The Gilded Age on HBO - scrapes off the gild to reveal plywood

Madison Square Park, photo by Sarah Sarai

I am most unhappy with the first episode of "The Gilded Age," a Julian Fellowes-written jam which is very silly and very white. My HBO subscription ends in a few hours, so this was my farewell and no problem there. 

This first-of-the-series episode is a fitting send off (to the demise of my subscription).  There were many complaints with HBO's The Wire - that it was a white writer's impression of a black city (Baltimore) and a black struggle (Baltimore). That is my perspective of "The Gilded Age" - that it is very very very white and remarkably uninventive in being so. Despite the one young black woman who is a struggling writer. Perhaps her struggle will be representative of the times but why bother representing those times? Why use the history of racism as an excuse to further racism? 

And why such a pallid portrayal of the nouveau riche? Hallelujah and thank you, lord, two great and interesting actresses brightened the screen. Christine Baranski as an old school white lady richie rich. And, briefly so far, Audra McDonald as the mother of Baranski's new secretary. (There is no situation or script on God's earth that could not be bettered by Baranski and/or McDonald.) 

The plot is pallid. Carrie Coon, an actress I dislike (her expressionless face creeps me out - has done so since Fargo [the t.v. show], is the striver in this series. A monied wife who has a house built on Fifth - across from Central Park - as her Cape Canaveral to launch herself into old New York society. Her architect is the great Stanford White but apparently his name means nothing to the first families of New York. New York has always had snobs spinning its social circles with a circus clown's panache. And, yes, snobs are delightful when they are Baranski aided by some of the mustachio twirling men in the series. 

In the final scene of Episode 1, the Carrie Coon character, an arriviste, insists she's going to make the snobs of New York admire her or come to her parties. THAT's the issue? Sounds like a Father Knows Best episode with Kitten scrunching her 10-year-old face to reveal gumption. It would work better if Reese Witherspoon were the pushy broad determined to get through Harvard Law. 

I live in NYC and it is mundo snob-o-licious. It is awful here, in fact, IF you harbor a desire to fit in. Which I stupidly did. Because there are no accommodations for weirdos like me (a simple country lass with no money and a quick tongue). I'll talk about that sometime when my thinking portions are up to par. 

TV commentary: Entourage on its last legs

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard

I noticed a little attention paid to a previous posting on my miracle at housing court. I suspect it was the word entourage that, at least in part, pulled in a few more readers.

My entourage consisted of two subtle-thinking and gorgeous attorneys (see My 3,000 Loving Arms: Spinoza in Housing Court). The other entourage, these days, is on HBO. I've checked out several years of the series from the library. At first I enjoyed watching, despite its being based on the Hollywood entourage of former rocker Mark Walberg, a.k.a. Markie Mark, who was publicly and privately racist. He claims to have recanted.

Rex Lee as Lloyd the assistant and Jeremy Piven as Ari the agent boss are so much fun to watch with their outsized and dead on characterizations. The boys themselves, the four guys who came up in Queens and now live the Hollywood life are cute.

However the day-to-days of this entourage include nothing to indicate any contact with brain stimulation. As hall-monitory as this may sound, not one of the entourage ever does anything to choose to use the mind, and it seems a fair representation of the rocker, rapper, movie star life.

Hey. I smoked marijuana through the seventies. I also read. This group, especially in the most recent season, simply smokes dope, prowls somewhat inefficiently for babes and watches t.v. That's it. They are so boring to watch.

Soooooooo boring.

Am I judgmental? I'm okay with that. TV is often mindless and that's good. Married with Children (for example) was a silly series but I loved it and never felt the characters' boredom. They were too busy being frustrated, opinionated and scheming.

I have lifetimes of bad karma to work off. Even this one life of mine has revealed me as rich with bad attitude. The point is to keep trying for something better. Hall monitory plus sinful Christian-y? Could be.

Still, HBO's Entourage has devolved into a spineless lowest common, and it didn't start out with high marks in attention to women, something I avoided mentioning up front (although when one of the few women in the series is a smart professional, like Debbie Mazur as publicist, she's allowed to be that--allowed by audience and entourage).

In the name of being entertained, I am willing to overlook many a questionable attitude. Ya gotta. Comedy's rarely about the pure (well, except Keaton and Gleason fighting with themselves). Huh. Maybe it's always about the pure in an impure world. I gotta think about that. I do know this: The impurities of boredom are too much for me.