tek's rating:

Making History, on FOX
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So there's this guy named Dan Chambers, a janitor at a college in Massachusetts, who has a duffel bag that's actually a time machine. (Apparently his father invented it, but we never meet him nor learn much about him. I think he's dead, but I'm not sure.) Dan's been using the duffel bag to go back to 1775, where he's friends with John Hancock and Sam Adams (the latter of whom is played by Neil Casey, whom I know from the webseries Other Space). Also, Dan has a girlfriend named Deborah 'Deb' Revere (Leighton Meester), the daughter of Paul Revere. And... Dan gets a history professor named Chris Parrish involved in his time travel shenanigans, to try to fix the harm he unwittingly did to the American Revolution. Subsequently, Dan reveals the truth about himself to Deb, and takes her back to the present. At some point, Deb decides she wants to open an ice cream parlor, and to get the money for it, they go back to 1919 Chicago to bet on the World Series, and end up getting mixed up with Al Capone. And when they get back to the present, Deb opens her shop. Later, Sam Adams and John Hancock come to the present and make life difficult for the main characters (especially Chris), for awhile. But finally they go back to 1775. And I don't know what else to say about the plot.

The whole show is utterly redonkulous, but I find it pretty funny. And I think Deb is pretty much the best part of the show. She's just... obviously smarter than Dan, and yet... I dunno, there's just an impossibly fine line between her credulousness and her savviness. Anyway, the show was cancelled after just 9 episodes, and I wish it would have lasted longer. So I could put my review under "too something," except that I keep thinking I might eventually get rid of that section, so I figured I might as well give this a more permanent home. I could have called it "weird" or "quirky" or "campy," or even "science fiction." But I think "sitcom" is really the best fit.


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