Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn what I fear is the passing of a cherished TV tradition: the high-concept network TV hate-watch. “Hate,” of course, being a very strong word that’s really just there for convenience, because it’s much easier to say than “so-bad-it’s-enjoyable-but-also-wow-this-is-awful-OMG-IT-GOT-WORSE-watch.”
We’ve talked before about shows that are fun to take in with a pal or a partner, and there are definitely some that Kevin and I genuinely like and prefer not to watch without each other. But today, I’m grieving a different sort of show. I’m not talking the kind of quality experience that you want to dissect immediately (hi, Severance). I’m referring to a network TV sci-fi style show that’s been blown up as An Unmissable Event, which you end up watching for laughs because it looks incredibly stupid yet unaware of its own stupidity, and then keep watching because you’re curious how much worse it can get. This show must have a bigger concept than network TV can currently handle, without the kind of Netflix or Apple bankroll that will make it look every bit as expensive as it is. It’s required to have at least one character who will say, “You have NO IDEA how high this goes,” and/or, “You don’t know who you’re DEALING WITH.” At least two people will behave misguidedly and claim it’s because they’re protecting someone.
The show’s very essence must say, “Heroes and Lost did really well. Can we bang out another one real fast?” and then later scream, “We didn’t think about whether we could sustain this for ONE season, much less multiple seasons.” It’s the kind of show where, once it gets picked up for a full 22 episodes, you can practically hear the writers scrambling to figure out how to stretch this concept and set up a potential second season and beyond — and, preferably, it’s also the kind of show that therefore typically doesn’t GET a second season, because viewers could tell the ship was being steered by about ten different people (which ends up feeling like nobody at all). In other words, it’s a show that’s here for a good time and never a long time.
Fellow Olds may recall the unique glories of the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue — absolutely my favorite magazine of the year — which was where I discovered so many of these. I would pore over it, figure out what programing I wanted to sample on which night and what I needed to record versus watch live (!), and leave it on my coffee table as a reference point. I had schedules. I would sample anything. And amid it all, there would always be something that jumped out as high-concept nonsense, destined to be cancelled. It wasn’t always sci-fi. For example, there was Reunion, the 2005 FOX show that interwove the lives of six high-school friends from their graduation in 1986 with scenes from the “present day” investigation into one of their MURDERS. It was full of people you would recognize and they made a big deal of revealing each week who wasn’t dead until they ran out of candidates, and I vaguely remember one of them had become, mic drop, a priest. It handled being set in the past as gracefully as you might imagine: On a Thanksgiving episode set in the early 90s, one character sincerely said aloud that it would be really incredible if someone invented the ability to pause and rewind live TV. It lasted nine episodes out of the intended 22.
Somewhere along the line, my good friend Carrie and I developed — or admitted — a specific affinity for silly network sci-fi, and we’d pick a contender to sample together. There was always something likely to involve a high-level conspiracy, and a Blandy McBlanderson who had to beg everyone to just BELIEVE him, already.
There have been so many of these that came and went, but only a couple that I remember with clarity; I’m curious how many you will recall. Like The Event, in 2010, which, I am sorry to say, preferred to style itself as THE EVƎNT. Naturally, this involved aliens, as most of these things do (or at least pretend to until they figure out their actual mythology). I had to look it up to recall details, and the Wikipedia page is as unhinged and hard to follow as you might imagine, but it involved the existence and government cover-up of a cabal of humans with at least 1 percent extraterrestrial DNA.1 The pilot ends with Scott Patterson — Luke from Gilmore Girls — trying to kill President Blair Underwood by flying a plane into his press conference, but Jason Ritter talks him out of it and then at the last second the plane DISAPPEARS because ALIENS, and lands somewhere else. Shenanigans ensue that involve Laura “Kerry Weaver” Innes from ER, Clea DuVall, D.B. Sweeney, and Željko Ivanek after he won his Emmy for Damages. There are kidnappings and safe rooms and detainees. The Washington Monument collapses in episode 15. There are poisons and viruses, and at the end, a planet zaps itself into the atmosphere and the president’s wife looks up at it and calls it home, gasp, cliffhanger… and then, cancellation. Almost 11 million people watched the pilot; it was down to 3.8 million by the time its single season ended. These days, 3.8 million viewers for a network show would be considered a success.
We for sure sampled 2005’s Invasion, which was hurricane + amphibious aliens + cloning, starring William Fichtner, Eddie Cibrian, a young Evan Peters, with guest-star Elisabeth Moss. It died about three-quarters of the way through its first season, after 17 million viewers turned into a paltry 9 million, which AGAIN by today’s standards would be a runaway hit and win them six seasons and a movie. There was also 2011’s Terra Nova, in which Jason O’Mara, who turned out to be a bit of a show-killer, is part of a crew from the 2100s who decides to save humanity by jumping to Earth’s Cretaceous period in a parallel time stream — so, LOTS of science to mess up in this one!! That lasted three months. Jericho — Skeet Ulrich tries to rebuild a small town after a nuclear attack on the U.S. — should only have gone one, but a fan campaign involving peanuts bought it a second season that ultimately failed. And of course, there was FlashForward in 2009. That one had the benefit of being based on a book, at least; the concept was that everyone on the planet lost consciousness for two minutes and 17 seconds, and in that time saw their lives exactly six months into the future, without any knowledge of context or anything. And so of course they all start Questioning Things, or chasing their visions.2 It’s stuffed to the gills with actors who are way too good for this shit — Courtney B. Vance, Jack Davenport (RIP, Smash), John Cho, Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan — and then Joseph Fiennes, absolutely NOT too good an actor for this shit. My theory was that Courtney B. Vance felt like he had to act HARDER in scenes with Joseph Fiennes because Fiennes was so bad in it, and then Fiennes acted EVEN HARDER, and it was a vicious cycle. FlashForward is special to me for several reasons: one, I can still hear lines from the episode wherein Joseph tells everyone that “a recurring theme of crow attrition” is pointing their investigation in the right direction, and LOTS of characters are like, “Uh… crow attrition?” and indeed the viewers themselves I think in that moment were like, “IS THIS THE BEST YOU’VE GOT?” I still use “… CROW ATTRITION???” when I want to convey deep skepticism. The other happy memory is that for some reason, I recorded on my phone a voice memo of Joseph Fiennes WAY overacting the reveal that he, a recovering addict, was drunk in his flashforward. Why did I record this? I don’t know. Posterity? Blackmail? Who can ever know.3 But I still HAVE IT, DEAR READER, and now you can experience it too:
Sidebar: When Liam was three and a half, he heard the memo — I’m sure I was playing it for Carrie, to laugh at the memory — and he immediately started mimicking it, and I have THAT performance ALSO because I recorded it for Kevin and also for playing at his future wedding:
Give that child an Emmy!!!!
Anyhoo, these were, by and large, perfect experiences because they only lasted one season, if that. We did not have to remember anyone’s name. We did not have to keep track of any mythology, so it didn’t even matter that the shows themselves barely could. We could just enjoy dumb plot twists and strange acting choices and the ensuing raft of inside jokes, and then occasionally be surprised and charmed when a show turned out to be so much better than I expected (2019’s Emergence, which is one of the arguments in favor of watching anything Allison Tolman is in, period, end of story)4. But then Carrie and I got betrayed by our own system. Because in 2018, we started watching Manifest.
Manifest started as a show about a plane that landed five years after it took off, but for the passengers, it was a normal flight with maybe a little turbulence — so they were all the same age, even though nobody else was. All the passengers started getting Callings that guided them to people who needed help, and yada yada yada What Happened To The Plane, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW HIGH THIS GOES, etc. It was not well acted, poorly shot, had terrible special effects, and was full of annoying lead characters. And stupid Manifest violated the whole concept5. It would not die. We tricked ourselves into sticking with it, week after week, assuming the bitter end would be right around the corner… and then the damn thing kept going, even through its own cancellation, because NBC sold its episodes to Netflix and then everyone discovered them during lockdown. Netflix invested in twenty more episodes. And Carrie and I decided it was our lot in life to watch them ALL. It became a joke, that we were prisoners to our own snark-watch, a four-season captive to this inane experience. But really, and this is true on some level for all of them, it was a comfort. It was connective tissue that kept us together even when the world conspired to keep us busy and apart. We would let Manifest stack up during Covid, when I was in Vancouver and she was in L.A., and then pick a night and cue it up on Hulu. “How many Manifests is too many Manifests for one sitting?” we would ask. (Typically, two.) “Do we have to watch the Previously On recap?” (Yes.) “Wait is that guy not dead?” (Never.) We’d press “play” simultaneously and then text each other things like, “HE IS THE WORST,” and, “UGH SO SMUG,” and, “NOT AWFUL TJ AGAIN” and “NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS.” Except apparently, we were, on some level. Manifest and its forebears were always really just about the social experience, and at this specific time it was a way to maintain human connection when it was otherwise in short supply. Grinding through this big dumb thing made both of us feel at least a LITTLE bit more normal. And when it became clear my family was moving back, we banked all the subsequent episodes so we could resume watching them in person, the way the Lord intended.
Last month, Carrie and I finally finished Manifest. We made it through the wilderness; somehow, we made it through. And when we did, we exhaled and turned to each other and said, “Was that… the last one like it?” Our big dumb show began with a mysteriously disappearing aircraft and ended with a scene where rivers of lava scorched parts of New York, the phrases “the God frequency” and “the divine consciousness” were used with earnest urgency, and then the plane — which had previously, I believe, blown up AND been fully recovered AND then zapped out of its mysterious government hangar — suddenly rose up out of the Earth’s crust. I will give that show this much: There is no way in hell they greenlit that thing with a show Bible that said, “Here is our five-year plan, and it involves LAVA and the EARTH BARFING UP A PLANE.” They were probably as shocked as we were by four whole seasons, and bless their hearts, they WORKED for that thing.
The obvious other candidate for an experience like this is NBC’s La Brea, which involved a sinkhole opening up in Los Angeles near the tar pits and sucking everything and everyone within a certain radius down through the Earth and into caveman times. That show ticked all the boxes: mostly bad acting, government conspiracies and shadowy cabals, someone running from a bear and/or a prehistoric mammal in every single episode, and yes, time travel. But it started during Covid, it made Kevin fall asleep, and even though I could work with it on in the background and occasionally look up and say, “Oh, an underground lair,” I didn’t have a true buddy for it because Carrie decided she couldn’t put up with it alone. Turns out that when you can’t start the show on the same couch, the experience misses something — and eventually, I bailed, too. La Brea was essentially cancelled after two seasons; NBC gave it a six-episode third run just to wrap itself up, and that ended in February.
Broadcast TV is in a weird state now, with such a priority on streaming, that I’m not sure we’ll get another version of those big-budget big experiments with cliffhangers before every commercial and a deep-voiced promo guy insisting it’s the most-watched show of the year that Just. Keeps. Making. You. Breathless. Sure, we can still get together and watch movies, and we do, but the impetus just isn’t there to schedule an evening around an episode of Survivor or Ghosts or Silo. When it comes back, I will talk about Severance the next day with my friends who watch, but I don’t feel the same urge to assemble in a room and experience it in real-time. It’s not as fun as, for example, yelling at the screen when the girl from The Americans6 ends up with a celestial sapphire fused to her palm. There’s a certain camaraderie in abject disbelief.
Maybe, though, the universe is trying to tell me not to give up hope that one of the networks will — like nature itself — find a way. Because when we were on our spring break trip to France, I turned on the TV one night before bed to see what wacky theatrics I could find, and what did I turn up? Manifest, dubbed in French. I decided it’s a sign. If Manifest itself simply refuses to die, even past its own actual death, then maybe the so-bad-it’s-enjoyable-but-also-wow-this-is-awful-OMG-IT-GOT-WORSE-watch will live another day along with it. I can only hope.
— Heather
The Best (Auction) Is Yet to Come
Greetings from your Celebrity Auction Desk, which today is coming at you from the LA County Criminal Courthouse, because I have jury duty.7 My hot take is that I enjoy jury duty: The people-watching is unparalleled, and I’m really nosy. Also, it’s good to do your civic duty and all that jazz. Anyway! This week, Julien’s — which you may remember from its notable auction of Truman Capote’s cremains! — is auctioning off a tremendous number of items from the estate of Tony Bennett. The collection is fascinating, and well worth some of your precious office procrastinatory time. In addition to the usual sort of thing — low-level awards, a smattering of gold records, and a large variety of watches and cufflinks, for example — there are several signed albums, as well as selections from Bennett’s personal record collection, and a really nice array of art, much of which is of his own making. I had no idea Bennett was so prolific, but that’s just because I was ignorant! He studied art as a youth, and you can tell. For example, I love this little painting of Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and this landscape of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but that’s really just skimming the surface of what is on offer.
There are also many sketches of various celebrities that Bennett dashed off and then had autographed by the celeb in question — like this one of Lady Gaga. There are letters and notes from nearly every president since Kennedy — and a collection of invitations to JFK’s inaugural events. (Yes, You Know Who is included in that category, but all the communiques from Trump pre-date his political career; this 1997 note where he, seemingly last minute, jotted down that Tony’s address is a “GREAT BUILDING!” is so on brand that I just had to laugh.) There is a State Dinner menu from the night Bill Clinton was impeached. (It looks delicious, honestly.) There are interesting (and not-so-interesting) correspondences from basically every celebrity you can think of, from Amy Winehouse to Fred Astaire to a wealth of sweet notes from Frank Sinatra. Helen Mirren sent Bennett a hand-drawn thank you note that is so delightful and low-key weird that I want to buy it and frame it. The man never threw away a note and I love it.
Right now, the item going for the most money — as it should be — is a letter from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery. (Per Julien’s, “Bennett, along with Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, entertained the crowds who camped in the yards of supporters during their historic journey.”) But the collection does run the gamut. From every meaningful glimpse of American history, or delightfully unexpected watercolor, there is a portrait bust from Madame Tussauds, or a monogrammed Ritz Carlton robe. It’s a fascinating collection of items. And if you’re currently shopping for a special someone who would really appreciate Tony Bennett’s personal didgeridoo, friend, you are in luck!
—Jessica
This Is The New Drinks With Broads HQ FOR REAL.
I have made many suggestions for the Drinks With Broads HQ but this one is legitimately perfect for us. I mean it this time! Sure, I have no idea how much it costs — it’s tagged with the dreaded “price upon request,” which we all know is code for, “if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it” — but it’s got a staggering 39 bedrooms and 40 bathrooms, so at least we won’t have to share. (I assume that every bedroom has an en suite and then there’s just one very well-trafficked one downstairs.) (In all seriousness, the property is basically a series of fancy villas, so this is more than just DWB headquarters: It’s our compound.) It’s on an island in Sardinia! There are three beautiful pools! Per Christie’s, it’s got “two unspoilt private beaches, two private jetties and a mooring buoy to berth a superyacht.” Perfect for when we get that DWB superyacht; just imagine Jeff Bezos’s face when we pull up next to him and moon him. The property is beyond stunning… but, hmmm. I just noticed that there aren’t any photos of the interiors. What if the wallpaper is bad? Ugh. Back to the drawing board!
—Jessica
Last Week, Paid Subscribers Got…
Don’t miss out! (Also, I accidentally sent this out last night with a header on it that pretended that issue was a recap of Feud? It was NOT, I am sorry! I just messed up.)
Last Call
— So, amusingly, we sent out a free preview of Thursday’s newsletter to unpaid subscribers… and forgot to change the header on it. If you got it and wondered why it mentioned being a recap of Feud, well… oops. Dig it out and keep scrolling, because it most certainly is not that! We fixed it, but that probably wasn’t the first time and almost surely won’t be the last. —H
— The Cut wrote an extremely detailed — and in many places speculative — piece about Rupert Murdoch’s upcoming fifth marriage, a topic about which DWB readers are fairly well-informed, thanks to my own personal compulsion to write about the personal lives of rich people, even (perhaps especially!) the ones I don’t like. But we didn’t think to email Derek Blasberg for comment or to speak to a wedding stylist or a prenup expert, so this is a real value-add! — J
— Excuse me, but the real takeaway for me about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce smooching at Coachella is that they were doing it during a DJ set from Vanderpump Rules’s James Kennedy, who is DEFINITELY going to gloat about this. (Especially because DJJK probably has Coachella-related PTSD stemming from the fact that he got engaged in Coachella to a person who was cheating on him with the person who helped him plan the engagement!!! Vindication!!) — J
— In case you need another reason to dislike Chris Pratt, he and Katherine Schwarzenegger just demolished a beautiful and architecturally significant mid-century home in Brentwood, a city which famously does not give a shit if people tear down homes that should be preserved. Her mother Maria Shriver lives in the house across the street, so I get why they wanted this property, but the whole thing is a bummer. Los Angeles does not need another “modern farmhouse” — and I think “Chris Pratt gets involved in historic preservation of Los Angeles-area homes” would be good PR for him. Why does no one listen to me? — J
— I used to love Tatler, but they’ve had a lot of turnover in writing and editorial and it no longer scratches the same itch it used to. (I’ve swapped in Town & Country for my slightly cheeky rich people reading.) Having said that: This collection of Society Bride covers was a fun diversion — although I actually think there have to be FAR more covers that fit the bill in their collection. Right? — J
This already happened on The X-Files!!! I am pretty sure. - J
Was no one just in line at Starbucks or whatever? - J
I seriously think you may have recorded this so I could hear it. -J
Also, 2017’s Kevin (Probably) Saves The World, starring Jason Ritter; it was not sci-fi, but it did have a fantasy element and it was A GODDAMN DELIGHT and I’m so sad it got axed.
So did 2013’s Under the Dome, based on Stephen King’s 2009 novel that itself is basically the plot of 2007’s The Simpsons Movie. That one went 40 whole episodes. I didn’t stick with it because, yep, I had no buddy to yell at it with, because I found out too late that Tara Ariano was also hate-watching it.
Holly Taylor, one of the actors who deserved so much more than this. I don’t know her character name because we just called her The Americans, usually in the context of, “Poor The Americans. Someone give her another show.”
I did not literally write this from jury duty, don’t worry. I am focused on JUSTICE.
The Tony Bennett auction is one more example of what happens to the memorabilia that celebrities get: they sell it. In Tony’s case, however, I wonder why the printed material isn’t going into an archive. Lots of high profile people and their heirs have donated/sold their papers to universities and foundations. Kirk Douglas has one - with letters from Tony Bennett. I can understand Susan and Tony’s kids not wanting to go through it. But archivists might find it valuable. https://douglasfoundationarchive.org
This just reminded me of one night in college, watching tv with my best friend. We were flipping channels and landed on some kind of drama that caught our attention when.....suddenly everybody on the screen dropped everything and started DANCING. That's when we realized we'd been sucked into an episode of Cop Rock.