Watched: Bunheads

The show opens: Michelle is a sarcastic, slightly bitter, very disillusioned showgirl working in Vegas. Longtime admirer Hubble enters stage right, has been trying to get her attention for ages, after a truly terrible audition she finally gives up on life enough to give him a chance and in the process gets wasted and then married to him, in the span of one night. She wakes up to find herself in his small southern California coast town of Paradise, with a whole lot of quirky characters including a ballet instructor mother-in-law, a deranged dressmaker, a one-eyed plumber, an award winning barista who works at a snail's pace, a stoner couple who run the only bar in town, and others. Obviously I'm not going to try and capture the whole first (and only, *SOB*) season in pictures, but I did get some of my favorite moments to put on here.

But first, just one thing. I love Gilmore Girls, have rewatched it multiple times and know for a fact that I will do it again in the future. Same goes for Bunheads. Amy Sherman-Palladino makes great shows. I hope she gets the chance to make more, and I hope wherever they find a home they get more lenient overlords than those at ABC Family. That all of their garbage soap opera shows were allowed to survive and a show like this, which may have a stupid title and appear, from a distance while squinting, like those shows, was given such careless treatment, is a good argument for why American television executives just don't get it. 

The truth is that this show was dark, in a way that people sometimes forget that The Gilmore Girls could be. What people generally tend to remember about GG and probably will remember about Bunheads are the jokes about coffee and its incessant consumption, the junk food, the town events, the rapid-paced dialogue, the cultural references, the quirky townspeople as background, and the cute leads. I don't know that people necessarily remember that in Gilmore Girls the leads, a single mother and her daughter, didn't talk to each other for about half a season because Lorelai couldn't forgive Rory for throwing away the dream that Lorelai had poured all of her energy and spirit into making happen after her own life had veered wildly from its intended path. They don't necessarily bring up the scene where Lorelai's father has a heart attack and she can't bring herself to enter his hospital room until no one else is around and even then, can't put into words the fear and sadness that hangs between them. They don't remember how often the consequences of Lorelai's youth revisit her, or the sometimes brutal levels of dysfunction within that tv family.

Just as in Bunheads, some viewers who were not paying attention may not realize that this was an amazing show about contending with your failures and finding the will to transfer your hopes and dreams to new ventures, or maybe even onto the next generation, when your time has passed. There is an elemental sadness in the passing of a torch, in what it means to be the passer and what it means to be the passee, that I think Bunheads renders better than many, many other shows that I have watched and loved. This is not just a fun, silly show about teenager girls who dance and have boyfriends and their wacky former-showgirl (sometimes) teacher and her former-prima ballerina mother-in-law. It's not just about Madam Fanny's wacky spiritualism, or Truly's oddball relationship with her high-powered bussinesswoman sister, or Michelle's acceptance of a mentor-like position. Although it is about these things too. But for me, Bunheads is a show about what happens when a dream dies; whether it is a long, gruesome death that takes decades of wearing feathers on your head and dehumanizing auditions, a boy who doesn't call you back, accepting that you'll never have the right body or charisma to do the thing you love, accepting that you do but that still won't ever give you the right to squander your gifts, or even just accepting that everything you've built in your life may not mean to others what it means to you.

I know, I said dream about a bazillion times in this post. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead talking about something cliched as one's dreams. But this show handles the fragile nature of success, failure, and womanhood in a way that worked so well for me that it broke my heart it wouldn't be coming back.

It was a good show, it what I'm saying. It was a funny show and it was a sad show and it was a show that gave a lot of women a chance to shine and that just does not happen nearly enough.

So, pictures!

 Obviously this dog had no serious relevance to the plot but I took several shots of it because LOOK AT IT.

 The first dance sequence to make me cry, for Hubble's memorial service.

 Fanny's flawless bitch face.

 Would that all of these dance sequences could be my favorite! Still, this one was definitely up there. Maybe number four or five. The theme of the dance is environmentalism, with the girl in red the villainous checkout girl, paper and plastic her dueling minions, and the martyred hero: the canvas bag. WHY WAS THIS SHOW CANCELED GODDAMMIT

 On the far right of this one you can see one of the most marvelous "Sparkles" botique creations from Truly (on the right, in purple): a teddy bear head covered trench coat. Just... perfect.

 Movie night, with Boo's massacred eyebrows and the mysterious appearance of a rogue baby.

 One of Sasha's several non-sequitur dance sequences, in which we get some insight into her emotional state and also get to watch her do her (very talented) danc ing thing. This one was possibly my favorite just for sheer WTF factor; after not getting home before the house security alarm is turned back on, Sasha tries to sneak into her house and ruins her mother's car in the process. She and her friends sleep in the car and although they're able to sneak into the house in the morning, Sasha sees her dad (who is in the middle of slow but painful separation from Sasha's mom as he is coming out of the closet), sits down next to him, confesses exactly what she did to him, then runs upstairs to join her friends. All hail Sasha, heartless ruiner of things! Cut to: Sasha in all black with the two gingers, dancing a very sassy ballet (and maybe some modern?) to "Istanbul, not Constantinople". So. Perfect.

 I captured Michelle mid-line. She's teaching a young girls' ballet class and lets them have a bathroom break. A friend brings her "health" fries which she does not enjoy but continues to chow down on while this girl runs across the background, screaming, with her tutu on her head. Michelle remarks, "I should probably do something about that."

 So many Gilmore Girl cameos!!!

 The ringer, taking the role she always knew she'd have (so deranged).

 The "O Captain, My Captain" moment. Another horrible tear-jerker moment.

 No commentary needed; just.. PERFECT.

 Possibly my favorite four seconds of the whole show. This character, who had heretofore been mostly the dim, irreverent, or uninterested of the four friends, depending on what was needed, is finally given a defining trait: she's a bruiser. And it is amazing.

 More beautiful/awesome dance sequences.

One final shot of Michelle, in battle gear, trying one more time to put herself out there and keep her career going. As is often the result on this show, the result is heart-breaking but the process is worth it.