The weather has been giving us a preview of the season-to-come today. It hasn't yet touched 70°F and has been raining most of the day, although it seems to have stopped; not a summer cloudburst, but a slow soaking rain. I'm sure the grass is just gulping it up. It was a pleasure to go out at lunchtime and not be struck all over by heat.

Alas, it's going back up into the 80s soon.

Speaking of fall previews, I remember as a kid looking forward to the Fall Preview TV Guide, walking over a mile to the nearest store that got it early: Food Town and later Thall's Drugs. Thall's was also where they sold my favorite composition books to write stories in.

No TVG like that any longer, but I did watch a new fall series last night. I don't know if I'm interested enough to record it if I'm going to miss it, but it was kind of cute, if a bit depressing at the beginning. It's called Men in Trees and is about a successful "relationship coach" (think Dr. Phil) named Marin who's on top of the world: her second book was just released with a third in progress, her book tour takes her from city to city, and she's about to be married to Graham, the greatest guy in the world.

Yeah, it figured: it couldn't last. Marin's agent Jane books her at an appearance at a small town named Elmo in Alaska; on the plane she realizes she has Graham's laptop instead of her own and she finds Graham's slideshow—of himself and her friend Kiki. Marin crumbles, finds the nearest bar to get drunk in, and tries to pull herself together.

If the venue sounds a little like Cicely, Alaska, well, maybe. I never watched Northern Exposure much. The people seem a bit more normal than the oddballs who wandered in and out of Joel's life: the barkeep and his estranged wife, the town "hostess" who's supporting a child after hubby ran off "to the lower 48," an African-American pilot who moved to Alaska after prejudice kept him from flying for a major airline, a Fish and Game hunk who has to extract a raccoon from Marin's room at the inn, and the owner of the inn himself, who also runs the town radio station. (The raccoon, by the way, is a regular and is played by a real raccoon named Elvis.) At one point Marin does get a ride with a Native American type who spouts the usual native homilies that get stuck in these types of characters' mouths. And there's a young woman named Annie, Marin's fangeek, who follows her to Alaska and seems to be hitting it off with innkeeper/DJ Patrick.

But there was something rather appealing about the Marin character when she started taking an interest in the landscape around her and, realizing she hasn't really ever been out on her own, decided to change that. So maybe I'll check back and see where they take the character. We'll see.

Labels: television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:09:00 PM

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