SailingBy

On first seeing him, I thought: he looks like the love child of Rasputin and a Sasquatch.

Perhaps it's a pendant to Gunnar, who over three seasons was the one person who always gave Will sensible advice about how to deal with being gay, and even on how to ask a guy out on a date (which Will of course never listened to). While his own love life was an ongoing shambles.

From what little I know about the subject, that does seem to be the fairly standard way US TV is written. There is a team of writers, who discuss (along with non-writing producers and the like of course) what is going to happen, then one of them gets assigned to write the actual script for an episode on their own, taking them out of the loop for the discussions on the next episode until they've finished. So they're basically cycling through their pool of writers in succession. (Things work entirely differently in most European TV productions, AFAIK.) So it depends a lot on how good the memory of that one writer for the past history of the show is. But you're right, since I started watching some US shows again, not that long ago, I've often been struck by the permanent amnesia that seems to reign. It's not a Nashville problem, it's all over the place. The writers often seem to have forgotten things that happened just a few episodes ago, and consequently the characters have forgotten too. It's not just forgetting, either. There is also a recurring problem, almost the exact reverse, where characters know about things they couldn't possibly know about - but which we as viewers know about, and the writers know about, but the writers forget the characters can't know about. I can't remember an example from Nashville for that last phenomenon right now, but the first season of How to Get Away with Murder was particularly rife with such instances.

As to the question whether Dynasty was any good: I loved that show as a teenager. But I (and some members of my family) watched it as a comedy. It was much, much funnier than many a supposed comedy series was. It was completely, outrageously, over the top unrealistic in every possible way. You couldn't parody it, it was its own parody. Just like Empire, it was based on the premise that large companies (in the case of Dynasty, oil companies) are run by people who are all, in some convoluted way, related to each other, or married to each other, or sleeping with each other, or have slept with each other in the past, and who all have bitter feuds amongst them (which in the next episode can equally well turn into alliances), and that's what business decisions are based on. Just as in Empire, nobody is ever seen doing any of the boring stuff that real people running real businesses do most of their working day. They even had the homophobic patriarch who can't accept his gay son. If you've never seen it, you really only need to look at the opening titles. Here a clip of those on Youtube: https://youtu.be/AVu01ShJ5qA . If you just watch those 1:42 minutes, you'll get a pretty good idea of what the rest of the show was like, I think.

Thanks for the answers. So it seems that it won't be that difficult to do this "adapting", in a way that would probably not even be noticeable to someone who just watches a show and doesn't keep up with news about actors. I'd like to add an observation from my own personal experience here. As someone who's struggled with severe depression over long stretches of time, I'd like to point out that being depressed doesn't means someone is suddenly stupid, or irresponsible. The rational part of your brain remains in full working order - that's part of the problem: you know you, objectively, really have no reason to feel the way you do, or act the way you do, but that doesn't seem to make any difference. So I think it's quite possible that Hayden picked this moment to seek this kind of help, having decided that she needed to do so much earlier, exactly because she knows that because of the already-planned storyline and the already-shot material, at this point in time she could do so causing minimal disruption. Even severely depressed people can be quite methodical in some things. Note: this is nothing more than a personal hypothesis about how this timing might have happened, I obviously have absolutely zero information about the real situation.

Am I the only person who is shocked by Jamal's appalling taste in interior decoration? That place of his is done up more garishly than a Republican congressman's closet.

This might be a stupid question, and I don't know if this is the right thread to ask it in, and I hope it doesn't come across as insensitive or anything, but: Does anyone here know how the shooting schedule on Nashville works? IOW, how many episodes in advance of the ones that are being shown are generally already on the shelf (although they might of course be tweaked in various ways before broadcast)? The Hollywood Reporter article states that the producers are "adapting" to this situation, but that it is "too soon to tell if production on the ABC country music drama will have to make any further adjustments", which is terribly vague (understandable, given the circumstances). There are all kinds of ways TV series can keep characters alive whose actors have, for whatever reason, suddenly become unavailable for at least a while - have other characters constantly mention them, have them talk to them on the phone, that kind of thing. But how much you can change a character's storyline to "adapt" depends a lot on what the delay is between already recorded material and what is broadcast, it seems to me. I know that here in Europe for some daily soap operas for instance it's often remarkably short, on the order of one or two weeks at the most, which makes it very difficult when something serious happens to an actor who portrays a central character to try and work their sudden absence into the plot. OTOH, a weekly drama with a set number of episodes for a season might already be for most practical purposes finished before the first episode airs. I was just wondering how it works on a US show like this.

I can't find the articles on their website right now, but during season 1, the Wall Street Journal's real-world IPO specialist did a weekly analysis of what happened on Empire, comparing to what could happen in reality. In reality, they would still own their shares in Empire. I can't remember the time limit, but there are legal rules that limit sales of shares by people who own stock in a privately-owned company when it goes public, for a certain period after the IPO (which was definitely longer than what has been portrayed so far, as far as I can figure out the supposed timeline). Exactly to avoid shenanigans like the ones the Empire plotline relies on. Another problem was that Empire has voting and non-voting stock (a perfectly standard arrangement used by many companies), and the sons and Cookie only got non-voting stock. So as long as Lucious keeps control of a majority of the voting stock, it doesn't matter how many non-voting shares somebody manages to buy - a hostile takeover was always, by definition, impossible. Plus, real IPOs usually have even more specific safeguards against hostile takeovers built into them, by very expensive, specialist lawyers. Once again, to prevent the possibility of the kind of thing Empire is portraying from happening. It's hard to believe Lucious wouldn't have consulted those kind of lawyers beforehand, to make very sure he retains ultimate control.

I know it's not unique at all. But it's still a completely damn stupid trope. This complete disregard for technical reality has been around forever, really. I remember as a kid laughing with my dad about how people in TV shows, or movies, were able to have "enlargements" made from a photograph, that allowed them, on the basis of a 35mm photograph (it usually seemed to be 35mm film), to zoom in on something like a license plate, or someone's face, accidentally captured in the distance, with crystal clarity. Once the digital age came around, this same nonsense became the "enhance this" trope, which I will demonstrate with a link that shows the nonsense much better than I could explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk The things Oliver is shown doing in all his supposed "hacking" are completely impossible, and frankly risible. That doesn't help to make a show that, I think, is supposed to be still, somewhat, based on how real people behave, in the real world, appealing to me.

I haven't seen this episode yet (nor would I be able to tell the difference, probably), but that would be part of normal practice. There are extremely strict rules about how much time underage actors are allowed to be filmed, because of child labor laws, and past abuses of child actors. The younger they are, the lower the time limit. So for a baby, the time you can show them on camera (I first wrote "you can shoot them", then realized how awful that sounds) is very limited indeed. That's why identical twins are popular with TV or movie producers, to portray just one small child: you can get double the on-camera time out of them. Or why preposterously obvious dummies are used instead of real children.

Sorry, and I know it's not really on-topic, but the misuse of the word "pedophile" always irritates me. It refers to people who are sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Wes is definitely not that. He's an adult. If there was some kind of sexual thing going on between him and Annalise, a lot of people would consider the age difference made that weird or creepy. And of course entirely inappropriate because she is both his law school professor, and his boss. But pedophilia it definitely wouldn't be. I also don't see how a heterosexual relationship like that would play into any stereotype about gay people, male or female. Is there some stereotype that middle-aged bisexual women prey on young men? I certainly have never heard of it.

And why would that stop the writers of HTGAWM? Nobody on this show behaves like any remotely normal human being would. Or even could behave in reality. On a multitude of levels. (For instance, I've wanted for a long time to write a post about the absurdities of Oliver's supposed Magical Super Hacker Skillz, which are really beyond parody, to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of how computers, and the internet, work for real. I never get round to it. The only plausible IT related thing he's ever been engaged in was in the pilot - that as an IT guy, he'd have the password to the email system for the company he works for makes sense. Nothing else he's ever been seen as doing in all his supposed "hacking" is even remotely possible.)

From my recollection of the way she was written in season 1, she was mostly bothered by the fact that she and Aiden had opened up to each other about past boyfriends/girlfriends (I presume before getting engaged), and that he'd omitted to mention his fling, or however you'd call it, with Connor. My impression was that she was bothered by Aiden's dishonesty, not so much the fact that he might be also attracted to men. He assures her it was an insignificant one-time teenage thing, but then she thinks he's flirting with another man. I don't think it was Aiden's possible bisexuality-of-some-sort that bothered her. In my anecdotal observation, a lot of women have no problem dealing with that, and certainly not women of her age group and educational level nowadays. But she started to think he wasn't really the honest person she thought he was, and was in love with.

I only just now managed to steel myself enough to watch this episode. And I was left wondering: why is it that Frank is living in the apartment where Oliver was living in season 1? Or otherwise, in an exact clone of it in another apartment building? It's No. 303, just across the hall from No. 304. Compare Frank & Laurel at the door of it in S02E02, with Connor & Oliver at the door of it in S01E02, or in S02E01. The only thing that has changed is that the outside of the doors are painted a different color. Or perhaps all apartment buildings in Philadelphia are built identically. Oh, the many mysteries this show baffles us with!

Please! Not a third Nashville-based label founded, seemingly exclusively owned, and personally run, by country singers who clearly have no qualifications whatsoever for doing so, and who never seem to do any of the things that people heading real companies, of any kind, spend most of their working time doing. Let alone a record label based on such ghettoization. I really only started watching this show again because I was interested in the Will storyline, and how they would deal with the fact that at at the end of season 3, they sort of painted themselves into the corner of trying to put on a convincing fictional portrayal of a situation that has never happened in the real world: a country music star, and major heartthrob with a huge female fanbase, coming out as gay. On the basis of these first two episodes, I have been far from impressed. But hey, it's Nashville. For all we know, a few episodes from now, Will may have been snatched up by some major label (so not Luke's or Rayna's cottage businesses), playing to huge enthousiastic audiences, and it will turn out that the country music audience was never really homophobic at all, it was all just an error of judgment by that newly arrived "expert" on the matter. We're clearly not dealing with anything even remotely related to reality anymore.