Fall romance

jumptheshark.com, public TV, MST3K

by Robert David Sullivan

In the first episode of the documentary series An American Love Story, Karen Wilson and Bill Sims reminisce about the awkward situations they've faced as an interracial couple. There was the time they visited one of their two daughters at Colgate University and decided to attend a party open to all the tuition-paying parents. "We took one look and walked right back out," Karen says. She could detect "stopped conversations" in the room, and that was a bad sign. Karen doesn't seem to find it ironic to use racism as a reason for making snap judgments about other people.

It's hard to believe that anyone fascinated by the idea of a 10-hour program about the challenges of an interracial marriage would show no reaction to an actual interracial couple who just walked into a crowded room. In fact, it's hard to believe that Karen Wilson and Bill Sims wouldn't stop dead in their tracks to nudge each other and say, "Look, there's another couple who have to deal with people pointing at them all the time." Karen (who's white) makes it clear why no one claims to be color-blind anymore: it's tough to pat yourself on the back for being enlightened about race when you have to pretend not to see people of color.

An American Love Story (airing next Sunday through Thursday from 9 to 11 p.m. on Channel 2) is a mixture of cinéma-vérité scenes and talking-head interviews pulled together by director Jennifer Fox (Beirut: The Last Home Movie). The first two episodes are mildly interesting, but we're asked to cut the principals a lot of slack when they talk about the effects of racism in their lives. Bill says that daughter Cicily "was an easy target [at Colgate] because she was different," but he doesn't tell us what, specifically, she was a target of. Cicily recalls that her mother once warned her, presumably talking about a presidential election, that "if someone came into power that was racist, then I would have to go with Dad." Statements like that make Karen appear absolutely paranoid. An American Love Story often seems to be making the point that interracial marriages are truly harmful to the children involved, since even the two obviously bright and capable young women in this film claim to suffer from the stigma.

By the end of the second episode, the family, who live in Queens, are coping with a possible hysterectomy for Karen and concern over Cicily's semester abroad in Nigeria. These dramatic developments help, but An American Love Story is still too respectful of its subjects to provide the voyeuristic thrills of The Real World or PBS's landmark 1970s series An American Family.

FRASIER'S David Hyde Pierce and Dharma and Greg's Jenna Elfman host the 51st annual Emmy Awards ceremony (this Sunday, September 12, at 8 p.m. on Fox), and Elfman should give the mute button on my remote control quite a workout. Emmys are rarely given to truly bad television programs (in contrast to what happens at the Oscars and especially the Grammys), but the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences can be faulted as predictable. In eight of the past 12 years, the Best Drama award has gone to a program with regular courtroom scenes (L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Law & Order, The Practice). The award almost never goes to an innovative show that can be great one week and so-so the next. Northern Exposure won once, but The X-Files has never triumphed, and Homicide: Life on the Streets has ended a seven-year run without ever being nominated. Nevertheless, this may be the year that voters are forced to reward something new. Here are my odds for the top two awards:

Best Drama Series

ER (NBC): 20-1. This was the medical drama's weakest season yet, and Emmy voters don't often reward shows with stars who would rather be making movies (i.e., George Clooney).

The Practice (ABC): 8-1. Last year's winner became more sensationalistic and implausible this year. Viewers apparently liked the serial-killer story arcs, but Emmy voters stay away from shows with even the faintest whiff of camp.

NYPD Blue (ABC): 9-2. Jimmy Smits's death scene was a long time ago, and the season finale was over the top, giving Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) yet another chance to play a martyr. Still, this highbrow version of Touched by an Angel may appeal to Emmy voters wanting to distinguish television from nihilistic action movies.

Law & Order (NBC): 3-1. The safe choice, helped by solid ratings and classy guest stars like Julia Roberts. If it hadn't already won in 1997, it would be a shoo-in this time.

The Sopranos (HBO): 2-1. Possibly the most universally praised new series since Hill Street Blues in 1981. Four of the five nominees for Best Writing in a Drama Series are Sopranos episodes, and four regular cast members are up for acting awards. Giving the award to The Sopranos would help compensate for the Academy's snub of HBO's The Larry Sanders Show for six consecutive years, and it could also be a silent nod toward HBO's much more violent Oz, which has never been nominated. On the down side, The Sopranos has a murderer as its protagonist, and there's no Emmy precedent for that. This would be the first time a cable network has won in this category, and the broadcast nets won't be happy to see the award go to a show with no restrictions on language, nudity, or the malicious use of a staple gun.

Best Comedy Series

Ally McBeal (Fox): 12-1. The buzz for this show has passed, and it's in the wrong category anyway. If it wins, all hour-long shows with a trace of humor (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer) will demand to compete against sit-coms rather than the more slickly produced crime and medical dramas.

Sex and the City (HBO): 7-1. Too racy, and the Academy is not going to give HBO both top awards. It also loses on moral grounds: Tony Soprano feels guilty about whacking people, but the women on this show see nothing wrong with sleeping around.

Frasier (NBC): 9-2. It seems inconceivable that the Academy will award Kelsey Grammer and company for the sixth consecutive year, but the fifth award seemed inconceivable too. Frasier is not a bad show, just a repetitive one, and Emmy voters have essentially thrown away this category for the past few years by refusing to acknowledge any new direction for TV comedy.

Friends (NBC): 7-2. A strong season and weak competition have pushed this sit-com onto the list of nominees for the first time in three years. It doesn't help that Friends is the epitome of the "let's get laid" genre of comedies, but Emmy voters may be impressed that the six cast members have stayed together for five years and have grown into their roles. Unfortunately, only one of them, Lisa Kudrow, is up for an acting Emmy, which doesn't bode well for a Best Series win.

Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS): 2-1. The show was better -- no, it was almost perfect -- last season, but it wasn't even nominated for Best Comedy. This time, the show's ratings are up and four of the cast members are up for acting Emmys. The clincher is that a win for Raymond, which is about a dysfunctional but non-violent Italian family, would balance out a win for the Mafia clan on The Sopranos.

ANYONE WITH the slightest interest in I Love Lucy, or the production techniques for sit-coms in general, should do any scheming necessary to get a copy of Geoffrey Mark Fidelman's The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television (Renaissance Books, 387 pages, $19.95 paperback), which came out earlier this summer. Fidelman covers every one of Lucille Ball's appearances on TV, including guest shots on other people's shows and her disastrous 1986 series Life with Lucy. As a result, we get some new insight into why I Love Lucy worked so well but also why her follow-up series were so disappointing. (The aging process was only part of the problem; poor Gale Gordon, no substitute for Desi Arnaz as a co-star, gets dumped on a lot in this book.) Fidelman includes interviews with dozens of actors and production staffers who worked with Ball, and his decision to give equal weight to her later career yields some great anecdotes for I Love Lucy fans. For example, it's common knowledge that William Frawley and Vivian Vance hated each other while they were playing Fred and Ethel Mertz. But former child actor Stanley Livingston reveals that the feud continued when Frawley was in My Three Sons and Vance was in a nearby studio doing The Lucy Show. ("The nicest thing I remember him calling her was a douche bag," says lovable "Chip Douglas.")

As for Lucy and Desi Arnaz, the interviewees in this book seem about evenly divided as to whether the couple were consummate professionals or egotistical control freaks. One consensus is that Ball never tolerated any horsing around on the set, and that she almost never improvised any of her physical gags. (I Love Lucy scripts were incredibly detailed, right down to Lucy Ricardo's hand gestures.) The contradictory accounts of Ball's off-camera behavior make The Lucy Book more believable than if it were a hagiography or a hatchet job. The strange love-hate relationship between Ball and Vance -- who was required to appear older and fatter than Lucy in all their scenes together -- is another puzzle that's explored here but never solved.

Among the I Love Lucy trivia: Desi wore elevator shoes and used a booster cushion in any scene where he and Lucy sat on a couch (to hide the fact that she was taller); the giant loaf that pins Lucy to the wall in "Pioneer Women" was real bread, and pieces were handed out to the studio audience after the taping; the studio audiences imposed their own rule on jokes about Desi's Cuban accent (writer Bob Carroll Jr. recalls, "They didn't laugh and seemed to resent it. We could only get away with it when Lucy did it."). For the record, Fidelman lists his favorite I Love Lucy episodes as "Job Switching" (the conveyer belt in the chocolate factory), "The Operetta" (Ethel sings "Lily of the Valley"), and "Lucy Does a TV Commercial" (for Vitameatavegamin, of course). His top Lucy Show is "Lucy and Viv Put in a Shower" -- not, presumably, because Ball claimed that she almost drowned making that episode.