|
Well, I'll tell you something. When we started this site, back in 1999, we certainly never thought we'd be auditing Teri Hatcher's fame.
We didn't think we'd have cause, since she was wandering around that post-Lois & Clark hinterland in those days, and that seemed about right: her fame certainly wasn't greater than it should have been, then, nor was it less than we would have liked. She'd had a popular show, it ended, she went away, and we didn't miss her. But we also never could have guessed that we'd have occasion to audit her fame: the odds were so against her ever doing anything that would even make us notice her again.
Just shy of the site's second birthday, Hatcher did bob up amid the showbiz flotsam, and we not only remembered that she existed, but asked the question of whether she was still a celebrity, or had morphed into a Personality. At that time (spring 2001), she was apparently starring with Ken Olin in a sitcom called Say Uncle that you've never heard of because it never aired. She was also "starring" with Howie Long in a spectacularly grating series of ads for Radio Shack. Remember? She was all skinny and ghoulish and smiling so hard (too hard), and you were at home, all, "No, Radio Shack, I'm not going to buy my desktop computer from one of the sad salesclerks you force to wear ties even though they can never match them to their faded burgundy or bottle-green buttondowns and saggy chinos and all end up looking like child molesters, and also, are Howie Long and Teri Hatcher married now?" Anyway, we generously decided that she wasn't a Personality...yet. However, we weren't terribly confident that a contract endorsing Proactiv skin-care products wasn't in her immediate future.
How, how could we have predicted how aggressively Desperate Housewives would ravish the nation, gripping America in its dramedic thrall? And even if we had guessed that a contentious election year was the perfect time to launch a supremely unsubtle un-satire on America's suburbs and their seedy underbellies, Teri Hatcher wasn't even supposed to be there that day: the role of Susan Mayer was offered to Sela Ward first -- and if Sela Ward didn't know what a huge hit it was going to be after reading the pilot script, what chance did we have?
So Teri Hatcher landed on the show that had all the nation abuzz (for a while), started winning acting awards for what ABC decided to position as a comedy (even though each episode is an un-sitcom-like hour long and, hello, kicked off with a woman's suicide) in order not to put its Gorgeous Ladies Of Wisteria up against real actors giving real performances (like Edie Falco in The Sopranos or even Allison Janney in The West Wing), yammered on about her amazing comeback and how her agent thought she was a nobody just a few short years ago (hey, just like we did!), started hogging all the attention the show was getting to herself (if that Vanity Fair cover story last spring was to be believed) and making at least some of her co-stars despise her (hey, maybe that's why the show's titular Housewives have had so few scenes together in the second season!), got a gig promoting Nice 'N Easy hair dye, wrote an "inspirational" autobiography (hey, just like Susan's trying to do on the show!), and got a Vanity Fair cover profile all her very own. And when TV stars are elevated to solo VF covers, I think we can all, in unison, raise a cry of protest, because THIS SHIT HAS GONE TOO FAR.
The show's success, we have to admit, is a particular sticking point with us, because it is so vastly overrated and overpraised, the sort of show that lazy TV viewers think is really smart (see also: Nip/Tuck) -- and even they are starting to notice in its second season that Emperor Marc Cherry has no clothes (if by "clothes," you mean "idea what to do with these characters" or "ability to tell a story" or "concept of basic chronology"). But it was a hit, merited or not, and Hatcher -- as the biggest star among the Housewives, the Courteney Cox to their The Rest Of The Cast Of Friends (In Its First Season) -- was entitled to reap some of the fame benefits. And while we're not thrilled to see her winning acting awards that should be going to actually funny performers, no one we like ever gets nominated in those categories, besides which there's possibly never been a better moment to come around to the notion that showbiz awards are worthless and meaningless than the week after Crash was won the Oscar for Best Picture. (Rrr.)
The problem with Hatcher is not that she became the flashpoint for all the attention lavished, wrongly, on this pretty average show; it's that the minute anyone in the press looks away for a second, she does the media equivalent of a pratfall just to get their attention focused back on her. Not the show: her. She has all kinds of tidbits on offer about how hard it is to date (now that she's divorced) when every man she meets acts like he already knows her; of what great friends she is with her daughter and what special, just-them things they do that she'd like us to know about; what men she's been mistakenly linked to, romantically. And while other stars -- who value such things as their privacy and dignity more highly than they do their celebrity -- adopt an attitude of pretending that gossip columnists don't exist, Hatcher personally took it upon herself (since she doesn't have a publicist) to correct an item about her that ran on MSNBC's The Scoop. (And, hey, check out that photo. The smile could not be bigger, but the eyes, they are so dead.) If we've all heard the story of what a has-been Hatcher was, maybe she needed to give us a newer, bigger reason to pay attention to her -- one that gave her public persona depth and tragedy -- and apparently she found one. Which is not to say that we doubt the story or that we don't abhor the man who victimized her...but when the photo accompanying the story is of her in her panties and appears on the cover of Vanity Fair, the timing of the disclosure just seems a bit convenient. And the fact that that item of Hatcheriana hit the press just the day before her announcement that she and Jon Tenney only had sex once a year when they were married, like...give the first, sad, meaningful one a chance to sink in before you start force-feeding us the wacky lack of sexcapades in your adulthood, woman, damn.
For some reason, America fell in love with Hatcher's character, Susan Mayer -- the sometimes capable, sometimes ditzy, devious yet good-hearted siren never more than a few moments away from her next attack of physical comedy. And for a very clear reason -- all of Hatcher's concerted efforts -- America has conflated that character with the one Hatcher presents as her actual identity. It's apparently not enough for Hatcher that the nation has become addicted to the hare-brained scrapes Susan lands herself in every week; Hatcher's also (apparently literally) working her ass off to addict the nation to her, and if she doesn't bewitch you at the drugstore with her Nice 'N Easy or her Star coverage, she'll try to get you at the bookstore, or over your morning coffee, or maybe, if the technology can catch up with her, project herself into your dreams. Teri Hatcher's already had fame once and lost it, which may be why she's digging her talons into it so hard this time around. Perhaps if we stopped paying her so much attention, her grip would loosen. Let's find out!
|
