Only pretty/handsome actors on shows now? Obviously you haven’t been watching possibly the most well written, thoughtful, insightful TV series of all, “The Red Green Show”. produced way up in Canuckland.
Zachary Levi is cute in a geeky sort of way, absolutely, but I’m not sure he’s in the league of Yvonne Strahovski or Jordana Brewster.
Am I weird for finding Morgan (Joshua Gomez) totally cute?
The real ugly on Chuck is reserved for the guy playing Jeff. He is more than ugly enough to cancel out the implausible hotness of some of the other actors.
He is. Tall, nice body, extremely handsome. He’s styled to look as goofy as they can make him on the show, but Zachary Levi is an exceedingly handsome man.
This seems like my problem with the new Star Trek. The actors seem too bland, too unmemorable. You can picture Shatner pretty easily, Chris Pine is less distinct.
Well, the women are hardly dogs, either. I’d say most of the main characters on that show are pretty damn hot.
That show is funny. My local PBS affiliate plays it randomly and it did regularly years ago. They tended to play it at night when I was probably supposed to be asleep and it was before we had cable so not much was on. But yeah no one on that show was attractive, most were purposefully made to look more nerdy/hoosier/ugly.
By real world standards, yes. But not by TV standards. Sandra Oh, Ellen Pompeo, and Sara Ramirez are all attractive women but they’re the kind of attractive women you see in real life. Now compare them to actresses like Cote de Pablo, Emily Deschanel, Jorja Fox, Mariska Hargitay, Melina Kanakaredes, Emily Procter, Elisabeth Rohm, or Robin Tunney - all of whom are playing “normal” women on other series.
One of the reasons I love Eastenders is for the decidedly non-gorgeous cast. They eat breakfast for every meal (with their average-looking teeth), drink in the pub, bed-hop, do laundry, and accidentally kill each other all day, every day. It’s delightful. Your PBS may show it, though fewer do these days.
But that’s the thing about “attractive” because it can mean so many things to different people. If I woke up as Jorja Fox tomorrow I’d cry myself to sleep. Emily Deschanel is downright ODD looking to me.
Agreed. Elisabeth Rohm, Mariska Hargitay and Melina Kanakaredes are attractive women, but abnormally beautiful they’re not. Neither are any of the Grey’s Anatomy women outside of Katherine Heigl and Chyler Leigh.
If there’s one thing you’ll never get people to agree on, it’s who’s hot and who’s not.
Fair enough. I haven’t really seen him outside of the show. I am inspired to look for pics now! 
I think that one probably runs down to taste. “Cute” goes further than “hot” in my mind. But I’m not necessarily putting Pam above the other four in discussion; they’re all extremely attractive, which is basically my point.
This list really fascinates me (I had to look up all of these women–the only one I’d even heard of was Emily Deschanel, who I’ve always thought was strange-looking.) I dunno, none of them strike me as being above a 7 at best, certainly not drop-dead gorgeous. I love how varied people’s tastes are.
Oh, I’ve been watching it on PBS here for 15 years! I marvel at the non-gorgeousness (and that includes the appalling home decor :eek:). And Phil! He looks like a shaved boar, on the verge of a stroke or heart attack, yet every bleached blond is swooning after him!
And in black and white B-movies in the Men Wearing Hats era, and in a lot of old TV shows (I Love Lucy for one), many of the lesser characters - the shopkeeper, the mailman,the taxi driver, the teacher - those positions are filled by frumpy old geezers and hefty old women, the kind you’d hate for them to accidentally step on your foot.
The Sopranos cast had a very wide array of different appearances - the vast majority of the main characters were not necessarily ugly, but somewhat “odd” looking. Whenever there was a person who was extremely “attractive” in the conventional sense, it was always either a minor character or someone who was an outsider to the mob lifestyle or both. Meadow (and I never get over how weird of a name that) was very pretty but she started off the show with a great honking nose, as a teenager, and then clearly had it bobbed by Season 2. I wish they would have worked that into the show, because it’s SO obvious. They should have just made it part of the show.
Back when Doug Flutie was playing professional football you’d always hear talk about his height. People would say he had skill but he was just too short to play in the NFL. And it would show everytime he was out on the field and the other players were towering over him.
But here’s the thing: Doug Flutie is 5’10". He’s not really a short man. His height is, in fact, slightly above the national average.
The reason he always seemed short was because he was surrounded by football players. These guys are mostly six foot tall or bigger. So a person of normal height looks short when he’s among them.
My point, obviously, is that the same phenomena affects women in television. Pretty much all actresses are above average in appearance and our standards for them rise accordingly.
Think about some of the more physically attractive woman you know in your workplace. Now imagine them standing next to Emily Deschanel or Jorja Fox or Elisabeth Rohm. Who’s better looking? I work with over a hundred women and maybe two or three of them would be the equal of these actresses.
Which is not surprising. Good looks are one of the things actresses get chosen by. But good looks become so common in TV we become used to it. And when there are so many tens, the eights and nines become the ugly ones by default.
One of the many things that was so refreshing about The Wire was the absence in general of hotties. The people looked normal, not as if they’d just stepped out of their trailers adter an hour in makeup.
All the so called “hot” actresses are always covered in makeup and filmed under special lighting conditions designed to make them look better. Very few of them, in my opinion, have a truly distinctive natural beauty.
Totally agree with the O.P. it just seems to make things unrealistic when all the characters,including minor bit parts look like male models/pin ups.
Something in a similar vain that used to be common but now not so much, was ordinary street scenes where there was no litter,no graffitti and everything was spotlessly clean or series about soldiers historical or otherwise whos uniforms were also clean,ironed and unfaded although they had supposedly been in the field for months.
When I see yet another incredibly good looking street sweeper or stable mucker outer I can’t help but think actor not character,and this in turn takes me out of the drama.
There are of course stunningly good looking people in ordinary life,leading ordinary lives but we are extremely rare.