by Slate. com
To many critics, Cupid and other matchmaking shows that mix money and real-life marital machinations represent a cynical and tasteless new genre that is yet another sign of America's moral decline. But there's something familiar about the fortune hunters, the status seekers, the thwarted loves, the meddling friends, the public displays, the comic manners, and the sharp competitiveness—all find their counterparts in Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. Only now, three-minute get-to-know-you tryouts in a TV studio substitute for three-minute waltzes at a ball. Traditional family values, it turns out, are back on television after all.
Lisa Shannon may lack the wit, depth, and cleverness of an Austen heroine, but like many of Austen's women, she has put herself in the hands of others (in this case her friends and the TV audience), trusting that they will choose the right match. Even the idea that Shannon, at 25, feels the need to go to such lengths to find a husband suggests a troubling 19th-century ethos: A woman who is not married by her late 20s is doomed to be an Old Maid.
Undoubtedly, the hundreds of suitors who joined the pursuit are as attracted to the $1 million dowry as to Shannon. But money played a large (and openly discussed) role in the Victorian and Edwardian contract as well. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, we learn that "Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien—and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance of his having ten thousand a year." And in Emma, Mr. Knightly scolds the novel's eponymous heroine for imagining a match between Mr. Elton and her friend Harriet, without understanding he is more interested in money than in love: "I have heard him speak with great animation of a large family of young ladies that his sisters are intimate with, who have all twenty thousand pounds apiece."
On Cupid, Lisa's friends Laura and Kimberly are there to protect her from such gold diggers. They helped Lisa screen the men who answered a coast-to-coast open call (which produced more candidates than did the California primary). After the three whittled down the list of hopefuls to 10, the final selection was turned over to TV viewers, who called in every week to vote for their favorite.
Like the secondary characters in Austen and Wharton, Shannon's companions are clearly there to provide piquant social commentary, deliciously wicked judgments, and intrigue, sabotaging some suitors and championing others. "Freak," "boring," "awful," shrieks Laura, Lisa's confidante, as she ridicules suitors' looks, accents, clothing, schooling, and pronunciation.
Of course, nothing but superficial snap judgments can be made in the few minutes that each man is initially given to impress the three women. But the snap judgments aren't necessarily unanimous, and Laura and Kimberly's debating of the various virtues and flaws (is he "an arrogant jerk" or a dependable lawyer?) are a prosaic version of Mr. Knightly's and Emma's spirited sparring over the lovesick Robert Martin:
"A respectable, intelligent gentleman-farmer," says Mr. Knightly.
"His appearance is so much against him, and his manner so bad," Emma responds.
Likewise, the hopeful bachelors on Cupid understand what goes into a suitable match. Corey, a rocket scientist with the Air Force, acknowledged up front, "I know you have your friends here because I have to fit in." One contestant, Rob, went so far as to boast, "I come from good stock, too. I have good hair and teeth," as if he were a racehorse, waiting for her to check his gums.
Even Richard Kaye, an English professor and the author of The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, confesses to being a "guilty watcher" of the new matchmaking shows, finding the parallels spookily similar. But inevitably, these series—The Bachelorette, Meet My Folks, Married by America, and For Love or Money (where a woman can keep the man or the million but not both)—have all been scorned for debasing the sanctity of marriage and for their shallow, indecorous exhibitionism.
But the shows also betray dissatisfaction with the individualistic, go-it-alone ethic of modern courtship. The Victorians and Edwardians organized balls, dinners, afternoon teas, country walks, and the like to help their younger members find mates. Today, without such formal social arrangements, singles are pretty much left to their own devices to suss out partners. And while the elaborate courtship rituals and codes may now seem curiously antique, they did serve to cushion the brutally competitive marriage market. "I've been looking for Mr. Right and I've just not been able to find him," Lisa confesses. "Based on my track record, I obviously need help." She has discovered what Lily Bart in Wharton's The House of Mirth learned after losing a sought-after bachelor. Upon hearing of the wealthy match that Grace Van Osburgh expertly concocted for her daughter, Bart concludes: "The cleverest girl may miscalculate where her own interests are concerned, may yield too much at one moment and withdraw too far at the next."
In the end, the American public will choose Lisa's potential spouse in what could be seen simply as a more democratic version of those literary heroes and heroines who gave themselves wholly over to society and allowed their extended family to pick an appropriate mate. And why not? The idea that a good husband is hard to find has become a cultural watchword. Meanwhile, the high divorce rate is evidence that love, American style, hasn't necessarily produced happier unions. Nor should anyone forget that Lisa, too, stands to gain the million only through an advantageous marriage. And if it doesn't work out after a year, she at least has one of the modern conveniences not available to Austen's or Wharton's protagonists: a no-fault divorce.
Assessment: The Simpsons
Who turned America's best TV show into a cartoon?
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2003, at 4:16 PM PT
At some point during its 14-year run, The Simpsons turned into one of the best sitcoms on television—and that's not a compliment. At one time, to call The Simpsons the best show on Fox would have been a vast understatement; to say it was the best sitcom on television would have been inadequate; and to describe it as the greatest TV show in history would (and still does) minimize its importance by limiting its cultural impact to the small screen. Who knows when it happened—maybe it was when Homer visited the leprechaun jockeys in Season 11, or when he was raped by a panda in Season 12—but for several years, watching The Simpsons chase Ozzie & Harriet's record for the longest-running sitcom has been like watching the late-career Pete Rose: There's still greatness there, and you get to see a home run now and then, but mostly it's a halo of reflected glory.
The hype surrounding this Sunday's 300th Simpsons episode (actually the 302nd because Fox isn't counting two holiday "specials") has underscored the show's decline. To celebrate the milestone, Entertainment Weekly picked the top 25 episodes in Simpsons history: Twenty-four of them come from 1997 or before, meaning that only one comes from the past five seasons (which, not coincidentally, is the time period from which EW selected its "Worst Episode Ever"). Similarly, USA Today published a top-10 list written by the fan who runs the best Simpsons site on the Web. He picked nine shows from 1993 and before, and the other was from 1997. The newspaper also asked Simpsons staff members to select their 15 favorite moments and episodes, and only one person (Al Jean, the show's executive producer) chose something that happened within the past five years. Even as fans, critics, and staff members rejoice in the show's amazing longevity, they all agree: The past five or six seasons just haven't been up to snuff.
Who's to blame for this state of events? Some of the die-hard fans who populate the news group alt.tv.simpsons have settled on a "lone gunman" theory—that one man single-handedly brought down TV's Camelot. One problem: They don't agree on who's hiding in the book depository. Many fans finger Mike Scully, who served as executive producer for Seasons 9 through 12 (generally considered the show's nadir). Others target writer Ian Maxtone-Graham. Scully and Maxtone-Graham, both of whom joined the show after it had already been on the air for several seasons, are cited as evidence that The Simpsons lost touch with what made it popular in the beginning—Matt Groening's
and James L. Brooks' conception of an animated TV family that was more realistic than the live-action Huxtables and Keatons and Seavers who populated 1980s television. Unlike other TV families, for example, the Simpsons would go to church, have money problems, and watch television.
But under Scully's tenure, The Simpsons became, well, a cartoon. In A.O. Scott's Slate "Assessment" of Matt Groening, he wrote that Groening is "committed to using cartoons as a way of addressing reality." But in recent years, The Simpsons has become an inversion of this. The show now uses reality as a way of addressing itself, a cartoon. This past Sunday's episode featured funny references to Spongebob Squarepants, the WNBA, Ken Burns, Tony Soprano, and Fox programming, but the Simpsons themselves, and the rest of the Springfield populace, have become empty vessels for one-liners and sight gags, just like the characters who inhabit other sitcoms. (Think Chandler Bing.)
The Simpsons no longer marks the elevation of the sitcom formula to its highest form. These days it's closer to It's Garry Shandling's Show—a very good, self-conscious parody of a sitcom (and itself). Episodes that once would have ended with Homer and Marge bicycling into the sunset (perhaps while Bart gagged in the background) now end with Homer blowing a tranquilizer dart into Marge's neck. The show's still funny, but it hasn't been touching in years. Writer Mike Reiss admitted as much to the New York Times Magazine, conceding that "much of the humanity has leached out of the show over the years. … It hurts to watch it, even if I helped do it."
But can you blame one person for it? It would be nice to finger Maxtone-Graham, who gave a jaw-dropping interview to London's Independent in 1998. In it, he admitted to hardly ever watching The Simpsons before he joined the staff in 1995, to brazenly flouting Groening's rules for the show (including saying he "loved" an episode that Groening had his name removed from), and to open disdain for fans, saying, "Go figure! That's why they're on the Internet and we're writing the show." But just because Maxtone-Graham is a jerk (or at the very least, shows colossally bad judgment in front of an interviewer) doesn't mean he's a bad writer. On top of that, a show like The Simpsons is the product of so many creative individuals that it's difficult to blame one person—even Scully, the onetime executive producer—for anything.
So, instead, there are a few conspiracy theories for the show's not-quite demise. Perhaps the problem is too many cooks, as staff legend George Meyer implied to MSNBC.com: "We have more writers now," Meyer said. "In the early days, I think, more of the show, more of the episode was already in the first draft of the script. Now there's more room-writing that goes on, and so I think there's been a kind of homogenization of the scripts. … Certainly, the shows are more jokey than they used to be. But I think they also lack the individual flavor that they had in the early years." Another theory lays the blame on the show's many celebrity guest stars, which have made the show resemble those old Scooby Doo episodes where Sandy Duncan, or Tim Conway and Don Knotts, would show up just for the heck of it. Still others think the problem is the show's brain drain: Long-absent individuals include creators Groening and Brooks, actor Phil Hartman, and writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss (who both left briefly to do The Critic), Greg Daniels (still doing King of the Hill), and Conan O'Brien (who has been linked to the show's decline so many times that Groening once called the theory "one of the most annoying nut posts" on the Internet).
But maybe no one, not even a group of people, can be held responsible. Simpsons determinists lay the blame on unstoppable, abstract forces like time. The show's writers and producers often subscribe to this line when they publicly abase themselves for not living up to the show's high standards. Maxtone-Graham told the Independent, "I think we should pack it in soon and I think we will—we're running out of ideas," and Meyer admitted to MSNBC.com, "We're starting to see some glimmers of the end. … It's certainly getting harder to come up with stories, no question."
An incredible anxiety of influence hovers over Simpsons writers, who realize that they are judged not by the standards of network television, but by the standards of their own show's golden age. By the end of his tenure as executive producer, Scully was making nervous statements to the press like, "Basically, my goal is just not to wreck the show" and, "Yeah, we don't want to be the guys that, you know, sank the ship." Maybe The Simpsons is killing The Simpsons by setting expectations too high. After all, even while you're wincing or groaning at a particularly lame gag, you're hoping that the show will stay on the air longer than Gunsmoke. It's hard to imagine television without The Simpsons. If it sticks around for another 300 episodes, maybe, someday, the wound of the past few seasons will be remembered like the one Maggie administered to Mr. Burns: an accident, and not a fatal one.
OutKast Is Good
America's greatest rock band thinks hard about virtue.
By Sasha Frere-Jones
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2003, at 8:52 AM PT
Look hard at the universe of hip-hop since 1978 and you won't find a lot of records that say "I'm sorry." So, when OutKast released the 2000 hit "Ms. Jackson"—in which they apologized to Everymama for making her daughter cry—it was as unexpected as John Grisham spinning on his head. Even nice MCs brag and boast most of the time. (Listen to De La Soul again.) The longer it hung around, the more questions "Ms. Jackson" birthed: Did hip-hop have more to apologize for than other genres? Was "Ms. Jackson" a strike against the misogynist jerks that hip-hop built its reputation on? That pop music built its house on?
Stankonia, "Ms. Jackson" 's home, has sold almost 4 million copies to date, twice the number for the previous OutKast album, Aquemini. The new OutKast double CD, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, offers one disc by each member: Antwan "Big Boi" Patton provides OutKast-style hip-hop as we already know it on Speakerboxxx; André Benjamin does anything but on The Love Below. Peak of career, working on tracks separately, huge anticipation = The White Album. The CD will have sold 500,000 copies by the time you read this, making it one of the few quick platinum arrivals in a soggy business year. (The RIAA counts one sale of a two-disc set as two sales, so 500,000 sales of SB/TLB become 1 million, making the title platinum instead of gold.) A friend went to the Virgin Megastore in New York's Union Square
over the weekend and asked how the album was selling. "We have to keep re-stocking the end-caps [racks near the entrance] every 90 minutes or so," he was told. Whether it continues to sell through Christmas is another story. Is SB/TLB worth buying? Hell, it's OutKast. It's better than anything else on your desk. Is it too long? It's two CDs, so you already knew it was too long. Those are the easy questions.
SB/TLB pivots on the much harder question of "good behavior" proposed by "Ms. Jackson." African-American culture has a lot of voltage running through this cable. Thanks to hip-hop, the idea of blackness is now inseparable for many people from an idea of realness that equals cynicism, criminal fantasies, and enthused capitalism. The number of Hummers in the video and the gallons of blood in the rhymes are still metrics of credibility.
The African-American community has a specific cross to bear when confronting this "realness," but everybody has a problem being good. It's boring. We've known this at least since the 19th century, when the Rev. Rowland Hill of Surrey Chapel in London delivered the line often attributed to Martin Luther: "The devil should not have all the best tunes." Who has the best record collection? Your saintly friend who jogs 10 miles a day and does pro bono work or your annoying slacker friend who tends bar?
OutKast is in a better position than most to bridge what's virtuous and what's fun because their hip-hop has always been a vernacular blend. Hip-hop beats have become oddly jingoistic, rejecting sounds and samples that refer to anything outside hip-hop itself. But listen to Stankonia's "Bombs Over Baghdad." Is it hip-hop just because it has rapping? The drum beat and the guitar-playing read like rock at 30 paces. And there's that gospel choir singing the coda. You call it.
André's work on The Love Below skips the blend mode and goes straight to crush, puree, and vaporize. Fans of crunk, the S
outhern flavor of hip-hop OutKast helped midwife, will find the ecstatic pop of "Hey Ya!" sacrilegious. Fans of easy-riding anthems like "So Fresh, So Clean" will find position papers like "Happy Valentine's Day" corny: "When cupid knocks at your door/ you can't ignore me." The pop fans who liked "Ms. Jackson" and André's peacock style will be freaked out by his discussion with God, who is a woman. (Like everyone, André wants to know if God knows any single girls.)
André knows the cultural buttons he's pushing, so he lays out the dichotomies before anyone else can. On the back cover, he's a gangsta holding a smoking handgun—but it's pink. Tough, but tweaked. For the front cover, he poses in front of the Eiffel Tower wearing a red plaid suit and yellow tie, daring you to call him names. (Can the fragrance called Andrégenous be far behind?) The first song, "Love Hater," capitalizes the sentence: "Everybody needs a glass of water today, to chase the hate away/ You know you've got company comin' over/ So you scrub extra-hard/ And everybody needs somebody to love/ Before it's too late/ It's too laaaaaaateee oh/ Don't nobody wanna grow old alone!" And then he shows his hand: "And everybody need to quit actin' hard and shit/ Before you get your ass whooped (I'll slap the fuck out ya!)." See? We can trust André to be good but not a goody-goody.