After thinking about this for a bit, I was curious about the legal basis and factuality of Perry Mason’s confident declaration, so I asked ChatGPT. It wanted to know the actual episode in which the scene occurred, so I found it – episode 18 of Season 1, titled “The Case of the Cautious Coquette”.
Wow! I got back over two pages of legal analysis, the essence of which was that while much depended on the precise wording of the release agreement and of course the applicable laws in the jurisdiction, generally speaking in the vast majority of cases Mason would be right – this was not just Hollywood bullshit!
I don’t know how much of this little side scene, if any, was taken from an Erle Stanley Gardiner novel, but the guy was, after all, a lawyer!
I also recently saw a Netflix or Hulu doc that covered a similar subject. This was a ‘real’ documentary (as opposed to a movie) where we saw real footage of real police officers convincing real rape victims to drop the charges and then tossing them in jail for filing false police reports. Some of these cops should be in jail for how they manipulated victims and gave suspects special treatment. And it’s not even a he said/she said thing, there’s interrogation room footage/body cam video of it.
GLOW was great, I’ve watched it two or three times now. It’s too bad Covid got in the way of them making at least one more season. IIRC they left it on a bit of a cliffhanger.
One of the things I really liked about it is how they didn’t portray Jackies as a strung out junkie. They focused more on the collateral damage her addiction was causing than 'look at Jackie snorting some crushed up pills in the bathroom and acting high. As opposed to what you’ll often see when a show has an alcoholic character that shows up to work noticeably drunk.
Also, for some trivia, the pharmacist, Eddie, that she was sleeping with, was also Father Phil, that Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) had a thing for.
One more thing, another show I really liked Edie in was Tommy:
Grotesquerie (Hulu, 2024 1se.) My wife and I just finished the season. It’s great! Recommended to fans of American Horror Story or it’s spin offs like Ratchet or the fabulous Evil (2019-2024). It get’s too gross to watch at a few points but it’s well performed and the story is sharp. Special shout out to Niecy Nash-Betts, previously best known for her role in Reno 911! as Deputy Raineesha Williams. She crushed it in Grotestquerie, I expect to see her in more complex roles.
She was also in Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer as the next door neighbor.
She really seems to have broken free of the Reno 911 rolls. She pops up all over the place these days and half the time I don’t even immediately recognize her.
I’m finishing up the final season of Grantchester. Still enjoyable on its own terms. Still a little fast and loose with the time period. I know there have been many other anachronisms but one glaring one I recently noticed was the use of the term “serial killer” more than a decade before it was coined and probably 20 years before it found its way into wide circulation.
I enjoyed that show and wish there had been one more season with Alphy in it, as I think they really could have done so much more with his storyline. But it also seemed like the writers could no longer come up with anything original and just kept recycling the same things over and over again from earlier seasons.
I finished season two of Slow Horses last night. I didn’t enjoy this season as much as the first but around halfway through things started to pick up again. Some light Googling indicates a lot of first-time watchers feel the same and then like it a whole lot better if they rewatch the entire series again.
I finished it up. Alphy was my least favorite vicar until this season. I think this was an improvement over the last few and they handled his character better. It gave him a good arc and I feel it came to a satisfactory conclusion.
I was always able to just enjoy the show on its own terms while still perceiving flaws. It suffered from the usual BBC rose colored glasses when it comes to racial harmony in the past. Until the script wanted racial issues to be a major plot point. Then back to the idealized version in the next episode. Leonard’s lifestyle is unremarkable to those around him until it isn’t. Then it is again. I think they handled it much better in the final season. The themes were more cohesive throughout the season. They were able to portray Alpy as someone from two cultures who was struggling to find his way in both. Decently written and well acted.
The passage of time and the settings sometimes felt a bit off. It seems like it ended around 1963 or 64. It started in the early 50s. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t quite fit in where it was supposed to be. I mentioned earlier an anachronism that stuck out in a recent episode. I know there were many others.
They completely dropped anything to do with Geordie’s children. At least Esme got to make an appearance. Nothing at all mentioned about the son that was so prominent in another season.
Of course you have to accept that sleepy little Grantchester has a higher murder rate than Cabot Cove.
But as always the strength was in the cast. I will miss seeing them in character.
Started the new Reacher season yesterday and I agree with others that so far it’s better than the previous season, although that’s not a high bar to clear.
I found it hard to believe that Daniel (Leonard’s boyfriend) would be granted custody of Raymond. I think the child welfare authorities would insist that only a married couple (straight of course) are suitable substitute parents. That’s putting aside that Raymond was given to a pair of gay men to raise.
Spoiler boxing the above because apparently the show has not yet aired on ITV in the UK even though it’s already been shown in the United States.
A new season of Futurama is airing now and it took me by surprise a bit. I am a fan of the show but I thought the previous season was a bit of a letdown. Hulu is only producing 10 episodes a season, so the last one felt like a bit of a speedrun. It definitely had its moments but there was also this feeling that writers were checking off boxes of things to make sure to put in. It seems less so this season and they have gone to some oddball places so far. The latest episode has the Galaxy Express crew going to a Ringworld and goofiness, some of it unexpected, ensues.
I will have to check that episode out. I enjoyed Niven’s Ringworld books.
I was a huge fan of the series when it first ran, up through the 2-3 “movies” that were split into 4 episodes. However, similar to what happened with the Simpsons, I found the new episodes to be more and more based on current events. In 10-15 years, no one is going to care about an episode based on the covid pandemic or the rush to buy the newest iphone (eye-phone).
In preperation for a trip to Paris next month we’re watching “Emily in Paris”, which is objectively a bad show. But we are enjoying it just because we spend a lot of time guessing the upcoming plot points and seeing the Parisiene sights.
My wife wanted to watch Emily in Paris a while back, so we did. No, definitely not going to put it on my list of favorites, but I recall amusing little bits here and there. Don’t ask me what they were; not sure I can recall them. But I did like the guy with the frizzy white hair.
You probably know this, but Emily is, in real life, Phil Collins’s daughter.
I learned that (that even though series 11 of the Grantchester programme already aired on PBS Masterpiece Theater in the United States, it’s not scheduled to air on ITV in the UK until “early 2027”) from the Wikipedia article. That may be because Masterpiece is a co-producer.
My wife and I were looking for something new to watch last night, and found this. I went into it knowing less than you (almost…less than zero, you might say, heheh. Or not. Sorry). At first I thought, another drama about pretty, privileged teenagers? Nope. I’m so far removed from the demographic I just can’t do it. But my wife wanted to watch it, and reading the synopsis…takes place in the 80s, and there’s a serial killer? OK, I have an ironic fondness for cheesy 80s slasher movies, so perhaps it’s an homage.
I was surprised when I found out while watching that the main character was supposed to actually be Bret Easton Ellis. I thought “huh, I don’t remember ever hearing about a serial killer stalking and killing Ellis’s High School classmates ”. So I looked up more info on the show and read the wiki page on it-- turns out it’s a co-production of Ellis and Ryan Murphy (he of the ‘911’ and ‘American Horror Story’ franchises), based on a semi-autobiographical Ellis novel. Emphasis on ‘semi’, apparently. Ellis, it seems, has taken to writing ‘meta-fiction’ in the later stage of his career, which I guess means taking fact and fiction and blending it up like a margarita.
Final verdict: I’ll keep watching, in a ‘turn off my brain and enjoy it’ way. Ellis is about the same age as me-- I read his novels ‘Less Than Zero’ and ‘American Psycho’, and later watched the movies. I was never a big fan, but was impressed that an age peer had such writing success at a relatively early age. So, despite the fact that my high school experience was much less privileged and much more Midwestern than that of the characters, it does twang some 80s nostalgia vibes for me. It kind of gets the ‘feel’ of the 80s right-- a lot of TV and movies that do 80s period stuff overdo it with the big hair and legwarmers and Michael Jackson zipper jackets on everybody.
”. So I looked up more info on the show and read the wiki page on it-- turns out it’s a co-production of Ellis and Ryan Murphy (he of the ‘911’ and ‘American Horror Story’ franchises), based on a semi-autobiographical Ellis novel. Emphasis on ‘semi’, apparently. Ellis, it seems, has taken to writing ‘meta-fiction’ in the later stage of his career, which I guess means taking fact and fiction and blending it up like a margarita.