The TV MegaSite's Blog Post #172
 

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The TV MegaSite's Blog Post #172

Friday 5/22/15

Wally KurthI 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 beenKurt McKinney 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 Texas Rising cast posterto 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 TheGene Kelly 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 stock business photocrazy 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 toRipper Street cast 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.Wayward Pines stars Terrence Howard and Matt Dillon 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.

Billy Crystal and Josh GadIf 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 howMurphy and Thelonius of The 100 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

two families from The BriefcaseI 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 justBattle Creek cast 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

CatsI 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.Cho, Jane and Lisbon

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

Y&R's Neil, Phyllis, Jack, Kelly, Paul and ChrisWe 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! :)  some of the Younger cast

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!beautiful Elisha Cuthbert

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?

Duke and Anna in the 80'sI 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 areJason (Billy Miller) and Elizabeth (Rebecca Herbst) 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

American Odyssey castThis 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, catchingSense8 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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Page updated 6/2/15


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