DearEvette

I know right. I am doing a re-watch of S1-S4. S1 it was mostly Harrison Wells always looking at it leading the audience to the conclusion that Barry's disappearance in 2024 had something to do with The Reverse Flash. With Thawne travelling back in time to take over Wells to change the normal timeline of Barry getting his speed (he got the particle accelerator up earlier than the real Wells did in the original timeline) almost you'd think something about the article would change. But obvs the headline never changes even with all the Thawne and Flashpoint stuff. It was visited a lot in S3 (i can't believe how even more painful S3 is on re-watch... gah!) but they don't pay any attention to the article or the fact that Barry disappears. They are hyper focused on Iris' disappeared byline. But I guess the show is turning their attention to that. I wonder how they plan to play that out. If in Flash world it is 2018 like it is with us, that means 2024 is only 6 years away. When does Iris get pregnant with Nora? Does Barry's disappearance in 2024 means that he never made it back after that, so he is gone-gone in he future (which makes sense given Nora's reactions to him)? If so, how much would Nora have remembered about him depending on how old she actually was when he disappeared. If they are in 2018 and Iris got pregnant right now, at most Nora would be five when Barry disappeared. Also, they'd have to answer the question of how she got her speed. Barry got his from the particle accelerator explosion so it wasn't a genetic thing. But if Nora's is, does that mean that anyone who became a meta that way now carry their meta-ness in their genes and it is inheritable by blood? Maybe her being a speedster and knowing she got it from her disappeared father is what drives her clingyness to Barry moreso than anything she might have known or remembered about him on her own.

Put me in the camp of hating that damned Firefly song. I don't know if it a UO or not, but that song is awful. LOL.

Fox interfered with the show from the start. They ran eps out of order messing with story continuity and it was constantly pre-empted. People who watched the show loved the show (I am one of them) but it was a hard show to actually watch because it could never get ratings traction. I will admit I found Mal's attitude toward Inara problematic and thought Whedon only gave lip service to a progressive idea of sex work. But then again I was attracted to the show in the first place only because of Gina Torres.

I am doing a re-watch of season 1 and I have to say that this is the one season they got the big bad arc exactly right. The pacing was great. I loved how they handled the parallel (yet out-of sync) reveals to the viewing audience vs.the in-story characters about Wells. To the audience, they let us know fairly early that he was a bad guy while the characters were still entirely clueless that they were even working against a big bad foe. I like how they still managed to keep the audience off kilter by still keeping him a nurturing figure for Barry even though we knew he was bad. But why? Then to us they peeled back a layer to let us know he was the Reverse Flash whereas the characters had only just learned that another speedster was responsible for Nora Allen's death. And then slowly they allowed Joe to begin to get suspicious, but everyone else was still completely in the Dark about Welles. And even with what we did know , we still didn't know why either. And then again, the audience gets another layer peeled back by showing us Eobard Thawne's face telling us a little bit of the why, but we still don't know how Welles fits in with all this. Meanwhile the characters one by one begin to get more and more suspicious until they get just about caught up with what the audience knows -- except for his real identity. The episode where they flashback to how Welles died followed by the episode where Cicos/Joe find the remains and of the real Harrison Welles and then Barry/Cisco/Caitlin discover the secret room is a one-two punch of excitement and the classic storytelling structure where the rising action peaks and starts toward the climax of the story. A lot of the credit goes to Tom Cavanaugh who did a fantastic job of making Wells by turns sinister and sympathetic. There is this one conversation he has with Joe in 1x19 (right after Joe finds the body of the real Wells) about them both losing their wives. There is this great line he delivers with such pathos: "We are members of an exclusive club where the entrance fee is much too expensive." Cavanaugh makes Wells sound sooo sincere in wanting to connect with Joe on their similar loss. He's playing the scene very straight but Joe knows he's lying and so do we, so it comes off a little bit like a mind fuck. The show hasn't been able to recapture this level of pacing and excitement when it comes to the main villain arc in any of the last three seasons, but man did they do a great job in S1.

Just finished it. Loved it. In the end I think Ilona Andrews stayed very true to their philosophy of how they approached the whole series, so it felt very appropriate to me.

I don't think anyone could read anything into it. The room was small and circular. It looked liked they grouped the seats in small clusters of two-rowed seats with four seats per row. She just happened to be seated in the second row with his two oldest sons and daughter. I thought she was still very visible. The spouses were all to the right of them in their own little cluster of seats. Everyone got the chance to go an take moment with the casket, even the in-laws and grand kids. I've read that the whole family is pretty close, even the kids from the first marriage. I follow Jack. Jr and Renee (his wife) on twitter because I love how they both stan for their military branches (I was a Navy brat) and they seem like a cute fun couple.

Heh. Fox sure thought it was a black show. They paired it with Martin and Living Single as direct counter-programming for Friends/Seinfeld. I also remember Malik Yoba and Lauren Velez being given all the face time in marketing that was heavily geared toward the black audience. But yeah, hard to think of any other black led dramas in the 90s outside of Soul Food. HBO had one little two-episode mini-series of a black family drama called Laurel Avenue. I thought it was a nice little show and felt bad it never got expanded out. It would have filled a niche.

Your tagline is so much better than theirs....

Well to be fair... they probably needed the space for one more Ralph pep talk scene.

Yeah, I am finding the discussion fascinating. What I am curious to wonder about... a lot of people who are feeling negative toward the pitch cite the categorization of Darren being a 'slacker' as a counterpoint to Samantha's powers and why would she be attracted to this guy. But so far we've been told nothing about the dynamics of what the marriage is supposed to be or the nature of their relationship, just one facet of their personalities. The original Darren was a duly employed Ad Man but he was rather an asshole to Samantha. Would this Darren being super supportive and treating Samantha like a queen and being clearly besotted even though he's a slacker still be a deal breaker? Does the drive and ambition of the male carry more weight as an acceptable partner than the respect and love he gives her on the regular?

It sounds like, based on the pitch, he has to be white for the underlying story conceit to work. Samantha is supposed to be a single mother, hard worker who is a witch. He is supposed to be a 'bit of a slacker.' The conceit is, that Samantha can be a witch with actual superpowers but because Darren is a white male, his voice gets automatically heard and valued more no matter how supernaturally powerful she may be. This couldn't work if Darren is anything but a white male. And they are archly playing with the concept of 'black girl magic' (literally! as they admit) so Samantha is gonna be black. Depending on how smartly it it written, this could be an interesting observational comedy with some ironic bite.

I wonder if Barris would have any hand in it at all beyond a creator and possibly pilot writer credit given him leaving ABC for Netflix. It sounds interesting. It has the potential to be really good or eye-rolling bad depending on the casting and the scripts. Honestly in the original Bewitched, I found Darrin insufferable even without being a slacker and wondered what Samantha saw in him. She was way too good for him. I was always team Endora!

I just realized I don't like Steve Amell from the Arrow. When I see him in interviews he comes off as kinda smug and I just think he has a punchable face.

"Baby Green Arrow" Ha! Even in this the Legends are funny.

JFC! I went and looked at this tweet for context. Kessha was minding her own damned business posting a fun picture of herself , Jonathan Fernandez and Kevin Rahm promoting a friggin' Hallmark card when some rabid CC fan jumped into her mentions and posted something like "do you think this makes us forget about Clayne? You never cared for him you're being unfair" blah blah blah. Like what the even fuck? Keesha graciously(and unnecessarily, imo) thanked the woman for being a fan of the show and said she was never unfair. That is when Clayne himself hopped in. It was so unnecessary.

Rest in Power. Miss Franklin. Much R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I love this live version of Dr. Feelgood. This is one of those songs you need a dark room, a hard drink and some time to think about the choices in your life while listening to it. LOL.

I've been on A Sharon Sala kick. She writes romantic suspense. So far I've read four of her books: In Shadows, Next of Kin, Family Sins, and Mimosa Grove (written under Dinah McCall). So far what I am enjoying about them is the fact that unlike a lot of rom-suspense where there is a big climatic showdown at the end of the book between the villain and our intrepid hero/ine where the villain finally gets his just desserts, her books often have the villain's plans unravel because of some really random or unpredictable event that comes out of left field that all their nefarious planning could not account for. I think that is what I am liking about them, the unpredictability of how she dispatches with her villains or how their carefully crafted plans all come falling down while still managing to keep the protagonists in some sort of jeopardy.

There was an article last year that talked about the audience make up of some of the more popular shows with predominantly black casts. It turns out they have a majority non-black audience. Regards the fragmented audience, I think it is a combination of more channels to watch and more ways to watch them. In the 70s before even cable tv had the opportunity to saturate homes, most people had only 4 channels to watch and the only way to view them was on an actual tv set. Now we not only have broadcast channels, but syndication, cable, streaming, apps, and web channels. And you don't need a tv anymore to watch, but you can watch on phone, tablets, computers, through your Xbox or fire sticks. The thing is while the method of watching tv has changed drastically in the last 40 years, Nielsen's method of collecting ratings data really hasn't. They are still using their same methods: diaries, people meters, sample extrapolations etc. for their fast nationals and overnights. There is some data they can't measure (Netflix, Hulu and the demographics of people watching non-tv platforms) and even when they do have the ability to get raw information (DVR usage for example) they don't really use it as part of their ratings because it is all about how they count people who watch tv live who can see the commercials. There is a reason CBS dominates ratings. Their audience skews older and those people tend to be the ones who still watch tv on a tv set and that plays right into Nielsen's collection methodology.

I've had good luck with waiting a bit before choosing my Amazon First reads book. I try to get a sense from the Goodreads reviews if I'll like them and they tend to be more reliable than the blurb. I am not thrilled about any this month so far. I waited til almost the end of the month to get July's First Reads and I am reading it now, Jane Doe. The blurb made it sound like some run of the mill psychological thriller so I was pretty meh. But I read a few reviews and they made it sound more interesting and , dare I say it, fun, than the blurb. It is a pure revenge fantasy and it is pretty entertaining so far.

I just finished watching this. Overall I liked it better than season 1. First half of S1 with Cottonmouth was great. But as soon as we got Diamondback the show got cartoony and not is a good way. DBack was just a bad villain and he took the whole show down. This one started slow but I think as the show progressed it got much more interesting until it ended on an intriguing note. It helps that it made Mariah a straight up human monster. No fancy name, no weird special FX, just a woman who became increasingly corrupted by her own power and madness. Also that Bushmaster was a rather sympathetic villain as well. I always enjoy a show more when the antagonist has real motives that go beyond just being generic evil or having megalomaniac tendencies. One thing I did roll my eyes at was how quickly Mariah adjusted to the brutality and rose up the power structure in prison. I mean, what hardened, long time prisoner who has clawed her way up the top of a power pyramid in prison is gonna be so stupid to just hand Mariah a shiv? And there was no other badder bitch waiting in the wings to take over in case that one fell? And Mariah changing her will so quickly even though she hadn't actually realized she been poisoned yet just struck me as a bit too convenient. Oh well. I thought this season did better by Misty overall as well. Loved the way she looked in that last scene, her hair was pure Awesome! She looked very Nefertiti like in that entire get up. As a matter of fact, Tilda also looked gorgeous in that last scene. My ear is attuned to Jamaican speech pattern/accent so I had no issues understanding. But I have CC on anyway because we watch a lot of British shows and the variety of accents on those shows make understanding what people are saying difficult as well. Even with the CC though they used a lot of patois and some of it you could get from context e.g. "bomboclaat" is spat as a curse, but some might be missed e.g. "bredren" dropped casually in a sentence.

I was an early adopter e-reader. Had a first gen kindle. Got it mainly because back in the early days before the Big Six/Apple collusion lawsuit Amazon was offering ebooks at a huge discount as a lure to move Kindles. At any rate, have been an e-book reader for so long, I find it difficult to adjust back to paper. I do read graphic novels exclusively in paper, though. But novels I prefer now to read in e-format. I like the search function. Sometimes if I am reading a book and have a bad feeling that a character I like might not survive in the end, I'll cheat sometimes and search their name to see how far into the book they make it. I think it takes a little getting used to the functions on an e-reader to get good at this. On the kindle, if you swipe your finger up, the reader keeps the page you are reading in the background and it superimposes a copy of the page you are on in a large box over the front of your current page that with arrows on the edges of the text box so that you can flip through (and arrows at the bottom to quickly navigate forward and backward by chapter jumps). If you tap outside the superimposed box, it takes you back to the page you were on. Or you can tap in the upper right hand corner and get the bookmark symbol and bookmark the page you are on and then flip around.

Just finished Iron and Magic by Ilona Andrews. Very good and softens the blow for when the final book of their Kate Daniels series comes out later this year. This already feels like a worthy successor and they did an admirable job of moving an antagonist from the previous series into a creditable anti-hero in this one. Currently in the middle of The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. An alternate history story about how the US space exploration program began. In this one Dewey actually did defeat Truman and a big meteorite demolishes DC, thus ushering in the imperative to explore space. Including women astronauts! As I am reading I am also feeling the book was in some way influenced by Hidden Figures since the book heavily acknowledges racism along with the sexism and the intersection of both how they all play into and the plot and the key figures at the forefront of new space program.

The Iris/Eddie relationship was chock full o' chemistry. And it is a textbook example of why you don't allow your 'destined endgame' characters tease around romantically with other people before your get them together. There is the real possibility that putting them in romantic situations with other people while at the same time determinedly downplaying/ignoring any romantic feelings between the two of them will backfire. If one of them inadvertently creates a great connection with another character you start to build expectations with the audience. And it is doubly problematic if one of the characters in the destined relationship isn't embraced by the audience so the audience starts to actively root against the destined ship. WRT to Laurel v. Felicity -- I remain wedded to the unpopular opinion that Laurel's problems were not Katie Cassidy's fault. I lay the blame solely at the feet of the writers. In Laurel they created an angsty, humorless, poorly written character that they assumed they could load her in the chamber until they needed to pull the trigger on her place as BC and Arrow's love interest. In the meantime, they created a fanboy's wet dream in Felicity. A sexy geek, complete with quippy one-liners and a quirky style. It is super easy to root for a character like that. And it is super easy for a character like that to create fun chemistry with Oliver. Her 'adorkable' style was a great contrast with Oliver's dour demeanour and they played with that. I actually liked Felicity in S1 one Arrow. It wasn't until they really doubled down on her being such a special 'it' girl that my feelings turned to exasperation and then to dislike. My dislike of the character was solidified when they had her show up on The Flash for a fun night of trivia at a friggin' coffee shop in a barely there little black dress complete with the slo-mo glamour girl camera pan up. Really who does that? I still maintain that the Flash tried to do with Patty what Arrow did with Felicity and created this 'fun, adorable, quirky' character to act as a spoiler for the main relationship. I also think Flash WA fans lucked out because 1) that got nipped in the bud by the second-half of the season so it never could fully root and 2) Barry and Patty just didn't quite have the chemistry they needed to have in order to overshadow West-Allen.

Interestingly, I thought she had the best chemistry with Ronnie. It felt like she felt the relationship so she sold it. All the other pairings, came across as rather forced. I never felt her with either Jay Garrick or Julian.

In one of the many clips Trini posted above (one of the ones of SDCC panel) a viewer asks a question about if we can get a non-Arrow infested vow renewal for Barry and Iris. There is a lot of reaction to the question, one of which is Candace saying "shade" but if you listen through the chatter someone says "buttons" I think it is Helbing.