stanleyk

This sounds like exactly what I thought it would be: execrable. But my real question is "What in the Sam Hill is Matt LeBlanc thinking?" He's coming off a legitimately good show where he seemed smart and self-aware and willing to play an ego-deflating version of himself. And then he chooses to star in the exact kind of dumb, retrograde sitcom that Episodes made fun of (and the kind of show that Episodes portrays as soul-crushing both to those who make it and those who watch it). Is he hard up for cash? Is he desperate to remain on television? Is he not as savvy and self-aware as Episodes made him seem? I genuinely want to know.

I'll chime in to say I love this show, too, and really hope it sticks around. Absolutely hilarious and smart and original. I love best the guy who plays Chidi - it could be a sort of thankless, straight-man role, but I find him hysterical (and also probably the most genuinely kind and decent person on the show - though I suppose we'll see how that goes).

As soon as the kid showed up in the middle of nowhere with no other people or hosts around, I immediately assumed Ford had created an image of, perhaps, a child of his that had died. Maybe that is way off the mark, but I was sure he was a host from the jump. And when Ford said "only boring people get bored" and the kid said something like "my father always says that, too," I thought that was the indication that this was Ford replacing a child. I could have read WAY too much into this thing, but there's so much plot to digest, I don't know what the hell is going on at any given point. But I like it!

Me too. And I disagree with Jezebel that she is an "unlikeable woman" - she is struggling and makes horrible decisions and is transparently, heartbreakingly emotionally raw behind an aggressive exterior, all of which makes her very likeable and relatable to me. I though the show was beautifully odd and very funny, poignant and awful and absurd and absurdly real. And I need to know what color of lipstick she wears, because it is seriously on point.

This sounds too dull and cookie-cutter-ish for me to allot any of my precious little tv-watching time, but then I made the mistake of Googling Daniel Sunjata, since I wasn't sure what I'd seen him in before. Upon which I discovered he is apparently a deep believer in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Didn't need much encouragement to skip this anyway, but hard pass from me.

This show is amazing. It's both funnier and much darker than I was expecting. I did, though, find some of the scenes almost too painful to watch, and not because I was laughing too hard: the scene where the deputies beat up the crazy toilet-water guy and the scene with Lisa. I'm not sure this show would do anything as traditional as a "character arc," but I did wonder if we'll see Earn become less passive. His discomfort at witnessing the beat-down of this helpless, screaming person and at the homophobia were a call-back to me to the scene with the white guy in the first episode, where his reaction to the white guy using the n-word was a downward glance and faintly ironic "....cool." Like he wants to say something but can't quite bring himself to do it. (Not that he could say much when a bunch of cops are beating up another inmate, but in terms of another instance of his sense of his helplessness and passivity.) In a Twin Peaks-ish touch, I like how there are "broken" or "out of order" signs all over the place in the background.

Love this series (both the Wheel of Murder and the various Morse/Lewis iterations)! For my money, Endeavor is my least favorite of the three; while Morse (the show and the man) was always tinged with bit of melancholy, it's too much for me when watching Endeavor to know how Morse ends up. I do like the period look and details, though, and the callbacks to Morse. One of my favorite little games when watching Lewis and Midsomer and their ilk is to decide which witness continues doing the most absurdly mundane task while being questioned by the police. I get why they do this since it would be dull to watch everyone sit and answer questions, but...wouldn't you stop (a) setting the table, (b) running a flag up a flagpole, (c) gardening, (d) grooming a horse or (e) loading goods on a truck to answer questions from the police about a murder? In any event, this last episode of Lewis was great - they really got in a lot of beauty shots of Oxford. I'd be in for a Hathaway series, and I felt they left things a little murky with the new DS - what is the deal with her constant girls' nights and her absent husband? If there's a next season of the Wheel, I would suggest Rosemary & Thyme. I know you like a cozy, and it doesn't get much cozier than two middle-aged English gardeners solving murders.

Yes, I heard that episode! And also this article, which translates the Hebrew name for women in that position as "chained wives." I also remember reading an article, maybe in the New Yorker, about a rabbi who was like an "enforcer" that women would go to when their husbands refused them gets. I think he got arrested for basically beating up dudes who wouldn't grant divorces.

I've never seen this show, but I love the recaps, so thanks for those! My question on this season, though, is whether anyone in this Ben/Vicki situation has talked about the difficulty of divorcing in the Orthodox community. If Ben is controlling by nature and that domineering nature is exacerbated by being part of this culture, Vicki should be super-concerned about the fact that a divorce under Jewish law in the Orthodox community, to my understanding, requires the consent of the man. If he refuses to give it, then at least under Jewish law, the marriage continues. I suppose if she does want to leave she'd also be leaving the community so maybe she wouldn't care, since she could get a legal divorce, but there was a spate of media coverage a while ago about Orthodox men who refused to allow their wives to divorce them under rabbinical law. So there might be a bit of additional incentive for Vicki and her family to put the brakes on this disaster before she gets even more embroiled.

I think my favorite might be the nasty email that was supposed to be sent to "Tom" being sent to "Jessica." I love this series. I also 100% believe Debra Messing behaves exactly like this.

I saw the first two episodes and found it disappointingly flat, and I agree it is absolutely squandering Stephen Mangan. It's like the entire show is written by a computer, plugging in various threadbare cliches. I love a good procedural, I love period stuff, so I should love this, but it is...not engaging. But to be a tiny bit fair, Spiritualism and an interest in the occult boomed in Victorian England, so while surely not everyone was a believer, I don't know that you can say the cultural milieu was one devoted solely to rational thought. After all, the real Conan Doyle was a Spiritualist, just like the real-life Houdini exposed the fraud behind the Spiritualist movement. I'm no expert, but I understand that holding seances was A Thing among middle and upper-classes in England at the time, and the vogue was not that short-lived.

I would like the show a hell of a lot more if I could believe this is really what the writers/creators intended. But I can't. I think this is too generous an interpretation of what we were actually shown. My read is that they really are trying to do a rom-com of two fucked-up people finding each other and eventually realizing they're Meant To Be, not matter how much they get in their own ways. I guess I'd be happy to be wrong, but I just don't know that there's any evidence in the series so far to support the idea that the show doesn't believe Gus and Mickey are genuinely supposed to be a romantic couple. I don't think the viewers were supposed to feel queasy at their big gas station reconciliation kiss (as I did) - I think we were supposed to feel pleased that these crazy kids are getting it together after all. That's why I said above I would have liked that resolution better if the kiss had been followed by a long, awkward, uncertain pause, like the post-wedding car ride in Catastrophe or the famous final scene in The Graduate. That, to me, would have been evidence that supports your reading of the situation.

To be clear, I'm pretty sure Ruby's "seven words" are not about "if black people just behaved themselves, then there would be no problems!" They're about "you say what you have to and you do what you have to, in order to stay alive, no matter how unfair or demeaning the cop's behavior might be." That was reiterated by Bow saying that the main thing is coming home alive (paraphrasing). In other words, this: I'm white, but my son is black. I can never know what it's like to be black in this country, but I do at least know (a little, very little) something about being the mother of a black boy. I think it is really hard for most white people to understand the heart-clenching fear I feel when I think of my son being stopped by the cops some day, and how much I think about how to prepare him to handle that situation so that he comes home alive. I think about how few years we have left before strangers no longer see him as an adorable moppet and instead as a threat (that age, for black boys, BTW is TEN. That's when strangers start to see them as no longer children. Ten!). Every time he puts the hood on his sweatshirt up I think, "only a few more years before we have to talk about that." I dread the necessary conversations coming, because, like Bow, I hate to think of my son's realization that the world that's loved him so much so far won't continue to do so, that he will have to swallow his pride and act in ways his white friends won't have to in order to make sure he's safe. It's not an exaggeration to say I think about these issues on a daily basis. My son is three. THREE. So I can't know what it's like to be black but I do know the fear for my child, and it is very real. I get Bow's desire to protect her children from the reality, to preserve their innocence for a little while longer, but in the end I have to come down on Dre's side: they need to be given the context and the tools to survive. I keep trying to type responses to some of the "not all cops!" and "we shouldn't teach kids to hate cops!" comments above, but that way lies madness, and this is after all a board about a tv show. So I'll just leave it at...I think those commenters are missing the forest for the trees. I liked that they did this as a bottle episode, and I liked that they showed the real, rough emotion as well as the differences in opinion among the family members. It was true(-ish) to the characters (I'm not sure Bow-the-hippie would have been quite so pro-cop, pro-the-system, but someone needed to take that side, I guess) and gave some balance to the episode. So kudos to Black-ish on continuing to tackle difficult topics. If people think the topic is too much for a comedy, I don't think anyone who is watching a show that is explicitly about the black experience in America and specifically about raising black kids in a white world should be surprised that the show is discussing issues of police brutality and racism in the justice system.

I'd say this insight applies not just to the ponzu sauce, but to the date as a whole - Mickey wanted to stay in and order a pizza, but of course Gus has to "get credit" for planning a fancy date. She made her feelings about going out at all and then about the Magic Castle pretty clear, but she did actually give it a fair shot. I thought her point in the car that you can't force someone to like what you like, and especially can't expect them to like it in the exact same way, was totally right. It wasn't enough for Mickey to like the Magic Castle ironically, or to be entertained by the reactions of the woman in the bar, or to enjoy getting the ghost piano to play the Violent Femmes - Gus needed her to react in a really specific way that validated him. It had nothing to do with what Mickey is like as an individual, what she's interested in, what she might like to do. It was all about Gus. Despite her multiple faux pas at the magic show and her OTT reaction to the coat thing, I honestly felt that Gus acted more poorly on that date than Mickey did, in really fundamental ways of disregarding her desires, interests and comfort (after all, he chose her clothes...) in favor of his own. And then expecting to get kudos for it. tl;dr: Gus is The Worst. (Side-note: it took me FOREVER to place the magician who did the card trick that Mickey fucked up. The host of Cupcake Wars! It was killing me. I had to dissect the credits to figure it out since it wasn't on IMDB.)

Glad to see I'm not alone - maybe it was a mistake to binge the first ten episodes, but by the end I actively disliked the series and have probably reached the end of my tolerance for projects with Apatow's fingerprints on them (Freaks and Geeks bought a lot of goodwill, but it's not ever-lasting). I've enjoyed most of the recent spate of shows about relationships among terrible people (Casual, You're the Worst, Difficult People) - I don't need to like the characters or find them relatable or sympathetic in order to enjoy a show. But I found I disliked Mickey and detested Gus by the end, to the extent where I was actively rooting against them, which I don't imagine is where the show wants its viewers to go. I didn't want to spend any more time in their company. At all. They're completely toxic and appear to make each other more toxic, and not in any way I found entertaining or insightful. I found them both incredibly tiresome (though I recognize that Gillian Jacobs is objectively good in the show - it's the writing and concept that are the problems). Their "connection," such as it is, doesn't seem to be based on much more than Gus finding her hot and her wanting to try a "nice guy." And them having the same generic rug (a symbol of their One Trueness, apparently). Am I supposed to care about them being together? I honestly am not sure, because it's hard to believe the show failed so spectacularly if that was its aim. And I really hated the rom-com ending. Really, REALLY hated it. So Mickey, who at least showed a modicum of self-awareness and growth as the series went on, realizes it would be best for her to take a step back, and then runs to their meet-cute spot based on an Instagram photo because she and Gus are so in tune (barf) and Gus reacts by grabbing her and kissing her. And I guess the audience is supposed to clap and cheer? Even if it had followed that kiss with a Graduate-back-of-the-bus-like beat of "....oh fuck, what have we gotten ourselves into," I would have liked it so much more. I just don't know what the show is trying to say about love and relationships, because what it says to me is profoundly trite and uninteresting, and I'd like to give it credit for at least trying to do something better. I also agree that it played ike a dorky man's fantasy (like many of Apatow movies) - dweebish, immature, unpleasant man of at best middling levels of attractiveness is somehow able to score multiple women well out of his league, both in looks and personality. And it wasn't because of his accomplishments or intelligence or sense of humor - he was awful. His behavior on both the date with Bertie and the one with Mickey was terrible. His behavior at work was terrible. His behavior with Heidi was terrible. Mickey's not exactly a prize, either, which I suppose is part of the point, but at least you can see the basis for some of her broken self. Gus just...sucks. Fundamentally. I might be talking myself into hating it even more than I did when I finished it. It's kind of actually making me sort of mad.

I feel like I'm seeing this show through out of duty, not out of any real interest. I usually love all of the PBS stuff, but I think I'll give myself permission to quit this one. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think my issue with the show is that much of the acting is noticeably sub-par. Most of the main characters aren't bad, but many of the tertiary characters are either struggling with accent work or with the old-timey language...or they're just not great actors. Case in point: the lynching brothers in this last episode. Or the blonde Green daughter. Or the Green son. Or Olivia de Havilland/the other Green daughter. Or Frank. Or most of the patients. I just can't get past the accents on the women in particular. I grew up in Alexandria, and obviously a lot changed in a hundred-plus years, but I didn't know a single person who talked in that "Ah do DECLARE" Deep South accent. It's embarrassing. For them. And I think because I'm vaguely embarrassed for everyone, it's hard to get invested in the plots or characters. And because it's hard to get invested in the plots or characters, the moments of high drama feel hollow and unearned. Like the burial of Tom - I didn't care where he was buried. I didn't care that the characters cared where he was buried. So the stand-off at the grave and the noble, rebellious digging and whatnot...didn't care. Not to mention the plot holes. A high-ranking officer, who was in the hospital with an armed guard, is smothered and his papers taken and...no one ever mentions it again? The guards never point out that they let this random dentist into see him and then suddenly he got dead? No one investigates the stolen papers? So, ugh. Nurse Mary and Doctor Ted have grown on me. That's all I can say. I wish they'd tightened the focus of the show: done a case-of-the-week sort of thing, not gone so far outside the hospital, dropped the boring, unsympathetic Green family entirely. And, really, an assassination plot? That we all know will fail? Focus up, show!

I'm so excited to be able to watch Happy Endings start to finish; I was a little late to the party so there were some early episodes I never saw. It's still a great and hilarious show. But I have to say, watching the first season back-to-back, the re-ordering of episodes that happened during the initial air is very apparent and very jarring. I wish they had put them back in their original intended order, rather than in the order they were aired. Still...yay!

To be fair, at the start of their conversation, she did ask him if she could blog about what he had said, and he said yes. The fact that he was dismissive of bloggers and then acted like a jerk towards her pretty squarely puts the blame on him for what ended up happening. I suppose she didn't ask him if she could disclose every minute of their encounter, but she did tell him she was a blogger. I was enjoying this series - Michaela Watkins is great. But I have to say the events of the last episode kind of turned me off a bit. It seems profoundly fucked up that Alex appeared to be pleased that his sister had slept with his girlfriend in order to break them up, like it was proof of how much she needed him. But it was presented as...sweet? I guess? Not severely co-dependent and dysfunctional. I was entirely on Emmy's side in that conversation, but I wasn't confident the show meant me to be. And, really, killing Carl? That was a bit much. And as someone who has been heavily involved in animal rescue, it also challenged my suspension of disbelief. If Carl were a seven year old pit mix, ok, I can see that happening. But three month old chocolate lab puppies in a large city shelter get adopted - at the shelter where I've worked, puppies are literally adopted within an hour of being available for adoption, and labs are the most popular breed in the US. And, also, it was super-inconsistent that the guy at the store? shelter? whatever that place was that kept a weird puppy enclosure in the middle of the store - would drop an unsold puppy at a kill shelter. Just...no. Weirdly specific rant over. Despite my irritation with the last episode, I'm still in on this show, because I have some affection for Alex and Valerie, and to see if Alex can start to get his shit together and to see if Valerie puts her life back together, but I find Laura to be completely insufferable and delusional. And the parents...oy. So terrible it's hard to watch. I will say this - I do hope the show acnowledges that casual sex can be fun and fulfilling. It started out that way, I think, but it seems to be veering in a much more conventional, judgmental direction, where casual sex is really empty and soul-destroying and what everyone really wants is a stable, long-term relationship.

I suppose you're right, but it's funny to talk about equality inside the courtroom when the show took pains to show us the physical segregation in the courtroom: English at the front, Indian in the gallery. So while it may be historically accurate for the English to care about ths woman's murder, I'm not sure if the show really thought that through, or whether instead they just needed the English to care for plot reasons and it's easier to go for the "What a racist, unfair society this is!" angle.

Yeah, I don't really know what this show thinks it's doing. Is it possible for all of the characters to be The Worst? I don't need to "like" characters or have someone to root for in order to enjoy a show, but everyone is so uniformly awful, and their motives often so opaque, that it becomes tiresome to watch. Cynthia at this point might as well tie someone to the railroad tracks for all the subtlety of her villainy. I mean, I guess McLeod is okay? And Leena? And Ramu? And those orphan kids haven't done anything annoying yet, I suppose. But it's not just that everyone's unlikeable. They're also kind of dumb and personality-free while being unlikeable (witness: Aafrin, Alice, Dougie, Madeline's brother, Sita, all those bitchy women at the club). The magnetism of possibly murdersome Ralph can't carry this whole affair!

Are we even supposed to feel sympathy? Because I can't even with her. And, look. I have a son. It is heart-clinching to think, even just hypothetically, of sending him to a war. I get it. But she is a nutbar. I can't figure out if they think we'll find her delusions touching? Heart-breaking? Relatable? Ixnay on all, from my perspective. She gets on my last nerve. I keep watching because I am An Old and will watch whatever is on Masterpiece, but Home Fires didn't do a lot for me, in the end. A lot of it felt very rushed and undeveloped; either too many stories and not enough episodes, or they were rushing to get through a certain amount of material, or something. I mean, I'm not even sure about the names of many of the characters, and that can't be good after six episodes. I either disliked the characters or didn't care enough about them to become invested. Except in Alison, a bit. And Pat. Eff your terrible husband, Pat! Run free! Bake free!

Let me say for this for anyone on the fence about stopping with PR. I'd seen every season since S1, but half-way through this season I decided to cut the cord (to all cable, not PR in particular). I sort of thought PR was on Hulu, but didn't check enough to see that it's not the current season, so soon realized I wouldn't be able to watch the rest of this season. And it was a RELIEF. It is such a pale shadow of its earlier self that it was too irksome. The sad, awkward product placements, the stale challenges, the self-important Tim Gunn, the medicore designers. I checked back to see who won, but...so happy to be done with PR.

Can I ask someone to break down for me exactly what happened there? I missed the fourth episode and it's not available streaming through PBS. I'm getting pieces here and there from what people are saying, but I'm missing what this note business is. Aafrin took the document, and then...sent a note to Sita and told her to give it to Sooni? But Sita didn't? And we don't know why? I was also irritated by McLeod's naivete, in part because it seemed unrealistic and anachronistic. I don't think it explains it to say that he believes justice is the same for everyone. He's a white British man living in the 1930s - the system is explicitly set up to disfavor whole swathes of people and it was hardly a secret. He more likely would have thought that was the natural order of things than to be surprised that a man with brown skin was being railroaded and beaten by the cops. He lived in a society that was not only virulently racist and discriminatory, but openly so. I mean, hell, women had only gotten full enfranchisement a few years earlier!

Yes to all this. It seemed like this second episode was just a retread of the pilot, and I had thought they would try to go in a slightly different direction. My favorite sitcoms have all been grounded in some reality, even if there were absurdist elements (Parks & Rec, 30 Rock) and this one seems untethered from any recognizable reality. I also find Rob Lowe's character annoying and pretty charmless, and thus can't accept that everyone else grovels before him (thus the Natalie character was a good addition). I really want this show to work but it's losing me. As a reallife! not on tv! lawyer, I also have a sort of through-the-looking-glass problem with the show. I have issues watching all law shows because the mistakes take me out of it. But it seems worse here because part of the premise is that the show-within-the-show was ridiculously unrealistic from a legal standpoint and thus Dean thinking he understands the law is even more absurd. But...this show is insanely wrong on the law, and I'm not just talking about Dean's showboating and glamouring everyone around him. For example, in this episode, what was that supposed to be, a deposition? Was there a court reporter? Did they even file a complaint? A party is not, in fact, required to sit forever to answer questions, something his lawyers would certainly know. The whole thing was absurd. Is it all some meta-commentary on how unrealistic all lawyer shows are? Or does the show think it's getting it right? Because it's hard for me to accept the idea underpinning the whole show that it's laughable that Dean is using his tv-lawyer skills in "real-life" when the show itself is so far off on the law. I don't know. Now my brain is tired.

I thought that was kind of the point, no? That they're in a bit of a backwater, divorced from the fashionable (Western) world. I don't recall the exact words, but she said something to the effect that the dance was terribly out-of-date and (to make it worse) they were doing it wrong anyway.