It was a callback to the same joke told earlier that day/week. Danny had been trying to get a laugh with the same joke over and over, and Matt was telling him to give it up.
Slacker I think you got the leads mixed. Matt was trying to get people to laugh about it, Danny was telling people not to encourage him.
I don’t think that Jordan had a flilng with her boss. If she had sex with anyone, it would have to be Danny, and I don’t think its likely. We really don’t know anything about anyone’s private life except for Matt and Harriet. She could have a steady boyfriend (or girlfriend for that matter), but we’ve never been told about he/she/it.
Seems to me the father of Jordan’s baby has yet to be introduced. (Paging Josh Malina).
I was hoping for Josh Charles, myself. (If only for the future amusing moment of a three-shot of him, Bradley Whitford, and Timothy Busfield as Danny, Danny, and Danny.) 
I suppose it’s possible for Jack to be the father, but it’s unlikely. It’s definitely not Danny, just because there’s still that slight awkwardness between the characters that would be gone by now if they’d had any kind of physical contact. And given where her tummy’s at, Jordan may have been already pregnant when she took the job at NBS.
[QUOTE=Push You Down
Anyone else sick oh the horribly misleading to outright lying in the “next week on” promos?[/QUOTE]
I avoid the “next week on…” promos. If I forget and it pops on I’ll look away and stick my fingers in my ears and sing.
But sometimes, during the week, they sneak past my defenses. There are two sins I sometimes see. One; giving away a major plot point. Recently a promo for “House”, which ran just before the show started, spoiled the ending where he is arrested by the cop that he’s been antagonizing during the episode.
The other is, as you mentioned, just pure outright falsification. A recent promo for “Law & Order, Special Victims Unit” was cut to make it look like the main guy’s female partner (Mariska Hargitay) was going to spot him making out with the replacement female partner. Actually, in the episode, Hargitay’s character is not even around when the kiss occurs. So the promo editor’s are manufacturing situations that aren’t even in the show.
But she is playing a professional actress. Her character can’t remember a few lines?? Maybe she can’t tell a joke off the cuff and make it funny but she would at least be able to remember the lines …
I know lots of people who are very funny in conversation, but who can’t tell a joke to save their lives. (My mother is one.) Plenty of great comic actors and actresses have tried stand-up and failed. It totally makes sense to me how somebody could be reliably hilarious in scripted sketches but lousy at just telling a joke.
No way. She’s a fake news anchor. Her job is telling jokes, and we’re supposed to believe that she’s brilliant at it.
That part of the show was a total miscue. As was the strange, overly concerned attitude to the hostage taking. By the character’s reactions, I was thinking “someone from the Studio must be involved.” But no, we’re supposed to believe that when a hostage taking shows up on CNN, entire workforces grind to a halt while everyone rushes to a television to stare at it in horror?
Way over the top.
She’s not a “fake news anchor.” She’s a sketch comedian who happens to do the news segment. Being good at sketch comedy bears little relation to being able to tell jokes (Michael Richards, anyone?) so it’s not unbelievable to think she’d shank a joke pretty bad.
I guess we’ll just have to disagree. Being a ‘Weekend Update’-type anchor basically means telling jokes for 5 minutes.
Most comedians are great joke tellers. Have you seen “The Aristocrats”?
Exactly. Remember the earlier episode where Harriet and the others were making up jokes for the news segment? Harriet made up the one about the bear responding to the new hunting laws. It was a silly joke but everyone was saying how Harriet would make it work because she was such a great joke teller.
That’s not the way I saw that. She would sell it precisely because she wouldn’t tell it like a joke. A big piece of the funny in presenting fake news is to play it straight (ala Colbert).
Overall, the episode was pretty good, and McKinney is welcome. But I’m really, really tired of the show making Harriet bascially a dumb blonde. She’s supposed to be incredibly smart and endearingly funny; why can’t we see her be either one of those things?
Someone compared her to Dana from Sports Night. But at least Dana was a strong, authoritative character (even if she had neurotic moments). Harriet seems like nothing more than Sorkin’s punching bag, with very few redeemable qualities.
I saw a lot of work getting done for a workforce that had ground to a halt. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that a show based on the news and topical subjects keeps track of, you know, the news and topical subjects.
I wish they hadn’t written in Amanda Peet’s pregnancy. There’s enough of the TMG-board-doesn’t-like-her that they don’t need to throw in Unwed Mother as Head of a Major Network Entertainment Division to provide further tension.
Jack isn’t going to resign. I’ve seen enough mangled NBC promos to know better.
A friend of mine interviewed Lorraine Newman (an original Not Ready For Prime Time Player) yesterday, and she talked of a sketch they had presented in dress rehearsal but was pulled before broadcast. It was Jesus attending his high school reunion. It was filled with lines like “Jesus, it’s good to see you again!” and “Jesus! You really got fat.” When I heard about that sketch, it reminded me of the Jesus as head off Standards and Practices sketch in the “Nevada Day” episodes.
Does anyone have any other examples of Sorkin possibly cribbing from SNL lore?
Laraine Newman, of course. And in that interview she said of that SNL sketch it could never get on the air, although she said she thought she saw it somewhere else.
Weekend Update.
As ashamed as I am to know this - on the primetime tv show “Jesse” they did that as a gag in one episode.
amarinth do you mean the Jesus sketch? If so, I guess that idea is something that’s been floating around TV land for awhile then. And never be ashamed to know something useless about TV.
Well, it is a variant on something Bill Cosby’s been using for years.