Category: TV

I’d like to thank Mike, for putting together this great blog, and of course, my neighbor’s daughter Jesse, for letting me borrow her toy microphone…

So Fox finally cancelled Reunion, as I accurately predicted in October. This post generated a lot of criticism, but I think my comments were vindicated by the fact that not enough people were watching for Fox to keep it going. Eat crow, flamers!

My favorite comment (aside from the person who inexplicably concluded that I must be a callous person) was this one:
“How can you think Reunion is terrible?! It’s probably one of the best shows out there. I don’t think anyone agrees with you.”

Um, nobody agrees with me? Fox has really made a terrible mistake then, haven’t they? Of course, hardly anybody cares about the show, so maybe they just haven’t taken the time to agree.

Ironically, I actually thought the show was getting more bearable. I even enjoyed a few episodes! I wasn’t really upset that it is cancelled, but I didn’t hate it as much as I should have.

I think the sports guy summed it up best, during a plea to keep the show around, when he predicted the following would happen if Fox showed a Reunion marathon one weekend:
“[People will] watch the first [episode], think it’s terrible, vow to stop watching it, then inexplicably keep watching. By the third show, not only will they be hooked, they’ll feel like an idiot for being hooked. But they’ll keep watching.”

Actually, less Taylor Townsend. No Taylor, no good times on The O.C.

Tonight’s episode was horrible… That whole Seth-Summer competition thing? Bor-ing… Bring back Taylor!

As someone not famous once said, “If loving Taylor Townsend is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”

I really wanted Fox’s Reunion to be my favorite new show. Looking back, its hard to imagine how I could have been excited about something so crappy, but at the time (mid-summer), when Fox started running promos, it seemed like it was destined to be my new fav. After all, it had teen/college drama, an unraveling mystery and a unique gimmick (each episode is a different year) — it couldn’t miss, right?

Wrong. Reunion is terrible. And not even terrible in a One Tree Hill this-show-is-so-absurd-but-I-love-it-anyway type of way, just plain terrible. The story sucks (is Sam really that great?), the acting is bad, and the writing is even worse. (Actually, in these types of situations, I think acting ends up taking the blame for issues that are really caused by writing. Take Mathew St. Patrick, for example: a consistently solid performance in Six Feet Under, yet consistently cheesy and bloated in Reunion. Just awful dialog.)

The other thing that kills me about Reunion is that they explain the premise of the show before every episode. It’s kind of like a bad joke — if you have to explain it, perhaps it just isn’t that good in the first place. Just like the idea behind this show.

Shamefully, I set up a TiVo season pass before the season even started, and since there really isn’t anything else on Thursday at 9, I’ll probably keep watching this trash (until Fox inevitably cancels it and puts me out of my misery). And to make it even worse, perhaps the greatest single timeslot standoff of my lifetime occurs just one hour before, with The O.C., Alias and Smallville all competing for my eyes and TiVo space.

I’ve been watching the Dukes of Hazzard every night at 11 on CMT, reliving the days when I was 8 years old and made my mom roll down the window so I could get in the car the proper way. I suppose that if I never had been a fan as a kid, I’d probably think this was the stupidest show ever created, but quite frankly I can’t get enough of it. Nearly everything that happens in Hazzard is completely preposterous, but I really don’t care.

As is apt to happen when I get into a tv show, I start to overanalyze it. One might think that a flawed show like this would completely fall apart under such scrutiny, but in this case it actually make me like it even more.

Some additional random thoughts:

* I’ve always wondered about the family tree — the fact that a large family (7 brothers including Jesse, if you assume Daisy, Bo, Luke, Coy, Vance and Jeb Stuart Duke all have different fathers) exists is certainly believable, but how is it that those 6 other brothers are nowhere to be found? If these people are really as backwoods as the show suggests, wouldn’t they spend their entire lives in the same county?

* As a kid I never really appreciated the moonshine lore that surrounds the show. Considering that the entire Duke family is a bunch of criminals really changes one’s perspective on the whole thing. It certainly makes their respect of the law a bit confusing. Take this example from tonight’s episode:

The Dukes find this bag of stolen credit cards, and they decide to call up Uncle Jesse for advice. The advice: “You’ve got no choice but to turn that bag over to Roscoe.” Of course, the boys protest b/c Roscoe is as crooked as they come. Jesse then responds, “Don’t you think I know that! But the law is the law, and Roscoe is about the only law we got around here.”

The law is the law? You’re one of the most infamous moonshine runners in Georgia! Your nephews are on probation because they got caught runnin’ shine!

To top that off, within a minute the boys are outrunning Roscoe, which, the last time I checked, is against the law.

You just gotta love it! Anyone got a ’69 Charger they want to get rid of???

Just watching an old episode of the Dukes of Hazzard, and couldn’t help but laugh when they brought out a musical guest, classic country star Dottie West. Apparently Ms. West had been caught in Boss Hogg’s “celebrity speed trap”, and had to work of her ticket by playing the Boar’s Nest. Honestly, would it be that far off to see a similar plotline force Death Cab to play The Bait Shop or Gavin DeGraw to play Tric?

As Waylon said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.