Two weeks ago, Fox debuted two new shows to the television
viewing audience, “Playing it Straight” and “Wonderfalls,”
that really are complete opposites: Not only are they completely
different in the format (the former being a reality show and
the latter being scripted), but they are wildly dissimilar
in the tone, delivery, and, unfortunately, overall quality
as well.

“Playing it Straight – 8:00 PM Friday (Fox)

Let’s look at the 8:00 PM timeslot first where Fox viewers
will see the newest reality/game show to hit the air, “Playing
it Straight.” The concept is fairly simple. Jackie, an auburn-haired,
tan skinned, Midwestern, young college student with a great,
big white smile is brought to the “Sizzling Saddles” ranch
in Elko, NV to take part in a “Bachelorette” style competition.
While there, her goal is to pick the man of her dreams while
the 14 men in the competition wear cowboy hats, tight jeans,
and cowboy-esque shirts that I think came from the pink and
yellow “Marty McFly Collection” from Back to the Future
– Part III. They also get to compete in various mundane
“ranch” tasks where the winner(s) get(s) to spend extra time
alone with Jackie. However, besides the poorly dressed cowboys,
there is a twist to the match making show that (is supposed)
to turn it into a “Survivor”-esque game involving skill and
strategy:

Not all the guys are straight (hence the catchy show title)…

If Jackie can sniff out the gay contestants and find herself
a straight man to fall in love with, then the two lovebirds
will evenly share a $1 million grand prize. However, if the
belle of the competition chooses a gay man as her love connection,
then she gets nothing and he gets to keep the entire $1 million
for himself.

What’s fairly interesting about the concept is that the producers
and casting people did an excellent job of finding men that
do not necessarily exude “gay” characteristics (and when I
say that, I think of the typical stereotypes seen primarily
on shows like “Will and Grace”). So, since all the men come
off as chiseled straight fellows vying for the affection of
the lovely Jackie, it makes the game more difficult for her.
Exactly how hard that has been to this point has been obvious
through the first two episodes as Jackie has eliminated four
men and only one of them has been gay. While the exact ratio
of gay to straight men in the competition was not revealed
initially, seeing as three straight ones have already left
the ranch, it creates a higher probability that she’ll be
saddled (excuse the pun…) with a gay man and losing the money.
We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks. The question is:
“Do we want to?”

To quote another maverick beer drinking kind of cowboy involved
with World Wrestling Entertainment: “Hell No!”

Similar to many other reality shows, “Playing it Straight”
has “confessionals” where the contestants/cast members can
comment alone and in private on the action going on in the
game and tell the audience what they are thinking as events
unfold. Well, since the object of the game is to determine
if a player is gay or straight and then get him out of the
competition, all the guys appear to spend all of their time
in the confessionals giving half-assed reasons as to why another
particular player is gay and constantly labeling one guy as
gay and another as straight. While it’s fun to casually turn
on your “gaydar” (the part deep in your brain that helps determine
a straight person from a gay person), spending an hour in
primetime forcing us to do it with poor Jackie isn’t fun,
it’s annoying. Therefore, this is a game that doesn’t have
all that much strategy and isn’t all that interesting. If
one of the gay players can act well enough to fool Jackie,
he will win. If not, then he won’t. In the mean time, everyone
else just labels each other as gay as if it’s a nasty, soul
drenching crime.

Speaking of that…

“Playing it Straight” reminded me of some of my classroom
experiences. I have studied some communication theory and
part of that is the school of thought known as “cultural studies.”
I couldn’t come up with a terrific explanation so this page
from
Blackwell Publishing helped me
out. The page stated that cultural studies is:

Cultural studies (CS) is concerned with subjectivity and
power–how human subjects are formed and experience their
lives in cultural and social space. CS blends methods and
issues from economics, politics, media and communication studies,
sociology, literature, education, the law, science and technology
studies, anthropology, and history, with a particular focus
on gender, race, class, and sexuality in everyday life.

So, there’s a lot going on in the field of cultural studies.
From a cultural studies point of view, what I see with “Playing
it Straight” is that being gay labeled as “evil” and “bad”
and that those people need to be “gotten rid of.” Technically,
that’s the idea of the game: to get rid of those who are gay.
However, the message that could be interpreted is that while
the straight man and woman can walk into the sunset holding
hands, a million dollars richer while the homosexuals slither
off to the caves they came from.

Is that the idea of the show? I highly doubt that anyone
affiliated with the show is thinking in a derogatory manner
about the homosexual lifestyle. If anything, the people at
the Fox network are merely taking advantage of the fact that
being gay has been largely accepted and is almost “chic” as
opposed to dragging down gay people in general. However, I
did see that “gay = evil or bad” message loud and clear and
while people in cultural studies rarely, if ever, label anything
as “right” or “wrong,” I will say that I don’t think that’s
a good message being sent. This coupled with the sheer unbearable
simplicity of the game being played and boring players simply
labeling other players as gay or straight makes the show a
DUD.

“Wonderfalls” – 9:00 PM Friday (Fox)

When a new show with a fairly edgy concept is stuck on a
lousy night with a terrible lead in, it’s going to be pretty
difficult for it to catch on with the audience. Unfortunately,
for the new Fox “dramedy” (part comedy, part drama) “Wonderfalls”
that appears to be the case.

It’s amazingly difficult for a show to secure high ratings
on Friday nights for obvious reasons. That’s the beginning
of the weekend, so people are either out on the town enjoying
their lives or are (going) out of town so they can enjoy different
and exotic locations outside of their living rooms and what
the media feed to them. Also, if a network provides a potentially
disastrous lead in (i.e. something unproven), then it’s even
harder to get people to stay tuned for another new show.

So, this is the plight of “Wonderfalls.” While that may be
the case, the show still shines bright like a poorly attended,
but well written off Broadway production. The program revolves
around Jaye Tyler (Canadian beauty, Caroline Dhavernas), a
24-year-old “Gen Y’er.” Her goal since high school has been
to “end up over-educated and unemployable” and she’s done
a pretty good job of accomplishing that goal. She has a Philosophy
degree from Brown University and has chosen to take her career
into the direction of retail clerk at the “Wonderfalls” gift
shop in her hometown of Niagara Falls. All this while she
makes her home to a trailer that’s been compared to the inside
of “Jeannie’s bottle” (an obvious comparison from “I Dream
of Jeannie”).

In the mean time, as the beginning of the series’ second
episode neatly reminds us within the storylines, the family
are all superstars in society. Jaye’s father, Darrin (William
Sadler – The Shawshank Redemption), is a successful
surgeon who’s a music composer on the side. Jaye’s mom, Karen
(Karen Scarwid), is a successful travel guide author and local
celebrity (complete with the unnecessary snooty attitude).
Meanwhile, Jaye’s sister, Sharon (Katie Finneran), is a successful
immigration lawyer and her brother, Aaron (Lee Pace), won
a prestigious fellowship and is pursuing a PhD in a religious
course of study. So, Jaye either has a lot to live up to or
rebel against. She chooses the latter constantly. These characters
constantly exude the surface definition of “achieving in life”
and the way they are written (and acted), the audience is
reminded who “does the most” and who “does the least.”

In addition to her family, the other main characters in the
story are Eric (Tyron Leitso) and Mahandra (Tracie Thomas)
who both work at Jaye’s favorite drinking spot, a dive bar/restaurant
known as The Barrel. Mahandra works as a waitress at The Barrel
and is one of the few close friends Jaye has in the Niagara
Falls area. Unlike Jaye, she loves the area and doesn’t plan
on leaving any time soon. Meanwhile, Eric ended up as a bartender
at the bar after catching his new wife “being intimate” with
the bellboy at the hotel that were staying at for their honeymoon.
He cried at the bar and then got a job there…Logical progression.

These aren’t necessarily all the characters in the show.
During the pilot, Jaye begins receiving cryptic messages dispensing
advice from various animals. Some are wax, some are stuffed,
some are plastic, but the bottom line is they are all animals/objects
that shouldn’t be talking and delivering mysterious messages
to anyone. Naturally, Jaye is pretty freaked out by the prospects
of various fake animals talking to her. However, it turns
out that the animals are actually revealing relevant, albeit
vague, information that is meant to assist Jaye in helping
people that randomly come into her life through chance meetings.

The Fox network advertisements really don’t do the show any
justice at all. In a way, they make the show come off TOO
quirky and may be driving people away instead of getting to
watch. After all, it’s kind of difficult to make the argument
that watching a show with talking fake animals is going to
be worth an hour of a viewer’s time.

That’s why it’s very important to give “Wonderfalls” a chance
and not dismiss it as trite dribble because it is entertaining
and just quirky enough to make it original but not too foolish
either. Take the second episode aired on March 19th as an
example of a beautifully written, well-developed hour of television
programming. The show began with Jaye engaging in a wildly
disappointing dinner with her family that has led her to The
Barrel doing shots of tequila when a fish on the wall (one
of those dopey singing fish I presume…) tells Jaye to “Help
her get her words out.” She ends up befriending a girl with
a very noticeable stutter named Bianca (they become friendly
when she steals Jaye’s wallet and returns it to her). Since
Bianca has the stutter, “help her get her words out” could
mean that since she stutters so much, Jaye needs to finish
her sentences for her.

However, the story goes much deeper than that when Bianca
makes Jaye a pet of sorts and starts to mirror the Jennifer
Jason Leigh part in Single White Female by attempting
to look and talk like Jaye. After our protagonist breaks into
the van that Bianca was living in, it appeared her worst fears
were realized. However, it turned out Bianca was just an aspiring
journalist looking to write a story on what it’s like to be
a “Gen Y’er” (Generation Y – referring to the age group of
people post-baby boomers and post-”Generation X”) and wanted
to get as much information out of Jaye as possible. So, as
Jaye answered the questions and Bianca took notes, that also
helped Bianca “get her words out.”

Unfortunately, Bianca liked Jaye’s life a little too much
and wanted to remain there, even getting Jaye fired from the
“Wonderfalls” shop. However, Jaye came to the rescue again
by writing the “Gen Y” story for Bianca and again “helped
her get her words out.” Once the story is published in a national
magazine, Bianca is gone, presumably for good.

So, if you’re keeping track at home, that episode started
out as a cry for help answered by Jaye and then morphed into
the plot of Single White Female and then turned into
a commentary of “Generation Y” people, which briefly reverted
back into the Single White Female plot again, ending
with the cry for help being met, but in a dramatically different
way than when the show began. By the end of the episode, so
much has happened, it feels like Bianca was two different
people. Through it all, Jaye “helped her get her words out”
in three completely separate, yet intricately related ways.

While a several-hundred-word description of a show plot does
not do it justice the way seeing and experiencing it would,
the comments summing up the episode and the way one vague
sentence can take the story in multiple directions, really
demonstrate the depth in the writing in “Wonderfalls.” That’s
why it’s worth giving a chance. The stories aren’t typical,
the characters aren’t ordinary, the storytelling method isn’t
conventional by any stretch, but it is imaginative and rich.
That’s why this show deserves a chance to shine and is a STUD.

Enjoy the Shows!

Steve Coogan also
writes for the 411mania.

Last 5 posts by Steve Coogan

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