MerBearStare

I'm thinking Coach is kind of in the same situation that William H. Macy was with Operation Varsity Blues. Like he definitely knew about it, but he wasn't the main person driving the scheme and there isn't enough evidence to arrest him.

I was fully expecting a little surfer to pop out of his hair.

At least now we know how Jen and Coach have so much money.

There's not one weak link among the actors or the characters, which is quite a feat considering how many people there are. I watched the show as it was released and at first it seemed like they were setting up Keeley and Ted to be the couple, but I'm glad they didn't go that way. Though one of my favorite scenes in the entire season is when she and Ted were talking about the photos the paparazzi took of both of them. "Tartt's tart breaks Tartt's heart" "Lasso makes passo and creates team fiasco" "You have no idea the power of rhyming in this god damn country."

Not to get too far off topic, but OMG this bugs the shit out of me. I'm glad I'm not the only one who notices it. I was watching I think Fear Thy Neighbor and the episode took place in the 80s and I was just like, "80s kitchens didn't have granite countertops and stainless steel appliances!"

Don't forget mothers!

Omg, I had In-N-Out for the first time in 2018 after years of hearing about how good it is and it is ridiculously overhyped. I was just like "This is it?" It was inexpensive and the milkshake was really good, but the food was just average. For my money, Portillo's, Whataburger, and Shake Shack are all way better. Hell, the burger place a few blocks from my apartment is way better (Byron's, for those of you in Chicago).

The message that calling a woman of color aggressive can be dangerous is right, but Jen is 1000% the wrong messenger. She is aggressive and she has massive anger management and self-control issues. She shoved Whitney; she threw a glass at her husband's party; she's had multiple tantrums. She needs to stop hiding behind that message. We all saw it with our own eyes.

The show has been picked up for a second season: https://deadline.com/2021/02/stanley-tucci-cnn-1234699770/

Are we the same person, Cheezwiz? I've said basically the same thing about energy, but to explain why I do believe in literal ghosts. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, I think sometimes something so bad happens that the energy from it sticks around and keeps playing itself out (like the Japanese tsunami episode in the most recent Unsolved Mysteries season). I remember once in college I was living in a terrible roommate situation (nothing too serious, just standard young people drama). I was walking home from class and it was a beautiful spring day, the sun was setting, and I just felt really content. Then as soon as I walked into my house, my mood dropped because my roommates had just been fighting and I could like feel it in the air as soon as I walked in. And I feel like, if you can feel bad energy from something as inconsequential as a stupid roommate fight, then you're going to feel energy from serious things like murders, suicides, overdoses, and accidental deaths. Was No One Saw a Thing about Skidmore, MO and it aired on Sundance? I became obsessed with that story after first hearing about it in an episode of the podcast Criminal. Then Buzzfeed Unsolved did a video about it and I found on Youtube a 60 Minutes story about it from the early 80's. I didn't put any thought into what happened to the town after the murder, but the documentary really showed how secrets fester and it seemed to infect the town. I wonder how the town would be today had someone confessed rather than everyone having to keep a major secret like that. While I don't normally support vigilantism, the justice system did not help that town at all, so I can't really blame them for doing what they had to do to protect themselves from someone who had shot multiple people, raped and abused women, and set a house on fire. Even with the most deserving victim, though, murder's gotta be a tough secret to live with.

I binged this yesterday and felt like they could have cut out the 2nd and 3rd episodes and just made it a regular documentary rather than a docu-series. I did not care for the "web sleuths" 😒 and "youtubers" 🙄 at all. Especially the guy with the eerily calm voice who had a friend visit Elisa Lam's grave, film it, and touch the headstone, then cried about it on camera. Like, what?! He just creeped me out. And I was very put off by the people who visited the hotel like it was an amusement park or something. People died there tragically, lots of people, so maybe don't treat it like a joke. I was in LA for the first time in 2018 and the homeless situation there is shocking. And I've spent most of my life in Chicago, so it's not like I'm not used to seeing homeless people. My cousin, who lives there, took us to some weird 1970's brutalist hotel (I think it was a hotel) downtown that had a revolving bar/restaurant at the top and then he drove us around the neighborhood afterwards. Like the docu-series showed, there are literally blocks and blocks packed with people living in tents. Seems like CA, which would be the 5th largest economy in the world if it were its own nation, should have the resources to tackle this issue... But I don't want to get too far off topic. The general manager seemed to have a Jack Torrence-like devotion to the Cecil. Especially when she was referring to the hotel as she/her in the last episode. But honestly, with that history, the only thing that could help that hotel is to burn it to the ground and start over. I definitely went into watching this thinking Elisa's death was unsolved, but it was pretty clear by the end that it's solved. Everything that the web sleuths flagged as suspicious had reasonable explanations (and to be fair, even though they annoy me, a lot of them admitted that). Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

I remember in the episode with the Met Gala lunch - with Valter! - the older man who was helping her set up placed one of the ear pod boxes upside down and she was like, "That's upside down. Can't you read?!" Seemed like she forgot she was on camera for a minute and showed her true self (not that her fake self was that much better). That's why, to me, Mary will always be so much worse than Jen, no matter how many obnoxious, violent temper tantrums Jen throws. Mary is a legitimately bad (not just Real Housewives bad) person who is scamming money out of her congregants to maintain her lifestyle, her house in Carmel, IN, and her ridiculous "closet" full of ugly clothes. Agree that the three of them need to go.

It's crazy how so many people got away with it too. No internet, credit card use was not that frequent, less surveillance. When my sister and I were born (1977 and 1982), you weren't legally required to get your baby a social security number, so we didn't get one until the mid to late 80's. Adults back then could just go in and apply for a new social security number and it wouldn't be seen as odd. One thing I learned from the OG UM was just how monstrous early to mid century social services was. One story that made me cry was this old man talking about how when he was a kid - in the 20's or 30's, I don't quite remember - his mom put him up for adoption in NY and NY social services just put him and a bunch of other children on a train headed to the west coast and the train would make stops through out the country and adoptive parents would just show up at the train station and pick a kid they wanted. And they got to take the kids home with them! Seemingly no background checks or being able to follow up on the child's welfare. This poor man was looking for his sister, who his mom did not put up for adoption, and sadly he died without ever meeting her.

God, that scene between the queen and Diana. Someone who is clearly struggling is reaching out to you and you can't even give her a tiny bit of kindness? I've seen more kindness and empathy between strangers at a bar (particularly drunk girls in the bathroom) than she showed Diana.

This episode could have been titled Shithead Children. Or more accurately, Shithead Children Don't Fall Far From Their Shithead Parents. Mark Thatcher - shithead. Margaret Thatcher - shithead. The entire royal family - shitheads. I used to think Peter Morgan was too enamored of the royal family and the queen in particular, but this season he's really pulling no punches. Now I'm wondering if he's a small-r republican. The royal family is a toxic mess and they really embody the phrase "hurt people hurt people." And they just keep repeating the cycle.

I'm at the part where they came down dressed for dinner. You must be a massive dick to make *Margaret Thatcher* sympathetic. I do like Denis Thatcher, though. And at least they're self-made.

I had somehow never seen this episode before and it was so good! I got the sense that the first defendant, the one who parked in the driveway, was the prettiest girl in a small town when she was younger and that's why she thought she could charm the judge with her potato chips story and seemed to think that it was cute that she broke into a home and stole a car. I've seen multiple comments on here about Judge Judy seeming meaner and more over her job this year. That's not something I've noticed until this episode today, which I think was from 2012 (the dad defendant said something like "last year, in 2011"). She yelled, because that's her thing, but way less than she has in the newer episodes. She didn't repeat the same insults over and over. Her comments were still biting but much less mean-spirited.

And Ted Lasso has been renewed for a third season! https://news.avclub.com/apple-hit-ted-lasso-gets-a-super-early-season-3-renewal-1845513460 ETA: And I learned from the comments section that there is an AFC Richmond website - https://afcrichmond.com/

The Jack Wheeler case reminds me of the Elisa Lam case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elisa_Lam), mostly because of the odd, slightly creepy surveillance videos that have been released in both cases. And because both victims had mental health issues. With Elisa Lam, the shocking but totally inaccurate theory was that she was being tormented by ghosts at the creepy murder hotel Cecil Hotel. In Jack Wheeler's case, I think the shocking but totally inaccurate theory is that it was a hit. That's awfully sloppy for a hit, both how his body was disposed and the manner in which he was killed. I mean, beating the shit out of someone wouldn't necessarily kill them. My guess is that it was either a random killing - they kept saying that if it was random, the killer wouldn't have put his body in a dumpster, but I don't get why. It wouldn't be that hard to throw one body into a dumpster and it's not like he was dismembered and put into a bunch of different dumpsters; now that would be a lot of work for a random killing - or that he ended up in that dumpster for whatever reason and was killed when he was tossed into the dump truck.

One thing I really appreciate about Murder, She Wrote is that it was actually pretty progressive for the time. And in some ways progressive even by today's standards. I think a lot of other shows would have paired Jessica and Seth, but I like that they remained friends because I feel like friendships between grown men and women are rarely shown in entertainment. She also didn't have children (though she did have a million nieces and nephews and cousins and sorority sisters), which I thought was a pretty bold choice. They alluded in one episode that maybe it wasn't her choice not to have children, but still; I'd be interested to know why she wasn't given children, especially since even today women who don't want/can't have children are judged. And lastly, she was also pretty non-judgemental about other people's sex lives. Even when she found out her former student was a sex worker, she was taken aback, but she still had an open conversation with the madam, who let her know that not all sex workers come from broken homes and bad families. And of course there's classic If It's Thursday It Must Be Beverly, where Jessica has to talk to Beverly about her relationship with Amos' deputy because Amos and Seth are uncomfortable talking about sex with her. And this has been my Ted Talk about Jessica Fletcher: Feminist Icon.

Oh God I forgot about that Mimi abortion storyline. Good for Heather Tom. I made the conscious decision to stop watching Days regularly when Mimi was sobbing and said, "I killed my baby. I killed *our* baby." All My Children did a more progressive abortion storyline in 1973 than Days did in 2005 (I think that's around when it happened).

David O. Russell (who I know is pretty ugh) actually loves soap opera actors - https://www.vulture.com/2015/12/david-o-russell-loves-soap-actors.html. There's also a pretty great catfight scene between Natalie and Erica on All My Children in that article. Soaps today may not be as good as they once were, but there have been some really good storylines with top notch acting in the past. I think a big part of the reason they haven't been give the respect they deserve is because the audience is largely female. A lot of entertainment largely enjoyed by women is often derided as "chick lit," "chick flicks," and "guilty pleasures," which is such bullshit.

I might rewatch the granddaughter episode to count how many times she said betwixt. She said between at first then quickly corrected herself to say betwixt and I was like, "She knows that between is an actual word, right?" So both her mother and grandfather filed false police reports against her? She reminds me of the line from Justified: You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you're the asshole. One of my favorite Judge Judy moves is when she emotionlessly hands Byrd a tissue to give to a crying litigant. (Although occasionally the litigant has a good reason to cry and I feel for them.)

I did tear up a little when Sami and Allie said their tearful good-byes. Mothers and daughters making up after a fight always gets me right in the feels, probably because I was such a shit to my mom during my teenage years (standard teen girl shit, not soap opera level shit). I've never really been a Sami fan - though I do love Lumi and I love seeing characters (and actors) with such a shared history interact with one another - but during this visit I've firmly become #TeamSami. At least for now. Everyone teamed up against her for no good reason and were so reflexively "Sami's wrong about this" and overreacting to everything she did. And at least once an episode it felt like someone talked shit about her. Even random people, like Abby in today's episode. I almost screamed at my tv, "Give it a rest, you guys!"

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people refer to Africa like it's a country and not a whole-ass continent. It's not just on Days, and it happens in real life, but it's been annoying me on the show the last few days. "I'm going to Africa." Cool. Where exactly in those 12 million square miles are you going? Is Lani aware of how many women in prison are mothers? Or does she only give a shit about Kristin and to hell with all those other moms?