Kids Today: Monday night fun

Monday night television is back! Well…sort of. This Monday brought the premiere of the new season of Secret Life of the American Teenager (which was originally to be titled the Secret Sex Life of the American Teenager, but that was too scandalous) and the new series, Make It or Break It. While neither show is Gossip Girl (sigh), both promise good, summer entertainment. SLAT is already pulling out all the stops, and Make it or Break it promises some wonderful underdog heroes and really love-to-hate villains.

The season premiere of SLAT dealt with pregnancy, sex, and death, and I have to wonder where they’ll possibly go next. The first big twist of the season is that Amy’s mom (Molly Ringwald) is pregnant! Like daughter like mother? Of course, we the viewers noticed that Molly had put on a bit of weight since last season, but I was shocked and tickled when her daughter also noticed and it became a major plot point for the first half of the show. Amy had her mom on a soup only diet so that she could lose the weight, and even after the pregnancy test read positive Amy was unconvinced that her mom hadn’t just gotten fat. (Editor's note: Molly Ringwald's real-life pregnancy was written into the show! Whaaaaaaat?!) Later in the episode, Grace, the blond Christian cheerleader who looks like a rabbit decided to have sex for the first time. Her mother and brother were taking her father to the airport, which was hours away (what town do they live in?), to catch a chartered flight for some sort of mission trip, which gave Grace the perfect opportunity to sleep with her ex-boyfriend apparently now turned current boyfriend, Jack, or as I like to call him, Dawson Leery's ugly little brother.

After they do it for the first time, Grace decides that she totally loves sex. Everything seems great until, as Jack is coming down the stairs looking disheveled, Grace's mom enters the front door with her son, crying. His first reaction to a crying mom? "Oh, it's OK, we just had sex." What??? WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT? Of course, the mom is crying not because of the sex but because they just learned that the plane (which took of mere hours ago) had crashed and that Grace's dad was dead. Way to go, Grace! Your premarital sex killed him! Good luck enjoying it again. I'm sad that we'll never see Grace's creepy dad with the constantly one eyebrow raised smirk on his face again.Make It or Break It tells the age-old tale of raw talent versus money, and I would imagine that talent will win. On the one side, we have a brunette with lots of natural ability but not a lot of money who has to come in as the new kid in town and make the cut to go to nationals. Add to that the fact that she is the daughter of a single somewhat slutty looking mom and has a younger brother in a wheel chair and we've got ourselves a protagonist, ABC Family style! On the other side, we have a blond with tons of money (and to be fair, probably some natural talent, too) and a bad attitude whose father (owns the gym? is the head coach?) and who has been working all her life to get to nationals. And she's not about to let some brunette from the wrong side of the tracks get in her way! Who will make it, and who will...break it?

These will be good summertime fun, but I’m still counting the days until Gossip Girl returns (81 days)…

This entry was posted by Brigitte, on Thursday, June 25, 2009. You can leave your response.