TNBA reviews: Mean Seasons

Revenge narratives are the meat and potatoes of superhero cartoons, and Mean Seasons is yet another tale of a self-appointed victim out to wrong her victimizers to add to the batch. The best of such tales paint sympathetic profiles for ostensible lunatics, while the worst find security in dehumanization, in the process following banal action-adventure formulas. However, on a scale that has as its extremities apathy and intimacy, Mean Seasons simply doesn’t make sense. It dabbles in conventions and furnishes unconvincing character motivations for its narrative springboards, while at the same time faintly speaking up on the behalf of the antagonist, a once aspiring model who was chewed up and spit out by youth-obsessed executives.

Judging Mean Seasons on the merits of its plot, terms like ‘adequate’ and ‘middle-of-the-road’ may come to mind. As a character exploration it’s often unsuccessful at reconciling psychology with artifice. Aside from some deft visual metaphors and an effectively pitiable ending, Calendar Girl’s enduring image is of a hyperactive, cliché-waving cartoon, ever finding an opening for a verbal affront to the shallowness of the entertainment industry. As a story of revenge, it’s simply too confused and contradictory to register as either a success or a failure. This explains why its real successes are almost all a matter of peripheral subtext or comic suggestions, many of which undermine the story but almost always for the better.

One would expect Mean Seasons’s indictment of popular culture and all the superficialities that govern it would have its firmest basis in the pathos ignited by the industry’s mistreatment of Paige Monroe. Heart of Ice and Appointment in Crime Alley take similar approaches in their respective condemnations of corporate greed, and various other episodes rely on the personal vendettas of the unjustly maligned to garner our hatred for organized crime and political corruption. Given that Calendar Girl is mostly a plot vehicle, however, the episode’s assault on media executives and fashion shows and the like is, in actuality, strictly anti-pathos, if anything scathingly and hilariously satirical.

From GWB’s television broadcasting expo with its programming lineup of shows about modeling school and a skateboarding cop to a Jurassic Park reference that eventually develops into a drawn-out action sequence, screenwriter Hilary Bader freely lifts what she pleases from the then-contemporary lexicon of pop culture, all of it intended to expose some form of hypocrisy that has taken root in the businesses that dictate our cultural consumption, not the least of which, of course, is Hollywood. Calendar Girl’s goons, meanwhile, come across as some kind of feminist revisionism of camp, replacing uniformed women in skimpy outfits, as seen in Cold Comfort and The Ultimate Thrill, with equally subservient muscle-bound hunks.

Brimming with satirical digs, film references, and gags of the eye-winking variety, Mean Seasons compensates for its dramatic shortcomings with a penchant for abrasive thematic details. While some claim the main plot to be incompetently silly, the infectious silliness that oozes into cracks of the story is anything but incompetent; in fact Mean Seasons’ pervasive comic absurdity, manifest in these aforementioned details, is calculated for a certain rhetorical and deconstructive effect that it pulls off without a hitch.