TiVo Lady

The L Word: Lazy?

Why can't these women just decide already?  Prepared to relish another season of The L Word on Showtime, the raunchy soap about mostly pretty, mostly youngish lesbos, I was uber-disappointed by the first episode.  I mean, I may have to admit that this is nothing more than soft pornography, with extended sequences of attractive young women pretending to have sex with each other.  Not exactly a Boomer pre-occupation.

Shane loves Paige, and is about to move in with her, but then cheats on her, so Paige torches Shane's skateboard shop.  Bette wins Jodi back, but then they argue about something that I couldn't understand, because Jodi (played by Marlee Matlin) is deaf and doesn't speak very clearly.  Tasha was supposed to go to Iraq, but didn't, so she's back with Alice.  Tina is still mooning over Bette, but can't have her.  And Jenny is insufferable now that she's writing the screenplay for her movie, and directing it--although at the end of last season she was semi-suicidal, drifting out to sea in a life raft.

Alice's business, OurChart.com, has morphed into a real site in real life, sponsored by Showtime.  If you go to their site, you can see how real lesbians--or real people pretending to be real lesbians--talk to each other.  There's something voyeuristic and creepy about the whole thing.  Yech.  But it's a TiVo Wasteland out there, so I am desperate enough to keep watching this dreck.

Maybe the new season of Lost will rescue me.

Me? Watch Commercials??!!

Front page story in the Times today says TiVo owners watch commercials. 

Are they SERIOUS???!!!  Well, maybe if by 'watch' they mean 'look at the screen while the commercials whiz by.'  Hey, if that's the definition, then I 'watch' commercials too!  I mean the whole point of this fabulous technology is that you don't have to ever see another commercial in your entire life.  Ever.  I mean, that's the point.  I've gotten so good at fast-forward remote wrangling, in fact, that most of the time, I start up the viewing within +/- .25 seconds of the final commercial.  This gives me enormous and great great pleasure.  And why shouldn't it?  I TiVoed the thing to watch the show, not to watch the commercials.  Maybe these slow folks haven't figured out the first commandment of TiVo:  Thou Shalt Not Watch Live TV.  Even if you can't bear to see your favorite show after it airs live, you just wait 16 minutes into the hour, then begin watching.  You will stop watching on the hour, 9 or 10 or whatever, only you won't have seen any commercials.

I TiVo (commercial-less), therefore I am.

Saw this week's Gilmore Girls.  All I can say is that this used to be the show I loved to hate.  Now, it's the show I hate to hate.  I mean, I really just hate it.  There is no internal logic to Lorelai's dithering back and forth between former fiance and current boyfriend.  Rory's awkward mumbling to cute new economics teaching assistant is just wearying.  Michel's super-gay dog funeral is a cliche waiting to be buried alive.  And Paris, as much as I love her, is about as much fun as nails on chalkboard.  Please give these people a merciful death, and send them off to the Stars Hollow in the Sky where they belong.

But here's my new secret pleasure:  The L Word.  I've been ignoring this Showtime production for a while, but my TiVo graciously recorded it for me, encouraging me to take a look.  So I did.  It's fabulous.  Jennifer Beals is a revelation:  dark and sexy and a surprisingly good actress, she is also--hold your breath--a tail-end Boomer.  Born in 1963, she looks breath-takingly great, and was just a freshman (at Yale) when she starred in Flashdance.  Apparently, I've already missed four seasons, so I kind of have no idea what's going on, but that doesn't seem to matter much.  Also, Cybill Shepherd plays a heart-breakingly vulnerable primo Boomer in desperate lust with a young girl.  Born in 1950, she looks it.  And this, I think, makes her humiliation at the hands of the young girl who could care less, that much more heart-breaking.  At least for another Boomer, it does.  Marlee Matlin is also in this show, and she is an almost-Boomer, born in 1965.  I love the L Word for not seeming to care how Boomerish its protagonists are.  Go girls.