TV Party With Girl Germs Blogulator Radio: Clarissa Explains it All

It’s that time of the month - TV Party time. Our next (and last for a little while) TV Party is coming up on Monday, August 8th at The Red Stag Supperclub. This month, we’ll be screening episodes of the ’90′s teen classic Clarissa Explains it All. From 1991 to 1994 Clarissa (played by Melissa Joan Hart) snarked her way into the hearts of young TV viewers the world over, and rode at the cultural forefront of the influential girl power movement.

Join us on Monday, August 8th at 9pm for TV Party with Girl Germs and Blogulator Radio. As per usual, happy hour specials are from 10 to close: $3 domestics, $4 select taps, $4 select cocktails, $4 Crispin, $3 house wine. (The event is ALL AGES.)

As a BONUS: Answer the trivia questions below for a chance to win a $25 Red Stag giftcard! Email your answers to girlgermsradio@gmail.com. Trivia provided by yours truly for our fabulous (and feminist-TV obsessed) co-sponsors Girl Germs.

1. Clarissa Explains it All is often credited as Nickelodeon’s first original scripted program featuring a female lead. Name three others that followed in its footsteps for the network.
2. What school bully (first and last name) does Clarissa stand up to for picking on her brother Ferguson?
3. The lyrics to the Clarissa Explains it All theme song consist solely of what three phrases (besides “Na-na-na-na-na”)?
4. Name at least two musical artists referenced throughout the series run of Clarissa Explains it All.

Click on the flier below for more info on tonight's anticipated event!

Classic Television Rundown: Roseanne

In this very special episode of Classic Television Rundown, I'm going to talk about a very special television program that just so happens to be the show of the month in the next installment of the TV Party at the Red Stag Supperclub in Minneapolis. That show is...

Roseanne!

As always throughout its run with our lovely Girl Germs co-hosts who founded it, this month's TV Party spotlight is on a show with strong lead female characters, characters who are woefully underrepresented on a majority of scripted television throughout history. And very few female characters (or, for that matter, female sitcom actresses) have been stronger than Ms. Roseanne Barr.

Started in 1988 in the wake of the success of The Cosby Show, Roseanne originally set out to be a sort of anti-Cosby Show, where the main family of characters were working class, got into trouble, fought with each other, dealt with real issues, and so on. Despite these intended differences, to me there are more similarities between The Cosby Show and Roseanne than there are differences. Aesthetically, the shows are different, but ultimately they both deal with what then-staff writer and future Gilmore Girls showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino called "small issues on a big scale". That, and they are both terrifically written shows.

Roseanne, in fact, historically was a hotbed for writers who are writing on television today. The aforementioned Sherman-Palladino got her start on Roseanne, having written numerous episodes, including one that will air at the TV Party on Monday. As did Joss Whedon, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Dollhouse/Firefly creator, and the constantly-in-the-news creator of Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory Chuck Lorre, as well as Cynthia Mort, the creator of HBO's Tell Me You Love Me. Though the series behind-the-scenes drama was well-documented (Roseanne herself gives a lot of great detail in this fascinating recent article in New York Magazine), clearly the fact that the show housed so many writers who have gone on to do their own shows is a testament to the great writing.

The show is also unique in its cast. Outside of Roseanne, who started as a standup comic, most of the cast had backgrounds in theater. It shows, as John Goodman's performance as Dan Connor is a thing of comic beauty, he a surprisingly complex man with some basic wants and needs, and Laurie Metcalf's performance as Jackie, Roseanne's insecure sister. Their theatrical training is perfect for a show that is often hysterical despite very rarely going for the setup-the-joke-then-knock-the-pins-down routine that most sitcoms, even the best, go for. In that sense, Roseanne was a bit ahead of its time in its character-based humor. Of course, her kids, most notably Sara Gilbert as Darlene, are pitch-perfect in their roles.

As the series went on (and even in some earlier episodes), the show arguably went off the rails a little too much, perhaps indulging a little too much in the whims of Roseanne. (It only took into season two to get into a largely imagined musical-themed episode, season two's "Sweet Dreams".) By the end of the show's run, the plot twists had taken its toll, with the Connor family having won the lottery, and then the final episode's reveal that the season (and, perhaps, the series?) was something the Roseanne character had written to cope with life's difficulties was a little wacky. But it's also a testament to a show that ran throughout its run with largely no network input, and maintained a stranglehold on the Nielsen Top 20 all the way through. In today's highly fragmented (and, yes, still sexist) TV landscape, it's unlikely we'll ever see a show as powerful, frank, sweet and funny as Roseanne.

TV Party with Girl Germs is co-sponsored by Fancy Pants Gangsters, and takes place at the Red Stag Supperclub in Minneapolis starts at 9:00 pm on Monday, July 11.

Answer V-Mars Trivia to Win a Gift Certificate to the Red Stag Supperclub!

Hopefully you’re as pumped for Monday’s TV Party with Girl Germs this Monday, June 13th at the Red Stag Supperclub as we are! We know you Veronica Mars fans are an obsessive bunch (present company included) so we have put together some V-Mars trivia. Send your answers to girlgermsradio[at]gmail[dot]com (if you haven't heard, Girl Germs podcast on the same network as us and blog here) by Monday, June 13 at noon. If you answer all three correctly, you’ll be entered to win a fabulous prize (spoiler alert: it’s a gift certificate to the Red Stag Supperclub–which you can conveniently spend at TV Party). Finally, all that TV-watching you do pays off.

Now make like Veronica and solve these crimes, er…trivia questions.

1. What does Veronica use to stab the Hearst College rapist in Season 3?

2. What is the name of the long-time secret society at Neptune High that Veronica exposes in Season 1?

3. What are the nicknames for the lower-class kids and the upper-class kids in Neptune, where Veronica lives?

Remember, the deadline is Monday, June 13 at noon. Good luck! Details on the TV Party in the graphic below.

Veronica Mars TV Party at Red Stag Supper Club!

So The Blogulator is finally showing its face in public. Qualler, Brigitte, Jerksica, and I will all be at the Red Stag Supper Club this upcoming Monday, June 13th, for our first co-sponsored TV Party with our buds over at Girl Germs. They've been doing TV Party for a while (which specializes in screening favorite eps of shows featuring empowered female characters), but now they've kindly asked us to join them, as we're both doing netcasts for the Fancy Pants Gangsters network, and we both love us some good TV. Our first foray into co-presenting this event is one of my favoritest shows of all time, Veronica Mars! Here's the lowdown why you need to come and/or start watching it already:

Crime shows and teen dramas have been among the most successful, albeit trite, sorts of primetime network television, so it must have been a real bummer to studio execs when along came Veronica Mars, a show that could technically be lumped into either category but boldly defied the conventions of both at every turn throughout its sadly brief three season run. Starring now-movie star Kristen Bell as the titular adolescent detective, "V-Mars" (as the cool kids call it) led viewers through addictive and twisty mysteries that eschewed the rote case-of-the-week procedural style of storytelling that has plagued television for far too long in favor of richer and more sprawling season-long arcs every year. In addition, the crime-solving side of the show took a modern noir-y perspective of the idyllic-yet-corrupt (not to mention fictional) community of Neptune, California, trading in smoky alleyways for sunset-tinted high school hallways and replacing ham-fisted machismo-soaked dialogue with aggressively witty (and often feminist) commentary.

The inaugural season, which debuted on UPN in 2004, is arguably the best of the small bunch, possibly only because of its grandiose and slow-burning introduction of a wide range of instantly memorable characters. There's Enrico Colantoni as Veronica's deflated yet supportive ex-sheriff father (it is in this TV geek's humble opinion that feminist male characters are just as important as empowered female ones) who triumphs as both a humble town saint as well as a complexly uncertain but constantly loving parent. And then there's Jason Dohring as the brooding rich boy next door Logan, whose girlfriend Lily's murder is Veronica's main source of investigation throughout the show's first run of episodes. Lily (played by Big Love's Amanda Seyfreid) is equally arresting and vital as Veronica, too, in powerful flashback scenes that never feel extraneous to the present day goings-on. Lastly, you cannot leave out Eli "Weevil" Navarro, portrayed by Francis Capra, Jr., whose presence exemplifies the tricky class conflicts of Neptune, and uses Veronica as an admirably capable middle class middlewoman between the so-called "thugs" and bureaucrats of the town.

Seasons two and three continue much of the awesome that the first contains, bringing Veronica and the gang (her best friends Mac the wry tech-geek and Wallace the timid basketballer) through to graduation and into college. It sounds like a typical place for the series to go, but it manages to use it merely as a backdrop for first, an intense (and unpredictably personal) look into a bus crash that killed several of Veronica's classmates, and second, an on-campus serial rapist at Hearst College. And here, in the show's third season, which sadly leaves behind or at the sidelines too many of the show's best characters from earlier not to mention came to a crashing cancellation that kept it from a proper close, it all comes back to the first season: Veronica, being a former rape victim, is not forced so much as chooses to constantly battle against seedy male figures that take advantage of and brutally assault the good and the strong throughout the series' run. Yet this fact never defines her, and she never lets anyone define her this way, nor let it lead to other distracting and unfair labels, because with or without mention of the event that may or may not have influenced her to become a professional investigator, she's a badass, she's smarter than you, and simply put, she's one the best female characters ever put to the small screen. And dammit, that fourth season with her interning at the FBI should have happened.


Join the ladies of Girl Germs, as well as us, the TV-obsessed Blogulator Radio crew, Monday, June 13 at 9 p.m. We'll spin some Germsy music until 9:30, when the Veronica Mars goodness commences.

Vote for your favorite episodes here, or email suggestions to girlgermsradio[at]gmail[dot]com.

Happy hour specials from 10 to close: $3 domestics, $4 select taps, $4 select cocktails, $4 Crispin, $3 house wine. (The event is ALL AGES.)

TV Party with Girl Germs is sponsored by Fancy Pants Gangsters and The Blogulator.

For more information about Girl Germs or Blogulator Radio, or to listen to the podcasts, visit girlgermsradio.wordpress.com or fancypantsgangsters.com.