Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett takes a tour through some of the new geek TV series.
A couple of weeks ago (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Don't Risk The Spoilers"), I ranted about how people in entertainment now were exponentially better looking than they were when I was a kid. "Attractive" is wholly subjective but if you've been involved even a little in 20th century pop culture it's pretty obvious there's been a massive escalation in the base level of what’s considered to be "good looks." The first moment I suspected something was up was back in the 80s when instead of a goofy looking guy Lee Major's comedy relief sidekick on The Fall Guy was both younger and better looking than he was.
I suppose this "attractiveness race" reflects the desperate struggle of entertainment conglomerates to hold onto ever shrinking mass audiences in an increasingly diversified entertainment world. The thinking apparently being "if viewers prefer looking at pretty people we can lure more eyeballs by making our people prettier than our competitors." In particular Fox and CW networks are desperately scrambling to lock up the key 18 to 25 demographic which is probably best exemplified by The CW's absurd version of Beauty and the Beast. In it "the beast" is a model handsome super soldier with a visible scar, though apparently the scar didn't test well with focus audiences. So much to the relief of Jay Ryan, the actor playing him (who according to a recent issue of TV Guide found the face prosthetic "hard to act with"), in Season Two "the beast" gets a makeover. At this point they might just as well call it Beauty and the Other Beauty.*
Then there's The CW's version of The Tomorrow People, a British children's science fiction series reinvented as a sudsy action series where the next stage in human evolution is gifted people with chiseled model-like features. The producers didn't realize, or didn't care, just how much it dials down the frisson of the series "persecuted vs. oppressors" central theme when our "feared and hated" genetic superiors look like idealized versions of the cool kids from high school. This is underlined by the series tagline: "Different Is Dangerous." I'm sure the producers meant it in the young, sexy perfume/car ad definition of "dangerous" but also it kind of makes it sound like they're on the side of the oppressors. Plus the sentiment doesn’t exactly do the genuinely different any favors either.
Then there's this Fall's surprise hit, apparently, Fox's Sleepy Hollow, where Washington Irving's awkward scarecrow Ichabod Crane is reimagined as a hunky heartthrob. Oddly enough this is not the silliest part of a show which has the silliest premise since My Mother the Car. That being Crane awakes Rip Van Winkle like (I swear I went to college and the fact that the series was a cross between the two Irving stories didn't occur to me until someone pointed it out to me) in the 20th Century. And instead of curling into a ball and howling at the first sight of a car he fights the likewise revived Headless Horseman who (naturally) is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
But I found the pilot to be strangely watchable as well as surprisingly funny. Though one thing the show should deal with at some point is our hero's period attire because, as pointed out by columnist Dalton Ross in this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly, they must be exceedingly smelly seeing as how he was buried in them. In the same issue executive producer Alex Kurtzman is quoted as saying Crane will never make a trip to Walmart to buy some jeans because "He can never feel comfortable in our world. The minute he gets comfortable, the show is over." He has a point, though I would feel more comfortable watching the show if there were at least a scene where he discovers the wonders of a laundromat.
This ridiculous ramping up of standards of attractiveness has definitely reached way beyond the grotesque; for me it came during the initial episode of The Tomorrow People. It wasn’t enough that the show tried to sell its buff, rugged twentysomething lead as an isolated, bullied teen. Look I intellectually know (I've got to confess it's totally outside my experience) that good looking people get bullied too--that list includes singers Christina Aguilera and Demi Lovato, and actor Christian Bale. But no, the producers had to stick a lampshade on this trope by making his "bully" equally tall and good looking.
My main problem with this is really twofold. One, it promotes impossible-to-achieve body images that give a lot of people just one more reason to hate themselves. And two, by selecting nothing but a steady stream of blandly attractive actors, their perfect faces uncreased by either character or thought, for their "hotness" instead of ability to make act makes for crummy popular culture.
I should probably at least mention Disney XD's Mighty Med, a fairly standard tween-com infused with superhero battles. While hanging out at their comic book shop best friends Kaz and Oliver find a secret doorway that leads to a hospital that ministers exclusively to superheroes. There are definitely some pluses, like a general respect for comic book culture; the kids are just regular kids and not depicted as stereotypical geeks for possessing encyclopedic comic book knowledge. The comic shop they frequent is large, well lit and attractive (i.e., it isn't an Ugly Boy Store) and run by recurring characters Clyde and Wallace, who while a bit goofy aren’t depicted as being fat, lazy or mean (though, spoiler alert, they’re secretly supervillains). And the pilot's pivotal plot point revolves one of the kids getting hold of a comic before its official Wednesday release.
Having been co-created by Jim Bernstein (Phineas & Ferb) there are also some wonderful non sequiturs, but most of the jokes are loud, low and crass; one uses the word "sexy" while a completely inappropriate one involved teen female hero Skylar Storm losing her uniform. But then, I'm not the droid they're looking for; evidence of that, the show launched as Disney XD's #2 series of all time in total viewers and across all major boy demos.
* Sadly, this isn't the first time someone has decided to make a version of Beauty and the Beast without so much Beast in it. I place into evidence the 2011 movie Beastly where a witches curse turns a vain, arrogant b-hole into a bald, tattooed… well, the movie tells you he's supposed to be ugly but in actually he looks more like a New York bartender.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.