Showering with something other than affection

[captainsblog]

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale

Ooooookay then. "Season," rather than "series," makes quite the difference.

I suppose any of the Lost seasons prior to the end would qualify. Any given Heroes year, likewise, but that whole show was basically brought to you by OMGWTF, so I can’t really count it.

So I’ve finally come to the point where I have to confess my true guiltiest of pleasures:

Bobby in the shower on Dallas.

I began following this drama long after it became a Friday night fixture in this country, and almost as long after the whole “Who shot JR?” obsession.  But it became a half-watch/half-mock tradition in my final year of law school, and I continued to watch semi-regularly through the two years that followed even though I was on my own and far away from the fellow fans at that point.

Other than the sorts of amnesia/longlost twin/other Deux Ex Machina stuff that infested daytime soaps, never before, in my experience anyway, had a show simply discarded an entire season of events, lives and even death in the way Patrick Duffy’s sudden reappearance did in May of 1986. Unlike JR’s shooting, which most of the country was prepared for on some level if not actually rooting for, Pam’s foray into that shower produced a collective “Huh?!?” around the entire country that night.

Once they’d done that, you could never take anything that happened there as seriously- and to some extent, whole arcs on other prime time shows became plausible because of what they’d sold to the public.  “Bobby in the shower” remains shorthand, at least for me, anytime I beta something that seems to undo canon to such a ridiculous extent.

If only he’d appeared with a set of gills. That would’ve homaged his prior role on the ill-conceived Man from Atlantis, plus accounted for the evolution that would have likely resulted from his standing under a Waterpik shower massager for the better part of 52 weeks.