Lost Episodes of Friends

According to the window we watch while huddled around our garbage-can fire, the 90's (1990s) TV (television) show Friends is available via "Netflix," which we river hobos can only assume is a code word for the things that are flicked from the nets that pull the bountiful seafood from the oceans.

According to our visual department, this is "New York City."

We have been able to discern few details about the show itself, but with the visual evidence alone, we have put together the following facts:

1: It is about six power brokers in Wall Street financial institutions with serious jobs that allow for significant amounts of time off.

2: They are obscenely wealthy, given their apartment sizes, coffee habits, and wardrobes.

3: They have a multitude of lovers in some sort of sexual "revolving door" situation.

4: At the top of the world in the most powerful city on the planet, they need for nothing physical or spiritual, a situation they leaven with various antics.

5: No matter how much time passes, they maintain this philosophical ennui. Days, months, years, all pass without event. They are meant to represent the ultimate insulating power of wealth.

This photograph represents the gap between these people and the 1%. We could not afford metaphorical imagery of the 1%.

Being being unable to hear the audio, we believe that the show is in the same vein as Dallas, showing the rise (and eventual fall, we're only on season 2) of a family (all the black haired ones are related, right?) at the center of a tempest of wealth and power. It was absurdly popular, last millennium, and as such, was quite often milked for more than it was worth.

Yes, we have found a list of the lost episodes of Friends.

Probably scribbled by this guy, given some of the content.

1: The One Where Rachel Births the Moon Child.

2: The One Where Monica Gets Confused With Another Monica.

3: The One With All the Blood.

4: The One With The One.

5: The One After All the Blood.

6: The One Where Joey Is Taken To Dulce Base.

7: The One With the Archons of the Outer Dark.

8: The One With No Survivors.

9: The One Where A Dark Name is Spoken.

10: The One Tale of Two Pizzas.

11: The One With All the 9/11.

12: The One Where The Gang Meets a Black Person.

13: The One Where Ross Covers Up Something Man Was Not Meant to Know.

14: The One With the Sigil and Key.

15: The One Who Cannot Be Named

16: The One Who Is Many Shares a Taxi.

17: The One Where Chandler Speaks the Syllables of the Kingmoor Ring.

18: The One Where the Gang Gets Evicted.

19: The One from the Depths.

20: The One Where Phoebe Must "ær grim struht fola" in Accordance With Bald.

21: The One With the Bums Fighting for Scraps.

22: The One Where the Empire Falls.

23: The One With Tom Hanks.


Law and Order: Fetal Attorney

The law office of Thad Pickens Heinz, Esq. Fetus Attorney.

Two things in life never change, despite new iterations. Anti-abortion activists, and Law and Order branching out into new, uninspired realms. Never have the two crossed, and now that they have, the result has gone directly into the trash where it belonged.

Alabama has been working with lawyers for embryos since 1987. It's about time someone dug through the Hollywood dumpster to find the script for the 2015 pilot: Law and Order: Fetal Attorney. The series was originally set on a riverboat, until someone discovered that the writers knew about as much about Alabama geography as they did human anatomy.

Someone did. And we found it. Fortunately for the sanity and excitement of our nonexistent readers,

The Courthouse of Ashby Hogworth Corpendal the IV, esq. Fetus Court Embro-Judge

Law and Order: Fetal Attorney

"In the criminal justice system the people are represented by two equally important groups separated only by a thin layer of tissue. The judge who tries to find a lawyer for the fetus, and the lawyer who represents it. These are their stories."

BZUH-WONG

Thad Pickens Heinz is seated at his desk, leaning back in the expensive wooden chair. Around him are the endless and repetitive shelving full of books, all of which have golden letters in the spine. Despite this, the office looks a bit rundown, there's a decanter of bourbon (clearly labeled: Bourbon) on his desk, and the inbox is empty.

His attractive, blonde SECRETARY (execs demand that the name be taken out) comes storming into the room. The audio cue is HIGH HEELS CLICKING.

"We've got a client. It's six weeks old. Judge thinks someone's trying to abuse it." She puts the sonographs on the table, by the bourbon. The decanter is mostly empty, the tabletop has dried spills near the glasses. The figure in the black-and-white images is clearly that of a fetus, or, perhaps, an oddly shaped groundhog.

[PRODUCER: Can we get everything cleaned up? I know this is supposed to be Alabama, but we're contractually obligated to only use brand new fashion and incredibly fancy sets. Maybe something else to indicate they're in the South?]

Thad is SWEATING PROFUSELY. His SECRETARY has the top of her business blouse undone, revealing CLEAVAGE, and a hint of a blue bra. Her sweating is not as disgusting as Thad's, but it's there, like a sheen.

"Where's she being held?" Thad asked, getting his jacket from the shelf as he reveals sweat-stained armpits. The fan in the background is going top blast.

"Some new unit, can't be more than 15 years old. Judge wants to get the grandparents involved, unit wants our client gone."

"What can you tell me about the unit? He? She? Do we have an age?" Thad asked.

SECRETARY pauses before she can answer this question. The door opens, and overweight southern Judge Ashby Hogworth Corpendal the IV enters. He is SWEATING PROFUSELY. Even MORE than THAD and SECRETARY.

[PRODUCER: I understand that we're making sure we stick with the old trope of having evil people be unattractive and if possible, fat and sweaty, but ever since CSI hit it big we've been very adamant about not having any unattractive people on the show. Just make him sweaty and use something else to indicate that this is taking place in the South]

Ashby bursts in. Liquid is just running down his face and arms. Dripping out of his goddamn sleeves. When he points at SECRETARY, she gets splashed by water, which is good, because she's dry now.

"She's gone!" Ashby blurts out. Why he is wearing his black JUDGE ROBES is not explained, but it's goddamn disgusting.

Also, everyone now has an accent so thick that Rhett Butler would not be able to translate.

"There's no way a fetus can survive outside the womb at that age! We're looking at a MURDER." Thad says.

"No, not the fetus, the..." He pauses, purses his lips. This is not something he has thought of often.

"...embryo?"

"Blastocyst?"

"Zygote?"

"No, the other thing. The unit. The carrier."

"WOMB." SECRETARY says loudly.

BZUH-WONG

The pilot was actually canceled midway through filming when two actresses burned one of the associate producers alive. The judge in the case let them go, citing their actions as "necessary improvements on the legal landscape."


Garbage, MD

Retro garbage - the kind that Garbage, MD picks up!

Keen readers - or at least, readers who remember a few things they've read - may recall that sometimes on this blog I make fun of stuff that is on television. There's a reason for that. People should just chuck their TVs out the windows, and that's coming from a man who wades in garbage for fun.

IN GARBAGE I found proof that television - far from being a decaying cesspool becoming worse and worse every year - has always been a mental sewer. What I found was a critical review, the work of Alain E. Ehtims, a ubiquitous television critic in the age of chest hair, whiskey, and explosions. (It is always this age wherever I am) Alain reviewed Garbage: M.D, a show about a doctor. Who was also a garbageman. And, it was set in the future. Anyway, here it is.

GARBAGE: MD

A Review by Alain E. Ehtims

To begin this review, I had to answer a simple question: What is Garbage, M.D? I had to reign in my joy at the novelty of a television show set in the distant future of THE YEAR 1990!

By day and night, Garbage (in the future, everyone only has one name) is a successful plastic surgeon to the stars, cavorting with the rich and famous in Beverly Hills. But every morning he does something far more important - he takes out the trash! Yes, that's the byline, and this isn't a cop show! "He takes out the trash!" How rich! This is impressive, cutting edge, avant garde television from ABC, who will reportedly be ditching the unpopular show Carter Country, which critics other than myself have recently trashed as "not racist enough."

But Garbage isn't just a city-ranging Sanitation Engineer, he's the elite commander of the massive Route King II, a truck he calls "KING!" from behind the luxurious command and control center seated behind this futuristic plastic windshield.

In the rapturous pilot episode, we learn the complex and tragic reasons that Garbage must be both a doctor AND a garbageman. We meet his comedic-relief foil, the rascally Police Robot Bossotron, voiced in a career-topping role by master actor Sonny Shroyer, hot off his soul-wrenching run as Enos Strate on the hit show The Dukes of Hazzard.

May I ruin a surprise? I will! Bosstron hates horses - and there's a horse in every house that counts in 1990! But when the Soy-Mafia (every food is made of soy in this veganic paradise!) needs to fill some beds with heads in Beverly Hills, Bossotron the police robot joins forces with his least favorite garbage man to prevent the decapitations from being blamed on him! Guess where they're getting THAT mess dumped? Not with Garbage, M.D. - who also has to pick up the trash in a trendy neighborhood without any of his face-sculpted celebrity clients realizing that the man who sucks the fat out of their stomachs is the man who sucks the fat out of their grease traps!

The "horse head cleanup" scene was a bit too graphic for our readers, so I found a still of a decapitated headboard.

These zany hijinks continue until Garbage gets KING in trouble with HIS boss - yes, rapt readers, you heard me right! In this future, even your car has a boss! And this is a boss that doesn't take any guff from a dump truck! Classic sitcom comedy continues as Garbage must run back and forth from a waiting operating room - stitching up wrinkles and lifting the face of an aging Hollywood beauty queen - and talking to the chain-smoking, laser-gun-packing Chief of Garbage, Ban Hotswood! During these wild surgeries everyone's smoking futuristic electronic cigarettes that cure cancer!

In these scintillating scenes the director makes artistic use of elaborate color schemes, bombarding the viewer with bombastic screen-filling hues of avocado and eggshell. In one scene, a scene that recalled to me the beautiful sensual landscapes of my adolescence, Garbage walks through the smoke-bombed streets of Hollywood in the guts of dead robotic animals, their visceral internal organs rendered in disgusting oily smears that give Garbage flashbacks from CyberMedical School where he was touched inappropriately by horses.

Horses show up a lot in Garbage, MD, as the writers masterfully interweave callbacks, internal references, and character flashbacks interspersed at random with lies, memories, and the psychic visions of Hollywood stars - in this future, all stars are psychics, and have a telephone network you can call to talk with them directly!

The scenes of futuristic warfare hinted at in the smash-cut credits reveal a lot in common with the Frank Herbert classic Dune, except with camels instead of sandworms. Towards the end of the show, characters are revealed to be robots, the flesh of their faces flayed away with finger-knives, one at a time, Garbage waiting and sweating to discover if he too is a soulless automaton or if he will have his face removed by robotic razors. It's television like this you just can't get anywhere.

Anywhere! I saw this Pilot, I promise, and the joys of the overreaching robotic arms hauling and catapulting the futuristic trash of celebrity culture and a world gone mad with the banality of horses - this is a world that calls to me! I hear the shrieking siren song of Garbage, M.D. at night, written on the ceiling of my home in dappled doubts and shadows of a world that could be our own, if we but submitted to the fever dream of a madman, the holographic flesh I found splayed across the scattered napkins of a dozen west coast diners with disillusioned waitresses and pristine restrooms.

Garbage M.D. is real! I promise! Hear my words, ye who doubt, and despair upon the falling of the eons!

3/5 Stars.

Alain E. Ehtims

Murder Show She Screenwrote

A sportsball, memorabilia from a global crime syndicate, evidence of water-theft (punishable by death on Arrakis), a gambling prize, the husk of a sports-water cyst, and the large leaf on which this madness was transcribed.

In case you haven't read anything on the website, one of my favorite story hooks is the one where I find something that has been rejected, thrown away, or just plain chucked into the river. I use that one a lot. It fits the theme of the place. Plus, I'm lazy. Sometimes, sure, there's an interview, but, it's always with wildlife.

Anyway, I'm not interviewing wildlife or crazed newspaper editors today. I'm being lazy and finding something I found in a truck down by the river. (Apologies to Bob Odenkirk) As usual, it's just fragments and torn paper, befitting something chewed on by drum.

Special Serial Murder Crime Forensics Tactics Squad: Jackson

aka "SSMCFTS:J"

Directed by: Roland Emmerich and Sam "Boot" Hill

Written By: Ehren Kruger

Produced by: A Giant Pile of Cocaine

 

TOKEN BLACK GUY: "So you're tellin' me that this guy kills multiple people the same way every time, even though it's all elaborate?"

FBI PROFILER GUY TOTALLY NOT MULDER: "My god, you're a cop on the Special Serial Murder Crime Forensics Tactics Squad, you should understand what we mean by "serial killer."

TBG: "It's not my fault, I think whoever gives me my lines is racist."

[Missing Pages and Mold]

PROFILER: "From seeing the instagram photos from the man who sold the murderer's sister a  car last year, I can tell that our killer is a white guy with a ponytail who orders expensive coffees, even though he can't tell the difference between them. FURTHERMORE - [insert plot twist here: EK]

ATTRACTIVE FEMALE SCIENCE LADY TOTALLY NOT SCULLY: "Whoa! Let's wait on those lab reports, cowboy."

INTERN: "They're already done, boss! I was holding them back for dramatic impact!"

SCIENCE LADY: "I thought I was fast, but in reality there's no way I could have even sent those to the lab by now."

INTERN: "Just 'Pullin' a Scully,' as we say in the lab."

PROFILER: "Nobody says that except as a euphemism for..."

[Pages Missing]

The characters are standing around the dead INTERN. Nobody is therefore picking up EVIDENCE but SCIENCE LADY has her hand in a PLASTIC BAG. For REASONS no one has turned on any LIGHTS, even though it's a CRIME SCENE.

PROFILER: "Murder."

TBG: "We are murder police, Captain."

PROFILER: "It's pronounced 'Capain.' It's French."

SCIENCE LADY: "Put it in the murder bag."

TBG: "But your hand is in there."

ATTRACTIVE WHITE MALE WITH JAWLINE: "He's made this personal, FBI Special Murder Agent Capain Psycopath. Unnamed Intern there was one our own."

AWM approaches PROFILER and puts a hand on his shoulder. It is RAINING, even though we are technically INSIDE.

AWM: "That intern worked for free, Capain."

PROFILER: "Goddamnit. Also, I'm a psychiatrist, and it's pronounced 'Psycopah,' it's Portuguese.."

TBG: "I thought you were a psychologist?"

PROFILER: "I'm Doctor Special Murder Agent Capain Psycopah, Agent. And don't you forget it."

[Several pages appear to have been eaten by a dog at this point]

Everyone is standing around in the dark, even though they could obviously turn on a light or something. It's their office, which is oddly abandoned, and spacious. It looks more like a Fortune 500 tech office than a government office. Have you ever even been to a government office? Oh man, we totally make more money in a few minutes than those rubes do all year. Anyway, uh, what? Where was I? Does this shit matter?  - EK.

PROFILER: "It's a sex thing."

SCIENCE LADY: "....that thing you do with all the pens?"

PROFILER: "No! I mean the murder-killer serial murderist. The crime that we are solving with psychology. He has a sex thing for coffee. And murder."

SCIENCE LADY: "And science."

PROFILER: "Psychology IS a science."

SL: "Like, a Discovery Channel science. We might as well get out there and look for fucking bigfoot." (Can we use "fucking" on Public Access? I literally do not know. - EK. Also, get an intern to see if bigfoot is real)

PROFILER: "You can't tell me that I don't know what I don't know! I don't know what I don't know! There are things I know you don't know! About knowing! Can your science know knowing?"


SL: "Whoa there, Sigmund Fraud. I do forensics. It has flashing lights, computers, there's a quirky minority in charge of my technical gear and therefore it is science and it is true. There's math. Math, Capain. Maths. I'd even go so far as to say I use "the calculus." If what I do is fraudulent, or even somewhat unscientific, then that'd be real, real bad for lots of people, Capain Psycopah.

PROFILER: "There's no way we're convicting people or murdering them in dramatic violent moments on just bad pop psychology and biased psuedoscience! That'd be ludicrous."