An Ode to Landlines, and Possibly a Farewell to Gabriel?!?

Also: Cruel Intentions is back, again.

Last week I wrote about Rivals, a banger — pun intended — of an ‘80s corporate/revenge soap on Hulu. But, and this is not a plot spoiler, I didn’t talk about the moment in the season finale where I actively let out a shout, aloud, alone. It was this:

“THAT’S OUR PHONE!” I shrieked. When my family moved into our house in 1983, if I remember correctly, it had all old beige rotary phones — one of which we kept because it was separately wired to the alarm — but we eventually replaced them all and I vividly remember us picking out this British Telecom Viscount, which we had in grey and bright green. Not only was this a delicious piece of work from those in charge of keeping the sets authentic, but it, was a huge nostalgia moment for me; in combination with the comments of this post, in which it came up that Kids Today are fascinated by cassettes, it cemented for me that corded landline phones are the technology of the past I wish we could bring back in full force.

I have always been very tactile when it comes to this stuff, and Young Heather found phones irresistible. How they felt in your hand, or against your face. How your breath bounced off the mouthpiece. How satisfying it was to hang them up. The Viscount, I regret to inform you, did not have great slam value. It was too slight. The better phone for that was this very boring brown Statesman my Dad bought for his office, I suspect because he decided he wanted one that blended into his desk better. That one had a little heft. My grandparents had an olive-colored one like this, which is an all-in-one and disconnected just by putting it back down on the table. I found an excuse to at least pick it up anytime we visited them, even if that meant chatting to the dial tone for a while before it cut off. Sometimes I might even have unplugged it and used it to play. No comment.

Landlines also had personality that varied far more widely than any of their descendants. They could be chunky, they could be sleek, they could be retro, they could be glamorous. Sometimes they told you a lot about a person, and sometimes they were the opposite — my best friend in Miami, very much NOT the person I would have predicted for this, owned basically exactly this princess phone.¹ The curved bit you speak into reminded me of the Olden Times wall phones, where you only actually picked up and hung up the ear cone. You’d better believe I envied people in movies who got to hang with those. In that same time period, which was my first in which I was allowed a phone in my bedroom, I ended up getting this exact Swatch model; its base doubled as a SECOND HANDSET, so if you had friends over both of you could be on the same phone call but also in the same room. Magic. It never sounded great that way, but who cared? Fun at sleepovers! Irritating if you accidentally knocked it over! Technology!!!!²

Eventually, phones got more streamlined, more dull, and of course, more cordless, which really began our descent into a society where kids no longer understood the rare delights of hanging up on somebody in a real tizzy. Which is not to say that I was frequently in phone fights, but the act was so fun that sometimes I’d slam it down just to DO it. Pushing a button on a cordless, and eventually poking at an iPhone, lacks the thrilling feel AND the visual interest in a TV show. Case in point:

Imagine Jeannie Bueller calling the cops in her bedroom, finding them unsympathetic, and NOT being able to hang up violently before wrestling the phone and screaming, “DICK! HEAD!” It’s just not the same.

We’ve clung to the idea of keeping landline capability for 911 reasons, or if, say, an earthquake manages to knock out the cell towers and our power but the phone lines still work. (Who knows.) In our old house, I had phones in the bedroom and my office which looked like push-button versions of what an old-school detective or journalist might’ve had on their desk in a black-and-white movie, and I loved it. Eventually, one stopped completely hanging up, and the other was heavy enough that I couldn’t justify bringing it to Canada or putting it in storage. This was the death of my proper telephone usage: We bought a cheap cordless phone so that we would have a Vancouver number for anyone who required one (and many places did), but never really touched it; when it came back down to L.A. with us, it moved into the cupboard where our modem and router are, because we have zero jacks in this house and therefore that’s the only place it can connect.

But I don’t love it. I realize offices and professional establishments still use these, but our homes have lost these delicious little artifacts of whimsy, and I wish we could bring them back the way, say, vinyl has made a return. I want a princess phone, maybe. I want to feel a receiver curve around my face. I want to call my mom and idly wrap the squiggly cord around my finger, or untangle it from itself in order to stretch the phone further from the base. I definitely want to feel like Alexis Carrington Colby sometimes and hurl down the receiver when wronged by my enemy — a telemarketer, a few noteworthy customer service reps, or that one “local contractor doing work in [my] area” who didn’t like me telling him we had a person already but didn’t need anything done, called back immediately to suggest I didn’t understand the importance of keeping my house in good shape, then called back AGAIN and specifically demanded to speak to my husband. I did have a landline for that one, and I slammed it down with TRUE VENGEANCE pulsing through my veins, and it was GLORIOUS.

What’s the bygone piece of technology that you miss the most? Are you hankering for your old VHS tapes? Missing the art of recording a song off the radio on your cassette deck? If you could make anything old new again, what would you pick?

— Heather

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Emily in Paris Season Five: Gabriel In the Doghouse?

‘Tis the season, apparently, for the handsome leading men of shows I recap to be either outwardly or secretly displeased with their professional lot in life. Last week, we chatted about how Harry Richardson of The Gilded Age allegedly unfollowed everyone associated with the show. The meat of that discussion was, naturally, primarily gossip and conjecture; whatever Richardson is doing with his own social media may be totally meaningless. On the other hand, we’ve got Emily in Paris’s Lucas Bravo, who plays Emily’s on-again/off-again love interest, Hot Chef Gabriel, who has left very little to the imagination in terms of his current feelings about the show over the last few weeks. It is refreshing and also lightly weird to see a leading man just airing it out like this.

In September, at a literal promotional event for Emily in Paris, he said the following to the folks at SheKnows. On camera!

“Reading the script this final season it was like ‘I don’t really like what [Gabriel]’s becoming and where the storyline is going. At the end of the day, I’m just an actor and I’m here to say my lines….part two was weird, I don’t understand him anymore but we’ll see….”

A week later, he told USA Today:

“I’m an actor and I don’t make choices for [Gabriel],” shrugs Bravo, speaking hours after Netflix announced the series would return for a fifth season. “I don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but I hope we’re not going to go through another Team This or Team That, because I don’t like to be a choice; humans are complex. But, you know, the show is what it is…I can’t say it’s the part where I’m showing the most range. But it’s not what the show is about. I’m mostly here to support the girls.”

And, most recently, Bravo sat down with Le Figaro and turned this up a notch, basically saying that he might not come back for season five. (I ran this interview through Google translate because my French is bad, but what I got seems to line up with everyone else’s translation so I feel like the gist is correct.) Ahem:

Will we find him in the credits of season 5? " It will depend on the script because I think I've covered everything a bit. I don't really have any freedom and, as I'm starting to be given some elsewhere, I'm getting a taste for it. Life is short. The filming of this series lasts five months. Do I want to sacrifice them to tell something that doesn't stimulate me?"

Then he really twisted the knife:

 I don't want to be part of a cog that tends not to consider the intelligence of the spectators. 

YIKES!

To round up: He’s not stimulated and he thinks Emily in Paris is dumb.³ This man is over it! Bravo is certainly not wrong that Gabriel’s character was a mess last season; he complains in several of these sit-downs that his character lacks agency, and he’s correct. It’s just that actors generally don’t publicly complain this much about the show that’s currently paying their bills. This is, after all, how Joey Tribbiani ended up falling down the elevator shaft. (It also got Katherine Heigl decades of shit from people, but I suspect the viewing public will treat a hot French man with considerably more latitude than they did her. For one thing, he can probably just blame this all on ennui.) Perhaps Bravo’s interview with Le Figaro is the most blunt because he was talking to his countrywoman in his native tongue and it makes sense that you might feel more unguarded in those circumstance; in the very same week, Bravo spoke to the Telegraph and said he loves Darren Star and has no plans to quit the show — although he also said he almost quit after the first season and confessed to actively trying to de-hot himself. ⁴

I think part of the issue here is that Bravo — in addition to agreeing with much of the audience that his character is all over the place at the moment! — is, like Dan Stevens before him, now getting more interesting (to him) roles. Both of his most recent profiles are ostensibly in aid of his new Prime Video film Freedom, directed by Melanie Laurent, in which he plays a real-life jewelry thief/bank robber/French folk hero, and he’s appearing opposite Diane Kruger in an upcoming French HBO adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons.⁵ His role in Emily in Paris was basically his first professional acting gig, and it makes sense that he might be antsy to spread his creative wings and five years of will they/won’t they with Lily Collins doesn’t seem as appealing as it once did. Of course he wants to explore greener creative pastures. After all, as they say, how can you keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paris?

— Jessica

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Yet Another Bittersweet Symphony

While we’re (vaguely) on the topic of Dangerous Liaisons, its most successful modern adaptation is itself getting a modern adaptation. Prime Video has taken Cruel Intentions and placed it in the Greek system. The trailer for the eight-episode series dropped this week:

My knee jerk response is two-fold: (a) we don’t need this! And (b) I might watch this! (My third reaction is that Sarah Katherine Hook is VERY brave to be stepping into the shoes of both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Glenn Close, although she appears to be handling it adeptly in the preview⁶.) Despite that first instinct, I have to admit that I believe Les Liaisons Dangereuses is endlessly adaptable and if I am honest with myself, it is on my short list of books for which I will always entertain a new version even if I have my favorite. (Also on that list: Little Women.) I don’t know if it needs eight hours of storytelling, but I’m willing to be convinced. PS: Congrats to The Verve for cashing that check again.

— Jessica

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ICYMI…Halloween Version

Last year, we visited the gift shop of The House of Seven Gables in one of my favorite Enter Through the Gift Shops so far!

Don’t forget that we crowdsourced Halloween carols! Now is the time to make that playlist.

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Last Call

— I guess I should have predicted that Armie Hammer would launch a podcast. I guess I also should have predicted that he would title it… sigh… Armie HammerTime. I did not make this up. — J

— I saw this headline and truly thought, “There but for the grace of God go I”: An Australian Woman Trying to Rescue Her Phone Gets Stuck Between Boulders. This is why I don’t hike. She was also UPSIDE DOWN. (She’s fine. Albeit traumatized, as you would be.)— J

— Gisele Bundchen is having a baby with her boyfriend, the jiu-jitsu instructor she began dating after she divorced Tom Brady. I’m glad she’s happy, but I also feel like… when they got divorced, I had high hopes for some GREAT public dating weirdness that never really manifested, beyond those rumors he was dating Reese, and then Kim K, neither of which turned out to be true. I guess maybe he had that fling with Irina Shayk? With her basically settled down again, it’s all on Tom now to be interesting, which… has never been his forte, so we’re screwed. — H

— Having said that, someone check on Tom, because he’s ‘gramming like he’s deep in his feelings. —H

1. She ALSO had a waterbed. I did not envy that as much but I DID enjoy getting to sleep over on it, because this was 1990-92 and those still seemed like the height of a luxurious splurge.

2. I owned this one, but it was painted a shiny dark blue; I got it for Christmas one year! I still have it, but the ringer needs to be fixed. (Otherwise it works great.) It’s A THRILL to slam down and it weighs a TON. (I actually do still have a landline...) — J

3. That’s not wrong but it’s also why it’s enjoyable for people who enjoy it.

4. In researching this piece, I also discovered that Bravo REALLY wants Gabriel’s restaurant to go vegan, as he told this to more than one journalist. It’s so cute to imagine him pitching this to the writers every season and them just making thoughtful noises. He even had his Le Figaro interview at a vegan place!

5. The Krugs is playing…Valmont’s aunt, a character most recently played on Broadway by Mary Beth Peil, a.k.a. Grams from Dawson’s Creek, who is about 40 years older than Diane Kruger. And Bravo is playing le Comte de Gercourt, who never appears in the most famous film version but who drives a fair amount of drama in the book, as I recall. (I haven’t read it for, generously, thirty years.) They are calling this a “re-imagining.”

6. Maybe ALSO being a three-named Sarah will be lucky for her. — H