I have paid more attention to the 10 entire minutes that the Today show has committed to throwing Jenna Bush Hager out of a plane than I may have paid to the entirety of either Bush presidency, one of which occurred when I was a child and the other when I was in college and still pretending I was a libertarian because I was too scared to tell my Southern parents I was a Democrat and possibly a communist.
Apparently, when the elder Bush I least remember wasn’t running deeply racist presidential campaigns, war-mongering, puking on the prime minister of Japan, or allegedly not keeping his fucking hands to himself, he enjoyed jumping out of airplanes every fifth birthday to commemorate the time he jumped out of an airplane in WWII. History!
And so, five days after what would have been the former president’s 97 birthday, his granddaughter did not follow that tradition at all but did jump out of a plane while Today show anchors watched.
What I suspect actually happened is that someone at the Today show finally got around to watching the absolutely perfect and criminally underappreciated film Morning Glory, in which Rachel McAdams pulls her morning talk show out of its ratings slump by acknowledging that Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton seem to stay fine in perpetuity and tossing the film’s long-suffering weatherman out of a plane.
It’s also possible that producers were bored enough during the pandemic to watch the lamentably unfunny Bridget Jones: On the Edge of Reason, as I know I was, to see Renée Zellwegger also thrown from a plane into a bunch of pig shit for her morning show’s ratings.
Both of these possibilities make just as much sense as watching the granddaughter of an unpopular president skydiving nearly a week after a birthday that he reportedly would not have skydived on, though the dive makes less sense than it did to the plot of the aforementioned films. That being said, as romcoms have indubitably proven, watching people who do not want to jump out of planes forced to jump out of planes and land safely is hilarious, even if there is a negligible amount of pig shit and no perfect Harrison Ford deadpanning. So enjoy.