Since I have nothing to do for the next two days but wait for the plane to come and take me to Austin for JournalCon, I�ve been occupying my time (as per usual) on the forums at Television Without Pity. There are threads for essentially every television series ever, so even if all you watch is Blue's Clues, you can talk about it with someone.
My two favorite new shows to watch and dissect this season are The OC and Joan of Arcadia. The former has been on hiatus for baseball since last month and the latter only airs one time a week, so I've had to slum it in the Regis and Kelly thread, the Hope & Faith thread, and any of the various Law & Order threads. Oh yeah, and the Passions thread.
I started watching Passions during the last days of high school. Heather at Dancing Brave had been babbling all this nonsense about a shed, and I was about to have loads of free time on my hands, so it was only natural that I'd check out my first-ever soap. Of course, by the time I started watching, the shed was all but a thing of the past (they've mentioned it maybe four times since May), but I found other plotlines and characters with which to entertain myself.
The kids in the TWoP Passions thread have been listing the ten reasons they each watch the show, so I figured I'd do the same on a grander scale, because I am lame and the best I can do for an entry is justifying my soap-watching habits. Here they are, in no particular order. (If you follow a link to anything at Dancing Brave, you'll probably have to scroll down to get to the relevant material.)
1. The shed
Let us never forget where we have come from. TC has this unexplained shed in his backyard. Every now and again someone will happen upon the shed and/or discover its contents, leading to lots of angsty shed-related chanting and muttering. "Oh my God! If so-and-so sees what's in the shed, the universe will implode upon itself!"
2. Fox Crane
Justin Hartley plays the delectable Fox, a 'playboy' who is careless with the women he loves, if his trash-talking, Theresa-loving brother is to be believed. Fox's favorite activities include trying to get Whitney to fall in love with him and walking around shirtless and/or pantsless. Mmm, Fox's chest.
3. Beth and Charlie
They're daytime TV's sort of forgotten lesbian couple, if only because Beth doesn't really like girls. She's just using Charlie for her own selfish purposes. Granted, it's wrong to lead people on, especially in romantic contexts, but it's also wrong to lie about having been married before and whether one is sleeping with one's sister-in-law, so Beth pretending to want Charlie for her body is probably the least of the show's sins.
4. Sheridan's summer in the pit
Like I said, I'm relatively new to the show, so I don't know a whole lot about Sheridan. I know that she's an heiress and I know that I think she's a spoiled bitch, which is why I giggled gleefully all summer long as she languished in a pit in Beth's mom's basement. See, what happened was this. Luis (whom Beth loves; this is the guy who's banging his sister-in-law, Sheridan) knocked Sheridan up. Beth, in a desperate and pathetic attempt to curry Luis�s favor, kidnapped Sheridan and plotted to steal her baby, claiming that Luis also got her pregnant. Sheridan was held hostage in a conveniently located pit, where she was alternately taunted and ignored. Luis, meanwhile, launched a full-scale search of Harmony (did I mention all this shizzy goes down in Harmony?) but failed to find Sheridan in the pit.
5. Mrs. Wallace and Precious
Beth's mother, Edna Wallace (played in heavy, heavy makeup by the completely awesome Kathleen Noone), is generally geriatric. She requires the assistance of a helper orangutan named Precious, who also fantasizes about Luis (which I don't understand. Why are all these women after such a moron? He�s not that hot.) The antics of an orangutan are entertaining on a normal day, but when said orangutan is a regular character on a daytime serial, those antics are even more appreciated. Monkeys (and related species) are funny stuff.
6. The theme song
Crash and I can � and do � sing this song for hours. In the beginning, we had to tape it off the broadcast, but I finally tracked down an MP3, which obviously has better sound quality. The lyrics are just so happy and peppy. Jane French is the girl behind the voice, and I'm not sure that she's done anything else that's worthy of a mention, but hey, nothing wrong with being a one-hit wonder. I mean, she has a solo album out, but who doesn't?
7. The legal issues
I like feeling smart, like all those sleepless nights of government team and the countless hours I've logged in front of Law & Order are actually somehow useful, even if only in picking apart the bizarre procedures of the Harmony police department. This is a city where the police can arbitrarily decide to search every single house WITHOUT ANY WARRANT because Sheridan might be trapped inside. As any lawyer worth his salt will tell you, just because this suspicion ended up being correct doesn't mean that the search will be admissible or legal. And the same goes for this blanket DNA testing off all Harmony newborns. These are the kind of things that can get fictional police departments sued, and I know that because I scored a 3 on the AP Government test.
8. Cat fight!
Sometimes this show can just drag along for weeks without any action. This show is like 24, except it moves slower than in real time. Every second we see actually took place over half a second so that we actually see forty-eight hours of any given day. Thus, when there are weeks like this one in which Theresa and Gwen are fighting tooth and nail over Ethan (yes, again), the knock-down, drag-out, bitch slapping, hair pulling, strangling extravaganza (although Theresa is refusing to put up much of a fight) runs for a good seven or eight minutes. You just don't have time for this level of detail in prime time.
9. College life suits soap viewing habits
As a freshman, there is at least an hour a day where I have about nothing to do. I can squeeze Passions in. Plus, it's like a rule that you have to have a soap in college, isn't it? When the semester started, I was rushing back to the dorms to watch the show during the broadcast, but then I got smart and started taping it, the better to fast-forward through the more tedious or uninteresting plots. Plus, on any given day the last fifteen minutes of the previous episode are the first fifteen minutes of today's episode. When you account for this and commercials, there's really only about twenty minutes of show, which means you can watch it all really quickly.
10. The writing
Come on, you guys. Worst dialogue ever. Just ask Heather, who got me into this whole mess in the first place.
Someone got here by searching for: First time lovers Reading: Finished The Accidental Tourist. I was very pleased with the ending. Listening to: The growling of my stomach. Watching: Arsenic and Old Lace. It's a classic. Craving: A Philly cheesesteak. I know you did not just write 1200 words about a soap. Yeah, well.
