This week’s episode of The Pitt on MAX (the twelfth of this first season) was the big one, featuring the hospital emergency department responding to a mass casualty incident.
Well, on MY watching experience, I got to see two people worth a billion dollars combined argue about a $4,000 check, which I think is pretty much it for me and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Consider it curbed!
Last night, finished the Green Acres binge I mentioned starting upthread. Overall, highly recommended for viewers who appreciate the absurd. It took a few episodes for it to find its legs in the first season (the first episode is a truly unwatchable and unnecessary info dump), and the last season was something of a drop-off. In between, a whole lotta good stuff, a fair amount of truly inspired stuff, and a little bit of cringey stuff here and there.
The last two episodes were back-door pilots for other shows that were never picked up, and they have the feel of a fourth-rate sketch comedy show trying to do a satire of bad sitcoms and having an off night. Some truly unfortunate stuff there, and a sad way for the show to go out.
Interesting. Just a couple of days ago I finished a Green Acres rewatch. I thought at the time about starting a thread on weakest series finales.
(I’ve been doing a rewatch of lots of old shows. I have finished, for example, Green Acres, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family, and The Munsters. I’m mostly through The Rockford Files and Colombo, a couple of seasons into Mister Ed, and just starting Quincy. I largely watch them in a window on my phone while doing other stuff, so I’m not giving all of them all of my attention.)
I recently read a list of worst TV shows and had to try Aliens in the Family (here is the complete series on the Internet Archive). It could have been a fun sitcom if done well (see the not entirely dis-similar Dinosaurs) but AitF had bad writing and really terrible acting. The baby is so similar to Stewy on Family Guy that I wonder if he was the inspiration.
I was curious about what happened with the actors on the show, and things did not go well for the mother:
The father was by far the worst actor, but he seems to have had a pretty extensive career.
Green Acres would be a good one for that. I’m aware that they were caught up in the “rural purge” going on in the early seventies. I don’t know how the timing of that played out in terms of the production schedule or how suddenly the official cancellations came, but they obviously didn’t have an opportunity to plan for a proper series finale.
Andy Griffith was another one. Ended on a pilot for Mayberry, RFD.
OMG, what a cheap cop out. L&O had it’s ripped from the headlines, where a guy murders the CEO of a Health insurance co.
His defense was they that company killed his mother- in that they refused a $20000/mo experimental drug for her cancer. And that he was preventing other deaths.
And Nolan blew it- all he had to do is bring in a couple of respected oncologists who would say that drug would likely not have helped her, and that due to its non FDA approval they wouldnt have prescribed it, and then get some Insurance ombudsman to agree that insurance companies cant approve a experimental drug, since if it kills the patient that leaves them open, thus proving that even if the drug was $1- they would not have used it anyway.
But the ending has the jury foreperson reading the verdict and it is “We find the defendant…” and then it goes to black.
What a fucking cheap cop out.
Actually his defense was that their decision to deny coverage to multiple customers resulted in thousands of deaths. The prosecution might have pointed out that the insurer can not possibly approve all claims; the funds are not unlimited.
That was part of it, but in any case, what was needed was to prove that denying a lawful claim killed a client.
Nitpick: No, as you announced back on March 9, Netflix currently has only the first two seasons of Dark Winds, Season 3 is on AMC for now.
It is. New episodes drop on Thursdays.
I haven’t checked it out yet but it has a few of my favorite actors in it, so might have to.
I may wait a little bit and then subscribe to Britbox to watch it.
Brain fart.
It seemed that 80% of the episodes were “I don’t have a couple of bucks for tips or for parking and it all gets so out of hand, I’m too rich to carry money”. That and Larry finds something offensive funny and won’t let it go. Which was slightly more bearable.
Watched S3, E2 of Dark Winds. It doesn’t seem to be working well. The actors are mailing it in so far.
Huh, I’m liking it, especially the local-culture-clueless but evidently smart and determined FBI agent who’s uncovering what happened to BJ Vines. And I like how that menace is manifesting for Leaphorn in hallucinatory flashes of apparently supernatural entities that he is normally a little more consciously skeptical about. I admit I’m a little fogged on the progress of the main plot about claw killer dude and how it all fits together, though.
Maybe E2 is a bit lower-key (well, after that rather dramatic opening sequence, at least) to pause for a pacing reset and setting the stage. For example, Manuelito getting a shit busywork assignment to discipline her for being too nosy about a powerful local businessman makes sense, but by its very nature is slackening the dramatic tension for the moment. I expect shit to start hitting the fan sometime soon.
(Liked the Robert Redford/George R.R. Martin producers’ cameo appearance in E1, but could not help feeling that an actual elderly bilagáana jailbird in a reservation jail cell would have worse-looking teeth than Redford’s pearly whites.)
Just finished this - I’m not a binge watcher but I had to find out whodunnit. I suspect I found it funnier than you did, but it is effectively a mashup of OMitB style whodunnits with The West Wing and with a definite Shonda Rimes vibe (she produced but did not write this).
Like OMitB there are red herrings by the ton, but also enough actual clues to reveal the culprit buried amongst them. Lots of Agatha Christie references too. There are also certain jabs at real political figures, but not enough to make it soapbox-y or stray past incidental satire. I also think there’s scope for Cordelia Cupp to be the next Benoit Blanc (and I suspect there’s more than a soupçon of Blanc in Cupp anyway).
Bonus funny: Al Franken appears as a Senator (heh) named “Aaron Filkin”. I had to explain to the wife what a filk was and why this was likely a cheeky nod to Aaron Sorkin.
We binged season one of Dark Winds yesterday. I like the characters (except for the badly written bad guys) and the way they interact but the underlying crimes/mystery was contrived nonsense. We also watched the first episode of season two. It’s worth watching just for the landscapes.
A lot of it is shot in Monument Valley. There are a lot of scenes where the mittens can be seen in the background.