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Ande Dagan
09/21/2009 03:00 PM
HBO kicked off two premieres last night, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bored to Death, unofficially branding its Sunday nights as the antithesis of beer drenched, football watching, Sunday afternoons. In short, Sunday nights on HBO are the night of the nebbish.
The last few seasons of Curb have ended with outrageous grand finales, a not-so-suble acknowledgement that Larry David never seems to know if there will be a next season. The seventh season of Curb began where the sixth left off. David, who plays an exaggerated version of himself, and all his abhorrent idiosyncratic behaviors are back, along with most of his cohorts, including estranged ex-wife, Cheryl (Cheryl Hines).
HBO has complemented the Curb time slot with Bored to Death, starring Jason Schwartzman as failed writer and aspiring hipster private detective, Jonathan Ames (a character based on Brooklyn writer–and show creator–Jonathan Ames). Neither Curb nor Bored are intrinsically Jewish shows but, while Larry David is, much like Jerry Seinfeld was in Seinfeld (the show David co-created) inherently a Jewish character, he rarely has to put on a yarmulke to remind us of that. Bored, on the other hand, presents Ames's Jewishness with the subtlety of a 1980s Bar Mitzvah gown. Schwartzman's Ames is neither capable of shadow boxing without causing himself physical pain nor drinking whiskey without coughing into his elbow (the proper way to cough, by the way, probably drilled into his head by his overbearing Jewish mom). These underwhelming Jewish stereotypes seem about as fresh as a Jay Leno joke, something that might have worked once, but has since been played out and isn't really accurate anymore.
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09/09/2009 04:36 PM
When the original Melrose Place debuted in 1992–when there were roughly four channels worth watching–it became nothing short of a national obsession. Within its first few seasons, Aaron Spelling and Darren Star's neighbor-coveting vision became a permanent fixture of pop culture. It was a generation gap-closer, and teenagers and their moms ceased fire for one hour a week to sit together and watch the psychotic sexcapades of a group of hot Angelenos living in a mythical apartment building in West Hollywood. The show launched the careers of several of its resident crazy bitches into stardom (Kristin Davis, Marcia Cross) and obscurity (Laura Leighton–who made a brief cameo on the new Melrose Place, only to be instantly killed off before viewers had a chance to refill their wine glass). The prime time soap eventually got too ridiculous for its own good (quite a feat), and the show was put down in 1999 to the chagrin of nobody.
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