I found out something a little while ago that was a little bit disturbing. When I was a kid, I used to watch the TV show Laverne and Shirley — this would have been in the late ’70’s. I have since found out that one of the recurring jokes in the show was that Shirley and her boyfriend Carmine never had sex — Shirley refused. I had no idea about this (since I was only 8-10 at the time), so who knows how many jokes I just didn’t get while watching this show in my youth. That made me wonder what other things happened in TV shows at the time that I was not privy to because of my age and relative inexperience in the ways of the world.

Maybe Captain Stubing had a coke problem. Or maybe Steve Austin got addicted to painkillers after his surgery. Did Mr. Roarke want to make other people’s fantasies come true because he was abused as a child? Maybe Arnold and Willis got to live with rich Mr. Drummond as a reward for being confidential informants into gang-related activities in Harlem. We already know that Gilligan’s Island was a mystery drama masquerading as a comedy. Were Charlie’s Angels really hookers who solve crimes? Was Jack Tripper really gay?!?! The possibilities are endless.

One of the TV shows Gail and I have liked to watch for years is Law & Order. In more recent years, we’ve also enjoyed its cousins, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. For those of you who don’t watch them, each of these shows occasionally has an episode they describe as being “Ripped from the headlines”, where they take a real-life high-profile news story, and write an episode about it. Of course, they change the names and some details and stuff, but it’s usually pretty obvious what story they’re talking about. For example, a few years ago, they did one about a man who was arrested and tried for several murders, including that of his wife’s sister. Later on, it was revealed that his wife was directly involved in the killings, and was just as evil as he was, if not more. This was the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. There was another one about a six-year-old beauty pageant winner who was murdered. For the most part, the stories had some obvious connections to the real-life stories, but diverged in some way as the story went on.

I think these “ripped from the headlines” episodes were fairly popular, since they began becoming more and more frequent, and then I think the writers just started getting lazy. In the last month or so, there was a L&O story about a female astronaut who suffered a mental breakdown, and drove across several states (wearing adult-sized diapers to avoid having to stop) to confront her lover and his wife. The other day, we started watching one (this was L&O:CI) involving a pudgy bleach-blonde former stripper who had become famous by marrying a 90-year-old billionaire and inheriting his estate on his death. Her 20-something son died of a drug overdose shortly after the birth of her daughter, and then she died mysteriously shortly after that. When the story started to deal with paternity issues, we got bored and turned it off.

Note to the L&O writers: enough of the “ripped from the headlines” stuff already. It’s been done. To death. Drop it. It’s one thing to write a story that vaguely resembles a news item, but when you take the news item, modify the names of the people involved, and that’s it, well, that’s hardly even worthy of the term “writing”, is it?

I’ve heard in a number of places about what a great show Battlestar Galactica is, so I finally rented the pilot mini-series last weekend. Gail and I have been
watching it over the last couple of days (and we’re not done yet), and I’m
very impressed. We both remember watching the original show back in the late ’70s;
it only played for one season (1978 — thanks Wikipedia),
but we both remember Starbuck, Apollo, Commander
Adama, and Boxie (annoying little kid and his weird robot dog), plus the Cylons
(with the cool red light bouncing back and forth across their face). The new
series is different but cool — Starbuck and Boomer are now female
characters (though Starbuck is still a cocky bastard; that I remember
from the original series), and some Cylons are human-looking, and the special
effects are obviously better. There are a few familiaries in the show — the
scientist Dr. Baltar looks and sounds a lot like Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine, and Colonel Tigh used to be on Cold Squad, a cop show set in
Vancouver that we used to watch. Also, one of the early scenes on Caprica is
shot at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver; I visited there when I was living
in Redmond back in ’91.

Now all I need to do is find someone who owns the first season on DVD and
borrow it! I could probably find them on the internet and download them, but
that would be illegal. Then again, if I were to download them, watch them once,
and then erase the files, how would that be different from borrowing the DVD
from someone?

From TV Squad:

Sorry, Crossing Jordan fans. NBC has pushed back the season premiere, in favor of a new game show hosted by Bob Saget. The game show is called 1 vs 100 and it’s a game where one contestant battles 100 other people to win $1 million. It’s the American version of a game show that is already popular in Europe. The series premiere is at 8 pm on October 20th, as a lead-in to the season premiere of Las Vegas.

NBC hasn’t announced a new premiere date for Crossing Jordan.

Question: Why is Bob Saget still on TV? Has he ever been funny?