Word: sitcoms
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...ability to luxuriate in fluff that a feature accords, I'm confident the TV writers could have taken the same material and made it succinctly engaging, with more consistent jokes and probably more sincerity to boot. Instead, the movie infuriatingly waters down what might have made a decent sitcom, and we're left only with the remnants of sitcom artifices, without any punch...
Back in 1995, MARY TYLER MOORE declared she was done with Mary Richards. "I decided that I was not going to play any more characters with whom I was totally familiar," she said. That was then. Two years ago, Moore and VALERIE HARPER tried to sell ABC on a sitcom reprising their Mary Tyler Moore Show characters. The network passed, but it green-lighted a movie, and last week Moore and Harper were in New York City filming Mary & Rhoda, which will air during the February sweeps. In the movie, Mary and Rhoda Morgenstern reunite two decades after leaving Minneapolis...
...there you have the state of gayness on television in 1999: TV has come out, within fuzzily defined but undeniable limits. Since the much touted coming out of Ellen DeGeneres in 1997--and the much noted rapid demise of her sitcom in the following season--prime time has seen an influx of popular, prominent and well-rounded gay characters without Ellen-esque audience or advertiser cavils. Indeed, there's so much cachet in being gay that even straight characters are trying it. On Fox's Action, scheming movie producer Peter Dragon received oral sex from a star to whom...
...jokes of W&G--"I haven't seen a kiss that uncomfortable since Richard Gere and Jodie Foster in Sommersby"--would be unimaginable in the era of Three's Company's fairy jokes. Some shows even cultivate what you might call a gay sensibility. HBO's heterosexual (and how) sitcom Sex and the City regularly broaches sexual gray areas, taking the perspective, less broadly embraced among straights, that sexuality isn't either-or but a continuum. The Ally McBeal same-sex kiss episode, for all its easy titillation, takes the same view...
...after another, all the while wrapping his acerbic barbs in self-deprecation. Perry's got great timing and a needling delivery, and these qualities have helped make his Chandler Bing the most consistently funny and engaging character on "Friends" for the last five years. And Perry is an ideal sitcom actor--his playful banter and caustic wisecracks are perfectly suited to a medium that thrives on one-liners. But Perry is still trying to find his niche as a movie star. Almost Heroes was a total dud, and his Fools Rush In would more accurately be interpreted as a euphemism...