The wife loves it. Wednesday nights are hard around our place.

It might just be the music. Maybe it's just the dreamy caterwauling girly people walking in slow motion on "Felicity" music. The music equals feelings, deep feelings, the kinds of feelings you sit in a room in black and white and talk to a camera about. I hate the music.

Don't get me wrong. I like feelings, like deep feelings, like talking about feelings. (The wife will disagree. OK, preferably not my feelings, but still.) I like girls, dreams, music and even, in certain moods, people walking in slow motion. But I hate that music.

On "Once and Again" they sit in a room, one at a time, and they're in black and white (black and white equals feelings -- deep, deep feelings), and they talk to the camera about their feelings.

We need the characters on "Once and Again" to do this because they are the most inarticulate bunch of losers ever to populate the public airwaves. The men are ineffectual and weenie-ish, the women ineffectual and solipsistic, and nobody, man, woman or child, can spit out what they, well, you know, what they want to -- listen, I don't wanna sound like a bad guy or anything but -- what they want to, you know, kind of like, sort of, um, say.

It's true that people do talk that way, sometimes, some people. But they also talk other ways. Like all at once sometimes. And stupidly. Silly, laughing. People make bad puns. Nobody, at least nobody I've ever met, or at least nobody I've ever wanted to talk to a second time, talks all portentous and slow all the damn time, every single word out of their mouths. And nervous. The people on "Once and Again" have all known one another for years, but they all act like they just met. All those years I spent watching movies and TV shows and saying, "Nobody talks like that. Nobody has just the right snappy comeback always ready. If only there were a show with realistic dialogue!" If this is reality, get me Noel Coward.

The only time the wife gets mad at me these days -- things are going good, they're really going good I think -- is when I offer my trenchant criticisms of "Once and Again." For example, she might say that what she likes about the show is that it's about "the more subtle parts of relationships. Like, it's not a big blowout fight -- he had an affair or whatever. It's more how real relationships are. It's just this one comment he made. That's what makes it interesting." To which I might say, "Yeah, but it sucks."

For some reason this bothers her. I wish I had a black and white room with a camera in it to go to, because I need to talk to somebody about that.

Nobody on "Once and Again" has much of a sense of humor. How can you want to hang out with these people? The younger sister -- oh, God, don't get me started on the straight from the character warehouse standard issue quirky younger sister with self-esteem problems who loves hates loves envies her sexy glamorous beautiful sexy lovely successful and did we say sexy she really is sexy folks ain't she it's not just hype you really believe she's sexy don't you big sister -- the younger sister might be OK, if she were snottier and not as self-absorbed as all the other characters and could riff humorously on their self-absorption and pettiness.

I want her to look into the camera, not when she's in the black and white room but right in the middle of the action, and say, "Do you guys believe these yutzes? I mean, get some real problems, folks. Listen, Michael Tucci -- from 'Grease,' you know? -- is guest starring over on 'Diagnosis Murder.' Go check that out for a while and I'll see what I can do to work on these losers."

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