Again With This: Dawson's, Melrose, 90210

Dawson has a lot of naïve ideas about love, and in this episode sees several of them destroyed. His parents' perfect marriage? Not perfect enough to keep his mother from making out with her co-anchor in the middle of their TV station, which Dawson witnesses. His wonderful friendship with Joey? Whoops, she knew about the affair and didn't tell him. Jen's purported virginity? Apparently a distant me...

Kyle and Amanda are back together: yay! Kyle and Amanda's plans to move into their dream house and start a family might get postponed by Amanda getting forced into finally bringing her slum of an apartment complex up to code: noooooo, or something! Given the financial pinch Amanda is feeling, it's a wonder Eve is even bothering trying to repair their broken friendship -- but never mind, she's stil...

Since Dawson simply cannot shut up in the back of the film class he is very much not enrolled in, Mr. Gold finally tries to get him to shut up by letting him be a PA on Cliff's movie. Will Dawson's constitutional inability to keep his thoughts to himself ruin his chance to parlay the PA gig into full access to the class? At the same time, he's still very anxious to kiss Jen, going so far as to pla...

Amanda's one-story fall leads to medical consequences that are, for any soap opera viewer, extremely expected. Further consequences ripple through the group: Lexi takes advantage of Ryan's distress to get intel on his romantic past. Eve looks up an old prison pal for help fleeing her life. And Peter finally decides to try to run down the VA lab results to see if he can prove to Kyle that he did, i...

Only two episodes in, and already it's just overall a bad time to be Joey Potter. First of all, she has to be present for all of Dawson's yammering about the romantic relationship that only he thinks he's on his way to having with Jen. Also, she has to bear the terrible knowledge that Gale is having an extramarital affair, though at least in that case, she lightens her burden a little by telling G...

Amanda is doing her best to be supportive while Kyle goes through his rehab program, but she still feels guilty about pushing him to do things she doesn't think he ever wanted to do, while he feels ashamed to have fallen short of his own standards. She definitely needs a friend to lean on, and since she and Eve are still fighting about Amanda having fired Sharp Objects, Amanda seeks support from P...

Dawson Leery, the world's #1 Steven Spielberg fan, has a great life: wonderful friends he's known since childhood, parents who are seriously crazy about each other, and plenty of resources to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. But just as he and his pals are about to start high school, cracks start to appear. Joey suddenly decides she can't sleep over anymore, just because of their hormones...

We're off this week but we bring you two Again With Again With This episodes full of holiday cheer. AWAWT 120: Let’s Watch SNL’s Tori: Absolutely Christmas! Our discussion of the ongoing Tori Spelling send-up from Saturday Night Live is twice as long as the pleasingly concise skit, which we give pretty high marks. Is Melanie Hutsell's Tennessee-flavored Tori a success? Is there STUFF? Listen and s...

We're off this week but we bring you two Again With Again With This episodes full of holiday cheer. AWAWT 121: Let's Watch Jack Wagner In Falling For Christmas ! Netflix's "Hallmark, But Expensive?" movie Falling For Christmas features LiLo as an amnesiac heiress, and Jack Wagner as her hotel-magnate dad. It's a completely predictable bagatelle -- but were we charmed by it? Was Wagner's best work...

The good news is that after seeing his worst qualities reflected in his awful father, Kyle has realized that he does, finally, have to tell Amanda what's driven him to drink and pills. The bad news is that he does so immediately after setting the dream house frame on fire and driving off to parts unknown. Amid and around waiting for him to return, Amanda decides to send Ryan to Mexico for a resort...

McBride patriarch Mack comes to town to ruin everyone's lives.

Having been assaulted, at the end of the previous episode, with Kyle's version of Eve's scandalous history, Peter kind of...acts like a grownup? He tells her what he's heard, then goes to Oakhurst to see what he can find out himself. Unsurprisingly, the small-town fascists make Eve look much more credible by contrast. Back in L.A., Kyle is still a mess, and Ryan is still sniffing around Megan's re...

Kyle's reaction to Amanda kicking him out? Putting down his duffel bag and opening up his bag of pills. He's not trying to hear advice from Peter or Ryan, so Eve takes her shot -- then probably regrets it when Sharp Objects comes to town and Kyle orders her to perform as their new lead singer despite how uncomfortable she is about their lascivious looks. Perry is selling Michael so hard on the inv...

Kyle still hasn't figured out how to tell Amanda the news about his infertility, and has gone so far past the point of self-medication that he...gets on a plane and goes all the way to the other side of the country to "scout bands" in New York City. This is a great plan, because Peter doesn't want to refill his prescription of "relaxers," and you know who has access to drugs and a willingness to p...

It's the winter holiday season on Melrose Place, and Santa's sleigh is about to get totaled. Dr. V has the charitable instinct of enlisting Michael, Peter, and their male neighbors from the complex to be temporary Santas at various local schools. Little do they know that ANOTHER group of Santas has assembled for much more nefarious purposes. Fortunately, a moment of mistaken identity is quickly cl...

Amanda and Kyle having decided they want to have a baby, Amanda's gotten herself medically cleared for action, and asks Kyle to do the same. But since he knows some of his Gulf War veteran buddies have had fertility issues, Kyle goes to his new pal (?) Peter (??) for a physical to see if he also got exposed to anything that compromised his baby-making capacity. The very busy Amanda also accepts Le...

We found out in the last episode that Eve served 15 years in prison, and this week, we find out why; thus, all of us are one-up on Peter, since Amanda and Eve convince Kyle (to whom they spilled their secret) not to tell Peter, and he and Eve get married without incident as far as he knows. Kyle's not thrilled about it, but when he gets back to L.A. he finds much to distract him: a random baby to...

The sex-driven roof collapse of the previous episode has thrown everyone into chaos. Jane is going ahead with divorce proceedings immediately! Ryan is done with Lexi for good! Megan is also done with Lexi as a friend and a boss! Michael...is starting therapy, which is honestly probably a good idea and long overdue! Peter is suddenly bereaved, as he finds out his estranged father has died, apparent...

It's Jane and Michael's wedding day: take 2! Bad start: Michael is reunited with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, who all soon realize none of them knows where Jane is. Amanda does, once Jane summons her to the hotel room she's booked (which: let's pause and congratulating her on figuring out THIS resource) to say she and Alex kissed and now she doesn't know if marrying Michael is a mistake. Ama...

In some ways, things for Eve and Peter seem to be going great: he's giving her his credit card for a shopping spree, broadly hinting that he'd love her to move in, and so on. Buuuuuuuut, there's also the fact that she needs a shopping spree because she barely has any clothes; and is she maybe so focused on Peter that she might pass up a chance to make a deal with a record label? That's not all, bu...

Eve is about as eager to get things going with Peter as a person can be. And she knows he and Amanda were formerly married. And she recognizes that her instincts about relationships may not be the greatest. But no, she is not going to listen to any of Amanda's suggestions about how to handle things with him. Megan is trying to walk the narrow line between staying on Lexi's good side (and in her em...

After being drawn to Eve's (a) medical level of neediness and (b) siren song, Peter asks her out. And Amanda is all about it, giving Eve tips on how to land him and even lending her an outfit. But then Eve is a little too aggressive in kissing him goodnight, and too eager to try to walk back her first impression, to the degree that both Peter and the audience is left wondering what her deal actual...

When Peter makes a whole scene at the not-jazz club keeping Lexi from telling Amanda what she knows about Peter, Kyle figures out that he might be able to confirm his vague suspicions about Peter by joining forces with her, even going to her fake office to arm-grab her about it. Lexi keeps it to herself...for now. When Kyle's not laser-focused on taking Peter down, he's taking down Eve, a Lilith F...

From AWAWT 126: Let’s Watch Grant Show In  True Blue ! Midseason replacement True Blue is the 9-1-1 of its day...so why didn't it last longer than three months? Maybe because Law & Order , which staffed up with half TB 's cast, came along and ate its lunch? Maybe because it spent its entire budget on music rights for this one episode, "Oldies But Goodies"? We have some theories, but we're pret...

Kyle is still morbidly focused on Amanda, Peter, and the missing diary page, which is such a waste of energy since Peter is probably going to trip himself up soon enough: LEXI has winkled out his most recent terrible secret, which if Kyle knew she'd done should make him very ashamed that she's shown him up. When Kyle's brother Ryan isn't reading way too much into his every interaction with Kyle, h...