Read Online This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange - Free Book Online Page A

single-camera sitcom called New Girl , the first major network series built around the charm ballistics of the dream girl du jour. Conceived and written by another young woman, playwright Elizabeth Meriwether, the show’s tagline is “Simply adorkable.” Deschanel, also a part-time chanteuse, sings the oopsy-daisy theme song: “Who’s that girl? It’s Jess! ”
    Deschanel, who wears butt-skimming rompers, ballet flats, a springer-spaniel perruque of hair, and baby-doll stamps of rouge in and out of character, capitalized on her epitome with a girly service Web magazine, also launched in 2011, called Hello Giggles. Aimed at Manic Pixie Dream Girl Scouts, the site’s contents fall under headings like “Treats,” “Social Studies,” “Home,” and “Beauty,” and its exercises in cooking and craft tutorial suggest the collecting of merit badges.
    In New Girl , recent dumpee Jess moves in with three young men. By pretending these men find Jess to be a huge and highly aggravating drip, the show activates an ultimate MPDG premise: it takes a special man to recognize this girl’s sui generis appeal. In the first few episodes, Jess often slides from speech into song and back; an early subplot involves her inability to say the word penis without atomizing in a sparkly puff. “I just got out of a long relationship” goes a typical declaration of self-insufficiency, “and I don’t know what I’m doing emotionally, or—let’s be honest—sexually.”
    That such a self-conscious, ghettoized romantic ideal is now the center of a network television show has been hailed as a kind of breakthrough. The traditional, live-audience sitcom has been dead for a decade. To revive the half-hour format, shows like The Office and Modern Family adopted a meta-documentary style, as though constantly seeking the camera for a slow burn or pausing to debrief what just happened in a talking-head interview captures something essential about both modern life and modern entertainment. With channels proliferating to accommodate the endless niches and crannies of our viewing desires, and manifold delivery systems for the latest episode of 30 Rock , television is not the audience mobilizer it once was. The viewership for today’s most popular series is nowhere close to that of a top show over the last decades of the twentieth century.
    Which is why New Girl ’s arrival only highlights how everything about this character has been forced upon us. It’s a case of a bush-league ideal finding its fractured level. To attract even a niche audience, Deschanel has to stretch the MPDG personality to a painful extreme, performing the desperate bricolage of her weirdness to the point of exhaustion. It makes the issue plain, which is that whether you are trying to create an archetype or hoping to pull at the bar, calculation will always work to a certain extent, but the things we seek and cherish most in life and in each other are beyond measure. The only surprising thing is how well television’s smaller stakes suit this big-screen creation. The context of a sitcom is just artificial enough to can and preserve her meager illuminative powers, like a firefly in a mason jar.

    A General Call for Submission
    Often when we talk about the way movie and television landscapes are peopled today, we are talking about equal representation. Seeing one’s self reflected in the culture has become a moral imperative. A white woman complaining about the way (overwhelmingly) white women are represented might seem a little rich when other ethnicities are rarely seen—much less promoted as ideals—at all. And yet I think what has happened within the relative majority tends to enforce the point. It is not enough to be represented for representation’s sake; there is a larger, more elusive morality to consider. Because although we are born into the world with some