As this show starts, Will and Chris are discussing the spelling irregularities in the names of Atlanta Braves outfielder Andruw Jones and sports commentator Cris Collinsworth, and Kim gets in on the act so it goes on for a little while, and this would be annoying except news outlets do sometimes fret over details like that -- as well they should, I suppose, although in the case of one desker at work the other day who spent the better part of half an hour trying to determine whether the N in "Guns 'N Roses" is capitalized, sometimes energy can be better spent in more productive areas, like, say, laying out pages that don't have any stories mentioning Guns 'N Roses.
Elliot wonders aloud why there's a twenty-pound frozen turkey up on the light grid. Sure, it's the tubby guy who sniffs out the food up there. Dan, walking from the set to the control room, repeats Elliot's question to Dana. She says it's twenty-four pounds, like maybe she could have actually answered the damn question. So of course Elliot comes in and now wants to know why there's a twenty-four-pound turkey on the light grid. Dana says she's thawing it out. "Anybody got a problem with that?" she asks, a little snippily, if you ask me. All the Tertiary Characters say it's fine, and Elliot just kind of shrugs and walks away, knowing full well that if anyone else had put a turkey up there, Dana would have been pretty pissed.
So Dana and Natalie starts speaking in hushed tones, because Dana will explain to her buddy Natalie what she's doing but doesn't have the courtesy to tell her staff. Apparently Dana's holding a dry run for Thanksgiving, which is a week away. Her family is coming to visit, and Dana has never cooked for eighteen people before. Kim starts yammering on about how Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks. Well, there's that little mystery solved; I have always wondered exactly what that cryptic word "Thanksgiving" was supposed to express. Then Kim starts talking about some sort of "warm embrace," and I perked up, but we go back to Natalie, who tells Dana, "You don't want to take any crap from your mother," which Dana confirms. Natalie says, "I think you're doing the right thing," which didn't really even make much sense. Then Dana says, "I need to see how long it takes to thaw," which makes even less sense, and I hope this episode's dialogue starts to show some sort of continuity soon instead of just a bunch of non sequiturs all randomly slapped together. Not to mention, I'm no Martha Stewart, but I know how to cook, and unless Dana has a light grid in her kitchen, I don't see how this experiment is going to give her an accurate idea of how long it takes a damn turkey to thaw. I swear, it's getting harder and harder for me to even make it through the happy-fun two-minute opening sequence of this show.
Thespis
“ Then she falls down. I guess by 'strange show,' Jeremy meant 'annoying show.' ”
At the desk, Dan asks Casey expectantly if he knows what day it is. It's Monday, November 23rd, Casey reveals, when Dan clearly has something a little more significant in mind. Casey tries to think and comes up with Boston College upsetting Notre Dame (and I don't know what he means, but November 23 was when Doug Flutie threw his famous Hail Mary pass with no time remaining to beat the Miami Hurricanes in the Orange Bowl), Wayne Gretzky scoring his 500th goal (when, as I'm sure everyone knows, it was actually his 600th goal he scored on November 23rd), and then a bunch of guesses about Alberto Salazar winning the New York Marathon, and I have no idea if any of those are true but I'm not going to look it up. Dan's getting more and more pissed off by degrees. Then Dan gets all sulky and tells Casey to forget about it, while Casey tries to cajole Dan into telling him.
In the control room, Kim is smiling at the married couple bickering at the desk when Isaac gives her his daughter's phone number in San Francisco and asks her to keep trying it. Dana asks him if there's a problem, and he says there isn't, but "she's due in ten days" and his wife, Esther, flew out there to be with her, and she should have landed by now but Isaac hasn't heard from either of them. Dana tells everyone to have a good show, then says, "Esther and Cathy are fine, you're going to be a grandfather in ten days, so try not to make everybody crazy." He seems a little worried and reveals that he and Esther had a fight this morning before she left, but he won't say what about.
Casey asks Jeremy what happened on November 23rd. Confidently, Jeremy declaims thusly: "It was on this day in 534 B.C. that Thespis stepped out onto the stage at the Theatre Dionysus during a choral song and dance and became the first man to speak words as an actor in a play." By this time everyone has turned to look at him. Casey says to Dan, "Tell me I was supposed to know that," but Dan, without any humour at all, says he doesn't want to talk about it.
The show intro starts. "Thespis?" says Dana. "The first actor," says Jeremy. "Now a mischievous ghost, he likes to wreak havoc on performances of any kind. I'd brace yourself for a strange show tonight." Dana gets up and says that there will not be a strange show, that it's "locked up tight as a drum"; Jeremy warns her that "Thespis loves a challenge" but eventually gives up trying to convince Dana, even though she does start to look a little apprehensive. Then she falls down. I guess by "strange show," Jeremy meant "annoying show." Dana clomps to her feet and wants to know why she wasn't briefed on this Thespis thing before. And then she decides that as long as they get through the first half-hour, they'll be fine, because that's normally when things go wrong. Which was sort of strange in the sense that she now seems to be buying into this mischievous-ghost thing, but she's setting the parameters of his havoc-wreaking? Anyway, she's determined not to be defeated. Jeremy chuckles at the "mortals" of Sports Night.