We watch... so you don't have to.
The 1997 Fall Season Dead Pool: Greg Knauss
I was in love with Harley Jane Kozak.
She played Mary on Santa Barbara, the soap opera I accidentally addicted myself to, like pain killers, in high school. She was a nun who left her order to marry Mason -- Lane Davies, who would later be sentenced to sit-coms like Woops! and The Crew -- only to be tragically crushed to death beneath a giant, neon "C".
No, really.
This happened while I was wandering around Europe in standard-issue American-tourist powder-blue shorts. I'd convinced my Mom, a patient and generous soul, to tape each episode while I was gone and, upon arriving home, I watched twenty episodes of Santa Barbara in a row. I spent the night I discovered that -- sob -- Mary was no longer with us moody and sullen.
No, really.
I continued to follow Ms. Kozak's career for a while after that, thought I could never bring myself to actually watch anything she appeared in. Charlie Grace, "The Amy Fisher Story," "Side Out," "The Taking of Beverly Hills," all bowel-fouling, cramp-inducing garbage, judging from everything I've heard.
But now, Harely Jane Kozak is starring in her own sitcom -- You Wish -- about a single mom who has her own 2,000-year-old genie in order to cope in the busy, busy '90s.
No, really.
And so it is with a fond memory of times past and a benign, almost fatherly concern that I hope -- even pray -- that this egregious, festering wad of televised excrement is first in line at the slaughterhouse. Good God, does America really need a gender-reversed I Dream of Genie? Wasn't anything learned from "Kazaam"? Isn't it about time that everybody responsible ABC's Friday night kiddie dumb-down fest be rounded up and donated to a Haitian medical school badly in need of supplies for their dissection labs? Hasn't poor, dear Harley been punished enough?
Haven't we all?
#2: Total Security
#3: Over the Top
