Ringing in the Fall Season

Anybody else remember this show?

I do. Swan's Crossing aired for like four months way back in 1992... Christ, I feel old. Anyway, it was a pretty terrible show, an attempt at a daily soap opera for teenagers that featured, among other things, Russian spies in a submarine. As a show, it's beyond forgettable; so forgettable, in fact, that I can't even find a way to download it off the internet, and I was able to find the full series of Are You Afraid of the Dark? online. The only reason I bring this show up is that it was the first show to star Sarah Michelle Gellar, and, as such, it was the first time I saw her and where she became the first crush eleven-year-old Jimmy ever had.

From Swan's Crossing, she went on to a roll on All My Children for a handful of years, which I caught bits and pieces of here and there because my grandmother followed that show closer than Jews follow the dollar. Then, of course, there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which most people know is my favorite show of all time. Granted, not because of her but because of the total package, although she definitely helped.

I go through this roundabout spiel to point out that I've seen every TV show SMG has ever starred in, so it was only fitting that her return to television was the first show of the Fall TV season to premiere for me.

So how was it? Convoluted as hell. You might have heard the plot; she plays twins who haven't seen each other in years because one is a junkie and the other is rich. Long story short, when they do finally meet again the rich one disappears mysteriously and the junkie assumes her life because she's running from both the FBI and Native American gangsters.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

Anyway, she finds out her rich sister's life isn't all it was cracked up to be, and let's face it, nobody's is. There are plenty of twists and turns in the first episode... too many, honestly, but I imagine that was necessitated to set things up and won't be the norm. The acting is fairly solid; aside from SMG the cast features Ioan Griffud (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) and a bunch of people you've never heard of. Well, and Mr. Eyeliner himself:

It's like his eyelashes are looking into my soul, man!

The only real gripe I have with the show so far is how many damn mirror shots there are. The first one is genius; in it the sisters are face-to-face in a mirrored closet, giving the impression there are, like, forty of them... and, let me tell you, forty SMGs would have been just too much for eleven-year-old Jimmy's brain to handle. But from there, there's a mirror shot in just about every scene, and it goes from a clever technique to a cute affectation to flat-out annoying real quick. That one complaint aside, the show was definitely interesting enough to at least get me to want to watch the second episode. Only time will tell, though, if this is another Buffy... or just another swan crossing in the night.