That's Entertainment Dept.: (1) Right-wing Prop 8 nitwittitude, (2) Waiting for the "Big C" season finale

Sorry, the Big C clip seems to be iffy from the Showtime website. (Heavy pre-show use tonight, perhaps? I'm getting it OK in Firefox, but not in Safari.) But then, I wasn't going to watch it anyway! -- Ken


Showtime's preview for tonight's Season 2 finale of The Big C -- I'm not going to watch it till after I've seen the show, but you may be less fussy about the risk of having elements of the show spoiled for you.

by Ken

(1) REVISITING THE MODERN-DAY POLITICAL QUESTION:
ARE ALL RIGHT-WINGERS MENTAL DEFFECTIVES?

The New Yorker's Michael Schulman has a "Talk of the Town" piece in the new (October 3) issue, "Do-over," about a play that screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk and the upcoming J. Edgar) has fashioned out of the transcripts of the San Francisco trial in which lawyers David Boies and Theodore Olson successfully pressed their case that California's Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. The play is called 8, and a star-studded reading was held last Monday in New York, with Morgan Freeman as Boies, John Lithgow as Olson, Bradley Whitford as hapless defense attorney Charles Cooper, Bob Balaban as Judge Vaughn Walker, Christine Lahti and Ellen Barkin as plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, Jayne Houdyshell as Maggie Gallagher, and the likes of Anthony Edwards, Rob Reiner, and Yeardley Smith as witnesses.

Schulman tells us that Black was present for 10 of the trial's 12 days of testimony (missing the others because of movie-project prep work), and his task in reimagining the proceedings in dramatic form --

was to shave down three weeks of material, some of it mired in legalese. "It's incredibly dense, and you have to communicate it in a way that is clear to an audience that hasn't gone through law school."

It's an entertaining piece, well worth your attention (and for once we've got a New Yorker item that's actually available free online). We learn, for example, that David Boies considered it "a real thrill to have Morgan Freeman play me," though he acknowledged that Ed Begley Jr., who played him in the HBO film Recount, looks more like him.

But the reason I bring this all up is for the sake of this exchange that Schulman reproduces.

David Blankenthorn, a marriage "expert" who was the defense's only witness, served as comic foil, as in this Abbott and Costello-like exchange, drawn from the cross-examination by the plaintiffs' attorney, David Boies:

Let me stress again that in broaching this question of whether all right-wingers are mentally defective, I am of course excluding those who who are unabashedly serving their personal economic or power-gathering interests, notably our beloved economic predators and powermongers and their associated stooges. For the rest, the evidence continues to pile up.


(2) COUNTING DOWN TO THE EVERYTHING-CHANGES
SEASON 2 FINALE OF THE BIG C, "CROSSING THE LINE"

The relationship between fellow clinical-trial subjects Lee (Hugh Dancy) and Cathy (Laura Linney) got off to a rocky start, to put it mildly.

Probably a good rule of thumb for folks in the trenches pitching new TV shows: If you're looking for something with the possibility of a long run and a profitable syndication package, you probably don't want to build your project around a terminally ill person.

This was obviously a problem, or at any rate a feature, built into The Big C (created by Darlene Hunt, who has written or co-written all 26 episodes to date). Considering how strong a bond the show's producers and writers and of course actress Laura Linney created between viewers and their Stage IV melanoma sufferer Cathy Jamison, it was good news that Showtime ordered a second season, but considering the show's basic premise, it is kind of term-limited. Sure, medical miracles happen, and we all hope that the clinical trial Cathy managed to get into this season will buy her some more time, still, this is supposed to be a show about a woman getting on with her life in the knowledge that the end is in sight. (Not in Season 2, though, since a Season 3 has been announced. So I guess that's not part of thehuge-surprise, everything-changes-type events Showtime has been promoting for the season finale, "Crossing the Line." I wish they wouldn't do that, or feel the need to do that. Let the show team do their damned show the way they want, and then have the network people market that to people who might enjoy it. )

For Cathy and husband Paul (Oliver Platt) and son Adam (Gabriel Basso) and Cathy's bipolar brother Sean (John Benjamin Hickey) and the assorted people woven into their lives, it's been another strong season of getting on with those lives, with more humor than one might think possible given the basic situation. But I thought last week's next-to-last episode of the season, "The Darkest Day," was especially strong in bringing us back to that central reality, and I doubt that I was alone in being overwhelmed by the death of Lee (Hugh Dancy), the "soul mate" Cathy discovered in the clinical trial being run by Dr. Sherman (Alan Alda).

As a side note, it's a tribute to the human dimension of the show that the two characters who have sent to meet their maker -- Cathy's eccentric neighbor Marlene (Phyllis Somerville) and now Lee, both of whom were introduced with decidedly hard-to-crack exteriors -- became so dear to at least this viewer.

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