The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it.

Marche argues that Twilight’s Bella falls for Edward because he’s “strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her”—just like why the straight girls at his high school lusted after gay dudes. But the common thread among the triumvirate of recent vampire hotties—Edward, True Blood’s Bill, and Buffy’s Angel—isn’t that they’re “strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by” the nonvamp women who love them. What they share is being hot, strong, and supremely protective. They lurk in shadows, lending a slaying hand when Buffy is outnumbered; avenging Sookie’s childhood molestation; stopping the car on a collision course with Bella. That seems just about as heteronormative a fantasy as you can get.

Marche’s argument continues:

Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That's what everybody wants, isn't it? Sex that's dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving.

OK, I guess all of that sounds good. But how is having sex with someone who could kill you with a hickey “nonthreatening”? In most modern vampire dramas, the vamps are exerting tremendous, nonstop self-control to keep from chomping the woman they love. Having sex with them is the ultimate risk. As they usually tell their soon-to-be-lover in hushed undead pillow talk, they worry that once they let go a little, they’ll lose control entirely. And that’s not a groundless fear—look what happened to Angel.

Marche goes on to claim that True Blood “connects vampirism to homosexuality explicitly.” His proof: the roadside sign in the opening credits that says “God hates fangs” and general talk of “mainstreaming” vamps. Well, that points to the “vampires as social outcasts” theme. But it seems a big leap to get from that to “vampire craze as proof that all girls want to schtup gay guys.” I see the vampires' fight for equal rights in True Blood as similar to the struggles of mutants in X-Men. But in X-Men, that mutant/non-mutant tension seems more a stand-in for the relationship between blacks and whites (with Xavier as MLK and Magneto as Malcolm X) than a gay/straight thing. So, would Marche also says that X-Men comic books popular with nerdy boys because all nerdy boys want to have sex with black men? Or something?

Tags: gay rights, movies, Race, TV, vampires

Matt, I can assure you, David Plotz is no Roger Sterling. He cooks, he changes diapers, and he’s still married to his first wife. That said, he feels the same way you do. Every time we sit down to watch he yells, “Bring back Roger!” I was thinking of having bumper stickers printed to that effect. (If I do, I’ll send you one.) He’s never articulated why he misses Roger, but I think you put your finger on it: Mad Men is getting too preachy, and Roger is the answer.

I, too, was wary about the drift into the mid-'60s. The whole beauty of Mad Men is that it’s suspended in that moment before the dam breaks. Then the question becomes, can they hold that pose in perpetuity, or for at least five seasons? I think not, because then the show is entirely about style and periodicity and Weiner’s anal accuracy about types of liquor and train schedules, and that’s not ultimately all that interesting.

The new, groovy Mad Men is growing on me. I am curious to see who can make the transition into the new age and who can’t. Don Draper has gone mute and backwards-looking. Betty Draper is clearly frozen in time. The boys in the office—a question mark. Unclear if they will adapt or not. Ditto for Peggy. Roger, God bless him, is definitely moving into the new age of self-fulfillment and free love. As is Sally, who is well on her way to becoming a Goth cutter.

Tags: mad men, TV

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The flurry of and endlessly changing discussion surrounding AMC television hit Mad Men is to be expected. But the water cooler conversation, creative fan tributes, and shrewd, encyclopedic commentary are often totally out of left field. Of the many branching forms of homage, this video parody, featuring an all-female Sterling Cooper, is the funniest. Watch as the female account executives ogle their male assistants (the crotch shot at 0:53 is not to be missed), and the assistants in turn scheme about getting a wealthy woman to light "a fire in the bed." In this world, men don't write ("Who would answer the phones?"),  but one roguish man-cretary decides he has "bigger plans"—and something to say about that "relaxicizer" his female bosses are having such a tough time understanding.

Image is a screenshot.

Tags: gender roles, mad men, Mad Men parody, Mad Women, Television, workplace humor

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As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, this season of Mad Men has a new tagline—no longer "Where the truth lies," but rather, "The World's Gone Mad." Things seem relatively normal in the early 1963 moment with which the season begins—though by year's end, we know that history alone, not to speak of the tangled lives of Mad Men's ensemble cast, will make a sense of cultural and political vertigo inevitable.

And, through all this, Don Draper is trying to reclaim his place as the ever stable ubermensch—not just a dashing salesman, and the kind of guy spoken about in hushed whispers by his younger colleagues ("Baltimore? With Don Draper?"), but a good father and a good husband. I rather like his brand of parenting—he usually backs up wife Betty when the kids come 'a-whining about various acts of discipline, and his one-liner about daughter Sally's status as a dependent seemed fresh out of the 21st century daddy playbook. But as a husband, he's been atrocious—the missing piece of a man otherwise crying out for idolization.

Actor Jon Hamm, who plays Draper, has suggested that Don will start to atone for his wayward homemaking in this season. And indeed, the episode opens with a birth scene, showing the broken home(s) into which he was born. Don seems distinctly bothered by this imperfect genesis, and making a silent pledge to be "good at this," as Betty notes shortly thereafter.

So why is Don still cheating on Betty? And with such an obviously idiotic young, blond stewardess? The group of friends with whom I watched the premiere noted that Don's banter with this vaguely southern belle was distinctly stupid compared with his usually zippy seduction protocol. And that Don's dalliances from seasons past (bohemian Midge of the West Village, staid Rachel of Menken's department store, the mysterious Californian heiress, and brash Bobby of the entertainment scene) have been brunettes—and spitfires in their own right. Our theory: Don couldn't help being emotionally invested in women who were his intellectual equals, or close, and fun in bed to boot.

But if we take it as an icky matter of 1960s-era fact that men will cheat on their wives, isn't Don doing his best by picking the least plausible (true) love interest around? It's cold logic, but that's the kind of man Don is.

Photograph of Jon Hamm as Don Draper copyright 2009 American Movie Classics Company LLC. All rights reserved.

Tags: cheating, DOn Draper, mad men, marriage and commitment, Television

June, Drop Dead Diva ties together two things we’ve been kicking around the blog the last few days: Is T.V. a better place for women than film? And why on Earth do we keep paying to watch terrible romantic comedies like The Ugly Truth, when we could be sitting around in our PJs watching something slightly better for free? (or, at least it feels like it’s free once you pay the cable bill.)

Regarding the first question, Drop Dead Diva is pretty convincing evidence that T.V. is a better place for women, or at least for ones that don’t look like movies stars. This show, with this cast, is not about to end up at the cineplex any time soon. It is also, Nina, a comedy, suggesting that genre can be as good for fully developed female characters as dramas. There are some moments of seriousness and no laugh track, but that’s just because the latter is out of style. The cast mugs, often. My favorite recurring joke, and one pulled off only because Brooke Elliott’s really good at her job, comes when some of Jane’s intelligence bounds to the forefront of Deb’s previously dim brain. It hurts. Deb always reacts with a yelp of prideful, painful surprise, like you would if you smashed your big toe on the top of a door frame: ouch, but, oh my god, you are so awesomely flexible.

Of course, if this show somehow did end up in theaters, but were reduced to two hours, it would seem, as Nina suggests, pretty damn silly. Also, how would it end? With Jane/Deb landing Deb’s old fiancé? I know we’re supposed to root for this, but I have a hard time swooning for the guy who fell for an idiot. When the show flashes back to Deb’s first meeting with him, I couldn’t understand what he liked about her, except that she was hot. Jane, and also a newly intelligent Deb, deserves better.

But before I go anointing television a better place to see rom-coms than the movie theater (though, another really good T.V. rom-com, that Sam praised earlier this year, and, much like Drop Dead Diva is a whole lot more charming than its plot synopsis might suggest, is Soapnet’s Being Erica—seriously, good stuff), I think it’s important to talk about expectations. We expect more from movies than we do from television, especially television that airs right before Army Wives. If The Ugly Truth were playing on basic cable, or rather, when The Ugly Truth is playing on cable, I will be excited to watch it. Perhaps it will be airing right after 27 Dresses but before How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. If so, I will happily waste six hours of my life. (It is possible watching romantic comedies on cable is like drinking diet soda? Most of the taste, none of the guilt?)

But, you know what? I kind of want to see The Ugly Truth in theaters, too. Jess wondered if there was a reason we keep paying to see mediocre films like The Ugly Truth, other than for a good old “hate watch.” But, honestly, I never go see a movie for a “hate watch,” or seeking an ironic, “it’s so bad it’s funny” viewing experience. I go for all the same reasons that I sometimes eat Twinkies and Dominoes and read Twilight and watch The Bachelorette: Sometimes bad taste tastes good!

I don’t go see lame, girl-hating romantic comedies in theaters just so I can knock them—I go see them because I don’t really care that they are bad. (Of course, if they suck as much as Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which clocked in at about 95 percent suckage, I get very bitter. But the 60 percent suckage of The Proposal did not bother me at all. As bad as romantic comedies have been of late, to get to 90 percent suckage is still pretty rare). All I want from a stupid rom-com is, boy meets girl, boy and girl get complicated, boy and girl end up together, and, maybe, three real laughs, one well-realized scene, nothing hugely, overtly misogynistic or racist, and for both the boy and girl to be really attractive. Of course, I would prefer, hugely, for romantic comedies not to be stupid, but, well, I would also prefer for all bagels to taste like they were made in New York City. Sometimes, you just crave the carbs anyway.

And this (the bagel analogy!) is the real problem about the state of romantic comedies in film: Once upon a time, Hollywood mostly made New York City bagels, while television was churning out, like, microwaved bread in the shape of a donut. Recently, T.V. has learned a trick or two about making entertainment (and about making art), while movies have forgotten a trick or two about making entertainment that is art. If T.V. keeps getting better and better at romantic comedies, and films keep getting worse and worse, there will be some day, not so long from now, when even I get fed up with the stupidity and realize movies will never ever remember how to make bagels like they used to, and I will just have to watch The Philadelphia Story on my computer, before turning on the 60th episode of Drop Dead Diva. But that probably won't happen until after Love Happens, because I kind of want to see that.

Tags: drop dead diva, film, romantic comedies, the ugly truth, TV

What is television good for? Curbing population growth, of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making. (India’s population of over one billion is expected to exceed China’s sometime in the next 20 years. The nation is currently home to 17 percent of humanity, despite taking up less than 3 percent of the Earth’s landmass.) “If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children,” Azad said. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.” Funny to think that anyone would rather watch Jay Leno than have sex, but then, again, there's something so obviously prophylactic about Letterman. Maybe India can borrow him?

Tags: india, sex, TV

"Everything's falling apart." So begins the first episode of HBO's Hung, a new dramatic comedy that premieres this Sunday, June 28, at 10 p.m. The opening shots highlight downtown Detroit's urban blight, and the economic downturn serves as backdrop for the tale of a man who takes desperate measures to survive financial hardship. Because it's HBO, this particular red-blooded American man doesn't score a part-time position at Starbucks. He becomes a male prostitute.

Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a once-great athlete who's fallen from his lofty pedestal. His homecoming queen ex-wife (Anne Heche) has left him for a wealthy dermatologist who's kind enough to give her Botox injections in the kitchen while she complains about her failures as a mother, his house has burned to the ground, and his fellow teachers at the high school where he teaches history and coaches basketball are getting laid off left and right. His kids don't even want to live with him anymore. "What happened to my life?" Drecker laments.

Looking for a way out of the mess, Drecker attends a get-rich-quick seminar, "Unleash Your Inner Entrepreneur," in which he is advised to discover his "one winning tool" that will turn him into a multimillioniare. Drecker doesn't have any clever ideas, but he does have one thing going for him: He's very well hung.

While Jane's Drecker is a bit of a lummox, and the show's thin premise is little more than a protracted dick joke, the pilot's director, Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), guides our hero through a myriad of rotating relationships with women played by brilliant female character actresses. To get work, Drecker teams up with sometimes-lover-and-fellow-seminar-attendee Tanya Skagle (Jane Adams), a flailing poet who's brilliant idea is Lyric Bread: bits of poetry stuffed into baked goods. (The inside of her left wrist reveals a tiny tattoo: "proust.") Regardless of her lefty leanings, Skagle decides her gift with words is destined to market Drecker's new sex work career. "I'm hoping to make money and bring something positive into the world at the same time," she explains dreamily to a well-connected woman the pair use to solicit wealthy female clients for Drecker's budding business.

Being a male prostitute isn't easy, apparently. You won't be hearing any of Hung's more memorable one-liners on network TV anytime soon. "Good cock is hard to find," one woman observes. "Why can't they just fuck me for me?" Drecker grouses. And then there's: "I hear you've got a big one."

Ultimately, Hung can't quite make up its mind whether it's a penis joke masquerading as a TV show, or a sometimes insightful look at the strange relations between men and women laid bare when things get intimate. The series' best moments come during the all-too-rare sex scenes wherein both parties let down their guard, and Hung shows us what we haven't yet seen: how terrifically complicated it is for men and women to understand one another.

Mostly, the show's creators, Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson (The Riches) ignore the moral issues of sex work that Showtime's Secret Diary of a Call Girl had to wrestle with. When the pimp is a woman, and the whore is a man, why bother considering the finer social issues? There's another dick joke to be made!

"I think for a lot of women happiness and great sex are kind of the same thing," Tanya, who refers to her male charge as a "happiness consultant," insightfully observes. Unfortunately, that's the last we hear of that. It's not until the fourth episode that Drecker finally gets it on with a client, and we're left staring at his bare bottom while a woman oggles his hungness. Where's the revelation in that?

Tags: HBO, Hung, men, penis humor, thomas jane

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Early in the first episode of NYC Prep, Bravo’s new, Gossip Girl-inspired reality show about New York City high school students that starts tonight, PC, the self-styled Chuck Bass of the bunch, says to the camera, “In New York City, money flows like the wind.” It was at this, the moment of the overly knowing, slightly off metaphor, that I realized it was going to be impossible for me to hate him. Try as he and the five other teenagers featured on the show might—and God they try—there is no talk of money, sex, or power, no uncanny preciousness, no shopper at Barneys, no address on the Upper East Side, no limo rides, and ultimately no reality show that can turn these kids into adults. Despite their best efforts, and all of their privileges, they are in a high school state of mind.

Take, for example, Camille, a senior at tony all-girls school Nightgale-Bamford, who asserts about her own future: “I will go to Harvard. Then I will be the business head of a genetics firm. And then at 40 I will have a husband and two kids.” This is delivered with the frightening intensity we have come to expect from Blair Waldorf, and is not, exactly, typical of the average 17-year-old. And yet, it is still wholly laughable. Check back in a few years, Camille, after life has gotten in the way.

Even more of the series is taken up with genuinely unprecocious high school antics, just enacted on the glamorous streets of New York City. Taylor, a 16-year-old who attends, gasp, public school tells her mother that she is throwing a party. (Her mother, a divorcee, does such a credible impersonation of a good parent, one wonders if she thought she was letting her daughter appear on some PBS special.) It turns out “party” means hanging out with a dozen other girls in a sushi restaurant.

Even the circumstances that do seem unusually adult, like Kelli and her brother living alone in the city while their parents stay in the Hamptons, aren’t quite. Living alone really means ordering Chinese food on your parents' credit card every night. That’s sad, not cool. And then there’s Sebastian, a self-described ladies man, with shaggy blonde hair who tells us all episode that he has sex with girls all the time, like some slightly less creepy version of Kids’ Telly. And yet, there’s no evidence to support his claims, except a few kisses on the cheek. Later in the series, PC asks a dinner table full of his peers how many of them are still virgins—it’s the vast majority.

Of course the kids all want you to think they’re the hippest, coolest, most knowing bunch of teenagers to ever live, and they say all sorts of gross things and buy all sorts of expensive objects to prove it. (PC, in a recent radio interview, called the Real Housewives, who are also on Bravo, “trashy pieces of sh-t who are not in real society at all.” Stay classy, kid.) Is it because of the NYC-SoCal difference, or the Bravo-MTV one, that more coherent sentences are uttered in the first episode of NYC Prep than in all episodes of MTV’s Laguna Beach combined? Of course, it’s unclear that the hyper-verbal New York City kids know or understand themselves any better than their spaced out, mute California counterparts, who at least got to behave like the confused 17-year-olds they really are. NYC Prep did nothing so much as make me feel deep-body tired for these kids, hustling so hard, with a toddler’s frenetic, purposeless energy, to prove they are in the know. Lucky Cali kids just get to hang out on the beach.

Ultimately, these teenagers inspired a pretty genuine sympathy in me, having nothing to do with what they said or did, most of which is pretty heinous. (This feeling makes watching the show significantly less fun than watching The Real Housewives series. Those shows supply viewing pleasure by delicately triangulating our fascination, disgust, and concern. But since NYC Prep involves minors, it lessens our disgust, while amping up our concern. We feel bad, even when they are being little jerks, because they don't yet know better, thus upsetting the carefully calibrated balance that keeps voyuerism fun.) They’re living in that existential, hormonal, crazy crisis known as adolescence, when you just want, you want so fully, so completely, things that are all wrong—like To Be The Business Head of A Genetics Firm, To Make Sure People Know You Are In “Real Society,” To Have People Think That You Hook Up With 32 Girls A Month, and To Have Everyone In Your School Watch You On Bravo. Probably, no one should be allowed on camera in this state, but, if you are, well, I’m not going to be the one to make fun of you for it.

Photo of New York City by Getty Images.

Tags: Bravo, high school, NYC Prep, real housewives, Reality TV, Television

Why is The Real Housewives of New Jersey a smash-hit? The season finale's 4.6 million viewers in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic testify to its broad appeal, but why are we so enamored with these table-tossing housewives? Is it the big hair? The brash talk? The back stabbing? One thing's for sure. It's not their manners.

Out of all the Real Housewives series—from Orange County to Atlanta to New York City—"New Jersey" is the breakaway hit. Because I have deeply bad taste in TV, I've watched every installment of the Bravo franchise. Sometimes, I watch them twice. But the Jersey wives are far and away the most fascinating. Sometimes, I quote lines from the show. "Prostitution whore!" I shout, pointing accusingly. "I don't like you before I like you," I inform strangers.

I think the Real Housewives are popular for one reason: They're mean. I mean, they're really mean. They render Mean Girls pranks child's play. They don't sit around talking the talk, like the well-tanned, blond-highlighted, high-heeled 'bots of The Hills. These bitches will cut you. They actually walk the walk, which is why tables have a tendency to get overturned.

I hope they don't tone it down next season.

These molls are my heroes.

Tags: real housewives, Real Housewives of New Jersey, TV

Newsweek has an article out debunking much of the health advice shilled by celebrities on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Most famously, Jenny McCarthy has been on Oprah several times claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism (the vaccine/autism link has been scientifically disproven). But, more entertaining is the anti-aging regime that Suzanne Somers promoted in January:

Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina ... Next come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and other preparations every day. 'I take about 40 supplements in the morning,' she told Oprah, "and then, before I go to bed, I try to remember ... to start taking the last 20.' She didn't go into it on the show, but in her books she says that she also starts each day by giving herself injections of human growth hormone, vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex. In addition, she wears 'nanotechnology patches' to help her sleep, lose weight and promote 'overall detoxification.'

The authors of the Newsweek article argue that by allowing Suzanne Somers on her show to spout off about "nanotechnology patches" unchallenged by medical professionals, Oprah is tacitly condoning Somers' wackadoo advice. Though Oprah is arguably the most powerful woman in America, I find it hard to believe that more than one or two of her millions of audience members would run out and buy syringes to start injecting their hoo-has with estrogen just because someone on the Oprah show recommended it.

Tags: health, Mehmet Oz, Oprah, Suzanne Somers, TV