Gregory Brooker
American Episodes
In that episode of Friends where Ross and Rachel are late to a wedding and sideswipe and kill an eight-year-old boy riding his bicycle and fret about what to do by the side of the road when finally Ross says “I have a shovel” and the way he says it makes them both bust up laughing and they bury the kid in a shallow grave and make it to the wedding and have the time of their lives at the reception the show ending in a freeze-frame of Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer jumping midair all smiles on the crowded dance floor where everyone is dancing to The Isley Brothers’ “Shout” and “I have a shovel” becomes a catchphrase spawning “I have a shovel” T-shirts and bumper stickers and Secretary of State under Bill Clinton Madeleine Albright invokes the phrase in a meeting with NATO to commence the bombing of Kosovo.
In that episode of Glee where Marley turns to her guidance counselor Emma for counseling after she’s been warned again and again about not showing up for rehearsal on time which is not like her and Marley says to Emma that honestly she doesn’t care about the upcoming choir competition in Chicago or the New Directions gang and then finally confesses that she’s purposely messing up in school because she doesn’t want to go on the trip because she has no money for incidentals even though the school provides transportation and a hotel room and nobody understands how humiliating it is to be poor and she’d just die if the gang wanted to order a pizza at the hotel and she had no money and this was her single biggest fear in life so Emma tells her she should open a MyFreeCams account online and livestream herself naked and masturbating for viewers around the world and if she can get enough followers she can actually make good money and says the nastier she gets the more money she’ll make so you see there’s always a solution from an adult who’s been there before and Marley’s initial MyFreeCams session doesn’t go so well at first and she’s awkward and no one is watching and just when she’s about to give up she remembers Emma’s advice about the nastier she gets the more she’ll make and finally Marley gets her first viewer and a not insignificant number of tokens thrown her way which can be cashed in for real money and the enthusiastic fan turns out to be Emma her guidance counselor and pretty soon Marley has a real following and every night she’s putting on a real show for countless viewers online and she’s back in with the gang and showing up to rehearsals on time and when they do order that pizza in that hotel in Chicago Marley proudly pulls out a wad of cash and says “Guys, the pizza’s on me” and it feels like a victory for poor kids everywhere.
In that reality series in the 2000s where they followed a group of young women who before 9/11 had been married and were trying to conceive a child with their husbands who on 9/11 died in the towers and here now after 9/11 were with the help of the show trying to conceive a child and we watch them on their journey to have and raise a baby on their own in Manhattan and in that episode in season three where the kids are now two years old and the show’s producers reveal to each new mom that all along they were using Osama Bin Laden’s sperm and the child they love and have been raising is his and the looks on their faces that Tuesday night at 9:30.
In that episode of The Beverly Hillbillies where Jethro excitedly tells Jed about all the rioting going on down in Watts and Jed immediately breaks out the family hoods and sheets and the Clampetts all start preparing crosses to burn as they don’t want the troubles to come up into Beverly Hills and down Rodeo Drive and across Wilshire Boulevard and into the bank they walk in their full KKK regalia to the shock of passersby and Mr. Drysdale nearly has a heart attack when he thinks the Beverly Hills Grand Wizard is paying him a visit during banking hours but when it turns out it’s only Jed Clampett and Jethro under the hoods they all have a laugh and after the commercial break Mr. Drysdale and Jane Hathaway convince Jed to put away his Klan duds and explain that the best way to address the inner-city situation is to exploit the rioters who were all probably hungry from rioting by selling them a watered-down frozen-TV-dinner- style version of Granny’s ’possum stew and vittles and Granny cooks up a batch and Jethro and Elly May take the TV dinners down to the rioters and pass them out from the back of the truck and it’s a big hit and the Watts Riots end and the Clampetts and Drysdale and The Commerce Bank start making black gold on top of black gold.
In that episode of Sex and the City where the ladies escape to Aruba for three days to ditch the New York winter and their relationship doldrums but before they do Carrie has a quandary figuring out how many pairs of Manolo Blahniks to pack and which and how many dresses she’ll need and Samantha gets all worked up about the pictures of the cabana boys working the resort in the online ads and dreams of post-sex mimosas under the palm trees on the beach but as they’re flying over the Caribbean there’s some engine trouble and they must make an emergency landing in Haiti and the airline informs them that there is no other flight to Aruba until the morning and they’re set up at a hotel for the night so the ladies make the best of it and get all dolled up and head out to a restaurant in Port-au-Prince but Haiti’s not what they had in mind for a relaxing getaway as the city smells of exhaust from the tap taps and mopeds mixed with that particular metal-on-the-roof-of-your-mouth taste rain makes in combination with corrugated tin but still they find a nice restaurant with outdoor seating and just as they’re about to bite into their griot and rice and red beans a Haitian man who they at first think is just a dirty street beggar comes up to the table but he doesn’t beg at all but rather asks the ladies in a halting and sometimes difficult to understand pitch if they know an American man named Bobby Keno who works for an NGO called CleanSource out of Houston, Texas and when they tell him no, they do not know a Bobby Keno, he goes on to tell them the story anyway of how he met this man Bobby Keno who was sent to Haiti to help bring clean water to the children in the countryside and how this Bobby Keno had tricked him into a romantic relationship even though “Ladies I am not gay, not gay” but he finally capitulated to Bobby Keno’s advances because Bobby promised to bring him to the United States but after a six-month relationship Bobby Keno’s time was up in Haiti and he left without even saying goodbye and was never heard from again and as soon as Mr. Keno left the country this guy who was promised a new life in Texas was attacked by a street gang who accused him of being a homosexual because they saw him for all those months with the American and three men held him down in the street while a fourth punctured both of his eardrums with a long knitting needle to teach him a lesson for carrying on with men and now he was deaf and he couldn’t find work anymore on account of his deafness and he was living on the streets and “Please pardon the way I speak but I thought perhaps you lovely ladies would know this Bobby Keno and how I might be able to get in contact with him” but no, they all said again, they didn’t know him and the look on Miranda’s face said everything and the man finally limps off into the night and the ladies dig in and oh my god the food is so good and they hope they can find a place like this back in NYC and anyway they go on to Aruba the next day and the sun is shining through the palm trees and they’re sipping mimosas on the beach at the resort and Samantha has a torrid and satisfying fling with a cabana boy and it’s just what they all needed and they even joke about all their sad-sack friends back in the gray New York slush and when they’re back in New York and Carrie is writing her column about how some tanning lotion and a tropical drink with a little paper umbrella in it can work wonders on a girl’s soul neither she nor anyone else ever mentions the deaf guy in Port-au-Prince again and we get the idea that for all of them it’s just easier not to dwell on whatever happened to the guy and to forget that Haitian business altogether.
In that episode of The Sopranos where Tony’s wife Carmela is drugged and then raped by a leprechaun and she’s obviously depressed about the whole thing and Tony senses there’s something wrong especially when he comes home and there’s no dinner on the table and finally he strong-arms the truth out of her: “I was raped by a leprechaun, okay?! It drugged me and it raped me, understand?! There’s a leprechaun out there, Tony! Everything I’ve known is out the window. It’s out the window! So make your own fucking spaghetti!” and suddenly this leprechaun is affecting everything in Tony’s world and he vows to kill it but this isn’t like anything he’s ever dealt with before and when he tracks down the leprechaun and corners it it shoots lightning rays from its finger destroying an entire pizza place and flipping a delivery truck on its side and Tony barely escapes with his life and all this from a little green leprechaun in a green velvet suit and hat with little black shoes and this isn’t like in the movies where only one or two people see the thing and nobody believes them, all of Jersey and New York City see it as there are security cameras and smartphones everywhere recording the leprechaun’s destruction of Tony’s territory all the while laughing and talking trash and in a flash kaboom there goes Tony’s Chevy Suburban and in a flash the leprechaun disappears into thin air and thus with all the coverage the world is turned upside down and humanity and the sciences must adjust to this new element in the world and everything is in chaos as this single leprechaun has re- calibrated the life sciences, physics, religious beliefs and even all of history is now up for grabs and Tony is just trying to keep his head and his family and business together and there’s that great shot of Tony Soprano sitting in the dark in his T-shirt smoking a cigar just after the scene where the leprechaun hijacks his kids’ school bus and drives it over an embankment and into the Hudson River (though the kids survive) and you can see the wheels turning in Tony’s head only this time we don’t get the idea that he’s figuring anything out or that it will be possible to stay one step ahead of the leprechaun but still we know that Tony must somehow restore order to his world and then just like that early one morning the cops are called to the back parking lot of a strip joint in Newark where they find the leprechaun dead on top of an old oil drum and all the strippers and staff locked inside the place and when they’re freed they tell a harrowing tale that began with the leprechaun showing up and magically sealing all the doors and disabling all their phones and forcing dancer after dancer into the VIP room for some serious lap dances all while the thing was knocking back shot after shot of Irish whiskey and shouting that it had come from a magic land to run all of fucking New Jersey even though living so brazenly in the open was forbidden where he was from “But fuck ’em!” it kept shouting and anyway when they do the autopsy they discover it died of alcohol poisoning but still the death doesn’t negate all the supernatural and amazing things caught on camera or the rape which Tony never got to avenge and in later episodes history and time in the world of The Sopranos is marked Pre-Leprechaun and Post.
In that episode of How I Met Your Mother where Barney coldcocks the homeless every time they ask him for money and finds he’s never felt more powerful and everything starts going even better with the ladies even though he’s always done incredibly well in that department but now he has some kind of ridiculous superpower due to punching the homeless but he learns a lesson when the gang intervenes.
In that episode of Full House where Joey meets a Brazilian woman named Lota and they hit it off and she invites him and the whole gang to Petrópolis, Brazil to visit her but little Michelle says “No way, Jose” and reminds them all that two other Lotas, same name but different spelling, who lived in Petrópolis, one the wife of novelist Stefan Zweig and the other the lover of poet Elizabeth Bishop, both committed suicide, the former Lotta in 1942 (with Zweig himself also taking an overdose of pills so despondent was he that Germany was wreaking havoc now a second time with his ideal of a unified continent and the “Great European”) and the latter Lota in 1967 and Joey thinks twice about going to Petrópolis with this new Lota and he/we all learn a valuable lesson from one of the Olson twins and two episodes later they receive a funny little postcard from Lota in Petropolis that says “No hard feelings and wish you all were here, kiss- es,” and then in the next episode they receive a nasty letter from Lota’s poor old mother saying that Lota had hanged herself from a ceiling fan out of heartbreak, despair, and loneliness.
In that episode of The Big Bang Theory where the gang is arguing over the goddess Isis and when Rajesh accidently Googles with the caps lock on “WHO IS ISIS?” hilariously overly aggressive NSA agents show up and Sheldon has a stroke and is given anticoagulant drugs which turn out to be counterfeit pills from China and he becomes comatose and agonizingly atrophies in a bed in the middle of the living room over the course of two seasons saying not a single word but you had to hand it to his friends for feeding him through that tube like that.
In that episode of Baywatch were David Hasselhoff goes on a first date with a gorgeous and funny new lifeguard on the team named Lani and everything is going fine until the date montage sequence when Hasselhoff notices that the woman begins to age rapidly until finally by the end of the montage she’s ninety-one and on her death bed in a nursing home in Malibu even though sec- onds earlier in the montage she was youthful and riding a horse on the beach and the still youthful Hasselhoff faces his own mortality and is touched by her death as are we.
In that episode of The Lucy Show where Lucy and Vivian go to the picture show to see Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and set off a craze for Deconstruction all across America 1962.
In that episode of Bonanza where Hoss has a funny feeling when a new ranch hand shows up at the Ponderosa and he goes to his father Ben Cartwright played by Lorne Greene and says “I think I might be gay, Pa” and Lorne Greene says “I’m glad to hear you’re finally out of your depression” and Hoss says “No, I mean homosexual. I mean to say I think I like (beep)” and all of America watching could see that he mouthed the word “cock” under the beep (which of course they had to beep out as this was network TV in 1964) and though this first attempt to fold the gay and lesbian issue into the Civil Rights Movement was crude and the rioting that ensued across America all that night and into the next day with Dallas, Pierre, North Dakota, Reno, and St. Louis nearly burned to the ground with twenty-six shot and killed by the National Guard, all the up- roar led Lyndon Johnson to pen his famous “Too much, too soon, Hoss” speech which was carried on all three networks the next evening while the cities and suburbs smoldered.
In that episode of Girls where Hannah and Adam are watching season three of the DVD box set of How I Met Your Mother that episode where Barney goes around punching homeless people to gain power and Hannah says she’s glad the Age of Irony is over and they discuss the coming New Age of Sincerity and that the truth of that How I Met Your Mother episode was that some producer or writer somewhere out in Hollywood had some secret fantasy about coldcocking homeless people and even though Barney comes to understand that it’s wrong the producers sure had no problem taking all that time, money, and energy to cast Homeless Guy #1 and Homeless Guy #2 and so on and put them through wardrobe, hair, and makeup, find locations and shoot the scenes, not to mention paying the crew etc. plus all the editing and sound in post-production and Hannah says “you just know the assholes who thought up that episode were laughing their asses off on set when they were shooting those scenes” and they turn off the TV and Hannah and Adam promise together to try to bring in this Age of Sincerity they were talking about and truth and goodness and sensitivity also and their heady conversation leads to the best sex they’ve ever had and after Adam comes on her stomach Hannah wipes it off with a washcloth which she frivolously throws out the window with a laugh and down it goes into the street where a homeless woman picks it up and wipes herself with it and gets pregnant then returns a year later with Adam’s baby and Adam in the next season marries her and moves to Connecticut and in a kind of inside joke homage to the How I Met Your Mother episode Hannah goes on a rampage against the homeless with bricks and buckets of urine especially attacking homeless women first and foremost for vengeance and secondly in hopes that like Barney she’ll gain some kind of superpower that attracts men like crazy so she can forget all about Adam but it doesn’t work and Hannah is despondent until Shoshanna suggests that she should write about her travails like Sarah Jessica Parker does in Sex and the City except add in details of all her acts of rage and violence against the homeless because that’s totally new and honest and could be her entrée into the New York literary scene and that’s exactly what happens and there’s a silver lining and Hannah finally finds the subject matter she was looking for but after the episode airs a rash of copycat crimes are visited upon the homeless across the country and Lena Dunham has to go on Anderson Cooper and denounce the behavior and remind people that even though she and Hannah appear to be identical Han- nah is merely a flawed character and entirely fictional.