gesundheit

Seems that this was clear in the book but they made a different choice for the show. Odd. This article goes a little deeper. Frankly this other stuff sounds way more interesting. Interesting that show-Jane seems so much less sympathetic than book-Jane in terms of the historic details and what would've led her to make the choice she did toward both men. TV shows usually go for less ambiguity on a protagonist's morality.

That was really strange, the pan up to the Planned Parenthood sign as if it were a reveal. I still love this show but I'm going to go ahead and come out as a person who's bored to tears by lengthy cooking scenes in scripted drama, and this one has so many of them. I find the daughters considerably less irritating than in past seasons for some reason. So far.

It seemed to be heavily implied throughout, but on the other hand it didn't seem like the type of show to leave things unsaid. Maybe we were meant to think that he'd molested her but not that Andy was his?

Whew, it took them 8 hours to get to a "reveal" that seemed obvious from the beginning? That was exhausting. (Although did they get to the reveal that Andy was probably her grandfather's daughter? I couldn't tell if that was just implied, but granted I lost interest in the endless denouement.) Fun to see the moments where young Jane got extra British, but that was a fun game the whole series. Barely an American in sight! Was this shot somewhere that necessitated that? (Though that wouldn't really make sense since it was a heavy mix of UK and Australian actors.)

I feel like the guy playing Nick has the dopiest peppy-dad walk, it cracks me up every time. He seems so far from the hot young dangerous thing that Jane would've been so taken with. He also seems well into middle age. He's either miscast or my take on what the character is meant to be is way off.

I feel like the slow burn here is leaving me a little lost for actual details to hook onto. What are we meant to be invested in besides info reveals?

I'm really enjoying this so far. Hate to pull the cliché of comparing it to Inventing Anna but it's virtually impossible to avoid -- so far this is so much better. They're actually showing us an arc instead of any overly simplistic "she started out evil just because, and ended up the same kind of evil" version. People's curiosity about her doesn't seem at all unfounded. And that moment of desperation leading to a terrible choice for the demo actually tracks, especially given her sources of advice and her misread on all of it. I hope the quality continues. Seyfried is terrific.

That Thanksgiving flashback episode was pretty well done but painful to watch. Just reminded me of being young and dumb and having those "lost nights/weekends" with some new pal that feel so fun and rebellious until you think about what it looks like from the outside. Loved seeing Carl Anthony Payne. I know he's worked a ton but I still associate him most with The Cosby Show and Martin. Freeform continues to keep our 80s/90s legends employed and I continue to love them for it.

They've all been exposed so many times on this show, press conference, front page of the Post, etc. But they still keep going. I guess they assume nobody pays that close attention. (Which is fair, I live in NYC and I certainly wouldn't recognize any of the many detectives in the news, but I'm also not a mastermind criminal who needs to know how to evade them.)

The Knight Rider theme! That's the perfect description. I hate it. Agreed with you and many above on the opening. A dead body in Central Park, the staple we need! There really is something very off about the acting, though I wonder if the editing is part of the problem. In other words, the shot lingers too long with the cut-away that "saves" the actor from a stilted, awkward delivery. Everything is held just a millisecond too long, so we have too much time to think about it.

Oh she's working, she's got an absolutely terrifying role this season in Euphoria. She's amazing.

That really made no sense. At least finish out the semester and take the experience and transfer the credits to an HBCU or something! But of course this is grown-ish, where everyone makes rash decisions and somehow lands on their feet anyway. So grown-ish Charlie is just a full-blown dramatic character now with no connection to the Black-ish person. Probably for the best.

Binged this show over the past couple days, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. And so glad to see Ally Sheedy out of retirement! Freeform HQ must have a special department devoted to re-recruiting Gen X former stars who denounced the industry forever. I need a Felicia in my life.

Yikes. The wrap-up of this series was truly awful. I thought episodes 2-7 had some good stuff in there, some fun stuff at least. But wow. That was really exhausting. Everyone kept talking like she was some poor little girl getting kicked around by a system stacked against her. She was a pretty (enough) adult white woman who came from, by the way, a middle class family, for crap's sake -- it wasn't even some "but consider the cruelty of the class divide!" argument. Agreed on all the above. If somebody insists on buying me an extravagant vacation and I say yes, and then I get stuck with the bill under duress, I'm not the asshole. Is it wiser not to participate in such things if it's out of your reach if something goes wrong? Of course. But being unwise and excited about a gift someone you think has unlimited funds has provided you does not make one a monster. They didn't use Jessica's name because the character was "inspired by" her, not based on her. Thank goodness. I've read a few fact vs fiction things on the series and most of the most infuriating things about Vivian were out of whole cloth. (She didn't trespass in any German homes or have battles for the story with her editors or work furiously up until childbirth or bail on a newborn or even cover the trial at all, for starters.) My real question is why they thought this horrible fictional journalist was a good "way in." This is just it. I can see the argument that we weren't necessarily being told Anna was some anti-hero and Rachel was the worst, for instance, but we were being told a crap-ton of sympathetically-written characters thought exactly that, and at no point were we shown why. We really only ever saw reasons for all of those people to root against her, and nobody gave a good reason why they thought she should be acquitted. Yeah, I feel like the show made it perfectly clear how there was actually no way out of that situation for Rachel. And to suggest that the fact she ended up fine and even profiting off it somehow mitigates the damage done is missing the point that she only ended up fine and even profiting off it because she claimed the damage done. For a while during the series I was really appreciating what a good job they did showing Anna play the "they wouldn't do this if I were a man" card which, of course, undermines women the world over who have legitimate claims on that front. But of course by the end somehow all the "good guys" on the show seemed to agree, despite zero evidence to support it. I'm just not sure what this show had to say at all. There's every reason to watch a good, fun con woman series, which I imagine is why most people tuned in. But there seemed to be a preoccupation with a message, swallowing up all the fun of it, and the message landed with an ambiguous thud.

Also, how does it make any sense that Cedars-Sinai would send an adult's psychiatric report to Germany??

Anna is boring, that's the strangest part of Vivian's fascination. What's more boring than wanting to be part of high society? Oh how special and rare! Me too. I didn't quite get why so many people seemed to hate the character so much until these past 2 episodes. Now I'm aboard the hate train. I'm so, so, so glad that Vivian is supposed to be pretty far removed from Jessica Pressler. But why Shonda thought this would be a compelling character to invent is beyond me.

Luckily it seems like Rachel's beyond-the-point-of-any-reason loyalty was largely fiction -- sounds like in reality she got the picture but really had no choice but to keep begging, but this depiction where she was screaming at other people after months that Anna was still good for it wasn't what happened. She was scraping by as it was and didn't know what else to do after being turned away by being turned away from legal and civil recourse, it's not like she could afford legal advice. She was just fortunate that when she finally contacted the DA with the Post article that they were already investigating her. I felt terrible for Rachel in the show and real life, but of course there are a lot of people who wouldn't have the connections and access to make a writing career out of it, they'd just be screwed with no way to find a silver lining. And in the end, Anna's the one who really got to use the situation to make herself a star and a pile of cash.

Reading the real Rachel's account of this story for the first time certainly cleared up a lot of my questions, but frankly makes it seem even worse than this episode did.

Is there any website doing one of those fact-vs-fiction per episode write-ups on this show the way they often do for shows based on true stories? I've only found broad ones for the full series, not the episodes.

I would absolutely watch The Scriberians. They could do so much with that! 6 seasons and a movie! I only realized this because I had captions on, but at one point they were doing a closeup on Alan Reed's wife played by Tracy Pollan, and right at that very moment whatever hip hop song they were playing had a verse about Back to the Future (starring Pollan's husband, of course). Anyway, not a huge thing but it was cute!

I agree. I think the go-ahead she got from the friend that it's not necessary to be coy about it was what let the reporter know this wasn't a dance -- she just needed to say it outright and satisfaction would be immediate. Before that she perhaps got the sense that it was just a tactic on Anna's part to keep upping the ante because she wanted to be courted. But really she didn't, she was going to say yes right away with only that one selling point.

My memory could be telling me lies, but I have a distinct memory of her having the implants removed and trying to tone down the image a bit in the aftermath of all the endless public drama, and she looked amazing. And then she got them put back in. Which is entirely her prerogative, of course, I just remember feeling a little sad! The whole Rand and Miltie story is cracking me up. I don't remember what ultimately happened but I hope the show gives at least gives them some comeuppance. I feel like the show's gearing up for it by depicting them as so repulsive and hypocritical (I was dying at Rand's fury at how unethical it was to bootleg his stolen tape).

Is it my imagination or this show getting darker and darker? I mean in terms of cinematography, I feel we're being told we're watching something at the bleakness level of Breaking Bad or something (it's particularly glaring when they have Johnson Family Home scenes, as compared to the way the home looks on the mothership). It's bizarre and laughable. I miss the college show. Is this the last season? It has to be, right?

Just binged this, so hopefully I timed it right to be closer to season 2? Any word on when that's coming? Definitely. The show went out of its way to demonstrate that her hypothesis was dead wrong (e.g., right after she announces that power transitions will be peaceful and completely free of violence, they cut to the girls beating the crap out of each other on the island). The feminist part of this show is just giving a lot of jobs to women and writing complicated female characters. Not the cartoonishly evil Machiavellian experiment! Also, I'd say the reason Gretchen chose such "damaged" young women for the experiment is that she had to choose girls whose parents would willingly send them away with no contact for that long. There's a whole lot of allegedly behavior-repairing camps that you can still send kids to that are up to all sorts of unethical nonsense but don't get shut down because the parents like the results, I'd imagine Gretchen was hedging her bets that this was the behavioral reform, and look! Your kid's great now! Or something. (Yes, outlandish, but this is hardly gritty realism here.) Ooooh, like a Squid Game thing! That would be hilarious. Martha did acknowledge that he molested her before she reverted to her original denial on the stand, so I think it was meant to be knowing perjury. I'm with everyone who doesn't want a season of the boys' island. Don't care. I'd love some glimpses, but I need to stay with our protagonists again! Warren Kole is certainly making a nice career out of acting on shows about girls surviving in the wild after a plane crash!

What casting director found that child who played Courtney? That kid was amazing.