Gamboling With Hogs

Television in the UK can be pretty diverting. If there isn’t a brat show, in which a plucky nanny will transform an incorrigible little monster into Mummy’s Lovely Little Gentleman, there’s often a medical marvel one with a title along the lines of The Boy Who Gave Birth to Himself. There are the Gordon Ramsay Unhinged shows, in which himself screams at failing restauranteurs or young chefs who aspire to work at one of his 7500 restaurants around the world, and other, kinder/gentler fix-it shows in which, for instance, a purported expert explains to a hotelier why he’s going bankrupt. On a slow night, you might have to settle for marveling at how poorly other Brits eat, or how filthy their homes are, or even try to content yourself with a real estate show in which disgruntled couples from Scunthorpe are shown properties for sale in parts of the world where the sun actually shines for more than 20 minutes at a time some days.

‘Twas in the UK, among all the above-referenced riches, that I first saw Wife Swap, which I remember now is available in this country too, and more than diverting enough for an evening on which you’d planned to watch the latest episode of Friday Night Lights, but NBC didn’t broadcast it for reasons no one bothered to convey to you.

The idea’s very simple — and, I’d have thought, apparently wrongly, deeply offensive to feminists. For two weeks women of very different styles and circumstances, live with each other’s husbands and children. During the first, the transplanted wife is required to act as a surrogate for the departed wife, and to abide by the husband’s rules. In the second week, she theoretically gets to rewrite the house rulebook as she sees fit. As you can well imagine, what almost invariably happens is that, after a week of having things pretty much as he’s accustomed to having them (except, in many cases, for Surrogate Wife’s frequent expressions of horror and disgust), Hubby snorts, “No [bleeped] way!” when presented with new rules. At this point, he and Surrogate Wife start slamming doors and calling each other names and making the children whimper piteously, and we out in Videoland are wonderfully entertained.

Commonly, the two hubbies are able sometime after the second commercial break to glimpse some small trace of wisdom in what their Surrogate Wives are telling them, and the kids come to love their stand-in moms nearly as much as they originally loathed them. Finally, the two couples sit down face-to-face, the two hubbies — meeting for the first time — give each other looks that say, “If you so much as touched her, I’ll pull your fucking esophagus out through your fucking ear,” the two wives bristle at each other’s suggestions that they’re imperfect mothers, and everybody snarlingly denies that he learned anything at all from the experience.

In this past week’s episode, a snooty rich black woman social climber who gave her two terrified daughters a daily grade on, for instance, how expeditiously they got from the car into the house after school, moved into the home of a body shop owner whose womenfolk liked to roll around in the mud. Meanwhile, White Trash Mama, at the home of her snooty rich black temporary husband, had to wear pantyhose for the first time in 20 years for dinner, and later to teach a class in ladylike deportment. Over at White Trash Towers, Mr. Body Shop was literally burning in the fireplace the Nice Clothes Ms. Snooty had tried to insist he and his two fat daughters wear to dinner the second week. Sparks a-plenty flew, and make no mistake!

Are you thinking what I’m thinking — that the whole thing would probably have been a lot more interesting, and maybe even led to actual bloodshed, if white folks had been the snooty ones, and the blacks those who enjoyed gamboling with the hogs? But the actual football scenes in FDN are comically unconvincing, and the main character in Breaking Bad — the meth-cooking chemistry teacher just trying to do right by his loved ones before the cancer finishes him off — is aloof and humorless. I’m finally learning, after all these decades, that it’s a chump’s game to expect perfection from even the best TV.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Great Show!

I know, I know. Most of the actors playing 16- and 17-year-olds are obviously closer to 25, and all the young white male characters are apparently coached to speak as though heavily sedated or newly lobotomized. And I’ve never seen so many people with tiny noses in one series (the tiniest of all belonging to the preternaturally pretty Minka Kelly, the daughter of someone who used to be in Aerosmith, of all things!). And it never seems, even though Dillon is supposed to have one of the most successful high school football programs in a football-crazy state, as though there are more than 46 people watching. And in every third or fourth episode like clockwork the staunch rectitude of Coach Taylor — a good and decent man prone to shooting himself in the foot — causes a mass desertion by his players, who then reappear, eyes full of wariness and recrimination, only at the last possible second. But boy, do I love Friday Night Lights — possibly more than I’ve loved a dramatic TV series since NYPD Blue in its David Caruso and Jimmy Smits years.

Watching Season 2 on Netflix this past week, I’m consistently brought closer to tears than any TV show has brought me since Jimmy Smits’ character died in NYPD Blue by Julie’s being a perfect little bitch to Mrs. and Coach Taylor even though they clearly adore her and are doing their damnedest to spare her the pain she seems so intent on bringing on herself. And all the football stuff brings back painful memories of when my own son Jared was playing for Montgomery High in Santa Rosa 10 years ago.

One week I was just a poor old sap constantly being told by sandwich makers at Subway and restroom attendants at Ross Dress for Less that I looked exactly like a character on Seinfeld, by which I was never even a little amused, and none of whose characters I had even the slightest interest in resembling. The next, after Jared scored those three touchdowns against Rosa Parks, there wasn’t a filling station in town that would take my money, nor a Subway, and it was profoundly discombobulating. As I have probably mentioned here, my own high school athletic career was undistinguished; it was as captain of the debate team and male lead in the drama club’s presentation of a “daring” (according to the Santa Monica Evening Outlook) musical adaptation of Judgment at Nuremberg that I had finally been able to escape wallflowerdom. And here I was being treated like a hero or bull stud because of accomplishments not my own!

It got to the point at which Nancy and I couldn’t go to the Sizzler for fear of being besieged by locals wanting either that I personally autograph ATM and supermarket receipts or whatever else they might find in their billfolds or pockets, or take them home for Jared's autograph. I knew he would never get around to it — between his studies, gaining carnal knowledge of an endless parade of coeds in tight cutoff jeans and halter tops that bared their lovely flat young bellies, and being fellated by prospective agents, he hardly had a moment to call his own. And when many of the coeds Jared simply didn’t have time for began offering themselves to me instead, Nancy hit me with a rolling pin and insisted, in that way she had, that we seek out couples counseling, though we couldn’t afford it on the money she was earning as the koala keeper at the San Francisco Zoo.

At the plant, guys who’d previously glared at me menacingly when I tried to seat myself near them in the canteen at lunchtime suddenly wanted to play golf or go bowling with me, or at least buy me a couple of cold ones after work. I think in most cultures, persons with both an X and a Y chromosome are presumed to just love it, but because of the way it tastes, I’ve never been a big drinker of beer. I spent many sleepless nights either worrying that my co-workers perceived me as thinking myself too damned good for them, or being kept awake by the ecstatic howling of whomever Jared happened to be dating that night. Even through three interior walls, I could tell most of it was affected.

I know this will sound awful, but I actually felt some relief along with great sadness when Jared was paralyzed from the waist down in the big game against Oakmont.