Rickster

No, you're right. What I meant was that there were a few schools on the list that have no national recognition in football, so a generic college football fan with zero knowledge of basketball might not know the nickname. Georgetown and UConn would be examples. I don't think there were any others.

Not a baking show, but my local PBS channel has started showing a cooking show with Prue Leith at her home in the Cotswolds. Guests on the first two episodes are Sandy Toksvig and Alison Hammond, probably to capitalize on the GBBO fan base, plus Prue’s husband. I was not impressed by the first episode, but others may disagree.

It was strange that the college basketball category had nothing to do with basketball. A knowledge of college football would give you almost all the answers.

I liked the concept of the island category, but there were some wonky answers allowed. Japan is not a single island. Pearl Harbor and Waikiki are on Oahu, not Hawaii. They shouldn’t allow the state of Hawaii as an answer if they’re then going to ask for Maui.

I thought the street in the little town in Scotland looked suspiciously like Soho or Tribeca.

For anyone interested in seeing a selective view of the inside of Craig Melvin’s house, there’s an article about him in the Real Estate section of this weekend's NY Times (paywalled). He has a restaurant booth in the basement where the family eats Sunday dinner.

Chloe has already been recast. It's a different baby in the last two episodes than at the beginning of the season.

Interesting. We’re 3 episodes in and think it’s vastly better than the first season.

Not a bad guess. Having seen the final episode, I am really annoyed at the spy subplot. It was as if they needed enough plot to fill 6 episodes and came up with a wacky idea to fill it. I never bought the idea of the wealthy Swedish couple hanging out on Shetland to begin with. Then to layer in all the spy stuff and Euan and the flashbacks, then to suddenly drop it. On the other hand, the impetus for the killing seemed to come out of left field to me, but possibly I wasn’t paying enough attention in the earlier episodes. The final scene seemed to cement that this is now the Ruth and Tosh show, with Sandy running in with new CCTV footage once an episode.

I think you’re right. I looked at the list of books and “Mephisto Waltz” was the final one in the series, however the plot seems different than what we’re watching.

A little research seems to show the series was adapted from a series of books and they have reached the end of them (unless they skipped a book in the middle). I guess they would have to start writing original scripts to keep it going and maybe it was not successful enough to do that. I’m sorry to see it end. It was a nice change to all the British based mystery dramas on PBS.

We’re three episodes in and really enjoying it, so far.

Having finally caught up through episode 4, one other thing that struck me as odd writing was that they were able to get a record of Bergen's phone calls, yet the record didn't show that he called Annie Betts on the night they were killed, and the police had to find that out from Noah that she picked him up? I am also not happy that this has become the Ruth and Tosh show. I'd prefer a bit more of an ensemble approach.

While this is an entertaining show to watch, the structure bothers me. It seems the winner gets chosen at random, purely based on the way categories are played. Periodic Table guy had to play twice, if I’m not mistaken. If I’m watching to see someone win $250,000, I want to see some dominance in knowledge, not just a lucky roll of the dice.

I could be wrong, but I know the first few seasons were based on the books but I thought at some point the series veered off into independent plots. Certainly Jimmy Perez is in all the books. I know I started one of the early books (Red Bones) a while ago and couldn’t get into it having already seen the show.