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Tori Spelling, Pathfinder

by Greg Knauss - September 25, 1996 12:00 AM

Tori Spelling is distinctive in two ways. While her utter inability to act is painfully, woefully common, and the rampant nepotism that lands her in a new TV movie every three weeks isn't unheard of, she has a couple of unique traits matched by no one.

The first is that she resembles a car. While Ms. Spelling isn't obviously automotive, she does have a jaw the size of a Buick front-end and breasts that resemble nothing so much as twin airbags, recently inflated. That they probably came with a five-year or fifty-thousand-mile warranty only reinforces the image.

The second is that she is the first actress to use up all the movie-of-the-week titles. While there are an infinite combination of English words, the conventions of bad TV movies require that only specific words, in specific positions, may be used:

  • "Living Too Fast"
  • "My Husband, My Tormentor"
  • "Tawdry Excess"
  • "Danger in the Dark"
  • "She Ran From Fear"
Following this convention, of course, leads to some confusion when more movies come out, using the same formula:

  • "My Husband, Too Fast"
  • "She Ran From Excess"
  • "Living in the Dark"
But eventually all the possibilities will be used up. While resorting to garbled nonsense like "She Danger, My Excess" will undoubtedly be tempting, network executives will instead start slapping existing titles together, like thick slabs of mud. The Library of Congress insists on unique titles, apparently, since the plots are all the same. This, of course, will eventually and inevitably lead us to:

  • "Living Too Fast in the Dark"
  • "She Ran From Tawdry Excess"
  • "My Husband, My Fear of Living Too Fast in Tawdry Excess"
While many may think that such creative bankruptcy is years, even decades, off, they either haven't been paying attention to the alarming frequency of bad TV movies or they have some sort of bizarre faith in the ability of the people who run the networks. Fools, fools.

Next week, the aforementioned anthropomorphic Tori Spelling stars in the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" of TV movies, "Mother May I Sleep with Danger."

That Mother will likely say "No" hasn't, unfortunately, stopped what will undoubtedly be two hours of painful swill from being made. Weren't "Mother May I" and "Sleep with Danger" bad enough on their own? (Note: I'm assuming that there were TV movies called "Mother May I" and "Sleep with Danger" here, but I don't actually know. They sure sound like it, though, don't they?)

Rather than wasting all the brain power that goes into inventing these titles -- we're talking about network executives here -- perhaps a better course of action would simply be to start numbering each movie-of-the-week that comes out, by genre. Is "Mother May I Sleep with Danger" really any more distinctive than "Buxom Teen Menaced by Boyfriend XXVI"? Or "When Bad Things Happen to Good Women LXII?" Or "Counter-Programming to Monday Night Football MMMIV?"

Of course not. Especially since they all star Tori Spelling.

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