Drop Dead Diva, no really.

Several mornings ago I was flipping through the few channels I have on network t.v. and saw Margaret Cho on The View so I stopped to see what she was up to. Currently she plays the assistant to lawyer Jane (Brook Elliot) on the new television series Drop Dead Diva airing on Lifetime Sunday evenings. I thought, oh well she’s funny that may be a good show. Then I realized it was on cable and I’d never be able to watch it, thus it was dismissed from my mind.

Only later when I realized I could stream Project Runway on mylifetime.com did I come across Drop Dead Divas again and decided to give it a try.

The premise is a bit much—a size 2 model named Deb (Brooke D'Orsay) on her way to a Price is Right audition dies as she wrecks her car into a truck-full of grapefruits at around the same time a lawyer named Jane, in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets shot by a disgruntle man pissed off at her boss for having an affair with his wife. Deb is in heaven and the angel informs her she’s a double zero. She has done nothing good and nothing bad in her life. Upset and never one to follow the rules she hits the return key on the keyboard and ends up in Jane’s body. Now Jane possesses Debs soul, but all of Jane’s intelligence.

Wehh. Yeah. That’s the running plot-line and I will not even go into the holes as I assume you can deduce what those are yourself.

What I do want to discuss is the last episode I streamed “Crazy” In it there are two main story-lines, one follows Jane and her shenanigans with some possibly insane guy she’s supposed to be defending and while the other line follows her love interest Grayson (Jackson Hurst) and another lawyer Kim Kaswall (Kate Levering) as they deal with both their relationship tensions as well as the tensions in another relationship they’re supposed to defend together.

This second story line is what I want to focus on. In it we meet a crying woman in a wedding dress. She is distraught. She spent $10,000 on her dress and she never got to walk down the aisle. Instead of following the tradition of waiting until the ceremony to see your husband she snuck into his room and found him fucking her maid of honor. Which of course makes me want to write some sort of pun about not being “made of honor” but I will not. In any case she wants to sue said “maid of honor” for ruining her life. Basically. Her fiancé (is he still a finance if they don’t go through the actual marriage?) declares his love for her and apologizes profusely. In the end she drops the lawsuit and goes back to the man in an attempt to “work things out”.

What. The. Fuck.

Where to even begin.

Lifetime creates this “new” show in an attempt to say something about “inner beauty” and this woman runs back to a cheat?

What is this saying about monogamy in general? That it’s okay for men to cheat because women are inferior and have to deal with men’s discrepancies? That she wasn’t good enough to find someone to treat her with respect? Yes, it was absolutely ridiculous of the story-line to have her suing the maid of honor over ruining the scared vows of matrimony, but at least it had some reasoning behind it, whereas the woman completely giving up in the end lacks any source of empowerment for women.

Oh. You may argue, some women would go back. Yes. But, it’s television. They write the script. They could have made anything happen. The only reason they made that woman get back together with that man was so the main characters in the storyline would have a “revelation” and discover something out about their own experiences of the day. How disgusting.

If you’re going to have a woman run back to her man about cheating there better be a discussion about other options such as non-monogamy or polyamory. But no. Let’s make women look weak, passive and unconfident. Let’s have everything, including all the story-lines revolve around what men think and whether the men are going to like us. Yippee. Is the real reason marriage still exists just so we can have these terrible plotlines in shows? because that’s all it seems to be to me—this awful conforming joke that isn’t really funny at all. Love is all we need, perhaps, but not the bling bling wedding rings and contracts that are basically meaningless these days.

Check out Pervertable Tongues;

“Cut Out My Brains and feed them to my Dog” aka the monogamy song for more of my feelings about this issue,

Available on iTunes for only 99 cents or at www.myspace.com/pervertabletongues for free!