The West Wing
West Wing Dude #2 (J. Lyman) is talking to gay republican congress critter (GRCC) about the west wing analog to DOMA. GRCC goes into a tirade about how he’s going to vote for it and just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he should vote against it. GRCC rambles on about he’s not just a gay man… blah blah blah.
Stupid. Just stupid. Hey dumbfuck, you know what doesn’t treat you like a whole person and ONLY cares that you are gay? DOMA, that’s what.
Yep, I’d totally forgotten that, or suppressed it. That terminal phase of the show had the R2D2/C3PO pair ripoff and everything.
Just the other day, we set a recording for the season opener of the CNN series “Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown.” Because we were recording two other things at the same time as the first airing of the show, we set it for a later showing. When we tried to watch it last night, it turned out that they’d pre-empted it - for yet another “special news report” about the fact that they still don’t know a damned thing about the missing Malaysian flight! Amazing.
The line between reporting news and making news was irrevocably blurred decades ago.
Hence “Anchorman 2”: the journalistic coup of a lifetime- a live, one-on-one interview with Yassir Arafat- is preempted by coverage of the O.J. Simpson freeway chase.
omg I have forever held this in and now it can come out at last!!
Ages ago, watching Scooby Doo. A scene in it has a lady wearing a long skirt sitting down doing something and she drops the object. She catches it between her knees and continues with whatever. Later when the gang solves the crimes they declare that they KNEW SHE WAS A MAN ALL ALONG and it was because when “she” dropped something she caught it between her knees and if she’d really been a woman she would have just let her skirt catch it.
WTF??? To this DAY if I drop something and catch it in my lap, I think about that and get pissed all over again. I am unable to let it go.
You might want to avoid reading Huckleberry Finn, BoBettie.
Yes.
“What’s this Watergate stuff? Gilligan’s Island is supposed to be on!”
Makes perfect sense to me. :dubious:
This was prevalent back in the bad old days, when cannisters of film were actually shipped from station to station across the US so local broadcasters could air syndicated shows. The locals would remove entire scenes to squeeze in more commercials, and the excised film would end up literally on the cutting room floor. I remember watching Hogan’s Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, Wild, Wild, West, and a lot of other shows that I had seen in network first runs, and I could tell immediately which scenes were missing. AFAIK, this doesn’t happen anymore since (a) DVDs are used instead of films and videotape and (b) syndicated shows are transmitted over the air to affiliates for rebroadcasting later. The films are trimmed in advance (if at all), and it’s done much more subtly. I remember watching Hogan’s Heroes once on the old WTCN in Minneapolis, and whoever had cut the film for some reason used a very crude mechanical wipe to splice it back together again—just some kind of black strip that grew until it filled the screen and then shrank again. The effect was horrible!
I first noticed the much more subtle effect watching ST: TOS back in the '80s. Instead of dropping whole scenes, they trimmed little bits and pieces off here and there. I could tell because I had seen the episodes in their entirety earlier and could pretty much recite the dialogue from memory. For those who remember the TOS film clips that were sold through Roddenberry’s Lincoln Enterprises in the '70s, a lot of pirated ones were apparently put into circulation by teenaged Trekkies (females) who cozied up to the film cutters at their local TV stations and were collecting the scraps that they edited from the syndicated episodes.
Another memory: One summer in the late '60s, I went from Massachusetts to Virginia, from West Virginia to Illinois, from Indiana to Michigan, and back again to Minnesota, and the same freakin’ syndicated shows followed me across the country, confirming my suspicions that the film cannisters were being shipped from one station to another across the US!
Note: Here in Totonto, they were airing Fawlty Towers in prime time on the Vision Channel this winter. I switched it off in the middle of one episode when I realized they had cut out large chunks to make it fit into the allocated time slot. So it does still happen today (though I doubt they had it on film or videotape). I think I caught a few edits in their broadcast of Columbo last week, which really pissed me off! What, the revenue from an hour and a half isn’t enough for them to air the show without cuts for more crap commercials?!? :mad:
Our power went out at halftime of the 2010 World Cup Final. Sunny day, temps in the upper 80s, no wind, and FFZZZZT. We live in the American burbs, so it took us until the 68th minute to find any kind of commercial establishment that 1) had power and 2) was showing the game. Although watching car loads of distraught neighborhood Spain fans whizzing past us on the road making the rounds to various strip malls was pretty amusing.
This is more a frustration caused by TV.
The first time I saw Jaws was when it was broadcast here on TV - I’m guessing that was around 1983 (mainly because I remember taping it on the VCR and watching it on a TV that was slowly crapping out - the colour guns were not working properly and it was mostly green - we got a new TV so my dad could watch the 1984 Olympics). 
Apparently the version I saw was an extended version, quoth IMDB:
I had no idea I had seen an extended version so when I purchased the DVD Special Edition I was very puzzled to find that some of the best parts of the film were not there, and could be found in the 'Deleted Scenes" section.
I was amazed when Blazing Saddles was first aired. As you might expect, it was heavily Bowdlerized, but they inserted a scene I had never seen before, I guess to make it fit the allocated air time: when Bart and Jim are running from the Klansmen, they join a bunch of Baptists christening people in a river and let themselves be dunked in order to hide underwater. I’ve never seen this again in any other cut of the film.
An old girlfriend of mine once told me she had seen a cut of The Producers in which Hitler and Mussolini have a food fight with spaghetti during the one and only performance of Springtime. Again, I’ve never seen this sequence in any version of the film either. 
Isaac Asimov wrote a lot of locked room mysteries. He’d tell the story with all the clues and you had a chance to solve it before the reveal. The skirt vs pants catch was the big clue to one of them, when he was trying to catch a spy, iirc. I read it around 1980-1981 and thought it was weak sauce then, but I figured times were different when he wrote and/or set the story. I went with it, though I felt ripped off, as there was no way I had a chance to solve that in the jeans/slacks-wearing age.
No one has mentioned it yet? What the hell, I’ll be that guy. FIREFLY. Watch “Objects in Space” and weep for our collective loss. Random time/day shuffles? Out-of-order showings? Dammnit!
That’s one of the reasons Huck Finn got caught out when he dressed as a girl. He also threaded a needle wrong (girls hold the needle still and poke the thread at it) and threw too well. The skirt one was the most logical.
Is my memory reading that book back in the 60s so wrong? I remember that “girls hold the thread still and slip the needle over it.” Did you get it backwards?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but from what I remembered, after Rex got shot…
His body completely healed after a few seconds, and he said, “What did you guys do to me?” The implication being that the transfusion of Jack’s blood had made him immortal.
So I guess that could have given the next series/season a direction to go in, but we’ll probably never know. After Russel T. Davies’ partner got ill, I think he abandoned any further work on Torchwood. Although I was never crazy about how “Americanized” Miracle Day was, so maybe it’s just as well.
But I agree about killing off the previous characters. I liked Torchwood as it was in the first 2 seasons, with the same 5 characters, taking place in Cardiff, and mostly the monster-of-the-week type stuff. I can only assume that everyone but Gwen and Jack were killed off to make room for new American characters, sigh.
Something a bit different to the “I hate it when sports pre-empts everything” stuff, but I really hate the way people winning “reality” TV shows has become news worthy of prime space on major news websites.
If I cared who won the show, I would have been watching it. I wasn’t, because I don’t care, and therefore I don’t want to see it front and centre on a major news website the next morning.
You must have missed some thirsysomething episodes. Gary died midway through the last season, and there were several episodes dealing with the fallout from his death. MIchael and Melissa both had a hard time dealing with it in particular, and the character appears a ghost at the latter’s wedding to her younger boyfriend.