Here’s something of a rough draft of a letter I’m thinking of sending to the producers of That 70’s Show. Let me know what you think.
Dear producers,
Please do not put Laurie Foreman in any more episodes.
I’ve just finished watching the recent Thanksgiving episode, and she had about the same effect on me as a powerful acid poured directly onto my face. This was by far the most painful That 70’s Show I’ve seen since…well, the last one she was in.
Let me be perfectly clear. The problem isn’t that she always gets her way and is pretty much a complete waste of flesh. Fez isn’t too different from this template, and he’s a managable character (who’s produced some very funny scenes, I might add). The problem is that her story, never, never, ever changes. She wants to be the favorite, she enjoys ticking off her brother, she’s no good at all at judging men, and that’s it. Even worse, the logistics of making these machinations even remotely believable requires incredibly forced setups and plots (oh no, Mike’s dating the math teacher!) even by sitcom standards.
Unless you’re willing to make some effort to add a little depth to her onionskin-thin character, or at least give her something else to do, for crying out loud, I urge you to leave her in Chicago or Detroit or some other place far, far away from Point Place where she belongs. Thank you.
My favorite thing about this show is that Alex Chilton is getting beaucoups royalties off the title theme, even in it’s Yum-Yum form. Beats washing dishes…
I thought the Thanksgiving episode was one of their better ones. I’m glad she came back, I was wondering when she was going to return. I missed their insults and such. And the whore jokes.
No, no, no! Nothing is hotter than Donna, especially now that she’s regularly wearing that school uniform!
We need a tongue-wagging “horny pervert” smiley.
Am I the only guy that thinks Mila Kunis is a pug-eyed troll? The girl who plays Donna is definitely smokin’, but I’d go for Eric’s mom eons before I’d consider Jackie.
But Laurie is so deliciously evil!!! She is my favorite 70s show character (even though Donna is the ultimate girl next door in Catholic girl’s school uniform). Laurie is the bomb! And when Kitty finally realized that she took after grandma, evil skips a generation, what could have been better! More Laurie! More Laurie!
Look, I don’t have a problem with evil, I have a problem with predictability, and I swear I could’ve predicted everything that was going to happen in the episode ten minutes in advance. (Lessee, Eric tries to weasel out of big lie, check. Big lie gets out, check. Dumb-a-word Fez involved, check. Laurie acting like the sadistic bloodsucking slimeball that she is and no one noticing, not even Donna, who should know better…sigh…chee-yeck.) I mean, Mike Kelso may say super-dumb things, but at least it’s a different kind of super-dumb thing most of the time.
I take it from the responses that I shouldn’t take this silly show too seriously. I know, I know, but…I’ve seen this in other shows, even a few that centered around the obnoxious one-dimensional character (hello, Baby Blues!), and this just rubs me wrong.
Well, predictability in a sit com isn’t the problem of the character or the actor playing the character. Its a problem with the writers and the art form. Nothing about That 70s Show is original or unpredictable, except the exact phrasing. That is what is so funny about it to those of us who lived it. I was Eric Forman 25 years ago. Laurie and Eric are the most dead on characters in the show. (That and Pastor Bob.) We knew nobody like Tommy Chong, but did listen to him when the folks were gone. Had we hung out with someone like that, our dads, a lot like Red, would have laid down the law damn quick.
They started out as Juniors in high school, except for Jackie who was a Sophmore. In the 4 or 5 seasons since then they have aged exactly 1 year as the gang are now seniors. I guess somehow Jackie caught up with them as she also visited a college with them.
I think the entire show should be about Red and Hyde. They are the only entertaining characters. Donna is nice to look at, but she seems to have no other function, so I would suggest making the Red/Hyde show and add an actual female character as a foil.
What’s really weird to me is that Kurtwood Smith, the actor who plays Red, also played the villain Clarence Boddicker in “Robocop.” Everytime I see him laying down the law to Eric, I think of him saying “Look at my face, Dick!”
