Upsetting Day: The Girl Most Likely To... (Patreon)

Joan Rivers wrote the script for a Django Unchained for slightly attractive white women. It was a made for TV movie that aired on ABC in 1973 called Girl Most Likely To. Some people call it a black comedy, but there aren’t that many jokes in it beyond, “look at this woman she is ugly,” which is famously Joan Rivers favorite joke. Others label it a psychological horror film which more closely matches my feelings while watching it.

The role of hideous woman is played by Stockard Channing in a fat suit and a bad wig with some nose and eyebrow prosthetics. This was before Hollywood understood you could do even less to trick an audience into thinking a gorgeous woman looked disgusting. Throw some glasses and a ponytail on that Sandra Bullock and everyone would have considered her a monster.

Stockard’s character, Miriam Knight, keeps transferring colleges hoping to make friends and get laid, but everyone is insanely over-the-top mean to her. It’s like those Asian TikTok shows where a woman brings her stepmom soup and the stepmom smacks it out of her hands and calls her a pig. Then you watch every other character in the show do the same thing to the woman until she reveals that she’s actually the queen empress of the whole world and they all have to apologize to her. Yeah, Joan Rivers invented that genre.

The first thirty minutes of the movie are a series of vignettes of people being terrible to Miriam. It’s very similar to the first half of a horror movie, but instead of Leatherface chasing Miriam around with a chainsaw, it’s just all of humanity hating a nice girl for needing an eyebrow pluck. Joan Rivers once told The New Yorker that Miriam is based on her real college experience. Specifically, one time she went on a blind date, and the guy looked horrified at her and then said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” to the friend who set them up.

Joan lost some weight, got a nose job, and was shocked at how differently the world treated her. The television movie version of that is a lot more dramatic, but we’ll get to it. First, you have to hear the multitude of sins committed against Miriam. They start gently with Miriam’s beautiful roommate setting her up on a blind date at a pool hall with a man who is horrified to see her. He sends her to get drinks for all of his friends and ditches her. This sucks, but by '70s movie standards I thought it was pretty tame.

Then she gets asked to tutor a football player named Moose, as most football players of the era are. Moose takes her to see Romeo and Juliet at the drive-in under the guise of tutoring, and he almost makes out with her, but Miriam gets so jazzed for kisses that she starts throwing her elbows around and hits him in the nose. He sends Miriam for ice and then drives off without her, leaving her to walk home in the rain. Of course, once she gets there, her roommate refuses to let her in because she’s having sex with one of her many boyfriends. This is the meet-cute for Miriam and the male romantic lead of this movie, Ed Asner.

Yes, college coed Miriam's OTP is forty-four-year-old Ed Asner. He’s not even nice to her in this meeting; he just thinks she’s breaking into her own car, and when he realizes she’s not, he politely lets her go on her way, but that is leading man material in this universe, as evidenced by what happens next. The bar for a middle-aged man to marry a twenty-year-old woman was in hell in 1973.

Miriam gets a cold from being in the rain for so long and goes to the school doctor's office, where she meets a nerdy young doctor named Ted, whom all the other doctors make fun of for being a virgin. He asks Miriam on a date, which takes place in an empty operating room at the hospital. Don’t worry, he’s just attempting to fuck her in front of all of the doctors in the hospital who are watching from the operating theater. They can’t hold back their cheers when she and the doctor start making out, and Miriam flips on the lights to reveal a room full of men applauding.

So that would be a series of events unfortunate enough to make Miriam snap, but no. We must offer Miriam more indignity. I don’t know if that’s because this is a comedy and we’re supposed to find this part funny, or if we’re supposed to enjoy watching Jason Voorhees slowly chase his victim, knowing he’ll get the death he deserves in the end, no matter how temporary. How am I supposed to feel about this, Joan?

As she’s running from the incident with the doctor, the director of a school play sees her and immediately casts her as the lead because she is “real.” Miriam takes this as an opportunity to win over Herman, a boy her parents have wanted her to marry since she was a kid because their families own rival plumbing companies. I’m sure that will go well for her. Right?

Of course not. Her terrible roommate fills a prop box that’s supposed to be empty with roses, causing Miriam to have a sneezing fit onstage because she is allergic to them, which the audience finds hilarious. Herman is actively heckling her from the audience. This is the big mid-movie turning point for Miriam. This is when she decides to kill herself by running her car into oncoming traffic. Oh, is that not where you thought this comedy movie was going? Weird. I guess the TikTok show version of this usually cuts that part out.

Miriam lives, and she decides to make that everyone else’s problem. She spends months in the hospital on a liquid diet and has to get massive reconstructive surgery on her face. While she is in bandages, Herman does visit, but mostly to tell her he’s going to marry another woman. If Miriam wasn’t criminally insane at that point, Herman certainly pushed her over the edge.

When her bandages are removed, it’s revealed that trying to commit suicide was the right choice. Miriam is beautiful now! Men catcall her in the hospital hallway! It’s the sexual harassment she’s always wanted. Her plastic surgeons tell her she’ll have to let go of how people treated her in the past and move forward. Then they each give her a little smooch, the kind doctors aren’t allowed to give patients anymore, which is lame.

Never mind that most of her transformation is weight loss, eyebrow plucking, and a blowout, all things you can get without breaking every bone in your body. That’s ok, though; because since she suffered so much, Miriam now gets to rain sweet justice down on those who wronged her by living a happy life and also murdering them. Yes, this is a full revenge fantasy to completion. They’re not even all silly fun deaths. Miriam kills the doctor first; basically, on her way out of the hospital she slaps on a wig, gets him alone with her hot new body, then drugs him and sends him into surgery in place of an appendectomy patient, where he dies on the table.

Next she lures Moose to a place she promises is completely secluded where she can let loose the animal in her. It turns out this place is an airplane that they're jumping out of, I guess to have sky sex? They’re in full flight suits, no genitals out at all. I don’t know what Moose thought the plan was. Maybe she’s a woman who only fucks immediately after jumping out of the plane? I would have loved to see the scene where she explains that to Moose. Sadly, it’s just a hard cut to the plane and then a reveal that Miriam has sabotaged his parachute.

The police catch on that both of these bizarre accidents are murders, and Ed Asner starts investigating them in a really horny way. He’s turned on by how good the murders are and how smart the murderer is. It’s very clear that no matter who’s doing the murders, Ed Asner will be kissing them when he catches them.

Miriam tricks her dumb roommate into backflipping out a window. It’s so easy that I don’t think it should count as a crime. Someone who accidentally backflips out of a window is on borrowed time anyway.

Then Miriam gets to Herman. First she shows up not in disguise at all and tells him who she is. Once he believes it’s really her under that perfect blowout and eyebrow job, he’s ready to divorce his wife for her right away. They go to her apartment to have sex, but instead she breaks a pipe in the bathroom, locks him in, and drowns him. Telling him that if he were a good plumber, he could fix it. I’ll give it to Joan Rivers, this death is actually kind of funny.

The one mistake Miriam makes is going to Herman’s funeral, which she feels she has to do because he was such a close family friend and her mother would be mad if she didn’t. At the funeral, she runs into Ed Asner, who realizes she was Backflip Girl's roommate. He then pulls her college transcripts and finds out she took classes in nursing, skydiving, biochem, police procedure, and, gasp, championship billiards. That, of course, must mean she’s on her way to a billiards-themed murder right now. She’s got the discipline and dramatic flair of a Batman villain. You have to respect it.

Ed Asner manages to arrest her at a pool hall just as she’s about to murder the guy who ditched her on their blind date. He takes her to his car, and they watch together as the pool hall explodes when the eight ball is struck. Ed Asner tells Miriam he is in love with her because he’s a crime pervert, and she’s thrilled to be loved for who she is (a hot murderer). They get married in prison because Ed Asner did still turn her in for her crimes. He’s a law-abiding crime pervert.

And that’s why no one should ever be mean to Joan Rivers. If anyone was going to haunt your ass for being mean to them, it’s the writer of this TV movie. I would like to take a moment now to say how normal-looking Joan Rivers always was, and how making fun of people for what they wore and how they looked on TV is cool.

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