When I was fifteen, my French teacher lent me The Glass Virgin.

“You’ll appreciate this someday,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

I watched it, and promptly forgot most of it. I retained some vague memories of a dude slathering himself with a lady’s bathwater as a sign of love (no joke), and a spindly woman shouting “Manuel!” at the top of her lungs, but it vanished into my memory and became a soft, pulpy mess. Given how I usually cling to movie memories more than any memories of my actual life, this seemed strange; I decided it must not have been very good, and as the years passed I assumed my French teacher had simply been wrong.

A few weeks ago, a friend came to visit and handed me a DVD.

“You’ll appreciate this,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

It was The Moth. I watched it twice in one day, sat back, and realized what my teacher had meant.

They are pulpy, social-commentary, random-romance, varying-production-values crack, and they’re hysterical.

I am in the process of devouring all I can get my hands on, and will be reporting here, to make sure that no incorrect hoop skirt, longing glance, windswept vista, class struggle, cave dwelling, pointless romantic interest, interrupted molest attempt, bastard dad, random occupation, or illegitimate bairn gets lost in the shuffle. I can’t promise perfection, though, since it’s possible to watch some of these and feel like you missed a plot point, only to realize later there was no plot to begin with.

Despite her issues (and girl has issues), I think she occupies some strange, ever-shifting space between Dickens and Nora Roberts, where women try to fight a class system that oppresses them and keep falling on penises by mistake.

Join me tomorrow as I begin digging through the luster of Awesome British Actor Camp graduates, past the visible chemises, to the stinky, mushy pulp that pulses in the very core of these overblown dramas.