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Mar 30 2018
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TV

TV Review – Roseanne

Roseanne, Dan and Jackie are back and it’s almost like they never left.

BQB here with a review of the “Roseanne” reboot…return?  I guess it’s a return.

There was a time when sitcom families lived idyllic lives, akin to the Cleavers, where Ward would come home to a perfectly clean house, a hot dinner, and a pair of slippers courtesy of doting wife June.

But by 1988, that was in the past and America was waiting for a family that looked more like the blue collar families that were struggling all over the country.

Enter Roseanne Barr, an overweight, loudmouthed comedian who got famous through a comedy routine where she’d complain about her dishes, her husband, housework, and so on.  Add John Goodman as husband Dan and typically bratty kids Becky, Darlene and DJ and of course, nosey aunt Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) and you had the Connors, a working class, mid-west family working hard to make ends meet, barely keeping a roof over their head, food on the table and somehow finding the time to keep kids out of trouble…or at least, less trouble.

Roseanne was liberal for her day.  She’d advise her daughters to use birth control because she figured that she couldn’t stop them from engaging in hanky panky.  She was one of the first comedians to have recurring gay characters join the cast and there was always one social issue or another being discussed.

The formula was typical.  Chronically unemployed Dan would lose another job and question his manhood.  Roseanne would have to get a job and that would make him feel less manly.  The kids would act up and Dan would try to intervene only for Jackie to butt in and then Dan would go drink in the garage because he felt henpecked at every turn, whether it be from his wife or sister in law.  Ultimately, Roseanne and her big mouth would be the final arbiter and put the fear of God into everyone to obey and more often than not her big mouth led her family members to more or less a good path.

Twenty years later, the formula is still there and as I watched the two return episodes, it’s like the Connors haven’t changed.  If anything, though older, Dan and Roseanne actually look a little better since both have had serious weight loss since their younger days.  Darlene, Becky and DJ just look like older versions of themselves but it’s bittersweet as I grew up watching them grow up and now it’s like my TV siblings are old.

A point of controversy is that Roseanne and Jackie are at war in the first episode.  Roseanne, a paragon of liberalism on TV in the 1990s, has gone full blown MAGA, boasting of her love of one Mr. Donald J. Trump, whereas Jackie arrives in a “Nasty Woman” shirt and pink pussy hat, ready to protest in the name of keeping her rights over her uterus intact (is it filled with cobwebs at this point?)

Speaking of uteruses (uteri?) – huh, it must be uteri as the spellchecker didn’t go off so you learn something new everyday, Becky is attempting to become a surrogate mother at age 43, the wannabe mother employing her is noneother than Sarah Chalke, the other girl who played Becky as a kid when the girl whose name I can’t remember wasn’t playing her.

I’ve kept my eye on Twitter and Roseanne as a Trump supporter is catching a lot of heat, ironically from both sides.  Liberals pretty much want the show to be cancelled and all prints burned in a tire fire and Roseanne flogged in the public square for daring to portray a Trump supporter on national television as anything more than a fire breathing goblin.

Meanwhile, some conservatives say MAGA Roseanne is a sign they are winning the culture war while others say that Roseanne is only a conservative in name only and the show is still pushing liberalism (a grandson who dons girls’ clothing to go to school has ginned up some controversy.)

Personally, I enjoyed the first episode because I felt maybe it was something the country needed.  As the plot goes, Roseanne and Jackie, once close sisters and friends, haven’t spoken for a year over the 2016 election results.  They come together due to some wrangling by Darlene and talk it out.  Both view the other as having done something awful – voting for a candidate the other finds intolerable.  They joke about each others’ political leanings and then finally, agree to disagree and hug it out.  Soon, they are friends again.

Perhaps that is what this country needs more of.  Enough of the political rhetoric that is thrown way too easily on social media.  The point of America is that a whole bunch of people from all different countries, religions, backgrounds, etc came to a land where they could be free to be themselves while living alongside others who are different and in that spirit, we should remember that people who didn’t vote the way we want, regardless of which side you voted for, aren’t “the other,” aren’t all bad people, they just see the world a different way.  Find common ground where you can, agree to disagree where you can’t, nothing stops you from continuing to be friends.

 

STATUS: Shelf-worthy….though it made me feel very old.

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May 12 2017
2 Comments
TV

Last Man Standing Cancelled

Dang it!  I just discovered this show and they already cancelled.

3.5 readers, as you know, I don’t like to get political on this blog, but on this show, which I enjoyed, Mike Baxter (Tim Allen) was a conservative with one conservative younger daughter, a liberal wife and two older liberal daughters.  They sparred, they made fun of each others’ ideas and preferred candidates/political viewpoints but at the end of the day, they all gathered around the table, cared for one another and were there for each other.

This country is too big and there are too many different groups, opposing viewpoints for people to not be able to agree to disagree and be there for each other despite their differences.  “You disagree with me so you’re the enemy now!” is how civil wars break out.

Am I saying this show could prevent civil war?  No.  Am I saying that it is nice to see a family with different viewpoints coming together?  Yes.  America needs more of this.

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Jan 10 2017
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TV

TV Review – Last Man Standing (2011-Present)

If you were alive in the 1990s, chances are you, at least one time in your life, turned on your TV to watch Tim Allen grunt like a gorilla as he played with power tools.

Home Improvement was born out of Allen’s stand-up schtick in which he poked fun at men who begin playing with power tools only to feel surges of testosterone that cause them to regress into primates.  The schtick evolved into a show in which Tim would work on his home improvement television show by day then be a father at night.

I’m very late to the Last Man Standing party, mainly because I believe that by and large, the sitcom formula, though not technically dead, is certainly on life support.  Cheesy jokes, holding back on swears, formulaic plots, cookie cutter characters – all out the window ever since cable TV started producing their own television shows.

However, I noticed it was on Netflix the other day and feeling nostalgic for my youth in which Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor was one of celebrity father figures my TV offered me, I checked out and yeah, I have to admit, as cheesy as it is, it offered me an occasional laugh or two.

Allen has recycled his gorilla grunting tool man schtick into the form of Mike Baxter, an executive of sorts at “Outdoor Man,” a large Bass Pro Shop/Cabella’s type sporting goods store.

By day, Mike sells crossbows, knives, and hunting equipment, complaining about how unmanly men have got all the while.  By night, he reconciles his macho tendencies with the fact that he is outnumbered in his own home by his wife (Nancy Travis) and three daughters with no one but his infant grandson Boyd to turn to.  At times, he finds allies in the form of his hard ass boss Ed (Hector Elizondo) and his daughter’s boyfriend Kyle.

Gorilla grunts have been traded in for complaints about millennial hipsterism.  Baxter is sort of a less offensive Archie Bunker-esque character, unabashedly unapologetic with his conservative views yet twist his arm enough and he might try to see everything from the millennial hipster’s point of view.

An episode in the first season sums up the character.  When his company’s baseball team is forced to go co-ed (let females play), Mike is torn between his belief that men should be allowed to have their own time when they can grunt, snort, burp, drink beer and tell dirty jokes without worrying about offending women.

Co-ed sports are lose-lose for men as Baxter explains that if a man beats a woman at baseball he’s considered a bully, but if he loses to a woman he’s considered an embarrassment.

On the other hand, as a father of three girls, he dislikes the idea that someone might tell his daughters they can’t do something.  Ultimately, he recruits his most tomboyish daughter for a spot on the team and she crushes all the dudes.

Mike, who rants regularly on in videos on his store’s website, sums up a feeling that a lot of men think but few are willing to say out loud, “I want a world where women can do everything a man can do…and just don’t want to.”

Tim Taylor has grown up and morphed into Mike and Mike, like many of us modern men, suffer from an identity crisis.  Women have no idea what they want us to be anymore and we’re just as equally clueless.

But one thing’s for sure – we men need crossbows, and beer, and hunting equipment, and on occasion, the ability to burp and drink beer and tell obscene jokes without being judged by the women folk.

We’re just too evolved now to tell the womenfolk that they can’t join in on the outdoor crossbow hunting trips, but they’d better start burping and drinking beer and telling obscene jokes if they want to keep up.

File under – “Women Have the Right to Act Like Men Now…But Why Would They Want To?”

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.  Available on Netflix. Good show for when you need something not too complicated to watch for twenty minutes before you fall asleep.

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