annewithaneee

Blergh. - It's always really amusing to harass someone just trying to do their damn job, right? I'm sure the go-go dancer is well-used to drunk tourists ineptly hitting on her, but that cute little bet made my blood boil. - Typical, but infuriating of Danny to get so much more unearned confidence because he became the pet favorite of a handful of pathetic 50+ year olds trying to score with a bunch of girls who might not have been in Greece on spring break, but likely still have spring break. If I were the rest of the crew I would take it as a high compliment not to be liked by those pathetic pleated khaki sleazes. Also, the last time I demanded a rum milkshake I was twenty, drunk, and in an O'Charleys. - This week is the most I've sympathized with Hannah. It would have been terrible to get a migraine while Karate Toddler is playing the role of a shrieky booze cruise director. Then she had to be the target of the return of Danny's clumsy, casually sexist insult game. I would have reacted just like she did, and finally her temper had a worthy outlet. - I was rooting for those girls to swipe something from one of the guests as hazard pay. Next time, these slimeballs should do it right and recruit some Instagram "models" who are happy to do a bit of unofficial escorting on yachts. Now that they're Bravo-adjacent, maybe they can hit up Vanderpump Rules' LaLa for some contacts. - "Never have I met someone with so much entitlement in my life." - Bryan, who has apparently never used a mirror. - So Bryan's management style is micro, and completely ineffective. While I thought his talk with Danny around the break room table was the most managerial he's been so far, calm and reasoned and on-point, it's also been at least a half dozen times he's attempted this lecture, and that's just on-camera. Judging by next week's preview it is complete news to the Captain the myriad ways Danny has behaved like a giddy unhinged child on the clock. If direct correction isn't working, and hoo-boy is it not, then it's time to take it further up the chain. - I'm starting to think befriending the batshittiest and most useless crew member (Rocky, Danny) is something Ben does to amuse himself and neg the chief stews. - Hannah and Julia were so right about Bobby's appeal and chief drawback. Get him to shut up and ride it like you stole it, Hannah.

I bet a lot of shows have their equivalent of 'the hole' Brandi was thrown into. This past season of the UK's Celebrity Big Brother, one of the contestants had to stay overnight in a similar room - it was all black walls and unfurnished - because they had too many people who were ill or flipping out and destroying house property. This episode was definitely an improvement. I'm starting to warm up to Darius more as a character rather than someone good to look at.

I noticed that too, at least in the talking heads. It looked more like really unfortunate makeup choices to me than anything else, like she'd chosen a really odd yellowy-orange shadow and maybe did a dark color in the waterline? Face work or not, hair/makeup/wardrobe is still pretty dismal. She's a beautiful blank canvas, I don't know how she manages to do that to herself. Hopefully this year she cools it with the headbands. I'm not so sure about this season. If I remember correctly, the first weeks of shooting were dominated by Heather, Shannon, Megan and Tamra refusing to film with Vicki and trying to force her off the show. And while I get their anger to some degree, that sort of shit has made only one good season of Housewives, and that was New York. Usually, it makes the action stall out and coats everything in vague, unresolved hostility. Maybe it won't be so bad because we're already at a point where all the ladies are pushed together, but I have my doubts.

I get that the majority of Bravo's offerings are for viewers to revel in judging fake-rich, really horrible people. But this finale was dark; the whole season has been. I think this was probably my last episode. I think the fact that Whitney is a producer makes this whole thing extra sleazy. Bravo shouldn't have picked up a show like that -- it kills part of the spirit of these kinds of shows. Kathryn's far from a saint, but the way all these older vapid assholes blithely ignore Thomas's glaring defects and dependencies while slut-shaming and condescending this woman, I can't stomach it anymore. It feels like everyone but Kathryn is controlling the edit, and the show isn't at all self-aware of the sliminess of its men. My skin crawls whenever Whitney, Thomas, or JD are onscreen. I guarantee the reunion will be more of raking Kathryn over the coals, which is sounds like she really doesn't need right now. I'm no fan of hers, but she seems pretty broken, and getting painted as a villain by your costar who you once slept with and can basically control your edit has to be hell. I think it's perfect that Landon finds Patricia so aspirational. Being a petty, vapid divorcee isn't much of a leap for her, after all....maybe the second time around she can find a wealthy, prenup-adverse chap.

Personally I think Sansa held out on Littlefinger's army because the writers wanted the moment of a surprise cleanup crew saving the day, even when the commander himself thinks he's beaten. I predicted that weeks ago at the proverbial watercooler at work, that this would end a lot like Stannis's attempted siege of King's Landing. I think it was conveniently written into character motivations where it didn't quite make sense otherwise. As it is, I think Sansa had known for some time that she wanted an ace up her sleeve that Jon couldn't know about and therefore fuck up. Since there's apparently several portals in key locations this season (I love that people actually arrive at their destinations now, but time and distance is starting to lose meaning), I'm assuming Littlefinger and his posse didn't storm in as they actually arrived -- I bet that's where Sansa rode off to in a hurry after delivering the only real good burn of the eve-of-battle faceoff with Ramsay, she went to wherever the troops were hidden. She kept insisting that Ramsay would set a trap, so my guess is she decided to keep the extra army a secret so that they could be deployed once the trap revealed itself (the phalanx), and not before. I bet the extra men didn't make up for the numbers disadvantage, because they were so under-manned to begin with, and had they added Littlefinger's men to the ranks from the beginning they still would have been beaten. If that was what she was thinking, it was a solid plan and brilliant Sansa strategizing, which I want to believe in because I love her (and Sophie Turner has been killing it this season)...but it would predicate on Sansa knowing for some time that Jon was going to fuck this up, and she couldn't even tell him about the potential Hail Mary reinforcements because he would just bungle it, and she could run the battle better. Which...maybe? Jon has been fairly obviously checked out since being resurrected, to us the viewer, but they haven't seen each other for years and fighting has never been in her wheelhouse (even from a strategic standpoint), so it's hard for me to believe she could realistically be so perceptive and so confident she could pull it off. All of that suspension of disbelief aside, I loved this episode, and it had me so keyed up I had a hard time falling asleep afterwards. I was convinced that Jon was going to prevail, but that Ramsay was going to, like, shoot Sansa from afar (with his frankly insane and infuriating archery prowess -- no way he should have been able to get Rickon like that from so far away, even as a practiced people-hunter) before retreating. So happy we got to see Ramsay not only die at last, but on Sansa's terms. It was very clear that Jon saved the kill for her. And with that, I might actually keep watching this show until the end! This is actually the first season since S2 that I've watched all the way through. I nope-d out of all the previous ones partway through due to Ramsay, who I think is a terrible villain (and not in a good way), both in the show and in the source material. I'm sure gratuitous torture will prevail throughout the rest of the series, but I bet none will piss me off as much as good ol' one-dimensional nearly-invincible Ramsay.

I'm mean-spirited; I got a kick out of watching the dude go home without a single Tiki Bar lady. This is why, as an adult man, you don't call yourself "Stevie".

Maybe I'm being overly generous to Below Deck: Mothership but -- they didn't do nearly as much drunken unofficial performance reviews, did they? First Hannah with Tiffany in like episode one, now this shit with Bryan getting all aggro and handsy with Danny. He's probably trying to bait Danny into doing something mega-fireable (after the Tilted Kilt charter, I don't even know what that would be -- hitting Bryan, I guess?). But it looks like literally no one is bringing anything to the Captain, except for Ben's poorly executed CYA maneuver. I doubt Jen does literally anything else well, but she was an excellent audience surrogate tonight.

Damn, Thomas must have one hell of an understanding with Whitney/TPTB to so carefully avoid saying "dude's clearly shitfaced/high". Every single cast member deliberately talks around it. It's infuriating, yet mesmerizing to watch. I guffawed when Landon said that the only problem with dating Thomas was Kathryn's existence. Not that he's old enough to be her father and will guzzle/snort anything you put in front of him. I totally want to see him cross over into RHoNY and date Dorinda, though. The shit they would angrily slur at each other!

That was forty minutes of frustration with a big payoff in the last five minutes. I was getting so weary with the Chet invasion, and Rachel moping and staring balefully at pill bottles with her mommy issues being too blatantly and repeatedly trotted out. I think my dissatisfaction with this season, especially 90% of this episode specifically, wasn't the show's fault (at least not mostly). This has been a bad couple of weeks, news-wise, and all this real life hatred has really beaten me down, so I really couldn't with the wall-to-wall unpleasantness that this show is basically all about. But beyond that, it did feel like something has been off so far this season. The Quinn/Chet show-off didn't really make sense, even within the lax boundaries of this show's universe, and it felt like all the nastiness kicked off too quickly and wasn't really giving us anything that different from season one. As the episode was winding down, I was thinking that the show needed some new unknown entity to deal with. We already know the deal with Chet, Quinn, Rachel and Jeremy, and there's nothing really new in how they battle and align with each other. And just like that, it looks like we're back to having one show, and we have this new showrunner to try and figure out. And now I'm excited! Also, Everblasting, even in the early 00's with Temptation Island and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, is way too ridiculous and trashy for TV. It was a Girls Gone Wild commercial at best. I loved Chet in the first season, for his storylines and occasional comic relief, plus the actor does a great job with him, but I think he might completely exhaust me this year.

I can't decide if Chad is a plant or not. I mean, are Bachelor producers really unReal levels of evil and reckless? Since he hadn't gone beyond a fairly tame push and issuing verbal threats, I could maybe see why they didn't pull him in the name of drama. But making the date include "hey, here's a hatchet, go chop some stuff" was baffling. I suppose it's possible that when they do the whole dramatic "abandon the 2:1 date loser at the site of the date" thing, they typically keep the loser there for a while to film interviews, it seemed super implausible that they would just let the guy seethe back to where the guys are, a literal cabin in the woods. My thinking is if this happened where women were the ones being threatened - if he was stalking towards JoJo's cabin rather than the guys, or this had happened on Bachelor in Paradise or something - the network and show would have to answer for it, and explain if they were creating a storyline or had been reckless in the name of good ("good") TV. I'm guessing no one's going to get too riled about this, unless actual major violence goes down next episode, and we'll never really know. I think we still haven't seen whatever caused a man's shirt being absolutely covered in blood that they kept teasing was coming up this season. My guess is it's a red herring and Chad doesn't cause it, maybe it's an accident from some future date. Also, is it just me or are the Bachelorettes (or production, anyway) into increasingly aggressive guys? I feel like Kaitlyn's season also included a lot of "beat the shit out of each other" full-contact group dates. Don't get me wrong, if I had a couple dozen guys in a pack to choose from, I'd want at least one hot dirtbag type (there's an Inside Amy Schumer sketch that is so me, where she's Weird Science-ing a dream guy and wants a guy who's all like, sensitive and sweet and enlightened, but fucks like an ex-con). But really only one, not half of them. Also, I forget who it was, but the really forgettable guy in hour 1 uttered the word "misogyny" when he was dressing Chad down and it blew my mind.

I shouldn't have watched this episode like an hour after seeing the CNN video of Ashleigh Banford reading the Stanford rape victim's letter and bawling my eyes out. The hot tub thing made me perhaps disproportionately ragey. Also, Bryan has no profile; when the camera catches him from the side his nose and cheekbones are basically flat. He's just a buttchin with blonde hair. The editors clearly like to cast chief stews that are going to be polarizing - though for the record, I liked Adrienne and love Kate - but Hannah went from bitchy to inept. The way she just hovered anxiously asking Julia what to do boggled my mind. Kebabs are simple to throw together, Danny was there and seemed capable enough of at least stirring whatever caramel or whatever it was Ben had going for dessert and making sure nothing burned, and Ben offered to do it. Bullshitting your way around a mistake, be it yours or the kitchen's, is kinda service 101. Grab the guests some drink refills, vamp through the delay, and bring them the next course. She wasted a ton of time and telegraphed the mistake to the guests when there was no need to. Next week looks good. Ready to see the Captain have to deal with personnel issues since he's been a complete non-factor the past couple episodes.

I have so many thoughts. This episode was basically Fear, without the fun of fingerbanging on a roller coaster. Mostly I thought it was weird, but telling, how the whole "Chad is toxic masculinity personified and is totally going to beat someone to death, probably while eating deli meat" storyline boiled down to the boys fearing for their safety. There was also a thread of the guys smugly pouring lighter fluid on the flames to get the guy eliminated as an act of gamesmanship. Why was JoJo's safety, and the concern that in theory she could end up in a relationship with a guy who has rapidly devolved into a Lifetime movie villain, not ever even really mentioned in passing? Why did JoJo herself never mention that she found those facets of his personality troubling because it could turn violent, and it could turn violent with her? After Caitlyn's season where the show at least tried to pretend it was woke, defending her from oodles of slut-shaming, it seemed odd to focus so much on how uncomfortable the guys were with not even a passing mention of concern for JoJo. Paternalistic over-protective bullshit oozes out of every other pore of the show, but when actual serious issues approach, concern over the supposed star of the show fall by the wayside. Other things I noticed: - The terrible sex-themed standup (was it maybe a podcast live show or something?) proved that JoJo and the guys don't know what the word "kinky" means. - Daniel's tale of cutting a girl's hair against her wishes during bondage play....what in the everloving fuck was that. Poor JoJo, all her guys either have the exact same haircut and lack of personality, or they're going to turn her into a lampshade. - Chad's claims of being bullied was a new low of reality show contestants/participants drastically misusing the word. Worse than Kelly Bensimon. - At one point in hour 1, Chad wandered somewhere he probably thought was off-camera to mutter ragily to himself, and called Evan "Gary Oldman from the Fifth Element". I'm going to miss him when he's bounced tomorrow night and the guys probably ask Chris Harrison to sentence him to lethal injection. That was a really untimely, random, and completely hysterically accurate pull on his part. - The opacity surrounding production in this episode was interesting. They have security stationed - it was also odd that they didn't ask Chad his thoughts on it in a 1:1 - but Evan feels the need to engage Chris Harrison, who then spontaneously decides to "handle it". Many seasons prior, when one of the girls on the Bachelor slept with a producer, the fourth wall completely shattered. It would have been more interesting to have Chris or JoJo narrate what the show does when physical contact (without actual injury) and threats of violence occur.

In fairness, I'm not pitching that the actual Bachelor/ette do this, but that it would be an interesting spin on the show-within-a-show. Isn't it almost better if there are some spectacular disasters along the way, and/or it's a failed experiment? I'm not rooting for Everlasting the show to succeed, I'm in it for the exploration of Rachel and Quinn's relationship. I could see Rachel as a showrunner pitching this, since prides herself on her liberalism...despite the fact that she's participating in really harmful behavior and perpetuating stereotypes. I'd personally like to see Everlasting continuing to be the setpiece for Unreal, but it would probably get a little stale if they kept the format the same. I'm also not super interested in seeing a bunch of male contestants vying for a Suitorette; Season 1 showed that these writers are great at writing women in competition with each other. A lesbian or bi Suitorette, or a trans Suitor, could keep women in the mix as contestants while exploring new themes and conflicts. On a sidenote, dating shows with these sorts of premises have already existed. And while I would trust/hope the writing staff of Unreal to have a field day with all kinds of scandalous behavior and turn the whole thing into a dumpster fire, should ABC actually go there, I think a LGBT edition of the real franchise would be entertaining and would be as successful as the other seasons (as in, the majority of seasons don't have a happy ending). Maybe a few would click more with each other than the bachelor/ette, but a lot of the field would have their game faces on, knowing a good edit, other reality show stints, and $$$ for shilling detox teas on Instagram are on the line.

Yay!! Personally, I would love to see a season 3 with a lesbian, bisexual, or trans Suitorette.

Did anyone else see that in Lu's phone, Bethenny is spelled "Bethany"???? I'm hoping it wasn't a very specific sort of stroke I just had, and it really happened, because it was glorious.

Part of me likes that the guys who get dumped in the villa phase go home - it would kind of mess up the format of the show otherwise - and part of me is sad there isn't a way to have these dudes at the villa when their previous match comes in with a new helicopter drop guy. But that's an itch that Bachelor in Paradise already scratches. Most of these people I'm pretty indifferent towards, but the show's still a perfectly pleasant thing to watch on Hulu while I'm getting other things done around the house. Kristin's the only one I'm really rooting for, because she seems to have retained her common sense instead of just speaking in dating show platitudes. She looks just like Taylor Shilling! I think Girl Alex had a tearful meltdown after BT (wisely) didn't pick her at the tiki bar because she loves the cameras and is trying to self-produce a storyline, of course, but I bet it crossed her mind that with a relatively diverse cast of women around her, the likelihood of any other guy coming out of that helicopter being a white, rightwing military vet is pretty close to nil. I'm pretty much crossing my fingers that she ends the season matchless.

This was a pretty joyless filler episode for me. Captain Mark's gonna need to put the tweezers away and get started firing, because my interest is completely waning. Danny is still really giving me the wiggins. There's just something about him that's really unnerving to me, which might be harsh, but...he clearly thinks he's saying all the right things to project himself as a team-player and extroverted people pleaser that charter guests will be endlessly charmed by. And it's not just that his bullshit is super transparent and feeble, it's also just really off, like he's doing his very best to fake being normal, not just faking being competent at his job. Also the fact that his idea of a scathing insult against Bobby is that he's got a "tampon in his pussy" speaks volumes about the sad little MRA he must be.

I can't really remember it either, maybe it'll get a mention in the recap tomorrow -- I think it was when he was shit-talking the other guys with Daniel, and he said something like "I mean, if you were going to make a protein shake with one of those guys, what would it even taste like", or something equally asinine, to try and compare the guys' personalities to shake flavors. Seems like Chad in general wants us to be well aware he's hitting up GNC on the reg.

Maybe Rob Kazinksy? Dude from True Blood and Pacific Rim and etc. That's who I was getting a whiff of.

Chad is the only thing saving this season for me, which is too bad, because I'm sure his Crossfit American Psycho edit has only a couple weeks left in it. Almost all of these guys look like somebody took Henry Cavill's gene pool and severely watered it down. I swear half of them have the exact same hair. Just a sea of generic white guys with brown hair and severe bone structure and the worst personalities. I'm living for Chad, though. First of all, I've never known a sane, likeable Chad, so the consistency is good. And the bizarre protein shake metaphor he tried to make happen in the first hour gave me life. And the menacing rose ceremony snacking!! Who knew someone could eat so evilly. He's a gift.

Bethenny is a nightmare person but I hope she stays on the show until its dying breath. She's like Brandi Glanville, but with receipts. And I have to admit, I totally identify with her unstoppable giggles when Luann said she was trying to mentor Sonja. And the way you can see her literally buzzing with electricity when she knows it's time to rip someone a new asshole, it's something to see. I'd never want to be in a room with her, but she's settling back in after filming a lot on her lonesome last season, and she helps stop this arm of the franchise from turning into Beverly Hills -- she self-produces in a way that makes the episodes exciting, by picking fights she knows she can win, rather than some of the other women both on this show and in other cities that try to self-produce to avoid certain topics being brought up.

This entire crew is a mess of largely unlikeable characters. I miss OG Below Deck, where Captain Lee's crotchety reactions to all this stupidity and incompetence would've been at the very least super entertaining. It seems like they cast the bosun every season to be an off-putting misogynist/sexual harrassment suit waiting to happen. The way he was hitting on Tiffany made me full-body shudder. Danny really unsettles me. I'm definitely getting an Elliot Rodgers vibe from him, could be just a very slight physical resemblance, but the way he sees situations and interacts with women crosses over from childish/pathetic to something kinda disordered and really not right.

My theory with Pavlok dude: he's very real, but his whole thing is selling people on him/his products through intentional controversy and stunts. Exhibit A: http://mashable.com/2012/10/20/maneesh-facebook-slap/#bmt_3VBgZmq8 If you Google him, it's all a rehashing of him as an Internet entreprenuer, best-selling author, and "you may know me as the guy who hired a girl to slap him". I'm betting if the Shark Tank producers had even a little Google-fu when Maneesh applied, they knew exactly what sort of segment they were in store for, and Maneesh got just what he wanted out. Little surprised he didn't throw a fit on Twitter about Cuban's (correct) reiterations that he's a con-artist, though, I looked the guy up because I kinda expected to see him throw a litigious tantrum about slander or whatever. On PMS Bites: I was glad that most of the sharks were quick to counteract that "you're eliminating 50% of the market, won't someone think of the men!!!" argument with the point that it gave her an edge in an overcrowded space. But I couldn't stop thinking about how no one pointed out the useless gendering of other products they get pitched, like those toilet wipes for men, because it's marketing towards men and not women. I did think, though, that the name was a little lame and also unnecessarily limiting. Why not make the company woman-centric in general, and offer different "bites" with different health/energy advantages? You could have a PMS range, a pregnancy craving range, etc.

These aren't necessarily my all-time favorites of those seasons (minus the winners), but I think I'd watch the hell out of all these girls competing and reading each other, plus a good mix of queens who have great looks, performance/acting skills, or could lip synch the hell out of people. Season 5: Alaska, Alyssa, Roxxxy Season 6: April Carrion, DeLa, Milk, Darienne Season 7: Katya, Kennedy Davenport Season 8: Thorgy, Cynthia Lee Fontaine, Acid Betty