BEFORE: The Emmy Awards aired a little over a week ago, and I couldn't help but notice that there's a distinct category for TV movies, which used to be something of an oxymoron - once upon a time, something had to be either TV or a movie, it couldn't be both. But now the category is called "Limited series or movie", and in that instance "movie" really means "movie made for TV" or "movie that couldn't get released in theaters", because that line is getting really blurry these days, thanks to Netflix and other streaming services. Years ago we also knew the difference, a "made for TV" movie was just never going to be as good as a movie made for theaters. Even if you made a movie and it did zero box office in theaters, better to let it die that way than to be bought by a (ugh) network and air for free, at least that way the movie could die a quite, dignified way.
Then something happened after the cable explosion, once networks like Lifetime, Hallmark, and AMC started producing original content (because, you know, it turns out there are 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week), the made-for-TV movie became slightly more respectable. But only slightly. Tonight's film was made for ABC Family, which I think is now called Freeform or something. And it's streaming for free on ABC.com and also Freeform's site - so there's just no way this can be any good, because it's being given away like a cheap floozy of a movie. You get what you pay for these days, and this one's just being handed out like a take-out menu on the street, not a good sign at all.
BUT, it is part of my workable solution to the question, "How the hell can I get from "The Suicide Squad" to the start of my October chain in ten steps or under?" which at one point seemed very impossible, only it wasn't. It only took a few pages of charts with arrows between movies that could lead me to Fred Willard, who's serving this year as my (recently departed) harbinger of Halloween - if Fred's here, then spooky movies are RIGHT around the corner. Barry Watson carries over from "An Hour Behind".
THE PLOT: An archaeologist from 1,000 years in the future uncovers a romance novel written in our time. Curious, he journeys back to find out about this thing called "love" from the novel's author.
AFTER: If you don't recall Sara Rue, she was the "it" girl of network sitcoms in the early 2000's on a show called "Less Than Perfect", and this came after a few small roles in movies like "Pearl Harbor" and "The Ring". She's sort of been bouncing around the network dial for years, with short runs on shows like "Mom", "Bones" and "The Rookie", and most recently on a CBS show called "B Positive". It must have been tough for her when Zooey Deschanel came along with "New Girl" and was deemed way more a-dorkable.
If you don't recall Barry Watson, he was on a show called "7th Heaven" for a full decade, and during that time had roles in movie comedies like "Sorority Boys" and "Teaching Mrs. Tingle". After aging out of the family drama racket, he did a similar bounce around the networks in shows like "Samantha Who?", "Gossip Girl" and "Hart of Dixie", but based on what I've seen this week, he also found a home in these made-for-TV romantic comedy movies - hey, I get it, if you don't get three screen credits in as many years, I think they take away your SAG card or something.
Here Barry plays P-A-X-497/341, a guy from the 32nd century, who discovered an old romance novel in a metal case, inside an old sunken ship, which was accessible after the oceans dried up. Yes, climate change is real, this tracks, we get it. Good to know that humanity is still alive in 3127, even though there's no oceans - I guess the ice caps melted, but the Earth also got so hot that the water all boiled away? I'm not sure how they're surviving, it must be like 200 degrees outside on a good day. Pax (for short) functions here as the classic "fish out of water", who doesn't understand what society was like in 2011, so he came back to see for himself. The concept he doesn't really understand, of course, is "Love". Umm, and sex - neither one apparently exists in the future. Reproduction takes place in a lab, of course, and marriage is still a thing, but only for companionship, and it's mandated by the government. I'm not sure if this means the conservatives came out on top in the future, or the liberals - it's tough to say.
(It's weird, to see a future where "love" was labelled a toxic, subversive concept, so nobody even talks about it, but is that even realistic? They still speak and read English, so there's no great literature from the 1700's or 1800's that made it to 3127? No Jane Austen, no Bronte novels, no Jackie Collins? Something doesn't really track there. The future people have overcome and outlawed violence and hatred, but how can you eliminate one thing and not be at least aware of its opposite? If society eliminated war, they'd still understand peace, right? They'd be soaking in it.)
Why is there a need to "dumb down" future people? We'd like to think that society as a whole gets smarter as time goes on, not dumber, right? But then sometimes when we see a story set in the future, people seem very clueless - like in "Equals", which I watched last month, people in the future had rid themselves of emotions, and then when they inevitably bubbled to the surface, people didn't know what to do with them, and people displaying emotions got sent to asylums for reprogramming or worse. Silly future people! Plus the government is involved with falsifying all the "historical records" and we all know that can't happen, the U.S. government always, always tells us the truth about everything, right? RIGHT?
What we get then are these cinematic time-travelers who spend most of their time trying to figure out every little element of human society. What is this strange music called "the blues"? What is this strange food called "jambalaya"? What is this thing called "sex"? Hang on tight, Paxie, we're about to rock your world. A human from 1,000 years in the future is like an alien, this is the "Mork from Ork" syndrome, where he needs everything explained to him so that we the audience can see our own world in a different light.
Elizabeth, the author of that romance novel that Pax found, works at a newspaper called "Strange Times", which is a spin on the old Weekly World News publication that used to feature totally real stories about Bigfoot, Batboy and Hillary Clinton dating Hitler. It was "fake news" before fake news was cool - the difference was that everybody KNEW it was fake, and read it anyway, just for fun. If you believed those stories about alien invasions, Elvis Presley sightings and demonic faces in the World Trade Center, then you were easily pegged as somebody to watch out for - but later QAnon picked up that ball and ran with it, and look where we are now. The Weekly World News defiantly refused to fact-check anything, and they sprinkled in a few real but also ridiculous stories from the A.P. so the entire publication would appear legitimate. I haven't read their content in years, because who needs the fictional columnist Ed Anger when we've got Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones fulfilling the exact same function in the real world?
They just couldn't find a way to end this one without tipping their hat to the old time-travel paradox, could they? Pax solves the problem of how to be with Elizabeth not by returning to 2011, but by making another jump, "Quantum Leap"-style, to 2010 and making sure that she never gets together with Richard in the first place. Umm, yeah, that may solve the problem but it creates a number of other ones - with everything he knows about Elizabeth, he's got an unfair advantage here, she of course doesn't remember him at all because at this earlier point, she hasn't met him yet. And now Pax will have to explain the whole "man from the future" thing all over again, which is a lot of work, why go through all that twice if you don't have to?
This also reminds me of "Time Freak", when Stillman kept re-doing relationship moments until he got the outcome he wanted - this brings up issues of free will and consent, like if you remove all the timelines that you don't like, and leave only the ones where the girl falls in love with you, then she's not really with you by choice, is she? I'm not saying this is temporal rape, but it's stacking the deck in one's favor, and that's not cool. It's a slippery slope once you start manipulating the timeline just to get hooked up with a non-time traveler. Seriously, aren't there more important things that Pax should be doing to change the timeline? How about that whole "the oceans dried up in the 25th century" thing. Maybe warn somebody about the comet that's going to hit in 2875, and kill millions? Just a thought, maybe with enough advance notice, we could build a planetary shield or a space laser to destroy the comet, or get a crew to land on the thing a blow it up? But no, you go ahead and figure out what love is, because that's way more important.
Yesterday, after tweeting about "An Hour Behind", my BFF responded that it sounded like one of those fake TV movies mentioned on "30 Rock" as a cutaway, and of course he nailed it. This one's cut from the same cloth, though I assure you this film is completely real and totally terrible. Once again, I'm watching this so that you don't have to. You're welcome. If you do watch this, I can guarantee you'll be counting down the minutes to the next commercial break.
Also starring Sara Rue (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Fred Willard (last seen in "Mascots"), Jordan Wall, Justin Smith (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Valerie Harper, Adam Boyer (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Enisha Brewster, Mike Pniewski (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Cara Mantella (last seen in "I, Tonya"), A. Ali Flores (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Jody Thompson (last seen in "Instant Family"), Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Cleaner"), Kevin Stillwell, TJ Hassan, Jay Gates, Larry Schmidt, Rivka Levin, Steve Warren and the voice of Ryan Felton.
RATING: 3 out of 10 overpriced Hurricanes on Bourbon St.
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