Anti-War Protesters Rally In Federal Plaza
Expiration Date: An interview with Undateable’s Anne Coyle
Review: Revolution Brewing
Where Are You Going? Hyde Park Mural Asks Big Questions
Bookstores We Love: The Book Cellar
Last night, Chicagoist sat down to watch the premiere of “My Boys” on TBS. As the show is supposed to take place in Chicago, we figured it’d be worth a look to see if it captures the spirit of the city and whether it’s worth your time. On both counts, the answer is “not really.”
“Sex and the City” is the show that “My Boys” gets compared to the most, as it is ostensibly about a single girl looking for love (Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter P.J.), who’s prone to unnecessary voiceovers and has a close group of friends (the aforementioned “boys”). But it’s the template created by “How I Met Your Mother” that the writers are going for here. Yet a weak lead, tired metaphors that thematically link sports to dating and a lack of supporting character development makes “My Boys” fail where “HIMYM” succeeds.
The most interesting aspect of P.J. is her “guyness,” but it’s undercut by an unrealistic script that tells us one thing, but shows us another. “The cute girl who likes sports” is more clichéd than fresh at this point, and as much as everyone struggles with “the dating thing,” no one with this many guy friends would be so clueless about men. As forthright as P.J. is in telling Bobby — a Tribune sportswriter and the object of her affections — what she wants in the bedroom, she’s apparently unable to take two seconds to tell him that she’s interested in something more. A more compelling show would be to see the difficulties that a smart, confident woman has when looking for love in a world with romantic miscreants like Bobby. (Also, a woman like P.J. would never coin the phrase “The Girl Booty Call,” wherein a woman calls a guy late at night because she has emotional needs. It’s called a booty call for a reason.)
As for the “boys” of the title, this is the only group of close friends that doesn’t constantly share in-jokes or riff off each other. A short bit late in the 2nd episode — with Jim Gaffigan as P.J.’s brother ruling on whether Mike is “allowed” to ask out a girl that Kenny met once for coffee — worked, and the show needs more of these moments. Incidentally, we had to go to the TBS website to remember everyone’s name. The only characters that are fleshed out in any way are more caricatures than anything else (Rock DJ Guy, Unhappily Married Guy, Schlubby Bald Guy).
Unfortunately, the character of Chicago was underdeveloped as well. We counted about 15 local touches over two episodes from the obvious scenery (shots of Wrigley) to sly name-drops (a mumbled reference to Toon's). Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t (seriously, Lord and Taylor?). With a sitcom budget, no one should expect the Chicago of “My Boys” to reflect the real deal. But again: “HIMYM” works because even though their version of New York doesn’t resemble the actual New York, you still get enough of a sense of the world around them for it to ring true.
The subtle touches of “My Boys” are the ones that give it a sense of place; Crowley’s Tavern — the bar all the characters hang out in — is a Sluggers/Guthrie’s hybrid (with an unfortunate Applebee’s sheen), and the characters at least dress like the people we see waiting for the bus, although we have yet to meet anyone who wears jackets here in the summer. But there’s no way P.J. would be able to afford her cavernous, six-room, North Side apartment on her beat writer salary.
If the idea of seeing a character wearing a Metro T-shirt in a world that apparently begins and ends with the Chicago Cubs appeals to you, set your TiVo for “My Boys” on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. But your time would be better spent hanging out with your real-life counterparts that this show desperately wants to imitate.
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Here's another review:
http://beachwoodreporter.com/
Maybe it's because the bar for Chicago sitcoms has been set so low, but I thought the show was OK. It had its moments and, sure, it had its problems (ostensibly, it takes place in the summer, but they're watching a Bears game in one of the early scenes; heading to the Billy Goat from Wrigley seems like a long trip for a grilled cheese; and the Metro and Cubs T-shirts were too brand new to give 'em any on-location cred), but I thought the lead girl, Jordana Spiro, had a winning screen personality. Two of them, in fact.
I didn't have the space or the desire to list all the inconsistencies. Here's another one: the Pizza Castle they ordered from? There is one, but it's way down on 59th St. and I don't think anyone from Wrigleyville would be ordering pizza from there. Unless they picked a name at random that just happens to exist.
Also, the Cubs and Bears play at the same time?
Yup, I'm kinda glad I sat this one out. From what you wrote, it sounds like a midly pleasant snoozefest.
Incidentally, do you know what my litmus test these days for what a good new show is? If I'd actually rather watch IT than whatever happens to be on ME TV. By that standard, "30 Rock" is good show. I still watch it, and it still makes me laugh.
There's a good month of overlap between the MLB and NFL seasons, but it looked like a mistake to me—kind of like the writers saying to each other "Hey, people in Chicago love the Bears. This show takes place in Chicago. We need to have a scene where they're excited about the Bears." Kind of a cheap attempt to garner cred.
But to be fair, the show has to appeal to people across the country to get picked up, so the stupid shit I find to complain about probably doesn't make a lick of difference to the producers. Maybe it'll get more obscure and accurate if the show develops a following.
I saw an ad for this on a bus shelter this morning. I seriously thought this was a show about a young teenaged girl. The picture of the main actress makes her look like she's about 16 years old.
Just another show I'll never see.
I understand that this blog is about Chicago but the review of this and "Happy Hour" seem to be taking it a little too seriously. Granted, i've never seen either of these shows b/c frankly, they look like every other sitcom about young, witty, urban-dwelling people with good jobs who wear layered t-shirts and have overly-groomed 5 o'clock shadows. What is this "character of Chicago" of which you speak and how is it underdeveloped? In my opintion, 15 mentions across 44 minutes of television sounds like trying too hard.
Sitcoms always take place in fantasy versions of real places which is how they all afford those unrealistically big apartments and wardrobes. Any sitcom that tried to capture the "real" lives of young people hanging out in bars or their crappy apartments in any major city would be so unbelievalby depressing so as to make the average viewer want to paint their crappy apartments with the contents of their skulls. TBS wants a broad an audience as possible, not just a handful of people in the Chicago metropolitan area who'll need to change their undies b/c someone on a Los Angeles sound stage is drinking a Goose Island...it is afterall a TV show, not a paid advertisment by the tourism board of Chicago.
Jeff, I agree. She looks like Amanda Bynes to me, so it's kind of a shock when you hear her voice, which has this Kathleen Turner-esque growl to it.
Dustin, if there were shows that featured Chicago as much as L.A. and NYC then maybe I wouldn't care so much. But it seems like every recent show featuring Chicago (save for "Prison Break" which left after the 1st season) sucks beyond the telling of it. The show doesn't want to be just another retread of what you describe, it wants to give you a specific sense of these characters and their environment. And it just fails.
Mr Smith: You are seriously annoyed that TV doesn't get Chicago right (whatever that means), or, I guess, that Chicago is under-represented on TV fictions?
Uh, ok.
I find it amusing how many people in Chicago have an inferiority complex when it comes to these types of meaningless things.
Not under-, just poorly. And apparently the phenomenon means enough for it to evoke comment from both myself and you, sir.
how hard can it be to make a sitcom based in chicago seem authentic? why do producers seem to just throw darts at random chicago institutions and expect things to make sense? granted, as previously stated, the show isn't just for us; it has to appeal to the entire nation. but when it's left up to NY or LA boneheads, then there's no possibility of an accurate portrayal. they're trying to appeal to flyover country...by showing the biggest city in that area that they don't really give a shit. no wonder these shows fail. that, and they're just not fucking funny.
"Production" makes it very difficult to get the above mentioned details right. I can tell you that most of the "real" Chicago references were taken out in early versions of the scripts...because the TBS legal department threw them out. (It's all about $. Legal does not want to pay for references that people outside of Chicago do not get.) And...the TBS budget is much smaller than CBS (HIMYM), so there's no room for error.
The Pizza Castle ref was a bit of a mistake: A made up name...that just so happened to match the Southside locale. Trust me, four of the writers on this show are from Chicago and know the area around Wrigley. And the length of the trek to the Billy Goat. Long story short: You have to stay away from a ton of real names for budget reasons.
The bar is "inspired" by Guthrie's, but built like an Applebee's because you need tons of room for the cameras and the lights. Ditto for the apartment near Toon's.
'Nuff said re: this obvious defense of production minutiae.
IT'S A FREAKING SITCOM, for godsakes.
The only "phenomenon" I care about is that some people attach such importance to it, as though a sitcom that may or may not last a season on cable means anything to Chicago's image; reputation; or future.
For the love of all that is semi-holy, give a rat's butt about something more important than this trivia.
Vise, I know you have no love for "low" culture, but why must you chastise those who think it's as valuable an examination of who we are and how others see us as any book, painting or theatrical production?
BudMan, thanks for the info. It's interesting to learn how financials affect the creative process.
Thank you, Mr. Smith. Financials ALWAYS have an effect on the process, but it's also fun to work around it. I can also tell you that the Metro tee WAS distressed - in a batch of other shirts - to the tune of a $100. It sucks that it doesn't look totally worn in, but at least we're pushing the Metro.
I "chastise," Mr Smith, because this Red Eye mentality of caring so much about trash culture is one reason our culture is superficial and trivial. Yeah, I've read far too much Postman, Huxley, Orwell and the like, but still. Are you going to argue that a sitcom, at least the general form, is as important and satisfying and original as a painting or theater or literature? Good luck with that one.
Frankly, nearly all sitcoms are generic, and little that's on TV gets any location right--ER, for instance, can be pretty laughable, and I'm sure NY- or LA-centered shows have taken outrageous liberties with those cities (the characters on Friends really lived in that apartment, and hardly ever saw non-white people? Yeah, right). Complaining about it, and caring about it, is about as valuable and insightful as saying it tends to be cold in January in Chicago. (Yes, there are expections, and yes, there is decent TV, but I'm talking in general terms. Based on your review, I doubt this show qualifies as the relatively rare example of notable TV.)
I don't understand why our age group dwells so much in bad TV culture, and cares so much about the details of a bad sitcom. Yes, most of us drowned in TV as kids--we couldn't escape it--but that doesn't mean we have to be trapped by the TV mindset--which, if you believe some of the above writers, is truly harmful to our society, our civic and intellectual cutlures especially.
ER was able to use the Chicago setting effectively, or at least they did when it came on the air 25 years ago. They'd have a scene on the L, or at the lakefront, or in the Loop, and it was enough to capture the city vibe, without seeming like a blatant name drop.
This show seems like it's pulling all the Chicago cliches: Bears, check, Cubs, check, Billy Goat, check.
Looks like Vise77 needs to watch "Sullivan's Travels". Sometimes it's just about having a laugh. Also, it's not the medium you work in, it's what you work in the medium.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do NOT work on this show or for it. I do, however, know the creator, several writers and several of the actors.
Trust me when I say this: the folks that work on this show LOVE LOVE LOVE Chicago and would love nothing more than to be there year round. This show was made with as much profound respect for Chicago as you can get. These are folks that get the MLB package so they can TiVO and watch the entire season of Cubs baseball. These are people that would love nothing more than to get every single reference to Chicago absolutely perfect, but like someone said it is all about the legal issues, money and, sometimes just not wanting to deal with the hassle.
Trust me: I get it. I don't watch HEROES because they screwed up an X-Men reference early on (that is kind of a joke, kind of not).
Oh and sometimes are cliches because they're true: 3 of my roommates from College were from Chicago and when I went to visit, where did they take me? Wrigleyville, Billy Goat, Watertower, etc... man, was their tour cliched, they must have secretly hated Chicago.
When I saw the characters playing Jenga in "Crowley's", you could tell that someone (or someones) working on the show loved and knew Chicago because it had to have been someone who knew Guthrie's. And as much as the characterizations come across as kinda flat, you get brief glimpses into the kinds of multi-dimensional people they're intended to reflect.
Whether the reasons are financial or the result of too many notes from the network, that love and those multiple dimensions just aren't coming through on-screen.
I haven't yet seen this show, but I love Chicago and always enjoy it when a TV show or movie is supposed to be set here. The inconsistencies don't bother me too much. It's kind of fun to note them just because people who don't live here or know the city wouldn't really see them.
Trash culture is my happiness.
OK - I'm just going to come right out and say it for everyone else here who has been thinking it:
Vise? SHUT UP.
God. I don't write for the site anymore and I'm almost glad. Because no doubt you'd spend some of your incredibly valuable time picking apart anything I wrote. For someone who so obviously fancies himself an arbiter of taste, you spend an awful lot of your time pontificating at a blog whose writers - and readers - you clearly disdain. If your goal is convert, you get more flies with honey, my long-winded friend.
God forbid, Erin, that not everything is in sound-bite form.
Why are people so senstive when you call trash trash? Funny.
Vise, I don't think they're sensitive to the sentiment so much as the condescending way in which you express it. We can have a healthy disagreement about the relative merits of pop vs. other kinds of culture, but name dropping your favorite authors and drawing sweeping conclusions about the values of people you don't know tends to go over poorly.
Mr. Smith: The entire cast spent an evening in Guthrie's in early October...after a nice dinner at Mia Francesca.
maybe she should have been a writer for the Trib. I would never be interested in anything having to do with the suntimes.
i think all forms of art are important at different times for different reasons. if we start entirely dismissing sitcoms and television because it's "trash," and "lowbrow," i think we will be missing real opportunity for societal discourse. i think that sometimes it is in the media of the lowest common denominator that there is the most insightful commentary on what is really being said or not said.
let's face it, women are still the ones doing laundry in all the commercials. and to just dismiss television out of hand as something that isn't worth watching or discussing i think is a mistake.
as far as chicago inferiority complexes? i'll cop to one sometimes. but i think it stems from 1. wanting details to be right (it saddened me that they didn't actually show "CTA" on the buses in 'stranger than fiction') and 2. being really proud and excited of all the great things about my city. i was talking to my landlord's wife yesterday and she remarked, "if it weren't for the cold, you couldn't keep people away from here."
and i just don't think people realize how true that is.
I'm with vise77 the writers on this blog bitch about everything. They are also consistently negative and then get mad when people don't agree with their above it all comments.
RE: dustin's post [7]
"Any sitcom that tried to capture the 'real' lives of young people hanging out in bars or their crappy apartments in any major city would be so unbelievalby depressing so as to make the average viewer want to paint their crappy apartments with the contents of their skulls."
Please watch "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia."
It's exactly what you wrote and it's amazingly hilarious.
As for the rest of you yapping back and forth, I got nothing for you. Except, to lighten the mood, have you ever seen Jim Gaffigan's bit about manatees? That's comedy.
Now, can somebody please stop spreading the awful stomach flu that's going around our real-life city?!?