SLACKING IS A CHOICE:

Forget the Downturn; Punish the Lazybones (GINIA BELLAFANTE, 10/14/10, NY Times)

The series [“No Ordinary Family’‘] is one of a number now on television to break with a long strain of tradition by casting ambition as something healthy, positive, redemptive and even honorable, and its absence an agent of ostentatious humiliation. During the past decade the dramas that helped define television — “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Damages” — equated professional striving with dark moral deficiency, while comedies like “Sex and the City” and “Friends” imagined the urban playground as the great priority of adult life.

The recession, though, appears to have prompted a re-evaluation. In recent years the eager embrace of the capitalist impulse has largely been found in competitive reality television, where aggressive contest is thrilling and good, and the will to achieve is the lifeblood of the American way. Shows like “The Apprentice” and “Top Chef” pump this notion into us as if it were an intravenous narcotic. But during the downturn, fictional television has become an enabler of a similar spirit, administering the drug even when it doesn’t necessarily intend to.

During the bleak days of the 1970s economy, characters were mostly committed to just getting by. But today a show like “Undercovers,” a caper from J. J. Abrams on NBC, is a tribute to advanced multitasking. Here an attractive young couple who have retired from the C.I.A. to spend more time together embark on the fantasy Plan B career of so many overburdened yuppies: gourmet food. Steven and Samantha Bloom (Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) run a catering business but, quickly bored by hours of menu planning, return to jetting around the world fighting terrorism even as they continue to do inventive things with shrimp for parties of 200.