JTM

This is not a great take. And the compliments don't improve it. It's really very diminishing to assume or imply that someone's presence is stunt-casting, and you're contributing to an environment in which people have to deal with that all the time. Sura is obviously competent to be there. Why not assume she was simply included on that basis, as presumably the rest of them were.

Like others, I started weighing "step-dad or pastor" as soon as the pregnancy was revealed. And that peeved me off, even though I should know better by now. It was just so... cheap and easy. Instead of what could have been an interesting, nuanced episode -- perhaps looking at the weird irony that a 13 year old isn't old enough to consent to her body participating in sex with a 16 year old boyfriend, but has jurisdiction over whether her body participates in pregnancy -- we got STARK OBVIOUS girl-was-raped-by-stepdad, everyone with an ounce of compassion recognizes the validity of her choice. Shows like this are one reason why actual choice as a simple right is under attack -- because the validity gets located in the circumstances.

Ya, I know. What I didn't understand is the poster noting Jay was sent home, and then hoping the CBC wouldn't 'go all pc on the winners'. Like, is the poster peeved that a white fellow was sent home? It seemed pretty obvious he would be -- he had a really rough go this week.

What does even mean?

Sounds to me like the OP was scared it might default, as such things often do, into being a limited exploration of a complex artistic genre -- concentrating on those who took the genre 'mainstream' at the expense of the stories of those whose traditions served as its building blocks. If that possibility didn't concern you, as it did the OP, that might be because you don't usually have to fear being left out of broad-strokes American cultural storytelling.

ENOUGH, two weeks in a row, of emotionally manipulative "babies are magical" barely veiled anti-choice rhetoric. Two weeks in a row, Benson provocatively sentimentalizing pregnancies that are inherently fraught in ways that simply erases their fraughtness, automatically privileging fetus over mother. This is not a critique of one side or the other of a deeply emotional issue. I would be just as angry if St. Benson was provocatively challenging these women "are you SURE you want carry that baby, what with the RAPE and all???" This is a critique of the show for deliberate exploitation, via inserting emotional propaganda that does not belong there into a program that is theoretically about characters' engagement with police and the legal system. There could easily be a storyline that challenges current laws, if for whatever reason the producers wanted there to be. This emotional exploitation instead is cheap and it's disgusting.

They don't. Even if there were still orphanages, which in Canada at least there aren't, newborns don't fall through the cracks. If they're not immediately adopted, it's usually because they're being fostered very specifically TOWARD the birth mother being able to parent them.

Good remembering! Still pretty implausible though. MANY newborn infants have heart murmurs -- my first son had one 25 years ago -- and the protocol at the time was "let it be, check it in six months, most of them heal on their own". It's far from being a major issue, generally speaking (and clearly wasn't, if Jo's wasn't 'corrected' until she was three), but I'd submit that the adoption-desperation for newborns, and especially a newborn with no presenting parents, would have been huge enough anyway that she'd have been adopted. I think it was a miss by the writers. As, to some degree, from a different angle, was the Betty story. Placing an infant for adoption is all-too-rarely the mother's actual choice. Often it's deeply fraught. If anything, Jo's story with this set-up should have been an example of a best-possible scenario.

One thing I don't get about Jo's story. Healthy newborn infant. I don't care if she 'handed over to an adoption agency' or left on the steps of a fire station -- no healthy newborn infant is spending more time in foster care than it takes for the next couple lined up for adoption to sign the papers. I'm in Canada, but I can't believe it's so different here. Healthy newborn infant with NO presenting parents, no grieving mother just waiting to be released from prison, or grieving teenager who changes her mind -- that baby's adopted in a heartbeat.

I can't even with Benson's outrage at being stopped and questioned and asked to step out of the car when she indicated she was carrying a weapon. "But but but my son was in the car, and he was hysterical." Cry me a river, toots. Pulled over for a dubious reason and then hassled into a reaction that 'warrants' ratcheting things up? Welcome to the world for a whole lot of people. Regularly. And they don't just get to call their chief.

Every week I think they've made Olivia as unbearable as humanly possible... and then they keep topping it.

They made the eggless version, which uses corn syrup instead of egg.

I can't imagine they're forced to participate. And to be fair, they don't all have to have the exact same political viewpoint generally speaking to be reactive to the past two years -- which has less to do with policies than it does with tone.

I've completely blocked out who married them... but this drives me NUTS. It's the person who officiates who sends in the legal documents. NOT the couple. Unless US law or some states' laws are completely different from Canada, it's NEVER the couple that's responsible for sending in the signed docs. Believe me, we as officiants know how easily it would get forgotten. That's why it's part of our job. Ugh.

This is straight out of the book. The heiress Miss Schwartz is West Indian. It was rather a 'thing' at that time, for the wealthy often-mixed-lineage daughters of colonial plantation owners to be educated in England in the hopes of snaring a high-end-but-poorish husband.

I also found it weird that it was sort of implied it was connected to the incel thing, because it was very specifically targeting women for their professional success in male-dominated fields.

Foyle's War -- My absolute favourite, hand's down. The whole cast, the history of it, fantastic. And I too loved that our MI6 Hilda was in Endeavour too!

I'm a little ashamed at how annoyed I was by that poor little girl, particularly since she doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of "I'm good at thinking long term" parenting. But honestly, as a (mostly) reformed (ish) nail-biter, my heart broke every time I saw her hands go to her mouth. Whatever she's presenting up front, she's got some big sads going on inside.

I just want to quietly point out that there was no such thing as a Jewish collaborator in Nazi Germany. The occupied zones certainly had locals who collaborated -- for a variety of reasons, from vile to expedient -- but there was no way to mitigate Jewishness. No Jewish person could merely opt to be corrupt, horrible, evil, and 'get' to collaborate. Many things are nuanced. Nazi policy with regard to Jewishness was not.

I'm looking forward to the second half, which I'll certainly watch -- but I'd hoped to fall in love, and I haven't as yet. These books were truly formative for me, so I did have high hopes. I do like how closely they're staying to the book, because that's a huge pet peeve of mine. But something isn't ringing quite right as yet. Others have mentioned a lack of warmth, and maybe that's it. One thing is for sure -- I think it would have benefited from being longer with a slower pace. There was something frenetic about chapter after chapter whipping by in vignettes. It seemed to lose its heart in all the action. Updating language (mellow out) is weird. Far better to let the book be what it is -- and to let the subtext be reflected so that the characters feel real, as the new Anne did.

SNL tends to 'seize on' whatever tv shows are popular/current for their show parodies. Since I don't watch most of those other shows, I don't necessarily get the jokes, but I see the references in forums like this one. So doing a Handmaid's Tale sketch is sufficiently in their wheelhouse not to be evidence of some kind of focused gynocentric conspiracy. That said, I'm not sure that women who are viscerally fearful of having their bodies controlled by government qualifies as a 'niche audience'. I'd write more about how Handmaid's Tale is indeed a dystopic work of futuristic fiction, and not meant to represent reality, but I gotta go read the news. I've heard that some state legislatures have been super-productive lately! Gotta keep up!

I think it must be quite wearying for people of colour to see actors who look like them actually included as the ordinary Britons they are in the casting of British tv shows... only to have even the concept that they might actually just BE ordinary Britons extra-dismissed by the addition of snark about manufactured diversity.

I didn't get that sense at all. There wasn't a whole lot of drama -- both homeowners were doubtful about the rooms as they were working on them, and then both of them really did hate their own rooms.

It's worth remembering that British actors get work even when they look like normal people. Good work, regular work, even lots of work.

I agree. I think what we're actually seeing -- and we're experiencing how dispiriting I suspect it was for many -- is the actual changes on the ground in Poplar.