It’s a bad sign when nobody’s even bothering to start a thread.
Actually it was a pretty good episode. Sorkin avoided the sitcom wackiness that he does poorly and focused on the dramatic elements that he does well. People were acting serious but they were doing so in the face of serious problems. Nobody seemed to be acting out of character this episode which was nice. There was minimal Matt and Harry nonsense. And Camille Chen really does look good in a swimsuit.
Disregard- I was thinking 30 Rock
I found the lawyer extremely irritating. I just waned Matt to say, “You know what? I’m doing my job here. Could you shut up for 45 more minutes?”
Actually, that’s all I’ve got. I watched it, but it was kind of like going to dinner with a girl you know you’ll be breaking up with soon: I wasn’t exactly hanging on their every word.
The cable guide said that this episode was a rerun, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be, so I watched. I agree that the lawyer was irritating (even though I like Kerri Matchett a lot). Who gives a rat’s ass about some former writer’s discrimination suit anyway?
I think they could have done a lot more with the software that tells you how to write a successful pop hit/screenplay/sketch comedy. Maybe in the next couple of episodes.
Why did Harriet even think it would be a good idea to tell Tom that his brother might be missing in the middle of a live show? And why would Tom’s parents call Harriet in the first place? I thought it was handled well when they did tell him about it, though.
Was Jenna Fischer shown at all before the goodbyes? I had no idea she was supposed to be the guest host until then.
Do they even make Flintsones vitamins anymore?
The old ones used to be shaped like the Flinstone characters. The ones he poured out were not. Maybe he was being funny?
This was a much better episode than we’ve seen in a long time. The scene between Matt and Suzanne, when she confronted him about the pill use, was outstanding, and this show might have survived if there’d been a few more like it.
Harry is supposed to be a smart girl, but Sorkin keeps writing her as an idiot. There could have been no good reason to tell Tom during the show, and if Harry really were a smart character she’d have known that.
I didn’t like the lawyer either.
Camille Chen did look edible in that swimsuit! And Lucy’s legs are fabulous! We needed more scenes like these too!
A rooftop wrap party, huh? I hope someone brought the door key…
I thought it was a repeat?
Good thing I taped it then…I will be back later to discuss.
Damn, I missed it.
I’ll try to catch it on the website. Is that still available?
Was it just me or was there a HELL of a lot of mumbling in the show this time. There were about 8 different places when I had to backtrack the DVR and turn the volume way way up to understand what people said.
I actually thought this episode was pretty stupid. Software to analyze sketch comedy? Get real.
And you’ve got to be kidding that Matt would actually be so stupid as to tell someone that the writer was fired for performance reasons and that she was suing them. If the Gage-Whitney team had any brains at all that would have been one of the first things they told him not to do.
I leave the closed captioning on to help deal with mumblers. It leads to some interesting insights, too. For instance, when Danny asked a staffer to drive Jordan to “Hollywood Memorial Hospital”, the subtitle said “Cedars-Sinai”. I guess the captioning is done from a shooting script, and any changes only show up in the final recorded dialogue.
Okay, all caught up.
I see that they have found the gravitas missing for so long. And I never noticed the “Pirates of Penzance” poster in Matt’s office before. Is that new?
Really? You don’t think there’s a possibility that knowing your brother has been captured or killed in a war is more important than your job? I don’t work on something as Earth-shatteringly important as a Friday night comedy show, I realize, but if someone waited until the end of my workday in order to tell me my brother had died in a car accident so it wouldn’t affect my productivity, I’d be pretty pissed.
It’s not a question of what’s more “important.” There’s nothing Tom could do about his brother in any case, and the news of the hostage-taking didn’t come until after the show.
During the show, they were wringing their hands only over whether to tell Tom they hadn’t heard from his brother, which is no news at all. Possibly worrying Tom needlessly.
I don’t know where you work, but I doubt it’s a live TV show. I’ve performed in live theater, and I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be told something like that when I still had to go out on stage and remember lines and hit marks. That’s just common sense.
If they’d learned about the hostage-taking during the show, well, that’s different. That’s big enough news that, not only would telling Tom be a no-brainer, they’d probably suspend the rest of the show and go to a breaking news update anyway.
Did you notice the tie-in with Howard and Tom? Matt mentioned to Howard about him mispronouncing the show’s name and he became so worried about it he did it again. It was a parallel to Simon and Harriet not wanting to throw off Tom’s performance by saying anything to him.
I can see it as a real dilemna. Do you tell someone something that will upset them because of its uncertainty or do you wait until you have definite information? Although it was a little unreal that they never mentioned that Tom must have already suspected something - they said his brother always emailed him before a show and hadn’t done so this week. I thought the payoff of the plotline was going to be when Tom was talking to Lucy about his performance after the show and he was going to say he had been worried about his brother all night and make us realize that Simon and Harriet’s worrying had been meaningless.
I can also understand why they’re pushing the whole lawsuit issue. The real point is to bring in a character to act as a romantic counter to Harriet. The lawsuit is just a mcguffin to have a reason within the show for her to be hanging around all the time.
No, it’s not. It’s a decision that an individual can arrive at after carefully considering the particulars of a given situation–what, if anything, can the person do about the situation? will they still go on stage after hearing the news? exactly how bad and how certain is the news anyway? what’s the personality of the person to be told and how are they likely to react?
I think the point of that whole plot line is that it’s not a cut and dried situation, that you can be tremendously caring and possibly do the wrong thing (the potential in the Harriet side of the argument) or be doing what looks like the cold hearted thing and still possibly be right (the Simon side of things). Maybe the situation could have been written a little farther in one direction to push it farther into the grey area where it was clearly meant to sit (but not so far that it became to cut and dried in the other direction), but I don’t think it comes close to being so black and white that Harriet’s position was automatically idiotic.
Was anyone else annoyed and/or totally distracted by the constant talk about the ratings? We get it already, your ratings stink. What exactly are we, the people who are currently watching it, supposed to do about it? I know they were talking about the ratings of the TV-show within the TV-show, but we all know what they were *really * preaching about. At least when Arrested Development did that, it was hilarious.
I bet showing more of Jenna Fisher would have helped the ratings! :smack: They could do a lot of good, funny scenes with their “guest hosts”, yet IMHO, they always seem to fall flat in that area.
I found that amusing - they managed to blame everyone, Nielsen for looking at the wrong demographic, the audience for being too shallow to watch “the war sketch,” the studio execs, the actors, reality tv, the writer’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, a woman who got fired years ago, more on the audience, the actors for failing to deliver a scene about Nicolas Cage, everyone (but the writer) for the fact that the ratings sucked.
And when someone finally did say “hmm, maybe, just maybe it might have something to do with the writing” that was pushed aside as “oh, it’s the percoset’s fault.”
The level of denial going on is amazing.
The scenes with Tom talking to Lucy followed by Tom talking to Simon about Lucy were nice.
Except that the Simon and Tom scene used the oldest bit in the book. Character A has something to tell Character B , but Character B won’t shut up which makes Character A change his mind about the thing he had to tell. This must go back to when cavemen performed for each other.
Actually, at the end Matt admitted that his writing with or without the drugs sucked, and he and Danny knew it. I think that it was clear what the problem with the show was and they all knew it.
Dilemma.