NJRadioGuy

@Skooma, I found that Series 1 was uneven and like you, I really didn't like a number of the characters, but by mid Series 2 the characters have found their footing and have become much more interesting. Yes, Thomas is skeevy, but for a 19th century poet that would be in character. My least favourite ghost initially was Mary but even she's grown on me as the show progresses. The only character I truly dislike is Allison's husband, Mike. He's an utter idiot and played as if he has the IQ of a small soap dish. He's not fun to watch and contributes very little positive energy to the show. Jay is the anti-Mike. A talented chef and a really cool guy. I'm currently midway through Series 4 (I watch one a week) and it absolutely gets better IMHO. What I find is the more sentimental episodes are done better by the British ensemble, but the U.S. (well, technically the Canadian) version's cast is more well-rounded. I enjoy them both for what they are.

The technical advisor for this show must have taken the day off. A small car like that weighs very little (comparatively speaking) and could be easily secured to the far side of the bridge, or even dragged away from the precipice. Figure about 3500 pounds spread across 20 people, less if there's a snatch block pulley or two (for a double or triple-line pull) if someone on the scene had one. But even if not, the lines and chain would have easily sturdied that load, and they could have easily cut up some timber for cribbing if they didn't have any on the truck that they could bring. There are tie-down points under every vehicle to secure it to the ship, car-carrier, or train car. Many cars (but not all) also have rated recovery points on the back. Also sirens have loud public address modules, so switch the siren into PA and order the car in front to move over, lather rinse, repeat. A bunch of ridiculous and useless plot points in furtherance of some less-bad family dynamics.

Is his middle name "Sandor" by any chance? Does he like hounds (or chicken)? His backstory is very much like one of the most tragic anti-heroes from Game of Thrones, Sandor Clegane, known as The Hound. (see below) From the GoT Wiki: Sandor is the younger brother of Ser Gregor Clegane. In his youth, Gregor nearly burned off half of Sandor's face because he found Sandor playing with a toy that Gregor had discarded. Without warning or uttering a word, however, Gregor grabbed Sandor and "punished" him by holding his head into a burning brazier. Gregor was only forced to stop after half a dozen servants managed to pry him away from his brother. The incident left severe burn scars over the right half of Sandor's face, thus he usually wears his hair long on that side to cover them. Instead of blaming Gregor, their father merely stated Sandor's bed caught fire. Ever since, Sandor has been deeply afraid of fire.

Well that was a mostly-depressing hour of television. Since there are only three episodes I'll stick it out, but if this was an ongoing open-ended story I think I'd be ready to bail. For as much as they do great world-building, the story has become tedious and at times difficult to follow. Plus out of however many billions of people who have died through the millennia, we only see this small group, and they easily find two dead characters amongst them after barely searching (well, one finds them). The HDM Shark has been jumped as far as I'm concerned. I just want to see the end and then forget how much time I wasted on this.

Seconded, but to add insult to ursine injury, it was the wrong type of bear! You won't find grizzlies in Quebec or the northeastern US, just run-of-the-mill Chonky TrashBlimps™ (a.k.a. American Black Bears). Just honk the horn or turn on the siren and it would have bolted off, right quick fast and in a hurry. But I guess there aren't many trained bears with SAG-AFTRA cards out there so they had to take what they could get. And while there are brown-furred black bears, this wasn't one of them; you can tell a grizz by the hump over their shoulders.

It really needs work. The awkward slapstick crap is starting to wear thin. Play it more as a light-hearted drama than a neither-fish-nor-fowl dramedy. Like "The Rookie" but at a law firm. The fundamental characters in the show are good but there are cringeworthy, awkward scenes in every episode that turn me right off.

Question for Montrealers. It's been over 40 years since I lived there and I can't recognize the building used as the supposed headquarters of the SQ. The aerial shot of the Jacques Cartier Bridge looking downtown would make sense since the real-life SQ headquarters building is very close to that bridge. But the one used in the show is somewhere up near St. Joseph's Oratory near Côte-des-Neiges and Queen Mary, east of the Décarie Expressway. Note that in French, Queen Mary would be....Reine-Marie! Speaking of place names, I can't believe the Penny (ahem) didn't drop with the series filming location that I posted the other day. The stories of Armand Gamache are filmed in Saint Armand!

Real-life ones as well. However they are filled with ballistic gel (not water )that slows the projectile down and allows it to retain its form-on-impact.

Well since you don't see him for most of the episodes you can assume he's doing DDC stuff then, but I agree maybe showing him being interrupted during a Very Serious Discussion to respond to a fire not in 51s response area would be realistic, or have his car not in the apparatus bay all the time. And why doesn't he have a driver? Dunno if it's actual policy in Chicago, but in a lot of bigger departments, battalion chiefs have a chauffeur so they can work the radio, lookup CIDS information or perform other time-critical tasks while enroute. Yes, yes, I know--one more expensive cast member on the show if they did.

I actually like the fact Severide is good with arson investigation. Some folks really do have the knack for it (I knew one such person many years ago). But let's say TPTB decide to make him a full-time arson investigator. What do they do with him onscreen to make him still visible? OFI is based out of HQ so how do you keep the star of the show in every episode? All I can think of is they give him a satellite office in 51 to be a field investigator since so many suspicious fires seem to be in 51's response area. That would also open up another LT spot (Squad).

I'm originally from Montreal (now living in NJ) but I never heard of these books before. What a welcome surprise! I'm only halfway through the series as I write this and for me the second story, The Caretaker, is the better of the two. When I lived in Québec as a child I'd never heard of the residential school scandal and wasn't exposed to much in the way of First Nations stories and as such I find the subject just heartbreaking. I'm of Irish descent, and reading about the Magdaline Laundries in Ireland evoked the same outrage and horror. My one quibble is that I wish the dialog had mostly been in French (with English subtitles), using Québecois actors. I felt the same way with the former CTV/TVA production of Montreal police procedural 12-2 (IIRC the first season is also on Amazon Prime Video). I'm a huge fan of the Nordic Noir genre, and the fact those shows are filmed in Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian only adds to the mystique and charm of each of the productions. The small incidental bits of French here are most welcome indeed.

It's in the credits; the town of St-Armand, about a mile north of the Vermont-Québec border, in fact. https://www.google.com/maps/@45.0325976,-73.0438941,3a,90y,170.46h,88.98t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sScPa_z5jmb4dtx4uxcJZDA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Yep. I lived on Fresh Pond Rd. for five years!

Note to the writers: Police cars' back doors only open from the outside. Just sayin'.

This week it pulled a 0.36 in the target demo, which is very definitely middle-of-the-pack. It beat the CMA Awards, but L&O SVU won the timeslot at 0.59. A decent chance the show sticks around, but the Demo numbers are trending down. https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/so-help-me-todd-season-one-ratings/

Agreed. He's always been the show's force for good so it's about time something nice happened in his life. Hopefully this really is the end of both Choi and April on the show. Now if only we could ship Halstead off to Peru to join his brother. I'm sure they could use a combat medic down there. Here's hoping they can settle the cast down a bit now.

Felony Barbie at her finest. I think she's fully aware that she's already turned to the Dark Side and I believe she's very comfortable with that decision. Now all she needs to do is put some feminine touches on the torture cage in the basement. Meanwhile Voight has been defanged and has been growing a conscience. For as much as I rag on her normally, I think Tracy did a decent job with this storyline and in this episode. Her one expression worked perfectly with Sean in that one-on-one scene. I'll confess I didn't foresee Patty killing himself; I figured he'd whack his evil spawn son and turn himself in to Hank. I actually liked the father, to be honest. Guess we need yet another new Chief now. They don't seem to have longevity in the post.

That bridge rescue call. I was laughing out loud in what was a very, very nice homage to a certain 1980 film starring Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. Even down to the tight shot of the gears turning. As for the ending, all I gotta say is "Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of Martucci....has been approved."

Frank had the right idea with that smirking coward. At first I thought foot patrol in the Bronx, or midnights in Transit, but both those require actual police skills. Motor pool or evidence room are far better, with a guarantee he'll never get promoted and his career is now a dead-end. Modified Duty (aka the Rubber Gun Squad--where they actually strip a sworn officer of his gun, with no right to access any police resources) is a good place for this clown. Anthony's storyline made no sense. He's Mr. Law-and-Order (with a capital Dunh-Dunh). His reaction was out of character. Eddie and Badillo getting a police boat to escort the young lady was cute but dumb. Especially in dress blues. I expected them to do what they did (because TV) but that was just too over the top. And I laughed at how, in the closing shot, the Statue of Liberty was screen left, and the character walked to the far side of the boat, away from it. I still can't resist getting a complete eyeful whenever I ride the ferry across to S.I.

When it comes to network broadcasts, if you don't have a Nielsen Box there is absolutely nothing you can do that will affect the actual ratings. Think of it like a political poll during election season. If you never answer poll phone calls or they never call you, nothing you can do will influence the poll numbers. Pollsters have a complex formula that simulates the responses of a large swath of targeted voters by only polling about 2000-2500 people. Same with ratings. There are estimated to be about 42,000 homes and 120,000 TV sets within those homes. Their sample heavily researched for various census factors and those 42k homes represent about 122 million households (including yours and mine). There's a really good article here on how it all works. The article mentions that C3 was supposed to have been replaced earlier this year but I don't know if that's come into effect yet or not. I'm not in the industry so I don't know all the ins and outs. Now, if a Nielsen device household TV displays the ads in the show then 100% that counts. For SVOD (streaming video on-demand) services, I believe they can tell the number minutes watched and the number of commercial minutes displayed, but not for cable or OTA linear broadcasts on network television.

What really surprised me was why Alex would use the punishment pass for going bowling when the actual punishment wasn't hideous. That's definitely something you use for garbage day, delivery day, or cleaning up confetti/etc, or when the reward is a trip to Vegas or something truly spectacular. Bowling? Really??

If the gun was planted post-mortem the only way he'd have even a little GSR on his hand would be if a second shot was fired with the doer's hand kinda-sorta around the vic's--which would be heard by neighbors and thus a giveaway to investigators. But even then there would be very little residue on the vic's hands, so...red flag. The projectile's angle of entry would also be a telltale clue that the M.E.'s examination would have revealed the next day . Obviously the perp shot him from a distance (hence no stippling) and likely at a higher angle than if he was sitting in a chair or sofa. Sloppy work from an ex-detective, to be honest. But you know what they say, crime makes you stupid.

Just check the overnights from showbuzzdaily.com. No, it's very much still the case. Only those with Neilsen devices can have *any* impact on a show's performance. The key thing to remember with ratings is the networks themselves don't really care how a show does directly from a creativity standpoint. They care about how much they can sell advertising time for. Media buyers will pay X dollars for Y audience numbers in the demographic that they (often mistakenly) believe are the most susceptible to their commercials. If I had $250,000 to spend on advertising my company between 8pm and 11pm on Thursday night, I would seek out the strongest shows in each half hour. Ads within those shows would cost more than in shows with crappier ratings. They're there for apples-to-apples comparisons essentially. A show could have 50 million viewers who record and watch the show on DVR within a week, but if every single one of them zaps the commercials with the 30" jump button, the advertisers are paying for no viewers. Why should "I" spend my $250,000 to have nobody watch my ad, even though the audience is wild about the show I'm paying to produce? C3 ratings measure those who DVR shows but play them back with commercials intact, as well as those who watch the show live-to-air. Live-plus-seven-day or L+35 or L+whatever is meaningless in terms of the decision to renew or cancel a show, although it does provide for interesting trends and demographics. But if a show is regularly pulling 0.2 or less in C3 on CBS, NBC, ABC, or FOX it's deader than a doornail come the spring. Ten years ago a 1.0 rating in the key demo would be so low that not only would the show get cancelled but no further episodes would be aired after that overnight. Today, that 1.0 rating would be a guaranteed renewal and would command extremely high ad rates. Think "One Chicago" and "Young Sheldon" here, among a few others. As more eyeballs gravitate to streaming services, the share of viewers staying on linear TV's scripted shows grows smaller and smaller each season. As C3 and C7 numbers fall, the networks can't justify the price of a 15 or 30 second spot on any given show to the people buying the ads for GM, Ford, P&G, etc. Less income per episode = more cost cutting, usually in terms of shorter seasons (18 episodes is the new 22), big-name stars getting "killed off" or written out of the show, shallower production values or just outright cancellation. Old/expensive shows have to justify their high salaries a lot more than fresh new series--especially those with unknown stars. Of course, they need to be able to sell the show in syndication to Netflix or Amazon, etc, so occasionally they'll prop up a current series to boost episode count to get more for it on the back end. A good summary can be found here. Bookmark this link to check and see how your favourite show did the previous night.

Could be for playing back tape of old interviews or local musicians who are Very Old School. Or as electronic eye candy :)

Yep, from ST:TOS. Security officers wore red uniforms, and were usually the first ones offed in landing parties. Surprisingly, the ad agency for a certain healthcare provider didn't quite understand what redshirt means in pop culture, leading to this...unfortunate billboard.