TVSquad

Looking in from the outside, you might think that Alec Baldwin has the tiger by the tail. He's the star of a critically acclaimed television show. He's winning awards for his work. And, while he's no longer landing those leading man roles in films, over the last few years he's added several good supporting roles to his long list of credits. Apparently, those are not the makings of a happy-go-lucky life.

There is an interesting profile of Baldwin on The New Yorker's website. In a long and thorough piece, Ian Parker talks with Baldwin about his career, his family, mistakes that were made, and things that might have been. Throughout the piece, it becomes clear that he is anything but satisfied. They talk a lot about the film business, and the decisions that shaped the direction of that part of his career. For our purposes here though, the more interesting bits are the discussions of 30 Rock. They include a quote that actually shocked me. Not so much for the sentiment, but for the fact that anyone, even Alec Baldwin, would say it in print. I'll tuck it away after the jump for those of you that have an aversion to f-bombs.

I've been a nut about game shows ever since I was a kid (the good ones - I don't want to be bothered with something like Deal Or No Deal or Moment of Truth), and I've specifically been intrigued by the game show scandals of the 1950s. Game shows were really hot then - the reality shows of the 50s, really; several of them were on the air, they talked about and written about a lot, etc. - and several got caught in a cheating scandal, including Twenty-One, Dotto, and The $64,000 Question. The Twenty-One scandal was made into the Robert Redford movie Quiz Show, but I've always wanted to hear an in-depth explanation of what happened from Charles Van Doren, the teacher-turned-game show winner at the heart of the scandal (that's him on the right in the pic, with challenger Vivienne Nearing and host Jack Barry). Now Van Doren has opened up to The New Yorker in a piece that's long but well worth reading.

Of all the shows on TV, the last one I ever expected to see reviewed in the pages of The New Yorker was Family Guy. Not that the show doesn't have any sophisticated humor; it's just that the sophistication is buried so deep under fart jokes and silly flashbacks that I figured it would never enter The New Yorker's radar screens. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my copy of the lastest issue this afternoon and saw this positive review by Nancy Franklin (the review also mentions American Dad, largely in negative terms. Franklin even manages to squeeze in a mention of Drawn Together, which she liked, sort of).

The review mostly summarizes what most Family Guy fans already know about the show: it's cancellation, it's popularity on DVD and Adult Swim, and the show's resurrection. But you have to remember that Franklin needs to go back over this well-tred ground so the readers -- who probably don't overlap too much with the show's fans -- have an idea of what the show's about. Most interesting is the lead paragraph, where Franklin takes a roundabout road to saying how mostly men make cartoons because we were never trained to be Nice and Proper like women were.

Also funny are the fluffy character descriptions, like when Franklin characterizes Stewie as "foppish and maniacal, and creepily pansexual." Really. I kinda had a feeling Stewie was foppish. But I never would have pegged him as pansexual. I think.