Style and Substance (BBC2, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)
Big Brother (C4, daily)
20/20 (TV3, Sunday)
Debut (N2, Wednesday)
The latest US sitcom, Style and Substance, has neither. Set in the offices of a "style queen" named Chelsea (Jean Smart), its premise is that hard-driving guruette of chic, Chelsea, is, underneath it all, desperately lonely. Don't worry. Your heart won't bleed, for this is among the most risible trash currently showing on television. Beside it, Leave it to Mrs O'Brien is Cheers and Extra Extra! is The Front Page. Still, its very existence is instructive even though it traduces such worthwhile themes as consumerism, media power, feminism and femininity.
Sure, it's light entertainment and it would be ridiculous to demand depth or analysis from it. But given the quality of scriptwriting on many US sitcoms (Frasier, Seinfeld, Friends) a little sharpness isn't asking too much. Indeed, even a little bluntness could have merits. But this one is neither sharp nor blunt. It's almost violently artificial - like a TV advertisement come to life as a regular programme - and that is its most awful aspect of all. You can see it knitting in seamlessly between those stacatto bursts of US television advertising.
For sheer hypocrisy, that takes some beating. The designer "moral" of Style and Substance is that Chelsea has lost her humanity in obsessive pursuit of a Sunday-supplement lifestyle. Enter a new office manager (Nancy McKeon), an all-American girl of good humour and good sense - the substance to Chelsea's "style". Despite setbacks in every episode, she will mine the capillary vein of humanity which continues to pulse, albeit almost imperceptibly, in Chelsea. So, ostensibly satirising consumerism, the ad-like quality of the programme is, in truth, blatantly promoting it.
The opening episode begins on the day of Chelsea's divorce. Even after her character is summarised in the title sequences, there's an elaborate build-up for her impending entrance. When she arrives, she rifles through McKeon's purse, defending this on the grounds that character can be read accurately through possessions. Root canal treatment would be funnier because, even allowing for the hyperbole of Chelsea's carry-on, its invasiveness tacitly accepts her vile, proprietorial urges. Even Big Brother is decidedly coy by comparison.
Then there's McKeon's love-interest, Steve, an egomaniacal hick from Omaha. With an Elvis accent and a monstrous sense of self-regard, Steve persuades Ms All America to return to Nebraska with him. Just as he does so, Chelsea gatecrashes and, in turn, convinces the heroine to stay in New York. Miffed Steve freaks, warning Chelsea's sidekick that she "might enjoy success" in the Big Apple but adds that it can only be "a hollow Steve-less success". Sandwiched as she is between hick and chic, our sympathies are expected to flow towards McKeon.
Look, it's only a late-night sitcom but it has all the vacuousness of daytime television. In itself, it's just another example of TV drivel. But its premise is pure propaganda and an especially insidious form of propaganda at that. Why the BBC has chosen to screen Style and Substance remains a mystery. It's more sentimental than the consumerist ads and lifestyles it pretends to mock. In fact, it's hardly worth bothering about except for the crucial matter that even ad-free BBC 2 is now being corrupted by the kind of culture it is supposed to resist.
There are commercial channels which could screen this duplicitous and treacherous nonsense. Indeed, most commercial channels show similarly horrific sitcoms. Back when The Cosby Show was number one in the US's ratings, it seemed reasonable to ask if many black people in the US lived like the Cosby family - you know, a lawyer married to a doctor and the entire happy family struggling nobly and humourously against life's daily vicissitudes while living in their own brownstone building. Compared with Style and Substance, the Cosbys were almost ethical misrepresentations.
A COUPLE of weeks into Big Brother and Sada has been evicted. As I write, Andrew or Caroline will follow. Do many viewers care? Perhaps teenagers and twentysomethings, characteristically obsessed with issues of ego and individual identity, have firm favourites among the contestants. But the group dynamic (though admittedly inseparable from the individuals) and public reaction to that dynamic are peculiarly, almost dismally, intriguing.
Perhaps more intriguing still however - and certainly less dismally so - are the pundit psychologists who assess the behaviour in the human goldfish bowl and assign it meaning. Well, if football, politics and the arts can have their TV scholiasts, psychology is equally deserving. There are differences though. In most areas, punditry is recognised as not being agenda-free and in football, for instance, quips between former defenders, midfielders and attackers concede differences of approach and emphasis. Likewise with left, right and centre political pundits; and aesthetic, contextual and deranged arts heads.
Indeed, in football, the surrealistic exaggerations of the Apres Match crew recognise and exploit the dynamics of TV punditry. The result is that we have commentary on commentary and it's popular because it's funny. So far, however, the Big Brother psychologists appear either not to realise or, if they do realise, not to wish to recognise the fact that they too are part of the gig. Fair enough, they are not guinea pigs in the sense that the crowd in the house are guinea pigs. But by just appearing on television - the ultimate and ubiquitous human goldfish bowl - the detachment they effect is compromised.
Television inevitably does that. You like one face, one voice, one attitude more than another. Consequently, the criteria which make for success on television - and rational judgment is rather low down the list - apply also to the shrinks. It might have been better to have off-screen punditry with the various assessments read by an off-screen broadcaster. Perhaps viewers will not be greatly influenced anyway by the judgments of professionals. As it is, however, viewers' judgments of the professionals are more likely to result in skewing the outcome.
Anyway, it's interesting that as the public increasingly despises manipulative former public schoolboy, Nick, the housemates continue to accept him. He has twigged that Anna, the lesbian, Irish former nun, is a real threat to his chances and he appears to be fomenting a whispering campaign against her. The most worldly successful of the bunch, Nick's Machiavellian manoeuvrings suggest that prosperity in the outside world is attained through morally disreputable methods. Despite the objectionable hype and prurience of Big Brother, it points up some valuable, if dark, truths.
MORE seriously dark matters were outlined on 20/20, which put faces and silhouettes to the ongoing investigation into Garda behaviour in Donegal in the early and mid 1990s. This story of purported deception regarding Garda "finds" of bombmaking material - allegedly planted by gardai themselves - is, aptly, a minefield for a reporter. Nonetheless, Frank Connolly did a commendable, if understandably restrained, job in recounting a yarn which has genuinely chilling implications.
There was little new in this report but persuading the estranged wife, albeit in silhouette, of a suspected garda to talk to camera was a coup. She recounted being told by her husband that an unassembled bomb was being stored in their shed. "I was brought and shown black bags and I asked my husband was it likely to go off and he said, `No, it's safe'. It was gone the next morning and I don't know how it went." The inference is that some gardai were placing and then "finding" bomb-making equipment in order to secure fast-track promotions. Finds of explosives in Bridgend, Donegal town and Rossnowlagh were reported as IRA bomb finds.
The IRA, finding the finds incomprehensible, was allegedly mystified. It was also claimed that a bomb at an MMDS deflector mast was manufactured by gardai. This is tread-lightly territory but it does appear that after the raft of scandals involving the clergy, the banks, the blood board, businessmen and politicians, gardai have now joined the ranks of the disgraced. As ever, the customary cautions about a few bad apples in a big barrel apply. But this is a grave story - political, social and legal dynamite. 20/20 ought to keep after this one. TV3, obsessed with vacuous style, needs substance. This is its chance.
IN lighter vein, Debut returned this week with a new season of short films. Dream Kitchen and Left Back looked, respectively, at difficulties faced by older teenage and adolescent sons. The former dealt with the dilemma faced by a young gay man coming out to his family; the latter with the predicament of a Star Wars-loving, football-hating boy faced with a football fanatic father. Both were funny and at times poignant. By and large they worked because they generally coated seriousness with just the right amount of relieving whimsy.
In Dream Kitchen, directed by Barry Dignam and based on an original stage scene by Kevin McCarthy, the gay youth daydreams of his coming out being elaborately celebrated by his family, who instead of their usual contemporary Dublinese, talk in a mix of Shakespearean syntax and sci-fi formality. When he snaps out of his fantasy, he hears them talk of "fairies" and "bloody perverts". It's a harsh reality but, in truth, it's preferable to the comic but inhumanly bland world of the daydream.
Left Back, by Joe McElwaine, saw a disappointed-at-work father, Frank, castigate his son for playing with "dolls" - Star Wars figures. The son, Paschal, couldn't kick snow off a rope but Frank can't accept this. It takes an epiphanic moment to bring growth and maturity. When Frank, demonstrating football tactics by using his son's "dolls", pulls the head off one of them, causing the youngster to bolt, he finally realises that "being yourself" is the most important quality of all. A final twist sees Frank successfully manage the schoolboy team his son has gladly forsaken.
These shorts are not proof of any renaissance in home-produced TV drama. None the less, made on shoestring budgets, they do show that originality, feeling and humour can always beat the well-financed banality and propaganda of such as Style and Substance. There is a practically mandatory glossiness about most US TV shows these days. It's meant to indicate a certain style and quality of production values. Sometimes it does but more often than not, it reminds you that programmes look increasingly like commercials, which, of course, many are.