Mega Marathon: Tonight, on a Very Special Episode . . .

Parental guidance suggested.  Some mock, some play it painfully straight.

• American Dad, "The American Dad After School Special"

Steve starts dating an overweight girl, leading Stan's own weight issues to spiral out of control.

• Clone High, "ADD: The Last 'D' Is For Disorder"

The school is having its annual Awareness Fair, but the festivities are tainted when word gets out that Gandhi has ADD and everybody shuns him.  Will Abe turn his back on his best friend in his hour of need?

• Daria, "My Night at Daria's"

Daria and her boyfriend consider taking their relationship to "the next level."

• Dinosaurs, "Changing Nature"

It's the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs when WESAYSO Corporation builds a wax fruit factory on the mating grounds of a vine-eating beetle.

• Drawn Together, "A Very Special Drawn Together After School Special"

The housemates agree to role play so Xander can practice coming out to his parents, but things quickly devolve into an after school special (starring Meredith Baxter Birney).

• The Facts of Life, "Runaway"

Tootie is mad that the older girls won't include her on a trip to see a Broadway play.  But when Tootie follows them into the city, she gets a glimpse of the dark side of the city when she meets a teen prostitute.

• Family Guy, "Brian Wallows and Peter Swallows"

Brian bonds with an elderly singer during his court-ordered community service, while Peter takes care of baby birds that have taken residence in his beard.

• Flight of the Conchords, "Drive By"

Bret and Jemaine are shocked when a fruit vendor refuses to sell to them because they are New Zealanders.

• King of the Hill, "Leanne's Saga"

Luanne's mother is released from prison and moves in with the Hills.  She starts dating Bill, but quickly reverts to her drunken and abusive ways.

• South Park, "Kenny Dies"

Kenny is diagnosed with a fatal illness, leading Cartman to lobby for stem cell research.

Missed Connections: Thanks

I have a quirky habit of watching TV shows that make me angry.  That used to be fulfilled through 7th Heaven reruns, but with them no longer in syndication, that spot in my viewing schedule is now filled through 19 Kids and Counting on TLC.  This show centers around JimBob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children. ("And yes, I delivered every one of them!" Michelle asserts, which makes it sound like she caught the babies instead of giving birth to them.)  They have been catching flack for saying they would "welcome" a 20th baby, even though #19 was born prematurely and is surely not through with her health problems yet.  They have been lampooned on many websites, including the dead-on parody, Kid Farm.

The issues I have with their lifestyle go much deeper.  They are connected with organizations like Vision Forum and ATI.  These groups go beyond fundamentalist Christianity--they ascribe to a rigidly patriarchal lifestyle and believe in Dominionism, the belief that Christians have a G-d-given right to rule over non-Christians.  Through increasing political power and increasing their numbers "the old fashioned way" (hence the anti-contraception stance), they hope to turn America into a theocracy where only Christian male heads of households vote, women remain in the home and perpetually pregnant, children learn everything through homeschooling and apprenticeships, and people can be executed for anything from homosexuality to taking G-d's name in vain.  The implications of the Duggars' belief system is frightening, and TLC hides it in favor of showing how they "do things just a little bit different."

They don't want to go back to the 1950's.  They want to go back to the 1650's.  This brings me to a short-lived TV show that I discovered completely by accident.

In August, the AV Club had a news story entitled, "NBC Developing New Pilgrim-based Workplace Sitcom."  The article explained that the sitcom was going to be about people working at a Plymouth Colony-type "living museum" akin to Colonial Williamsburg.  (Or, for Midwesterners from places where history doesn't go so far back, Old World Wisconsin or Naper Village.)  In the commentaries, several people were disappointed that the sitcom wasn't going to actually be about pilgrims.  Then someone responded that this has already been done, and it didn't go over well.

Thanks was about Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony trying to survive their first year.  It centered on shopkeeper James Winthrop (Tim Dutton) and his family, who were likely named after John Winthrop, the Puritan leader who said that the new colony should be like "a city on a hill."  The show premiered on CBS on August 2, 1999 and was promptly cancelled after six episodes.  The few viewers who were able to watch the show in its entirety remember it fondly, but the reviews were generally mixed.  One positive review is from Sarah Vowell, who wrote about the show for Salon.com and spoke about it on This American Life.

The show was a satire poking fun at the people who brought us things like the "Protestant work ethic" and our stringent morals.  Plots included one where the town elders decide whether to allow tobacco in the colony and another in which James shocks the town by building a private bedroom for Granny Winthrop (Cloris Leachman).  The style of dialogue could be a bit on-the-nose at times.  Take, for example, the episode where daughter Elizabeth goes to a dance and James explodes upon seeing her dancing with a handsome French fur trapper.  Elizabeth shoots back at her father, "You people are so judgmental!"  James responds, "Well, of course we are!  We're Puritans!"  That humor is a style I often like, at least on paper, which is the only way I can experience the dialogue for now.  For example, I like a line when Elizabeth persuades her family not to move back to England by imploring, "Think of all the times we've had here together as a family--building our own house, plowing our own fields, watching the misty sunrise over the verdant landscape of our new world."  Then there was the time that James tried to lift the town's spirits:


"I have decided in hopes if lifting the spirits of the community to hold a gathering in the shop tonight.  Everyone's invited.  There will be music and, well, not dancing, because that's a sin.  It will be a, well, not a party, because that would be wrong.  But I assure you we'll have lots of, well, not fun, because that's against everything we stand for."


I was sold on the show by that dialogue and wished I could see more, but by now it's pretty obvious why this was cancelled.  Smart satire is a tough sell on the average audience, and an even tougher sell in period costume.  Hollywood writer Ken Levine addressed this in a guest blog post written by Phoef Sutton, the producer of Thanks, on why period comedies are mostly doomed to fail. You are probably thinking, "What about Happy Days and Hogan's Heroes?  They were popular!"  They don't count because they were based in the recent past, and thus played on the audience's sense of nostalgia.

Sutton starts by giving a list of some historical sitcoms.  The longest running US one was F Troop, which managed to survive two seasons by entirely avoiding history.  Seriously, I remember seeing a clip where two cavalry men dress up as Sonny and Cher.  Others he mentioned were Mel Brooks' Robin Hood sitcom When Things Were Rotten (if you've seen Robin Hood: Men In Tights, you've seen the best material from the show) and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer (about a slave working in the White House for Abe Lincoln, which Spike Lee would later comment on in the form of the movie Bamboozled). He then goes on to talk about Thanks, the first problem of which was that anybody flipping past the show would assume it was a scene from a sketch comedy show.  The second problem was that a historical sitcom needs to take place in an era that resonates with the contemporary time period.  Sutton felt people could identify with a show about Puritans--in 1999, the nation still remembered the conservative finger-pointing of the Clinton sex scandal and George W. was gearing up for his 2000 election run with Jesus as his homeboy.  The country didn't think so and the show was promptly cancelled.

I'm sure the show would last about as long if it premiered today, and possibly last a shorter length of time.  It's a shame, because I think we need it now.  As Vowell said in her review, "I'm tempted to say that a satire on Puritan morality is entirely appropriate at this moment in American history. But a satire on Puritan morality is appropriate at every moment in American history."  Ten years later, we have large-family reality shows with covert Dominionist agendas and Glenn Beck rallies filled with Tea Partiers screaming that they "want their country back."  (As Bill Mahr says, I want my country forward!)  We have a growing number of people who think life will be better if we return to America's "roots."  More than ever, we need shows that are willing to examine the true extent of these beliefs.  Maybe we won't end up with ten-year-old girls being put in the stocks for suggesting that a dentist (gasp!) wash his hands because of "tiny creatures that might be living in people's mouths."  (The dentist's reply:  "Sounds like black magic to me!")  Still, an America where fundamentalist Christian church is synonymous with state, where freedoms of all kind are restricted, and where women are treated as property is not an America I want to live in--and if people knew what it would REALLY be like, I'd doubt anybody else would want to live there either.