Come on, Reunion, get it right

So with the vast wasteland of repeats this evening giving us a brief respite before sweeps, I watched episode three (1988) of the Fox show Reunion, which had been lying around on the floor of my bedroom on a videotape for the last five weeks. And while it isn't a particularly good show, it has its appeal. The cast is good looking enough so you don't change the channel (I've been a fan of Amanda Righetti since her appearances on "The O.C." and I only watched one of the worst television shows of the last few years, "North Shore," because of her, and I'm rapidly becoming a fan of Chyler Leigh--although Alexa Davalos, the one who had the baby, doesn't do much for me), and the mysteries and plot twists are often ridiculous but just intriguing enough that you want to know the answers. You want to know how everyone turned out (particularly the annoying guy who went to Seattle, now looks like some kind of spacemen from the future, and apparently signed Nirvana to a record contract or something). And you want to know who got killed.

But what I really wanted to say is that I might have to stop watching the show because the producers seem to not be able to put the proper songs in the proper year. And while characters acting stupidly in a show (which is a problem at times with Reunion) bothers me immensely, anachronisms annoy me too. In episode one, we had that annoying Seattle guy watching A-ha's "Take On Me" video during the summer of 1986. Sure, it's possible, but that song was popular the summer and fall before, I believe. He should have been watching the video for A-ha's followup "The Sun Always Shines on TV"--well, actually, he shouldn't have because no one saw that video. That episode also featured Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which I'm pretty sure was popular at the end of 1984. Not even close.

In the 1988 episode, the problem continued. O.M.D.'s "If You Leave" was played prominently at the start of the show, but that song was a hit in the spring of 1986. It would fit nicely in the premiere, guys. They also played Brian Adams' "Heaven," but to be fair, that was referred to as their "prom song," so the fact that the song was released well before 1988 was acknowledged. And later in the episode, they did get one right! George Michael's "One More Try" was released as a single in 1988. But while there were a number of unintelligible songs playing in the background during the show, if you're going to do a show in 1988, how could you not play songs popular that year like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (the song my next-door neighbor freshman year played out of his four-foot-high speakers and yelled, "It's all one guy!"), "What I Am" by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians (an album every guy on my freshman hall bought by Thanksgiving and probably hasn't listened to since 1989), and perhaps one of the best rock songs of the past 20 years, "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns n' Roses.

Come on, "Reunion" producers. A little racking your brains for memories from those years, and a little Internet research, and you can do a lot better with the music. Remember, music is powerful--there are times when I hear a song and I can remember exactly what I was doing years ago at a time when I was hearing it. So getting the music right can only help--it can hypnotize viewers into remembering that particular year. But if they're hypnotized into thinking what they were doing in 1986, and it's really 1988 on the show, well, that's just unsettling.