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Messing With Chick Lit!! What Make The Critics Of USA’s THE STARTER WIFE??
SPOILER ALERT !!
I am – Hercules!!
"The Starter Wife" is a six-hour miniseries about a movie producer's ex-wife (Debra Messing) who tries to love again. It’s based on the popular 2005 novel by Gigi Levangie Glazer, herself now the ex-wife of a movie producer. USA is making a marketing push, but what say the critics?
Variety says:
… as stitched together into a six-hour USA miniseries, the whole exercise feels like a nonstarter. The two-hour premiere (to be followed by four weekly installments) is neither trashy enough to qualify as a Jackie Collins-type guilty pleasure nor hip enough to break ground sifting through Hollywood's dirty, overpriced lingerie …
The Hollywood Reporter says:
… "Wife" is entertaining and bitingly irreverent, at once sweet and sour. It ropes you in because Messing is so adept at making us like her neurotic personage. If there is an abiding problem with the mini (and this isn't insignificant), it's that it actually is based on something of a flawed premise. It isn't a riches-to-rags story so much as a riches-to-riches. …
The Los Angeles Times says:
… Cast within an inch of its life and full of terrific Hollywood tear-downs, "The Starter Wife" tries to be good clean mean-spirited fun. For the most part it succeeds, but the chick-lit trend of really sticking it to rich women remains disturbing in its sexism and classism. … the character, narcissistic and grasping, gives us little to love. …
The Chicago Tribune says:
… an enjoyable chick-lit concoction … As adapted by USA, it’s the TV equivalent to a satisfying, entirely inconsequential beach read. …
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says:
… The essence of chick lit is well covered here -- fabulous woman and friends get toppled by circumstance, tumble down the hill together and land on the solid ground of True Selfhood. The formula for a decent, quick read. Television requires a different mix of stimulants absent in USA's muddled version. A sense of destination, solid plot progression and firmly developed story lines would all be nice. Director Jon Avnet ("Fried Green Tomatoes") should know that by now.
…
The Boston Herald says:
… Messing is not talented enough to carry off the role of Hollywood wife Molly Kagan … could be the love child of “Sex and the City” and “Will & Grace,” but the satire is so broad, it loses its edge.
USA Today says:
… The Starter Wife is really little more than a summer read brought to somewhat overstuffed life. Still, if it's fluff, it's well-made, well-cast fluff that marks an entertaining union of two oft-dismissed genres: chick lit and TV movies. Maybe they were always meant to wed and we just never noticed. …
9 p.m. Thursday. USA.
The Unaired 73-Minute Pilot!!
50 Extended and Deleted Scenes!!
Loads Of Featurettes!!
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i'm there!
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i'm really not, but i know the guy who is.
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And one year some friends and I got together for an old fashioned Chinese restaurant Thanksgiving dinner. As the food arrived and was placed on the table I turned to The Poozer and said "hey, what's the name of that show about the gay guy living with the Jewish redhead, Will and something...?" and he said "Grace" so I announced to the table "Okay, he said it, now let's eat."
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That's a pretty gay story
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Geez, my wife asked me to set the tivo for this show...I love her, but our tastes in entertainment take WIDE forks in the roads.
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I LOVE redheads, absoutly love redheads, I think it goes back to my exposure to tons of John Hughes movies as an impressionable lad and seeing Molly Ringwald, I don't know. But I CANNOT stand Debra Messing. Didn't like her on Ned and Stacey, didn't like her in Will and Grace (didn't like that show at all...and what is up with Debra Messing and sitcoms that go blank and blank??), didn't like her in the jermey Sisto Jesus miniseries, her Mary Magdalene was neighter slutty enough nor innocent enough, she just was there, so there is a very good chance that I WON'T be catching this.
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her Mary Magdalen was NEITHER slutty enough or innocent enoughalso i don't subscribe to the belief that MM was a whore, that's not what the Bible says, that was what Pope Gregory the something or othr decleared once upon a time, however the Jesus mini insisited on showing MM as a whore (as has most every other single Jesus movie ever made) thus my statement about her niether being slutty or innocent enough
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There isn't anything remotely Cool about this.
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So I'm gonna check it out with her. I think Messing is pretty hot...so looks to be a lot better than a lot of the other stuff my girlfriend tries to get me to watch.
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I opened it up out of sheer curiosity, and it had a bunch of frilly sun dresses and Coach handbags in it. I then checked the packing slip and found it was addressed to Hercamina T. Strong. I was confused for about 10 seconds, until I remembered that you posted this Talkback, and then I remembered you were becoming a woman and everything became clear.
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There is no shame in being female.
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Too true, Herc. Too true.
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Didn't Fanny Flagg write Fried Green Tomatos?
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I was on the Contact page here one day and they had Herc's name listed as being rory...tkae it for what you will
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According to Us Weekly, they tried to make her wear falsies in Will & Grace, but she held her ground. Let's hear it for the flat girls! Hey, I read it at the doctor's office.
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At least Rory Calhoun better hope so. In any case, Herc, just teasing you. I could care less if you're a man or a woman as long as your writing style remains the same.
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At least Rory Calhoun better hope so. In any case, Herc, just teasing you. I could care less if you're a man or a woman as long as your writing style remains the same.
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First off...Fried Green Tomatos was a book first by Fannie Flagg. She also wrote the screenplay. This has the same DIRECTOR as FGT. Now, one question, why isn't this on LIFETIME? As a woman, let me say that chicklit is the suck.
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Anything written by a woman? Books with women as the main characters? Harlequin romances? I am reading George Eliot's Middlemarch right now. Is that "Chick Lit"? If so, bring me more! I love Jane Austen. I that "Chick Lit"? What about Joyce Carol Oates? Gertrude Stein? I don't know. Publishing company marketing terms confuse and frighten me.
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Hey Herc you could have mentioned
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Herc failed to mentioned Miranda Otto was a cast member playing one of Messing's friends. I would have watched just for her!
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way to propagate sexist gender roles. "chick lit..." read some Judith Butler or the Feminine Mystique.
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Great. Another narcissistic, do-nothing housewife does nothing. Sounds like I'd want to slap the bitch upside the head in the first ten minutes, which is maybe what the studio is going for.
Debra Messing is pretty good actress, in my opinion, but another billionaire, do-nothing wife whining about billionaire, do-nothing wife problems makes me sick. Fuck you, bitch, I say.
I'll pass.
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