This episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me cry the first time I saw it. And it’s made me cry every time that I’ve watched it since.
(Along with She’s All That, It also left me with a totally unrealistic expectation of what my senior prom would be like but that’s okay.)
The Prom originally aired on May 11th, 1999.
(10/13/2015 update: Oh my God, y’all! I am so pissed off at Hulu right now! This entire show was available when I first created this post. And now, that I’ve actually published it, Hulu suddenly just wants to provide a 90-second preview. Please accept my apologies.)
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, Ollie Pope (Edward Andrews) kills a boy in a hit-and-run accident. Ollie tries to cover up the crime and frame an innocent man. His car, however, has a different idea.
This episode originally aired on January 3rd, 1964.
In this episode of The Twilight Zone (which was originally aired on May 4th, 1962), a neurotic ventriloquist named Jerry (Cliff Robertson) has a bizarre relationship with his dummy. Not only does Jerry seem to hate his inanimate partner but the dummy doesn’t seem to be too fond of Jerry either.
You’ll probably already figured out The Dummy‘s twist but it’s still extremely well-done, featuring a great performance from Cliff Robertson and expressionistic direction from Abner Biberman.
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, bitter millionaire Paul (Joseph Wiseman, who also played the title character in Dr. No around the same time that this episode as shot) offers three people safety from a nuclear war on one condition. They must apologize to him for insults that are both real and imagined.
This episode originally aired on January 12th, 1962.
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, Marsha White (played by Anne Francis) discovers some strange things happening in a department store. If you’re like me and you find mannequins to be super creepy, this episode is for you!
In this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy gets infected with the blood of a demon and develops the ability to hear other people’s thoughts. Along with allowing her to discover that Xander is obsessed with sex (like she needed telepathy for that) and that Giles and her mom did it twice on the hood of a police car, it also allows her to discover that one of her classmates might be planning on doing something violent.
This is one of my favorites episodes of Buffy, largely because it uses the paranormal as a way to expose a very real issue and to explore everyone’s shared humanity. Plus, I’ve always felt that, even after playing Buffy and starring in the wonderful guilty pleasure Ringer, Sarah Michelle Gellar remains a sadly underrated actress. This episode features her at her best.
I cannot begin to put into words just how much I miss the Fox Reality Channel! From 2005 until it went off the air in 2010, Fox Reality was the channel to go to if you wanted to watch some of television’s greatest guilty pleasures. It was all reality tv all the time, a mix of original programming with reruns of shows like The Amazing Race, American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen, and about a hundred different dating shows. Occasionally, they would devote an entire weekend to showing just one show and I have many fond memories of binge watching Paradise Hotel on Fox Reality.
Fox Reality also showed its share of cheap original programming as well, including today’s guilty pleasure. If you were watching the Fox Reality Channel in 2009 (as I was and I have the tweets to prove it), there’s a good chance that you saw this commercial:
Now, of course, after seeing that commercial, you probably said, “Oh my God, I have to watch this show! I mean, it says ‘sex’ right there in the title so it has to be good!”
So, you tuned into the Fox Reality Channel and, after sitting through the last 15 minutes of a rerun of The Rebel Billionaire: Richard Branson’s Quest For The Best, you watched Sex Decoy: Love Stings.
Fortunately, just in case you were unsure about what you were about to watch, the opening credits explained the whole concept behind this “reality” show:
All 8 episodes of Love Stings started out the same way, with Arizona P.I. Sandra Hope talking about how worried she is about her three daughters: Kashmir, Jasmine, and Xanadu. It upsets Sandra that all three of them dislike her nerdy boyfriend and business partner, Tom. It also upsets Sandra that all three of her daughters work as strippers whenever they are running low on funds. (But, if Sandra is so worried about all of her daughters becoming strippers, why did she give them all stereotypical stripper names? That’s what I’ve always wondered…) Then the daughters show up and make fun of Tom and complain that Sandra doesn’t treat them like adults…
It’s probably around this time that you, the viewer, came to realize that Sex Decoy: Love Stings was obviously an attempt to create a hybrid of Cheaters and Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Much like the Kardashians, Sex Decoy was obviously scripted. However, Sandra and her daughters made Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and even Kris look like Oscar-winning thespians by comparison. Sandra, in particular, had an amazingly robotic voice. Her dialogue and her interactions with Tom and her daughters were so lacking in emotion and spontaneity that they became odd portraits of existential dread. And when Sandra robotically talked about how much money she made by exposing cheaters, it almost felt as if we were watching one of Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental attacks on capitalism.
Anyway, after each episode’s family crisis had been set up, we would then meet this week’s client and get around to exposing their mate as being a cheater. This, of course, involved a lot of secret cameras and a sex decoy who would be brought in to seduce the cheater while the client watched in a nearby trailer. (Often times, Sandra would use her own daughters as the decoy which was kind of icky. A running subplot, throughout the series, was that Kashmir felt she was never properly used as a decoy and, as a result, would threaten to go back to stripping.) The client, naturally, would often get very upset and eventually, the cheater would end up being confronted while the cameras rolled.
And again, what made this so fascinating was the total inability of Sandra or her daughters to show any hint of human emotion. The client would get upset and start yelling. The cheater would try to talk his way out of it and occasionally beg for forgiveness. Meanwhile, Sandra and the daughters would watch and say things like, “He. Is. A. Cheater.” It was almost as if they were aliens sent down to Earth to expose cheaters.
Each show would end with Sandra, Tom, and the daughters doing some sort of family activity. Sandra would often brag that Sex Decoy was a family business but, being a robot, it always came out as, “After. All. We. Are. A. Family. Business.”
It was seriously just so strange to watch and that strangeness made it the epitome of a guilty pleasure. Sadly, Fox Reality is gone but Sex Decoy lives on! You can watch every episode on Hulu. And, fortunately, there’s only 8 of them so, right when the novelty of the show starts to wear off, it’s over!
Let’s continue our look at Horror on TV with another classic episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Just as yesterday’s episode focused on a supporting character (Xander), this episode focuses on Willow!
I was going to say that Doppelgangland was one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but then I realized that everyone would probably say that. This is an episode that truly shows why countless fans continue to love the show after all these years.
I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer and it’s always bothered me that I haven’t been able to share any episodes on this site. But, fortunately, this Halloween, Hulu has come to the rescue!
The Zeppo is one of my favorite episodes. While Buffy and the Scooby Gang save the world in the background, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) finally gets an adventure of his very own! Actually, there’s a lot of things that Xander finally gets to do in this wonderful episode!
(On a personal note, it breaks my heart whenever I read about Nicholas Brendon getting arrested and I’m reminded that Xander was just a fictional character.)
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, Gladys Cooper plays an elderly woman who lives in such fear of death that she refuses to even open the door of her apartment. Then, one day, a young policeman (Robert Redford) is shot outside of her apartment and Cooper is forced to finally confront the world.
This episode was directed by Lamont Johnson and written by George Clayton Johnson. It originally aired on January 5th, 1962.
Through the Shattered Lens 