By the time you read this, I will be ensconced in Los Angeles. For a week or so I will be held hostage by the U.S. networks as they unfurl their new fall series. Executives, actors, writers and producers turn up, on the hour, every hour, day after day, to talk up these shows. I pay attention. This is the way it is.
The regular visit to the centre of the entertainment racket is always educational and deeply instructive. The location is a nice hotel in Beverly Hills and, daily, a vast army of pretty people teem about in the building. The execs, the actors and the publicists are there on business. The point of everything is to make every new show appear hot, hot, hot.
Not all the shows are good. This is the reality. Some are mere confections cooked up to fill a hole in a schedule or to do a favour for somebody who needs favouring, with some distant and murky payoff in mind. It's the prettiness though, that can be unnerving. Once, a few years ago, I stood at the back of a reception for daytime TV - the afternoon soaps, mostly - and gazed at the throng. The Canadian critic standing beside me said, "I've never felt so ugly!" I looked around again. And gently reprimanded her. "They are all cookie-cutter pretty," I said. "There is nobody here who is genuinely beautiful." There was a pause. "Yeah, I guess," she said, deeply doubtful about the veracity of what I'd said.
This brings me to Lady Gaga. Eventually, the reason may become clear. Lady Gaga is on The View (ABC, CTV, 11 a.m.) today. As the ABC announcement declares, "The world renowned pop music superstar Lady Gaga will, for the first time, partake in the 'Hot Topics' discussion of ABC's The View, live, Monday, August 1. As previously announced, Gaga will also perform her smash hit single You and I on piano."
Phew! Is Lady Gaga actually a world-renowned pop-music superstar? I mean, I know she's way-famous and all, but is she actually famous throughout the world? Or is it that she's way-famous in an American, L.A.-centric way?
Lady Gaga has been all over TV recently. She was on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night. She goofed around, did a spoof of a baby-wear clothing line that she's not, in reality, launching, and performed on the street outside, closing down a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard for a while. During the shindig, Gaga thanked Kimmel for letting her do her first late-night TV performance in 2008. She thanked him for "letting the really weird girl sing."
I have no idea what "hop topic" Lady Gaga will tackle on The View. I have no idea where she stands on issues of the day, as those issues might be chosen by The View. I've no idea what she stands for, if anything. I do know that she characterizes her vast fan following as an army of "outsiders" and that she has always has a strong following among gay men. A good deal of the persona she has crafted for herself is rooted in the idea of the freak who finally finds acceptance in the mainstream. In many ways, she is a very New York-showbizzy figure. She is, I gather, relentless in promoting the idea that she is not pretty in any cookie-cutter sense of pretty, but she fights for acceptance of her looks, her clothes and general weirdness.
So, what the heck is she doing on TV all the time? The ominous thought arises that her blitz of TV appearances is about furthering her fame and notoriety in the most conformist branch of the entertainment industry - television.
Watching superstardom unfold is a truly bizarre experience these days. You can be an obscure performer and gain notoriety via Twitter. Thanks to YouTube, you can be both famous and penniless. In the case of Gaga, the glory of her success has been in the vague sense that she's an outsider who beat the odds. But not all of it feels right. So, for instance, her embrace of gay culture can seem perverse. Most gay people don't consider themselves to be the "freaks and outsiders" that Gaga talks and sings about. They are mainstream and want to be so.
Maybe Gaga's recent concentration on television is part of adapting to this reality - leaving behind, or outgrowing, the outsider shtick and pragmatically seeking the approval of the conformists.
I don't know the answers. But I do know this - the television business tends toward conventionality, and the business believes in orthodoxies. The pleasure of covering it is finding the unconventional, the unorthodox. And that's what I'll be looking for this week in L.A. Stick with me.
Check local listings.