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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Dennis Miller's monkey business. Plus: Disposable drug lords, 'shroomless wonks, and "The Bachelorette" hits a sour note.
Feb 9, 2004 | It's Miller time (again)
Dennis Miller has a chimp on his desk and a button that replays Howard Dean's now-infamous "Hooah!" from the night of the Iowa caucuses, but he wants us to know that on his new show, he won't be relying on irony or snide gimmicks to make his deathly serious points. "It will not be Dennis Miller's Ironypalooza business as usual," he enunciates emphatically. "Excoriation has been my milieu up to this point, but on this show, I'm going to be a smartass with the smartasses, and heartfelt with the sincere people. I hope you'll eventually come to think of this show as an ombudsman: fair and insistent."
Yes, Miller admits, he's less liberal and far more outraged than he was before. "9/11 changed me," he says. "Quite frankly I'm shocked that it apparently didn't change everyone out there." According to Miller's logic, we may have been open-minded, even-handed folks on the 10th of September, but on the morning of the 11th, we all earned the right to surrender to our least enlightened selves, to fall prey to our worst impulses, to vent enough spleen with such righteous outrage that it almost matches the fury of our fundamentalist oppressors.
Miller's worst impulses include a resident chimp, a live-show format without an audience, a watered-down "Weekend Update" that resorts to jokes about Dean's sanity and Kucinich's creepy looks for its weak laughs, and a "Varsity" panel so awkward and unprofessional that the words "Junior Varsity" spring to mind more often than the chimp presses the "Hooah!" button.
Since Miller is relentlessly self-serious and wildly overconfident, he confuses his worst impulses with really bold, daring choices. Thus, the opening current-events segment wins only scattered laughs, not only because it's not that funny but also because those are members of his staff laughing. You see, Miller refuses to ship in "tourists" to fill his audience, so instead, two or three producers and network executives guffaw loudly, and we're meant to think the key grip and the gaffer just can't get enough of Miller's love. And that's bold? Aside from the obvious fact that executives constitute more of a fraudience than honeymooning couples from Michigan ever could, when paired with mediocre jokes that I'm betting are all written by Miller himself (and if they're not, he should replace his entire writing staff), you've got one of the most painful, awkward segments of television ever produced.
"Kraft Foods says it will eliminate good jobs, 6,000 of them, due to more than a year's worth of disappointing losses," Miller quips. One nervous chuckle can be heard, faintly. "All right, who's not eating Velveeta. Is it you?! You slackers! Eat your damn Velveeta!" The studio is deathly silent. I don't think I'm the only one longing for some good old-fashioned tourist laughter about now.
Another bold choice? Invite rambling pundits and TV amateurs to be guests on your show, perch them on bar stools a couple of inches from each other, and do little to herd them toward a discernible point. "For the most part, I'll let people talk until they're talked out," Miller explains, and you just know there's a Big Idea behind it. "I think talk show guests sometimes bank on the host's intercession to save them. I say let them finish, see what's next, what's on the other side of all that bluster. Also, I believe constantly trying to break into their answer with my next question is a particularly precious form of preening that I hope to avoid."
No preening? No live audience? Guests talking until they're talked out? Someone needs to remind Miller that this is television. Getting all thoughtful and self-conscious about what makes most talk shows ring false is all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily produce a more entertaining show. Thanks to Miller's ill-considered purist impulses, we find him cringing his way through weak jokes in an empty studio, or wringing his hands as Naomi Wolf and David Horowitz attack each other in 5,000 words or less, sidestepping any recognizable issue or topic for minutes at a time.
In short, Miller has changed. Despite his talk of pragmatism, he's evolved into exactly the kind of semi-intellectual who's so boxed in by ideas, he can no longer entertain. Miller says he would like his show to be the headquarters of a "common-sense revolution." Unfortunately, that revolution's not likely to begin until Miller himself demonstrates a little common sense.
My beautiful bachelorette
I tuned in to "The Bachelorette" for the first time last week, just to check in and see if I was missing anything. Instead of just taking a peek, I had a really bad flashback of my early reality-TV viewing. Somehow, seeing the boys whinging about another group date filled me with such shame, it was like hearing "Gloria" by Laura Brannigan and stumbling on my old zipper-legged jeans, which my mom always said made me look like Tweedle Dee.
The problem is not the new bachelorette, Meredith. She seems pretty fun, not exactly mesmerizing or richly layered, but anyone is a step up from that stale sugar cookie Trista Rehn. The guys seem nice enough. They're all the manicured 'n' meaty variety, a little too prematurely heartsick for my taste, but then I don't generally meet big, beefy guys who claim to be "good providers," and if I did, I might think they wanted to sell me healthcare. I didn't even roll my eyes when I learned that half of them were pharmaceutical sales reps, even though I associate that career with richly tanned men from Hermosa Beach who smell like Polo cologne and have massive projection TVs in their condos and "party with their boys" every weekend, even though they're 46. I could even stand to hear them repeat that tired refrain of "Seven guys. Four roses. Who will Meredith send home?" before each commercial break, but only because I TiVo'd through it after the first time.
