Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

All-American Girl: “The Apartment”

I rented a DVD of the old Margaret Cho sitcom, All-American Girl, a few months ago in the hopes that maybe the show has improved with time.

It hasn't.

To be fair, Margaret Cho isn't exactly my favorite comedienne. I once bought one of her comedy albums on CD and found myself at best underwhelmed.

But even she deserved better than this generic mess.

And even the funniest woman who ever lived would have difficulty getting laughs from this show's dull-as-dust scripts.

The most shameless example of why this show was destined to become a failure was the episode “The Apartment.” The whole premise of the episode had Margaret's character (imaginatively named Margaret) moving into an apartment with two female friends.

Once there, the three friends began having “wacky” roommate problems. Not funny roommate problems like one might see on Buffy The Vampire Slayer's fourth season. That would imply that the episode was amusing.

No, these were “wacky” roommate problems. The type of problems that Hollywood scriptwriters found funny but no one else found amusing.

The oddest of these problems was a certain roommate's sudden desire for indoor nudism. Interestingly enough, such a desire was never hinted at in previous episodes. Nor was it hinted at in subsequent episodes. For that matter, it was never really explained in this episode why the roommate in question had such a sudden burning desire to take off her clothes in front of her roommates. Indeed, the only reason that made sense was a simple one: the scriptwriters' desire to provoke interest in the show from heterosexual male viewers.

Of course, seeing that this program aired on commercial TV, the show's creators were forced to hedge their bets by having said roommate's less family-friendly body parts obscured from TV viewers via pixelization. Thus we're supposed to be intrigued that said woman was naked but frustrated that said portions of the woman's anatomy weren't visible to the TV audience as anything but a strategically placed blur.

In any event, the episode still managed to be boring. Even insultingly boring.

Jodie Long (the actress that played Margaret's mother) showed a touch of class in a scene toward the end, in which she talked Margaret into moving back home, but as a whole, the episode, nudity and all, was still part of a generic TV sitcom -- and worse yet, part of an unfunny generic TV sitcom.

I suppose the one thing worse than seeing a naked actress used to elicit cheap laughes was having to see said actress elicit no reaction at all. Except, perhaps, pity for seeing her stuck on such an awful TV show.