In Which Katherine Heigl Falls In Love With A Murderer

Knocked Down

by DICK CHENEY

Doubt
creators Joan Rater & Tony Phelan
CBS

"He's the first guy I feel like I could really talk to," Katherine Heigl explains to her mother, who is serving a life sentence since she was two years old. Her mother is very proud of Katherine Heigl, who has become a noted defense attorney. Why isn't anyone else proud of Katherine Heigl?

Actually, her boyfriend is. "You fight like most people breathe," Billy (Steven Pasquale) explains to her over dinner. He has just been released from prison on bail, but Katherine Heigl still finds something attractive about this pediatric surgeon, who is going to be convicted of a murder he committed twenty-four years earlier in Gramercy Park. He is really proud of Katherine Heigl: her education, after all, is considerable. She made it through four years of NYU without killing herself, and then headed uptown to Columbia for her law degree. It taught her, somewhere along the line, that it was OK to make love to her client. "We are the lucky ones," she muses in a private moment.

Katherine Heigl has everything she could ever want, yet people still don't want to watch her. At times she looks like a skeleton riding a bike through New York City in Doubt, the new show from the married Grey's Anatomy producers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan; she resembles a muppet when she is in the courtroom and her lips come together just so. Dulé Hill just looks at her like, "Why am I on this show?"

I guess it all comes back to when Katherine Heigl started saying bad things about Judd Apatow and how much Knocked Up sucked. It did suck, but maybe it was supposed to? 2007 was a very confusing year for a lot of people. Perhaps it was not the best idea to cast Ms. Heigl in a show that is exactly like Grey's Anatomy. "Travel's not my thing," she explains to her boyfriend at dinner, in an attempt to become even more unlikable to her target audience.

Men gave up on Katherine Heigl when she savagely turned on Seth Rogen, causing him to retreat into his office where he smoked so much pot that he drove other people out of the building. Women could still have a chance of liking Katherine Heigl, but Doubt gives them so many reasons not to do so. Personally, I love Katherine Heigl. Did you know that Katherine Heigl has two adopted children in real life, and is dating a murderer in not real life? "It's not going to be easy to explain the coincidence of the cat scratch to the jury!" someone bleats in the background.

In order to discover the reasons why Katherine Heigl's unpopularity has led to such low ratings, it behooved me to research the cause of Katherine Heigl's unpopularity with her key audience. This resulted in a somewhat combative conversation with my wife Lynne, which I have reproduced below to the best of my memory.

ME (DC): Do you think Katherine Heigl uses a loofah?

LYNNE: I don't believe she can actually ride a bike. That's probably a stunt double.

DC: Did you feel betrayed when she left Grey's Anatomy?

LYNNE: Not really, I mean, she was an actress on a TV show.

DC: Do you think Katherine Heigl smells like gasoline and Head & Shoulders?

LYNNE: They were still rolling out the credits on this show fifteen minutes in. Is that Omar Epps?

DC: No. Do you think people who travel don't like people who don't travel?

LYNNE: I don't understand the question.

To be fair, Doubt's questionable command of civil procedure renders the show essentially an extended fantasy sequence. In one of the show's key subplots, another attorney (Laverne Cox) wins the trial of a deranged man who pushed a woman in front of a subway. Afterwards, she commiserates with her associate (Dreama Walker), who exclaims, "Our client is on his way to a mental institution and we're supposed to be celebrating?" Where did she want a murderer to go, vacation?

Are you maybe starting to get the same sense that I am, that at one point Shonda Rimes killed a dude and the point of all these hour-long shows is to slowly legitimize murder in the eyes of the public until she confesses to Oprah and everyone is like, well, Viola Davis killed several people and continued a fruitful teaching career in a top tier law school, so you're fine Shonda?

But back to Katherine Heigl, the only subject really worth writing about. I have devised some suggestions for Katherine Heigl, so that she can resume her rightful career as a serious television and film star. My first thought was that she should do a role with an accent. Katherine Heigl with a southern accent would be just darling. If she can't do an accent, than she should stop dieting down to fit preconceived stereotypes about how leading ladies should look and play the role of a woman who is almost permanently pregnant. Gentile pregnant women are very sympathetic.

Anyway, it is kind of sad that Doubt is such a mess. I think part of the problem is that the show is photographed and scored like every other Shonda Rimes show. It just comes across feeling so generic at this point. Plus Katherine Heigl's outfits are not so exciting in this. She wears a lot of sweaters and the ensuing sexual milieu is extremely dated. I understand she is a powerful attorney in this diegesis, but she's already making love to her client, so keeping up appearances otherwise is maybe a misguided use of resources.

Dulé Hill and Katherine Heigl have a lot of chemistry. It would have been great fun to see them taking off their clothes, and I think that is where Doubt was eventually going down the road, but we'll never know now because the show is doing such garbage ratings. That's a shame, because I would have really enjoyed seeing their bodies press together. It would have sounded like a car wash.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Katherine Heigl Totally Redeems Herself

Shonda's Necklace

by DICK CHENEY

State of Affairs
creator Joe Carnahan

"Can we get dinner this week?" a young man Katherine Heigl has used for sex suggests from her bed. "I'll call you," she patters back. "But you don't have my number," he protests as she walks out the door. We flash back to their time together: Katherine drags him into an alleyway, and chooses to face the wall as they have wintercourse. She does this so she can pretend he is her now-deceased fiancee:

He enjoyed making love to her from behind almost as much as the rando she brought home did.

The sorrow patterning the man in bed's face now looks like an emoji. Katherine's apartment is so bizarrely lavish for a civil servant that it more resembles the bedroom of the Ayatollah.

Look away, look away, look away... (It's a Being John Mallkovich reference. OK ttyl)

Later that day, on NBC's new Homeland tribute/parody State of Affairs, Katherine - who goes by the name Charleston, presumably after the chew - flirts with a fellow CIA analyst. She's moved on, clearly. Watching her totter around the Oval Office, looking like a piece of gluten, it's hard to feel sympathy. That is until we discover her dead husband was also THE PRESIDENT'S SON.

In a nod to Mrs. Doubtfire, Heigl also portrays her own therapist.

For some reason, even though she is merely an analyst, Charlie commands shock troops targeting suspected terrorists overseas. These troops call her at the most inconvenient times - when she's at the gym, when she is taking it from behind in an alley, when she is having extended Benghazi-esque flashbacks to the perishing of the man she loved. Heigl gets this screwed up look on her face, like, "You're calling me about this now?!"

Bret Easton Ellis should look into a lawsuit, I'm pretty sure this exact scene was in 'Less Than Zero'

In almost every single review he wrote, Roger Ebert would grandiously quote Truffaut's maxim that all war movies end up making war look like fun. This is completely stupid; almost no war movie even did this. Truffaut was an idiot, did you see his later films? I might possibly be confusing him with Godard; ever since my quadruple bypass I'm a tad shaky on the French New Wave. If I wanted to watch the work of a communist, I'd go see Interstellar.

Shonda Rimes trembles with anger every time a male showrunner puts a woman in a pearl necklace. My source is Nikki Finke.

Movies about the intelligence community all seem tremendously boring actually. It's funny to watch State of Affairs momentarily cut to an action scene like they are apologizing for taking us away from the central, important drama of whether or not Heigl is getting along with her therapist this afternoon. "Good doesn't have to come, I do," she tells her shrink, explaining why she was so willing to do it doggystyle while outdoors.

This show badly needed David Cross as her love interest.

Art imitates life I'm pretty sure - wasn't that mentioned in the video where Ariana Grande was wearing those svelte boots? Obama's political innovation, besides adding an uh to every sentence imaginable, is making what used to be captivating, boring. Chris Matthews used to tremble with excitement each time President Clinton made potty; now the Secretary of Defense gets exiled to Antarctica because he criticized the school lunch program and accidentally revealed he didn't know the capital of Uzbekistan, and the collective reaction was, "Gee, Katherine really has lost weight!"

We live in profoundly unserious times. Pauly Shore has a new show where he portrays the British Prime Minister, and it's not a comedy.

Alfre Woodard was cast as the president of the United States and the mother of Heigl's dead fiancee. You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like either a fascinating story in itself, or a chance to take subtle shots at Shonda Rimes. Neither occurs, no one even tiptoes around Heigl even though the president is basically her mother-in-law. For fuck's sake her own boss at the CIA orders her detained. (He is fired and, predictably, an actor from Lost takes his place.)

Next time, I hope they cast her as a killer-for-hire/wedding planner.

Heigl has no friends, just work acquaintances and casual fucks. Bobbing around from sit down to sit up, she sort of comes across like a buoy on a windy day. No one catches her, challenges her or even touches her other than with their penis or a folder of documents. Everything is exactly as it should be.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. Have a great holiday with your family and friends. Make us feel like we destroyed an indigenous people for a reason.

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