Faulkner

Haha! You thought I was gonna give you one of your blond, corn-fed Midwestern farm boys, huh? 😝 Here’s an approximation, I suppose: the first openly gay active NFL player, Carl Nassib, defensive end for the Las Vegas Raiders: Note: Michael Sam was cut before ever playing a regular-season game with the Rams.

Rachel Lindsay basically put the entire Bachelor franchise on blast in this essay: https://www.vulture.com/article/rachel-lindsay-the-bachelor-franchise.html

I can’t with this idiotic show. If it weren’t for Quinn/Carter, I would have bailed.

Wait, so Justin didn’t kill Vinny? It was even worse: Vinny killed himself?

“Butter” is No. 1 for a fourth week.

I know ESPN used to show the later rounds of the hardcourt Masters (I think they showed “Cincinnati” last year) and the ATP Finals, so I wondered about that.

LOL. She’s… not great. Have ESPN’s tennis rights changed? I’m not following that.

From Oman 🇴🇲

Anila charging $600 worth of drinks to Lisa Nicole’s hotel room… LMAO. Mess.

CLB looks SO much better with the beard btw. Dude does NOT look 63. He talks about being a gay man and the legacy of Stonewall 20 minutes in, mentioning his husband and how he doesn’t hold his hand in public. Really good interview. I like Maurice Benard’s series a lot. He gets people to open up.

No spoilers but it *sounds* like we might get a decent week next week (starting Monday, June 28).

From Florida 🇺🇸

Milos Raonic says he won’t compete at Wimbledon.

I think Y&R would be better off letting the audience in on the schemes of characters like Tara earlier on instead of doing it as a reveal. (Not that Y&R hasn’t hinted that Tara had claws previously, but most of her scenes just completely flatlined and didn’t have enough real subtext.) The show’s not engaging enough in the day-to-day for viewers to sit around to see if the story’s going somewhere. At this point, I’m too annoyed to care that Tara’s openly threatening and manipulating Summer. It’s not like Lucy Coe the mousy librarian being revealed as the vamp. With Y&R’s best villains, we were given their points of view (true to Bill Bell’s obsession with psychology), which made them all the more impactful and disturbing. Even if, say, Cricket knew Phyllis was a bit off, she had no clue about the depth of Phyllis’s evil. But we did. In the past, the audience knew how bad the baddies were long before the other characters did, which added a lot of tension and suspense.

From Nigeria 🇳🇬

Baby-making music.

From the United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Esta barely looks different.

I typically don’t love medical crises/near-death stories on soaps because the writers go to that well too often, you know there will be a miraculous recovery, and they’ll be walking around like normal three episodes later (like Curtis and Jason after being shot). The stakes just don’t feel there. But Josh Swickard has really elevated and grounded this in ways that I haven’t seen in years on these shows. I can’t give him enough praise. I liked him before and thought he had more talent and star quality than your bog-standard soap hunks, but he has really impressed me with this illness story. (He’s made me emotional multiple times, without straining for effect.) I hope GH knows how lucky they are to have him, considering he has had some mainstream success. Gotta say, we dunk on him a lot, but Michael Easton has stepped up big time for this story. His breakup scenes with Finola a few weeks ago were just *bad*, and FH basically had to do all the work. But he’s been really good the past couple of weeks.

Annie Ilonzeh (Maya, GH) has been cast as the lead in an NBC drama pilot. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/annie-ilonzeh-nbc-getaway-1234970539/

The dialogue on this show is so clunky and labored. It’s as if someone told them to write the show like a stiff Victorian costume drama. It’s clear they’re setting up the Lockes to be snakes in the grass, with eyes potentially both on Jabot and NE. They could not have laid the groundwork more poorly for this, though.

He really was an underrated lyricist, even when the suggestive stuff felt on the nose. “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” was a great storytelling song.