baileythedog

Correct on all comments here. S5 really is not bad. It's just that S4 sunk it down into such a hole that being "substantially better than" was not enough to keep the show afloat.

Same, same. I hate "shipping" characters and tend not to watch TV that way, but Gerald and Mrs. Hall is the dryest, most uncomfortable thing to watch ever. Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes on "Downton Abbey" were a house on fire, comparatively. I'm glad Mrs. Hall is open to thinking that her romantic life can pick up and continue but i think she is better off with, dare I say, Siegfried.

Hmmm...Are you in the US? Because I certainly don't have AMC+.

Currently Mad Men is streaming on Amazon Prime so if you have that subscription already, it is there. Also, I decided I wanted my own digital copies and I bought all of the seasons on Amazon and they were, like, $5.50 per season which I thought was a pretty great deal. Not sure if they are still marked that way or not. I agree on the commentaries, though. I wish they came as a bundled file with any digital purchase made as well as DVDs since I really don't want to keep DVDs of anything anymore.

Not really. The Queen's death was an incredibly planned for event. I remember reading an extensive article in the Guardian about it years ago. It's been a minute since I've seen this episode, but I think in the show they actually did refer to it as Operation "London Bridge?"

Understood. Fully get the contradiction. Biologically (and psychologically), though, mothers offer something to babies that men simply cannot (effectively) in their earliest stages. Again, I am as feminist as is possible, but pushing off the care of an infant in favor of work (if you do not economically need to) is not a mature decision.

I was thinking the scene were she had a complete over-reaction to his desire for his on-screen persona to have a plausible romantic partner. He WAS nervous playing opposite Audrey Hepburn in "Charade", and not unreasonably so as he had his pulse on who is audience was and what they wanted from him. He was right to consider his "brand" something to be managed carefully. Who he hooked up with in his private life (i.e someone younger than Audrey Hepburn) was beside the point and her storming off because she was conflating the two was childish. I can agree that she was assertive and wanted to enjoy her life and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. I did think it was weird that she was so adamant about starting a family and then immediately wanting to go on location to work. I'm pretty obviously a staunch feminist but even I think a mother wanting to hand a newborn off to a nanny is a bit selfish. Again, I know very little about Dyan Cannon. My impression of her is based pretty solely on what I saw in the series so I could be very off based with this assessment.

I'm not sure if they're still running it, but via Amazon Prime there was a free 7-day trial of BritBox.

She didn't leave him on the spot, but quite soon after. That would certainly be a deal breaker for me, even if I tried to bend over backwards and make sense of his (overblown) concerns.

The Paley Center discussion with Jennifer Grant, Dyan Cannon, Jason Isaacs, and Jeff Pope was really quite good.

I've never been so angry at a show as I was at "The Crown" by casting Jonny Lee Miller here and somehow making me horny for John Major. The most awkward feeling ever.

Ah yes, but I think this is about William and Harry's age at this point in the story. Since it's Alma Mater that implies William is at least 18. And I assume Harry is supposed to be 16 then. (I think that's their age gap?)

I'm not sure exactly how old they're supposed to be at that point---16 and 18? If so, that isn't underaged drinking in the UK.

I enjoyed the real photos as videos as well. (Though there wasn't anything I hadn't already seen before.) And I admit to being a little verklempt at the final bow Cary Grant took at the conclusion of his "Conversation", along with the other three iterations of Archie Leach. "I think I hear my exit music." 😭😭😭 I wasn't bothered by anachronistic dialogue -- not after the entire series had anachronistic music and other cues throughout. "Jet Boy / Jet Girl" for Archie's arrival in NYC was a particularly apt musical choice for subtext of his possible (likely) bi-sexuality. All in all, a tour de force perfomance of screenwriting by Jeff Pope and acting by Jason Isaacs. I was not as taken in by the actress portraying Dyan Cannon, but that could just be because outside of a few of her roles (i.e. "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice") and her marriage to Cary, I don't know much about her. From the story depicted on screen, I full believe he was a controlling figure to his wives (that certainly would have been an inherited trait) but Dyan Cannon also seemed like kind of a pill as well. Their age difference and life experience was far too vast to ever bridge. Archie / Cary was a guy traumatized his entire life by his mother -- first by her moody illness and disappearance masked as her "death" and then by her return and her obviously inappropriate attachment to him. "You don't need a wife, you have me." Yikes. I'm also trying to put myself in the shoes of Cary's half-brother, Eric Leach. (They did remain in touch in real life.) Eric Leach in the movie, and in life, was kind of a shlubby looking guy. How are you that closely related to the perfect human specimen of Cary Grant and end up on such the other end of the gene pool? Poor guy. Photos of Elsie Leach make it clear that Archie / Cary got her dark eyes and arresting beauty. I'm really taken by the fact that he retired for good at age 62. Imagine Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks just deciding to hang it up now. Seems incomprehensible.

Thanks. I think I had skipped over the language where it said "Next Thursday" since not putting an actual date on that is weird. Alas. Cary Grant is my all time favorite actor as well. And I like Jason Isaacs quite a bit as an actor, though he isn't one that i traditionally follow or intentionally seek out -- I just always enjoy him when he pops up. Having said that, I've watched a couple of interviews where he's talked about how he prepared for this project and I am super impressed. He says that he knew how he could do a Cary Grant impersonation, but that would be boring and not terribly helpful when the part you're really trying to figure out is Archie Leach. During his life time, Cary Grant did very few interviews that were recorded, so it isn't obvious how he would speak when he wasn't playing a role, or more specifically, the role of Cary Grant. Jason Isaacs spoke about how he was tracking down meeting minutes from Grant's time on corporate boards to get a feel for how he would have spoken off screen and he finally found someone who had illicitly recorded one of Grant's "An Evening With Cary Grant" Q&A's that he was giving near the end of his life. Evidently that was the secret sauce to helping Isaacs figure out the rhythm of his speech that he'd be normally conversing in. I really appreciated all the due diligence that was being done to prepare for this role. Small voice here: I kind of like it. She was 22 or 23 when she met him. So maybe. Also, it is really pretty weird to have been effectively plucked out of a middling TV show, as a near unknown, by one of the world's biggest film stars. That, coupled with the age difference, must have been truly disorienting. Yes, that was called "Poor Little Rich Girl - the Barbara Hutton Story." And yes! James Read! (Had nearly forgotten about him -- I always really liked him as an actor. Cannot for the life of me remember how he did in that role, though. As I recall, even though their marriage failed, I believe Grant stayed fairly close to his stepson (via Hutton) until his early death in a plane crash. Agreed. I really like the actor playing Grant's lawyer / agent Stanley Fox. I honestly think HE'D make a better Hitchcock. (Loved him as Prime Minister Harold Wilson in "The Crown"). I don't think they exist as recorded pieces. He was truly traveling around performing those in small college towns and had a strict no recording policy. NxNW is my favorite Grant / Hitchcock film -- then Notorious. Overall, my favorite Cary Grant film is "The Awful Truth." Just fantastic.

One thing I'm annoyed by as there doesn't seem to be any posted schedule online as to when we can expect episodes #3 and #4 to be published on the platform. For a show that's already run in the UK and is only 4 episodes long, is there any reason to not drop all four at once? Has anyone seen this information anywhere?

Jason Isaac is fantastic in this role. He has the gait and the speech patterns just right. I absolutely love Cary Grant and have read every biography, seen every documentary and tracked down the autobiographical series he wrote for Ladies Home Journal back in the 60s. Aside from some playing with time and chronology of events, this is so far ringing largely true. They've made some dramatic changes that don't make a lot of sense, i.e. Elias and Elsie Leach did have a child that died, but he died of meningitis at 1 year old, dying the year before Archie was even born. Archie's mom was very likely suffering from post-partum depression and grief even before Archie was born. Because much of this was based on Dyan Cannon's book (and with she and Jennifer Grant as producers), the show has to wrangle Grant's best known movie of that era and Dyan into the same timeline so it appears they're shooting "North By Northwest" in 1961 instead of 1958 when the movie actually came out. It appears they also have Cary finding out that his mother was still alive a few years later than he actually did in real life. (Or they've misrepresented the dates to which he was married to Barbara Hutton.) At any rate, these are small quibbles and, by and large, I'm impressed with the creative approach taken to this series. The duality that Archie / Cary struggled with his whole life is, not incidentally, the basic theme of Don Draper in "Mad Men" as well. There are so many bits and elements of Cary Grant that Mad Men used to flesh out Don Draper. (It's no coincidence that Don Draper is an advertising executive circa 1960; the same time frame of "North By Northwest" when Cary Grant plays ad man Roger Thornhill. The opening shot of "Mad Men" is a behind the head shot of Don Draper that mimics the behind the head shot we have of Cary Grant in "Notorious". Don Draper, despite his professional success, can never find personal happiness or escape his history as Dick Whitman any more than Cary can escape Archie Leach.) At any rate. I'm very glad this series was made. Bravo to Jennifer Grant / Dyan Cannon for pulling it together.

Curiously, Dennis Dugan (the actor that played Walter Bishop) auditioned several times for the role of David Addison. (He may have even been the network's preferred choice before GCC convinced them to gamble on Bruce Willis.) He directed several Moonlighting episodes, including the series finale where he also played the "Sy" network mogul character at the end of the episode. The production seemed to really like that guy though it is too bad they saddled him with the thankless Walter Bishop character. I did not enjoy the Walter Bishop marriage --- although his character contrast to David Addison made for some good laughs. It was an odd way of showing that Maddie could, after all, do something spontaneous, even if it was wildly stupid. Part of me wonders if the writers weren't just punishing Maddie as a character at that point because Cybil Shepherd was such a pill to work with.

It's not every show that can turn a miscarriage into a musical, so I kind of give them props for that!

There is some ep in S5 where David Addison is out on a date and they're in front of advertising poster for Die Hard. :-) I enjoyed seeing Cool Hand Dave pt. 2 -- where they're looking for a new David Addison-- and front of the line for try outs is none other than Michael Garibaldi from Babylon 5. (Actor Jerry Doyle who approaches his role on B5 as a poor man's David Addison, for sure.)

Yes, it's frustrating but music rights are incredibly expensive and no one thought that far ahead to a digital future when the show was first made. It wouldn't matter what platform the show went to, there would still likely be a great deal of music replacements. Having said that, a lot of music DID get licensed to remain in the show, including perhaps most importantly, "Be My Baby."

I noticed that the Isley Brother's "This Old Heart of Mine" did not make it into "Knowing Her" which broke my heart a bit since Moonlighting was where I was first introduced to the Isley Brothers. Loved that song and it worked so perfectly there. Also, maybe no surprise that the Rolling Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want" wasn't gettable. Agreed that I'm glad I bought the DVDs when they came out. But still -- I'm very happy this landed on Hulu. I've turned on many of my younger friends to watching it and they're loving it.

Oh thank you. Don't worry about spoiling though. This show is nearly 30 years old. It isn't possible to remain spoiler free and don't expect others to not discuss freely. :-) (I just finished season two.)

I mean Beth Toussaint. A very shocking and distracting appearance, that I wasn't expecting. (I do remember from my celebrity news fix that back in the day Melissa Gilbert and Bruce Boxleitner were married. But I have not gotten that far in this watch to know that she makes an appearance. Curious how that works out.)

Decades later I'm just finally making my way through this show. The 90s were college / overseas travel years for me, so there is a big chunk of TV that I missed. Also, I'm thinking this maybe aired on a cable channel that I didn't have? Lastly, I was very much into "The X-Files" as the one show I could reasonably keep up with, though even at the time I remember people of various forums saying how much they liked "Babylon 5." So thanks, Tubi, for throwing it all up there for free to watch. I'm sure I'll have more to say later, but the first question I have --- admittedly incredibly shallow --- is what is the deal with Sheridan's missing wife Anna? His sister brought that video message on board for him to listen to and assuage his own guilt but the only thing I could concentrate on was how completely unusual looking she was (and I don't think she's supposed to be an alien, right? She's human?) and wondered if they had found the worst possible actress for that very small part. Just shocking and cringe-worthy.