So I was just hanging out at my apartment the other night, yodeling myself to tumescence, when all of a sudden, the phone rang. This week's recap will include some excerpts from the ensuing conversation:
Aaron: Hello?
HBO Head of Programming Chris Albrecht: Hi. Is Aaron there?
Aaron: Yes.
Chris Albrecht: Well, thank God. Otherwise, how would you breathe?
Aaron: Damn it, is this Mike Binder again? 'Cuz if it is, I'm calling the cops this time.
Chris Albrecht: Nope. It's HBO Head of Programming Chris Albrecht. I was just calling to find out what happened to our love.
Aaron: We were in love?
Chris Albrecht: Well, yeah. I mean, you raved about what turned out to be a sub-par Sopranos season, you loved Six Feet Under, even if it did take you a while to come around, and my copies of your confidential TiVo logs indicate that you're a huge fan of Real Sex and G-String Divas. So now I'm just wondering why you gotta be so mean to MoMM all the time?
Aaron: Uh, have you seen the show?
Chris Albrecht: Of course. That Brian Benben is one funny dude.
Aaron: What? Who?
All right. I need to level with you. This is the first time I've ever been entrusted with the awesome responsibility of consigning a show to the Permanent Hiatus dustbin of history. As such, I feel compelled to provide you with a truly stellar recap, kicked off with a witty and insightful opening paragraph that lays out just how truly awful the show is while simultaneously presenting an interesting and humorous metaphor that will help you understand my suffering. To that end, I've considered and rejected any number of potential openings. I had a pretty good one about how the whole "Television Without Pity" thing obviously doesn't apply to recappers, as Sars felt my pain acutely enough to cancel the show. Then there was another one artfully rhyming the fact that MoMM is so freaking awful it couldn't even outlast Wolf Lake, for God's sake. And of course, as is my wont, I also had an elaborately constructed (and, as you may also assume, alliterative) homage to various female recappers and forum regulars that compared and contrasted Mike Binder's eternal egotism with my own somewhat stalker-ish style. But sadly, I found that none of them could ever really do justice to the absolute bottomless depths of crap this show has subjected us to, which in the end is why you're getting a process paragraph rather than the real thing. So, yeah. Sorry about that.
But, then again, how can I be sorry about anything that might mean the end of MoMM? This is, after all, a joyous occasion, a time for levity and celebration, for parties and for festivals. So I say we all meet at Pontoon's house Sunday night to get really drunk and show Mike Binder that, no matter how hard he may try, he'll never be able to ruin our lives. That's not a problem, is it, Pontoon? No? Good. See you there.
And now, on with the recap. We open once again with the weekly Walk & Talk. The Dorky Dilemma Du Jour is that Donna is angry at Mickey for not answering his phone when their kid was injured. Apparently, the kid whacked his head on a coffee table, and when Donna called Mickey for help, he wasn't available. "Why wasn't he available?" you may be asking (assuming, of course, that you care, which you so don't). Well, it turns out that Mickey was at the massage parlor. Sorry you asked yet? Mickey rationalizes that there's nothing wrong with that, because everyone gets massages, right? This is spoken over images of a naked Sachiko pressing her pointy, pointy nipples right into Binder's back. For a moment, I fantasize that I'm watching some sort of bizarre porno-Buffy (and yeah, I have that fantasy a lot) wherein staking him with those nipples is actually the only way to kill the Binder beast. Meanwhile, back at the Walk & Talk, the NBF has arrived. He changes the subject to Jake and Eileen The Oversexed Entertainment Editor, and Jake reports about the letter to the editor Eileen wrote last week. "And you know how [Memmet] is," he says. "For every letter to the editor, he thinks there's thirty people out there who feel the same way." Well, going by that statistic, Sars can tell you that there's at least 510 of you out there who find Mike Binder to be funnier than me, and we all know that's not true. Jake is planning to have a "sit-down" with Eileen later in the day, and I can only hope it goes better than the last "sit-down" I recapped. Mickey now gets all worried that Sachiko might send Donna a letter, and then presents the following as the excuse he might use: "If she does send the letter, I tell Donna it's addressed to a former occupant and sent by a wacko Japanese masseuse who's been hiding in the woods since World War II and doesn't know the war is over." First of all, way to rub it in once again that I could have been recapping the far superior Band of Brothers instead of this crap. Secondly, it's...you know what? There is no secondly. It's a stupid line. I know it's a stupid line, you know it's a stupid line, and HBO Head of Programming Chris Albrecht knows it's a stupid line. And at this point, my coming up with a funny way of showing that it's a stupid line would be a stupid waste of time. So I'm not going to bother. Hell, even Jake knows it's a stupid line. "Think she'll buy it?" he asks. "Depends on how I sell it," replies Mickey.
Chris Albrecht: For the record, the only reason I even bought this piece of crap is that he told me the guy from Barcelona would be in it.
Aaron: Ooh, good flick.
Chris Albrecht: I'll say.
Aaron: So Binder doesn't have dirty pictures of you?
Chris Albrecht: Hey! There's nothing dirty about sheep. It's a perfectly natural biological response to long periods of isolation, and even if it weren't, I still don't know what you're talking about.
Aaron: Dude. Relax. I'm just glad you didn't say Ewoks.
Incidentally, there'll be no witty meta-reference to whatever plays over the "Written by: Mike Binder" credit this week. That's mainly because Mike Binder didn't write this week's episode. I don't really have anything else to add to that statement, but since the mere fact of it alone is the best thing to ever happen to this series, I felt it deserved it's own paragraph. Moving on.
At the office, Jake arrives, and is told by his secretary that "she's waiting for [him]." Jake, much like everyone else, assumes she's talking about Eileen, so he's shocked to find the Computer Conslutant sitting behind his desk. He quickly tries to shuffle her out the door, and so of course Eileen is waiting for them just outside. The ladies exchange bitter looks, and the secretary chimes in once more, adding, "Your wife is on line two." "You must think I'm a fucking idiot," snarks Eileen as she stomps away, leaving a hangdog looking Jake to stand alone in his office doorway. In the interests of giving credit in the only place where credit has ever been due, this scene made me giggle slightly the first time through. I suppose that could have something to do with the extra-strength allergy medicine I took just before airtime, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Cut to the Barnes's apartment, where Donna presents Mickey with a pager so she can always get in touch with him. He accepts it reluctantly, and then, as always, she starts in with the suspicious questioning. Mickey claims to have been at the movies (rather than having been getting nipple-staked, as it were), but Donna doesn't buy that for a second. First she asks if Missy was with them, and Mickey lies even more, saying that Missy was at the dentist with her boyfriend. Then the argument moves to the bedroom, where Donna asks what movie he saw. Mickey can't answer, which prompts her to assume that he went to a porno flick. Okay, I gotta admit that, while I hate the show, Donna is kind of cute. Sonya Walger, call your agent. Maybe Arli$$ is hiring. This scene also features Binder putting on an inexcusably crappy British accent and referring to himself as "a comical bloke." I don't know about you guys, but I'd like to give this freak a comical choke, and that's NOT a euphemism for masturbation.
Jeers. The boys mock Mickey for accepting the pager, with the NBF proclaiming that he would have told the wife that "it's a no-go on the pagerio." Uh-huh. He actually said that. Someone actually wrote that. "It's a no-go on the pagerio." I'm SO happy this is my last recapio. Anyway, Mickey worries (complete with unfunny visual aids) that Donna might make him wear a video camera on his head. Doug wonders where Mickey was that Donna couldn't find him, and Mickey confesses his massage habit to the boys. Doug considers that to be the equivalent of cheating, and delivers this near-Confucian proverb: "You go to the barbershop enough times, eventually you're gonna get a haircut." Yeah. I don't know what it means either. Of course, I'm pretty much bald, so I actually have been to the barbershop without getting a haircut. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask. And besides, there's so many better (or, depending on how you look at it, worse) things to make fun of in this scene. Like when Medium Pussy defines cheating as being only when "the skin bus takes a little drive into Tunatown." ["Ew." -- Sars] Or when Jake defines cyber-sex as being simply "keeping up with technology." Or perhaps even when MP says that anyone "fingering" Doug's wife should wash their hands immediately. ["AUGH!" -- Sars] That last one is so disgusting that I can't even bring myself to make the anthrax joke it's so desperately begging for.
The day, Mickey tries to set Missy straight on all the lies he's told. Missy, by the way, uses a pen with a fuzzy green flower on the end. She also has a boyfriend named "Gunnar." I guess this means she's already broken up with Matthew. Incidentally, if you got that joke, you've got really, really bad taste in music. Just so you know. Furthermore, she's wearing a skirt and sitting with her chair backwards, so that her legs are straddling the backrest. Oh yeah. This girl is a paragon of good breeding. And believe me, it only gets worse. When Mickey's new pager goes off, he can't figure out how to make it stop beeping (and we're supposed to believe this guy writes intellectual columns on religion and politics? Please). Missy runs in to help out, which of course involves her going down on her knees right in front of him, because simply taking the damn thing off his belt would be too easy. Since I already said everything I could bring myself to say about the image of Mike Binder getting head a few weeks ago, I'm just going to skip over the rest of this part. Suffice it to say that Memmet stops by, sees them, and immediately turns around to leave. I knew that guy was too smart for this show.
Not Jeers. Jake reports that Eileen is threatening to talk to his wife. Mickey claims to have a plan to fix the situation. Said plan involves Jake taking Eileen out to a fancy dinner, and then "very nicely fucking the living shit out her until she drops in exhaustion." Then the boys will arrive, pack her into a crate, and ship her off to the Arctic somewhere. Hey, wasn't that the plot of an X-Files episode a few years back? NBF points out that Eileen will be so thrilled to discover that she's now "the hottest chick on the tundra" that she'll never want to come back. Actually, I already know the hottest chick on the tundra, but I'm not telling you who she is. Let's just say she looks damn sexy in one of those hats with the ear-flaps. Anyway, Mickey wraps up the scene by saying that he could go on "busting [Jake's] balls" all night. That's roughly how I feel about this show, except for the fact that it's now 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, and if I go on all night, Sars will be very, very mad at me.
At some theater somewhere, Mickey is trying to retrieve a ticket stub for the movie he supposedly went to see. The lady working the little box office booth knows instantly that he cheated on his wife and just wants an alibi. She also insists that Donna will want to ask what the movie was about, even though Mickey is certain that she won't.
Can you guess what's ? Donna: "So what was the movie about?" Mickey babbles and lies even more, claiming that he only went to the theater because of writer's block, and left as soon as he got an idea. The idea? A column on how rising murder rates lead to rising insurance rates. He further claims that Memmet thought it was the best idea he ever heard and wants him to write it right away.
Can you guess what's ? Memmet: "Now that's a shit idea. Don't write it because I won't run it." Mickey tries to convince him to run the column, adding that he "ran it past Roger Ebert at the Sun-Times, and he got tears in his eyes. He actually had to sit down." Something tells me that's actually a pretty fair approximation of Roger Ebert's response to The Mind of the Married Man, and not in a good way either. I certainly know this show has left me with tears in my eyes more often than I'd care to admit. Sometimes they're tears of shame that I'm prostituting myself on the altar of Mike Binder just for the lousy few bucks these recaps pay each week. Other times, they're the tears you get from slicing an onion, as that's precisely the sort of odor this crap emanates. Memmet runs off some psychobabble and also some backstory, but since I'm not recapping this crap anymore and you all stopped watching three weeks ago, there's no point in my explaining it to you. Wow. This not caring is so liberating. I love it.
Chris Albrecht: Oh, come on. How can you not care? I mean, that's not TV. That's HBO.
Aaron: That's crap.
Chris Albrecht: That's beside the point.
Aaron: No, that is the point.
Chris Albrecht: Yeah, I know. But I gave it a green light, which makes it MY crap, so try and work with me, wouldya? Believe me when I say you don't want Gerald Levin breathing down your neck.
Aaron: Eh. Been there. Done that. Pitch him a few product placement opportunities and he turns into a total pussycat.
Chris Albrecht: Ooh, good call. You know anyone who sells disinfectant? This show is the perfect vehicle.
Jake's house. Eileen calls and asks to speak to his wife. He hangs up on her (Love it, love it, love it! The not caring, not what's actually happening onscreen). My old pal The Hyperkinetic Editor Who's Suffered A Relapse And Returned To His Twitchy, Twitchy Ways chops up a few shots of Jake sending the kids off to bed, and then someone starts knocking at the door. Can you guess who it is? Yep, that's right. It's Eileen The Oversexed Entertainment Editor. Jake pleads with her not to confront his wife, and she finally consents to meet him for coffee down the street instead of coming inside. My new (old) girlfriend Brigitte Bako looks both sad and suspicious as she watches her husband leave.
At the coffee shop, we get a scene that involves actual good taste and an almost realistic facsimile of human emotion. Jake and Eileen work out their differences, and both seem to grow up a little. Jake's basic rationale is that he had to end their affair because he could have fallen in love with her. Eileen just feels stupid for having fallen for him in the first place. I'm so confused and discombobulated by near-quality writing on display here that I'm almost at loss for how to recap it. Maybe I'll go read a few Six Feet Under recaps to get my groove back. No, wait. I don't care enough for that. Oh, well. Anyway, Eileen agrees not to tell Brigitte, and Jake finally manages to relax.
Speaking of relaxing, we now cut to the massage parlor. Hey! Sachiko is wearing a shirt. I guess she really was scratching up the lenses last week, because there's certainly no other reason for a show this misogynistic to cover up its only reliable source of naked boobies. Sachiko is still pushing him to have a "happy ending," and Binder jokingly consents to having "half a happy," which involves her just "rubbing it a little bit and making it think it's happy." Ew. Also, ow. You'd think Mike Binder of all people would be sensitive to the possibility of forever removing the hoary old "blue balls" excuse from millions of sex-starved teenagers trying to convince their girlfriends to go for the happy ending, but apparently that's just what he's done here. I hope you're happy, Mike. There's gonna be a lot of sad sixteen-year-olds after prom this year, and it's all your fault. Mickey and his flabby, pale stomach fat continue to use these sessions with Sachiko as free therapy, as he runs through the list of lies he's told his wife. He also refers to his life as "a treadmill of bullshit." No argument here. We also discover that Sachiko knew who he was all along, mainly because (and start rolling your eyes here) she's a big fan of his column. Sachiko consoles him further as she gently lays him down on his back. Just as she's about to reach under the towel that I'm pretending is made out of lead and titanium rather than face the fact that it's the only thing between me and little (and I do mean little) Mickey ["Bleeecccch" -- Sars], his pager goes off.
Chris Albrecht: So, yeah. Ew. If I'd have seen this scene, I never would have let him on the air.
Aaron: Welcome to my world, my friend.
Chris Albrecht: And she does that "happy ending" bit every week?
Aaron: Yep. It's a running gag. As in "gag me and make me want to vomit," that is.
Chris Albrecht: Wow. I had no idea. I guess I should watch my own network more often, huh?
Aaron: Eh. I don't really blame you. I've been watching every week, and it keeps making my balls hurt.
[Long pause.]
Chris Albrecht: Stop looking at me like that.
Aaron: We're on the phone.
Chris Albrecht: Whatever. Just stop. It's not gonna happen.
Aaron: Why not? It's a perfectly natural biological response to long periods of isolation.
In the room, we see Mickey (in a kimono. Ew.) along with about a dozen of the women who work the massage parlor. He returns Donna's call from a pay phone on the wall, and, of course, all the ladies are giggling and making noise in the background. Then again, if you were faced with the image of Mike Binder in a kimono, you'd be giggling too. Mickey goes through an excruciatingly unfunny bit where he lies to everyone about who called him, and then comes back to apologize for it. Whatever. Not caring. Buh-bye.
Back at the Binder Boudoir, Mickey comes home to find Donna waiting for him. In typical male ego-gratification fashion, Donna apologizes to him for making him wear the pager, because it impinges upon his God-given right to be cheating, sanctimonious prick. Mickey, perhaps fearing assassination at the hands of rabid (or even moderate) feminists (put the gun down, Sars), reverses himself and agrees to wear the pager from now on. Fade to black.
And so it ends. But since you all know I'm fond of finding circularity in my recaps, I'll just now refer you back to my original opening paragraph. Remember? When I was searching for a metaphor that would best describe this show? Well, I've just found it. This week's episode (not to mention MBTV's coverage of the show) culminates in a three-minute credits montage of Mike Binder taking a crap. And as he sits there on the porcelain throne, gleefully reenacting all the ways in which he has taken a dump directly on HBO, MBTV, Sunday nights, and my hopes for the future of television, all I can say is "Get out. Now." And don't EVER come back. And if at this point I have any credibility left with the people at HBO (sorry about that sheep crack, by the way), I beg of you to do the right thing and cancel this show. It's beneath you. It's beneath the fucking UPN, for God's sake. It's an embarrassment to the people who have produced some of the finest shows TV has to offer. Not only that, the ratings suck, you've already had to move it so it doesn't kill Curb Your Enthusiasm, and if I were an Emmy voter, I'd pick West Wing over the Sopranos just so I wouldn't have to validate a network that would air something like this. And don't think I'm the only one who thinks that way, either. I mean, there's a reason Buffy never gets nominated, and it ain't the lack of porn. So, Chris, if you're out there, pull the plug. You owe me.
And speaking of me, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who read these recaps just because I was writing them. Which, basically, is all of you. And while that's still only about five people (hi Jessica, Linda, Sher, Pontoon, Fluke Girl, and all the rest!) (Sars gets paid to read them, so she doesn't count ["Ack" -- Sars]), your sacrifice is still duly noted and much appreciated. And fear not, I'll be back. Six Feet Under starts up again in March, but between now and then, I do plan to keep busy. Maybe that means Memento, or maybe I'll get ambitious and tackle a few of those shows you've been begging for on the forums. I figure I can knock off a few seasons each of Picket Fences, Farscape, Law & Order, and Knight Rider while the winter snows keeps me from venturing outside (yeah, right. This from a guy who takes the full seven days to write one seven-page recap). Until then, however, always remember to rhyme when possible, to always be alliterative, and don't ever, EVER, agree to recap a show starring Mike Binder. No matter how attractive the thirty-minute format might be.
Buh-bye, Binder. Don't let the door hit you in your enormous ego on the way out.
Aaron: So, listen, Chris, about that pilot script I sent you...Chris? Hello? Hello?
Operator: If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.
Aaron: Asshole. Heh. Thank God for *69.
[Ring.]
Chris Albrecht: Hello?
Aaron: Yes, hi. Do you by any chance have Prince Albert in a can?