Week Ending October 22, 2004

Mid-October, 2004. The Red Sox were getting ready to defeat the curse of the Bambino. It feels like every other ad begins with some variation on the words “does this make me look fat?” Israel concluded an 18 day operation in the Gaza strip in which 130 Palestinians and one Israeli were killed. Bratz dolls were flying off the shelves. Jude Law was the sexiest man alive. Jib-Jab videos were flying across email servers. Let’s see what was on tv.

Sunday, October 17

8:00 American Dreams on NBC

I only added this show to the rotation because nothing else was on at 8:00, and Brittany Snow plays the lead, and I’ve always liked her. I was expecting a lot of vapid Boomer nostalgia. And there is a lot of Boomer nostalgia, but it’s thoughtful boomer nostalgia! This episode covers Halloween and Election day of 1965, as heroine Meg Pryor’s father runs for city council. There’s a whole sub-plot about busing Black voters to the polls and efforts to sabotage that by the opponent. This sub-plot is driven by a friendship between Meg’s family and a local Black family, and you can tell that it is genuine but also not without tension. There’s no silly post-racial stuff here. Also, Meg’s brother is in Vietnam, and he isn’t just sending letters home. We’re there with him, seeing the fighting and the horror!

This is all balanced beautifully with quotidien family drama plotlines. Brittany Snow smokes pot with dangerous love interest Milo Ventimiglia. Everyone’s filtering all their crushes and friend drama through the school production of Henry V. Meg’s best friend (Vanessa Lengies from Stick It!) is staying with the Pryors, and there’s tension and awkwardness. Plus there’s an original song by James Taylor and Carly Simon’s son, and it’s really good.

9:00 Desperate Housewives on ABC

(record Jack and Bobby on the WB and The Wire on HBO)

I said nice things about Desperate Housewives in my last two posts about the show. I like Bree. I like all the character actresses that eat up the scenery. I like how artificial and stylized the show is (I’ll talk about that later). But there’s a lot I don’t like. This week we’ll start with Susan.

Susan is supposed to be relatable. She’s supposed to be a klutz, an underdog. All I see is pandering. Making sure the shippers have a couple to ship. Giving the men a lady to ogle. They contrive to get her naked and locked out of her house, for heaven’s sake! (And if you don’t believe that the show was trying to appeal to men, just watch this ridiculous promo).

Even when I don’t like them, the other housewives have a prickliness to them that I admire. Susan gets to be a little prickly in this episode, as she holds a grudge against her husband. But her husband is so horrible that she still feels totally justified. I do like the moment when her husband’s new girl apologizes to her, if only because it gives Anne Dudek something to do. But it doesn’t make Susan more interesting. Neither does the supposed romance between her and Mike. They’re both just so boring. “Middle aged people can be hot and sexy too!” is the only idea there.

Susan feels like she was created to be relatable, but in a studio note sort of way. I’ll always like the woman who tells the whole dinner table that her husband cries when he ejaculates better.

10:00 Boston Legal on ABC

Even at the time, Boston Legal was criticized for its underwritten female characters. The situation is really dire. Last episode introduced Elizabeth Mitchell as Christine, a ex-girlfriend and potential courtroom rival for James Spader (she’d tried to kill him! he’s broken her out of the nuthouse but what if he shouldn’t have). Elizabeth Mitchell was great in the role and it traded on James Spader’s status as an erotic thriller icon in fascinating and fun ways. If there were any justice in the world or in this show, she would have been the Louis Canning to his Alicia Florrick, clocking in two to three guest appearances a year.

This episode does not deliver on that promise. Christine confirms she’s not crazy by giving a closing statement in which she argues that sexual harassment law is unconstitutional because women should be able to handle a little sex talk in the workplace. Then she and Spader make up and part on good terms. The closing statement is truly excellent, it’s well-written and Elizabeth Mitchell kills it. But it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Especially because this was Christine’s final appearance.

A glance at the show’s Wikipedia page reveals that the show churned through a shocking number of talented actresses. Rhona Mitra, Monica Potter, and Lake Bell were all series regulars to start with. None made it to season two. That’s not surprising, the show serves them bad material. They get the short end of the stick, always playing the stick in the mud to wild James Spader and William Shatner. However, Mark Valley has the same job, and he’s way worse at it than Bell, Mitra, and Potter. Somehow he stayed on the show for four seasons. Constance Zimmer, Julie Bowen, and goddamn Taraji P. Henson only lasted one. Are we noticing a pattern here?

What Else Was On

• It was Game three of the ALCS on Fox. The night before, the Red Sox had lost their third straight game to the Yankees, 19-8. But tonight, they turned it around, beating the Yankees 6-4 in extra innings. Exciting!
• This week’s CBS Sunday Movie was Perfect Strangers, in which Rob Lowe and Anna Friel switch lives and fall in love over the phone. Khandi Alexander was the black best friend. If anyone finds this, let me know!
• NBC let viewers decide if popular Law and Order: Criminal Intent villain Nicole Wallace lived or died. In a move inspired by reality television, they aired two endings, one in which Vincent D’Onofrio’s nemesis lived, and one in which she died. Which ending you saw depended on your time zone. After the episode, you could go to NBC.com, watch both endings and vote. Viewers decided to spare Wallace. The NYT wrote two whole articles about this stunt. The first one had a frickin’ David Carr byline. The second one focused on the resulting drama in the fandom even got a lot of people on the message boards to go on the record under their own names!
• Showtime aired Cavedweller starring Kyra Sedgewick and Kevin Bacon and directed by Lisa Chodolenko.
• The Sci-Fi Channel premiered Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. The channel had canceled the cult favorite space opera, but after a very savvy fan campaign (bras were mailed to TV executives, and that was just the beginning!) it was brought back to life.
• Pax (now known as the Ion Network) was in the middle of airing reality series Cold Turkey. This show was the real world, but everyone in the house was trying to quit smoking. Sounds terrifying.
• Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo featured Dennis Rodman, Ryan Stiles, Cheryl Hines, Bobby Cannavale, and Tony Hawk

Tivo Status

5 episodes of Everwood, 2 episodes of The Wire, a four-hour Mystery! miniseries that I’ll get to at some point (e.g. when my inter-library loan finally arrives and I have the DVD). Tonight, I recorded Masterpiece Theater‘s The Lost Prince, the first part of their latest miniseries (Olivia Colman, Bill Nighy, and Michael Gambon are in it!). 13 hours, with 15 hours of space left.

Monday, October 18

8:00 One on One and Half & Hlalf on UPN

This is the fourth election day episode I’ve seen for this project (after 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls, and American Dreams). It’s not didactic, it’s not a polemic. There are lots of jokes. It feels like the other episode I threw on a couple weeks ago. There’s a silly sub-plot about the then rising problem of identity theft.

But it has a clear political message, and I found that refreshing. The show focuses on young Black single father Flexter raising his daughter Breanna. The episode opens with her asking her father an important question as she prepares to vote for the first time: what outfit should she wear? (He helps her decide which wins him dad points in my book). They become more engaged in the election since their cousin is running for mayor. But when Breanna realizes her cousin is going to cut school arts funding, she attends a protest, ends up on TV, and makes the whole family uncomfortable, which is always good news in a sitcom. While he’s discussing the merits of his cousin, Flexter points out that once the new stadium was built, he never took his family to games, he just took his corporate buddies. This is a joke about how self-absorbed Flex is, but there is of course a real political argument hidden in that complaint. This is a fun episode of a sitcom that tries to engage young people in the political process. It doesn’t preach, it focuses on an issue that’s relevant to them, but it also has a very clear point of view. It doesn’t try to do any “both sides” nonsense.

The episode ends with them watching the return. Right as they announce the result, it cuts to a black screen with the words “Vote or Die!” Research has told me that this was all part of a campaign by the now disgraced Sean “Diddy” Combs. But I still think it’s cool, especially since that sentiment and urgency is backed up by the episode itself.

Over on Half and Half, poor Alec Mapa has to carry a storyline where his gay best friend character tries being straight because being gay has become too “mainstream.” It’s more nonsensical than it is offensive. But I say it’s still pretty offensive. But Mapa carries it, his physical comedy and commitment is superb. Really what a difference a funny and game performer can make, especially in a slight multicamera sitcom.

9:00 The Wire (recorded)

Record Girlfriends on UPN and Everybody Loves Raymond on CBS

This episode is a lot of table setting. Just a lot of scenes that are supposed to set up better scenes down the road. No throughline, no structure. Episodes like this are why I watch TV from 20 years ago and not today. But with The Wire, I trust that what comes later will be great and that this episode will be richer once I see all the stuff it was setting up.

One scene I already love? Bunny rounding up all the corner boys in a high school gym. I know that creator Edward Burns was a schoolteacher, and you can see that experience here. This so perfectly captures what it’s like to try and tame a group of kids with no respect for you. That moment where the principal intervenes and you think he has it, and it all slips away so quickly? Brutal.

On the other hand, I am not a fan of this love triangle between McNulty, Daniels, and Rhonda. I love love triangles, but I didn’t necessarily want to see one on The Wire. It would’ve been great if they proved me wrong. But for a good love triangle you usually need three good characters, and Rhonda has always been one of the show’s weakest characters.

Later Jack and Bobby (recorded)

This episode of Jack and Bobby gives us the most detail about the 2040s timeline yet. In the future when Bobby is president, we’ve apparently had a gay president. We get allusions to “neural enhancement,” and “HIV vaccinations,” “security chips.” It becomes more striking than ever how optimistic the show’s vision of the future is. Scientific progress and technological progress are coming, and they will make things better. The next president is a teenager right now, and he will grow up to be a great and good man who will heal our divided nation. That vision seems ridiculous and naive now.

But I would caution against thinking that everyone was so optimistic twenty years ago. There was another vision of the future captivating America back in the fall of 2004. In this very week The Plot Against America, Philip Roth’s vision of a future America falling to fascism, was number two on the NYT Bestseller list, behind only the latest volume of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. I wasn’t even the one who made this connection: someone made it back in 2004. It was in an Entertainment Weekly listicle.

Late Night

Letterman interviewed Jimmy Carter and they discussed the cover he painted for the novel he wrote (take that, George W!). This show also included a great segment about Martha Stewart’s recent incarceration. He brought on a real life woman from Montclair, New Jersey also named Martha Stewart to recite the top 10 worst things about being named Martha Stewart. Only two of the items traded in tired women’s prison tropes! I’ve been spending a lot of time watching old late night jokes, that is a pretty good ratio.

What Else Was On

• It was another thrilling baseball game on Fox, as the Sox beat the Yankees in 14 innings.
• Lifetime was undergoing a bit of a slump, so they started premiering a new movie every Monday. This Monday’s movie starred Nicollette Sheridan, also known as Edie Britt on monster hit Desperate Housewives. In Deadly Visions, Sheridan receives an eye transplant and experiences visions of the donor’s former life. And it turns out the donor was murdered, uh-oh!
• on Animal Planet you could catch Nutts for Mutts an all-mutt charity dog show with celebrity judges including Kim Basinger and Goran Visjnic. According to the weekly tv listings in EW, there was a best singer event and a best kisser contest!

Tuesday, October 19

8:00 Gilmore Girls on the WB

Gilmore Girls is known for its references. They were a huge boon to its reputation back in the 2000s. Other shows were referencing Paris Hilton and other trashy stuff that teen girls like. Gilmore Girls was better. It referenced books, and other cool stuff that people writing for Slate and Entertainment Weekly liked.

Of course, reference-heavy dialogue has infected all of culture. Once, Gilmore Girls’ references to obscure pop culture ephemera sounded novel. Now it sounds like everything, just executed better. And in hindsight, there’s a certain smugness and snobbery to all that love of the references. I get them, I’m cool, I’m not like those other girls.

Basically, the references weren’t a draw for me. But in this episode, Amy Sherman-Palladino basically tries to create a new cult movie, and I have to respect that. It works! I now want to watch that Pippi Longstocking movie, and I imagine a lot of people felt the same back in 2004.

The actual storylines are winning me over too. The melancholy and humor in Richard and Emily’s separation subplot is wonderful. I am full-on shipping Lane and Zach from the band, even though I have a feeling it won’t turn out well for me. And for now, I like that Rory is with Dean. I like it when plucky heroines make bad decisions. I hope that the show makes her pay for it and we get lots of drama and angst. But, you know, in a whimsical way, with lots of snappy dialogue and references to classic movies and mid-century literature.

Basically, the show is growing on me. I may have jumped into season 5, but I’m becoming a Gilmore girl.

9:00 Veronica Mars on UPN

This episode is remembered for the flashbacks to the homecoming dance. Those are important. They make us love Lilly, which will help the mystery plot going forward. They provide some tantalizing glimpses of the Kane family life. They show how Veronica fit in with the popular crowd. And they show us a different side of bad boy Logan Echolls, and flesh out his relationship with Veronica a bit.

But all I want to talk about is the case of the week. It’s be best one yet. The reality show fake-out is a truly inspired red herring. Veronica and Wallace infiltrate a video game cage thingy and a college party. There is code-breaking and safe-cracking. Our tech bro villains are so punchable, and hearing them as they dig through that garbage can offscreen is so terribly satisfying. It’s the show’s best case of the week yet, and it’s everything that you want from a teen Nancy Drew show.

10:00 Girlfriends (recorded)

I jumped into season five of Girlfriends, and it’s been a fun time. Except for Toni. Her storylines are the most soapy and the least comedic. Her story would probably mean more if I knew why she wants kids or if I knew the history between her and this boring Todd guy. But I don’t. This episode was all about Toni and her pregnancy and I found it tedious. Hopefully, I’ll be more into this storyline once I get to know Toni better.

10:30 Laguna Beach on MTV

Much has been made of the fact that Laguna Beach was scripted. And I think it is, at least in part. But in a fully scripted teen drama, Christina would be a good singer. Instead, we have her going to this purely ceremonial audition, singing a terrible version of “Only Hope,” and we see the casting director’s terribly coddling comments (her comment on the phone before the audition is almost worse. She expects Christina to “do the best she can.” Oof). She sings this hard song that goes on and on and on. If this was The OC, then she would have sung something easy and looked pretty doing it.

I’m also obsessed with the fact that Lauren is going to The Academy of Art College in San Francisco and Spencer is going to SF State. The headline is that they’ll be together. But the headline to me is that those are not prestigious schools! I would know, I grew up in San Francisco and graduated from SF State. Lauren is a rich girl with bad grades, so an expensive and not very selective art school is exactly where she would go. But if this was Gossip Girl she would be headed to Berkeley and Spencer would be headed to Stanford.

This limited realism lends extra juice to Lauren’s conflicting desires to escape Laguna Beach and to stay there forever. She wants to grow up. But what if she’s peaking here? That subtext wouldn’t feel quite so acute if she was going to UC Berkeley.

Late Night

The highlight of tonight’s Conan is a bit in which the show’s 74-year-old announcer Joel Godard has to be locked up because his need for a flu shot has driven him mad. A lot of 20-year-old bits on Conan and other late-night comedy shows have aged poorly. This one though? Fine wine.

What Else Was On

• On Fox the Sox beat the Yankees again. The series would be decided in game seven on Wednesday. I’m sure Fox executives were weeping with joy.
• TBS premiered the reality show He’s a Lady. Here’s the official description: “This reality show takes 11 men on a wild adventure as they walk a mile in their wives or girlfriends’ shoes by undergoing a complete feminine makeover for a chance to win a quarter-million dollars. Each week, the competitors learn something new about what it’s like to live as a woman and then be judged by a celebrity panel.” Early 2000s reality television was truly the wild west. There are some episodes on youtube if you’re curious.

Wednesday, October 20

8:00 Lost on ABC

Last week’s “Walkabout” showed us that Lost was here to stay. It was a great episode, and it showed us what the show was capable of.

This week proves that was no fluke. It’s not a masterpiece like “Walkabout.” The flashbacks are pretty ham-fisted. But it continues to build the show into something that can last, sustain the hype, and change the culture. We are introduced to an important new location, the caves. We basically get a mission statement for the series in Jack’s big speech. And of course, we are properly introduced to Jack, the classic white guy protagonist who needs to stop being the white guy protagonist and chill out a bit but cannot. That central tension is a vital part of the series (both in the show and behind the scenes). We get our first major conversation between Jack and Locke, establishing what will become the series’ most important relationship. Locke voices what we all know: something funky is going on with this island. That, plus the ghost of Christian Shepherd, further stoke the fan theories. But there was plenty to interest those who weren’t visiting message boards: daddy issues, a big rescue mission, shipping, dilemmas of survival and scarce resources, plus a jungle quest.

There’s all that, plus the moment when Jack destroys his dad’s empty coffin, and we cut to a wide shot of the jungle, but we can still hear him moaning and hacking away at the coffin like the sad white boy he is. Then it cuts to commercials. That’s television, baby.

9:00 Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel

I’ve never watched Mythbusters, but I kind of grew up with it anyway. If you thought that all TV was bad for kids in the 2000s, Mythbusters was the exception. And the show was filmed in the Bay Area, where I grew up, so stories about its production were always in the air.

The show is fun! It reminds me of America’s Test Kitchen, but with explosions. Both shows are filmed outside of New York and Los Angeles (ATK is filmed in the Boston area) which gives them an outsider spirit. In both shows, part of the joy is seeing these weird nerds, people who you rarely see on television. Both shows also have the feel of a workplace show. You can feel tensions between the hosts bubbling under the surface, and there are some weird gender dynamics. It gives all the experiments and explosions and crashes a fun subtext.

It’s also just fun to see the place where I live and grew up on TV. The experiments take the hosts all over the Bay Area, to a pottery studio and an acupuncturist, and everything has a distinctly Bay Area vibe. The episode ends with an epic crash text on the waterfront, and they can’t be more than a 20-minute drive from where I’m sitting right now. It’s cool.

10:00 Law and Order on NBC

The big guest stars in this episode are Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Wendell Pierce. The Wire was in the middle of its third season when this aired, and comparisons must be made. The people making the show may have been asking for those comparisons.

The Wire presents a clear and compelling argument about the failures of the American criminal justice system. This episode shows why it is hard for Law and Order to make a clear argument about anything. A cop was killed, but he was undercover, the guns are here, the guns are there, the suspect is a fall guy, maybe this kid was unjustly killed, and the kid’s dad (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) set it all up as vengeance, he’s representing himself, he gives a big speech, he’s a sad dad, he’s a fool, he’s guilty. The twists and turns take precedence over character, over theme, and even over a decent mystery plot. But beneath all the twists and turns, Law and Order‘s philosophy rises to the surface. The show probably thinks it's balanced. See, the Black families whose relatives have been killed by the police can be sympathetic and tragic! But remember they are foolish and dangerous. Sure, cops can make mistakes and undercover work is messy. But they are heroes and our job is to stay behind them 100%. The message is clear.

Later The Wire (recorded)

Let’s watch an episode of The Wire! Much less likely to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I love a title drop. That moment when a writer drops the title of the movie or book or play or whatever to make sure you pay attention? I live for it.

The Wire is fun because it often gives you two title drops in an episode. A couple of episodes ago, at least five characters uttered the title words all due respect. But there’s also the epigraph, the quote at the end of the credits that you wait to find each episode. This episode has one of my favorite epigraphs yet. It reads “I had suck fuckin’ hopes for us,” attributed to McNulty. I thought he would be talking about the floundering detail, I thought he’d be talking to Lester or Daniels. But no! The full quote is “You disappoint me, String. I had such fuckin’ hopes for us.” McNulty brazenly approaches Stringer at the copy shop, only for Stronger to out-brazen him and try and sell him a condo. McNulty realizes that Stringer is out of his reach and the cat-and-mouse game that gave his life meaning is over. It’s unexpected, it reveals a lot about the true nature of police work, and it’s fun.

This is the part of the season when you can feel that something big is about to happen, and it’s always fun living in that moment. Avon is out, Omar and Marlo are arming up, Hamsterdam is taking off, middle management is unhappy on both sides of the law, Bubbs might try to get clean again. My guess is that the whole plot is about to blow up. I’m excited, but I’m also nervous (in some way the ideal state of mind for a prestige TV freak).

Late Night

I’m discovering that my favorite part of Late Night with Conan O’Brien is usually the silly bit after the first interview. The earlier bits often feel too rehearsed, too clever. They try hard to be edgy and topical, and I rarely like the results (tonight’s episode is no exception). But the bit in act two is always pure silliness. In this episode we are introduced to “Conan of the Night.”

What Else Was On

• On Fox the Red Sox defeated the Yankees and secured their ticket to the World Series.
• The Flash made his first appearance on the WB’s Smallville. He was played by Kyle Gallner, not Grant Gustin. And he was called “Bart,” not Barry.

Thursday, October 21

Earlier America’s Next Top Model on UPN

This episode shows us that when you constantly criticize insecure young women, they feel like shit! Shocking. Kelle is a gorgeous and charming rich Black girl who is clearly struggling with some internalized racism. The judges have constantly criticized her photos and her performance. Most of her photos are pretty bland, but that’s the case for most of the girls at this stage in the competition. And they didn’t have to be so mean. Now Kelle is crying when she looks in the mirror and analyzing her microfeatures and it’s very sad.

In other news, these girls are finally starting to take some cool pictures. This week’s photo shoot had them wearing roller skates, crazy hair, and lots of neon. There were serious disco vibes, and I was into it. There were at least four photos that made me pause the video on Hulu. God help me, but I love watching the girls learn how to model properly in this silly and potentially soul-crushing competition.

9:00 Record The Office “Christmas Special” on BBC America

10:00 ER on NBC

This episode begins with major melodrama and histrionics. A mother and her children are trapped in their apartment. The abusive father is at the door, so they jump out the window. They’re found by the County General staff and everything is “why would God do this?” and “are you an angel?” and whatnot/ It’s not my preferred mode of ER.

A lot of the episode is like that. Lots of yelling. But midway through, there’s a twist: there was no man with a gun at the door. The mother was hallucinating (trauma from years of abuse plus going cold turkey on her valium prescription when she couldn’t afford it anymore apparently did the trick). The father is dead. Her daughter jumped out the window and died from her injuries, and she didn’t need to. This could be cause for melodrama, but the episode downshifts. No cops are called, and the doctors treat the woman with compassion. At the beginning of the episode, this woman and her family feel like a dramatic problem for our heroes to solve. By the end, they feel like a real family, beset by a terrible tragedy.

After the big twist, the rest of the episode quiets down a bit too. Alex Kingston’s Elizabeth Corday departs in this episode, and I was worried her exit would involve a lot of angry board meetings. But instead, we get a quiet conversation between her and Carter, in which they reflect on how much her life (and by extension the series) has changed.

Later Everybody Loves Raymond (recorded)

The math teacher in this episode immediately joins my personal pantheon of TV teachers. TV teachers are always heroes. Not this guy. Mr. Putnam doesn’t care about the kids. Maybe he did at one point. Now he just wishes they would behave, do those math problems, and make his life easy. He’s exhausted and miserable. There are teachers like this at every school around the world. You never see them on television. Here, you do. And Robert Joy is truly excellent as Mr. Putnam. He makes you understand and sympathize with this exhausted man who is bad at his job. And he’s hilarious.

This episode offers a very realistic portrayal of a teacher. It also presents a very realistic and insightful portrait of how parents deal with teachers. Mr. Putman is a new way for Debra and Ray to argue. At the beginning of the episode, Debra is aligned with the teacher, while Ray hates him. By the end of the episode, they’ve flipped. Now Ray is telling his daughter to listen to the teacher he thought was the devil incarnate 5 minutes ago. It’s not about the teacher. It’s about parenting, and about their marriage. They want to win. Of course, neither of them do. I suspect that the kid will listen to Ray, or Debra, or the teacher…when it suits her. Mostly she’ll do what she wants. You can only hope that she stays safe.

Late Night

Tonight’s first guest is Jude Law, heading downstairs from the SNL studios (he was hosting that week, with musical guest Ashlee Simpson. Surely this is going to turn out great for everybody!). Beholding early 2000s Jude Law is always a privilege. This was peak Jude Law, when he released three movies in one month (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I Heart Huckabees, and Alfie). Conan plays all three movies at the same time, and then the fourth screen is Johnny Damon’s grand slam that beat the Yankees. It’s a whole lotta 2004 in one screenshot, and I love it. This is followed by a delightfully chaotic and flirty interview with Meredith Viera. She tells Conan that he’d be a good bull rider. My favorite part is when she reveals that male cohosts of The View are “always a disaster. Because no one really cares what [they] have to say.” Oh snap!

Friday, October 22

8:00 Joan of Arcadia on CBS

On this episode of Joan of Arcadia, what if God was the school stoner?

This is my third election-themed episode this week! Much like the episode of One on One that aired earlier in the week, this episode wants to make kids interested in politics. The fact that young people don’t vote is mentioned directly multiple times, as are popular excuses of the era like “it doesn’t matter” and “all the candidates are the same.” Of course, Joan is talking about the current student council election, but we all know she’s really talking about something bigger.

Joan of Arcadia is a show about a girl who talks to God, but her God is a non-denominational one. The creator of the show had rules to make sure of it. It’s one of the show’s greatest strengths. However, when the show takes a similar approach to politics, things go south. The show seems reluctant to take any kind of stand on real-world issues so instead we get a parable about the dangers of mud-slinging. It ends with Joan and her friends nearly outing a closeted student, and it is impossible to take the storyline seriously. It makes it hard to like Joan or her friends, knowing that they seriously considered doing something so reprehensible, just to win a student council election for some twerp.

Joan’s storyline is a total misfire. But I’m more interested in her mother Helen’s story. It’s better, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. One of her students is offended by a classmate’s art project featuring her taxidermized pet gerbil. The girl’s parents try to have it removed, and Helen righteously argues against this censorship. She takes her case to the school board and wins. But the offended girl leaves art class. In her righteous zeal, Helen didn’t listen to her student and her family, she didn’t treat them with respect.

In isolation, there’s nothing wrong with this storyline. But censorship in schools is rarely about pet gerbils. This episode is concerned with making the censors feel welcome, like part of the community. But all too often, the goal of censorship is to make people unwelcome and unsafe. Gay people, trans people, people of color. The most vulnerable members of any school or community. Censorship sends a message. It’s a tool used to enforce a rigid set of behaviors and push out those who don’t conform.

So yeah. I think they missed the point.

Late Night

On Conan, this is the fifth or sixth show in which Bill O’Reilly “calls” into the show and sexually harasses Conan. Apparently, this was hilarious back in 2004. I hate it.

One bit I am happy to see return is the Late Night version of Frankenstein. Guest Will Arnett also reveals that he’s to be the voice in GMC ads and CBS promos. Now whenever I hear car ads or TV promos, I will hear Gob Bluth. Which will make both those things so much better.

Tivo Status

5 episodes of Everwood, episode one of Masterpiece Theater‘s The Lost Prince, and The Office Christmas Special from across the pond. I had Dalgliesh: Death in Holy Orders on the imaginary TiVo. But my interlibrary loan finally arrived, and the DVD glitched out before the end of the first episode. Also, it was kind of boring. So it’s deleted! In other, better news, I’m caught up with The Wire! 9 hours, with 19 hours of space left.

News, Notes, and Other Fun Stuff

• There was a huge brouhaha all month of the film Stolen Honor, a film about John Kerry’s activities protesting the Vietnam War. Sinclair broadcast group ordered all their local affiliates to air the film in primetime, often pre-empting popular programs like Desperate Housewives. The move was rightfully perceived as a pro-Bush effort from the conservative Sinclair broadcast group. Several very 2000s compromises were proposed (the film should be edited, Kerry should get to show a film too, and the film should be followed by a panel discussion). Michael Moore even offered to let Sinclair broadcast Fahrenheit 9/11 for free so they’d ostensibly have both sides covered. But ultimately the film did air in several markets, though the controversy did hurt Sinclair’s reputation and bottom line. That was mostly temporary though. Sinclair has grown more and more powerful, and it has continued to use its stations to boost increasingly dangerous right-wing propaganda, and the American public has mostly it slide.
• Maureen “Mo” Ryan published several excellent stories about the efforts to save Farscape in the Chicago Tribune. The Farscape fan campaign was very savvy and focused on raising the series’ profile in the press and touting its engaged fanbase in the hope that another channel or group of investors would take note. instead of appealing to executives.
  • When fans thought there was still a chance that “Farscape” might return on Sci-Fi, female fans sent network head Bonnie Hammer hundreds of bras to show their, er, support for the show. Other Scapers delivered handmade “Farscape” cookies to executives at rival networks, collected information on the income and education of “Farscape’s” TV audience, and “adopted” members of the media and sent them information packets on the show. Fans even raised money to donate “Farscape” DVDs to libraries and military bases…With their own money, the “Farscape” faithful have bought commercial spots on TV and on radio and have purchased ads in magazines all in an effort to keep the show before the public — both around the time of its cancellation and in the run-up to the mini-series. Many also spent the past few weeks trying to cajole various talk shows into having “Farscape” star Ben Browder on as a guest.
• The campaign worked, they caught the attention of some European financiers and Farscape returned. Ryan’s article about the show’s return is really a goldmine of prescient insight. “As servers get more sophisticated and broadband TV spreads, viewers will have an almost unlimited number of shows they can watch,” and that will “give new life to shows that didn’t quite make it on network TV and also give life to shows that never would have even made it to a network,” says one consultant. Another consultant predicts that the brave new world will be “easier for content creators.” That prediction came half true (being a content creator is really hard when everyone is a content creator). But it is also really wild to see someone using the phrase “content creator” before the launch of Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
• Anyone interested in network efforts to diversify writing staffs should take a look at this article in trade publication TV Week which explores the existing diversity hiring programs at the four big networks. Read that and think about how white writers' rooms still were for the next two decades. And about how the people of color who did get in were treated.
• Also remember that this week the New York Times published a big story about the infamous Friends case, in which a Black woman who worked as a writer’s assistant sued several Friends writers and Warner Bros. television for sexual harassment and the most powerful forces in the entertainment industry argued that harassment didn’t apply because they were protected by free speech. There’s a lot to unpack in that piece, and the lawsuit, the contemporary reporting on it, and the way it made it harder to address diversity and workplace harassment in writer’s rooms should be its own piece. But I also think the closing lines of this article say a lot all by themselves:
  • It’s unclear what Amaani Lyle herself thinks of the legal and professional arguments that have arisen from her case. After leaving ”Friends” in 1999, she joined the Air Force and is stationed on the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. Meanwhile, her former co-worker at ”Friends,” Mr. Rosenblatt, has since graduated to staff jobs at two network sitcoms and just finished working as a story editor on a midseason NBC program called ”The Men’s Room.” ”See what happens when you keep your mouth shut?” Mr. Rosenblatt said.