TV’s New Hobby: Making Fun of Portland
Sing along with new IFC show Portlandia: “The dream of the ’90s is alive in Portland.”
Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jan 04, 2011 at 09:00AM
4 Comments
All the hot girls wear glasses. No one has jobs, people sleep till 11. Portland is a city where young people go to retire. And it’s like cars don’t exist! You ride bikes, you ride double-decker bikes, you ride unicycles! Apparently, the dream of the ’90s is alive in Portland.
Thanks to some masterful viral marketing, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s new IFC show Portlandia—a send-up of the Oregon city’s flannel-loving counterculture—is getting a lot of buzz. Even The New York Times picked it up, and they don’t cover anything until a doctor or psychologist has deemed it A Trend. But what do Portland natives think of being in the spotlight? And are Portland, Maine natives confused and/or bitter the show’s not about them?
Anne Adams, my counterpart at our sister publication Portland Monthly and someone who’s guilty of sleeping until 11, brought this show to my attention and has an interesting theory about Portland’s slacker insurgence:
In the 90s, Seattle woke up (at eleven) in the new “hotbed of counterculture”—then immediately suffocated under the weight of a whole nation trying to pile on top of its mosh-mound. If Portland currently hosts the “dream of the 90s”, then it stands to reason that we’re about to endure the same rude awakening as our Seattle neighbors.
Admittedly, I wasn’t in Seattle in the ‘90s — I was in school in New Jersey, where guidos and guidettes roamed free and everyone showed up to prom a self-tanned shade of burnt sienna. Sort of. Just as Jersey Shore and Jerseylicious zing the Garden State and all its foibles, Portlandia has the potential to be equally hilarious: an SNL-styled satire (SNL circa the ’90s, or else it won’t be hilarious) that pokes fun at all that Portland natives love—and kind of hate—about themselves. It’s good, old-fashioned exaggeration.
Did Seattle suffocate under all that media attention? I certainly wouldn’t say the counterculture shriveled up and died here. Sure, flannel now counts as business casual, but what of our rising hip-hop scene, our dedication to local farmers, our ability to teach tourists to recycle? We survived and thrived, and I have a feeling that Portland will endure this new spat of attention, too.
Especially since I don’t even know what the IFC channel is. Seriously, is it basic cable?
Portlandia premieres on IFC January 21 at 10:30pm.
Tags: Television, Portlandia
Thanks for the shoutout, Laura!
The “death of Seattle counterculture” that I characterized was of THAT counterculture—grunge counterculture—that was secretly thriving just prior to its stint as a media darling. (Literal deaths of a few of that scene’s figureheads also ensued.)
I was living just outside of Seattle (in Auburn, WA) at that time, so I remember it well: the feeling of being in the most culturally relevant region in the nation, and the feeling of deflation and disaster that followed. That’s what I was speaking to in my post.
Seattle as a city has not died, but it’s hard to deny that it was permanently reshaped by its period of worldwide prominence.
Gotcha. I actually had an interesting conversation with the curator of EMP’s new Nirvana exhibit, Taking Punk to the Masses, recently, and he said that without Nirvana, we’d never have a Vera Project, or a mayor’s office of film and music. We’d never afford that kind of money and attention to our music scene. So maybe the death of grunge—its legacy—means the birth of 10 other opportunities? And that media attention, ultimately, was a boon, not a bust.
Seattle natives, care to weigh in?
Uhg. This is simply too much for me to handle with an ounce of maturity or seriousness. I never left the PDX/Vancouver area and I haven’t had a job in 2.5 years. If I can’t laugh at my peer group who can I laugh at? People with jobs from the east coast? Seattle sucks and Portland rules.
Hey, Seattle is awesome! Portland is awesome too, though let’s be honest not really a haven for those who like being employed and making more than minimum wage and stuff. I really don’t see why Seattle and Portland gotta fight. And for the record, having lived in both cities pretty recently, Seattle likes flannel way more than Portland. Flannel shirts with party skirts, anyone?
Though I’m no Seattle native, just a Portland transplant, and I haven’t watched the Portlandia clip or anything yet. And hey, if Portland like, thrives and develops an economy and stuff, that’s not bad, right? Can’t we just all be friends?