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Just when we think we've got this whole television thing figured out, somebody throws us for a loop. Case in point is the success of the WB Netlet, a phenomenon we at Suck HQ assumed we had down pat.
We chalked up the wild success of Dawson's Creek to Jen and Joey's sly updating of the Betty-Veronica rivalry, with Dawson as an Archie for the '90s. The inquest into Felicity's breathy angst has already finished its season and gone into reruns. Even the puzzling popularity of Buffy makes sense because, well, people will take any old crap.
So how do we explain that WB's real ratings champ, its first show to put a hurtin' to the networks, is, in fact, none of the above but the barely discussed Spelling-Vincent family dramedy 7th Heaven?
"Yeah, Dawson's Creek and Felicity are the shows people tend to write about," says WB publicist Pamela Morrison, "but 7th Heaven is actually our No. 1 show, with a 4.9 rating for the season and an 8 share." Though the show performs the often-overlooked trick of attracting an audience, exposes yet another comely starlet, and provides gainful employment to Tales of the Gold Monkey mandroid Steven Collins, its stylistic MO of steering a course through the narrow straits between The Brady Bunch and Eight is Enough apparently doesn't provide much material for the paid bullshit artists who try to pass off TV viewing as sociological research.
That's probably why it doesn't get written about very often and why the sophistries of couch-bound not-so-young Turks are as easy to ignore as the oregano joints that fuel our ardent excogitations. Poor Barnes & Noble can't get a break. The company's bookstore dominance seems only to have overshadowed its presence on the Web. (Last week, a CNBC correspondent attributed B&N's dragging stock price to the fact that it "is still selling books in stores.") Its user-friendly blend of fine coffees and pompous "book-minute" radio spots has not touched the flinty hearts of indie-store diehards. Even after its purchase of Amazon's main supplier, B&N is still valued at a fraction of the market value of Earth's Largest Bookstore.
But perhaps most damning, for all its alleged depredations of America's cultural heritage, "Starbooks" can't even excite a decent protest. Last week our mailboxes began filling up with invitations to join a Barnes & Noble protest. The combination of the protest's organizers (Negativland, the estate of Terry Southern, Alt-X/Black Ice, the AK Press, the Church of the SubGenius, and others), its unstirring anthem, and the simple fact that the planned protest consisted of having malcontents don paper bag hoods and browse B&N shelves led us to suspect this thing would never get off the ground.
As it happened, the appointed protest hour found us in San Francisco's flagship superstore -- and there wasn't a protester in sight. A few quick calls to B&N outlets around the Bay Area indicated that Barnes & Noble Bag Day generated about as much excitement as a special edition of Booknotes. Protest organizer "Ray" claims mayhem did erupt at stores in Beantown; Austin, Texas; and Australia -- which is impressive, given that Barnes & Noble doesn't have any stores Down Under, according to company spokeswoman. Our diagnosis: This event resulted in a truly depressing combination of sagging Q ratings for Negativland, Bob, and Superstore Supervillainy in general. But hell, think how the Unknown Comic must be feeling these days. Nu? It began as just another lame attempt at waxing literary, but when a scribe from Time magazine penned the phrase "much of the heavy baggage that readers will schlep across the bridge into the 21st century," Time managing editor Walter Isaacson got offended. He wasn't sickened by the tired, Clintonian bridge rhetoric nor the clunky, college-newspapery prose. Isaacson's Irish was raised by the language of the sons of Isaac.
He decreed Time reporters should, from now on, avoid words like "schlep." "It's not some crusade I'm on," he told The Washington Post. "Yiddish words like 'schlep' are not as common out of New York as they are in New York." Whether or not Isaacson believes that gentiles -- a superstitious folk given to cannibalism and ancestor worship -- would really be spooked by such cabalistic mumbo jumbo as "tochus," "schnorrer," and "call me pisher," his condescension is sadly mingled with the kind of self-hating self-censorship that led Brandon Tartikoff to label Seinfeld "too Jewish." More importantly, Isaacson is dismissing different languages' ability to capture complex concepts endemic to their cultures.
Even if the Eskimos don't have 1,000 different words for snow, could anybody but the hot-blooded Italians have given us vendetta or la dolce vita? Only the Arabs with their love of intrigue could have contributed both assassin and algebra to the lexicon. Who else but the French could create joie de vivre or cherchez la femme? Phat and muthafucka could have only come from the 'hood.
Yiddish is a language replete with words for insulting and complaining: Schlep is only one of the more recognizable examples. Frankly, seeing Isaacson struggle with a whole genre of verboten words fills us with both Schadenfreude and ennui and hints at a whole new definition for putzhead. Then again, maybe Isaacson was just trying to increase Time's circulation in the inner cities. According to poll results released last week by the Anti-Defamation League, blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to hold strong anti-Semitic views. The survey, which asked participants to rate statements such as "Jews have too much power" and "Jews have too much influence over the American news media," found 34 percent of black Americans to be "most anti-Semitic," compared with only 9 percent of whites.
In a stunningly unexpected conclusion, ADL national director Abraham Foxman blamed the fiery rhetoric of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who when last heard from was spouting some stuff about nine and 19 that was far more likely to provoke bad math scores than Kristallnacht. You might as well argue that antipathy between blacks and Jews stems from the scandalous neglect of Sammy during the recent wave of Rat Pack nostalgia. Or you might say this is a case of the media ignoring the good news.
After all, zero percent of Americans believe blacks have too much power or influence over the media, which by the ADL's logic should indicate that racism has finally been wiped out in the United States. So where are the celebrations? We prefer to accent positive developments like Adam Allen's top-notch Sanford and Son tribute site, which unites people of all creeds and colors in honor of the comedic stylings of Redd Foxx and LaWanda Page and the benign guidance of mensch Norman Lear.
At the same time, the official Grady site offers a detailed history of Whitman Mayo's appearance on the Conan O'Brian Show, the epochal meeting of the favorite son from Watts and history's whitest man. This is small stuff, perhaps, but it's out of such humble tiles that the American mosaic is built.
In other news, the probability that you will encounter idiotic poll results at least once a week remains steady at 100 percent.
Finally, we've learned a lesson: Don't fuck with Ira Glass. Sure, we'd been hearing for some time that Glass could be lethal rather than just lethally dull. And frankly, the fulsome praise heaped on the boss by his underlings ("I'll think, Ira, Ira, Ira, Ira," contributing editor Sarah Vowell purred to the Chicago Tribune) always reminded us of unctuous apparatchiks reporting a successful five-year plan. But it wasn't until we made the mistake of awarding him a Suck Evil Genius Grant that we really experienced Ira's Stalinist will to power.
Although the most scabrous assertion in our EGG was that the Chicago superstar was "handsome," Ira immediately dispatched his agents to let us know that our tribute had left him, well, not angry but hurt. So moving was this tale of the lonely titan's sensitivity that the judge of the EGG in question (a compassionate soul whom we employ to lend Suck its "human" element) took the unprecedented step of sending the 10,000 Watt wunderkind a self-abasing email. Which, of course, is just what Ira wanted: hard evidence of his own power to make all rivals truckle, evidence which he could then turn over to a reporter for the Chicago Reader with that flourish that says, "I am Ira Glass, hear me roar!"
We've seen this method before: the show trial, the forced confession, the public humiliation, and, finally, the midnight disappearance. For now we're just grateful Ira stopped at embarrassing our correspondent and relieved that we narrowcast at a safe distance from his Windy City Kremlin. But we suspect he won't be happy until we turn up with ice picks in our heads.
