Say a little prayer for I

I've been mourning The WB
all weekend. The sendoff tonight did a little bit to help work through some of the pain, but it'll take a while, a few more minutes at least. At least they brought back both Michigan J. Frog and the inappropriately old soudning voiceover guy for one night only. I had forgotten Amanda Peet started her career on The WB! (and tomorrow her TV career begins anew on "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." Coincidence, or total cosmic convergence? You make the call).

The expectedly overblown bumpers proclaimed The WB to be "the network that defined a generation," which is stretching, but from, say, 1998-2002 it really did have a stronger style and identity for a network than I've ever seen before. Sure, a lot of that may be from having a bunch of extremely similar shows, but still, admirable. And using "fresh" as a euphemism for a new episode was pretty genius.

Given a few years of distance, I have to say that it's pretty amazing that anyone ever bought James Van Der Beek (given the once prominent status of our big-foreheaded friend, isn't it weird that he hasn't really done anything post-"Dawson's"?) as a high school sophomore. On the "Dawson's Creek" pilot he says something like "But I'm 15" and I LOLed for real. What an old looking guy. And man, Pacey was unlikeable that first season. Holy cats. The show definitely exists as a product of its time; I can't imagine it would be as well-received now. It's just way too unsubtle with its portrayal of horny teenagers, and the idea that some middle aged men was writing it all was just really creepy (thankfully, since every actor on the show looked about 30, it was never actually crepy to watch). But in that first episode, every big vocabularied word out of someone's mouth is genitalia this, lost my virginity that.

It was cool to see "Buffy" and "Angel" on normal TV one last time though. Why have those pretty much disappeared from syndication already?

Here's an interesting article abotu the whole thing.

It's unfortunate UPN didn't get a similar sendoff, but I'll never forget them for this piece of TV history: