free 2 be marlo

Monday, January 24, 2005

Posted by Evil Schmoo @ 12:19 a.m. ET

Look, TS, you know you're, like, totally the biggest pimp in television. Hell, when you (quite rightly) canned the OC, they wrote you into an episode:

Seth: [picking up a copy of Madame Bovary] That Flaubert can really turn a phrase.

Summer: I guess. It was kind of a bummer. I mean, I know Emma got her heart, like, totally broken, but why did she have to go and eat arsenic?

Seth: You’ve read Madame Bovary?

Summer: Five times. It’s Tom Shales’ favorite book. Oh, I should go check on him. He’s two floors down. He’s, like, incontinent.

(If that's the best Josh Schwartz can do for a slam, he deserves even worse than you gave him, TS.)

But I'm sorry -- I can't agree with you on this one.

Tommie Boy, do you still understand the concept of the guilty pleasure? Your colleague at the WaPo, Stephen Hunter -- who is easily the Schmoo's favorite film critic, of all time, ever, Pauline Kael included -- does. He understands that sometimes, bad movies are gloriously bad, and hilariously stupid, and consciously so, and sometimes, it's not ironic. It's just gleefully awful. Now, don't get the Schmoo wrong -- sometimes stuff simply sucks. (See, oh, I dunno, "The View".) But occasionally, there's something which, while genuinely bad, is really kinda good. (See anything by Joss Whedon.)

Take the example of Nip/Tuck. Nip/Tuck is awful. Truly, gloriously, awful. The acting is pretentious as fuck. Jackie Collins -- hell, Jackie Stallone -- could create better storylines, and the dialogue makes Proust look like Stoppard. Direction? Direction? We don't need no steenkeen' DIRECTION!!

Nip/Tuck exists entirely to see Miami hotbodies fuck on free TV. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) It's bad. It's Psycho Beach Party bad. It's Fox Force Five bad.

Dude -- it's "I Married Dora" bad.

And yet ... when Julian McMahon (his character's named "Christian"! Isn't that deliciously ironic? Ooh, it's just so terribly terribly, as the SchmooGran used to say ...) smiles that devilish "I'm-gonna-fuck-you-in-the-ass-and-there's-jack-shit-you're-going-to-do- to-stop-it-because-you-like-big-cock-in-your-fudge-tunnel-don't-you- you-dirty-whore?" smile, you feel so ... wicked. And it's fun, and it's hilarious, and you just want to sit back and watch it happen. Like Joan Collins on Dysentery, when it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's better. (Apologies to Miss Dorothy Parker, upon whose altar the Schmoo lays his bent head in shame.)

And clearly the Schmoo is not the only one who thinks so, for Nip/Tuck won the Golden Globe award for Best Drama.

So, Tom, let the Schmoo voice his happy accolades for "Numb3rs". Yeah, it's really just another CSI. So the fuck what? Those Viacom boys figured out that campy CSI (Miami) works a hell of a lot better than serious CSI (New York). Sometimes it ain't about the writing or the acting (hell, Gary Sinise's taint sweat could out-act David Caruso!), it's about how much you like a show, for no other reason than you like it.

Numb3rs isn't a great show. But it's fun. It stars that guy who was on that show -- you know, the one that basically created the fish-outta-water-inna-nutball-little-town concept the critics love so much. See "Ed". Of course, you can't, because nobody did. It also stars that girl* who was on that show, which no one saw but critics loved. (Anyone see a pattern here?)

It also stars that guy. You know, the one who was a child actor, who actually seems to have one of the very few (along with his Addams Fam costar, Christina Ricci) to break the curse? Now listen to me, Tom, and listen good. David Krumholtz owns this show. He freakin' dominates it. I agree with you that Rob Morrow is gettin' a little long in the tooth, but hey, the dude's 42. (That's in human, not SchmooYears.) But the show isn't about Rob Morrow. It's about David Krumholtz, pure and simple.

Now I know you made a comment about Krumholtz that seems positive: "...played as well as the part probably could ever be played (what with Olivier and Brando dead and all) by David Krumholtz." But you're snide, Tom, and you know what you were really saying -- not bad, but it's a crap role, and TV actors are just Hollywood's also-rans anyway. Well, the Schmoo is going on the record here and now: if this show stays on the air for at least two seasons, David Krumholtz will be nominated for and win Best Supporting Actor in a Dramatic Series. I fucking guarantee it, because he is that damn good.

The show's smarter, too, than you give it credit for. Hell, they mention Dick Feynman and Evariste Galois in the first episode. Galois? Are you kidding me? He's only the second-or-third-most brilliant mathematical mind in history (behind Gauss, and maybe Euler). He's also a universal symbol, like Rimbaud to poetry, of flaming out and dying unappreciated, which is why no one's ever heard of him outside of graduate-level math classes. (Galois had the pitiful fortune to have two of his greatest papers -- of which there were but single copies each -- lost by their scholarly reviewers.) But you didn't pick up on that, did you, Tom? You just thought it was Hollywood hackery grabbing at the first name in the Math Picbook. Wrong.

The Schmoo does not profess to know whether Numb3rs will be successful. Viacom's supporting the heck out of it, what with the best possible run-in of the AFC championship and all. But he does know that this is a smarter-than-average, well-acted show that deserves more than just a standard throwaway review from you, Tom. It's attempting to make math appealing to the general public. It's a difficult task, but a worthy one, and there's no better formula to follow for this than the CSI system. Forensics are easy to follow -- third-order differential equations aren't. And yet their presentation of regressional group theory is pretty easy to follow.

All I'm sayin', Tom, is give it a chance, is all.

Speaking of great shows that no one watches, the Schmoo would also like to mention publicly that, as a college-educated straight male in his extremely late twenties, he is completely addicted to Gilmore Girls. And before you say a word, fuck off if you haven't seen it, because the Schmoo is prepared to defend this one. Y'all better come correct

*PS: That French site is the closest thing to legalized stalking the Schmoo has yet run across. Ka-REE-peeeee!

---

Replies: 15 comments

© '95-'08. Questions, comments, etc: hit me up. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of any of our employers, current, past or future.