And If, You Don't Love Me Now, You Will Never Love Me Again, I Can Still Hear You Saying, You Would Never Break The Chain

--"The Chain (cover)", Scarlett Pomers w/ Jak Paris

She'd been trying to get me to watch that show for ages. "Hell's bells, sugar, it's way funnier than anything you're watching now. I guarantee it," she'd say, but I would never listen to her. When it comes to viewing habits, I'm even more selective than my music taste. After all, I concede it's impossible to listen to everything under the sun out there. Yet, even with hundreds of channels, I thought I had built up a pretty good radar for quality entertainment on television. I thought I simply didn't have any more room to add one more program to the list of programs I had to watch every week. I was too stubborn to even give it a chance.

And that was my loss.

I think Reba was one of the funniest shows I have ever seen.

It finally took manipulation of the lowest sort to cajole me into watching that first episode ("There's a cute redhead on the show..."). And, yes, Scarlett Pomers is rather cute, but I've seen dozens of cute redheads on various shows throughout the years. Many of them I stop to watch the one episode and that was it. Yet the comedic timing, chemistry, and compassion on the show kept drawing me back into watching day after day. Admittedly, I didn't even want to take it that far. I had a bias about the show. I thought that because ostensibly it was about a Southern family that I wouldn't relate to the humor, that I just wouldn't get what they were going through, and that, because of all that, I wouldn't think it funny at all. Yet I found myself laughing loud enough to wake my neighbors and my roommate. If that isn't the true test of a good sit-com then I don't know what is.

I found myself coming into work the next morning and quoting lines from the show. Jokes, bits, and schticks would emblazon themselves in my memory. That's when I knew that this show would be right up there with classics like Friends or Cheers. It was literally a joke machine far exceeding the two good laughs a minute rule. That's initially what kept me coming back for those first few weeks.


watch the sun rise

However, as with most things, I started to analyze what was going on deeper in the show. I started to take a look at where the humor was being drawn. What I discovered is that it was tackling a subject I had never dealt with personally and presenting it in a way, on one hand, easy to digest and, on the other hand, very illuminating.

I've never had anyone in my extended family get a divorce. Filipinos just are built to divorce. Moreover, nobody I knew in school all the way up to high school had parents who had gotten a divorce. I'm not saying there wasn't anybody in my school who fell under that category; there just wasn't anybody I was close with who had been raised under those conditions. In fact, the earliest education I received on the subject matter, aside from novels and other pieces of fiction, were the Jenny Lewis (the first notorious redhead) movies Troop Beverly Hills, The Wizard, and Big Girls Don't Cry, They Get Even. Hell, even Trading Hearts involved a broken family. I always thought it was fascinating to hear and see what it was like to have parents who didn't see each other all that often, to have to split time between them, and all the other realities of that lifestyle. However, I never took it as anything more than the characterization of the people in the story. I never felt what it was like to be in that situation.

The people on Reba were a different beast altogether. Since it was a show that lasted multiple seasons I was privileged to see the different levels that having multiple parents has on kids. I got to see how it isn't a cut-and-dry set of rules that families have to live by. Most importantly I became aware of something I always took for granted in families like that. I'd always been shown families who are devastated once the parents break up--acrimonious fights, using the kids as spies, the ripping apart of the institution of marriage--or I'd been shown the other ideal, where the parents became jolly good friends for the sake of the kids and where everybody came to some sort of lasting peace despite the situation.

On Reba, it always fell somewhere in the more believable middle. They split the difference. Yes, Reba and Brock managed to keep things civil. Yes, Reba and Brock's new wife Barbara Jean managed to forge some sort of friendship. And, yes, the kids came to see that they had three parents who cared about them. Yet there were constant reminders of Brock's infidelity, Barbara Jean being the "other woman," and Reba's inability to come to grips that she had been discarded. The show also delved a lot into Kyra's feeling like she was the reason her parents split up. It touched on Cheyenne being worried that her marriage would end up like her mother's. It even shone a spotlight on the idea that Brock's infidelity could even spill over into his new marriage.

In short, the dynamic of the show reflected the idea that a family, any type of family, is always in flux. That's why I think this show resonates with me so much. I've always had a theory that it is impossible to love somebody the same amount and in the same way over any extended period of time. It is impossible to predict how you're going to feel about someone in the next five or ten years. You could safely guess that as you get to know them you'll fall even more in sync with them, but you can never be sure. People's interests change, people mature, their personalities deepen, &c... which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the person you fall in love with today might not be someone you can love in the future. You hope. You pray. You worry. Yet you can't do anything to stop someone from becoming who they are.

I balk when people make proclamations that they're going to love someone for the rest of their lives. I know it can happen. I mean I've loved Breannie for a long time now, but I even hesitate to stamp the word forever when I talk to her. You just don't know.

I think the idea expressed on the show that I really latched onto is the idea that even if you can't love someone forever, even if you can't love someone as strongly as you did before, you can still manage to hold onto the idea of them as being a part of you. It speaks to the romantic in me that there can be this separation of love from caring because I know all too well how fragile true love is. I've seen firsthand how it can all go wrong so quickly. Yet in everyone of my relationships, after that initial period of adjustment, I've always made that effort to stay friends with the young woman in question. I've always taken it to heart that just because you've stopped loving a person doesn't mean they're no longer in your heart.

Reba was an entire show built around that principle. Marriages and relationships may come and go, but sometimes there's a bond between families and some friendships that endure forever. It showed that if a person was willing to make adjustments to the view of how their world should be that everything can turn out pretty okay in one's personal life in the end. Not great. Not the best, but enough to get by on and sometimes good enough to make all the hardships worthwhile in the end.

Yeah, that's my history with the show: came for the redhead, but stayed for the life-affirming message of hope and love. LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers