Asp Burger

I'm still liking life on the barge, but keeping an eye on this thread to see what I'm being spared missing. Some of you have me tempted to at least watch the Ava/Austin + Nina/Sonny luncheon. So, Curtis is paralyzed? Maybe they can bring crack neurosurgeon Dr. Griffin Munro back for a brief return to save the day, between his crying spells.

It's possible the episode just caught me in an "easy" mood, or maybe after a season and a half it has worn down my expectations, but I think this was my favorite episode of either season. Even Che had a good week. The spontaneous gag about the vibrator not having a lifetime warranty, while not thigh-slapping hilarious, was better than anything from last season's "comedy concert." Che and Carrie have good friendship chemistry (as do Carrie and Seema). Cynthia Nixon is a good director. All of her episodes behind the camera have been above average, and this one had some gorgeous images. The Miranda/Steve argument (the downstairs part, I mean) was very moving to me. I felt that the writing, directing, and both actors caught how people who have loved each other for a long time, and still do, feel and act when they fight and it gets ugly. LTW and husband still seem very "back-door pilot," though. I have nothing against that family; I just get less of the point of them than with any of the other AJLT characters. It's as if we briefly join some other show in progress.

I'd say yes on "lighter tone," @RealHousewife. Carrie's widowhood still comes up in conversation sometimes, but there's more distance from Big's death, because time has passed and life has gone on. We aren't still getting scenes like Carrie screaming "You broke the picture frame that my husband touched!" They also are not dwelling on Samantha severing ties with the other three, as they often were in season 1. It's still a show with problems, but I cannot say one of them is the glumness that weighed down season 1.

From the HuffPost piece that @chitowngirlposted (thank you for that): Ding, ding, ding. It could not have been better expressed. I realize I don't have as much company here as I had a couple of years ago, but I still kind of care about Miranda. She had been my favorite on SATC. For all the discussion of Che's pronouns, it bothers me to see Miranda in a borderline-toxic relationship with someone who behaves like various uncomplimentary nouns. I'm hoping, maybe vainly, that the two of them get these issues out in the open and then part amicably, maybe stay friends if Che is (as I suspect) going to be around for the duration of the series.

She reverted to red at the very end of the first season's finale. She and Brady had a conversation about it. She asked if he was ever going to comment on her hair, and he said he liked it but wondered happened to her "gray pride." She said it's still there; she just liked the idea of changing it up again. Then he said she was just copying his look, and she said she had it first. It stayed in my mind because it was one of the nicer Brady scenes.

I haven't seen an episode since the one that aired on Thursday the 6th. This is the first thing I've read here to make me regret it. Obviously, I picked my spot badly!

Ha ha. And Seinfeld's recurring cast included an unfunny standup comedian too. Che is the new Banya! Now they just need to have Che say, "That's gold, Miranda. Gold!"

I didn't comment on the episode in which we actually saw the sitcom pilot being taped, but the reasons not to pick that up are myriad. It looked terrible, like a really bad show from Tony Danza's actual network sitcom heyday of 30-40 years ago. The AJLT writers were no better at writing an old-fashioned "taped before a studio audience" sitcom than they were at writing a "comedy concert."

I think they're hinting at it. No one's brought it up here yet, but in the scene in which they're eating, Che is talking about something, and Miranda's eyes are watering and she's clearly not attending to the conversation, and she finally manages to gasp out that the red curry means business. Che says something like "You have to be prepared when you get something spicy," and Miranda says she needed something to wake her up. AJLT writing isn't known for being furtive and subtle (nor was SATC writing), but I wondered if we were supposed to store that away as a signal of impending doom, even more than the overt incompatibilities we've seen. Che was the spicy thing that "woke Miranda up," and now she'll find a more sustainable long-term love interest. Like some above, I thought this was the best episode of the season so far. It did feel like an SATC with older women. Don't even get me started on that focus-group scene, though. I have a dreadful feeling that MPK and crew decided that what we didn't like last season was that Che was too brash and confident and lacked vulnerability, and the "vulnerability" this season means a Che who is irritable, insecure, and prone to tears.

I agree. I think the nickname "Seemantha" is funny, and I get it (she's more like Samantha than the other new AJLT women and Che are), but Seema's vulnerability and sensitivity are closer to the surface than Samantha's were, for one thing.

I agree that Nya would have been a better partner in that story for Miranda, if MPK and Nixon were dead-set on doing it at all. But I don't think there's a version of reality in which Che would have been anything except in our faces for as long as there's an AJLT, even if the "X, Y and Me" subplot had wrapped up on the same schedule. MPK clearly loves him some Che (and Ramirez) and thinks what he's doing with the character is an important blow for progressivism and the opening of minds. He'd just have given Che a different love interest and put Che in the brunch rotation with Seema et al. We'd still be getting Che scenes to swell each episode to a sluggish 45 minutes. I do know what you mean. In these cases I was prepared, as I'd seen them in the last few years: Williams in the Star Wars movie (looking about like he does here) and Bergen in Let Them All Talk with Meryl Streep and Dianne Wiest (same). Objectively, they look great for the ages they are, but they were both so gorgeous in their sex-symbol heydays, and those images stay fixed in the mind...especially because they're not constantly appearing in new movies and shows anymore, so we are not getting the slow progression we get with someone like Streep. She's really never stopped being in high-visibility projects since she became a star 40-something years ago.

Yes, it really was. It wasn't just Carly and Sonny getting together late in 1999 (the pairing had been teased as far back as summer, when she was the only one who could talk to him during a penthouse-trashing pre-bipolar-diagnosis episode), but that didn't help. They really started dominating the show in 2000. It goes without saying that 2000 looks much better when placed next to 2022-23. I'll be the one to add the darkest possibility: "Or dead." We don't hear as much about writers passing as we do with veteran actors, but we're all on the same timetable. The last time there were as many as ten daytime dramas airing was 20 years ago exactly.

I know we all might have different answers to this, but when I think about the last time it was "great," as opposed to "watchable" or "less bad than at some other points," I get depressed. 1998, very early '99? (Before Lucky "died," before Tyler Christopher peaced out the first time, and before Hannah, Chloe, and Juan debuted in rapid succession with the impact of three very damp firecrackers.)

"Hey, it's that guy!" I saw "Cyrus" (Jeff Kober) on a Lost episode from the final season. He's a mechanic who helps Kate break out of her handcuffs when she escapes from the federal marshal in an off-island scene. There are a few GH faces on that series. Of course, Cynthia Watros was a series regular in season 2 and kept recurring even after her character, uh, exited. Nigel Gibbs plays a funeral director on Lost, and he later played two GH roles (Aunt Stella's ex, Marcus Godfrey, as well as an unrelated judge).

I may be swimming barge-ward for the first time since about 2015. It's not really that the show is worse now than it was when Shelly and Jean were writing, but the irritation-to-fun ratio has been wrong way around for too long. I conclude most episodes thinking I got nothing out of them; I'm just watching because I did it the day before. There's nothing I'm hopeful about or look forward to seeing. Nothing realistic, anyway. Points in support of bailing out: If I hate a character, they'll be on all the time, usually with the writers attempting to ennoble and vindicate them. If I like a character, they'll get written as if the writers are trying to get me to change my mind. There are too many characters on the canvas who serve little purpose other than allowing the actors to continue working, and the pacing of ongoing stories is terrible. There are always more entertaining ways of spending the <40 minutes it takes to watch an episode. Even if I limit myself to television, I can do better, no matter what time of day it is. Waiting around for a regime change is pointless. Anyone who would do a measurably better job would not be writing or producing daytime soaps, because daytime soaps belong to another era. They still have some good actors—some just breaking into the business, others having been in daytime for so long that it's their niche—but I can see good acting in other places. See point #4. Carly's Scarlett O'Hara moment last week, in which she said she started out with nothing and ended up on top, and whatever she's lost she will get back, may have been my last straw. Scarlett O'Hara sort of works as a parallel for Carly, because they both "ended up on top" through a combination of force of will, lack of scruples, and attaching themselves to the right men at the right times, but as unfashionable as some of its specifics are today, Gone with the Wind told that story in a more entertaining way. And a more nuanced way, in that it didn't expect us to love and admire the protagonist without qualification. (Also, Scarlett's business sense was made more believable.)

That's how I see it too. Spencer's knowledge of fighting is spoiled-rich-kid level. And it would be late in the day for me to start caring about implausible outcomes of fights on this show based on the sizes of the participants. I've been watching Maurice Benard beat other men up for years (maybe more in the 1990s and 2000s than now), when some of his female love interests look as though they could take him. Jonathan Jackson's assaults on Tyler Christopher in the early days of Lucky/Nik were good for a laugh too. I don't mind Dex. Anything I have against him is guilt by association, in that anyone who voluntarily has a relationship with Josslyn has one strike against him. Even Cameron's standing took a hit. Evan Hofer isn't as good an actor as NAC, but he's satisfactory for a daytime young-hunk role. I'd put him on about the same level as Josh Swickard, Tajh Bellow, Ryan Paevey, Bryan Craig, etc.

Fitting, considering that the star and executive producer of the show gave her career-best performance as SanDeE*.

I'm reminded again of Succession, which just ended its run. The four adult children all had had a horrible father (and the three youngest had had a mother who was no prize either). They tried to bulldoze, outmaneuver, manipulate, and claw their way to the top as the old man had done—and they were starting from a position of wealth and privilege he had not had—but they just didn't have his touch. So, they got the worst of both worlds: a bad role model who made sure they were ineffectual.

It was nice of The Hollywood Reporter to use an old picture of Ingo looking his best. I imagine that's how most of Jax's fans will prefer to remember the character, since he is likely a part of history now. I can't see them recasting Jax with some other tall, fit, blond Australian actor. They were barely writing for him even before relations with Ingo soured. The actor's status as a '90s fan favorite was probably all that was keeping Jax coming back. In fact, if the real-life death toll of GH actors hadn't had a spike recently, I'd be expecting Carly to get a phone call and break news to Josslyn about an offscreen mountain-climbing accident (or something similar) any day now.

I'd love a Trey update! Trey wasn't the most grateful role (Charlotte's seemingly "perfect" man who then revealed one imperfection after another), but Kyle did a great job with him. I've loved him ever since Blue Velvet. Recently, he was even a bright spot of the dull Lucky Hank with Bob Odenkirk on AMC. Here he is reminiscing about his SATC experience, starting at 13:38. But the whole video is hilarious, especially the Showgirls part.

Indeed. Here's some detail from the Soap Central recap. It's another good example of the music they would pay to license in those days.

I guess Hannah Scott was pretty peripheral in the scheme of things, as a failed Sonny love interest who hung around for a little while after Carly "won" Sonny, but she liked him. They tried to salvage Hannah by putting her in a triangle with Taggert and AJ. I'll never forget AJ's gift to Hannah: a gorilla bumping and grinding to Prince's "Kiss" right in the middle of the police station. (A guy in a gorilla suit, I mean. Or was it AJ himself in the gorilla suit?)

Then it got even better. The example Carly came up with of an unpunished bad deed of Tracy's was framing Alexis for drunk driving. That was so much worse than Carly drugging AJ (who was in recovery at the time), pouring alcohol all over him, and leaving him in a back alley so his family would think he had relapsed. I'm struggling to recall how she "paid" for that.

Not necessarily. No matter how Molly (theoretically) exits, it could open up a storyline for him. He is connected to Jordan, Curtis, Marshall, and Stella, and I have a hard time picturing an ABC show in 2023 writing off one of their few younger characters of color. Giving him little to do, sure, but not writing him off. But the temporary recast becoming permanent seems the most obvious play. Cynthia Watros and her co-star Michelle Rodriguez had highly publicized DUI incidents—within 15 minutes of each other!—while they were on ABC"s Lost in 2006. Fortunately, there were no injuries or attacking of firefighters, just straightforward being pulled over on suspicion. Both women were written out of the show within a few weeks, although the showrunners have always maintained that it was planned anyway and the episodes had already been shot.