As teacher Marla Hendricks, Loretta Devine gets up on the tiny stage to introduce the band playing for the Winslow High fund-raiser. As she reads the band's name, Marla suddenly realizes that the supposedly unknown group she corralled into performing is actually none other than R.E.M.
Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck then launch into an acoustic version of their worldwide hit "Losing My Religion." Tucked into a booth, Devine closes her eyes and grooves to the music. Sitting nearby is castmate Jeri Ryan, who plays teacher Ronnie Cook, happily singing along.
"I'm a huge R.E.M. fan," Ryan says after the scene. "I love their music. Every song speaks to me. Michael's voice is beautiful. I was so excited to hear they were doing 'Losing My Religion,' because I love it.
"I'm a groupie anyway. Forget it, there's no acting involved. It's not like I have dialogue and have to be cool, so I'm just going with, 'My character's a big fan of R.E.M.,' because I can't listen to it and not sing along. I've just made the character choice that Ronnie wants to sing, so there."
"Oh, that's sweet," Stipe says when Ryan's comments are relayed to him. "Several of the cast came up and presented themselves. Everyone seemed very nice. We were just very honored to be a part of it. I kept having to look up to realize I wasn't sitting in a real room."
Stipe says R.E.M. -- whose songs were recently featured on and episode of The WB's "Smallville" -- had been interested in appearing on a dramatic show to promote its compact disc "In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003." The new single, "Bad Day," is also played on the episode's soundtrack.
"They were kind enough to invite us," Stipe says. "It seemed like a good fit."
The band also wanted to perform live, unlike most musical acts, which lip-sync to pre-recorded music. "For TV," Stipe says, "it really doesn't work. It always looks a little bit fake. We prefer to do the real thing. However flawed it might be, it's real."
Although R.E.M. is well known for its dedication to good causes, Stipe isn't quite sure that he and his bandmates could be talked into playing in a small pub for a high-school fund-raiser -- but maybe.
"It's television writing," he says, "so it's vaguely unlikely that it would happen exactly as it does in that particular episode. But is it out of the question? No, it's not out of the question.
"It's a suspension of disbelief that we all expect from TV and from film, that you would bump into someone and mistake them for an unsigned, unknown band and then realize, once they're onstage, that they're neither unsigned nor unknown. But as a fan of television and film, I like the suspension of disbelief."
The episode even calls for a brief scene with Stipe and Devine. "I was barely acting," he says. "I was just playing myself. Luckily, I was opposite a very good actress, so she carried the scene for me."
Series executive producer Jason Katims wrote the episode with R.E.M. in mind. As he began to flesh out the story, he knew that one of the story lines would deal with student Peter Feldman (Miko Hughes), who suffered an electrical shock in a September episode and has since believed he's Jesus.
"It came up that R.E.M. was potentially interested in doing the show," Katims says. "I was saying, 'We would love it to be an acoustic piece, because it would fit the bar and the venue.' They suggested 'Losing My Religion.'
"I started thinking, 'Oh my God, I have this story line about this kid who thinks he's Jesus, and they're doing a song about, 'Standing in the corner ... losing my religion.' So when I was writing the episode, I used that as a way to guide me to how to write the story.
"It wound up being something that I thought worked thematically for not only this story line with Peter Feldman, but with other story lines as well. The end of the episode, the plan is to make it this montage of all the story lines coming together.
"So you see them in the bar, then you go to another story line and another and another, then you finally come back to the bar and finish the song. Literally every word of the song is used in the script.
"Knowing not only that R.E.M. was going to be here, but also that it was going to be that particular song, allowed me to really have it woven into the fabric of the episode."
Stipe says that the popularity of the song surprises even him. "The fact that that song was our biggest international single was a bit of a fluke. The lead instrument is a mandolin; it's five minutes long; it doesn't have a chorus.
"For whatever reason, it hit at the right time for everybody to want to hear a song like that, and it stuck around. At this point, it feels like a song that belongs to everyone in the world except the people that wrote it, and we're happy to play it for them."
"It's 'Boston Public Unplugged,'" Katims says. "I like it."
