Episode 60: Things To Come

 The first glimmer of what Chances would become appears in episode 60, when Connie comes home to find her son watching… Chances.

This is what soap opera characters get up to when they don't have a plotline, apparently. Young Sam hasn't had one for ages, and in fact never will again. And just as Connie comes home from a long day of playing second-fiddle sounding-board to someone else's dreary plotline (and just before she has a scene designed to knock her own dreary plotline over the head)... she walks in as the end of the Chances theme is playing over the TV. We hear what sounds like a couple of her fellow actors performing a seduction scene, followed by erotic murmurs and possibly an excessive amount of saxophone.

"Um... Should I be watching this?" Sam asks, without taking his eyes off the screen."Well you see they're... doing it, with no clothes on."

Connie shrugs, pats him on the back. "If it shocks you, you're not old enough. And if you're not old enough, you should be in bed..."

Which is the perfect response to the wowsers who were already complaining about Chances being "teleporn" that would corrupt the tiny tots. They said it had no redeeming values... and to be fair, at this point it didn't particularly. But its vices were as modest as its virtues. And the situation's easily solved, as Sam heads off to bed—"wouldn't want to warp my development..."

Now, by the time this scene was shot, the axe had already fallen on the show these two belonged to—next week they'd be starting shooting on the new, streamlined one-hour-a-week show, and it's jettisoning its soap-format plot-threads left right and centre in favour of more standalone stories. In two months’ time, both these characters are going to be bundled hastily off the show and literally never mentioned again. Sam, in fact, never even appears again until the episode where his whole family gets pruned from the story. But the throwaway meta gag they set up will outlive them both.

Because about eight months from now, around episode 91, when Alex and Angela are at an advertising / PR agency which doesn’t even exist yet, and they’ve just sold The Sex Show with Dr. Bambi Chute (yeah, we’ve got all that to look forward to) to what’s clearly the same network that they’re on, and Angela’s sitting down with a room-full of new regular characters who aren’t even a gleam in the writers’ eyes right now to watch the premiere… what we hear over the TV just beforehand is their own end-credits music.

(Which, even more wonderfully, means that The Sex Show must be airing in the late-night timeslot which Chances will be banished to a few months after that... around the time in-story that The Sex Show gets cancelled. It all fits, I tell you. It all fits.)