December 8, 2001

CD: If you've been watching this space you may have noticed that Blair and I have all but blown off this project. It's a bummer, because this was the only thing I had on the site, until a few of us started writing music reviews. (Which is only slightly less original than recapping a TV show.) I don't foresee us getting back to this anytime soon, but I didn't want to drop it without making a few explanations.

Blair and I started watching Seventh Heaven when we were roommates in Somerville, MA. In late '99 Blair moved back to the Washington, D.C. area, and when we kept in touch by e-mail we would sometimes stop and make fun of Seventh Heaven. Like a lot of people, we had watched the show because it's funny. It's stupid; it's kitschy; it's a '90s version of The Brady Bunch. Again, it's not too original for twentysomethings to watch something awful and laugh at it. But that doesn't make it less funny. Or mean that we just watched it to laugh. And remember too that this is the highest rated show on the WB. There have to be more people watching it than families and Christians.

As you've seen in the earlier parts of the journal—all of which were copied straight from e-mails we wrote each other—we especially liked the teen sexuality. Lucy, Mary and Matt were all dating. Occasionally they would kiss someone. It was very cute and high school, and the girls were hot.

Somewhere, however, the show took some wrong turns. As it tries to grapple with late-teens issues like sex and drugs, it gets stupider and stupider. All of the young characters want to get married. In the last episode that I watched, Mary and Lucy kept bugging their parents to find them husbands. And Matt's black roommate, one of the only intelligent characters on the show, married a woman he'd just met and hasn't been seen since.

There are the dumb storylines. Lucy gets engaged to a guy she's just met, moves East with him, and then comes back. She's been sitting around the Camden household all season without getting a job or going back to school. Mary—temporarily exiled from the show because of some topless photos in Gear magazine—hangs out with her grandparents in Buffalo and starts to build a life for herself. Her comeback storylines were actually halfway-believable, as she struggled with an adult relationship and her first tries at a career. Then a couple of weeks ago the show's writers dropped all of it and brought Mary back to California. Whammo.

Why do they do this stuff? Because they're stupid. The writers on this show are some of the worst on television. The dialogue is tin-eared. The situations are contrived. Every single scene is just one person telling another person what to do. Sure, the implausibility of the show is part of what makes it addictive. "I can't believe they just did that," we say, scene after scene. But that gets old.

What really drove me away, though, is that they lost the innocent charm they had when I started watching it. We could make fun of Jessica Biel and talk about how hot she was because nobody else seemed to know. There were storylines about the silliest things. I keep coming back to one story where Simon and Ruthie, back when they were really young, go for a walk and get lost. They end up in some adjoining suburban neighborhood that, of course, looks just like all the other neighborhoods in California, and they wander around hopelessly until the show's one cop finds them and helps them get home. That was an entire storyline. It's stupid, but something about it has stuck with me. Maybe it's the thinly veiled religious implications—you know, that God is a black suburban cop and we are lost little children. Or again, maybe it's just the innocence of it. I don't know.

In the latest episode, in addition to the thing where the teenage Camden girls want to get married, there was a storyline where Robbie and Reverend Camden help Robbie's new girlfriend find her brother. Her brother was kidnapped two years earlier, at age seven. They find him again because the kid's dog, which had also been taken, took off and walked all the way home. From Arizona. The Rev. and the cops finally capture the kidnapper, who tells them to blow themselves. "I'm not scared of you, or the court, or going to jail."

"Are you scared of God?" the Rev. intones, and I think a cloud passes overhead.

Sorry. That ain't what I'm here for. There's a war going on, and anyway, my intelligence gets insulted enough at work.

So that's that. But if you've read any of this, I want to thank you for taking the time, and I hope you got some laughs out of our work. I'm starting to plan out another recurring feature to take its place and hold onto some of the thousands of visitors I get every day. Well, to be honest, most of the people who end up on this site are looking for topless photos of Jessica Biel. But maybe I'll keep that in mind.