bravelittletoaster

I don't think it's actually clear that Piper didn't secure the cancellation of all transfers. We only saw the beginning of her negotiation/discussion with Caputo, not them hashing it all out. Regardless it still wouldn't have happened without her. Much like the re opening of the track, sometimes there are ripple effect benefits for other prisoners when she's pushed back against the administration. She's not some selfless crusader for the downtrodden [nor do I think she's obligated to be] but occasionally her rising tide has lifted other boats besides her own.

There probably do need to be completely different threads like GoT, because it's kind of crazy making if you've read the book to watch people speculate about details that you know are meaningless tbh. Though personally I think the show's kind of weak, will be shocked if it takes off, and am skeptical it could actually support two threads. (Though I guess Glee is the gold standard of shitty shows about which there is a lot to say and it's got a thriving forum, so quality does not necessarily correspond to forum health.)

The book is definitely not about the whys and wherefores of the vanishing, so either the show is taking a completely different tact, or the show creators are selling people a bill of goods by trying to make them think there's some solvable mystery here when there's not. Given the precedent of Lost...I wouldn't hold my breath.

Just wound up my rewatch of season 2 and was given pause by the moment where Piper is watching the inmate with the baby [Maria?] break down over her impending transfer with clear empathy. I kind of think the writers' put that grace note in deliberately to show Piper thinking and caring about someone other than herself--in answer to criticism of her on that point--but I don't think viewers see it if they don't want to see it. The sun seems to shine out of Taystee's ass as far as critics go, even after the woman handed Nicky a baggie of heroin. I think people just see what they want to see when it comes to certain characters, and I'm sure that's true of all shows to an extent, but for some reason I just notice it more in criticism of OITNB. I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and fairly avid reader of critiques of it, and I don't remember a lot of hand-wringing about what a terrible person Walter White was. And clearly he was. But that's alright for male protagonists. They're allowed to be anti-heroes and reside in gray places more comfortably. As for me I hope OITNB signals a new trend of problematic, anti-heroic female protagonists until we get over some of our hangups for female characters. Not that I actually think Piper's that terrible a person. No one in that prison is selfless, except maybe Poussey [who's super bland to me].

That might be an avenue for Piper in season 5, but at the rate they're going she should still have two seasons left on her sentence. Ha. Which is fine. After 5 seasons it'd probably be healthy for me to divest emotionally from this show anyhow...

The baby stopped crying because it was gone, not because it saw something. The people who disappeared just vanished: poof. Gone before people's eyes.

Nah, I think they were just hacked. Dianna was once too. People are just dumb with their passwords. I'm sure the prevailing reaction to anyone who saw the Colfer tweet was, "That show is still on?" I don't think anyone's trying to drum up interest in a DOA show that's not going to air until 2015 anyhow.

I think she was tilting at windmills when she made that comment about maybe by season 4 exploring guards' back stories at Paleyfest. I wouldn't put too much stock in it, though I liked the little extra we got of them this year. O'Neill and Wanda Bell were great comic relief, I thought, and like to see them used in the same capacity next season.

Yeah, the woman who plays Polly has great timing/delivery. I hope they find a way to use her occasionally, too.

Kind of bummed it was fake. That's the most interesting this clusterfuck known as Glee has been to me since Brittany and Santana briefly made up and made out.

I think the point of the smoking is to gaslight the fact that they think it's end of days and they're not worrying about their long term health.

Of course 2% of the world's population doesn't mean that percentage was distributed evenly across the world. Some communities could have been hit harder than others for whatever reason, just as some families were. Kevin lost no one immediate to him. Nora lost her whole family.

And yet Ryan basically did anyways. To spite them, maybe? Or just blinded by his own hubristic notion of himself as the star maker who could spin any shit into gold.

Probably because the show doesn't seem to have thought things through very well. Stray dogs were around in the book, though they didn't get their own deer-mauling scene. I'm sure someone in the writers' room was like DUDE YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE REALLY COOL AND EDGY?

That's a pretty good distillation as far as I know it [and I followed it all very closely at the time and also correctly predicted almost immediately when Murphy said the kids were graduating that the network had given them a spinoff]. It seemed that Dana cancelled the spinoff out of spite because she was so pissed off at how Ryan handled the situation, and although at the time it seemed a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face, I'm sure in part she thought, "Do I really want to work with this ass clown on TWO shows?" And he did make an epic mess out of it, so.

It just actually never even occurred to me seeing Amy sleep with Liam that it changed her sexuality or meant something different about it than I'd already believed. I thought Amy was gay, and I still think she's gay, not bi. She just wanted to burn her life down, and that was a pretty efficient way of doing it. Unfortunately it was also a pretty good way to burn the show down, apparently. Amy's an overly emotional hothead [and I relate to that], but Carter probably should have known better.

A look at teeth as a class and cultural signifier as seen in Pennsatucky's trajectory: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/what-pennsatucky%E2%80%99s-teeth-tell-us-about-class-in-america

Showrunners definitely still do bibles for their shows. Not the ones who suck at their jobs, tho.

I don't think the dogs mean anything. They just went feral when their owners disappeared.

Probably not. I really liked the book, but I thought this was fucking terrible for what it did to it. I sort of knew there'd be a lot of changes because the source material isn't really adaptable to a tv show, but I hated what they did with this and especially Kevin, who's the mayor in the book and (I imagined) less sweaty and unstable. Just as well, really. I don't need another tv show in the queue. I can definitely leave this one.

I loved Perotta's Little Children, which also was adapted--for film. I always meant to get around to reading The Leftovers but never did until a couple of weeks ago when I had a long flight ahead of me and figured I'd read it in anticipation of the show. I really admired and enjoyed the book and what it seemed to me that it was trying to do: use a fantastical event as a metaphor to explore loss and people drifting apart in the modern world. But the whole time I read it I thought, "I don't know how the hell they think they're going to make a tv show out of this? What are they thinking? Are they just going to change everything?" The short answer seems to be yes. I liked the book, hated the pilot. Hate what they did to Garvey. Honestly they should have just changed the character's name. That would have made it slightly more palatable to me that the show runners had no interest in using the protagonist in the book, because this isn't that character at all. Instead of the novel's Kevin who is kind and struggling but throughout it all a grounded and stable person, we have what I can only presume HBO thought would be more gripping: a perpetually sweaty and on the brink Justin Theroux channeling Rick Grimes (probably my least favorite protagonist on tv). I can feel a lot of mansplaining on the horizon. I still don't really know how they're going to sustain this for one season, let alone several, unless they're importing an explanation for the phenomenon that wasn't in the book. I stopped and restarted the pilot several times as my interest wandered, and turned it off entirely at the scene near the end where the dogs mauled the deer, because it was just such an HBO thing to do--look how ugly our edginess is! Don't you want to give it an Emmy? At the end I was just left thinking A: HBO really is starting to get a kind of unified tone across their bleak-ass dramas that I'm not sure is going to serve their brand in the long run, and B: You guys passed on Orange is the New Black and bought this and a forthcoming show by Ryan Murphy? Lol, ok. Fire your development dept.

I'm kind of in the same boat, but some of that may be due to OITNB season 2 landing and hijacking all my spare brain cells. But I agree that while I'm not angry per se in re: the finale, it's kind of killed my hard on for the show a bit.

I think/hope Piper will be more central again next year, but it really felt like Larry was being written out at the end of the season. Maybe he'll still show up occasionally in a recurring capacity, but I don't think he'll get his own storyline next year.

This is a good rebuttal to the Atlantic piece from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/07/01/want-to-change-culture-pick-better-targets-than-orange-is-the-new-black/

I think we're supposed to find the vaguely goth chick's [Flacca?] taste in music out of left field, though. I mean, it's a bit of a running gag they introduced last season, and her friend even called her out on it. She said her boyfriend's name was "Ian," so I'm guessing he's something of a departure from her world, and I kind of attribute her music taste to him. I had a harder time believing that she knew who Fleet Foxes were enough to diss them, but I work for the label and we enjoyed the hell out of that nonetheless. I agree with you that Soso's song choices were dated, though. Was she even alive when that was a hit?