Series Rewatch: The X-Files S1E1 "Pilot"

Like I said before, part of the reason I wanted to watch The X-Files and Lois & Clark at the same time was to compare how two shows that had a lot in common--"nerd" shows, started almost simultaneously, sci-fi/fantasy/comic book genres--developed over the series. I've seen this pilot four or five times since the last time I saw the L&C pilot and I was really expecting this one to be the one that held up the best. And in most ways, it did. Plot, characterization, commitment to the concept of the series as a whole--in ALL of these things, I think that The X-Files pilot episode blew the doors off the joint. Oddly, where it fell apart most for me was, to some degree, visually. The special effects in both pilots were dreadful by today's standards. And I think that worked better on L&C because it is SO over-the-top camptastic that it kind of feels like it should have ludicrously awful special effects. Now, the "look" of The X-Files? Spot on. It is absolutely gorgeous. The first four years of the show were shot in Vancouver so there's this omnipresent grayness that hovers over the proceedings setting an impeccable tone for the stories they are telling. The other thing that made me gape in horror was something that, again, I thought would be more jarring in L&C is the wardrobe. And again, it's the cartoonish nature of L&C that is served by the costumes on the actors. I think guys are always easier anyway, but the very sleek and stylized, almost 1940s lines of everything Teri Hatcher wore in the pilot were silly, but they looked good. Which brings us to The X-Files, where the aforementioned idea that guys are just generally more generic fashion-wise when looked at through a lens of 20 years is painfully obvious. I don't know how much of it is that women's fashion circa 1993 was just plain godawful (and it was. I have picture galore from my freshman year of college that serve as proof) and how much of it is that obviously the wardrobe people had not the faintest, foggiest, ghost of a clue how to dress someone of Gillian Anderson's stature. Which by the way is TINY. She's not wispy skinny, but she's petite. It's entirely possible that every single suit worn by ladies under 5'4" in the early 90s was awful. It's also possible that they made her look dowdy on purpose--it fits into the idea of the character and I guess, in fairness, Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D. isn't going to look like a fashion plate. It was still distracting. Mainly because all I could think was that was exactly how I must have looked when I wore a suit in the 90s.

So, now that I got that out of my system...this pilot is AH-MAH-ZING. Okay, that may be too strong a word. But it just ticked every box of what the show would end up being. The plot is...well, hell, y'all...The X-Files (spoiler alert) is about ALIENS. Logical, scientific Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D is sent by the high ups at the FBI to provide scientific analysis of cases in a division referred to as the X-Files, which are cases that involve unexplained phenomena. The whole scene where she's assigned this task...so smart. It perfectly introduces her character, the central premise of the show, the X-Files as an entity AND (although we don't realize it) the central antagonist of the entire series. We proceed to her first meeting with her new partner, Special Agent Fox Mulder (So. So. Cute. I'm not kidding when I say that to this day, the first time we see Mulder with his floppy bangs and wire-rimmed glasses makes my girlish heart flutter. For that matter, Gillian Anderson is absolutely angelic, too. So attractive, these two.) which is also practically perfect. He's just far enough "out there" to be amusing and immediately trundles Scully off on their first case which involves the mysterious death of several young people, all of whom graduated from the local high school in the same year. There are things in this case that will be relevant in the larger myth-arc of the entire show. The case itself is re-visited in the Season 7 finale. Concepts are introduced that provide the groundwork for central plotlines for the 8th and 9th Seasons. It makes for very cool retrospective watching. Especially when you start seeing things like how a scene in the pilot--it's the one where Mulder tells Scully about his sister (ALSO a central and long-running plot point)--is directly mirrored in the final scene of the series finale, nine years later. There's shady government guys interfering in the case, disappearing evidence, Mulder seeing with his own eyes evidence of the existence EBEs while Scully juuuuuust misses it and no real answer at the end of the case. In other words, it's exactly what happens in pretty much ALL mytharc episodes.

OMGWTFBBQ Guest Stars--Strangely, none. The show will prove a goldmine of almost and used to be famous. But other than actors who later play the same character on the show--The Cigarette Smoking Man and Billy Miles are the two biggest--it's just a few character actor types that you've seen in other stuff.

Grade: Solid A. Not The West Wing pilot good, but still pretty great.

The Good: Mulder's glasses, spook-factor, excellence as representative episode of the show as a whole, off-the-charts sexual tension between Mulder and Scully from the get-go, ESPECIALLY when she strips down to let him check her for alien implant marks (not a euphemism-he's ACTUALLY looking for alien implant marks--and if you think these two are hitting the sheets anytime soon. Well, I laugh at your optimism.); ability to make something that could be silly--like looking for aliens--decidedly UNsilly; intriguing enough to make someone want to watch more; beautifully introduces TONS of things that will be important to the show, both in general and specific to this thread of the alien/myth umbrella plot

The Bad: Hokey special effects, especially the Alien Light Tornado that carries away the abductees; tacky pilot sets for the stuff that happens at the FBI; couple of minor misses in the acting department from the supporting cast

The Ugly: The atrocity of a brown plaid suit jacket perpetrated upon Scully's person in her first scene.

Series Rewatch: Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman S1E1 "Pilot"

It's been years since I watched this. I was a little leery. I remember mostly that it was over the top and cartoonish and I wasn't sure how it would hold up two decades down the line. And actually it was better than I expected. It was definitely still over the top and cartoonish, but I think that may actually have been WHY it still works. I've noticed that when you watch a show that's this old that one of the things that makes it seem dated is that the clothes are weird and the cars are weird and the technology is dated.

But here's the thing...a lot of what was going on here was so very stylized--Lois's clothes are very much evocative of the 40s and tend to be very fitted (I know that the hallmark of horrible early 90s fashion is that everyone wore everything approximately 9 sizes too large)--so you're less likely to be distracted. But at the time I was SO distracted. Distracted by how adorable I thought Dean Cain was and how I planned to marry him. Distracted by the perfection of Lois's ultra-shiny dark brown bob. Distracted by the (what I found to be at the time) witty dialogue.

As far as a pilot episode, it hit most of the marks. It set a tone for the series as a whole which they pretty much stuck to for the run. It's feature length so there's a lot of time to get a lot of information in there. But in actuality, there's not a lot to put out there. It's entertaining and fun, but the plot, as tended to be true of the show as a whole, was slightly silly. There are two things happening. The first is the human story. Specifically, Clark Kent arriving in Metropolis and trying to get a job at The Daily Planet while trying to decide what he's going to do about his powers. And here's the reason watching it FEELS silly: As much as Perry White hems and haws and turns Clark down at the initial interview, we, as a society,are so aware of the Superman mythos, that it's impossible for us to TRULY suspend our disbelief to the point that we actually have any kind of question about whether or not Clark will eventually work as a reporter at The Daily Planet. Just like he can dither about whether he's going to use his powers to help people and how he can make that a reality, but we are being completely disingenuous if we act like we don't know that before the end of the episode he's going to put on that red and blue suit and get down to the business of superheroing. Likewise, the whole action hero plot involves the crack investigative team of Lane and Kent trying to figure out who's sabotaging The Space Program's Space Research Station so they can replace the Program's station with their own for profit. Which...I guess could be suspenseful. If they hadn't mentioned Lex Luthor approximately ten thousand times in the course of the episode. (And then meeting him face to face for the first time at a party during a thunderstorm where there are huge crashes of thunder at opportune and suspenseful moments.) It's Superman, for Pete's sake. If there's bad-guying to be done, then Luthor is your man.

But this sounds like all complaints and really, I found it to be enjoyable. It moved. There was no lolly-gagging through useless scenes and it did seem at least somewhat in on the joke of revealing to us a bunch of stuff we obviously already know. The people in it are very, very pretty and not half-bad actors. It was clever enough (although not as clever as it would be later). K Callan and Eddie Jones as Martha and Jonathan Kent and Lane Smith as Perry White pretty much own ever scene they're in, outshining the younger crowd (although that may have to do with the fact that the nature of those characters gives them much better raw material with which to work.)

Good: The pretty. The willingness to commit to the ridiculous. It's very shiny to look at. The entire scene where Martha designs and makes the Superman costume (it's a montage set to "Holding Out for a Hero"). The tongue in cheek references to whether or not people are going to be fooled by the glasses. Gratuitous shirtless Dean Cain scene. Teri Hatcher's bob.

Bad: Some truly poor acting from the bit part crowd. The plot is evocative of the series...the more pedestrian episodes of the series, that is. It's not dreadful, but it's not a great moment in television. The jaw-droppingly 1993 nature of the special effects.

Ugly: Dean Cain's proto mullet when he's Clark.

OMGWTFBBQ Guest Star: This episode is filled with actors in guest spots who are the kind of actors you recognize as familiar but don't quite know why. Television Without Pity always called them, "Hey! It's that guy!" The one who was truly recognizable to me was Persis Khambatta who was Lieutenant Ilia (hot, bald alien chick) in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Overall Grade: I want to give it an A for effort, but really I hand it a solid B. Good enough that it could compel one to watch more episodes. Not in the Pilot Hall of Fame.

In which my television curse continues full throttle...

It's a long-running joke amongst my friends that I am a curse on television shows. If there's a new show that I see advertised and I think to myself, "Hey, that shoe looks really good. I'm gonna watch it." and then I watch it from the beginning, said show will be canceled after one season (maybe, two). I have killed Homefront, Pushing Daisies, Mr. Sunshine and most sadly (at least to me) Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. There are others. It's traumatic for me to discuss it at length.

And that is why I'm issuing an apology. Because y'all...I have killed Bunheads. It was saucy and sassy and it starred Sutton Foster and it was about ballet. Sometimes there were production numbers. It delighted the hell out of me for 18 episodes and then it was in this weird limbo place where ABC Family was trying to decide whether to cancel or renew and after keeping everyone waiting for the better part of the summer, they cancel it. (Actually, this shouldn't surprise me. Disney is doing their level-best to kill my soul this summer.)

I'm dead inside. I got that show. That show got ME. And now 'tis but a memory.

Partying like it's...1993

Last night, I started thinking how I haven't done a "re-watch" in a while. I mean, a legit start to finish on a show. I watch old shows all the time. I have an almost embarrassingly huge collection of television shows on DVD. Plus a few more newer ones on iTunes. And amongst those I have a few go-to episodes that I tend to watch over and over again. So what I actually decided to do was watch TWO things. It's weird, The X-Files has been EVERYWHERE on my social media for the last week and change because this fall is the 20th anniversary of its premiere and it was featured at Comic-Con. And I was really thinking about 20 years ago, because last weekend was also my high school 20th reunion. I didn't go to it, but I've REALLY been remembering 20 years ago because of it. As I walked to the shelves with the TV DVDs for some reason my eye was drawn to Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. And I realized that is ALSO premiered 20 years ago (or thereabouts) and that it was, in fact, the OTHER show that I watched on Sunday nights in college. So, I'm going to watch both. It's an interesting juxtaposition. They were both huge nerd draws. The X-Files still very much is, I think. Lois & Clark ran for four seasons and a total of 87 episodes. It was fairly light-hearted and embraced the comic-y side of the Superman mythos. And by that I mean the old school comic-y side. It was almost cartoonish in moments and had a pretty loyal following although it was never a ratings boom. Even at its very most serious it wasn't particularly deep. Even though it dealt with a subject that was so ingrained in the public consciousness, it took it from a completely different angle. What I loved about it was that that the guiding premise (and I'm going to quote Clark Kent on the show here) was "Clark is who I am. Superman is what I do." Which was a sharp contrast to the Superman films that I had watched as a kid. Because it focused on Clark, I think it was a great way to shine a light on other characters--if it's always Superman, it's always Superman and the Big Bad--specifically, in this case, Clark and his relationship with his parents was so cute and fun and depth-filled. I have a hands-down favorite episode, "Tempus Fugitive" from the second season (which is probably the best season as well) and having so clear a favorite episode is weird for me. Sadly the show was never able to produce great ratings (although Teri Hatcher became one of the first internet phenomenons because of it. And being a smoking hot babe). It ended on a cliffhanger and then didn't get picked up for a fifth season. The X-Files was different. It was a phenomenon. It was HUGE. It ran for 9 seasons and a total of 202 episodes plus two feature films and two spin-off series. So many aspects--"I Want to Believe", "The Truth is out there.", the theme song, the characters themselves--became so hugely iconic (I can name off the top of my head it being explicitly referenced by both Bones and Castle) that it's sometimes hard to remember a time when it and references to it weren't a part of our cultural vernacular. Filmed for the first four seasons in dank, rainy Vancouver, it couldn't possibly be any visually different from L&C and while there were any number of stand-alone/Monster of the Week episodes that were just plain funny, they were also sophisticated and even if verging on the silly, very, very clever. The episodes that weren't the "comedy" episodes were dark. ALL of the mytharc episodes were dark and the stand-alones that were dark were freakishly dark and sometimes absolutely terrifying. Like L&C, it was part of the first wave of internet fandom although rather than a picture of Teri Hatcher rolling around scantily clad and wrapped in a Superman cape, with The X-Files it as EVERYTHING. Message boards full of speculation and episode discussion and fanfiction. This is a fandom who created the idea and terms of "shipping" and "shippers", for God's sake. The last two seasons were shaky--mainly because David Duchovny was absent from about half the episodes of the 8th season and all but the final episode of the 9th season--but they finished with at least a respectable amount of closure and enough ongoing interest for there to be a second movie and continued speculation about a third. I've watched both pilots. My thoughts to follow.

Love In the Afternoon--Flashback to Awesome

Here's the thing: A soap opera is on five days a week, 52 weeks a year. For argument's sake, let's say that there are going to be about ten days a year--some holidays and a handful of days where it's preempted by national news coverage--where on a weekday there isn't a new episode. In any event, a good average would be about 250 episodes a year (General Hospital's 10,000th episode came two weeks after the 39th anniversary of the show, which allowing for a little error for those two weeks, averages to just about 256 episodes a year). So with that in mind, and knowing that I've watched GH since I was in preschool, taking into account there were times when I watched it sporadically at best, but also times when I watched it with an almost religious fervor, I think I can safely say that if you added up all the hours of primetime television I've ever watched in my life, I've still dedicated more hours to GH. Which is why what I'm about to say is so huge: Of all those days that I spent the 3/2 p.m. CST hour in front of a television, I can tell you WITHOUT A DOUBT what my favorite was. One episode out of the THOUSANDS I've seen. There have been some other great days on GH. There have been other days where I squealed and clapped or cried my eyes out or thought, "Finally! It's happening!!", whatever "it" may have been. There have even been other Valentine's Days that were memorable. But not like this. It's not just that they are my favorite couple or that I had waited so long for it to happen or that it was the hottest thing I'd ever seen on television at that point in my life. It was all of those things and more. It was saucy and sexy and funny and...well, you'll see. So, in honor of the day...my favorite day in soap opera history. Robert and Anna and the Valentine's Day Massacre Aaaaand.... This happened. It happened before 9 p.m. It happened in 1991. And it was amazing.

Lest you think I only watch a soap opera...

Short list of other stuff I've been watching. You know...stuff that isn't General Hospital: Castle--Before this time last year, I had seen MAYBE one episode of Castle. Then, there was all this hoopla about them doing a noir episode. It probably also helped that this was about the time last year that I got really, REALLY started watching GH again in 'real time' so I started seeing a lot of commercials for it. Anyway...I fell in LOVE. And I'm so very glad. Last year's season finale was SUPERB. This season has had a couple of fantastic episodes and, I'm sorry to say, a bunch that have been mediocre at best, but they've done a pretty good job of avoiding the "Moonlighting Curse" and on the whole it's still pretty fun to watch. Smash--Dear God. I had this weekend at home alone this summer where I THOUGHT I had plans and then I didn't have those plans and instead I watched the entire first season of Smash. There are plenty of things that I enjoy about it. I think Megan Hilty is a goddess and supremely talented and I can vouch that she's utterly charming in real life and when I met her we were wearing the exact same shirt, so she's obviously got excellent taste. The thing is, I felt the whole time that they were trying to make her character, Ivy, just impossibly vile, because it was the only way they could make me sympathetic towards Katharine McPhee's character, Karen, in comparison. The problem is that it kind of didn't work. I mean, yeah, there was an episode near the beginning where I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Karen, but then...nothing. And most of the time, it was just a contest to be the character that I DIDN'T want to punch in the face. Only one episode has aired so far and it may be that they've compounded the problem by bringing on Jennifer Hudson who's playing a character I like to call, "Another Person Who Can Sing Rings Around McPhee." Seriously...find a clip of Megan Hilty singing "Second-Hand White Baby Grand". I'm telling you...goddess. Bunheads--I am now confess that I am the one person on the planet of my particular demographic who didn't watch and worship every single episode of The Gilmore Girls. I watched it here and there because my mom and sister both LOVE it and sometimes they'd have it on when I was around. So I didn't watch the first episode of Bunheads because I was an Amy Sherman-Palladino disciple. I watched because it managed to hit some theater geek trifecta with Kelly Bishop, Sutton Foster AND a plot that centers around a dance school. It can be silly and way to self-aware of how adorable it is and some of the acting is less than award-winning, but it's super easy and fun. Law & Order: SVU--I have come to accept that I will never, ever be able to quit you. We are Ennis and Jack and we must accept this. The Carrie Diaries--This is where I have to confess that I was really excited about this one because I had already read the books and LOVED them. And boy did it not disappoint. Anna-Sophia Robb as a teenage Carrie Bradshaw is just fantastic and charming as hell to boot. It's got tons of fun 80s fashion and the music is really incredible. And it's really neat (and different) to see an in-depth look at the background of such an iconic character. Two EXTREMELY enthusiastic thumbs up. The Americans--Okay, so I watched the first episode on Hulu the day after it aired. And the reason is because I was reading an article about it and in the comments, someone said, "It's like Jack and Irina from Alias if Jack had been a Soviet deep-cover agent, too." At which point I almost broke my fingers trying to type hulu.com into the address bar because--OMG JACK AND IRINA!!! Also, I was fascinated by Keri Russell playing a spy, because JJ Abrams said that the way he came up with the idea for Alias is that he had this thought of, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Felicity was a spy?". I've only seen the first episode--I haven't watched this week's yet--and I'm completely hooked.

Love in the Afternoon--February 11, 2013

It's kind of...poignant, I guess, that I'm posting for the first time in eons. Because last year, right at this time, I was busy working myself into a cautiously optimistic frenzy over General Hospital. Frenzy, because of returning characters-specifically, Anna, who came back on Valentine's Day-and cautious, because, well, let's face it...the show had been so awful for so long, it was on the verge of cancellation, and it was really hard to hold out much hope that it could dig itself out of its, well...pit of despair. What a difference a year makes. It is kind of awesome. And not in a "I'm watching this because it's such a horrible train wreck" kind of way. It's really, really good. Silly sometimes? Yep. Campy? Oh, you better believe it. Does it still have moments where it stumbles? Of course. But the almost unprecedented 180-degree turn is mind-blowing. Of course, if any show was going to do it, it had to be GH. Because, in the stuff of soap opera legend, this was not the first time that GH had teetered on the brink. Thirty-five years ago the show was months from cancellation when the Luke and Laura storyline caught the fancy of pretty much everyone. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that THIRTY MILLION people watched their wedding. That's bigger than the audience for the most popular primetime shows now. For perspective, it's less than watch a Super Bowl, more than watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The new head writer, Ron Carlivati, and the new EP, Frank Valentini, so obviously get the genre and the audience, and what's more, they are willing to make it happen. In one year, they have gotten rid of a bunch of characters and stories that no one really cared about. They have brought back, at first in a trickle, and now, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the show, a deluge of veteran characters and actors. Even better, other than one kind of big screw up with the character of Robert, they have used the returning characters, if not perfectly, then at least in a way consistent with what we have known and loved about the characters for years. And even the flub of the Robert return last spring, can be forgiven, because of the pure excellence of his return in November and December--if you don't watch you only need to know that he revealed that his ex-wife's other ex-husband was actually Robert's former Eastern Bloc spy arch nemesis in a latex mask and he did this by melting off the mask with a pot of fondue. Seriously? It was one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of television. Is it perfect? Of course not. The introduction of some of the characters from One Life to Live has been awkward and really, in my opinion, only one actually dovetailed nicely into GH. Either because of the way they now film in blocks or because they are spreading out the scenes they have from the returning vets, we sometimes get a HUGE reveal (for example, last week Frisco saw Maxie at the end of an episode and it was for the first time since she was SIX and then that story was left dangling for three days. And when it DID get picked back up, they skipped over the actual reunion and we got aftermath) and then the story is put on ice for a few days. The pacing can be erratic. The November sweeps story involving Anna, Robert, Robin, Duke and Faison was jam-packed with awesome and action only to end very abruptly, with no real resolution (we left Robert's life in the balance for DAYS) and had to slog through several weeks of other story lines before we got something approaching an answer. There are still some characters that need to go. There's a fairly awful recast. And some of the newbies are either excruciatingly awful OR being used in an excruciatingly awful way. The only new pairing that's even shown a hint of sparkle is really just fortuitous because it involves two actors who were a wildly popular pairing on another show. The rest of the new couples range from just okay (Starr and Michael) to wrong place at the wrong time with a side of that could have been amazing (Todd and Carly) to meh (Alexis and Shawn) to OMG STAHP (Luke and Anna). But really...there are no fatal flaws. Yes, there are plenty of scenes where I'll take a bathroom break or swap the clothes from the washer to the dryer, but mostly I'm watching. And since I just spent a lot of time complaining about what's wrong, here's the far more important list of Top Five Things GH is Getting Right: 5. Doing what needs to be done to keep it under budget--The reason that the other soaps are gone is that the network knows that soaps, and really ANY scripted show, are expensive. It's tempting to replace them with much cheaper reality, talk or game shows. GH was very, very lucky. It's ratings were BAD. Worse, at times, than the other two ABC soaps, but because it IS GH and the flagship soap of the network and the most name-recognized soap to non-watchers, it got a pass. At least temporarily. There was also a rumor that Katie Couric, whose took GH's traditional timeslot lobbied for it when she realized the havoc the former AMC and especially, OLTL caused for the ratings of the replacement shows. So, yeah, LUCKY. That said, the spiraling costs coupled with declining ratings were a death sentence. I don't understand all of the intricacies of the way it's filmed now, but it has something to do with filming huge blocks of a single story at a time--so they don't have to keep changing out sets--and scrupulously sticking to the number of days each actor is supposed to shoot according to their contract. 4. Integrating the Storylines and Characters--I don't mean racially, although that wouldn't hurt them either. What I mean is that for YEARS the storylines existed in these weird little bubbles. Very, very occasionally there would be a big story with most of the cast. But it was a single story. And it wasn't that their stories were woven into it. It's that their story stopped while something like, a big fire at the PC Hotel happened, and then everyone went back to their business. Characters are TALKING to each other (not just to the others in their particular story and SOnny or Jason, may he rest) when their storylines don't necessitate it. Characters are involved in SEVERAL STORIES AT ONCE. 3. Refocusing the Show--Nowadays, GH is about the hospital and cops and ELQ with a taste of mob. Which is awesome, because for years it had been about people in the mob and...other people in the mob. The hospital was used primarily as a building where mobsters went when the got shot by other mobsters. Part, if not all of this, has to do with my number two reason. But the decision to centralize the show on Anna is brills. First of all, it's a proven thing. Anna was the show's main character for YEARS. Second, Finola Hughes is damn good. She's damn good for anything, actually. For soaps, she's AMAZING. Third, it's very, very, very easy to connect Anna to pretty much any storyline you can get going--she's the police commissioner, she has a history with the mob stuff (via Duke), she's friends with the Qs, she's connected to the hospital (via Robin and Patrick). Also...let's face it...Anna's just awesome. 2. Returning Vets--Obviously the coup is Finola Hughes as Anna and Genie Francis as Laura, but at this point we also have/had (albeit some of them briefly) Robert, Holly, Faison, Duke, Felicia, Frisco, AJ, Kevin, Lucy, with Scotty still to come. And not a character, but the Nurses' Ball! All of this tied into the approaching 50th anniversary of the show on April 1. 1. That This Happened--Luke contacted Robert from a Turkish prison to let him know something was hinky with Duke's return. The viewers and Robin find out that "Duke" is Faison IN A DUKE MASK (that Faison sometimes puts on a table and has conversation with). Robert came to Port Charles to investigate only to discover through one of Olivia's LSD-induced psychic visions that Faison was impersonating Duke. Robert unveils "Duke" who's attempting to seduce Anna by pouring hot fondue on him and melting that mask. That shit really happened, y'all. And I cannot stress enough how amazing it was. So get watching people! I'm kind of intrigued by what insanity they can come up with next.

My New Love

It is nigh on impossible to get me to start watching a new television show. It took an entire season for my best friend to convince me to watch Alias and it took YEARS for me to finally sit down and watch The West Wing, which is bar none, my favorite show ever, in its entirety and from the beginning. Part of this stems from my prevailing television abandonment issues. I became convinced, at a fairly young age, actually, that if I were to fully invest in a new show from its infancy and then happen to fall in love with it, it would be summarily canceled. Case in point, Rags to Riches, which may, in retrospect, be the most awful thing ever to happen to music and acting, but when I was eleven, represented the pinnacle of television achievement. I loved it. It was canceled. This happened to me several times over the years. I would discover something. It would be AWESOME. Networks would cancel it. When Alias was ending, to much wailing a gnashing of teeth at my abode, I knew that I had to find something new. Hence Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Look, I know that a lot of people thought it was relatively horrible. But I also know a bunch of people who LOVED it. I was one of those people. And I got all caught up and invested in the characters and, of course, it's canceled. Which sucked, but I guess I should at least be thankful that they knew it was happening and wrapped up the ending in a nice little package. I also fell head over heels for Pushing Daisies. Which had TWO WHOLE SEASONS. Okay, not really. There were two seasons. Sort of. It was on sporadically at best. Anyway. These and many other events in my television past have made me extremely wary of anything new. Which is why when daytime shows were being absolutely flooded with promos for a new ABC show three years ago, I studiously ignored it. No matter how adorable it looked. And so, into my world came Castle. I knew it was there. I knew it was starting. But it was a mid-season replacement, which can mean it's gonna go huge and be awesome. It can also mean it's gonna suck and last for twelve episodes as a filler until the fall season starts. It was also fortuitous that three years ago, almost EXACTLY when the show was starting was when I was making my first foray back into community theater in several years. So, it was easy enough for me to dismiss it with, "Well, I probably won't be around to watch it anyway." And I guess to be honest, a lot of the time, I wasn't. And even though the promos still danced adorably through General Hospital commercial breaks, I didn't watch. Which brings me to the end of January. I had just finished my run of Pirates of Penzance and had the first completely free weekend I had had in MONTHS. Which was great. Except for the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do. So on Friday, as I wandered through Target, I saw a display with the Castle Season One DVDs. And they were something like $20. So, I figured it couldn't hurt. When you think about it, twenty dollars is pretty cheap for a weekend of entertainment. Plus, if it turned out to be awesome, there were two more seasons on DVD waiting for me AND the current season. And, for real, y'all. I am in LOVE. It is one of the cutest shows EVER. And also, Nathan Fillion. Which rocks. I've had a thing for him since he was Joey Buchanan on One Life to Live when I was in college. It's a cop/detective show. Which usually, other than Law & Order: SVU, I avoid like the plague. Actually, there are things about it that remind me very much of SVU. It's certainly, as Buffy would say, "dark and twisty" from time to time. But where SVU is, at heart, a procedural and is always heavy and actually kind of dismal, Castle is delightfully funny. There are a couple of scenes that I have saved on my YouTube favorites that I can watch over and over and still laugh out loud. Every. Single. Time. It gets compared with Bones quite a bit, but I'm old-school and it feels like there's much more in common with Moonlighting and Remington Steele. It brings the banter. And the people in it are just ridiculously attractive. And it makes references to the late, much-lamented Firefly all the time. I'm pretty excited about tonight, which is the season finale. And by "pretty excited", I mean REALLY REALLY SUPER EXCITED OMG!!!!!!111!!! I mean, the promo at the end of last week pretty much showed Beckett (awesome lady police detective) DIVING for Castle's face, in particular the mouth part of his face. With the mouth part of her face. Castle being Nathan Fillion's character, who is a best-selling mystery writer who shadows Beckett for research for his books. And also because they are TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER. Anyway, the point is, this show is awesome. You should be watching it. Tonight. 10/9 Central. ABC. Or get thee to a Target/WalMart/Best Buy and buy those DVDs. Or watch on ABC.com.. And if you hear shrieks of joy or mournful wailing coming from central New Jersey in that hour? It's me. And I'm sorry for disturbing your peaceful evening.

Love in the Afternoon: Strange and Wondrous Joy

Okay, so at some point, I am going to discuss the state of soapdom as a whole. I have simply tons to say about ABC Daytime, the cancellations, the possible cancellation, the returns and (sobs) the leavings. BUT, before that, I need to start on this. I am 100% reinvested in General Hospital, which, again, I'm going to get into later, but for now--and this could fail at any moment because I am sporadic if nothing else--I am going to try to give a daily recap-type entry on what went down. However, my dear friend, Anne Marie, is allergic to commercials or something, so so she always watches a day behind. So just to be safe I'm going TWO days behind. I had thought about starting when I started watching on a daily basis again, which was the Monday after OLTL ended. But it was just...awful. The worst I've ever seen the damn show in 30+ years of watching. I mean excruciating, y'all. Even at the worst it had ever been, I had been able to watch while spewing hatred and vitriol. But this shit was just boring. And for a soap there's nothing worse. Hence starting this business with two days ago. Valentine's Day. Which, considering that this is, in fact, A SOAP OPERA, should be a big deal. But let's be real...for the last decade or so, "big deal" on this mess of a show means a mob shootout or maybe some kind of an inferno. Which is just offensive. I mean IT IS VALENTINE'S DAY!!! And considering that my very favorite thing that ever happened on GH--and I mean EVER-- happened on Valentine's Day. Twenty-one years ago to be exact. It involved Anna and Robert, which means that it was always a win for me whatever happened. And what happened was that their relationship, eternally at a low simmer, was ratcheted up to a rolling boil. Specifically, Anna used her stockings to tie Robert to a column in his penthouse, then she dumped ice water on him and left him, her revenge for him calling her a 'frump'. It was hilarious. It was unexpected. And most importantly, it was dead sexy. Which brings me to Tuesday. The last time I watched the show with interest was the day that Sonny and Brenda got married. The last time I watched it with JOY was the day Robin and Patrick got married. So, despite the fact that everything that's happening is the lead up to (and this subject is probably gonna get its own EPIC post) Kimberly McCullough's--and her character, Robin's--exit from the show and the role she has played SINCE SHE WAS SEVEN, I must admit to feeling complete and utter giddiness on Tuesday. Because Anna, my beloved and adored favorite character ever, is back. Y'all, I love her so much. I love her so much that even the fact that a portion of the show involved Jason and Sam and his stupid, broken brain didn't make me have complete and utter rage. Granted I only paid attention to it because it is kinda dovetailed into the Robin story, but usually I want to throw things when Jason and Sam are onscreen. And in other parts of the show, Dante and Lulu, who I don't dislike at all, but in whom I'm not really invested, were super cute. But at the Scorpio-Drake house, things were so unbelievably cute that I almost can't process it. Patrick and Emma make a trail of Hershey's Kisses to the front door. And can I just say Emma is the second cutest kid ever? And she's only second because her mother was THE cutest kid ever. I mean for goodness' sake...Emma pronounced it "ValentiMe's". So. Damn. Adorable. And of course, on the other side of the door is Anna. And the pure, and seemingly REAL, happiness that the two actresses show when they see each other...just suffice it to say, I was crying five minutes into the show. And then there was Anna and Emma. I guess it should come as no surprise that the mother who was most adorably real with her onscreen child would be equally adorable with her onscreen grandchild. And, SHOCKER, despite the fact that it has seemed for these many years that the morons in charge at ABC Daytime think that all the viewers want is young characters doing young things, my favorite character interacting with her granddaughter was sublime. So, in short, despite the fact that other things that may have sucked a little happened on Tuesday, the approximately none minutes that Anna was onscreen more than made up for it. And, yeah...I cried. More than once. Sue me. I know that there's no way this ends happily. It just...can't. But oh, but it was lovely while it was happening.

Calm down, Francis--Pottermania Up Close and Personal

I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 at the midnight premiere. Now, don't get me wrong...I LOVE Harry Potter. Okay, let me clarify: I love all seven of the books dearly. The movies? Well, I like them. I've seen them all. I know I've seen at least four of them at the midnight premiere. But somehow, for me, the movies never managed to catch the...well...magic of the books.

That's a personal opinion. I know lots of people--and I mean the kinds of people in whose opinions I generally put great stock--who adore the movies. But let's have a little perspective, people. I'm pretty sure that the bulk of the other people at the theater with me that night had LOST THEIR MARBLES. At the very least, they all seemed to be involved in some mass-hysteria. And I mean the kind of pervasive, simultaneous mass-hysteria that leads to things like the Salem Witch Trials. And I'm not talking about dressing up. 'Cause that's kind of cute. And while I've never personally done it for a movie, I've been to see movies where the audiences consisted of stormtroopers, Jedi, Starfleet officers, Klingons, elves, hobbits, and vampires of the non-sparkling variety (I'm not gonna touch the sparkly vampire movie crowd, because that bunch displayed a kind of fanatacicsm that verged on the terrifying and I consider them to be the Hezbollah wing of fandom). Hell, I attended the second Fantastic Four movie with a ten-year old in full Thing costume. Even the other HP movies didn't seem to elicit this kind of nutbar response.

So again...perspective is key here. Especially for the two girls in line behind me at the snack counter who were almost in tears due to the MOST EXCITING THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED IN THE WORLD OF FILM. No, really. The line was long. I was with these girls for a while and their entire conversation consisted of reassuring each other that NOTHING THIS IMPORTANT HAS EVER HAPPENED IN A MOVIE THEATER BEFORE AND NO ONE HAS EVER LOOKED FORWARD TO A MOVIE AS MUCH AS EVERY PERSON IN THE WORLD HAS LOOKED FORWARD TO THIS.

Look, ladies, I know it's exciting to think that you are part of something unique. And in a way, for Harry Potter, that's true. You are a generation who entirely WITHIN your generation followed the entire story of Mr. Potter from the first book to the last movie. And it IS exciting. It's fun. And it's sad that it's over. But you didn't invent crazy fandom.

Says the yo-yos who camped out in line at Mann's Chinese for THREE MONTHS in the spring of 1999 to make sure they got tickets:



(And I can't judge them, really, since I waited in line for twelve hours on the day it was released to make sure I got tickets to the first showing. I also schooled people at Trivial Pursuit: Star Wars Edition while I waited.)

Or speaking of Star Wars...please observe the mob scene at Mann's Chinese in May of '77 when the ORIGINAL Star Wars movie was released. And remember that this bunch had never even seen a Star Wars movie. They were this excited over something they knew only from trailers and nerd rumors:

.

But really, the fans who are scoffing at the whole lot of you--Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry and the sparkly vampire brigade--are these:

/>

This picture was taken outside the Loew's Grand in Atlanta the night of December 15, 1939 at the premiere of Gone With the Wind. Hundreds of thousands of people--some estimates say half a million--lined the streets. Tickets sales were such that for four solid months after the premiere, every showing of the movie in Atlanta was standing room only. In London, where it premiered during the Blitz, it ran for four solid YEARS. And adjusted for inflation, it is still (and probably always will be) the top-grossing film of all time.

So, be a fan. Be a crazy fan. But don't think you youngsters invented it. Old people have been crazy like, FOREVER.

The Worst Thing Ever In the History of Film Media

It's been almost 20 years since I've taken a math class. Eighteen years, to be precise. That math class is a story in and of itself, but it is where it was last emphasized to me that if one makes a mistake at the beginning of a long and complicated problem, said mistake compounds itself as one continues to work. My crazy, French Calculus professor (and it's too bad you can't hear the explanation in his hilarious, excited French accent--he was always VERY excited about Calculus) explained it thus, "If you make a tiny mathematical error here, then your graph is just a little off when you start plotting, but the further you get from the starting point, the wider the space between where you are and where you're supposed to be." This seemed fairly useless information at the time. I wasn't going to be a math major. I only took the class because the University said I had to do so to graduate. However, Professor French Guy had a very important point. One that, it turns out, is easily applicable to other parts of life.

Like miniseries.

I think it has been well documented previously that I freaking LOVE a miniseries. They are so much fun. Long. Usually pretty soapy. Dramatic. TONS of people who either used to be famous or are about to be. My two favorites are War and Remembrance and North and South. They're war-centric and based on hugely popular books. The former is pretty faithful to the novel. I guess you really don't have to go for added histrionics, romance and melodrama when the central plot involves an American Jewish lady who gets trapped in Nazi-controlled Europe and ends up in Auschwitz. In the latter, some tweaking happened--characters were combined, characters who weren't killed were and characters who were were not, and in the third installation, George and Madeline's marriage of convenience was turned into a mad-hot, sex-up-against-the-porch-railings torrid affair, and what's not to love about THAT? Anyway, the point is that even when a miniseries goes way, WAY off the rails (please see for reference Scarlett which has little to do with the book on which it's based. Which is convenient because the novel, Scarlett, has little to do with Gone with the Wind) it can be so spectacularly awful that it still is totally awesome. We like to call this the Grease 2 Phenomenon.

And the point of all that is to tell you that Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is the most horrible thing that has ever happened. Ever. You see, with the advent of Netflix, hundreds, nay...hundreds of THOUSANDS of films, tv series, documentaries, miniseries and assorted other watchable-type things which I would have previously had to track down and purchase for an exorbitant price were suddenly right at my fingertips. Which is why, when it came up in my 'suggested' list I immediately put it in my queue. Wait...not just that. I moved it to the TOP of my queue. Now admittedly I was a little leery. This is actually the fourth Anne miniseries. The first two, which are absolutely SUBLIME, were made in the mid-80s, and starred, as Anne Shirley, Megan Follows, who was just amazing. They cover (with a smidge of dramatic license which I heartily condone) the first four books written by Lucy Maud Montgomery about the spunky red-haired orphan. Like I said...a few tweeks. The period of the mini is (weirdly) moved forward about 15 to 20 years from where it is in the books. Anne is a couple of years older to start out, ostensibly to accommodate having the same actress--again, the imcomparable Miss Follows--play Anne all the way through the story. The entire fourth book is moved, timeline-wise, to the middle of the third book. The love interest in Book 3, used to potentially spoil the main romance of Anne and Gilbert is scratched, and an infinitely better romance is placed into the story of the fourth book (because, if you've watched it, dashing, taciturn, Darcy-esque Morgan Harris is WAAAAAAY better than bores-to-tears Roy Gardiner). So long story long...the first two Anne of Green Gables miniseries are made of win.

The third? Not so much. The EIGHTH Anne book is about Anne and Gilbert only peripherally. It's really about their six(!) children during WWI. The third miniseries bastardizes this horribly. Since the story was moved forward in time in the original outing, it's Anne and Gilbert involved in WWI. Which would be okay if the story wasn't so ludicrous and silly. The tiniest slivers of story were gleaned from the book and the rest is just...idiotic. It's not the worst thing ever, but it's..bad. Not over the top enough to verge into true, cheeseball awesomeness and not close enough to the characters as I know them to actually care.

Which is why I was both horrified and intrigued by the fourth miniseries. And it managed to fulfill my every desire. At least as to the horrified part. It's AWFUL. First and foremost, Anne is played by Barbara Hershey. Which...just NO. AND in the first minute and a half...GILBERT IS FUCKING DEAD??!?!?! WHAT THE HELL??!?!?! I already hated it, but I kept watching. And then it goes into this supremely asinine flashback, where we are supposed to be shown Anne's life BEFORE she was adopted and came to Green Gables. Which would be fine IF it didn't contradict EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Anne had ever said about her past. Thus making her, rather than a charming and imaginative child, A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR. As if that wasn't enough, the newly retconned backstory involves Shirley MacLaine. Who should know better. Because she's an awesome, awesome lady. And yet she's involved in this tripe. I mean, she's good, 'cause she's still Shirley MacLaine, but everything around her--from the scenery-gnashing child playing Anne right on down to the dreadful backstory and bore-you-to-tears,grown-up Anne story--positively reeks.

I realize that if you aren't the kind of person who loved the Anne books and original miniseries this would be but a merely subpar television happening. But for me, and I guess all true fans, this was an anathema. It was literally so awful that with probably half an hour to go, I took the DVD out, laid it to the side and then blocked it so thoroughly from my memory that Netflix sent me an email saying, "Did you forget to return our DVD?" because I was watching things on instant queue instead.

Sorry, Netflix. It was trauma-induced amnesia. You can have the DVD. In fact, please...take it now. And remember that YOU are the ones who recommended the stupid thing in the first place...so don't be surprised when I sue you for intentional infliction of emotional harm

I have obviously been a very, very good girl...

Yesterday, the weather here was sublime. As such, I had the sunroof open. Which provided an opportunity for a bird. To poop on me. And no, that's not some hilarious reference to Triumph, The Insult Comic Dog. I actually got pooped on. However, Kel pointed out to me that getting pooped on is actually lucky. I'm the first to admit that I had some doubt as to the veracity of Kelly's little factoid. I certainly didn't feel lucky yesterday. No lottery. No marriage proposal. I didn't even find money in the pocket of my jacket (which I had to wear today, because the weather was just...well, sucky).

And then this happened....



And it was most definitely worth a bird pooping, because OH. MY. GOD. Actually, to judge from the reaction when I posted this picture on facebook, the reaction of pretty much every female I know is "OH. MY. GOD." Actually, from a couple of guys, too. One of whom used the phrase "sex on legs". Which is, I think, a pretty apt statement.

My seriously insane crush on Mr. Rob Lowe is no big secret. I saw The Outsiders when I was about 10 and I was pretty much a goner. And then The West Wing happened and while I wanted to do bad, bad things to Bradley Whitford's fiery, adorable Josh, I wanted to MARRY Rob Lowe's sweet, idealistic, insanely handsome Sam. In fact, I still do.

Hence, in honor of The Best Magazine Cover Ever, I'm gonna give you my Rob Lowe Top Five Not To Be Missed:

5. Wayne's World, Austin Powers and Tommy Boy--Yes, they are the very definition of sophomoric humor, but awesomely so. Especially since, in each, Rob Lowe is essentially spoofing...Rob Lowe. Or at least spoofing the fact that he's just ridiculously good-looking.

4. The Stand--To this day I rate this as one of the scariest things that has ever happened. And also one of the most awesome. Because I like to point out that in this miniseries, Rob Lowe shows shades of the Sam Seaborn to come--sensitive, heroic, ridiculously good-looking. Plus, his character is mute. So he's mad hot and SILENT. Which in many situations equals the ideal man.

3. St. Elmo's Fire--I thought about putting the aforementioned The Outsiders in this spot, but really, there's just too much distracting eye-candy in that to properly appreciate Rob Lowe. And here I can appreciate him. I can appreciate him playing the saxophone. I can appreciate him explaining, with the aid of a blowtorch, that most problems are like St. Elmo's Fire. I can appreciate that he's willing to help shy and awkward girls lose their virginity. All while being ridiculously good-looking.

2. If the Shoe Fits--I think we can safely award this one the Xanadu Honorary So Bad It's Good Award. It's a Cinderella knock-off. Also starring Jennifer Grey. Rob Lowe plays a fashion designer and wears a series of HILARIOUSLY awful outfits while speaking with a HILARIOUS accent. And yet it's like a drug. You can't stop looking at it. So bad it's good AND did I mention that he's ridiculously good-looking? 'Cause he is.

1. The West Wing--Duh. I would think this being number one would go without saying. Because this is the moment when you stop thinking about how Rob Lowe is ridiculously good-looking and start thinking about what a ridiculously good actor he is. I'm in love with Sam Seaborn. Things you need to know about Sam: 1) Ridiculously good-looking. 2) Super smart. 3) Wears monogrammed shirts. 4)Just the sweetest guy ever. 5) Because it can never be reiterated enough-RIDICULOUSLY GOOD LOOKING.

If you haven't watched these things in whole or part, then I have to ask...WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Get on this, PRONTO.

Seriously, ABC Daytime. SERIOUSLY?!?!?

Yesterday afternoon, I was coming home from my voice lesson when I get a text from my Best Guy Friend, Taylor. The sum total of the text was, "Are you alright?" Since to the best of my knowledge, I hadn't in my immediate past been killed or maimed, I texted back, "Is there a reason I wouldn't be?" And that, lads and lassies, was my introduction to yesterday's gut-punch of an entertainment news tidbit--ABC has canceled both All My Children and One Life to Live.

Ok, in all fairness, it wasn't COMPLETELY out of left field. The vast webs of internet rumor mills have swirled for months with whispers of the imminent cancellation of one show or the other. That ABC had uprooted AMC from its NYC home so that it could consolidate its scripted daytime television into a one-coast operation (General Hospital is a west coast show) and OLTL was going to be canceled. That AMC was getting the ax so that ABC had one show on each coast. Rumors, rumors, everywhere. But somehow, I was laboring under the delusion that cancellation, at least within the realm of soaps, was something that happened to: a) glacially-paced CBS soaps watched mainly by people born during the first Roosevelt administration. The first TEDDY Roosevelt administration. b) NBC shitfests like Passions. c)A stream of half-hour ABC filler soaps that came on between the noon news and AMC.

But AMC and OLTL? Really? They've both been on the air for more than forty years. Maybe I...maybe we ALL should have been more prepared, though. In the last few years, both Guiding Light and As the World Turns have been canceled. And they had both been on the air since God was in short pants. GL started out as a radio show, for heaven's sake. I guess, though, I had a real sense of detachment. Mostly because I can count on one hand the number of full episodes of GL I had ever seen and I'm pretty sure I had NEVER seen an entire episode of ATWT. The ABC soaps are different.

I'm the first to admit that among the Big Three ABC shows (I never had more than a passing interest in Ryan's Hope/The City/Loving/Port Charles--aka The Half Hours), my first and greatest love was and is and ever shall be General Hospital. I've watched it the longest by far and it's the only one that I've watched without significant breaks. But I've watched them all. In fact, there was a brief moment, practically a millisecond in soap time, where I would have told you, with some conviction, that AMC and not GH was my favorite. Perhaps the most succinct way to put it is thusly: This time it's personal, bitches. Because even when I wasn't watching regularly (and it's been years since I would even consider myself a casual viewer of either show), I kept up, at the very least enough to tune back in for major events on both shows.

And so All My Children has approximately five months to wrap up FORTY-ONE YEARS of stories. THAT'S FORTY-ONE YEARS OF ERICA EFFIN' KANE. It would take more than five months to wrap up a recap of Erica's latest marital woes. Much less her, you know, LIFE. One Life to Live is lucky, I guess. They have 'til next January. But they also have to tie up ends with Ms. Viki Lord. And she's got more than one personality, so that's no easy task, either.

I just wish there as a way to properly express my rage. Because I've developed a heady need to kick some asses, starting with one OJ Simpson, whose stupid-ass trial delayed and pre-empted the soaps for eons and dealt them a ratings blow from which they NEVER recovered, and ending with that of Brian Frons, the current head of ABC Daytime, who has been nothing short of condescending, insulting, arrogant, and clueless with regards to the soap audience since he took the job. My best course of action is to direct you to the Serial Drama girls, whose blog, often filled with frothy rage directed at the "writing" on the various ABC shows, is so awesome that it landed them a writing gig at a real live soap magazine. If you want to get a good idea of the rage I'm feeling, their five years of rantings about the precipitous drop in quality of daytime dramas, particularly those of ABC, their vitriol is without compare and I agree with pretty much everything they've ever said. (Except about Jax and Brenda, because I don't roll that way. S&B4EVA!!)

Actually, though, while the rage is not insubstantial, the most real and most enduring feeling I'm having over all this is sadness: for the hundreds of people who work on these shows who now...won't. For the actors, especially the ones like Susan Lucci and Erika Slezak who have given their lives and careers to these shows. For the big name actors who got their starts on AMC and OLTL and who still look back on the shows with fondness and gratitude. For the no name actors who got their SAG cards playing waitresses and cops and clerks on the shows and the ones who got a paycheck for pretending to drink coffee in the background. But most of all for the fans. Because these characters were and are our friends.

Someone I know was reading about this (it was in the NY Times this morning) and said, "Well, who watches those shows anyway?" I do. And my friend, Anne Marie, who is one of the smartest people I know. And my little sister, who watches because I watched. And my friend, Hannah who has three pre-schoolers and said that the only hour of the day when she feels like she doesn't have to deal with "Dora and that damn monkey" is when AMC is on. And my friend, Michelle, who works in advertising, who I met my first week of college because she was watching the ABC soaps in the sorority house TV room and I heard it and went in to talk to her which I normally would have been way too shy to do.

I'm sure that in the five months leading up to The End, I will have lots more to say on this subject. But for now, I'm gonna leave it with the immortal words of Agnes Nixon (and this is really how so many of us feel:

The Great and the Least,
The Rich and the Poor,
The Weak and the Strong,
In Sickness and in Health,
In Joy and Sorrow,
In Tragedy and Triumph,
You are ALL MY CHILDREN.

(And also, EFF YOU ABC DAYTIME!!!)

Love in the Afternoon

I have been, up until today, surprisingly detached from the forthcoming nuptials of my all-time second favorite couple EVER on General Hospital. It's weird, really. I spent the entirety of my college years wanting Sonny Corinthos and Brenda Barrett to make it to the altar. And six months ago, when she returned to the show and they fairly quickly entered into a (re)whirlwind romance, I was bizarrely underwhelmed. It felt forced. It felt weird. It felt awkward. And the most strange of all, it felt almost completely free of the scorching, white-hot chemistry that the two actors always seemed to possess. And so, while I had been aware that this wedding was fast approaching--it was hard not to really, since they talked about it all. the. time.--I just couldn't muster any real enthusiasm.

Until the last few episodes. When all of a sudden this whole mess of a show (and, frankly, I think the show has been spiraling into a vortex of suckitude for the better part of a decade) suddenly morphed, as it's wont to do, into one of it's tragically brief periods of awesomeness. General Hospital has been, since the late '90s, wildly erratic. Months of story lines so poorly and nonsensically written as to be painful to watch tend to give way for a week or so into something so gloriously soapy and old-school as to be, in a word, delightful. Now, granted, many of the individual elements of this show, many of the individual elements of this wedding, even, are still horrible. But somehow, they are all mixing together beautifully. It's like vanilla flavoring, I guess. It's really foul by itself, but thrown into the batter it turns out to be pretty awesome.

It's not over. It could end up horribly, horribly wrong, as it so often does. But for right now--and we're only at the "does anyone object?" part--it's SAH-WEET. To quote the imcomparable Soapdish, "THIS is what I was talking about. THIS is soap opera." What it is, y'all, is good, old-fashioned Love in the Afternoon. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The Winds of War

Even though I actually watched it more than a month ago, I'm gonna have to tell you about the first entry in my Netflix mania viewing. It's so odd. I hadn't thought of this miniseries in forever. Actually, to be honest, I had never actually seen this one. The Winds of War originally aired wen i was seven and since it was something like 18 hours long and about the lead-up to America's entrance in WWII, I somehow missed it. I did, however, watch every last minute of War and Remembrance, which was based on the second Herman Wouk novel about the Jastrow and Henry families and which spanned Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (and I've just rewatched all THIRTY hours of that one, so we'll get to it, too). I had, though, read the book. And that, combined with the absolute reverence in which I held the miniseries of War and Remembrance, led me to expect much, maybe too much, of the first miniseries.

I'm going to start by saying that the whole thing is exquisitely and lavishly made, top to bottom. Since this was made smack dab in between Roots and North and South and one year before The Thorn Birds, I think that it's safe to say that it epitomizes the heyday of the epic, Event miniseries. And I do mean Event with the capital letter. It follows two families--the Henrys, an American naval family, and the Jastrows, a Jewish family, with members scattered from Poland to the USA--from the months leading up to the German invasion of Poland, through the first two years of WWII and then concluding in the week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In many ways, The Winds of War (and its sequel) are very different from most of the other Event minis. For example, The Thorn Birds exists on the fringes of world history, so that although the characters sometimes mention things happening in the world at large--such as secondary characters going to fight in WWII--it's never really part of the action. In the North and South minis, the historical aspects of the story--the Mexican War and the Civil War, in particular--are much more central to the plot, but the battles and speeches are all seen from the viewpoint and perspective and through the involvement of one of the characters. The Winds of War is different. While HUGE parts of the story focus on the interpersonal relationships of the characters and also on their fictional involvement with non-fictional events, there are also portions of the story where the history itself BECOMES the story. It's a very interesting narrative tool, actually, and makes even the fictional parts seem much more tangible.

So, as I said before, I actually watched the second miniseries first, and I think that most of my "problems" with this stemmed from that. In War and Remembrance, the most interesting plotline, by far, at least in my (at the time) thirteen-year-old eyes, was that which followed Natalie Jastrow Henry, an American, married to an American naval officer and trapped in Europe at the time the United States enters the war. AND SHE'S JEWISH, which meant OHMYGODTHEDRAMA. In any event, Natalie is played in the second series, by Jane Seymour. Who is absolutely perfect. In the original, she is played by Ali MacGraw. Who is way too old and also...can't act. There, I said it. I really thought she was kind of awful. The other half of the romance, Byron, the Henry son who becomes a reluctant naval officer, was played in W&R by Hart Bochner, who was really good and terribly handsome. In this, Byron is played by Jan-Michael Vincent. Who really seemed like an odd choice to me. Oh, the acting was fine, but he's not a THING like the Byron described in the book. And there was also the small matter of me singing the Airwolf theme song in my head every time he was on screen, which I realize is a personal problem, but a distracting one, nonetheless.
The other main character (and actually MOST of the secondary characters where played by different actors in the second series) who was played by a different actor is Aaron Jastrow, Natalie's uncle and an American ex-pat author who's the reason she's in Europe to begin with. In this it's the incomparable John Houseman, who because of health reasons was replaced by the incomparable Sir John Gielgud in the second. So that's pretty much even.

Frankly, apart from my problems with Ali MacGraw (and I don't mean this harshly, but I don't think she's good in ANYTHING and include in that assessment Love Story), this is probably the best-acted, across the board, of any of the big miniseries. At the least it's tied with Roots. The three main actors who remained the same in the second series--Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen and Victoria Tennant--are predictably excellent. Mitchum, especially, gives a tour de force performance as Victor Henry, the family patriarch.

In short, The Winds of War has held up AMAZINGLY well. I'm a WWII junkie, so I'm predisposed to like it, even without the added bump of having seen and adored the sequel. I can't recommend it enough. It's not available on Netflix Instant Queue, so you have to actually get the DVDs, but it's well worth it and one of the best miniseries ever made. I still prefer the sequel (also available and also not on Instant Queue) and I think if the entire thing is too daunting, you could skip this and still easily follow War and Remembrance, but really, seeing the whole picture is much more compelling. This one's a solid A-.

Like I said on the other blog...REBOOT

As I have had some sort of viewing epiphany (at least that's what I'm gonna call it), I have decided that, like the song says, let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. My viewing epiphany, is, in a word, Netflix. I've had it for a while. I got it so that I could get a few movies a month and not have to buy them without testing them out. Which I had been doing way to much of and thus was ending up with any number of subpar offerings in my permanent collection. Plus, as far as regular viewing...well, that had been pretty odd, too. Last season, I watched exactly ONE episode of American Idol, which I had watched almost religiously since it started. And while I haven't completely given it up, there have been any number of times where I forgot to watch Law & Order: SVU. I have, of course, watched Glee like nobody's business and I really like (although it's only been two episodes) Matthew Perry's new show, Mr. Sunshine. AND, I have been to the movies...well, almost not at all. So I really didn't have much to say.

Until this whole Netflix thing. Especially the watching online part of Netflix. Which I am quite enamored of. I have watched about a zillion documentaries in the last month, so I can at least claim that there's some merit to what I'm doing.

In any event, I hope that this is my restart. If you are laughing at such a supposition...well, you're probably right, but miracles happen.