might as well dance

I was listening to Kate Kulzick and Erik Adams discussing Bunheads, which given the season finale of Galavant and the fact of Singing in the Rain sitting on my DVR, reminded me of the way my engagement with musicals has changed. It's weird, when you think about it -- and it comes up every time someone launches a Cop Rock or a Viva Laughlin or a Glee -- that the musical is one of the most popular and significant genres in movies (albeit one with a long-gone heyday) and yet has played so little role on television. Or maybe it's not that weird -- maybe it makes sense given television's live origins, the popularity of the variety show during the only period when the existence of television and the prominence of the movie musical overlapped, the additional lead time it takes to write musical episodes, and the cost of licensing existing music as an alternative. But saying it's weird is the done thing.

[NOTE: This blog entry was begun shortly after Galavant's first season ended, but not finished until Caitlin and I binge-watched Bunheads, which required tracking down torrents since it isn't streaming anywhere, nor released on DVD.]

Bunheads wasn't a musical, but as a show about ballet students, it had enough song and dance numbers that it might not have been produced in the pre-Glee world. It was a one-season wonder on ABC Family (albeit one divided by a long mid-season gap, and ordered in two batches) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, and in many ways came the closest to that show in tone, outlook, vibe, I don't know what you want to call it. Nobody watched it.

(And because nobody watched it, and because I imagine few of the people who did watch it were also Friday Night Lights fans, hardly anyone knows how versatile Stacey Oristano is, who played quirky delight Truly in Bunheads, who quickly steals the show, and stripper-slash-glimpse-of-the-possible-future-for-Tyra Mindy Collette on Friday Night Lights.)



In a lot of ways, Bunheads suffered from the same problem as Friday Night Lights: though it was a show about dancers, it was morethanthat in the same way Friday Night Lights is about football but morethanthat. For one thing, as with Gilmore Girls - or Quirky Place shows from Parks to Green Acres to Newhart - it started to become a show about a place as much as about its main characters, and over time I'm sure Paradise, California, would have become as well-populated and bizarre as Stars Hollow did. But even more than that, the pilot's set-up made this more than just a show about a ballet school. Sutton Foster plays the lead character, Michelle Simms, a talented dancer working as a Las Vegas showgirl when we begin, and reaching the age at which it's increasingly unlikely she'll ever get her Big Break. She impulsively marries Hubbell, a long-time admirer, moves to his hometown with him, and he promptly dies. All in the pilot.

Michelle barely knows her late husband's mother, whose home and ballet school he had supported financially, and Kelly Bishop from Gilmore Girls does a great job playing the mother-in-law as someone who's not quite an antagonist but not welcoming the stranger with open arms either. The cast is rounded out by the aforementioned Truly, who carried a torch for Hubbell, and the high school girls who attend the ballet school.

Like Gilmore Girls, Bunheads combines some fish out of water elements with family-like frictions and a thirtysomething single female lead in an unusual dating circumstance (she's a widow of a one-day marriage: how long does she mourn? how do you process losing someone you were still getting to know?) Michelle isn't a mother-who's-also-a-best-friend, but she's in a mentor position with these teen girls, and so similar conflicts come up. I'm not saying it's at all derivative of Gilmore Girls or fails to feel fresh -- only that Amy Sherman-Palladino is playing to her strengths here.

It differs from Gilmore Girls largely in that it takes longer to find itself. For instance, before the rewatch, I remembered the music-video-like musical numbers being a lot more frequent than they are. While there are partial dance numbers all throughout the show, the use of popular or unexpected music -- like the Sparks song above -- is primarily found in the back half of the show, and even then it's only a handful of times. Meanwhile, supporting characters come and go as though everyone's auditioning to see if they're going to become important -- there's a wealthy guy who's as much an outsider as Michelle who seems like a possible love interest, and he's never mentioned again after an episode that kind of revolves around him; there's another love interest later whose function in hindsight seems to have been only to make Michelle realize that she missed Hubbell and hadn't dealt with his death.

It took a few episodes for the students to really stand out for me - although they were presumably cast for dancing ability rather than acting ability, I think it was more of a writing problem, where it felt like the writers were waiting to get to know the characters (or actors) to differentiate them. For a few hours, they all just kind of blend together. (It didn't help that one of the Bunheads is named Boo and one of the Bunheads is played by Bailey Buntain and these are two different Bunheads.)



It's slower to come together than Gilmore Girls was, and less focused -- Gilmore Girls always has the central Lorelai-Rory, Lorelai-Luke relationships to come back to, and the Friday night dinners for structure, while Bunheads never entirely settles down and finds its center -- but it is nevertheless a great show, and by the end it has developed its central characters enough that their presence on television is really missed. Unfortunately it only seems to be available in paid digital form, no streaming or DVDs.



Galavant, on the other hand, is a full-on musical. Airing Sunday nights while Once Upon a Time was on hiatus, it has a tenuous Disney connection in that Alan Menken is a producer/songwriter/composer, but otherwise has nothing in common with the weird weird mess that is Once Upon a Time. Thank God.

I can't find video of one of my favorite moments, when evil King Richard -- who has been taking lessons to be more funny -- enters the room and interrupts hero Galavant:

Galavant: Where do you think they're keeping your parents:

King Richard: Perhaps they're up your butt.

King Richard: ... you see, because that's the most unlikely place.




 I really should have mentioned Timothy Omundson -- who I previously only really knew from a questionable arc on Xena -- in my Emmys discussion, because as King Richard he gave one of the two or three funniest performances on TV this season. It's a light show -- not quite as silly a spoof as something like When Things Were Rotten, more strongly plot-driven and invested in character relationships than a Monty Python production. Galavant's off to rescue the love of his life, Madalena, from King Richard, only she's pretty happy being the power behind an evil king's throne, and meanwhile there are sparks between Galavant and the princess who's helping him on his quest. Along the way you have frequent songs and guest stars from John Stamos (as "Sir Jean Hamm") to Hugh Bonneville.

If it weren't for Omundson, the show would be just fine. Creator Dan Fogelson has an iffy resume that is more likely to include a guilty pleasure or two (I like Cars because of the character design and use of Route 66) than anyone's favorite movie, but at least Galavant takes more chances than your average network sitcom.

And Omundson ... Omundson is amazing. The other characters are just foils for him to play off of, as far as I'm concerned.

one of those fights where it feels like the fight's having you

There was a brief period in graduate school when I still wrote things for free, because I wasn't sure how long I was going to stay in grad school, and whether or not I was going to teach, and academic publications are helpful for getting accepted/retained/hired -- which of course is exactly why those publishers know they don't need to pay. Anyway, this is one such thing - a chapter on My So-Called Life, for Dear Angela. There are other such things out there, but they weren't as easy to find and didn't bear as specifically on television. Maybe at some point I'll post my David Lynch paper, some 20 years old now and the most widely-cited thing I've written.

This was written a decade ago (more than two years before the publication date at that Amazon link - not only does academic writing like this not pay, but the lead times before publication are the longest I've experienced); television criticism and I have both come a long way, and I'd do it better now. (I've published over a million words between now and then, literally; one would hope that I've developed my voice a bit in the process.) But so it goes. At the time, My So-Called Life was almost everyone's go-to example of a "brilliant but canceled" show, one that had left a real mark on our collective psyche but had come and gone in a flash. Although Freaks and Geeks aired about halfway between MSCL's cancellation and the writing of this chapter, my recollection is that it hadn't yet accumulated the same level of retrospective critical adoration -- maybe the teenagers who grew up with it just weren't old enough yet.

---

One Of Those Fights Where It Feels Like The Fight's Having You: 

The "Patty Reading" of My So-Called Life

The pilot episode of My So-Called Life opens with a lie and an audience lied to: the first scene, shot from the point of view of random passers-by, shows teenage Angela and her new friend Rayanne claiming to be twins while asking for spare change. Rayanne compounds the lie, claiming Angela's mother is in a coma. The scene tapers out with Angela's first of many voiceovers, one which relates to the scene but doesn't address it in the way that, say, a Wonder Years voiceover directly comments on the on-screen action:

So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff. Just for fun. Just cause it seemed like if I didn't, I would die or something. Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way, even your best friend.

How people are, how they... expect you to be, is a lens through which we can view the rest of the series. The lens I'm offering here isn't the only lens; it isn't a prescribed view against which all other interpretations suffer; it isn't "true" so much as it's a game. It's a possible take on things, one that adds an extra layer to some scenes, while completely changing the meaning of others:

Imagine MSCL takes place not from Angela's point of view, but from Patty's. Consider the series as a narrative not witnessed by Angela, but rather imagined by Patty, combining the actual events she witnesses with the events she imagines, fears, or believes transpire when she's not around. Consider a mother who has become less and less intimate with her daughter and can literally only imagine what her daughter's so-called life is like. Circumstances give her a handful of facts and clues, which she connects based on her own experiences and anxieties.

Like "what if you told The Great Gatsby from Daisy's point of view" or "how does Fitzgerald use color symbolically," this is a game we can play with MSCL as the board. The rule is simple: any scene without Patty in it (and any voiceover or internal monologue that isn't Patty's) takes place in Patty's imagination, though this does not exclude the possibility that at least some of her imaginings are accurate.

This is a reinterpretation of the series' diegesis: the diegesis of a fictional text consists of those things true for or experienced by the characters, while the non-diegetic material is experienced only by the audience. Music playing on a jukebox is diegetic: the film score is non-diegetic. A character's facial expression is diegetic: the close-up on that face in a reaction shot is non-diegetic. The default interpretation of MSCL, of any TV series, posits a very inclusive diegesis, in which most of what is seen and heard that is not voiceover is experienced by the characters present in the scene, and furthermore that voiceover accurately reflects the character's internal monologue (either in the moment, or in retrospect from some near-future moment). The Patty reading rejects this, and supposes that most of what we see is, in essence, Patty's daydream, experienced only by Patty just as only Calvin experiences his conversations with Hobbes.

Just as the split between diegetic and non-diegetic is, in most cases, one that affects presentation more than plot -- a dramatic sting in the score cues the audience to expect the killer to burst from the closet door but does not cause the killer to do so -- so too the split between diegetic and Patty-diegetic. The difference between MSCL's "real world" and the world as Patty imagines it does not cause dissonance between mother and daughter, or mother and family: it is emblematic, symptomatic, of it.

MSCL easily accepts the shift to half-dreamworld, as even the adjective of the title shifts from the eye-rolling intonation of a teenager to an adult's confession of unreality. This is a show, now, about an imagined life: an imagined Angela who begins the series in the final stage of losing her two best friends (Sharon and Patty herself) as she replaces them with Rayanne and Ricky, just as her father is replaced with the mysterious and almost mythical Jordan Catalano.

The pilot focuses on the changes in Angela's life: her new friends, who are radically different from Sharon and very much the sort of teenagers parents have in mind when they talk about not being able to understand kids today; her new hair color and Patty's reaction to it; and changes in her relationships with her parents. Her father, Graham, can't relate to her as a parent now that she's becoming a young woman -- he barely speaks to her, barely looks at her, insists Patty tell her to wear more than a towel, and is incapable of disciplining her. These are all external, diegetic, things, things Patty is exposed to, things she can use as evidence or symbols of deeper and more complex changes below the surface as she reconstructs Angela's life.

Sharon and Rayanne

The changes in friends, for instance. Because Sharon is the daughter of Patty's best friend, a girl to whom she is a sort of honorary aunt in the manner of parents' friends, Angela's distance from Sharon compounds and underscores her distance from Patty. Sharon is someone Patty understands, even someone over whom she has a sort of authority. Sharon is also the popular, mainstream, seemingly uncomplicated one -- the one Patty may think she understands better than the increasingly gloomy and closed-off Angela. This makes it all the more important that Angela and Sharon's friendship, virtually abandoned by the time the pilot takes place, is slowly renewed over the course of the series, as Sharon becomes closer to the new additions in Angela's social circle (most noticeably Rayanne) and finally as Sharon's father suffers a heart attack.

Rayanne, often positioned as Sharon's opposite, serves as an instigator for Patty to blame for the changes in Angela, from the way she dresses to her new hair color. Rayanne also serves to reassure Patty that she made the right choices in parenting, since Rayanne's mother Amber is the picture perfect example of "parent as best friend" or "parent as litter-mate," a mother who never quite grew up and whose child has had to do so too quickly. (Even outside of her interactions with Angela, maturity and responsibility are clearly high priorities for Patty.) And perhaps most of all, Rayanne is a stand-in for Patty's unnamed college roommate, who died of some substance-related excess -- whether drugs or alcohol, we're never told.

It's Sharon who writes the erotic poem everyone assumes is Rayanne, and sexual experience provides their common ground. The differences between them are less about private behavior than public personae, something important not only to the high school setting but to Patty's examination of Angela's public persona in her search for clues as to her private life.

Sharon's relationship may tell us something else about her role as Patty-surrogate. Sharon's boyfriend Kyle is a typical popular guy who is a proper match for Sharon the typical popular girl, but in Patty's imaginings, Sharon is never particularly happy with him, and public appearance and sex provide the main motives to keep the relationship together. Meanwhile, Sharon's only male confidante seems to be Brian Krakow, dismissed by the women of the show as the school dork. While Patty and Graham went to high school together, Patty was the prom queen while Graham was so far from the popular clique that Patty didn't even remember him until they met later in life. It's possible Patty is imagining a similar arc for Sharon.

The reluctant and occasionally tumultuous relationship between Sharon and Rayanne, who likely understand each other better than Angela understands either of them, may be read in a variety of ways. It may represent closure for Patty's relationship with her late roommate, whose name we never even learn. It may, if we see this Rayanne as an aspect of Angela, reflect Sharon and Angela's new friendship as young adult peers, replacing the friendship that was forced upon them by proximity, as so often happens to children whose parents happen to be friends.

Ricky

Unlike Rayanne, Ricky doesn't replace anyone specific. In the Patty reading, he represents both the confusing world of modern teenagers -- should Patty worry about him being in Angela's bedroom? does worrying make her uncool, as though she's denying Ricky's apparent homosexuality, or does not worrying make her heteronormative, by assuming that certain displays indicate certain sexualities? should she ask if Ricky is gay? -- and the jeopardy that Patty so often imagines for Angela. It's Ricky who winds up homeless, Ricky who is the central figure in the "guns in schools" episode that ends with students passing through metal detectors we never see again (perhaps the best "evidence" for the Patty reading). Further, when Mr Katimski, the English teacher who has taken an interest in Ricky and his homelessness, lashes out at the Chases for not making sure Ricky was okay, it's Patty who bursts into tears. Her imagined world, her anxieties and fears, have just intersected with the real world.

As for Katimski himself, he's one of only two teachers who stand out from the crowd of Peanuttian mutterers, the other being the over the top, toothpick-chewing Vic Racine, who may be literally plucked from some movie-of-the-week ripoff of Dead Poets Society. Where Vic comes and goes in a blur of sound and fury, exhorting his students to feel passion and carpe the diem but leaving no long-term effects in his wake, Katimski is the more realistic "magical teacher." Quiet, stammering, and uninspiring in the classroom, he nevertheless can probably be credited with saving Ricky's life, and is instrumental in Angela's reconciliation with Rayanne after Rayanne sleeps with Jordan (notable as one of the few moments of melodrama that we know Patty didn't imagine). It is not a coincidence that the teacher Patty has the most meaningful interaction with is the most realistic as well as the most influential.

Jordan and Graham




Speaking of the sex god jungle king brooding puppy dog of Liberty High, it is impossible to talk about the life of Angela Chase, so-called or otherwise, without talking about Jordan Catalano. The central figure in Angela's life, he is almost invisible to Patty, who pieces him together as the blind men did the elephant. He is untouchable and unknowable, a silhouette who leans like a rock star. He's the neglected underachiever who Slipped Through The Cracks of the System and needs a magic teacher to bring him out of his shell. He's illiterate. He's a user, a bad boy. He's sweet and charming. He's Rhett Butler and James Dean, seen only in slow motion as he passes you in the hall and you hug your books to your chest.

He's impossible, of course. He can't be all these things, and yet the better we get to know him, the more unreal he becomes, a patchwork of all the things a mother might imagine about the boy her angsty, flame-haired daughter likes. When she finally meets him, she even compares him to Tony Pool, a high school crush of hers from "long, long ago." "Like a fairy tale," Angela says, conveniently enough for us.

Jordan replaces Graham as the central male figure of Angela's life, and some of his unknowability reflects Graham's opaqueness to Patty, which fuels her paranoia about his affairs and mood swings. Angela's father is no longer comfortable about her, and the only time they talk without Patty there is to talk about Patty. Graham's portrayal is one that from the start is invested in sexuality, as Angela's voiceover tells us that her breasts have gotten in the way of their relationship, while in the second episode, Patty imagines Graham considering an affair with an unidentified woman (it can't be future business partner Hallie Lowenthal -- younger and redheaded -- because he hasn't met her yet).

These surrogate roles aren't static. In the fourth episode, "Father Figures," Angela is a stand-in for a younger Patty, to whom Graham gives Grateful Dead tickets that Patty has prevented him from using himself; there is an element here both of Graham trying to force his musical tastes on his daughter and of him forcing her, as a Patty surrogate, to partake of the very thing she forbade him. It backfires when Angela scalps the tickets, trading fun for monetary gain just as Patty forced Graham to stay home to prepare for an IRS audit. Patty, meanwhile, deals with her own father's refusal to take responsibility during that audit, or to treat her like an adult.

Juliana Hatfield



The famous Christmas episode, "So-Called Angels," lends itself easily to the Patty reading. Patty's worrying about Ricky -- which is really Patty worrying about Angela -- becomes so great that she imagines a ghost in the form of Juliana Hatfield as a fey homeless girl who eventually reveals that she died after running away from home, having had a fight with her mother. "It was one of those fights where it feels like the fight is having you," she says, quoting word for word Patty's description of a fight with Angela. "So-Called Angels" is the only episode without a voiceover, incidentally. Patty doesn't need to imagine Angela's thoughts here, when she has the dead Angela surrogate to speak to.

Conclusion

The Patty-view of Angela's world necessarily ends with ambiguity and uncertainty. In MSCL's final episode, Angela learns of Brian Krakow's feelings for her (and seems genuinely surprised, though we have to wonder how she could be unaware) and of his ghostwriting of illiterate rock star puppy god Jordan's love letter. She seems to choose Jordan anyway, the homunculus, the empty shell. Does she really? Does she change her mind? Does she choose either of them?

In the end, we don't know, not only because Patty does not know, but she does not give in to the urge to imagine. She won't construct a happy ending for her daughter, nor will she send her down an imagined road to ruin to meet Juliana in the snow. In the end, it's Patty who cancels the series when she accepts that her daughter is not an appendage or character, but a person, with a life that is both unpredictable and unknowable to others.