scowl

One scene I'll always remember was Tyra's mom telling her in the truck to give up getting out of Dillion because it's hopeless. The lighting had most of Palicki's face in dark shadow except for her eyes, yet you could still see that Tyra's heart was dying while hearing that her mom didn't believe in her. Putting an actor's face in shadow in an emotional scene is an extremely risky choice for network television.

Remember when Leif Garrett guest starred as an obnoxious "pop star"? That was some pretty amazing acting if you ask me.

Since it's Christmas and there is nothing but Christmas music on most radio stations, I found myself this morning listening to Perry Como barely singing a Christmas song. The man really sounded half asleep when he sang. Naturally I remembered the SCTV sketch which featured Perry Como flat on the ground next to a microphone covering a classic Police song.

Retro TV has been airing some classic episodes. I thought I would half-watch them while I do some work since I've already seen them several times. Every one has cracked me up at least once and I end up watching the whole thing.

As Arngrim said, Hollywood is full of actresses with beautiful noses and perfect breasts who work in restaurants and bars. She wasn't going to get a part through surgery.

I gave up when Gilbert decided that a boob job would solve all of her problems. I didn't bother to read how she became the president of the SAG. She seemed to be completely unaware of the productions she worked on (mostly Lifetime movies) other than she showed up and did some acting and she seemed completely clueless and uninterested in the industry she was employed in. I just saw the episode that young Todd Bridges was in. I guess thanks to the success of Roots, they were able to use the "n word" freely on the show. Of course the term "black" didn't show up for another hundred years but they couldn't dare say Negro over and over. At least no one said "colored". I thought it was clever that they had the black doctor working on the reservation since white people wouldn't "be doctored" by a black. Pretty good episode.

I believe the rats crawling around in the grain is the disturbing image I remember from childhood. The people of Walnut Grove are so stupid that they didn't notice rats in the bags of grain when they bought them!

I know nothing about Rob Lowe. I know even less than nothing after attempting to read Gilbert's book.

With all the candy Nellie and Willie eat, their teeth should be rotting out of their faces by the third season.

When they brought Dave back, the show lost what little credibility it had. The lawsuits and everything were just as fake as the show.

I have these latest episodes sitting on my Tivo but I can't make it through even one of them without more snark around here!

I'm watching a season three episode called "The Hunters" with Laura and Pa out on a hunting trip. The only thing Pa was able to shoot was himself.

I'd be more concerned about their teeth. Hard candy is the worst thing for them. Too bad Nellie didn't get dentures for her 18th birthday.

Pa hunted in the pilot when they lived on a real prairie. Then the hunter became the prey! I guess the meat and food products would be coming from other farmers in the area. In Minnesota that would give them cheap beef and pork. The Oleson's don't appear to sell much food other than grain products and candy. In season two we learned that the Ingalls don't have cold storage (get off your ass, Pa!) so they must be eating very fresh food. From the books we know that most of the food during the winter came by train. Before refrigeration the trains shipped lots of perishable food only during the winter. It was possible to get very exotic food like oranges and bananas.

I'm a few episodes into season three. I mostly notice boring technical changes. The lighting has gotten more realistic. It bugged me that the Ingall's home was lit up with full-intensity studio lighting at night. This season someone realized that their home must have been very dark at night when lit by only a lantern or two so they just have a single light pointed down at the dinner table. Good idea! They contrast this with the Oleson's house which is still being brightly lit. I still wish Pa would get off his ass, buy a bag of plaster and finish the wall around Carrie's bed. Hell, he spent days fixing up Mariette Hartley's house last season. Arngrim's breakout episode "Bunny" wasn't quite as good as I thought it would be. She described her two trips down the hill in the wheelchair in her book but there are really only a few seconds of it (one great shot between her feet). It's crazy that "Little Girl Lost" is just like what happened to Baby Jessica ten years after it aired, right down to the men digging a parallel tunnel next to the hole. Jack is the best TV dog ever. There was an entire episode about a goat. Hard to believe the writers passed on worse ideas than "Let's get a goat and have him do something funny over and over." Ah, 70's television. Remember when we had a variety show hosted by mimes? I can't believe it took three seasons to see Pa beat the shit out of someone in "Bully Boys". Even more incredible, Reverend Alden, after preaching non-violence during the first 40 minutes of the episode, thanks the mob of children for beating up a bully and showing them the way. What? Season four will be out on Blu-ray in January!

That actually makes more sense than any explanation I thought of. I've decided that it was clever to leave the scene ambiguous since television back then disdained any ambiguity that might confuse the viewer. I'm sure the NBC suits were yelling "What? What the hell happened? We can't air this. Landon has to fix that scene." but Landon was able to get it on the air. Of course the late 70's were desperate times for poor NBC.

After reading Arngrim's book it wouldn't surprise me if it was some inside joke between them.

I'm only mostly through season two and Arngrim has only been featured a few times. At this point in the series she's not all that great. She's playing a little snot with no subtlety. In one scene she was talking to Gilbert's chest and I don't know why the director wasn't yelling "Eyeline! Eyeline!" at her. Katherine "Scottie" MacGregor as Harriet Oleson is the only character who acts like she's in the 19th century. Her years of experience on the stage really pay off. She's always doing a performance of a performance since Harriet Oleson is always playing the part of Harriet Oleson. I love how her voice trills in the upper register as she tries to be polite and fails, then falls into a growling lower register as she gives up trying to be polite.

"Richard Baseheart! Richard Baseheart!!!" As I'm finishing season two, I finally saw the episode with RIchard Mulligan as a Civil War veteran with a bit of a substance abuse problem. It was surprising how the same rambling nervousness which made him so funny on Soap was used to make this character so pitiful. This episode I think is the first time the series ever used a flashback (or was it a dream?). Spoiler Warning: What the hell happened at the end of this episode? Did he O.D.? Did he commit suicide? Did God make that tree fall on him? Normally I hate expository dialog but that last shot of him was totally confusing and needed some explanation.

I'm about half way through season two and saw "Troublemaker". I loved RIchard Baseheart as the harsh disciplinarian teacher, Mr. Hannibal (!) Applewood! He had an intense Richard Burton vibe going in that performance. Too bad he didn't work out and Miss Four Eyes came back.

I don't think the girls did all that much farm work other than feeding the horses and the cow. We only see them going to school, going to church and having conversations in the loft. Laura also spends a lot of time fishing. And look what they had to eat: corn, potatoes, and mystery meat. Every damn meal. Night after night.

Gilbert made her mother sound like the stereotypical controlling stage mom protecting her asset, I mean her daughter, from anything that might harm her. It's probably not an exaggeration -- both her sister and her brother were on TV shows too so it sounds like they started their acting lessons in the maternity ward. I don't think she even cares why her brother split with her family. She hardly even talked about her sister Sara who was also on a successful television series for nine years and then went on to movies like Poison Ivy and High Fidelity, and is still in demand in television. You would think her sister's parallel life experience in the entertainment industry would give Melissa some insight into her own life and career but it sounds like they don't even talk to each other. I congratulate anyone who was able to make it through Gilbert's book. Arngrim book reads like an adult looking back at her childhood with wisdom and that's what made it entertaining. Gilbert is the opposite. She still sounds like an angry teenager. I got tired of her blaming her failures on the drug addicts and self-absorbed celebrities who she called her friends.

I tried to get through Melissa Gilbert's "Prairie Tale". She doesn't have a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that Arngrim's book was full of nor does she really discuss much about the show. In fact she hardly discusses her acting career at all. The book is mostly about her endlessly troubled personal life which is a result of her consistently poor decisions which she sometimes admits were poor decisions but never regrets making, i.e. marrying an uncontrollable alcoholic who she caught screwing a hooker in her house while she was asleep wasn't a bad decision because she got her first baby out of the marriage. I felt like I was reading something written by a teenage girl about things that happened recently, not by a woman in her forties looking back at her messed up life. For example in a single paragraph she recalled how she was bothered by two women who were looking at her at a club and described it as if it had been some kind of invasion of her privacy. However after they came up to her and told her how much they loved her on LHOP, she immediately turned to her celebrity friends and bragged about how she was so much more famous than them because she was on a television show. The hypocrisy of "Leave me alone, you nobodies" followed by "Look at me, I'm so famous" is still completely lost on her. I stopped reading when Gilbert was depressed, broke, and was hardly getting any work, then decided to cheer herself up by getting a boob job. It's funny that Arngrim came from a crazy family yet has made mostly wise decisions in her life. I think she had the brain of an adult by the time she was ten so she already knew where she wanted to go in life.

We found out after the season that Sierra drove people nuts by constantly talking about her successful modeling career, the many cities she's lived in around the world, and showing little interest in other people's less interesting lives. The producers chose to give her a "hero" edit and leave out this dynamic. After all it was insignificant compared to how Coach was driving people nuts. Since Baylor seems to be getting this kind of edit, I suspect that she is going to be around for a while and we'll find what was going on after the season is over.

Just another very small anachronism: nails. The box nails with the round flat heads that we all know and see Pa hammering into things arrived in the 20th century. Before that we had cut nails and they were expensive. Even my sister's house built in 1890 had nothing but cut iron nails. They were very difficult to pull out.