gesundheit

I'm glad Serwer said what he said last night about why people are leaving Trump rallies. It's not wise to look at that as a sign of lost support -- it's just fatigue of the same thing over and over. These are "season ticket holders," as Serwer says. Provides me no comfort when those early departures keep getting touted as significant. I hope he has lost significant support, but people leaving rallies is not a data point. Poor Jordan is so ready to stop going to rallies. I hope he gets to. (Of course, if they lose he'll then have to go to more Stop the Steal rallies.)

I believe so, yes. I think Jon is hosting, too. (That's why he said last night that it was his last show before the election -- there will be a show this coming Monday but someone else is hosting.) I knew this would happen and predictably it did -- social media is outraged because last night Jon said Tony Hinchliffe was funny. Cue furious liberals insisting Jon is one of the bad guys now and "part of the problem" and that they've refused to watch him since his return (so how do they know??). No context provided, of course, about the fact that he showed a different clip and said he thought it was funny. He certainly didn't say the Trump rally jokes were funny! But we've got high-profile people out there fanning the flames about it anyway. Klepper's special last night was excellent. I can't believe that Trump supporter didn't burst into flames when he said Harris is a pure narcissist.

Guess we get to keep our Mondays for a while! https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/jon-stewart-daily-show-extension-through-2025-1236046622/

Agreed! The red paint was something tossed in from the producers that actually had a fun payoff, I love that. And still more to come! Also great seeing her almost win immunity, despite being "45" (ha). It did make for a fun visual, though, when they were all sitting there with a crystal clear Genevieve in the middle. Just looked like everyone else was blurred out, almost.

Then I hope even more that Jordan Klepper is the host because maybe that would mean there will never be another Trump rally. He was, but I think paying for a CNN-shared-segment is a little anethema to the show's functions.

Yep -- it's the latter. They always know, they just still want to get their "message" out and think it'll resonate louder than the show's antics. Oooh, thanks for that info! I thought I couldn't watch it since I don't have CNN, but I do have Max! Speaking of CNN, not sure how I felt about the John King segment last night. This show is supposed to satirize the media. It's fine if a mainstream media anchor comes as a guest or something, but it feels a little like playing along with them in a segment waters down the critique. Who is everyone's money on for the permanent host gig if there actually is one and it actually does come from this rotation? I feel like Desi or Jordan (but I also feel like Jordan would already be the host if Jordan wanted to be the host, so I'm not sure on that one).

The Walz interview was great. I was a little miffed at Jon for trying to get Walz to criticize places/people (Saginaw/Cheneys) it would impolitic for Walz to criticize right now, but of course that's the game and Walz handled it well. Anyone who's concerned Stewart isn't taking this all deadly seriously and doing his homework should check out his Weekly Show. It's very in-depth, very wonky, very serious, and has nothing to do with satire/comedy. It's excellent. Does anyone know the plan down the road for this show? When the Jon Stewart Returns announcement was made, it was a vague "until the election," but does that really mean we lose him in 2 weeks??

By the way, when did Jeff stop ending TC with some nugget of a lesson? He always used to do some version of, "As you can see from tonight's result, no one is safe even when they think they're safe. G'night!" It's been a while.

I feel like a no-frills hot dog reward actually is more old-school. When early rewards were something very very very simple that they'd bleed for anyway because they were so hungry -- only later in the game post-merge did they get the more decadent rewards. I'm just happy we got a reward challenge instead of a reward/immunity combo.

Did more come out about that shooting post-acquittal, does anyone know? I'm just curious how the show presented it so confidently as 100% Aaron's doing, but I didn't follow the news about him all that closely. I just know he said it was the friend who shot them and that a jury thought that was feasible.

Too short a season, stuffing too many twists into just one episode! Have they been renewed yet? I really hope we don't have to wait multiple years for the next season this time. I saw a few people predicting that she may have lied about the LSATs but then the show did so much doubling down with her crisis and the credit card, etc., that I had dismissed the theory. Very satisfying! That said, it was cruel to deprive us of her telling him that to his face. I want him to know what he lost. I love the college timeline, but the 2015 timeline is just so depressing. Some of these folks have not only not changed, they've gotten worse. I'm trying to think of what the fallout would be of the big reveal to Bree before the wedding. Honestly, she already knows he cheated on her that time. It shouldn't be a dealbreaker that it was Lucy, so I imagine it's more about the friendship than the marriage? On the other hand, she might think the recording is recent, too. (Or maybe they'll reveal that she already knew?) But whatever that phone call was that she had might be the primary factor, in that she's actually happy to have a reason to bail. Welp, no hope for personal growth for most of the key players. But at least there's Wrigley and Diana and Pippa. I hope. And we're still thinking Diana has done the math and knows it was actually Stephen driving that car, so that could come out in the 2015 timeline.

It's odd that this show spends so much time on Aaron in this side relationship with Chris -- I don't know all the details, but in real life my understanding was that he never had anything remotely close to a relationship with a man. I thought it was just a few hookups. Did I miss something in previous treatments of the story?

Wow, this episode showed us that neither Lucy nor Bree have grown at all in seven years, so that's depressing as hell. I honestly thought we were seeing some personal growth this season, but it's really back to Wrigley & Pippa being the least-worst out of all of them. And after all that awkwardness at the engagement party, we're now learning that Lucy and Stephen are still in touch, and that Stephen will just show up somewhere if Lucy summons him via text? Yikes. Admittedly, Lucy's line to him at the end was pretty great -- about how she loved even the worst parts of him that nobody knows, and why is he punishing her for that. (Although she still doesn't know the actual truth about his little vehicular homicide oopsie.) Granted, a little armchair psychology tells us the answer is right there in her question, but it's certainly something he should think about. Diana's 2015 wig was a LOT!

Is there any media outlet doing one of those episode-by-episode "Fact vs Fiction" features? I've seen some broad strokes for the whole series but nothing that does much of a deep dive. (I found one for American Sports Story but not this one.)

I think it's the latter. If both their accounts are true, the abuse had a fairly small window for Lyle and he turned his dysfunction into false machismo and narcissistic sense of entitlement, lashing out at the world. He was already a fully-developed (badly developed, but developed nonetheless) grown man when he recounted that story, a man with ugly defense mechanisms and a lifetime of constructed walls. The abuse went on for Erik for almost his whole life, he bore the brunt of most of it and it seemed to manifest more in fear and self-doubt.