wendyg

sailingby: I don't think the writers are as disconnected from each other as all that. Typically, (from reading Ken Levine's blog on TV screenwriting) script outlines are agreed in advance, and although an individual writer *may* have the assignment to write the script (many comedies are now scripted by the entire writers' room working together - all of Chuck Lorre's are apparently written this way), the showrunner certainly reviews it and may ask for changes (the network also will have notes), and there is supposed to be a "show bible" that writers use to stay on point. Either the NASHVILLE writers are under extraordinary pressure or they just don't care (and think viewers will not remember mistakes). In Britain, yes, the process is quite different. It's much more common for one or two writers (who are partners) to write the entire show and complete all the episodes before shooting begins. That is also why every season ("series", here) is so short. If you want to have 22-24 episodes of something a year you *have* to have a bigger writing staff and have more of an assembly-line process where one script is being written while the next couple are in pre-production and the one after those is being broadcast.

I would say she acted a little too cheerful - a break with her mood when Jimmy left her not long before. This is the first episode of this show I didn't care for, but that's really because I just don't find fictional haunted houses/Halloween shenanigans particularly interesting (look what you could do if you had an entire special effects department!). I think it or something like it was necessary if they were going to show Jimmy not really understanding what clinical depression meant in terms of both Gretchen herself and their relationship. Lying to him is stupid and destructive and going to cause them all sorts of problems; from what little she's said, though, it sounds like she's had previous experience with the sort of failure of understanding Jimmy showed here and doesn't believe she can ever really get through to him what it means.

Is there anything more one needs to know re Makuna Hatata than that it's a song in THE LION KING (about which I know nothing)?

The tennis writer Peter Bodo once commented with respect to the women's tennis association's then-new age eligibility rules that "No one ever went to Wimbledon and had a bad time. Not even Jennifer Capriati." Capriati began playing top-tier tennis when was about to turn 14 and burned out by the time she was 18, later to come back to achieve some of the success originally predicted for her. Which is all leading up to my thinking that doing one song with a top star on one occasion in a full stadium is not that big a deal - as long as you are smart enough to expertly handle (and generally turn down) the offers and buzz that follow. Janis Ian had a huge hit at Lennon Stella's sort of age with "Nobody's Child". Pam Shriver played the final of the US Open. truebluesmoky: I can't imagine that Pannettiere, as one of the two top leads of the show, wasn't consulted about her storyline or couldn't have gone to the showrunners to ask them to tone it down if it cut too close to the bone. She may find it therapeutic as a way of working through her own troubles, we don't know. I would assume she's consented.

I read somewhere an interview with Christine Baranski, who recounted that early in her career someone advised her to fix the gap between her front teeth. She took the advice. Would the wondrous actress we know her to be ever have had a chance if she hadn't? We'll never know. But neither will she - and not having a spare lifetime to experiment with, she didn't take the risk. Tjhe one that really saddens me is Carol Burnett, who had a fabulous career, and yet throughout it had enormous amounts of work done - which she admits. Even her chin was reshaped at one point.

Couple of points: - Maybe Grace couldn't have called Stanford, but she *could* have used one of the online services that will verify credentials for you for a modest fee. Employers (and others) do this sort of thing all the time. That said, I don't like this abrupt transformation of Grace. I never thought she was as dumb as others did, but I think we could be shown her getting up to speed rather than arriving fully formed. I also think it's useless to say someone called and said you were due in court in an hour without mentioning what *time* they called. And, you know: doesn't Luca have Alicia's cell phone number? A timed-stamped text message would be a more reliable communication. - It would have been so much more fun - but probably was time the writers didn't want to take - if Eli had realized Ruth was probably pulling the meeting time ploy and checked with someone and had her know he'd do that and pull a last-minute reschedule. Seeing smart people second-guess each other is always fun. - I didn't get the sense the intern was entitled, just, like Caitlin, making different choices than older feminists did. And I rather like the Kings pointing that out, because the varying expectations are a real issue that comes up in real life. - I'd have expected anyone political operative mentioning Hillary and the chocolate chip cookies to immediately scrub whatever event they were comparing it to because that was a total and complete disaster. - Eli's small office took me all the way back to the Marx Brothers and the very famous stateroom scene from A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. Which of course was an elaboration of umpteen clown cars. But the stateroom scene begins just that way with a giant trunk that impedes opening the door. Anything more recent surely derives from that. If you haven't seen it, hie thee to YouTube (and then watch the whole movie!).

wilco: In folk music, arguably; probably also in traditional jazz - both music genres that are not of great interest to the music business and where many performers put out their own records. Folk Legacy, for example, one of the most respected labels in folk music, was founded by a husband-and-wife performing duo, Sandy and Caroline Paton, not really specifically to put out their *own* music, but that of traditional musicians whose songs they'd collected and that they admired. The label has put out albums of dozens, even hundreds, of folk artists over the last 50 years including the Patons themselves.

Found via Slashdot: a collection of complaints about BBT filed with the FCC: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/05/big-bang-theory-fcc-complaints/

Early seasons Sheldon - the guy who saved his friends' lives when they blew up the elevator - would have known the effect of that amount of thermite. The fact that he didn't step in and protest because the showrunners liked the gag of the van on fire is everything that's gone wrong with this show for me. (Or that they got the factual effect of that amount of thermite wrong - either way...)

I wouldn't argue for being fussy about spoilers in all contexts, but given that the Emmys are there to *market* shows and get people to watch them, maybe *that*'s the place you don't post the ending of long-running series the same year that ending airs. It would not be particularly hard to choose a different clip. So why not do it?

I don't understand the criticisms of Frances McDiormand's appearance. She is the one actor who showed up completely honest about her real self: she's not dyed, primped, made up, or starved. Good for her. It's a very 1970s feminist kind of thing to do. wg

Not to hijack this very interesting discussion, but the mention of different types of poor reminds me of Alfred Doolittle in PYGMALION (or MY FAIR LADY) explaining to Henry Higgins that he's one of the *undeserving* poor. If you're not familiar with it, the text of this monologue is here: http://www.monologuearchive.com/s/shaw_006.html.

I said "maybe" - she does talk about how much she loves her kids, albeit with the clear indication that it's not enough to counter the depression she feels having lost her seat. You're right that many people do seem to think that; I don't happen to be one of them, but I'll note that I have seen both women *and* men react to the life change that is becoming parents by changing how they view their lives and the decisions they make. Vinnie clearly was older, had better perspective, and was more emotionally stable - the difference between being circumstantially depressed and being clinically depressed, might be a way to put it. And put that way, no, no amount of children would have helped Nick!

I think the other thing about Billie is that it's all so precarious: a middle-class white kid can afford to be a spoiled brat and act entitled because their parents provide a safety net - they may fret, complain, push, even bully, but in the end unless there are drugs involved they won't let that kid starve - and they'll teach her about birth control. For Billie, the self-indulgence that a white kid has the resources to outgrow is disastrous, as is her preference to believe that the guy who's gotten her pregnant will stick to his word when he says he'll take care of her and the kid(s).

Well, it's like Vinnie said: the political life is addictive. Doubtless for some, more than others. She was able to pull herself back together. But she had some assets Nick didn't: she was older and maybe stabilized by the fact of having kids. One problem with achieving a big success very young is you think it's the natural order of things. It can be very hard to come to grips with the possibility that you got lucky and were just in the right place at the right time. Nick thought *he* beat Belushi's character; in reality, anyone would have won in his place. That's a hard lesson.

The words "flying her out for every episode" were what led to my comment.

It's odd if an actress offered a regular part in a highly acclaimed drama series wouldn't move to the city where production is for the duration. But it seems to me part of a (sad) trend on the show: one thing I loved about it in its first few years was all the great women, many of whom were allowed to have full lives. Now, it seems like the percentage of male characters is going way up.

It depends on the writers - some writers give actors more latitude than others - but AIUI it's pretty common for shows to insist that all lines be delivered exactly as written.

How many new characters is that? Five? (Hm...replacing Kalinda, Jon the campaign guy, Finn, Grace (mostly)...I guess it's close to parity.) Is Alicia going to spend any time at all this year with the remaining original cast members?

If Kyle Chandler says a line and then instantly repeats it, it's because the writers have dictated that he do that. They may think it's effective when he speaks that way, but it's still the writers' choice, not the actor's.

I loved pretty much all of season 1 and season 2, so it's hard for me to identify with these complaints. :) I always really enjoyed Becca and her thorniness in Eli's side, and I've never really understood the extreme dislike of Elizabeth Reaser's Tammy - the placeholder for the lead's true love is always a pretty thankless role.

It reminds me a whole lot more of DAMAGES with the crossing timelines and foreboding. And I see it's from the same writers.

I think the show simply hasn't figured out how to deal with the forced change: the heart of S1 was this little start-up being caught between two billionaires (who were fantastic in their one scene together). The big pity of it is that the woman running Raviga is really funny, and putting her in the resentful position of having to obey, say, Peter Gregory's will (which could say anything he might have wanted about his investments), seems to me like it would have had legs. As for the IP issue, patents have not been mentioned, so this ought to be a question of employment law: if Hooli's employee contracts specify that *anything* done on company computers belongs to them, ISTM that Richard really might be on shaky ground. However, I find it unlikely that someone like Richard would make a mistake like that and I also wonder how he managed to ensure the company didn't keep backups. Because they would certainly have investigated everything on his company computer and its use when he left and refused to sell them Pied Piper in case there was something useful.

Even dumber than that: there are no hosting companies in the *REST OF THE WORLD*? Cloud companies in Russia, China, and *LONDON* are all going to turn them down? They could quite rationally have had a conversation about what they wanted their burn rate to be, how long they wanted the money to last, and how much they wanted to stockpile as protection against Russ's next expensive imposition.

The other problem with pursuing a patent is that it takes so long, and must be done separately in each country (the EU has a Europe-wide patent system now). Software patents are actually very controversial in the industry (because they block progress; it's very hard to describe software clearly so people can know where they might and might not conflict with them), and there have been a number of highly contentious cases where overbroad patents awarded have been eventually overturned (see for example Comptons multimedia). Filing is also expensive and processing applications is quite slow. To me it's not at all unrealistic that neither Houli nor PP has gone this route, and even if they did it wouldn't provide them with immediate protection. Houli can get faster results by throwing in-house lawyers and buyout offers at PP. PP is trying to decide whether it can pay its engineers. I wonder if Mike Judge would have proceeded with the setting up and politics stuff as suggested upthread if Christopher Evan Welch hadn't died. But since he *did*, it makes sense to go through a different round of seeking funding (I guess the alternative was to send Peter Gregory to an island somewhere for a year... and let Monica be the only go-between). At least this way has given them a way to bring another woman into the show, which I at least appreciate. (Plus she's so deliciously dysfunctional in her own way.)