Lifetime Television for (Really Weird) Women
Lately I’ve been watching reruns of Frasier. These air on the Lifetime channel, which I vaguely recall from my past as being promoted as the “channel for women.” Now that I’ve watched just over 200 episodes of Frasier, I can tell you what this means.
As judged by the ads that air between the Frasier episodes, women are apparently interested in death, affairs with some very bad men, and mistaken identities.
I have never watched a Lifetime Original (or otherwise) Movie, but the ads have proven to be an eye-opening experience, albeit a very shortened one. None of the ads are ever the same, and watching a new ad is like watching the latest installment of a long-running, serialized show populated with semi-familiar actors and conflicts that will undoubtedly require a lot of talking to resolve.
An early “episode” starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played a doctor or nurse or physician’s assistant who suddenly learned the value of life from an old patient who was dying.
Another one featured a teenager who got married to her high school sweetheart (no, she wasn’t pregnant) and surprisingly, found out married life was not that nice when her husband finally realized he was 18 and there were many, many other women in the world.
Oh, and one recent show had Peter Gallagher (was this post-O.C.? Did he just feel like making some easy money?) in some odd quasi-horror/chick flick in which his loved one is not who he thought and he refused to rest until he figured out what’s going on. During the less than 10 seconds of this ad, I was unable to determine whether his loved one was A) having an affair, B) possessed by a Stephen King-type monster, C) had another life/name/amnesia, or D) was dying, very slowly.
But the worst Lifetime ad I have ever seen was today, in the middle of a Frasier episode in which Niles and Daphne get married twice. It is possible that they would have gotten married even more times before the episode ended, but I had to turn off the TV after watching this ad.
Today’s installment of “Crazy Ladies or Crazy Sensitive Men Who Are Dead, Dying, Or Someone Else Entirely” starred Amber Tamblyn. She was playing a high school kid who hangs out with a bunch of other high school kids and they all get together and … have orgies.
My high school was just like that, wasn’t yours?
The ad showed 4 couples, all dressed, but all making out and lying down in the same room. I mean, no one was having sex with more than one person at a time, but the ad was pretty clear that the actual partners did not matter and that the high schoolers swapped partners all the time.
The twist in the story, though, is that Amber Tamblyn wants to date one guy. Just ONE guy…and no more orgies. Naturally, she is perceived as a Freak.
I had so many questions. The guy she had decided was the Chosen One spoke ominously, just before the ad ended. “If you were the last girl on earth and I was the last guy…” How would his sentence end? How would this be resolved? Would she be forced to make group love forever? And how many more crazy plots would Lifetime come up with? I had two more seasons of Frasier to find out.
Posted by: ssjane | September 27, 2007 | 2:48 pm
Posted in: Entertainment/News