The New York Times is a hotbed of awesomeness this week. Where do they come up with this great stuff?
From a joint review of memoirs from Dick Van Dyke and Barbara Eden:
As much as television has changed in 50 years, you can trace “30 Rock” directly back through “Mary Tyler Moore” to “The Dick Van Dyke Show”: beneath its oh-so-nuanced emotional firewall and the sophisticated embrace-rejection tango with cynicism, there’s at least as much insulation from the harsher facts of show business and personal misery as when Van Dyke was trading writers’-room one-liners with Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam. ... “I Dream of Jeannie” is certainly far more anachronistic, yet its infantilism is somehow invincible, imperturbable, timeless.
The joke of the Jeannies and Gilligans is on all of us who even as smart-aleck kids thought they were destined for the dustbin of television. Au contraire: Jeannie long ago transcended the mundane laws of time and space and taste, like Dalí or Bettie Page or Paul Lynde sitting catbird-like in the center square of eternity.
"Sophisticated embrace-rejection tango..." and that last bit throwing Jeannie in with Salvador Dalí, Bettie Page and Paul Lynde? Bless your cotton socks, Grey Lady.
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