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NYTV blues | page 1, 2
And of course the
biggest splash of all is sunny San Franciscan Sarah Merrin (Jennifer Love
Hewitt) ditching "Party of Five" to search for her birth father in New York
on Fox's new "Time of Your Life." She's so giddy in nice New York that when
someone asks her at one point if she's OK she moons, "Yes! I am so
wonderful!" And this New York is wonderful. Because this New York is San Francisco.
And San Francisco is murder on entertainment. With the notable exceptions of "Vertigo,"
"The Maltese Falcon" and "Party of Five" (at least the parents
died horribly and people keep getting cancer and bad grades), film and TV shows set
there tend to fail. The rule is the more livable a city, the less watchable it becomes. My Montana
hometown is so very nice that it is the setting of the worst movie Gregory
Peck ever made -- "Amazing Grace and Chuck," in which a Little League
player quits baseball to protest nuclear proliferation. Sarah and Felicity are both Bay Area transplants, but they need not have left home.
They could have had the same well-scrubbed, well-spoken, beautiful friends.
Felicity could have worked at Peet's instead of Dean and Deluca, could have
gotten stuck on BART with her ex-best friend who just wrote a mean song
called "Felicity" instead of the subway on her way to the Museum of Modern
Art (San Francisco has one, too). Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
And Sarah could have moved to the Mission in lieu of the East Village. Because what's the difference? In this new New York, no one's going to be running into Andy Sipowicz. The only criminal here is the beaming Jennifer Love Hewitt: She and her new soul mates get arrested for jumping a subway turnstile. My female friends make fun of this show, just like they made fun of "Felicity" before it. Sarah ends up on East 10th Street. I have a friend who lives on that street who after watching "Time of Your Life" spewed, "Ugh, I wouldn't let her in the door." This is the same person who shares my affinity for the "Godfather" movies. And I think if you compared both of our lives to "The Godfather" and "Felicity," we'd have oodles more in common with Felicity Porter than with Michael Corleone. Which is probably good news for our respective siblings -- her brother and my sister need not fear any Fredo hit on the lake -- but not such good news for entertainment seekers. Because who wants to see her own life on a screen? Who wants to see a New York she can actually live in? When Henry Hill in Scorsese's "GoodFellas" brags, "I always wanted to be a gangster," an ordinary middle-class viewer can go somewhere she never thought she wanted to go. It's only at the movie's rueful end that, foreshadowing the early-'90s time frame of "Bringing Out the Dead," Henry complains, "Today, everything is different. There's no action." But when Felicity agonizes over changing her major, and you're young enough to remember that dilemma but old enough to be living out its consequences, what's the fun in that? Last season, when it came out that Felicity was having an illicit (if celibate) affair with her dorm's resident advisor, her Goth roommate hissed, "Man, I had you pegged as this uptight, no-fun, like, follow-the-rules kiss-ass bore." To which Felicity replies, "Well, actually, that's much closer to my personality." I have no problem being an ordinary, urban, middle-class woman
in her (for a few more weeks anyway) 20s. But when I turn on the TV, I
want that box in the upper-left-hand corner to be crammed with sex and
violence warnings. Which is why the best network program remains ABC's "The
Practice," even though it's set in -- honestly -- Boston. Like who cares about
Boston? If buttoned-down Boston is the nation's new locale for sex and
death, the next thing you know, they'll start setting TV shows in Providence.
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