whiporee

I didn't mean her abilities. I meant her name and her reputation.

I did a rewatch, and I definitely think we're headed towards Nate either suicide or suicide attempt, which is going to send Ted spiraling because I'm also pretty certain Ted's father killed himself. If you look at Ted in the Doozerverse, I think his most direct comparison is Perry Cox. They both are repressed and over the top in their actions, it's just that Perry was overly negative and Ted is positive. But they both go too far on the spectrum for a healthy person to go. Both have bouts of binging and both, when pressed, show off their opposite side -- while Perry was fundamentally nice pretending to be mean, I think there's a chance Ted is fundamentally mean working very hard to be nice. The other thing at work is Ted is starting to realize just how over his head he is. He doesn't have a strategy for fixing this. He explained to his son that being a soccer coach was mostly letting the team play to their skills, but there's more to it than that, and I think Roy being on the staff is going to highlight the differences between competence and skill. Ted is good at creating culture, but at some point he has to actually coach. He has to help his team get better, and we're not seeing any of that from him. The show skirts it, but at some point I think there's going to be a showing of limitations, and it's going to hit Ted very hard. So I think we're going to see something dramatic happen -- Ted might demote Nate, and then Nate tries to kill himself, then Ted spirals down and we get a deeper exploration of the character before Ted rights himself -- probably with Rebecca's help (or even better, Christa Miller as Ted's acerbic sister)-- and the season gets saved. That might even be why the first episodes felt so sweet, because they were needed to balance off the rest of it. The rub is, though, I'm not sure BL's writer's room is up to it. In all the years of watching his shows -- and I adore most of them -- his team has never been able to get deep into a character. Cougar Town didn't even try -- Whisky Cavalier didn't have the run time -- and if you look at the two emotional episodes of Scrubs -- My Screwup and My Fallen Mentor -- they're good and they're powerful, but it's all still very surface and all resolved quickly. For an under-the-radar show like Scrubs, which got renewed but not much attention, that was fine. But for a show everyone talks a lot about like TL, I think it will bring a lot of negativity and harsh commentary.

But Ted apologized the next day, and had Nate deliver the critique to the team. This time it didn’t even faze him. I think the surplus of Ted-isms is because he’s going crazy. I think we’re about to stop having as enjoyable a time.

I think Nate is going to either try or commit suicide. That look he had when Roy walked on the pitch -- the way he fiddled with his jacket -- was not a sign I like to see. Ted has a lot of coping mechanisms (not all of them good) -- but I don't think Nate does. He's been the only one on the staff who knows football, and seeing Roy come out to cheers -- especially after Ted basically called him insignificant compared to Roy -- won't go well. And one other thing in that -- have we ever seen Ted not apologize before? Very weird exchange. My guess is that it's Rupert on the other end of Rebecca's texts. Whether he knows or not is a different story.

Except I'm pretty sure Joker raped her in The Killing Joke. So I think the cruelty would be at least a wash.

I loved Keely and the chocolate fountain. That was enough for me.

That was the first episode I didn’t like. The naïveté of everyone is just too much. Sams making a drastic, direct accusation against his native government. That may not go well for his family living there. His contract probably has clauses prohibiting him from speaking out against the team’s sponsors. It makes for neato TV for him to protest and for Rebecca to blow off her biggest sponsor, but there are ramifications for things like that, especially when it appears that Richmond is her only real asset. Dropping out of the Premiership probably cost her team 50 million pounds. it’s not realistic for her just to blow that off. It's also worth noting that the lowest payroll for a premiership team is about 65 million pounds -- there are 23 players on a roster, so that's about 3 million pounds on average. I'm sure Sam is sending some of that money home -- his father's mean text to him seemed rather unwarranted, too. Not suggesting that athletes just stay quiet, but they ought to be aware of ramifications, too. On the other hand, teams and players have contracts. Jamie, being a superstar, would not have just been cut loose from Man City. Rebecca can't just cut Sam because someone asked her to. Owners of these teams are, for the most part, billionaires -- they don't shoot darts at the local pub. I think this show would have been much better suited for it to be a smaller, lower revenue club. Sort of like a minor league baseball team -- not quite Brockmire, but closer to it than a Premiership team. Bill Lawrence’s writers’ room does this sometimes. They have ideas but are unwilling to do the storytelling work to justify it. Dr. Cox’s frequent alcoholic benders, Jules’s father’s Alzheimer’s, now this global issue. As a Floridian, I never got past them showing wetsuits, mountains and surfable waves on Florida's west coast. It's never been a writer's room that pays much attention to either continuity or details. They throw down big ideas without really understanding them and then just trot away. They can be so good at some moments, but it almost feels like when they try to get bigger, they flub it.

Didn't Donna die? I mean, glad she's back, one of my all-time favorites. But didn't she die in S2? Seems weird to have her on a poster.

Ted was right to bring back Jamie. He has an obligation to try to win, and if Richmond is to be promoted, a bunch of draws won't do it. While it fits with the show, Sam is out of line. He's a professional -- if you remember last year and the guy talking about his Lamborghini, he's a highly paid professional. He doesn't get to bitch about chemistry or being bullied or feeling bad when the team he's getting paid to play for is not winning. If Ted can get a talent the caliber of Jamie without a trade or buying them from another club, he'd be crazy not to do it. Higgins knows that because he's in the business of the sport, not just the games. Nate's along those lines. He had no hesitation trashing Danny for not living up to his the terms of his contract when he had the yips, but because he doesn't LIKE Jamie he as a against bringing him back. Someone at The Ringer or Slate or somewhere really did lay out that Ted might be a much different guy than we think he is. This positivity may just be his form of manipulation. One of the key points was that Ted consistently gets people do things that ought to be his job. He got Nate to deliver the criticism of the team (and when you look back at it, Nate's mean-spiritedness shows in those critiques); he got Roy to bench himself. He "forgave" Rebecca for giving him a job he was clearly unqualified for -- but he's smart enough to have assumed something else was going on when he was hired. The only real managerially tough move he's made was benching Jamie. I don't think we're headed for a holy mother forking shirtballs moment with Ted because Lawrence isn't Schur, but I won't be surprised to see a different side of Ted as the season progresses. The way he talked about his father last episode makes you think that maybe he's not as okay with his team's performance as his demeanor might suggest, and what he might be willing to do to improve them. Keely is my crush. I'd leave my wife and kids and everything for a weekend with her. :)

Ava's a mess. I mean, I can understand it because her mom is a mess, and I guess her dad was a mess. But she's quite the mess. Deborah showed some real kindness at the wake. She's right -- those things really do need master or ceremonies. Maybe that should be my next career -- getting people to talk about dead people. I was sorry to hear the show bombed, but that makes sense. Comedy takes a LONG time to get right -- stand ups spend months if not years coming up with five tight. Trying to fill an hour would be a gargantuan task. I'm a little confused about the timelines, like how long had it been since Deborah had decided to try the new stuff? It seems she might have been working some of it in to her regular show. Likewise, how did her set go after she put Drew down? I think these last two episodes needed one more edit. Altogether, though, Jean Smart has never been better.This part blew away her role in Mare or even in Watchmen. I even liked it better than Fargo. Hard to believe Charlene has come so far. I do wish they hadn't left with a cliffhanger, and if I were a showrunner I'd do a passing line in the season opener that Ava called the writers and said she'd signed a NDA, and if they used anything she told them they'd have to deal with it along with her. Deborah would probably find that funny. It would be cool if at some point, just for kicks, Deborah said one of her inspirations was Midge Maisel. It's been a good show. Sorry I didn't space it out further. :)

I thought there was way too little about the public reaction to Deborah's move in the previous episode, and I also found it odd that Deborah would take Ava's looking for another job so seriously. It didn't really seem to fit her character. Or Marcus, either. The episode just felt off for me -- a little out of sync from where it had been building.

Wow, that's a total miss of the scene and the point. she explained it all pretty well. By saying what he did, he put her in a box that he got to define. He got to make a joke about her tits. Woman's a legend, and he thought it was cool to make a joke about her tits as she took the stage, and she could ignore it, or she could joke back, or she could call him out. I guess you'd have preferred she ignore it, and let him think it was okay. She wasn't being woke -- she was putting a piece if shit in his place. It's not okay to publicly humiliate someone, and if you do, then you deserve the humiliation when it comes back at you. She wasn't insulting his act. She was attacking what he said to and about her. And to be honest, I doubt you really know the stuff of most of the names you've mentioned. Because aside from Clay, none of their routines were attacking specific people. None of them acted to menan other comedians. They were funny because they didn't need to do that. This guy did. Sticking up for yourself isn't woke. It's natural. its what we all should expect of ourselves and each other.

Wow, CW is a hack. A visionary hack, but a hack nonetheless. It was good. I wouldn't call it great. But next week might be.

Bobby is gorgeous. The actor/actress playing the role is very attractive, and they've done a great job with the character. I liked it, but I think we missed a couple of episodes due to COVID. I can't imagine they thought they'd end the season that hung up in the air. Ed Helms keeps playing Ed Helms. I think it would be interesting to see him play something else, because I've never found an Ed Helms character likable. Not on the Daily Show, not on the Office, not when I've seen him in movies and frankly not here. The self-aggrandizing, patronizing, goofily unaware, too-caught-up-in-name-and-entitlement upity New Englander who somewhere has a decent heart just isn't appealing to me anymore. It was nice of Mike Schur to give the guy who played Brent on The Good Place the chance to not be an asshole. On the podcast he said he was always cast as guys like Brent, so it was good to see. I like the Native American through line, and both Terry and Regan are good characters who are entertaining. Regan's coworkers are also fun. I'll watch if it comes back, but I gotta think there's some stuff left out there somewhere.

But any responsible gun owner -- especially a retired cop -- would have a trigger lock on a gun that wasn't kept by their bedside. You don't keep a loaded gun in a shed.

He's the inheritor of Pod's magic penis. Or girls are dumb. Take your pick. That's what the show was showing us.

There's also this: a former cop left his commemorative revolver in a barely locked shed, without a lock on the case or a lock on the trigger, with the gun FULLY LOADED. Who the hell does that? I've got a rifle in my shop (in case of bears, mountain lions or zombie apocalypses) that I keep with a lock and the ammo in a completely different place. With the crime in the town, that's basically asking for someone to take his weapon and use it in a crime. Too many easy fixes for a show that tried to be so much more. I've read a lot of people saying this was Mare's story, but they didn't even do the work for her. She transformed almost overnight -- going from planting drugs on Carrie to taking Drew to her house without trepidation, from avoiding a party altogether to having celebratory drinks with Faye and Frank and patting Faye's shoulder as they goof about Frank's wardrobe. They showed her change but they never showed why. And for a story that worked hard to show how stuck people here, Siobahn got out very easily. Brianna's entire future was shot by the video, but she makes a movie and gets invited to Cal-Berkley (that was a major screw up. A whole country of less known, less unlikely schools to choose from)? We never saw any interaction between Mare and Dawn's daughter -- and their idea of giving her a future was giving her a fixed-up druggie's house? Plus, maybe some therapy for the girl who had been a caged sex slave for a year? Or does a mom haircut makes it all better? Again, wanted to be much more than it was.

John sucks for trying to pin it all on Billy, and for screwing Erin and a whiole bunch of stuff, but I can't blame him for trying to take the fall to protect Ryan, especially since what Ryan did was fundamentally his fault. He's actually better than Lori, who was willing to let John go to jail for murder even though she knew the truth. I think had anyone but Kate Winslet been involved, this show would have been much more criticized than it has been. Looking back, while it did paint a good portrait of an area and featured some strong accent work, it was very shoddily put together. When you only have seven episodes, throwing in a complete red herring seems like a real waste of time and manipulation of the audience. The second set of girls and Zabel's entire arc was just a waste of time. Even the stuff about Mare's son was a waste, because we as viewers, were never allowed to understand it. Was he bipolar? We he crazy? Just an asshole? What actually happened? Beyond their accents, none of the supporting characters felt developed at all. What was Sibaugn's deal with her old girlfriend? And then what happened to her new one, the one involved with a high school student? Did Dawn's cancer go away when her daughter came back? Why was Dylan a psychopath last week and giving money away this one? I don't really care about the murder, but Erin wasn't giving vibes of someone who was out to destroy John the night she was killed. She wasn't out of control raging -- she was upset and had just gotten beaten up. Just none of it fits, but all that got lost behind Kate's performance. Which was really good, in what turned out to be a story that made no sense at all.

That was a rough, solid episode. Everyone broke up, at least to a degree, except CW and Susan who are still circling around the offices. They're doing good stuff with Rachel and Dana. Brad and Jo are fun to watch. And Ian and Poppy ... Ian knows how to cut much deeper than Poppy does, but Poppy is every bit as mean as he is. But I'm starting to wonder whether she's nearly the person he is -- she might be, in the end, exactly what Ian originally called her. A paintbrush -- able to implement an idea but unable to really come up with them on her own. Even the shovel only gets used once Ian figures out how to weaponize it. She's the one who sold out -- against Ian's wishes -- and created Battle Royale. She's the one struggling with her side of the expansion. She's the one who had to get a whole new team of programers because she couldn't inspire the original team. And she's the one who finds Ian's failure entertaining -- we've not see that kind of directed malice from him.

To each their own. I thought it was pretty darn funny.

On rewatch, I'm pretty sure DJ is John's baby, and Ryan killed Erin. Ryan confronted Erin, or Erin confronted John and Ryan overheard. The whole thing about Billy being covered in blood doedsn't fit Erin's murder -- she didn't have any gaping wounds, no real place for a lot of blood to come from. Dylan's schtick is he recruits young girls to become escorts. That's what he's so panicked about with Jess, because Jess helps him. It's what he was doing with Brianna -- getting her in so deep that she would do what he wanted rather than risk losing him. Classic pimp move.

Breaking Brad was really good on a lot of levels. The pig thing was great, the stuff with Ian and Rachel was great. I think they are going too far making Poppy a jerk this season, but I do like the overall dynamics of the show this year. The young kids aren’t wise but they aren’t stupid; they’ve done a good job showing why Ian was able to build the game and the company. That was lost in his hyperbolic narcissism last year. And also that Poppy was the one who sold out to Brad, and that decision created a real threat to the game. I think they had to build the world last year, and letting Pootie be the “villain” was a good way to do it. But this thing from Zach? That feels real and legit. the only thing I don’t love is Jo. Last year she made me laugh every time she was on screen. This year she’s gone from chaos agent to more plotting, and I think it takes away some of her humor.

There's a suggestion on the Reddit board that says the moon-based Soviets acted on their own accord attacking Jamestown. I think that makes sense -- way too aggressive a move for the age of mutually assured destruction for the Soviet government to endorse. Anything else leads to even more of a shooting war than we already have. I think the tensions can be walked down to a "you killed one of ours in an unprovoked attack, we killed one of your sin an unprovoked attack." Not exactly a proportional response, but one that could be sold. I get Karen. I think Apollo Soyuz is going to have a malfunction like Gemini 8, and it's going to take a lot of collaboration to save the ships. I wouldn't be surprised if both sides end up in the others' craft as they have to fix things, and that will leave to resuming detente. To respond to someone up top -- the Soviets were also the instigators for Ed wrecking the rover. They were doing something at the mining site when Ed confronted him as he came out of the crater.

At the end of the day, I think the showrunners, and maybe some of the writers, too, thought they had a great character in Frank. They seemed to think of him as a carefree, kind of loosey-goosey kind of guy who had the right outlook on life. Because that's the only explanation I could come up with for that ending -- Frank giving out sieze-the-day sort of lectures. They were never able to just accept that the guy was a monster at heart. That could have been Macy, too, though. I remember Eric Braden had a clause in his contract that said Victor Newman could never lose. Macy was an EP, and he might have wanted to make sure Frank remained the focus, even though the character was both limited and limiting. With that the case, everyone was trapped where they were because having them leave pulls them away from Frank. Lip had to end up back where he started because his success would have created too much space between him and Frank -- same thing with Debbie. At the end of the day, since Frank couldn't leave, none of the rest of them could get out.

So many things wrong. So many, many many. Lip made the right decision, but you never count on a real estate deal going through until it goes through. Taking the first offer would have been dumb, and if the agent was going to renege on a deal, they might have anyway. Real estate always depends on signatures. That said, the development going up next to his house will only increase its value. Dude can't catch a break, though. Keeps trying to do the right thing and getting punished for it. Debbie admitting she raped the guy seemed like a whole bunch of fan service to me. Anyone else find it interesting Heidi looks a lot like Fiona? When she first appeared, I thought that's who she was. I can see Kev and Vee selling the house and moving. I can't see them not telling anyone for the reported two weeks it took for the money to get transferred. And, as stated above, real estate doesn't work like that. Plus, they haven't even listed the bar but they are moving soon? In that gentrifying neighborhood, a bar with an active liquor license would be worth a lot more than the house. Doesn't make sense that it's not even discussed. In my entire life, I've never heard anyone ever make a comment about someone not showering before they dove into a pool. Are actual police academies not a thing? I had no idea you could become a cop without any kind of training at all. When did Carl join the union? The overall meta thing I've got as this show -- which I've liked quite a bit -- has fallen into a very classist attitude. No matter what they do, the Gallaghers can't get out as long as they live there. Mickey can't leave the South side -- literally can't sleep anywhere else, except he was on the lam in Mexico for a while. Lip's a smart guy who, if unwilling to improve his lot and not leave, could be a narrative device. But now they're making the point that the fates are wrecking him. He's gotten sober. He's been a solid father. He got job he's good at. He's trying to build a home. And at every turn he's screwed by circumstances. He may have made unwise decisions, but he hasn't made destructive ones. The show, however, just keeps building toward the idea he's fucked by the circumstances of his birth. It's a very demoralizing premise, and not the one they started with.