 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Sunday-night shlockapalooza, which premiered this week on the E! Entertainment Network, scored the biggest ratings ever for a debut series on cable. It doubled the opening numbers for MTV's The Osbournes, which has been the talk of television this summer, and which appears to have been its inspiration. The program is a "reality" series in which a camera crew follows Anna, a former Playboy Playmate and fashion model, on her daily rounds. Hilarity ensues, or at least that's the theory. The joke is that Anna is a big dumb Texas-born hoochie, a white-trash Amazon whose lifestyle exemplifies the maxim popularized by social critic/Godfather of Soul James Brown, who observed, "You got to use what you got to get just what you want." The former Vicki Lynn Hogan worked as a topless dancer in Houston, and chose the nom de stripper Anna Nicole. Before a photographer discovered her and, with the help of cosmetic surgery and breast implants the size of dueling Astrodomes, got her into the pages of Playboy. In the early '90s, the big-boned Mexia, Texas, native went on to become a modeling superstar as the face and body of Guess? clothing. Fame turned to infamy when Anna suddenly turned up married to enfeebled 89-year-old Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, who died 14 months later, as if anyone could tell. Gold-digging Anna called the old codger "Paw-Paw," and wore her wedding dress to his funeral. After years of brutal litigation over the estate with one of Marshall's sons, Anna scored an $88 million judgment in her favor by a U.S. District Court judge this past March. For the past few years, Anna's life has been a tabloid bonanza involving allegations of drug use, multiple cosmetic surgeries, boozing, binge-eating, and kinky derring-do, including a sexual-harassment suit filed by a former female assistant who accused the blonde bombshell of forcing her into lesbian love slavery. Clearly, America hasn't heard enough from the pride of Mexia, which brings us to The Anna Nicole Show. The premier episode joins Anna and her entourage — lawyer Howard, assistant Kim, kickable lapdog Sugar Pie — as they search for a new L.A. house for the star. Widowhood has not been kind to our Anna, who has packed on a significant amount of weight, which wouldn't be quite so noticeable if she didn't insist on wearing skintight jeans and a tragically skimpy pink blouse. Though she may not have much sartorial style, manners are important to Anna; "Quit farting!" she instructs her flatulent pooch. Anna's slurred, babyish speech suggests that she may not have licked her substance-abuse problems. She behaves outrageously, scarfing food out of strangers' refrigerators, testing beds by simulating copulation atop them, and nattering on about how sexually needy she is. This big blonde is so thick she makes Goldie Hawn look like Hannah Arendt. When she is told about suicide bombers, Anna says, "Woo, why would they do that? Don't you think it's kinda painful?" And so forth. You get the joke. In fact, like The Jerry Springer Show, you get the joke in about ten minutes, after which it ceases to be funny, and starts to be sad. The show's witty animated introduction frames the program as the campy adventures of a spunky, uninhibited good ol' gal, but Anna is a rather unsympathetic figure. She has all of Elvis Presley's poor-boy-made-rich compulsions, without a modicum of his talent or humanity to compensate for the lurid excess. She's a blithering idiot who is making a fool of herself on national television. The show's humor depends entirely on its egomaniacal subject disgracing and humiliating herself unawares. There's no point beyond, "Get a load of this juggy floozy" — which, come to think of it, is the point of Anna Nicole Smith, period. It leaves you feeling cheap for having watched, especially when you think about what her sweet-faced 14-year-old son Daniel, who appears from time to time, must think. By way of contrast, The Osbournes seems humane and civilized. It's easy to like poor old burnt-out Ozzy and his shrewd wife Sharon, who both come from the English version of the same background as Anna Nicole. Their ugly, sullen teenagers, Jack and Kelly, are very much another story. The humor here depends on the tension between image and reality, which is to say, between the 52-year-old heavy-metal great's reputation as a hellraiser, and his daily life as a domesticated father. It helps that Ozzy has fried his mind on drugs, and dodders around like an amiable dunce who has been whacked on the head with a frying pan. While there are always some clever moments in The Osbournes — Ozzy observing the soap bubbles that will pour off the stage at his concert: "Oh come on, Sharon, I'm Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of F**kin' Darkness!" — the joke gets pretty old fast. Who wants to watch parents deal with spoiled Beverly Hills brats from week to week? How many times can you hear the sour-mouthed Sharon say things like, "We're not the f**kin' Partridge Family," and still think it's funny? Though these characters are vastly more pleasant than Anna, you're still watching a train wreck of a family exploit itself for the public's amusement. The thing is, the Osbournes aren't characters, they're real people, and you're left thinking, "Jeez, what a bunch of losers; those messed-up kids never had a chance." Audiences, however, seem to like the anti-glamour of these celebrity "reality" programs, and we shall no doubt see many more before this unfortunate trend departs. VH-1 is rushing into production a series starring — steady, people — Mr. and Mrs. David Gest. A friend of mine who is savvy about these things says this one will be probably the only such series worth watching? "This will be the first televised portrait of a beard marriage," he says, referring to the widespread speculation that Liza Minnelli, like her mother before her, has married a gay man. "That's going to be really interesting." Maybe so, but how ironic and cynical do you have to be to take pleasure out of watching complete bizarro phonies behave like complete bizarro phonies? As ironic and cynical as me, I guess; I'll watch it for the same reason I have David 'n Liza 'n Michael 'n Liz tacked to my bulletin board. Anna Nicole is tawdry and sad, the Osbournes pathetic and depressing, but this upcoming crew are a different breed of limelit grotesques: they're professionals, baby, and they're ready for their close-up, Mr. De Mille. Whether or not we are, or should be, is another story. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
inned
to the bulletin board above my desk at home is a portrait of insanity.
It is a photograph of the principals involved in a recent wedding ceremony.
From left to right: David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth
Taylor. Can you imagine such baroque human ridiculousness concentrated
in a single place, captured in a lone image? Verily, the Minnelli-Gest
wedding set the mark high for celebrity-trash-culture achievement this
year, but it has been bested (worsted?) by America's newest vulgar showbiz
sensation: The Anna Nicole Show, and its mega-bosomy raison
d'etre, Anna Nicole Smith. 
