Max Blum, Toyota, and quiet acceptance

Jeffrey Songco's excellent piece about Toyota's "It's Reinvented" ad over at the Huffington Post really crystallized my thoughts about last night's Happy Endings. The ad, which features Toyota reinventing various mundane objects and making them better, has been praised as a step away from the heteronormative culture of advertising due to a moment early on concerning a "reinvented couch." The narrator describes the reinvented couch, which is made up of girls in bikinis, as a schlubby Everyman comes into his apartment, looking excited. The narrator then notes that the couch "also comes in guy," the camera cuts to the everyman, and he shrugs, as if to say "That works too."

Songco's excellent analysis notes that the real, radical message of the ad comes through not in the inclusion of the male reinvented couch, but in the guy's nonchalant reaction to it: "It's amazing to see Toyota's "It's Reinvented," not because it showed gay sex, but because it showed a reaction to gay sex as oh, cool, OK. In other words, the gay sex in "It's Reinvented" is a big deal because it isn't a big deal.

Songco's piece clarified, for me, why I liked this ad so much. It also clarified what I found so refreshing about last night's episode of Happy Endings, not to mention the series as a whole. Last night's episode, "The St. Valentine's Day Maxssacre," ended with the show's resident gay bro, Max, reuniting with his ex-boyfriend Grant in romantic scene that was the site of one incredibly hot kiss.

The great thing about the moment wasn't really the kiss itself - although it was an awesome kiss - but the fact that the kiss wasn't treated as anything more than a kiss. It wasn't endlessly hyped or controversial or the subject of self-aggrandizing promotion, and by being none of those things, it was more progressive than any other show on television.

That kind of quiet radicalism is par for the course for Happy Endings. The best element of the show is Max, and the best thing about Max is that he's, as Hulu said when they named him the best character of 2011, "just one of the guys - who happens to be one of the gays." Max is just a regular, well-rounded character. He's not a gay man, but a man who happens to be gay, which is a very important distinction. Unlike, say, Glee's Kurt Hummel, or even Modern Family's Mitch and Cam, Max's sexual orientation is not his entire identity. It doesn't define him.

The very fact that the show doesn't draw attention to Max's sexual orientation, instead treating him just like everyone else, makes Max Blum revolutionary. (Similarly, the show never draws attention to the relationship between Brad, who is black, and Jane, who is white. If you think that's not boundary-breaking, read this and think again.) Instead of celebrating Max for being different, the show just lets him be Max, just like the guy in "It's Reinvented" nonchalantly accepted the male version of the reinvented couch. So let's be more like Happy Endings and Toyota, and just give an oh, it's cool shrug to gay sex. After all, if Max doesn't define himself by his sexuality, why should anyone else?

NBC's casts band together in a fantastic Super Bowl Promo

Suppose you're an actor from a show on a network whose ratings are tanking faster than the GOP's enthusiasm for Newt Gingrich. Suppose that your network has one property - NFL Football - that's keeping it afloat enough that your show can continue, even though there are less people in your audience than cast members on your show. You would want to celebrate that event, wouldn't you? Well, if you are on an NBC series, you would, and you would do it with song and dance.

This promo, like so many NBC productions, is weird, fantastic, and totally alienating to its target demographic. I'm prepared to assume that there is not a huge overlap between people who enjoy sharp, self-deprecating parodies of famous Broadway numbers and people who want to watch Tom Brady either crush or get crushed by the Giants. (And no, liking the Family Guy "Shipoopie" number doesn't put you in the first category.) There are moments when NBC seems more like a niche cable network than a big four station, and at this point they should probably just embrace that.

It's also a little puzzling that the cast of Community plays such a prominent role, given the show's recent disappearance from the primetime lineup. Maybe the screen time given to the adorable, talented cast, in combination with a brief, listless shot of the leads from Are You There, Chelsea? and Whitney (seriously, the gang from SVU was having more fun), is a sign that the study group is poised to return to the airwaves. Oh, and did anyone else find it weird that the only people who didn't sing were the successful, chart-topping singers on The Voice's judges panel? And that, right after Jenna Maroney and Jack Donaghy sang their lines celebrating mediocrity, the cast of Smash was introduced?

Besides a few perplexing bits, however, the ad was great fun. The stars of Up All Night and Parks and Recreation were almost as charming as the Community cast, and it was nice to see the hosts of Today perform with their late-night antithesis, the cast of Saturday Night Live. I'm hoping that Katrina Bowden's appearance as the scantily-clad Cerie is a sign of her imminent return to 30 Rock, because I was just wondering where she had gone. And the tag, starring a tap-dancing Jimmy Fallon, was a lovely ending. Here's hoping that next year he'll make it in time.

Apple's five greatest pop-culture moments

The reaction to yesterday's announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO of Apple Inc. has been mixed, to say the least. Some people have heralded this development as a victory for freedom and democracy, while skittish traders' worries about the company's future led a drop in stock prices. Whether you love Jobs or hate him, it can't be denied that Apple would never have become the instantly recognizable, globally dominant brand it is today without Job's perfectionist involvement. So today, let's mark the end of an era by cataloguing Apple Inc.'s greatest moments in pop culture.

"1984"

The ad that started it all, Apple's famous "1984" ad ran during the 1984 (ha!) superbowl and introduced the world to Macintosh personal computers. The Ridley Scott-directed spot featured an atheletic iconoclast (Apple, of course) disrupting her homogenous, dystopian society by throwing a hammer at a figure who looks suspiciously like George Orwell's Big Brother. (The resemblance was not lost on Orwell's estate, who sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter that prevented the commercial from airing again.) Ironically enough, the company that once cast itself as the brave instigator of a rebellion now has it's own army of mindlessly devoted drones.

Legally Blonde

Photo courtesy of net-practice.com.

Sixteen years after "1984," Apple still held only a small percentage of the personal computer market, which was dominated by Microsoft. So, in 2001's Legally Blonde, the bright orange iBook purchased by Reese Witherspoon's Elle stands out among her classmates' uniformly drab laptops. At this point, Apple still represented an individualist spirit even as the company was seeping into the public consciousness due to exposure in other places. For example...

Sex and the City

Photo courtesy of onesforwheeler.blogspot.com.

Over the course of six seasons, Carrie Bradshaw may have changed clothes, shoes, handbags and boyfriends at a dizzying pace, but she was always faithful to her Mac laptop. The models may have changed, but the computer Carrie used to record her musings on life, love and sex alwlays bore a glowing Apple logo. Suddenly, a generation of single, stylish aspiring writers wanted Macs on which to compose the "great American novel" while sipping some complicated Starbucks drink.

"Get a Mac"

The uniquitous Mac/PC commercials that ran from 2006 to 2010 were simple, recognizable, and funny. They continued Apple's portrayal of itself as a young, hip, original alternatuve to stodgy OCs. The problem was that, by this point in time, Apple was experiencing explosive growth due to the iPod (and later the iPhone), and their claims to a unique, underdog status were starting to grate. Plus, anyone who knows anything knows that John Hodgeman is way cooler than Justin Long.

White earbuds

If Eric Northman has them, they must be cool. Photo courtesy of alexskarsgard.org.

The iPod may have revolutionized the way people listen to music, but it was the white earbuds that accompanied the players that became an instantly recognizable symbol. Seeing those bright white buds peeking out of someone's ears meant that person was young, smart and cool enough to be an Apple customer. (They also indicated that their person liked their music to sound tinny and unbalanced, as those of us who actually care about audio quality ditched the white buds in favor of headphones that actually work.) Those earbuds marked Apple's transition from a maker of computers for geeks to a worldwide phenomenon. When Apple Inc. eventually takes over the planet, and everyone has a link to iTunes in their brain, just remember: it was the earbuds that started it.