"Back To You" - television show

OK, so there came a time several months ago when I apparently became completely unable to write about television shows. There are some shows that I don't think I even got around to starting and others where I just stopped writing about them, whether the show had just started, whether it was in the middle, or whether it was almost at the end. For the longest time, I was still taking notes and planning on writing synopses. And then I was just going to write a few thoughts. And then, I finally decided that for some of the shows (like "Big Brother", "Celebrity Apprentice", "Survivor" and "Hell's Kitchen"), I wasn't even going to bother, so I've actually deleted all of those notes. There are three shows that I've kept the notes on and that I will be writing some kind of comments on, for various reasons. This is the first of the three shows.




When "Back To You" came back after the writers' strike, there was one very noticeable difference. Chuck and Kelly had given away their daughter and instead adopted another daughter, also named her Gracie, and then were passing her off as 10 when she so did not look 10 but instead looked much younger. In actuality, the first actress was 12/13 when she was filming the show, about two and a half years older than the barely-10-year-old who replaced her, but in film and on TV, it's fairly common for kids to play younger than they really are. I have no idea why the other actress got the boot, since I thought she was fine. I didn't really care for the re-cast. I think that the attitude and smarminess was ok coming from an older child, but coming from someone that young, it just seemed annoying. Enough with the precocious little kids for now.


Gracie (Laura Marano) at the beginning of the season.


Gracie (Lily Jackson) after she went away to soap opera camp and then came back for the rest of the season.


I also didn't much care for the introduction of Marsh's wife Peg and the whole story that was built around Marsh and Peg and their apparently weird pictures/paintings of themselves naked in their house. It seemed as if Peg was going to become a regular and more emphasis was going to be put on Marsh's personal life, neither of which interested me. There was also a new girl at the studio, but Montana, the weather girl, was surprisingly absent. Were they trading in Montana for the new studio chick and Peg? After the initial let's-play-up-her-latina-heritage bit, they never seemed to know what else to do with her. Montana did show up in a subsequent episode, though only long enough to be fired. There was this whole story about how Chuck and Kelly felt bad about her being fired since they felt it was partially their fault, and then Chuck threatened to bring La Raza into the matter - only to find out that Montana Diaz Herrera was really Sally Lerner from Nebraska and was not hispanic at all - she just adopted that name. Well, at least she got to go out on a laugh.

The "big" story, of course, surrounded the secret of Gracie's parentage, that she was the result of a one-night-stand between Chuck and Kelly. Chuck finally convinced Kelly to tell Gracie that he was her father, a secret that Gracie was not happy to hear, but then, by the end of the episode, Chuck got her a puppy, so all was well. Yeah, I know it's a sitcom, but I wasn't too happy about that quick fix. The next crisis came about when they decided to tell the world about the relationship just as a new ad campaign for the news show was being launched - with the tag line that Chuck and Kelly were "doing it again", with Kelly posed suggestively bending over in front of Chuck. Another character was introduced in the form of new station manager Ginger, who was a bit of a schizoid - one minute, she was all business and tough, and the next, she had her feet kicked up on the sofa and was laughing and joking. Ummm, ok. Ginger threatened to banish Chuck and Kelly to the Siberia of news broadcasting if they told the secret immediately rather than waiting a year as she wanted, and Chuck had to decide between doing as he was told or not further disappointing Gracie by making her keep the secret for that much longer. Of course, in the end, Chuck decided to reveal the secret, and Chuck and Kelly were indeed banished to the early morning, there's-not-even-heat-in-the-building-yet-and-no-staff-to-speak-of-not-to-mention-no-one-is-watching news shift.

There was a funny side story at the end about Marsh, where he had this weird quirk that if anyone commented on how nice something was that he had, he had to give it to that person.

However, while I thought the show started off really good, it was kind of dragging by the end, so I wasn't terribly sad to see it go.