Bravo’s weirdest reality competition show returned last night, and we’re confident that Season 2 will be every bit as bizarre as Season 1 — in fact, it may even be crazier. The highlights of this year’s cast include a woman who looks like a punk-rock Mayim Bialik and photographs her own sculptures of viscera, a street artist who’s always talking about how much time he spends in jail, and a rural Arkansas art teacher who (sigh) continued Work of Art‘s great clown-painting tradition. But by far the most fascinating character so far is also the show’s most established artist. “My name is The Sucklord,” is how he introduces himself — and if, like Simon de Pury, you dare to call him by his given name, he’ll correct you.
The oxymoronical has happened: Hipsters have gone mainstream. After two weeks on the air, it’s clear that NBC’s Two Broke Girls and Fox’s New Girl are ratings hits — attracting around 12 million and nine million viewers, respectively. What the sitcoms have in common is young female protagonists who (due to living in Williamsburg, baking cupcakes, and dating musicians or wearing glasses and being portrayed by Zooey Deschanel) could fairly be described as hipsters. And it looks like the trend is only just beginning: 25-year-old micro-budget filmmaker Lena Dunham is currently prepping a show called Girls for HBO, and MTV recently gave viewers a sneak preview of the pilot for the Wavves-scored I Just Want My Pants Back, about 20-something creative types living in Brooklyn. (Don’t worry if you missed out — it may well have been the worst half-hour of television we have ever watched.)
But just because they seem to be having a renaissance in 2011, that doesn’t mean hipsters are new to TV. In honor of an archetype whose roots stretch all the way back to the ’50s, we’ve compiled a retrospective of our favorite hipster television characters, from Happy Days to Portlandia. Since we figure you probably know about some incredibly obscure shows we wouldn’t have heard of, we hope you’ll assume your best elitist voice and tell us who we missed in the comments.
1. Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and The Backstreet Boys are among the many pop artists whose songs have recently been banned by China’s Ministry of Culture for containing “vulgar content.” The offending tracks must be removed from Chinese websites by September 15, or their owners will face prosecution. [via Guardian]
2. Here is your first look at Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatbsy in Australia.
3. We’re excited to see that Bravo has announced the 14 contestants who will be competing in the upcoming season of Work of Art; Simon de Pury, China Chow, and the rest of the gang will return to our lives on October 12 at 9pm. [via THR]
4. The lovely Charlotte Gainsbourg will release a new double album called Stage Whisper on November 7 that will be made up of live and unreleased studio material, and includes collaborations with Beck, Noah And The Whale, Conor O’Brien of Villagers, and Connan Mockasin. [via NME]
5. We know that people love sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but we can’t help but be surprised by the news that Keith Richards’s memoir Life has sold over 1 million copies since coming out last fall. [via USA Today]
If the Academy Awards are “The Gay Super Bowl,” then the day Bravo announces a new programming slate may be the queer-TV equivalent of Christmas. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the 2011-12 season will be the successful network’s most ambitious ever, featuring no fewer than 11 new series and an armload of second-season renewals (welcome back, Top Chef Just Desserts). After the jump, we rate each forthcoming show for its dramatic potential and camp appeal and try to predict whether it will be worth watching.
Work of Art finalist Peregrine Honig takes our intertwined obsessions with youth, fashion, and celebrity, and turns them into quirky, unsettling art.
Perhaps Kansas City’s best-known art-world export (thanks to her star turn on the Bravo reality show), Honig makes paintings, sculptural installations, and performative, fashion-based projects that combine folk-art inflections and a childlike love of color, cuteness, and baby animals with a worldly, satirical voice that’s not afraid to get profound, funny, and even scatological.
Bravo’s Work of Artis shaping up to be everything we had hoped. Don’t worry: We weren’t expecting great art on ridiculous deadlines, and we have an innate suspicion of any “artist” who would submit to such strange scrutiny. No, friends, we’re in it for the precious personalities and outrageous statements. (Also, we genuinely like Miles, the OCD screen printer who makes to-do lists in the bath tub and thinks he is too good to be on this show.) Last night, we saw a young woman fret over the difficulty of portraying an older woman, a map of interconnected dots that was supposed to be a portrait, and a painting of a Juggalo created by Work of Art‘s very own outsider artist. The episode’s ten most wonderful quotes, presented without comment, are after the jump.
Another week, another reality show is making its debut. With the new series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, Bravo introduces fine art to this millennium’s most popular genre of television. The show documents 14 artists, who range in age from 22 to 61 and preferred mediums include sculpture, painting, performance, photography, and architecture, as they compete for the grand prize of $100,000 and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. Almost identical to America’s Next Top Model or Project Runway, the hour-long episodes involve competitions, judges, immunity, and plenty of bickering between the contestants.
Dust off that out-of-print copy of “Cop Without a Badge” that you ordered on eBay and get ready.
Yes. That’s right. The Real Housewives of New Jersey — the greatest thing to come out of the Garden State since Garden State — are coming back for season 2 in 2010 reports Variety. No word yet on which Housewives will or will not be back to stir up trouble or whether or not Caroline’s son has opened up his car wash/strip club yet, but we expect that there will still be plenty of drama to go around. It’s also been announced that the next batch of Real Housewives will hail from our nation’s capital, Washington D.C. — though short of casting Michelle Obama or having some major Republican beard of a “House”-wife come on the show and call her co-star a “prostitution whore,” we doubt they’ll be able to hold a candle to our beloved Jersey Girls. Our favorite table-flipping moment after the jump.
On Attractive Qualities in Men: Metropolitan, Nick: “Rick Von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.”
NYC Prep, Taylor: “I’m, like, attracted to Sebastian. I like his hair.”
- The Faster Times compares dialogue from “WASP Woody Allen” Whit Stillman’s classic Metropolitan with the verbiage of the possibly morally and definitely grammatically bankrupt teens of Bravo’s NYC Prep. BTW, who watched last night? We hope the producers feel at least a little ashamed after they achieved their goal of convincingly insinuating that a 17-year-old girl did something slutty. Team Camille!
The only thing that surprises us about the upcoming debut of NYC Prep, Bravo’s not-so-thinly-veiled reality version of Gossip Girl, is that it took this long for them to roll out the idea. As early disciples of Josh Schwartz (btw, congrats on your wedding!) will recall, it was GG forerunner The O.C. that originally begat The Real Orange County: Laguna Beach, thus kicking off the “quasi-reality based on fiction” craze. Now the network that spawned The Real Housewives of [Insert Location] is poised to bring us a show that promises a peek into the lives of real Upper East Side prepsters and the public school outcasts that circle them. The show won’t premiere until June 23, but Hulu just put up a twenty-minute sneak peek, and we have to say, it’s good. Read More »
