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:

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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