Episode 416--"the difference between men and women"

Writer Winnie Holzman Director Timothy Busfield Air Date 2/26/91 Guest Stars

Mocking Michael & Elliott's orange juice commercial.

Heavy flirting between Michael and Michelle the concierge.

The ladies sing "C'mon marry me Bill."

Chris Mulkey as George; Laura Tate as Michelle, the concierge; David Clennon as Miles Drentell

Bachelor and bachelorette parties are thrown for Billy and Ellyn, with wildly different results

While Michael and Miles are screening a new orange juice commercial, Melissa blips through the office and is invited by Miles to stay and give a feminine perspective. She hates it and questions why the woman is hardly wearing any clothes but the husband is. That night over wine and pizza, the men and women debate whether or not it was a sexist ad and then move to whether or not there should be a bachelor party. Elliot and Michael decide they definitely have to have a party now that the women are vaguely upset about it. They decide they need help planning since all they know is that there's supposed to be beer and strippers. Ellyn is busy planning the wedding out of books and the matter of changing her name comes up again (somehow this involved an illustration from Dances with Wolves). George, an old friend of Billy, shows up to help plan the party and seems to be a bit of a lout. The "hostess" agency makes a return call and thus Hope discovers some of the plans for that evening which leads to Hope threatening to organize a bachelorette party with Nancy, Ellyn, and Melissa. They gather to plan and this devolves somehow into their being summoned into the other room to see a surprise that Britty has prepared, but they can't open their eyes--Ellyn sounds cracks her shins on the furniture while grumbling that "these aren't my children." The big night arrives and the couples are getting ready simultaneously while trading cryptic remarks about their plans for the night. The guys pick up Michael in a limo, complete with beer and a bad porno film. The women also get a limo, but with champagne and roses. The guys come to realize that they don't know where the women went, which causes them to go into dream sequences about the preparations for the evening which feature the women as brazen hussies and pampering mothers. Ironically, Hope also recalls Michael as having been overly macho in the preparations. The men reach the hotel and Michael picks up their reservations from the female concierge who seems very interested in him. After dinner in the room and many more drinks and cigars, Elliot makes a toast that contains another reference to the fact that Ellyn doesn't want to take Billy's name. The guys seem to keep trying to convince themselves that they're having fun. Meanwhile, the women are at dinner in a very nice Italian restaurant and the waiter comes to tell them that one of his friends (another waiter who doesn't speak English) thinks that they're all very beautiful. Ellyn then realizes that another table of four men alone are watching them. After Hope has a nightmare about what the men are doing at their party, the waiter brings a bottle of champagne from the other table and they accept. In fact, Billy is being entertained by a kind of trashy looking sick (as in she has a cold) stripper. Michael envisions the women at a strip club, getting drunk and throwing dollar bills at the men. After a brief discussion among the women about what they miss about romance and seduction, they invite the table of men over. It turns out they're all married and everyone swaps baby pictures and has a perfectly lovely time. The party in New York breaks up in all its sordid glory and Michael still keeps running into the concierge, Michelle, and she makes an offer that he takes a little while to turn down. Quite tipsy, the women sing "C'mon marry me Bill*" in the limo on the way home. When Michael is dropped off, he thinks he sees Gary jogging by, but it's someone else instead. He tippytoes upstairs and discovers that Hope has beat him home. Billy is feeling rather sick and as Ellyn helps him undress, she tells him she definitely doesn't want to change her name. Elliot and Nancy have a playful fight over putting the lid up or down which results in her demanding that he seduce her in Italian (he doesn't speak Italian, but it doesn't seem to matter). Hope and Michael settle into bed, he tells her that he thought he saw Gary, and he doesn't tell her about Michelle, the concierge.

Billy has a brother who didn't speak to him for years; some mention of Melissa meeting Lee because they've decided to be friends now; many references are made to the toilet lid being up or down; lots of shots of people either going or preparing to go to the bathroom (the purpose for this has eluded me)

Elliot wears that weird combo of an aqua shirt with a wild maroon tie and a beige jacket with patterns on it. Someone attacked Hope with that damn knotted headband agin. The women look really, really nice for their big night out--Ellyn looks very good in the dark blue dress, a good color on her.

--"Would you hire me to sell juice in my underwear?" --Hope

 --"Could I pick the underwear?" --Michael

 --"Martha Stewart's Book of Weddings. Who's Martha Stewart?" --Billy

 --"You don't want to know." --Ellyn

• And yet again, more sex, undressing, and people in the bathroom in this episode than usual. Timothy Busfield has a one track mind. Does anyone else see the irony in that the episode spent the whole time arguing against this perception and use of women, yet at the same time reavowed it through the use of a stripper and the way that Ellyn was costumed?
• From Lynch:
• Hmmm....Lisa points out that the Tim Busfield-directed episodes have a

lot of underwear in them, more than all the other episodes combined.
I might take issue with that, mainly because there was plenty of under-
wear scenes (plus tub-and-shower, plus naked-under-the-bed-covers) in
other episodes. In a way, 30s was network television's version of a
little art house cinema, where you could see French and Italian and
Swedish movies where semi-clothed lovers talked about love and death
and nuclear disarmament....Anyway Tim Busfield has portrayed a number
of characters who experience various degrees of sexual frustration:
on Trapper John, MD; the recent film "Souler Opposite", the "Revenge
of the Nerds", and of course Eliott Weston. In real life, Busfield
seems to enjoy raunchy humor, and I'm afraid I should note that there
was a well publicized sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him
several years ago. Still, I question if "his" episodes are really
extensions of his personality. The feeling I have gotten is that
unlike movies, the TV episode director is not a true "auteur" but
a craftsman presenting and executing a finished script. The writers
and producers are more responsible for the content of a given episode
than the director, who'd be more concerned with acting, pacing, mood,
camera placement, etc. So I'd be interested if the stripper and the
showers and what have you were in the original scripts, not written
by Busfield, or if he had somehow inserted them.
By the way, anyone notice that in the first couple of episodes of the
fourth season, Busfield was regrowing his beard? That's because
during the spring of 1990 he appeared in the Broadway production of
"A Few Good Men" and had to appear clean-shaven. When they made the movie
a few years later, apparently Tim and Stephen Lang were not available
and they had to settle for Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson (go figure).
 
• The observations made about how men shut up to deal with conflict which causes the women to talk more and more were absolutely brilliant.

 
• There should have been some sort of equivalent wrapup with Melissa even though she doesn't have a partner at the moment. After all, someone referred to Lee earlier in the evening.

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