My Response to TMZ’s Last Days: Farrah Fawcett
James Cowman
When I started watching TMZ’s Last Days episode on Farrah Fawcett, I was interested in how hosts Derek Kaufman and Jason Beckerman would approach a life already covered extensively in biographies, documentaries, interviews, and retrospective articles. The episode is built around Farrah’s death in June 2009 and the way Michael Jackson’s unexpected death later that same day quickly overtook the news coverage. That is a legitimate subject, and as the program developed, I found several of the hosts’ observations thoughtful and fair. Their explanation of why Jackson overshadowed Farrah without causing her death to go unnoticed is probably the strongest part of the episode. Unfortunately, the podcast spends far less time developing observations like this than I expected.
What gradually became distracting was the amount of basic biographical material being read before Kaufman and Beckerman offered much interpretation of their own. The episode moves through Chasing Farrah, her cancer diagnosis, Farrah’s Story, Ryan O’Neal, Lee Majors, the red swimsuit poster, Charlie’s Angels, her film career, Playboy, David Letterman, and other familiar parts of her public history. Some background is obviously necessary, and there is nothing wrong with having prepared notes available when dates, quotations, and events need to be presented accurately. The problem is that those notes often seem to control the program. A section of biography is presented, a quotation or clip follows, the hosts react briefly, and then another prepared section begins. After a while, the approach feels unnatural and clunky.
The difference becomes obvious whenever Kaufman and Beckerman stop reading and begin examining what the information means. Their treatment of Michael Jackson’s death is a good example. They do not simply repeat the familiar argument that Farrah died on the wrong day and therefore disappeared from public attention. They explain why the two deaths produced such different reactions. Farrah had been fighting cancer publicly; Farrah’s Story had recently aired, and the public knew she was gravely ill. Her death was terribly sad, but it was not entirely unexpected. Jackson’s death, in contrast, was sudden and immediately surrounded by questions about what had happened. The hosts describe the change in coverage almost as an eclipse, with Jackson’s death suddenly overtaking everything else.
I think this is a solid argument because they also make an important qualification. Farrah’s death did not go unnoticed. She initially received major coverage, and the public had already been following her illness closely. Farrah’s Story had attracted a large audience and was later rebroadcast. In other words, Jackson overshadowed Farrah in the breaking-news cycle, but he did not erase her from public memory or mourning. I find that observation much more persuasive than the familiar complaint that Michael Jackson somehow stole Farrah’s moment. It is also an example of the hosts taking known information and adding something useful to it.
I also liked the section where they read comments from Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, and Cheryl Ladd after Farrah died. Normally, simply reading public statements is exactly the type of thing the episode relies on too heavily. In this case, however, they explain why the comments are worth considering. Farrah became the enormous breakout star of Charlie’s Angels and quickly overshadowed Kate and Jaclyn as a cultural phenomenon. I think that is fair. It does not mean Farrah was necessarily a better actress or more important to the structure of the show. It means she became the face that captured the public imagination on a completely different level.
The hosts then observe that Farrah could have become a prima donna under those circumstances. She could have. Sudden fame on that scale has changed plenty of people, and there is nothing unreasonable about asking whether it affected her relationships with the other women. What makes the comments from Jaclyn, Kate, and Cheryl interesting is that their memories are warm rather than resentful. Jaclyn’s recollection of Farrah bringing her a German chocolate cake, looking through her closet, trying on shoes, and spending hours talking about their lives presents a much more ordinary and personal Farrah than the cultural icon seen in photographs and television clips. Memorial statements cannot establish that there was never tension among the women, but they do show affection. Here the quotations lead somewhere rather than simply filling out a biography.
The discussion of Farrah’s red swimsuit poster also begins reasonably well. Kaufman and Beckerman trace the familiar history of the shoot: Farrah styling herself, the swimsuit, photographer Bruce McBroom, and the selection of the final image. Eventually they arrive at a useful question: why did this particular poster become such a phenomenon? Their answer does not need to be complicated. Farrah was extraordinarily attractive, the image was sexy without being explicit, she had an all-American quality, and her television fame gave her something many other pinup models did not have. I agree with most of that. Sometimes the obvious answer really is the answer.
Unfortunately, this is also where the episode moves into a form of modern-day moral commentary that I find condescending. One host says that boys probably do not hang pictures of attractive women on their walls as much anymore and suggests that doing so would now be considered “pretty disrespectful.” Later, he says that he looks back with “a touch of regret” at the way boys like him would “literally objectify” women. The other host largely agrees, then points out that Farrah herself had significant control over the image. What the argument overlooks is fairly obvious. Boys may not cover their bedroom walls with posters the way they did in the 1970s, but that does not mean teenage boys suddenly stopped looking at attractive women. The medium changed. Posters were replaced by the internet, smartphones, social media, and an almost unlimited supply of images that previous generations could not have imagined.
That is one reason I found the entire exchange completely unnecessary. Men are attracted to beautiful women, and teenage boys hanging a glamour poster on their bedroom walls does not require some later confession of guilt. More importantly, a glamour poster is meant to create an appealing image that people want to look at and display. Boys who hung Farrah Fawcett’s poster on their walls were responding to it in exactly the way it was intended to be received. If anything has changed, it is how attraction is expressed and consumed, not whether attraction exists. Treating the disappearance of posters from bedroom walls as evidence of some broader moral evolution strikes me as a very weak argument.
Farrah’s own public comments make the moral argument even less convincing. In an earlier 1979 interview with Brian Linehan, she discussed the tension other people sometimes created between her religious beliefs and her sexual image. She remembered seeing a comment questioning how she could describe herself as a devout Catholic while also not wearing a bra. Farrah’s reaction was essentially to question why those two things were supposed to be incompatible. She also spoke about looking at her poster or a sexy photograph of herself without treating the image as something shameful or morally disqualifying. Rather than accepting the assumption that sexuality and morality were automatically in conflict, she rejected the connection others were trying to impose on her.
That does not prove Farrah would have used the language I am using here, and it does not tell us exactly what she would have thought about every boy who hung the poster on his wall. However, it does establish something important. Farrah was aware that people sometimes judged her sexual image through a moral framework, and she did not simply accept that framework as valid. In fact, she appears less uncomfortable with the coexistence of sexuality, religion, and public image than the two men discussing her poster decades later. That makes the retrospective guilt in the podcast even harder for me to take seriously.
The podcast bounces back somewhat when Kaufman and Beckerman discuss Farrah’s 1997 appearance with David Letterman. I agree that the interview is uncomfortable at times. Farrah and Letterman never seem to find a rhythm, and at times she gets distracted, loses her train of thought, or struggles to get through a story. What I appreciated is that the hosts place her appearance within a larger history of unusual Letterman interviews. They mention Andy Kaufman, Madonna, Howard Stern, Crispin Glover, and later Joaquin Phoenix. That prevents Farrah’s appearance from being treated as though no other celebrity ever had an awkward exchange on that show. Letterman had a particular style that sometimes let an uncomfortable moment continue rather than quickly steering the guest back to safe promotional conversation.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that Letterman may have been somewhat mean-spirited for allowing the interview to continue in that direction. I did not see it that way when I watched the interview, and comparing the original exchange with what Farrah later told Howard Stern gives me even less reason to accept that interpretation. When Stern asked her directly about reports that she had been high during the Letterman appearance, Farrah denied it. She said she knew what she was doing and explained that the audience was unusually energetic and kept reacting while she was trying to tell stories. In the original Letterman interview, that behavior is actually visible. Farrah repeatedly looks toward the audience, comments on their reactions, and at one point makes clear that she wants to finish what she was trying to explain.
Farrah also explained to Stern that the odd exchange at the beginning of the Letterman appearance was intended as a joke. When Letterman asked why she had never appeared on his program before, she responded by asking whether he remembered her and then immediately said she was kidding. That is exactly what happens in the original interview. More importantly, when Stern asked whether Letterman had made her nervous, Farrah said no and spoke positively about him. The original interview also gives me little reason to see hostility on Letterman’s part. He tells Farrah that she seems fine, helps her at several points when she struggles to find a word or finish a thought, and after the interview repeatedly tells the audience that she had been fabulous.
None of this means Farrah’s later explanation has to settle every question about the appearance. The interview remains strange, and viewers can reasonably disagree about why it unfolded the way it did. However, there is an important difference between saying an interview went badly and suggesting the host intentionally allowed a guest to embarrass herself. Farrah herself did not describe Letterman as cruel or hostile, and the original exchange supports several specific details she later gave Stern. I think the podcast is right to place the interview in context, but it goes further than the evidence supports.
The Letterman discussion also illustrates what frustrated me about the episode as a whole. When Kaufman and Beckerman stop reciting background and begin interpreting what they have found, the program becomes much more interesting. Unfortunately, they repeatedly return to prepared blocks of biography. Someone with little knowledge of Farrah may find Last Days useful because it provides a broad introduction to her career, relationships, cultural importance, illness, and death. There is value in that. Anyone already familiar with her life, however, will encounter long stretches where very little new is being offered. The stronger moments are when the hosts move beyond the information and tell us what they think it means. There are not enough of them.
For this reason, my reaction to Last Days is not entirely negative. I think the Michael Jackson discussion is strong. I liked the way the hosts interpreted the comments from the other Angels. Their explanation of the poster’s success is mostly sensible before the moral commentary takes over, and their treatment of Letterman provides useful context even though I disagree with part of their conclusion. There are ideas here worth examining. The frustration is that they are buried inside an episode that spends too much time demonstrating the research instead of turning it into a natural conversation.
That is where Last Days: Farrah Fawcett falls short for me. Research is necessary, but knowing the material is preparation; interpreting it is the work. Kaufman and Beckerman clearly did the first. I wanted much more of the second.
Sources Consulted
James Cowman
When I started watching TMZ’s Last Days episode on Farrah Fawcett, I was interested in how hosts Derek Kaufman and Jason Beckerman would approach a life already covered extensively in biographies, documentaries, interviews, and retrospective articles. The episode is built around Farrah’s death in June 2009 and the way Michael Jackson’s unexpected death later that same day quickly overtook the news coverage. That is a legitimate subject, and as the program developed, I found several of the hosts’ observations thoughtful and fair. Their explanation of why Jackson overshadowed Farrah without causing her death to go unnoticed is probably the strongest part of the episode. Unfortunately, the podcast spends far less time developing observations like this than I expected.
What gradually became distracting was the amount of basic biographical material being read before Kaufman and Beckerman offered much interpretation of their own. The episode moves through Chasing Farrah, her cancer diagnosis, Farrah’s Story, Ryan O’Neal, Lee Majors, the red swimsuit poster, Charlie’s Angels, her film career, Playboy, David Letterman, and other familiar parts of her public history. Some background is obviously necessary, and there is nothing wrong with having prepared notes available when dates, quotations, and events need to be presented accurately. The problem is that those notes often seem to control the program. A section of biography is presented, a quotation or clip follows, the hosts react briefly, and then another prepared section begins. After a while, the approach feels unnatural and clunky.
The difference becomes obvious whenever Kaufman and Beckerman stop reading and begin examining what the information means. Their treatment of Michael Jackson’s death is a good example. They do not simply repeat the familiar argument that Farrah died on the wrong day and therefore disappeared from public attention. They explain why the two deaths produced such different reactions. Farrah had been fighting cancer publicly; Farrah’s Story had recently aired, and the public knew she was gravely ill. Her death was terribly sad, but it was not entirely unexpected. Jackson’s death, in contrast, was sudden and immediately surrounded by questions about what had happened. The hosts describe the change in coverage almost as an eclipse, with Jackson’s death suddenly overtaking everything else.
I think this is a solid argument because they also make an important qualification. Farrah’s death did not go unnoticed. She initially received major coverage, and the public had already been following her illness closely. Farrah’s Story had attracted a large audience and was later rebroadcast. In other words, Jackson overshadowed Farrah in the breaking-news cycle, but he did not erase her from public memory or mourning. I find that observation much more persuasive than the familiar complaint that Michael Jackson somehow stole Farrah’s moment. It is also an example of the hosts taking known information and adding something useful to it.
I also liked the section where they read comments from Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, and Cheryl Ladd after Farrah died. Normally, simply reading public statements is exactly the type of thing the episode relies on too heavily. In this case, however, they explain why the comments are worth considering. Farrah became the enormous breakout star of Charlie’s Angels and quickly overshadowed Kate and Jaclyn as a cultural phenomenon. I think that is fair. It does not mean Farrah was necessarily a better actress or more important to the structure of the show. It means she became the face that captured the public imagination on a completely different level.
The hosts then observe that Farrah could have become a prima donna under those circumstances. She could have. Sudden fame on that scale has changed plenty of people, and there is nothing unreasonable about asking whether it affected her relationships with the other women. What makes the comments from Jaclyn, Kate, and Cheryl interesting is that their memories are warm rather than resentful. Jaclyn’s recollection of Farrah bringing her a German chocolate cake, looking through her closet, trying on shoes, and spending hours talking about their lives presents a much more ordinary and personal Farrah than the cultural icon seen in photographs and television clips. Memorial statements cannot establish that there was never tension among the women, but they do show affection. Here the quotations lead somewhere rather than simply filling out a biography.
The discussion of Farrah’s red swimsuit poster also begins reasonably well. Kaufman and Beckerman trace the familiar history of the shoot: Farrah styling herself, the swimsuit, photographer Bruce McBroom, and the selection of the final image. Eventually they arrive at a useful question: why did this particular poster become such a phenomenon? Their answer does not need to be complicated. Farrah was extraordinarily attractive, the image was sexy without being explicit, she had an all-American quality, and her television fame gave her something many other pinup models did not have. I agree with most of that. Sometimes the obvious answer really is the answer.
Unfortunately, this is also where the episode moves into a form of modern-day moral commentary that I find condescending. One host says that boys probably do not hang pictures of attractive women on their walls as much anymore and suggests that doing so would now be considered “pretty disrespectful.” Later, he says that he looks back with “a touch of regret” at the way boys like him would “literally objectify” women. The other host largely agrees, then points out that Farrah herself had significant control over the image. What the argument overlooks is fairly obvious. Boys may not cover their bedroom walls with posters the way they did in the 1970s, but that does not mean teenage boys suddenly stopped looking at attractive women. The medium changed. Posters were replaced by the internet, smartphones, social media, and an almost unlimited supply of images that previous generations could not have imagined.
That is one reason I found the entire exchange completely unnecessary. Men are attracted to beautiful women, and teenage boys hanging a glamour poster on their bedroom walls does not require some later confession of guilt. More importantly, a glamour poster is meant to create an appealing image that people want to look at and display. Boys who hung Farrah Fawcett’s poster on their walls were responding to it in exactly the way it was intended to be received. If anything has changed, it is how attraction is expressed and consumed, not whether attraction exists. Treating the disappearance of posters from bedroom walls as evidence of some broader moral evolution strikes me as a very weak argument.
Farrah’s own public comments make the moral argument even less convincing. In an earlier 1979 interview with Brian Linehan, she discussed the tension other people sometimes created between her religious beliefs and her sexual image. She remembered seeing a comment questioning how she could describe herself as a devout Catholic while also not wearing a bra. Farrah’s reaction was essentially to question why those two things were supposed to be incompatible. She also spoke about looking at her poster or a sexy photograph of herself without treating the image as something shameful or morally disqualifying. Rather than accepting the assumption that sexuality and morality were automatically in conflict, she rejected the connection others were trying to impose on her.
That does not prove Farrah would have used the language I am using here, and it does not tell us exactly what she would have thought about every boy who hung the poster on his wall. However, it does establish something important. Farrah was aware that people sometimes judged her sexual image through a moral framework, and she did not simply accept that framework as valid. In fact, she appears less uncomfortable with the coexistence of sexuality, religion, and public image than the two men discussing her poster decades later. That makes the retrospective guilt in the podcast even harder for me to take seriously.
The podcast bounces back somewhat when Kaufman and Beckerman discuss Farrah’s 1997 appearance with David Letterman. I agree that the interview is uncomfortable at times. Farrah and Letterman never seem to find a rhythm, and at times she gets distracted, loses her train of thought, or struggles to get through a story. What I appreciated is that the hosts place her appearance within a larger history of unusual Letterman interviews. They mention Andy Kaufman, Madonna, Howard Stern, Crispin Glover, and later Joaquin Phoenix. That prevents Farrah’s appearance from being treated as though no other celebrity ever had an awkward exchange on that show. Letterman had a particular style that sometimes let an uncomfortable moment continue rather than quickly steering the guest back to safe promotional conversation.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that Letterman may have been somewhat mean-spirited for allowing the interview to continue in that direction. I did not see it that way when I watched the interview, and comparing the original exchange with what Farrah later told Howard Stern gives me even less reason to accept that interpretation. When Stern asked her directly about reports that she had been high during the Letterman appearance, Farrah denied it. She said she knew what she was doing and explained that the audience was unusually energetic and kept reacting while she was trying to tell stories. In the original Letterman interview, that behavior is actually visible. Farrah repeatedly looks toward the audience, comments on their reactions, and at one point makes clear that she wants to finish what she was trying to explain.
Farrah also explained to Stern that the odd exchange at the beginning of the Letterman appearance was intended as a joke. When Letterman asked why she had never appeared on his program before, she responded by asking whether he remembered her and then immediately said she was kidding. That is exactly what happens in the original interview. More importantly, when Stern asked whether Letterman had made her nervous, Farrah said no and spoke positively about him. The original interview also gives me little reason to see hostility on Letterman’s part. He tells Farrah that she seems fine, helps her at several points when she struggles to find a word or finish a thought, and after the interview repeatedly tells the audience that she had been fabulous.
None of this means Farrah’s later explanation has to settle every question about the appearance. The interview remains strange, and viewers can reasonably disagree about why it unfolded the way it did. However, there is an important difference between saying an interview went badly and suggesting the host intentionally allowed a guest to embarrass herself. Farrah herself did not describe Letterman as cruel or hostile, and the original exchange supports several specific details she later gave Stern. I think the podcast is right to place the interview in context, but it goes further than the evidence supports.
The Letterman discussion also illustrates what frustrated me about the episode as a whole. When Kaufman and Beckerman stop reciting background and begin interpreting what they have found, the program becomes much more interesting. Unfortunately, they repeatedly return to prepared blocks of biography. Someone with little knowledge of Farrah may find Last Days useful because it provides a broad introduction to her career, relationships, cultural importance, illness, and death. There is value in that. Anyone already familiar with her life, however, will encounter long stretches where very little new is being offered. The stronger moments are when the hosts move beyond the information and tell us what they think it means. There are not enough of them.
For this reason, my reaction to Last Days is not entirely negative. I think the Michael Jackson discussion is strong. I liked the way the hosts interpreted the comments from the other Angels. Their explanation of the poster’s success is mostly sensible before the moral commentary takes over, and their treatment of Letterman provides useful context even though I disagree with part of their conclusion. There are ideas here worth examining. The frustration is that they are buried inside an episode that spends too much time demonstrating the research instead of turning it into a natural conversation.
That is where Last Days: Farrah Fawcett falls short for me. Research is necessary, but knowing the material is preparation; interpreting it is the work. Kaufman and Beckerman clearly did the first. I wanted much more of the second.
Sources Consulted
- TMZ, Last Days Podcast, Episode 70: “Farrah Fawcett” — Derek Kaufman and Jason Beckerman, June 19, 2024.
- Farrah Fawcett interview with David Letterman, 1997 — Late Show with David Letterman.
- Farrah Fawcett interview with Howard Stern, 1997.
- Farrah Fawcett interview with Brian Linehan, 1979.
