Since my last blog post, some good stuff has happened. Osama bin Laden got killed. I drove 1100 miles in 18 hours. Uhhh, I read War Of The Worlds and Tina Fey's Bossypants, and some other books....
But that has all been wiped away by the illness that has plagued my last three days. And at the same time, my internet went down. So I was reduce to watching my roommate's boxed sets of Gray's Anatomy.
I have never seen a show that has a main cast that is as attractive as Gray's Anatomy. Even movies don't try to put five or six extremely attractive people on the same screen. But the attractiveness level of TV show casts is usually lower than in movies. I mean, that's not to say that TV shows don't contain attractive people. It's just that they usually have...I don't know...interesting faces. They have faces with something weird going. And maybe they have some older people, or some rotund people, or something. Some sort of physical diversity.
But Gray's Anatomy is a little unreal. It makes the drama kind of hard to take seriously, actually. Something about the brain rebels against the notion that six or seven beautiful people can exist, much less be involved in some kind of plotline.
Casting directors and showrunners must have little rules of thumb about how many attractive people can be in one cast. I know that they must, because I know that there are enough out of work, very attractive actors in LA to staff a hundred Gray's Anatomies...yet these shows do not exist.
Relevant quote from Tina Fey's Bossypants that is probably the spur to this entire post (For years the networks have tried to re-create the success of Friends by making pilot after pilot about beautiful twenty-somethings living together in New York. Beautiful twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles. Beautiful twenty-somethings investigating sexy child murders in Miami. This template never works, because executives refuse to realize that Friends was the exception, not the rule. The stars of beloved shows like Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, Newhart, and The Dick Van Dyke Show had normal human faces. And that’s what some of the people on our show have. When you watched Sanford and Son, you didn’t want to have sex with everybody you saw, just Grady. I’ve never understood why every character being “hot” was necessary for enjoying a TV show.)
Except that the stars of Gray's Anatomy are more attractive than the stars of Friends (or maybe they're not, really, but it just appears that way because of the weird dreamlike lighting in the former show?). On the one hand, it seems intuitively obvious that having a super-attractive cast is great and awesome and fun to look at. On the other hand, it seems intuitively obvious that it's unreal, and kind of silly.
Hmm, I was going to say something more about the structure of Gray's Anatomy and how it has very long denouemonts and I always feel like the show could be ending around the 30 minute mark, but I am still kind of feverish and I fear that I may not be making much sense as it is.