Little House: "Little Women"

So the Most Awesome Thing I saw on TV last week was an episode of Little House on the Prairie which, you know how on The Simpsons, the first few minutes of the episode are some random thing that has nothing to do with the main storyline? This was kind of like that because Willie Oleson and his two henchmen wouldn't let Mary and Laura and a redshirt named Ginny down the road to school because Willie was pretending to be Robin Hood. So then Laura beat Willie's ass (which is even funnier because in real life, Laura and Willie are brother and sister along with Darlene from Roseanne) and Miss Beadle told them not to act out the books they read in school unless everyone consents to play their roles ahead of time which is some weird Antioch College bullshit, so Mary the brown-noser suggests that they all do plays of their favorite books like how many books did they read per year in their one-room schoolhouse and how did they afford all the books anyway when Laura and Mary couldn't even afford a penny for a pad of paper on the first day of school?

So then Laura and Ginny and Mary are trying to decide what book to act out and Ginny suggests Little Women and Nellie is all lurking nearby because no one wants her to be in their group and Nellie jumps in and basically takes over the whole thing and Mary is about to tell her to bug off but Ginny is entranced by the idea of seeing Nellie's parlor (is that a double entendre?) so they agree to do it. So Harriet writes up the play and makes Nellie the star even though she's playing Meg who wasn't even the main character in the book, but that becomes clear later.

Meanwhile, Ginny's mom is a bitter widow who won't let any men come calling even though there's one dude, Mr. Wakefield, who's also a widower and trying to get up on Ginny's mom by hanging out with Ginny and calling her young 'un and whatnot but Ginny's mom is not having it. So Ginny begs her mom to come see their play at school but Ginny's mom claims she can't come because she doesn't have a nice enough dress like anyone cares but Harriet Oleson.

So then Harriet orders a wig for Nellie to wear during the play, and it costs about a million dollars (or, in pioneer dollars, $7) and Ginny is overly interested in the fact that the wig man buys hair and if you didn't see this plot twist coming a mile away, I don't know what to tell you. Also there's a scene where Laura steals Ma's mop and puts it on her head since they can't afford a wig and Ma and Pa totally laugh at her because she apparently caught Carrie's slowness that day, because seriously, a mop? So the day of the play, Ginny gives her mom a new dress and Ginny's mom thinks that Mr. Wakefield paid for it and refuses it like nice parenting, Ginny's mom, and way to not even notice that Ginny refuses to take off her bonnet. So Ginny's all crying and Mr. Wakefield comes upon her (doesn't he work?) and promises to get Ginny's mom to come to the play.

At the schoolhouse, Willie's group has to go first, and they're supposed to do Tom Sawyer but Willie couldn't steal any tobacco from the Mercantile to give his group members so they bail on him and dump paint on his head. Waa waaaaaaaaaah. Also, Willie comes into the school and totally drips paint all over the place and I don't know who had to clean that shit up but it better not have been Miss Beadle. Ginny's mom and Mr. Wakefield slip in after that. So then Laura's group goes and of course they are doing the scene where it's revealed that Jo sold her hair to help pay for Marmee's trip to see their father in the hospital and Laura was Beth and Mary was Marmee and Nellie was Meg and Ginny was Jo and no one was Amy so they couldn't even include the one good line where Amy tells Jo that her hair was her one beauty. So Ginny takes off her bonnet and she sold her hair to the wig man, surprise! And Mary and Laura are all breaking character and questioning her about her hair like nice professionalism there, Ingalls girls. And Nellie's the only one who's trying to keep the scene going but they tell her to stuff it and force Ginny to admit in front of the whole town that she sold her hair to pay for her mother's dress, like how is that good manners? Couldn't they have had that conversation privately? So Ginny's mother is all humbled and agrees to date Mr. Wakefield finally and everyone in town approves except probably Harriet who shelled out for Nellie's really expensive wig for no good reason and it doesn't even matter because Ginny is never seen nor heard from again so maybe Mr. Wakefield killed the whole family in their sleep or something. But it was awesome.

Little House: "The Love of Johnny Johnson"

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was an early episode of Little House where a new boy named Johnny Johnson moved to Walnut Grove. He was ugly and had a head like Frankenstein, so I immediately assumed that he was a nephew or illegitimate son of Doc Baker, but he wasn't. He also wore the tightest overalls this side of Studio 54 or some roller boogie movie. Anyway, even though he was super-old, Laura fell in love with him and started plotting to get him to fall in love with her, and for a second I thought it was going to be the episode where Laura puts apples down the front of her dresses to simulate big boobs and then goes up to write on the board and one of the apples falls out, which was awesome, but it wasn't that episode. Instead, Laura just stared at Johnny Johnson like a creepy stalker, but Johnny had the hots for Mary, which makes sense, because Mary was a hottie back in the day, even if she was kind of a prude and no fun besides. So Laura asked Ma how she snared Pa, and Ma spun some bullshit about kindred spirits, and so Laura asked Johnny on a picnic, and he agreed to go, but then spent the whole time pumping Laura for information about Mary. So Laura got pissed at Mary, because it was somehow Mary's fault that Johnny didn't want to date someone like seven years younger than he was who hadn't hit puberty yet. So Johnny carves Mary's initials into the Sweetheart Tree, and Laura gets pissed at Mary yet again, and Mary gets pissed at Johnny because she doesn't even like him, and Pa gets pissed at Johnny for daring to be sweet on one of his girls, and Ma gets pissed at Pa for being such a buffoon, and Carrie pisses herself, because she's kind of slow, and in the end Pa has a gentle talk with Laura down by the creek and spins another bullshit story about how Ma was an awkward little girl who blossomed into a beautiful woman and he fell in love with her when what he should have said was that Laura shouldn't waste her time with boys who just aren't into her, but then we would have never had the Manly saga, so I guess it all worked out in the end. And it was awesome.

Maximum Exposure

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. You know how sometimes you're just flipping through the channels, and you find one of those home video shows, and you know it's going to be really dumb and/or anticlimactic, but you watch it anyway, because there's nothing else on? So that's sort of how I came to watch Maximum Exposure last week. Apparently, each episode has a theme, and the theme of this episode was drunk people. Given the show I recap, I figured there wouldn't be anything on there I haven't seen, and I was mostly right, but there were a few clips that were awesome. In the first, a really drunk guy gets pursued by a police car – while driving a lawnmower. And he fell off the lawnmower in super-slow motion, and the cops chasing him were just giggling their asses off. So that was awesome. And the second clip was a drunk guy who had been pulled over and he was wearing cutoff jean shorts and no shirt with work boots, just to give you the visual, and the cop must have asked him to perform some part of the sobriety test, and drunk guy picked up a GIANT orange traffic cone, and held it up like a megaphone and just yelled at the cop, "NOOOO!" Come on. Picture a guy using a giant traffic cone as a megaphone. It's funny. But it gets better. The next guy in a similar situation took a giant traffic cone and put it on his head. So it came down to, like, his elbows. And then he started doing the field sobriety test as though he totally didn't have a cone on his head. So he was touching his nose and walking a straight line. With a giant cone on his head. So he was really just touching the cone where his nose would be. And he concluded his performance by doing a little dance, and I wish I could demonstrate the dance for you, but just imagine someone who can't lift his arms up much due to having a giant traffic cone on his head shaking his arms about and kind of doing the Twist. Because it was awesome.

Little House: "Goodbye Mrs. Wilder"

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was one of the later episodes of Little House, after Laura got married but before James (Jason Bateman! My crush begins!) and Cassandra showed up. So anyway, Laura was teaching the students about something stupid, and none of them knew the answers, and she was, like, the worst teacher ever with her leading questions and inappropriate anger, and of course Harriet Olson picked that moment to show up because some guy from the state board was coming, and his visit would determine whether the school got additional funding. So Harriet called a meeting of the school board (Pa, of course, Doc Baker, the Olsons, and two randoms) and argued that they needed to upgrade the curriculum and include French and art appreciation and Pa was like, "Why do farmers need art appreciation?" which, way to encourage education just for bettering yourself, Pa, and Laura said she couldn't really teach those subjects because apparently she was incapable of having the Pony Express or whatever deliver a book on those subjects, reading it herself, and then teaching the students, so of course Harriet stepped up and said she'd do it and then Laura got pissy and quit on the spot, and I really thought this was going to be the episode that Laura revealed she was pregnant because she was being such a bitch. And then I remembered that Laura's pregnancy was revealed in the same episode where Ma thought she was pregnant, but it was really "the change," thus leading to (on my initial viewing at like eight years old) an awkward conversation between me and my mother about the facts of life, and particularly, menopause. So Harriet took over the school and made the kids dress in uniforms, and Albert outsmarted her by putting coal dust on his ankles to simulate black stockings, like, wouldn't the fact that his leg hair was totally poking out be her first clue? Meanwhile, Laura was using her newfound free time to cook elaborate meals for Almanzo, who kind of hated them, but tried to be nice, but Bitch On Wheels Laura must have been taking lessons from Old School Nellie because she got pissy and flounced out, and Almanzo had a hilarious callback joke to the cinnamon chicken incident. And then Albert found out that some other kids were planning to screw up Harriet's big day in front of the guy from the state, so he ratted them out to Laura and she went into the school and took over to help Harriet out, and they got their funding, and no one cared about French anymore, or art, because they were just poor farmers who were never going to leave the town limits, or have to talk to anyone from Canada or whatever, and it was awesome.

Mother Knows Best

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw On TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a television movie called Mother Knows Best. It starred Maggie Seaver from Growing Pains as the mother of Emily Valentine from 90210. And Maggie was all rich and snooty and stuff and was always bugging Emily to find a good man and get married. And Emily worked as a nurse so Maggie was always telling her to marry a doctor, although it does seem kind of weird that the family was so rich and lived in a mansion and then Emily worked as a hospital nurse. It just doesn't seem like a profession that someone from a wealthy family would have, but maybe she had a calling or something. So anyway, Maggie totally responds to a personal ad in the paper and sets Emily up on a date with Jake from Melrose Place, and of course Emily is all annoyed at first but she ends up falling in love with Jake, who is a mechanic who owns his own shop. And Maggie is all pissed off because she doesn't want her daughter dating some dude who works with his hands, even though Maggie set it up in the first place. So Maggie does various things to try to get Emily to break it off with Jake, but they don't work, and Emily and Jake end up getting married and having a baby and cutting all ties with Maggie, who gets really nutty and decides to hire a hit man to kill Jake. And the whole time all this is going on, there's this really bloopy music in the background, like it's a slapstick comedy or something, and I think they were going for a To Die For vibe, but it just didn't work out. So the hit man Maggie hires turns out to be a cop, but they need to pretend Jake was killed so that Maggie will pay the money and they can arrest her, so Emily has to call Jake's mom and say that Jake is dead to keep the charade going, which seemed kind of mean and unnecessary. But then Maggie gets arrested and Jake and Emily live happily ever after and it was all based on a true story, and it was awesome.

90210

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was every episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 on Soapnet. I watch it every weekday! Right now, they are in the episodes just before Brenda leaves the show. So Andrea is totally having a premature baby, which I think they had to do because they didn't make Andrea pregnant on the show until Gabrielle Carteris was about twenty months pregnant already, so they had to have Andrea give birth prematurely or else it would be really obvious. And my favorite thing to do after every one of Andrea's lines is yell, "Because you're forty!" I can't believe she got hired for the role. And then Steve was dating crazy Laura, the actress who tried to commit suicide in the theater. And Brandon and Kelly are totally cuckolding Dylan, and Dylan's fake stepmother is scamming him, and every day Brenda has a different hairstyle and hair color, and David is singing with Babyface and making out with Ariel in a limo, and Steve is wearing hightops everywhere in case a basketball game breaks out, and Nat is whatever and Jim and Cindy are whatever and I know that pretty soon, Val shows up and I can't wait for her first episode where you think she's all nice and sweet and then at the end she SMOKES POT! I was so scandalized the first time I saw that episode. And it was awesome.

Talk to Me

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw On TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a television movie called Talk to Me starring Ms. Yasmine Bleeth as a naïve talk-show producer who joins the production staff for a Jerry Springer-esque talk show. The Jerry Springer character was played, of course, by Peter Scolari. Because, why not? So anyway, Ms. Yasmine Bleeth got taken under the wing of the senior producer, played by Veronica Hamel with an awesome '80s permed bob. I totally had that hairstyle in eighth grade! So Ms. Yasmine Bleeth needs to come up with her own episode idea, and she decides to follow up on a previous episode they had done on prostitutes, and investigate the prostitutes' families and find out how they became whores and shit. So the one whore she decides to investigate further is played by Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley fame! And she's all addicted to heroin and has a scuzzy pimp boyfriend and her mom and grandmother want her to get help, but she won't. And Ms. Yasmine Bleeth keeps compromising her principles more and more and finally Jenny Lewis commits suicide and Ms. Yasmine Bleeth blames herself, which she should because it was totally her fault. So Ms. Yasmine Bleeth quits the show, and in the end, she finds out that Peter Scolari has already contacted the mother and grandmother to do a follow-up show, and Ms. Yasmine Bleeth is all disenchanted, like, you work in the entertainment industry, so just give up your ideals and youthful enthusiasm and start smoking a pack a day and become cynical like the rest of us. Which is awesome.