The "Blurred Lines" verdict that awarded the Marvin Gaye estate $7.2 million earlier this month had music journalists scrambling to find whatever counterintuitive spin they could put on it. The New York Times called it a scary omen of things to come: a world where only printed (as opposed to improvised) music counted in courts. LA Weekly said the Bob Marley estate can now sue anyone who plays reggae because the "feel" is the same in every song.
Pish-pash and poppycock. Robin Thicke and Pharrell blatantly ripped off Gaye's "Got To Give It Up," and even if it wasn't intentional, they need to pay up. But with online and print media competing for the eyes of culture vultures, people seem to be squeezing their brains as hard as they can to find new things to say about any given subject.
With that said, please indulge me in the same.
TV criticism is no different from music criticism. After happily binge-watching Tina Fey's awesome new series on Netflix, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I looked online to see what people were saying about it. The reviews are uniformly positive, but some folks just can't help themselves from overthinking things.
Unbreakable is about a naive gal with a lot of pluck who escapes a doomsday cult and tries to make it in the big city. What's not to like? Ellie Kemper is perfect for the lead role, probably because it was created especially for her by Fey and fellow 30 Rock alum Robert Carlock. It was originally scripted for NBC, which passed on it for some bizarre reason. Netflix snapped it up, allowing for an extra four minutes of jokes in each episode — and the jokes are fucking funny. On her first night out on the town, Kimmy sidles up to the bar for a drink and a group of giggling twits asks her if she wants to party. "Are you into molly?," they ask. "Am I!," replies Kimmy. "She's my favorite American Girl doll!"
The show has a lot of heart, too. But it's not perfect. Carol Kane is cast as the yenta-ish landlady, and the normally brilliant comedienne seems out of her depth here. Her lines are sometimes hard to understand, and when she drops ironic hip-hop allusions — yes, I'm a middle-aged dowager, but I'm still down — it doesn't have the desired effect. Jane Krakowski plays the Manhattan billionaire's wife more aptly, but her Native American backstory is superfluous, which would be fine if it were funny, but the jokes there are as thin as her character is supposed to be.
So that's my 20th-century take on the comedy — a straightforward review, right? Cut to the internets, where each entity seems to be using the show as some sort of Rorschach test. Think Progress has outdone itself by seeing the ensemble as some sort of championing of the Other Man. "It's a show about all the people who never got shows about them," it writes. Really? Actually, Unbreakable is not that different from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Joey, or 2 Broke Girls — it's about being cast out of some place or situation and starting over.
Various other outlets are having a really hard time with how race is portrayed on the show, despite the fact that it pokes fun at every single person, even whitey, the same way. The Bold Italic calls it a "great show with a big race problem." Sure, one of her love interests is an Asian guy named Dong, about which the Bold Italic astutely asks, "Didn't we get over that joke in 16 Candles?" But the rest of the review is a ridiculously PC Church Lady pick-apart of every single racial theme on the show.
With all the online blogger forensics going on, I'm reminded of the trend in higher education to warn students when they might feel "triggered" by something in a piece of literature. Lighten up, people. If you have to brace yourself through every frame of Unbreakable because there might be something past/post/future-racial going on, perhaps your time would be better spent watching C-SPAN. As for me, I can't wait for Season 2.
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