Taking TV Seriously: It’s Just What I Do.
I don’t think I’ve followed a TV show with a laugh track since Frasier. So when I found out that 2 Broke Girls was of the multi-camera, CBS-primetime sort, it felt a bit like stepping into a sports bar wearing 6” heels and covered in glitter. It’s out of my comfort zone, so to speak. It’s typically the realm of bawdy bro humor and Charlie Sheen. That I’d stumbled into this strange place on account of Molls made it even weirder.
Lord knows who convinced the industry it’d be okay to keep making shows with laugh tracks after 1998—it pretty much kills the jokes. Nevertheless, it’s exciting to watch one of your contemporaries have her hustle pay off, so I stomached it. To the uninitiated: Molly McAleer is a 20-something lady blogger with a chihuahua and a penchant for Real Housewives, who’s been trying to make it in LA for the past few years. Her blogging success broke out of the interweb and into Hollywood last spring, when she announced she’d been hired to work on this new sitcom.
The pitch sounded perfectly tailored to Molls’ personal brand and blog: two young Brooklyn waitresses from disparate economic backgrounds form an unlikely union to pursue their dreams. I thought the best we could hope for, under its CBS sponsorship, would be a vaguely commercial show with subversive jokes à la Molls sprinkled throughout. I was not expecting those sprinkles to be of a distinctly racist and sexist flavor.
Here are the issues:
- In the first scene, Max (Kat Dennings) has to wait on two tribal-tatted bros who snap their fingers for service. She schools them by returning the gesture, which is great, until her comeback is soured by the line “You think this is the sound that gets you service, I think this is the sound that dries up my vagina.” This bummed me out, because it posits the dialectic between female server and the serviced as inherently sexual; as if her vag would actually run wetter if they merely refrained—not like, y’know, such treatment is an affront to one’s personhood, period, and can my sexual organs stay out of it, thank you very much? But Broke Girls’s designation as chief new-female-driven-sitcom seems to depend on proliferating lame vagina jokes, mostly thanks to…
- Whitney Cummings. She has this other show on about her life that looks completely idiotic. Known for her “I can be just as crass as the boys”-style humor, she co-creates with Michael Patrick King, longtime writer for Sex & the City: a show that did a great job of warping young girls in the 90s! Because these two get head writer credits, and Molls was only listed as “staff writer” at one source I found, I don’t know who is responsible for the bulk of the dialogue.
- By minute two, we’re smacked with this tired Asian stereotype: Max’s boss is a tiny doddering Korean man, who drops his articles as he gleefully announces he has changed his name to sound more American. It’s Bryce Lee (“Because I guess he wants people to take him even less seriously?”) in the show, but Angry Asian Man received this excerpt from the original script that had Max slur his name into “Rice” pretty quickly. Rice Lee. Are they fucking serious? There were also meant to be more gags at Lee’s expense, including a reference to his pants being “belted up way too high” and a pop quiz given by Max, on which AAM comments: “Isn’t it great? These kind, know-it-all white girls teaching the wide-eyed, dumbass new immigrant about American customs and holidays? The way this guy is acting, they must not celebrate Christmas in Korea. Oh, wait. But they do.”
- Caroline, Max’s Upper East Side counterpart, doesn’t understand what “marrying the ketchups” means on her first day of work. Max then chastises her literal interpretation of the phrase as “that whole Temple Grandin routine.” Because that’s not ableist or demeaning of Grandin’s many & honorable achievements or anything. Not at all. I’m just being sensitive. They’re simply taking a dig at her 2010 Emmy success! It’s all fair game.
- Token black man (Earl) gets all the token one-liners (“That girl is working harder than Stephen Hawking trying to put in a pair of cufflinks!”), but nothing else.
Is it too much to ask that these new female-dominated sitcoms not come at the expense of other underrepresented and marginalized people? I recognize the argument that the quality of these women-centric shows is not as important as it is that they get to be seen at all; that there should be a great variety as there is with men-centric sitcoms, that we should actually get to see girls do both lowbrow and highbrow humor, because they can. I do not, however, tolerate bigoted speech, and it pains me that a show [partially? mostly?] written by a woman I held in such high esteem would stoop that low.
