Heh. The new actress was in a movie called Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

I didn't realize so many parts were being recast. That's weird. Is this unusual? I mean, I've heard of one or two characters being recast from a pilot, but this is something like six so far.

Actually, it's more like eleven. Twelve if you count Taryn Manning who's switching roles.

Damn.

This is weird, right?

That's too bad. I like Alan Ruck. From the looks of his IMDB page though it's not like he's hurtin for work.

Just found this in an interview with Sean Ryan:

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tim Minear’s work. He and I have he same manager and agent. And it was like 1994-95 and I’d written a spec ‘Cheers’ and a spec ‘Friends’ and a spec ‘NYPD Blue’ and I was getting meetings but I just could not get a job. No one was hiring me to be on a staff. I was getting depressed. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go to business school, for God’s sake.’ Because I had been an economics major in college. But what I was doing wasn’t working.

“So I called up my agent and I said, ‘Obviously, I’m doing something wrong. What script do you have that is getting one of your clients constant meetings or constant jobs? And can I read that script?’ And he gave me Tim Minear’s ‘X-Files’ spec script.

“What I realized after reading that was that my scripts were sort of great in places, and the rest of it was sort of good. And Tim’s script, it was great from page 1 to page 57 or whatever it was. You could tell he’d worked hard on every page. And I said to myself, that’s what I need to do. I could write a good spec script very easily. But it was a lot of hard work to write a great one.”

Or, really, by most everything these days.

See, when I read a few posts above, how you wrote "we finish the first 13 sometime in June-ish", I squeed almost audiably myself, so I guess you're entitled to some tickliness.

In other, older, you're-probably-already-tired-of-them news, I still love "Firefly". What prompted this surprising and unexpected declaration was the newborn baby of my best friend. She gave birth 3 weeks ago, and the baby is currently both a slow eater and a complete night-owl. So I tried to assemble some tapes for her, stuff to watch while she has to keep herself awake with a delicate baby in her arms. On top of some other stuff (some of it BtVS and AtS), I tossed in "Firefly". She's already seen it, but that was part of the point - not giving her completely new stuff, which will demand her concentration and attention on 4:00am, but rather, good things that will draw her attention and can be stopped at any minute when the baby is finally asleep.

To make a not-so-long story (though you can't know it from how I'm telling it) a little longer, their VCR wasn't hooked up properly (it's a multi-system one, which can show both European and American tapes, but it has to be setup properly for it), so when I was there last night, I tried to convince it to work OK (and, yes, that friend has a PhD in experimental physics, hooks up the most complicated systems on a daily basis, plans them and analyzes them, but when she needs to hook up the VCR and the TV and press little buttons, she asks me to do it. I have no explanation for this).

Um, "Firefly". Right. When I finished playing with all the cords and buttons, I wanted to make sure I didn't ruin anything along the way, so I popped a tape insde the VCR and pressed "Play". It was one of mine, it was "Firefly" and it was at one of the last scenes of "The Message", with Tracy feeling betrayed and trying to do what he thinks will save him and threatening Kaylee and looking haunted and stressed and scared and trying-to-be-determined and taking all the wrong steps and Mal angry at him and trying to save him and not telling him that and directly shooting him when Kaylee seems to be in immediate danger.

I only saw a couple of seconds. They were Mal's face, right before he shoots. All that anger and determination and sorrow and protectiveness and having-to-make-a-quick-decision and somewhat falling-victim-to-his-own-weaknesses, just like Tracy, the love for his old friend and for his assembled family and the pain in the lack of possibility to keep it all and the need to choose and the sorrow for the past and of what was and is now gone, and - I could just go on.

I saw a couple of seconds of that face, nothing more. My friend's older son demanded my attention, after waiting patiently while I was playing with all the cords and buttons and not letting him touch anything, so "Harold and the Purple Crayon" is was (continuing the theme of presents and nephews which seems to go along in this thread recently, though he's not related to me and the book was a "don't worry, you're still loved, even though there's a new baby" present, not a Christmas one). But I recognized the place of the episode immediately. Mal was going to tell Tracy soon that he only carried the bullet for him for a while, and Zoe was going to hold his hand when he died. And now I can't take Mal's face out of my mind, and I can't watch the episode because it's over at B's, and I'm all in love with the show all over again. Sigh.

However, I managed to have a whole post about "Firefly" and Mal without mentioning "Out of Gas" even once. I take this as a sign that I'm growing as a person.

Heck, Nilly, just "listening" to you talk about Firefly makes me fall in love with it all over again. I wish I could watch it through your eyes, I see so much more of it when you talk about it.

Nilly darling, all the hair on the back of my neck stood up just reading your description of Mal's face in that scene. I never lost my Firefly love, but you bring it roaring back to full strength.

Yep.

I'd say that's what Nillies do best, but our Nilly (the one, true Nilly) does everything best, I think.

The wonderful thing about Nillies
is that Nillies are wonderful things...