Dumb Luck

			Send to a Friend
			Printer Friendly Format
			Leave Feedback
			Read Feedback
			Hooksexup RSS

‘ve never given much thought to what I might do if I won a $360 million lottery jackpot, aside from the standard fantasies (feeding Africa’s starving masses, hiring Vice President Cheney to have sex with me). So, with a genuine sense of curiosity, I sat down to screen NBC’s new drama Windfall, in which twenty loosely connected friends share a lottery prize of that sum.
   At the center of the show is the American dream of material transformation: that wealth will grant us different and better lives. I’m sorry to report this is not the case. If you are a ridiculously pretty actor stuck in a dismal replacement drama, you will remain a ridiculously pretty actor stuck in a dismal replacement drama.

   I’m also sorry to report that you will not have much sex. Let me offer Damien (Jon Foster) as a prime example. He’s a hunky seventeen-year-old who uses his share of the dough to buy a hottie Russian mail-order bride. So far so good. Now we all know what an actual seventeen year old would do in this situation. But Damien treats her like a gentleman. He has married her, it turns out, to become an emancipated minor and escape his abusive father. Damien puts her up in his posh hotel suite, buys her slinky dresses and boozes it up with her. But they do not fornicate because Damien — unbeknownst to the show’s producers — has no genitals. Instead, he nurses a chaste, age-appropriate crush on a fellow high school student.
   If you are getting the sense that Windfall doesn’t exactly reflect the reality of life here on earth, you may be onto something. This is the sort of show in which characters lock eyes across the room and cheesy pop immediately starts blaring. Characters also make out in the rain (naturally) and profess their love in hushed whispers, while softly lit from below. When they do have sex, it’s that maddening teevee variety. The women wear bras or camisoles and the sheets cover all other items of genuine erotic interest. All you see are two torsos mashed desperately together.
   The show’s central players are two couples. Nina (Lana Parrilla) is married to Peter (Luke Perry) but still lusts after her ex, Cameron

(Jason Gedrick), who happens to be Peter’s best friend and husband to Beth (Sarah Wynter). I am given to understand that there is some sort of meta-fun in watching Perry play the devoted husband, given that he became famous as the bad boy of 90210. As someone unfamiliar with his previous work, I can only tell you that he doesn’t have much to do in Windfall, and he looks a lot like a sad gargoyle these days.
   Cameron plays the hateable hunk well enough, but the show’s writers don’t do him any favors. Asked by Nina to explain why he abandoned her, he responds, “It’s complicated . . . Things happen.” Ah, that explains it.
   The whole dual-couple scenario calls to mind an Andre Dubus story. But the delivery is pure soap opera. Which is fine. The problem with Windfall is that it wants to be more than a soap opera. It wants to make important statements about wealth and power in this culture. Thus, inevitably, we’re treated to a few winners who are supposed to be from the wrong side of the tracks. This makes sense, given that lotteries aim their vast advertising budgets squarely at the poor, who squander much of their income playing the numbers.

   But remember: this is the underclass as Hollywood portrays them, meaning the synthetic poor. Introducing Kimberly (Malinda Williams), a single mother who works three jobs to support her son and lives in a trailer park. As should go without saying, she is drop-dead gorgeous and pure of heart.
   Then there’s Sean (D.J. Cotrona), an ex-con with a dangerous past that doesn’t allow him to claim his winnings publicly. He does the obvious thing: finds a gorgeous blond attorney named Zoe, beds her, and convinces her to claim the money for him. This may seem implausible, until you consider that Sean looks like a Ralph Lauren model. Zoe is rendered helpless by his impeccable stubble. She continues to help him, even after her own life is placed in danger.
   “You don’t have to watch Oprah to know that when a handsome stranger offers you ten million dollars, there’s a catch,” she observes. That’s true, Zoe. You don’t. Nor do you have to watch Oprah to know that when Hollywood tries to make a show about lottery winners, they will all have perfect teeth. (Even the resident crack addict has great skin and a chubby build.)
   But it’s not just the look of the actors that marks Windfall as fraudulent. It’s the astonishing hypocrisy. The show wants to be seen as condemning greed, even as it relentlessly celebrates conspicuous consumption. So when one character abandons her used car in the middle of traffic and dashes off to buy a Mercedes, or another

flies to Paris for a shopping spree, these aren’t selfish acts — they are moments of personal liberation. Kimberly provides the most striking example of this dissonance. In a scene that plays like Lottoporn, she rents a helicopter to whisk her and her son away from her trashy trailer park and to a five-star hotel.
   A few days later, our heroine finds herself at a meeting with her son’s teacher and a group of other parents. She stands up and offers to use some of her winnings to pay for better supplies and better salaries. It’s meant as an inspiring moment, but it ignores the fact that the government, not gamblers, should be paying for public education. After all, there are only so many saintly lottery winners available, and it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make up the $40 billion shortfall in the No Child Left Behind Act. (Fun fact: states with lotteries inevitably decrease funding for public education!)
    In this sense, Windfall is the perfect show for the Bush era. It sends all the approved messages: that luck matters more than hard work, that no American should ever feel guilty about spending, that good words matter more than good deeds.
    And, of course, that no responsible adult ever has sex while naked.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Steve Almond‘s new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy.