Julia & Julia (and Taylor)
Recently HBO canceled the show Julia, which is a real bummer to me. I loved the show, which portrayed Julia Child in the early days of her public television career and a lot of the people who made up her world. The show was sweet and funny and had an attitude toward the 1960s that drew me in. The cast was made up mostly of rich white people well past middle age, and they were looking ahead to a decade of tumult and change with cautious enthusiasm. They were suddenly seeing the boundaries of their comfort zones and putting a toe out of it every chance they got. And my goodness, excellent cast! I’ve seen critics joking about Fiona Glascott’s accent work but she was great and it never distracted me from the way she played Judith Jones as someone who loved books because she loved people. Sarah Lancashire of course crushed it in the title role, and David Hyde Pierce was just so good! Frasier is one of my blind spots - I’ve never watched it so this was the most DHP I’ve ever gotten and it was revelatory. What a great actor! And in all his scenes with the great Bebe Neuwirth! Really awesome. Brittany Bradford, creating Alice Naman more or less from scratch, filled in a lot of the pieces missing from an occasionally underwritten character to create a believably neurotic genius.
Having to say goodbye to the show got me curious about the real Julia Child, in particular to her real experience in television.
The series Julia of course had to fictionalized some things. It seems that Paul Child was more supportive from the start of Julia's show, but it makes sense that the show would need him to grow into the role more; it also might feel unbelievable to modern audiences to see a man in 1963 appear so enlightened. Furthermore, the character Alice Naman, is a composite of some real people including Ruth Lockwood, Julia’s real-life longtime producer. I like that the show created a new Black character for its portrayal of the world of Boston public television; part of me wishes Alice had been a character in addition to Ruth Lockwood, not instead of her, but maybe I’m asking for too much. Russ Morash (played by Fran Kranz, an actor who is good but I always think of him as being bad because of his character in the movie The TV Set) was a notable enough figure in real life to require a presence on the show if it was to last longer. With its two seasons, I’m not certain he was necessary (as compared to Lockwood). Similarly, Avis DeVoto (Neuwirth) was not just a good friend to Julia Child; she was a cookbook editor who first encountered Julia under professional auspices. I do think it made sense to emphasize her as a friend more than business contact, but it’s not like a show can have too many midcentury women working in publishing, right?
One fascinating detail that I don’t think made it on Julia was that early in The French Chef’s run, the only working kitchen that was big enough to film in was in the Boston electric company building, so the crew had to haul equipment up the fire escape and through a window to film there. I think this would have been a good source of comedy or drama, so I’m curious why it wasn’t a major part of the show. Julia Child also apparently taped as many as four episodes per week at that stage, which must have been grueling.
It may already be widely understood that part of what made Julia Child such a beloved figure was her comfort with small mistakes, e.g. dropping something here or there, mistiming things slightly, or when recipes just didn't quite turn out. These demonstrated to the home audience that nobody gets things perfectly every time, not even the great Julia Child. She also had that too-rare ability to laugh off those errors and make them part of her own patter (like Johnny Carson when a joke fell flat). But to Child herself, these errors were frustrating and sometimes mortifying. She really didn't want to make mistakes on camera, ever.
This has me thinking a bit about one of my favorite subjects, the gaps between someone's televised persona and who they actually are, or want to be. Julia Child's career as a cooking instructor put her on quite the pedestal but she was only human, in multiple ways: she made mistakes, just like the rest of us; AND she wished she got things right all the time, just like the rest of us.
I've also been checking out the new CBS show After Midnight recently. If you don't know, CBS replaced James Corden with a comedy game show hosted by relatively young comedian Taylor Tomlinson. I think she's a good comedian (her bit about convincing men to wear condoms makes me laugh whenever I think about it), and I think her show is a pretty good one, and she's a charming host.
The reason I bring it up here is because After Midnight currently has a little bit of a "We're late night, so we can say things that otherwise wouldn't be allowed on CBS" edge to it. In this past week's post-Superbowl episode, Wayne Brady commented that he could say things on After Midnight that he couldn't say on his own CBS series, Let's Make a Deal. Tomlinson herself encourages this attitude, reveling in being late night like Letterman in the 80s.
Her show will evolve over time, of course, and in the meantime I wondered: if I were in her position, would I want to act like I'm getting away with something by encouraging guests to be mildly profane, or would I want to act like I disapproved of what they were saying, to emphasize that the guests are transgressing? The two attitudes could make two different shows even with the exact same guests saying the exact same things.
Ultimately, it may not be a deliberate choice on Tomlinson's part. She may just be who she is, or a rough approximation of it. Like with Julia Child, your television persona kind of creates itself. You can only hope people end up liking it.
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA
Blue's Clues was created by Todd Kessler, Traci Paige Johnson, and Angela Santomero. Johnson also voices Blue. Since then, Johnson, along with Blue's Clues producer Jennifer Twomey created the series Gabby's Dollhouse (a show about a kid who shrinks down into a dollhouse to play with cats). Santomero has worked on a number of other shows, including creating Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. I wouldn't have independently connected Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood with Gabby's Dollhouse but you can absolutely see both shows's DNA in Blue's Clues. All are shows where a host directly addresses the audience; all focus on social-emotional learning. All take place in fundamentally kind worlds where everyone is available to help. But Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is part of the PBS Kids family, which means it values healthy child development above all (Pinkalicious being the only PBS Kids show with apparently no interest in healthy development at all; it may even have some hostility toward the idea). Gabby's Dollhouse is a Dreamworks show airing on Netflix, so it's much more nakedly designed to suck in children's attention and sell them products. Having said that, it can be a very charming show with great songs about trying your best and being kind to yourself.
WHAT'S NEW ON GH LATELY
Esme and Spencer went off the side of a boat in France and are now both presumed dead. Esme was facing prosecution for the crimes she committed before getting amnesia (the DA decided not to prosecute her because she couldn't remember her crimes, but once she got her memory back everyone agreed she would face charges?), and Spencer was being a dick like usual. Now both are apparently dead, but Spencer may come back depending on how successful his run on a forthcoming Ryan Murphy series is.
Also, Jagger is back, but played by a new actor now. Jagger was more of a thing in the 90s and now he's an FBI agent who is angry at Anna.
Sonny and Nina are mostly broken up and Ava is just living with Sonny - I'm really hoping they hook up soon! I don't ship the two of them at all but I do think it would be fun if they would hook up again (the first time they did was almost exactly ten years ago, in the Quartermaine Crypt).
TAGS
This broadcast's theme song is Splendora's You're Standing On My Neck, just because I like it.
The Julia Child books I was checking out: Appetite for Life by Noel Riley and Julia Child by Laura Shapiro. The former is much longer than the latter, if you were planning to read one and had a set attention span for the topic.
Pretty wild that Jon Stewart is back on the Daily Show, huh? I wonder if he'll be worth whatever Viacom had to cough up to bring him back.
To supplement my watching Feud: Capote vs the Swans, I started listening to a podcast series about Truman Capote. It's actually a mini-arc that's part of an unbelievably lengthy podcast about Dominick Dunne. It's been interesting to learn some more details about the world of Capote and his high-society bffs, but my favorite detail is that Carole Marcus married William Saroyan when she was still a teenager. One day, she read about women's orgasms and reached out to her close friend Gloria Vanderbilt to ask, "Hey, that's made up, right? Because my husband says girls can't have orgasms." And Gloria Vanderbilt had to set her straight. Carole Marcus then went on to marry Walter Matthau and they apparently had a very active and satisfying sex life, so have fun imagining that.
Someone on Youtube started posting multihour classic Adult Swim blocks - Home Movies, Dr. Katz, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc. I am generally supportive of this concept but one of their videos also added an episode of Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace, which is both not a contemporary of these other series and also a show that Adult Swim was constantly having to edit swastikas out of. Why was this added? I can only assume the worst, and I hate it.
Last time I mentioned I'm working on a book review. It's taking me so long in part because I refuse to accept that I've done enough auxiliary research (I read the book and watched two miniseries but I still want to watch another miniseries and possibly rewatch a made-for-TV movie and also a documentary about one of the miniseries and then maybe read a couple of other books). Anyway, I'm quitting one of my favorite vices until I get this thing done so I apologize if I seem ornery when you see me next.
As I mentioned recently, I've been rewatching UnREAL. I'm in season three now and the show gets wild. I think it said more or less all it had to say about reality TV with season one, but it continues to have its own queasy charms.
I'm still working on whatever I said I was still working on.
"'Take care of yourself and each other.' - Jerry Springer" - Harry Waksberg