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The actor who plays Mark is taller every time we see him. Given how short both Sara Gilbert and Johnny Galecki are, it's disorienting. (Not that there's anything the show can do about it now.) Also, the shape of his face is changing.

Given the Conners' luck, you'd expect the waterbed to fall through the ceiling because they didn't check the floor could take the weight.

I get the sense that Whedon has never changed his view of himself as the powerless nerdy guy women reject...while nonetheless believing his own press. It's a weird mix.

Really good interview with Christine Baransk about her life and work in general: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/17/how-lucky-was-i-the-good-fights-christine-baranski-on-sondheim-stardom-and-snobbery

That line was n a Peanuts cartoon many years ago.

This Vulture review of season 2 is fun. "It is captivating in its stilted strangeness; almost arresting in its capacity to identify the least recognizably human direction for any story to go and then head unerringly toward it." https://www.vulture.com/article/the-morning-show-season-2-review.html

I would note that Betsy's mother is played by Mare Winningham, whom Roger Ebert described as one of those actors where when you see their name in the cast you know at least some of it is going to be good/interesting. I first saw her long ago in ST ELMO's FIRE.

Even more incredibly, she was doing JUSTIFIED alongside LAST MAN STANDING.

I really liked the first season; I thought the premise was interesting and different, and there was a lot of potential to explore a kind of relationship that hasn't been seen on TV before. I'm close to bailing on the second season. I hate new credit sequence, I really don't like most of the new characters (particularly Jane Seymour's), and I don't care for the new premise. Every one of the dialysis group was more interesting than these. (I except Norma, because Linda Lavin is awesome.) And Kether Donohue is *still* being wasted. She was brilliantly funny in YOU'RE THE WORST, so we know she can do it.

I did not like the way this show handled the cheating and wish they had picked some other infraction for Hazel to be punished for. I'd want to know a *lot* more about the incident: what did she cheat on and how? And how was she caught? Not sure about her age group, but older kids are increasingly harshly punished for this. I guess we're supposed to assume that all this came out in discussions with Vanessa, but I think the show passed it off too lightly.

Well, she went through them all earlier to make the spreadsheet with Tripp, so that would have cemented them in her mind. But I think it's characteristic of a relationship that consists of scraps that you pay a lot of attention to every scrap and embed it deeply in your memory. I think the real Monica Lewinsky has a sort of brashness about her that this actress is not showing, and I do wonder if Lewinsky internally sees herself as more of the innocent naive deer in the headlights that Feldstein is portraying and doesn't realize that to others she comes across differently. (I also think that seeming brashness is one reason she got pilloried so badly.)

One thing that made me respect Aniston is that when she did THE GOOD GIRL - and this was years into FRIENDS - she hired an acting coach, recognizing that she was going to have to unlearn Rachel's habits. I think this is in the period when Italy was blowing up with covid, but people still thought of it as a China issue. In London in February 2020 a lot of our favorite Chinese restaurants lost a lot of customers who felt unsafe there; we ate there anyway on the basis that Chinese people might be the most safety-conscious. Meanwhile, in my neighborhood people brought covid back from half-term ski trips to Italy. My suspicion is that hugs got blamed when the real problem was shared air over a period of time; it wasn't until that summer that people really began focusing on ventilation and open spaces (and even now that message hasn't been nearly clear enough in the UK). Iran hit the news soon afterwards, and the UK shut down on March 23. People I knew started withdrawing from public stuff a couple of weeks earlier than that. The Morning Show is shot in New York. Wikipedia saith that the first confirmed case in NY was March 1. The situation blew up over the course of that month and by April 4 there were 12,000-plus new cases a day. So I would agree with those who say the consciousness just isn't there yet. Wikipedia has first confirmed Italian case on January 31, clusters in Lombardy and Veneto (where was Mitch staying?) began February 21, first deaths Feb 22, beginning of March virus everywhere in Italy. I'm thinking therefore the show is at late February and covid will blow up in NYC in the next episode and the season finale. I figured the woman who was lying on the couch and said she felt dizzy could have been harboring covid, but not clear where she'd have gotten it. The show is playing games with us, asking us to guess who's going to get sick: Alex and the glass of water; Alex's hug with the kid; much more dangerous, her time in the closed car with Chip. Etc. (Ironically given his later attitudes, if you listened to Joe Rogan's March 10, 2020 podcast you knew what the story was going to be; he hosted epidemiologist Michael Osterholm that day, who opened with: This is just beginning, this will be many months, transmits very easily through the air, infectious period before you get sick, best estimate 10-15x worse than seasonal flu in illness and fatalities, conservatively possibly over 480,000 deaths over next 3-7 months. Two weeks before, no known cases; cited Italy, which went from normal life to total shutdown in 2-3 weeks. I went to one last small group event across London on March 11 and then shut down.)

Julianna Margulies was I thought perfectly cast in THE GOOD WIFE, where the character was so restrained and repressed. But she's utterly miscast in this. It's not just her character seems blank; she and Reese Witherspoon have no chemistry whatsoever.

Not really. Goranson is 47 now. In 1992, Hillary Clinton was 45.

MAD ABOUT YOU circa 1995.

Kaitlyn Dever is one of my favorite young actresses; she was wonderful in JUSTIFIED.

Because they think people don't notice. I remain the only person I know who found DOWNTON ABBEY unwatchable in part because - among many other things - both Elizabeth McGovern and the actor who played her husband have blue eyes and Michlle Dockery has dark brown eyes. Also, Jennifer Connolly (dark brown eyes) played the child version of Elizabeth McGovern's character in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. I spent half the movie going, wait, is that supposed to be the same person? He was very good in MAD MEN.

I do know a guy who had this really happen to him. She told him when the kid was eight...and the spitting image of his sister. I agree it's a ridiculous decision from what's known so far in this show, though.

The history of Drudge presented here is spot-on. The Usenet newsgroup (where I encountered him circa 1994) was alt.showbiz.gossip, and it was a particularly snarky haven for people mocking Hollywood bullshit. (The pre-TWoP, I guess.) Drudge also had a period of lactating excitement over the movie BABE. And yes, he used to post long lists of links to that newsgroup that was just as annoying there as it would be here, and then found success on the web. He wasn't aiming at Humphrey Bogart, though - his role model was gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hence the hat. Drudge was most noticed for the "breaking news" aspect of his website, but the *other* thing that made it successful (and makes it useful even today) is the extensive links to newspapers, wire services, columnists, etc. When it started, it was *incredibly* useful to have that because there was nothing comparable. The best search engine of those pre-Google (founded 1998) days was Altavista, which was not bad, but it was incredibly cluttered with screen noise. Even now, Drudge is the fastest way to locate the current output of syndicated columnists. He has long passed peak *notoriety*, but his website is still getting 22 million visits a day, and even if it's not the one-man band of the 1990s it's still going to be a very small, lean operation that pays its owner far better than any other outlet would. A lot of ridiculous hot air was spouted about Drudge by journalists far too impressed with their own "seriousness". Even at the time it was obvious that Rupert Murdoch had done more damage to serious journalism than Drudge ever would.

Let's at least agree that the wig looks awful - and decidedly un-Russian. I've seen lots of Russian women with long hair, and they all know how to take meticulous care of it. I also happen to think Kidman looks terrible as a blonde and that she's nearly unrecognizable and that her face barely moves. It's true that we have gotten much less used to seeing normal aging on TV. I remember the first episode I watched in THE RANCH and being actually startled to see Debra Winger's forehead wrinkle. Kidman is 54, Winger was 61 when the first season of THE RANCH was produced. You want to see natural aging? Have a look at British actresses: Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith, Glenda Jackson, and Judi Dench were all Kidman's age around 1990.

I really don't think anyone regards Cornell as a safety school.

Izabella: Her name was Lani.

In any event, I thought Shane's Cornell hat was mostly to indicate that Olivia and Paula got it wrong when they guessed his education on the boat. I have certainly always understood that Hotel and Business Administration is private.

I don't think that's enough for an annulment. Grounds for an annulment are more fundamental than that - bigamy, incest, etc - things that render the marriage illegal or based on outright fraud. Disagreements over careers do not rise to that level. There's a current list for California here: https://www.courts.ca.gov/1037.htm

Oh! I didn't recognize her and didn't see her on the cast list.