Milburn Stone

Thank you! It was Yellowstone, and I think you have it right.

There was some recent show where an older brother took his younger sister to get an abortion because he was so ashamed she was pregnant, and she didn't even understand what was happening to her until she was on the table, and then she couldn't have children. I can't remember what the show was but it was good.

I feel the same way about Tom. Everything else about him is slimy and kiss-ass and always "looking for the angle," but as regards Shiv, he's honest. I felt that way in the "wake" episode. Some here thought he was attempting to play her even then, but I didn't. I thought his love and concern for her in that scene on the stairs was real.

I thought about that, but it just didn't look like CGI to me. Of course, CGI is getting better and better, and maybe it's reached the stage where it is undetectable to me. All I can say is that my gut is telling me, based on what I saw, that it was a practical effect. (Produced physically.) Or perhaps was a practical effect aided by a bit of computer enhancement.

With a show I really like--like this one--I will make up reasons to satisfactorily explain to myself the things I might otherwise question. In this case, I "satisfactorily explained" to myself the reason they didn't struggle, which is that they were too shocked to do anything. They all feel the sand is as solid as Mother Earth. Before they can realize that what's happening is really happening, they're buried. All I can say is that it made sense to me. I half want to know how they pulled off the stunt, and half don't. I assume there was just open space underneath maybe two feet of sand. (Which is obvious when I think about it, since this was done on a soundstage rather than an actual storage bin filled with millions of pounds of sand.) So the platform was elevated above the floor of the soundstage to allow space for the actors to slowly fall. Underneath the maybe-two-feet of sand upon which they stood was a motorized lower-able circular platform, which was slowly lowered to allow them and the sand to gradually collapse. That's all I can figure.

This episode made me uncomfortable, but not because I thought it was sub-par. I was just so anguished by Roman's pain, Shiv's confusion, and (what seemed to be) Ken's delusion, and where all these things were leading. Usually we have a goodly dose of humor to lighten the suspense. Not this time. But that was a choice, not a failure. On Day 3 after Logan's death (if that's where we are), the emotional chickens of a lifetime are coming home to roost.

Dana Bash may be the only full-time personality at CNN I can stand to watch. I'm happy for this promotion.

I like his radio show on POTUS Sirius XM. Didn't know he was on CNN on weeknights now. Is it a trial run?

Don't know if these have been mentioned, but our love for Shetland has sent us over the last few months into our own Doug Henshall Festival. We've watched In Plain Sight (also featuring a fantastic performance by Martin Compson), Collision, and The Silence, and all of them have been awesome (and he's been awesome in them). In all of them he's played a detective but his performances have been anything but cookie-cutter. We just finished The Silence last night and were blown away by his sensitivity. He must be drawn to detective roles, or show runners are drawn to him when they're casting a detective. Has he done dramas in which he's not a detective? Or comedies?

Could it be (partly) his new haircut? It sounds like a silly thing, but with his old hair, I could see him as a lovable (yet smarter than he let on) goof. Now his hair says naked ambition and it's harder to like him.

I agree with your main point, but the personal does enter into it with Matsson, to the extent he wanted Shiv to text him a photo of their faces on the plane. He knew they wanted to walk away from the deal (he's too good at reading people not to know that), and that now they can't. He's looking at their sullen faces as he luxuriates in a great big bubble bath of revenge.

It's because we failed to humiliate the first person to do it. Vigilance, people, vigilance!

Same. I liked Ana in Knives Out, but I think it's a mistake for SNL to have a host whose command of English is not good enough to land a joke. Her English is infinity times better than my Spanish, but that doesn't necessarily qualify her for sketch comedy.

I agree with this description. If you told me I would enjoy a movie with this much blood and gore, I would have said you were crazy, but the gore is so over the top that it becomes a source of amusement. It's like the movie issued itself a challenge to take as a benchmark the goriest movie ever made to that point, and then outdo that by a factor of 100. They clearly had fun rising to that challenge, and once I got what was really going on, I had fun seeing how they'd do it.

I see what you did there. I loved David Rasche as Sledge Hammer for however long that show was on TV until it got taken off for being too good. But then I've loved David Rasche in everything, since I first saw him at Second City and Chicago's Organic Theater in the 70s. I knew he was great then.

And yet another great Douglas Henshall show: Collision. Again, he's a detective with a propensity for sadness, only younger. 🙂 Watched the first episode last night, and was immediately hooked. So far, based on three different shows, I conclude that Henshall has excellent taste in show runners.

I wonder whether the truth is that he's just trapped by his brand. Privately he may be able to entertain some opinions contrary to the ones he espouses. Commercially, he can't.

I wasn't crazy about Piers Morgan having all of his "best lines" on paper in front of him, pre-packaged and ready to go.

A local channel in Baltimore used to run the Henry Aldrich movies. I think they were Paramount's answer to the Andy Hardy series. As a kid I didn't think about any of that, I just really liked them. Would be interesting to find someone's doctoral dissertation comparing the two series.

From what I read elsewhere, the pricing is not going up, and that indeed seems to be the case for most people. We get ad-free, and that price is not going up for those who only need two concurrent streams. (We only ever need one at a time.) The new $20 tier is for those who need four concurrent streams. (And honestly, that seems fair to me. It's analogous to Netflix's higher pricing for those with shared accounts.)

Saw the final episode of S8 last night. I just have to vent. It was everything I hate about this show. That silly, unserious pair from the mortuary...the idiot volunteer firefolks...they all went together to make a very unserious, and therefore unhumorous episode. Humor arises from reality, not spuriousness. Hoping for more of the Brokenwood I like in S9.

Shiv/Roman/Ken enjoyed the luxury of believing they could run the business smarter and make deals better than Logan. In truth, they needed Logan to win time after time not only because it kept them rich, but because it allowed them to keep telling themselves that lie. With no Logan, the lie has been pulled out from under them. They're clueless what to do, and clueless who they are.

FWIW, I've noticed a pattern in the episodes I like vs. the ones I don't like as much. The ones I like are fairly serious, leavened with touches of humor. The ones I don't like are the ones that deal in broad humor featuring "loony, eccentric" suspects and persons of interest. An example of a recent episode I really liked was the one with the real estate lady whose deceased father owned a house in a beach community, with a legacy at stake. Serious, with real stakes from the beginning. (It helped that the murder victim was a sympathetic character.) "Lunacy" was kept well under control, without sacrificing the touches of humor that give the show personality.

Maybe this has been mentioned? Douglas Henshall is great in another series, In Plain Sight (2017), based on a true story from the 1950s. He plays a detective in this one, also. Martin Compston is his quarry. Compston gives good despicable. Make that great despicable. I remember seeing Compston in the first episode of the first season of Line of Duty, and thinking, "not an actor yet, but shows promise." That sure came true.

Will be interesting see Joe all these years later. He and his wife are approaching middle-age! Their kids are teens now!