TV Tuesday: Why, Fiddle-dee-dee, it's GCB!

Some weeks ago "GCB," ABC's comedy about Dallas church ladies gone bad, burst into the Sunday night lineup with all the color and fervor of a blue-ribbon garden.  Of course, no rosebush worth its grits comes without thorns, and it's just such sharp edges that make this saga sizzle.  Former head cheerleader Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb, in a near-reprisal of her WB "Popular" role) is forced to crawl back to her mother Gigi (a take-no-prisoners, mentor-material Annie Potts) after her embezzling and philandering husband dies in a fiery car crash.  Although the one-time queen of mean has mellowed during her years in California, her victims have long memories and an uncontrollable urge to choke her with humble pecan pie upon her return.  Having picked up Amanda's discarded queen bee mantle, Carlene Cockburn (a hilariously over-the-top Kristin Chenoweth) leads the pack in hatching a string of stunts that  - and I just had to say this - fetches laughs as big as Texas. 

Candy-colored, upbeat, and full of fabulous fashion, "GCB" is fun because it delivers comfort food spiked with spice.  I think this is where "Pan Am," the 1960s drama "GCB" replaced, missed the mark.  Slow-moving and a little dreary, its storyline seemed to stunt the development of promising characters.  Not that I gave up on it.  I watched "Pan Am" until the bitter end, indignantly dreading its demise at the hands of some catty cowgirl show that went by an acronym.  Little did I know that "GCB's" particular brand of melodrama stems from the kind of adolescent wounds and shared history that lay the foundation for a compelling series.  Because despite their slick exteriors, these women have layers.  Although Amanda is the heroine, and therefore the rightful recipient of our loyalties, Carlene and company garner a certain amount of empathy as former pawns in Amanda's games.  There are, after all, two sides to every story.  And it's the rare woman alive who can't relate to that. 

Promises, Promises

Yesterday, my mom and sister and I went to New York's Broadway Theatre to see "Promises, Promises," starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth. It was a revival of a 1960s play of the same name, which was based on an earlier 1960s movie, The Apartment, starring Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine. In a nutshell, it was the story of a lowly office worker, C. C. "Chuck" Baxter, who gets sucked into lending his apartment to the senior executives for rendezvous with their mistresses only to discover that the girl he's in love with, Fran Kubelik, is his boss's, mistress. It's cute and campy yet underscored by the shadows of the male chauvinism that dominated the workplace of the 1960s. (One review I read aptly compared it to Mad Men.) But unlike Mad Men (SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!), "Promises, Promises," finds a moral high ground and stakes its claim there. Ever the "good guy," Chuck saves Fran after a failed suicide attempt brought on by the news that Mr. Sheldrake is not leaving his wife. By the time Mr. Sheldrake crawls back to report that he is, after all, free and asks for Fran's hand in marriage, she's already fallen in love with Chuck, securing the classic happy ending. Snappy dance numbers, stellar singing, and period humor made "Promises, Promises," a joy to watch. Incidentally, it also inspired me to commit to buying a fedora I'd been eying in JCPenney. (Chuck sports one despite his worry that it makes him look like James Cagney. His was gray; mine is pink and black.)

As a side note, it occurred to me that the movie The Baxter was probably based on Chuck Baxter's character. The Baxter is about Elliot Sherman (Michael Showalter), a guy who lets people walk all over him. Indeed, the name Baxter becomes synonymous with anyone who's a malleable yes man, establishing the theme of the movie. Elliot's fiancé (Elizabeth Banks) is cheating on him with her high school boyfriend, and he's powerless to stop her. Meanwhile, he becomes friendly with his offbeat temp secretary (Michelle Williams), who is enmeshed in a relationship with a Baxter of her own (the inimitable and always-easy-on-the-eyes Paul Rudd). In the end, Elliot gets jilted at the alter when the high school boyfriend busts in. Elliot ends up with the secretary, who has overthrown her own boyfriend for being too "Baxterish." Poor Paul Rudd ends up with no one. Although it's a little more complicated than The Apartment and "Promises, Promises," the parallels between C. C. Baxter and Elliot are definitely there.

Now that the deepness is over and done with, it's time to share an interesting tidbit I learned after reading the "Promises, Promises" playbill. It turns out that Sean Hayes (of Will and Grace fame) is the executive producer of that new TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland co-starring Betty White. Small world, huh?