The Grammy Awards was great, wasn't it? Such singers, such songs. The divas, the debauched, the faintly talented and the very famous. Songs of love and songs of desire. Songs of triumph and songs written by some anonymous committee of music-industry weasels that require the singer to give the impression he or she is aware what the song is about. That kind of thing.
What was missing was songs about critters.
Now, at you average country-music awards event, you're sure to find songs about critters. A lonesome dog, a handsome horse, a favourite cow. A staple of country is the song about a critter.
I put it to you that not only are there not enough songs about critters, but there aren't enough critters on TV. A good sweet critter could save a TV show on the brink of cancellation. People appreciate a critter. In fact I also put it to you that, as continual suggestions are made that YouTube is on the brink of defeating television as an entertainment source, what YouTube has going for it is critters. Cats playing the piano. Cats doing the ironing. Doggies making friends with giraffes.
As I write this on a cold afternoon with snow faintly falling, The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is unfolding on Animal Planet. It is highly entertaining, cheerful and wacky. I have learned much. Confident and with a lively bearing, that's your Icelandic sheepdog. Stuff like that. And I have been introduced to the Briard, a large, powerful herding dog that looks fabulous as his handler twirls him around in front of the judges. Apparently Napoleon had a Briard.
If you've missed it on Animal Planet, a channel not everyone subscribes to, don't worry. The entire dog extravaganza is repeated, first on Discovery World, Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., and then on the Discovery Channel, Saturday and Sunday at noon. According to Animal Planet, the Westminster dog show is its "No. 1 marquee broadcast event and the television experience of the year for dog lovers across Canada and around the world." The only thing more popular is The Puppy Bowl, I'd wager.
Further, in researching the deep and abiding appeal of critters on TV, I came across an interesting footnote. So, I ask you, what show featured the following array of distinguished Canadian and international talent – Al Waxman, John Ireland, Megan Follows, Alan Hale Jr., August Schellenberg, DeForest Kelley, Ray Walston, Michael Ironside, Patrick Macnee, Abe Vigoda, Saul Rubinek, John Vernon, Chris Makepeace, Karen Kain, Vic Morrow, Henry Gibson, John Carradine, Leslie Nielsen and Mike Myers? The answer is The Littlest Hobo.
My point, and I do have one today, is that a good deal of mainstream TV is repetitive, off-putting and sometimes repulsive. And that's just the commercials. The characters are worse. Anybody been watching the crock of rude and faintly racist jokes on 2 Broke Girls (Mondays at 8:30 p.m. on CBS and CITY-TV)? What makes 2 Broke Girls occasionally watchable is a horse. The horse, the property of riches-to-rags girl Caroline (Beth Behrs), has been used as material for a multitude of rude jokes, but it humanized two characters who were quickly becoming ciphers.
That's the thing about critters. They humanize the viewer and humanize characters, making palatable the cardboard cutouts who populate so much of TV. More critters, please.
Airing Tonight
Lone Twin (TVOntario, 9 p.m.) is a wonderful, richly textured examination of the strange, emotional world of twins. Filmmaker Anna Van der Wee, whose twin brother Dirk died in an accident at age 20, says she has since asked herself, "Am I still a twin?" To find out more about her sense of identity, she went to several countries to interview twins and talk to those who have studied the relationships between twins. In the Netherlands, two young women, twins, sit together and one says, "This unconditional relationship we have is very hard to find in others." And her sister nods. In Toronto, twins Denise and Michael Wilson talk about a friendship in which they can finish each other's sentences. It turns out that several experts interviewed are twins themselves.
Love Addict: Not a Love Story (CBC NN, 10 p.m. on The Passionate Eye) is a sometimes chilling examination of people who are addicted to romantic love. An English-language, Danish production by Pernille Rose Gronkjaer, it's a series of vignettes or case studies of people who became too attached to the emotional high of romantic love and neglected everything else. Best not watched if you were made even slightly morose by Valentine's Day, it is sometimes heart-wrenching about fragile, angry and unhappy people.
All times Eastern. Check local listings.