You know what's great about Mary Steenburgen?

If you read the subject of this post, you’re no doubt thinking to yourself “But Anthony, everything about Mary Steenburgen is great!” That’s true, obviously, but today I want to talk about one thing specifically.

Mary Steenburgen is so talented, so generally amazing that sometimes I do nothing for days on end but sit around and think about how terrific she is. With that in mind, it’s my theory that she would be well-cast in some role in any movie ever made. Not every role, but *a* role in every single motion picture ever made.

For example:

Rocky – Mary Steenburgen as Adrian
Batman Begins – Mary Steenburgen as Boring Katie Holmes Love Interest
Revenge of the Nerds – Mary Steenburgen as Gilbert’s mom
City Lights – Mary Steenburgen as the Blind Girl
Alien – Mary Steenburgen as Lambert
12 Angry Men – Mary Steenburgen as Juror #2
Toy Story – Mary Steenburgen as Bo Peep
Casablanca – Mary Steenburgen as that woman who wants to escape with her husband. Not Ilsa, the other one. The one who Rick rigs the roulette wheel for.
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure – Mary Steenburgen as Movie Dottie
Norbit – Mary Steenburgen as Eddie Murphy

I could go on until I’ve listed every movie, Leonard Maltin-style, but you get the idea. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I defy you to name me a picture that wouldn’t do well to feature Mary Steenburgen. Seriously – go ahead and give it a try.

This is a Career?: Cynthia Stevenson

Cynthia Stevenson is awesome.

I first became aware of actress Cynthia Stevenson when USA Network started rerunning the 1995-1997 NBC flop Hope & Gloria in the fall after it had been cancelled. Now, Hope & Gloria was not a great sitcom, or even an especially good one. But even as a twelve-year-old, I was captivated by her offbeat-yet-shockingly-sincere delivery of stale sitcom punchlines. Somehow, on a TV show that also featured Alan Thicke chewing scenery like he was selling a trip to Las Vegas, she managed to convince me that Hope was an actual human being. I was astonished, and I became a fan for life.

I can’t find any decent clips of Hope & Gloria online (You’d think the Enrico Colantoni fansites would be all over that), nor can I find clips of the next place I saw her. Three years earlier, she had played Bob Newhart’s daughter on his failed sitcom Bob. I saw a few reruns on TV Land in the late 90s, when they filled time by showing failed sitcoms rather than reality shows (Weren’t those the days?)

Clearly, she wasn’t the best thing about this show opposite a legend like Newhart, but she held her own. Bob had resisted having kids on his hit sitcoms, and having an adult child here could easily have flopped. It didn’t, and that’s because Cynthia Stevenson was perfectly cast. Her flippant, wise-cracking delivery is about as far as you can get from Bob’s signature stammer, and the generational bafflement was all there in the performances. Too bad the scripts weren’t up to the same standard.

In the years since her failed sitcoms, Cynthia’s been working steadily, and she’s been wasted consistently – as the mom in the Air Bud sequels, as the mom in Agent Cody Banks, as George’s mom on Showtime’s Dead Like Me, as that one guy’s mom on ABC's Men in Trees. In all of these roles, she has the same snappy, believable delivery she always had, but she gets nothing interesting to say.

The one role I’ve seen that really allowed her to display the range of her talents was in Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Most of the praise directed towards the movie focuses on Dylan Baker’s role as troubled, twisted pedophilic father Bill Maplewood. But Cynthia matches him as his cheerfully, pathetically, heart-breakingly oblivious wife Trish. At the beginning, it's a pretty typical performance for her - the same smirk, the same wisecrack-y delivery. As the picture goes on, it becomes clear that much of that is a mask because the character can't bear to deal with the reality of her everyday life. It’s an amazing performance, and she deserves the chance to do that all the time.

I’d like TV and movies a lot more if Cynthia Stevenson wasn’t wasted all the time.