Reheat & Serve

(2 of 2)

As usual, the Onion had it right. The satirical paper ran an article in which the "U.S. Dept. of Retro" warned that because of Gen X hipsters' fixation on nostalgic kitsch, "we may run entirely out of past." Recycled culture is becoming a staple of other networks like Trio and E!, and sources of retro are becoming more recent and repetitive. On a recent afternoon, VH1 had talking heads snarkily dissecting Enrique Iglesias and t.A.T.u. videos on All Access: Most Awesome Makeouts. Four hours later, talking heads on VH1's All Access: Awesomely Bad Videos were snarkily dissecting the same two videos.

Those who remember the past, it seems, are doomed to repeat themselves. VH1 risks becoming a parody of itself — video clip, talking head, movie clip, talking head, all day long. It slyly acknowledges that danger with a new series that is literally a parody of itself. Best Week Ever (Fridays, 11 p.m. E.T.) applies the I Love the ... format to the events of the previous seven days — celeb gossip, trends, music news, real news — as if the nostalgia cycle is so accelerated that it has almost caught up to us. Can All Access: Most Esoteric VH1 Countdowns be far behind?

But the network is also finding fresher and more dramatically rewarding ways of plying nostalgia, in particular on Bands Reunited (weeknights, 10 p.m. E.T.). The point of the show is not so much the reunion concerts as the quotidian stories it tells on the way there — how former stars have become insurance underwriters and wedding-band players or how feuding brothers Mike and Ali Score of haircut band A Flock of Seagulls haven't seen each other in five years. When the Scores reunited for a London club show in front of their beaming mom, I misted up — even though in 1982 I'd have sooner eaten seagull than bought one of their albums.

Reunited is affecting not because the viewer deeply cared about Klymaxx or Romeo Void — did anyone?—but because it's both more poignant and more uplifting than Behind the Music. Its paunchy New Wavers are not operatic figures; they're just folks with jobs who have moved on to other jobs. They haven't gone on to ruin or luxurious retirements. They've just gone on — steadily, maybe happily, maybe not quite as excitingly as in their synth-fueled youth. That's not rock 'n' roll, necessarily. But as VH1's too-old-for-TRL audience has found, that's life.