Vee

A pretty remarkable fall for a widely-loathed boss among retail/park staff:

Mehdi Hasan aggressively steps in it, again, defending Qatar hosting the World Cup (which he has a history of doing):

I'll watch anything Danai Gurira is in, and Lincoln is brilliant as well. The others spinoffs hold no interest for me. Meanwhile:

Since I know they were the only reason both @DRW50and I kept watching for awhile, this is newsworthy: Apparently Danai Gurira co-wrote their spinoff miniseries, which I will be watching. I don't know if/when I'll watch the actual final seasons of TWD though. It seems very odd that the actual ending of the main show appears to largely just be a springboard for the multiple spinoff shows - I think they are remiss to not show these two main characters at least reuniting with the rest of the longtime ensemble (and their two young children) before going off on a new adventure, unless that reunion is going to happen in the spinoff. If the show ends up in syndication somehow new people are going to be wildly confused. Apparently Carol is left caring for the Grimes kids and helping to run whatever the current settlement is. I'm glad she's happy. I do hope she eventually got back together with Ezekiel. They were neat together around when I stopped watching. But I still think killing off Carl was an unforgivable mistake.

Important going forward:

Ncuti Gatwa at the BAFTAs. He claims his costume has not yet been settled on, and does not discount the possibility of not wearing a shirt (as he is quite fond of not doing). Capaldi gives Gatwa a nod:

That bitch Kat will pay!

Jason Frank was a force of nature on kids' TV who stole the show in a guest spot and became a legend. How sad.

Meanwhile: BritBox is likely to be folded into ITVX, I believe.

There may be another announcement next week. I assume that will be the traditional official costume reveal picture for Ncuti Gatwa/Fifteen, which they are likely to do to get ahead of people taking pix of filming Series 14, which they begin early next month. That was the reason for the Tennant/Tate reveal as soon as they began filming those.

Millie Gibson is Ruby Sunday:

Ex-Corrie star Millie Gibson joins Doctor Who:

No relation to Y&R:

Neither Nikolas nor Esme is a dark-skinned Black performer.

Not surprised.

I don't think Disney is super conservative at this point despite many valid criticisms of representation in their main line content. And I don't think Disney or ABC are exerting much oversight at all; they don't care much about GH at this point, it is a timefiller. But I do think Frank Valentini in particular, who is a producer bent on survival for his soaps above all, is very concerned about turning off the last of what he believes is a remaining core audience of white seniors in red states. GH was far bolder about interracial love onscreen 20 and 30 years ago than they are today. FV has a history of running from diversity when he thinks it affects the bottom line. Y&R and B&B have the relative protection of international money.

In fairness, that (streaming with ads) is what Hulu was at the time for AMC and OLTL; it was a cash flow/management issue there. But FreeVee is more explicitly ad-based and has no subscription fee or payment required whatsoever, which is even more convenient. You were ahead of everyone on FreeVee.

Which is why I'm very glad we passed an excellent climate bill when we could. This ventriloquism act is growing more bizarre and embarrassing by the hour:

It's obvious what is happening, and fans should be on their ass about it every single day on that GH hashtag tbh. Remember #WhyRatingsAreLow in 2015 when Ron got canned for Denise, Fluke, etc? That hashtag got heat and IMO the relentless pillorying did contribute to the drumbeat. People need to start cataloguing every day they fail to let their central young interracial couple kiss or be intimate after close to 18 months. They should find a hashtag and hit it every day, and see how long GH handles it. Because I am not convinced they'll kiss this month, next month or New Year's, and even if they finally do I'm skeptical it'll happen again any time soon. They seem scared and hesitant as hell, and I think it's cowardly and pathetic in 2022 when this show was doing onscreen interracial couples over 30 years ago.

We have been sleeping on F.A.S.T. a bit. It occurred to me not long ago its possibilities might be strong for soaps when I got very, very bored and began watching a lot of Dallas on FreeVee. I'll probably never fully recover from how close AMC and OLTL were to making it work, but it can be done again with many soaps. It's what should save General Hospital along with a complete creative overhaul porting it onto streaming, but that will likely not happen tbh. With the exception of Days, which may succeed against the odds some of us were predicting not long ago (due to Peacock's instability and poor quality) if their renewal news is true, I think the remainder of American soaps will have to be dragged off network TV to their deaths.