COMMENTARY
‘The Philanthropist’ is mind-blowingly good
I’m used to being in a minority but this one’s really ridiculous. There are only a few of us left on earth, if we’re lucky. We could probably hold our annual meetings in a Mini Cooper.
I’m talking about surviving fans of the half-hour CBS TV show “Mr. Garlund,” a 13-week wonder which premiered in October of 1960 and was gone by mid-January 1961. Its name was changed to “The Garlund Touch” in November 1960.
It was about an obscenely rich but virtuous fellow whose office was in a skyscraper with his name on it and who decided that doing good was how he ought to spend his money and his even more valuable time.
In one episode, we discovered he was the fictional moneybags behind the real preservation of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers—probably the definitive American “outsider art”— when the philistine city council of Los Angeles wanted to tear it down because it was “unsafe.”
“Mr. Garlund” was kind of the short-lived activist version of “The Millionaire,” the wonderful 1950s fantasy about wheezy millionaire John Beresford Tipton and his habit of giving away $1 million a week to unsuspecting citizens just so that he could sit back and watch what they’d do with the dough. You never saw Tipton’s face. All you heard was his voice, which was evidence of a well-developed case of emphysema.
What I’m telling you then is that, in one sense, NBC’s “The Philanthropist” is as far from new as it could be, even though it’s the most creative new show to hit network TV in years. In another sense, of course, “The Philanthropist” is the most radical thing to hit prime time in ages.
It’s about that primal American fantasy—what would you do if you had all the money in the world?
It takes a very special kind of brain (aside from Lottery winners) to amass truly monumental wealth, obviously, and just as obviously that kind of brain is quite different from the kind that might be gifted at figuring out what to do with it all. Personally, I wasn’t as surprised as so many seemed to be when billionaire Warren Buffett—who owns this newspaper—decided he’d give a massive chunk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to put it to good use.
“The Philanthropist” is about multi-billionaire Teddy Rist (James Purefoy) who has lost his young son and, in the ensuing domestic despair, his wife. So, in our post- 9/11 world, he has gone way past “Mr. Garlund.” He travels the Third World himself, dispensing medicine to Nigerian villages and enabling kidney transplants for slum dwellers in Myanmar. Along the way, he uses his great wealth and knowledge of bureaucratic greed to grease whatever wheels need greasing.
So far, so good. But also, so far, so potentially ordinary.
Remember that at one point, NBC wanted to yank writer and co-creator Tom Fontana off this show to make it more James Bondish—to increase the show’s foreign derring-do quotient and decrease its moral dilemmas and probings into Third World brutality.
Well, surprise, surprise. Fontana stayed and the show is, so help me, mind-blowingly good. When is the last time you saw a TV show that cared to make a clear distinction between the oppressive military junta that wants to call a country Myanmar and the democratic liberationists who want to return to calling it Burma? And when is the last time you saw a show whose episode, on that very subject, ends with the despairing realization that doing good for one little girl—i. e. enabling her kidney transplant—might mean shoring up a whole system of institutional evil?
Allow me a one-word reaction to Wednesday’s episode’s conclusion—WOW. So let me just say this, have you seen this show at 10 p. m. Wednesday nights? Sorry to raise my voice, but please do, for your sake as well as television’s. I have no idea how long it will last in the great scheme of things but at the moment, it may not just be unique, it may be historic.
Which is something HBO’s potentially controversial “Hung” is definitely not, despite the fact that its pilot episode turned out to be so much milder and even more graceful than its “hook”—the prostitution of a prodigiously endowed high school basketball coach—portended. Though its raunch quotient is sure to increase, what we have here is just another variation on one of our favorite, if lesser, cable TV fantasies in the current recession. To wit, that it’s perfectly OK—and indeed sympathetic—when needy suburbanites go into crime. See, for that, Showtime’s “Weeds” and AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and their incursions into drug-selling and manufacture.
Our “Hung” hero has decided that it’s indeed a victimless crime if he prostitutes himself, with the pimping help of an ambitious and money-starved poet who happens to be a previously satisfied lover. The comedy of marketing sex, while struggling economically in middle- class suburbia, is what the show is about. It does indeed have possibilities.
Unfortunately, Showtime’s “Californication” and FX’s “Rescue Me” have gone so far in the direction of genuinely rollicking and ribald hilarity that “Hung,” despite the title and potentially gamy subject matter, is just a weekly provincial euphemism for the show its funky audience is dying to see.
That’s because the American truth in 2009 is this: Inside every good dirty joke, there is a group therapy session struggling to be let out.
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments