My TV Musings

It always starts with a dream and this one is in a funeral home where visitation is taking place and Anne (Lili Taylor) is in a casket. Everyone is saying nice things about her and she’s looking around, trying to tell everyone she isn’t dead and would they please not bury her in a wedding dress. When she awakens, she hears noises in the living room and her soon-to-be ex-husband is packing some books. He insists he’d left messages saying he was coming.

After Anne and Phil’s argument takes them to his car and he leaves, Anne heads to work. On her way to her parking space she hits another vehicle, driven by William Banks, played by Courtney Vance, formerly of Law & Order. Turns out he is Cordelia Banks’, one of Anne’s colleagues, ex-husband. Who knew he was sexy? Apparently Anne did.

Anne’s first patients are an elderly couple played by Shelley Berman and Ann Morgan Guilbert of the original 1960’s Dick Van Dyke show. They appear to have brought adventure back to their lives by trying to kill each other. They seem so happy. Well, apparently not. It starts to look like the wife has killed the husband and Anne feels responsible for not knowing. How could she not have seen? It looked pretty obvious to me.

In any case, Anne and William go to her place and he makes a wonderful dinner of canned clams, butter and milk and they end up in bed, both happily so. But things go downhill due to Anne’s guilt about her patients and perhaps also guilt from having betrayed her friend Cordelia. My thought was: why can’t Anne date a divorced man? I mean William and Cordelia have been divorced awhile now and Cordelia did not appear to be pining for him.

But I digress. Cordelia had been seeing a handicapped patient who insists on climbing the stairs everyday to see Cordelia. It becomes obvious he is smitten with her and she has to lay down the rules. So he stops coming to see her for awhile but one day shows up, just after she’s heard about Anne and William. It cheers her up to see him.

Well, to make a long story longer, Anne goes to Shelley Berman’s funeral and has a vision of him. He tells her that “passion might have killed me but a life without it? You tell me.”

So Anne goes shopping and buys some canned clams and calls William, who is at the airport, leaving for a short business trip. She tells him that, if he is a mistake, he’s one she might be willing to live with. He promises to see her when he gets back.

Some people are complaining about this show because Anne, a white woman, is dating William, a black man. Is this the 1950’s? I hope this is just a small (not to mention small-minded) vocal group and not a representation of a larger force that can make Lifetime sit up and take notice.

And again I digress. The big twist came at the end when Cordelia went into a shop to buy something and, as she crossed the street, she passed a man in a jacket. She paid no attention whatsoever to him as he hurried past her and down the street but, after she entered the store, he turned around and watched her for just a moment, and I have to say that he looked a lot like the handicapped man except for the lack of leg braces and glasses. Had he been stalking her all along? Will there be more to this story? All I know is that I don’t expect to be Sookie-ing Cordelia anymore.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 11:11 pm and is filed under State of Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.