Wax Lion

If you go to MSNBC.com you can either watch Rachel's segments separately or the whole show (which includes the interlude) the later requires you sign in with a cable provider. I'd guess that's connected to the podcasts being cut back.

On the bright side maybe this is a chance to get people to learn about Rosewood, FL.

And as Rachel keeps pointing out, Sanders has a far better chance than many of the Republican candidates the media is taking seriously. It's the kind of double standard Rachel likes to go after.

Sadly, GH has joined the soaps that jumped the shark during the run of Jill Faren Phelps, which has become a trope for the genre. Every show she's worked on took a disastrous turn that it never recovered from... even GL, which survived several years after her departure, never had a long-term creative recovery. And GH was somehow stuck with her for a very long run. I remember checking out Y&R in the 2000s. Suddenly, every long-term character looked the way they did when I first watched it in the 80s... which was disturbing because in the 90s they did look ten years older. That trope drives me crazy. Unless there's a set-up where the cop/doctor/agent changed jobs from a desk job, the spouse should have known what they signed up for. On a related note, I hate it when this trope is used to justify asinine behavior. The main guy from The Strain is an entitled jerk, especially around his family, but his ex-wife complains when he runs off to deal with CDC emergencies. When he tries to warn her about the vampire epidemic she insists he must be making it up to be manipulative. Just because she's worse, it doesn't make his behavior any less annoying.

It depends on who is in charge but when Republicans took the house in 2010 they cut back the House's work schedule drastically, IIRC, because if you campaigned on less government then taking a long vacation is living up to your campaign promises.

The Roku is a device for connecting streaming services to your TV, so instead of watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on your computer you can watch it on the same set you watched 30 Rock. I used to access Netflix and Hulu via my Xbox 360 but the traffic goes through the Xbox Live servers (at least it did last I used it) so if Xbox Live is having problems, I couldn't use Netflix even if Netflix was fine. However, the Xbox otherwise works great for playing games and watching streaming TV. It's worth noting that Roku is the only independent streaming box. The Kindle, Google and Apple equivalents try to keep you to buy from their sister companies but Roku has a more open way of creating "channels." That makes the number of Roku channels overwhelming (though you can find the major stuff) but it also means your local news might have a channel for streaming stories. One nice feature of the Roku 3, you can plug headphones into the remote which turns off the sound and pumps them into the headphones, great for watching TV while the rest of the household is asleep. However, one channel the Roku doesn't have is one that lets you stream VOD content from Comcast. Comcast has been resisting the Roku, it took them a while to allow the Roku to access HBO Go. I hope that's helpful.

They actually managed to make Sinead's entitled ass even more annoying by putting Scott in her orbit. I'm liking Harry, though, even if I wish the next disaster were an O'Connor armageddon. I wish Dylan's story didn't feel like it were being told in such a well-worn way.

It's on Friday nights between two shows that have done much better than expectations, including Undatable* which is also pretty terrible. It's got a chance. However, I noticed it'll be airing against Dr. Ken. * Undatable did a plot recently where a gay man deals with his nervousness about dating by practicing kissing a woman.

I think it's amazing that Jon is running a program to help veterans find jobs. However... what the @#$% is up with the way people are writing about it. So far I've seen the NYT and EW bring up Jon's criticism of the Iraq war as if that makes this surprising. I mean this is the intro to EW's article: Seriously? The fuck? Does EW think Jon is some cartoon 60's liberal spitting on soldiers for being sent to a war they may have complicated feelings over? Jon's coverage hasn't ignored that the war mongers are quick to scream "Support the troops!" whenever the necessity of was was brought up but when it comes to putting some money or effort into supporting military veterans those people are suddenly gone or, even better, denying that there are any problems to address (see Bill O'Reilly going after John Edwards for talking about homelessness among veterans). Jon has been pretty focused on veterans actual needs instead of making them into strawmen. ETA: Apparently, I was so annoyed I didn't know the difference between writing and righting.

Interesting. Thanks DearEvette. So far, both of the women cast as Mark Paul Goasselaar's wife were of Asian ancestry, though different regions, like MPG. I'm still hoping that MPG might end up playing a multiracial character for once. It would be interesting to see a character who is multiracial and can "pass".

There's also THE GUIDE TO SURVIVING LIFE, a midseason Fox comedy where (if I'm reading the synopsis right) Justin Bartha hangs out with the twentysomethings in his building and steers them from repeating his mistakes. One of those twentysomethings is Meghan Rath, who was also in the original PEOPLE ARE TALKING pilot. (We'll see if she's replaced with another multiracial actor.)

As I recall Robert Reed was pitched The Brady Bunch as being a serious, Norman Lear-style social issue comedy, which was at least partially blamed on why Reed was such a pain. There were plans to kill off his character in The Bradys in a helicopter crash (with producers being tired of him being such a pain) but then the show was cancelled. It's a fun laugh to think of The Brady Bunch as a more serious show.

Ah, Taylor Momsen. I remember Tim Gunn had his cameo on the show and from that one day of shooting was ranting to the media what a pain she was.

That was a very different time. At the time of Washington's blow-up, Callie hadn't shown up (much less realize she's bisexual), if Grey's had any gay characters they were in one-off tearjerker-of-the-week stories. Openly gay male actors were rare at the time and it was still common wisdom in Hollywood that audiences wouldn't buy an openly gay man playing a straight character in relationships. (This still applies to movies.) The only gay lead character on TV was Kevin on Brothers & Sisters, every other character was considered supporting or recurring. (ETA: For further context, reports of the incident was in October 2006. Neil Patrick Harris came out in November 2006 and NPH's coming out went far in changing the idea of what audiences would accept out of a gay male actor.) A lot of gay blogs at the time (particularly ones aimed at gay men) looked at Rhimes with suspicion by then. There was the whole attempt to get her to do something after Washington reportedly used a slur on set in an altercation. Then Knight's character just got horrible stories, eventually leading to a season where he disappeared. It looked retaliatory to a lot of people. Then came the whole incident with Brooke Smith. Again, remember, at the time the majority of queer women on TV were pretty bisexual women primarily in relationships with men. Female bisexuality was used as titillation and seen as a way of checking the diversity box without actually treating LGBT people equally. So when a character hyped as Callie's love interest was suddenly written out mysteriously, that encouraged the suspicion. As I recall, it took a while before AfterEllen relaxed enough to enjoy Callie and Arizona instead of worrying how it would go wrong. Knight was written out of Grey's in 2009. Smith in 2008. Scandal didn't debut until 2012. In the meantime, if Private Practice or Off the Map had any great gay regular characters, it fell below the media radar. At the time Knight came out, Rhimes didn't have much of a record on how she treated gay characters or gay people. There's also a good chance Rhimes spent the years after that incident educating herself on those issues, especially since she's had gay writers in the writer's rooms over various shows, so even with her current record there's still a good chance she might have given Knight that kind of advice. He was probably getting that kind of advice from a lot of corners (he probably expected he could focus on Broadway again if all those warnings came true, which he largely did).

I know a lot of quarantines can be shortened nowadays, providing you go through certain requirements first. I don't remember where I heard it but one story said Australia's quarantine can be just a few days and it looks like Hawaii is similar. I'm guessing it comes down to being willing to pay for tests and waiting for any period when the test wouldn't catch the presence of rabies, otherwise you wait the period when a dog with rabies would take of go rabid. The short-lived 90s drama The Byrds of Paradise showed the family medicating their dog to travel to Hawaii before them in the pilot, IIRC, that scene was in winter and then when we saw them move it was clearly much warmer.

FWIW, Super Clyde was a comedy pilot from Greg Garcia, who also created My Name is Earl. The original pilot had Rupert Grint as Clyde, a fast food worker who inherits a fortune and decides to become a "super-hero" who looks for deserving people and schemes to gives them things they need. (It turns out the relative who left him the inheritance had a similar hobby.) In some ways, it was Earl with a smarter protagonist. CBS eventually put the pilot online and it was very promising. (It's no longer on CBS' site but I found it on YouTube.) Unfortunately, that year they passed on it for another show from Garcia, The Millers. This year they re-made the pilot with the boy from The Middle but passed on it again.

With the way John was covering it I was wondering if the UK had the kind of quarantine policies that island governments tend to have. There's a good reason for them, even if some of the specific policies seem to miss the point and I didn't get the impression John was familiar with it, or if they miss the point in the UK... Wow. That seems ridiculously overboard, I'm guessing they killed it because no one would be there to claim it after the quarantine period? That's still overboard (I mean why not turn it over to an adoption center afterward) but that's the only explanation I can come up with.

I'm disappointed but not surprised that CBS passed on Super Clyde a second time. I did like the original pilot.

Based on the balance of power, I'm guessing Margulies fueled the rivalry. She's a producer, I don't think Pajabi has the power to tell producers she won't work with Marguiles or the power to refuse to do a single scene until producers offer to Orphan Black it so they don't have to be together... and if you read comments at Gawker, there are people who are trying to create the impression they know it started when Pajabi won the first Emmy. TVLine was heavily hinting that no one on CSI: Miami liked working with David Caruso. Chevy Chase had a new pilot this year and I kept hoping it wouldn't get picked up (it didn't) because I knew it would eventually turn into the same drama as Community. The thing with Valerie Harper getting fired from her own show was that she was staging a sickout, possibly for more money. Instead the producers killed her character. But if you want to go way back on cast feuds how about Grey's Anatomy? That's was where Shonda Rhimes started doing background checks before casting actors, calling up their past shows. The impression I got at the time was that Dempsey and Knight could be pretty flaky, so there was reason behind Washinton's outburst but it was still uncalled for. I'm not sure if Rhimes just wanted the whole thing to go away or if she was trying to keep Washington around (but he kept digging) but the way George was treated afterward did feel like retribution against Knight. And, of course, there was that whole situation where Brooke Smith was suddenly disappeared from the show just as she was settling in, IIRC ABC had just released new cast photos including Smith when the announcement came she was gone from the show.

I'll be honest, I didn't like Nowhere Man. On paper it appealed to me, but it suffered from being one of those shows that had to keep repeating the premise. I got tired of him keep approaching people he knew and being surprised when they didn't recognize him. My husband had a similar problem with Journeyman. I'm not saying this to be a jerk to the Nowhere Man fans, I'm just thinking the show might have done better today because networks seem to have given up that formula and viewers would be trusted to get the plot of the show after one or two incidents. Mick Lady, I remember It's Like, You Know. I keep trying to explain the episode where Joel Grey appears and people just look at me like there's no way a TV show would do a plot like that. Maximum Bob was the reason I watched Karen Sisco and Justified.

Thanks attica, that makes a lot more sense (so was it just an idiotic media making eating in pubic a campaign issue? that clip did make it sound like that was a bigger deal than John Kerry going windsurfing) I rember John Oliver making fun of how the campaigned on womens issues but even that felt superficial, as a lot of it was about whether the van they were using was pink.

John Oliver went there before but the way the Labour chief was defeated makes me feel like the UK's voters aren't much smarter than the US. He makes an ugly pauseface while eating? Seriously? That is a major moment that affected people's votes? It seriously sounds like it wasn't much better than our 2004 campaign, even with the better campaign rules.

He'll never be a host of a show like Meet the Press because of what you just said. They prefer slobbering lapdogs like David Gregory or Chuck Todd, lest they risk hurting the delicate fee fees of the guest they're interviewing like Lindsey Graham or John McCain. Rachel Maddow will never host Meet the Press, too for that reason. All those Sunday network shows think that if they don't have John McCain on every week, viewers will stop watching. Republicans will refuse to appear on shows where they expect a tough interview (heck look at all the whining that still happens about Rachel Maddow's interview with Rand Paul, where she did nothing but ask him to clarify something he said) so those shows will only hire a host that Republicans will agree to talk with.

There are a few differences like the Clinton Foundation has a mission that doesn't involve getting a Clinton elected, as attica explains well. I believe the Foundation also discloses its donors and there's a type of SuperPAC that lets donors be anonymous (Democrats tried to close that loophole but couldn't get past Republicans). If in 2012 you heard talking points that Democrats were getting more big donations from the mega rich, that was because conservatives have moved on to using the anonymous kind of SuperPAC and that talking point was disingenuously comparing something Democrats were still using to something Republicans were using a bigger version. But in some ways I don't feel like there's a big difference except that the media finds it scandalous when Clinton gets big money but has a default "Oh, well, what can you do" when the money is going to Republicans.

Wow. That really is the entire series. Thanks bmasters9!