Friday 5/22/15
I hope everyone is having a great week! Mine was so busy...
lots of interviews and season finales and more.
Even though I don't watch any of the soaps regularly any
more, I see them a lot when I run the transcripts for our
site. I always enjoy seeing Wally Kurth, who's played Ned
off and on for years, on "General Hospital." I was a huge GH
fan ever since 1984, and he's one of so many great
characters they had over the years. Up until recently, they
barely used him. They tend to neglect anyone over 40 on
soaps. He's also been
playing Justin on "Days of Our Lives",
which is a role he did before GH. Lately he was on both
soaps, so it was great to see so much of him! But, sadly,
he's leaving GH because DOOL offered him a contract. GH
often loses their best actors that way. I hope they're able
to bring back the original Ned, Kurt McKinney. He was on "Guiding
Light," too, and he's still very good looking.
This week I got caught up on most of the DVD's
(screeners) that have been sent to me recently for
review.
Some of them are online. I enjoyed watching the History
Channel's "Texas Rising". They let us watch three episodes.
I look forward
to the rest. I'll probably record it and
watch the whole thing later. It's terrible to do that, but I have to
prioritize. Even though it's a really good miniseries, and I
love the cast. Too much to watch!
I know that a lot of people watch YouTube quite a bit. I
rarely have time to watch anything there. I wish I'd had
YouTube around years ago when I was always bored, as a teen.
"These kids today have it so easy!" LOL! I did spend
an hour watching an old video because of Memorial Day. I
found out that my uncle, who died in WWII, had died on a
ship called The Franklin, and they made
a video about what
happened. Gene Kelly narrated it. I'm sure it probably ran
on TV sometime. It was from the 50's. The sound went in and
out. Too bad they don't have a better copy. I'm sure that it
must have run on The
History Channel at some point or one of
those others like The Military Channel. Anyway, it was quite
interesting. I'm not much of a history buff, and I don't
watch too much non-fiction on TV, but having that slight
personal connection made a huge difference. Amazing, right?
Or am I just conceited? Ha ha ha!
As someone who runs a business/website, I go out of my
way not to annoy or anger people. In my view, everyone is a
potential viewer/visitor/customer. That's the way all
businesses should treat the public, IMHO. Anyway, if you
ever do hear of anyone bad-mouthing me or my site, please
let me know. There are some
crazy people out there. There's
this one woman who likes to stalk me a little online (she
stalks a lot of celebrities, too, but I believe she's mostly
harmless and just annoying), and I know from friends that
she's said some things. I've blocked her as much as I can.
I'm not saying she's the only person who would say
something, necessarily, but sometimes there are just some
crazy or weird people out there. I've had to fire a few
people that worked on the site (not too many, thankfully),
for plagiarism or other things. You just never know
with people! So please bear in mind that if someone is
saying terrible things about me or my site, it's probably
not true, but ask me if you have any questions or concerns,
and I'm always happy to answer!
We do have an FAQ and an
About page that you can visit,
too.
Saturday 5/23/15
"Ripper Street" is another great series that I'm way
behind on... I have to
figure out where I left off. I
think it was somewhere in the 2nd season! It airs on
Wednesdays now on BBC America. Another show on that channel
that's great, that I'm behind on, is "Orphan Black." I
watched the first season, but I still have to watch seasons 3
and 4.
I hope you're all enjoying "Wayward Pines" Thursdays, now
that it's airing.
Such a good show. Let me know what you
think when it gets to episode 5. That's the big one! Next
week should be interesting with the "Bones" season finale
and also the premiere of the fantastic new show "Aquarius."
Thursday is a big night.
If you're not enjoying "The Comedians" on FX, then
there's something seriously wrong with you. It's so funny. I
think this coming week is the season finale.
I've been trying to delete as much as possible from my
DVR because we'll be taking a trip in June, so I don't want
it to fill up while I'm gone and run out of space. I finally
finished watching "The 100", which is good, but very
violent. I think the second season may have been even more
violent than the first. It makes it hard to watch sometimes.
I think they should change the name to "The 30" because how
many of them are left now? Or just "The Ground," something
like that. Ah, well. The season finale was really good and
definitely makes me want to keep watching... especially to
find out what happens with Murphy and Thelonius.
On the weekend, I'm always working on our
Primetime News
and Schedule Pages, with tons of help from Angie and
Danielle. Check it out.
Gisele runs our daytime section and works on it every
day, full time. She does a fabulous job!
Sunday 5/24/15
I don't watch reality shows, but there sure are a lot of
them. In the summer we see way more of them. This week and
next are the debuts of "500 Questions," "The Briefcase,"
"Bullseye," "Celebrity Wife Swap," "Masterchef," "The
Bachelorette," "Extreme Weight Loss," "Are You Smarter Than
a 5th Grader," "American Ninja Warrior," and so many more. I
could puke ;) Enjoy them if you like them...
I really enjoyed the show "Battle Creek" after awhile...
at first it just
seemed kind of bland and somewhat quirky,
but it got better. I was very sad to see it go. Great
finale, though.
This week is the season finale of "Bones," as I
mentioned, and I can't wait to see what happens. Thank
goodness there are three more episodes of "The Messengers,"
at least! Something to enjoy. This week's "Hot in
Cleveland" is a clips episode, so it's not a new one.
Next week is the last episode, the series finale! Hard to
believe.
Monday 5/25/15
I had taped "Cats" from PBS in November (although
apparently it's a re-run), so I watched that tonight while I
recorded it to DVD. Good musical! I used to have the album,
but I'd never seen it before. Finola Hughes (Anna on "General Hospital") was
the original Victoria back in 1981! I could only find blurry
clips of her dance on YouTube. Too bad! I've also got
"Sweeney Todd" to watch and record onto DVD... then I have
to start watching all of the episodes of GH I have on there,
from December through May. It's time!
Today's GH was a re-run, and NBC showed tennis instead of
"Days of Our Lives." The other two soaps were new episodes. It's
interesting to me, to see how they handle the holidays... they used to
all take off most holidays, but since the ratings have
gotten so bad, they don't take off as many as they used to.
I guess it just depends on whether they think that you'll be
home watching the show or not.
Speaking of ratings.... now that David Letterman is off
the air, CBS is showing re-runs of "The Mentalist" after the
news. They'll do this until June. Wow, if they think re-runs
of the show do so well, why did they cancel it??? Hmm....
that's very odd. Then they'll show "CSI"
in the timeslot after that.
Tuesday 5/26/15
We
can really use some new "Young
and the Restless"
update writers
for our site! Please
email me if you can help out even one day a week.
Thanks!
You may know that we have a
monthly DVD Giveaway on our
site. Sometimes I'm very lazy about sending out the prizes.
I just sent out about 6 months' worth of prizes. Sorry about
that lateness! I have most of them in the guest bedroom, and
I just let that room get such a mess, and I kept putting off
cleaning it up, and that kept me from wanting to go in there
and look for the prizes to send, too. It's not a very good
excuse, though. I have most of the prizes in a couple of
bookcases. Even so, I was shocked to find that some of the
prizes people had asked for (I let them choose from a list)
- I couldn't find. They may be misplaced somewhere. Two of
them I just went ahead and bought again from Amazon and had
it mailed to the winners. I probably gave it out in a
previous giveaway and then forgot to delete it from the
list. Our May contest just finished, so I'm going to
have to pick more winners. Make sure you enter again after
June 4! Each month's contest runs from the 5th to the
25th.
I'm already sick of all of the re-runs! :)

Now I'm watching "Younger," which I
also enjoy. I think it's almost over for the year.
Wednesday 5/27/15
We were glad to have "The Daily Show" and "The Nightly
Show" back. Yay!
I spent a lot of time the past two days putting up
interview transcripts. I had about 15. Most of them are NBC,
but quite a few are FOX and one was from ABC Family. We're
all very grateful that they let us do these calls, of
COURSE, and that they transcribe them for us, which is
great. They send the transcripts right away, too.
However, sometimes things are irritating. Even
though the PR people know our names (they have us on a list,
with our email addresses), and then when we phone in to the
call, we also give our name again, and spell it, and then
also tell them what our website or other media outlet is,
then when we get the transcripts, the names are often
misspelled. It's a little bit annoying. Why can't they just
make sure that the person transcribing has all of our names?
Is it really that difficult? Some of them get very bad.
In April I interviewed Elisha Cuthbert. They left the T
off the end of her name all through it. They mangled a
lot of the names. Worse, it was an uneditable PDF file, so I
had to find an online converter, and then that messed up the
formatting so I had to completely re-format it.
Then the one they had for Debra Messing was also pretty
bad. They had my name as "Diane" and my website as "Suzanne
Lanoue." Huh??? How does that even happen? I know they
probably pay some intern a very low wage to quickly
transcribe these, but geez... And it's not just my name but
some pretty regular, easy-to-spell names that they mess up.
How do you mess up "Jamie?"
ABC Family doesn't even bother putting our names on it.
They just put everyone as "Moderator." I don't think that's
better. You better hope you remember which question(s) you
asked!
And there were two I did last year for Syfy that they
never sent me (my guess is that they never bothered to
transcribe them). Yet, when I asked about it, the PR person ignored
me. Okay, whatever. I'm just grateful to be here. You
know, though, most of us are professionals and not just
running fan sites. They expect us to act like professionals.
So they should, too... but they know they have the upper
hand. We'll do anything for that access! No making waves
here, uh-uh! We're all good. I'm happy to do it. I just find
it very funny. You have to laugh, right?
I was just reading in Soap Opera Digest about GH killing
off Duke. The head writer Ron Carlivati was saying that we
can't say he's ruining the show's history because he really
cares about these characters and doesn't kill Duke lightly.
Um, sorry, but yes we can. One has nothing to do with the
other. He also tried to say that since Duke was only on for
3 years in the 80's, and they brought him back for more than
3 years this time, we should be grateful (I guess). Well,
you have to realize that back in the 80's a whole lot more
of us were watching. There were only a few channels, and we
were all pretty young (I was in college), and this
character, and his relationship with Anna, really meant
something to us. At the time, his death was pretty shocking.
Now, it's not shocking, it's just stupid. It's been done
already and no need to do it again. Also, they ruined Duke
long before killing him off, by making him an unrepentant
mobster. In the 80's, he was a reluctant one and spent most
of his time wooing Anna and trying to leave the mob (which
is why he was killed).
Ron also needs to learn that you can't have good guys
doing terrible things. See, it's one thing when a bad
guy, like Sonny, does nice things. That's ok because people
do different things, good and bad. That's realistic. Even
the worst people sometimes love their families, or their
friends, or they donate to AIDS charities. However,
once you've established that someone is not only a good
person but a HERO and on the side of the good guys, you
can't just have them do something really bad. Sure, we all
make mistakes, but we also have moral boundaries that we do
not cross. Having Anna torture Faison and then kill Carlos
is not a "mistake." I know that she felt backed
into a corner, but why would keeping Faison in a pit
under Wyndemere be safer or harder to break out of than a
secure prison? It doesn't sound like she checked on him very
often to make sure he was still there, either. Wouldn't it
have made more sense to keep him at the Port Charles jail,
where she could keep an eye on him, and maybe hire a few
special security to watch him? Surely Frisco and Robert
could have helped her with that. I guess it's too much
reality to ask for.
Having Elizabeth change paternity
tests and not tell Jason who he is are
also not mistakes. These
are malevolent, selfish actions. Good people don't do these
things. You can create conflict without completely
compromising your characters. If you compromise them, then
NOBODY is a hero and everyone's a villain, so you have
nobody to pull for and no sympathy for anyone. It's
irritating and makes the show boring and stupid.
Alexis pushed a bad guy off a balcony once, when he was
threatening her. She didn't deliberately kill him. She also
slept with Sonny once (because, gosh, who wouldn't?), and
she loves Julian, despite his flaws. Those are mistakes, not
malevolent acts. They're not CRIMES, either. Both Anna
and Elizabeth should go to jail (to be fair, so should about
half the town).
Tonight's "Hot in Cleveland" was just a clip show. I
don't watch those, or re-runs of episodes I've already seen.
Life is too short!
I've been watching of the older episodes of GH still. I
need to make more space on my DVR so that when I go on
vacation, it doesn't fill up.
Thursday 5/28/15
This morning I was on a
conference call interview early
this morning with American Odyssey's Yousef Sweid and Peter
Horton. Sweid played a drag queen on the show (I believe the
character was killed off). Horton is Executive Producer of
the show and has written many of the episodes as well. You
may know him best from when he starred in "thirtysomething"
years ago. Nowadays he's mostly a writer and producer. They
both seemed very nice on the phone and hopeful that it would
be renewed. It's a really good show. More people should
watch it. I heard their ratings went up this week! Yay!
Tomorrow I have two more calls, and one on Monday! It
never ends ;)
Most of the TV shows have had their season finales, but
we still have a few shows that are finishing up, like
"Bones," "Younger" and "The Messengers." New shows are
starting up (lots of reality shows, which I don't watch).
What are you watching now?
My friend Mike on Facebook told me about this site
http://trakt.tv that helps you
keep track of which TV shows you watched or collected, and
more importantly, which episodes you haven't watched yet. It
really has forced me to figure out where I left off on these
shows. It's a fun site, so check it out. You can find me at
http://trakt.tv/users/slanoue
This weekend I'll be watching a bunch of new
DVD's to review,
catching
up. Please check out our reviews!
I'm looking forward to this new show "Sense8" on Netflix.
It sounds really good. Have a great week!
You can find my older blog posts at
http://www.tvmegs.com
Chronicles
- My personal blog, which is not about TV.
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