Dev F

I think the idea is that Late Night shoots at Universal but their production offices are at CBS Television City. Since Deborah and Kimmel both seem to be working out of Television City and they're shown to be in direct competition, it doesn't seem like we're meant to think that this corresponds to what network they're on. Edited to add: Wait, no, looking back at some of the episodes, I don't think that tracks, because Ava's meltdown where she drives through the front gates takes place after a confrontation with the writers in the production offices, and later she tries to get back to the studio for the live broadcast and the same security guard is there and mentions the broken gate, so I guess in the Hacks universe Television City and Universal Studios are the same place? I guess that would kinda fit with Deborah's company being the fictional amalgam CBSUniversal, though in at least one scene you can see the studio gate in the background with "NBCUniversal" and the peacock logo on it.

Yeah, it looks like the Vigoda incidents were in the 1980s, and were limited to a couple badly edited articles that mistakenly referred to him in passing as "the late Abe Vigoda," rather than actual obituaries. After that, though, his greatly exaggerated death became a running gag, and the tale apparently grew in the telling. Maybe a closer real-life story is when the Associated Press published a premature obituary of Bob Hope in 1998 and a congressman announced it on the floor of the House, which propelled the report into a couple other news outlets. But the original article was pretty obviously just a draft ("Bob Hope, the master of the one-liner and tireless morale-booster for servicemen from World War II to the Gulf War, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx He was xx"), and most outlets were cautious enough to hold for confirmation. An alternate possibility is that Deborah was wrong about the obituary being published accidentally, and TMZ did have a source of some kind. I could imagine, say, a reporter calling Kathy Vance hoping for some inside dirt on her sister's "retirement," and Kathy getting annoyed, seeing the chance for a little revenge for Deborah's lies about her illiteracy, and telling the reporter that Deborah was dead.

Deborah assumes that it was a prewritten obituary that went live by accident, but that doesn't quite make sense. Although that does happen sometimes, it would quickly be corrected by the news outlet itself, since they would know it wasn't prompted by any actual reportage!

It's possible that originally the explanation was just something along the lines of "Singapore is remote enough that Deborah can get away with breaking her contract there," but that once they actually started filming on location and needed the cooperation of the Singaporean authorities, they got pushback about portraying the famously business-friendly country as indifferent to international law and hostile to corporate interests.

I mean, that's true whether it's an exclusivity clause or a noncompete. It's just kind of an instance where the show is willing to sacrifice plausibility for comedy—like the idea of a studio deciding to make a movie about "a bisexual Gumby," or Katie Couric nodding solemnly as Deborah lies that her sister is illiterate.

I think part of the reason the whole situation is so puzzling is that they keep calling Deborah's contractual issue a "noncompete clause" (which in the real world has been illegal in California for years), but what they're actually referring to seems more like an exclusivity clause. "Noncompete clause" usually refers to a prohibition that kicks in after the end of an employee's contract term, preventing them from ending a relationship with one company and immediately going to work for one of their competitors. But that doesn't apply in Deborah's case, because she's still under contract—as Bob Lipka tells her, "We own you!" So what Bob is really doing is refusing to terminate her contract and holding her to its exclusivity clause, which prevents her from working for anyone else while she's supposed to be devoting her labor solely to The Network. So while giving away her labor for free might not violate a noncompete, it seems like it would reasonably be disallowed under an exclusivity agreement—in the same way that if you, say, signed an exclusive agreement with Trader Joe's to sell your artisanal salsa or whatever, you couldn't then stand outside Trader Joe's and give it away for free without their approval.

Especially considering that in the Hacks universe, the show has been around since at least the 1970s—not as long as The Tonight Show, but longer than any other recent late-night talk show. Being held responsible for killing a show that was a television mainstay for half a century is definitely a stain on the old obituary. On a related note, I'm honestly kind of fascinated by the weird alt-universe late night history of the Hacks universe. Though they've avoided saying the name of The Network so as not to impugn its real-world reputation by portraying the CEO as a creep, we know from the title slate on Deborah's pilot from season 1 that it's CBS. And this is in keeping with Deborah's Big Three rivals being ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and NBC's Jimmy Fallon. Of course, in the real world Late Night is NBC's 12:30 talk show, created by David Letterman in 1982. We know that Letterman's original show exists in the Hack's universe, since Dave's former partner Merrill Markoe is a character, and Ava in fact credits her as the woman who "cocreated Letterman." I guess in the Hacks universe that show is called something else? And the real-life CBS didn't even have a late-night show for a big part of the time that the fictional Late Night was on the air—not until Letterman left NBC in 1993 and created The Late Show. I guess in the Hacksiverse, Dave jumped ship for the already-extant Late Night? And when he retired he was replaced by Deborah's predecessor, Danny Collins? Which seems to mean that Stephen Colbert isn't a late-night host in this universe. But we do know that he's a prominent showbiz figure in some capacity, since when Ava gives career tips to that aspiring screenwriter kid in exchange for legal advice in season 2, he asks her whether he should e-mail Stephen Colbert, who spoke at his career day, and Ava emphatically dissuades him. Finally, Bob Lipka talks about how the bread and butter of his company is "my parks and my franchises"—which makes it seem like CBS's parent company might not be Paramount like it is in the real world, since Paramount has never had particularly impressive theme park holdings, and sold them all off in the mid-'00s. Given the focus this season on the rides and tours at Universal Studios, where Deborah shoots her show, I wonder if the conglomerate is meant to be, like, CBSUniversal, in place of the real world's NBCUniversal. Anyway, I've probably put a lot more thought into this than the show's creators ever intended for us to, since the whole point seems to be that the exact corporate details are fudged to avoid besmirching any real company's reputation.

I think I'm starting to piece together what happened with this episode, and why it left a lot of people with mixed feelings, at best, about season 2. According to an anonymous insider who has been dead-on with other spoilers this season, the confrontation between Ellie and Owen/Mel was completely reshot. You can also find rehearsal footage of what looks like the stunt performers for Ellie and Owen running through the original version of the scene. It's much more brutal, involving Ellie standing over a kneeling Owen as they struggle for Ellie's gun, Ellie gouging Owen's eye, and finally Ellie shooting Owen twice in the chest. The more I think about it, the more it feels like this scene—or, at least, a scene that shows Ellie's revenge quest culminating in this level of brutality—is what Ellie's entire arc for the season was meant to lead up to. It starkly bookends the smiley "Day One" Ellie of episode 4. It builds on the violence of the Nora scene at the end of episode 5 instead of weirdly backing away from it, as I complained earlier in the thread, and it cuts against the mushiness of Ellie's I didn't kill Nora, I just tortured her assurances to Dina by exposing them as self-serving hypocrisy. It even pays off the scene in episode 1 where Ellie is training to take down a bigger man in close combat. It seems like someone, whether the showrunners or HBO, got squeamish about taking Ellie to that place and they reshot the scene to pull her back, but to my mind it left a pretty enormous hole in her arc for the season.

I'm not aware of many shows that have multiple first-unit crews shooting different episodes simultaneously. As far as I know, it's generally reserved for massive, overbudgeted epics like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And if the argument is, "Well, they could've shelled out for more first units for The Last of Us too," that's certainly true, but you can hardly hold the show's creators responsible for not being given a bigger budget! I know there's also another form of parallel shooting that's become increasingly common called "block shooting," but it's kind of the opposite of what you were suggesting: it involves using the same director and crew to shoot multiple episodes on the same locations because they do overlap. And even that is a money-saving technique in comparison to shooting every episode individually; it's not a miracle budgetary trick that allows you to film twice as many episodes for the same cost. So, again, the argument would sort of boil down to "Why didn't the show's creators simply make HBO give them more time and/or money?" No, of course I'm not, why would I? My whole point is that the length of the season shouldn't be considered a creative choice, since it's almost certainly imposed on the show's producers by the bean-counters at HBO. I obviously regard them as two separate groups, and judge the success of the producers by how well they managed to bring across the story within the limitations established by the bean-counters.

I mean, the obvious complication with filming both stories simultaneously is that they would need two full crews, and thus not only twice the filming budget but also double the amount of qualified talent behind the camera. That would be harder than just shooting for twice as long, not easier! I don't know why we would assume that the amount of story the producers can fit into one season is primarily an artistic choice on their part and not mostly the result of time and budget constraints beyond their control.

Overall I thought this was a good wrap-up, but a little rough around the edges. Having Ellie go from coldly torturing Nora with a pipe to killing Owen in self-defense and accidentally killing Mel feels like what writers sometimes call a two-one punch: an unsatisfying narrative choice where an especially dramatic moment builds to . . . a less dramatic one. It's also structurally weird to have introduced Abby and her four compatriots and set them up as targets for Ellie's revenge—and then have one of them, Manny, not feature in Ellie's revenge story at all. Especially since his characterization as the most contemptuous of Joel's killers made him seem ideal to serve as Ellie's first victim, the kill that doesn't seem so bad because he was such a garbage person all along. And leaving Manny alive also muddied up the season's final twist, because if Abby wakes up and there's a dead guy at her door, it's immediately clear that we're flashing back to an earlier time, but if both characters are still alive, I'm not sure it's obvious at first that this isn't just a cut to some later day. And regardless of its importance as exposition, it's definitely a stronger mission statement for season 3 if we end with we flash back to Abby's life at a simpler time when her now-dead friend was still alive instead of we flash back to Abby's life and Manny is hanging around then, too.

They talk about it in episode 2, when they're holed up in Eugene's stash house outside of town.

I think part of the subtext of Ellie's suspicions is that Joel claimed to know for a fact that the Fireflies found "dozens" of other immune people, but his behavior with Eugene suggests that he thinks she's the only one. It's actually funny how many different ways the Eugene situation resonates with Ellie and Joel's issues: Joel is immediately certain that Eugene needs to be put down, despite supposedly knowing that immunity isn't all that rare. Joel makes a promise to Ellie that he has no intention of keeping, giving her what she recognizes as "the same fucking look" as when he swore that his story about the Fireflies was true. Joel makes up a whole story about Eugene's final moments to make Gail feel better, the same way he told Ellie what he thought she needed to hear about what happened to the Fireflies. Eugene's willingness to risk the safety of Jackson for the woman he loves echoes Joel's own choice to save Ellie at the cost of a vaccine—and the fact that Joel is on the other side of the issue now that someone he loves isn't involved is probably part of what provokes Ellie to deem his choice "selfish." Eugene is himself a Firefly—something Ellie didn't know at the time, but it adds additional weight when Jesse later tells her and then implies that Joel had no choice but to murder that poor Firefly. When Jesse shrugs that Eugene "couldn't be saved," it also highlights that he was one of the people who actually could've survived a nonfatal Cordyceps bite if the Fireflies hadn't been prevented from developing a cure.

Yep. In his world, civilization collapsed before gay marriage was legalized anywhere in the United States. Lots of people who would've gone on to be fully supportive of gay rights in our world probably ended up frozen in an earlier mindset that assumed pursuing a "gay lifestyle" meant inevitably cutting oneself off from mainstream social institutions like marriage and parenthood. It actually impressed me that the show didn't whitewash that sad likelihood in the interest of making Joel more palatable to modern audiences—that they had him tell Ellie he didn't know if she'd ever understand his love for her, seemingly a nod to the assumption (quickly proven incorrect, as it turns out) that being into girls would mean she'd never have children of her own.

I don't think we have any reason to believe that Joel was skeptical of the Fireflies' plan. If he were, there'd be no reason for him to insist on the lie that apparently destroyed his and Ellie's relationship, because "I rescued you from the Fireflies because they were psychos who were going to kill you for no good reason" is a perfectly acceptable explanation for his actions. Heck, it's such a good explanation that the fact that he doesn't even reach for that as his LIE as to what happened, instead making up some horseshit about other immune people and raiders, suggests that it didn't even occur to him as a possibility. I mean, the infected have been down there for a quarter century at this point, so there's some reason for the Wolves to believe they'll stay down there. Though obviously a major theme of the episode is the idea that deeply buried demons don't stay buried forever.