While this year’s most obvious and manliest trend in US TV has been military shows, with Shooter and Six already with us and a slew of others in the pipeline, another, womanlier trend has been quietly bubbling away in the background: TV satirising TV. It probably all started with Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, but since then we’ve had The Bachelor satirised with UnREAL, news programmes mocked with Great News and Notorious, period dramas skewered with Another Period, and real-life crime documentaries teased a bit with Trial & Error.
Now we have VH1’s effort, Daytime Divas, a mild poking in the ribs of The View. For those who don’t know, The View is America’s equivalent of Loose Women, with its cohort of calculatedly diverse women expressing calculatedly diverse opinions on the topics of the day, ostensibly in a show of sisterhood, but largely to further their own diverse personal agendas. Former The View presenter/cackler Star Jones went on to write a satire of the show and its internal politics called Satan’sSisters, which is the basis of Daytime Divas.
Vanessa Williams stars as the creator and co-host of ‘The Lunch Hour‘, a View-a-like show in which five women sit around and pretend to be friends while still hating on each other and dealing with their own personal problems:
Tichina Arnold (Everybody Hates Chris) is a black female stereotype of a stand-up who plays up to the stereotype to ensure she’s the vital (irreplaceable) comedy presence on the show. But is her performance too ‘urban’ for the network? And is her rocky sex life her Achilles heel?
Chloe Bridges (The Carrie Diaries) is a ‘sexually fluid’ former child star still on probation after rehab and having to deal with a mother who only loves her for her money
Camille Guaty (Scorpion) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who’s perhaps a bit too boring for her own good, but never seems to get to do the journalism she really wants to be doing
Fiona Gubelmann (Wilfred) is a conservative Christian Republican, who’s all about the family values, but whose marriage is rocky and possibly even abusive
All seems to be going well until one day, the famously cosmetic surgery-free Williams undergoes minor surgery (actually cosmetic surgery) when she has a reaction to the anaesthesia and falls into coma. Before you know it, all her co-hosts are vying to take her spot in the vital ‘left chair’, with Williams’ son – the show’s producer – McKinley Freeman (Hit The Floor) having to adjudicate between them.
Despite ostensibly being a skewering piece of TV, it doesn’t have even one-tenth the edge of UnREAL, the one real tool in its armoury being mild cattiness. The co-hosts are slightly unpleasant to one another and will threaten to confess each other’s secrets to the media, but that’s about it for the inter-personal drama and satire, the rest of the time being devoted to tepid issues-based personal drama and poor representations of bisexual women. The characters are all studiously far enough away from being real View hosts to avoid lawsuits, too, but that also means there’s no real accuracy to the comedy, either. Its idea of how a TV show is produced is like a five year old’s and the worst language used is vagina. And that’s to describe a vagina.
So, these are not ‘Satan’s Sisters’ by a long chalk and by the end of the first episode, it’s clear that Williams is the surrogate mum of the piece who keeps her family together – they all need her and it’s really just one big dysfunctional family, who’ll end up loving one another really. Ah. How lovely.
That means whether you watch Daytime Divas is basically down to whether you like women saying mildly catty things to one another to raise a laugh. And if that’s your bag, you might as well just watch The View.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
This may – or may not – be the last WHYBW for a couple of weeks. TMINE will be taking a break from Thursday through to Monday next week. Will I have time to watch much TV? I don’t know. The fact that my watch list is now just a few shows should help, but we’ll know for sure next Tuesday.
Which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of American Gods, Doctor Who, The Handmaid’s Tale, Silicon Valley and Twin Peaks, as well as the season finale of The Americans. That’s not much, is it. Come on summer season. Where are you?
Because this is the only other show I watched this week:
I’m Dying Up Here (US: Showtime) 1970s-set drama about a bunch of up-and-coming comedians in LA, all hoping to hit the big time by appearing on the Johnny Carson Show. But first, they’ve got to prove themselves worthy of a main room gig at Goldie’s on the Sunset Strip and Goldie (Melissa Leo) is only going to let you have that once she decides you’re good and ready. Until then, you’re not going to get paid, so you’ll be bunking down with your mate in someone else’s closet or masturbating in front of dying priests to earn some money, just to get by.
Initially, the show, which is based on journalist William Knoedelseder’s non-fiction book of the same name, looks like it’s going to be about Sebastian Stan’s ‘Clay’, who is the first of the bunch to get on Tonight. However, as the name of the show suggests, all doesn’t work out well for Stan, so the focus quickly shifts to his ex-girlfriend and fellow comic Ari Graynor (Bad Teacher), some of Clay’s friends from Boston (The Knick‘s Michael Angarano and The Office (US)‘s Clark Duke), and African-American comic RJ Cyler, who’s badly represented by agent Alfred Molina.
Despite being exec produced by Jim Carrey, I’m Dying Up Here‘s biggest problem is it’s not funny. Indeed, it’s bloody miserable, being closer to How To Make It In America and the horrors of being completely utterly broke than it is about the joys of comedy. Even when it’s supposed to be funny, such as when Graynor finally produces a routine that will ‘define’ her and potentially take her to the big time, it’s singularly unfunny.
It looks beautifully 70s and it quickly kills any idea you might have that stand-up was glamorous back then. Watchable or enjoyable, though? Not at all.
