Vicarious Prostitute

There’s a hilarious show coming out this fall on ABC that I’m really looking forward to. It’s called Commander in Chief. And it’s about a delightfully mismatched pair of political pundits who get into all kinds of outrageous, wacky shenanigans.

I haven’t read anything about it, but I’m sure that’s what it’s about. The reason I know is because the show is about a woman (Geena Davis) being president. And if there’s any more fertile ground for outrageousness or shenanigan, then it’s probably got something to do with drunken Leprechauns.

Let me tell you why I will love this show.

This show is going to give us our first chance to ask the questions that everyone wants to know about a woman being president. Just like how the Brady Bunch asked the question, ‘would anyone give a shit if a family of dudes moved in with a family of broads?’ It turns out the answer was no. It was no for that, it will be no for this. No one gives any kind of a shit.

We also might get an answer for the age old dilemma of putting a woman in any kind of position of power that we men can actually say out loud without getting stoned. What happens when she’s on her period?

Will civilization be over in less time than it took The Lord or Gozer the Gozerian or Whoever The Fuck You Want to build it in the first place? Probably. That means the series will play very much like 24, except instead of hours it will be days. And as a man, I love a good suspense. It lets me exercise both my powers of deduction and my powers of talking during a show at maximum capacity.

Granted, I personally have never seen a woman act like any more of a shrill cow during a special part of the month, but it allegedly happens. Even scientists say so.

Mostly I’m thrilled about this fictional show of a woman being president for the same reason I’m thrilled every time there’s a new documentary on Hugh Hefner or a new Batman cartoon series. I will never be Batman. In fact, no man will ever be Batman. The lawsuits Batman would have to cover to continue his vigilante crusade would be outrageous — especially to enforce the thousands of Non Disclosure Agreements that he would have scattered across half of China and the Silicon Valley to support his cache of gadgets and doodads.

What I’m saying is, remember when Geena Davis made that movie about women pretending to play baseball? You know what happens when women today start to get uppity and want to start petitioning or whining or whatever women usually do as a first step to the Major League Baseball president to subsidize them an actual league of their own? They just go to Blockbuster and they fucking rent the actual A League of Their Own, and that’s as close as they ever get. If there was a similar movie about crying and whining and club-footing your way through a season about basketball, then there would be no fucking WNBA. And wouldn’t that be great.

That’s why there’s the Oxygen network and Women’s Entertainment. So women can sit back on the couch and enjoy a bag of Doritos instead of actually doing any of the bullshit that those channels sell by the trough.

And that’s why I think this is going to be a great show.