The Medium is Not Enough

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, ABC

There’s a lot to be said for a good name. Take GCB. What’s that then? A recreational drug? Some kind of excavator? A vaccination?

Now GCB started with a good name, seeing as it was based on a book entitled Good Christian Bitches. That at least gave you a good hint as to what it was about – a bunch of Christian mean girls (well, women). But before that title could ever hit the airwaves, protest groups moved in and before you knew it, Good Christian Bitches became first the dull and unhelpful Good Christian Belles before finally becoming the useless and meaningless GCB.

Who’d want to watch GCB, huh? Watch as people skip nimbly over it in TV Guide and on their EPG*.

Now, Good Christian Bitches for all its apparent faults was at least an accurate and descriptive title. It sees Leslie Bibb (best known nowadays as the Vanity Fair reporter in the two Iron Man movies but who was the star of the previous generation’s GCB, Popular) as a former Dallas mean girl who marries a rich guy and moves to California. Nearly two decades later, her husband is running a Ponzi scheme and dies in a horrific car cash while eloping with his mistress. That leaves Bibb penniless, the mother of two teenage children and nowhere to go but home – to her mother and all the girls she used to be mean to at school who are all grown up now.

Except everyone’s changed. Now Bibb is sober and nice and all the grown-up mean girls – in particular Kristin Chenoweth – are wanting to pre-empt Bibb’s expected meanness and husband-stealing with some meanness of their own, largely during church.

Cue a desperate attempt to do Desperate Housewives but in Texas and without much actual excitement or fun. Just like the show’s title, in fact.

Continue reading “Review: GCB (Good Christian Bitches) (ABC) 1×1”