmy a chance. Or else I promise you nothing but weekly analyses of Lindsay Lohan’s mental state, and pictures of Mel Gibson.

Until next time, kids, have a great weekend.

Credits: Image by mystical_XVI

Saturday Night Live Feverish

By Blake Townsley

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Friday. Sure has been a rough couple of weeks for celebrities, huh? In the last two weeks we’ve lost Gary Coleman, Rue McClanahan, Dennis Hopper and Ronnie James Dio. It’s been quite a shakeup in the standings of my annual celebrity death pool. If John Wooden passes this week, we’ll have had two new leaders in two weeks with a little more than a month to go. I’m starting to consider the legal ramifications of driving a truckload of cocaine out to Lohan’s house in LA.  

But I’m not here to talk to you about the sadness of those recently passed. I want to talk about an entertainer on life support, one potentially in need of a Do Not Resuscitate order, Saturday Night Live.  

At first blush, putting Saturday Night Live out of its misery seems like an unthinkable idea. The show has been declared dead and come blazing back more times than Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhies and Michael Myers put together. It’s survived hundreds of critical suggestions that the show has outlived its usefulness, and casts that made no one laugh. And despite a season that made it harder to defend than at any time in recent memory, the fact remains that the show still has the potential to be a cornerstone of the cultural landscape. You only have to look back as far as the 2008-2009 season to find a time when people were buzzing about the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin sketches that opened seemingly every single week’s show. 

 So what’s wrong with the show? The current cast is as talented as any to have graced the stage in several decades. I can’t think of a current regular on the show that I dislike for any reason, unlike any year that Chris Parnell was dragging down sketches with Horatio Sanz, Will Ferrell, and Amy Poehler. Even the featured players are excellent, with pretty much all of them slated for regular status down the road. My only exception to that? Nasim Pedrad, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.  

Some have argued that the lack of female regular cast members is the leading cause of the season-long epidemic of unfunny episodes. Certainly the Betty White show seemed to lend credence to this theory, as regular female cast members from the show’s recent past showed up to ease the burden of hosting on Ms. White. No less an authority than Seth Meyers tweeted that the show could easily have gone two hours with all the funny sketches they cut, pointing his followers to Hulu, where the dress rehearsal versions of those sketches could be seen. While it’s true that Kristen Wiig is doing the lion’s share of regular sketches for female characters on the show, and I really really miss Amy Poehler’s razor sarcasm on Weekend Update, I don’t know that the lack of female performers is to blame for the weak showing. Abby Elliott and Jenny Slate were both featured pretty regularly this season, and were really funny. Hell, even Bobby Moynihan is hilarious dressed up like an Oompa Loompa version of Snooki on Weekend Update.  

I think the problem stems from something a little simpler, and at the same time perhaps more difficult to fix. It seemed to me that the writers on the show were suffering from a massive case of writer’s block. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is “lack of inspiration.” The 2008-2009 shows were great because Sarah Palin provided an easy target for mockery, and the confluence with Tina Fey’s slightly exaggerated, hilarious impression made it easy for the writers to deliver memorably funny lines. The Betty White show gave the writers a chance to revisit famous sketches from seasons past, sketches in which the joke structure was well known and easy to repeat.  

But the election ended, and Palin temporarily faded into the background, the show lost much of its topical bite, and all those former female cast members went back to their regular jobs. The writers were once again on their own to come up with the funny. Let’s face it, there hasn’t been much that’s been funny over the past eighteen months. Whether it’s the BP Spill, or the lunatic rise of the Tea Party to national prominence, or the inability of the government to shit or get off the pot with regard to healthcare, the American landscape hasn’t seemed particularly joke-worthy. But Saturday Night live has found the dark humor in situations like that before, and handled them with caustic wit and a weird grace.  

It seems like this time the will to fight has gone out of them. Instead of ridiculing our lovely members of Congress for taking twelve months to debate healthcare for their constituents while the economy lagged and people struggled to make ends meet, Saturday Night Live did jokes about teens with weird crushes on their suburban parents, and got January Jones and Megan Fox to try and host their way out of the cardboard boxes they seem to be made from. Rather than focus on finding the hottest hosts possible, maybe you should try actually being funny about current events. It is your bread and butter after all. 

So while I’m confident the show can recover, and even faster if it decides to regain its bite on current events, I’d like to offer one other piece of advice to the show. You need to bring back Michaela Watkins immediately, if not sooner. She was unceremoniously dumped from the show when Lorne Michaels decided that she was too old to do well with the show’s younger viewers, aka “not pretty enough” disease. While I’m up for debating the level of Ms. Watkins’ beauty with Lorne any time, the fact of the matter is that she is far more hilarious than her replacement, Nasim Pedrad. I can’t think of one single thing Ms. Pedrad did this season that didn’t make me cringe in embarrassment for her and the show. As one of Michaela’s Weekend Update characters might say, biiiiiiiiitch pleeeeeze. There’s some bad karma going on over at Studio 8H, and it’s due to Lorne’s horrible decision to fire Michaela Watkins. Do the right thing, Lorne.  

But if you won’t do that, at least lead off every show with What Up With That? Jason Sudeikis kills me in that sketch every time. Until next week, kids, take care of your favorite celebrities. I think someone’s hunting them, and I’m afraid Keith Richards is next.

(Credits: Image by dno1967)

A Guys Guide to Surviving Sex and The City 2 

By Blake Townsley

Howdy, friends, and happy Memorial Day Weekend to all of you. I’m hoping everyone’s getting ready for the official start of summer, and planning on getting out there and safely enjoying yourselves. Unfortunately, I think that too many guys out there are unknowingly headed towards a catastrophic disaster of a weekend, and I want to take some time to warn y’all before it’s too late. 

I’m speaking of course about the Sex and the City 2 movie that opens this weekend. I don’t know how much attention the fellas have been paying, but if my Facebook feed is any indication, this is going to be the highest grossing movie of all time in about four days. I’ve been getting notices for four weeks in the vein of, “OMG, just bought my SATC2 tickets for a night out with the girls. Can’t wait!!!” That way lies damnation, gents.  

Like most of you with the Y chromosome, I am utterly baffled by the excitement surrounding this movie. The critical reviews are nearly universal in panning everything about it, and with what seems like good reason. To me it looks like a cross between Ishtar and a drag show produced by the mentally infirm, with a plot written by an English class of gay racist tweens. As near as I can tell, however, Sex and the City has two things going for it as a franchise, shoe porn and female bonding. Those are some powerful forces at work. That means the ladies are going to see it, and you’re probably going to be forced to talk about it, or hear about it in the near future. In order to help you survive this ordeal, I’m going to provide the greatest public service I possibly can, The Guy’s Guide to Surviving SATC2, in easy to read question-and-answer format. As always, all questions and answers are totally made up.  

Q: Blake, I’ve never heard of Sex and the City. What is it?

A: It used to be an HBO show about four women living in New York City, and their relationship travails. The four women can be loosely categorized as the romantic, the workaholic, the sexually voracious one, and the one who wore a flowerpot on her head to the premiere of the first movie. 

Q: It sounds…weird.

A: It sorta was, but it didn’t really start out as horrendously as its current incarnation. The show used to be somewhat entertaining, and sometimes you’d get to see some boob. Or the chick from Mannequin proving how flexible she was.

Q: So why does this girl I’m interested in want to see the movie so much if it’s as terrible as it sounds?

A: It’s kind of like a high school reunion. It sounds like a good idea at the time. You’ll get to see old friends, and reminisce about what things were like in the good old days. Also, as I mentioned above, ladies love shoe porn and stories about tightly-knit friendships amongst women who will always love each other. 

Q: Wow! Both of those things sound hot, but what is shoe porn exactly?

A: Neither is exciting as it sounds. Shoe porn, much like real porn, is the gratuitous display of ridiculous things you would never do in real life. In the case of SATC2, this involves ridiculous shoes that cost more than a monthly mortgage payment, and $20,000 dresses. It’s basically a shopping fantasy. 

Q: BORING!

A: I’m with you on that one, pal. Believe me. 

Q: So what if this girl I’m dating asks me to go see the movie with her?

A: Make up any excuse you can think of to get out of it, my friend. Tell her you’d rather she share that experience with her girlfriends. Tell her you’d rather have a Memorial Day barbecue. Tell her you’ve suddenly become really interested in watching the Stanley Cup Finals, and can’t make it. Tell her your dog drove your parents off a cliff, Toonces-style, and you have to preside over three funerals this weekend. Basically, tell her anything you can to get out of it. 

Q: What if she says she really wants me to go see it with her, and she’ll have sex with me afterwards?

A: Ouch, that’s a real Sophie’s Choice right there. I mean, you’d think the no-brainer choice would be sex, right? WRONG! I’m telling you right now there is no way you’ll feel like having sex after having gouged your eyes out with the popcorn bucket.

Q: I’m scared, Blake.

A: Me too, buddy. Me too.  

Q: So what should I do?

A: The best thing you can do, fight fire with fire. If this is a girl you’re serious about, tell her the truth, that you’re not really interested in seeing the movie, but you will anyway because you like her. And then make plans to see a movie of your choice later in the year. I’m recommending the A-Team. If she likes you, she’ll appreciate that you’re thinking about your future together. If she doesn’t, she’ll probably dump you right then, and then you won’t have to go see the movie. Everybody wins!

Until next week, kids, take care!

(Credits: Image by lorenzinhos)

Pal + Kate Plus Eight = Bad Ideas

By Blake Townsley

Howdy, folks. Welcome back to the humble Friday installment of the Pickv bloggers’ corner. As you may recall from last week, my mission here at Pickv is to scour the tabloids, internet and otherwise, to find the pop culture nuggets that make for an interesting discussion. What you choose to do with those nuggets is up to you. I promise I won’t judge.  

Today, I was all set up to discuss the pop culture phenomenon of Glee. I’ll admit that I’ve been hooked on it since Fox premiered the pilot last spring as a teaser for the full season. It’s even caused me to break my very strict rules about never, ever watching a musical. When I got home last night and hopped on the internet, however, I saw an article that made me cackle with glee for a different reason. The article? The latest from Kate Gosselin’s camp, regarding her plans for achieving A-list status in Hollywood. I guess that review of Jane Lynch paying tribute to Madonna’s Vogue video will have to wait until next week. For now, I can’t wait to dig into the hubristic train wreck of Team Gosselin.  

Setting aside a moment for full disclosure, I’ve never seen one minute of Kate Gosselin’s show about her and the kids and the chain-smoking husband-douche. I don’t watch Dancing With The Stars. My only real contact with the Gosselin family has been through those most reliable of sources, Internet celebrity gossip websites. While those are far from unimpeachable, firsthand founts of information, I feel like I’ve been reading long enough to get as good a grasp on her life as any other random blogger. Which is to say, none whatsoever. Let’s proceed with the judgment! 

For those of you that didn’t see it, one of Kate’s “pals” was quoted over at Popeater spouting the following: “Kate is serious about going Hollywood and thinks dating a celebrity is a great idea. When Kate sees how Tom Cruise changed Katie Holmes life, it became clear that she needed to do the same. Obviously, she knows she’s not yet ready to date a George Clooney, but she thinks she would be the perfect partner for a Jeff Goldblum or someone like David Hasselhoff.” 

After I stopped laughing, two things became immediately clear. First, Kate’s “pal” the publicist is either the logical heir to Steven Wright’s killer deadpan style of humor, or a community college dropout with delusions of grandeur. Second, Kate Gosselin just got a whole lot more interesting, if only for the tragedy that lies down this path.  

How many things are wrong with that three-sentence paragraph? I will agree that dating a celebrity is a great idea. What’s not to like about it? I’m sure it’s a rush to associate with someone that everyone knows, and potentially likes. It’s the equivalent of dating the head cheerleader or varsity quarterback in high school. It automatically makes you cooler by association, unless I totally misinterpreted the plot of She’s All That. And I understand that Mrs. Gosselin certainly has acquired a taste for easy money after her reality show. If someone wanted to pay me for doing pretty much nothing all day, I’d get used to it in a hurry as well. It’s the same reason you’re not supposed to feed bears in Yellowstone. It makes them lazy and unable or unwilling to find their own food.  

We haven’t even gotten to the part about which celebrities Kate is ready to date. Obviously she’s not ready for a Clooney, so she should probably start at the bottom of the celebrity food chain, and work her way up like a minor league ballplayer. I can only imagine how bad Jon Gosselin must be as a husband if The Hoff seems like an upgrade. All I can see is that video The Hoff’s daughter put on YouTube of him on the floor, drunkenly eating a cheeseburger with no shirt on. There’s only one possible conclusion: Jon Gosselin must be the spawn of the devil.  

Obviously, once Kate’s proved that she can handle a German heartthrob with alcohol issues, it’s only a matter of time before she convinces Intern George that she is what’s been missing from his fairy-tale existence of winning Oscars and sleeping with beautiful Italian women and Las Vegas cocktail waitresses, who as we all know are the American equivalent of beautiful Italian women.  

Where was I? Oh, right, YOU LEAVE JEFF GOLDBLUM OUT OF THIS, KATE GOSSELIN! THAT MAN IS A NATIONAL TREASURE! 

Whoops, the powers that be here are telling me it’s time to wrap up. So here goes… 

I’m sure it’s not easy to raise eight kids with an absentee father, and I don’t begrudge Kate Gosselin the chance to provide the best possible life for those poor kids. The therapy bills alone are going to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars before high school graduation hits.  

So, good for you, Kate, for pursuing the American dream for your kids, if that’s really the reason you’re doing this. I hope it is, because otherwise this whole thing smacks of self-serving egotism, and misguided and amateurish attempts to get famous. If you’re gonna date someone, do it because you like them, and they really love all eight of your kids, and it’s the right thing to do for your family. At the very least, fire your publicist, because she’s pissing off Jeff Goldblum. Don’t make him send Sally Struthers over to your house to smack your nannies around.  

“Won’t anyone think of the children!?!”

(Credits: Image by Grant Neufeld)