Milburn Stone

My own take--based on what I saw in Fuches' eyes, thanks to the magnificent talent of Stephen Root--is that Fuches in this moment is back in touch with the deepest emotion of his life, his love for Barry. One minute ago he might have thought of holding the kid for ransom or blackmail. But now, looking at Barry, feeling his love for Barry, he has only one choice.

For some reason I don't recall seeing Brand Spotlight as an option, but will definitely look for those words when I go back there. Thanks!

Tuned into the new Max streaming channel last night. They seem to have gotten rid of all the hubs! (Including TCM.) The TCM hub on the old HBO Max was nothing to write home about, but it occasionally turned up something worth looking at. Or are hubs still there, and I'm not looking in the right place?

"Tuned into" Max for the first time last night. They seem to have dispensed with all the hubs! (TCM, etc.) Or are they somewhere I'm not seeing?

I would have agreed as recently as a couple episodes ago, but now that we now Mattson wants a toady-puppet as CEO, who is more right for the role than Greg? (Tom is the only competition.)

In the trauma sweepstakes, I don't know how to rank any of these against thinking you gave your little sister polio and killed her.

Previously I thought Chris Licht was trying to move CNN closer to the center. But the firing of Tucker Carlson changed everything. CNN now smells "blood in the water" and sees an opportunity to bite off a chunk of the Fox audience. So, yeah.

I may be the only person in the universe who wants this, but I want The Hardy Boys with Tommy Kirk and Tim Considine. I loved that series, which was built into The Mickey Mouse Club. Disney+ is giving us Spin and Marty, the other such series. What's the deal here?

Two episodes into Magpie Murders because we're on a Lesley Manville jag. (And also because writer Anthony Horowitz can usually be counted on.) So far, liking all the stuff in the present day significantly more than the parallel stuff happening in the Atticus Pünd novel. Hoping the present day comes to predominate.

Really like Laurence Harvey in Manchurian Candidate, but...I don't know, in so many movies I've seen him in, he just seems dead inside. That was perfect for Manchurian, but not so much in general. Probably a minority opinion.

The scariest thing in the episode was to learn there are that many different fundamentalist Christian podcasts. (But of course there are.) The episode was definitely dark, but not in the way of last week's. There was humor. Gene; Fuches; Hank; the podcasts; Fuches' crew oohing and ahhing over the house; the Warner Bros. exec; the very last shot with Moss; et. al...I enjoyed this week's episode instead of feeling trapped and desperate like I did last week.

You make me realize that this was the episode in which I first began to consider her flirtation with the left to be more than an affectation. Previously, it felt to me that she'd worked for the Dems for no good reason other than that the Dems were "cooler." She flattered herself that she actually had ideals and wasn't like her brothers (even though she had more in common with them than she wanted to know). I still think that's a lot of it, but her panic over a fascist president seemed at least partly because of fascism. (Go figure.)

I agree with your first sentence. But as for Roman, I found myself liking him the most of any of the characters, even though I fear and despise Mencken. Roman's always been good for a laugh, but there was no laughing this time. Of any character, it was Roman who knew what he wanted, had clear reasons for wanting it, and never gave up making it happen. Unlike Tom, he's not a creature of what other people need. Unlike Ken, he's not paralyzed by conflicting wants. Unlike Shiv, he's not a liar with a secret agenda to thwart his siblings! He's up front. I don't share his goals (understatement) but I do admire his clarity of focus. I didn't want to root for him in this episode, but that's what I found myself doing.

[Tangent] Sometimes I look up top at the "Following" stat on the topics and forums I go to. Most often I'm shocked by how few people follow the stuff I follow. The TCM topic, though, has 67 followers! (Woo hoo!) That puts it probably in my top 3. 😊

Thank you for posting this clip, @Crashcourse. It's amazing. I've tried to watch Picnic, but for some reason cannot get past the first ten minutes of it. I didn't know it had delights like this scene in store. (Including Arthur O'Connell's delivery of the clip's final line). And thank you also, @Rinaldo, for the clips of Inge's play.

I've seen him in a number of films and shows from the fifties--including Vertigo and double-digits of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes--and why I'm so aware of that is that every single time, I exclaim, "Mr Drysdale!" In pretty much all of these he's bald.

Add me to the list of people who really dig/dug Sherwood. The first episode was a bit confusing, with a lot of characters, and two different mining unions, and trying to figure out who was retired from one and who was retired from the other, but sure enough when we watched the second episode we could not stop and had to "mini-binge" right to the third.

The strange thing about Berman/Pulcini's story is that it contradicts what I've always understood about how a season of a series is created. Show runners may not assign a writer to a particular episode when a season is being conceived, but they do map out the season before shooting on any of the episodes gets underway. Something as important as a lead character being pregnant would definitely be on a 3 X 5 card tacked to a corkboard before shooting of a season began. So we know Berman/Pulcini are quoted in print as saying they didn't know. Many possibilities. 1) They're being misquoted. 2) They said what they said but somehow the writer misinterpreted what they meant. 3) The show runners deliberately withheld the information from the directors, but the writers they assigned to the episode did know. 4) They also withheld the information from the assigned writers! 5) The show runners made up some important stuff as they went along. I consider that last possibility the least likely of the five, but it is possible I suppose.

Hmm. Is it possible she merely put on a performance of asking tough questions, then strategically failed to follow them up with evidence when he lied? This is starting to make me think that.

Kaitlin was as good as anybody could be. Congrats, CNN. You took a slowly failing network and made it fail faster.

Same reaction. While I thought the writing was at fault in most of this episode, here I thought it was the direction that let us down. I'm a fan of Berman/Pulcini--I think American Splendor is genius--but here I kept feeling "the camera is in the wrong place, the edits are off, the actors haven't been properly prepared," etc., all those thoughts that add up to "I don't know why, but the scene isn't working."

I was totally confused by the election talk. (Just me?) It seemed that it must be about the general election (not a bunch of primaries). There was even talk of electoral votes. So is Connor running as a third-party candidate? Or is Mencken? Surely they would ordinarily belong to the same party and be opposing each other in primaries, not the general. What have I missed?

I did, too, and I wonder why. The writing seemed off to me--that Tom/Shiv scene being the sole exception--like it was the work of a second-tier or novice writer trying to do an imitation of Succession.

You've put a thought into my head with this. Was this Barry's childhood? (I don't mean we're seeing a fantasy of Barry's childhood in Barry's head. I'm with @Dev F in thinking that what we're seeing in the future is real. I mean that the sins of Barry's parents, which turned Barry into Barry, are being visited now upon John.)

I find myself agreeing with those of you who loved it and those of you who didn't. The episode was awesome in its power to make me feel as trapped, hopeless, and depressed as the characters in it. It was brilliant and I hated it.