Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez to star in the new show Only Murders.
Variety tells us that the new show called Only Murders is a comedy. And it could be.
But there’s a dangerous alchemy attempted here. Bringing together distant generations is hard to do. It almost always descends into an effort to find the funny in mutual incomprehension.
And nothing is sadder.
Different generations are different cultures. Strict rules govern the comedic possibilities. It’s ok if Selena doesn’t get Steven and Martin. Cool rules. Youth doesn’t understand age as a matter of principle…and pride.
But it’s not ok if Martin and Steve don’t understand Selena. This occasions embarrassment and drives every bit of funny out of the room.
On the other hand, maybe not.
Martin Short is a genius. Steve Martin is very funny. And show runner Dan Fogelman is gifted.
So.
Maybe.
But here’s a solution. It comes straight out of the ethnographic data. Call it a gift from anthropology to Hollywood.
My interviews with Millennials tell me two things:
that Millennials are often “playing” boomers, creating the impression that they like and admire them. Boomers are so clueless they don’t know they are being played. And if you can’t turn this into funny, well. Make this a running joke and you have a comedic device that will return riches.
that Millennials sometimes conduct a private, coded communication with other Millennials as a way to comment on one another and Millennials. I studied an office in London where everyone sat around a table. Above table, they carried on an amiable conversation. Below table, chiefly in some social medium, Slack or Discord or something, they kept up a withering commentary.
So it’s simple, really. Let Steve and Martin not “get it” all they want, but allow Millennials this method of managing them.
I was reading Axios today and came across an article that describes the desperate conditions of some American neighborhoods.
Working with data collected by Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Kim Hart reports several problems:
In many post-industrial cities, vacancies are still at “epidemic levels.”
It’s not just an urban problem; rural areas and small towns can have a vacancy rate nearly twice as high as major metro areas.
Abandoned properties are a significant drain on municipalities because they are expensive to police, drag down the value of surrounding properties, and reduce tax revenues.
This crisis can go from bad to worse.
Hard-hit legacy cities are dealing with some degree of “hypervacancy.” When vacancies rise above about 20% of a community’s total properties, the number of vacant buildings may grow indefinitely and the market stops functioning, according to Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress.
Angie, a friend, recently told me about her brother’s work in a midwestern city.
He was living in Seattle when he decided to see what he could do to repair his home and native city. He called friends from high school and together they put to work.
Wouldn’t this make a great HGTV show? HGTV has enjoyed a big success covering renovation teams of several kinds. Fixer Upper, Good Bones, Flip or Flop, Rehab Addict, to name a few. Indeed, this is one of the real success stories of reality TV.
I couldn’t help wondering whether this might not be an idea for a new HGTV franchise. How about a show that features Millennials helping to rebuild a neighborhood? This would be a story about renovation in the literal sense. But it also renovation of community, neighborhood life, urban economies and the American city. Angie’s brother is all about this bigger picture.
And surely a bigger picture would be good for HGTV. There is something cozy and charming about their present narrow focus, individual homes, families, reno projects. But there is always a bigger picture, and this would open up story-telling vistas for HGTV.
Best of all, HGTV could help us reckon with a compelling social problem.
The Venn diagram in question. How can we make these circles intersect?
Call it City Salvage, or Reno, not demo, or Reno rescue.
I have reached out to “Angie’s brother” and if he is prepared to let me, I will give you more details in a subsequent post.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Patrick Gorski for the image and to Pamela, my wife, for help with naming.
It is widely noted that Millennials are a tolerant bunch. They accept diversity and the rights of minorities. The younger you are the more likely you are, for instance, to take for granted a gay couple’s right to marry. Tolerance is a demographic wave. It will eventually triumph.
This is the outcome of a variety of historical and cultural influences. In the present day, the most effective players perhaps are Hollywood and the elementary-school system. These institutions took on entrenched hostility, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia. And, mostly, they prevailed. A task of no small difficulty. An accomplishment of some real significance.
But there is, I think, a flaw in the Hollywood-School approach. And it’s the inclination to treat tolerance as an act of generosity, as something that fills the world with the light of human goodness. This approach is designed to show how deeply satisfying is the act of tolerance and in most cases to make us reach for our hankies. Tolerance…is…just…so…beautiful. (Snuffle, snuffle, honk.) We are not only doing the right thing, we are generously compensated for our good behavior.
But consider this second approach to tolerance:
Dutch tolerance was never “nice”. It was, as Shorto remarks, built not on admiration or even celebrating difference, but precisely on indifference, on letting others live their lives regardless of what one might think of their practices and beliefs, as long as they did not interfere with the business of society and of business itself. It was a shoulder-shrugging tolerance.
(This is Philipp Blom in his Times Literary Supplement (April 30) review of a new book by Russell Shorto called Amsterdam: A history of the world’s most liberal city. Little, Brown)
Shoulder-shrugging tolerance may be the more powerful, durable, dependable form of tolerance. And it is one promoted by J.S.Mill. (Though I’ll be damned if I can find the passage in question.) The idea, Mill says, is not that we are supposed to like the people of whom we are tolerant. The liberal idea is that we are supposed to endure even those we find dubious, difficult or repellent.
Forget the self congratulation. Stow the hankies. We are obliged to be tolerant all the time, and not just when it feels good or makes us look good. Real tolerance is not always “nice.”
Now, this might be merely a point of principle were it not for the eruption of a certain illiberality in American culture. Politics have turned into a shouting match. There are no limits to things we are prepared to call one another. Character assignation is the order of the day. And this comes from people who would insist that they are the very souls of liberal toleration.
I will use one example from my own experience. When even well educated, tender-hearted Canadians discover that my wife is American, they let fly with extended rants that drip with a bitter tongued indignation. It doesn’t seem to matter that my wife and I are standing right there. A small but apparently invisible point of courtesy. But what is also missing, and I mean utterly invisible, is the Millean idea that we are obliged to respect even those we dislike. Do these liberals understand liberalism?
And here’s perhaps the oddest twist. Even Millennials, our best and brightest accomplishment in the liberal ascendancy, can be discovered trashing the opposition…even as they insist that they are liberal to the very core. Apparently, Hollywood and the school system missed the “Dutch” part of the story.
We can guess at what happened here. Hollywood of the old fashioned kind sometimes struggled to tell a story unless it had a swelling orchestra in the background. Big emotions, yes. Shrugging, not so much. So “hanky” liberalism was bound to get on the studio “docket” while Dutch liberalism was not.
The same might be true for elementary school. Hanky liberalism is a great story to tell. It makes the teller look so very noble. The “told,” too. Hanky liberalism carries a rhetorical pay load. It says, “embrace this idea and we’ll adorn you in nobility.”
Shrugging liberalism, that’s a less pretty story. But to the extent that it delivers the more durable form of liberalism, it’s the more urgent one.
Acknowledgements
To Wodek Szemberg with whom I was talking about tolerance just a couple of weeks ago in Toronto.
The photo. showing a magnificently elaborate shrug, is an outtake from the Pharrell Williams’ Happy video here.
