Vee

I like Glenn's everything. I don't know if they'll leave early, but I assume they may be on the road by the time the show breaks for the winter.

Ty, I believe. That was Larry Gilliard from The Wire. So good. I believe I recognize that scene - slightly transposed to a new setting - from the comics, too. If I'm right, Tyreese will be just fine.

I don't believe one or a handful of saboteurs could make that place so insecure simply by going in and out and pulling [!@#$%^&*] that they'd have to leave. They'd have to be actively disabling and destroying all the defenses. And it looks like those fences aren't holding so well anymore.

Yeah, I assumed he saw Sasha. I didn't think she'd last too long - I was surprised they made her a regular. I do like her, though, so hopefully she'll hang around a bit.

That looks fantastic. Just what I was hoping for from this year - a community. I'm sure Carl will be thrilled with all the Carol stuff.

Season 6 was basically the nadir of the show. I remember what happened very well. They used the back end of the last episodes of that year to try and get people excited about actual things happening - Lexi goes apeshit! Coop tries to kill Lexi! Billy gets with Jennifer! Season 7 was a return to form IMO, and a much smarter, better show. It had its flaws but it was on a major upswing and 90210 was a piece of [!@#$%^&*] at that point. It should not have been canned while 90210 went on - that was an injustice, pure and simple.

Was his last name seriously "Man"? Oh, no, it's Silva, I see that now and I should've remembered. I remember seeing NM on ATWT and finding his hair with sideburns wildly out of date even then. That whole show seemed so lame when I would tune in. Ellen Dolan with a terrible hairstyle, involved with some criminal. Carly and Molly, the wacky dykes with more bad hair. And then NM turned up on OLTL looking exactly the same and it took not one but two public outbursts for him to finally be let go years later.

I missed Hannah Stokes desperately when she was gone. Jerry Lacy actually did appear as Mr. Trask once or twice more, in the final weeks as they revealed who killed Angelique. I believe he was on during the Carolyn Loomis Death Tour - him and Amy together. I believe it was both his and Denise Nickerson's final appearances, his in Parallel Time, hers on the show entirely. I was surprised he turned up just for that. I actually really loved Kate Jackson on the show. I thought she was already excellent and that both she and Vestoff were great with Selby. When they very pointedly had Daphne wear Vicki's old clothes - going so far as to mention it onscreen - I held out hope that had the show continued, they might have even recast Vicki with Kate. That would have worked too, IMO. We don't talk about Kathy Cody.

The most fun portion of Parallel Time for me was the early period when almost all the superstars were off filming HODS. They were basically putting any old [!@#$%^&*] thing onscreen, and anything could happen - Hannah Stokes! More and more Cyrus and Sabrina! John Yaeger! Elizabeth Eis! Dameon Edwards, the most evil publishing executive in history! He's returned to destroy us allohwaithesgonebye. And don't forget Mr. Trask, the evil butler! That was great.

There wasn't enough of it, but I enjoyed it. I liked the Parallel Time world a lot. I had a terrible story idea for it when I was very, very young many, many years ago. I'll always remember the last week of shows for Carolyn Loomis where she wandered drunk and crazy chewing through basically every inch of the town before being killed in the tower. Good times.

I guess you could say he was one of the leading men, yes, although he was always the second banana in those last storylines as Desmond or whoever. Ultimately his characters were either Renfields or someone else's buddy. He did wonderful jobs with those parts, but you would never have seen a more cultured, smarter Willie romance anyone in the main timeline a la Will Loomis or Desmond.

The poor man. All my best. I do agree that after 1795 or maybe the initial Quentin story if you're being generous, the individual personalities and lives of any character who was not Barnabas, Julia, Quentin or any of the monsters or at times the kids largely fell by the wayside. Nancy Barrett always infused Carolyn with so much fire, but not much of it was on the page - Joan Bennett, Louis, Katie Scott, etc. all did what they could with what little they had for Liz, Roger and Maggie. And it's a shame because when you do watch the early years of the show these characters were all full, layered and rich. It always felt to me as a teenage viewer that when the show lost Alex, as well as Joel Crothers and David Ford, it turned its back on so much of that. (Mitchell Ryan was also fantastic as the original Burke, a force to be reckoned with, but he took himself out of the equation.) I think had the show wanted to survive it would've had to transition to somethng more soapy, more on par with Edge of Night. I remember the idea being floated by online fans of having Roger and Julia fall in love - using Louis Edmonds as a witty, urbane rival to Barnabas for her - which I think, shockingly enough, might have worked. It would have required making Roger into something other than a clueless buffoon for the first time in years, but hey. I will agree KLS was forced into a square hole to try and make Maggie into Vicki. But I think she did a very solid job of it in the 1968 Quentin story. She was a trouper no matter what, but she so rarely got to show what she was really made of as an actress. I loved Virginia Vestoff as Samantha but I do often think about what Katie could've done with that part, a la Kitty Soames only spikier.

Semi-tangential: Interesting article with Kirkman from Comic Book Resources on the new focus of the comic book. Makes me wonder if this is part of what spurred Rick's actions with the Woodbury survivors in the finale.

HBS was very desperate for Gregg Marx to get the role of the Sam Rappaport recast on OLTL in 2001. It went to Laurence Lau instead, who she loved as well.

That won't be happening, IMO - Tyler Perry is deeply closeted and deeply self-loathing. The man put a [!@#$%^&*] '70s Paul Lynde caricature in the equally hilarious and terrible Why Did I Get Married? films, where all his misogynistic, hyper-religious pathology is even more on display than it is here. A fat middle-aged white man with a poodle and an ascot - in like 2010.

You forgot to mention that the camera cuts between close-ups with each line. I can't decide whether it's more silent film or very early sound film.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I remember that. A sick joke. He is a handsome man and mildly watchable, and he has a bit more gravitas now that he's older. But they appear to have dyed his temples gray and made him affect that accent.

I'm not sure she doesn't think it's real.

Everyone on the show other than Tika, John Schneider and Crystal Fox is distractingly bad. And the long silent film pauses for the endless reaction shots don't help them either. Oh, and poor Peter Parros, but they have him doing a Colonel Sanders accent. Aside from everything else terrible about it, my biggest problem with the show is: Candace is actually the Erica Kane or Rachel Davis, the heart of the only good part of the story, not pure evil but something much more raw and complex, but in the world of Tyler Perry this character is ultimately nothing more than a whore who doesn't know her place with a man and with God. That's how that story for that kind of character always ends with Perry - total submission or destruction.

Wow. To paraphrase my status update, this show has the cutting, pacing, and story and character tempo of a silent film, with the camerawork of a dolphin. The PP soaps's very minor issues look incredibly slick by comparison. Tyler Perry's work always looks, sounds and feels like it's being produced by space aliens from the planet Puritan in the Misogyny galaxy, but this is a whole new level of ineptitude. The good news is Tika Sumpter has proven she is a star, a black Erica Kane, and the mom, while playing a stock Tyler Perry stereotype dating back to old Hollywood, is pretty solid at what the role calls for. They both are old school Nixon archetypes, people who deserve to be on any other better soap, anywhere else. It kind of makes me wish Tika would return to NuOLTL as Layla, but I know that she's destined for bigger, better things in film and TV. The rest are mostly a mess. Poor Peter Parros, too. And I can't believe someone else actually hired Pilar Lopez-Fitzgerald.

I believe all those history, etc. videos are on the Blu-Rays (at least for Season 1). I borrowed my friend's box set and devoured all of those videos in the extras section after watching the first couple episodes - it helped tremendously. And yes, the actors do them. A lot of the V.O. on the ones I watched were Bran, Viserys, Robert, etc.

I just started watching Season 1. It's a hell of a show.

The real question is, how many times can I tell you?

Unless it's On Demand, I've penciled it in to DVR all of 'em next week.

Now I've got to watch this [!@#$%^&*].