Week of the Lost Pilot (9/22/04-9/29/04)

I became a fan of tv because of Lost. And Lost changed television forever. But what kind of television world did Lost enter? What else was on the air the night the first part of that iconic pilot aired? What else was on the air why people were eagerly waiting to find out what exactly killed poor Greg Grunberg the pilot (they’d be waiting a long time).

Let’s find out! Let’s journey back to September 2004. The Sopranos, Angels in America, and Arrested Development had just cleaned up at the Emmys. The CBS news forged documents scandal was hot off the presses. Britney had just married Kevin Federline. Ken Jennings was in the middle of his Jeopardy winning streak. Green Day’s American Idiot was hitting shelves. Oprah had just given everyone a car. And ABC was about to take America to a mysterious island.

Wednesday, Sept 22

8:00

I recorded America’s Next Top Model on UPN and Smallville on the WB. But I watched the buzzy new J.J. Abrams show about the plane crash live on ABC. It’s gotten such good reviews and everyone and everything looks so beautiful in the promos!

Even 20 years later, the Lost pilot is special. First of all, I have watched a lot of 20 year old tv this week, and Lost just looks…so gorgeous in that context. The images are all so rich, so colorful, so clean, and so exciting. Lots of tv today is beautiful, and much of it is more stylized. But the simple style of Lost is so hard to do well. This pilot (probably the best directing of J.J. Abrams’ career) makes it look so easy. But as Lost‘s imitators have proved time and time again, it is anything but.

I could talk about the glorious opening images, full of wonder, terror, beauty, action. The eye, the jungle, the dog, the bottle, the shoe, the beach, the crash. The opening sequence of Lost is 20 minutes long. 20 minutes before we hear that now iconic “boom” sound and cut to commercial. It’s an astonishing indulgence for 2004. Also indulgent? The pilot’s $10-14 million dollar price tag. It set records and raised eyebrows at the time. But boy does Lost ever make it count. The rest of the episode can’t match the opening act, but it is still extraordinary. This 43 minute episode manages to introduce you to each member of Lost’s ginormous ensemble. Again, I’ve watched a lot of tv, and a lot of pilots, and so many shows struggle to introcude 4 or 5 characters. Lost introduces 15 characters, and finds time for two great action scenes,¹ and two awesome suspense sequences.² This is one of the best pilots ever made, and it’s only halfway done.

Thanks to a now-deleted video, I was able to watch the ads that aired during the Lost pilot. They provide a glimpse of the changing world that would make lost huge. Best Buy advertises the HDTVs that were practically made for Lost and its gorgeous Hawaiian locations. And there’s an ad for the new DVD release of Star Wars, and DVD sales were of course integral to Lost’s popularity and success.

9:00

Another pilot getting rave reviews was the teenage noir show Veronica Mars. It airs on (gasp!) UPN? I had to watch this thing ASAP! I recorded the Law and Order season premiere.

Hell, this is another all timer of a pilot. Everything is here: a great ensemble, three (3!) enticing mysteries to follow. The look is so great: sun-bleached, garish, and perfect. And there’s a great setting, Neptune, California already feels like a perfect noir setting. A colorful cast of characters, a beautiful surface that hides hidden reesentments and dirty secrets. But most of all, there’s Veronica herself. TV was awash in snarky smartass teens in 2004, but she stands out. For one, the snark is really good. For another, the pilot slowly pulls back the curtain to reveal the pain it covers. For one thing, Veronica demonstrates how smart savvy she is throughout the pilot. But watching as an adult, it’s clear how reckless and impulsive she is. Those are all ingredients for a great character, a great mystery, and great drama. Can’t wait to explore Neptune this year. I’ve forgotten about how a lot of these mysteries resolved, and I’ve forgotten about all the fun red herrings and blind alleys the show takes you on along the way.

10:00

I watched the Law and Order episode I just recorded. I was recording the second episode to Law and Order (it was a 2 episode premiere) but cancelled it while watching the first episode. Why, you ask? Let’s talk about it!

I’ve never seen Law and Order before. But this project is as good an opportunity as any to sample this cultural institution. But my research has told me that season 15 was always going to be a tough one for Law and Order. Jerry Orbach’s Lenny Briscoe is by far the most beloved character in the show’s very long history, and this was their first season without him in over a decade. Though it wasn’t public knowledge at the time, Orbach had been receiving cancer treatments for over a decade, all while filming 25-odd episodes of Law and Order and its various spinoffs every year. In 2004, he finally decided to pull back. NBC had planned to move Orbach to the series’ third spinoff Trial By Jury, where he could play a smaller role. But Orbach died in December 2004 after filming only two episodes (one of a long series of unfortunate events and self-inflicted wounds that hobbled the once-mighty NBC in this era). Replacing Orbach was going to be an impossible task, and even the hiring of beloved character actor Dennis Farina would only help so much.

Still, there’s lots about Law and Order that appeals to me. The New York City locations. The New York City actors. And the rigid structure. I like structur: in my tv, in my books, in my movies, in my life. And Law and Order, with its title cards, its sound effects, and its rigid casting setup of three police officers and three attorneys, with each episode divided neatly between them, is nothing if not structured. But then there’s the other side of it. This is a show that believes, to the very bone, that law enforcement is right, heroic, and a true instrument of American justice. That would make me wary in any episode, but this episode, “Paradigm,” is a real ripped from the headlines doozy.

The Abu Gharaib scandal broke in late April of 2004, too late for Law and Order to tackle it in their current season. But they wasted no time, incorporating it into the following season’s premiere. “Paradigm” is a truly bizarre episode in which the detectives discover that Sarita Chowdhury murdered an army reservist in revenge for her brother’s treatment at Abu Gharaib. You could write multiple academic papers about this thing. There’s Chowdhury’s character’s confusing insistence that she be treated as a prisoner of war. The way that S. Epatha Merkerson floats the theory that the victim was killed as part of a military cover-up. Farina belittles her, and she is later proved wrong. The way the police’s first thought is to look for Abu Gharaib detainees who’ve been released and come back the New York City? How? When? Also the choice quote “I’d put panties on every head in Abu Ghraib prison if I thought it would save one innocent life.” That’s just the weird stuff, there’s also the quotidien both-sidesism that only reinforces Islamophobia. The base assumption that everyone the US arrests, at home and abroad, must be guilty. It all made me sick to my stomach.

But through it all, there’s Sarita Chowdhury, bringing a whole universe of feeling and complexity that’s totally outside the show’s worldview or imagination. She shows us a righteous but flawed woman. Her charisma, her anger, the conviction and sadness in her big courtroom testimony scene, all exceptional. Chowdhury is not Iraqi (she was born to Bengali-British parents) but the horrors of post 9/11 America lumped her in with Iraqis and other Middle Easterners and South Asians, giving them all a terrible set of shared experiences. Here, she uses her immense talent to give voice to that experience, in NBC primetime. Even amidst the mess, it is something to behold.

10:45

I felt like total garbage after watching that Law and Order episode. I needed to watch simething stupid, so I watched the season 4 premiere of Smallville.

I had never seen Smallville. But I watched a couple seasons of Arrow and The Flash, and you can see the template of those shows here. But the show is also stranger than I ever imagined it would be. This is our grand introduction to Lois Lane, and it involves running into Clark, naked, in a cornfield. Lois is introduced and she mentions a craving for nicotine! A heroine who smokes, who would have thought! Also there is a scene with Lana Lang in the shower that is really horny and bizarre. At first I thought she was…practicing self-care and I was stunned. But I think something supernatural was going on and after she gets out of the shower she discovers a tattoo that looks VERY phallic. Either way, I was enraptured. The show is surprisingly horny. Also, John Glover is in this, and he is super fun as Lex Luthor’s big bad dad.

Then it’s time to watch the cycle three premiere of America‘s Next Top Model. This episode involves a pool party, a barfight, and a tear-jerking twist. But Top Model is more fun when the drama is filtered through silly challenges, silly photoshoots, and judging panels so serious they become silly. Still, this premiere is a reminder that cycle 3 features one of the series best groups of girls, and a surprising number of them have defied the odds and found real success after this dumb show. We are also introduced to Tiffany, who is eliminated this cycle. But her story on the show is far from finished, and that story is a very important part of ANTM history.

12:35

It’s time for Late Night with Conan O’Brien on NBC!

The opening segments are fine. Jokes about Britney Spears’ recent marriage and a segment of pop-culture themed SAT analogies (the aged well to ages poorly ratio is about 50/50. Some fat jokes, some gay jokes, it’s 2004!). Then poor Conan begins carrying water for NBC’s ailing Thursday lineup. The first guest is Matt LeBlanc, promoting Joey. Conan jokes several times that “we [NBC] really need this show” but it doesn’t really feel like he’s joking. Then Anthony Edwards stops by to promote his new movie, the a forgotten Julianne Moore thriller called…The Forgotten. But he’s also there to evoke the memories of the golden days of ER.

Having done his duty as an NBC employee, Conan gets to do his “one for me” interview: Terry Gross. Terry Gross is there to promote her new book, which includes her Fresh Air interview with Conan. But Conan clearly admires her, vibes with her and loves talking to her. He gets her to loosen up and they have some really fun banter. It’s easily the highlight of the episode.

TIVO status

I’ve cleared out the TIVO in anticipation of the fall season, but I still have two episodes from the latest season of Everwood and the season 3 premiere of The Wire on there so I can watch them once I catch up with the old seasons. My imaginary Tivo has 28 hours worth of storage, so I have 25 hours left.

What Else was on TV

• FOX was waiting until after the World Series to debut most of their programming. But they were still burning off the summer sitcom Quintuplets starring Andy Richter, and featuring Evan Chambers from Greek and Jerry’s daughter from Parks and Rec as two of the titular quintuplets. In this episode, they go to “quintcon.”
• CBS debuted CSI: New York and in a total power move pitted it against Law and Order: Original Recipe, setting up a direct showdown between tv’s two biggest crime solving franchises. CSI won this round, in the total ratings and the 18-49 demo.
• ABC followed up the Lost pilot with the season 6 premiere of The Bachelor, in which the contestants had to choose between TWO Bachelors. This season consistently places near the bottom in fan rankings, so apparenltly this gimmick didn’t amount to much.
• NBC aired their own Hawaii set show opposite Lost, a police procedural called…Hawaii.
• The Law and Order episode I didn’t watch was about a murderous 9/11 widow. Goodness gracious me.
• The WB aired the pilot of their big fall show The Mountain. The WB must have been rattled when FOX snagged the latest teen sensation the previous year, because this is a blantant OC copycat. It’s produced by McG, and it trades Sunny Newport Beach for snowy Colorado. It stars Oliver Hudson (Kate’s brother), Anson Mount, Penn Badgely, and Barbara Hershey. The theme song is Blink-182’s “I miss you.” In the words of an Extra host, “this show has everything: sex, sibling rivalry, extreme sports.” I think I may have found the most 2004 show of 2004.

Thursday, September 23

8:00

Did I want to watch NBC’s Joey? No. But it was up against Extreme Makeover, the sketch show Blue Collar TV starring Jeff Foxworthy, and WWE Smackdown. Oof. I could have watched Survivor, but I’d heard the first couple episodes were boring, so I might as well watch Joey. For good or ill, everyone’s talking about it!

I thought Joey would be a car wreck. That would make it easier to write about. But it’s just a deeply boring and mediocre sitcom. In the series’ third episode, Joey hosts a party. He meets Simon Helberg and Ben Falcone. Everything is very Italian. Joey is stupid. It’s inoffensive and forgettable.

John Goodman and Jason Alexander also had new sitcoms in 2004 (and Goodman was married to Jean Smart, and Ed Asner and Olympia Dukakis played his parents!). They look mediocre too. Actually, they look way worse than Joey. But those shows weren’t supposed to save a Network, and they are forgotten, while Joey lives on in infamy.

After Joey, I am too lazy to change the channel and I watch Will and Grace.

Liking the later seasons of Will and Grace is not cool. But Will Arnett and Sean Hayes compte to be backup dancers for Janet Jackson! I laughed, many times. Also, it is genuinely cool that the producers booked Jackson post-Super Bowl fiasco. This is one time when Will and Grace was on the right side of history. I was nervous about the b-plot at first since it started with Will’s cop boyfriend Bobby Cannavale inviting him to have dinner with his racist boss. But at least the show makes no excuses for the racist boss, and he only appears in one scene. Once he’s gone, we get a truly lovely story about balancing friendships and romantic relationships. I had feelings, there were good jokes, and Bobby Canavale makes this amazing noise while looking at a wedding dress.

9:00

The Apprentice seems horrible, but critics have been giving it good reviews (yes, this is true, the Apprentice was once critically acclaimed). So I kept watching NBC.

I’m jumping into the third episode of season two, titled “Send in the Crowns.” The challenge is to market a the new Crest vanilla mint toothpaste. The candidates have their work cut out for them, because that sounds truly gross. But the challenge is judged by real P&G employees, which lends it all an air of legitimacy, and let’s you pretend it’s classy. I remember people at the time saying that the prize of a job was more meaningful and attracted a higher class of contestant. But looking at things now, these contestants are all business owners, attorneys, and investment bankers. Would a job with a hack like Trump really be an upgrade?

People’s ideas for the marketing involve doing a million dollar giveaway that doesn’t cost the company anything, creating a ruckus in Union Square, circus performers, and making Mike Piazza brush his teeth with the disgusting vanilla mint toothpaste. But what it comes down to the fact that one of the teams went over-budget. As Trump told us in an earlier monolgue “A Penny Saved is a Penny Saved,” going over budger is Very Bad. Deep insights from this pretend billionaire. Almost half the episode is dedicated to deciding who to blame for this. The entire team is called in and they all blame Stacie (not to be confused with Stacey, also a contestant that season). Stacie is the sole black Black woman, and she’s been getting the villain edit from the beginning of the episode. Her crime is either getting too competitive while selling ice cream or playing with a magic eight ball. But we all know the real problem.³ They call her “crazy” and “schizophrenic,” and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff. She is eliminated. I honestly did not expect quite so much overlap between Trump the reality show host and Trump the President of the United States. But I shouldn’t be surprised.

But this episode also illustrates the power and value of reality television. When television was dominated by scripted fare, and that scripted fare was written by white dudes, it was possible to create a post-racial fantasy version of America. That fantasy is a lot harder to maintain when there are real people involved and though there might be a script of some kind, they won’t always follow it. By the end of season two of The Apprentice, the show’s racial politics had inspired not one but two articles in Entertainment Weekly magazine and what I imagine was a lot of thorny discussions at virtual and in person water coolers.

10:00

Out of lingering loyalty to Peter Benton, Carol Hathaway, Mark Green, and the rest, I spend my whole Thursday with this diminished Must See TV lineup and watched the season 11 premiere of ER, “One for the Road.”

Lots of this episode is very melodramatic and exhausting. A car chase, gunshots, a tearful speech in French, a confrontation at a motel. But the classic workplace ER stuff is still good. When the hospital is short-staffed, Maura Tierney’s Dr. Abby Lockhart gets to start her internship 12 hours early, donning the lab coat and everything. She more than steps up to the plate, and Tierney shines, especially in the scene where she walks a man with advanced tonsil cancer through his decision not to accept extraordinary measures. That scene also provides a great showcase for Nurse Haleh (Yvette Freeman). I love Haleh. Abby also deals with an pushy narcotics detective, a sensitive cavity search, and characters in critical condition (two series regulars and one recurring guest). It’s exacly the stuff that made me fall in love with the show in the first place.

TIVO Status

I set Conan to record before going to bed. Tomorrow evening I’ll have 24 hours of space on the TIVO.

What else was on?

• This is a quieter night than Wednesday. You can still see traces of the old reluctance to go against NBC Thursday.
• Except CBS went toe to toe with Must See TV. They aired three of their biggest hits: Survivor, the season premiere of CSI, and Without a Trace. And they the beat NBC, each and every time.
• Meanwhile, FOX aired a documentary special about The OC, which foreshadowed its plan to put their hot new show on Thursday in November after the World Series was over.
• So everyone smelled blood in the must-see-tv waters.
• PBS aired a hourlong special featuring Russell Crowe and his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.

Friday, September 24

I would watch Joan of Arcadia, but I haven’t caught up with season 1 (stay tuned for my review!). So I’ll watch last night’s Conan before Friday’s episode.

This episode has a pretty good monologue in which Conan gets in some great digs at his bosses (“this is ‘maybe check it out tv.’ I you have time. Or you’re not reading a good book.”) Having watched the entire NBC Thursday lineup from that week…shots fired. There are lots of hoary old jokes about televangelists, bike locks, Paris Hilton, and Star Jones, but he riffs on them and his charisma carries it. Other than that, this episode is most memorable for the surreal spectacle of watching Katie Holmes (promoting First Daughter) when we now know that she’d be Mrs. Tom Cruise in less than a year.

On Friday‘s episode, Rob Lowe stops by to promote Dr. Vegas (for more on that insane show, see “what else was on” below). After a lengthy discussion of their respective hair care routines, Conan reveals Trump said Lowe was “the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.” What follows is a lot of banter that was probably strange even at the time. They call Trump a fairy, then sing his praises, and it goes back and forth like that for awhile. But later you get to hear Lowe’s excellent Joey pants impersonation. And Conan tells a very funny story involving Joey Pants, a Sopranos spoiler, and a zip line. So it could have been worse?

TIVO Status

Just two episodes of Everwood, one episode of The Wire, and one episode of Joan of Arcadia.

What Else was on?

• CBS aired the series premiere of Dr. Vegas, in which Rob Lowe plays the on-call physician in a casino. As Rob Lowe opined on the Extra fall tv preview, “we all know what goes on in Vegas. And we all know what goes on in medicine. It’s a perfect match.” Amy Adams played his beleagured love interest (“do you want them to suspend you medical lisence?”). She was cut after five episodes. In January, she won best actress at the Sundance film festival for Junebug, and went on to an Oscar nomination.
• NBC premiered a medical mystery show starring Neal McDonough. It looks truy unhinged. In the pilot, he has to figure out why people are turning blue!
• ABC aired a 20/20 special interview with a recently released Mary Kay Letorneau. You might know her as the woman who inspired May December.
• Cartoon Network aired the final episodes of Samurai Jack, at least until they revived the show in 2017.

Sunday, September 26

8:00

Fashion Rocks was an annual charity concert special filmed at fashion week. The likes of Avril Lavigne, Beyonce, the Pussycat Dolls, and Usher appeared on Fox in primetime.

A handful of performances from 2004 Fashion Rocks survive on youtube. There’s Alicia Keys dancing in a slinky silver minidress that probably made 14 year old Taylor Swift jealous. Avril Lavigne getting introduced by Marilyn Manson. The Pussycat Dolls covering “Tainted Love.” The Black Eyed Peas, easily worst in show, doing “Let’s Get it Started.”

But one performances stands above the rest. The second highlight is Avril Lavigne joining the Goo Goo Dolls to perform their most iconic song, “Iris.” Lavigne brings so much feeling to the performance. The song came out when she was about 14, so you can imagine her being a fan of it as a teen. And her voice is a great fit for this song, which is more literary than her usual stuff. But the rawness of her vocals also adds something to the track that isn’t there in the more controlled Goo Goo Dolls original. And she and the band just sound great together. A great cover, and a great performance.

9:00

I’m still catching up on The Wire (check out my season 1 review) so I record the latest episode. I also record the new WB show Jack and Bobby before heading to CBS for their Sunday Night Movie.

On September 26, 2004 at 9pmm Christine Lahti fans were faced with a choice. They could watch the latest episode of her new show, Jack and Bobby. Or they could watch her in the CBS Sunday movie Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman. I like Jack and Bobby, and Lahti is great in it. But Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman was the correct choice on that night.

Lahti plays Rose, a fortyish woman living her best life. Her kids are in college, she’s killing it at work, and she and her husband have sex so good the lights need to be off on network tv. She looks at a politician’s cukcholded wife with pity. Overall, she agrees with Oprah: 40 is the new 30.

But she didn’t count on the relentless stupidity of men. Her husband leaves her for her secretary. And she’s fired from her job, basically for being too old. So she calls her best friend Caroline Aaron and they drink a bunch of vodka. She spends the rest of the movie in grief, anger, delusion, she does it all. And Lahti delivers. There are some weird dream sequencey-type scenes and A LOT of voiceover and she makes it all work. There are multiple scenes where she blows the doors off the place.

At the end of the movie, when she’s offered her old life back (the husband, the job) she turns it down, because she wants better. It’s formulaic, but Lahti is so good, and the film allows her to be messy and real, so it is so, so, satisfying. And there’s lots of ways in which the movie is smarter than you expect. For instance, her kids are idiots, and the movie acknowledges that’s okay. They’re in college.⁴ And the treatment of the mistress is very smart. The movie has empathy for her, but there’s no moment of grand reconciliation or forgiveness. There’s a second chance romance with a lost love (hunky Australian Bryan Brown) but the movie doesn’t overdo it, keeping the focus on Rose’s self-actualization.

If you love the “older woman finds herself” sub-genre,” it’s worth checking this one out, especially since it’s available to watch, for free, legally, on youtube. Of course, this is a tv movie. It’s a little hoary and clunky. But what really matters in these movies is the writing and the lead performance, and those are good and great, respectively. So why not spend your Sunday with Christine Lahti?

TIVO Status

Two episodes of Everwood, two episodes of The Wire, one episode of Jack and Bobby and one episode of Joan of Arcadia. 6 hours, with 22 hours of space left.

What Else was on?

• CBS premiered Clubhouse, a drama in which the kid from the PJ Hogan Peter Pan movie lies to his mom (Mare Winningham) so he can become a bat boy for definititely not the New York Yankees. When Dean Cain asks him to take his Ferrari on an errand, he is stopped and they find steroids in the car. I don’t know who thought that a CBS family drama was the time to tackle the baseball steroid scandal. Christopher Lloyd was also on this show, by the way.
• If you wanted to see a different side of America’s Pastime, you could turn on ESPN for the premiere of Hustle, the tv biopic of Pete Rose. Tom Sizemore (who also appeared on Dr. Vegas this week) played Rose. The movie was directed by (checks notes) Peter Bogdonavich?
• On NBC Fisher Stevens played a murdered shock jock in the season premiere of Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
• On the WB, Nick Lachey began an arc on Charmed.
• It was election season and reality tv fever was in the air. So Showtime combined the two trends and created American Candidate, a reality show in which contestants competed to be the ideal political candidate. Learn more about it in the New Yorker.
• Ad packages from this night on the WB‘s broadcast of Charmed and CBS‘s Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman have been uploaded to youtube. They offer a fascinating contrast. WB viewers were treated to a tv spot for The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, an ad for HP iPods (that was a thing???) featuring breakdancing to country music, and ad for “Pepsi Edge” (with splenda!), an an ad for the new LG camcorder phone, presented entirely in comic book filter, which begins with the line “does this phone make me look fat.” Best of all, the incredible piece of aughts cringe that is the Sarah Jessica Parker and Lenny Kravitz Gap ad aired several times throughout the night.
• Meanwhile, on CBS, viewers were sold on Rogaine, Swiffer dusters, Lean Cuisine, and viagra competitor Levitra. There was an ad for Citi bank in which a woman mistakenly thinks Yvette Nicole Brown is pregnant but it’s all good. A birth control ad set to “There She Goes” by the La’s. And a Coldwell Banker ad apparently based on a true story (sample quotes “When Sylvia Maxwell was single again…” “Larry was a single professor who lived next door”).

Monday, September 27

8:00

I have Christine Lahti fever and watch the Jack and Bobby episode I recorded last night.

The Jack and Bobby reveals that the titular brothers are half Mexican. I was shocked. Logan Lerman’s grandfather was born in Mexico City to Russian Jewish parents, so there’s some sort of Mexican heritage there. Matt Long is just white. Overall…yikes.

I was expecting the show to ignore the titular brother’s Mexican heritage going forward. So I was intrigued and wary when I realized this episode was going to explore Bobby’s Mexican heritage. In the present timeline, Bobby falls in with a group of smug bullies who seek revenge on the janitor for enforcing school rules. They go to his office and see an ofrenda to his son and mock it, but Bobby explains what it is. The bullies proceed to trash it. Bobby knows it’s wrong but goes along with it anyway. The janitor interrupts this cruelty, and the other boys run away. But Bobby, guilty and inexperienced in rule-breaking, is not fast enough and is caught. He goes to apologize and brings a drugstore candle. The man explains that his son died last year in the Iraq War (though the war is never named).

Meanwhile, in talking heads from the future, Bobby’s opponents recall how he froze in a presidential debate when pressed on his Mexican heritage, on why he never mentioned it and whether he was actually white. Bobby was running as an independent, and the Republican (John Heard) recalls thinking he’d won the election right there. But the Democratic incumbent (Paul Sorvino) recalls thinking he’d lost the election anyway and so he intervened on behalf of his preferred candidate, bloviating about the need for racial unity. He later explains that Bobby reminded him of his son, who died in the “War of the Americas.”

I’m not wild about all the war stuff. These roles still should have gone to Latine actors. But I do like that the show refuses to resolve Bobby’s relationship to his heritage. The show dribbles the talking heads from the future throughout the episode, building suspense for how Bobby will respond to this debate question. I was ready for him to give a big speech, affirm his identity. And we would see that the nice janitor changed everything. A real West Wing moment. But the show goes a different way. It shows that Bobby struggled with this his entire life. He always felt alienated from his father and his heritage. And I admire that choice.

9:00

I watch the season premiere of Girlfriends on UPN and record Everybody Loves Raymond on CBS for when I’m done. I contain multitudes. I also record the latest Everwood for when I finally catch up with that show.

Girlfriends is famous for its portrayal of female friendship. This episode is not a good showcase of that. Toni is pregnant and it takes seeing a live ultrasound in a doctor’s office for her friends to believe her. I honestly found it pretty upsetting. But there was a lot to like about this show anyway. Of all the shows I watched this week, this one easily has the best fashion and lifestyle porn. Not only is lifestyle porn and glamour an important part of television, then and today, it’s an aspect of television that has historically been inaccessible to Black women. And seriously, the gorgeous outfits, the sleek apartments, the sleek cafe where Joan and Toni talk? They’re just fun to look at. Also, there are some good jokes! The b-plot features Al Sharpton as himself and involves Maya (Actress) promoting her book and asking inappropriate questions about his hair, and it’s truly funny, which is not what I expected when I realized that a legendary civil rights leader was guest starring as himself.

I’ve never seen Everybody Loves Raymond. But it does not seem like a plot-driven show. So I was shocked to see the second episode of the final season (titled “Not So Fast”) open with a “previously on” segment. Apparently Ray’s parents are moving into a retirement home. Since the whole premise of the show is “man lives across the street from his parents,” this is huge development.

So of course the show immediately undoes it. Because Raymond’s parents haven’t changed. Now, instead of making their sons lives difficult, they’e making life difficult for an entire retirement community. Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton’s expressions as they realize this are absolutely priceless. By the end of the episode, the retirement community has forced the family to take their parents back and everything is just as it was. Nothing changes. It’s textbook sitcom storytelling, and it’s hilarious. It helps that this ensemble is clearly a well-oiled machine working at the peak of their powers, paying off character dynamics that have been built up for years. I laughed so, so, much. I was not expecting the final season of a sitcom to be this good.

TIVO Status

Three episodes of Everwood, two episodes of The Wire, and one episode of Joan of Arcadia.

What else was on?

• Apparently Hawaii was offering some serious tax breaks, since this fall had three new shows filmed there. Lost, the NBC police procedural Hawaii, and the Fox soap North Shore, which had started airing during the summer. Jason Momoa was in it!
• NBC premiered LAX, which I can only describe as the post-9/11 version of an Aaron Spelling show. Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood are exes who work at the LAX airport. Judging by the trailer, there’s lots of serious talk about safety and how flying is different now. But also a suitcase explodes. In the middle of the terminal. As a joke. Heather Locklear stages a fake emergency with a pretend suitcase bomb so she can flirt with Blair Underwood. I really want to watch this show but cannot find it anywhere.
• The pilot of LAX was directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, who also served as co-executive producers. It was their biggest gig up to that point.
• In other “before they were famous” news, Channing Tatum appeared on CBS‘s CSI: Miami in his first ever credited role. He played a total jabroni who steals a speedboat, finds a dead body on board, and dumps the body in the water. As one does..
• On ABC, you could watch The Benefactor, an Apprentice copycat hosted by Mark Cuban. The twist was that the contestants didn’t know the rules because Cuban was either keeping them secret or making them up as he went along. This sounds like a very accurate portrait of life in corporate America. It doesn’t sound like a good reality show.

Tuesday, September 28

9:00

It’s time for the second episode of Veronica Mars, “Credit Where Wredit’s Due.”

Second episodes are hard. The cliche is that you have your whole life to write a pilot, and a week to write the second episode. And Veronica Mars had the extra challenge of fitting in Special Guest Star Paris Hilton in what I imagine was a network mandated promotional stunt. But Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell, and the team all rise to the challenge. The second episode deepens the world and the supporting cast, especially Weevil (though I wish they didn’t throw his cousin under the bus in their quest to make him more sympathetic. That twist plays into some ugly racial stereotypes). It also furthers the show’s exploration of class, and even challenges Veronica’s own privilege a bit (Paris Hilton is actually used very effectively as a foil for Veronica in this respect). All that and we get the developments in Veronica’s love life and the Lilly Kane murder case. The traffic photo is such a great twist that blows the case wide open and fits in nicely with the larger plot, exactly the kind of thing this show excels at. And then there are little details like the introduction of one of my favorite settings, the school bathroom (the colors always look so great and make the series’ many bathroom confrontations so exciting. And they always shoot everything at high angles in the small space, it’s so unnerving and great). And in other very important matters, Veronica’s new ‘do is much better than her severe tryhard pilot haircut.

10:30

I’m curious about this new “what if The OC was a reality show” show on MTV and I tune in.

Laguna Beach is obvious. The voiceover. The needle drops. It’s not subtle. But thought the big party that ends the first episode is “A Black and White Affair,” Laguna Beach is not. Consider my favorite moment of the episode: the cut to Kristen’s dress. Lauren Conrad and her friends are all getting ready in a crowded bathroom, talking over each other when one girl points out that no one is wearing white. Another muses that she can never find cute white dresses. A third girl agrees: white dresses are ugly. Cut to Kristen in a white dress. Ba-dum-tss. But what does it mean? Are we meant to think that Kristen looks ugly, that she’s stupid to wear white? That she can pull off the white dress because prettier and cooler than all the other girls?⁵ The episode has so far painted her as the bad girl, but here she’s the one wearing virginal white. So maybe she’ll turn out to be the good girl?? I’ve only seen one episode, and that episode can hold all those readings. There are several moments like that in the 20 minute episode.⁶ Laguna Beach feels primal, it feels essential. The New York Times even said so, all the way back in 2004.

Even the flaws make it better. For example, I cannot tell all these blond girls apart. By the end of the episode I’m pretty sure I’d identified Lauren Conrad’s best friend Lo by her wavy hairdo from the party. But in the next episode the hair will be gone and she’ll once again blur together with the sea of blonde girls. And that’s perfect, no?

11:35

Tonight, I have to watch The Tonight Show. On September 27, 1954 NBC aired the first ever episode of The Tonight Show. So 50 years later, NBC of course aired a big anniversary special. There was lots of nostalgia, lots of clips. Oprah even showed up!

But NBC was also looking toward the future. After he’s shown all the clips of all the hosts, Jay Leno sat down at the desk and announced what people had already seen in the morning papers. In five years, he’s stepping down, and Conan’s taking over. The audience boos and awws, but he insists it’s all okay. He invites Gary Shandling out and Gary assures him he’s doing the right thing, tells him he’s a real hero. But Jay doesn’t seem so sure. It feels like he’s talking himself into it. Surely this will end well.

12:35

Conan comes out for his opening monologue and he’s buzzing. He does the seemingly impossible: deliver a good joke about Paris Hilton’s sex tape. The rest of the monologue is less successful. There’s a joke about a soccer team of sex workers that he clearly hates,⁷ and a gay joke about Clay Aiken. He doesn’t hate that one, but I do.

Then he makes the big announcement: he’ll be at Late Night for five more years, then it’s off to The Tonight Show. Conan seems excited. But also nervous. Several times throughout the rest of the hour, he’ll make a joke and muse that he’d never get away with that before midnight.

Even at the time, people thought this was a disaster in the making. The New York Times remarked that even US presidents were only expected to be lame ducks for four years. Five seemed excessive. But few could have predicted clusterfuck that would come in five years. But you watch Jay and Conan on this night, and you see the makings of that clusterfuck.

Wednesday, September 29

8:00

It’s time for the second part of the Lost pilot! I record America’s Next Top Model.

The first part of the Lost pilot feels huge. It does its best to hook you, and it boy does it ever succeed. The second part of the pilot teaches you how to watch the show. We’ve got small moments of characterization and humor, more flashbacks, lots of dramatic cuts to commercial, a really fun twist (that polar bear!), and a cliffhanger for the ages. I just described the second part of the pilot, but I could be describing almost any episode of Lost. These are the building blocks of the show, and we’ll watch as the writers play with them for the next six seasons.

I love so many scenes from the Lost pilot, but the final one might be my favorite. Five of our castaways have made hiked the top of a mountain, trying to get a signal on their fancy walkie talkie. In the past 90-odd minutes, we’ve gotten to know them all. And now we get to see them all interact as they fight and talk over eachother while a mysterious message plays and the camera frantically spins. So many of the relationships and character dynamics that have been built up play off here. Sayid’s competence, Sawyer’s cynicism, Shannon’s lack of self-worth, Boone’s posturing, Kate the conciliator with something to hide, Charlie the everyman. It’s all here. They are screaming at each other, and we just want to know what’s in the damn message. Finally, they start to piece it together amid the chaos. Michael Giacchino’s music slowly gets more ominous and for the first time, the castaways are united. United in sheer terror. Charlie utters that immortal question: “guys, where are we?” Immediately, millions of people were desperate to know the answer. That thirst for answers changed television (and the internet, and fanc culture, and my life) forever.

9:00

Time to watch Kevin Hill on UPN, one of the best reviewed and most hyped shows of the fall season.

Taye Diggs is a high-powered attorney whose playboy lifestyle is cut short when his cousin dies and he becomes the guardian of a ten month old girl. His current employer is less than accommodating, so he starts working at an all-female law firm (with Christina Hendricks!). Maybe the gender role reversal hook seemed novel in 2004, but I found it tedious. I was hopeful that things would get more interesting when Diggs arrived at the lawfirm with the ladies, but his first case is a sexual assault, and of course Diggs has to be convinced she’s not lying. I wanted to like this, the cast is so fun (I didn’t even mention Patrick Breen as the gay nanny!). But the gender politics really turned me off. I don’t like watching a dude slowly learn about feminism. Maybe it got better after the pilot, but I can only find the later episodes in French. The episode I watched was actually the unaired pilot, so they might have made some tweaks and improved it by the time it aired.

10:00

Now I can watch the America’s Next Top Model I recorded! Now that all the girls have been introduced, we can get down to the really fun stuff: photoshoots, Tyra mail, moving into their gaudy suite at the Waldorf Astoria, the opening credits and the closing fadeout of the eliminated girl. And lots of girl drama. This round the class and racially politics are fairly overt. All the girls are asked to sit in a circle and say their greatest physical flaw (in Tyra world, this is empowering). Kelle, a Black girl who grew up in the “last gated community in NYC,” mentions her “monkey mouth” and instantly cements herself as a villain, especially to the other Black contestants.

The photoshoot this round had the poor girls flying to Jamaica and posing in bikinis while balancing on gnarly looking rocks in high heels. And doing it all on no sleep. Sounds about right.

12:35

The highlight of this episode is a truly loony interview with Christopher Walken. Topics include how to select good produce, zombie movies, his misadventures in directing, therapy, and what it’s like to film in the desert (easy to park, lots of cow pies).

What else was on

Not much. But Switchfoot sang “Dare You to Move” on Letterman. This gives me an excuse to link to Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s glorious exhibition to that song. I am 90% certain it exists because of One Tree Hill.

Thursday, September 30

12:35

The first Presidential Debate was on. Apparently Kerry won but it didn’t make much of a difference. And Bush’s poorly tailored jacket ignited a conspiracy theory. Has the menswear guy weighed in on this? So prime time was pretty barren. But this was the best episode of Conan I watched for this little project by far. There was a hilarious segment of “New Fall TV Characters” including a “record store prospector” and “Dave the Lobster Messiah.” It was silly and strange and perfect. There was also a fat Paris Hilton character, but I guess we can’t have everything.

But the highlight of the episode is the James Spader interview (Spader was promoting Boston Legal). The interview opens with a discussion of Spader’s last visit to Late Night, in which he spent his entire interview talking about eggs. I was worried I’d missed the fun James Spader interview. I hadn’t.

This interview is wild. It starts with Spader’s recent Emmy win, moves on to food (Spader is big on white truffles) and ends up on which foods are sexy and if everyone thinks about sex all the time (or, put another way, if everyone is like James Spader). Believe it or not there are yet more surprises in this interview. You must watch it.

TIVO Status

I set Friday’s Joan of Arcadia to record. So now it’s 3 Everwoods, 2 Wires, and 2 Joans for 6 hours.

Sources, Notes, and Fun Stuff

• The Extra Fall TV Preview from this season is a delightful time capsule full of fun stuff. In one of the all-time strongest development cycles for the broadcast networks, they manage to mention none of the big hits. Perfection.
• You can also find big glossy fall preview packages from NBC and CBS on youtube.
• And I managed to find the AV Club‘s Fall TV report card.
• My deepest thanks to the person who scanned this week’s Entertainment Weekly and uploaded it to Archive.org. (This issue also contains a very sweet Mark Hamill profile by Jeff Jensen, who will become important part of this blog’s narrative later).
• Speaking of Archive.org, the reason I can watch all these Conan episodes is that Conan fans have uploaded what seems like Conan’s entire career to the Internet Archive. In addition to being very fun in their own right, these are a great time capsules that let you take the pulse of pop culture in that particular week. So thank you to the Archive and the people who upload old talk shows and forgotten but culturally important shows like Joey and The Apprentice to the site.
• The Laguna Beach review from the Times by Virginia Heffernan that I mentioned earlier is a mini-masterpiece and truly worth a read.
  • “Everyone’s staring here, as if lives depended on it: at the girl, to see if she’s trying too hard; at the guy, to see how he’s responding; at the interloper, to see how far she’ll go; at the object of desire, to see who has a chance with her. The camera seems to be held by someone who is fragile and intense, someone whose stare is telepathic. ”I hate you,” it says, or, alternatively, ”Stay.” This show, which elegantly sidesteps overplayed popularity issues by concentrating only on beautiful kids, simply gets it. Without much reality-show apparatus (no talking-head interviews, no prefab activities), ”Laguna Beach” runs on adrenaline. And no fiction show does as well at evoking, so forcefully, the hot, tribal mentality of high school kids who might just redeem their adolescence with sex. Hooking up with the right person tonight might just make their teenage years no longer boring or wasteful, but lovely and romantic and rad.”
• Also good? This EW review of CSI: NY and Law and Order by Gillian Flynn. Yes, the author of Gone Girl.
  • CSI: NY is one of those projects in which ”the city itself is a character.” The investigators toil amidst blue fog in their moody headquarters; inside the office they’re ominously shadowed by a fan’s ever-rotating blades, and boy, is everyone exhausted and whispery. This eager, overdone noir is sort of poignant–a version of New York City that exists only in car ads, and now, well, here….The [CSI] formula felt less bouncy with CSI: Miami; in NY, the lack of inspiration is palpable. (Palpable like the mean, stinky streets of this damn dirty city, and…no, must…fight…bad noir!)
• I guess that in 2004, everyone was ready to start processing 9-11. You’ve got Lost with the plane crash and Law and Order returning with two different episodes about the 9-11 aftermath. I didn’t even mention Gary : Sinise’s tragic backstory on CSI: NY (his wife died in the attacks). Or Rescue Me, a show about how the firefighters who saved New York were heroes but they were also assholes. Hell, even America’s Next Top Model introduces a contestant who will reveal her son was “conceived to the hour on September 11 in two episodes.
• On the other hand, outside of that quagmire of a Law and Order episode, you would never know from watching primetime that America was in the middle of a brutal, unpopular, immoral…I could list more bad adjectives, but I feel like that would distract from how bad the whole Iraq war was. For us, for the whole world, and most of all for the people whose lives we turned upside down. But American television, and much of American popular culture was happy to ignore it in 2004. And this was right in the middle of election season, when the general public is willing, even eager to talk politics! The reckoning would have to wait.

1. The opening and the chase scene that closes the episode. ↩︎
2. The monster’s introduction and crawling up the plane to find the pilot. ↩︎
3. Reid scott footnote ↩︎
4. It might seem obvious that they’re all pretty, but 2000s beauty standards make this confusing. Anyone could be ugly in the 2000s, for any reason. ↩︎
5. I am especially obsessed with the scene in which LC and Spencer walk through the shell of her future mansion. The shameless OC homage! The gorgeous scenery, shown off in those expensive crane shots! The thudding and perfect symbolism of romance and dreams for the future and empty wealth. The cringe but perfect “100 Years” needle drop! ↩︎
6. The story they’re referring to is about a team of Guatemalan sex workers who formed a soccer team in part to raise awareness for their poor working conditions. Prostitution was legal in Guatemala, but they still experienced police harassment and their wages were downright dismal. Then they were ejected from a tournament. Organizers claimed it was because their fans used foul language. The team claimed discrimination. A few weeks later after they lost 3-1 to a team of policewomen, one team member explained that the controversy had led to increased support from the public and renewed solidarity in their community. Conan and the writers probably saw this headline (I doubt they even read story) and used it for a lazy joke. There’s been a lot of talk about Late Night hosts and their cruelty towards tabloid fixtures like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in this era. But this kind of thing is way more rank as far as I’m concerned. They turn these heroic activists into a crude punchline through sheer carelessness. And these women had less power than Paris or Britney or their fans, so this jokes and others like it received no pushback. ↩︎