I don't have cable. Someday, when I am terribly powerful and famous, I will be able to afford it, and HBO too, along with my own bathroom, art, car service, and Valentino. Ah, life in the big city. Until then, you're going to have to deal with the delays as friends schedule, tape, and mail any controversial Hanson-related programming.

Unfortunately, this means I heard all about VH1 All-Access before I actually saw it, thanks to you all of you yammering, overexcited ninnies. I imagined it would be like one of those unfunny movies where all of the best jokes—all two of them—are in the trailer. I was wrong. Seeing VH1 All-Access—the swank Manhattan apartment, baby Ezra padding about, Ike dancing poorly with skanked out girls—was indeed more interesting than hearing about it.

If this is a mere taste of the full, as-yet-unreleased Hanson Documentary, I really think we're in for a walloping treat: A sort of braces-off, R-rated Tulsa, Tokyo & the Middle of Nowhere. Six years ago, when we used to spend an embarrassing number of our Saturday nights perched in front of the TV watching, re-watching, and analyzing that very video, we used to ponder where these boys would be in a few years. Famous? Lovely? Married? Broke? In college?

We considered all of those possibilities for our precious, handsome boys. We also knew, somewhere in the back of our minds, that one would be married, one would be a ho, and one would be sobbing over the state of his precious art. We were dreadfully wrong, however, about who would be doing what.

• Hanson fans harbor a lot of bullshit theories. It's never clear where they come from, whether born of fanfic or wrought from one comment in an interview. There are tons: Ike is a dork. Taylor is stupid. Zac is a cynical wiseass. But the more we learn about Hanson, thanks to their newfound willingness to overshare like crazy, the more we learn about how stunningly off the mark we are.
  
  How about this one: Somehow, everyone came to the unanimous conclusion that Zachary Hanson was somehow less invested in his music than his big brothers. After all, his songwriting presence is barely felt on This Time Around, and on Middle of Nowhere, his hyper, monkey-boy antics were played as teenybopper schtick. And while Ike and Taylor blather endlessly about songwriting and passion and the evolution of their art, Zac is still content to crack off-color jokes and post FUTYs about his shaving habits. Somehow, I think we all took this to mean that Zac could, at any given time, quit the band, go to college, become an accountant like Dad, get married, have some babies, live in Tulsa, and be pretty damn happy driving the minivan and volunteering his time to teach the local high school band.
  
  Remember, too, when asked what he'd be doing in ten years, an eleven-year-old Zac didn't so much as blink before answering, "I want to be sitting on the pot."
  
  Except all of that is wrong. As wrong and ill-conceived as the assumption that he's the tough guy, the edgy, one-liner happy man's man next to Taylor the Beautiful and Isaac the Suave.
  
  There it was, a single tear sliding across his lovely face as he described the frustration of hard work met with rejection. Of his music being not good enough. Or wrong. Or not marketable. You heard it before you saw it, that tear. The emotion curdling his voice as he spoke. The edit there is quick, but you can almost perceive it—Isaac and Taylor panicking a little bit, then rushing in to rescue him. It was a shocking moment. Yes, because the very notion of Zac crying is enough to send even a lukewarm Hanson fan into fits of maternal clamoring. (There was talk amongst our little group of rumpling his hair and putting him to bed with chamomile tea and kisses and promises that it'll all be better tomorrow baby, you'll see.) But also because it was a terribly honest, unscripted moment. This will shock you I'm sure, but we don't see, and haven't seen, too many of those from Hanson.
  
  If what's in the finished documentary is even half as good as that one little piece of footage, we could find ourselves re-thinking our Hansons in very serious ways.
• An awestruck Taylor discussing the birth of his first child is very sweet. Except for the look on his face, which gives the impression that the word "placenta" in bleating red caps flashing repeatedly before his eyes.
• So, let me get this straight, VH1. We've gone from brace-faced hysterical pre-adolescents to half-naked sorority girls? There's a grain of truth there, sure. But it's one grain on a very big beach. My particular grain, granted, doesn't play so well for the cameras. (I can hear the narration: "Some of their fans have even turned into overworked, underpaid, big-dreaming office girls who don't have nearly as much sex as they should." Cut to footage of me in my cubicle, taking an Advil.)
• Funny how, with Zac and Taylor taken, Ike's bachelorhood, his suits, his mysterious illnesses, his fondness for hard alcohol, have all suddenly become something of a platform for him. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I want to unknot those skinny black ties as much as the next girl, but it still feels sort of like an underhanded oldschool Ike dis to me. "Hey girls! You can still have the old one if you want!"
• Oh Lord, J. Ezra, the single most interesting Hanson, pound for pound, these days. With his Hansony hair and Taylor's nose and those big, serious eyes. Sitting on the floor with his sippie cup. Getting stuck on the subway with Dad in his little orange hat. Playing the piano. Futzing with Uncle Ike's $30,000 Gibson, which someone left wondrously unattended on the floor.
  
  Ezra is, in short, completely awesome. He's Taylor spawn, for one thing, a completely new kind of relation. Not a sister or a Mom or a Walker or a grandma, even, on the cover of the AARP magazine.
  
  He is also, although no one will admit this, a truly unique kind of Hanson: His mother is one of us. Ezra is a rockstar baby, yes, with his little striped scarf. But he's also half mortal, and if the rumors are true, he is half teenie. With blood that potent carousing through his veins, he is destined, like his pops, for all sorts of greatness.
• We definitely think that Taylor should screech his vocal warmups over Ike's shoulder all the time. While there are cameras in the room.
• There was only a hint of it here, but we want to see Hanson fights. Like, bad fights. Like, somebody getting shoved against a wall over a chord change. Why? Because we want to take sides and then argue about it on the Hanson.net message boards for the next six months.
• Nice apartment. Can I have sex with Isaac in the hot tub?
• Isaac's facial hair, we have somehow learned to live with. In fact, we're almost at the point where it doesn't outwardly offend us anymore. We even find it, like so much about Clarke, vaguely hot. Taylor's facial hair, on the other hand, does not sit nearly so well. Maybe it's because it makes him look like a dirty sweathog. Maybe it's because there doesn't seem to be method to it. It's not groomed. It doesn't have a shape. It's not a particularly nice color. Gilding the lily, in Taylor's case, is fine. Growing fur on it is not. Moral of this story: Taylor should shave. Right now. Your heterosexuality, child, is proven. It's walking around your kitchen with a pacifier in its mouth.