I don’t know if it’s something to do with Leslie Bibb or not, but ABC has a habit of taking promising sitcom titles and then squeezing all the fun out of them. Bibb, whom you may remember from Popular or Crossing Jordan or more likely as intrepid Brown-educated reporter Christine Everhart in the Iron Man movies, did of course star in ABC’s GCB. GCB was previously unhelpfully named Good Christian Belles, which in itself was a fudge since the show was originally based on a book called Good Christian Bitches. As you can tell, someone started to fret about the title and did some hasty renaming that never really went anywhere good.
Bibb doesn’t star in American Housewife but she does guest star in the first episode, bringing this cold-footed curse with her to the show, which originally bore the more intriguing and potentially more divisive title The Second Fattest Housewife in Westport. You can tell that’s what it had been called until the pilot had been filmed because that’s virtually every second line out of the mouth or voiceover of star Katy Mixon (Eastbound & Down but probably best known, thanks to TV’s inability to register the existence of fat women, for playing Melissa McCarthy’s sister on the fat-abusing haven for overweight actors and actresses, Mike and Molly). Now, with its title making a pointless and almost irrelevant claim to universality (cf This is Us), all those repeated references to not wanting to be “the second fattest housewife in Westport” are entirely stupid.
Continuing this season’s theme of “there are fat women, TV, get over it – but they’re not happy about being fat, oh no!” (cf This Is Us again), the show sees Mixon renting a house with her family in the otherwise rich and exclusive neighbourhood of Westport. All the other women are so rich that all they have to do all day is eat healthily and work out, resulting in Mixon being perpetually looked down upon for being ‘so real’ (ie fat). And most of the first episode is about Mixon’s worries that opposite neighbour ‘fat Pam’ is moving away, which will result in her becoming the second… you can work out the rest.
American Housewife is extremely short on laughs and extremely long on stereotypes. Despite ostensibly being pro “the 50% of American women who are a size 14 or over”, pretty much everything is about how miserable Mixon is, despite not being that overweight. Well, maybe not miserable. Irritated and angry, and not in a virtuous way – she really hates those ‘skinnies’ and most of the time, you’re not routing for her as a result, since she’s always being pre-emptively snide to a group of people who are at most oblivious, it would seem, rather than actively nasty.
What humour there is stems from ABC’s more traditional reservoir of family laughs. In contrast with Speechless, here it’s hubby Diedrich Bader (Office Space, Veep, Outsourced) who actually raises some chuckles, helped by the younger kids in the family – the son being the new, younger, Rand-reading Alex from Family Ties, the youngest daughter being an OCD nightmare. There’s also a black lesbian divorcee (Carly Hughes), who adds a bit more fun to the proceedings, if only through contrast.
There’s some insight, to be sure, and there’s probably a group of women who can empathise with Mixon’s anti-heroine, but this isn’t black-ish for the plus-sized by any stretch of the imagination. One not to add to your regular TV diet.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
So now I have to apologise. Sorry, Australia. Sorry, UK. Sorry, Internet. I have failed you, as well as a whole bunch of other countries whose TV I ostensibly review but I never quite get round to.
Oh well. I’m used to failure. Readjusted schedule, then. Some time in the next week or so, I should hopefully be getting through the first few episodes of a whole bunch of Australian TV shows – Hyde & Seek, The Wrong Girl, The Secret Daughter, Deep Water and Rosehaven. As for the US, I should be previewing Epix’s Graves and reviewing HBO’s Divorce. Meanwhile, on the Internet, Netflix’s Easy, Crackle’s Start Up and Amazon’s Crisis in Six Scenes might well be on indefinite hold, but maybe I’ll find the time.
I’ve not yet caught the latest episodes of The Fall and High Maintenance, so after the jump, I’ll be looking over Ash vs Evil Dead, The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Impastor, Lucifer,Westworld and You’re The Worst, as well as the return of Arrow and The Flash. Two of those are for the chop – can you guess which ones?
If you look over all that, you’ll see I did watch an awful lot of TV last week, just not enough. I probably could have watched all of it though if I hadn’t been bogged down with one thing…
Marvel’s Luke Cage (Netflix) Netflix and Marvel’s latest ‘Defender’ is a stonking 13 episodes of… not much. Continuing where Marvel’s Jessica Jones left off, it sees Luke Cage head over Harlem way to keep his head down, but when an old friend gets killed, the bulletproof black man has to wade in to help protect the neighbourhood. But then his past begins to catch up with him…
The show sticks pretty closely to the original Luke Cage comics – I’ve read precisely none of them, but if you watch this video, you’ll be caught up on them and know pretty much the whole plot of the first season. But what do we care about plot? Atfer all, Marvel’s Luke Cage doesn’t, being interested mainly in discussing black culture, history and what is the true and correct course of action for the modern black man of honour. Cage, who is a walking encapsulation of every single African-American stereotype and archetype (gang member, son of a preacher, ex-military, a blue collar worker, frequent denizen of social barber shop, lover, prisoner, medical experiment, boxer et al), becomes a nexus point for modern US politics, wandering around town in a hoodie but able to withstand police bullets, he’s able to demonstrate and confront all manner of arguments, while being the perfect role model at all times. Sweet Christmas, he doesn’t even swear.
And when he’s not doing that, we’re getting a musical interlude down the club, to celebrate black music. Method Man makes a cameo and even raps live about Luke Cage and police brutality.
Unfortunately, despite a cracking soundtrack and numerous homages to blaxploitation movie, that’s really all the show is, despite a grade A, almost exclusively black cast that includes multiple members of The Wire‘s cast (eg Sonja Sohn), Sons of Anarchy‘s Theo Rossi, Alfre Woodward, Banshee‘s Frankie Faison and House of Cards‘ Mahershala Ali. There’s minimal superhero fun, since Cage basically just wanders into rooms, people shoot at him to zero effect and he then punches them unconscious. Even when Cage’s arch-nemesis shows up, their confrontation seems to drag out across about half the season without much really happening.
If you’re expecting crossovers with the other shows or the movies, I’m afraid beyond the now compulsory appearance of Rosario Dawson and numerous references to the other shows and films, you’re going to be disappointed. At most, they offer only a rehabilitation of Justin Hammer.
And the dialogue. Oh gods, the dialogue.
In a sense, Marvel’s Luke Cage is an important show, offering a uniquely black perspective on the superhero genre, just as Marvel’s Jessica Jones was a uniquely female deconstruction of superheroes. But actually watching it, so little of any real interest happens dramatically that all you can do is admire its heart. And how it managed to slip Cage’s original comic book costume in there. That was impressive.
