8.20.97

Has a friend ever asked you if you've seen a movie (say...Out Of Africa) and you haven't, but you lie and say you have? You say how much you thought Out Of Africa sucked, and anyway Hemingway was waaaay overrated. Then your friend tells you Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with Out Of Africa, and now you've gotta argue with him, how it was based on one of Papa's short stories.

And you've gotta throw in that you know Hemingway's nickname was 'Papa.' And at this point your friend's shaking his head, so you also tell him how Hemingway's mother dolled him up in dresses when he was a baby because she wanted a girl, and that's where all his macho crap came from. Especially the macho crap from Out Of Africa. Yeah. Us too.

Take, for instance, JAG. Sure, we've bad-mouthed it before, but we'd never seen it. And no one called our bluff, asked us to cite one single episode. We figured we had it easy. JAG is the Family Matters of its genre, doing the network-bounce and landing at CBS, where Letterman's salary evidently hinders development of original content.

Shame on us. That's not journalism. There are dozens of upstanding citizens who work on JAG, who don't deserve to be blindly bashed. The least we could do is watch the friggin' thing, right? Who the hell do we think we are?

Last night, all that changed.

Boy, JAG sucks. David James Elliott---the Canadian John Stamos---had an excuse to wear a wet tank top before the second commercial. They put his pretty assistant, Catherine Bell, in Speedos and boxing gloves for the fetishist in all of us. Stereotyped horny Russian sailors were practically licking the fo'c'sle when they drooled, "How many women do you have on board?" The military effects shots were obviously stolen from a Desert Storm training video. Our intelligence (such as it is) was slaughtered from start to finish. JAG is mediocre, dull and dumb.

Whew. That's a load-off. And by the way, we were just kidding, just trying to make a point. We have seen Out Of Africa.   That Paul Newman's a genius.