The 39 Dumbest Things You See on TV

I've watched a lot of tv, mostly sci-fi and sitcoms.  The set was on all the time when I was a kid.  In adulthood, it's like comfort food, warm, predictable, mildly amusing.  But is it really necessary to have so many plot conventions that strain credulity?  Plus are sexist, heterosexist, or downright homophobic?  Almost makes you want to pick up a book instead.

1. No one ever says a complete sentence; everyone takes turns.  "This looks like the work of..." "Two killers."  "So we should..."  ",,,get backup."

2. Whenever someone says "It's possible that...", as in "It's possible that the signals are coming from Mars" or "It's possible that the killer worked for the FBI," they mean "It's an absolute certainty."

3. Whenever someone says, "The chances against this working are a million to one," they mean, "It will absolutely work."

4. You cannot discuss the plan on the way to the site, even if it takes two hours to get there.  You must always wait until you have arrived.

5. All discussions of plans must begin with the phrase: "And that's the plan.  First we...."

6. Whenever someone asks "What's for dinner?", the answer must always be "Your favorite."

7. The only people who can eat dinner at home are heterosexual nuclear families: The Man in a lumberjack shirt, a son and a daughter under age 10, and The Woman, usually blond.  The Man always says "Great meal, honey."

8. The only people who can eat in restaurants are four young adults, divided into male-female couples.  One is always shown shoving a forkful of food into someone else's mouth.  Sometimes this happens in groups, too.


9. Whenever anyone turns on the tv, they must  hear a news story pertaining to their situation.

10.  If they are shown watching tv alone, it should be an old black and white movie, usually a Western.

11. Except for kids and serial killers, who must always watch public domain cartoons from the 1930s.

12. The only people who can watch tv in groups are heterosexual nuclear families, and they are always cuddling while holding a gigantic bowl of popcorn.  No one in the real world eats popcorn while watching tv.

13. If someone wants to talk to you, they can't call, they must drive across town to get there.

14. And the drive is extremely short.

15. And the door is unlocked, so they just walk in.

16. Whenever you enter a scary place, someone must say "This place gives me the creeps."  But no one in real life ever says this.

17.  People always complain that they don't have enough money to pay bills, but have thousands to spend on expensive props.

18. Poor people live in huge, well-appointed houses.  Middle-class people live in mansions. There is no such thing as an apartment, except in New York.

19. Men may not be shown engaging in any housecleaning activity.  Ever.  They can be asked to cook, to "help their wives out," but they must flub the job and take the kids to McDonald's.

20. The main characters must be white, but the captain, chief, or judge who appears in just one episode should be black, to demonstrate that racism no longer exists.

21. Everyone belongs to a huge number of clubs and organizations, but only for one episode apiece.  Then the club is never mentioned again.

22. Funerals always occur in the rain.

23. All college classes, even advanced seminars, must be taught in giant lecture halls, with never an empty seat.

24. College professors must all be elderly, wear bow ties, and have gigantic offices and personal secretaries.

25. All high school teachers must be bitter and depressed, or sadistic jerks who, in real life, would be fired in 30 seconds.

26. You can struggle with failing grades throughout high school and still get into a top college.  Even the Ivy League.

27. Action-adventure series must always begin with a flashback in which the central character's heterosexual romantic partner is killed.

28. Movie trailers must always contain a heterosexual kiss, even if there aren't any in the actual movie.

29. When a male character dresses in drag, he always does a horrible job, with chest hair and moustache, and he must have a startlingly deep voice.

30. Preteens must always be portrayed as heterosexual and boy- or girl-crazy, no matter what their age.

31. All teenage boys must be portrayed as crazy about sports, rock music, and girls.

32. Single adult heterosexuals must make jokes about how horny they are every five seconds.

33. Married heterosexual men hate their wives, especially having sex with them, and will do anything to avoid it.

34. A transwoman should always like women before transitioning and men after, to ensure viewers that everyone on Earth is heterosexual, regardless of gender identity.

35. Gay men must always be portrayed as swishy queens obsessed with fashion, skin-care products, and show tunes.

36. They rarely have gay friends, but they are crazy about hanging out with heterosexual women.

37. There are no lesbians, just "girls gone wild" who can easily "switch back" to heterosexual again.

38. Men with feminine traits are always evil.

39.  Space explorers always get their shirts ripped off.

See also: 10 Gay Movies I Hated; and 12 Songs I Hated.

Max Thieriot: The Gay Villains of Yesteryear

You probably remember Max Thieriot from Catch that Kid (2004), a teen heist movie in which a  girl and two boys (Max, Corbin Bleu of the High School Movie franchise) break into a bank vault).  It was more about "young love," hetero-romance, than buddy-bonding, but both of the boys received some teen idol treatment.

Next came some father-son or father-surrogate son roles, with Max as a teenager who doesn't express any romantic interest: The Pacifier (2005), with Vin Diesel; The Astronaut- Farmer (2005), with Billy Bob Thornton.  Plus the boyfriend of perennial girl sleuth Nancy Drew (2007) and a few other teens who find "young love."

My Soul to Take (2010) had a gay subtext, at least.  Max starred as Bug, a teenager who tries to save his friends from the dead serial killer who is stalking them, along with bromantic partner Alex (John Magaro).  But there's also the implication that the serial killer was a gay pedophile.  I know -- how about we have a horror movie sometime where the killer is not gay or transgender?

Recently Max has played a lot of damaged or evil teens, often gay-vague or gender-transgressive: an online hustler in Disconnect (2012), a killer in House at the End of the Street (2012), Norman Bates' even quirkier brother in the tv series The Bates Motel (2012-), a prequel to Psycho.  

Sort of a throwback to the gay villains of yesteryear, like Norman Bates himself.

An Unfortunate Series of Unfortunate Events

There are a lot of things I like about season 2 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Netflix adaption of the book series about the unfortunate adventures of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny.

1. In the books, the mystery was infuriatingly hard to unravel, and never fully resolved, but here it's straightforward: the children's parents belonged to a secret society dedicated to "putting out fires." A number of years ago, a group led by Count Olaf split off and dedicated themselves to "starting fires" instead.  The children are caught up in a war between the two factions. 

2. The settings and costumes are beautifully realized,  Depression-Era in The Austere Academy, Jazz Age art deco in The Ersatz Elevator, 1950s Cold War in The Hostile Hospital, with only a few of the books' anachronistic references to streaming videos and the internet.

3. There is a lot more humor in the series. In the books, it was unrelentingly depressing, with any humor coming from wordplay.

Of course, there are flaws:

1.  The children don't get to do much.  Their essential traits, Violet's inventions, Klaus's interest in books, and Sunny's biting, are minimized, while the adults get most of the action and all of the best lines.

2. The hetero-romance between the Baudelaires and the Quagmires is only hinted at in the books, but in the series, it takes center stage. Even when they're searching for their kidnapped friends, Violet yells "Duncan!" and Klaus yells "Isadora," as if the same-sex Quagmire doesn't even exist.   Have to emphasize that these kids are heterosexual!  Don't want any of those pesky gay subtexts!

3.  The action drags and drags and drags.  A very short book adapted into two 45-minute episodes means a lot of reaction shots, irrelevant comedy bits, and even songs.

4. No gay characters, except a couple of the villains, by implication.

5. The "Person of Indeterminate Gender" in the books is a man in drag.

6. No beefcake.  A lot of the actors are buffed -- even Louis Hynes (Klaus) somehow managed to develop a physique --but no one unbuttons a button not even Robbie Amell or Nathan Fillion.

7. This is kind of nitpicky, but, however evocative the name "Lemony Snicket" is, when you say it aloud, it sounds silly.

The Flash: Gay Characters and Subtexts in a DC Comics Reboot

The Flash is one of the primal characters of the Golden Age of Comics, appearing in 1940 and rebooted several times as DC consolidated universes.  Flashes include Jay Garrick, who gained super-speed after accidentally inhaling "heavy water" in 1938; Barry Allen, who got splashed with chemicals, and named himself after his childhood hero; his nephew Wally West; and his grandson Bart Allen.

The new tv series returns to Barry Allen (Grant Gustin, left), who experienced a Batman-like trauma early in life, when his mother was killed and his father was framed for the murder.

Raised by the kindly Detective West (Jesse L. Martin), he has grown up into a police investigator and paranormal specialist, a moody Fox Mulder.  Then, after being doused with chemicals and hit by lightning, he discovers that he has become a "metahuman" with special powers.

The accident created other metahumans, too, with various powers.  Some are good, some evil.  And there's an Agency with a sinister interest in them.  And Barry's dousing with chemicals wasn't really an accident.  It has something to do with who killed his mother....

Sounds like there's going to be a lot of Batman-X Files - X Men mythology included with the mutant-of-the-week.

Will there be any gay content?

Lots.  Even a couple of gay characters: Barry's boss, Captain Singh (Patrick Sabongui, left), is gay, although this fact hasn't been mentioned yet, and his boyfriend Hartley (Andy Mientus) will become a super-villain, the Pied Piper.

Barry is played by Grant Gustin, who played a gay character on Glee.  

Iris West (Candice Patton) was Barry's girlfriend, then wife, in the comics, but here the two were raised together, so a romance between the adopted brother and sister might not be on the table.

Barry has a buddy bond relationship with Eddie Thawe (Rick Cosnett), a coworker with a dark secret who will eventually become his arch-enemy, Professor Zoom.  They may have a Superman-Lex Luther thing going on.

And there will be ample beefcake.  Many superheroes and villains will be dropping by, including The Arrow (Stephen Amell), Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller), and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell).

Big River: Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey

The homoerotic import of Huckleberry Finn and Jim the escaped slave rafting down the Mississippi has been well-known for many years.  Even homophobes notice.

 In 1961, Leslie Fiedler wrote "Come Back to the Raft Again, Huck Honey," bemoaning that Huck and Jim, like many men and boys in classic American literature, are afraid to grow up and establish "mature" heterosexual relationships, so they fall in love with men.

When both you and your intended audience are fully aware of the gay subtext, how will you build a stage musical out of Huckleberry Finn that adequately avoids it?

Especially when you know that the actors will be much closer in age than the 14-year old Huck and adult Jim of the novel?




That was the problem that Roger Miller and William Hauptman faced when they wrote Big River, which premiered on Broadway in 1985, at the height of the 1980s homophobic backlash.  In that political climate, no way could they allow the slightest hint of Jim and Huck liking each other!

So they had Huck and Jim explicitly reject the idea that they could have any kind of romantic bond:

I see the friendship in you eyes that you see in mine
But we're worlds apart, worlds apart
Together, but worlds apart

Then they gave Jim s a quest: to go to the North, make some money, and buy his family out of slavery.

And the newly heterosexual Huck gets a girlfriend, Mary Jane Wilkes, who asks him to stay in Arkansas with her:

Did the morning come too early
Was the night not long enough
Does a tear of hesitation
Fall on everything you touch

He decides to move on, not because he isn't interested, but because he made a vow to help Jim escape to the North.

Finally,  they defer the homoeroticism onto the Duke and the King, two gay-vague villains of the old, simpering school.  The "Royal Nonesuch" show, which they advertise to grift the townsfolk,  purports to be a horror of gender indeterminancy:




Well, it ain't no woman and it ain't no man
And it don't wear very many clothes
So says I, if you look her in the eye
You're better off looking up her nose

It's actually the Duke and the King mooning the audience.

Does it work?  Does Big River adequately erase the gay potential?

Not really.  This scene could just as easily be from Romeo and Juliet.

It takes a lot more than that to keep gay subtexts away.

See also: Huck and Jim on the Raft

Skip Homeier: Gay-Vague Villain and his Nude Model Son

On February 21, 1969, Star Trek encounters the counterculture when a group of groovy, extremely muscular space hippies take over the Enterprise to fly to the legendary  planet of Eden.  Unfortunately, the plant life turns out to be poisonous.  Moral: don't be a hippie.

The gang is led by the long-eared Dr. Severin, played by Skip Homeier (left, with Charles Napier).
The kids watching probably didn't realize that Skip Homeier got his start as a prettyboy child star.  In 1944, the 14-year old debuted in Tomorrow, the World!, a tour de force about an American family who adopt a boy from Nazi Germany, only to find that he is spouting Nazi propaganda and bullying his classmates from "inferior" races.

During the 1930s, there was a fad for homoromantic dramas, starring Mickey Rooney, Jackie Moran, Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Frankie Darro, and a dozen other teen actors.  But by the 1940s, the fad was over.  There is no particular gay subtext in Tomorrow, the World! or in most of Skip's later teen roles, except for some buddy-bonding vestiges in Boys Ranch (1946).

As an adult, Skip worked steadily in war movies, science fiction, Westerns, and many tv dramas, usually playing gay-vague villains or good kids who go bad.

I've seen him in The Burning Hills (1956),  as the gay-vague Jack Sutton, who sends his hired muscle to kill Trace Jordan (Tab Hunter).  Isn't it ironic that the heterosexual guy plays gay-vague, and the gay guy plays heterosexual?

And in Day of the Badman (1958), as the snively gay-vague son of the villain.

In 1982, at the age of 52, Skip retired from acting and moved back home to Chicago.  I'm pretty sure that Christian Homeier (top photo), who posed for Playgirl in 1992 and now manages a smoothie bar in Springfield, Illinois, is his son.  Or maybe his nephew.

David Barry Gray: Not as Homophobic as Chevy Chase, Probably

Chevy Chase may be one of the more homophobic actors in Hollywood, as his cast mates from Saturday Night Live and the National Lampoon's Vacation movies can attest, but the naked man on top of him, David Barry Gray, is not.  Not very, anyway.

Not as homophobic as Chevy Chase.

Probably.

The New York City native, heir to the Pepsi Cola fortune,  has appeared on many tv series, beginning as a teenager with William Tell (1987-88); he played William's son, Matthew.  Other series include 21 Jump Street, The Client, JAG, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, and Rizzoli & Isles.

Not a lot of gay subtext vehicles, although you could include his role in S.F.W. (1994), as the brother of hostage-survivor Stephen Dorf, and the "rescuing people from Southeast Asia" movie Soldier Boys (1995), as Lamb, who steps on a land mine (sacrificial lamb -- get it?).

Man-mountain Michael Dudikoff stars.

No gay characters, although he did star in the mega-homophobic Lawn Dogs (1997):

A lonely ten-year old girl and her only friend, the reclusive Trent (Sam Rockwell), both have problems with unwelcome sexual advances from a couple of sleazoid roommates: the girl from Brett (David), and Trent from Sean (Eric Mabius).  Not to worry, the evil gay guy is killed, but the pedophile isn't.

So he played the teenage version of homophobic President Richard Nixon, and more recently, Todd Palin, husband of homophobic Alaska Governor and VP contender Sarah Palin.  That doesn't mean he's personally homophobic.

Does it?

His sister-in-law, Ariel Winter, stars in the gay-positive Modern Family as the brainy teenager Alex Dunphy.

Doesn't that suggest that David is gay-positive?

No?

Well, at least he has a nicely toned physique.

Teen Beach Movie: Not Your Grandfather's Homoeroticism

Teen Beach Movie premiered with frenetic hoopla on the Disney Channel last month, and has been repeated many times since.  It reprises the premise of Pleasantville (1998), with Tobey Maguire as a teen who gets trapped in a 1950s sitcom.  Here the teenage Brady (Ross Lynch, #4 on my list of Unexpected Disney Channel Teen Hunks)  and his girlfriend McKenzie (Maia Mitchell) are trapped in the 1960s beach movie Wet Side Story.  

After becoming acclimatized to beach movie conventions, like you go in the water but never get wet, and you randomly break into choreographed song and dance routines, they draw the attention of the stars, Tanner (the bulgeworthy Garrett Clayton, Disney's Next Big Thing) and his girlfriend, thus upsetting the plot and jeopardizing their chances of getting home.

Meanwhile, there's a bitter -- yes, bitter -- conflict between the surfers and the bikers, and two villains, one flamboyantly gay-coded, build a diabolically fiendish Weather Machine to drive the teens away from the beach.

Back in the real world, McKenzie's evil aunt hatches a dastardly plot to send her to college. The horror!

Throughout, I was wondering:

1. Do we really need a parody of beach movies, a genre that ended in 1967, enjoyed by the grandparents of today's teenagers?

2. I'm all for sending girls a message of empowerment, but should that message really be "Don't go to college!  Stay on the beach and become a surf bum!"

3. In the original beach movies, Frankie Avalon, Jody McCrea, John Ashley, Tommy Kirk, Duane Hickman, and the rest of the guys wore swimsuits throughout.  Biceps and bulges were emphasized.  Why does Brady never once take his shirt off?  Tanner hangs around with his shirt unbuttoned.  The other stars remain fully clothed.

4. Why do all the songs sound like they came from the soundtrack of Grease?

5. A gay-coded villain?  Really?

6. The original beach movies were overbrimming with gay subtexts.  Frankie is torn between the wild homoerotic freedom of the surf and conventional wife-kids-house-job with Annette.  Here McKenzie is torn between the wild heterosexual freedom of the surf and college, while endless songs extol boys liking girls and encourage every boy to find a girl.

The only gay subtexts I could find were:
1. The gay villain.
2. Both of the male leads are extremely feminine.  Disney seems to have hired them explicitly because of their outrageous swishiness.
3. Butchy (John DeLuca), the leader of the bikers, doesn't express any heterosexual interest, and he has a homoerotic moment with Tanner when they decide to work together to save their friends.

ICarly: Gay Villains and Bisexual Brothers

The Nickelodeon teencom has a mixed record.  Drake and Josh, Zoey 101, and Victorious are masterpieces of gay subtext.  What I Like About You and Wendell and Vinnie are undefatigably heterosexist.  ICarly (2007-2012) combines gay subtext with homophobia.

Miranda Cosgrove (center) plays Carly, a Seattle teen who lives with her older brother, a free-spirit artist named Spencer (Jerry Trainor, top).  She produces and stars in  a comedy-variety webseries with the rough, aggressive proto-delinquent Sam (Jenette McCurdy) and the nerdish Freddie (Nathan Kress).  Brief clips from the series appeared in each episode, and there were others on the ICarly website.

Carly and Sam can easily be shipped as a lesbian couple, in spite of their endless machinations after boys.

Although Spencer is frequently shown dating women, he is obviously bisexual.

1. He hosts a group of Eastern European bodybuilders in swimsuits.
2. He dreams that, while in drag, he rejects a series of male admirers until he finds the most attractive.
3. He handcuffs a former bully and gleefully spanks him.
4. Carly is searching for Bigfoot through binoculars, but sees "Just two guys.  And they're not even cute."  Spencer responds: "Bummer!"

5. In "IGo Green," Spencer returns to the apartment with a same-sex date, Cal (Jake Siegel), obviously expecting to be alone.  After gamely introducing Cal to Carly ("Come meet the guy I found!),  he keeps trying to steer him into the bedroom, but is stymied by Cal's interest in Carly's science fair project.

6. In "IFind Spencer Friends," the gang thinks that Spencer needs a new "friend," they evaluate several possibilities, including guys wearing only towels in a locker room and a guy who broke up with his boyfriend in the supermarket.  Gibby even approaches a man in the restroom with "a proposition."

So what's the problem?

An ongoing homophobic contempt for gender-nonconformity and gay potential of any sort.

1. Carly catches Spencer browsing an online dating site, and says "That's a dude!" in disgust.
2. Spencer is arrested for appearing in public in drag.
3. Sam frequently calls boys who are inadequately masculine prancies, no doubt meaning pansies.
4. In "IMove Out," the gang run afoul of an evil gay couple who run a pet photography business.
5. The Big Bad of the series, rival webseries host Neville, is a sophisticated, effeminate, gay-coded villain who says things like "Would you like a tapanade?" and "You'll rue the day!"

In contrast to the vocally gay-allied cast of Victorious, the ICarly cast has been suspiciously silent, except for a tweet Jennette McCurdy made in support of Chick-Fil-A.  Nathan Kress (#6 on my list of unexpected Nickelodeon Teen Hunks) and Noah Munck (who plays the effervescent Gibby) are both evangelical Christians.  They might be ok, of course, but the odds are they have adopted the homophobia of their churches.

Ricardo Montalban: What Happened to the Hispanic Beefcake

One of the most iconic beefcake images of the Boomer generation appeared on February 16, 1967, in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed": The Enterprise picks up the frozen survivors of a long-ago eugenics experiment, including the world's most perfectly developed man, former dictator Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban).  As he strutted around Sick Bay, his hospital gown robe falling off his massive, smooth chest, Boomers believed it.

Khan returned fifteen years later, in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), to take vengeance on the Enterprise crew that stranded him on a barren planet.  He was gray-haired and craggy, but he still couldn't find a shirt that could cover his massive chest.  His crew, including male model Cristian Letelier, was buffed, too.  And he had a gay-vague sidekick played by Judson Scott.  Gay favorites  Ike Eisenmann and Merrit Butrick costarred.

In between, Ricardo Montalban played the mysterious, probably supernatural Mr. Roarke, who managed the wish-fulfillment Fantasy Island (1977-84) that our parents or, more likely, our grandparents watched.  Most wishes were about finding heterosexual loves.

But those parts are only two of the highlights of a 60 year career.

Born in Mexico in 1920, Montalban became a film star in his home country before moving to the U.S. in the late 1940s.  He insisted on remaining true to his heritage, and became one of the few Hispanic actors who was regularly cast as Hispanic, even though it meant many suave, sophisticated, gay-vague villains in B-movies.  He also played many hetero-romantic roles, reviving the Rudolph Valentino "fiery Latin lover" image in the postwar world.

And, during the craze for Biblical and ancient Roman epics, he got to take off his shirt a lot.

I haven't seen many of Montalban's 160+ movies and tv shows, but I did note the buddy-bonding Joe Panther (1976), in which Turtle George (Montalban) mentors a young Seminole Indian (Ray Tracey).

In Captains Courageous (1977), he played the noble Portuguese fisherman Manuel, who mentors rich kid Harvey (Jonathan Kan).

He played gay villain Victor Ludwig in The Naked Gun (1988), who doesn't hit on his secretary because he "likes German boys," whatever that means.

More recently, he was playing parodies of himself, such as Senor Senor Senior on Kim Possible and a Hispanic cow on Family Guy.

Although he was married to Georgiana Young from 1944 until her death in 2007, he is the subject of several gay rumors, linking him to Zulu on Hawaii Five-O, Cesar Romero, and teen heartthrob Scott Baio.