Milburn Stone

Agree. I really liked the way Lester met his demise, because it was so in-character. Lester (despite New Cocky Lester being a facade that worked for him for a while) was a character who lived in fear. To die because he was running away in fear was a perfect ending for him.

One non-Hepburn I like him in is Bad Day at Black Rock. He gives good badass.

I loved Martha Hyer's speaking voice. I have no idea what that kind of voice is called. Linguistics experts probably have a term for it. I've heard the sound elsewhere but not very often. It's not a dialect, it's something to do with the voice production itself. Maybe some very slight nasality in the sound? I think it was her most distinguishing feature. (I mean, certainly she was a capable actress, and easy on the eyes, but that voice was what made her stand out, IMO.)

Makes me wonder…Won't it be incriminating when it's learned that Lester printed out a single ticket before he had any idea his wife would be killed? Edited to add: Oh, but I guess he figures that if he can get to Acapulco he'll be well outside the reach of the law?

Glad to find a fellow-fan. (And I'm looking forward to catching up in my Maron viewing.) I love Louie, but it bears observing that somehow Maron is able to put together a self-exploratory comedy that digs deep while staying entirely within the realm of realism, rather than surrealism, fantasy, flashbacks, etc.

As an old person, I take great comfort in how Keith Carradine seems exactly the same to me now as he did then!

I hope someone is watching this show besides me. It will probably never be anyone's favorite must-see show, but it always rewards viewing. I really like following Maron's struggles, which I have a feeling are not so different from the struggles of people who don't have their own TV shows. There seem to be many shows now that explore the psyches of their comedian-stars (Louie, Inside Amy Schumer, etc.), but none other than Maron that I can think of that do it strictly within the traditional "half hour sitcom" format and do it so well.

I had two associations. One was an exorcism priest confronting Satan. The other was John Gavin "pleasantly conversing" with Anthony Perkins across the motel desk in Psycho.

To me, it's not bait and switch, because the show long ago transcended any genre. I don't tune in anymore looking for laughs, although I often get them. I tune in looking for the work of a brilliant man who has turned into a brilliant filmmaker, who miraculously has been given a forum by a major media outlet to use as he pleases. And I'm never disappointed.

Maybe the contract is with Broadway Video, rather than NBC? In which case nothing needs to be voided?

It might be a fine distinction, but I don't think Louis is making a statement about racism; I think he's casting in a colorblind way because he feels the right moral choice is to treat color as irrelevant. Why that's not a statement is that he's not presuming to tell anyone else what to do. But he has decided to "be the change he wants to see," as the saying goes.

The first time I was ever on a plane in my life was at age 19, a student charter from Philadelphia to London with my roommates, in 1969. The inflight movie? Change of Habit. It just contributed to the giddy surrealism of the whole experience.

Beautifully said. I agree with all of the above.

And of course, even that fist pump is subject to differing interpretations. I'll tell you how I did not interpret it. I did not interpret it as: "Hooray, I forced a woman who didn't want to kiss me to kiss me!" I interpreted it as: "Hooray, Pamela conceded that she does feel something for me!"

Not that it's necessary for me to say this, but I want to: I value the perspective of those whose life experiences made them see things in the scene that are different from the things my life experiences made me see.

About the colorblindness in casting, here's what I take Louis to be saying: "Look, I get it that some of my casting choices might confuse some people at first. But the world would be a better place if we didn't even notice color. And so, dammit, I'm gonna act like the world already is that better place! Because there's no better way to bring the better world we envision than by making choices as if that better world were already here."

I guess this scene really is like a Rorschach Test--different people will see different things in it, depending on their own life experiences, understanding of the way the world works, ideas of human nature, etc. That kind of complexity and nuance is part of what makes this show so great, IMO. In a way, the scene fit a certain trope that romantic films have been exploring for decades (and romantic fiction and drama, comedic and otherwise, for centuries before that). One which requires agreement from the audience if it is going to work--and therefore may not work anymore, as the audience becomes more splintered in its response. Basically it could be expressed as: IF two people would be best off if they could both just realize how much they need one another, and IF it takes an act of audacity on the part of one of those people to make both people recognize the truth of this, THEN it would be a great shame if that act of audacity never happened.

To me those two things are inseparable, because the reason Louie keeps pushing is that he knows the deepest part of her wants some sort of intimacy with him. Now, yes, that's what probably half of all garden variety rapists think. What makes Louie different from any garden variety rapist is that Louie happens to be right. She does want intimacy with him, no matter how she denies that part of herself. Without this sureness of knowledge, a sureness that comes from his truly knowing her, Louie's actions would be indefensible. But with that sureness of knowledge--a sureness that, it bears repeating, is correct--his actions take on a somewhat different complexion. I think we all probably agree on one thing, which is that Louie would not rape her. Even as overcome as he was by his own need for connection, he wasn't so far gone as to take things beyond Pamela's limit. Any Louie that would go beyond this point is a Louie none of us would want to know, let alone spend four seasons with. The fact that he is happy with a kiss--happy, completely fulfilled, to establish the most basic mutual bond with Pamela--is consistent with the Louie we know. If Pamela had felt violated by this kiss, not only would we condemn him, he would probably condemn himself. But she didn't.

I can tell that I saw a different scene than those who have commented so far, but I'll share what I saw. I saw a Pamela who was fighting her own demons, more than she was fighting Louie. She has intimacy issues; when, ultimately, she consented to whatever strained level of affection she did, that was with her consent, not under duress. She didn't yield (in her limited way) to save herself from worse, she yielded because that part of her needed to, even while another part couldn't handle it. All respect to those who saw nothing more than the simple black-and-white of a man not hearing that "no means no," but I saw something a little more complicated than that.

John Oliver.

Don't forget, everybody in Brooklyn is dead.

This Bridget person is fast-forward material. I guess Amy and her writers were kind of light this week.

Yeah, and part of being blandly British is that the writers are writing him exactly like an American would write someone British. The writers' ears are sensitive enough to have picked up some roughly contemporary Oxbridge locutions and they're just running with them, instead of creating a character.

One thing to appreciate about Kenan is his versatility. He can be funny if the sketch relies upon his race for its humor, and he can be funny if it doesn't at all. I love Jay Pharoah--he has made me crack up at various times--but I'm hard-pressed to think of one character he's played that didn't somehow depend on his being black in order for the character to make sense. He is versatile in that he can play a range of black characters, but Kenan is versatile in that he can play a range of characters, period.

The greatness of the net neutrality segment blew me away. I oughtn't even to call it a "segment"-- it rose to the level of a short one-act play. A one-act play that deserves a Pulitzer Prize. I always liked Oliver on TDS (who didn't?), but I never expected him to achieve what he's achieving with this show.