The Comic Strip, Part 9 - all of the leaves have gone green

"Susie" - January 14th, 1984


Here is the synopsis from epguides.com:

A lascivious schoolteacher has grown hopelessly bored with her bland small-town existence. Her world takes a sudden turn, however, when a wealthy, impetuous pop star moves to town to get a taste of country life. Suddenly, she must choose between her tedious but adoring husband, her indifferent but steady lover, and this intriguing, unpredictable new man in her life.

I could not do any better than that.

One of the things that I am enjoying about seeing these episodes in order at last is seeing how they all play off each other. Where the last one was a surreal farce, this one is only steps away from the sort of drama it's trying to lampoon. Really. Jettison most of the po-faced meta-textually self-aware dialogue, and expand the episode so it is not so breakneck (It clocks in at 33 minutes, but it feels like an hour long) and you have the sort of movie that dies in the multiplex (Ebert likes it and Roeper is indifferent -- ultimately giving it a thumbs down because the characters don't think to use their cell phones in a moment of crisis. He hates that.) but does well in the three-screen college neighborhood mid-to-low price independent theater (with the art-school popcorn barristas and the other two movies could be a soccer comedy from Zimbabwe and a documentary about the hidden social culture of the grey squirrel) and later shows up on an international airline seat-back video player as counter-programming to Herbie Jumps Over the Grand Cayman Islands.

You know the type.

This was another episode not shown on MTV. In some ways this is understandable, as there is an awful lot of sex. In other ways it isn't, as all that shows up on screen is bouncing cars. Of all the things that have turned up on MTV, I can't imagine that they would be upset about bouncing cars, but then I've never pretended to understand MTV. Another reason could be that they simply didn't want to cut the episode down to fit the slot, which on the face of it is unlikely as well - I can't see them suddenly being concerned with something being edited to the point where it no longer makes sense.

Oh, and three cheers for the ending. It not only isn't a cop-out, but makes sense in context of the episode and is (until the punchline which is also fine) reasonably unexpected.