susanhathaway

When an especially vicious rape matches the M. O. of an already incarcerated man, Detective Benson loudly insists that it's the work of a copycat, then proudly defends her coercion of a false confession from an innocent man, meanwhile letting the real rapist and torturer go right on raping and torturing multiple victims for eight years. For once, she's acting like a real cop: hotly protesting that a nine-hour interrogation (actually, she conducted only the *last* nine hours of the extended, brutal questioning of the suspect) did or could produce a "good," truthful confession, rather than simply breaking the suspect down until he says what she tells him to say--and what she told him to say turned out to be problematical.--as well as defending anything that results in a conviction, even of an innocent person.

It's not the most brilliant of the series, but overall this has been a fairly good season, albeit one with an extremely long hiatus that led me--among others, I'm guessing--to forget a lot of what happened before Part 2 resumed. The story was fairly interesting, the characters were fairly attention-holding (if not always likable), and the story was, on the whole, involving. Still, it seemed disturbing that the moral of the tale seemed to be that a woman can't have both a career and a family, or else a bizarre little coven will swoop down and take her children away.

Also, although they clearly were intended to look like black wings, did the odd appendages on the cultists' headgear remind anyone else of Playboy Bunny "ears"?

This is a strong episode with an interesting story and a very good cast, but Francie Swift in particular shines as a pathetically neurotic, chronically confused, and grotesquely over-medicated young woman whose parents have arranged for her to marry into a family that is useful to them and who continue to treat her upcoming merger-marriage as more important than their younger daughter's murder. As in so many L&O episodes, there's a rich family indignantly telling the police that law enforcement is targeting them because of their wealth--never mind that the evidence points to several family members--and the plot unfolds in a highly interesting manner, with multiple possible suspects. Definitely worth watching, especially for the performances of Francie Swift as the tortured ingenue and Anne Twomey as her mother.

This isn't the only TV show I have this problem with (it was a regular problem on, among other shows, CSI). WHY are the lights so dim in just about every indoor scene? In particular, when Lorna confronts the evil Sister Eileen and afterward, when she's brought in to talk to Detective Massey, in each scene we can hardly see the actors because it's so dark in each respective room. Since when does any police station keep every room so dark?

"The Woman in the Wall" is a fascinating story, played out by fine actors, and it keeps getting more interesting--I'm just wondering why nobody believes in indoor lighting.

Walter Grimes was framed for Leanne Testa's murder, but no mention is ever made of any search for the real killer. Also, Detective Daniels finally admits to having tortured Grimes to get his false confession, but he's never prosecuted for torture (apparently, torture is prosecutable *only* in connection with another crime, like kidnapping, rape, or murder) or even for obstruction of justice. It makes for a highly unsatisfying episode. The Daniels character also has a number of rants about "making things right" by framing Grimes for one murder because he couldn't convict him of another, but, again, no one ever mentions the murderer he let get away by never troubling himself to look for who really killed Leanne Testa.

Sadly, this episode demonstrates that the writers weren't content with having Barbara Stanwyck playing a power-behind-the-throne-hungry villain trying to manipulate her husband's military career to her own best advantage. That made for an interesting villain, one with no pesky human feelings to stop her from sacrificing her husband's troops to make him a "hero," and Stanwyck played that villain with her usual intensity and a chilling disregard for human life. However, the show wouldn't stop with defeating her character's insane quest for a bloody, murderous form of "glory." No, it had to send the message that her failing wasn't really her narcissistic ambition, but her hidden desire to have a "real man" make a "real woman" out of her by dominating and ruling her--which apparently all "real women" want.

Aside from the fact that it wastes a lot of time on unfunny and uninteresting host segments, more and more often "Toon in with Me" is showing worthless cartoons, including many later, poorly animated (and poorly written) Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry stuff. I seem to remember that for a while the show used to air a lot of really good cartoon shorts, but lately it's been mostly junk, indicating a classic bait and switch. It's too bad that this is what MeTV thinks the viewers will put up with.

Why not run an hour of just good cartoon shorts, with no hosts and no idiotic pretense at comedy? Sort of like the weekly "Three Stooges" show?

This is a fairly decent attempt at a fairly standard mystery plot: A beautiful young woman goes to stay with a mysterious, secretive family, and the audience anticipates the specific nature of the secrets before they're revealed. This one had a decent cast and was fairly well executed, but there's nothing really new here. For me, the most annoying aspect was that the matriarch of the piece apparently forgot her guest's name and addressed her exclusively as "My dear." Still, it's worth a look.

This is a suspenseful, exciting thriller frequently interrupted by Pamela Britton as Edmond O'Brien's possessive, whiny, incredibly neurotic girlfriend. He tells her he's going away for a week--she throws a fit at the office where they both work. He talks her down, and she promises to stop crowding him--then starts calling him every hour, even as he learns that he's been poisoned and starts a frantic quest to find out who did it. The action unfolds in an extremely suspenseful manner--and then the stalker girlfriend shows up, having tracked him down after he asked her not to interfere. She could have been completely eliminated from the script, and it would have been a much better movie. As it is, it's still well worth watching.

This episode started out well, with Wooster, Hawks, and Adams shanghaied onto a ship whose captain and first mate appear to be brutes. This part was very different from the usual Wagon Train episodes, and I had some hopes that the plot might involve the men's planning and executing an escape, possibly bringing charges against their kidnappers, maybe even inciting a mutiny. But no, the wagon train men determined that the captain's trouble was being an inadequate father, raising his young daughter on board ship and not even getting around to courting her pretty governess. So, instead of escaping their captivity and righting the wrongs done to them, they set out to fix the sea captain's family life and get him to adopt Wagon Train-style family values. So much for expecting anything different from this series.

The series should have changed its name after this episode, in which an executive ADA ordered the police to get a confession "by any means necessary" after they'd already sweated a witness to identify "positively" a suspect who turned out to be innocent. If coercion, threats, and physical mistreatment (specifically, withholding necessary medical care) don't bother these "law enforcement" thugs, doesn't it bother them in the slightest that they got the wrong man and were ready, willing, and eager to stop looking for the right one? "Law & Order." What a joke. At least I guess it's more true to life than shows about good, law-abiding, wholly fictitious cops and prosecutors.

Please, somebody, tell Seth Meyers that over-explaining his jokes and laughing over them with his writers and crew make them LESS funny, not more.

Parents Jane Wyatt and Donald Cook should have kept adopting kids, as their two biological daughters (Ann Dvorak, Natalie Wood) are nightmarish: the older is jealous, petty, and deliberately cruel, while the younger is a rotten little loudmouthed brat who won't stay out of everyone's business. I wasn't five minutes into the movie before I wanted to strangle the youngest girl with her own pigtails. Otherwise, standard family-style soap opera.

I'm with Maggie: I have no patience with being asked to sympathize with Negan. Anyone who could become the monster he became can't ever be trusted again, even if he did "love" his wife (by, among other things, cheating on her and running up her credit card balance). His "redemption," after all, involved deceiving Alpha into believing that he was her ally, then murdering her (never mind that she deserved it). He became an alleged "hero" by a premeditated assassination. He's not a "good guy" and never can be.

The '60s-ish "music" (if you want to call it that) and slang were out of date by the time I was a teenager, in the 1970s, so they could never have been contemporary for Will and Penny, who were supposed to have been pre-adolescent when they left Earth in the 1990s. When the original Star Trek dealt with a hippie-like culture (in the episode "The Way to Eden"), the writers had the sense to make up some novel-sounding slang, rather than making a futuristic show sound like the 1960s. (It still came off phony, but not anachronistic.) This is yet another "Lost in Space" episode that's more silly than anything else.

Regis Toomey pimps out Loretta Young to Lyle Talbot, who attempts to rape her, then claims to have fallen in love with her--which he "proves" by constantly pushing her to go farther physically. After Young quits her supposed secretarial job in protest at being used as a PG-13 prostitute, Talbot (the purported good guy) pimps her out to Hugh Herbert, and she's just fine with that. I realize that even more sexism was tolerated and encouraged in the 1930s than now, but it's pretty disgusting that a "Good Girl" puts up with being used as a "date" to close business deals for her various pimps.

Apparently Trevor Noah doesn't want viewers older than about 35, or fans of classic rock, because he's doing his best to alienate us. I've had enough of "The Ageist Show."

So, if they wanted to create a series that had nothing to do with Terry Pratchett's Guards stories, why call it a Terry Pratchett adaptation? Why pretend that it has anything to do with the beloved Discworld stories and characters that are so poorly represented here? And why pretend that it's funny when it isn't?

One thing that always bothers me about this movie is that the lynch mob members appeared to be charged with only murder and nothing else. There was a strong implication that, if they weren't guilty of murder, they weren't guilty of anything at all--although we saw them start a riot, break into the jail, assault the sheriff and the deputy, and start a fire in a deliberate attempt to kill Joe Wilson. These are all felonies, yet the movie seems to say that, if there were no murder, there was no crime.

While Sidney Blackmer and Dana Andrews cook up and carry out their scheme to prove that an innocent person can be convicted of a murder, everyone ignores the fact that, by getting this innocent person convicted, they're helping the real murderer escape justice. Just sayin'.

This was an infuriating episode that glaringly illustrates the folly of revering tradition for its own sake because some traditions are barbaric. The city-slicker bridegroom is expected to embrace "country traditions," such as being kidnapped and dumped in the woods on his wedding night, and to take everything with good humor and "no hard feelin's," while NOBODY in the little community that has suddenly been revealed as populated by a bunch of ignorant hillbillies is required to take any notice of the young man's own feelings and his anger and repulsion at being treated so horribly. Even the bride's family keep laughing at him for not wanting to be brutalized.

Despite the deliberate misconstruction of another reviewer of this episode, my point is that the "city feller" was commanded to understand the point of view of people who refused to try to understand his and bullied when he couldn't.

I still haven't quit watching The Daily Show, even though the quality has gone down quite a bit, but I think the "old" jokes are going to be the tipping point. Every night, Trevor Noah has some supremely unfunny comment on how old people are confused, irrational, and unfit to do anything. Why did Jon Stewart go off and leave us with this adolescent?

James Cagney obviously didn't put his heart into this film, and it's hard to blame him, considering what a thoroughgoing piece of garbage his character is. Controlling his younger brother's life, showing ever greater contempt for his long- and loud-suffering lover, competitive to the point of causing a supposed friend's death on the race track, he's nothing but loathsome throughout. Ann Dvorak doesn't help by constantly overemoting (she makes every line sound as if she's about to cry), but then how realistically could anyone play her character's undying love for someone with no redeeming qualities? Joan Blondell is wasted as a femme fatale turned Good Girl, and the script is beyond predictable, though never believable.

This episode doesn't quite take on, at least not head-on, the persistent lie that forced birth is somehow not only moral, but the implacable will of an apparently misogynist god. The 13-year-old girl in this case was shown to have a "good reason" for wanting an abortion, i.e., that her pregnancy resulted from repeated rape by her stepfather. Then an out-of-state attorney tries to charge the New York D.A.'s office with attempted murder for trying to provide necessary medical care to a minor in need. At the end, A.D.A. Carisi offers the evangelical Ohio lawyer a gratuitous story about his mother's choice to have an abortion after learning that her baby could not survive--again, a "good reaon," not simply the pregnant person's own choice, for whatever reason. It's sad to see SVU pulling its punches like this.

Lose the damn gray filter, already! We get that this is a grim show; we don't need to have it hammered home by making it look like black and white, only a hundred times uglier. I'm sick of trying to tell the difference between gray living people and gray dead people.