Tag: TV

Photo phobe

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Look at that, I think, watching citizens on the street interviewed on the nightly news. So composed, so poised, so extemporaneously eloquent, fluid and alive, all with a thrusting camera and flood lights in their makeup-free faces, knowing this is a one-shot performance for the big TV show, posterity even. How do they do it?

Me, no. Cameras are my kryptonite. I am so camera shy, from still photos to shaky video, that even in these starved, socially distanced times, I will not do FaceTime or Zoom with even my coolest pals. They know this, so they don’t try much. No. They never try.

I’m ruthless: The last time my own mother tried to FaceTime me — on my birthday — I declined her three times. After that, we had a brittle phone chat. It was a short call.

Cameras are performative devices; they make you assume an artificial skin. I personally find this embarrassing and uncomfortable, and it’s not just because I dislike seeing my own image, although I certainly do. Hammy poses, coerced smiles and theatrical displays of affection — it’s all so plastic and painful. Every time my picture is taken, I feel like I’ve sold my soul to Lucifer. And he wants a refund. 

I used to be quite photogenic, if I may say so. I do not believe this anymore. And so, amid group shots in particular, I try to hide as much as possible. My resulting image is invariably spectral — that of a Native American spirit hovering with ritual solemnity in the background, very displeased with my historical lot. 

I’m a wuss. Not only do I shun pictures, I dread public speaking, including toasts, and prefer to interview others instead of being interrogated. 

Of many offers to be interviewed on television and radio for my last job, I made only two exceptions. I was so fumbly and fidgety when I appeared on TV that I can hardly even remember the incident, except that I hated it. Seeking a segment for “This American Life,” NPR guru Ira Glass interviewed me from New York. Naturally, I choked with nerves. 

Traveling alone, I used to snap selfies for the visual record. I have a lot of those and they’re not bad. Even my distorted self-image can’t ruin all of them. But I don’t do that so much now, yet I have, in these Covid climes, surrendered to FaceTime for the occasional doctor appointment and such. I don’t like what I see. Not one bit.

So how do those regular folks on the news get so natural and comfortable and chatty, besieged by lights and cameras on live TV? I’d dash if a camera crew approached me.

If they indeed snared me, I’d gleam with flop sweat and stammer like a fourth-grader giving a book report. I’d botch the take and wind up on the cutting room floor. Then I’d shamble off, relieved, yet again, that the camera didn’t get me.

A pungent parting shot for ‘Game of Thrones’

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Game of Thrones” is over — thank god.

And yet the chatter sputters on. Fans can’t clam it. Of all the “GOT” noise — a FOMO racket, a bellyaching din — this might be my favorite snippet, courtesy of clear-eyed Washington Post critic Hank Stuever, whose healthy cynicism is gleefully cathartic:

It’s likely you’re already aware of the dissatisfaction with the conclusion tweeted hither and yon — six weeks of nitpicking complaints, first-class nerd whining and an ungodly amount of postgame analyses. Consider all those hastily posted diatribes or that pointless online petition with a million deluded signatures on it, demanding (demanding!) to have Season 8 scrubbed and remade. In some ways, “Game of Thrones” had grown so popular that it made its viewers look embarrassingly out of touch with life itself.

This can only happen when we love our popular culture a little too hard, crossing some line of personal investment, forgetting when a TV show is only just that. It was our fault for coming to regard the show as the apogee of the medium itself.

It’s also why I’m glad some unnamed, unwitting hero left a coffee cup in the camera shot in the episode that aired May 5. That one coffee cup humanized the whole endeavor. It reminded us that a TV show, no matter how absorbing, is a folly, a fake, a job that someone is hired to do, so that an HBO subscription can be sold to you. The coffee cup will be scrubbed away with a quick flick of magic technology; but before it’s entirely gone, I hope they give it an Emmy.”

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She’s depraved, debauched, despicable — and so lovable

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

One of the piquant pleasures of the British TV comedy series “Fleabag” is how its protagonist, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, insistently pokes through the fourth wall with the impish gall and smug impetuosity of a naughty little girl. She winks, crinkles her nose, smirks, grimaces, makes snide comments, all of it right at the camera, meaning right at us.  

She wants us to be a part of her latest escapade, her latest squirmy moment, lest this young woman has to go it alone in her flailing, full-frontally narcissistic existence. As she says in the first episode, she has “a horrible feeling” she’s “a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.”

Well. Now. Really. She’s not that bad. How could we love her so much, empathize with her so fully, if she was such a steaming heap of debasement? Even her self-anointed sobriquet, Fleabag, is more fitting for a scuzzy homeless tramp than the bitingly charming London cafe owner she is.

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Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), breaking the fourth wall with an uneasy reaction to the audience

Season one of “Fleabag,” which premiered in 2016, is streaming on Amazon, with season two on the way. From online posts, viewers either adore or abhor Waller-Bridge’s character, which she created from her play of the same name. (Waller-Bridge stars in and writes all of the TV episodes.) “Hate the protagonist … She has no redeeming qualities and is totally unlikeable,” someone groused, and that’s enough of that.

So she’s divisive. Aren’t some of the most interesting women multifaceted? Don’t they chafe while they charm, pepper smarm with snark, own a bit of Mother Teresa mixed with, say, Sarah Silverman? “Fleabag may seem oversexed, emotionally unfiltered and self-obsessed, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” say notes from the “Fleabag” play.

With her floppy pageboy fit for a ’30s Hollywood starlet, natty outfits and Skittles-red lipstick, our anti-heroine exudes a glamor incongruous to her unsavory descriptives. Though she’s too surly to be screwball, she often recalls the great comedians of yore with kaleidoscopic facial expressions that match her shifting moods. Waller-Bridge plays light and dark with equal dexterity. She is a scintillating performer.

Fleabag has been called “an angry, confused young woman attempting to navigate life in London,” which is about right. Yet you can’t ignore her Olympian sex life, a tragicomic pastime that ends as these things do, with a droplet of satisfaction and a river of rue. 

With a rich, unsmiling sister, a fun, like-minded bestie and a mostly off-again boyfriend, Fleabag, who’s on the cusp of 30, is still working things out. She’s painted as a classic self-absorbed millennial, playing the field and playing out with scant regard for the collateral damage. Ever-so slowly we watch her crumble, perhaps implode. The show slyly builds to a dramatic pitch that’s truly poignant and confirms that there is little superficial about it.

“Fleabag” is TV’s best comedy, better than my other tops: the cinematic if shrilly hyperactive “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the near-perfect “Catastrophe,” the wry, wondrous “SMILF” and madly inventive “Atlanta.” (“High Maintenance” — you’ve slipped.) 

Super news: Waller-Bridge is bringing the stage version of “Fleabag” to the SoHo Playhouse in New York City for five weeks, Feb. 28 through April 7. Waller-Bridge wrote and stars, and I have a ticket.

As a one-woman show, she’ll be addressing the audience face-to-face, the fourth wall totally disassembled, the rubble kicked to the side. It should be tartly hilarious, cheeky and racy, and fantastically uncomfortable — just like the staggering series. 

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