Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Death Takes a Holliday
By Djb | Season 2 | Episode 1 | Aired on 04.12.2001
Since "this episode" and "shred of plot arc" haven't been so much as introduced at a party, it's a true shock when we hit our stride and learn in voice-over from Trevor, "We just found out that we are gonna get to perform on the Miss America Pageant. We're gonna be performing 'Liquid Dreams.'" Jacob notes that, having been on television before they sang a note together, "we have to prove that we're for real. That's our main obstacle." Your Gillette product-placement contract begs to differ, Sir Shave-a-Not. Even though every single person watching this episode experienced the misfortune that was Miss America, Ash drives the point home by saying "this is going to be [their] breakout performance," and Trevor ensures that there will be no diamond tiara on the brow of tonight's biggest loser, Miss Narrative Subtlety, when he adds, "This performance could be huge. We need to go out there and we to need to hit 'em like, 'Pow! O-Town! Here we are! Whap!'" Thanks for the descriptive adjectives, Trevor. I always appreciated the Adam-West-Era-Batman approach to E-Z plot development. Zing! Pop! Suck!
Take me away. I don't mind. But you better promise me we'll be back in time to October 14, 2000, where the logo for the Miss America Pageant fades up. Donny and Marie Osmond, card-carrying members of America's Most Ambiguously Cultish Religion That Isn't Scientology, gaze into the camera with their glassy, Mormon, even-we-don't-know-if-we're-married-or-related lobotomized smiles, and Marie explains that "ABC debuted a unique new reality series, Making the Band." I have to say I'm impressed with ABC's marketing savvy, as if we'll believe Marie Osmond's independently rendered opinions about a show that airs on the same network to a significantly smaller audience than the pageant. It would be like NBC creating a show based on people reading Vilanch-penned patter about how much they enjoyed The 10th Kingdom and it's all so meta and ouch my brain just exploded. Donny finishes the introduction of the five boys, and dashes to the green room during one of these rare breaks to deliver a shoddy and hastily assembled marriage proposal to Miss Utah, only to go red-faced when he discovers -- oops! -- that they are, in fact, already married. Crazy, crazy Mormons.
The band emerges and the crowd goes wild. Ashley mercifully talks over the first verse, setting the spin control into action with the excuse, "I have an in-ear monitor, and I hear the track start to fade out." Trevor shares this story that technical problems plagued them that night, and Dan agrees that "we're kind of in trouble now." Erik drives it home: "We're singing to air. And you can't hear it." No, no, E-M. That was the problem. We really could hear it. And I'm sorry, but technical difficulties? They couldn't have just said they were all "suffering from exhaustion" or something? We all know they can barely hit their vocal marks when it's fed through the Milli-Vanilli-Music-Maker and horked ingenuously onto a CD, so why not spare our collective intelligence and just say that it was their first network performance and they were nervous and then they sucked? It would have allowed them to save face with a little more elegance than trying to convince the four viewers of Making the Shoddy Rationalization that Justin Timberlake was running around backstage kicking over amplifiers and unplugging essential-looking equipment while twirling his evil, French-villain moustache and chuckling in a sinister "haw haw haw" fashion. Besides, Miss West Virginia with her slide harp and yodeling didn't have any trouble hearing herself during the talent competition. We're smarter than this. And if you possess such high levels of musical ineptitude that you can effortlessly insult the musical sensibilities of Donny and Marie, well, you're somehow less smart. End of story? Yeah, I thought so.
Cut to the band and the managers and Doc Holliday watching the performance on a monitor. Jacob tells us, "We can record outstanding music." I see. "But if you can't do it live and reproduce it live, then you're done." Because then it's...well, fake. Ashley notes that it sounds "like amateur karaoke night," which I'm going to go ahead and take as a personal affront, because five gin and tonics into my average karaoke night, I'm hitting even that windy, arpeggiated "if you are the desert, I'll be the sea" bridge of "Father Figure" like George Michael had been my father figure all along. ["That's damn right. And you's better believe that Korean mail-order brides are firing up their lighters in the audience and sobbing into their sloe gin fizzes at those vocal stylings." -- Wing Chun] Then again, Ash, there's nothing amateur about it. He continues, "If we had been able to hear ourselves, we would have been just fine." Mike Morin, who we'll call Mafia Mike for easy reference (he's the Buttafuoco manager with the pulled-back ponytail, rather than the younger manager who looks a bit too much like he's there trying to Dan Miller himself into the actual band should a member spontaneously decide that the break-room buffet doesn't contain enough citrusy, tropical fruits), assures the band, "Fifteen million people saw you guys, and nobody knew there was a technical problem." Because there wasn't. If there was no track, how did they hear the underlying beat and stay vaguely synched with their dancing? Doc, wearing a Mets cap and therefore all good by me, tells them that his "reputation is on the line," and that they're going to have to accept some of the responsibility for this massacre. "I know the guys in the booth," he continues, "They were pushing for us to lip-synch, weren't they, Mike? I don't do, we don't do lip-synch. We're for real, here." Meanwhile, in a resplendent mansion in the Hollywood Hills, Britney Spears looks up from the recording contract for her next single, "Oops, I Did It Thrice," knocks over a strategically-placed Pepsi onto a draft of her restraining order against a pestering Bob Dole, quietly utters "Oh, for the love of Rob and Fab!" and picks up the phone to fire "Too Legit To Quit" Holliday in a big ol' freakin' hurry. Because for the purposes of this conversation, he doesn't do lip-synching. Doc continues, "You don't have a lot of time," and Trevor is just slightly less exhausted of hearing about the endless rigors of boy-band-dom than we are, snarking back, "We never have a lot of time." Doc: "Well, we're never gonna have a lot of time." Algonquin, this round table is. Mafia Mike tells them, "If the schedule starts getting slow, you guys are finished." Fin-ished! Fin-ished! Fin-ished! And...wait. Why would the guys in the booth have been pushing for lip-synching anyway? Bad sound check, perhaps? No one's ever like, "We were really pushing for lip-synching because we were concerned about you humiliating your record label, Mr. Dylan." Come on, people.