{"id":250,"date":"2000-02-23T12:21:53","date_gmt":"2000-02-23T17:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/?p=250"},"modified":"2008-06-30T12:22:57","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T17:22:57","slug":"roswell-review-from-washington-post-not-very-nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/2000\/02\/roswell-review-from-washington-post-not-very-nice\/","title":{"rendered":"Roswell Review from Washington Post, not very nice!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Chix19 for sending this in.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8216;Roswell&#8217;: The Morons Who Fell to Earth<\/p>\n<p>by Tom Shales Washington Post Staff Writer<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Roswell&#8221;&#8211;such a dull title. Not very descriptive, either. Why not &#8220;Whining Wimps From Outer Space&#8221;? Punchy, pithy and pathetically accurate.<\/p>\n<p>The whiners in question are three 16-year-olds, allegedly the progeny of extraterrestrials who crash-landed in Roswell, N.M., back in 1947. Surely you remember: It&#8217;s that big UFO scandal that the federal government has managed to cover up for 52 years except that everybody knows about it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Roswell&#8217;s&#8221; premiere, at 9 tonight on WB&#8217;s Channel 50, introduces us to the mopey, drippy teens (two boys and a girl) who are humanoid in appearance but possess such magical faculties as&#8211;better be sitting down for this one&#8211;the ability to listen to CDs just by holding them up to their ears!!!<\/p>\n<p>By heaven, has there ever been anything so mystical from the outermost vastnesses of deepest infinity?!<\/p>\n<p>Hey, that&#8217;s nothing. They can also melt the cheese on their nachos merely by looking at it cross-eyed. And yet in spite of such fantastically fabulous abilities, plus the capacity to &#8220;manipulate molecular structure&#8221;(does that mean, use a microwave oven?), they&#8217;re a forlorn trio of paranoids, ever fearful that the world, starting with tacky tourists visiting the alleged crash site, will discover their secret and send them to a laboratory.<\/p>\n<p>There they will be dissected and trisected and maybe even octasected to see what makes them tick, or so they think. But what groundless fears; they don&#8217;t tick. They barely blink. They&#8217;re duller than Bill Bradley debating Al Gore at a Warren Beatty cocktail party. They&#8217;re even duller than the self-important little snots who populate many of WB&#8217;s other odious odes to adolescent angst.<\/p>\n<p>The cat almost jumps out of the bean bag&#8211;to paraphrase Ricky Ricardo&#8211;in the very first episode, and all because alien pouty-boy Max (Jason Behr) has a crush on a waitress Shiri Appleby). She gets shot during a robbery attempt at the Outer Space diner. Max surreptitiously heals her wounds with a touch of his hand, thereby leaving a Day-Glo handprint on her tummy, which she happens to notice later that night.<\/p>\n<p>Immediately after he saves her life, she tries to run away, showing no interest in or curiosity about the boy who stopped her an inch this side of death&#8217;s door. There&#8217;s gratitude for you.<\/p>\n<p>You may wonder how the kids are only 16 when the UFO crashed in 1947. Frankly, it&#8217;s rather amazing you&#8217;ve even read this far, much less are wondering anything about the show. You must have read this far, because otherwise you wouldn&#8217;t be here in the middle of this sentence, which is about to end, not a moment too soon.<\/p>\n<p>Now, back to the kids&#8217; ages. It seems the tots were in pods, incubating for a few decades before springing forth. We have suggested that the show should have been thus titled &#8220;The Pod Squad.&#8221; But if WB won&#8217;t go for &#8220;Whining Wimps, etc.,&#8221; they probably won&#8217;t go for &#8220;Pod Squad&#8221; either.<\/p>\n<p>Besides, it&#8217;s not our job to think up titles. It&#8217;s our job to watch miserable television shows. Some job! And how miserable is &#8220;Roz&#8221;? It&#8217;s not just a bad show, it&#8217;s a destroyer of brain cells. It&#8217;s pernicious, it&#8217;s atrocious. It&#8217;s not even smart enough to be called mindless.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a seething, gurgling, boiling-hot caldron of noxious, molten pus! No, wait&#8211;that makes it sound too entertaining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Chix19 for sending this in. &#8216;Roswell&#8217;: The Morons Who Fell to Earth by Tom Shales Washington Post Staff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[16],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roswell","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}