DearEvette

Ooh, oof I did not enjoy this one that much. Especially coming after last week's sublime perfection of an episode. IMO the best parts were Amy & Holt's belly laugh/happy sigh in stereo and Rosa.

Oh, I immediately noticed chemistry between Sharpe and Max from the beginning. But it wasn't a will-they/won't they chemistry. The actors are such charismatic screen partners that I saw the potential there. Something that the show could keep in their back pocket and deploy later on. Also the actors weren't selling a romance and yet still there was the sense that if/when the show went there it would be a believable pairing. I agree with everyone that it was rather abrupt and unexpected though. Also agree that if the actress who played his wife worked better for him, they wouldn't have gone there in just this way. I get the impression that this was a bit of a swerve. Maybe the network realized that audience just wasn't connecting with Georgia so they decided to clumsily go there? Of course maybe next week Sharpe and Max won't ever get to talk to each other and we'll all be left hangin'

I agree with this so much. I can appreciate the show on its own merits, but I could never get over some of the changes from the books. But also the events of the show have crystallized my desire to not continue reading the books (if they ever get done) even if the events of the books don't exactly march with the show. Also, not sure if this is a UO or not, but according to my twitter feed it might be. But dammit I hate Cersei. I don't even 'love to hate' her. I just plain old hate her. I hated her since I read the first book some 20+ years ago and nothing has ever changed my mind. And wouldn't you know, I have an Entertainment Weekly subscription and out of 16 possible covers, I got the damned Cersei one?

This episode cracked me up. The DRAMA!! Oh, no, no ambulances can get to the hospital. Cut to scenes of surgeons battling through torrential snow-winds to get to people and practice medicine outside int he blinding snow. I love it! I will say I am surprised they decided to pull the trigger on Max and Sharpe so soon. Ryan and Freema have great chemistry but I wasn't prepared for them to confront it. Also Ryan Eggold did a great job of face acting when confronted with the idea that Max had to explicitly admit to himself that he had more than co-workerly feelings for Sharpe. He looked rueful, embarrassed, uncertain. I don't miss Bloom at all. Her replacement is prickly, but I like her.

There is a great thread happening on twitter all day today about this very thing. Not just about Candice, but so many black actresses and models are speaking up about the lack of stylists on set who know how to work with black and textured hair and don;t know how to properly make up darker skin. So many have chimed in. Gabrielle Union's tweets are informative, basically you have to be in the union and it is HARD (and very insular) to get the foot in. So many have told stories about doing their own hair and bringing their own make up, flat irons, product and clip ins etc. to set.

I totally agree with this. Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, Clay Aiken, Fantasia, Carrie Underwood, Daughtry, Jordin Sparks, Kellie Pickler, Kat McPhee and Adam Lambert are the only ones I can think of who've had some measurable and somewhat lasting success. And they all were on the show when Randy, Paula and Simon. I can't think of anyone after Adam Lambert who has really made it big. And wasn't his season the last of the original three? When the show premiered, most viewers had no idea who Simon and Randy were. And yeah, even though Randy used the word 'pitchy' like it owed him rent, there was a sense that they were really judging for talent and really knew what they were talking about. Even as the original three became celebs themselves that sense of the show& judging still being about the singers, never changed imo. As soon as the judges became the focus of the show, the judging calibre went down and we had to suffer through the antics of a Nikki Minaj/Mariah Carey feud, Jennifer Lopez' ginormous salary and Ellen DeGeneres' fad casting. I didn't even watch the show after season 8 and all I heard about were the celebrity judges. I can't even name a contestant after that. Also, if I am not mistaken, out of all the 'we'll catapult you to a job in this area of entertainment' reality shows out there, AI has been the most successful overall? Maybe RuPaul's Drag Race comes the closest because it has raised the profile of drag overall and has resulted in some of the performers on that show being able to command better bookings in a rather niche industry and even allowed some of them to cross over into mainstream celebrity (Shangela was in an Oscar nominated movie and got to walk the Oscars red carpet in full drag). Project Runway: I can only think of Christian Siriano as the biggest runaway success. America's Next Top model: has some successes but none have become huge names. YaYa Dacosta has a pretty successful tv acting career and some well received indie films. Eva Marcille has dome some movies and was on Young and The Restless for awhile The Apprentice: Welp, we got Omarosa.

The King Shark vs. Grodd fight was the highlight of the episode. Loved the Joe/Iris subplot. Just loved seeing Joe again and it was a nice change of pace to have them solely concentrated on each other. Not sure why the writers wrote Jenna into Joe is absent subplot. There are much easier ways to explain a baby not being seen onscreen than having her schlepped o Tibet. I just roll my eyes with the whole 'you didn't get consent' line of reasoning from Cisco and Caitlin. Y'all created and meta-humanly accelerated the production of a serum for the sole purpose of forcibly injecting it into your adversary. Even going to the trouble of finding some tech to forcibly keep him still so you can inject it in him. Only Now you struggle with the ethics of it? And just in time to piss on Barry about it? Between this and the whole 'well we can only use it once so King ShayShark will have to be a shark from now on' just scream "because of plot reasons..." And finally, Barry and Iris are still technically newlyweds having been married less than a year. And yet you'd never know it considering they barely interact with each other in any intimate way that does not involve them pep talking each other about Nora. The last time we got anything that just let them interact as a loving couple was in Episode 5.

I really liked Survivor at first. It just felt so interesting and different at the time. But I have to agree that it created a type of template that other reality competition shows and competitors emulated. Richard the first winner was a basic asshole but after he won, his duplicity and manipulation was praised and offered up as something cool and inevitable. You could tell that other shows that came after actively sought that sort of ethic. And because it seemed like it was rewarded in winning and audience admiration, backstabbing behavior became the norm and became somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy in that you couldn't seem to win without lying in some way, I feel like this was something egged on and encouraged by production as well. This is one of the reasons of all the competitive reality shows, I liked The Amazing Race the best. I thought it was the one show where you had to rely more on ability, your own strategy and just plain luck over something like and alliance or lies in order to prevail.

I'd actually go lower and say five seasons is a sweet spot. And also I came across an article today that I fully agree with. Some shows should only run for one season the author name checks several series, but Big Little Lies is the main one for me. I thought it was a perfect one season show.

Yeah, this is where I am at. These writers do not have good ideas. And the ones they do have they do not implement them effectively. The show has demonstrated that from season 2 onward, the writers can not sustain a season long big bad arc. Also have any of the characters had a meaningful growth arc? Iris is probably the character that has shown the most growth but then that was not hard because she was the most undeveloped to start out with, they had nowhere to go but up there. Also they don't know how to write humor well. They try but it is like they forget and the show gets muddied in angst again really quickly. There are individual good episodes that make you realize they can write good comic book drama. I still love the "Enter Flashtime' stand alone episode from last season. it was so well executed on every level. This makes me realize if they are wedded to the season long arc model rather than an episodic model maybe they should give up on creating a big bad cuz nobody has ever been as good as Thawne/Wells. And go with a major destructive event that is not precipitated by an eeevil bad guy but something that requires all of their talents to stop along the lines of what they did in Enter Flashtime. It could even be something they caused.

I dunno. That doesn't sound like it gives the biracial person the privilege and access if they can't handle issues without calling in the white parent. That just sounds like putting the white parent in the space of white saviour. Also if you read interviews of people like Kidada Jones or Halle Berry speaking about some of the issues they had growing up biracial it doesn't bear out either. For instance, Kidada and her sister Rashida both went to the same school as kids had the same famous parents, yet Rashida's experience was easier because she looked whiter (paler skin, silky hair) than Kidada did (dark curly hair, darker skin) and who had a really hard time. In this case the presence of a white parent had very little to do with how they were treated but the skin color and phenotype did.

I agree with this a lot. Like a lot of people for years I'd always taken the Oscars/Emmys at face value i.e. that they really did try to reward excellence. But as I've gotten older I see how mediocre so may of the winners are or in the case of Emmys seeing actors and shows that continue to get awards year after year after they've peaked and already gone downhill while some really great lesser known shows/actors never even get noticed, I and I realize it is mostly about money, influence and power and quality might be a lucky accident. I don't typically watch live, preferring to get the highlights. I did watch the Oscars this year because I was rooting hard for Regina King and Ruth Carter. And I do admit, I did love watching the major fuck up of the La La Land/Moonlight debacle unfold in real time. I hate these types of Villains. I call them the 'Energizer bunny' villain. One of the main reasons I can't bring myself to watch Killing Eve. My one exception is Doug Judy, the Pontiac Bandit on Brooklyn 99. It wouldn't feel like a season of B99 without a Doug Judy episode or a twisty Halloween episode.

Ed Mcbain. I loved his early 87th precinct novels. They were a great blend of police procedure and soap opera. They had great long running characters and character arcs and cases. But then as time went on it felt like his own personal politics started to infiltrate the books. Long screeds against PC culture began to appear. He started to use his minority characters as mouthpieces to argue against ideas that typically minority people are solidly for. And the final straw was that he made one of his most racist, bigoted, awful creatures a main character and gave him a black informant that spoke in rap. Rap! all the time. Ugh. Talk about souring a legacy. I can't even go back and remember the early books fondly anymore because of how the series devolved.

I enjoyed them the most this ep. And I just love Talia.

Billy's outfit was apparently an homage to the late legendary father of the house of Xtravaganza, Hector Xtravaganza. Between this and Shangela walking the red carpet at the Oscars in full drag as part of the cast of a major motion picture, I can't help but think of how proud the Paris is Burning ball walkers would have been.

My probably not popular opinion is that I think Oscar gets best picture wrong more often than it has gotten it right. Quite a few best picture winners don't feel like you are watching great cinema and especially not the greatest of the year. I think Green Book's win for writing was probably a worse travesty than its win for best picture. So Banal. Hell Black Panther had better writing that GB. It kinda sucks that is was the last winner of the night because it leaves a sour taste after having some really deserving wins early on: Regina, Ruth, Rami, Spike, Hannah Beachler, Cuaron, and Olivia Coleman etc. Even Mahershala deserved his win since I do think the acting was about the only thing the movie did well.

I don’t miss having a host at all. They even managed to put in some funny bits with Melissa McCarthy/Bryan Tyree Henry snd Keegan Michael Key.

It was a great speech though. Not just a litany of names. I felt bad for her co-winner the set designer guy, tho.

YES!!! Ruth Carter and Regina King were the two I wanted to win so bad. I can go to bed now. My day is done...

Seriously. Paris is Burning?!?! Speaking of.... Billy Porter's outfit is supposed to be an homage to Hector Xtravaganza who wore something very like it first.

If that is the same person to whom Candice responded with the very pithy 'I was there ashy.' (which cracked me the hell up!!) then it makes sense. The person had about 12 followers and their entire account was nothing but claiming how much Grant hated Candace. That is literally ALL they posted, the had not other twitter life or interest. So the person wasn't well adjusted in the first place.

I loved this scene. Also, how did Jake trill his "r's" on a sentence that does not contain the letter R?

In a change of pace from anonymous voters giving their picks, I like this article on designers discussing the graphic design aspects of the movie posters from among the best movie nominees -- what works and what doesn't work. From a visual standpoint I immediately agree with their two top consensus picks. I love their critical comments, the conversation sounds like it was fun.

I gave up on this series around book 8. I loved the first four -- LOVED THEM. But as the series went on, it felt like she had made up her overall myth arc on the fly to keep the series going. So the back story and the ongoing high stakes plot felt muddled and lacked focus and momentum. And I could never get really invested in the Charley/Reyes relationship.

I hope not. I hope he is just what he's been presented so far: Nolan's rich BFF who is basically decent. Of the the three storylines between each of the rookies dealing with issues extant to freebies/money, I liked West's the best. Not only did it end on a great note, but it built on the personality and backstory they gave him really nicely. I'd always thought he was the least developed of the three, but in the past few eps they've given him a lot more depth. I think they are doing a good job with showing how someone who thinks they know it all because they observed it all their lives from the outside, but they really don't because they haven't experienced it from the inside. Not only that but his continuous breakdown over the creme brulee was funny. Overall I liked this episode quite a bit. Thank goodness it is tv so the bad guys have to monologue a bit and hesitate before pulling a trigger cuz that is the only thing that saved Lucy.