At the end of the fifth instalment of Episodes, I could not help but shudder over how the pitch for this series by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik must have gone down. Did the pair approach Showtime intent on a script to complement the male privilege already celebrated in their fare such as Dexter, Californication, Shameless, Brotherhood and Penn & Teller? Showtime’s Sunday night line up in particular boasts Episodes, Californication and Shameless, in what amounts to a master study of male entitlement to treat women like garbage and behave as abusive dickwads. Is there any character type creepier than a misogynist who wants to get back at women by fucking as many as he can manage, as that Hank Moody character in Californication? And how many tear-rendered memoirs have been penned by folks who suffered drunken abusive fathers like the one William H. Macy plays in Shameless? Oh, and they gave him an Irish name, too. Way to break those gross stereotypes, Showtime.
At best, Episodes could be viewed as a cautionary tale for women with career aspirations in the entertainment industry. The show makes it clear that La-La Land is a mug’s game for women. Tamsin Greig plays a smart television writer, a transplanted Brit named Beverly Lincoln. Bev sports chic ensembles from Hobbs that underscore a London career-gal background. (In fact, one blouse she wears when they arrive in LA, a mustard in geometric print, I cheered to recognise the same hanging in my closet from our trip last year.) Bev’s predicament, as for all smart ladies in Hollywood, the show tells us, is that you can expect to be patronised, marginalised, excluded as the downer, the adult, the one who won’t laugh at kids with Tourettes. If you are the female lead in a sit-com, like Morning Randolph (played by Mircea Monroe) you will be the centre of on-set gossip about how you played William Shatner’s wife onscreen in the 80s. She’s old, plastic, shallow, a laughingstock. The central lady in the production team, Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins,) is a toady, yes-woman doormat who carries on an affair with the network boss, Merc,(John Panklow) behind the back of his blind wife. The show thinks so little of the blind wife that I couldn’t locate the actor’s name at IMDB or the Showtime website. Merc ignores, humiliates and mocks his wife. Not only does the show make fun of a blind lady, it makes a direct connection between disability and being an insufferable pain in the ass. Politesse dictates that you can’t tell a blind lady to shut up with all the yackity-yack, so just roll eyes and make faces in order to indicate displeasure at a skirt taking up airspace. They made a woman’s spirit, resolve, and generous philanthropy a punch line. The same line of low-blow humour stages riffs during a fundraiser for a rape crisis centre. Yep. There’s nothing funnier than smug dudes making jokes while a woman onstage describes how she was raped.
Such unsparing and unkind characterisations are not shared out for the men in the cast. The one long-running joke for Matt LeBlanc is that he has a really big dick. Ouch. Now that casts quite the aspersion. Dudes, as we all know, are fun as a barrel of monkeys. They just want to go to Vegas, talk about chicks and how banging the nanny in front of the kids results in the bitch-ass ex keeping you from them. Joey-I-mean-Matt is presented as a good guy, a total bro, a misunderstood hero.
In Episodes, the sour and lazy jokes come at the expense of women while men get fantasy fulfilment. All crudity aside, none of this seems fresh or interesting. Women are a pain in the ass; Men want to fuck around. *Yawn*
Give us something we haven’t heard a gazillion times already, Showtime.
