My Boys

Everyone I know is sipping eggnog and playing with edible body paint or watching DVDs or something. I am indeed feeling sorry for myself having to work. I never worked in this week when I had a job. But now...

I know. I know. You don't care. Nor should you. Yes. I'm complaining about having work. It's bad form.

Bite me.

So, TV. Thanks to a l'il TBS mini-marathon this week, I've finally gotten the chance to see My Boys. I tuned in mainly because of the incandescent Jim Gaffigan, of course. But the lead, Jordana Spiro, was apparently a big deal in that Must Love Dogs movie. I will take this as read since, of course, I've never seen the movie. Because I have a penis.

Spiro plays, in a nice twist, the real male fantasy woman:

The sexy, sports-loving tomboy who gets along (for the most part) better with men than women, and who has a gaggle of male friends to prove it.

Just to drive the point home, they take it to a ridiculous extreme: she's a sports reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.

I know.

If Sex in the City was a female fantasy (and ladies, it was: it was your world as filtered through the sensibilities of gay men, though I'd argue the show became much more interesting in its later seasons when a group of very talented female writers took over), then My Boys is the straight male version. The guys are allowed to be guys, and care about guy stuff, and lo and behold, the centre of the piece is a woman who thinks vaguely the same way -- the kind of woman who maybe you would have as your best man -- and who would understand you wanting to hang with your friends every once in a while; but who's also female enough to set you straight and not judge your ex-fiancee just because that woman who liked to wear a Ramones shirt at 23 turned out different at 30.

Reviews have been good to middling, with Virginia Heffernan's NY Times damn-with-faint-praise take being pretty representative of the bunch:

Her posse of buddies — a ragtag gang that includes her brother and a bunch of other dudes — surround her without hitting on her, which seems at first implausible, but makes sense as her persona emerges as a mix of sisterly, collegial and abrasive.

There seem at first no pitfalls to this guy-friendly act. Isn’t this the kind of easygoing bonhomie that young men always say they want from women? No makeup, no pressure, just insults, beer, nights of poker, sports talk?

The show goes with that hypothesis only so far. On tonight’s episode, P J, after serious scheming, finds herself in bed with Bobby (Kyle Howard), another sports writer. She comes on strong, to say the least, and clearly doesn’t understand even the most elementary push-pull of seduction. Her odd behavior is almost startling — but she takes Bobby’s unease as evidence only that he has problems, and concludes that the whole world of dating is just badly rigged.

As she puts it in voice-over, speaking of sports: “Can you imagine what it would be like if the foul line was always moving? Or if sometime it was two strikes and you’re out?”

And then she wraps up, “If you’ve ever tried to date someone, you probably can.”

At this point, her character — a woman who is intrinsically rule-bound and who prefers well-built games to emotional improvisation — comes into sharp focus. Her boyish swaggering seems to reflect almost a cognitive impairment. But that impairment is absorbing, even attractive. P J may yet be a terrific character, and “My Boys” is certainly a charming knockoff.

See? Spiro's character doesn't get it and can't review emotional cues, so therefore it's a cognitive impairment. Because, you know...women's emotional intelligence never steers them wrong, ever, dude.

Sex in the City was based around the trope of Carrie discovering some sociological quirk and detailing it in her column. The quirk was usually external -- Women making sense of "the city" around them. That struck a chord with its audience.

What's nice about My Boys is that it's a more classic setup; it's internal and intrapersonal conflict at play - P.J. is wrong more than she's right, and most of the problems come from within the dynamic of the friendships, or the neurotic nature of P.J. herself (which, in itself, is a more male comedy trope than female. The neurotic male usually gets to be lovable. The neurotic female is usually portrayed in unflattering terms.) This gender reversal is actually what makes My Boys fresh.

But just like a lot of women don't like/get/trust women who have more guy friends than girls, I think you'll probably continue to see a lot of dismissal of My Boys by women who prefer, say, the documentary-like portrayal of relationships on Grey's Anatomy.

In the end, the show's as much a ripoff of Friends as SitC, and therefore, by my TV math, it's not really a ripoff of either.

And just to go a little further through the looking glass? Sex in the City, which gave women their voice, was brought to TV by a gay man, Darren Star. My Boys' creator is Betsy Thomas.

Take that, easy categorizing stereotypes!


What My Boys is, is well written and familiar, peopled with a truly likable cast of characters (would that anyone on The Class was this likable.) And it's a little shaggy, too.

Not everything works.

The Sex-In-The-City/Grey's Anatomy voiceover thing needs to be taken out behind the building and given the Old Yeller. But considering the fact that TBS is new to the original programming game, this is a pretty impressive first entry. Considering that there are so few great sitcoms right now, you could do a whole lot worse than spend time with My Boys. It's a solid base hit. A double, with a good chance of stealing third down the line.

(Part of the reason I crashed together this review today when I should be doing something else is that the last two eps in Season 1 run tonight at 10pm on TBS. Give it a look and let me know what you think.)