Who is Christopher Wilde?

The teaser trailer for the latest Disney Channel Original Movie, Starstruck, made its way online last night and, for once, I'm super excited. Why, you ask? Well it's not because of the plot, which sounds like a corny and predictable version of Sonny With a Chance (girl from the Midwest ends up in Hollywood trying to pursue her musical dreams and falls in love with the most popular singer in the country). From that description alone, I feel like I've seen this movie 1400 times before. The teaser, however, gives me a little hope that Starstruck may be a tad more clever than your average DCOM (hopefully they got some SWAC writers to work on the screenplay). What I'm looking forward to and, consequently, has me so excited for the film is the cast which includes SWAC veteran Brandon Smith and Chelsea motherfucking Staub, supreme JONAS goddess and all-around star-in-the-making (I had no idea she was in the cast and nearly did the gay inhale when she popped up and said, "People call us the It couple" in that hilariously phony, dumb heiress tone). And then there's the crown jewel, the one, the only, the should-be King of Disney Chad Dylan Sterling Knight! If you are loyal readers of the site, you know of my immense love for this man, the greatest actor of his generation. His role in Starstruck sounds vaguely similar to Chad Dylan Cooper although, unfortunately, probably less douchey and less fun since he won't have Demi Lovato's wonderful Sonny to verbally spar or create lovely sexual tension with. Oh well. I am all for more Sterling Knight in my life and eternally thankful he gets to headline one of these things instead of one of the male loser from Hannah Montana (Which one? Take your pick, they all suck).

"All I hear from that is, 'Chad, you're so super blah blah blah blah.'"

Golden Globe FYC's: Television

In just under a month, the Golden Globe nominations are going to be announced. Say what you want about them, but I love the way they cater to mega stars and nominate some out-there movies and TV shows the more serious Oscars and Emmys wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. And in that spirit, I wanted to point any members of the Hollywood Foreign Press who may have wandered onto my site to some underappreciated and unknown TV shows and performances from the past year. So, without further ado,

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Best TV Show (Musical/Comedy)

Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Joel McHale
Best Supporting Actress: Yvette Nicole Brown

Not everyone is in love with this show and I can accept that. The show's scattershot, smartass humor is a bit hit or miss, but when it hits, damn it is funny. Joel McHale, host of The Soup, is my boo so it should come as no surprise I love him on this show. The show's other highlight is Shirley, played by Yvette Nicole Brown. She's warm, generous and often hilarious with admittedly little to do sometimes. Hell, she can make silence funny.

Best Supporting Actress: Jane Lynch

The show is wildly inconsistent for me. Jane Lynch, however, is always spot on and often has me howling in laughter with her non-sensical metaphors and "Sue Says" TV spot. It's no wonder that Sue Sylvester is quickly replacing Chuck Norris as the ultimate tough guy.

Best Actress (Drama): Leighton Meester

This season so far has been a bit of a wash for Ms. Meester although things seem to be looking up for her (I loved the way she stood back and simply observed the aftermath of the "OM3"; she was far more interesting than any of the participants). My FYC is for, of course, her stellar work from the second half of last season. Do I really have to try and convince you again of her amazingness?

Best Supporting Actress: Chelsea Staub
Best Supporting Actress: Nicole Anderson

The Jonas Brothers may be the "stars" of JONAS, but the true discoveries are the main females of the show. Staub plays the band's stylist and shoulder to cry on about their various problems with an unusual combination of warmness and ferocious comedic timing unseen on any Disney show I've ever seen. Anderson is the band's obsessive fan who has slowly become my favorite reason to watch the show.

Best TV Show (Drama)
Best Supporting Actor: Sebastian Stan

This show never really had a chance on network TV, did it? Ambitious, layered and epic in scope, Kings was doomed from the start. But in its short 13 episode run, Kings had more impressive moments than some shows have had in three seasons. Ian McShane, with his booming voice and larger than life bravura, was great as the king, but I often found Sebastian Stan as doomed Prince Jack to be even more compelling throughout the show. In just a few episodes, the one-time Ed Westwick imitator became an actor to watch for in the future.

Best TV Show (Musical/Comedy)
Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Demi Lovato
Best Supporting Actor: Sterling Knight
Best Supporting Actress: Tiffany Thornton

Who said that Disney was only for kids? One of the best shows on TV right now is on the Disney Channel and I'm not ashamed to admit that I watch it religiously. Sonny With a Chance is 30 Rock for the tweens and it's often just as groundbreaking and can't-catch-your-breath funny (when compared to its contemporaries, at least). Leading the cast is Demi Lovato as Sonny, the Liz Lemon of the show, and what's exciting about her performance is that over the course of the season, you can see her letting loose more and more, finally getting the hang of this comedy thing and truly becoming a star with each passing episode. Tiffany Thornton, plays self-obsessed diva Tawni Hart, the Jenna to Demi's Liz, and is a hoot everytime she appears on screen. Do you know anyone else who can elicit so many laughs just by repeating "Cocoa Mocho Cocoa" over and over again? And then there is trusty old Sterling Knight as tween heartthrob Chad Dylan Cooper (swoon!). His role as the romantic foil to Demi's Sonny is not particularly groundbreaking but the way he remains a complete douche even during the moments when he's supposed to be "wooing" Sonny is impressive. Less talented, "pretty boy" actors would have completely pussified CDC by episode four, but Knight is just as mean and darkly funny as he was on day one. Kudos to you!

Best TV Show (Musical/Comedy)
Best Supporting Actor: Keir Gilchrist
Best Supporting Actress: Brie Larson

Toni Collette is likely to get a nom, so it seems unnecessary to FYC her right now. Instead, I'll focus on the underappreciated children of Tara. Like I've talked about before, Gilchrist brings a clever twist to a stereotypical gay teen role. Larson is a complete bitch on the show, but she somehow brings enough humanity to her performance that I kinda wish she was my older sister.

Jonas With a Chance

Thanks to Netflix on Demand, I decided to continue my never ending investigation of today's tween subculture by watching a couple of shows from the Disney Channel. I decided on the Brothers Jonas's latest attempt to dominate every single artistic medium out there simply titled Jonas and Demi Lovato's show Sonny With a Chance. Remembering the poor excuses for acting I witnessed in Camp Rock, I didn't have high hopes for either of them but both of them actually turned out better than I ever imagined.

I'll get Jonas out of the way first since it's obviously the weakest of the two. The show is about three brothers (Kevin, Joe and Nick) who--shockingly--are in a mega successful rock band but somehow find the time to go to a normal high school with students who have known them so long don't really care that they are famous and pretty much leave them alone. Joe's BFF Stella (the fabulous Chelsea Staub) is their wardrobe mistress and shoulder for the brothers to come cry on with their various (usually uninteresting and Disney show-specific) problems. If this sounds a bit formulaic and obvious, it is. Jonas is nothing more than Disney's most recent attempt to cash in on a hot commodity without regards to originality or more than six minutes of brainstorming. I know that this show is just another way for them to make money, but it's entirely obvious they don't want to be actors nor care about really learning the craft. They are musicians first and foremost so Jonas is, pretty much, a complete waste of time in that regards.


One of the biggest problems that Jonas faces is that many of the deliberate "jokes" that they write for the Jonases don't work and are simply frustratingly, jaw-droppingly bad. Take for example the moment when Nick comes rushing in to tell the guys that their favorite backup singer can't work on their new demo because she has a frog in her throat. No, literally, Nick explains, a frog in her throat; she has to get a "frogectomy." I mean, seriously? Who on earth writes rubbish like that and then expects any actor to try and make it work? The Jonases fair much better with jokes that play into the "it's a TV show" aspect of the show, such as when they repeatedly break the fourth wall and address the audience or when Kevin decides to spontaneously break into song and an extra walks across the screen to hand him a guitar while a spotlight comes on. For every two or three lame jokes that practically thud, there is one legitimate laugh that comes from its self-reflective nature.

Not surprisingly, the Jonases are the least interesting actors on the show. Kevin is definitely the most fun of the three with his dumb schtick (he has a comedic element that's actually reminiscent of Justin Timberlake at times). Joe occasionally gets some good lines and he's definitely better than he was in Camp Rock but it's hardly great. Nick, with his serious nature, is "The Kelly" in the show (named after the girl in my high school who every year had the lead role in the play but it was always as the dull straight person in a farce full of supporting nutjobs) but, with the right push, he could either develop that into a Buster Keaton-style stone face or a Victoria Beckham way of deadpanning everything (There was this great Beckham-esque exchange in the first episode where the girl Nick is crushing on tells him he has a great smile to which he replies, "Shh, it will ruin my image.").

Obligatory pause for a pretty picture of Nick.

The real star of the show, however, is Chelsea Staub as the perpetually crazed Stella. She has the sweetness around here that reminds me of La Tisdale on the few episodes of The Suite Life I've seen but she also really lays into the physical comedy bits she is given. When she bets her Jonas-obsessed friend Macey (a lovely Nicole Anderson) that she can go longer without texting than Macey can go without talking about the Jonases, she runs the gamut of usual withdrawal symptoms but she really goes for them and the moment when she finally gives in rings with genuine hilarity. When the Jonas Brothers finally grow out of this Disney crap and concentrate fully on their music, it will be Chelsea Staub that we will be watching and wondering what she will do next to impress us. C

I've heard Sonny With a Chance described as "30 Rock for the tweens" but I found it hard to believe that any show airing on the Disney Channel could be anywhere as good as the best show on TV currently. I was wrong. Don't misunderstand me, 30 Rock will always be leaps and bounds smarter and funnier than Sonny, but for a Disney show aimed at tweens, this show is impeccably well-constructed and acted.

The Liz Lemon of this show is Sonny Munroe (played by Demi Lovato), the fresh-faced newcomer from Wisconsin to the cast of So Random!, a teen sketch comedy show obviously based on my generation's revered All That. The pilot episode deals with Sonny's integration into the cast and ends up preaching some nonsense about getting along with people that I've been hearing since elementary school. Thankfully, that is as close as this show ever gets to moralizing. The rest of the episodes are jam-packed full of fun as Sonny, being the Liz Lemon, gets in trouble, makes said situation worse and then rallies the cast--which includes the Jenna Maroney to Demi's Liz, self-absorbed, delusional diva Tawni Hart (portrayed brilliantly by Tiffany Thorton), the usual duo of fools Nico and Grady (Brandon Smith and Doug Brochu) and the young oddball (Allisyn Ashley Arm, who's mugginess and child actor tics are irritating to say the least)--to solve the problem. The premise is oh-so-simple, but you can't even imagine how many laughs they wring from it.


The characters on Sonny With a Chance are nothing more than stereotypes we've seen countless times before, but part of what sets the show apart is how committed these actors are to them. Demi starts the show off kind of rough, relying on that huge smile of her through much of the first episode to project niceness. As the season progresses, however, she starts to let loose and get into the (anarchic) spirit of the show. With a lesser actress than Tiffany Thorton, Tawni would have ended up as big of a travesty as Meghan Martin's diva/mean girl in Camp Rock. Thorton knows exactly when to go all out for the big laugh and when to pull back so she doesn't become obnoxious or overdone. But no one deals more with stereotyping than Sterling Knight (whom you may remember as Zac Efron's son in 17 Again) as narcissistic tween heartthrob Chad Dylan Cooper, star of the hit tween drama Mackenzie Falls which shoots in the studio next to So Random!. Given all the douchey characteristics he is given, it would have been easy for Knight to cop out and try to sneak some sympathy every now and again to make him more likable. Thankfully, he doesn't and plays the jerkiness for every laugh possible.

Obligatory pause to admire Chad Dylan Cooper (you know he would demand it).

I'm also impressed that any single episode of Sonny With a Chance is more structured than any Disney Channel movie released in the past four years. Take for example the episode titled "Battle of the Networks' Stars." The episode starts with Demi sitting at a table in the cafeteria with what she thinks are her co-stars. It turns out that they are simply look alikes so she heads to another table and runs into the same problem. Finally the real castmates come in and they have no idea what is going on. It tuns out that Chad is directing the biopic of his life (appropriately titled Chad Dylan Cooper: The Chad Dylan Cooper Story) and is holding auditions for people to play the members of So Random!. The castmates protest and eventually Chad gives in--partly anyways. He still makes Sonny tryout for the part of herself but in the end chooses Selena Gomez (playing herself) to play Sonny in the movie. So, Selena decides to study up on Sonny, following her and mimicing her every move, and decides to call her out on her love for Chad. Sonny, of course, denies this and when Selena brings it up again with Chad, citing that she needs to know for "character motivation," he denies it as well. The episode comes to a head when Sonny comes on the set of the movie and starts giving Selena direction on how to play her. When she starts overstepping the boundaries and yells "Cut!" during a scene, Chad gets angry at her and they proceed to have a shouting match through their megaphones while standing not more than 10 feet apart. Selena then stomps off the set after they both turn on her and mentions something about doing Camp Hip Hop. Chad then offers the role back to Sonny and she ends up taking it. At the very end of the episode, the castmates are all gathered around the TV watching Selena in Camp Hip Hop and it turns out to be a thinly disguised version of Demi's Camp Rock, complete with Jonas Brothers look-alikes and everything! The layers of comedy that Sonny consistently builds on never less than impresses me. The way that the show is able to laugh at itself and not take itself so seriously is one of the reasons why I think this show will appeal to people beyond its target demographic. The show may not be completely perfect (I could live without the dumb sidekicks even if I understand their purpose) but when it's right (that being anytime Demi, Tiffany or Sterling appear in a scene) it's damn close to being one of the funniest shows on TV, Disney Channel or not. A-