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I totally agree--I would have liked to have seen what they could do with an additional day. I also think it was dirty pool to give each team advice that sometimes ran along the lines of "your concept stinks, start over" and then promptly take away their models and send everyone to the studio (at least that's the impression they give--hard to tell what happened before editing). Why not give them more model-time to figure out the mechanics of their project post-criticism? I know we say it a lot, and we'll say it again. It warmed my heart to see Ben give lots of credit to his partner, as well as his overall graciousness. With so much bad behavior in the news right now, thank goodness there are a few people out there modeling how it should be done.

I totally agree. It wasn't quite a letdown of How I Met Your Mother-like proportions, but close. The ending of Burn Notice really tarnished my memory of the series.

Let's not forget that we first learned about this from the commercial that Six saw in the waiting room: the disposable clones for faux-transporting only last for 72 hours. Even if Two had never heard that counting cards was a no-no, the first rule in being a wanted fugitive on a strange station is Don't Attract Unnecessary Attention. Win a little, deliberately lose a hand, and walk away. Come back later if you have to, with a different hair style and maybe a jacket. Don't win big. I was so disappointed b/c so far they've portrayed her as the leader with a cool head and common sense. I agree that low lighting helps the set designers. but I also believe that this is partly because today's generation of scifi showrunners grew up on Star Trek, and they've all embraced the pushback that the spacey future won't be clean and shiny and well-lit. I think they see it as a badge of gritty realism.

The weird thing about the bird subplot is that they were clearly trying to show a progression for Evan from "nobody thinks I can do this job" to "I can do this job"--the look of "hey, I got the bird out of the hospital in the end and nobody died" on his face at the end projected an epiphany, but it didn't seem earned. As so many above have pointed out, a really good administrator would know how to put the right people on the job in the first place. Is anyone here old enough to remember the M*A*SH episode when Klinger proved he was up to the job he inherited from Radar, by coming to the rescue and organizing whatever it was they needed in an emergency (I remember he had them using jeep headlamps for lighting)? I was really wishing for that kind of moment, when Evan could do what he does best, which is schmoozing and connecting people, in a way which would solve a problem for the hospital. eta: Please add me to the roster of the Evan and Maggie fan club. I've always liked the actress, but in my heart she will always be Ellen's friend Audrey. Yeah, I'm old. :)

Hey, have y'all seen this? Show Me a Hero Coming to HBO in August.

I would much rather that the showrunners play BlockThatFetus! (™ the good folks back at Televisionwithoutpity) than trying to shoehorn a pregnancy storyline where it has nothing to contribute to the show.

All I could think of was "Divya, you have a kid. Call someone to pick up Sashi and don't come near her until you've 100% identified what you've just been exposed to.

They showed Paige taking multiple pregnancy tests, and they were all positive. I suspect a false negative (not enough of the marker hormone in the urine to detect) is probably more likely than a false positive.

The policeman who (would have) filled out the accident report (would have) told him what kind of car it was. (Since Karen asked "will you sue him?" and Matt didn't tell her it was a hit-and-run, I figured he wasn't going with "he got away.").

On a purely practical level, I can imagine how it would be easier on CC and the FX makeup crew if he doesn't have a lot of body hair, as he has to undergo a lot of FX makeup for the many, many wounds he sports all over his body. Smooth skin makes it easier for them to apply, easier on him when they take it off. I don't know if there are other reasons as well, but I suspect this had something to do with their decision to go this direction.

In my experience, landlords in inexpensive neighborhoods aren't always motivated to keep things up. (Not a condemnation of all landlords of affordable apartments, I'm just saying the situation occurs sometimes.) Walls that need a fresh coat of paint might not get one, light bulbs in stairwells might not get replaced, broken things might not get repaired right away. There is the potential to let it spiral, to the point where only the financially desperate are willing to live in a building because it's all they can afford, and landlords end up with tenants who sometimes end up being late with their rent b/c of financial emergencies, reinforcing the lack of interest in keeping up with repairs/maintenance. And yes, sometimes tenants just destroy everything around them. It happens. I enjoyed this episode except for one line, from Fisk to Gao: "So you speak English." WELL, DUH. Since we've been introduced to them, Mrs. Gao and Nobu have been very active participants in every negotiation with Fisk and never have we heard anyone translate for their benefit (that I can recall). Yes, there's a difference between speaking and listening comprehension, but if she understands English well enough to rely on her own comprehension for big-money business deals, she can darn well make her point in English if necessary. Refusing to speak someone else's language is an assertion of power, as well as part of the mind-games all of them are playing on each other. To the poster above who commented that Fisk's Chinese sounded awkward, I would say that would be understandable. You can have a very good grasp of a language's structure and be able to communicate well without having beautiful pronunciation. I doubt Fisk had the opportunity to spend any time immersed in the language environment, such as foreign study, so his accent probably would be unpolished, to say the least. Count me in as someone who is in the dark as to what Fisk's "grand vision" is for Hell's Kitchen. Particularly telling after Daddy Fisk's speeches about the City Council position as basically nothing but a bribe machine, not even pretending that he would do a single positive thing for his constituents once elected.

I understand they whys of having to make it a movie instead of a tv show, but I don't want to see a Bab 5 movie. Granted, I'm a little prejudiced--I'm not a big fan of the movie style of storytelling. A 2-hour limit on telling a story, or a Hunger-Games-style 8-hour span over four years, just isn't enough time to tell a decent story, particularly one that was so rich in part b/c it showed us the everyday lives of the characters--daily petty annoyances, routine breakfast in the mess, elevator rides and bureaucratic hassles. While I would love to see the story told, serially, with a modern effects budget and a few rough spots ironed out, I don't think I could bear seeing the greats played by anyone else. Andreas, Peter, Mira, Bill (Mumy), Stephen--they created perfect characters in my mind, and if I saw anyone else trying to inhabit them, it would just hurt.

it was preempted in New York Yeah, what's up with that? It was a bit of a surprise to find nothing but a rerun on the TiVo this week, but then I saw that a new episode had been recapped.

Sorry to be so late to the party, but I've begun a rewatch of Deadwood on my Kindle at the gym, so I thought I'd see what the discussion was like over here. The Deadwood forum on Televisionwithoutpity remains my gold standard for tv forums: thoughtful, funny, generous, and (as a group) intellectually curious and better than any book group I could imagine. Sigh... Anyways, as to the tangled web of Deadwood's ending, according to absolutely everything I have read and heard, David Milch may be a genius, but he can be a nightmare to have as the writer for your show. He would hold up production with last-second rewrites, to the point where, sometimes, expensive filming crews would be held up waiting, or shoots would be scheduled and locked in and then he would change his mind and a scene would be cut and a new location would have to be scheduled. HBO swooned at the chance to give up Deadwood for John from Cincinnati, because on paper it was so very easy to film: a very limited number of shooting locations, costumes you could buy at any local mall or surfer shop, and no horses (notice how that got him in trouble again on the next series). But Milch was back to his old ways, and he notoriously worked on scripts until the last second, sometimes changing locations entirely, meaning that again, the filming budget became unmanageable. (Among other problems, of course. I do wish I could have seen what he had in store for the second season; despite all of its flaws, the show intrigued me.) Game of Thrones is a different story. First, it's exponentially more popular (and I think that the difference between television culture and the international online community then and now has something to do with that) and therefore harder for HBO to kill if they wanted to. Second, the scope of the story is so vast that they have all of the scripts in hand, and the shooting schedule is locked down to the minute, so that each crew (Croatia, Ireland, etc.) has meticulously planned out the logistics long ahead of time. More expensive, but not wasting money. I also figure HBO will be following the current practice and putting every last prop, costume and piece of furniture on eBay the second that filming finally ends. I don't think they're losing money.

From everything I've heard Joss say about DH after the fact, including this interview, his vision was to have DH focus on the clients and the dolls, the client-of-the-week stuff. He said that what he calls the "espionage"--the plotline about plotting and corporate evil and the struggle of the dolls with self-awareness" was what the network forced him more and more to do. I don't think I would have liked the show as he envisioned it, honestly. Not a biggie--different strokes and all. But a lot of the fandom (the ones on Televisionwithoutpity, anyway), seemed to like the direction the show took once he went in the direction the networks were pressuring for.

I think it's because she only owns one shirt that doesn't bare her midriff. Was he mixing cliches on purpose? B/c the saying is that there is a lid for every pot. But if he's implying the pot is calling the kettle black as well... huh.

David Simon weighs in on events in Baltimore.

I believe him when JMS says he can't do anything more to pressure Warner, but I also don't believe that fan pressure would be any more successful. And fans have been pressuring them for years. Fans begged Warner to re-release the B5 books, and really, an ebook release would cost them pennies, even if they had to pay the authors a new royalty (and that's unlikely).

I think you'll always find people interested in a rewatch. And as I mentioned above, the Babylon Podcast discussed each episode individually, as well as interviewing cast, crew, and the Great Maker himself. Yes, Deadwood is the one with all the language. Eventually you get used to it. Deadwood can also be very, very brutal--I was four episodes in before I was hooked, because I really don't like brutality or bleakness in my shows. Deadwood also had one of the most amazing Television Without PIty forums ever--it was like a book club that met every week, digging into the characterization, exploring the historical background, trading links to studies of history, economics and sociology on relevant issues such as the state of medicine and the real life of prostitutes in the American West at the time. It breaks my heart that those discussions were nuked by NBC Uni.

Hi--just stopped by this forum, don't know if you're still following, but... From everything I've heard on the Babylon Podcast (excellent podcast, btw, they interviewed just about everybody you could hope to hear from), I get the impression that Warner Bros. is and always has been particularly dog-in-the-manger with their properties. If they can't make buckets full of cash, they won't bother releasing something, but they won't let anyone else play with it at a lesser profit. In case their lawyers are reading: this is simply what I have heard, and an impression that I get. ;) So they are probably sitting on the streaming rights, holding out for an unreasonable fee, figuring that any fans that really want to watch again will fork over the dvd or download prices, which both kick licensing fees back to the mother ship. In interviews, I've heard at least a couple of people describe the Warner Bros. business model when B5 was in production: they would pit each division against each other, television vs. fim vs. music etc., so instead of developing synergy between divisions to create a stronger product, like leveraging television products to help dvd sales, it was an every-man-for-himself corporate culture. Ugh.

Seconding Deadwood in that it it's one of the closest shows to The Wire: complex, layered characters from every point on the good guy/bad guy spectrum, beautiful glimpses of humanity shining through, a little bit of humor, and a whole cartload of quotable lines. If you want to dig really far back, Hill Street Blues certainly didn't have the aspirations of The Wire, it was a traditional tv series, but it had many of these characteristics and, for the first few seasons, at least, was very, very good (sadly not streaming last I checked, but on dvd). If you like SciFi, give Babylon 5 a try. It's best described as a novel; the show was conceived and written with a beginning, middle, and end, and the characters are as layered as any onion out there. You do have to stick with it, though; they had a limited budget, and the work also suffers from clunky exposition a lot in the first season. But it's an amazing story of sacrifice, faith, destiny, choice and consequences.

There was an article in the paper this morning about the "dream home" (the one that has everything the househunters want but costs too much). They apparently began filming in March, and the paper says that all homes featured on the program will be on the market (so no faked decoy houses, I guess?). The application also states that they are looking for candidates who are shopping for a house, but then asks detailed questions about the house that househunters might have already had their eye on, a "house of interest." Are they being coy so the newspaper has a fig leaf for printing the official party line that the househunters are househunting still, or have they honestly not settled on a house yet? As for locations, the original casting article said that both PB and Buying & Selling with the Property Brothers were casting in the NY/NJ/CT, which isn't that big a net, if they stick within the NYC commuting radius. The "dream house" has wide open spaces and a funky round stone-walled bedroom. And the kitchen, while ginormous and sporting huge windows, looks like a futuristic office file room.

I saw an article in the local paper, and was amused that they portrayed the show as looking for people currently househunting. Don't these shows choose homebuyers who have already made a choice, and then show decoys? And yes, prices can be terrifying here, particularly down-county where the PB are looking.

Much as I hate every Rowena scene, the age thing never bothered me. Both because of the fact that she's clearly chosen a magical loophole out of the aging process and he's in a totally different body and also looking spry for his calendar-age. But the fact that she's on the young side for a mum brings with it all kinds of associations of "bad mother" we've seen on tv and movies--the too-young mother who wants to have all the fun she had before the responsibilities of parenthood, and who is close enough in age to her child that she doesn't have a parent-child relationship but more of a "buddy" relationship, which is trouble for both of them b/c it's so out of place. For me, reflecting that kind of toxic relationship works here.

Just to add a little to the Emily-love: she's the only contestant we've seen in a while to test techniques/color palettes on a small swatch before committing to a big piece. That's just smart. (Of course, goodness knows what happens the rest of the time on the footage the editors choose not to show us, maybe all of them do test pieces and we don't get to see it--knowing who won in the end, they might just choose those clips to build up the argument in favor of the winner.) I usually ff through the talking-head crap b/c it's always the same stuff over and over again, and I imagine the director really pushes the contestants to gush with enthusiasm or super-emote the frustration. Our favorite trope in my household is currently "it would really suck to go home after only one challenge/it would really suck to go home so close to the finish." Yeah, guys, it really sucks to be eliminated. I agree. It's a competition, and it's just a given no one wants to lose. Can we please just lose that line? There are so many other things that would be interesting to hear from the contestants--why they chose a particular model, is there a piece of the makeup that they learned something new on, that surprised them, that was fun to make?