In her review of TV shows on the Lifetime channel (“Women’s Work: Sunday Night on Lifetime,” The New Yorker, 13 Aug 07), Nancy Franklin writes: "I wearily note, for the record, that both of the other Sunday-night series on Lifetime begin with dream sequences in which the lead characters – played by Lili Taylor in "State of Mind“ and Marisa Coughlan in "Side Order of Life“ – are humiliated in public. It’s clear that it no longer makes sense to prosecute this crime of supposed cleverness; every TV writer would be in jail if Hollywod cracked down on dream sequences. But it’s a shame that the ploy is resorted to so often; there are better ways to reveal what a character is struggling with. And, consarn it, "State of Mind“ starts the second and third episodes the same way – a repeat offense fo which there is really no excuse, not even the fact that the main character is a psychiatrist.“
Sleep dreams, a source of vital and unexpected information for real-life dreamers, have become a stale device on television, a trite ploy to convey information about characters in an unimaginative fashion. The art dream of TV has misappropriated the realm of sleep dreams.
Talk about bad dreams!
