Looks like our rotund hero’s going to have model troubles in his next video:

I think one of the things I love best about Cee-Lo is that he’s a supremely confident underdog. He may be a pudgy dude who took a long time finding success to match his talent. But he’s thoughtful, knows how to treat a lady, sexy in a way that were he a woman with his equivalent body type would get him labeled sassy, or something. It’s a kind of self-assurance that’s not grating, just a pure and accurate knowledge of one’s worth.

I wasn’t crazy about In the Loop, which was slightly past my caustic comfort line, but I did think the movie did an utterly phenomenal job with James Gandolfini’s general, a man who wants to buck Washington’s power structure and ultimately can’t bring himself to do it. I hope Iannucci can achieve the same balance of intelligence, yearning for integrity, and clear-eyed sense of what the system is in the character he’s creating for Julia Lewis-Dreyfus in the new HBO show they’re doing together, in which she plays a Senator who becomes Vice President.

The description of the show itself, about Lewis-Dreyfus’s struggles with a job that’s “nothing like she expected and everything everyone ever warned about” sounds a little stupid because, duh, being Vice President is not a job anyone can adequately prepare for (much less being President). But we need someone who can do something a little caustic with a female politician character. My hope is that she won’t be a moderate fantasy, like on Commander in Chief, and that the show won’t need to linger excessively on the idea of a female political figure coming into her own a la Donna Moss. It’s a tough balance right now: Iannucci needs to steer between Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Hillary Clinton, all the female politicians who have been unfortunately reduced to stereotypes. He can’t make her dumb or people won’t like her, but he sure shouldn’t make her an ultra-competent saint, or an ultra-competent shrew. I genuinely don’t have ideas for what should happen, I only know that I hope it will be good.

David Brooks is right that there are an exceptional number of very good sitcoms about friendship on television these days. Emily Nussbaum is also correct that the last several seasons of television have breathed new and energetic life into the family sitcom. But I think where both of them are somewhat wrong is that they’re drawing distinctions between friendship and family that are less relevant than they were in the early days of television. Brooks writes:

With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.

 But I think there’s a bit more to it than this. If family is both the people who are supposed to support you no matter what, but also the people you have to put up with no matter what, I think family relationships and friendships may be closer than they’ve been before.


Take the friends in Community. They tend to operate in a context relatively devoid of family ties, to the extent that Troy is living with Pierce even though he presumably has parents somewhere. The study group actively participates in helping Shirley spend more time with her children. The group provides both support to Abed in pursuing a filmmaking career and the checks and correctives on that ambition his family can’t really provide because they’ve written off participating in that part of his life. Troy, Abed and Annie chloroform a janitor for Jeff. These behaviors, and the emotional investment the characters have in each other, aren’t just a substitute for family ties—they’re a replacement for them. 


On 30 Rock, Jack and Liz aren’t married, and they’re not related, but they’re tremendously formative and supportive figures in each others’ lives. On Bones, Angela and Brennan are sisters, people who are committed to their relationship even if they substantially hurt or misunderstand each other. Why are those relationships functionally different from ones formalized by blood or a legal ceremony? And in the real world, this is true for people whose families aren’t crazy Florida Irishwomen, or on-the-run criminals. The friend whose wedding you stand up at can be just as close as a sibling or cousin without dysfunction, or anger, or distance in the family to create some sort of balancing equivalence. Television’s just captured our expanding understanding of family, especially for people who aren’t married, or choose not to marry, or have had marriages that don’t work out.