DRUNK HISTORY
Comedy Central, 10:00 p.m. ET
SEASON FINALE: When I was in high school, I wrote term papers for money – not much money, and I was learning by researching and writing, so I have little residual guilt from my formative writing experiences. Anyway, the way I taught my children my old tricks, back in the days when libraries and books remained plentiful, was to use an assignment in Modern European History as an example. Go to the stacks in the library where that general topic is housed, pull out a book, and go straight to the index. If the entry under Cleopatra has hundreds of pages cited, don’t dare write a paper on Cleopatra. But if the next index entry, on Cleopatra’s sister, has only one page, throw that book to the ground, grab the next book, and look for Cleopatra’s sister in that index as well. If there’s a citation or two, throw that book on the ground next to the other one, and repeat until you have five books. Read those five-to-10 pages, cherry-pick one quote from each source, add some connective paragraphs, and presto: You have a five-page term paper in one hour or less, on the little-known topic of Cleopatra’s little sister. I mention this because, other than using Arsinoe as an example of my term-paper writing technique, I’ve never thought of that Egyptian girl again – until now. As part of tonight’s season finale of Drunk History, the story of Cleopatra’s sister is told on TV, relying on a single source. Lyric Lewis tells the story, quite inebriated; Aubrey Plaza (pictured) plays Cleopatra.