Word: middlebrows
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Everybody hates an Anglophile. Or at least everybody should. By this I mean the kind of buttered-scone Anglophiles who have supported middlebrow imports like Ballykissangel and Masterpiece Theatre through pledge drive after pledge drive: those self-hating televisual Tories who cling to genteel dramas and dotty, dated comedies as a Union Jacked bulwark against American TV's tendency to be so crude, so commercial...so American...
...hands Homer a Grammy and Homer chucks it into the trash. Which is how I feel about the awards right now. I suppose I'm expected to say something about them, this being the music column and all, except that I feel award shows naturally tend to reward the middlebrow rather than the spectacular. (Hello, Santana!) And the behind-the-scenes politics of major labels to win Grammys just leaves an odd taste in my mouth. I wonder if record labels send "for your consideration" copies of albums to Grammy voters in the same way studios give out comp tickets...
Until last week Firing Line was there to remind us that TV didn't have to be that way. The show was spawned in the earnest mid-'60s, before popular culture swallowed up the middlebrow and "educational TV" became a comical oxymoron. During last week's taping, Buckley told his guests about David Susskind, the talk pioneer from the 1950s who was host of a show called Open End. "Every night he'd go on the air with some guests at 9," Buckley said, "and he'd keep going--an hour, two hours, three--until he got bored...
...tearful interviews, the wedding footage and--that sine qua non money shot--the baby pictures: it can be hard for the uninitiated to tell the shows apart. But there are identifiable categories. Educational, middlebrow offerings like Biography and PBS's American Masters aim to be definitive (and, more rarely, hard-hitting), while entertainment channels tend toward frothy love letters like CMT Showcase. Others are hybrids, like Bravo's brainy Bravo Profiles, which delves into artists' creative processes--it's fan mail, but in iambic pentameter. Likewise, Intimate Portrait has a classy roster of "women of substance," which it treats with...
Where did the sassy, savvy show tunes of yesteryear go? Has the all-American genre been smothered in middlebrow blandness by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his carpetbag clones? Way Back to Paradise (Nonesuch/Atlantic), the first solo album from three-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, points to smarter times ahead for the Great White Way. It contains 14 songs by five young composers who specialize in musical theater, none of which sound even remotely like Memory. All are highly listenable; a few, downright remarkable...