thewiseman
Lauren Graham's Guy
Posts: 638
(4/19/04 8:14 pm)
Reply
|
a BUFFALO NEWS review of the Nick & Jess "Variety H
Thought y'all would be interested in this one:
COMMENTARY
Nick and Jessica bring back the bad old days
By JEFF SIMON
was watching the Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson variety special last Sunday when it hit me like a freight train full of Chevys.
I suddenly remembered how utterly terrible TV used to be. Never mind Mark Burnett's dandy "reality TV" series "The Restaurant" returning at 10 p.m. Monday.
Try to remember what used to be - a five channel universe. No VCRs or TIVOs to catch the good stuff you missed. And strange, brazen coastal mutants who thought they could convince you that the crassest and worst rubbish imaginable was "entertainment."
And, by God, there was Nick and Jessica's foray into a variety show to bring it all back. Lachey spent the whole show casting furtive and wary looks at his wife's cleavage, lest there be a wardrobe malfunction and a flood suddenly sluicing through a weakening dam. As it was, her cleavage upstaged him for the entire hour. And when he wasn't worrying about a sudden failure of adhesion which would cause everyone to stop taping, he was making yokel mammarian jokes about her.
Or taking off his shirt in a Western saloon skit. Or singing duets with Kitt, the car from "Knightrider" (or, at the end of the show, with Babyface, who had an expression of strained and vaguely terrified cheer, like a man who'd momentarily misplaced his dignity and couldn't figure out where he'd left it.)
For her part, Jessica Simpson brought back the jiggling bimbo of Hugh Hefner's dreams (Little Annie Fannie, anyone?) and Gloria Steinem's nightmares - when she wasn't singing, that is. When Jessica Simpson sings, her Tammy Faye eyelashes twitter, her mouth and face tend to contort grotesquely and her hands go all over the place in semi-voluntary spasms, as if she'd adopted the performance style of Joe Cocker in his "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" phase.
Her singing confirmed, as does most of "American Idol," that Michael Bolton's strenuous throat-flexing ulta-white imitation of black vocal styles is now the standard of American pop music - the default vocal style when nothing remotely original is available.
Compared with the "comedy," complete with Mr. T., her singing, mind you, was an immense relief: duets with Jewel, Kenny Rogers and all.
I was a daily TV columnist in the Dark Ages of the '70s when similarly gruesome accidents on the entertainment highway used to be one of only five viewing choices offered America. What I can't, for the life of me, figure out is why any showbiz professional would want to bring such garbage back - unless, that is, it's just an onstage, audience-cheered version of the "reality TV" which has, on MTV, made Nick and Jessica America's favorite Mr. and Mrs. Bimbo (Lachey, the poor kid, moans in interviews that he's finding it difficult to be taken seriously as a musician. I'll bet.)
The sudden flash of memory of how truly awesomely horrible TV often used to be revealed to me how protected we now are from all that.
There's always a good old movie to watch somewhere now on digital cable. Or a "Law and Order" episode on some channel or other for our brains to work as if it were moral chewing gum. Or even, heaven forbid, an absurdly politicized TV talk show with someone like Dennis Miller having his midlife crisis in the political arena and inflicting it on CNBC viewers nightly.
Perhaps in the TV world we now live in, everything seems to be turning into some weird new variant of "reality TV" (that is, crass manipulations of life) but at least we know that a terminal paucity of choices isn't forcing anyone to watch "Fear Factor" or "Nick and Jessica."
Let me confess this then: I am more grateful to Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson than I am to anyone I've seen on TV all year.
They briefly showed me The Ghost of TV Awfulness Past and made me love TV as it now is.
None of us has to be Scrooge anymore.
I feel, as Alastair Sim might say, "as giddy as a schoolboy." I may just buy a goose for the Cratchit family.
And God bless us every one.
email: jsimon@buffnews.com
Hey! I used to LOVE watching the "Sonny & Cher" comedy
hour on CBS back in the '70s! Jeez! Give Jess & Nick the
chance to be the "new" Sonny & Cher!!!!!!!!
wisedude 
........Buffalo Bills 2003.....season's
OVER. Any questions??????? |
Email This To a Friend
Topic Commands
Click to receive email notification of replies 
Click to stop receiving email notification of replies