Word: sketches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recognize a tv breakthrough? Network publicists usually try hard to sound the alert -- a cop show with nudity! an Asian-American sitcom! She TV too arrived on ABC last month with a high-concept selling point: TV's first sketch-comedy show focusing on, and creatively dominated by, women. Actually, from a commercial standpoint the female angle has probably hurt more than it has helped. Critics were generally cool to a show that wore its feminist agenda on its sleeve, and a lot of potential male viewers were probably scared off as well. Ratings have been mediocre, and prospects...
Women have long been second-class citizens in TV sketch comedy, never more so than today. On Saturday Night Live, the female cast members are so overshadowed that most of the women's roles seem to be played by men in drag. The only memorable character created by a woman in the past five years is Julia Sweeney's Pat -- and the joke is that no one knows Pat's sex. The show has all but abandoned nuanced relationship comedy in favor of TV parodies and broad, running characters that are like antic vaudeville acts. Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner...
...ones. Nick Bakay has nailed the sensitive-macho posturing of NYPD Blue's David Caruso, and the show has lampooned everything from Forrest Gump to a dippy model turned TV host named Bagitta. But She TV's horizons are broader. That became clear its first week, in an inspired sketch called "What Do Women Want?" Ostensibly a parody of a game show, it turned into a sly satire of the gulf between the sexes; a lone male contestant is trapped in a world where the rules are fuzzy and he's the only one who isn't clued in. (Emcee...
There was a satisfying airport paperback, with pink cover and gold-embossed lettering for the title, to be written about Blue. Where is Judith Krantz, the reader muses, when we need her? And never mind that the Jacob King figure is an obvious sketch of the real-life mobster Bugsy Siegel and that since everyone knows that Siegel was murdered, there isn't a lot of suspense to be generated about whether King will live to collect Social Security. Blue is a good, tough, hard-edged character ("she only cries on cue," someone says of her), and a straight-ahead...
After that, Aubrey simply disappears, though Nathan believes he sometimes sees him, usually at funerals. The rest of In the Tennessee Country follows Nathan's adult life. Though Trudie wanted him to become an artist, he settles for being an art historian, and Taylor makes an elegant sketch of the bramble of academic politics. On his retirement, Nathan becomes preoccupied with Aubrey to the degree that his son Brax, who really is a painter, becomes bored and annoyed. It is Brax who finds Aubrey, now a dying ancient, and Brax who chooses finally to follow his path and live...