Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 6 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Blood In/Blood Out/La-La-La
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 07.30.2012
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Fanny's still gone, so you might as well turn back now.
But if we must: Michelle discovers a leak in the roof of the studio, which is never explained, and calls in a one-eyed plumber from Stars Hollow to fix it. Instead of the leak, he fixes Truly's broken heart! She contemplates leaving behind her sick obsession with a dead married man, which I guess is healthy but care about only marginally more than Michelle, who really could give a crap about Truly's emotions, even after all this time of them being horrible to each other.
Michelle takes the girls out for a gluttonous buffet, which brings all their many body and food issues to the fore, but in that fake way where they're more like punchlines and less like problems this show is totally obsessed with. A few million mixed messages later, Michelle has convinced Ginny -- mostly through her creepy tales of being an elementary school hussy -- to dump her gay boyfriend. This sends her mother Claire (the awful real estate lady) to attack Michelle physically, as the gay boyfriend is the only one keeping her house together ever since her husband left her shrewish ass. It's uncomfortable in so very many ways, and doesn't -- as usual -- seem to understand that.
About 3/4 of the way through the episode, Sasha steals a shirt from Michelle and they have a short fight which ends well for all concerned but, combined with Claire's attack above, puts Michelle into a thumb-sucking meltdown. Luckily she is nursed back to health by Boo's mommy Nanette in a very fucked-up scene that could come from adult baby porn in which Nanette pets her like a dog and force-feeds her kindergarten food, but whatever, it does the trick. As usual, Nanette should be focusing on her own daughter, as Boo's codependent little heart has been broken yet again by Charlie, who this week is excited by the news that Ginny needs a new gay boyfriend.
Whatever. It's hard to judge something when you come to it with no expectations whatsoever, and who am I to say that this isn't art? Who am I, to bring up my hidebound notions of "storytelling" and "narrative" and "causality" and "physics"? What kind of a jerk just assumes that a character will in some way resemble herself from week to week, or even scene to scene? What's this obsession with characters and plotlines that disappear without a mention never to be heard of again? Which is to say nothing of the temporal and editing issues plaguing the whole thing, like how they jump back and forth literally days between scenes, or spend an interminable amount of time blowdrying an entire room of carpet -- don't ask -- with their hair morphing back and forth between styles, or the fact that this week sadly does not include a mean sexy dance.
All in all, the consistently inconsistent show that we've all come to lo... Ha... Anticip... Experience. The show we often experience on a Monday evening. Now seven episodes in, without a story or recognizable characters to speak of. Even Dorothy Parker stopped drinking occasionally, one assumes.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Sasha did a crazy dance, rendering everything else irrelevant.
I read an interview today that ASP did with the great Willa Paskin where basically she copped to everything that is berserk and disconcerting about this weird show, but then explained -- in definitively Michelle Simms-Flowers fashion -- that this simply does not matter.
"Yeah, our show is deranged and makes no sense and yeah, a girl did a crazy dance, but you know what? More shows should make less sense. More girls should do crazy dances. Television should be less satisfying for the audience, and more up my own butthole. I have earned it."
Also, I just realized that this show comes on after Secret Life* which makes so much sense: Our lead-in is also about people in a made-up world that don't act like people or talk like people and spend their days solving problems that aren't actually real problems and have never happened to a single person in all of our rich human history. If the people on that show had as little sex as they're constantly exhorting one another to do, which is zero, it still would be a thousand times less sexless than this show.
*(Intl. title These Sluts Won't Shut Up!)
STUDIO
Michelle is teaching the cutest pack of five-year-olds you ever did see, in green tutus and mouse ears, how to do some kind of a ballet dance. The cutest one -- Boo Jr., essentially -- finally asks if she can pee. But since this is Michelle we're talking about...
Michelle: "Ladies, Broadway is a motherfucker and you can't just go pee-pee whenever you want."
Girls: "But we are five."
Michelle: "Listen, Les Mis alone is three hours long, not to mention fucking terrible, and between the weird sex shit theater people get up to and the rest of my dissolute former existence, you won't have time to pee. Ever. That starts now."
Boo Jr.: "Uh, too late."
They run out, en masse, like ten adorable little girls in matching outfits, and Michelle tosses herself down next to Boo, who gives her the horrible news that Kelly Bishop is sitting another one out. I guess this is "pacing," I guess this is what we're calling the arc of the show, that after five weeks of repetitive and nonsensical non-reasons for Michelle to stay in this town, we're going to brute force it this way.
Michelle: "Hey, the premise of this show hasn't happened yet and the season's almost over. That's something a weird exercise in strangeness might do, instead of being a TV show."