Vee

How can it be streamed if someone doesn't have Bounce?

As a late viewer I never understood how Blake got from the original character to Keifer's glorified housewife. She's a decent actress but I've always been uncomfortable envisioning major story with her in the role (like the truly bizarre one I once dreamed up for the family and her twin sons). I loved Marj as Vanessa on AMC, but that was a very specific, campy character. I had no real experience with McKinsey's Alex on GL until the advent of online videos, but once they came into the picture and you could see and hear her - she was indomitable. Then you turn on CBS and poor Marj is up there doing a blowsy, campy old loon and I'm like, 'are you fúcking kidding me?' Marj is very good at certain things but it was night and day. And her stories in the 2000s didn't help. Like the one where she doses Alan with hallucinogens and she starts popping up in his visions in ridiculous costumes! Don't get me started on Alan either. I like Ron Raines as a performer but he was wildly miscast as Alan - watching in the 90s he was so campily nefarious and bombastic he just made me laugh. It was even more embarrassing after I got acquainted with Chris Bernau's work (I'd only seen him on Dark Shadows until the 2000s). When RR turned up on OLTL 2.0 on Hulu as the big bad guy behind a global conspiracy that was fine, because he was suited to that sort of Snidely Whiplash figure - but Alan wasn't that.

Matt Yglesias has been crashingly negative in recent months. I think 25%-40% is closer. The fact that the GOP and WH, internally, are expecting a bloodbath says a lot.

I do enjoy Sessions being humiliated on the daily. But oh God, the times are so much more dangerous, and that includes both men.

Finally:

It was amusing watching contrarian Chuck Todd - who's never quite left his snide ways behind despite some good moments - ask a largely black, bipartisan panel (including Michael Steele) if DeSantis deserved the benefit of the doubt or 'guilt by association.' He got slammed down pretty fast, particularly by Steele. Meanwhile:

I always felt Keifer's Blake was matronly and safe, at least in the late '90s.

More Bobby and Laura on tour, and a celebration of FWWM's anniversary:

Nice to see the kids are back. Ames McNamara was golden with the family.

As for my thoughts on McCain: He was a deeply flawed human being born to privilege, with a lot of old fashioned or outright bigoted ideas, who also simultaneously believed in hard work, personal honor and caring for veterans. His anger against Obama was very personal and petty - it fueled him in going along with the GOP post-08. Which is why I was more than a bit surprised he wanted Obama to give a eulogy. I think McCain and the press' vision of McCain often drove his own sense of self, more than his own actions in later years. It was a convenient vision of himself that wasn't always very true to his actual choices. But he still was a decent if very complicated man, who made both poor and decent choices. His resentments and weaknesses drove him to a lot of bad places, but he also owned up to a number of his mistakes eventually (Keating Five, Palin). Maybe not as much as I would have wanted, especially per his rancor towards Obama or his obsession with "the surge" - but reducing any one man to a barrage of wikipedia facts or ancient clips of a punchdrunk candidate on the campaign trail riffing on the Beach Boys is not really a fair summation. I thought he was a doddering, out of touch old man by the end of '08, and I disapproved of a lot of his behavior with the GOP Congress for years after. But I never, ever doubted McCain had a core of personal honor and integrity, no matter how much I disagreed with his choices or often found his political calculus inconsistent with that core. Most of us are more than one thing, and a lot of those things are messy and contradictory. It is the unfortunate polarization and absolutism of our times that has led to an us vs. them mentality and a need to fly one's banners for Side X or Y, and in online circles that often leads to a certain impulse to cull for moral and ideological imperatives anyone deemed insufficiently pristine. But we're all dirty. We're all damaged. We're all wrong somehow. McCain just did it in public for most of his adult life. He was a decent, honorable man who sometimes said or did indecent things, who believed in America and its ideals and wanted to serve the country more than himself. And he was a lot more decent than most of the GOP he left behind, and he had honor and morality. For all the shít I talked about McCain over many years I will not forget his giving Mitch McConnell a thumbs down. I never saw it coming. So I hope he rests well.

I usually can't stand Meghan McCain, but I sympathized with her greatly despite myself when Biden was on The View with her discussing his son's battle with cancer last winter, and this is beautiful:

RIP.

I think he did get her wrong under Krista Tesreau. With Karen's Tina it just seems mostly like a '90s outgrowth of the original to me, especially early on in fall '91 when Luna tells Tina they think alike or think the same way or something - and Tina is shocked to hear someone else say they feel the same way she does. It seems both so much like Andrea Evans as well as something new, as does Tina trying to conquer the country club and the Daughters of Llanview. But most of my experience with Andrea's Tina is on YouTube or in her 21st century stints, so I can only speak to that so much. I can't deny she is the ultimate Tina. I just wish Andrea's iteration had matured a bit more before the end of the ABC run when she finally did. I wonder how she could've played similarly socially conscious material. Andrea certainly has the skill. Pretty sure Malone had Tina teed up to be the now-mythical C.J.'s homophobic mother in the original plans for 2003. Same with his alleged plans for Becky Lee Abbott to be a racist when he intended to pair Rachel and Drew in 1996. Both very wrong.

Hot take of the month: I loved (and at times possibly preferred) Karen Witter's 'evolved' Tina under Gottlieb/Malone/Griffith. The material wasn't always perfect - nor could they have unseated Cord with Cain, not for good at least - but you could see the throughline, especially in her relationship with Luna.

Sharp Objects Castle Rock Doctor Who The Keepers Dark One Day at a Time Channel Zero: Butcher's Block Iron Fist (oy) Penance Fuller House very behind on: The Staircase Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Bloodline (final season)

Julee Cruise is back, still wild:

Say what?

No, being an adult is taking thirty seconds to check what you post is legit or relevant as opposed to posting it the instant you see it on Twitter. Which you don't do. But go for it, John, no one's stopping you least of all me.

The point is if it doesn't have any actual OLTL content, maybe it shouldn't go in the OLTL thread. You could have posted it as a status update - that's a great idea. You didn't because any time you see something, like a news item or a fake spumor, you usually don't fact check it or take very much time, you just post it. You don't wait to see if there is another thread - you just want to be 'first'. So you don't think about it, you just do it. That's what I have a problem with and it's why you posted this. People can differ, I stand by it.

Oh, by all means. Good luck, dude! You didn't have to live with the 2000-page spamfest that was the Prospect Park in production threads.