25 Comments

Hooray! I got my Danny Stevens closure.

That scene of Kelly talking Dev (but mostly herself) into bring Alex along on their mission was good, too. Mostly because I saw it coming a mile away, and it still made me mad that she would do that. She really is her father's daughter.

It seems like we're setting up a final stretch with Aleida, Eli and Margo in the USSR and the other main characters on Mars with the asteroid and the Helios workers fomenting interplanetary proletariat revolution and an unstable Soviet government. And presumably the whole smuggling the North Korean's wife thing will end up mattering, too. Gonna be fun.

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Dev's reaction to Kelly's little speech was so heartbreaking. Edi Gathegi played that perfectly.

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That was a real Letterman Top 10 list, from December 3, 1999 except they moved the actual #6 to #9.

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I forgot to mention the Gore taking credit for the asteroid thing! I laughed for five full minutes. Nice touch.

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Monk's' Last Case: Welcome Back to the OCD

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Dec 8, 2023·edited Dec 8, 2023

I assume Mike Schur being on Mount Rushmore would be 100% recency bias?

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Definitely. I love Parks and Rec and I think The Good Place is a masterpiece.

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Any consideration for Rod Serling on Mount Rushmore?

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He could be there, sure.

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Please bring out the very large chisel for David E. Kelley's face. Dude dominated TV (all four majors stations!) for a good decade and then some.

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Alan, you’re right about the Monk being so heavy-dramatic. I wasn’t expecting them to go into that depth about his psyche.

If the ratings are a success, I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more tv movies. I wouldn’t mind them checking-in once in a while (ala The Rockford Files movies).

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Not trying to take a shot here or anything, but I'm wondering about comparing it to the Rockford movies and not the more obvious Columbo movies. More comparable IMO seeing as how you see the crime committed and then the "mystery" is how the detective gets to the solution. All three definitely iconic characters, though.

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Colombo was never a regular weekly series as Peter Falk was adamant about being allowed to do theatrical films.

So that’s why I compared it to The Rockford Files as James Garner was still up for the tv movies after the weekly show ended.

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Definitely not a weekly series, yet still a series in the original run. Regularly scheduled 8 "episodes" per year for the first several years. The last few years of the original run (3 episodes in '76 and 5 in '77) was probably when he requested a reduced workload so he could do other stuff. Still kept him plenty busy and I doubt he shot any theatrical stuff during the shooting season. And, like Rockford, was then revived for a series of TV films (20 produced in about 14 years).

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I suspect that this particular Mount Rushmore is just for the entertainment side of the house. Otherwise, we'd have to talk about people like Edward R. Murrow, Don Hewitt, Roone Arledge and various names I don't know on the business side (Paley?).

I also suspect that when it comes to "influence", just like George Washington has to be on the original because he decided a million things that are still held today, the biggest influences are probably before our time.

And the arbitrary choice of four because the guy who led the creation of the original liked Teddy Roosevelt so much . . . Well, it probably opens more doors, as Alan did, to say that there is no way of picking just four and just have fun throwing out names.

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I loved this week's episode of Fargo and I also am loving Hamm as this BIG BAD. I honestly feel like it's the meatiest thing he's gotten to do since Mad Men. I really liked Fletch but that was very light fare and he didn't have much to do on The Morning Show that was very interesting.

Was anyone else very sad momentarily that Wayne had been killed by the electrocution?

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I thought this week’s Fargo was pretty meh. Love Jon Hamm, but they’re not giving him much to do. And otherwise the whole thing is treading water - seemingly every scene this week was a variation on what had already been done earlier this season, usually with more humor.

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Steven Bochco would be my 4th choice in Mt. Rushmore as he really did single-handedly change the direction of tv dramas with “Hill Street Blues”.

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Wire over Sopranos 1000%.

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Yes, Chase on a TV Mt Rushmore for one show is pretty weak. I'm not as big a fan of The Sopranos as Alan and a lot of people around here, but even if I give it top of the pantheon status, that's pretty much all we have from him.

But The Wire is just a much better show.

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Dec 8, 2023·edited Dec 8, 2023

Most people think of Orson Welles and the only film they know is Citizen Kane and yet Citizen Kane has long been considered one of the most important, consequential films in history, so comparing IMDbs really isn't the point.

The choices are subjective but what isn't is that if The Sopranos wasn't the massive medium-altering success that it was, David Simon may not have even got to make The Corner for HBO, let alone all those other TV series and mini's. It's no secret that The Sopranos filled HBO's coffers so fit to bursting that they actually could compete with the broadcast networks. David Simon has done a lot of great TV shows for HBO and The Wire is one of my all-time favorites, I also like it more than The Sopranos in some respects, but the totality of Simon's work for HBO still has not had the cultural impact or financial success that The Sopranos did; The Sopranos literally changed how the medium operates. We've been living in a post-Sopranos, David Chase-inspired TV landscape for two decades. He's one of the easiest choices frankly.

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That’s my point. It’s really only the one show, although he worked on a bunch of other excellent ones. But the impact of that one show is the biggest the medium has ever seen other than I Love Lucy.

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My counter argument would be that Spelling just furthered a genre that already existed. Chase basically invented a whole new type of TV, without which most 21st century drama would not exist.

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It’s kinda ironic that Chase would make the Mt. Rushmore for tv has he still views the medium “as lesser” despite great success. Even during the publicity of the Sopranos movie, he kept saying he wishes was more in the movie business.

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Yup this well said!

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