Alexa Chung, I kinda like you

Yesterday I was home from work and had a chance to catch up on my day-time tv watching. After finishing up a re-run of The Gilmore Girls on ABC Family, I accidentally found myself switching to MTV, surprised to discover that a new talk show had hit the air waves called, It's On with Alexa Chung. Initially I had my doubts. MTV hasn't hired a good "VJ" in years. I don't think they're even calling them VJs anymore. It only took a matter of minutes for Alexa to sweep me off her feet with her charming British wit and boyish mannerisms.

MTV, as off late, is only interested in airing the exploits of the hopelessly dumb and the stupidly beautiful. They must have at least five different reality "game" shows involving dating, or dating your friend's mom, or breaking into someone's house to find out if you want to date them. All of these shows employ hidden cameras and they're all transparently cheap to produce. TRL, the last video-hosting show standing on the once music saturated network, was cancelled last year and I couldn't even name one VJ in Post-Carson Daly era if I tried. Not that Carson Daly is much of a host.

Alexa Chung is a throwback to the old style of MTV VJ: smart, sassy, commendable personal style. She's no Kennedy but she's closer to an Ananda Lewis or a Martha Quinn than anyone else I've seen on MTV in the past ten years. On the show I watched yesterday, she interviewed some Hills' cast member (I can't tell any of them apart) and Margaret Cho. At one point, Margaret Cho went off the script. I think the topic was "things that you wish were ok to do" and Margaret starts talking about using a digital video camera to look at one's "hole." A lesser interviewer might have stumbled over that but Chung blushed and laughed and kindly reminded Cho that "they did not rehearse that."

Alexa's show is also smart about the way it incorporates Internet/social networking platforms. Usually talk shows are more passive about integrating internet technologies. A typical host may casually mention at the end of the program to follow the show on Facebook or Twitter. It's On With Alexa Chung takes a more active approach: twitter, youtubing and other internet activities are a integral part of show segments. I caught a segment in which Alexa asks the audience for two random words and performs a you tube search, selecting the most unlikely video result that the search may yield. For example, I think it was something like "pitbull" and "central park" produced a video featuring a pitbull in a tutu pushing a baby carriage. I don't think those were the words but you get the picture. The whole concept of playing Youtube videos on the show fits in well with the show's setting: a New York loft apartment. We're made to feel as if we're sitting in Alexa's living room as she facebooks and youtubes and chats with celebrities.

The show has only been on for less than a month and I don't think it has generated a lot of buzz yet. But there's still time. I think the show has the potential to be the best program on MTV, which isn't saying much but still...

Middlesex the TV series?

HBO announced today plans to develop Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, into an hour-long drama series. I don't know much about Donald Marguiles, the writer attached to the project, but I have serious doubts about whether this novel can be adapted serially. Middlesex is dense: a sweeping family history enmeshed with personal narrative,a novel that calls upon the arbiters of history to address the mysteries of the self. My concern is that a TV series will feel too reductive, given the scope of the novel. Wouldn't want Middlesex to be "a quirky, new drama series about a suburban Detroit hermaphrodite just trying to fit in..."

Buffy vs. Edward- Would Buffy Slay Edward?

By now, most of you have seen the Edward vs. Buffy fan vid making the rounds.



Edward vs. Buffy, which premiered at the Open Video Conference at NYU Law school, straightforwardly asks and answers the question: is the world of Buffy compatible with the world of Twilight? As we can see from watching the vid, Edward, with his antiquated notions of gender roles, does not survive in the progressive Buffy-verse. For video's author, 'Jonathan McIntosh,' the choice to kill Edward was "only reasonable":

In the end the only reasonable response was to have Buffy stake Edward – not because she didn’t find him sexy, not because he was too sensitive or too eager to share his feelings – but simply because he was possessive, manipulative, and stalkery.

See, I think Twilight's Edward could easily be a character in Buffy. The video in many ways, shows how seamlessly Twilight and Buffy could be integrated into one narrative. As I was watching, Edward reminded me a lot of Angel. Both are handsome, aloof and as McIntosh puts it, "possessive,manipulative and stalkery." Angel never took classes at Sunnydale High but he was always lurking in the shadows, offering Buffy protection from afar. Although in the vid, Buffy seems fairly indifferent to Edward's advances we can remember Buffy's affection for Angel is kind of her Achilles' heel, how Buffy would sacrifice anything for Angel, even her own slayer blood! Not to mention that for both Edward and Angel, sex is essentially the trigger that makes them dangerous and violent. Both Twilight and Buffy romanticize the non-sexual relationship between human girl and vampire man so why are we supposed to believe that Buffy would reject Edward, given that Edward has not crossed any of the boundaries (ie. sex) that made Angel a sizable enemy that needed slaying?

I agree with McIntosh: it is only logical for Buffy to kill Edward because Buffy has to kill all of her vamp-boyfriends whether they are evil or not. Both Angel and Spike died in their most non-threatening Edward-like incarnations. Buffy slays Angel after his soul is restored. Buffy has many opportunities to kill Spike but he actually dies after he has a soul, in an act that saves Buffy, and the world, but mostly Buffy.

Buffy,as a post-feminist icon, has a duty to serve and protect the world from evil that comes before any desire she might have to settle down and get married to Edward. It is interesting though how Buffy vs. Edward highlights how Buffy embraces antiquated notions of masculinity, even if the heroine rejects her prince in the end.

Thoughts on 'Hung'

Haven't had a chance to comment on the new HBO series, "Hung," that premiered last week. Since HBO CEO Chris Albrecht's departure in 2007, I've been interested to see what the new execs would come up with. "Hung" so far seems promising, better than a show centered around a man's big penis might sound.

I think it would be too easy to group "Hung" with other shows about white suburbanites side-stepping the law in pursuit of alternate income sources. "Hung" is about a middle class guy Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane) who is trying to get by after losing nearly everything in the pilot episode: his wife remarries, house burns down, kids jump ship. He can't find the money to repair his house so he decides to pitch a tent in his backyard and call it home. And oh yeah, he's a high school gym teacher coaching a basketball team on a losing streak. 

"Hung" isn't just about the plight of Drecker but is also about the post-industrial landscape of Detroit. Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways, About Schmidt) makes some interesting directorial choices in the pilot episode. The show begins and ends with shots of Detroit: from a bulldozed stadium to a homeless man plodding along a street wide enough to be a highway. These shots avoid being annoyingly heavy-handed because of their length and their attention to silence. I can remember a still shot of a gutted warehouse that carries on long enough to capture the small movement of a wind-blown scrap of paper. The same meditative camera movement extends to the scenes containing characters and dialogue. During a post-coital moment between Ray and Tanya (Jane Adams), the camera lingers on the black cursive lettering of her tattoo spelling out "Proust" as she reads him the poetry of Rumi, and in that momentary "Proust" pause we know exactly everything we need to know about what kind of "artist" Tanya is. 

"Hung" might seem to be covering old terrain but it does so with a fresh eye for detail, that will keep me watching in the weeks to come.