Vee

He's right. Good luck with your next delete.

Found myself bingeing this on HBO a ton lately for chill after work and IRL stress alongside Abbott Elementary - my first consistent watch of the show in many, many years. I've always liked the late Mary Alice, but her role here with Lettie's history overseas is really interesting. I understand why they wrote the character out as others evolved, but I still wish she'd hung around longer as the show got better and better - her literate, worldly energy is unique and fascinating.

When he chooses to be.

Ryan Murphy is self-hating vapid scum and a craven opportunist. That's something that crosses all sort of demographic lines. He hasn't made a coherent series since the mid-late 2000s.

Who doesn't love Coolio? No one. RIP.

Non-paywall link here. As always, archive.ph or .is can bypass the paywall on any articles if you plug the main URL into their form.

My thought at the time had to do with what would be realistic - back then, Watros was getting a lot of primetime work and had not yet returned to daytime. So, bring her in for a publicized stint and finally kill Annie off. I think both Zimmer and Watros have since said any friction was overblown.

I remember the Watros eps of AW. I thought she was fine. Had GL been brought back as a mini or something, my angle a decade ago was always to promo it up and do a few episodes' arc where they close out Annie by having Watros return (the plastic surgery face change would be discarded) and get gunned down by Reva when she goes for the grandkids or whatever.

If you look at the show in the Marland years or later on and you're a pair of new eyes, you just assume Bob and Kim have been together forever. It's beyond me how they kept them apart so long when the social mores of the '70s continued changing and after Dan Stewart was dead. We've often said Susan Bedsow Horgan doesn't get enough credit for her work on various soaps, but IIRC it was her stroke of genius to finally re-pair them and marry them off pre-Marland, correct me if I'm wrong.

Sarcasm and increasingly strange improvisations.

Dang, Trevor got old in the face (which would at least help with what may be a ludicrous recast). He's his typical snarky self in motion and still handsome, but he looks remarkably like Stephen Collins now.

idk about Mad About You but Just Shoot Me, Suddenly Susan, Caroline in the City, etc. all only survived because of Friends.

I would def call Coach a timeslot hit, lol.

Shrink it, baby.

Maggie Haberman has been getting roasted even more than usual for days as the book rollout of her latest conveniently-delayed Trump scoops begins, with the usual feverish wagon-circling from the Beltway press who continue to fail to read the tone and temperature of the country.

Larys was featured before the timejump.

Ava seemed a bit more competent and on top of things in the premiere. She ran that opening meeting well and was on top of things with Melissa - I think coming through in front of the board has her a bit more dedicated, by Ava standards.

I'm always happy to see Frazer Hines. I don't know how they haven't made more use of him.

The Parks and Recreation parallels are interesting in that a lot of fans have twigged the Tariq character as likely becoming a bigger presence a la how Chris Pratt/Andy Dwyer blew up on that show. He clearly has a good heart and is good with the kids whenever volunteering despite also being a layabout idiot. I don't think Zack Fox/Tariq will become as big as Pratt/Andy did on Parks, but I do think there's a fair amount of similarity. I'm most pleased to see Tyler James Williams in a popular lead role - he's been so, so good as an adult performer on a bunch of shows and he deserved a lasting showcase. But Sheryl Lee Ralph, Quinta Brunson, Lisa Ann Walter, the whole ensemble is great.

I had to make a thread for this after catching up with its first short season on HBO Max - it just began its second on Hulu/ABC. Sweet, earnest and very funny. Sheryl Lee Ralph's Emmy is well deserved after so many years of great work, but the entire ensemble crackles and Janelle James steals every scene as Ava.

Frons went to the wall to try to save first Guza, then GH in 2011 from the ax IIRC. He felt Guza was GH's true north, that only he could write it. But he couldn't protect him after a certain point, and he was gone not long after himself. I think JFP stayed on because she was a capable line producer, and because after Guza's grand return with Frons' blessing in '02 and her complete disaster stint with Megan McTavish the previous year that was largely what she was reduced to. Guza had learned from his battles with Wendy Riche and came back with a co-producer credit; he had creative control (beneath Frons), which was unheard of for anyone other than JFP in the mix at that time. And she lost it all. Based on the difference between her past work at other shows and at GH post-2001/early '02, it appeared as though Jill never had real creative control (outside of the '08 WGA strike) at GH again. And she deserved to lose it. She was reduced to getting her ex Kale Browne constant voice-over gigs on the show because he was widely disliked among performers and production across ABC (Hillary B. Smith and Mark Derwin were still taking anonymous shots at him in the OLTL oral history, and he was fired the instant she moved to GH) and she no longer had the power to force him onscreen.