Homage to Kim

One of my very favorite ways to avoid doing work at work is to visit Television Without Pity; I can easily kill an hour or seven scrolling through recaps of shows I watch and, more frequently, shows I used to watch or of which I've seen a couple of episodes, but would now prefer to read about than actually sit through.

The Real World falls into this latter category; I invested in more seasons than I'd care to admit -- Boston, Seattle, Hawaii, Back to NY (but I knew someone on it, so I feel like that's a good excuse!) and Chicago -- before I decided with Las Vegas that I was really getting entirely too old for this kind of crap, and lost all patience with it (although I still somehow find the RW/RR Challenges oddly compelling). But I'd still read the recaps of Las Vegas to keep up with the roommates' skanky behavior and, more importantly, for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week.

Almost every week, awesome recapper Kim takes a little detour from recapping The Real World and gives a quick summary of something else, often a Little House episode or a Lifetime Movie, and they always give me great pleasure.

So last night, I was home alone with Tucker (who's wearing his little spacedog Elizabethan collar and feeling a little lethargic but experiencing alarming bursts of energy where he wants to jump and run around and I'm afraid he's going to hurt himself, because I am a complete worrywart and thank god I don't have an actual child because I would be the most anxious, overprotective thing in the universe) while the Smelmooo did his fantasy football draft. I got take-out Thai food and, after watching the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, decided I needed something a little more inane for the rest of the evening.

I found great success with Friends 'Til the End, which admittedly I've seen several times before, but it is truly the Most Awesome Thing I'll see on TV most weeks.

First of all, it stars Shannen Doherty, the chick who played Kate on Party of Five, and Jason London (twin of Jeremy London, also on P5). The chick who played Whitney in Bring it On has a supporting role, and she basically plays a college-aged Whitney, making the exact same facial expressions and exasperated noises.

Anyway, the basic idea is that Shannen is the darling of her sorority and of her band (in which she's the only girl, of course, and her boyfriend Jason London is also in the band, as is some other guy who totally loves Shannen but never says anything, just stares at her moonily from afar and takes great pleasure in their songwriting sessions), and Kate from P5 is this nerdy girl who desperately, desperately wants to fit in, and Shannen feels bad for her and convinces all of her sorority sisters that Kate will be an asset to the house because she's smart and she'll get the Delta sisters lots of coverage in the school yearbook. This is enough for them, apparently, and of course within five minutes Kate becomes the sorority darling, and goes all Single White Female, trying to take over Shannen's identity. She steals Shannen's car keys and extraordinarily inappropriate dress that barely covers her ass and starts making out with Jason in the middle of a fancy restaurant on his birthday, and poisons Shannen's drink so she can't sing the night the band's shooting its video, right before she kills some guy in the alley (and then, of course, takes Shannen's place onstage 5 seconds later) because he knows all about her secret past, which includes time in a mental institution after she was accused of killing the winner of a pageant in which she came in second.

Of course, in the end, Kate cracks and everyone realizes that Shannen wasn't the crazy one or the evil one, and Shannen and WritingPartner end up together and they win the Battle of the Bands or whatever (I think; this last part is fuzzy, because I didn't actually watch the end last night), and Kate either dies or is committed again, but everything works out in the end, except I guess for that poor dead guy in the alley. And it may be the greatest guilty pleasure movie ever, except maybe that one where Melissa Joan Hart arranges for her parents to be killed, but it's too close to call.