 Studio Creepy
I haven't watched last night's Studio 60 yet, but Laurel of the TV Picks is exactly right about the recent episodes leading up to it:
[Previously,] Danny (Bradley Whitford) informed his boss Jordan (Amanda Peet) that he was "coming for her." ... Any woman would react to "I'm coming for you" with dread or fear or some unpleasant feeling in this circumstance; even if you were into the guy, that phrasing would surely make you uneasy.
But it was last week that upped the creepy ante ... [it] opened with Danny making repeated phone calls to Jordan during their holiday break. Sometimes she answered and told him she wasn't interested in dating him, other times she let the phone ring ... At some point he actually changed his phone number so she wouldn't recognize it and would answer the phone. Yes, really.
Later in the same episode, he got a bunch of people (famous and otherwise) to fax Jordan letters of recommendation. ... Jordan's been in hot water due to scandal in the press, her job has been in jeopardy, she's pregnant and dealing with a whole lot. She has a high profile job and some of the people Danny contacted are folks who work in her field. She's also Danny's boss.
When Danny approaches her at the end of the episode, she tells him his behavior is inappropriate. She tells him it's embarrassing and it's harming her career. She lays out the facts. She tells him to stop. As I watched I thought that I might be able to get past this whole creepy storyline if Danny apologized right there and recognized that he'd been way out of line and hadn't been thinking clearly.
Instead, when Jordan asks Danny to leave her alone and stop this harassment, he says "No." That's the end of the episode and it sure did sound like the music swelled at the end. Ew. Are we supposed to find this romantic?...
Tonight's episode really should have Danny getting a reprimand from his boss and being sent to a class about sexual harassment and/or stalking. At the very least. In the real world, he probably could be fired and/or have charges filed against him for stalking.
Given my lack of enthusiasm for the Matt/Harriet relationship-without-a-reason, plus the new Danny-Jordan stalking plot, at this point my favorite character is pretty much Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber), which I would not have predicted at the start. OK, I still really like Matt in scenes neither containing nor referring to the existence of Harriet.
By the by, until today I had been blissfully unaware that Matt/Harriet is basically a custom-made replay of Aaron Sorkin/Kristin Chenoweth's relationship & breakup (unusually, Medley knew this before I did). I already thought that plotline was pointless, now it's OMG-Lame N!. As a sharp recapper at TWOP put it -
...[Harriet flubs an insult, proving she] still can't get a line out without a boy to write it for her! Poor Harriet. ... Matt points out both the backwards idiom and the non-word "romanticness," so she leaves, knowing that she will never have the upper hand, because everyone knows Kristin Chenoweth couldn't beat Aaron Sorkin in an argument. Especially if he got to tell her what to say.
TWOP also has opinions on the Danny-Jordan debacle:
It's just a terrible misstep ... It's very obvious that at some point later in the process, Jordan is going to fall into Danny's arms, and whether they want to admit it or not, that's going to ultimately suggest that Danny's refusal to accept "no" from her is the result of overwhelming love for her. It is a myth -- a total myth -- that the more you love people, the more you will not listen when they decide to walk away from you. There are people who believe that love is a sliding scale with "obsessive stalking" at one end, like that's the result of too much love. Like refusing to respect a person's decision not to see you is an overdose of love...
...What Danny is doing here is more like bullying than anything else. He wants what he wants, and he doesn't really care what she says she wants. Knowing he's hurting her doesn't make him want to stop what he's doing, and that's not love either. I just don't even know what to say about the wrongness of this whole plot...
And as Laurel notes in her post, Sorkin says they're concentrating on romance for the rest of the season. Ai-yi-yi...
From this week's quick TWOP recap, the best summation of the series so far:
I think I preferred the show about the unfunny comedy program to the show about the unromantic romances.
TV
2 comment(s)
yeah, the stalker thing seemed pretty unfunny to me. the only thing that made it mildly palatable was that the one thing Jordan hadn't said was "I'm not interested," which I honestly think we're supposed to think would have cooled his jets. further, up on the roof (last week) we got the sense that she thought his motive was pity rather than actual interest (romantic or stalker). so, while I haven't watched this week's episode yet, I can imagine a way for it to become romantic without giving me a complete feminist heebie-jeebie breakdown.
otherwise, generally, when will this flawed and limping vehicle begin to find its way?
"Cheno" was on Letterman recently and talked about how Sorkin will still call her up and ask her how she'd react to some comment or situation and she'll say something like "do you really think I'm going to answer that knowing that it's just going to show up on network television in a couple weeks?"
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Tuesday, 30 January 2007
