"The Quality Of Life Report" (2013 - 2015)

Full Overview

Based on Meghan Daum's glorious novel of the same name, this comedic, socially satiric drama follows Twenty-Nine year old Lucinda Trout, who hates her job as an on-camera "correspondent" for a popular New York morning talk show called "Up Early, New York!", filing what are, collectively titled "Lucinda Trout's Quality Of Life Reports". Recent topics? "Yoghurt; What Happened?", "Why No One Wears Gold Anymore", "Is 37 The New 26?", and, "Are Clueless Men The Answer?". Oddly, and wonderfully, when the "Bummer News" correspondent is suddenly confined to a Mental Health Facility, Lucinda lands HIS next assignment, "Crystal Meth Use In America's Heatland". So, even though she's just lost her tiny, Upper Eastside apartment, and also broke up with her "boyfriend"; a tiny ex-Astronaut, she is nonetheless psyched as hell, and flies off to a small Midwestern farming town called "Prairie City", situated in either Missouri, Kansas or Iowa. Upon arriving, and she visits The "Women's Health Clinic and Agricultural Museum", and is surprised by how many skinny, hyper, stringy-haired, tooth-deficient women are waiting, over-eagerly, to horrify her. She interviews each woman, indeed horrified, and is often reduced to tears, something she'd thought her eyes had forgotten how to do. Her Prarie City "guide", an enormous, and enormously charming, lesbian, Sue Leginbeel -- Lucinda later discovers that this small, somewhere-in-the-Midwest town is home to a rather astonishing number of lesbians -- drives her and her crew around for a "look see". As Lucinda looks out over the waving fields of... crop, and witnesses the sky for the first time in several years, and passes by a lovely, two bedroom bungalow that rents for $400 a month, Lucinda, with unusual, confusing even to her, decisiveness, decides to move to Prairie City. She emails her batshit crazy boss, explaining that she can still continue to file her weekly reports, on tape, or even via Skype, thus expanding the geological reach of "Up Early, New York!" Amazingly her boss agrees, and Lucinda, the next day, moves into the bungalow and, from her new front porch, tapes her first "Prarie City Quality Of Life Report" wearing Martha Stewart separates and interviewing her favorite, most camera ready, addict. She lives blissfully in the bungalow, jogging every morning, where she meets, mid-trail, a tall, arrestingly handsome "Mountain Man" (Prairie City is as flat as a piece of particle bord), named Mason, who has huge hands, three children with three different women, works in a grainnery, drinks a great deal of beer and graces Lucinda with the best sex she's ever had. While fastidiously filing her weekly reports, "What, precisely IS a farm?", "Is lard really a vegetable?" and, visits a quilting bee, all of it's participants being lesbian. The theme of their "empowerment quilt"? "Batttered Women, Kill your Husbands!". Lucinda, now in love with Mason and his three delightful daughters, and tired of staying with Mason in what he proudly refers to as his "log tent", reads the "Prairie City Chronicle" one morning, and sees, up for sale, a large, rambling, "All it needs is some TLC" farmhouse. She convinces Mason to, after she buys it, move in with her. And, the very difficult life of overseeing a working farm supplies her with many a topic for her weakly reports. All seems to be going well-ish until she walks in on Mason, in the crumbling barn, smoking Crystal Meth. Somehow this results in HER being arrested, fired from "Up Early", and living in her sprawling, decaying farmhouse, alone. How Lucida's story resolves itself is quite surprising, deeply moving, profound, simple, and somehow... just right.