About two years ago, my friend and SCE co-writer Aaron Rosenberg made the following suggestion for watching TV:
So, has anyone else tried watching the season’s new shows without the sound, and inventing their own dialogue? Jen and I did this last night, and discovered that Everwood is far more twisted–and more interesting–than we’d ever suspected.
For those of you who missed it, last night’s episode involved the Treat William doctor-character (we didn’t catch the names–the sound was off) and his son taking a wayward deer back to the mountains. The dad’s real motivation for this was that he planned on pushing his son off a cliff and then blaming it on wild animals because he was fed up with the boy’s constant moping. The boy, typically, was too self-absorbed in angst to notice.
Meanwhile, the doctor’s daughter was left with an older woman who turned out to be the town’s main dealer–did we mention that Everwood is the site of the country’s largest crystal meth plant? Well, now you know why everyone on the show is always walking around with dopey smiles on their faces. The woman answers the little girl’s suprisingly insightful questions about drug processing at first, but then she starts to get suspicious. Lo and behold! it turns out that the girl isn’t a girl at all–she’s a 47-year-old DEA agent with dwarfism who’s posing as a girl to infiltrate the community. Pretty clever, really.
While all this is going on, there’s a side-plot (yes, there’s more). The town’s other doctor discovers that his daughter is trying to kill him (lots of that going on in Everwood–must be all that crystal meth), after she hands him a revised copy of his will and orders him to sign it �just in case.� Then she gets him to help her pick out a photo for his obituary, and write all of the obit itself. But the girl planned to murder her father the next day, and apparently that isn’t convenient for him. Unfortunately, she’s already sent the obit into the local paper, and the guy there won’t pull it–it’s already been printed. So father and daughter confisicate all of the papers and toss them all, so that she can kill him at a more mutually convenient time.
Oh, and the doctor doesn’t manage to kill his son–every time he thinks they�ve found a cliff it’s a burnt-out forest or a wide plain, and he finally gives up. That night he confesses the plan to his son, who’s both shocked and amused–for a brief moment he leaves his angst behind. But it returns. They do, however, manage to trade the deer for two backpacks from the school bus driver–no doubt full of crystal meth.
And the girl/DEA agent fails in her mission. The other woman takes her for a ride on her motorcycle, drugs her, and forces her to join the Hell’s Angels. Now the girl can’t reveal what’s going on because it’s against the HA code, and they’d take back her tattoo. But at least she’s found some new friends.
Honestly, I’m amazed that WB can get away with showing something like this at prime time–think about all the kids who are watching it. We can’t wait to see what happens next week–meantime, I think we’ll try checking out the Guardian. I understand it’s actually about a family’s attempt to rule the spaghetti sauce market by lacing their own products with narcotics and forcing them on minors in the guise of a home-cooked meal.
Why do I bring this up?
Because he’s basically just described the world of VERONICA MARS (Tuesdays on UPN).
Brought to us by Rob Thomas, the guy behind the dearly missed CUPID, the show sets up a mystery venue that rivals some of the best around. Think Marlowe as a teenage girl, and you might have an idea of the gist. I’ve also described it to friends as SMALLVILLE without Clark, maybe with a bit of S.E. Hinton, or– just watch an episode. You’ve got nothing in that timeslot until 24 comes back in January, right?