“Try this for a deep, dark secret. The great detective Remington Steele, he doesn’t exist… I invented him. Follow: I always loved excitement so I studied and apprenticed and put my name on an office but absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so… feminine, so I invented a superior, a decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm until the day he walked in with his blue eyes and mysterious past and before I knew it he assumed Remington Steele’s identity. Now I do the work and he takes the bows. It’s a dangerous way to live but as long as people buy it I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure, well, almost never. I don’t even know his real name.”
It’s hard for women to get to the top in business. Don’t believe me? Just check how many women are CEOs or members of the boards of directors for Fortune 500 companies.
The reasons for this are long and complicated, involving history, discrimination and a whole lot more. In particular, there’s perception. Some people, both men and women, don’t think women are going to be as good as men are at certain jobs.
Particularly private detectives. Or at least people didn’t in 1982, before VI Warshawski, Anna Lee and co. Certainly, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalst) found it hard to get any work when she started out. She may have come top of her class at pretty much everything, but with her name on the door, for some strange reason, no one was interested in hiring her.
So crafty Laura Holt decided to invented a boss with a very masculine name: Remington Steele (Remington as in gun, rather than Fuzzaway). Suddenly, for some equally strange reason, people were queuing up to hire her – well, they wanted Remington Steele, but he was always out of town on business but somehow he always managed to solve his cases with the help of his ‘assistant’.
All was going well with this set-up until a movie-loving, very handsome con man (Pierce Brosnan) turned up and assumed Steele’s identity. Together, he and Holt end up working together, solving crimes. But would their relationship ever become more, when it was all founded in lies – hell, she didn’t even know his real name? Well… that would be saying.
Here’s the intro from the very first episode – the observant will notice the wording is different. After that, the full, rather catchy, Henry Mancini-scored theme tune, and then every episode title from the show, all of which were puns.
NBC has a ‘born to lose’ tattoo somewhere on its corporate body, doesn’t it? It just doesn’t want to do well in the ratings. Here’s a perfect example.
Tonight’s episode of Hannibal has been pulled from the schedules in the US at the request of show runner Bryan Fuller, because the story involves children being brainwashed into killing other children and that’s a bit too much like the Sandy Hook shooting back in December or something – although, apparently, it’s okay to have adults tortured and/or killed every week on TV, so the rest of the series is going ahead.
So instead of tonight’s originally scheduled episode, NBC is going to show the next episode. How can that be, you might ask, given that Hannibal is a serial and we’re busily watching all kinds of relationships develop? Aren’t we going to lose out on some important details?
Don’t worry, NBC has your back. In case you were planning on watching tonight’s episode and actually want it to make some kind of sense, Bryan and NBC have stripped out from the missing episode all the bits that involve children being mean, and converted the rest of the episode into five webisodes that further the serial nature of the show.
Yes, I can’t see anything going wrong here at all, can you? Viewers outside of the US will, however, get the full episode in the correct running order. Except Canadians, who also got Coquilles last night rather than Oeuf.
Webisodes after the jump, but they’re only viewable in the US, I’m afraid (unless you happen to be a user of Tunnelbear, for example). Also, no one in the NBC online department can speak French, so they’ve called the webisodes Ceuf rather than Oeuf. Or maybe that’s short for Cannibalised Oeuf.
