TV Corner: Save Me

[Content Note: Choking death.]

WHUT. Below, the trailer for NBC's new zany comedy Save Me, starring Anne Heche as an irredeemable (OR IS SHE?!) party girl, who becomes a messenger of God after choking on a piece of food and then being resurrected. No, really.


As Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" plays, Anne Heche, a middle-aged blonde white woman, wearing a gold jacket, has been pulled over for drunk driving by a police officer. "Now touch your nose," he instructs her, shining a flashlight at her. She flops over and looks at him upside-down through her legs. "Wait—did you say nose or toes?" she asks.

Cut to Heche dancing on a table at a party and then dirty dancing with some dude, wearing a gold jacket and a cowboy hat. "Beth Harper was no angel," says a male voiceover. Cut to Heche, working as a meteorologist, pulling a pink bra from under her shirt and yelling excitedly as she waves it at the camera. "Until she choked," says the voiceover, as Heche drinks champagne straight from the bottle out of her fridge, then chokes on a bite of a leftover sandwich, "on a message from God."

Cut to Heche in a bathrobe, standing on her front lawn in the rain, lifting her arms and looking to the sky. Cut to Heche sitting at her kitchen table, telling a white man who appears to be her husband, "God saved me." He asks: "Now you're a prophet?" She laughs and nods: "Yes."

Cut to Heche making ta-daa! arms. "Anne Heche is spreading the word," says the voiceover. Cut to Heche pointing at a young white girl who appears to be her daughter, who asks, "What is going on?" Heche's head spins, and she gets a vision of her daughter making out with a boy in a car. "You and Ben Tompkins? Our next door neighbor!" Her daughter looks terrified and yells, "Dad!"

"In an inspired new comedy," says the voiceover. Cut to Heche out on her lawn in a storm, brandishing something. She points with it and yells, and a bolt of lightning hits some lady. Cut to Heche about to put on sunglasses (CARUSO!) and quipping at her husband, "God knows when you're naughty." He says: "That's Santa."

Cut to an image of Heche as an angel in white dress and wings with halo. "NBC's Save Me. Premieres Thursday, May 23, at eight, seven central," says the voiceover.

Hey, that's today! What luck! I can't wait to not watch it!

I think the thing I love most about this trailer is how it implies (and who knows what the actual show will be like; I'm sure it will be TERRIFIC, though!) that there's no one worse than a woman who refuses to settle down and be a good wife and mother (and is Heche's character irresponsible, or an actual alcoholic?—because, if it's the latter, whooooooops your conflation of addiction with "bad behavior"), and that being God's prophet in the modern age consists of harnessing nature to kill people, tossing off sanctimonious one-liners, and policing your daughter's sexuality. Sounds great!