The Narcissist's Wedding by Suzanne Hadley Gosselin on 10/12/2009 at 2:13 PM

Being recently married, I am naturally interested in a good TV wedding. And so I couldn't resist recording Jim and Pam's wedding (from NBC's show "the Office") even though I've only seen a couple episodes of the show.

Anytime we talk about TV shows, we're bound to step on toes, but I wanted to make some observations about Jim and Pam's wedding because, quite frankly, it was particularly horrid. Not what I expected from a TV show that millions of viewers tune in to weekly.

First of all, I was shocked by the lack of preciousness surrounding what is a precious thing: marriage. As a recent bride, I tuned in hoping for some romance, but the most romantic line (teased repeatedly in the preview) was uttered by the groom in his toast: "I think deep down I always knew I was waiting for my wife." Aw. That was sweet ... but that's where the warm fuzzies ended.

As far as I can tell, "the Office" follows the lives, personality quirks and interpersonal dynamics of people who work in a typical, boring office in everytown, Pennsylvania. These individuals exhibit varying levels of dysfunction -- primarily social. Shot in the style of a documentary, the show explores the inner workings of the office and makes viewers privy to all its gossip.

So Jim and Pam's wedding was more about the other characters in the office than about them. One plot point was the fact that Pam was five months pregnant and was trying to keep the fact quiet because of her old-fashioned grandmother. At one point (after the beans were spilled), the office boss stood up and delivered a monologue on the virtues of unmarried women having consensual sex and how it needed to be celebrated. Another subplot followed the antics of the single men from the office trying to score with women and the boss hitting on the mother of the bride.

I once heard a professor say that you could learn a lot about people in the culture by looking at popular TV shows. He used the TV show "Friends" as an example and said that the show's popularity betrayed the culture's desire for a close-knit community where there was always a friend who cared about you and a group to share life with. Insightful, I thought.

So after wasting the good part of an hour watching "the Office" wedding, I began to wonder what this show could tell me about the culture. One thing that occurred to me is that "the Office" is about narcissism. It is an exaggeration of the idea that when it comes down to it, we're all just looking out for ourselves. While selfishness is a fact about every human; it's funny to watch it played out to such an extreme. It makes you feel a little better about yourself because -- well -- you're not THAT self-absorbed. Losers.

Even at their friends' wedding, the members of the office continue to only think about themselves. The bachelors are all about about meeting (and sleeping with) someone, the office gossips are jealous and bitter that they're not the ones walking down the aisle, the boss wants to be sure to get attention by making an unwanted toast. That's why the marriage felt stripped of its preciousness. Marriage is about complete deference to the needs of another, which was completely out of place in the context of this show.

In the end, the show attempted to make the point that the wedding was about Jim and Pam and they needed to just separate from their selfish, dysfunctional office mates and make it "their day." (At one point the bride said, "If this is our day, why did we invite all these people?") But even this weak salvage attempt failed to inspire. If these people did, in fact, exist, how are Jim and Pam to get a good start to marriage surrounded by such a horrible group of "friends?" Apart from the couple's care and compassion for one another, I struggled to find anything redeeming in this much-anticipated TV union.

David Letterman's Story Is Anything but Funny by Matt Kaufman on 10/02/2009 at 1:07 PM

The sordid David Letterman story is revolting on many levels. So are many celebrity scandals, and there never seems to be a shortage of them. Yet this one somehow feels a little extra-grimy, at least to me. But why?

Is it the fact that all these women worked for Letterman? Is it the fact that all this went on for such a long time, as he kept betraying his "long time girlfriend" (now wife)? Is it his familiarity -- the fact that he's someone you can see on TV every day, even if you don't go looking for his show?

Yes, yes and yes. But there's something more. It's the way we've been conditioned to respond to this sort of thing by people like, well, David Letterman.

Letterman has built much of his career on cynical snarkiness. He eats up scandals when politicians or other celebrities are involved: To him, they're comic gold. A lot of people will now be struck by his hypocrisy. But that should concern us less than our complicity. How many of us have watched Dave smirkingly zing his targets and snickered right along with him? Even many of us who don't like him haven't been above laughing when he went after someone we liked even less. (Exhibit A: Bill Clinton. I'm guilty as charged.)

If we follow Letterman form, we'll just transition from smirking with Dave to smirking at him. But cases like his -- and the cases of people whose sins he's exploited -- should feel like tragedies, not comedies. They should make us feel sad, not superior; appalled, not amused.

Let's try breaking the cycle here. Letterman's case calls for sincere confession of sins, repentance and forgiveness. Even now, it's not clear that Letterman thinks much in those terms, or that he'll be meaningfully humbled in the long term. ("I'll be darned," he joked with his audience, "Dave had sex.") But for the rest of us, let's work to react not as Dave has taught us, but as Christ has. And that includes praying someday Dave will react that way too.

Character Assassination, Soap Opera Style by Matt Kaufman on 09/09/2009 at 11:00 AM

Soap operas haven't exactly been bastions of family values, so it's no surprise to read in TV Guide that soap operas are going gay. The only surprise may be that it took so long.

What's interesting, though, to see how drastically they're rewriting veteran characters to fit the new angle. Which, apparently, is why longtime soap actress Patricia Mauceri is out of work.

For 14 years, Mauceri played Carlotta Vega, a strong Catholic on One Life to Live. Then the writers did a scene where Vega (mistakenly) believed her son was gay, and responded by immediately and cheerily accepting it -- and even declaring it to be God's plan.

Mauceri, who'd helped shape her character by drawing on her own Christian faith, objected on both moral and artistic grounds:

I did not object to being in a gay storyline. I objected to speaking the truth of what that person, how that person would live and breathe and act in that storyline," she said. "And this goes against everything I am, my belief system, and what I know the character's belief system is aligned to.

Mauceri says that she offered to compromise, suggesting script changes which would keep Vega's response more in character, but the show's producers refused to budge. She was fired (technically, her contract wasn't renewed), and she was quickly replaced with another actress who delivered the lines as written.

It's a good idea to be careful about assuming we know everything that happened in an employment dispute. That said, her story has a credible ring once you see the scene in question. (I looked up the video.)

Finding her son's gift to a gay friend (a book called How to Tell our Parents You're Gay), Vega assumes it's her son's. She shows not a trace of concern or surprise and tells him that "God made you this way." When another character expresses surprise at the churchgoing Vega's attitude, she breezily dismisses church teaching ("I know what my religion teaches") and declares that she's just thinking for herself.

You can see what the producers are up to here. They're so eager to hammer home the message that gay is OK that every likable character on the show must think gay is OK too. TV Guide says that's true on other soaps too: "No one ... thinks it's a big deal."

No one looks to soap operas for raw realism, obviously. But you'd think that a show would at least respect the consistency of its own characters. It says something about how insecure the producers must be when they don't feel they can afford to do that -- when they don't feel they can risk exposing viewers to likable characters who refuse to accept "progressive" attitudes.

Christians will suspect that's because the producers can't escape their conscience any more than anyone else can. Good thing no one can write believers out of real life the way they can from TV shows.

Uplifting TV by Matt Kaufman on 08/20/2009 at 8:08 AM

I've never watched an entire episode of a reality show. That's going to change in the new season of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the show where a family gets a new home built for them in the span of a week.

The reason the show first caught my interest was simple: They're filming just a few miles from my town this week. But I soon found another reason to care. The family whose home is being replaced are staples of a local ministry called Salt & Light, which helps hundreds of people every day. The ministry's been in local news lately because state budget cuts were forcing them to make major cutbacks. Presumably publicity from the show will help them raise funds, which would be an answer to a lot of people's prayers.

Extreme Makeover is devoting this season to helping "community heroes," which makes it something rare -- not just an uplifting reality show, but an uplifting TV show of any genre. I watch a few good dramas and a few good comedies, but I can't think of any of them that I'd call uplifting. If I could find them, I'd tune in. Seen any lately?