I turned on the Utah/Vegas game during the first intermission and was welcomed with ten minutes of arena sound and I kind of liked that.

This is the year of animal attack movies.

Primate - Pet chimpanzee gets rabies and attacks.
Thrash - Hurricane floods a town and bull sharks attack.
Hungry - A hippo attacks a swamp tour.

My Movie Awards 2025 Awards season has come and gone. People speculated what would win Best Picture at the most prestigious awards ceremonies, then watched as ce...

It took me long enough to get the post done, edited, and uploaded, but here it is. Here are my movie awards for 2025, from the 84 movies I had seen when I started writing it.

jessewritingthoughts.blogspot.com/2026/04/my-m...

What they didn’t notice was that the accident was caused by a violent sneeze that threw out your back at the age of thirty-three.

Not only did back problems popping up ruin your life. They ruined your death, too.

You show up to the heavenly gates after a car accident. The gatekeeper looks at you and says you’re in the wrong place. Texting and driving. Potential killer. Hell for you.

Somehow they missed the accident and only saw the aftermath where your phone broke loose from the hands free holder.

They tricked me. They fucking tricked me and hit me with something just as rough. I fell for it the whole way. Dammit, Scrubs.

I love you, but you do this to me all the time.

Turned on the new episode of Scrubs and JD said “You can’t hide from the Hippocratic rule of thirds” and now I’m worried this episode is going to be My Old Lady all over again.

That wouldn’t surprise me at all. Seems like the perfect IP for it.

Imagine Tommy Wiseau's big face on the backbox, your ball cruises into a hole, you hear "I did not hit her! I did nawt! Oh, hi Mark!" Then the ball shoots back out of the hole and into play.

Could be so much fun with the most random movies.

Now you're making me want machines for any old movie.

That’s where I’m going to leave it because I’ve been rambling on for too long when I work in the morning.

And that’s the kind of writing that makes me love everything I’ve seen from Bill Lawrence. He knows that a great look at characters can be as entertaining and, perhaps, more satisfying than a plot. You feel more a part of it. And that’s something special.

There was no clear cut plot. It was a whole season of emotional growth. Did plot stuff happen? Sure. Events happened in characters’ lives and there was a great recurring role from Sherry Cola as a patient. But the season was about being ready for the next step in your life, which isn’t a plot thing.

Compare that to the third season of Shrinking, which wrapped up tonight. The story of the season was moving on. Each of the characters had to overcome their own personal scars and move to the next stage of their lives. Sure, the therapy was still a part of the show, but the story was the characters.

Take Breaking Bad, for example. Sure, there was some solid character work. But there was always conflict against someone and the driving force of the show was the meth business. It was about the characters but it was about the characters navigating the plot. Great show, but great for plot.

Really, the stories of Bill Lawrence’s shows aren’t about the plot. They might start that way, but the stories are truly just character stories. The season-long arcs are more about the characters than about events. Most other shows are about the events and the characters around them.

I really need to just write a whole essay on this because these Bluesky messages don’t completely get my rambling thoughts across.

The first two episodes were okay, but once they resolved the tension between dad and daughter working at the same school, the characters really started to shine. Because that’s what Bill Lawrence is best at. His premises are basically ways in, but the characters are what the shows are about.

And through the first season of Rooster, I’m seeing it yet again. The inciting idea was that a men’s action novelist worked at the same school as his daughter whose husband cheated on her with a student. And now, only a few episodes in, that conflict has completely gone and it’s just the characters.

Through these three shows, I think Bill Lawrence managed to avoid the flanderization that tends to happen in shows as their seasons go on. Instead, he managed to, with whoever else was the big creative driving force on each show, actually deepen the characters.

Shrinking. It started being about a therapist who wanted to try a hands-on approach and turned into a show about characters supporting each other. The Jimmy-ing stayed, but took a back seat to the characters helping each other just by being there and being supportive.

Ted Lasso. It started as an American football coach being brought in to coach soccer because the owner wanted the team to fail. It became a show about the characters being there for each other and supporting each other, while the soccer became second to the character work.

You look at Cougar Town. Started as a show about a woman dating younger guys. Became about the characters rather than that concept that really couldn’t last a long time. And the characters became much stronger because of that.

This is a post-Scrubs discussion. Scrubs didn’t really fit into this, as the show has been about the characters being doctors the whole time, as opposed to being about the characters who just happen to be doctors. But that’s just the way Scrubs deals with life, while the other shows go opposite.

If there’s one thing I could praise Bill Lawrence on over everything else, it’s character work. His shows are always at their best when he gets past the initial concept and lets them just be about the characters. He may actually be the best at letting shows just be about the characters.

Can someone just stop this guy already? Please?

I’m always here for the year’s big crime epic.

Crime 101 was pretty good.

Glen Powell cowrote The Comeback King? I wonder if it will involve his character pretending to be someone else, like his other two writing credits, Hit Man and Chad Powers.

Is that jacksfilms?

They hit the "every ten minutes" button and thought that was good enough.