Fox’s second oldest show debuts while Webster says goodbye, Tom Hardy starts a prison break, babies can talk, Jon Stewart does what the news won’t, the debut of Capcom’s second best-selling game, the Wii savior that wasn’t, and another Disney remake falls flat. All that and more this week on Thirty Twenty Ten, your weekly look back on the week that was 30, 20, and 10 years ago.
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Sarah, DAG was not the dad on Sister Sister.
Haha, this moment hit close to home. Reminded me of when my girlfriend says something I know is incorrect and I politely second guess her, she doubles down with unwavering certainty without considering my speculation. Then I am the asshole if I correctly enlighten her in the moment whether through insistence or the use of my space phone that has the Internets on it.
The guy who is the dad on sister sister, Tim Reid, is a local in my parts, and was the lead on the cbs short lived show “Franks place” which was brought up very briefly a while back on the show. I only know it from commercial breaks on YouTube.
Alright, you three should have seen this coming; I’m going to defend The Rage: Carrie 2 given the huge Horror fan I am who’s very opinionated.
Anyway, I argue The Rage: Carrie 2 is massively underrated.
Sure, certain problems yeah like Amy Irving and the protagonist’s mother being completely superfluous to the plot just to connect the first film (started off as an unrelated script).
But I argue the premise of a telekinetic girl taking on rapists is an appealing premise. Could be cathartic for women who prefer to see rapists get their just desserts and whatnot but I feel in general the film made a very, huge middle finger to rape culture and toxic masculinity, I mean part of the premise where Rachel, the girl with the telekinesis, had witnessed her best friend commit suicide after being targeted by an older jock and slut shamed, it was actually inspired by a story of jocks raping an underage girl in high school IIRC.
The scene where one of the jocks (played by the older kid from Home Improvement, he’s the ringleader) gets off scott free because his dad is not only a lawyer but used the “Don’t ruin his life because of this” like that kind of bullshit. I was amazed that it was trying to tell people that’s a real thing that happens. And before you ask, this was directed by a woman, Katt Shea, who made Dance of the Damned.
I was really invested in what was going on and as soon as it got to the climax, I fucking cheered on Rachel 86ing every teenager including the rapist jocks. I mean, you guys are going to trash a film where the main jock rapist literally gets his testicles shot off by a harpoon gun? Come on! That was do satisfying!
But I agree about Baby Geniuses, that’s trash and poor Bob Clark, I love Black Christmas but it’s sad he made that. Worst of all? My fifth grade class voted to see that as an end of the school year movie. They loved it for whatever reason.
Is The Rage: Carrie 2 still worth seeing in 2019 though? In the recent horror genre I still haven’t seen (deep breath) It Follows, Get out, Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, Evil Dead (2013), Under the Skin, The Conjuring, The Skin I live In, The Babadook. Should I watch The Rage: Carrie 2 vs any of those films?
Watch all of them including Rage: Carrie 2. Have yourself a little marathon and include it. It holds up well given its theme.
Job. Kids. Wife (doesn’t like horror, either). House. My ability to watch movie after movie is highly limited. That’s one of the reasons I like 302010 so much, I can do it while doing other things.
Then watch each one when you’re doing something alone then.
Chris not knowing anything about Wing commander is genuinely surprising since the series was so influential for more than just its live-action casting. When the series debuted in 1990, it was the first space game to successfully adopt some of the tropes and mechanics of air combat simulators. Its cartoon cutscenes, branching story and narrative were pretty simplistic by today’s standards but were a big deal at the time, making it one of the first video games to get tie-in novels by authors who had already accomplished something. When WC3 came out and the cutscenes went to live action, Chris Robert’s was hailed as the only guy doing something useful with FMV. Alas, diminishing returns set in as X-Wing started to dominate the genre and Robert’s went to Hollywood. The WC movie is one of the great tragedies of fandom, nobody likes it including the man who wrote and directed it and made the first several games. Robert’s went back to games and made Brute Force and Freelancer and never recaptured what made the WC games special.
I don’t think Chris was a PC guy in the early to mid 90’s.
Surprised y’all didn’t mention the only noteworthy fact about Wing Commander, that the Episode 1 non teaser trailer was attached to it. Also Last House 2009 has Garret Dilahunt get his head asploded by a jury-rigged microwave, so thats neat. And fun fact, in Mad World, Black Baron, the character, isn’t black. Thats why in the sequel Anarchy Reigns, there’s Blacker Baron who is actually black.
This week’s episode knocked loose a lot of thoughts for me:
Police Academy:
Can we talk about the weird trajectory of this franchise? I was coming up on five years old when City Under Siege came out, and later in 1989 the Police Academy animated series will launch which was my first introduction to the series. What was with hard R ’80s comedies getting turned into heavily sanitized animated series in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s? Robocop. The Toxic Avenger. Police Academy. Dubya. Tee. Eff?
Needless to say I was pretty surprised a few years later when we inherited a bunch of video tapes a family friend’s grandma had recorded off of Cinemax in the early to mid ‘80s and got to see the first Police Academy in its original uncut boob filled glory. I don’t think my parents realized what they were giving me when they tossed me VHS tapes with movies like Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds, and I certainly wasn’t saying anything and risking having them taken away.
Webster visits the Enterprise-D:
I didn’t know this clip existed. and I’m a huge Trekkie. Like we’re talking a dragged my parents to conventions when I was a kid, heard Nimoy speak, met Shatner on multiple occasions, a little too obsessed with the show in middle school not knowing the delaying effect that would have on losing my virginity, Trekkie.
So naturally I watched the whole clip on YouTube, and boy was it interesting. Allow me to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose as I rattle these off:
-They clearly only had the budget for Michael Dorn. I guess he was a more affordable guest star than Brent Spiner since Denise Crosby had left the show at this point?
-The Enterprise-D runs a night shift and there’s always a full crew manning the bridge even when the main stars aren’t around, so talk about a flimsy excuse for not paying Patrick Stewart and company to appear in their clip show.
-What the fuck is up with those Enterprise-D security guards gleefully pressing their dustbuster phasers into a little kid’s back when he starts dancing?
-Webster didn’t beat the shit out of Worf as is customary for a potential security threat that circumvents all of the advanced security measures on the most advanced starship in the fleet.
-Worf mentions that one of Webster’s stories would’ve brought a tear to his eye if Klingons weren’t so fierce, but in Star Trek VI it’s established that Klingons can’t cry because they have no tear ducts. Yes they forgot about this a few times in TNG.
-They didn’t slingshot around a massive gravity well to enter time warp to return him to his time as had been clearly established in Star Trek lore and instead went with a joystick.
-If Webster does take place in the Star Trek universe then arriving back home 85 years late would be a mercy since that means missing the Eugenics Wars where KHAAAAAAAN! takes over a good chunk of the world, and World War III from 2026-2053 where a good chunk of the world population is annihilated in nuclear fire and the rest are left to live like extras in a Mad Max movie. Sending him back to his own time is basically condemning him to death in the near future.
Boy I really hope somebody got fired for these blunders.
COPS:
The discussion of COPS brought to mind the most surreal COPS watching experience I had. I was watching an episode one night in the early ‘00s and everything is normal, then all of a sudden Mulder shows up and starts asking questions about some supernatural creature that attacked someone. Followed shortly by Scully. I was watching X-Cops, a fabulous episode of the X-Files that premiered in February 2000, but I’d been channel surfing and missed the disclaimer at the beginning that it was all part of a TV show and the opening scroll, COPS theme and all, that identified it as an X-Files episode. I love that episode to this day, and part of it was because seeing it for the first time confused the hell out of me for a couple of minutes as I had a War of the Worlds “is this real?” disconnect.
Also while we’re on COPS, Diana mentioned the cameramen who are always able to keep up with the action far better than the soft around the middle cops usually featured on the show. That brought to mind a joke Reno 911 did where the camera crew was able to outrun the cops and they ended up getting robbed of their equipment when the criminals they were chasing turned around and realized there weren’t any cops around. I couldn’t find a clip, but that moment has always stuck with me.
Wing Commander:
Chris said he doesn’t know anyone who loves Wing Commander. I’ll fill in that role! We had a PC way before anyone else because my dad thought computers were the future and he was an attorney so he could afford the ridiculous pricetag. Which meant I got to play a bunch of old school PC games that a lot of the world doesn’t know about, including Wing Commander.
Wing Commander will always have a soft spot for me. My dad and I were in a competition to see who could beat the game first. We were stuck on the final mission when I realized that if you ejected, something that usually triggered the “bad” branching path, you won the game because at the end there was only victory and no bad path. I made him a clay sculpture of the space carrier that had “I Beat Daddy!” written on the launch deck, and he kept that silly sculpture with him in his office to the day he died.
The tragedy is Diana is absolutely right when she laments that they didn’t make Top Gun in space. That’s what this game was. A bunch of hotshot pilots flying their spaceships from a spacecraft carrier fighting off the catlike Kilrathi. The first game had branching paths for good and bad endings, and the second game started to get into more of the space opera melodrama that really took hold in 3 and 4 when they started going full voice acting. They already had a great story they could’ve used, but instead we get a movie that vomits the late ‘90s badass youth aesthetic all over the screen to the film’s detriment.
Everybody Crosses Over With Raymond:
You guys keep mentioning crossover episodes with Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens, and it reminds me of a crossover the show missed a year ago in 1998 when The Nanny and Everybody Loves Raymond had a crossover. Ray appeared at Fran’s high school reunion where they had a brief conversation with the kind of hamfisted but amusing dialogue that was The Nanny’s bread and butter, including Fran namedropping Ray’s new sitcom. Apparently Fran Drescher and Ray Romano actually went to high school together in New York and decided to have some fun with it when they both got sitcoms of their own on CBS.
That Star Wars Show:
I vividly remember the marketing blitz they did for That ‘70s Show going to see Star Wars. It was part of an interesting phenomenon at the time where it seemed like a bunch of sitcoms came up with excuses to have Star Wars episodes in the lead up to Phantom Menace being released. My favorite was Third Rock from the sun who did a copy of the Star Wars crawl complaining that Star Wars hadn’t given fans anything for sixteen years, but every week they gave you Dick.
Last House on the Left:
There was one small change between the 1972 version and the 2009 version of this movie. Mari, the daughter who is tortured which leads to the parents exacting their revenge, lives in the remake. I guess that’s a bright spot? I’m in agreement with you guys. I caught this on the movie channels after it came out, and we don’t need the gratuitous torture to make the revenge satisfying. I can only imagine this was greenlit because of the torture porn resurgence in the ‘00s.
Nostalgia Lens Movies:
Chris mentioned movies he fell asleep to when he was a kid that he’d never subject other people to. This was pretty close to my own experience. I still have a soft spot for the Beverly Hillbillies remake because we’d watch it on repeat when it came out on video. Other movies I watched every night before going to bed in middle school while I was staying at my dad’s for the summer where we had a TV in our room include Spaceballs, A Goofy Movie, and The American President. I’m pretty sure Beverly Hillbillies is the only one of those that’s a controversial pick that can only be enjoyed through the lens of nostalgia.
Big Bang Theory:
The Big Bang Theory is fine. I avoided it for years, then started watching it and it wasn’t terrible. It’s a sitcom based on nerds. All I’ll say is I’m a huge nerd. I’ve noticed there is a subset of nerd culture who are only happy if they can be angry about something else going on in nerd culture. I imagine the Venn diagram between people who, say, hated Ghostbusters 2016 and review bombed Black Panther and Captain Marvel ahead of their release. The show is fine. Watch it, or don’t. The keyboard crusaders who waste a bunch of time letting the world know how terrible it is, though? To quote William Shatner: get a life!
Bing bang has always screamed out to me as a basic bitch show. And Sheldon being funny because lol he’s annoyingly autistic isn’t funny to me.
The ’09 segment has really hit the young adult sweet spot for me. I was senior in high school and working at the “dumpy underdog theater in the dying mall” at the time with some of my best friends.
It was essentially non-stop pop culture talk – between wondering what new teaser posters would show up and “holy shit you need to rent X” I realize how much that period shaped me. Free movies after work, choosing whichever movie had sold the least tickets that day, then renting movies based on the DVD box to go watch in someone’s basement. I digress…
-Miss March is to this day one of my favorite dumb comedies. I was the right age and had the right sense of humor for it to stick with me all these years. I feel I must apologize to most of my love interests for at one point or another subjecting them to the film.
-Last House on the Left was another that my group went to free of charge, girlfriends in tow. Entering the theater expecting the typical horror movie of the era before being subjected to 114 minutes of awkwardness. I watched it some years later and to no surprise it has aged about as well as milk left in the car. That garbage disposal scene is on another level of cringe.
One more thing, the only way I’d ever watch a Police Academy movie if it gets rebooted with a competent writer and director and is also an adaptation of Sasquatch Detective from DC Comics because a Sasquatch cop is more funnier and charming than Steve Guttenberg. Or anyone else among for that matter.
Oh and if you think I’m making that up.
https://www.dccomics.com/comics/sasquatch-detective-2018/sasquatch-detective-1
It’s your friendly AYAOTD expert, back after a week off and I’m here to talk about one of my personal favorite episodes from season 6. I’m taking about episode 5; “The Tale of the Gruesome Gourmets”. The story follows two brothers who have an extra apartment being rented out to two extremely flamboyant me and when two people being interviewed for help mysteriously vanish, the brothers suspect the pair of being cannibals. It’s has a very interesting ending and is probably my second or third favorite episode of the season. It’s a big recommend from me.
P.S.: Thank you for the co-mvp award during the bonus show. Chris, please attempt to watch this one. I think you’ll have a good time.
Resident Evil 5 may not be the best game in the franchise, but it is certainly the one I have had the most fun playing due to the co-op campaign. The game is just a blast to play. It really leans into the popcorn-movie identity.
Yass to the Police Academy podcast. If you decide to, you should cover that short-lived Last Precinct tv show that bombed which seemed like a TV knockoff of Police Academy.
Here’s the ep of Night Court the gang skipped: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5d2zzz Harry gets his idol Mel Torme sick!
Hot take: I HATE Cops. Hate.it. My parents watch that shit alllllllllllllll weekend on WGN, no talking to each other or me just Cops all weekend. It’s sickening. LivePD is just as bad.
Is there a channel that shows 90s SNL? I really can’t afford another membership, but I wanna watch that Ray Romano ep!
I too would love a Police Academy mini-series podcast!
New York Stories. “Did you know Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Cupola all directed one film together?” “Well, everyone knows that multiple directors is always a sign of success.” What are some of the best multi-director films that have ever been made and what are some of the worst multi-director films that have ever been made?
Police Academy 6 City Under Seige: Thus endeth the Police Academy sextet (Mission to Moscow, being direct to video, doesn’t count). It’s pretty incredible that a hard R sex comedy ended up getting both a children’s cartoon series and a children’s comic book, but that was the 80’s for you. I can’t really remember this film as a film (they call kind of blend together in my mind) so I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’d be totally down for some Elmstreet Nightmare series going in-depth on the Police academy films. Would anyone else be up for that?
Second question about Police Academy 6: given how few fans they have today, it’s kind of amazing how big these movies were (Police Academy 1 through 5 all reached #1 at the box office, this one didn’t which is a reason it was the last one). So let’s examine the series’ popularity one last time: What was it about the Police Academy films that allowed them to be huge in the 1980’s but forgotten today?
Final side note: Believe it or not, I’m currently semi-involved in a minor project that involves the Police Academy-Universe. Not a fan-made film but the actual 1980’s IP. It’s too early to talk about it in detail in public but if it comes to fruition would the Laser Time crew be interested about it and / or possibly being involved with its unveiling to world?
The Adventures of Baron Munchesen. I 100% agree that the visuals aspects of this film are the best part of it and I might even go so far as to say that they are the only good part of it. Hot take: The Adventures of Baron Munchesen was the Phantom Menace of 1989. The characters? Bland. The dialogue? One, maybe two good lines in the entire film. The plot? Meandering and uncompelling. But the sets? The costumes? The visuals? All fantastic! Intriguing and wonderful even 30 years later. But at the end of the day that’s just not enough. Neither of my kids liked it and when I paused to go to the restroom there were calls to watch something else. We pushed through and finished the film but I can see why it was a total bomb at the box office as it is a surreal fairy tale too childish for adults and too adult for kids (in addition to being badly written). For kids, the framing device is actively detrimental for the film It starts with a 18th century battle scene but that battle is filmed exactly as you would film a war movie for adults. I’m trying to think of a kids film with a more gruesome battle scene and none is coming up. Then you have a play going on to add multiple levels of surrealism to this story, but this wasn’t done in a way that was interesting to me as an adult, and for the kids all it did was result in a ton of confusion and I had to do my best to explain it. And after my explanation I think they would have asked more about the film’s it-was-a-play-but-everyone-was-in-the-play-including-people-who-weren’t-but-not-really-but yes-really ending but my kids just did not care at that point. This was a film made for no one. PS. As a side note: Googling around I think this is the only IP in which BOTH the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany made film versions of said IP. Could be mistaken about that but that seems to be the case.
Webster Finale: So some big time producer decided that he was going to wrap up Webster, a show about a small kid living an utterly normal life, on the Starship Enterprise. What. The. Efffffffffff??? I get that compared with today “ending” a TV shows in the 1980’s wasn’t regarded as important but that seems like such a bizarre and weird choice. I did some quick goggling and there doesn’t seem to be any clear cut answer for why this was ending chosen as their were no answers to that question in the Webster Unabridged Companion Guide and the 2 hour examination of this episode on the podcast Talking Webster didn’t mention it (Note: Neither the Webster Unabridged Companion Guide nor Talking Webster actually exist). So I just assume it was nothing more than that both shows were being filmed on the same lot and that Michael Dorn had an afternoon free in which didn’t want to take the make-up off. The world may never know. Side question: I really enjoyed the LaserTime episode on African-American Sitcoms and wouldn’t mind a follow up with the focus on cross-over sitcoms. One where you examine sitcoms with both African-Americans and whites living with each other or interacting with each other in major ways (i.e. ones where African-Americans are major characters and a major part of the show, not just side characters). Different Strokes and Webster would be the two big ones, but were there others?
#thirtytwentyten Cops: Man, that song is 100% inseparable from the show which I’m sure is extremely odd to the song writer because the lyrics in and of themselves do not even remotely make one think of police officers. But anytime I hear those lyrics instantly images of police officers fill my head. TV is powerful, y’all. As for the show itself, it was the epitome of the “I’ll watch it because it’s on” genre of shows. I don’t think there was ever a single time in my life when I consciously thought, “Time to watch Cops” but I nevertheless watched tons of episodes because I would be flipping around, run across it, and then stick around until it was finished. And now “because it’s on” shows are a completely dead genre to me. For me, every single media viewing decision for a solid decade has been more or less a conscious one. As such I don’t even know what Cop-like shows exist today. Oh and to answer your question about how they ensured that they have enough action for an episode? Googling around it looks like on average they filmed 400 hours of footage to get the 22 minutes of footage you watched. And that’s the average, so you know there must have been times when they filmed 800 hours until they finally finally got enough to fill 22 minutes. Oh, and I would totally be down for a montage super-cut of person after person trying to talk their way out of being arrested on Cops. That would be the bomb. Final comment, this one about this show being “stereotypes on parade“ when you said that I was instantly reminded of the Onion article, ” Local Trailer Park Shatters No Stereotypes” – https://local.theonion.com/local-trailer-park-shatters-no-stereotypes-1819565364
Carry II. I got to agree that in 1999 nobody was asking for a sequel to Carry. What are some other sequels nobody was asking for when they came out?
Fraser: Here is the clip of the other couple thinking they hung up the phone, but they didn’t and end up talking about Niles and Fraser without realizing that their insults are being heard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTxI4hReE4 Side note: The Black Ball scene is a fantastic example of game theory as well as how no matter how you devise a system, people are going to figure out ways that you never considered to maximize their advantage.
Race to Witch Mountain. I was also a Clam Shell kid who watched Escape to Witch Mountain again and again and again. And you know what the best part about that film was? It existed. That’s it. That was the whole of the appeal of that film. Because the number of kid friendly live action adventure films available to rent at my local Captain Video was less than number of such films my kids can choose from on one Netflix screen without moving the mouse wheel a single centimeter. So I watched Escape again and again and again. So with my nostalgia for the original I decided to see if my kids would be interested in the remake and … WHO WAS THAT MADE FOR??? Because it is not a kids story. At all. The first 10 minutes could pretty much be the start of a non-kid action film (government agents doing ominous stuff, seedy motel, big tough crime guys doing a shakedown). The kids themselves are bland and have no character or character arc. It’s Dwayne Johnson who is the prime character in the remake He is the one whose decisions we follow, he is the one who experiences personal growth, and he is on the screen for 90% or so of the film. And he’s more or less Generic-Gruff-Bad-Boy-Action-Hero-Gone-Straight-#247 only he’s in a PG film! A PG film with more guns and gunfights than I have ever seen in any other PG film, ever. You know how when Spielberg replaced the guns in ETA with Walkie-Talkies? Whoever made this must have been filled with nerd-rage at that and vowed to take every gun Spielberg took out and replace it with ten new ones. We almost never see any of the government agents without them brandishing their guns and there is a running gag about how one of them doesn’t have a gun (until he gets one). Now, no one gets brutally shot but bullets are flying all over the place for most of the action beets and … yea that was not what I was thinking I was going to be watching with my kids in this remake of Escape to Witch Mountain. I don’t have a problem with guns in films but it also just felt deeply out of place if this was supposed to be a kids film. OK, so maybe it wasn’t a kids film? If so, I have no idea who it was for then because I just don’t know if there is that big of a demand for adults who like gun fight action films to watch a PG gun fight action film. It’s probably the most bizarre tone for a film in all of 2009. Oh, and there was a tiny sequel hook at the end. What other movies end on a sequel hook and then never had a sequel?
Castle. It’s fine. Seriously, it’s a fun little procedural show about a writer who gets to live out the cop fiction he writes. He has a bright teenage daughter and a will-they-won’t-they relationship with his female cop partner. I watched it for about two seasons but fell off after that. Off the top of my head I can remember one episode where they go to a Steam Punk bar and the suspect turns out to be a waiter who said he didn’t blame the stock trader who bankrupted his parents but actually did (what a twist!). And…. huh. Is that it? I must have watched at least 40 episodes of this show, but off the top of my head I can only remember a scene or two where Castle and his daughter bonded, a scene or two where he flirted with his partner, and the scene where he dressed as Malcolm Reynolds, but as for actually episodes it feels like I can only remember the one I already mentioned. Wow, Castle made less of an impression than I thought. What shows that you watched at least 30 episodes of in the last ten years have gone down your memory hole to such an extent that you can only remember one or two episodes of them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brCRfAgO1tE
#thirtytwentyten When everyone first experienced the Wii I think that 99% of us went, “Oh man, I can’t wait to do sword fighting game on this system!” And Mad World was the game that was supposed to deliver the sword fighting Wii game that everyone said they wanted. From what I heard it really did have good Wii sword fighting and …. people didn’t really want what they said they wanted. That was not the first, or the last, time gamers discovered that they didn’t know their hearts as well as they thought they did.
The 1989 death of Zeta, Former Empress of Austria-Hungary, is the perfect chance for me to recommend my favorite novel about Austria-Hungary. If that Empire didn’t exist fiction writers would have had to create it. It was such a patch quilt country that it’s hard to believe it shambled along generation after generation, but it did and even well researched and mostly historically accurate novels about it can have an air of unreality about them. Fiction has to be believable after all, while history doesn’t. With that in mind I heartily recommend “A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire” and its sequels. They tell the story of a sailor in the Austro-Hungarian Navy over the pre-war and WWI era. The Empire isn’t presented as all that great, but while the story is set in the 1900 to 1918 period, the protagonists lived into the 1980’s and occasionally mentions the horrible events that happened to him in the 1918-1945 period as a juxtaposition to the bumbling incompetence of the Empire he originally served. His description of a ham-handed close-minded incompetent small rural town and how after he left it a generation later it was burned by the Nazis, then burned again by the Soviets, then completely razed to the ground to make a train station that was never used as part of a post-WWII Stalinization plan has stuck with me for years. But those melancholy moments are the minority and most of the books are just rollicking good fun. Highly recommended.
My wife and I, for reasons unknown to us, recently watched the pilot episode of COPS. While they did feature the on-the-beat crash TV we all know and love from the show, the pilot also featured weird spotlight segments that followed the home life of certain members of the Miami PD. We watched a male officer and his wife share about their troubled marriage, largely caused by the officer’s poor adjustements to home life after he gets off patrol. We also watched a female customs officer describe her role at the Miami airport, including footage if her searching a 17-year-old Cuban immigrant they suspected was smuggling drugs; she definitely touched him inappropriately while making jokes about his appearance and age. All in all, everything about that episode was gross, and we’re all probably worse off for letting that show air for so long.
I watched the Last House on the Left remake with my now-wife when we were first dating. I went over to her place and she was watching it with a friend, and they were about thirty minutes into it. My wife told me, “These bad guys just raped a girl on the side of the road, and because of the rain, they’re staying at their rape victim’s parents house.”
Cool, got it. I never saw the rape scene. Never needed it.
What I got was a good thriller, with a slow burn where the parents figured out what happened with the bad guys (including Riki Lindholme of Garfunkel & Oates as the main henchperson), and then a reverse-slasher where the parents picked off each bad guy one-by-one in increasingly elaborate ways. I still have fond memories of it.