NOT SO SUPER

The Super Bowl in Detroit - An American Microcosm

I won't spend a lot of time on this--I've been told my sports blogs are my least interesting ones, and certainly I'm not in the league of a King Kauffman or an Allen Barra when it comes to the topic. But I can't let the week pass without saying something about the cruel irony of Detroit hosting the Greatest American Spectacle. I'm not going to bash Detroit--plenty of comics have already done so and the city certainly has enough problems.

But in a city where 55 percent of the population has fled since 1950, where the unemployment rate of 14.5 % is two-and-a-half times the national average, where more streets look like Eminem's 8 Mile (or Baghdad) than they do the Miracle Mile, the Super Bowl and the tourists it attracts will spend tens of millions of dollars on souvenirs, eat all the best food, put on all the best concerts and none of it will make a damn bit of difference to the 99% of Detroit residents who can't afford to go to the game or participate in the parties.

The roads have been repaved--but only near the brand new stadium. Dilapidated abandoned buildings and crackhouses have been demolished--but only in areas where tourists might have been unlucky enough to stumble across them. Detroit, like most American cities, used at least some public money to build the state-of-the-art indoor football stadium that will host the game--then slapped the Ford name on the building in honor of the Detroit Lions underachieving owners, the Ford Family, which also has had a pretty bad year selling cars...as witnessed by their "need" to slash some 14,000 jobs over the next few years.

While our reality TV-watching, Paris Hilton-gawking, pro sports-loving nation parties it up on the surface, below deck the whole country is slowly rotting away, not as bad as Detroit in most places, but rotting nonetheless. That doesn't mean we can't enjoy the game--for the record, I'm picking Seattle to win--but it's sobering to consider the Super Bowl for what it really is, even if that thought only takes a second of your time. It's a big suckup to one of the NFL's biggest sponsors in the league's most blighted city and all the fresh paint and all the hot pantsed hookers that will be evident in Motown this week won't change the fact that for the average NFL fan and the typical Detroit resident, every day gets a little bit bleaker and puts just a little bit more of a divide between us and the entertainers we idolize.

Jumping the Shark...

"Jumping the Shark" is an interesting term that has become a trendy American catchphrase. It was born on TV from the most unlikely of sources--an episode of the 1970's American hit Happy Days, in which, through various ridiculous and inexplicable plot twists, the oh-so-cool character of The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler, was forced to jump over a shark on a pair of waterskis. So unlikely, ridiculous and unpopular was this episode that now whenever a quality television show shows the first signs of decline, critics will say that the show is "jumping the shark." There's even a book that carefully lists dozens of popular TV shows and catalogs the precise moment when that show jumped the shark. The term is even spreading beyond television into things like politics (I think Bush 43's presidency jumped the shark right around when he went on vacation in August 2001. But that's just me.)

Every year at least one long running show jumps the shark, although I'm always amazed by the programs that can run a long time and still maintain a high enough level of quality to go off the air with their dignity intact. Examples of this include Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, M*A*S*H, Six Feet Under and The Jeffersons, just to name a few. Among current shows that have been cancelled after long runs or are on their way out, The West Wing (after a rocky couple of seasons), That 70's Show and the Bernie Mac Show are examples of programs that look like they'll cease production without looking ridiculous or being chatted about viciously online. But there are a few that aren't so lucky. I thought I'd share my opinion of a handful of shows that jumped the shark in the last year or so. I'd love to know if you have more candidates:

Will & Grace (NBC) - I can't say the precise moment when this veteran sitcom jumped the shark--it may have been more of a slow erosion of wit over the years--but for me the show lost a lot when it married Grace Adler (Debra Messing) to uncharismatic, uninteresting Harry Connick Jr. Their on-again, off-again non-romance turned me from a weekly viewer into somebody who cringed whenever I would tune into an episode. Then, getting silly, imbecilic Jack (Sean Hayes) an executive job at a gay network, while sounding like an inspired satirical gag on paper I'm sure, has merely turned into a boring series of predictable inside jibes at television executives. It's past time for W & G to go.

Malcolm in the Middle (Fox) - Since 2003 really, this show feels like it's the same show every week--wacky, flustered Dad and wacky, disciplinarian Mom try to put the brakes on their wacky, cartoony and rapidly aging kids. Enough already--this show wasn't that great when even when it was winning Emmys. Luckily, this is it's last season.

Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN) - It was unceremoniously dumped off the schedule in May of 2005, but what a horrible way for the last of the Star Trek shows to go out--with a flashback/flash forward episode featuring a bored looking Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation recounting some dull "historic" adventure that even die hard fans couldn't muster any excitement for. Nothing worse than jumping the shark in your last episode.

Boston Legal (ABC) - This one, unfortunately, shows no sign of going off the air anytime soon. Hell, it wins Emmys for Pete's sake. (William Shatner?!?) I swore I wouldn't watch this show ever again after Betty White's receptionist character killed off her lover to prevent him from committing murder again. And it was supposed to be funny. Uh huh. I never really clicked into this show's semi-surreal tone anyway, but that was it for me. David E. Kelley's best days as a writer/show runner ended with the fourth season of The Practice.

That's it for now. The Oscar nominations are due out in...oh, about 6 hours. You know I'll have something to say about those, but maybe not until Wednesday or Thursday--I need time to digest. One thing for sure--expect a ton of nominations for Brokeback Mountain, whether you think the movie is "groundbreaking" or just silly or anywhere in between.

Peace...