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The thing is that Amy Sherman-Palladino left right when Roseanne was fucking it up. She was the parakeet. She saw firsthand what happens when a person lets their selfishness get in the way of basic storytelling -- when the language you speak, which is what you have to trade just like Joss and anybody else that came through that machine, overwhelms the actual human truth you're trying to portray -- and got out right on time. Her last episode on that show, "Busted," is one of the finest half-hour scripts I've ever seen, in a show-length career of the best work you've ever seen. And then comes Gilmore, which had its problems, but certainly none of what we're seeing here. What we're seeing here is Roseanne-losing-it crazytown nonsense. This was a script that could have been written in ten minutes. Ten years ago.
What happens in it? Boo manages to make friends with the hottie boombalatty son of the odious Rico at the Oyster Shack where she works, in a fairly competent sequence of events that put the other girls -- especially, of course, Sasha -- right up on their toe-shoes. But beyond the meet-cute (in which he rescues her from the OCD of their college-focused teen manager, a type ASP has already done a million times, and better), it all just seems like plot movements. We're told week will "change everything," and I have to say, as a fan of these ladies over the last month, I can't wait. Anything beyond the lazy binary of "skinny bitch with skinny bitch mother" and "chubby sweetheart with chubby sweetheart mother" -- plus the two basically interchangeable other ones we still don't really know -- that we've been asked to care about so far.
These are some damned capable people we're watching go through this nonsense. It should not be halfway through the season that we still don't know what the hell the point is. It should not be halfway through the season that we're still bumping into gross characters like tonight's ass-centric goomba and wondering what part he's going to play. This isn't an era-spanning, geographical survey; it's a story about girls, women, who have shit to do. And instead of doing it, we're just meeting more and more people we may never meet again, and wouldn't miss if we didn't.
What happens in it? I'll try again: Michelle wakes up with a possum in her bed, which somehow causes her to get super intense about Fanny's flighty financials, which have to do with a set of four hatboxes, that were already a competent joke on the previously mentioned sitcom, but now make no sense because we're not doing blue-collar anymore, we're doing bohemian dance partners. Fine. So then -- fifty minutes into the airing -- we finally get to the meat of the conflict:
Fanny recognizes Michelle's potential as a leader of women, as a teacher, and Michelle demurs, because she doesn't want to identify herself with Fanny. She doesn't want to be a teacher, because that's settling, which is what Fanny did. Which is what I thought the show was about, a month ago, and I'm still pretty sure is the point: These bitches need money, and somehow Michelle is the key to making it. If this show has a point, that would be it, right? They provide something for the four barely sketched young ladies, they become an approximate family, and the show actually, finally, desperately, starts. Sounds like a good show, right?
(Did I mention Tedious Rico's barely literate son is literally fucking named Godot?)
But in the interim fifty actual minutes between this point being made and anything being done about it, what we get is a bunch of bull about how Michelle takes it upon herself -- after a radically awkward, poorly directed crosstalk conversation or two, in which Sutton Foster literally stops herself at the end of each scripted sentence fragment and waits for the other poorly directed actor to say his or her scripted sentence fragment, approximating zero arguments or conversations that have ever happened on Earth -- to scream and yell at everyone who goes to Fanny's dance studio, threatening her business only to repair it (mostly offscreen) with some similarly stilted and rude phone conversations. We're treated to an intensely quirky dance number about nature and plastic grocery bags, Truly acts like a person who should be institutionalized some more, and we're out.
You know what would be fun? Actually watching these seven talented and beautiful women take part in a scripted dramedy television show with a fully-funded feminist mandate that has literally no restrictions and could tell any story it wanted. Any story, whatsoever, as long as it approximated a story: 44 minutes, five acts, people with consistent personalities, doing things that matter, in a world where things like physics and gravity and causation have a relationship to what happens.
You know what's a good deal less fun than that? Watching a middle-aged kook talk to herself.
This is the kind of shit that got Michael Jackson killed: Nobody to say no. Nobody to say, "Hey, Roseanne? Um, in this episode you took down a railway train full of terrorists and you were dressed up like Xena, and then you had a half-episode conversation about Janis Ian and your half-baked second-wave feminist discoveries with Jenna Elfman talking about riot grrls and mixtapes and whatever crap because your daughter hates you. That is not a TV show, that is a pill addiction. You have a responsibility to the people you employ."
week: Presumably, things go back to being relatively awesome. Or Michelle goes to Iraq with a duckling in her dufflebag, and I quit, just like I quit shows that go the Milch, Sorkin, Gilligan, Moffatt route of being random, self-centered babbles by industry résumés with nothing inside. But probably -- very hopefully -- the former. I love this show, I really do. I love the characters and the actresses so much. What is always becoming, never being: I love it. Adore it. But seriously? If this show were written by a man, this would be the week I'd delete my Season Pass.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Michelle married a random and then he died. Now she lives in a small apartment on his land in his small town, where his crazy mother runs a dance studio. Everything else is up for grabs, I guess.
NOW
Michelle wakes up with a possum at the foot of her bed. People always think possums are so cute, and they are always, always wrong. For a while it looks dead.
Michelle: "There's something in my bed..."
Fanny: "Well, just give him some cab fare and change the locks."
Michelle: "No, it's like a thing. Like a nature thing."
Fanny: "Like a tsunami? Like a rat? Just get out of bed with it."
Michelle: "I cannot do that."
Michelle sends Fanny a picture of the nature thing, and she rolls her eyes and drops some truth bombs.
Fanny: "It's not a rat. It's a possum. Which is basically like a rat. They only attack when they're in heat, I think. Just grab a skillet, bang him on the head."
Michelle: "Are you going to come save me?"
Fanny: "Sure, idiot."
The possum attacks! Best open so far of the season! What does it mean? Nothing. Just a funny idea about a possum, you're welcome, on with the show.
BOOKKEEPING WITH TRULY
Michelle: "Oh, are you guys busy? I'm just going to keep babbling about the possum."
Truly: "I don't give a shit about your possum problem."
Fanny: "We hate Michelle. What we love, though, is Generation X paranoia bullshit! No Logo! Spam email! Product placement! La Revolucion!"
Truly: "I am very competent except for when it's personal to me. That's my main thing I've got going on."
Michelle: "That is double what I've got going on. I'm bad both at things that are related to me, and things that are not."
Fanny: "I have four hatboxes. I keep my bills in them, and then some of them get paid and some other ones don't get paid. And yet I continue to survive."
Michelle: "That checks out, sure."
Fanny: "Paradise. Very quirksome."
Michelle: "Cool, let's talk about it for a really, really long time."
OYSTER SHACK
Child-Boss: "[Talks faster than anybody has ever talked. Has OCD.]"
Boo: "I like to pull my Mom Jeans up to my nipples."
Child-Boss: "You can serve teens sharing fries, other people that don't tip. Your other job is to jump up and down on the garbage in the dumpster."
Boo jumps up and down on the garbage while the Child-Boss watches. He's a little too into it, if you know what I mean. It goes on for a really, really long time. Imagine jumping in the garbage of a seafood restaurant on a really hot day.
STUDIO
Melanie: "I have nothing going on in my life or my personality."
Sasha: "I'm a bitch mainly."
Boo: "I smell like seafood and stuff, because of jumping in the garbage for a man. He did not pay me extra for this activity."
I would like the show better this week if I knew this were leading to maybe Boo getting in over her head and she'd end up sitting on birthday cakes, or popping balloons, on the internet.
GRODY SAL
A grody man named Sal -- owner and operator of the quirky-as-shit store "Sal's Dancy Pants" -- has heard that Fanny is doing her twice-yearly payment of the hatboxes, and wants some of that sweet hatbox action for his dancy pants. He and Michelle discuss these fiscal matters, as well as saying the word "tush" a hundred times. It's fairly gross. Everything is pretty gross today. Sal is like jumping up and down in seafood garbage on a hot day with your mom jeans pulled up to your nipples. Your dancy pants.
What is going on inside Fanny's house is, the floor is covered with probably I would say about one hundred million different bills, and Truly is having a meltdown because she wants them to be in the computer and not on the floor, and then Michelle opens the door to get away from Sal and his far-too-dancy pants, and the bills go flying everywhere. I am not exaggerating the number of bills on the floor, but you know who is? This show. It's simply way too many pieces of paper, so the joke goes from being an okay joke to just some weird idea of a drunk mom.
OUTSIDE
Michelle follows Fanny through the grounds, where there are like picnic tables and geese scattered everywhere, so they can talk about how they don't have any money. See how that works? Kind of like how ten minutes of every episode of Gilmore was about watching them shovel food into Alexis Bledel's face, but she never got fatter. Or, come to think of it, how every episode of that show took place in a separate universe from every other episode, and sometimes Lorelei would be lining her shoes with newspaper and shit, and then the episode she's be jetting off to Rome or dressing up in kooky costumes.
For an episode about how this one lady doesn't understand how money works, this show itself really doesn't seem to understand how money works. Michelle stomps away past the butler and the guesthouse kitchen staff and the playing cards that are painting the white roses red -- they planted white roses by mistake, it's a whole thing -- and back to her apartment. Which is infested with possums, remember, because they have no money but also all the money.
Can't pay to refloor the dance studio, but you can fly in the Dalai Lama and cram him under a Ringling Bros. tent and everybody's wearing capes.
...I mean, I'm not trying to be a hater. I had this hope that I would hate this episode less on review, or that my love of ASP and the show would somehow counterbalance the complete clusterfuck of this episode, but no. And I want to be very clear about this: I would not wish the title of Exec Producer on anyone I loved, because it is a short ride to running out of steam. Even Louie CK is losing steam. And I'm not saying ASP is particularly crazy... I mean, let's pretend that Jacob had his own show -- a job I would never want, because of precisely this reason -- but let's just peek into that disquieting rabbit hole for a sec. You know what I mean?
Just off the top of my head, my TV show would need to include: Teenage girls murdering Baby Boomers for laughs and assuming political power, nuns turning into consumerist werewolves, a lady made out of computers that only can talk in Bangles lyrics, an oracular computer made out of dirt and bees, everybody popping pills all the time, parallel dimensions where everybody is some other kind of thing, gay librarians from the future with clipboards, probably like a witch in there or like a witch that is also a hacker or a celebrity chef, monks just going berserk, maybe like some kind of genetically modified army of terrorist supermodels, a ghost that is your boyfriend or some kind of gay vampire in love with a priest I assume would make it in there, I mean... That's not a show anybody would watch. That's not a show I would watch, it sounds awful.
But it also sounds not unlike Bunheads, in some key ways.
OYSTER SHACK
Ginny: "Okay, I have one personality trait which is that I have a ginger boyfriend and we've been together since second grade. We do things like buy potting soil together."
Melanie: "I like Josh, and all, but that's pretty gay. Like how I am maybe the gay one."
Sasha: "I don't like Josh, because I don't like anything, because I'm awful."
Boo: "I don't get to have an opinion about anything. I'm Boo."
Sasha: "Bring us some free French fries because it is exhausting being so mean all the time and I have a very fast metabolism. Same reason."
Don't you think that in about five years Sasha will be one of those that's like, "I just don't get along with other women. Most of my friends are guys, I don't know." And then somebody, maybe Michelle, will take her aside and say, "When you say that, what other people hear you saying is, I am a monster."
Girls: "Bring us lots of free food on your first day on the job. We don't understand how anything works because we are children, but also because we live in Paradise California, where sometimes up is down and sometimes hats are money."
Girls: "You know how Rico is absolutely the worst? He has a shirtless son named Godot. So."
They talk about that for a while. They get all Fifty Shades about his shirtlessness and Ginny feels weird about Josh and Sasha lusts after Godot in a way that is somehow bitchy and the other one unconvincingly lusts after him in a boring way. Not Boo, though. She is impervious to abs. She probably thinks he should pull his board shorts up over them.
ACCOUNTANCY
A sassy accountant is bothered by Fanny and how she's ludicrous, but also they don't make any money, and also Hubbell Flowers only left Michelle some amount of money that in some episodes is a shit-ton probably but in this episode, not so much. Turns out that of the 75 dancers at the studio, only nine of them even pay. Fanny is perturbed that Michelle has found out about this most bohemian of her bohemian activities, and Michelle has the swollen brass balls to call bullshit on Fanny's way of doing things.
Michelle, the girl that lives in a bathtub and married her serial killer stalker and now squats with possums, just can't believe how ridiculous Fanny is. Which would be a fairly cool dynamic, or even idea of a show, if we weren't halfway through the season -- first of all -- and second of all, if she were not also a flighty nitwit.
BACK HOME
Fanny spends the drive home listening to her iPod, dancing up a storm... And then Michelle figures out that she's not even listening to anything. Just acting like a crazy person. Can you believe it? Well, under the surface old Fanny's having a little bit of a capitalism problem, of course. She's an artist and an educator, you see, and the idea of charging her students money for the services she provides -- much less the looming day when she will not be able to supply those services -- somehow just doesn't compute. I sure hope it takes the entire episode for these people to comprehend the basics of how life works. Maybe Michelle can put on a fake oily mustache and Fanny can dress up like Little Bo Peep and they can do some kind of Punch & Judy olio about it. About how it's 2012 and there's this thing called money that you've been using every single day of your life.
Fanny: "Yeah, well, like think about Sarah. Some girl named Sarah who exists for the purposes of this scene, whose father has no job, and if she gives up dancing she will start doing crack."
Michelle: "How about we start teaching tap?"
Fanny: "It's so loud, how they tap around all over the place."
Michelle: "[Instantly produces one hundred solid and lucrative ideas.]"
Fanny: "[Slouches around drinking tea and not hearing anything she's saying.]"
See, in a regular TV show like you might see on the TV, there's a problem or a tension, and then it gets resolved, and that's what you call telling a story. People have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. It nurtures our souls and makes us feel less alone, which is our one duty to one another while on this planet: To show up, to love others, to cross the divide so we're not all brains in jars, and storytelling is the most efficient and powerful way we've learned to do this, in the thousands of years we've been here. We've gotten pretty good at it. Maybe too good. Maybe it's become passé?
Because we're going a little bit of a different way here, where every episode introduces an obvious problem that would never actually happen, with an obvious solution that would take five seconds. But then to create that sense of tension that you would get in a normal story about actual people in a universe that makes any kind of sense, Fanny just acts retarded, which causes Michelle in turn to act retarded, and then maybe it gets solved or maybe it doesn't or maybe we never find out.
Michelle: "Hubbell's not here to save the day anymore. For either of us."
Fanny: "Well, for me. Mostly for you, he's not around to get you drunk and make your choices for you."
Michelle: "Just teach more classes!"
Fanny: "I can't teach more classes!"
Michelle: "Just pay the rent!"
Fanny: "I can't pay the rent!"
Michelle: "Just do like one thing!"
Fanny: "I can't do even one thing! Help me teach the classes so that I don't break my old dumb body teaching so many classes!"
Michelle: "I can't do that!"
Because then she's just literally following in Fanny's footsteps, giving up her dreams -- literally; that recurring nightmare from last week now makes more sense -- to settle in some sleepy town and teach a bunch of girls who will also probably never amount to anything either, and then you're a million years old and flirting with Buddhism, and no thank you. Which, that's a valid complaint -- incredibly insulting, but a star's gotta shine -- except that is what is already happening. Michelle is already such a lazy, broken, undriven person that she is literally camped out in a stranger's yard, and it's like, "Why would I give up all this to contribute to the family I'm creating out of thin air?"
Put up or shut up, but don't just stare it in the face and refuse to think, like some kind of goddamn Fanny Flowers. Is the point that they're both stubborn? Because that's not actually what stubborn people are like, it's what addicts and the mentally ill are like. Totally different behavior. Stubborn would be, "I have a thing I want and I will fight for it." This is like, "What I want is nothing, including to fight for it." The schizoid behavior of a toddler who isn't entirely comfortable with causation as a concept yet.
Parent: "Okay, do you want ice cream or fruit?"
Crazy Person: "No!"
Parent: "No, I said, do you want one thing, or this other thing?"
Crazy Person: "No!"
Parent: "Do you want to teach ballet, or do you want to go quietly crazy and live off possum meat in a woman's yard? Or go back to Las Vegas like you probably should do?"
Crazy Person: "No!"
Parent: "Is this even about your son being dead at this point, or are you just being obnoxious?"
Crazy Person: "No!"
Parent: "Yes, this is almost like a television show in some ways."
Michelle: "Fine, then I will make your students pay currency in exchange for goods and services. And you can take part in what is called the economy."
Fanny: "You know what, or you could be a teacher at the school. A separate problem."
Michelle: "Oh, are we switching places? Now you can grin smugly to yourself while I stonewall you about this other obvious thing."
Fanny: "This would be a lot more satisfying if I hadn't spent the first half of the episode acting insane and stupid for no reason."
Michelle: "You still can! I'm just going to be doing it also."
OYSTER SHACK
The three non-Boo girls show up and they are dressed to the nines so they can flirt with Godot. Except for Melanie, who is totally unconvincing at all times and just seems like a girl that wandered onto the lot and they were like, "Do you want to be on a show maybe?"
Sasha: "How do I look?"
Ginny: "Underfed and bitchy."
Sasha: "That's a lot of bosoms showing, for a girl with a ginger boyfriend."
Boo: "Work stresses me out! I'm Boo!"
Michelle: "Little girls, I am having a bad day filled with crazy people who make no sense."
Girls: "You are crazy and you don't make any sense at all."
Michelle: "I just want to babble about French fries and Fanny Flowers."
Girls: "Please just leave. We're creeping on Godot."
Michelle: "Oh, that guy? Gross. Can I help? First, can I make an idiotic joke predicated on the fact that his name is Godot, which he is only named for this joke?"
Girls: "Yes, that is how comedy works."
Michelle leaves, but the scene continues.
Sasha: "I'm going to go flirt with Godot and get him to give me an alcoholic drink."
Girls: "No you're not."
She does not. It is kind of a nightmare. A well-actedly awkward horrific mess of a nightmare, which ends with her ordering a "Temple Grandin," which is a thing that does not exist. Horrible Sasha, mortifying herself, with a random Temple Grandin reference This show is just getting straight-up confrontational. I feel Brechted right now.
DUMPSTERS
Godot: "What are you doing?"
Boo: "Jumping in the garbage."
Godot: "Like you're a trash-compactor as your job?"
Boo: "No, that's not a thing."
Godot: "I can barely read, so."
He gives her his shirt so she will smell lovely, like him, instead of like her, who smells like Hoarders. The way he looks -- and speaks -- it's like every member of Jackass got drunk one night and they finally just went for it. Made a baby.
STUDIO
Fanny: "Parents, dancers, students, clients, customers! I just want you to know that everything is free and you can just have anything you want and never pay for it. Even though Chumbawumba broke up, it was not in vain."
Michelle: "Wrong! It is the opposite of that! From now on, if you don't give me money I will hurt your children."
Things continue in this vein. Even if you've ever wondered what it would be like to be truly annoyed by the wonderful Sutton Foster, this scene might answer some questions.
AFTER
Sure, in the aftermath of Michelle's bullshit -- which involved grabbing women's purses and threatening, as I said, their children -- the parents have gotten restraining orders against her. Sure, that could happen. Anyway, Fanny is not impressed by the fact that Michelle has ruined her business which is already ruined, and Michelle is very apologetic, and the Wu Twins are half off, and Michelle is still not interested in teaching dance. No teaching!
Fanny: "I've seen you with those kids, Michelle. You're a good choreographer, you teach them well, and they like you. They connect with you."
Michelle: "I don't want them getting attached. I don't teach, you teach."
It gets to a real emotional place -- I mean, this is not a bad show as much as a fetal episode that never grew into a real one -- but even in this situation it's still the actors doing the heavy lifting. The obvious solution, which the show could have been about starting with the second episode, is now right up in their faces: Michelle wants to squat in the yard and not teach, which is dumb, and somehow Fanny knowing that makes up for the fact that Fanny was being just this stupid and obstinate for the first half.
Hubbell's death was brilliant, because it set up a premise and then: Switcheroo. But a month later, the premise is still being dangled and teased and it's dumb, because you're not writing for idiots, you're writing for people who have seen a TV show before. There isn't a person in this country who watches the show week-to-week, and each week wonders whether or not Michelle is going to stay in Paradise.* Why is each episode about still teasing the premise of the TV show? Are we going to end this season with Michelle going, "Well, probably I am leaving Paradise still." Does that sound enjoyable to you? "Remember Season One, with Fanny and Boo? God, that seems like a lifetime ago. Back when Fanny and Boo were on this show and it was about ballet, because it's called Bunheads."
* (It's like when people don't have cell phones on shows, which there's nothing to even say about that besides, like, why don't the people have cell phones on some TV shows? It bugs me even when it's a period piece, at this point. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would have been exactly ten minutes long if cell phones had existed back then. What a waste the Cold War was. So much unnecessary pain, so many wasted resources, so many totally cute outfits getting shot all to hell. If only they'd had cell phones. But they didn't.)
GODOT
Calls Boo "Bettina," which is her name I guess -- thanks to her mom "Nanette," which that name just reminded me of a whole part of Gilmore Girls I blocked out, and makes Rico fit into this show a lot better now -- and they have a real eye-to-eye connection apparently, which drives the girls mental: Ginny in a halfhearted way, Melanie in an unconvincing way, and Sasha in a bitchy and off-putting way.
Sasha: "I'm not jealous of Boo!"
Ginny: "I think it's kind of romantic that he is giving her a mix CD."
Yep. Mix CDs. Still a thing.
Boo: "I don't even know what you guys are even acting so weird about! I'm Boo!"
Sasha: "I'm not trying to even hear this shit. Buckle up."
Boo: "He gave me a CD of surf music."
Sasha: "This just gets worse and worse, doesn't it? I'm right, but I'm saying it like I'm wrong, because this show and this town are topsy-turvy."
Melanie: (Makes a face; no idea what it's meant to signify except maybe she is having an episode.)
Boo: "He's just a friend, you guys! And I'm not just saying that, it's actually what you're supposed to believe."
PARADISE FLOWER FESTIVAL
Fanny: "I have choreographed this dance called 'Paper Or Plastic.' It is about how Michelle is trying to turn me into a capitalist running dog cog that drinks the blood of the proletariat, just like that one part in Beaches, even though I started writing it before I even met her. And even though I am a grown-ass lady and not a C-average Philosophy major in freshman year at a state school, like you might think."
Everybody looks awesome. The dance makes Michelle laugh because it's about the serious battle between paper and plastic bags, and then the hero enters: The Canvas Tote. I guess this entire season was written the week that ASP discovered canvas totes? They sure do come up a lot.
Fanny, verbatim: "The die is cast. The cashier looks around at the utter destruction she has wrought... And goes on break."
Michelle: "Sorry, so nature dies? That's awesome!"
Fanny: "It was so much fun to do. Choreography, teaching..."
Truly: "When the ecosystem broke down, so did I!"
At some point apparently Fanny convinced Sal that he got paid -- this part was dodgy -- and then his dancy pants go chasing Truly off into the crowd and then the episode just abruptly ends.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Bunheads, Pretty Little Liars and True Blood for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook. IRL work appears in BenBella's SmartPop series of anthologies, and novelette "The Commonplace Book" will appear on Tor.com in October 2012.