And great news Z Man

Glad to hear the MRI news was as good as could be expected, Z-man!

BTW my kid’s MRI came back with about as good of news as I could have hoped for

That’s great news, let’s hope she’s back playing in no time.

* I’m sure there are exceptions and Alan will know them.

Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, China Beach, NYPD Blue, Homicide… to name just a few.

Also, I love Buffy (even if its creator sucks). But to say it ushered in the new golden age implies a level of influence that I don’t believe it had. At the time, it was an incredibly low-rated show on the fifth or sixth-place broadcast network. It received no awards love, and while it was covered by the media wildly out of proportion to its commercial success, it was not a show that people in the industry at the time seemed to know and/or care about. Sopranos, on the other hand, was a juggernaut, to the point where you had people like the CEO of NBC sending out memos saying, “We need to find our own Sopranos.” You can prefer one to the other, or say (as several people have here) that you just never got into Sopranos, but its role in making TV what it is today is undeniable. Whereas Buffy’s influence was mostly posthumous, and far more in movies, where the self-aware Whedon tone is a key element of all the Marvel films.

The same holds true for Babylon 5, which a lot of nerds(*) like to cite as the show that invented the idea of intensely serialized, pre-planned storytelling, but that nobody in the business I’ve ever met seemed even vaguely aware of.

My feelings on Mitch: I don’t want him to go anywhere. I don’t know how much of it is the “homegrown” aspect, or just the fact that (at least up to this point) his personality is relatively lovable, but I want him here. I do have a niggling feeling that IHart is going to earn the starting spot over him, but that doesn’t mean that Thibs will make that change.

Is there any way we could play a “Twin Towers” lineup (Mitch at true C and IHart at PF), a la Olajuwon and Sampson? Yes, I know that it goes against what the NBA is right now, but sometimes really good things happen if you zig when everyone else zags. Damn, that would be cool to see, but if there is a 25 percent chance of seeing IHart in the starting lineup at any point this season (barring injury), there is probably a 2 percent chance of seeing a Twin Towers lineup for more than 0 minutes.

It honestly wasn’t that cool. Casting is pretty ugly work, especially back then. She only did a few rounds of it as an associate back when she was very young and got sick of it fast. (The only kind of “cool” thing from her short stint is that when Adrian Brody won his Oscar, I could brag that she discovered him way back when. He came in to read for a part and she came home and said the didn’t need to bother auditioning anybody else and could stop their search right there. (Must have been like what Steve Mills felt when he saw Kevin Knox play 3-on-3.)

They don’t look like Billy, but they are Clippers fans, which I always found suspect. Thanks for opening my eyes. Explains a lot.