JAG-Offs!

Oh NBC! You cancel Alf, you give David Letterman the biggest slighting in the history of the medium, and then you have the nerve to NOT AIR the death of Catherine Bell?

Its like you feed off my misery!

Alright, I might have gotten a little ahead of myself here, so lets start back at the beginning - the fall of 1995.

We were in the middle of those carefree years we called the Clinton presidency... It was a time when the NASDAQ soared… a time we saw the New Jersey Devils win their first Stanley Cup… a time when we saw Superman fall off a horse and land in a wheel chair..

1995 was a time where we saw a grown man struggle to put on the leather gloves that he wore to kill his wife… a time where we saw the opening of Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Hall of fame, and a waning of our fascination with Jamiroquai.

And, it was in the salad days of 1995 that NBC launched an hour long drama about a little-known department within the United States Navy called the Judge Advocate General, or JAG for short.

And, it was in those same salad days that NBC cancelled the show! They even filmed what was to be the last episode of the show, where the male lead, “Harm,” gets a visit from his girlfriend, (played by Catherine Bell,) who speaks three lines and then is murdered.

And that should have been that. There would have been no pieces of paper printed at my parent’s house with the scheduling of every JAG episode that will be splashed across TV screens that week… There would be no Christmas mornings spent with my parents, siblings and televised Naval Officers. There would have been no doubt in my head that my parents love me more than ANY TV show…

BUT – the episode never aired!!! Even worse, during the summer of 96, JAG found a new home and new life on the Tiffany network. As a part of JAG version 2.0, producers decided that they wanted a new female lead, and old Cathy Bell heard the call.

In a passing nod to continuity, we find out that this character, nicknamed “Mac,” looks an awful lot like Harm’s dead love… and, I’m sure you don’t have to be Danielle Steel to see that an uncomfortable romance will ensue…

And ensue it did! For another 9 seasons these two love-birds saw people hop in and out of each other’s beds with out ever feeling the need to point out that the agony of watching the person you're in love with go off with someone else must make you die the pain of a thousand deaths… No; somehow that never came up.

It’s this kind of tired will-they-or-won’t-they nonsense (and, of course the sibling rivalry I’m made to feel with a TV program in competing for the attention of my parents) that makes me question: Where would the world have been without JAG?

Sure, The covers of “TV Guide, July 6th 2002”, “STUFF Magazine, October 2003” and “Golf for Women, April 2005” would have been blank…. But there would have been other ramifications too.

I have to admit that people needed JAG. It was a show where the good guys wore white, and it’s run lasted through times that have not been easy for our country. JAG was there during the largest terrorist attack on US soil, it was there during the military campaigns in Afghanistan and in Iraq: the Sequel. It’s been there to provide entertainment to the stereo-typically-proud-Americans, (and while I side with the people who think we have as much to change as we have to celebrate,) I think that the flag-waving people of this country deserve at least one program where they can sit down and feel that the commies haven’t completely taken over the country they love…

And if JAG had only lasted that one season, then it never would have made it to cable syndication, and I would have never gotten to know the pleasure of flipping through the channels late at night hoping to stumble across that precious piece of what-could-have-been.

The moment when I gleefully admit that “it tolls for thee, Ms Bell,” and enjoy the episode where Harms girlfriend bites it… which DOES air occasionally during the cable repeats.