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What was the last TV show you watched?

2jakes

I'll Lock Up
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Finally! :)

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Last edited:
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A fantastic series with a fantastic game 7. Anybody know how this series did in the ratings? If this one couldn't pull them up, then baseball is in a world of hurt?
 
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Just did two minutes of web searching and great news, From MarketWatch:

Through six games, the 2016 World Series is averaging 19.9 million viewers per game on television, according to data collected by Sports Media Watch. Even without the highly anticipated Game 7, this year's World Series is already the most-watched Fall Classic since the Boston Red Sox ended their championship drought in 2004.

After averaging nearly 24 million viewers in Game 5 on Sunday and 23 million viewers during Game 6 on Tuesday, most are predicting a Game 7 audience of 35-40 million, which would push the average for the entire series to 22-23 million viewers.

 

Benzadmiral

Call Me a Cab
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The Swamp
A second-season episode of Trackdown from 1958, with Robert Culp. Good stuff, with a former Texas Ranger -- now invalided out of the service with an amputated arm given him in his last showdown with an outlaw -- called to identify the body of said outlaw. But the corpse is not that of the outlaw . . . who is still out there, somewhere, and nearby. . . .

Also, yesterday, a later episode of Have Gun -- Will Travel, with Richard Boone as troubleshooter-for-hire Paladin. Nicely done, with a script by Archie Tegland (who later wrote for U.N.C.L.E.), it chronicles a rivalry between a land-owning patriarch (Kent Smith) and his two grown sons. What strikes me as truly unusual about Paladin, in an era of stoic, tight-lipped TV cowboys and lawmen, is that he is remarkably human. He laughs, often hugely; he enjoys his comfortable life between jobs at the luxury hotel in San Francisco and the company of beautiful women; he displays little patience for fools and knaves, and is not above raising his voice to a roar when necessary. Boone's characterization, no doubt, was part of why the show was such an enormous hit in its day.
 

EngProf

Practically Family
Messages
597
A second-season episode of Trackdown from 1958, with Robert Culp. Good stuff, with a former Texas Ranger -- now invalided out of the service with an amputated arm given him in his last showdown with an outlaw -- called to identify the body of said outlaw. But the corpse is not that of the outlaw . . . who is still out there, somewhere, and nearby. . . .

Also, yesterday, a later episode of Have Gun -- Will Travel, with Richard Boone as troubleshooter-for-hire Paladin. Nicely done, with a script by Archie Tegland (who later wrote for U.N.C.L.E.), it chronicles a rivalry between a land-owning patriarch (Kent Smith) and his two grown sons. What strikes me as truly unusual about Paladin, in an era of stoic, tight-lipped TV cowboys and lawmen, is that he is remarkably human. He laughs, often hugely; he enjoys his comfortable life between jobs at the luxury hotel in San Francisco and the company of beautiful women; he displays little patience for fools and knaves, and is not above raising his voice to a roar when necessary. Boone's characterization, no doubt, was part of why the show was such an enormous hit in its day.
In addition to the positive characteristics you mentioned, Paladin was a very well educated man. A West Point graduate, he would quote from the Classics on a regular basis. Most Western heroes did not quote Homer or Cicero...

He also had a West Point style code of honor, and if the person hiring him was clearly in the wrong, he would change sides in hired-gun mid-task and see that justice prevailed.
 

Benzadmiral

Call Me a Cab
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The Swamp
An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that, oddly enough, I'd never seen. A first contact story, in which Cmdr. Riker has been undercover on a particular planet that is in the verge of implementing warp drive and star travel, it etched a portrait of an alien (though very humanoid) race. They are much like humanity, but, the Federation's reports say, more inclined to react badly to the news that they are not the central planet and central people of the universe. And we see this in a number of scenes. (I was muttering to myself, "If I were Picard, I'd write the place off and head back into space. These people are too darn difficult.")

It features a funny and odd little turn for Bebe Neuwirth ("Lilith" from Frasier and Cheers) as Lanel, a native woman who wants desperately to be intimate with an alien . . . and gets her wish by blackmailing Riker: She'll help him escape if he'll make love to her. Afterward:

Lanel: "Will I ever see you again?"
Riker (clearly wanting to be out of there): "I'll call you the next time I pass through your star system."
 

Doctor Strange

I'll Lock Up
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5,228
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Hudson Valley, NY
Ooh, "First Contact" is one of my personal top-five TNG episodes. It's the series' most nuanced approach to the first contact dilemma - it's a great script - and has several unique aspects:

It's the first time that the show (or any Trek) begins with a sequence set entirely among characters on an alien planet. We don't see the main characters or the Enterprise sets until well into the first act.

Space minister Mirasta is the rare alien character who immediately gets what the Federation's about, and is totally on their side in the debate with arch-conservative Krola. And - in an absolutely PERFECT ending - when the Enterprise is asked to leave without revealing themselves to the planet's populace, she leaves with them!

While Krola is overdrawn as EVIL, the handling of leader Durken, as a man trying to do what's best for his society in a difficult conundrum, is a very well-shaded and subtly played character.

The sequence you mentioned with Lanel is unlike anything else in the series. A good laugh, providing some release in a very serious episode.

While much of TNG can seem too PC for its own good, or have too much of an ax to grind based on the Roddenberry humanism it sprang from (especially all these years later), this episode presents all its arguments very carefully. A smart, interesting episode... And l'd like to think that Mirasta went on to have a great life, the spacefaring life she always dreamed of, somewhere in the Federation!
 

Worf

I'll Lock Up
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5,179
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Troy, New York, USA
A quirky new comedy on TBS called "People of Earth". Funny, irreverent, goofy and smart, it plays fast and loose with the whole alien abduction scenario. Well done.

Worf
 

Worf

I'll Lock Up
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5,179
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Troy, New York, USA
In games of this magnitude where I have a favored team, I love the blowout; I do not want the stress.
:D

Funny, as a life long Mets fan (saw em in the Polo Grounds with my father), I spent the last game of the '86 Series pacing back and forth in my bedroom while friends watched the game on my T.V. in the living room. I couldn't take it. Thought I was gonna wind up in the Cardiac Ward. Still can't take stressful games. My son watched the Cubbies win downstairs while I diddled in the computer room upstairs. When the Cubs blew the lead in the late innings that was ALL I could take.

Worf
 
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Northern California
Funny, as a life long Mets fan (saw em in the Polo Grounds with my father), I spent the last game of the '86 Series pacing back and forth in my bedroom while friends watched the game on my T.V. in the living room. I couldn't take it. Thought I was gonna wind up in the Cardiac Ward. Still can't take stressful games. My son watched the Cubbies win downstairs while I diddled in the computer room upstairs. When the Cubs blew the lead in the late innings that was ALL I could take.

Worf
Yep. I will flip channels, turn the game off and the follow online, take a walk outside, but I almost always return to the game. I tend to watch alone as I do not want the distractions of others to bother me. I definitely am right there with you.
:D
 

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