My Top Ten Pet Hates On Fame - No 6

At Number 6 on my top ten pet hates on Fame is Guest Stars Taking over the Show.
My favourite episodes of Fame tend to be the ensemble shows, where all or most of the cast are involved and the story and scenes are shared amongst the cast. I not really keen on guest star centric episodes.

Now I understand that every TV show needs guest stars to come on to the show to bring new situations and create drama and I have no objections to guest coming on to help support or create a story for our cast but I do get frustrated when guest stars came on and took over completely and our cast get ignored.

I refer to this as guest star syndrome and found it was particularly prevalent in seasons 2 and 3. It was almost as though the executives thought they had to have all these guest stars to make the show popular but to me the show was all about the cast as most of the guest stars would be gone by the next episode and we’d never see or hear about them again.

A number of guest stars were also given the opportunity to write or develop ideas for the story of that episode and also write and perform the music. Sadly most of them took full advantage of this and made themselves the star of the show. Giving themselves the main story and the songs to sing. Personally I felt this made those episodes a little slow and boring, particularly if the main cast were ignored. In some cases it was almost like the guest star was using the show to promote themselves and show the World what they could do. I felt they didn’t really care whether the story fitted the show or worked for the audience, just as long as they got what they wanted out of it.

I guess part of the issue for me was a big fuss would be made of a guest but in the U.K. and I’m sure other parts of the World too, we didn’t actually know who some of these people were and what all the fuss was about.

So an example of what I’m talking about Tom Sullivan comes on to the show in Season 2 as Jim Hamilton and I feel takes over that episode. He’s allowed to provide the ideas for the story and writes and performs the music. There are a number of scenes where we see him on his own or like in the opening sequence where he’s with the janitor. There needed to be more interactions with the cast and the episode should have been told from the point of view of Doris who develops a crush on him and Lydia who struggles to tech him, to sing.

Compare this to say “The Monster That Devours Las Vegas” Tuesday Knight guests and sings on a song but all of her scenes feature other cast members and her purpose in the episode is for Doris to fight against, be jealous of and then for Doris to realise that people she believes are popular have the same insecurities as she does. This is how I prefer my guest stars to help the development of my favourite characters.

What was even worse than a guest star taking over an episode was when they suddenly appeared but really had no purpose like in Season 2’s “Blood, Sweat and Circuits” when Brenda Vaccaro suddenly appears and we have a whole question and answer sessions with her that has no bearing on the rest of the episode at all. That really made no sense to me.

My Top Ten Pet Hates On Fame - No 7

At number 7 on my top ten pet hates on Fame is The Season of Death!

The Season of Death is my little nickname for Season 2. After a very upbeat season 1, I was always a bit disappointed by Season 2 for a number of reasons I didn’t think it lived up to magic of Season 1. Naturally individual episodes were great but as an actual season I felt it was a little downbeat. One of those reasons was the number of episodes that had storylines involving death or potential death. It’s a little difficult to have a rousing song & dance number in the cafeteria when someone has just died!

We started off in episode one with a small plot of Sherwood’s ex husband, Nick, dying and Sherwood going off work sick. We knew nothing about this character or even that Sherwood had even been married and divorced, so to suddenly throw it in seemed a little bizarre to me. Although we care about Sherwood, the audience has no emotional attachment to the character that has died. I’m sure they could have come up with a storyline more relevant to the school which would cause Sherwood to question her life.

In “Childhood’s End” Coco’s grandmother dies and causes her concern that pursuing her dreams of stardom is turning her into someone she doesn’t want to be. This is a great episode as we see a different side to the usually over confident Coco. Although did someone actually have to die for Coco to question what she’s turning into? Again it’s someone we’ve never heard of although do get to see briefly in the hospital.

Then, just 2 episodes latter the School is dealing with the death of Mr Crandell in “a Tough Act To Follow”. Now naturally Michael Thoma had died in real life and the show wanted to do a tribute to him, which is all fine and good and to be honest killing Crandell probably was the best way to go with this story. At least we knew and cared about this character so his death had an impact on the audience as well as our characters trying to adjust to the situation.

Then in the very next episode Will, Doris’ cowboy boyfriend is killed off suddenly and I was starting to think that the writers were struggling to think of other ways to create drama apart from having characters die and how this affected our core cast. Did Will have to die? If we were never to hear of him again couldn’t he have just have met someone his own age and not want to go out with a school girl anymore and broke Doris’ heart that way?

A few episodes later and we have an episode about teen suicide and we discover a couple of kids at the school maybe feeling suicidal. Again there are some great parts to this episode particularly Valerie’s scene in the acting class as Doris puts into words how Timmy may be feeling. Even though the episode ends positively for the most part a lot of these episodes were downbeat.

Obviously death is part of life I just felt in 22 episodes that for the people in one small school to have gone through so much death in one school year seemed a little unrealistic to me. Yes there’s some good drama really death isn’t the only thing to cause drama however it is a very easy way to create it. I just think the writers should have been working a little harder to find more imaginative ways to create conflict and drama in our characters lives.

Debbie Allen Interview On Mariah Carey

Debbie Allen Interview on Mariah Carey as Debbie is directing and staging Mariah's 2010 World tour.

Janet Jackson We Are The World 25

Janet Jackson appears on the 25th anniversary remake of "We Are The World", in support of Haiti.

Fame in Italy 4 Rehearsals

Jesse Borrego on lead vocals and Cynthia Gibb on backing with disco Inferno as they rehearse for the fame in italy concerts from December 2009 singing an foreign laguage version of Sting's Fragile.

My Top Ten Pet Hates On Fame - No 8

At number 8 on my count down of pet hates on Fame is Doomed Love!

Doomed Love was often used as a storyline for many of the episodes particularly in seasons 2 and 3. The standard type of thing would be that one of the characters would meet someone and instantly be head over heals in love with them. Then there would be a problem and the relationship ended by the end of the episodes.

Now I have nothing against the writers having the characters fall in and out of love because that's all part of life and gives the show realism. However I found these episodes a little too predictable and the relationships boring. None of these stories made for really great episodes because we knew pretty much what would happen. We wouldn't know how the couple would split but we knew it wouldn't last and that the person who our characters had fallen in love with would never be seen or heard of again!

This meant I never saw any point in having much of an emotional attachment with these guest characters because they'd soon be gone. In fact it was not always clear what our cast saw in some of these guest characters because there wasn't enough time to build the relationships properly before it was time to end them.

To be honest I don't see why some of the relationships couldn't have continued. I realise the show wouldn't want to be paying guest stars to only make brief appearances in episodes just so our characters can have proper relationships but we don't need to see the characters all the time we could just hear that they are still part of our casts lives.

Some of them could have made a reappearance in a later episode to break the relationships up or to test them, which would have made things more realistic. For instance Doris falls in love with hunky cowboy guy in season 2 (Mmmm very nice!).

However, Instead of killing him off why not bring him back in season 3 to have the drink problem that Doris next boyfriend had. That way we already have an emotional attachment to him and we wouldn't be able to predict what would happen. I think that would feel less forced that the way those 2 episodes actually felt. If need be they could have then killed him off in a later episode which would have had an even greater impact on Doris and been far more emotional for the audience because we've seen her have a proper relationship.

Bruno falls for Lisa, a student teacher in season 3, and they have to break up because of the problems it has on his friends school work and the schools discipline. However we never see Lisa again so she obviously doesn't stay at the school very long. At the end of that episode it's like "call me in 5 years when the rest of the World goes up" but why wait so long if we never see her at school again. it's obvious she was only a temporary student teacher and what was wrong with Bruno having a permanent girlfriend?

They could have used Bruno's relationship with Lisa as a reason why we don't see him after season 3. He gets back together with Lisa and they move to a different area because she gets a job in another school. It really doesn't take much thought to add realism, develop relationships and give and explanation for a characters departure. (I don't want to get a head of myself here because Bruno's exit is coming up in one of my future pet hates!)

To me things were so much more interesting from season 4 when Nicole and Jesse started having a relationship because it was an on going relationship and we never knew what would happen. We saw a proper connection and not something that seemed forced like in many of the doomed love stories. When Jesse and Nicole finally break up it was worthy of a whole episode and to me far more interesting and emotional than the break ups we'd seen before.

I just feel that better continuity with the characters story lines would have made these love episodes far more rewarding. Not all of the doomed relationships need to continue just a couple of them and that way we wouldn't be able to predict the episode ending. Which to me makes them instantly more interesting to the audience.

Erica Gimpel Love will come Back To Me video,

"Love Will Come Back To Me" is a beautiful song written by Erica for her 2010 solo album "Spread Your Wings and Fly".

My Top Ten Pet Hates On Fame - No 9

At number 9 on my countdown of pet hates on Fame is Opera!

Now I'm not a big fan of Opera at all and I believe it was a big mistake to try to introduce it into Fame.

Classical music had been a major part of Fame since day one particularly with Julie Miller being a cellist but it never felt that that music was taking over. All credit to Lori for actually making the cello seem sexy. I guess after Lori left the show the producers were looking for something different to keep that classical aspect to the show but not just have another cellist or something similar like a violin player.

I guess on paper having an Opera singer join the cast was a good idea. There would instantly be something different about that person, who would struggle to fit in with the main group and that could bring drama to the show. However the way it was introduced I don’t think it worked at all. “The Deal” is one of my least favourite episodes and I not only dislike the opera but the whole story of linking Alicia to the mafia and striking a deal to get her into the school was a bad idea.

I think to have made the character work the bursts of the opera we saw needed to be shorter, so we got a sense of how good Alicia was without feeling that opera was taking over. There also needed a good pop or rock song in the episode to balance things out again so we didn’t feel totally overwhelmed by the opera. They could have even tried to turn a couple of pop hits into an opera style for a bit of fun and make Alicia more accessible to those of us who aren’t keen on that style of music. Even having Alicia sing a normal ballad as well as the opera to help us relate a little nmore may have been a good idea.

After all the audience was predominately young and we loved the show for the singing and dancing and the huge feel good factor that these elements of the show brought with them. The choice of opera in “The Deal” didn’t do this and there was nothing in that episode for those of us who like their music a little more main stream to latch on to. Thus the whole set up of this character certainly made me feel alienated as a viewer.

I not only found the whole story boring but also Alicia’s character too. I’d been so excited at the thought of a new regular cast member because after Erica left there seemed to be a huge whole in the show and I was looking for a new character to fill it. Sadly Phoebe Yadon Lewis was not up to the job and I found her acting a little wooden.

Fame in Italy rehearsals 1 Jesse Borrego The World

Jesse Borrego in rehearsals for last Decemebers Italian concerts with Disco Inferno, performing "The World". With Cynthia Gibb dancing around the studio.