marybennet

Just read a really good piece in Slate about The Staircase (https://slate.com/culture/2022/06/staircase-finale-hbo-michael-peterson-murder.html) by someone called Flannery Dean, and she thinks that in the last episode the inaudible thing Kathleen is saying is "Why didn't you help me?" That's great, I think.

I'm terrible at reading lips but that's what I thought she said. That's what I thought, too: "Why didn't you tell me?" but this time more angrily. That is, I thought the first time was the way his narcissistic fantasy of her would say it (in a way that says it's ok, worried about him) but the second version seemed like the way a "real" Kathleen might have said it--still possibly somebody who might have been accepting of his bisexuality but who'd be mad that he kept this huge secret. I really liked the show's filing out of the figure of Kathleen. Partly that's the wonderful Toni Collette, but it's also that she seemed to be written out of the effects of that woman on that family. The Kathleen the show portrayed was full of life and warmth. She loved her pleasures (bath and dancing and alcohol and sex and social life and family), and she seemed like the center that held all those disparate people together. And her visible stress seemed like a reasonable response to being the person who has to hold everything together. And the extent to which the family spun out after her death--and after the way she died--speaks to the centrifugal force of who she was alive. True or not in the world, I don't know, but I think the show wrote a plausible and sympathetic account of her as a person alive and not just the absent victim.

I was quiet back then--still pretty quiet online, in fact--but I was a TWoPer, too, when Linda was Miss Alli, writing Amazing Race recaps. TWoP was great. And...something about Top Chef. Maybe that I miss recaps as a thing and sort of wish we had them for Top Chef. They were a way of seeing if somebody else interpreted an episode (or a raised eyebrow or a snicker) the way you did.

Gotta Love Pop Culture Happy Hour! They are so thoughtful about everything, while having a good time thinking. I really appreciated them and their account of Top Chef.

The Pack Your Knives podcast episode about the finale had Sarah Welch on as a guest after the hosts (Tom Habberstroh and Kevin Arnovitz) discussed the show. She was nice, smart, insightful, interesting. I think the people who found her irritating might find her more appealing than they expected. I did.

All that food looked so beautiful! Buddha’s leaves were amazing. I wanted to eat every one of those dishes. And I’m looking forward to finding a way to try Evelyn’s food in Houston. This was a lovely season. Just finished watching, and I’m still a little weepy from Buddha’s phone call.

I thought Evelyn’s wheelhouse—what she cooks professionally—is South Asian food.

Standing here in my wrongness and being wrong.

Local story about Evelyn a day or two ago. Makes me nervous she'll be out this week. I want to be wrong! I will celebrate my wrongness if I am wrong!

That seems right. But I also think that, then as now, people watched cooking shows for the pleasure of watching them and not always because they are going to go cook what they see being cooked. I think tv was slow to learn that, but it did, which is why the food television is less grounded in shows that teach recipes than it once was.

It made me think of “Turn it Off,” the song about repression in The Book of Mormon, the musical—a very different mood but a comment on the same thing.

My memory is that the documentary or something else I read said that the blowpoke (in life rather than on the show) was dirty and cobwebby, so it didn’t seem to have been cleaned.

I think that, since the blow poke was found without bloodstains, that rules it out as a weapon. They were presenting a plausible version of the prosecution case—that Michael Peterson killed Kathleen Peterson—as it stood at the end of the trial, without the blowpoke.

Wow! Now, that's a hit!

🙋‍♀️ Another old person here. There didn't seem to be any reason for dropping the H other than to misspell the word purposely (which is not a good enough reason, in my book). Also old and fond of correct spelling. But I think you misspell like that so that you don’t stumble into another business having the same name or, in real life, not being able to get the domain name for your website. It’s a variation on the weird spellings of tv character names sometimes (used to be done on soap operas a lot) so that a character whose evil twin did something strange wouldn’t be confused with an ordinary person who might sue.

The show’s creators have said: Julia Season One executive producers Daniel Goldfarb and Christopher Keyser have stated that one of the questions the series explores is if Julia Child represents feminism or traditional values of femininity. ” Foie Gras” delves into this during her explosive conversation with Betty Friedan. https://awardsradar.com/2022/04/28/tv-recap-julia-season-1-episode-7-foie-gras-questions-of-ethics/ Thanks, Cinnabon. My question is a little different, though. It’s not about the challenge of feminism. It’s about that moment when you might feel yourself to be riding high, and the world (your life, your day, chance) knocks you down. In tripling the bad events of Julia”s day, the show is giving her that experience, and I’m trying to think about why or about what issues it raises for us as viewers watching her.

The male French chef is Andre Soltner, who was chef at Lutece. No idea if he was hostile to the idea of women chefs or if he’s being used the way Betty Friedan is, to articulate a common view and give Julia a very bad day when she might have been feeling triumphant. That’s what I wonder about: why does the episode want her to have that experience of being dismissed three times, by Knopf and Soltner and Friedan?

Thanks for posting this. She looks great! I wonder if the hand jewelry is a different piece by the same designer as Kwame's. Anybody know?

I don't think the Betty Friedan/Julia Child encountered actually happened. I think the writers of the show are using them (writing a fictional encounter) to discuss possible different approaches to or understanding of 1960s feminism, imagining them in conflict when they may or may not have been.

I remember Ashleigh citing Leah Chase specifically as a namesake matriarch I also think Leah Chase was particularly known for her restaurant’s gumbo z’herbes, so every time you make a green gumbo, which Ashleigh did, you’re a little bit invoking her.

Pietro hit Elena. I don’t think we can forget that. Nobody is a prize here. I also think Lila is enjoying overstating the virtues of Pietro because it enhances her pleasure in discovering that Lenu can be stupid.

I think it's a New Jersey thing. Though it could also be mostly TV style New Jersey. It is; it’s NY/ NJ Italian-American accent, which comes from and is a slightly hardened version of the southern Italian pronunciation. But most of Italy doesn’t chop off the last syllable in that way. TV definitely institutionalized it, but members of my family definitely say reeGOTT, too.

This is speculation rather than a spoiler, but I couldn’t find a speculation thread for this season. Over the years, I’ve noticed that interviews with a candidate often appear a day or two before their elimination. Maybe everybody has already noticed this? Maybe I’m imagining it? But I saw 2 interviews w Jackson today, which makes me think he’s about to get felled by Restaurant Wars. I like him (and others), so I want to be wrong.

From her perspective, of course, what could possibly go right?!? I think she's walking straight into an affair and facilitating it. I confess I found myself (even knowing all that I know about him) charmed by Nino in this episode. I think the show wanted us to feel the power of his appeal, his interest in Lenu's work, for example, which Pietro continually ignores, can't help but be compelling for her. The part that shocks me a little is her willingness to not care about his wife, though I suppose the transposition of his wife and Lila in Elena's mind suggests that she does feel some guilt and maybe also some triumph.

I thought about the scene with her lesbian college friend, too, and it makes me wonder if the show is going to have a running thread about the homophobia that was prevalent in the era and that she was known to exhibit. I do think that when we look back at people we now have cultural love for, like Julia Child, we sometimes don't quite see or know ways in which we might have found them difficult. This piece talks about her homophobia https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2007/04/02/just-a-pinch-of-prejudice/ What was interesting to me in the scene was the way the original memory worked so differently for them. (Talking about them as tv characters, rather than real people now.) For Iris, it was a powerful memory of a kind of warmth and intimacy, while tv-Julia didn't or couldn't know what the moment meant to her and had now to think about it.