Week Ending November 12, 2004

November 6-12, 2004. Scientists were developing the HPV vaccine. The United States was embarking on a brutal offensive in Fallujah. Scott Peterson was found guilty of killing his wife and their unborn child (He did it! Why is this up for debate!). Snoop Dogg had just released “Drop it Like It’s Hot.” The T-Mobile Sidekick was the hottest phone on the market but the Motorola Razr was ready to steal its throne. Let’s see what was on TV.

Saturday, November 6

9:00 MadTV on Fox

I was expecting the press coverage of the Ashlee Simpson SNL incident to be more vicious. It wasn’t nice, but a lot of people blamed her dad, and most of the press gave her a chance to explain herself. I guess a lot of the really vicious stuff must have been on message boards. And on MadTV.

Of course MadTV was going to cover an already infamous gaffe on a competitor’s show. The sketch starts by making fun of Simpson for trying to shift the blame onto her band. Fair enough, that was uncool. Then they bring out her dad. And her dad chokes her. To sketch comedy death. It’s early aughts misogyny in its purest form, and boy is it ugly.

Nothing else in the episode turned my stomach quite like that. That doesn’t mean it was funny. And that’s a shame. Key and Peele were both part of the cast this season, and the show barely used either of them!

There was one truly funny joke, at the end of an imaginary Vh1 “I Love the 2000s” show (10 years later, Vh1 actually did make “I Love the 2000s.” I think I even watched some of it!). Our nostalgia eventually causes a rupture in the space time continuum. Gold star for that one. Doesn’t cancel out the Ashlee Simpson sketch though. Not even close.

What Else Was On

CBS was originally going to air The Amazing Race on Saturdays this Fall. For its first few seasons, The Amazing Race was a critical favorite that struggled in the ratings, always on the brink of cancellation. But the show was a favorite, and that plus the show’s strong showing the previous Summer and its second win at the Emmys convinced CBS to give the show a shot on Tuesday. That meant burning off their flagging family drama Clubhouse on Saturdays. I think this might be the last time a network ever programmed a real show on Saturdays.

TiVo Status

7 episodes of Everwood, the three hour Masterpiece Theater miniseries The Lost Prince, and The Office Christmas Special from across the pond (I’ll watch that one closer to the holidays, after I’ve rewatched the series). 12 hours, 16 hours of space left.

Sunday, November 7

7:00 King of the Hill on Fox

I honestly think I missed a lot here. It’s the first full episode of King of the Hill I’ve ever watched, and I was pretty tired. Everyone went to Montana and there was a land dispute with Henry Winkler, simmering family tensions boiling over, a lot of film references I didn’t get, and a pretty complex political argument. A lot of it went right over my head, I could practically hear the whooshing sound.

And yet, I still loved this episode. The emotional throughline about the matriarch resenting her mother is pitch perfect. The animation is gorgeous, the Montana scenery is beautifully animated. The score is gorgeous to, melodic and understated, and the show as a whole is surprisingly meditative and poetic. Even if I didn’t understand the satire, I could tell it was thoughtful and far from half baked. The Henry Winkler cameo gives the show an opportunity to comment on out of touch Hollywood elites, but it never gets preachy. The climax at the end of the episode involves the main characters righteously driving cattle down main street to teach Henry Winkler a lesson about small town justice. But even then, things are undercut by the name of the town: Osage. I’m willing to bet that choice of name is no accident, and it amounts to a sort of…land acknowledgement, undercutting the heroes’ righteousness.

Most of all, I’m surprised by how sweet the show is. I never expected that from a Mike Judge project! Underneath all the satire and silly jokes, you can tell that this family really does love each other. The end of the episode, when the parents look at their kid having the time of his life on a horse in the gorgeous Montana scenery. It made me feel things!

7:30 Malcolm in the Middle on Fox

On November 7, 2004, two different tv shows aired episodes in which American mothers are desperate to find their sons, who have gone missing in action in wartime. One was Malcolm, the other was Vietnam-era family drama American Dreams. Due to a football overrun, they even aired at the same time in much of the country. Both episodes were likely intended to coincide with Veteran’s Day. But in a dark twist, both episodes aired on the first day of the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, which proved to be the bloodiest battle of the entire war.

It was a coincidence. Except not really. George W. Bush gave the order for the Fallujah offensive immediately after he won his second term. When you watch newscasts from this week, you can see why. Two different local newscasts I found on youtube (from Ames, IA and Norfolk, VA) feature announcements that local men have died in the battle. Other newscasts feature footage of terrified families, and footage from the battle that tries to convince us that we’re winning and that the locals are grateful. I don’t know if it was convincing then. It certainly isn’t now.

Which is all to say that these episodes were speaking to very real anxieties in America. American Dreams is very serious. The mother looks into the distance a lot and we get flashbacks to happier memories of her son. The episode ends with a cliffhanger, as a message is delivered we hear eldest son J.J. saying goodbye to his family.

Malcolm takes a different approach. Some of it (mostly the stuff in Iraq) doesn’t work super well. Teenage soldier Reese is sent on a special mission in a Niqab and marries a local warlord. I’d just watched a documentary about the very real horrors that Iraqis and Americans experienced at this exact time and it was hard to find this funny.

The stuff at home is a lot better. The family is terrified, but they’re also confused and stupid. Jane Kaczmarek’s Lois is desperate to get her son back, and that desperation is terrifying, hilarious, and moving. I especially loved the scene in which she used her experience raising four boys to give an Army guy tips on discipline. They were good tips, I shudder to imagine what the army would do with them. And it works, the guy is impressed and lets her take the information she needs.

Meanwhile, Malcolm is guilty because Reese joined the army after he stole his girlfriend. He decides to volunteer at a home for senior veterans run by Caroline Aaron. Except he’s totally driven by his guilt, and that makes his a truly terrible volunteer. He decides to take them all off their meds, and it leads to a truly hilarious brawl (one guy reaches for his dentures and bites another guy, it’s great). Eventually his little brother convinces them that the true way to honor their brother is to do something he would appreciate: disrupt a local hippie art fair. When Reese comes home just as they’re getting ready to put their plan in action, it’s honestly quite moving. You know how when people say that young people at war or in other perilous “should have been at the club?” This is like that, except replace “club” with “dropping remote controlled shit balloons on hippies.”

8:00 American Dreams on NBC

Until about a month ago, I thought that Tom Verica and Tom Amandes were the same person. I think this started on Scandal. I knew that some guy named Tom was playing President Fitz’s latest opponent, and I knew that some actor-turned director named Tom was directing a bunch of episodes. I simply assumed they were the same person.

They are not the same person! Like many tv actors, Tom Amandes, has tried his hand at directing. He’s directed five episodes of television. Verica has directed over 75.

Like most tv actors turned directors, Verica started directing on his own tv show, American Dreams. He directed the previous episode, and that episode pretty much made me a fan of the show for life. Lots of actors direct episodes of their own show and then never grace a director’s chair again, but Verica has delivered on the promise he showed in that episode, and directed a lot of great television. He’s especially accomplished in the world of Shondaland, working on pretty much every Shondaland project (he also played Viola Davis’ husband on How to Get Away with Murder, it was his last acting role). Recently, he directed the entire Queen Charlotte miniseries, and I thought he did a great job.

So Verica wins the directing sweepstakes. But Amandes is the better actor.

I would be comparing the two men even if I hadn’t thought they were the same person for over a decade. Even if they didn’t share the same name. Right now, I’m halfway through season two of Everwood, in which Amandes plays grumpy patriarch Dr. Harold Abbott. And I just started watching American Dreams, in which Verica plays grumpy patriarch Jack Pryor.

In this episode of American Dreams, the Pryors discover that their eldest son J.J. is missing in action in Vietnam. Jack, a WWII veteran, encouraged J.J. to enlist and told his wife that he’d end up in Germany or on some army base. Now he’s going to DC to see if he can find any information about J.J.’s whereabouts. Daughter Meg tags along, hoping that she can sneak away to meet Milo Ventimiglia at a big anti-war protest. When Jack meets up with his old army buddy, he tells him that when you’re fighting a war in the jungle (and losing), missing in action means they’re not coming back. He tells Meg the truth, but tells her not to tell her mother. He hasn’t figured out how to tell her yet, so it will stay a secret.

Everwood fans will recognize this as textbook Dr. Abbott behavior. Coddling the daughter, being dismissive of the wife, pretending to be a big tough man but avoiding difficult conversations. But I love Dr. Abbott, and I cannot stand Jack Pryor. Amandes shows you Dr. Abbott’s internal struggle, his hesitation, and the moments when his better angels triumph. Also, he’s funny, and that always helps. Meanwhile, Verica’ Jack Pryor is just kind of stiff, and stoic, and humorless. Some of this is the writing, but a lot of it comes down to performance.

I’ve just finished watching an arc on Everwood in which Dr. Abbott steamrolls over his daughter, son, his mother, and his wife, convinced that he, the grand patriarch, knows what’s best for everyone. He only creates a giant mess. I’ve seen only a handful of episodes of American Dreams, but that also describes Jack Pryor’s behavior in every episode. Except in Everwood, I really hope that Dr. Abbott and his family can work this out. And on American Dreams, I often wish that Jack Pryor’s whole family would just pack up and leave.

9:00 The Wire on HBO

Record Arrested Development and Desperate Housewives on ABC

Carver is trying to make Hamsterdam work, even if it means annoying his co-workers and friends. Bubbs is staying clean in a literal hellscape. Omar is trying to do right by his community. Cuddy is staying out of trouble.

Even though things are truly rough right now, especially in Hamsterdam, it’s truly inspiring to watch these people I’ve come to know and love try to do right by themselves and their community. But I’ve seen three seasons of this show, I know it’s going to go to hell in a handbasket very soon. We’re more than halfway through season three, it’s time for those dominoes to fall. I’ve been waiting and waiting for it, complaining about all the endless table-setting in my reviews. But do I want those dominoes to fall? It will mean nothing but pain for all my favorites. But that’s television. And I love it.

10:00 Huff on Showtime

When HBO squished all the networks like bugs at the 2004 Emmys, several post-mortem articles wondered if cable was really re-writing the rules. Everyone acknowledged that FX also had excellent and buzzy shows on the air. But when people mentioned that Showtime was getting serious about prestige programming, you could practically hear the scoffs. No one thought Showtime had it in them.

That’s what Showtime was up against, and they really thought that Huff was the show that would change it all. They took out a huge ad buy. Billboards, spots on MTV and all the cool cable channels, the works. They booked stars Hank Azaria and Paget Brewster on Conan (this was savvy, since Conan knew Azaria from his Simpsons days and Brewster had starred opposite Conan’s old sidekick on Andy Richter Controls the Universe). They inserted a million DVDs of the pilot into copies of Entertainment Weekly.

The inciting incident of comes when a gay teenager blows his brains out inside protagonist Huff’s office. Much was made of how graphic and daring and dangerous this was. And it is grisly! But it doesn’t feel too dangerous or daring today (I literally watched this on youtube).

But it also doesn’t feel very daring because the show never entertains the notion that its hero might be at fault for this. It’s boring. His mother (Blythe Danner) is domineering but thinks he’s amazing. When he confesses that he doesn’t like listening to his people’s problems, his wife responds “honey, your patient’s use you like a garbage receptacle, who can blame you?” His lawyer (Oliver Platt) is flamboyant and sleazy but you know he’ll get him out of any jam.

Just why should I care about any of this? Audiences felt the same. Huff‘s first season got some good reviews and had a surprisingly strong showing at the Emmys (bolstered by what I’m assuming was a very aggressive campaign). But pretty much no one liked its second season and it was cancelled. So the show really did predict Showtime’s future, in a way.

Record 3am repeat of Henry VIII on PBS

What Else Was On

• CBS aired a Dallas reunion special.
• Fox premiered its latest obnoxious reality series My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.
• NBC began a Crossing Jordan/Las Vegas crossover event.
• Fox aired My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, an Apprentice knockoff that made the subtext of that show the whole point. Everyone hated all the contestants on The Apprentice. Now you’d watch a bunch of those assholes compete for a job with a Trump type, but the Trump is a paid actor!
• The WB made a major push with hit movies this November sweeps. Tonight they began a two-night airing of The Fellowship of the Ring. It tanked. 2004 was the absolute peak of the DVD era, and probably not the right time to try this. Other movies aired during sweeps included Save the Last Dance and A Walk to Remember.
• Tonight’s special sweeps guest star: Dana Delany on Boston Legal.
• Carrie Preston and Arian Moayed guest starred on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I don’t think they count as special sweeps guest stars, but they’re special to me.

Monday, November 8

8:00 One on One on UPN

It’s sweeps! And that means big guest stars. One on One really scored when it booked Tim Meadows, fresh off a scene stealing turn in that summer’s Mean Girls. Tim Meadows is an ideal sitcom guest star: he makes mediocre jokes good and good jokes great.

The episode is actually tackling a pretty serious topic. The heroine Breanna’s boyfriend is sleeping at school, so she has to convince her boyfriend’s Dad (Tim Meadows) to take him in. Tim Meadows insists that if he wants to live with him, he has to commit to taking over the family business, a crab shack (this lets Tim Meadows say he loves “giving everybody crabs” a bunch of times, and it’s great.”). Breanna convinces her dad to have a big dad talk with Tim Meadows, and it works, no more teen homelessness. It’s a silly storyline with Tim Meadows and weird STD jokes, but it’s tackling a serious topic, and I thought it did a decent job.

I also love the ending of the episode. The cold open is about Breanna and her dad Flex writing all their feelings in journals, following up on an earlier episode when they went to therapy. At the end of the episode, Breanna tells her Dad that he did the right thing and convinced Tim Meadows to take in her boyfriend, and she’s proud of him. And also, by the way, Tim Meadows is giving her boyfriend his own apartment, isn’t that great? Flex grits his teeth and then does some seriously emotional journaling. It’s a perfect ending. He did the right thing, it backfired, and now it’s just him and the journal, circling right back the the cold open. The first episode of One on One I tried, I bailed, since it was about Flex tracking his daughter with GPS and I thought it was gross. But this is how you do a “girl is maturing sexually and Dad can’t handle it” storyline.

8:30 Half and Half on UPN

I didn’t realize that this show had a Jenna Maroney! Because this show kind of has a Jenna Maroney. Broadway veteran Valarie Pettiford plays one of the heroine’s moms. She’s a local theater actress with too much confidence. This kind of character makes any show better, and Pettiford is a lot of fun in the role. And she had some really sweet scenes with her daughter in this episode.

9:00 Girlfriends on UPN

It’s the 100th episode! I love 100th episodes, it’s so exciting when a good show reaches this milestone and you know that the gravy train came for everyone involved.

Plus it’s fascinating to see how different shows mark the occasion. Girlfriends producer Kelsey Grammar’s show, Frasier, always had milestone episodes of the show coincide with milestone episodes of Frasier’s radio show (the 100th episode was about Frasier’s 1000th show). Sometimes the 100th episode will feature a major wedding, or birth, or death. But having your OTP finally kiss only to reveal that he hooked up with her mom? I’ve never seen that one before!

The rest of the episode is really good too. The big conversation between Joan and her mom is really satisfying, and Tracee Ellis Ross and Joan Pringle both bring it. The show doesn’t sacrifice the comedy though, I love the bit with Joan’s mom and her pedometer, truly ahead of its time. And the B-story, in which Maya discovers her son is watching PPV porn, is also a blast.

Congratulations everyone! It was a good episode, you all more than earned that gravy train.

9:30 Desperate Housewives (recorded)

Desperate Housewives was originally conceived as a half-hour show. I think that explains a lot. The black comic tone is the best part of the show. But the plottier elements? Not as good. Especially the mystery. The mystery acually wasn’t a huge part of Chery’s original pitch. An executive suggested that he play it up to keep viewer interest.

We finally get some real movement on the mystery plot in this episode (a spy mission! a secret baby blanket!) But it feels like too little too late. Especially when another new show, Veronica Mars, was putting on a clinic for how to do a compelling season long mystery.

It starts with the stakes. Veronica Mars has taken the time to develop Lilly Kane. The writing shows us a girl that was flamboyant, fun, and totally alive, and Amanda Seyfried does the rest. We love Lilly. Meanwhile Mary Alice was…nice? Perfect? Fond of cliches, judging by her narration? Supposedly she was friends with all our heroines, but their relationship with her is so generic. They all played…bridge? Together? What did she like? Was her relationship with Bree different from her relationship with Susan or Gabrielle? Meanwhile, Veronica Mars has managed to sketch out Lilly’s relationships with her best friend Veronica, her brother Duncan, and even her shithead boyfriend Logan. We understand exactly what her life and death meant to all these people.

Then there’s the mystery itself. Veronica Mars teases us with a possible a cover-up, a corrupt police department, multiple suspects, red herrings, buried secrets, a seriously fucked up family, and more, all in just a few episodes. Desperate Housewives has Mike talking to some dude on a bench? A buried chest that was discovered and never followed up on? A house that feels like it’s been on the market forever? A PI who is apparently just twiddling his thumbs? Mark Moses and Cody Kasch are both quite good as Mary Alice’s husband and son, selling their messed up family dynamic, but they can only do so much. Everything feels vague.

Of course, Veronica Mars has a lot of unanswered questions too, but at least I know what questions to ask. It also helps that the show answers a mini-mystery every episode. And it helps that Veronica has the means and motivation to go digging into all this stuff. And she can stumble across clues while working the case of the week. Meanwhile, the Mary Alice investigation is passed around between the housewives like a hot potato. One week, Bree is going to investigate. Then Gabby. We don’t want Susan and Mike to have sex yet, so this week it’s her turn. It’s boring.

Later Arrested Development (recorded)

The popular perception is that Fox let Arrested Development die, and there is some truth to that. The Murdochs were never going to be a fan of its Bush-skewering politics. But the show also had powerful champions at the network, like head of scheduling Preston Beckman. And this season, the network gave it a real shot, running a marathon of the first season on FX, aggressively promoting the first season DVD, and scheduling it after the network’s comedy crown jewel: The Simpsons.

But growing Arrested‘s audience was always going to be tough. I know and love the show, but jumping into season two was still rough. I forgot how dense this show is. I had to pause and rewind so many times (and you couldn’t do that in 2004, when DVRs and TiVos were often luxury or niche items). So many of the jokes are based on callbacks and the show’s own history, so you have to spend a lot of time remembering what’s going on (this is why the flashbacks and Ron Howard are so vital to the show’s success). I was so busy trying to understand what was happening I didn’t even have time to laugh. If a random Simpsons viewer just felt confused, I wouldn’t blame them.

Watching the show reminds me of going to see a good Shakespeare play. It takes a while to get used to the language and rhythms, but you catch up. And in the mean-time, great and hilarious actors (Arrested has plenty of those) and purely silly jokes (“I blue myself” comes in this episode”) keep you going. Hopefully some Simpsons viewers had some patience and fell in love with the show.

Late Night

Jennifer Tilly stopped by Jay Leno to promote Seed of Chucky. She completely takes over the interview, which makes her an ideal Leno guest. She spends the first minute or two taking about her tits. And why not? They look amazing! She dissects her new relationship with professional poker player Phil Laak in detail (they’re still together and Tilly is quite the poker player herself, winning over $1 million in professional tournaments). She gently ribs Jay for being a pervert, his boring love life, his workaholic tendencies, and his cars. At the end of the interview, Jay has to try no less than seven times to get her attention so he can throw to the clip. It’s great.

What Else was On

• A tsunami hit CBS‘s CSI: Miami in a special 90 minute episode.
• NBC began airing a very convoluted and cruel reality show callled The 25 Million Dollar Hoax. A woman would win $25,000 but she would have to spend it all on herself. She couldn’t spend it on friends or family. If she managed not to reveal the whole setup her whole family would win an even bigger prize.
• Special sweeps guest star: Garry Marshall on Listen Up!

Tuesday, November 9

9:00 Gilmore Girls on the WB

Ooof. This episode was kind of rough. Dean doesn’t give a sufficiently detailed review of Rory’s article and the show acts like this is a good reason to dump him. Maybe you should dump him Rory, but that’s a stupid reason. And he left his wife for you! You should feel bad about it. But the show just discards him casually, he’s a lame guy with a pickup, he’s not intellectual or sophisticated, who cares.

And what is up with Kyon the Korean exchange student character? She’s never heard of fries, she thinks the television watches her, she believes Lane’s mom has superpowers. South Korea is not the moon! Of course Lane believed these things, her mom told her that when she was a kid. Kyon lived a whole life before she arrived in Stars Hollow, not that you’d know it watching the show. And I’m not the person to comment on this, but her accent made me very uncomfortable.

9:00 Veronica Mars on UPN

Record Scrubs on NBC and Frontline on PBS

This episode’s case of the week revolves around Veronica’s missing pregnant neighbor (Jessica Chastain). All mystery shows should do an episode about a troubled neighbor, because it’s relatable to everyone, especially if you’ve lived in a large apartment complex. My best friend has never been murdered, but I’ve had neighbors who scream at night and freak out.

The revelation that her neighbor is a rape survivor also allows the show to follow up on Veronica’s rape, after putting it on the backburner for several episodes. It mostly stays subtext, there are no major developments in the mystery. Veronica just sees herself in a fellow survivor, and it allows her to further process her trauma. It plants the seed for her eventually investigating her own rape.

Veronica also discovers that her mother and Jake Kane used to be the it-couple at Neptune High, and we start to get clues that Veronica and Duncan’s relationship might have been incestuous, a truly messed up and delicious twist. The b-plot further humanizes Logan, but more importantly it further develops Weevil’s character and fully reveals that he was involved with Lilly, tying him into the central mystery plot.

10:00 Scrubs (recorded)

I’ve tried watching Scrubs a couple times but have always struggled to lock into its tone. This episode is especially surreal since the bug November sweeps guest star is Julianna Marguiles. She plays a malpractice attorney, and she’s essentially giving her Good Wife performance. As a die-hard fan of The Good Wife, it’s incredibly bizarre to watch Alicia Florrick kiss Zach Braff and do a Chorus Line dance number.

The other guest star is Richard Kind, playing one of Turk’s especially troublesome patients. He fits right into the Scrubs universe. The big cliffhanger, in which J.D. realizes that Julianna Marguiles is representing Richard Kind in his lawsuit against Turk just as he’s about to have sex with her, is enticing enough to convince me to watch the next episode.

10:30 Laguna Beach on MTV

Every teen show must do a prom episode, even if it’s a reality show.

This is an episode when you can see the show’s limitations, as they can’t show the actual dance at all, since it would be filled with ordinary hich schoolers who hadn’t agreed to appear on MTV. But the show turns this into a strength, focusing on the planning and aftermath. And it works, because that’s the important part of any school dance.

The producers truly strike gold in the classic post-prom limo scene, as Kristen and Stephen have a tense, awkward, and desperate argument about a future in which Stephen will graduate and head to college in San Francisco while Kristen will still be in high school. The whole time, Lauren is there, listening to it all, and everyone knows she’s planning to be in San Francisco with Stephen. You can pracitally draw the lines of the love triangle right there in the Hummer limo.

Once Stephen and Kristin leave, the girls crank up the Michelle Branch classic “Goodbye to You” and we get a gret montage. Scenes of the girls taking selfies with their digital cameras are intrcut with a frantic Kristin and Stephen makeout session. Last episode ended by intercutting Lauren and Kristin, but that was intended to show us how different they were: Lauren was watching the latest episode of The OC, while Kristin had the boy, she was living it. But this bout of editing unites the three pillars of the love triangle: they want to grow up, except when they don’t. I never thought that anything that happened in a Hummer limo would make me sentimental, but here we are.

Late Night

Conan has a killer guest lineup tonight. First is Tina Fey, and she’s in fine form. I’ve heard plenty of shitty jokes about the Bill O’Reilly scandal and the Ashlee Simpson incident while researching this project, but Fey proves even back in 2004, you could tell hilarious jokes without being cruel to a young popstar or trivializing the experiences of sexual harassment victims. My favorite joke is her description of her new Weekend Update dynamic with Amy Poelher. It’s just dangerous enough.

Then Conan interviews Spencer Fox, also known as Dash from The Incredibles. This 11 year old cannot sit still and he is wearing a graphic tee, a suit jacket that’s too big, Converse, and cargo pants. He talks about his band and gives a shoutout to all his homies in period 4. It’s adorable.

What Else Was On

• Pretty much every network aired a B or C tier award show during November sweeps this year. CBS was up first with the CMA Awards. Martina McBride and Shania Twain had some really fun performances with very elaborate sets. And George Strait did a good old fashioned country song, by which I mean the song is about getting totally plastered, and it’s angry and bleak enough to take your breath away. Those were the highlights for me. A lot of people thanked America and God, though not as many as I expected.
• It was a big week for Jimmy Smits. Tonight, he returned to ABC’s NYPD Blue and the role that made him famous. Of course, his character was dead so he was a ghost. The following night, he began a two season arc on The West Wing.
• Fox debuted its own Apprentice knockoff (everyone had one this year). But Branson: Quest for the Best flopped. There was only one Donald Trump. Though that is pretty cold comfort.
• Kyle MacLachlan guest starred in a now-memetic episode of NBC‘s Law and Order: SVU. (It’s the one where he kills the kid in the middle of the hallway).
• NBC dropped Father of the Pride, its CGI animated comedy about Siegfried and Roy animals, for the entirety of sweeps month. The network though the show would be its very own Simpsons for a post-Shrek age, but momentum stalled when a nearly killed Roy Horn in the middle of a live show while Father of the Pride was still in production. NBC replaced Father of the Pride with an extra half hour of The Biggest Loser.

Wednesday, November 10

8:00 Lost on ABC

Record America’s Next Top Model on UPN

I love Sawyer episodes, because the show is briefly transformed into a sort of Elmore Leonard cover band. Unfortunately, the show proves to be a bad cover band in this episode. Sawyer’s con and tragic backstory both a little obvious and bland. Thankfully, later episodes would feature much more interesting cons and would complicate and interrogate Sawyer’s backstory in interesting ways.

This episode is more interesting for what happens on the island. The Charlie and Claire ship sets sail with the adorable peanut butter sub-plot. The show invests further in its most troublesome storyline, the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle (though at least we get a super hot kiss out of it in this episode. That’s more than this plotline usually gives us). And most of all, this very post 9-11 show (it’s about a plane crash, for pete’s sake!) gives us its most post-9-11 storyline to date.

Like a lot of Lost‘s storylines featuring characters of color, Sayid’s torturer backstory too often feels subversive in a lazy way. They flip the script–this time, the Iraqi is the torturer!–and then seem pretty pleased with themselves and don’t go much further than that. This dynamic is most present in characters like Michael, but you see it with Sayid too. Naveen Andrews fills in a lot of the gaps, and he’s especially great in the final scene when he leaves on his redemption quest, but he can only do so much.

What really works about the torture storyline is that it allows the show to ask existential questions of our characters and their new little society: what are you willing to do to keep people safe? What lines will you cross? America spent a lot of time grappling with these questions after 9-11, and it turned out many people were willing to do some truly reprehensible stuff if it made people feel safer. Of course television was going to explore that.

I think it’s worth pointing out that in this episode, torture doesn’t work, which is typical of the show’s approach to the topic. All it does is help Sawyer sexually harass Kate and enable his self-destructive tendencies. This is in contrast to 24, the most famous show to approach torture in this era. In that show, torture got results. Even if you look at this year’s the Law and Order season premiere, which focused on the Abu Gharib scandal, people are questioning the morality of torture, whether it sullies America’s reputation. They weren’t questioning the guilt of detainees, and they weren’t questioning if torture even worked.

Lost is fairly detached from current events, what with it being set in a jungle of mystery, so it’s not surprising but it still represents something of an evolution in how tv approached the issue of torture. But only to a point. I’m not sure that American television and American popular culture has ever really explored the question of torture from the point of view of our country’s victims. We mostly like to ponder out own guilt and examine it from all angles, again and again.

9:00 The West Wing on NBC

The West Wing is not what it once was. But this is still a reasonably entertaining episode. This episode focuses on CJ’s first day replacing the ailing Leo as Chief of Staff, so it’s a great and welcome showcase for Alison Janney. More importantly, it introduces Jimmy Smits as Congressman Matt Santos. The show will eventually shoft focus from the Bartlet administration to Santos’ run for the White House. In doing so, the show transforms from a sad Aaron Sorkin cover band with overqualified actors into something new. Still a Sorkin cover band, but one with its own identity.

Seeing CJ take a position of real power and the introduction of an eventual Latino presidential candidate feels like an acknowledgement of how white and male the show was up to that point. And how white and male the US government was, and still is (a woman or person of color has still never served as White House Chief of Staff). And Matt Santos’ introduction is a reminder of how much the Democratic party was evolving. The democrats had just lost the presidency with a white Vietnam veteran, and their next primary would be between a woman and a Black man. Matt Santos would ensure that the show didn’t feel quite so behind the times. And Jimmy Smits is perfect casting as a presidential nominee. I’m very skeptical of The West Wing‘s politics, but I kind of want to vote for Matt Santos, because Smits makes you believe in him.

10:00 America’s Next Top Model (recorded)

Usually, the fun outweighs the icky and the problematic on this show, at least for me (hence why I keep watching). This episode, the ick took over. You have a stylist telling Yaya that she’s too “African” and that she’s trying to force her culture on people. That’s not an isolated incident either, there are tons of similar microaggressions throughout the episode. It all culminates in the judges trying to set her up to pick a tacky cheap kente cloth hat, and then getting pissed when she doesn’t follow the narrative. She is forced to the apologize to the hat, in a moment that would be super fun and silly if it weren’t so ugly.

Elsewhere, plus-sized Toccara has reached her breaking point. She’s spent weeks wearing clothes that don’t fit or are just plain ugly, and has correctly observed that she has to work twice as hard as the other girls too look just as glamourous. She endured a particularly brutal judging in the previous episode, and now she just seems down. The judges wonder why: Toccara got this far because of her infectious and joyful personality. Just insert the “we’re trying to find the guy who did this” meme here.

In the end it comes down to Toccara and Ann. Ann is a very pretty girl who cannot take a good picture to save her life but who also has a penchant for causing drama. So guess who they choose. This was controversial even back in 2004, Toccara was very popular. She’s done quite well for herself since, which is nice to see, she deserved it. But she didn’t deserve this, no way no how.

Late Night

On Conan, Adam Brody shows how he won the adoration of teen girls across America when Conan asks him about the homoerotic subtext between Seth and Ryan and Brody admits to it, zero shame, zero hesitation.

On the Late Late Show, Craig Ferguson was guest hosting for the week (he would be announced as the permanent host a month later). He interviews Hugh Laurie, who was about a week away from the premiere of House. It’s a good interview, and it’s fun to see these two Brits whose lives are about to change.

What Else Was On

Tonight’s special sweeps guest stars: Hector Elizondo on Jack and Bobby and Lindsay Lohan on That ’70s Show. Lohan was dating That ’70s Show‘s Wilmer Vilderrama at the time (insert long, melancholy sigh here).

Thursday, November 11

8:00 The OC on Fox

This episode is mostly dedicated to romantic disappointment. This is a tv show, our heroes can’t be happy! Seth is rejected by Summer, Marissa is kissing hot yard boy and not Ryan, and Jimmy’s girlfriend moves to Japan.

In the middle of this whole mess, I’m most excited about Summer’s new boy Zach. He’s a potential threat to the show’s true OTP of Seth and Ryan, since Seth and he can talk comics for real. And he seems like a genuinely good guy! The moment when he Seth gets pushy with Summer and Zach defends her is so satisfying, as is the moment when Summer tells Seth off. I was in middle school during The OC‘s heyday (I turned 12 this very week). I wasn’t ready for the show yet, but I remember that Seth Cohen worship was a true epidemic at my school. He was the number one teen girl crush for awhile there. It’s satisfying to see the show undercut his nice guy image. Apparently Adam Brody enjoyed it to, since he has spend much of the past two decades undercutting the nice guy Seth Cohen image in movies like Jennifer’s Body, Sleeping with Other People, and Promising Young Woman. And he’s so, so, good at it. I’ve heard people argue that he was award worthy in Jennifer’s Body and I am onboard, and I firmly believe that his big scene in Sleeping with Other People, in which he dumps Alison Brie, is better than the brekup scene in The Social Network.

9:00 CSI on CBS

This is a very fun episode that captures CSI‘s appeal. The heroes are at some kind of conference for investigator scientists when a girl turns up dead at a nearby homecoming dance (this is Vegas, so homecoming happens at a Casino). The roster of guests is great: Adrianne Palicki as the queen bee, Kate Mara as a trouble teen girl, Seth Gabel as a troubled teen boy, and Jonathan Banks as a menacing but also caring dad type.

The mystery plot is good, full of surprising twists and turns. It’s very lurid and gross. It’s very Vegas and sleazy. The whole thing looks gorgeous and slick. It goes down very easy, I understand why this captivated American and destroyed our ability to understand how crime works in the real world.

10:00 ER on NBC

The late Ray Liotta won an Emmy for his guest turn on this episode. The man sure earned his trophy. Liotta plays an alcoholic ex-con who succumbs to liver failure over the course of the episode. The episode takes place in real time and includes a lot of dream sequences. It could feel like a cheap gimmick, so it’s a good thing they hired Liotta.

Liotta plays Charlie Metcalf, a homeless alcoholic ex-con. His tragic backstory is eventually revealed, but the show doesn’t pull the usual tricks you expect. No dramatic reconciliation with family members. No last minute medical breakthroughs. Just death, but not a stoic and heroic kind, the messy and sad kind. The episode really captures how violent and invasive and confusing it is to be a patient in an emergency room. The episode and Liotta truly immerse you in this guy’s head. And you and the ER folks are right there with him until the end. I won’t lie, I cried.

Late Night

The full episode of tonight’s Letterman is on youtube, but I don’t have much to say about it, except that the Los Lonely Boys performance at the ends was really great.

The highlight of tonight’s Late Night was Pierre Bernard’s Recliner of Rage. I needed this in my life. Pierre is speaking for me! Every time they give me the wrong bagel at the cafe around the corner or change the train schedule I enter my own personal recliner of rage! Apparently this was a recurring bit. The universe likes me today!

What Else Was On

• ABC caused quite a stir when it scheduled a Veterans Day showing of Saving Private Ryan. Several local stations (especially those operated by Sinclair) refused to air the movie, citing decency rules, and this impacted ABC’s ratings for the night. But some people thought this was a strategic move on ABC’s part, and I’m inclined to agree. The FCC was on the warpath post-Nipplegate, and networks were sick of it. The rules seemed arbitrary and ever-changing, and networks wanted some clarity. They were also worried that the FCC would feel even more empowered in the wake of Bush’s victory on a family values platform. So ABC scheduled a famous movie about war heroes in honor of Veterans day and dared people to kick it off the air, essentially exposing the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the restrictions. I have to admire it!
• Yasser Arafat died, and CBS pre-empted an episode of CSI: New York to announce the news. Worse, they pre-empted the end of the episode, so viewers didn’t learn who did it. As detailed in Bill Carter’s book Desperate Networks, CBS chairman Les Moonves absolutely blew a gasket, and heads rolled. This also came at a time of great turmoil at CBS news, as everyone dealt with a forged documents scandal at 60 Minutes and the impending and reluctant retirement of Dan Rather. Looking back, once can’t help but notice that it was a female producer who was fired for the Yasser Arafat kerfuffle, and that three of the four people fired in the wake of the Killian documents scandal were women. Not fired? Dan Rather, and 60 Minutes producer Jeff Fager. Even at the time, this drew criticism, as chronicled in Desperate Networks. Why weren’t the top dogs taking the fall for this? An investigation revealed that the scandal resulted from a scoop hungry culture that tolerated and even encouraged sloppy reporting present at the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes (the division that aired the forged documents story). Jeff Fager was the head producer at the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes until the summer of 2004. Didn’t he create that culture? I’m not a reporter, but I think he should have lost his job. Instead, he was promoted, multiple times.
• A 2018 New Yorker report revealed a culture of rampant sexual harassment and abuse at CBS, fostered by Les Moonves as CEO and Jeff Fager as head of CBS News. Both men had sexually abused and harassed multiple women and created an environment where abuse was tolerated. Later reporting revealed that Don Hewitt, Fager’s predecessor as head producer of 60 Minutes, also had a history of sexual abuse in the workplace (CBS paid a victim of Hewitt over $5 million over the course of several years to keep her silent). These stories tell us a lot about who is expandable and who is protected in the television business, and the many ways in which it pushes women and minorities out or otherwise silences them.
• Tonight’s special sweeps guest star: Harry Connick Jr. returned to Will and Grace.

Friday, November 12

After dinner Frontline: The Persuaders (recorded)

The first part of this documentary is all about how advertisers are in the meaning making business. So an airline isn’t just an airline, it means “home” or “adventure” or whatever. It’s very strange, since this is basically what I learned about advertising from Mad Men. And this is a good documentary, but I’d always rather watch an episode where Don and Peggy pull an all-nighter and have a fight and she breaks up with her boyfriend and he gets some bad news and also they come up with a suitcase ad.

Their big example of this mode of advertising is Song airlines. Have you heard of Song airlines? Me neither! (They were a short lived competitor for Jet Blue owned by Delta, apparently). They profile Clotaire Rapaille, a French psychologist who the 2000s advertising industry treated as Don Draper. But he’s almost portrayed as a snake oil salesman. Apparently cars are like wombs because everyone wants to return to their mother’s womb. The same is true of overhead compartments in airplanes. The message is clear: the Mad Men model of advertising isn’t enough in the information age.

When correspondent Douglas Rushkoff starts exploring new methods of advertising, things get truly scary, which is often the mark of a great Frontline episode. We explore the full scope of product placement and product integration, with clips from Cast Away, Survivor, Sex and the City, plus footage of people in boardrooms debating if they should put their cars in the hot new boxing reality show The Contender, which was premiering that coming spring.

Then we start exploring political advertising, which had reached new levels of bulshittery in the most recent election cycle. And with political advertising, Rushkoff segways into narrowcasting, which is what really shaped the future of advertising and culture. He explores how narrowcasting helped Kerry win the primary, and how Karl Rove used it to mobilize Confederate flag nuts in a test-case local election in Georgia. Frank Luntz is interviewed. Multiple talking heads discuss how narrowcasting turns us into consumers, and into demographic groups. Marketers will know exactly how to target you, and they will predict your future and how to target you in 10 years. One man explains how narrowcasting makes us see ourselves not as part of a community, but as part of a demographic group, so we become loyal to that group and to our own interests. These people were predicting our present, heaven help us.

This is a entertaining a prescient episode that helped me better understand out present moment. It’s everything I love about Frontline. You should watch it.

After that Henry VIII (recorded)

Before The Crown, before The Queen, Peter Morgan’s first foray into royal drama was a three hour BBC miniseries about Henry VIII.

I could never get into The Crown. I always found it too slow. But this could stand to be a little slower. I was super excited when I recognized Charles Dance just a couple minutes into the series. Now this is who you want playing a scheming Tudor courtier! But twenty minutes in, it’s off with his head! What a waste. None of the other scheming dudes are nearly as fun, and I don’t particularly like Ray Winstone’s performance as Henry.

But let’s be real here. As in any Henry VIII story I’m not here for the guys. I’m here for the wives. And this miniseries has Helena Bonham Carter as Anne Boleyn. And she is dialed in! It’s a really great performance. She’s fun, she’s vulnerable, she’s righteous, she’s petty, she’s got it all. There is a rape scene between her and Henry, so major points off for that. And we have to look at Henry having a big crybaby moment when she gives birth to a daughter, and I just do not care. But I still had a good time. Much of the show looks like it was filmed in a basement, like the old BBC Shakespeare adaptations or Derek Jarman’s Edward II (the pinnacle of “British movie with stuffy dialogue made in a basement for $200 filmmaking). But the production design makes those basements look like a million bucks, and when the show actually does get to shoot on location they make it count. And there’s always Helena.

Late Night

Lost‘s Evangeline Lilly stops by Letterman (you know a broadcast show is a hit when the stars get booked on competing networks). She’s a really good sport about Dave dredging up that infamous Live Links ad, but then he rudely interrupts her (in the middle of a sentence! Listen better!) and tells her her teeth are nice. And then he ends up touching one of her teeth? What is wrong with you?????

Remember what I said about how you know when a show is a hit? Desperate Housewives star Marcia Cross was on Conan. Her life story is really interesting. Like a lot of actresses, she struggled to find work after her hit show ended (Melrose Place, in her case). So she want and got her MA in psychology! She thought she was done with acting when she was offered a role on Everwood and she decided to move to Utah and give it another go (she’s great on that show, by the way). Then Desperate Housewives happened. Life comes at you fast.

What Else Was On

• Records claim that the first edition NBC's of To Catch a Predator aired on November 11. But November 11 was a Thursday, and NBC wasn't quite desperate enough to schedule Dateline on the old Must-See-TV night (not yet, at least). So I think that the first ever To Catch a Predator probably premiered tonight. So began a huge franchise for NBC and Dateline. NBC regularly scheduled To Catch a Predator during Sweeps periods to juice up their ratings for the next three years. I'll talk more about To Catch a Predator as it becomes more popular, but Skip Intro explores how the show's hunger for shame and sensationalism distorted our view of child sexual abuse and even kind of killed a guy.
• Shelly Long and Betty White guest starred on ABC‘s Complete Savages, a Keith Carradine vehicle based on executive producer Mel Gibson’s family life. Yikes!

TiVo Status

7 episodes of Everwood, the three hour Masterpiece Theater miniseries The Lost Prince, and The Office Christmas Special from across the pond (I’ll watch that one closer to the holidays, after I’ve rewatched the series). 12 hours, 16 hours of space left.