Though the theme song remains the same, the opening credits sequence has been recut for S2 to showcase the five boys' tough-edged, hard-rockin', facial-haired (read: puberty-hitting) new look. The familiar Making the Band Surgeon General Warning unspools with its sinister caution about "5 performers, 1 shot at stardom, inside the music industry, behind the fame," so I guess jettisoned were the far more elucidating warnings, "O-Town causes burst eardrums and ruptured belief in the integrity of the music industry. O-Town contains carbon monoxide. You must be this tall to ride O-Town. Pregnant women and the elderly should not approach, look at, or taunt O-Town. O-Town should not be taken on an empty stomach. O-Town sucks unironically. The rest get sugar pill." Shots of singing and dancing, reminding us of the rigorous training and tireless effort required to reach a level of performance ability similar to how they would have ultimately sounded if these were shots of the boys dissolving their underdeveloped vocal chords in battery acid and sitting around in their pajamas eating Klondike Bars and prank-calling Boyzone. Shots of screaming fans. Shots of celebration juxtaposed with shots of angst-ridden, the-press-just-referred-to-us-as-"The-Monkees-but-without-the-humor-or-guitars-again-didn't-they?" glassy stares. And finally, the new shots of the individual boys, looking like they've been looking since last we left them: Ashley is spiky-haired and just as awwwww-inducing as ever, if you want my opinion about it. Erik is sporting an ill-formed patch of facial hair, which must have elicited more than one confused cry of "I don't remember this ecosystem containing a forest" from the race of tiny people who have built a working city in the cool, cool shade underneath his lower lip. Dan holds out a hand toward the camera and sneers, totally striking that rock-star pose that unmistakably says, "I have an automatic car-door opener and you don't." Trevor sports slicked-back hair and the slightly more apparent Waxed Eyebrows Of Undeserved Fame than I'm used to seeing from him. And then there's the most apparent victim of the stardom Jakeover, sporting dreadlocks and a chin covered in so much hair there must be young fans trapped deep in the underbrush. Shave. It. Off. White. Boy. I mean, really. The final shot of the new opening is the five of them, looking up at the camera. Jacob, incidentally, is wearing a black tank top and tight black pants, which, of course, is shorthand for "O-Town's Bad Boy." Oh, wait. I'm sorry, it's actually shorthand for "Gay Russian Defector Ballerina." I constantly get those two confused. And apparently, so does Bad Boy.
Cue stock footage of young, screaming fans looking crazed with adolescent hormones and holding up signs of the "We [heart] O-Town" variety. Interspersed with shots of a photo shoot, Ashley "There Must Be An" Angel "Playing With My Heart" tells us in confessional, "I feel like this last year has spun my life into outer space." Erik "Lips Ahoy" Estrada agrees that the year has been "so unbelievable, and so not real," realizing just in time that those two phrases mean exactly the same thing and wisely deciding not to tack on his belief that the year has also been "non-believable," and "totally real but in an 'un' sort of way." Cut to a quick shot of Erik, Jacob, and Dan singing a quick clip from "Liquid Dreams," as a numeric counter on the studio wall reading "Days Since Our Last In-Tune Chord" flips exhaustedly to four billion and bursts into flames just out of the camera's range. Cut to shots of more screaming fans, one of whom is holding a magic-markered sign reading "We skipped final exams for O-Town!" Oooooh. Quite the sacrifice. I skipped getting run over by a bus or contracting polio so I could stay home and write this recap. Where's my moment on TV? Trevor adds that he "could never have dreamed of anything this big," a general statement that does nothing but prove Trevor has spent so much time with Erik these last months that someone has finally become desensitized to the Venus-Flytrap-esque size and scope of The Lips. Airport montagecakes, as a stock footage plane we're supposed to believe is carrying the band takes off. Dan "Dan, He's Our Man, If He Can't Do It, No One...Zzzzzzzzzzzzz" Miller voice-overs, "Now it's a different city every day, running through the airports to the hotels, living out of a suitcase, and basically a big whirlwind." The boys walk toward their new house, as Jacob "Chia" Underwood fills us in that "the house is so phat. It's like a dream house." Embarrassed that he has said nothing that can't readily be seen by looking at the band walking into the house, Jacob strolls off camera, pulls an entire Salisbury Steak he started at last night's dinner out of his vast stores of facial hair, and begins nibbling at it mindlessly.
On a walkabout of Phat Manor, we are told there is a master bedroom, which Trevor predicts Ashley will get. Cut to the drawing of straws on the front lawn and, well, Ashley gets the master bedroom. Scintillating stab at drama, that. Apparently responding to the question of how he's changed over the past year, Ashley generalizes, "A year ago, I was not the same person." Insofar as not having the master bedroom and all. Trevor voice-overs that he thinks "everyone has changed the same way, like, everyone's just gotten a lot smarter," another cruel indication that he believes "that Erik character" was never called back after his initial audition. Jacob brilliantly informs us, "My hair changed. I grew my goatee back and I got my dreads again and I painted my nails again. And now I'll show you the real Jacob." Goatee? Dreadlocks? Nail freakin' polish? If that right there wasn't just a serious infomercial pitch for the upcoming tell-all autobiography The Real Jacob: Unleashing the Black Drag Queen Within, I just don't know what it was.
Because I've never watched this show or any reality television and oh my what are these glowing images emitting from this squawking box with all the colors right in the middle of my living room, I'm shocked -- shocked -- to learn from Erik, "Just because we're involved in the band doesn't mean that the problems of everyday life just pass us by." We get a few shots from the Ashley/Shelli archives and learn that Dan has broken up with Cindy. Girlfriends? Dispensed. And then to Erik, who has put on his wire-framed glasses and stares wistfully out the window, becoming his erudite doppelganger Pensive Erik for pensive moments such as this. Pensive Erik tells us, "My real dad left when I was one. I never heard from him. He ends up showing his face around MTV studios when I was just about to get on TRL." Shots of O-Town on the TRL set and slo-mo footage of screaming fans as Erik tacks on, "All of a sudden, I just knew it was him, 'cause I, like, look like him a little bit, and it's, like, weird." Yeah, genetics can be a pretty cruel mistress, can't it, Gregor Mendel? "So the first time anyone saw me on TRL, I had just seen my dad for the first time my whole life." Bunim and Murray high-five and Mr. Estrada dances around the Making the Band executive offices hurling handfuls of mysteriously-acquired piles of small, non-sequential bills in the air and screaming "I'm bribed and rich! I mean, not bribed! Rich, I say!" to celebrate the power of this not-at-all-contrived "coincidence." On the TRL set, Ashley describes Erik's greatest strength as "his soul. What he's singing is all from right here." Ashley indicates Erik's t-shirt as the source of his extensive mental prowess. Inside Erik's small head, his long-dormant brain peeks tentatively out from behind a huge posterboard sign reading "Me no see dad long time" and a decisively untouched copy of 101 Rules for Correct Syntactical Phrasing and concurs, "Yep, that's about right."
Rigorous Rehearsal Montage, starring a bunch of first-season imitators I've never, ever seen before. Ashley stumbles over even the superlative compliment that the people they are now working with are in that raging pantheon of talent known the world over as "good." Jacob gives a light hug to The Reanimated Corpse Of Clive Davis, nearly reducing him back to the pile of dust and bones that met the archeologists who dug him up in the '60s to prove conclusively that he did, in fact, father slave children during the Revolutionary War. Sadly, they forgot to put him back where they found him, and he rose again to wander the streets aimlessly, offering record contracts and detached, rambling denunciations of the music industry, so different now from his early days with Mariah and, like, Rachmaninoff. Because he's old, people. We meet their new vocal coach, "Doc Holliday," who has worked with the likes of "Backstreet and Britney" and their new management team, Mike Cronin and Mike Morin. Erik tells us that they trust Mike2 (I know, I nearly clevered y'all to death with that nickname right there, eh? Eh?) because "they're there, hands-on, every day." A shot of two terrified-looking men, whose names appear on the bottom of the screen written in MS We're Fucked OH GOD We're Fucked Bold, are Mikes Cronin and Morin, but might as well be labeled "Deer" and "Headlights." I hope their contract came with a painless exit clause and a lifetime's supply of dependable snorkel gear, 'cause this boat is sinking and they look neither like woman nor child to me. Cut to the quickest of quick shots of Lou Pearlman showing Ashley a glossy photo of himself (er, of Ashley. Not of Lou) from his own copy of Tiger Beat (er, Lou's. Not Ashley's) as the voice-over tells us "Lou personally doesn't do that much for us day to day." The photo is sprayed with many of the same mysterious stains that adorned Lou's collection of tucked-in shirts like so many Rorschach squiggles perceived by the average viewer as images such as "band failing," "band skidding," and "band tanking." Lou bailed when the going got tone deaf. Lou may be smarter than we initially gave him credit for. Lou may not be as dumb as he eats. Er, I mean "looks." Ah, hell. I meant "eats" the whole time.
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 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.
Cut to The City That Only Sleeps Through This Show, New York, for a "Promotional Tour." A Heli-Cam dollies all around Lower Manhattan, but no matter how high we climb, nothing will compare to the steep, painful fall of watching a short-lived boy band being dropped unceremoniously from its record label. In a New York City hotel room, Doc shares with the band that he has consulted with The Reanimated Corpse Of Clive Davis, and that they agree, "We're under some very unique conditions, and he's very concerned, I must tell you that." Concerned? About what? Concerned that the cinematic version of his life, Weekend at Clive's, is veering off schedule if the boys aren't up to snuff recording the theme song? Concerned that he'll be called out to answer for this embarrassment of the musical sensibilities on the very same day he regains a pulse? Concerned that he'll get in on the boy band craze as late as he did on that whole Baroque Harpsichord sensation of so many years back and then he goes and signs Mozart and then he dies and then that damn Saliere tries to pick up the slack and...well, y'all saw the movie. Just what kind of "concerned" is The Reanimated Corpse Of Clive Davis? O-Town's new Director of Ambiguity is vague. Erik thinks he knows: "Clive has a lot riding on us, and I can just imagine what he's thinking about us right now. 'O-Town? More like oh, brother!'" Oh, Erik. Feeling the pulse of the music industry at every turn. Doc tries to make them feel better, name-dropping all the while, telling them that they've had almost no time to prepare for the job. He tells them, "The public is very unforgiving." Right. Just as long as their suck is on our hands. Oh, brother!
Outside on his cell phone, Erik's jaw hits the floor (as opposed to its usual position of just above ankle level) when he retrieves a message from his "father, Ruben." Erik tells us that his father is "crazy" for contacting him now of all times, and Pensive Erik follows up on his belief about his father's craziness with the elucidating, "My brain right now is going through such craziness. My dad wants to talk to me now that I'm finally on TV." Cut to Erik strolling through a seedier part of Eighth Avenue. Well, those of you know know New York City know that "seedier parts" now means "Smiling, waving Disney characters...but ones who say 'damn.'" All I'm saying is that we're near Port Authority and there's a lot of neon and the potential for a little post-Giuliani, down-market porn...if you're into that kind of thing, of course. He's sporting a gray skull cap (Me brain warm! Me think smart!) and telling us, "I've gotta talk to my mom about this." Word. He stops into a ramshackle entryway of an apartment building and hits a buzzer. He should stop and chat with the realtors about rent-controlled units in the area. And then stop back at that Disney store and sound out an application. I'll bet the good, good people from ABC could help him land a job he doesn't deserve there in a few years, too.
Another city montage including The Don't Walk Sign Of Ambiguous Metaphor, and we're back in a NYC rehearsal space, the band gnawing off large chunks of other derivative boy-band pop, stirring with a liberal helping of "broken" "equipment" and "insufficient" "rehearsal," adding a dash of the quarter-tones that lie in between actual notes found only in the Serbian Chordal System, shitting said concoction through my television speakers for the fiftieth time this week, and calling the whole mess "Liquid Dreams." Cooks in three minutes. Serves millions. But not for long. We learn that they are rehearsing for "The Teen People Awards" at The Apollo Theater. It's their first show since Miss America, and we cut to the performance space to see Dan and Jacob having some kind of creative differences. Oh, God, they're alone in there, aren't they? I can see Ray and TyJuan sitting at home, planning the inevitable Paula Abdul rebirth and finishing up choreography on their shot-by-shot remake of the "Cold-Hearted Snake" video (the dancers still laugh), laughing their asses off and clinking frosty beverages in relief. O-Town runs through the end of the song again and Jacob tells us that they "don't need a babysitter anymore" as they finish up the song and proclaim it "much better." Oh, brother. Oh! Brother!
"We're Busy" Montage. Photo shoots, concert preps, roaring crowds, makeup, blah. A photographer demands "laughter, laughter," as Ashley, holding Erik up by one leg, notes what's so funny: "Oh, look, I'm holding his foot!" Heh. Don't pretend you're not part of the machine. Ashley then complains that all this press time takes away from their rehearsal opportunities, which is a shame because, according to Ash, "That's our main objective, I think. Our stage show." Oh, you think? I always remember Jerry Garcia telling people that the most important aspect of maintaining a successful band for the long haul was "Lee Press-On Hair on your face and Diane Warren on your Rolodex." I guess the experience of a touring musician really has changed these last years. Shameful, Jerry. Shameful. Cut to further exposition of Erik and his biological father, and how it's been affecting him through all this. At a New York radio station, Erik tells us that the guys expect him to answer a lot of questions, I guess so that one of them can finally be unironically described in the national press as "the smart one." In comparison, of course. Back in Orlando, Trevor kicks off the pathos by asking Erik, "What the hell is wrong with you?" Erik tells them that something is on his mind and he tells us that when he's being a pain in the ass, "it has a direct effect on the group." He apologizes and nervously fingers the Bar-Mitzvah-boy-puberty-level growth of hair, unearthing three lost local children currently appearing on milk cartons inside of a nearby refrigerator who accidentally wandered in there looking for the Tiki display at Disney World. Jacob is all "whatever," and competes by brushing out the entire lost city of Atlantis, which hits the ground with a resounding splash and floods Phat Manor's entire first floor.
More New York Panning! Look! The Brooklyn Bridge! I can see my house from here! Except that you care! Like, a lot. And I'm sure you also care that an establishing shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and then a cut to the Apollo Theater is roughly like showing a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and then kicking in with some voice-over like, "It was hot the afternoon we got to Taipei" or showing a picture of The Reanimated Corpse Of Clive Davis standing with the O-Town boys giving a big, toothy thumbs-up and wearing a t-shirt that screams "I'm With Quality" and an arrow below those words pointing in the direction of the band. Okay, maybe it wasn't so much like that last one. Up in Harlem (Jacob is all, "These people, like, fully saw me on TV and stole my haircut"), the O-Boys stand in the empty theater and rehearse "Liquid Dreams" a cappella. It's as fine as it gets. Which is somewhere just south of fine. But not as far south as the Brooklyn Bridge is in comparison to Harlem. Actually, that far. We learn that, save for a headlining gig or a showcase for record label execs or a network show viewed by fifteen million people, "Teen People is a big event with a lot of different people that are very influential in the magazine industry and in the music industry." Oh. Them. Ash continues that "[The Reanimated Corpse Of] Clive Davis sent Hosh down to take us to the sound check and to listen to the a cappella and see how it sounded." Let's all lay down our scythes and flaming torches and wave hi to Hosh "Your Last Name Is" Gurelli, who is the "J Records VP, Aamp;R." Ash continues that there can be no more mistakes after Miss America, and Hosh is pumping with so much adrenaline that he's on TV that he tells the boys that they sounded "good." Dan remembers in a confessional that people don't care about excuses and that you're supposed to be ready to represent once you hit the stage. File this one statement under "Reason, comma, voice of."
Erik hates me. He "represents" as such by changing his mood skull cap to the more angry, fiery red, calling his mom to tell her he doesn't know what to do about the situation with his father. The lovely and talented Mrs. Estrada plays diplomatic on the phone and on TV (I mean, the stank bastard walked out when the kid was one), telling her son, "You're twenty-one. You're a grown boy, you're a young man," leafing madly though her fatigued copy of The Big Book Of Inspirational Oxymorons for further conversational assistance so she doesn't accidentally refer to her son as "a smart complete idiot" and make matters for him even worse. More: "If you think this is the right time to do it, then by all means, go ahead and do it. I think you need to search inside of you and figure out what...what's your agenda." Awwwww. What an O-Town song kind of wisdom she dispenses. Three martinis later, Diane Warren scrawls those words down on a cocktail napkin, convinces herself she wrote them, titles it "The Right Time To Do It (But I Still Won't Do That)," sends them to Meat Loaf, and cashes a check for five million dollars. Bitch.
"Angelina Jolie's lips to kiss in the dark!" They're practicing in the limo. It rawks. Jacob tells us that they have to put on a great live show, "but you never know what's going to happen with live television." Yeah, the camera adds ten unexpected key changes. Oh no, wait. It adds ten pounds. Y'all, stop blaming the scenery and sing the damn song, okay? And so, to the performance. It's okay. Trevor wanted to "get out there and hit the a cappella" to prove Miss America was a fluke. And it was. It was. I mean, Miss Hawaii? But their performance was the real McCoy. After, Ashley and Dan believe things went well, but Jacob stands, all bratty, to his friend Janie. She tells him they did a great job, and he shakes his head, all mad at her for being his harmony muse and failing to deliver accordingly. She responds, and a subtitle appears at the bottom of the screen: "It went well. It did. It really did. I would tell you if it didn't." I'm sorry, is this Fire Walk With Me? She's speaking English. What's up with follow the bouncing ball? I'm just sayin', if Janie starts acting out her ego-strokin' prattle in semaphore flags, I'm out. Jacob is only worried every time on stage that "someone else is going to mess up." More about Erik having trouble concentrating, and he tells us again, "I usually deal with my problems by myself." And he doesn't want to be the person who brings the group down. Dude. Shave it off.
And finally, Ash wraps up, telling us he can't believe he was on the stage of the Apollo. He'll always remember the performance. And back in rehearsal, both Dan and Trevor have ditched their shirts for dance practice (not my top two choices...not even in my top four), which I can only imagine portends the inevitable return of Lou "The Biggest Kahuna" Pearlman to show up and rationalize the sudden presence of such glaringly nubile skin. And I don't want to be vulgar about that or anything, but...oh, brother!