Category Archives: TV

Every Sex and the City episode ranked from worst to best

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satc16

hbo.com

Carrie: ‘Great love, what does that even mean?’
Charlotte: ‘It means a love that changes you, that shakes you to your core, after which you’re never the same.’

For many women of a certain generation, Sex and the City was a ‘great love’ – and, it can be argued, we were never the same. The show first came into my life when I was the impressionable age of 16. I wanted to be a writer, had no idea about boys and spent all my money on the latest boob tubes and pedal pushers to hit Miss Shop.

Sex and the City spoke to me, which, now that I think about it, was part of its problem – teenagers could relate to Carrie and, to a certain extent, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. I can’t help but wonder what 30 something women thought of them back then.

These days, some of us talk about SATC like an ex that disappointed us but still holds a place in our hearts. So here, like a mix tape, is my inconsistent, messy and completely subjective list of every SATC episode ranked from worst to best, chronicling my love-hate relationship with a show that both influenced and infuriated me.

94. Ring a Ding Ding

Also known as the episode where Carrie has money problems, this is the one I love to hate. Following Carrie’s break up with Aidan, he gives her 30 days to come up with the money to buy her apartment. She suddenly realises she’s spent $40,000 on shoes and, after failing to get a bank loan, visits Big.

In other words, she goes to her ex – the very reason for her most recent break up – wearing what the Instagram account ‘Every Outfit on SATC’ informs me is ‘head-to-toe Chanel’ to childishly and helplessly say, ‘You know money, I want you to teach me what you know about money.’ I’m not exactly on top of my finances, but even I know the basic principles of saving and that spending $400 a pop on 100 Manolo Blahniks equals $40,000.

Kate Erbland articulates her rage at this episode a lot better and in more detail than me in her article for Film School Rejects. If you have a similar opinion, I suggest you check it out.

On a side note, wouldn’t Richard’s personal shopper have been fired anyway for writing ‘Love Richard’ on the card?

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Seinfeld Unsolved

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seinfeld

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Seinfeld was the master of its domain when it came to presenting and solving mundane mysteries. As it turned out, Jerry wasn’t invited to Tim Whatley’s party, George’s LeBaron convertible wasn’t previously owned by John Voight the actor, the creepy guy from the Subway made the Elaine mannequin and it was McDowell who spat on Kramer and Newman.

However, there were a few mysteries that remained unsolved …

1. Why didn’t Audrey taste the pie?

As Jerry summarised – ‘that’s one for the ages.’ Was she full? No. Was she averse to pastry? No. Did she witness something unhygienic going on at the coffee shop? She couldn’t have. Kramer later saw her eating the very same pie in the very same coffee shop. However, the fact that Audrey acted a little defensive when probed meant something was off that day she didn’t taste the pie. To quote Jerry, ‘why can’t we know?’

Possible explanation

Maybe she didn’t want to eat from the same fork as Jerry. The other explanation is that perhaps she really was a ‘psycho.’ According to the woman Jerry spoke to at the coffee shop, you’d have to be to refuse a bite of your friend’s pie without an explanation. I’d love to know other people’s theories!

2. Why did Christie always wear the same dress?

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“On Wednesdays We Wear Pink”: The Best Girl Cliques of Pop Culture

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meangirls

Paramount

1. The Plastics – Mean Girls

Mean Girls certainly wasn’t the first movie to put a girl clique at the front and centre of the action, but it was the first (unless you count Heathers) to blatantly shine a spotlight on the politics and psychological tactics needed to keep a girl clique up and running – think intimidation, bitchy three-way phone conversations, keeping secrets, burn books and rigid rules around dress and behaviour. That’s because Tina Fey’s screenplay was based on Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes. The result was comedy gold that often cut a little too close to the bone.

Hierarchy: Janis’ observation that “evil takes a human form in Regina George” wasn’t far off the mark when she described the school’s resident queen bee and if Mean Girls was Game of Thrones, Gretchen Wieners would totally be the hand of the queen. In fact, when there was disturbance in the realm with Regina’s “army of skanks”, Gretchen used another old world battle analogy to vent her frustration: “Why should Caesar get to stomp around like a giant while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? What’s so great about Caesar? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. OK, Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become OK for one person to be the boss of everybody, huh? Because that’s not what Rome is about! We should totally just stab Caesar!” Karen Smith would be, like, the queen’s servant girl, or something.

Dress Code: The Plastics wore pink on Wednesdays, they couldn’t wear sweatpants on a Monday and let’s not forget how Gretchen was forbidden from wearing gold hoops. Offences were punishable with banishment from their lunch table.

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Five Reasons Why Elaine Benes is Queen of the Castle

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Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently posed naked on the cover of Rolling Stone with the Constitution printed on her back (no nipples were exposed, though).

From all accounts, the interview she gave to Rolling Stone was apparently pretty awesome. When asked about sexism in Hollywood, she responded by saying, ‘There is sexism…I’m not denying its existence. But I’m saying that I will deny its effort against me. I just pay it no nevermind and say, ‘Get out of my way’’. Right there is yet another reason why you gotta looooooooooove the Dreyfus!

Photo: Twitter @OfficialJLD

Photo: Twitter @OfficialJLD

It is this same gusto that she brought to the iconic role of Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, a character that epitomises what we mean when we talk about strong, independent women of the ‘90s… and today, in fact. In 2014, we can still hold Elaine up as an – admittedly dubious in some aspects – role model.

I mean, sure, she wasn’t really all about the sisterhood, preferring coffee shop lunches with the boys to Sex and the City-like brunches (at which she probably wouldn’t be caught dead), and trying to one-up Sue Ellen Mischke. And she wasn’t always the nicest person in the world, becoming more hardened, jaded and apathetic as the series progressed. However, there were plenty of other qualities that, to this day, make her the queen of the castle.

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What a Girl Wants: The Best Love Triangles in Pop Culture

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One of my favourite chick lit authors, Lindsey Kelk, is set to release her latest book What a Girl Wants this July. What a Girl Wants is the sequel to About a Girl, a story about Tess Brookes that ends with a ‘who will she choose?’ cliffhanger. The men in question are her best friend Charlie, the object of her unrequited love for the past decade, and the arrogant and hot Nick Miller, the man she’s known for one thrilling, sexy week.

While we wait to see who Tess will choose (cough, Nick please, cough), it got me thinking about other ‘who will she choose?’ scenarios in pop culture, so here is my completely biased list of the best love triangles (from the ’90s through to today, of course).

Bridget, Mark and Daniel – Bridget Jones’s Diary
Before Lindsey Kelk, there was Helen Fielding – one of the masters of the chick lit genre. As we all know, the film adaptation starred Renee Zellwegger as the title character, Colin Firth as Mark Darcy and Hugh Grant as Darcy’s nemesis Daniel Cleaver. Is it completely wrong for me to go with skirt chaser Daniel here? It goes against my pattern of backing the ‘nice guy’ in these situations (with the exception of About a Girl’s Nick Miller), but Hugh Grant, in my book, trumps the nice guy any day. I still swoon every time I hear him say, ‘That’s an order Jones’. Swoon.

 

bridgetjones


Kelly, Brandon and Dylan – Beverly Hills 90210
Most of you would probably say that the more famous and better love triangle of Beverly Hills 90210 was the one between Kelly, Brenda and Dylan, and I would totally agree with you. After all, that love triangle gave us one of the best lines from the whole ten years of Beverly Hills 90210 put together. Remember when Brenda caught Kelly and Dylan out on a date, and Kelly defended herself when Brenda called her a bimbo? Brenda’s classic comeback went as follows: ‘Well Kelly, I was always taught that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…’ Oh. May. Zing.

However, we’re talking about the ‘who will she choose?’ scenario here, so let’s bring it back to Kelly’s love triangle with the other Walsh twin. At first, Kelly did a Samantha Jones and chose herself when faced with an ultimatum between Beverly Hills’s bad boy and nice guy, but the pull of the troubled bad boy was ultimately too strong for Kelly to resist. Alas, Brandon ended up being no match for the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Dylan.

This love triangle was revisited years later in an advertisement for Old Navy. Dylan and Brandon’s props – a motorcycle and a teddy bear – played into the classic bad boy vs nice guy stereotypes brilliantly, but neither were enough to entice Kelly, who this time ended up choosing jeans. I stick to my choice of Brandon 4EVA. Da-na-na-na, da-na-na-na!

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Ja’mie Bares All… or Nothing: My Final Say About Ja’mie: Private School Girl

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After weeks of speculating about Ja’mie’s fate – will she get her comeuppance? Will she see the error of her ways? Will her mother finally crack? What will happen between her and Kwami? Will she, in fact, learn nothing at all? – Chris Lilley served up a smorgasboard of outcomes for the private school girl we love to loathe. The multiple endings presented by Lilley in the final episode of Ja’mie: Private School Girl threw up many contradictions and that’s perhaps why it’s taken me so long to gather my thoughts and write this article. My head is still spinning, to be honest.

But here I go.

Photo credit: ABC1

Photo credit: ABC1

Lilley’s final episode simultaneously strove to please everyone by covering all bases, yet still, in many ways, pleased no one due to its lack of real change in Ja’mie – and perhaps that was the point. Madeleine Ryan’s article in The Age rightly pointed out that the series presented a parody of the unrealistic expectations society placed on young women to succeed so, subsequently, they became monsters. In Ja’mie’s words, she had to be “quiche”, “demonstrate Christian values and be good at everything”, not be a “full slut”, have a “box gap”, and “work at stopping child slavery and healing people and stuff like that”. The series, like its title character, couldn’t please everyone. That seemed to be one of the points it, and she, was trying to make in this interesting final episode.

Ja’mie, in failing to receive the coveted Hillford medal due to a leaked video of a Skype conversation between her and Kwami, in which she revealed her breasts while Kwami fondled himself, caused her father to concede that Ja’mie, by having her mother Jhyll’s genes as well as his own, wasn’t going to be a consistently high achiever after all. Jhyll’s silence as she sat next to her husband spoke volumes.

Ja’mie, however, responded to criticism and failure by making herself seen and heard. She states to her mother before her graduation ceremony, “No one fucks with me and gets away with it”. She means it. She hi-jacks the ceremony by playing the controversial Skype video while telling the audience, “I chose to expose my breasts on Skype in front of the boy I love. Because I chose to have an interracial relationship, the leaders of this school have decided to silence me”.

Photo credit: ABC1

Photo credit: ABC1

She then leads her pack of friends in a choreographed strip tease to the graduation song ‘Learning to Be Me’, where she takes off her bra after telling the audience, “Get your tits out girls, unite, no matter how big your tits are, get them out”.

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Ja’mie: Private School Girl – The Harsh Lesson of Episode Four

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Ja’mie: Private School Girl, episode four, definitely taught Ja’mie a thing or two and, as such, it certainly didn’t disappoint me as a Chris Lilley fan with high hopes for the series. As I had anticipated, the audience finally saw Ja’mie vulnerable. Yes, she was still monstrous, but vulnerable nonetheless. However, Lilley also threw in something I didn’t see coming and, in doing so, this episode really exceeded my expectations.

jamieep42

Image credit ABC1

It wasn’t a boarder who pushed Ja’mie over the edge, after all. It was, in fact, someone much closer to home – her BFF Madison, who hooked up with her boyfriend Mitchell behind her back and, when confronted about it, told Ja’mie she wasn’t even that quiche. Cue a physical cat fight and Ja’mie’s subsequent bout of depression. Briefly, she refused to return to school out of fear that she would be taunted for being fat and not having a boyfriend.

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Ja’mie: Private School Girl – What’s the Score so Far?

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Three episodes in and, whenever I watch Ja’mie: Private School Girl, I can’t get the Marina and the Diamonds song ‘Primadonna’ out of my head, particularly the lyric, “The primadonna life, the rise and fall”. Not that I want the series to fail, mind you. Quite the opposite, in fact. In order for this show to succeed, I feel that Ja’mie has to, finally, experience a downfall. I keep anticipating it with every episode.

jamie1

Photo credit: ABC1

Chris Lilley needs to make us feel something different towards Ja’mie other than outrage or incredulity. He needs to either give her a hint of sympathy or a lot of comeuppance in order for the series to be worth it. One of the reasons that Summer Heights High worked so well was that, while it had the shock and humour factor provided by all three main characters – Ja’mie, Jonah and Mr G – Lilley gave Jonah and Mr G something deeper.

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No Offence, But… A Look at Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High

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This article has been modified after its original publication on GaydarRadio.com on 21 July 2008.

The announcement that Chris Lilley’s Ja’mie: Private School Girl is set to hit Aussie, UK and US TV screens in October has caused many to dust off their DVDs of his 2007 series Summer Heights High, which featured his popular character Ja’mie King, a wealthy, snobby Australian school girl who, for one term, transfers to the government funded Summer Heights High to see how the other half lives.

 

As we wait to see what Chris Lilley’s new series will expose about Australia’s privileged using his particular brand of dark, outrageous humour and who it will offend this time ‘round, it is worth revisiting Chris Lilley’s earlier satire. The series offers an insightful, albeit exaggerated, exploration of the human condition and life in the Australian government system, an environment in which people from varying social backgrounds are forced to interact with each other on a daily basis and, as such, is affected by very real issues including bullying, social cliques, racism and homophobia. Lilley is not afraid to point out that the issues of class, race and sexuality still very much matter today. The series also humanises, at the same time as it caricatures, those people who fall through the cracks of this environment – this is no mean feat, proving just how much of a genius Lilley is as both a character actor and a social commentator.

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