What was on TV? Mon, Jan 17, 2005

20 years ago, gay rights were looking very, very fragile. Let's see what was on TV!

8:00 Law and Order (recorded)

15x13 "Ain't No Love"

Available on Peacock

I'm no expert on Law and Order. I've seen maybe a dozen episodes of the franchise. But I know that it did its female characters dirty. Even in coverage of the show from 20 years ago, it was an acknowledged fact that the ADAs were a revolving door of pretty girls who failed to make much of an impression. You could pick apart the performances of each actress. But when no one is making an impression, the problem isn't the actresses, it's the institution.

Elisabeth Rohm had spent several seasons on Law and Order, and no one liked her. Her performance is really stiff and uninspiring. But the way that she's used doesn't help. This was the era in which Law and Order hired real-life Republican politician Fred Thompson to run the DA's office, in an effort to cover "both sides" of the aisle. So many storylines involved Rohm being "emotional" and sympathetic to defendants and Thompson lecturing her about her bleeding heart and saying that she needed to be impartial and blah blah blah.

This episode (involving some repping kids who might have killed someone or might have just been bragging for street cred) follows the same script. Until the last scene, in which Thompson calls Rohm into his office and tells her that she's strident and believes in things and that's awesome but makes her a bad ADA. And he fires her. And in her final moments, she says the words that she's most remembered for on the show: "Is this because I'm a lesbian?" And he says no, and she says okay. Cut to credits.

It's a deeply bizarre moment of television. It comes out of nowhere. I can't imagine that it was ever followed up on. But it's also kind of icky. It implies that Rohm's queerness made her a biased and bad attorney. But it also absolves itself of its own prejudice, claiming that she of course wasn't fired for being a lesbian. So I guess she was fired for being a biased lesbian? For not checking her lesbianism at the door when she went to work? Even though she displayed not an inkling of queerness on the show before now? It really is as insidious as it is insane,

9:00 24 on Fox

4x05 "11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m." (record Everwood on the WB and Everybody Loves Raymond on CBS)

Available on Hulu

On this episode of 24, two Black guys in a beater car stop to be racist towards an Arab man in fancy (stolen) banana yellow pickup. They call him "Mohammad" and tell him to go back where he came from. The Arab man is then profiled by the police, but Jack Bauer is tracking this guy and he makes the police let him go. But now the Arab man realizes he's being tracked, and so he commits suicide by semi truck (but it's portrayed like a suicide bombing). It's racist and dangerous, but in this zigzaggy way that makes you dizzy and probably makes the show all the more dangerous.

See also: the twisted family drama plotline featuring Shoreh Agadashloo. This storyline is kind of evil, it feeds every Fox News paranoid fantasy. But it's also the best storyline on the show! The scene where Leighton Meester's mom comes to the house just as they're disposing of her body is truly gripping, making great use of the family dynamics they've established. And the scene makes great use of a downloaded ringtone, a perfect 2005 touch.

10:00 Everwood (recorded)

3x11 "Complex Guilt"

Available on Prime Video (whether you subscribe or not!)

This is a breakup episode. Will Dr. Brown and Anne Heche break up? Will Edna and Irv? And (most of all) will Amy and Ephram break up? The writers do a nice job playing with your expectations: couples I was sure would reconcile hit the skids and ones I thought were on the express train to splitsville reconciled.

I was especially taken with the Amy and Ephram storyline. It's an especially great episode for Amy. She was initially mad that Ephram went to see Madison. But she realizes that she's also mad because she's putting more work into this relationship, sacrificing her friends and hobbies and dreams for the future to accommodate Ephram and his musical ambitions. And that's her fault! And it's not the first time she's done this. So she decides not to break up, but to change their relationship. It's so mature! She's growing up, it warmed my heart, and my heart needed some warming this week.

What Else Was On

• Animal Planet premiered the reality show Who Gets the Dog? One of the judges was Merrill Markoe, the creative force behind the early days of Late Night with David Letterman.
• Lifetime premiered the original movie Dawn Anna. It sounds like the infamous Remember Me, but replace Claire from Lost with Debra Winger, replace falling in love with Robert Pattinson with recovering from a debilitating medical crisis, and replace 9/11 with the Columbine shooting.
• The final season of The Osbornes premiered on MTV.

TiVo Status

The Masterpiece Theater miniseries He Knew He Was Right and The Lost Prince, and one episode each of Carnivale, Everybody Loves Raymond, King of the Hill, and Malcolm in the Middle. 10.5 hours total.