Deleted Scenes 08.13.09: What I Watched on My Summer Vacation
Posted by Robert Sullivan on 08.13.2009
Not that there's much room for vacations around here anyway. Come on in.
Hey, everybody. I'm Rob, welcome back to Deleted Scenes, and this here's another variation thereof. Lots of new eyes on the column this week, as just about everybody who's anybody has heard how my readers and I (mostly I) took down Funny People two weeks ago. Well, I shouldn't say two weeks ago, the flopping carnage is still continuing at a theater near you as we speak, every pointless scene of "Yo Teach!" unspooling before increasingly empty theaters day after day...
But I digress.
This week, then, we'll get into what I (and, clearly, you) have been watching as the upcoming TV season draws near - catching up on previously broadcast material doesn't count. But before we can get to that, we've got a handle a little bit of business upfront -
And after you read all that content, go ahead and make 411Mania YOUR official homepage, okay? I know you will, you're good people.
The Column
Some people claim there's never anything worth watching during these long weeks, dragging into months, until our usually scheduled programs return. I never agree with this viewpoint. Why, you might ask?
That's why, people.
Crap. Huge steaming piles of crap, and I'm not just talking about the contestants.
And I'm just not talking about the heartbreaking work of staggering genius that is "More to Love." The summer TV viewing landscape is littered with said huge steaming piles of crap, and as long as it amuses me, whyever not? So here we go, the two shows you should be watching this summer -
This one, of course, goes without saying. The various highs and troubling lows of Denis Leary's baby have been well discussed inside these margins, so I'll keep it short. Suffice to say that despite its issues (all the women are insane, all the women want to fuck Tommy, it has a tendency to repeat itself), this show's a bracingly dramatic shot out of the summer doldrums. Hilarious in one second and tragic the next, "Rescue Me" always entertains - even when you can't believe that _______ is giving Denis Leary the "fuck me" pout as well.
"More to Love" might be the funniest program on television, possibly ever. It follows the developments of sending one 300-plus-pound former football player loose among a house of emotionally fragile, bizarrely desperate women who are all bigger than your average reality dating show SkankTron 2000. Some have wailed that the popularity of this show represents just another stop on the train to Idiocracy, but I say nay nay. I say that the success of "More to Love" is its own independent phenomenon - that it says nothing about us, intellectually or otherwise - simply due to what it is.
It's a dating show about fat women who are completely obsessed with the first dork who shows them the slightest bit of attention. How could this not be entertaining? How did the reality show genre (at least in the modern day) with 2000's "Survivor" and take nine years -
Nine years -
"Nine times..."
/too soon? no?
//see you around, John Hughes
NINE YEARS before someone got the brilliant idea to have a dating show about fat people. What are we paying these people for? Why are these creative geniuses driving their Porsches and fucking their supermodel trophy wives if it took them nine revolutions of the Earth around the Sun to think, "You know what would get ratings? Making fun of how quickly fat girls think they've found their soulmate if the guy doesn't immediately run away"?
I mean, come on, really. I know it's a fallacy to compare situations to yourself, but I'd like to think I could've imagined the Nielsen boxes popping if I put a pathetic loser like Kristian, a twentysomething New Jersey schoolteacher who acts like a restraining order waiting to happen, on television for the American public's derision long before 2009. It would've been possible to see in the comfort of your own homes women in their thirties wailing about never having gone on any dates previously if I were in the daddy chair, I'm sure of that.
Anyway. "More to Love." Watch it with tissues. Not for that reason of course, but you're going to need something to wipe away the tears of laughter.
