Vee

Lord, Nicole, Eric and E.J. all look too damn old for this.

I think anthologies are fine for certain things, but I also think they've become a bit of a crutch lately for creatives who don't understand how to long-term plot. Some anthologies have become a catch-all for 'pile crazy twist upon crazy twist for 8-13 episodes and then GTFO'. I'm thinking specifically of Ryan Murphy, of course, who couldn't long-term plot a serialized drama on his best day and used to regularly blow up any quality on nip/tuck when he'd come back to the show and upend the entire show out of boredom. People said 'oh, he's found his niche' when he began doing American Horror Story anthology tales instead. Then they discovered he can't even plot a single finite storyline coherently for 8-13 episodes without that same boredom and laziness. Now he's got an episodic AHS spinoff, with one-off stories per week a la Twilight Zone. The beat goes on.

As predictable as the tides. Noah and Allie should be leading story same as Kyle, Mariah, Summer, etc. But here we are.

As I said in the GH thread, it's very sad. I was encouraged by his appearance on Mo's stupid show and thought Tyler sounded very honest, clear and committed to getting well. I even entertained his return in the future. It seems he still has a long way to go.

Oh jeez. I was hoping his recent sobriety and reflection would stick.

Yeah, I'm about ready to start playing Charades with Errol for clues.

This is Frank and ABC. Frank prides himself on keeping the trains running on time at virtually any cost to keep the show alive. I cannot see him tolerating an interrupt unless it's extreme force majeure like COVID. I assume he has had fi-core/scabs lined up for months.

It would be wonderful to finally get a Y&R 2020-style classic episode marathon from GH, and by classics I do mean anything before 2005 let alone 2018. But I don't see Frank allowing that to happen.

If the scabs get nuts and start killing Willow or having people not eat Carly out everyday I will flip, lol.

And yet I can understand why both shows saved ABC in that era. The simple pitches are excellent, and much of the casting on both was great. Lost also knew when to not challenge convention too much for its network - elements of it were 'weird' or had ties to deeper concepts or ideas (like, say, naming all your characters after philosophers lol) but were never too deep themselves, and story or character was always emotional, always pretty or always cute. Such is the J.J. Abrams/Bad Robot secret sauce and it has served them well: Hot leads, sad backstories to fill heavy blocks of time, weeping string music montages by the in-house composer, viral marketing and a plot riding along on a hamster wheel.

You could tell it was winging it from the jump. I caught onto the formula immediately: Flashbacks, tedious character vignettes, sappy music montages and a lot of viral marketing. Great pitch, bad show. But it snowed everyone, and it was a good concept.

Yes, lots of worshipful TV journos and fans called them "Darlton". I will def be buying the book next week.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach's full statement is a lot. Oh, BTW: @marceline will be pleased and/or enraged to know the book apparently extensively covers Sleepy Hollow.

I had it so bad for Omri Katz on Eerie Indiana when I was a kid; he was several years older than me. I guess I should be glad he shaved his huge stoner beard.

You are entitled to feel this way. Clearly, I disagree!

Me neither!

There's going to be a certain amount of freewheeling behavior in any creative space no matter what. It certainly exists in the places I work. A fair amount of it is not okay with me. How you engage with it or don't based on what you feel is right or wrong to tolerate or participate with is down to the individual. But the work I do also isn't nearly as claustrophobic or high-pressure a closed-in environment as the writers' room of a network TV show from 20 years ago. Most of the work I do as a writer is remote and has only a few points of direct contact; if I don't want to engage, I simply don't reply. Most don't have that luxury. I do think you can chalk some of what went down onscreen at Lost to the times generally being very different in the culture in general - the network and creative focus on white leads, white love triangles, etc. above all. But the offscreen frathouse mentality, while also exceedingly and drearily common, reaching such wild heights at a show that prided itself on headlining media criticism courses before it went off the air, on being 'the thinking man's hit' just because it named characters after famous philosophers is... well, also unsurprising. I never thought anyone at that show was a creative genius. I have generally made it a point to avoid following most of the creatives' work since, though some are genuinely talented. I also watched a great deal of the latter half of Lost when it aired once it was given a clear end date, in a period in my life where I had very little to do with my time lol and because I wanted to see if they could possibly square the circle with all the mystery boxes and empty hype they'd built themselves around (I'd watched bits and pieces of the first several seasons). It was hatewatching, and the answer to my above question is they couldn't. Watch it again; for the bulk of the run of the show they simply go back and forth from Point B to Point C, learn nothing and continue to have circular 'character building' flashbacks. It was a formula and it was for treading water. But Lost is still venerated today. Everything it is credited as having done for popular entertainment and storytelling was done first and much better by other shows, Twin Peaks among them and most noticeable. Yet Lost gets the lion's share for making this kind of storytelling marketable and broadly commercial, because it is a show led predominantly by bland white leads embarking on a series of Legend of Zelda fetch quests while propped up with savvy mid-late aughts viral-marketing tie-ins and charismatic showrunners. To me Lost is a how-to manual for making a certain kind of successful four-quadrant hit, not any kind of artistic legacy. This is what always enraged me about the show. Even Ryan's (very well written) excerpt suggests it is settled fact that Lost was well-written and elevated drama. I never felt that way and I still don't. It was poorly done but passed off as high art. Which, fine, you can sell art to the general public by packaging it a certain way onscreen, I understand that and I champion it - but other people have done it better and smarter, to say nothing of more inclusively. It was clear they were winging it in so many ways, yet to this day they claim that ending was some true north for them all along. Come on.

Nothing about this show (which I never liked) or its production surprises me.

I remember someone telling us the Mal Young Billy/Phyllis reel story about what he showed to execs to try to circumvent Sussman's plan to end it and reunite Jack and Phyllis, and eventually force SS out altogether. I thought it was too pat a tale at the time but it seems true enough.

I'd forgotten all about this thread. I'll look at all of the above. @dc11786 thank you as well for Revelations. I thoroughly enjoyed the rare Springhill material + finale that turned up recently as well; the show was written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, Paul Abbott, RTD and others. I linked it in the lost media thread, I think.

I can't speak to Vanessa's debut, but it wasn't all that unlikely the instant you saw either Budig or Josh Duhamel onscreen IMO. They were introduced as spoilers for the latest iteration of Agnes' classic innocent young lovers couple - Scott and Becca - but neither poor Abigail Spencer nor a truly dreadful, pre-hambone Forbes March caught on with the audience at all even before Leo or Greenlee appeared. Once Josh and Budig showed up they were both electric. So you knew it pretty quick.

He's not wrong on either point! I could watch the cast do this all day.

@Darn pointed out that Sasha often talks very slowly like she's trying to be understood by a toddler or for the hearing-impaired. Try unseeing/hearing that from now on. It's impossible!

At which point I'd slip into a coma and die. Sasha and Willow are the same character yet Sasha is somehow slightly more boring.