wendyg

I am in transit through LA and had a free evening yesterday and thought it might be interesting to take in a TV taping. This show was the one that fit geoographically, so even though I found the episode I had seen utterly devoid of laughs, I went. It turned out that the audience was much more interesting to observe than the episode being taped. I will say this for Ken Jeong: he goes to considerable effort to engage the fans, including coming up to take audience questions before the show (last night's Q&A included Dave Foley, whose work I loved in NEWSRADIO) Some notes: - I can't imagine they need to goose the laugh track. The audience was hyped-up, raucous, energetic and appreciative, whipped up by the warm-up guy, who told no jokes but got the audience members competing to win free gift cards to Starbucks and In 'n' Out, four signed show sccripts, and a lab coat worn in a previous episode. The audience laughed at every joke, screamed at various points, and were all over it. In fact, for a closing scene, the producers asked the crowd to quiet down so they could get a clean exit. - The audience was young and, to my eye, diverse. Many were college students who attended in groups; plus there were some cast family and friends. - The group in line near me had been before - as recently as last week, and had come back because they had such a great time. They had attended tapings of other shows, but this was their favorite because Jeong spends a lot of time with the fans. Besides the Q&A, the cast pose for pictures with audience members after the show and the production team will email them (because audience is not permitted to bring mobile phones). About half-way through, the staff handed out candy and pizza, which got the audience even more hyped up, as did the handed-out prizes, which were sprinkled throughout the taping to keep excitement levels high. (Except for me, of course - Starbucks and In 'n' OUt gift cards aren't of much interest to me, nor are local movie tickets, etc.) Sadly, I found the show no fuunnier iin person. Jeung's performance seemed to me very much mugging rather than acting, and every joke was, to me, old and tired. But I think I've found Jeong's secret: he genuinely loves his fans, he has built up a big fan base, and maybe - without wishing to sound ageist - the 18-22yos who make up the preponderance of the studio audience just haven't heard these jokes as often before as some of us who are a few decades older. This show's taping is highly efficient - starts at six, out by 8:30. That probably also helps keep the audience revved up, since they don't have time to get tired. For this episode, about half of the episode's scenes had been taped the day before, so those were just shown once to capture audience reaction. The rest were basically caught in two takes, except for one scene that had an issue with a swinging door. This may have something to do with Jeong's background as a live performer - you are used to feeding off the audience, and he's probably conscious of wanting to keep the audience, as well as the cast, fresh. I'd be curious to know if they do extra rehearsal in order to facilitate this.

I would gladly pay for DVDs if they're release them.

I don't see Sarah as "the worst": I see her as someone who had a huge shock in her life, made a rash decision, and has suddenly realized it was a mistake. Lacking in self-knowledge, sure, but she didn't deliberately set out to hurt people. What really intrigued me was the choice of colors: usually, you think of the past as black and white and the present as colorful. In this, Soloway reversed it: everyone at the wedding is in all white (which is amazing in itself, because even at the most organized wedding *someone* shows up dressed out of sync), and other than the greenery around them, the wedding venue itself is largely grey/black. By the end they all look like ghosts flitting through an empty landscape. It's interesting - something about not being able to escape the past and continuity with it - plus the fact that the modern-day Pfeffermans are still at the beginning of something. If 1933 is any guide, an enormous and potentially catastrophic upheaval.

I think it's notable that here Jimmy has proved why he's different from his father - go back to what his father said about being married to a wife who got into a rough patch and stayed in it. The father sounds like he spent all those years as an unresponsive, resentful lump who after years of "putting up with" her got left. Jimmy has broken through taking it personally to something different.

Maybe offer this slightly more helpful URL instead? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=demisexual

arc: maybe. But it hasn't gone off.

arc: biological probabilities aside, this is American TV. I had been wondering why we hadn't seen Lindsay discovering she was pregnant yet. It's a handy way of keeping Paul around a while longer. And it's far enough back that she may no longer be able to get an "abobo", thereby neatly sidestepping the problem that her character *would* get one but apparently no main character is ever allowed to. Still in play: - Jimmy's love letter to Becca (that was awkwardly glossed over when she showed up to talk to Gretchen) - the gun

racked: one way it works is that your search engine company - aka ChumHum - collects user data - searches, scanned email, social graph, map searches, browsing history on mobile phones, tastes in music, what videos you watch on their site, etc. Advertisers pay for targeting. So advertiser says something like, "I have a chain of soul food restaurants. I want my ads shown to black people aged 30-49 who are in >xx< income bracket and live within >xx< miles of >>list of cities where chain has restaurants<<. Or whatever. And then the ad agency - aka ChumHum - springs into action to churn the gigantic piles of what's known about users from their many uses of the many aspects of the service and makes guesses about who fits that profile. They get paid per click, so the incentives are for them to get it right. This is the system Harry Crane was pushing for on MAD MEN. Don Draper was the opposite: find the emotional sweet spot and hit that. If Draper had won, we'd have much less privacy-invasive advertising practices.

WatchrTina: my thought was that the Yankee Doodle ring tone was specifically for the brother, the soldier. ElectricBoogaloo: I read once that Steffi Graf was such a klutz off-court that they used to rearrange the furniture and microphones so she wouldn't trip over them on her way into the press room. That said, I assumed the trip-and-spill was deliberate.

I had to laugh at that last shot of Margulies: she looked just like Morticia.

One of the best things about THE GOOD WIFE has usually been the way it highlights the conflicts raised by new technology. Apart from anything else (like entertainment), it raises these issues in front of a prime-time audience who might not otherwise realize some of the consequences. I was *delighted* to see them raise the issue of "digital redlining", and doing it via maps was a very clever way of making it visible for TV.

Agree with Bubbles, there. StrictTime: >>From the beginning, they were just out for a good time and loose companionship, and now Jimmy has neither of those things.>> I think that's not quite true. That's what they protected themselves by *saying* they were there for. I think it was clear by the end of season 1 that the relationship was a lot more than that to both of them. Remember, Jimmy's father told him not to waste his life on someone so miserable, and his response, "I really like Gretchen, so...", implying that leaving her for that reason wasn't an option.

How collected was she, though? I thought what she said was pretty incoherent, and it wasn't at all clear that it saved their public situation.

Lucindabelle: it's much more likely that they asked for bright colors because that's what looks best/most interesting on TV. Nothing to do with NY prejudice (and in any case, the writers are all in LA). Re the self-driving car case (I'm trying to meme "autocar" for that): the show actually picked what is quite a big issue and that to date does not have a solution (which may be why they glossed it over at the end). A number of states have now passed laws allowing these vehicles to operate on public roads - not sure how many, but I know they include California, Nevada, and I think Florida. A friend who attended the California hearings said that it was quite clear to him that no one wants to accept liability. Software manufacturers traditionally have none for any of their products, as you can see quite clearly if you read the license. (There is some interest among security people in changing this situation) and they made that argument. Car manufacturers took the view that they didn't design their automobiles to be driven by software but by humans; the amount of modification done to this vehicles in their view relieved them of liability. It's actually a very interesting legal conflict and will apply to many other types of robots as they are deployed. Car hacking has also been much in the technology news, and that, too, is a big issue: people think they buy cars, but they're really buying a cluster of up to 50 computers on wheels. So while the show didn't provide a solution, I think it did a nice job of highlighting the issues.

"That's your best garbage bag."

ISTR Michael J. Fox saying in an interview some time ago that he times his medications appropriately - that's probably also part of what the staffer saw.

I suspect the idea was to invert Alicia's situation with Will - now she's the boss attracted to her employee.

Oh, and: "I put a ball in front of you, you sat on the ball and read a book." That, to me, is a wonderful line summing up a lifetime of disappointment and alienation, on both sides.

I actually loved this episode. I live in Britain, and while the family were of course way over the top (as they say here) that was actually fun because so many Americans do think, as Lindsay said, "I thought English people were fancy." What she says next may be a favorite quote in the whole series, "But these are like...*Alabama* English people." Gretchen's family were over the top in the other direction, and I do wonder if the show is deliberately trying to see both families somewhat from Gretchen's and Jimmy's points of view - the people they grew up with are basically aliens to them, and they have no more understanding of them than they would of cartoon characters. And I also wonder if the father plays up to the women in his life - there are some people who are essentially chameleons, adopting the behavior of those around them, perhaps out of fear of not being fully accepted otherwise. I loved the Tesco sister and her shattered pride in "the *good* Tesco - on the north side". Lily is who Jimmy would have been if he hadn't left - just run right over as though she has no existence as a person. The bully sister is harder for me to understand. Planted for the future: the love letter to Becca, the gun, the bullets, the barista, Lindsay and the rapper, and the incomplete divorce. wg

That interview sounds like the montage of Dustin Hoffman's character's acting auditions at the beginning of TOOTSIE ("Is my acting interfering with your talking?") I would like to see a necklace competition between Christine Baranski's Diane Lockhart and Candace Bergen's Shirley Schmidt on BOSTON LEGAL.

...not to mention that Chuck Lorre has made so much money for CBS and Fox that they'd probably let him air laundry lists if it would keep him working for them. MOM's ratings have been slowly but steadily rising.

I think the current showrunner, Steve Molaro, is trying to make the show into FRIENDS.

It may not be entirely reasonable to expect mature, reasoned behavior from the leads of a show called YOU'RE THE WORST.

arc: I agree. He expressed a (perfectly natural, IMO) desire sometimes to escape and the sense that his life was not only not what he really expected but that he didn't fully recognize it as *his*. He asked her to text him sometime when she *and* Jimmy were going out for drinks; he didn't try to get her to meet him on their own. So he was expressing exaxtly what Gretchen is feeling about her life - and so poppeth the bubble of fantasy. And all set up from the opening scene, when Lexi and husband walk past Jimmy's house and see the huge bins filled with empty bottles and sigh nostalgically: "I hate them". What makes this couple so strong, though, was that they share all their doubts and unhappiness with each other. It was very cleverly done. For a second I thought I was watching the wrong show - like the opening moments of the Superstar episode of Buffy. Totally agree re spoiler: thought it was obvious. I had trouble placing Tara Summers: last saw her with her own English accent (and blonde hair) on BOSTON LEGAL.

I don't really have a problem with someone driving six hours and tracking down a suspect in the same day, but I had trouble getting past the improbability of the recorded phone call at the opening. You record a call because you are collecting evidence; if you're collecting evidence and recording the call you don't scream like that. If you scream like that, you're too freaked out to hit the record button.