While "Selfie" looks at a woman getting a first glimpse of herself, a restaurant views a glut of patrons gawking obsessively at themselves

An ABC trailer for Selfie, starring Karen Gillan and John Cho, created by Suburgatory creator Emily Kapnek

by Ken

It would never have occurred to me to watcha TV show called Selfie, for reasons that I hope are obvious, but I heard tell, from someone who's not much of a TV-watcher, that it's not cashing in on the "selfie" craze but is targeting it. So I glanced at the first couple of episodes -- not really watching them yet, but just trying to get a feel for what the show is doing.

The first thing that struck me is that the show was created by Emily Kapnek, who also created Suburgatory, whose three-season run ABC ended with last season, which is too bad. The show wasn't always as good as it should have been, but the premise -- a street-smart city high-schooler (the amazing Jane Levy), abandoned by her mother, being dragged by her father (Jeremy Sisto) from the streets of NYC to the hardly-idyllic world of suburbia. It had a fresh, distinctive point of view, and managed all sorts of observations on growing up and suburban social life that were funny and often powerful. My guess is that lots of people at the network hated it, and fought hard to water it down, and were thrilled to see it go -- do we really imagine that the Disney people could sell such a product?

If I had known about the Kapnek lineage, that alone would have made me curious about a show despite a title as unfortunate as Selfie. It turns out that what the show means by "selfie" is not the genre of photo but a person (Karen Gillan, another striking redhead) who is so self-absorbed as to imagine herself wonderful beyond compare, and is utterly shocked by her sudden awareness of abundant evidence that this view is not widely shared, and actually tries to do something about it. I can't tell you much more about the show, which I definitely want to give a proper look-see, but the premise is, like Suburgatory's, far out of the network-TV mainstream, where cretinously and revoltingly egomaniacal have become cultural heroes.

This was already on my mind when Howie passed along a link with the note "you'll like this," to a pickup by Tyler Durden on the Zero Hedge blog of a report from the "Meta Picture" blog. Now Howie isn't often wrong about such things, and I didn't just like it, I went wild over it. It's one of the most wonderful things I've read in a long time.

The premise was announced thusly:



"We are a popular restaurant," the poster explains, "for both locals and tourists alike. Having been in business for many years, we noticed that although the number of customers we serve on a daily basis is almost the same today as it was 10 years ago, the service just seems super slow even though we added more staff and cut back on the menu items."

The posting goes on to note:

One of the most common complaints on review sites against us and many restaurants in the area is that the service was slow and/or they needed to wait a bit long for a table.

We decided to hire a firm to help us solve this mystery, and naturally the first thing they blamed it on was that the employees need more training and that maybe the kitchen staff is just not up to the task of serving that many customers.

At the consulting firm's suggestion, the restaurant turned to the surveillance system that ("like most restairants in NYC") it uses, with a view to seeing how the staff's performance may have changed over time. Unfortunately, having switched from videotape to an all-digital system and no longer having the old videotapes, which in any case were recorded over after 90 days, they were at first hamstrung by not having older video for comparison. However, in their storage room they did find the four old recording devices, and each turned out to contain its never-removed last tape.

The date stamp on the old footage was Thursday, July 1, 2004. The restaurant was very busy that day. We loaded up the footage on a large monitor, and next to it on a separate monitor loaded up the footage of Thursday, July 3, 2014, with roughly the same amount of customers as ten years before.

They "carefully looked above 45 transactions," and this is what they found:




YES, THEY'RE IN A SERVICE BUSINESS --

And that means they're at the mercy of the people who choose to patronize their establishment, and nowadays, alas, that means that this is the kind of people their continued existence depends on. Which is a hell of a position to be stuck in.

I don't think it's possible to be too harsh in judging these people. They are enemies of decency and humanity, and should be summarily exterminated.

From a personal standpoint, what haunts me is that we've devolved into a culture mired in unprecedented self-absorption at a time when the selves have never been more odious.

I've written before about a haunting episode, called "The Cheaters," of the ancient Boris Karloff-hosted anthology series Thriller. The show, as I recall it, traces a couple of the more recent inheritors of a pair of eyeglasses that each comes to understand enables the wearer to see the truth, which astonishing power they naturally abuse as greedily as they can. But the glasses turn out to trace back to an old Dutch lens-grinder who created them in order to be able to look into a mirror to see the truth about himself. Whereupon he promptly committed suicide.

I guess such a premise would be meaningless in a culture looking obsessively at itself, smartphone camera in hand, and seeing nothing -- at least nothing real.

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