[Sidebar] June 10 - 17, 1999
[Television]

Lust is all around

Sex and the City; Eddie Izzard; Comedy Central

by Robert David Sullivan

The cast of Sex and the City

You couldn't really appreciate Seinfeld unless you caught on that the title character (as opposed to the real-life Seinfeld) was not a very good stand-up comic and that his success was as absurd as any of Kramer's get-rich schemes. Similarly, HBO's comedy series Sex and the City (in its second season, on Sundays at 9 p.m.) works only if you realize that lead character Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a fraud. Blessed with good looks, a Manhattan apartment, and several more years before she hits 40, Bradshaw writes a popular "sex column" and likes to quiz her dining companions about such pastimes as anal intercourse, but she's never convincing as the master of her domain. In an episode from last year, she decides to beat men at their own game by using an ex-boyfriend as a fuck toy (no cuddling, no phone call the next day). She brags about her success but later regrets the whole sordid experiment. In her on-and-off affair with a master manipulator known to viewers only as "Mr. Big" (Law and Order's Chris Noth), she repeatedly feigns indifference to his piggish behavior, then tries to win him back.

Sex and the City is one long riff on a classic moment from The Mary Tyler Moore Show: faced with yet another awkward social situation, Mary assures Mr. Grant (Ed Asner) that she'll defuse it with strength and self-confidence. Mr. Grant looks her over for a moment and scoffs, "You can't pull that off." Mary immediately dissolves into her usual nervous slouch and says, "I knooow." This is 1999, so Carrie Bradshaw doesn't blush easily and doesn't have crying fits, but she does have Mary's lanky build (with a lot more hair at the top) and that habit of referring to the most important man in her life as "Mr." Her dilemma is neatly summed up in the packaging for Sex and the City. In the print ads, "Carrie" is sitting in the nude with her back to the viewer -- looking over her shoulder as if to invite us into her world, but with a rather apprehensive expression. In the opening credits of each episode, Carrie walks around Manhattan in a pristine white dress and gets puddle-splashed by a bus (with her name on it, literally) in a slow-motion sequence that plays as a nasty spoof of Mary Richards tossing her hat into the air. The obvious conclusion is that we're dealing with the old madonna-whore paradox here, except that the men in Sex and the City don't seem to care about their girlfriends' sexual histories. No, the more immediate problem is that poor Carrie never gets to wear anything comfortable on the series, and certainly nothing like the black-sweater-and-jeans type of outfit that most of us wear around people we don't need to impress anymore. The richest irony running throughout Sex and the City is that the main characters have every kind of sex imaginable except the comfortable, relaxing kind, and neither the professional nor the amateur "sexperts" have a clue about what they're missing.

Sarah Jessica Parker is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but Carrie's false bravado works well as a comic thread through the series. In the season premiere (repeated this Saturday, June 12, at 1:10 a.m.), she has a nice moment in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium -- a cigarette in one hand and a cup of beer in the other, with legs dangling over the seat in front of her -- in which she tries a little too hard to appear as if she were enjoying herself without Mr. Big. (Naturally, she's wearing a white outfit that could be ruined by an errant flick of cigarette ash.)

The regular cast is rounded out by the three best friends -- also attractive, single, professional women in their 30s -- who seem to be Carrie's only sources for her column. It should be noted here that neither the column nor the TV series works as a field guide to sexual practices or fetishes. In an episode from last season, there's a lot of talk about threesomes, and Carrie's friend Miranda (Cynthia Nixon, whose ability to look disgusted and titillated at the same time provides some of the best moments in the series) goes so far as to meet a couple through the personal ads before backing out of the deal, but that's all we get on the topic. I wasn't waiting to be enlightened on the mechanics of a ménage à trois (easy enough to find videos for that), but I would have loved to see the husband and wife hash out the writing of the personal ad over the kitchen table. Alas, the curiosity-deprived Carrie, who says she has never participated in a threesome herself, is never shown interviewing anyone for her column on the topic. Its home on pay cable notwithstanding, Sex is rather lightly spiced. (Maybe the characters are too young and lacking in experience. HBO should consider a spinoff starring Carrie Donovan -- the former New York Times fashion columnist who now shills for Old Navy -- and a couple of tough old Manhattan broads like Elaine Stritch and Angela Lansbury. Imagine the dinner conversations you could get out of them.)

Based on an actual New York Observer column and book by Candace Bushnell and created by Darren Star (Melrose Place), Sex and the City does excel at Seinfeld-like silly moments. Among my favorites from last year was a phone call that caused one guy to dump his girlfriend, shall we say, prematurely ("You're breaking up with me while you're still inside me?" was the stunned response) and another guy's sensitive request that his girlfriend expand her sexual repertoire ("I'm planning on getting a lot of blow jobs in the future, and I hope you're around when I get them"). The first two episodes of the new season feature a few so-so recycled plots (like a guy with an unusually small penis who, implausibly, isn't aware of his problem) and at least one home run in this Sunday's episode, in which the inhibited Miranda learns to talk dirty but quickly finds cause to regret her new talent. Sex and the City just can't stay away from the idea that a little carnal knowledge is a dangerous thing.

THERE'S A LOT MORE COMEDY, but not much subtlety, coming up on cable this month. On HBO, Sex in the City is being paired with the frantically paced Arli$$ (in its fourth season, Sundays at 9:30 p.m.), which stars Robert Wuhl as an agent for professional athletes. The horn-and-whistle "background" music more than compensates for the absent laugh track in annoying viewers, and the parade of celebrities playing themselves only emphasizes that this is an affectionate (rather than funny) satire of the sports world. The season premiere (repeated this Friday at midnight) also features a lot of fart jokes.

At the other end of the quality scale is Eddie Izzard: Dress To Kill (this Saturday, June 12, at 11:30 p.m. on HBO), a concert special that has more laughs in 90 minutes than Saturday Night Live has given us in the past five years. Izzard, a stand-up comic from Britain, is a self-described transvestite who does his act in high heels, make-up, and a tasteful blue blouse, but little of his material has anything to do with sexual identity. The bulk of Dress To Kill is a splendidly Pythonesque history lesson ranging from Stonehenge to Margaret Thatcher. (As an English settler meeting American Indians in Plymouth: "You have no system of ownership, eh? Well, that could come in handy later.") Izzard also acts out the discovery of the Heimlich maneuver (after much trial and error), demonstrates how to sing the American national anthem if you don't know the words, and shamelessly segues from the Holy Ghost to the recurring haunted-house motif of Scooby Doo cartoons. Tape Dress To Kill even if you're home to watch it, because it's just as funny the second time around.

Sexual content won't be hard to find on Comedy Central's summer schedule, which includes two new series on the network made famous by South Park. Both are spinoffs of Win Ben Stein's Money, which won Comedy Central a daytime Emmy for best game show a few weeks ago. (Susan Lucci finally won, and Jeopardy! finally lost, so the Apocalypse must be near.) Each episode of the louder and cruder VS. (weekdays at 5 p.m. and Thursdays at 10:30 p.m.) pits two different teams of "real people" against each other to answer trivia questions. As on Ben Stein, all the category titles are bad puns, but in this case the puns all involve sex or other bodily functions (e.g., "When She Greased Down My Chassis, My Axl Rose," for rock-music questions). On next Thursday night's episode, Harvard graduates face community-college students (guess which side is familiar with Guns N' Roses album titles); the following week, it's bikers versus prison guards. You can probably find a wrestling match with more decorum.

Meanwhile, Ben Stein sidekick Jimmy Kimmel moonlights as co-host of The Man Show (Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m., beginning June 16), a low-budget vaudeville series with girls in bikinis and sketches that include monkeys re-enacting great moments in history (at least the fart jokes are more imaginative here than on Arli$$. The other co-host is Adam Carolla (of MTV's Loveline), who explains in the premiere that the purpose of the show is to stop "the Oprah-ization of America" and to "dam the river of estrogen" that's been flooding American culture. Because the logo of The Man Show is a fat, balding man with wrinkles, we know that this is really a spoof of misogyny and that it's okay to laugh at Amelia Earhart crashing her plane while trying to put on lipstick. We also know that women's lib is old news, that what really makes men nervous these days is sexual orientation; indeed, in the second episode, Carolla has a "nightmare" in which a bikini-clad Kimmel flirts with him by a pool. The Man Show is about the war between the sexes in the same way that M*A*S*H, airing during the Vietnam War, was ostensibly about Korea. That said, the show is sometimes amusing, and Kimmel in particular is fun to watch in the street-theater segments (when the two hosts collect signatures to repeal "women's suffrage," plenty of vocabulary-challenged women not only sign up but actually commend Kimmel and Carolla for their attention to the problem).

Next week, Comedy Central also begins new episodes of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.) and The Upright Citizens Brigade (Mondays at 10:30 p.m.). Katz is as dry and funny as ever, with 25-year-old Ben in crisis mode because a former classmate called him a "sissy" during a chance meeting; and Upright is looking more and more like Monty Python, with sketches on "baby races" and a parody of Karate Kid-type movies that ends at the "World Dialect Tournament."

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