In politics it may have been the Year of the Woman, but in television it’s been more like the Year of the Jewish Guy. They’re everywhere.
The impetus behind this explosion of Jewishness should be fairly obvious. It is often said that film is a director’s medium, stage is an actor’s, and television is the province of producers. Just as most art is at its root about the life of the artist, the Jewish explosion on television is about the people who make television shows.
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As Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own illustrated, the film industry has been dominated from its inception by Jewish men. The television industry, as an outgrowth, followed suit. As Gabler also suggested, most of the great movie moguls–Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, David Selznick, the Warner brothers–were for much of their lives consumed with self-loathing. For that reason old movies–and television shows–went to almost absurd lengths to sanitize ethnicity.
For a producer, a television series can provide a therapeutic outlet for such problems, a forum for exploring his ideas and concerns in public. By the end of thirtysomething’s final season, you got the feeling that the dilemmas the cast encountered were lifted wholesale from the producers’ lives. In the last few segments, three of the major characters, including Michael, weighed the notion of leaving the familiar, snow-belted northeast–the Land of Their Fathers–for the blinding white sunlight and potentially limitless possibilities of life in Southern California. It’s a conflict with which Zwick, a graduate of New Trier, and the Philadelphia-reared Hershkovitz clearly struggled, but seem to have worked out onscreen.
The Shiksa Goddess of television reached some sort of apotheosis this year with Tea Leoni, a stage actress in her series debut on the Fox sitcom Flying Blind. In it, Corey Parker plays Neil Barash, a well-scrubbed, dimpled young thing in his first job out of college in the big city, sort of a latter-day distaff That Girl. He meets a blond femme fatale named Alicia, a young fashion designer played by the radiantly gorgeous Leoni as a combination of Diane Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, and several incarnations of Madonna. The premise of the show is that Alicia has every man in New York falling at her feet but finds herself irresistibly smitten by the bewildered but uncomplaining Neil. Much of the humor revolves around encounters with Alicia’s ex-lovers and the intensity of her sex drive. As the object of her desire, Neil remains fresh-faced, innocent, willing, and endearingly neurotic.
