SeanC

They said in one of the interviews that they decided Dawn being Latina made sense since "California girl" was a big identifier for her and California obviously has a very large Hispanic population.

The skit in question was a scripted segment for an NBC-affiliated show, so NBC is rather unlikely to say anything about it.

There are lots of people who don't follow current events (indeed, around half of Americans don't even vote), so I don't think there's anything unlikely about him not being familiar with it. If it doesn't affect you personally, it's easy enough to ignore, especially since he spends all his time in what is not a particularly diverse setting (at least in terms of black performers).

Medvedeva's performances at Rostelecom last season were excellent, I would say she's improved a lot. It's an open question whether she can ever get the big technical tricks that she'll seemingly need to have a chance of making the Olympic team in 2022, but that's a new frontier. The project to rebuild her technique for her adult body has gone pretty well, even with the psychological hiccups (and occasional equipment failure).

Rika Kihira has announced that she's adding Brian Orser to her coaching team and will be splitting her time between Hamada's base of operations in Japan and the TCC. What do you think Orser should be doing for Medvedeva that he hasn't done? She's been undergoing a total reworking of her technique even down to basic skating; that takes years. Kihira's in a different boat, she doesn't need technique fixes, other than continuing to refine the quad attempts.

Meggie rallied impressively after losing all her money a decent ways into the game. Evidently none of them watched Lawrence of Arabia.

Meggie had the same reaction I did to that “Magic Mike Pompeo” clue.

The two other competitors from yesterday are both looking like very strong contenders for two of the wildcard spots at this point.

I'm assuming Meggie's mother was a big Thorn Birds fan. I'd like the odds of at least the second-place finisher here to make it into the next round, and even the third-place guy got a very solid number.

As a figure skating fan, I was looking forward to seeing Jackie on the show. He missed a few easy (in my view) ones, but hey, second place. There were hardly any significant novels published in the early 18th century, so it wasn't too hard for me to guess Robinson Crusoe (often called the first English novel) and reason out Swiss Family Robinson from that.

I mean, the wish fulfillment angle kind of starts by gifting the outsiders control of a studio, which they didn't have (well, it was true that studios in this period were generally owned and operated by Jews, but that ironically is one minority group whose onscreen representation isn't addressed by this series at all). Bottom line is, I don't think the series is suggesting that things would have been like this if only the oppressed had behaved differently. But since the series wants to center its marginalized heroes, and generally in a good story your protagonists have agency, it obviously celebrates their drive and success. As I said, I don't think it does a particularly good job of this, given how obstacles just sort of melt away into pure wish fulfillment as it goes on. But that's a separate matter as far as good dramatic storytelling goes. The aspects of the ending that are the least plausible are, unfortunately, the aspects of it that I suspect are dearest to Ryan Murphy's heart, namely, the massive acceleration in gay visibility.

I don't think so. Minority groups were campaigning for civil rights all through this period, the biggest difference is how much those in power opted to listen. As far as the Hayes Code goes, since the Hayes Code was only ever voluntary self-censorship, I assume what they were going for was that the film demonstrated that you could succeed outside it (which is what happened in real-life, though the collapse of the Code was in reality a process that played out over two decades). This is another case where it feels like the writers took the germ of a plausible scenario and then inflated it past plausibility -- I could believe that Meg found some measure of success commercially (there were indeed audiences primed for more risque material than the Code allowed), but not that it became an era-defining mega-hit.

Beyond Mrs. Roosevelt's public stature, it's more akin (in Commonwealth terms) to having the Queen Mother make a surprise visit.