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Sure, The Sopranos is great, and James Gandolfini certainly has the girth to wear the Santa suit. But for a certain class of cable viewer, there's no substitute for Carrie Bradshaw done up in red velvet and white fur. This (ahem) urge is met fully by the pink-bound Sex and the City: The Complete Series (HBO, $299.95). It's not cheap, but neither were the outfits worn by Sarah Jessica Parker and company during their prime (1998–2004). For that price tag, you get six seasons (94 episodes) on 20 discs, plus some bonus material.
Each episode carries a synopsis and credits in the spiral-bound volume. You can also search for certain themes and characters on the bonus discs, which also contain some games and trivia. The quality of these accessories still doesn't match the original garment, which holds up quite well. On one of the official HBO fanfare salutes, Kim Cattrall (forever Samantha) says, "Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you." Did the show, as she implies, change all that? I'm not sure every single woman in Manhattan (or Seattle) would necessarily agree. Certainly, however, the series brought a welcome media image of glamour to singletons, a rebuttal of sorts to Bridget Jones. It got women talking about how great it was to be single and uninhibited, which is a cultural advance of some kind. Sex and the City also served as a kind of home shopping network (no outfit was repeated, we learn) for Carrie wanna-bes, making Manolo Blahnik part of the popular parlance. (Not until skimming this set, however, did I realize that a real guy put his name to those teetery fetish clogs.)
What about the criticism that the show, created by two gay men, essentially made gay men—especially in their sexual mores— of its four heroines? At a panel discussion at the 2004 U.S. Comedy Arts festival, co- creator Michael Patrick King (a frank and funny guy) brings onstage his cadre of entirely female writers for a discussion with Parker. "We've learned a lot from gay men," jokes one writer, while Parker labels the charge homophobic—an overly simplistic denial, I think.
Instead, the program may've had such zeitgeist appeal—apart from being so smartly written and acted—by collapsing some of the gay-straight, male- female hang-ups that still dominate TV (certainly on the doddering networks). When Samantha asks, "If it's so hard to get pregnant, how do you account for the number of crying children on planes?" she speaks for all of us. That line, incidentally, was written by a straight woman.
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
SCTV, Vol. 4
The 1982–83 season of the legendary imaginary Canadian TV network programmed entirely by clowns has both advantages and disadvantages over the previous three seasons. The beloved Catherine O'Hara, Dave Thomas, and Rick Moranis quit, breaking comedy fans' hearts; on the other hand, the also beloved Martin Short joined the cast at the peak of his powers (bringing high-waisted Ed Grimley with him), O'Hara did return for the Christmas episode, and one no longer needs to scan past Thomas and Moranis' moronicGreat White North skits (the show's inexplicable first hit). The good-to-bad skit ratio is perhaps slightly higher than in previous years— the writers swept the 1983 Emmy awards—and there are more of them in this collection: a dozen episodes instead of nine. And, as ever, SCTV was infinitely more consistently funny than SNL, with the additional virtue of continuing story lines to knit the skits together. And even when SCTV shamelessly rips off its betters—in Harold Ramis' imitation of John Cleese's Minister of Funny Walks—it's still funny.
SCTV also is more modern than SNL because it mooshes pop culture bits together in a manner prefiguring mashups. In "Jane Eyrehead," Rochester (Joe Flaherty) winds up working for Jack Benny. Godzilla appears in "The Towering Inferno," Lucille Ball (O'Hara) and the idiot savant kid from Deliverance (Short) show up for "Count Floyd's Scary Little Christmas," and "12 Angry Men" reprises the film classic with a cast of irritable homosexuals. The gay gags, often done by Short, remain funny, but do point up a certain want of sensitivity in that more closeted era. Naturally, on this network, the Bowery Boys merge with another period classic, resulting in "The Bowery Boys in the Band." The Happy Wanderers, Stan and Josh Schmenge (Eugene Levy and John Candy), dress up in shark and Star Wars outfits and do a polka tribute to John Williams. Martin Short plays Jerry Lewis in "Scenes From an Idiot's Wedding," with no apologies whatsoever to Ingmar Bergman.
You do need to be awfully hip to history to be in on some of the jokes: It's hard not to get it when Short plays a bad actor singing "Pardon me, Miss, but I've never done this with a real, live squirrel" to a squirrel prior to being devoured by a wild animal, but in order to grasp the game show "Let's Find Jerzy," you need to know that the bizarre Jerzy Kosinski, author of Being There, used to like to hide in his friends' homes when visiting them, so he could spring out and surprise them.
