What up, "Big Love?" Just when I was going and liking you and watching you one the regular. Then you succumb to that bastion of all things horrible and wrong about teenagers on the small screen. You staged a mini-pregnancy. And now, I have completely lost faith in your originality and character lines.
It hearkens way back before Brenda Walsh had the big pregnancy scare on "90210" (the original). I believe it got its start on the after-school special in the early 80's. Here's how it plays out: teenage girl, despite being portrayed as smart and sassy, gets knocked up by some boyfriend/uncle/neighborhood drug-dealer. Several episodes are filmed that deal with this mess, and they are often referred o s "a very special episode." Tight close-ups of the teens struggling with the news and their decisions. Should she get an abortion. Should she put the baby up for adoption? Should she tell her parents? Will her pregnancy affect her prospects for the prom? It's all very dramatic.
Inevitably, it all amounts to the same. The girl decides she is going to have the baby, and just as she is about to spill the beans to her parents -- who would no doubt be very understanding -- she has a miscarriage. Sometimes the miscarriage is proceeded by some horrible accident,but in the end, the producers and writers of the show stage a convenient miscarriage to wrap up this "very special storyline."
Miscarriages are common, to be sure. More common than television and Hollywood would ever let on. We never see a happily married couple struggling to get pregnant only to lose it in real fashion -- a horribly sucky way. As a member myself of the so many miscarriages I should be in a book community, it angers me to see this cliche storyline used again and again. When miscarriage comes a relief instead f the awful loss that it is, then we are missing something -- humanity.
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