Right? Am I missing something here?

There was a really strange column in the Sunday Inquirer, from everyone’s favorite pink-shoed columnist, Karen Heller. It concerns the new mid-season replacement sitcoms and why they degrade women by having pretty women be single losers. Eh. Maybe? I don’t really doubt that it’s harder to be a woman working lead on a sitcom, but, that seems like a bit too broad (zing) of a statement. Also, the fact Freddie Prinze Jr. got a sitcom degrades all men.

No matter. Certainly an okay column idea at least. But what caught my eye was Heller’s lead:

Not to worry if you didn’t catch Heather Graham’s Emily’s Reasons Why Not, the ABC show in which the heroine is such social roadkill that it makes Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback look like self-help theater. In general, you should be paid to consume so many empty carbs. Fortunately, I am - so you don’t have to.

Graham, with Bambi eyes and Jessica Rabbit body, is so aesthetically and aerodynamically confounding as to have played Austin Powers’ arm candy and a porn star in P.T. Anderson’s indelible Boogie Nights.

On television, though, she has made the unnatural progression to total dating loser — perhaps because she owns up to reaching the near-death age of 36 — but mostly, I suspect, because watching beautiful things be as miserable as most mortals are has become a contact sport. This is what Sarah Jessica Parker and her Cosmo-swilling entourage have wrought, a modeling squadron of distraught, lonely women.

Yes, if you’re pretty, you’re happy — and shouldn’t be shown otherwise. Unless you’re Heather Graham, whose Emily’s Reasons Why Not provides the main example for Heller’s argument, and your show was cancelled after one episode. This factoid, unless you read the first clause a certain way, isn’t mentioned in the column. (I perused it three times; it’s still possible I could have missed the mention of it.)

Look for an impassioned defense of The Book of Daniel in the pages of the Inky later this week.

Intuition | Treating cute babes like stupid loser dirt [Inky]
ABC halts production of Heather Graham’s ‘Emily’s Reasons Why Not’ [UPI via RealityTVWorld.com]
NBC Cancels ‘The Book of Daniel’ [9News]

And don’t call me Shirley

Warning: The following rant is rather unfocused. Give me a few more months; I’ll get better at this, I swear. I don’t want to get all super-liberal for two posts in a row — eh, the previous one really wasn’t, I was just making the cheap joke — but let’s look at this attempt to get all advertisers to stop buying airtime on The Book of Daniel.

Some backstory on the show: As far as I can tell, The Book of Daniel was a Friday night show on NBC, which means it’s destined for failure. And it would have just gone to Friday Night TV heaven with Family Matters and Step by Step after a few weeks without any fanfare, but then the Christian right jumped on it.

The show is, by all accounts, offensive to conservative Christians. Frankly, though, the idea of a priest with his life so out of control he doesn’t see the housekeeper smoking pot seems pretty funny to me. (Why haven’t I watched this show yet? Oh, right, it’s a Friday night show on NBC.) And, okay, the priest’s family is out of control, etc., etc. Conservative groups — and I’ll pick on the American Family Association because that’s who’s sending letters to companies who advertised on the premier — have every right to protest and to send letters and tell advertisers they won’t buy their products if they continue to advertise on the show.

(On a side note, the only company not to pull their ads from the show — at least not yet — is Burlington Coat Factory. The ads that have been pulled is quite a crew: Mazda, H&R Block, Just for Men, Gold Bond Medicated Powder and Icy Hot. So we can rest easy knowing conservative Christians with jet black hair — none of whom have muscle aches or rashes — will be able to drive Mazdas to the mall to get their taxes done.)

I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t take myself seriously. Look, my previous post was entirely dedicated to calling the No. 3 ranking senator in the country a douchebag; there’s really no way I could. But I can see Rick Santorum taking himself seriously when he’s talking about the war, even if the idea of the media losing the war for us is a bit far-fetched.

I understand the sad fact that the advertisers are going to listen to letter campaigns because they’re in the business of being as bland as possible to sell products. But, seriously, how do groups like the AFA really take themselves seriously? Read the petition. They’re angry that one of the writers of the show is a gay man. Oh, my stars! A gay man in the entertainment industry! Call the advertisers, we have to stop it!

It’s not necessarily this show, though. On their website, the main group of articles is under this header:

And they believe this shit. And think there’s some sort of secret homosexual agenda all of us in the media are trying to shove down their throats so we can perpetrate the end of the human race. What. The. Fuck. They — and I’m generalizing here, but I’m allowed to because they do it so much — actually don’t see the slightest bit of irony, hypocrisy or unintentional humor in hating a show because (in part) a gay man writes it or coming up with a term called the “homosexual agenda.”

The downside of all this is that when Daniel gets cancelled, since it’s a Friday night show on NBC — even with the extra ratings the controversy has surely brought it — this group will, again, without any sense of irony, claim 100% responsibility. It’s enough to make your head explode… wait, too late.

Burlington Coat Factory, not backin’ down, huh? Man, if only I needed a new cheap down coat, I’d be at the Gallery fighting the good fight. Er, maybe not.

Burlington Coat Factory stands by ‘Daniel’ ads [Camden Courier-Post]