Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment releases the fifth season of Girlfriends on October 28th. As I said about the fourth season, the four stars in this sit-com are all terrible people. They are obnoxious, and irritating, and gold-digging and crazy and self-centred and stupid and lazy and conniving and backstabbing. Watching an entire season’s worth of women trying to one-up each other and screaming about their own needs could take a toll on one’s nerves. And mine are shot right now, as I write this review. The “girl” part of Girlfriends I understand. After all, the show is about four girls. The “friends” part confuses me. How these women can remain friends while being so LOUDLY into themselves is beyond me.

Season five of this show sees one of the girls trying to get back together with her husband, because she is pregnant. Why this man would even consider taking her back is beyond me. This woman is awful. Another woman struggles with the fact that she is in love with a man who confessed his love to her, but now he’s with another woman…straight out of Friends, I suppose. Another woman is publishing a book, and fighting with everyone around her because she is so powerfully self-centred and stupid. In fact, she appears to be much too stupid to write a book at all. I would suggest that most of the people in this show are too dumb and self-aggrandizing to accomplish most of the things that they do on the show.

Then there’s the laugh track. The reason sit-coms have a laugh track is that they need to tell you when things are funny, and it’s time to laugh. If you find yourself hearing the background laughter, and you didn’t laugh, and you’re not sure why, then you can know the people who made the show think that moment was funny. But you don’t. And you didn’t laugh, which means it actually wasn’t funny. In the first episode of Season Five of Girlfriends, there is a recurring joke about a lesbian chasing one of the main characters. And she keeps stopping the chase to take off her shoes. And the laugh track rolls. But then, you can tell that even the laugh track is half-hearted. Like, it’s a slow, quiet, rumbling of half-chuckle laughter in the background. One that gets quieter and quieter each time the gag is repeated. And deservedly so.

Girlfriends was cancelled after five seasons, so this was going to be the last one. But apparently it has, mystifyingly, just been renewed for several more seasons. At noon on Tuesdays somewhere in the states. Half-assed laugh tracks, self-centred, awful characters, and few compelling stories make this series one to skip. So skip it.

Paramount Home Entertainment is in the Christmas spirit. A little early, if you ask me. But they didn’t ask me. They just went ahead and released the Holiday Treats DVD today, October 7th. It’s billed as “8 heartwarming TV classics”, and it actually delivers. For although I have not yet become imbued with the Christmas spirit, and I will likely hold off on that until about December 22nd, these TV episodes stand on their own. I had just turned on the I Love Lucy episode to take a quick gander at the DVD, and I was joined by my nine-year-old stepson. And he forced me to sit there, through eight episodes of Christmas cheer. And, with the exception of the Frasier episode, he laughed the whole time.

There is an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ricky put up a Christmas tree while reminiscing about the birth of their child. Then The Honeymooners, where Ralph sells his bowling ball to buy Alice her Christmas gift, only to find out she bought him a bag for his bowling ball. The episode of Andy Griffith where they hold their Christmas celebration in the jailhouse. The Brady Bunch episode where Flo has laryngitis. A particularly funny episode of Taxi where Louie puts up his own mother in a poker game with his brother. The Family Ties episode where Alex is visited by the ghosts from A Christmas Carol. Then a truly heartwarming episode of Frasier and a silly episode of Wings that involves Fay throwing her late husband’s ashes out of a plane in a dustbuster.

I could have done without the Family Ties and Wings, but six out of eight isn’t bad. I would suggest saving the Holiday Treats DVD for Christmas, but it’s a gift that could well be opened before December 25th.

Don’t get me wrong.  Cheers was always great.  And season 10 contains some of the classic episodes the world has come to know and love.  Like the one where Sam, Cliff, Norm and Fraser go on a road trip to find their inner manliness, or the one where Norm and Cliff ruin Fraser’s therapy group.  Every actor is totally comfortable in their role, by this time they can do it in their sleep, and on occasion it seems as though they are.  But the indications that Cheers was nearing it’s end were there throughout the season.  And mainly, that’s as a result of the theme throughout the season where Sam and Rebecca decide to conceive a baby.

Not that the lame idea of the formerly promiscuous bartender and the uptight gold-digging whiner trying to have a child together can being down the entire series.  It can’t.  Cheers was just too good, and Norm and Cliff and Woody and Fraser and Carla and even Paul and Lilith made the series great regardless of the subject.  But where, in an earlier season, Sam’s romance with Diane was clearly going to be a fleeting one and was easily dismissed as Sam went back to his old ways, this time we feel as though it’s one of those will-they-or-won’t-they plots that could go on forever.  Like that Rachel and Ross thing that made Friends suck so very much.  Cheers is still hilarious, still way better than Friends, but Season Ten was the beginning of the end.  It comes out today, September 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Cheers is one of the very few shows from the 80s that actually stands the test of time. And season nine is out on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s in the midst of the Kirsty Alley years, back before she was a gigantic Jenny Craig spokesperson. As a child watching this show, I could not understand for the life of me why Sam Malone always wanted to sleep with Rebecca Howe. It confused me. I thought, this guy sleeps with every hot woman who walks into the bar! Why does he want the one who is fairly attractive at best? Not only that but she’s high-maintenance, she’s irritating, she’s kind of dumb, and she is a little mean. My mom explained that it was because he wanted the one woman he couldn’t have. At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought, the less effort the better, no? I understand better now, having succumbed to the same sort of mind set once or twice, but I still think it would be a lot better to just find a really hot girl with a great mind, like that one he meets every year on Valentine’s Day at that cabin in the woods, and go with it. Kirstey Alley seems like a lot of effort for very little return. But, that’s just me.

Season nine features some of the classic episodes of the series, like the one where Norm’s wife takes a job at the restaurant upstairs. In fact, the best part about season nine is the introduction of Keene Curtis, who plays John Allen Hill, the owner of Melville’s restaurant. His introduction leads to several great episodes where the ownership of the bathrooms in the back of Cheers come into question, and the feud between him and Sam reaches epic proportions. While Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammar are possibly the most successful actors to emerge from Cheers, it’s John Ratzenberger and George Wendt who kept the show outstanding. The ninth season was one of the best, and if you’re going to pick up one season on DVD, this is a good place to start.