The year entertainment quit entertaining us
It was a year in which every week felt like the end of days.
If you were to compare 2017 to random things, it was like a blackout. A train wreck. A kick in the crotch. A scorpion on the beach. A dumpster fire. A kite entangled in live wires. A jack-in-the-box that slow-cranked ominous music day after unnerving day — earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, floods, political insanity, Kellyanne Conway — until the trap door flung open and out popped more bad news. You got me again, 2017! Stop scaring the daylights out of me!
It wasn’t just the real world that was spinning out of orbit.
The entertainment world also wobbled on its fluffy axis. From an evil suicide bombing at Ariana Grande’s concert at Manchester Arena in May to the equally horrific mass murder in October at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, concerts ended in unspeakable tragedy.
Music venues turned into memorial sites.
This was the year entertainment struggled to be entertaining.
Around the same time as the Las Vegas attack — the worst mass shooting in modern American history — news emerged about Harvey Weinstein’s wretched history of alleged sexual abuse. The charges against one of the most powerful men in Hollywood detonated a powder keg.
The “Silence Breakers” who bravely shared personal stories were named Time’s “Person of the Year.” Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year was “feminism.” The #MeToo movement triggered a watershed moment as once-controlling men from television, film, music, comedy and media were accused of misconduct and banished to the cultural shadows as pariahs and reprobates.
In 2017, we needed death notices for reputations: Bill O’Reilly, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Brett Ratner, James Toback, Jeffrey Tambor, Russell Simmons, John Lasseter, Gilbert Rozon, Gregg Zaun and on and on.
A harbinger of this WTF Year came hours before the calendar even changed.
Due to a faulty earpiece, Mariah Carey helped shutter 2016 with a botched performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. It was like watching a fawn impale itself with a tranquilizer dart and collapse by a brook.
Carey would later refer to her moment of lip-synching wide-eyed inertia with three words that perfectly summed up 2017: “total chaotic mess.”
Case in point: a surreal gaffe at the Oscars resulted in La La Land getting announced as Best Picture before producer Jordan Horowitz held up the actual winning card and told millions of baffled viewers, “There’s a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture. This is not a joke.”
Nope. And that total chaotic mess set the tone for the months ahead.
In April, wealthy millennials splurged on the promise of a hedonistic new music and culture festival. Instead, they landed on the Bahamian island of Exuma to find disaster relief tents and the kind of Styrofoam-boxed grub that could lead to a prison shanking. The Fyre Festival, which imploded in a haze of lawsuits, was an epic fail. It was pure 2017. You can gauge other PR bombs this year just by recalling an enduring image from each: Kendall Jenner handing a Pepsi can to a cop in a street protest ad that was quickly pulled and deemed tone-deaf. Kathy Griffin posing for a photo with Donald Trump’s fake decapitated head in her hand. A passenger forcibly dragged off a United Airlines flight. The look on Justin Smoak’s face at the MLB All-Star Game after singer Jocelyn Alice giggled during the Canadian anthem.
His icy glare was this year’s expression of choice.
As our population passed 35 million, we were locked in fierce de- bates about everything from cultural appropriation to the demise of Sears Canada to Justin Trudeau’s socks. We argued about a giant rubber duck and bickered over pineapple pizza. From a female
Doctor Who to the BBC Dad, from fidget spinners to Confederate monuments, from covfefe to alternative facts, we squabbled about every
thing in a year punctuated by fleeting jolts and institutional change. CBC’s flagship newscast, The Na
tional, was reimagined without Peter Mansbridge, who retired in the summer. Piers Handling announced he’d be leaving the Toronto International Film Festival after next year’s edition.
When 2017 wasn’t teasing an un- certain future, it was reminding us of a halcyon past when industries thrived and leaders were endearing characters: the marquees for both Sam the Record Man and Honest Ed’s were relocated this year.
They will live on as new landmarks and old memories.
Compared to 2016, there were fewer superstar deaths in 2017. Still, there was no shortage of heartbreak. We lost Gord Downie, Mary Tyler Moore, Stuart McLean, Bill Paxton, Rob Stewart, Chuck Berry, Don Rickles, Sir Roger Moore, Gregg Allman, Avie Bennett, Adam West, Martin Landau, Chester Bennington, Jack Rabinovitch, Glen Campbell, Jay Thomas, Jerry Lewis, Hugh Hefner, Monty Hall, Tom Petty, John Dunsworth, Chris Cornell, Fats Domino, Malcolm Young, Roy Halladay, Lil Peep, David Cassidy and on and on.
What kind of year was it? We even lost Wiarton Willie. The irony is that entertainment is supposed to distract us from the real world, to keep us from ever seeing our shadow. But in 2017, the real world put entertainment in a headlock and not even months of “Despacito” could loosen the grip.
Saturday Night Live became less of a sketch series and more of a counterattack on Trump’s foibles and policies.
The least popular president in U.S. history also inspired a tectonic shift in late night as talk shows drifted toward cable news and some of the best unintentional satire came from Fox News. (Take a bow, Sean Hannity.) Jimmy Kimmel, who once presided over the Juggy Dance Squad on The Man Show, delivered earnest monologues on health care and gun control. Stephen Colbert commanded a battlefield on CBS, mostly by chucking grenades at Trump. The same was true for the now heavily armed Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee.
The only late night host who remained hostile to reality was Jimmy Fallon. And in 2017, he became as pointless as beer pong in a monastery.
The pop culture that did resonate this year had a strong POV, one that bottled the fear and loathing that oozed beyond our screens: Emmy winner The Handmaid’s Tale landed as an eerie vision of a dystopian future in which women’s reproductive rights are controlled. Get Out was a meditation on race relations. Mother! could be interpreted as a biblical allegory about the pillaging of Earth.
In 2017, curiously, Stephen Hawking claimed humans had 100 years to find another home before the planet would be uninhabitable. And when you paused to consider Dennis Rodman might be the only reason a nuclear war between America and North Korea is avoided, Hawking’s guesstimate seemed a tad generous.
Speaking of numbers, and in search of escapism, Netflix members collectively watched more than a billion hours of content per week. We took comfort in the Demogorgon. But the biggest day of bingeing was Jan. 1.
After the year’s first sundown, it got harder to decompress amid the anomie.
As the year unfolded, with less feel-good entertainment than in previous years, the personal lives of celebrities filled the void: Prince Harry got engaged to Meghan Markle! George and Amal Clooney had twins! Richard Simmons reportedly vanished! The most celebrated photo on Instagram belonged to Beyoncé, who racked up more than 11 million likes for her ridiculously staged pregnancy snap. Oh, and Queen Bey also had twins! How starved were we for upbeat news? The reunion of Jelena felt like divine intervention. We were riveted by April the Giraffe. We searched for affirmation in Wonder Woman. We guffawed at the crossborder foolishness of the ghastly Buffalo Lattes at Tim Hortons.
Or consider this: the most retweeted message on Twitter belonged to a random dude who set out on a mission to earn free chicken nuggets from Wendy’s for a year.
Times were tough. And in 2017, income disparity was everywhere.
According to Forbes’ annual list of the highest paid celebrities, Diddy earned $130 million (U.S.). By jarring contrast, before author Michael Redhill deposited his $100,000 cheque for winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize last month, his account balance was $411.46.
It was a year of extremes and a year of anxiety. It was a year in which the entertainment industry skulked between real-world headlines like an endangered beast in an unknown ecosystem.
But we’ve nearly made it to the other side.
Here’s to a better 2018. May there be more joy and less Kellyanne Conway. vmenon@thestar.ca