'Commander' Geena Davis on Leave

Thursday, February 02, 2006

'Commander in Chief' taking a break

Despite pretty much every bit of hype they could hope for, Geena Davis and the cast of "Commander in Chief" are going off the air for at least the next six weeks in favor of a sitcom. The network is saying it will air the final four episodes of the season in April, but I wouldn't bet on it if its replacement has decent ratings.

To be blunt, the show is awful. The plot is wholly unbelievable and the stories are painfully contrived. Geena Davis may have won a Golden Globe for her performance, but awards in Hollywood are often more about politics and social commentary than they are about the actual performances.

Davis was rewarded because the foreign press that awards the Golden Globes is in favor of Hilary Clinton for president in 2008. The show always has been an obvious stalking horse for her upcoming candidacy, and so Davis was unfairly given an award she didn't really deserve because they liked the role she was given and what it stood for. It had little or nothing to do with her actual performance in it - they probably would have given the award to a trained monkey in the same role if they thought they could get away with it, so its unsurprising that the show is faltering so badly.

(Don't even get me started on the gay cowboy fantasy movie, 'Brokeback Mountain,' and how much undeserved attention for awards it has gotten because its "message" is so popular in Hollywood despite the plot being so completely unbelievable to anyone who hasn't always harbored a hidden desire for the uber-masculine Marlboro Man to be a closeted homosexual.)

But back to the point...

I initially tried to watch the show, and as I posted here right after that failed attempt, I didn't think it would last the full season because it was so bad. ABC tried to fix it by giving control of the show over to Steven Bochco, but even he couldn't fix the mess. Lo and behold, it hasn't lasted the full season despite the best attempts of the Hollywood press to foist it and its message onto the American public.

Good riddance to bad rubbish...Entertainment is always better when it's pure entertainment where any "message" is incidental to the story. When the message IS the story, it stops being entertainment and becomes propaganda and that's never a good foundation for anything built to last.