Liars and Saints

 Watching "Heated Rivalry," I can't help but think of "The Outs," a better gay series. In "The Outs," two young men meet and start dating. They both begin to get their respective acts together. The most moving scene has one of the guys getting ready for a job interview. He recalls an episode just outside the subway; as he had packed his backpack, he had omitted his stash of drugs, because he had recently started giving actual thought to his choices. (This is a function of being in a healthy relationship.) At the subway turnstile, cops were checking bags. The young man saw that his day--in fact, his life--could have taken a bad turn. But it didn't. This is just a small moment between two characters, but it feels like real life. Someone with a laptop computer gave careful consideration to this scene. In another interlude, a young man is living in Brooklyn with a roommate he doesn't really know. Topics for chit-chat are banal: a gross colleague wh...

  Like most of the world, I’m delighted by Alan Cumming. I was happy to purchase his new memoir.   Cumming grew up on stormy seas, somewhere in Scotland, and he won independence from his abusive father. Cumming later confronted his father with memories of years of mistreatment, and Cumming, Sr., froze up; the most that came from this confrontation was a shrug and an  I don’t know what you’re talking about .   But: no matter. Alan Cumming began a major film career, with  Circle of Friends ,  Romy and Michele , and  Emma.  Sam Mendes thought he wanted to revive “Cabaret,” with a new emphasis on seediness, and Alan Cumming signed on.   The Broadway revival of “Cabaret” was such a smash, Lauren Bacall attended. Bacall cornered Cumming afterward and said, “You. Are. A. Star.” When Liza Minnelli made her pilgrimage, Cumming had the task of shepherding Minnelli in front of the Broadway crowd. And Cumming was so nervous during his rushed Tony accepta...

We were too damn tired to spend a great deal of time on the pumpkins this year. But here they are. Next year, I hope to take notes from Gris Grimly and the book "Ten Spooky Pumpkins"; specifically, I hope to make a pumpkin with circular (not triangular) eyes. A little treat after pumpkin-carving was the first episode of Alan Cumming's "Instinct"; the script was really awful and sometimes incomprehensible, and Cumming seemed to know this, and he was always just walking the line between Serious Performance and Total Campiness. Delightful. For example, watch how Cumming seems to address the camera, directly, when he tells Whoopi Goldberg: "There might be poison in your champagne!" Small pleasures....

I promise this will be my final "Good Wife" post. I watched most of Season Five--the fabled season, the one where "Good Wife" regained its momentum--and I agree with the world that "The Last Call" is a special hour. Basically, Season Five chugs along like a freight train, and it reaches maximum speed shortly after Will's death--and then the train slows down a bit (and then, in Seasons Six and Seven, the train just melts into a puddle of mush). The brilliant thing about "The Last Call" is its subversive approach to death. The writers take time to imagine, in depth, what a "day after" would resemble for each of the major characters, and the many smart decisions are surprising and memorable: *Eli, political genius, marches right toward his next speech. He forgets that the teleprompter is not his friend, so he finds himself cracking jokes about "my nervous husband" and "the man I spend my bed with." *Kalinda, beloved...