CleoCaesar

Jack's monologue at the end of "The Car" was one of the worst things I've seen on TV in recent memory. It was so utterly cheesy, over the top, and just cringeworthy that I couldn't believe a team of writers and produceres, a director, and Milo Ventimiglia all agreed to do it. This show is just so, so bad. It has its moments (I rather liked the fire + Jack's lowkey death scene) but oh my God all of these writers need to be fired.

There aren't enough eyerolls in the world for both these things. Why is being a fragile, hysterical ninny something people are so proud of? An absolute soul-crushing event is your child dying in front of you. Not an episode of a cheesy, low-quality nighttime soap opera. I get that hyperbole is a thing, but Jesus, these actors really have their heads up their own asses.

I'm with you. Didn't help that the professor was annoyingly over-the-top in general (the classroom scene). The whole "opposites attract" is a TV fantasy that doesn't work that well in real life.

The joke was that firefighters are extremely fit and strong. Finding out that the guy whose recent ex-wife you're sleeping with has that level of fitness can be disconcerting, the implication being that he can kick your ass. Raj even pointed out that the guy happened to be someone handy with an ax.

I agree about the cheating part. But I don't really see what's unhealthy about dating someone who resembles one's father, provided the father is a good guy (and Phil is). I'm not an Andy fan (don't find AD the least bit attractive, and Andy's hokiness got grating really fast) but I did like Haley more then. She seemed less vapid than usual.

I hated last week but really enjoyed this one. 1) Holy hell Kunal looked good in the morning-after kitchen scene. The curly hair suits him so well that it makes me irritated it took 10+ years to get here. Secondly the red shirt was such an upgrade from his weird 1970s wardrobe. 2) Raj becoming bros with the distraught firefighter was amusing (if TV fantasy). I just tuned out the Sheldon nonsense as I so frequently do.

It's hard to really root for any of Haley's relationships because she's written so inconsistently. With Dylan, she was a completely superficial ditz who was just barely more intelligent than Dylan. With Andy, she was a much, much more together young adult. They were friends first, and genuinely cared about each other. He helped her get it together and it was the healthiest relationship she's had to date. With Rainer, she was back to being a lazy Kardashian clone. What version of Haley are we going to get with the professor? Who knows. I always assumed they'd bring Andy back at some point - they spent so much time on that storyline - but if AD is unavailable, seems doubtful. If the professor is Haley's endgame, they need to devote a lot of time to building his character and their relationship.

These people spend way too much time together.

She may have outgrown it to an extent, but she still chose someone close to the type of guy she had initially wanted. Harry was a rich, successful attorney who was part of the Hamptons crowd. True, he may have been bald and wear loud tiki shirts to the pool, but he was still very much of that world. If Harry had been a plumber, Charlotte (even season 5-6 Charlotte) wouldn't have looked at him twice.

Agreed. This show doesn't really do sex/passion very convincingly. The one exception I'd say is Phil and Claire - I buy them being happily in love and having a good sex life. It helps that they're both in shape and very attractive, and frequently verbally affectionate. One of the best things about JvdB is how he doesn't take himself seriously and is more than willing to poke fun at himself/his Dawson years/the famous Dawson crying face. It's always nice to see him show up in random shows.

Their marriage (hell, their whole relationship) seems so...joyless. Like it's a pretty but vacuous girl who settled for a low self-esteem guy who has her on a pedestal. I don't look at them and see true love, just a couple that was together for a long time and took what is seen as the next step. (Even Howard and Bernadette make more sense, even with his manchild tendencies. Sheldon and Amy make more sense - a meeting of the minds, emotional growth, liking spending time together.) Penny and Leonard though...yawn. Sex seems halfhearted (cue joke about Leonard being less than competent in bed and joke about Penny being unenthusiastic). They don't seem to have any big mutual goals. Penny's career (whether it's a waitress or an aspiring actress or a pharma rep) always seems to be a point of contention. Leonard is insecure and jealous. Do they even like each other?

Heh when I was watching this episode I kept thinking "This is so cribbed from Friends, namely the episode with Emma's first birthday party. Especially the parts like the gang says it's too elaborate for a 1-year-old and she won't remember it and hijinks with aspects of the party - cake, guest list, etc. - ensue." That episode is on a lot in reruns for some reason.

Gotta say, this was one of my favorite episodes this season. Especially Amy's utterly delighted reaction to Sheldon's genuinely thoughtful and loving present.

Plus, you know, the perps always being white. There have been 8 episodes this season, and in all 8 the villains have been white. That is just PC agenda-pushing at this point. It bears absolutely no relation to actual NYC violent crime stats, particularly rape. I'm trying to imagine 8 consecutive episodes of SVU where in each and every episode the perp is black, or Latino, or Asian, or what have you. And I can't. The outcry would be deafening.

True, it is possible, but from what we've seen, Phil is a smart and very successful realtor, and he loves what he does. His sudden incompetence/lack of competitive drive is wildly out of character. If I am remembering it right, Wooznam and Kanily (don't even care how those names are spelled) left the company where they all worked and they asked Phil to join them in starting a new company. So the three of them founded the new firm. Phil joining them was the result ofa really nice conversation between Phil and Jay where Jay urged him to believe in himself and that he (Jay) would bet on Phil. To see Phil forced out of that job was more than a little disappointing, or rather the flippancy with which it was treated.

I'm more than a little tired of how flippantly this show treats careers. Mitchell has been in a constant game of Musical Chairs with his various law jobs. Cam attempts to be a teacher for a few days before he becomes a football coach and now vice principal? Claire gets gifted a CEO job of a large company due to nothing but nepotism. And now Phil has been casually fired from a company he was a founding member of?? It's more than a little annoying and unrealistic.

Hopefully this will be the start of Raj having messy curly hair and dressing like a normal person. The shtick that he dresses like a 90-year-old for no reason is about 10 seasons too old. It doesn't fit the character at all.

I was pleasantly surprised by the episode. Chris Martin was actually funny, and Mitch and Cam weren't complete assholes to each other for a change. I only recognized Billy Crystal towards the end of his appearance. Wow.

Bitcoin recently hit $10,000 so yeah...the guys should really just murder Sheldon at this point.

Funniest last scene of this show in ages. Benson’s Breakdown of the Week™ was tiresome as ever. But the dramatic DUN DUN DUN music really added a classy touch.

It's the path of least resistance for the writers. If they so much as imply that life for someone who weighs 500 lbs. is significantly different than for someone who weighs 150 lbs., they will be destroyed by the fat activist crowd and called "fatphobic" and smeared on social media. Blogs like ThisIsThinPrivilege show how deranged these people are; the Fat Acceptance movement is all for normalizing obesity in popular culture and I'm not surprised a mid-brow network soap opera is catering to that. As for Kate's storylines, I'm torn. On the one hand, it'd be great if they could come up with something that doesn't have to do with her weight, but on the other as I said above, not focusing on her weight challenges is unrealistic. Weight aside, she's such a miserable, bitter wet blanket all the time that I wonder why anyone even puts up with her.

This show reaches new levels of awful every week. The level of histrionic speeches has almost surpassed any Shonda Rhimes show. These do not seem like real people. They are screaming, crying speech machines. I watch it for two reasons (old teenage crush on Justin Hartley, and residual teenage fondness for Mandy Moore) and this week there was no Justin Hartley and Mandy Moore got one of those ridiculous screamy speeches. (Say "yellow onions" one more time. I dare you.) I remember how I felt when I watched The West Wing – the writing was so good, and the acting was so good, that I would get sniffly during particularly intense scenes. It wasn’t even SAD most of the time, just the power of the writing and great characters whom I actually cared about that elicited some genuine emotion from me. I have yet to so much as tear up during this show and its angsty, deliberate, manufactured "sad" scenes. I will never understand viewers like the lady who has an Amazon subscription to deliver tissues every Tuesday. Call me cold, but I don't find anything in this sappy, fake soap all that sad. This Is Shit.

Thanks for being open-minded! And I very much agree with you that this episode had a very bitter tone that other episodes generally lack. Sheldon's an oblivious ass, but he's not the type to openly backstab his friends.

I'm not really seeing where the misogyny (that word gets applied to pretty much everything these days) comes in in the second case. Raj wants a relationship, Ruchi doesn't. She's not stringing him along or mistreating him. She wants sex only, which is apparently considered selfish and shallow, and was quite upfront about that. Is that misogynistic?

Not to mention he should have his own drug dealer. Rich, popular Hollywood actor has to score smack with his legal prescription for painkillers? I don't think so. Robert Downey Jr., Lindsay Lohan, <insert any other name of famous drug addicted actor>, etc. did not get their stuff from their primary care physicians.