Season 1, Episode 3, "Blossom Blossoms"

 

If you thought Blossom was a period piece just because it takes place in 1990, boy are you in for a lot of trouble! And if you think that joke was in poor taste, be glad I’m skipping over the thirty or forty stupid menstruation jokes in this episode, in which Blossom gets her first period.

We open on a pharmacy where Blossom makes a dash to discreetly buy her first box of tampons.

She rushes them to the clerk, only it’s Giovanni  Ribisi of all people. She’s all embarrassed because he’s playing a boy she knows at school, though it would’ve been a better story if Giovanni Ribisi was playing himself and was ringing up Blossom’s tampons.  We could learn all kinds of things like why is Giovanni Ribisi is working at a pharmacy, what will the other Russos say when they meet Giovanni Ribisi, will Six try to make out with Giovanni Ribisi and try to steal his soul, etc. Sorry, I’m trying to pad the word count a little since I’ll be skipping over a lot of this episode, as it’s about 50 percent menstruation jokes.

Anyway Giovanni Ribisi rings up the gum and combs that Blossom buys so she can pretend she wasn’t buying tampons.

There’s a two-second fantasy where  he asks if she forgot a box of tampons that’s comically oversized, but it turns out he was only asking about the regular sized box. Back in reality Blossom says those must have been left in the cart.

At the Russo residence, Blossom thanks Six for bringing over tampons and maxi pads, because she didn’t know what she’d do otherwise. I’m finding it strange that Blossom does so many things without consulting Six first, when it seems on paper that they have a healthy, sisterly relationship. Maybe she secretly hates Six.

Blossom and Six exchange jokes about her period for about twelve minutes, which I’ll skip over. You’re welcome.

There are two conflicts in this episode, and we learn the first here: Blossom misses her mom in the midst of all the new jokes she has access to now that she’ll be having her period.  Good thing she has a friend like Six to help her get over this by disappearing for the rest of the episode.

Pop Culture References: Star Wars

Blossom walks into the kitchen to find Anthony murdered on the kitchen table. Alright, the show’s over. It was a great three episodes, and they chose to end it before the quality started to suffer.

Oh, fuck, it was just a bit. Anthony is helping Joey shoot a video for school. Guess we’re still going.

We learn that the second conflict is going to be about about Blossom turning into a woman while living in a house full of boys, and just as that’s clear, Anthony points out that Blossom’s in a bad mood, and surprisingly this isn’t played for a laugh.

And just as the show has redeemed itself a little, Blossom pulls out a carton of ice cream from the freezer, because she’s on her period, GET IT? It has what I think is supposed to be a severed foot on it, and Blossom tells Joey and Anthony that some day they’re gonna have to grow up.

They proceed to noogie the fuck out of her.

Pop Culture References: Halloween (film series)

Blossom wakes up and walks down the stairs.

She enters the kitchen, to find Nick getting in from another session gig. He jokes about how nice it is to drive in LA at five in the morning because everyone’s out of ammunition. Ha-HA!

Nick deduces Blossom has been up waiting for him, since her pajamas aren’t wrinkled and her face doesn’t have pillow creases, telling her this isn’t his first rodeo. I can’t imagine Joey or Anthony waiting up for Nick to come home, so I guess he means Maddy used to do that, but it’s never stated. Anyway he invites Blossom to talk over some chocolate ice cream, but because oh-ho-ho, Blossom ate it all.

They settle for chocolate chip cookie dough, which is a weird little coincidence because if this were made a few years later, eating raw cookie dough would have been the exact kind of cliché Blossom (the series) would jump at the chance to use for a heart-to-heart talk, and this episode has about eight heart-to-hearts. I know I’ll have to eventually go back and do another tally of something, and I pray to Gustov Youtube, inventor of the YouTube, it won’t be a tally of heart-to-hearts, because this episode alone has got to be in the double digits.

Nick tries to run down what the problem might be, and because we’re only in the first act, Blossom backs out of telling him what it is, and goes to sleep.

Blossom wakes up again, and goes downstairs again. Didn’t she just do that? That’s a little tedious.

Speaking of tedious, Blossom enters the kitchen to exclaim, “Hi Mom!” and around turns Phylicia Rashad.

Not that Phylicia Rashad herself is tedious, but the reference to The Cosby Show is. Fading memory tells me it was a great show and all, but it’s been at least ten years since I’ve seen it, and the idea that that Clair Huxtable is the ideal TV mother is no longer as ubiquitous and unquestioned as it is to the studio audience, who’s finding it uproarious. I realize The Cosby Show was the number one show for like six years at this point, but the idea is that this is inherently funny for some reason is just confusing now.

Clair Russo notices immediately that Blossom has had her period and pleasantly explains the whole menstruation process using the cake she made for Blossom’s afternoon snack. I wonder if she’ll be back for the very special episode about insulin shots.

I get that having Phylicia Rashad be the caring mother Blossom needs for this dream sequence was great cross-promotion for NBC, but wasn’t Clair Huxtable supposed to be, to put it gently, a no-nonsense bitch?  

She was loving, et cetera, but any time I watched The Cosby Show or A Different World and Mrs. Huxtable was forced to listen to one of the seventy or eighty idiot kids who inhabited that universe, she seemed to be eternally about two seconds from saying “That’s a great idea, my dear, but if you don’t stop talking I’m going to literally bite off your fucking head.”

Anyway Clair Russo tells Blossom to go back to bed, and that she’ll be upstairs soon with some soup and a heating pad, ready to talk about menstruation for as long as Blossom needs.

Pop Culture References: The Cosby Show

Blossom wakes up, calling for her mom. She at least turns the lights off when she goes to sleep now. We must have skipped over the episode where Nick has a heartwarming talk with Blossom about not running up the fucking electric bill.



Blossom heads downstairs for the third time. At this point I’m convinced every episode has some element that gets intentionally highlighted over and over just to see if anyone’s paying attention to how absurd it is. In the pilot, it was the Russo family’s Christianity, in “School Daze” it was the incongruity of the timeline, and in this episode it’s a fetish for the family staircase.

This time Blossom tries calling the number on Maddy’s most recent postcard, which is in Paris. She can only leave a message.

She checks the kitchen to make someone didn’t break into the house again to make a cake.

The next day, Anthony and Joey are still making their stupid movie, and Nick comes downstairs (oh, come on) and calls a meeting with them.

Nick is concerned about what’s going on with Blossom, hinting to Anthony that he’s worried maybe Blossom is taking drugs. I get that Nick is supposed to be this ignorant chump, but Blossom being on drugs is the last thing I’d read from their conversation in the kitchen. Yes, she was awake at 5am, but it’s not like she was tweeking or advocating Dave Matthews.

Also, Nick’s been working in music for over twenty years, so he should know the signs better than Anthony, who only spent year doing everything, including rehab.

Blossom brings in the groceries to someone else’s house. Hey, it’s Mrs. Swanson!

I have no idea who this is.

We infer that Mrs. Swanson is some neighbor or local woman that Blossom helps out. She’s kooky and she loves the Russos unconditionally, and I’m not sure that those two statements are mutually exclusive.

So she’s a wacky neighbor, an old lady, she dresses gaudy, she talks to imaginary animals, she complains about menopause, the list goes on. She’s so many sitcom clichés rolled into one I’m shocked she’s not being played by Edie McClurg or Billie Bird.

Mrs. Swanson finds Blossom’s tampons, and they trade more wisecracks about it.

Fortunately she’s the only person Blossom can have an emotional breakdown in front of.

And thirty seconds after Mrs. Swanson congratulates Blossom on becoming a grown-up, Blossom is sitting in her lap, crying.

Mrs. Swanson says Blossom’s family loves her, and so does she, and we all have to work with what we have. She hugs Blossom, and it’s very sweet. It’s also very sad, because apparently Mrs. Swanson dies the next day, as she’s never seen or mentioned again.


 

Blossom finds Nick writing sheet music, and Nick directs her on where to scratch his back, and Blossom chats him up. None of this stops Nick from writing, which is a little weird.

Anyway having gotten what she wanted from Mrs. Swanson, Blossom has the nerve now, and she gives Nick her prepared statement: she’s a woman now.

Thinking this meant she’s been with her first Puerto Rican, Nick looks absolutely furious.

Then she tells him she got her period.

He goes through every “Oh,” moment from adoration to anger, then “Oh no! Already?!” which is probably what he said to Maddy when she announced she was pregnant the first time. Or considering his contempt for Joey, maybe it was the second time.

They have a heart to heart. Everything’s changing, et cetera. Then Nick becomes ecstatic: “Wait’ll I tell your brothers!”

Anthony and Joey get called in. “Great news, guys! Blossom got her period,” Nick announces. It’s pretty horrifying, and pretty hilarious.

We get another heart-to-heart between Blossom and Nick, because the fierce competition between heart-to-hearts and characters walking down the stairs in this episode is still going strong and there’s still like six minutes left.

Pop Culture References: Ted Koppel, for the second time in three episodes

 
Blossom comes downstairs yet again. Dude, seriously.

The Russo family is going out for Chinese food to celebrate Blossom’s puberty, and kill the remaining airtime with some more stupid jokes about periods. And this time, the guys are getting involved!

Joey asks what this all means, how one day Blossom walks down the stairs and she’s suddenly a woman. Wait, was that a motif? Having someone walk down the staircase five times in a single episode? Huh.

Blossom tells him it just means they’re growing up, and that it doesn’t change anything.

Joey says yes it does, and he puts her jacket on for her. Tear.

The family goes out to dinner, just in time to miss Mrs. Swanson’s urgent telephone call for help.

Pop Culture Reference Tally: 4

Season 1, Episode 2, "School Daze"

For the first season at least, I’ll be reviewing these in production order rather than airdate. I’m more interested in the way the show progresses from the writing and production sides than the way the Russo family charmed their way into America’s hearts.



We open on Blossom and Six having a sleepover together. There’s not much of an introduction, and we don’t get Blossom’s video diary, which is still the focus of the opening credits. I wonder if we ever actually see it again before the last episode.

The girls are in their jammies, and Blossom remarks that she can’t believe how much homework she has. Six says she could pay someone to do it, or not, which is supposed to be funny, and then jokes that Blossom could change schools.

Blossom says she almost forgot that she changed schools, even though we're about to find out it was like a whole thing. Six says Blossom's switching schools was a nightmare, and Blossom says Six has no idea how true that is, which is weird because Six was present through the whole story.

Pop Culture References: School Daze (title)

Before Blossom even finishes her sentence we’re whisked into a sitcom flashback, complete with a fuzzy special effect fade.

In the flashback, Blossom sits in class.



Suddenly the teacher walks in, and she’s either Gates McFadden from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or someone who looks just like her, and she’s dressed in S&M gear. The fuck?

Mrs. Dominatrix threatens the students, and Blossom in particular, and obviously it’s a dream sequence.



The dream is supposed to establish Blossom’s desire to transfer out of Crestridge, the all-girls private school she goes to, but none of the elements in the dream correspond to Blossom's reasons for wanting to leave. In the dream, the teacher threatens her and her classmates turn into zombies, but later in the episode we'll find out Blossom wants to transfer out almost exclusively because she wants to be around boys. Expressing a character's dramatic desires is pretty much the easiest thing you can do in fiction, and they've already failed. That's a good sign.




Blossom wakes up and asks the audience why she can’t just have sex dreams like everyone else. She must have forgotten the S&M outfit.



After waking up, Blossom goes down to the kitchen, where we get our first official appearance of Anthony.

Anthony picks pepperoni slices off a discarded delivery pizza, and it was someone’s job to establish this, because believe it or not, this will be important later.

Anthony picks up a newspaper and tells an unfunny story he read in there, delivering the supposed punchline like it was his own dialogue. Blossom laughs and so does the audience. I’m beginning to wonder if Anthony wasn’t actually as cool as I thought he was when I was a kid.

Blossom and Anthony rap about how she wants to change schools. They talk about how public school starts on Monday, but it’s a bad time to ask Nick for anything, because he’s got a lot of stress these days, what with just talking to Maddy’s divorce lawyer, losing a film scoring gig, and with Joey’s summer school grades coming in. Joey’s summer school grades will be very important in how confusing this episode is later on.



As Blossom gets ready to start her day, Anthony says good night and heads to sleep, which is actually kind of funny.

Enter Ted Wass as Nick Russo! I never realized how young Ted Wass looked on this show, probably because his age of 40 or so was impossibly ancient when I was watching these as a kid.



Anyway he’s back home from an all-night recording session. Blossom tests the waters about wanting to transfer by telling him she thinks playing the trumpet might be her life, the way Nick’s is the piano, and they’ve got, like, the best music class ever at Tyler High.

This is the point where the entire story falls apart. I’m honestly not sure if Blossom is supposed to be bullshitting Nick here. She says the trumpet is her life, but we literally never see her play the trumpet, or even have one in her room. She will by the end of the episode take a music class, but we never actually see it, and most musicians tend to practice their instrument outside of their lessons at some point.

Nick points out that if she wants to study the trumpet, he’s a successful session musician who knows LA’s best local talent, and can set up lessons. Blossom was naïve not to realize this.

She replies that Tyler High wouldn’t cost Nick anything. And that’s about the dumbest thing to say, since money doesn’t seem to be an issue considering Nick was able to keep the house, pay his divorce attorney, support three kids who keep the lights on all night, and send Blossom to Crestridge in the first place.

The scene goes on and on after this, and we're not even finished with the exposition part of Blossom's whole conflict for this episode yet.

Pop Culture References: Night of the Living Dead, Father Knows Best



At some later point, Blossom tutors Joey, who is no longer named Donny, because when Joey Lawrence was being mentored by Tony Danza, he took every lesson seriously.



Blossom uses the time Nick is paying her for to talk about her own stupid problems. She’ll never have any kind of social life if she doesn’t go to public school and join the band there, she tells Joey.



Joey makes a crack about bands playing the Orange Bowl halftime show, saying that these musicians get their big shot while everyone’s peeing. I guess during the retool, Blossom’s penchant for observational humor was equally distributed through all of the characters, even Joey, who will be established even in this first episode as basically having brain damage.

Pop Culture References: Orange Bowl



For fuck’s sake, we get another Joey and Blossom scene right after that. While Blossom is doing some Acting 101 exercises like putting laundry away, Joey reveals his plan to cheat on the history test they’ve been studying for, which strangely Blossom has no moral opposition to.

Joey’s plan is to write all of the relevant facts on his arm, but do it backwards, with a mirror on his other arm for a decoder. This story is so unbelievably unfunny that I’m not going to cover it until its resolution at the end of the episode. Thankfully Blossom calls him an idiot after he leaves the room.



Blossom bites the bullet, telling Nick she wants to leave Crestridge and go to Tyler High. Which I thought she covered already, but I guess Nick can’t read context clues, like why he can’t figure out who’s been eating his pepperoni slices when there are only three other people in the house. It’s one of the kids, Nick. The one who tends to be awake late nights. It's not that difficult.




Nick gets all hardass and says no, and Blossom mutters that her mom would have let her go.



Nick replies that he’s not interested in her mother’s opinions on childrearing, because his is better. “Little Richard’s is better,” he adds, and even the studio audience doesn’t laugh at it. You’d think they’d at least cut that line out in editing, or do a second take when the audience was telling them they didn’t need a joke there because it's supposed to be a serious demonstration of Nick's authority.



Pop Culture References: Little Richard



So naturally Blossom undermines that authority and goes to Tyler High anyway, or at least a single hallway in it. I’m not sure if the set, music and nerd/Valley girl/jock extras are supposed to be an homage to Saved By The Bell.

This is where the episode falls into a pit of no return, and not just because the staging has Mayim Bialik's back to the "A" camera for the entire scene. (Seriously, look at these screen caps.)

So, it’s the first day of school, and Blossom decides the wear the ugliest dress she could find, because teenage girls don’t care what they wear, and she didn’t consult Six for some reason. I guess dramatically it demonstrates Blossom’s individuality and loneliness, but from a character perspective it seems like she probably would have told Six so they could go to school together. At the very least Six could have told her not to wear that dress.



Naturally within five seconds of being there, Blossom and Six run into each other, and Six has no other friends around because it’ll cut down on the production budget. Again, we’re to believe this is the first day of school.

Neither Blossom nor anyone else give any indication whatsoever that they have to memorize schedules, figure out which classroom they’re supposed to be in, et cetera. Which might be fine, but since the rest of this story is going to hinge on Blossom doing as much school work as possible for the first two weeks of the semester, they could have spared one line of dialogue to establish it.



Blossom says sneaking into public school will be like 21 Jump Street, except she wears less makeup than Johnny Depp, which is way too funny a joke to be on this show.



Six sort of congratulates her for pulling the whole escapade off, but asks Blossom what will happen when she runs into Joey, and of course that happens two seconds later. I’m all for comedic timing, but it’s hard not to see the cheapness of this, especially when we actually won’t see more of Tyler High after this one scene in this one hallway.



Joey naturally has some blonde under his arm, his arm being inside his football jacket.



Wait, what?

I’ll buy that the football players already know each other and Joey’s already got arm candy, but if it’s only the first day of school, why has Blossom been tutoring him? They flimsily established Joey was in summer school and Blossom was tutoring him, but the tutoring story goes from several days before the first day of school through the end of the episode, which takes place two weeks later. Joey takes the make-up exam two weeks into the school year?

And it's established that the exam decides whether he passes the tenth grade, too. So I guess Tyler High has a system where a student's grade level and schedule can be changed at any time.

And don’t think to yourself that I’m overanalyzing this, because this story jumps through about six hoops to arrange a scenario where Blossom can spend two weeks at Tyler High without the stakes of automatically shutting herself out of Crestridge by result.

Also, if this is two weeks before the private school’s semester, it’s got to be late August. Aren’t Joey and the other football players hot in wool jackets?

Anyway, Joey wisely doesn't care about any of this and wanders off. Blossom wraps up the scene by telling Six she thinks she’s doing the right thing, when another football player says hi to her.

Pop Culture References: I Love Lucy, Laverne & Shirley, 21 Jump Street, Johnny Depp



Nick walks into the kitchen, only to find Anthony stripping another pizza of its pepperoni slices, thus solving the lamest mystery of the 1990s.



Nick asks Anthony for advice, after getting all angry at Blossom before, and Ted Wass looks seriously overpowered by Michael Stoyanov for the rest of the scene. Is this intentional? Is this oedipal? Does it recur throughout the rest of the series?



Nick says he’s stuck, and he doesn’t know how to get unstuck. Anthony says that whenever he’s stuck, he remembers some chick named Stacy Fertelli. Nick thinks for a second and suddenly they’re on the same page. I'm not one hundred perecent sure what it is, but I think this is supposed to be incredibly filthy. So filthy, in fact, they weren't allowed to use the joke unless it was completely inferred.



Even Nick is horrified, but he thanks his son for the advice, as if the scene that opened with solving one of the lamest mysteries on record isn’t about to end with the creepiest thing ever.

Pop Culture References:  Frank Sinatra



So Blossom talks to Six again and we’re in the bedroom. So, are we officially in an entire episode that’s a flashback? That’s weird.

Anyway they take turns expositioning that Blossom is doing tons of work at Tyler High, since we won’t see a single classroom scene in this episode. Six notes that it’s only been two weeks and she’s done more than Six did all last year, plus summer school. So has the two weeks gone by already?

There's no mention of the Halloween party Six is going to dressed like a gypsy, but Blossom says her plan is to get letters from all her teachers saying how good she is, and present them to Nick at dinner. Because that’s really what teachers love to do, especially only two weeks into the school year. Did she explain the extenuating circumstances, and that she needed the letters because she was committing fraud?

Six asks what Blossom will do if it doesn’t work, and Blossom says she’ll have to leave Crestridge by any means necessary.



Blossom goes to Crestridge to meet with someone named Mrs. Whiting, who’s played with such cartoonishness I’m not sure if the actress is bad or if we’re in another dream sequence. They wouldn’t do a second dream sequence, would they?

Blossom tells Mrs. Whiting she wants to leave Crestridge, and the WASPy adminsistrator warns her not to go to public school with as soft a dialogue as they can get away with without exposing the actual disadvantage Blossom would have by leaving a prestigious private school in real life.



Blossom anticipated this would happen, so she proceeds to use the oldest tricks in the book to make her seem like an unruly student. She lights a cigarette using Mrs. Whiting’s desk, throws the lit cigarette in a trash can, puts her feet up, offers to bribe the old lady to keep her quiet, et al. Okay, it’s obviously a dream sequence now, but this would have been a much better story if she really did it.



Blossom wakes up. For those keeping score at home, we’re now in an episode told in a long flashback, with two separate dream sequences within. I got Inception, yet I had to watch this episode of Blossom three times to understand what was going on.

And this is the second time Blossom has woken up in a fully-lit bedroom. Maybe that's why she's having so many fucking nightmares.



Blossom and Nick go out and finish their meal.



Blossom, who was apparently wearing her pocketbook during the entirety of dinner, takes out the teachers' letters and is about to hand them to Nick. Suddenly a man approaches Nick and says hello.



While the eye is being distracted by the interaction between Nick and a guest star we haven’t met yet, Blossom freaks out, pulls her hat over her head, and hides under the table. The audience laughs at this even though we have no idea why she’s doing this.



It turns out he’s a musician friend of Nick’s, who coincidentally has been Blossom’s band teacher at Tyler High. This might have been funny if we had seen him before this. He tells Nick that Blossom is one of his best students and whatever, and Nick is not about it.



The guy leaves and Blossom resurfaces, coming clean to Nick. He’s rightfully pissed, especially when Blossom tells him she got into Tyler by forging his signature.



Nick and Anthony talk by Nick’s music equipment in the living room. Anthony plays with the synthesizer while Nick tries to tell him that he doesn’t know what to do because even though Blossom pulled a big one over on him, the letters from the teachers are actually glowing. Blossom has even been trying to start a chess club, because why not add something else to the list of achievements we are told Blossom makes and never see?



Anthony recites a Dear Abby article and tells Nick to figure out the lesson from there, and apparently they’ve already run out of things for Anthony to do after the three scenes we’ve ever seen him in. He drifts off somewhere.



Joey bursts in to tell Nick that his summer school grades came in, and he passed! Why are the grades determining whether he passes the tenth coming in two weeks into the school year? And if it’s two weeks in already and whether Blossom goes back to Crestridge on Monday is still in the air, doesn’t this make it Sunday?



Blossom comes downstairs and asks Joey if he cheated or not. Of course he did, he said, but he cheated by hiding the answers in his head so no one would see the writing. That’s actually kind of funny, though about ten years later it was used for a thirty-second bit on The Simpsons.



To celebrate passing tenth grade, Joey asks Nick if he can go to Las Vegas with his friends. As much as I can’t stand this character, I sort of feel bad for him here because even his dad can’t treat him with anything besides utter contempt.



Blossom and Nick talk, which starts off with Nick congratulating Blossom for helping Joey out there. Blossom admits it was a complete accident, but Nick gives her credit for it anyway, forgetting that he also fucking paid Blossom to do it, too.

On the topic of Tyler High, Nick says what Blossom did was amazing, but the way she did it was pretty dishonest. Nick tells her how scared he’s getting now that Blossom is becoming an adult, and he wants her to stay at Crestridge away from boys and drugs.



Blossom asks if he’s afraid she’ll become a nymphomaniac, which in my opinion should pretty much discredit her whole plan. Even if the trumpet thing wasn’t a ruse, her plan was only to be around boys, and she really only did two weeks of work. Now she’s breaking the social contract and saying a word like nymphomaniac in front of her dad, when out of respect she should have kept sexual extremes out of sight and out of mind, since masking her emerging sexuality with schoolwork was her fucking plan in the first place.



But since he’s been getting parenting and masturbation tips from Anthony, we’re well aware Nick is a chump, and he decides to let her go to Tyler High anyway!

No compromise of “Do well at Crestridge for another year and I’ll reconsider” or anything like it. Rather it's, “Well, honey, as a fourteen year old, you obviously know what’s best for yourself better than I, your fucking parent, does.”



Then he asks if since she’ll be going to school with boys if she has any questions, and Blossom reiterates that she’s in total control of Nick by saying he’s been through enough today. Nick sighs, “Thank God!”

Pop Culture References: Dear Abby

We come back to the opening scene with Blossom and Six’ slumber party to finish the multilayered flashback. Even though this is months later, Six has the exact same hairstyle she had the first day of school.

The writers self-congratulate themselves by having Blossom and Six recap and laugh about the things we just saw happen, but they also recap Joey’s B-Story, which is really weird, like saying “Remember when I had to go get my driver’s license, and the shirt my cousin wore that day?”

Six says it’s a good thing Blossom went through this process and they could see it firsthand, because now they will know what it’s like when their own daughters do the same thing. When do we get the origin story of when Six started talking like a 50-year-old?

Pop Culture Reference Tally: 11