wendyg

Buffy on MAD MEN: Buffy: Joan Holloway Harris. Self-righteous, dictatorial, likes to be in charge, but also feels burdened by circumstances no one else can understand. Willow: Peggy Olson. Smart, obsessed, insecure, and always in the shadow of her attention-grabbing cohort. Xander: Ken Cosgrove. Guys who make things work - and lose an eye for the cause. Giles: Don Draper. Mentor, part-parent, improvisational genius. Angel: Don Draper. It's as if he were two people. Cordelia: Roger Sterling. Always ready with the truthy quip. Dawn: Megan Calvet Draper. Because of course. Oz: Bert Cooper. Witty, sophisticated, possessors of The Knowledge. Spike: Pete Campbell. We may disagree how evil Pete ever was, but he winds up with new empathy - and it looks far better on him than it ever did on Spike. Jonathan: Harry Crane. Starts a nebbish, ends a creep. Joyce: Betty Draper. Mothers with sad ends. Riley: Abe. The heroine's 2nd boyfriend that no one liked. Wesley: Stan. The buffoon who grows into a mensch, although Wesley mostly did it on another show. Anya: Bobby Draper. Seemed like a different person every week. The girl with the baseball bat: Sally. For they shall inherit the earth.

Greg wasn't going to come home: "home" was where he was a failure. He'd have re-upped in the army again. Or found some other way to avoid confronting the reality of his own and others' disappointment in him. Why would you want Joan to stay with her rapist?

My mother, who I saw cry twice in my life and who taught all her kids never to cry in public - was crying when she opened the door for me that day when I got home from school. Not sobbing horribly, but she was definitely crying and very upset and shocked. I was nine.

candall: In fact, the most likely is that this show has the greatest share of Lorre's attention of the four he has/d on the air this year. It's the newest, and addiction material is where he lives himself (both because he's a sober alcoholic and because he's had to deal with the abuse problems of people like Brett Butler and Charlie Sheen). GRACE UNDER FIRE also showed he was pretty smart writing about single moms struggling to survive. Go back to the first couple of years of 2 1/2 MEN, and you'll find a sharply written show with a lot of heart and realism. Somewhere around year 3-4, shows get old, their creators get tired, and the incoming writers start writing an imitation of the original show, not the show it actually was. Grtgzu: I believe Christy is now the manager, replacing her old boss.

Aiming for Yoko: not clear if the writers would know this, but there's an old folk ballad, "Reynardine" in which Reynardine, a fox in human form, leads a woman to his castle, in which is the line: "His teeth did brightly shine." That line persists in all the (many) versions I've heard of it; it's how she keeps track of him in the dark. Here are the lyrics as recorded by Fairport Convention (which is well known enough that the writers might indeed know it, although there are also known Kentucky versions and many English ballads have variants from the Appalachians): http://www.metrolyrics.com/reynardine-lyrics-fairport-convention.html. ETA: not just leads her (and previous victims), but through the mountains in the dark.

The show's musical quality is basically leaving Britton behind, and if you notice she's singing less and less. At 13, Lennon Stella had far better timing, communication, stage presence, and vocal style than Britton ever will have, and both Stellas are only getting better. Way it goes. btw, re the Stella sisters, a prediction: they really do, IMO, have a future as professional singers provided that nothing untoward happens. Yes, you can fix pitch, but you can't autotune the way they harmonize (which was audible on their very first YouTube video, where they *weren't* autotuned) or any other qualities. The song they performed on this special also, IMO, showed that Maisie will have the more powerful voice of the two. We don't usually hear it because even at eight she knew how to modulate her voice to blend with her sister's, but in the solo line she sang toward the end of their song you can hear how much her voice is growing in force. Lennon, by contrast, sings (inevitably) with far more confidence than she did three years ago, but her voice is still rather breathy and delicate. Time and maturity will tel, of course. But that would be my guess.

gwhh: in the pilot episode, yes.

Honestly, I think the ketchup packets were because the current showrunner watched FRIENDS in his teenaged years and was thinking of the sugar/sweetener packets Ross's and Monica's Nana saved in those shoeboxes at the top of her closet. As for Scientific American, that story made me almost as nuts as watching two physicists and an engineer hang out in front of a freezer they're worried is defrosting WITH THE DOOR OPEN for what seemed like months. Any story in the printed magazine would likely have been on the Web site first and corrected then. In fact, I wrote a story for them last year in which exactly the same situation happened: I cited the lead researcher, whom I spoke to; he emailed shortly after publication to say that a good bit of the analysis and other ideas came from a colleague and could we add his name to the story? We added the colleague's name and also a full citation of the paper, which had both names on it. Granted, most people won't know that...

There's been a lot of speculation about which male Alicia might go on to have an affair with, and it occurred to me with this episode that the one she actually has the most chemistry with is Prady, and he would, to me, be the most interesting choice: a competing candidate who *knows* how profoundly Alicia is misrepresenting her moral standards.

I don't think Sean and Beverly know Matt is dead set against auditioning. When it came up before, it was because he refused to audition for Andrew Leslie, and then the Leslie crowd blinked and booked him anyway. I don't think he ever discussed with Sean and Beverly how he got that part.

Beverly isn't wrong that often. And Matt did a certain amount to obfuscate the issue because he saw he had a chance at sex with her. He only told her clearly afterwards that Sean hadn't done it. (She did, however, rush to judgment and storm out of the house rather than stop and listen.) I'd be friends with Beverly in a heartbeat. She's direct and says honestly what she thinks and what she thinks is generally consistent and on a straight path, unlike almost everyone else on the show except Sean. If few people like her, that's because she, more than Sean, can't really adapt to the surroundings where everyone is full of pretense. She's the sort of low-bulls**t person that not everyone will like but who will be deeply valued by the people who do like her. She and Carol have an interesting friendship where they critique each other - Carol to get Beverly to soften the way she conveys her judgments, Beverly to get Carol to be less self-absorbed.

Lordonia: that particular line from Counterfactuals (which is otherwise brilliant) drives me *nuts*. Danish pastry did not originate in Denmark. There, it's called "Wienerbrod", literally "Vienna bread". It was a *Viennese* pastry that was imported when out-of-work bakers there came north looking for work. Sheldon would absolutely know something like that, so every time I've seen that bit I wince because it's so obviously the *writers'* ignorance showing through.

The script requires actors that can play two roles, so what's needed is presumably character actors who can obviously make clear immediately the differences between the two. We have seen actors with successful track records fail at this - Sarah Michelle Gellar in Ringer, for one example. If all you'd seen Morning do is PUCKS, and all you'd seen fMatt (fictional Matt) do is PUCKS and FRIENDS, you might well think they were wrong for something that required such delicate nuances. I thought it was an easy miscommunication error: Sean wanted Matt to read it as a friend; Matt doesn't read unless it's for work. *We* have an advantage Sean and Beverly do not: we have seen Matt LeBlanc play fMatt *and* Joey, and they are quite different.

None of these plots make any sense *and* there wasn't enough music (which is the thing I started watching the show for). Leaving aside the whole paternity angle, in what US state is it remotely legal to sign a 15-year-old girl to a contract without her consent? Granted, the assumption is that Maddie is so eager to get started on a music career that she'd jump at the chance. But she's not a *slave*: surely her father's signing her to a contract she doesn't know about couldn't possibly stand up in any court. And while she wants a career in music it's just possible she wouldn't want to have it with *Edgehill* under these circumstances. This show is too ridiculous to watch any more. Maybe just buy the CDs when they release the music...and, on another topic, i really miss Nashville-the-place. One of the great things in the first couple of years was the way the show used local venues and bands and was forging a relationship with the real city. I notice that The Tennessean has even stopped blogging the show.

It would definitely be interesting to see Carol struggle to navigate how to work for a boss she's not sleeping with. But I keep expecting Helen to be fired: she's competent, smart, and doesn't make enemies. She can't possibly last.

I loved the exchange of expletives at the end: a perfect expression of the love-hate-frustration relationship they clearly have.

Many of my friends keep small libraries near the toilet; seemed not remotely odd to me to take something in to read over and think about. To the person who complained that you don't "swing by" Iowa on your way to Minneapolis: having driven a great deal in the midwestern US myself, sometimes you do. If you're going from Michigan to Minneapolis and want to see your daughter on the way, it's plausible, though granted, it's not the most efficient route (I'd go via Chicago and across Wisconsin, myself). My impression, like others, was that he wanted to tell her something and bailed. I'm going to think that it's not that he wanted to come out as transgendered. Divorce from her mother seemed the most likely to me. Or possibly that her mother split with all the family money and neither he nor Hannah has anything to live on now. I think the fact that the geographical detour didn't register with self-absorbed Manhattanite Hannah is another indicator that he had something he wanted to say: you *would* make that trip to impart important, distressing news that you wanted to deliver face to face. And we don't know how long he had before his conference (assuming there was one and not just some woman he was moving in with) began. Or, of course, it's just a stupid error by writers who can't look at a map. I'd like to think it's not that. ETA: The whole thing about having to do what's right for you without worrying about the effect on other people is totally what someone who's abruptly left his wife (or thinking of it) would say.

Schwimmer has been to the UK plenty since FRIENDS ended: he's done a West End show. My impression is that he's doing a lot of theater generally - which are his origins. He's actually a very good actor, as you'll see if you catch him in IT'S THE RAGE or some of the other things.

Obviously: my recollection is that on the DVD commentary Whedon explains that they wanted to give Buffy someone vulnerable to protect - that Willow, who served that role in the first couple of seasons, had grown too powerful. Seen that way, it makes sense that she stays so young. Interesting that when they did a similar memory warp/rework history thing on Angel the consequences were much greater - maybe because on Angel the spell got broken and the characters realized, but on Buffy it never did, so although the characters knew it had happened intellectually they never felt the loss/shift emotionally. wg