Mireille Enos

Lunchtable TV Talk: Sex & the City

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It will sound strange that I am ridiculously embarrassed to admit that I have been binge-watching Sex & the City this week. I readily admit my shamefully frequent hate-watching of shit like Zoo or the relentless and neverending decades-worth of cop and legal procedurals without the kind of shame and self-disappointment I feel at admitting that I’ve succumbed to watching this. I’m watching, and I cannot even call it total drivel – it’s not that bad. But it was so overhyped when it was new that it should/could not have been seriously watched during its heyday. Sure, watching it the way I’ve been watching puts too fine a point on the annoying parts – and they are many. But there are moments, when I set aside the fact that this is a show built around the pathetic idea that successful, independent, sexual, attractive women pretty much let their lives revolve around meeting someone, that elicit some kind of provocation or pique an emotional response. I think SaTC spoke to so many people at the height of its popularity because there are a lot of women in the same situation. Most of us can relate to some part of SaTC, whether it’s the elusive hunt for “the one”, thinking we’ve found “the one” only to be jerked around, or even the sad but seemingly ridiculous storylines like falling in love with the micropenis man, the out-of-control alcoholic, and god knows whatever else. Or a few pearls of Samantha Jones wisdom, i.e. in the new millennium (which was just dawning as this aired), sexual orientation will end up being more fluid and about experience and individuals over gender. We’ll see – but we’ve certainly moved in a more fluid direction in the 16 years since it aired.

As I wrote to a friend: “I am horrified at myself because I ran out of crap tv to have on in the background while I work so I have done something I swore I would never, ever do: I am watching Sex & the City. It is funny though what impressions you get of things while they are happening but you are not really watching. I had very misguided ideas on what happened in the Carrie/Big relationship, for example, based on water-cooler office talk and shit. I had during its original run seen an episode here or there … like one ep from season 1 and one ep from season 4 so it was not like I had any great continuity of plot – even though it is not hard to piece together or guess.” And being who I am (tv addict) I knew a LOT about it without ever watching it, but then actually watching it there are a lot of things I did not know.

The most fun part of the show actually has been realizing how old it is. It started almost 20 goddamn years ago. It featured loads and loads of actors who were nobodies who went on to do other things – people I barely recognized because the first season was from 19-fucking 98! What? The first two seasons included Justin Theroux in two different roles, Timothy Olyphant looking a little creepy (has he maybe had his teeth done since?), fucking Donald Trump, and even Gabriel Macht long, long before his success in Suits. There was even a 30-second scene of a silent Mireille Enos in the episode Valerie Harper was in.

Maybe when the show debuted it felt fresh – it did, after all, help to usher in an era of prestige TV that has led to this flood of vast and quality TV choices. But looking at it today is it provocative, as it clearly was meant to be? No, not so much. In fact, at certain points it feels hateful, full of all kinds of discriminatory BS, privilege and stereotypes. Can I overlook that?

Yeah, because, oh well now that I am watching it it is nowhere near as obnoxious and overblown as it was to me when it was new and everyone was obsessed with watching it. Now that we are awash in a sea of varying quality shows that are still better than network tv, it no longer feels like there is much novelty around something like SaTC.

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Catch

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Decisions on whether to cancel or renew TV shows are fundamentally mysterious to me. Loads of good TV gets canceled (and sometimes not even because of poor ratings) while crap gets renewed. Maybe there are monetary or political considerations at work in these decisions. A good example of this, for me, is the show The Catch. It’s the fourth of Shonda Rhimes’s shows to be on the air at the same time. Her grip on network television feels almost dictator-like, as the trio of her hit shows – Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, dominate. The long-running Grey’s has hit a creative renaissance, while (for me) Scandal and How to Get… suffer. Scandal grows increasingly ridiculous while How to Get hit a popular nerve in its first season, but seemed to grow less interesting in its second season. Maybe it was just me, but I grew weary and considered whether I should even continue (especially because it lost its magnetism for me).

Given this backdrop, The Catch was pitched as some kind of sexy mystery caper. Helmed by the usually solid Mireille Enos as Alice, it is immediately obvious that this show is not the right vehicle for Enos … or frankly for anyone in the show, including Peter Krause, who plays Enos’s conman fiance. He has conned her and her investigative firm, but doesn’t disappear into thin air afterwards because he has, apparently, actually fallen in love with his mark. The premise is flawed because it’s like it was written for the span of an eight-episode mini-series, not for a multi-season regular tv show. But it was nevertheless renewed for a second season, despite the weakness of the plot and the apparent discomfort of all the players in the play, so to speak. The script and story make all the characters look foolish and dumb, not at all the clever, canny, intuitive people we’d expect to be successful heads of major investigative firms or successful swindlers and con artists. I am prepared to buy into things that are not necessarily believable premises, but things like The Catch – with its bad plots, bad writing and overglamourizing its main characters – isn’t one of those things.

It’s boring; it’s a story that has been told multiple times before; it’s not even got a hook to differentiate it from stories like it before.