Week Ending November 5, 2004

October 30-November 5, 2004. It was spooky season, and America was about the experience a very spooky election. Let’s see what was on TV!

Saturday, October 30

11:30 Saturday Night Live! on NBC

I have Peacock. I could watch old SNL episodes on Peacock. But Peacock cuts the musical guests, and I cannot abide that. Sometimes the musical guests are good! But more importantly, the musical guests situate the episodes in time. The host introducing the musical guest has birthed a whole entire meme/time capsule twitter account and multiple memes. Furthermore, the episodes are edited down, sometimes by more than half. The dated bits, the bad bits, are all removed from the record. Only the stuff that they want you to remember remains.

I don’t like SNL that much, and I’m realizing that season 30 is no the show’s finest hour. But I watch it for this project because it is a perfect time capsule. No other show captures the zeitgeist so well, captures what people cared about at that precise moment in time. And you need the whole episode for that. The weird sketches, the tasteless sketches, the dates sketches, the offensive sketches, and definitely the musical guest.

Fortunately, the internet archive has the complete version of every SNL episode available to watch for free. No corporate airbrushing, no bowing to copyright restrictions, you get to see it all, the good the bad and the ugly.

Unless some cretins hack the archive, and the hardworking people who run it have to take the whole site down to protect its invaluable collections.

The archive went down just as I was getting ready to watch last week’s episode. And I definitely wasn’t going to skip that episode. it featured the infamous Ashlee Simpson incident. So I definitely wasn’t going to watch the edited version on Peacock either, that would mean missing the most important part of the episode. Finally I managed to pirate it (though not after going through a lot of ad soaked websites full of bad files and videos that didn’t play). I wasn’t so lucky for this week’s episode (featuring host Kate Winslet and musical guest Eminem). I can’t find a playable video anywhere. I would watch the episode on peacock, but it has been removed, for no apparent reason.

This is all to say that the internet archive is a vital resource, that contains parts of history that are otherwise inaccessible. It deserves support and protection.

What Else Was On

• CBS aired a 48 Hours about the Canal Street Brothel, which makes sense since they were premiering a tv movie about the case starring Ellen Burstyn and Annabella Sciorra the next day.
• Just in time for Halloween, NBC scheduled a marathon of Sci-Fi Channel shows Ghost Hunters and Scare Tactics. NBC’s cable portfolio was beginning to outshine the flagship channel, a trend that would only grow more stark in the coming years.

TiVo Status

6 episodes of Everwood, the three hour Masterpiece Theater miniseries The Lost Prince, a two hour Frontline documentary, and The Office Christmas Special from across the pond (I’ll watch that one closer to the holidays, after I’ve rewatched the series). 13 hours, 15 hours of space left.

Sunday, October 31

8:00 American Dreams on NBC

This is the third episode of American Dreams I’ve reviewed, but I haven’t talked about the hook of the show.

This show is set in the 1960s in Philadelphia. Lots of stuff happened in the ’60s in Philadelphia: race riots, gentrification, the ’76ers coming to town and winning an NBA championship. But one of the most influential TV shows of the 1960s was also filmed in Philadelphia: American Bandstand. Produced and hosted by Dick Clark, American Bandstand featured real live teens dancing to top-40 hits. It is credited with making Black music more mainstream, as it was one of the first major programs to prominently feature Black artists.

The hook of American Dreams is that protagonist Meg and her best friend Roxanne are among the teens who dance on American Bandstand. The show was actually produced by Dick Clark, and the involvement of the legendary super-producer probably helped American Dreams (an obviously expensive show filled with period details and pricey needle drops) stay on the air for three seasons despite low ratings. The American Bandstand hook also opened the show up to a sort of promotional gimmick: the show had current recording artists make cameos as the pop stars of the 1960s. This episode features Phantom Planet, who performed the theme song for the hottest teen show of the day, dropping by to play the Zombies and singing “Tell Her No.” They even made a video about their experience. This was one of dozens of cameos by real life artists. Michelle Branch played Lesley Gore, Vanessa Carlton played Dusty Springfield, Usher Played Marvin Gaye, Evan and Jaron played the Everly Brothers. You should look at the whole list.

The American Bandstand hook and the involvement of Dick Clark were a boon to the show in many ways. But they also had the potential to hurt the show. Dick Clark has long promoted the idea that American Bandstand was a force for Civil Rights and racial harmony in America. He claims that he integrated the studio audience after be became host in the late 1950s, but as chronicled in Matthew Delmont’s superb history of segregation on the show, historians and member of the Philadelphia Black community dispute his account, claiming that the show remained segregated throughout its time in Philly (the show moved to LA in 1964, but in American Dreams it stays in Philadephia so that Meg can keep dancing on the show). American Dreams aims to fully explore the racial tensions of the 1960s. How can it do that if it’s perpetuating the myth of American Bandstand as an uncomplicated force for racial integration when Dick Clark is a executive producer and probably vital to the show’s survival?

Making things even more complicated was the Hairspray of it all. The John Waters movie Hairspray undermines Clark’s narrative, fully exploring the segregationist policy of an American Bandstand style show. During the three years that American Dreams was on the air, a musical version of Hairspray debuted on Broadway, won a pile of Tonys, and was optioned for a movie. It was an absolute smash, running for six years and 2,642 performances. Brittany Snow, the lead of American Dreams, went on to play a similar role in the Hairspray movie after American Dreams was cancelled. If American Dreams pretended that everything was great over at American Bandstand, people would notice that this wasn’t how it seemed in Hairspray even if they didn’t know the history.

So does American Dreams perpetuate the myth? How can it thread the needle? It doesn’t openly criticize the show. But the Black characters are always set apart from it. I’m not sure, but I’ll be watching the scenes set at American Bandstand closely. Not that it will be a hardship. The remaining episodes feature Fantasia Barrino as Aretha Franklin, Kelly Clarkson as Brenda Lee, Jojo as Linda Rondstadit, John Legend as Stevie Wonder, and Fountains of Wayne as the Hollies.

9:00 The Wire on HBO

Record Desperate Housewives on ABC

Man, The Wire is one show that does not benefit from week to week viewing. I liked this much better when I was bingeing it. There’s so much set-up, episode after episode. I’m ready for a pay-off. Not even the pay-off, just a pay-off. Still, we got some good stuff this episode. Bubbs starts a new business! And we get that great scene between Omar and Bunk, which reminds you that Wendell Pierce comes from the world of classical theater and he can do a big speech like nobody’s business. And Michael K. Williams’ face is just the cherry on the sundae. Easily the best scene in the episode.

10:00 Desperate Housewives (recorded)

So I’ve talked about Bree, Susan, and Gabby. It’s time for Lynette.

I just don’t believe in Lynette’s storyline. The hook is that she left her high-powered job to become a stay-at-home mom, and she is bad at it and finds it totally unfulfilling. But I just don’t buy that she would have left this job she loves. Why? The show never gives you a good reason. This episode reveals that she made more money than her husband, and that even after she left her job they’re still rich enough to own a yacht. They couldn’t pay for a baby-sitter? You could say it was societal pressure to stay at home. But that pressure wasn’t huge, only about a quarter of mothers stayed at home in 2004 (in the late 1990s, when Lynette was having her kids, the number actually hit a record low). You could say it was the pressure of her suburban community. But Felicity Huffman’s comes across as such a strong and unflappable person. I never buy that she would have changed her entire life due to peer pressure.

The entire foundation of the storyline is hollow, and I can’t buy into it.

What Else Was On

• MTV had a show called You’ve Got a Friend, in which a comedian would pretend to be the contestant’s friend and torture them and their friends for 48 hours. If the contestant made it through the full 48 hours without their friends learning the truth, they’d win a wad of cash. One of the “friends,” was Crista Flanagan, AKA lawnmower Lois from Mad Men.
• Trashy cheap reality shows are a hell of a drug. HBO even had one, airing right after The Wire. Family Bonds chronicled the misadventures of a wacky family of bail-bondsmen.
• Fox Sports was airing the boxing reality show The Next Great Champ, a shameless rip-off of NBC’s upcoming boxing reality show The Contender. The Next Great Champ cratered when it premiered and was shuffled off to Fox Sports to die in obscurity.

Monday, November 1

8:00 Frontline on PBS (recorded)

I love Frontline. They produce engaging and invaluable journalism, year after year. They show you untold stories of some of the most vulnerable people on earth. They uncover gross injustices. They send brave correspondents into war zones to capture the stories of the people caught in the middle of the war.

But I’ve always had a particular weakness for the other kind of Frontline episode. The ones where a lot of talking heads explain the bad decisions of powerful assholes. This episode is about Donald Rumsfeld, so it’s one of those episodes.

But it’s not a great one. I learned a lot about the culture at the Pentagon post-Vietnam and how it plunged the world into multiple disastrous wars. But this episode didn’t do much more than feed me information. Documentaries like this one live or die on the strength of their cast of talking heads. This just isn’t a very exciting group. Lots of white guys from the Pentagon, plus two reporters and one author. Some of them are monsters (I’m sure plenty of those Pentagon guys have committed heinous acts, and also Lindsay Graham is there), and some of them just kind of suck (Bob Woodward).

But that’s not the problem. Frontline always keeps a few monsters and assholes in the rotation. They’re part of history, and seeing their monstrousness exposed and preserved on public television is truly cathartic. But you need some outsiders, wild cards, and non-assholes who can undercut them. Later, better Frontline episodes assemble a real variety of talking heads. You get more racial and gender diversity, a variety of political viewpoints, people biting their tongues and people airing grudges. Then the Frontline team can assemble a narrative that’s greater than the sum of its parts, contrasting the talking heads and letting them undercut each other (those moments are my favorite). When Frontline is really working, it carefully lays out all the pieces of its argument and then lets you assemble the puzzle yourself. This episode doesn’t quite get there.

9:00 Record Everwood on the WB

What Else Was On

Lifetime aired the original movie Idenity Theft. Annabella Sciorra (starring in her second tv movie in two days) is the theif, Kimberly Williams is the victim.

Tuesday, November 2

8:00 Gilmore Girls on the WB

In the past decade or so, Gilmore Girls has frequently come under fire for being clueless about class. But this episode is a good exploration of the role that class plays in relationship. Richard and Emily find out that Lorelai is dating Luke and they immediately insist on meeting him and begin trying to change him and control him. At the end of the episode they meet up, and while the separated couple agree that Luke is unsuitable, they disagree about what to do about it. Emily wants them to break up, Richard wants to turn Luke into his golf buddy and to franchise his restaurant (Luke will look cute on the billboards but Richard will pull the strings). It leans right into the class tensions at the heart of the series, and it has the potential to generate a lot of juicy and thematically rich material between Luke and Lorelai and Lorelai and her parents.

Meanwhile, Rory is getting drawn in by richie-rich Logan Huntzberger with his media mogul dad and hoity toity secret societies. Here we’re seeing the attraction of romance that keeps the upper classes together (and we’re also seeing the attraction of Matt Czuchry). When Rory runs into lovable lunk Dean again, he might not look so appealing. And that has the potential to generate yet more tension and juicy material involving the show’s true OTP, Rory and Lorelai.

9:00 Veronica Mars on UPN

The big four networks were all news all the time on election night. But UPN and the WB went ahead with their regular programming. Neither network had a news department, but their local affiliates did. They could have let them handle election night. But they didn’t they went ahead with regular programming, tacitly admitting that their target audience of young people weren’t going to be watching the returns.

It’s interesting to look at this election-themed episode of Veronica Mars in this context. Veronica’s former pep squad teammate decides to run on a platform of abolishing the “pirate points” system. Her platform is popular with burnouts, nerds, and art kids. The pirate points system is pretty much a way of letting the rich kids get special privileges like lunch delivery while telling everyone that they earned them fair and square. It’s a potent metaphor. Meanwhile, Duncan Kane’s dad is pushing him to run. He pulls out all the stops, even getting a celebrity endorsement from Logan’s movie star dad. Harry Hamlin, making his debut on the series).

When the results have Duncan winning in a landslide, Veronica knows something is wrong. She has to push past a complacent administrator (Jane Lynch!), but she discovers that phony ballot instructions were given to art, auto shop, and other classes that were expected to be pro-Wanda. Those kids thought they were voting for Wanda, but their votes were counted for Duncan. It’s a clever twist that mirrors real-life dirty tactics (e.g. making sure the wording for a ballot proposition is confusing).

A runoff between Wanda and Duncan ensues, and Wanda gets accused of being a narc. Veronica suspects dirty tactics from the rich kids. But after talking to Weevil, she discovers that to the true outsiders, Wanda is a narc: she informed on Weevil’s cousin Felix. And now Veronica has to vote! She remembers how Duncan was sometimes benevolent towards the outsiders over the objections of dickish Dick Casablancas (Ryan Hansen, making his series debut). So she votes for Duncan, and tells off Wanda, who just wanted her record expunged. Duncan keeps the pirate points, but allows people to earn them with good grades, vocational work, art, and non-rich kid activities. So I guess the message is stick to the status quo, and the poor little rich boy might surprise you.

This message is mirrored in the sub-plot about Logan. Logan tries to recruit a homeless veteran into his little fight club (the poor people fight, the rich people watch). It’s a particularly unsubtle dramatization of the class conflict at the heart of the series. Halfway through the episode, video from the fight club is leaked, and Logan has to go do penance at a soup kitchen with his dad. After he tricks his father into donates $500,000 to the food bank, we see him pick out a belt for his father to beat him with. What was once a story about the wealthy exploiting the underclass becomes all about the poor little rich boy. That’s teen dramas for you.

And this is a really excellent poor little rich boy story! Hamlin is terrific in the part, at once shallow and menacing. Logan’s mansion is a great setting, all cool tones, hard and glossy services. Everything is shot at weird angles, so the place looks enormous and forbidding. The scene at the food bank is especially great. The writing and Dohring’s performance as Logan are excellent. We watch as he lets himself show love for his affection for his father in front of the cameras, we see the catharsis and hunger for love in that moment. And then he does something at once kind and self-destructive. It leads right into the big abuse scene with the door closing and the mom listening and everything stays on the right side of over the top.

It’s really well done. Logan Echolls is probably the most beloved poor little rich boy in all of teen drama, and this episode shows you why.

But in Veronica Mars, as in life, the center of gravity so often returns to the poor little rich white boy. And we don’t need to do that anymore.

10:30 Laguna Beach on MTV

Like UPN and the WB, MTV offered counterprogramming for young people who didn’t care to watch election returns in the form of a fresh episode of its hot new reality show.

But like Veronica Mars, this episode involves our heroes doing their very own form of civic engagement. In Laguna Beach, this means a fashion show promoting their friend Trey’s trucker hats and also (somehow) the nonprofit Active Young America. According to Lauren Conrad, Trey “basically want to make young people feel like they can make a difference. And they can do things.” How a trucker hat fashion show might accomplish this is a mystery. But I’m pretty sure that this whole spectacle inspired an episode of Pen15, so that’s something.

Our heroes also attend a Blink-182 concert, which mirrors scenes in The OC, but with a much bigger band than Rooney. Then later in the episode, the girls actually sit down to watch a season one episode of The OC. In real life, the second season of the hottest teen soap of the day would premiere in two days, so this development is should make the girls seem more relatable. Except scenes of them watching the show are intercut with scenes of Kristen on a date with Stephen. There’s even a split-screen of Kristen and Lauren! The message is clear: these girls are watching The OC, while Kristen is living it. The show being so shady towards its heroine and by extension its audience honestly left me flabbergasted. But also excited to watch season two of The OC.

What Else Was On

Someone posted CNN‘s full election night coverage on YouTube. It’s over 10 hours, and I watched way too much of it, I do not recommend the experience. There is so little insight. Tucker Carlson is there. It made me even more anxious about the upcoming election, in the least productive way possible. It was awful.

It was an especially brutal night for the Democrats, you can’t help but wince in sympathy. Bush won with a clear majority, and the senate races were even worse. Their minority leader, Tom Daschle, even lost! The election also made it clear that the country was full of conservative eangelical voters who could be motivated by scaremongering over issues like Gay marriage and who they would struggle to ever win over.

In this environment, the man resposible for the only Democratic pickup in the senate hogged a lot of attention. Barack Obama’s victory was a foregone conclusion, but CNN pundits were agog at his performance. He outperformed all deomocratic candidates in recent memory in the rural areas! This guy clearly had the juice.

My favorite part is when CNN prepares to air his victory speech but then Michelle gives what was probably and excellent speech, and they just leave her muted on the big screen in the studio while they blow smoke for more than 15 minutes. Wolf Blitzer is confused, he’s never heard a candidate’s wife talk this much, when is “Mrs. Obama” going to cut it out? There were still some stars yet to be born.

Wednesday, November 3

8:00 Lost on ABC

Lost has given us three spectacular episodes in a row, but the streak had to end sometime. Charlie episodes are always a dicey proposition. Creators always claim that it’s hard to tell stories about addiction. But other tv shows would tell great stories about addiction (The Wire and House come to mind). Hell, Lost will eventually reveal that another character is an addict, and that time, it works.

It’s not an addiction storyline problem with Charlie. It’s a music biopic problem. The writers shamelessly copy the backstory of Oasis and fill the rest in with bog-standard music biopic tropes. It’s boring. It tries to moralize and justify the addiction, which isn’t really the way to go. Addiction stories work better when the addiction isn’t representing something or standing in for some kind of moral rot, when it’s just something that a sympathetic character is struggling with (Bubbles on The Wire is a great example). Lost is often obvious and unsubtle, and that’s one of the things I love about it. But that instinct does not serve it well in this storyline.

9:00 Jack and Bobby on the WB

This is a show in which Logan Lerman plays the future president of the United States, So of course they did an election day episode. However, this aired the day the day after election day, too late to inspre young WB viewers to head to the polls. That was because they shot three endings: one where Bush wins and Grace, the hardcore liberal mom of of future president Bobby (Christine Lahti) is devastated, one where Bush loses and she’s ecstatic, and one where she’s nervously waiting for a recount.

Like so many of the election day episodes from this year, this episode tackles the “why don’t young people care about voting?” question. Grace is getting ready for a big election party. Meanwhile, her older son Jack’s girlfriend tells him her dad is going to be driving seniors to the polls all night, so this is the perfect time for her to lose her virginity. The contrast is not subtle.

Grace is despondent that no one wants to come to the campus Democrats election day party, so she enlists her TA Bradley Cooper to get sign-ups. When a colleague suggests that the girls who signed up did so for prurient and not civic reasons, she yells at Bradley Cooper because his generation is so apathetic, boo-hoo, and he tells her off for being an annoying boomer, in a speech that would sound right at home on tv today. Later, she leaves to smoke pot with him, and they kiss, and lets know that this is Very Wrong because as soon as they kiss her poor future president Logan Lerman has an ashtma attack. It’s all very melodramatic and surprisingly conservative.

I did love that Grace said she could live with Bush winning because Hilary was going to win in four years. Grace is the most Hilary voter that ever Hilaried.

Throughout, the kids pretty much ignore the election, and the show seems to admit that young people don’t care about politics. But the show’s segments from a future documentary about Bobby’s presidency reveal that he his victory was very narrow. It all came down to his home state, Missouri, which he won by just a handful of votes. What made the difference was a bunch of Missouri natives at the University of Illinois taking a bus home to vote. So Scott Foley the talking head tells us, assuring all that your vote does matter, and young people do vote, and you can make a difference. As long as you’re from the right state. Democracy in action, ladies and gentlemen!

10:00 Wife Swap on ABC

ABC really had a spectacular fall. They had two buzzy smash hits in Lost and Desperate Housewives, a solid hit in Boston Legal, and a new hit reality show in Wife Swap. And Wife Swap wasn’t just a hit, it was critically acclaimed!

Wife Swap‘s success must have been especially satisfying since Fox had rushed the blatant copycat Trading Spouses onto the air that Summer, but Wife Swap still emerged as the winner of the spouse-swapping shows.

And I can see why people were drawn to this show. Decisions about child rearing, from chores to diet, affect so much of our lives and they are almost never discussed so frankly on television as they are in Wife Swap. The show also tackles the division of housework: some women do no housework, some do everything, the husbands usually do nothing. Seeing this all out in the open on tv is very satisfying. There are other, more insidious truths that get revealed too. In her New York Times review of the two spouse-swapping shows, Virginia Heffernan observed that once the two wives swapped places, the children were more likely to listen to their new mother if she was pretty. And sure enough, in this episode a young boy admits to having a crush on his new fitness nut of a mom, and he heeds her advice.

Late Night

It was the day after the election, so the Conan was jam-packed with a lot of political material that they wrote really quickly. So this episode did not play to Conan or his team’s strengths. Hank Azaria stops by and they reminsce about The Simpsons. Azaria claims that Apu was inspired by every 7-11 clerk ever and this probably ended up in the Problem with Apu documentary.

What Else was On

• Fox premiered Nanny 911! a shameless ripoff of a British show that ABC purchased the rights to and turned into Supernanny. This was the third rushed reality rip-off that Fox aired this season, after Trading Spouses and The Next Great Champ.
• CBS had fianlly started airing Center of the Universe. Despite having access to the considerable talents of John Goodman, Jean Smart, Olympia Dukakis, and Ed Asner, this show was by all incidation a piece of steaming hot garbage.

Thursday, November 4

8:00 The OC on Fox

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched season one of The OC, but apparently everything changed in the finale! Ryan ran away to Chino, and Seth ran away on his boat. Ryan’s ex Theresa was pregnant with his baby! Everything changes!

Except this is television, so nothing changes. By episode’s end, Ryan and Seth are back in the poolhouse, shooting the shit. The series’ true OTP, reunited. In the meantime, there’s plenty of gorgeous visuals, fun performances, and great needle drops to enjoy.

I’m sure that the following episodes will reveal that Seth and Ryan’s time away created plenty of problems with Summer and Marissa and Seth and Kirsten. But the important things haven’t changed.

9:00 North Shore on Fox

Fox always had trouble with the regular September to May network tv schedule, especially in the 2000s. They held the rights to postseason baseball, so when they debuted their fall season in September, they had to yank it off the air a month later. And every January, American Idol would arrive and blow the whole schedule apart.

In 2004, Fox tried a radical solution: year round scheduling. They would debut a bunch of new primetime shows in the Summer and run them for the rest of the year. Its most promising shows (e.g. House) and its returning shows would debut after the world series.

This caused immediate problems. Several people in the entertainment press complained that people who wanted to catch up on Fox’s buzzy freshman shows Arrested Development and The OC in summer repeats now couldn’t Fox tried to solve the problem by marathoning Arrested Development on FX and promoting the ever-loving daylights out of The OC‘s first season DVD box set.

But the real problem was that the summer shows were bad. Every review of the prestigious drama The Jury (from the producers of Homicide: Life on the Street) tried very hard to find something nice to say and just couldn’t. Sitcom Quintuplets only inspired cries of “free Andy Richter!” And soap Hawaii North Shore was just dull.

Seriously, no show that has charisma machines Shannen Doherty and Jason Momoa on its payroll should be this boring. And there’s nothing worse than a boring primetime soap. The thing looks shoddy too, it honestly looks more like a daytime soap, but less campy and silly and fun. And while daytime soaps film 90 pages a day on a soundstage, this thing was filmed on location in Hawaii! And it looks so bad! It makes me appreciate Lost so much more. Hawaii is beautiful, but you need a great director and a great crew to make it look amazing on TV.

10:00 ER on NBC

This episode concerns a contest initiated by Dr. Pratt (who’s really annoying me this season): the interns all have to discharge 25 patients during their shift. If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is. They almost lost a patient and harvest organs without consent. Oy vey.

But the contest does mean that she show focuses on workplace dilemmas and patients, and we get a break from all the histrionics and misery porn. We get a lot of stuff that makes me like the show, like a scene where Dr. Lockhard finally connects with a difficult patient even as she’s interrupted by doctors and nurses every few seconds. If the show can give me a scene or two like that every episode, I’ll be watching.

Late Night

I thought that we’d be phasing topical humor out of Conan now that the election was over, and I was excited about it. Leave that stuff to The Daily Show, please, I don’t like seeing you all do it. But the show’s final Decision 2004 segment was actually pretty fun, filled with strange and off the wall jokes, including a hilarious recurring bit involving Judd Hirsch.

Conan’s Jay-Z interview is also excellent. He really puts him at ease and gets him to divulge a lot of his life and business philosophy. It’s fascinating. And he gets him to kind-of-sort-of admit that he’s dating Beyonce, and that was a huge deal back in 2004!

What Else Was On

• This particular Thursday marked the beginning of November sweeps. Ratings for this month determine how much the networks can charge for advertisements for the following three months (sweeps still happen every November, February, and May). So get ready for lots of special guest stars, weddings, births, deaths, kisses, cliffhangers, tv movies, recent box office hits, and more. And get ready to see failing new shows quietly shuffled off the schedule.
• This was a particularly exciting sweeps. In the past, NBC usually had a commanding lead heading into November sweeps, though in recent years CBS had been hot on its heels. This year, all four big networks entered November sweeps neck and neck in the ratings. CBS had all its reliable hits, NBC’s fading hits still had some juice yet, Fox had blockbuster ratings for postseason baseball and was ready to launch its fall full schedule, and ABC had a dream fall season with 2-4 steaming hot hit new shows: Desperate Housewives and Lost were both bona fide smahes, and Boston Legal and Wife Swap had proved solid performers too. So it was in the race too. Things were even exciting further down the ranks. The WB had dominated rival UPN for most of its lifespan, they entered November sweeps in a virtual tie. So November was really anyone’s game.
• Tonight’s special sweeps guest stars: Kelly Preston on Joey, Kristin Davis on Will and Grace.

Friday, November 5

8:00 Regency House Party (recorded)

This show originally aired on Channel 4 in Britain, and it was part of a whole series: Frontier House, 1900 House, and so on. It’s like The Real World, but with historical LARPing. Sounds awesome.

Not so much! This show made me furious. The women are expected to really commit, and the results are downright disturbing. The woman have to share cramped rooms. The woman assigned the poorest role has to bathe in recycled water. There are chaperones everywhere, policing the women’s’ behavior. They claim it’s about historical accuracy, but it looks like garden variety slut shaming to me.

Meanwhile, the men go shooting, ride horses, snort tobacco, ogle the girls, sleep in giant beds, and bro out. One guy’s biggest complaint is that sometimes he gets stuck next to a boring girl at dinner.

This is too much historical accuracy. But also not enough. One youtube commenter pointed out that recency ladies had their own sports like lawn tennis, and hobbies like embroidery. But they don’t let the women do any of that! It’s all judgment and slut shaming and anxiety. It would have been way more fun to see their channeled through weird old-timey sports and stitched flowers.

This show was a regressive and conservative mess, but I’m also shocked that something like it isn’t on Netflix right now. It seems like a home run for the home of Bridgeton and an endless parade of reality dating shows. With a more lighthearted approach, I think a show like this could be truly fun.

Later America’s Next Top Model (recorded)

This episode confirms that ANTM is better when it keeps a certain distance from the world of high fashion.

This is the go-see episode. Normally the go-sees happen when the girls travel to a foreign country, and there are struggles with public transit and hot guys on Vespa. But here, the go-sees happen in New York City, in part because they’re going to see some big names: Diane von Furstenberg, Nanette Lepore, and Cynthia Rowley. And we don’t see underlings, Diane von Furstenberg actually showed up!

But these big names aren’t going to sit around all day as eight girls struggle with public transit and dribble in. So the girls go in as a group. This ruins the true fun of go sees (watching the girls get lost never gets old). But it also makes the atmosphere more cruel and competitive, since the designers are comparing the girls directly. And these designers are mean! They give the judges a run for their money! One man literally tells a woman with an eating disorder that her thighs and hips are too big. I wanted to melt into my couch.

The judges often justify their cruel comments and judgements by saying “that’s just the high fashion world.” That happens in this episode, as Janice Dickinson and guest judge Marc Bouwer go all in on plus sized contestant Toccara. Toccara is the most charming and charismatic contestant this cycle, and she’s taken some good pictures to boot. The only real knock on her is that shee doesn’t fit the high fashion mold. Sometimes literally. Toccara is impressively unflappable in the face of the relentless fatphobia that came with being on the show. But she reaches her breaking point this episode, since her outfit is uglier than the other girls (and it’s not the first time). She has to work harder to have a good and glamourous picture, every time. Because high fashion designers are too lazy to make clothes for people like her!

But the show never had much connection to high fashion. Top Model contestants have graced many a Forever 21 webpage, but high fashion runways? Not so much. The show could have turned this into a strength, and pushes a different idea of what a model can be and what it beautiful. Sometimes they do, just a little bit. Tyra really pushes for Toccara to stay this episode, and it’s one of her better moments. But mostly they don’t. They reinforce all the bullshit, and they didn’t have to.

Late Night

Letterman interviewed Kristen Bell. She was excited, she’d come to see Dave’s show back when she was a nobody. She came prepared with zany skydiving story, but he couldn’t even remember that UPN existed, let alone that her show aired on the network. Try harder man.

It was a delight to see Sarah Vowell stop by Late Night. She’d appeared on Conan before to promote her books, but her life had taken a strange turn and this time round she was promoting The Incredibles. She and Conan have a lot of fun unpacking the strangeness of her this development.

The Eva Longoria interview was also pretty fascinating, though. Longoria admits that an actual teenager was originally cast as her gardener boytoy. But he was too uncomfortable with the sex scenes, so he was recast with an an older actor (as Conan quips, “he’s not 16, that’s not how tv works. He’s probably in his late 60s). Maybe this whole experience should have inspired the producers to treat that whole storyline with more delicacy! But No.

What Else Was On

Tonight’s special sweeps guest stars: Jenny McCarthy and Robert Wagner on Hope and Faith.

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.

News, Notes, and Other Fun Stuff

• Veronica Mars fans should check out this ringing endorsement from crime queen Gillian Flynn (then a tv critic at Entertainment Weekly)
• OC fans should also take a look at Virginia Heffernan’s excellent review of season 2.
• Moving The OC to Thursday night was considered a big risk, but Fox hadn’t been competitive on Thursdays since the days of Living Single and they were eager to make a move. They launched a ginormous promotional campaign. They put ads on MTV and other youth targeting cable channels, billboards around the country, and promoted the first season DVD hard (necessary since they didn’t air Summer repeats of the series due to a failed experiment in year round scheduling). By the time The OC premiered, the competition wasn’t looking quite so stiff since Joey was shedding viewers like crazy. The OC didn’t help matters on that front: Fox beat NBC in viewers 18-34 for the hour and really did cut into NBC’s audience.
• Election night coverage did really well this year. NBC had 14 million viwers for Tom Brokaw’s coverage, making it that week’s number one program. And the top 10 programs on cable for the week were a football game and 9 pieces of election coverage from Fox News and CNN (but mostly Fox News, insert heavy sigh here). MSNBC had yet to emerge as a major player. In the coming years, cable news would start gaining serious ground on broadcast news, especially after the news anchors at NBC, CBS, and ABC all departed within six months of this election due to retirement, scandal, and untimely death (respectively).