Screeners? Yes, this year I was actually able to get hold of a few early versions of pilots for NBC and CBS, so I’ll indicate which pilots I saw that way. I’ll also note when I saw them, since the earlier I saw them, the greater the chances that there have been significant changes made since I saw them. I’ll also note which shows I’ve been watching since they premiered.

Anything with an asterisk is something I would recommend based on whatever version of the pilot I saw. I’ll probably be watching a couple more shows than that, but those are the ones that really stood out. Anything not listed here, I haven’t actually watched and thus do not feel qualified to give an opinion on other than “that looked stupid enough that even I wouldn’t watch it.”

After the jump, the full list.

Let’s start with all the stuff I saw on screeners:

NBC

Comedy

*Up All Night (saw on screener in late May, have been watching) – Definitely the best of NBC’s comedy batch. Christina Applegate and Will Arnett are great as harried new parents, and it strikes just the right balance between humor and sentimentality. The change to a talk show instead of a PR agency for the work environment and making Maya Rudolph’s character about 20-30% less cartoonish were both improvements on the original pilot, but they’re still trying to figure out just the right balance of work stuff vs. home stuff. Very, very promising.

Whitney (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – I got through eight minutes of this, had a technical issue, and decided it was not worth watching the rest. Punishingly awful laugh track, and what I did see seemed to be trying to do for casual sexism what Outsourced did for casual racism. There’s talent behind this, so maybe they can find a way to rework it to be less atrocious, but I suspect they may need to do so by just doing a different show.

Free Agents (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Yet another will-they-or-won’t they workplace sitcom, with the twist that he’s just gotten divorced and she’s getting over the death of her fiance. Anthony Stewart Head is clearly having fun reprising his role as the asshole boss of a PR company from the British original, but Hank Azaria just comes off as bland and kind of whiny. Again – good talent behind this (lots of folks from Party Down, and there’s a great shout-out to one of that show’s best episodes), but the whole thing was pretty blah considering the pedigree.

Bent (Airing midesason; saw on screener, late May, may watch if reviews indicate it’s improved) – This was moderately charming, if suffering from a serious case of exposition-itis. Characters who don’t know each other spitting out background information about their conversation partner they really couldn’t possibly know, just to communicate this info to the audience. The cast seemed to gel pretty nicely, though, so this is one where some carefully considered changes could make this a lot better.

Drama

Prime Suspect (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Shot a little more in a Law & Order style than I would have expected, but I like Maria Bello in this. I’ve never seen the British original, but it seems some of its vintage sexism made it into the pilot – though allegedly that’s changing in the series as it moves on (I haven’t watched last night’s episode yet). Replacing the husband character in the final version did wonders – the original guy was terrible. Seems pretty good as a cop show, but some of the attempts at making Bello a bad-ass were a little over the top (what cop slaps her gun THEN her badge up against the back window of a cab?).

The Playboy Club (saw on screener, early June, have not watched) – It’s the Eddie Cibrian show! Seriously, for a show about Playboy Bunnies, this show puts an awful lot of weight on the buff shoulders of Cibrian. I’ve got some residual affection for him since he’s very funny in one of my favorite movies, but he is just not a good enough actor to carry this show. I’ve heard this actually got substantially worse since the original pilot, which is saying something, because the original pilot was pretty blah. Also, the fact that the producers here were so lazy that they decided for their black Bunny they should cast the black Bunny from Mad Men speaks volumes about exactly how much thought goes into this show.

Grimm (saw on screener, early June, will not watch) – I’ll qualify this by noting that this sort of fantasy isn’t really my genre, and I will say that the effects were pretty impressive for having been whipped together on a pilot timeline. However, I wasn’t terribly impressed. The lead is likeable enough, but the whole thing just comes off as super-silly to me. Silas Weir Mitchell is a really undervalued actor, but his character here comes off just a shade too far on the wacky side to be effective. The music, which will hopefully be improved for the final version, was massively overbearing and drove into the ground why I don’t like this sort of thing most of the time.

CBS

Comedy

Two Broke Girls (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Look, I really like Kat Dennings, I think she’s damn funny. But she can’t save this on her own. CBS doesn’t do shows without a laugh track, and while they’re better at gauging what level of canned laughter is acceptable than most of the other networks, it doesn’t mean it’s not still awfully grating. The pilot was tweaked until it seemed considerably funnier than the first version I saw, but the second episode was a serious dud, and I think I may need to check back in when this has found more of its voice.

How To Be A Gentleman (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Probably the least offensive of fall the shows trying to re-embrace hypermasculinity, since at least this one says men have neutered themselves rather than saying they’ve allowed their women to castrate them. There’s a really great cast here (Rickety Cricket from It’s Always Sunny…, Mary-Lynn Rajskub, the manager from Flight of the Conchords, and, uh, Kevin Dillon), but I have a feeling you could turn the camera on their conversations between takes and have a much funnier show than the mediocre comedy this actually winds up being.

Drama

*Person of Interest (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – My favorite description of this is “Jesus and Ben Linus solving crimes.” Jim Cavaziel and Michael Emerson are both playing variations on characters they’ve played before, but the marriage of the JJ Abrams Bizarro Technological Mystery style and the CBS House Brand Criminal Procedural style works significantly better than I would have thought. There’s a lot of babble to justify the fairly strange premise of the show, but it’s well-written babble. This is one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Unforgettable (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – CBS basically takes a really fascinating 60 Minutes story (and you should really watch the video at that link, it’s one of the better pieces they’ve done in years) and turns it into…a criminal procedural! What a surprise! Poppy Montgomery is okay in the lead role, but the mechanism they use to show her perfect memory is a little cheesy. It’s also clear that the memory part was much more important than the cop part to the writer, since the cop part is pretty stupidly plotted. Will definitely appeal to CBS’s core audience, but I wasn’t sufficiently impressed to add it to my rotation.

A Gifted Man (saw on screener, late may, did not watch final version) – Desperate attempt to marry a medical procedural and The Ghost Whisperer. I couldn’t stand this, and I actually laughed out loud when the main character, who is a neurosurgeon, decides to address the hallucinations he’s having by…Googling “hallucinations.” I mean, really, people, please tell me that did not make it into the final version. The saddest part of all this is that it utterly wastes Margo Martindale as the main character’s long-suffering assistant, when she proved she was capable of SO much more in this last season of Justified.

The following shows I have watched as they’ve premiered. I didn’t see earlier versions of any of them.

FOX

Comedy

*New Girl – Basically, this show is a referendum on how you feel about Zooey Deschanel. I think she’s delightful, so I really enjoy this show. If you don’t, you will hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. It’s pretty cartoonish and a little twee, but she’s just so damn likeable that I can put up with a lot of goofiness I’d otherwise find over the top. One unfortunate thing is that Damon Wayans Jr.’s other show (Happy Endings) unexpectedly got picked up, and he made a far better impression in the pilot than the guy they got to replace him going forward. Hopefully that character will get rounded out as the season goes on.

Drama

Terra Nova – Dinosaurs! Who doesn’t like dinosaurs? Some of the CGI on this looks pretty pretty great, and some of it still looks half-baked. Which is kind of amazing, considering that this has been in the works for well over a year and a half. The pilot was a little thin on character development and heavy on laying out the plot – there were definitely a couple of ham-fisted HERE IS THE HOOK FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON moments – but I’m going to hang on for at least another episode to see how it does, mostly because I really like Jason O’Mara. Who, full disclosure, was in the pilot of the last series I worked on and was ridiculously nice despite basically not having slept for a week by the time he got to our set for reshoots because he was also starring in a totally different series which shot on the opposite side of the country.

ABC

Comedy

*Suburgatory – Great companion piece for criminally underrated The Middle and powerhouse Modern Family, with a nicely sarcastic bite and well-written characters. The actors also do a great job of quickly locking in on the characters’ personalities, and it just gels immediately. To a certain extent, it’s Desperate Housewives from the point of view of a sane father and daughter that moved to the block, but it’s much, much funnier than that description implies. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Drama

Pan Am - It’s got style by the barrel, but substance is a little harder to gauge after the pilot episode. There was a lot of work setting up back stories for four stewardesses and a pilot (This pilot/pilot thing is going to drive me nuts). The one storyline that stood out as the most potentially interesting was the one where one of the stews is actually working for the CIA, but the other stories were just a little too thin in one episode to make a judgement about how interesting they’ll be as it goes on. If you want to look at a very pretty recreation of the early Sixties with some hilariously square-jawed men and wee tiny gorgeous women, you’ll definitely enjoy the eye candy.

Whew! And yet I still managed to get an app approved and leave the house repeatedly this week. Amazing!

Finally, I’m looking forward to the following two upcoming shows:

- Showtime’s Homeland, with two actors I really like in Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, and what I’ve heard is a much more interesting take on the War on Terror than the producers’ previous delightful let’s-blow-shit-up-athon, 24. 

-FX’s American Horror Story, which I’ve heard is 32 flavors of bonkers. Wildly divisive among all the TV critics I follow on Twitter, but they all seem to agree that it’s very, very ambitious. And frankly, I’d rather watch an ambitious failure than a boring one.

I’ll try to disclose anywhere I’ve got friends working or where I’ve worked with principals in the past, though now that I’m getting the hell out of showbiz I feel a bit more comfortable calling a spade a spade when something is terrible.

Starting on Monday nights and going in roughly chronological order, these are the shows I’ve given a chance (anything not listed, I haven’t actually watched):

The Event (NBC, Mondays at 9pm) – Though it was conspicuously lacking in information, the pilot was better than I thought it would be (minus what I found to be spectacularly cheesy visual effects). The producers seemed to quickly realize withholding too much information was going to drive the audience nuts, and they immediately dropped quite a bit of knowledge about what the hell is going on in the second episode. Spoiler (highlight to read): Kerry Weaver is a goddamn space alien! This show desperately wants to be the next Lost, but the characters are way too thinly drawn at this point for it to be comparable. However, it also seems to be avoiding some of the pitfalls that dragged down FlashForward‘s early episodes last year by actually moving the plot forward in a meaningful fashion. It’s a big if, but if they can find a way to significantly flesh out the characters, this could actually turn into a pretty good show.

.

Lonestar (Fox, Mondays at 9pm, already cancelled) – Though I didn’t quite like it as much as most critics did, I thought it had a lot of potential and I’m sorry to see it go so quickly after it pulled microscopic ratings. However, I’m more depressed about what this means for intriguing dramas that require the audience to put in effort to watch them. This show could have been handled better – it got stuck with a deathly timeslot (even behind House it was still up against Dancing With The Stars and NBC’s one out-of-the-gate hit in The Event) and had a very weird marketing campaign, but good luck trying to sell any broadcast network on the idea that any drama requiring the audience to think is going to be viable in the future, even with a better slot and a better campaign.

.

Hawaii Five-O (CBS, Mondays at 10pm) – This is pretty much the Scott Caan Show, and Caan even makes the purported lead, the wooden Alex O’Laughlin, seem useful as a straight man. I’ve got no attachment to the original, but this is still far, far better than I thought it was going to be given the batting average for remakes lately. However, Daniel Dae Kim needs to cut his nasty, greasy-ass hair or I’m going to fly out to Hawaii with a goddamn pair of clippers and do it myself.

.

No Ordinary Family (ABC, Tuesdays at 8pm) – Fun. Needs to get rid of the talking to the camera bit right quick, but Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz are both clearly enjoying breaking out of old characters (him: monstrously corrupt cop on The Shield, her: Dexter’s pushover, now dead wife) and getting to do some much lighter work. The characters could use some more depth, but this one seems promising.

.

Raising Hope (Fox, Tuesdays at 9pm) – I’ve got a couple friends working on this one, but I think I’d enjoy it even if I didn’t. Being about a family of misfits trying to raise a baby, it’s a bit of a weird match for Glee, but it’s got some very sweet humor. There’s a real fine line to walk when you have fairly dim characters between laughing at their antics and laughing at how stupid the characters are, and so far it seems to be walking it nimbly. Martha Plimpton is a real standout as the (very young) grandmother. One drawback: They should have kept the snappier original title, which was Keep Hope Alive.

.

Running Wilde (Fox, Tuesdays at 9:30pm) – Probably a case of having my expectations too high, but this one is just not very good. It’s basically the Arrested Development gang trying to get the band back together, but instead of playing their original songs, they’re playing shitty covers. Huge, huge disappointment.

.

Undercovers (NBC, Wednesdays at 8pm) – For a show about spies, the pilot really didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of action, which was disappointing. The leads are perfectly likeable, though the “They’re spies! Who run a catering business!” portion of the premise is clearly going to need to go away quickly, because it’s so needlessly schticky. I’m still a bit undecided on this one, but the ratings have not been promising.

.

Better With You (ABC, Wednesdays at 8:30pm) – Spectacularly bland. And having one show with a laugh track on a night where none of the other shows have one is really, really jarring, and only points up what a stupid convention the laugh track can be when poorly executed.

.

Terriers (FX, Wednesdays at 10pm) – Well-done little story about a couple of PI’s, which coasts mainly on the buddy chemistry of Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. I worked on a great pilot that Logue starred in (which sadly got bogged down in legal issues and never went anywhere), and he’s a nice, nice dude, and a great actor, so it’s good to see him on a show that makes use of all of his talents. It’s a nice blend of cop show and character study.

.

Outsourced (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30pm) – Don’t make the same mistake I did of watching the show to confirm how awful it is. Please don’t. I think it was Dan Fienberg at Hitfix who gave the best quote about this show on his joint podcast with Alan Sepinwall of the same site: If nobody on this show had an accent, not only are the jokes not funny, they’re really not even jokes. Just an awful, awful show.

.

Outlaw (NBC, Fridays at 10pm) – This is another one I watched to see if it was as ridiculous as the reviews made it seem, and oh dear god, is it ever. I don’t demand perfect realism out of legal shows, mostly because that would be dreadfully boring. However, I do expect them to take place in a universe that bears some relation to our own, and this one just doesn’t, which makes it impossible to watch if you know a damn thing about the law. Fun party game: Invite a bunch of lawyers over to your house and force them to watch this show. Whichever one lasts the longest without yelling or gesticulating wildly at the screen due to the mind-boggling inaccuracies is the winner.

.

Boardwalk Empire (HBO, Sundays at 10pm) – This show was genetically engineered for greatness from birth, with Terence Winter from The Sopranos writing and Martin Motherfucking Scorcese directing, and it’s a mobgasm of the highest order. Scorcese does a typically outstanding job with the pilot, pulling every mob-movie cliche he can think of out of his bag of tricks and making it seem brand-spanking new, and it’s just masterful. The second episode is also really outstanding, which is a very good sign since it was shot on a significantly lower budget and, you know, not by Martin Motherfucking Scorcese. It’s hard not to talk about this show in hyperbole, and judging by some of the “Well, god, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but couldn’t it have been better?” reaction coming from some corners, it might be possible expectations have been raised impossibly high. But really, when you strip away the hype and concentrate on the product on-screen, it’s hard to deny that this is far and away the best new show of the year.

But I haven’t read quite as good a takedown on both the mechanics of a bad show playing out the string and the mechanics of Internet Lovefest Guy commentary as the following magnificent paragraph from Todd VanDerWerff at The Onion AV Club, in his review of the penultimate episode of FlashForward:

FlashForward has been canceled. It is a dead show walking, playing out the string in hopes that it can pull enough of itself together that there will be that one guy in every comment thread on the Internet about great shows canceled too soon who will say, “HEY, YOU GUYS REMEMBER FLASHFORWARD? THAT WAS A GREAT SHOW, AND THE NETWORK TREATED IT SO BADLY, AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.” And, eventually, the number of people who are capable of successfully arguing with this guy that, no, FlashForward wasn’t all that great, and it received a gigantic marketing push from a network that gave it one of its best timeslots, and it debuted to an audience of some 12 million who mostly left because it WASN’T VERY GOOD, even with a mostly enjoyable pilot, will dwindle to nothing, but that ONE GUY, that ONE VOICE OF PASSION and LACK OF REASON, will be able to convince some poor souls that it IS worth checking out, and they’ll head on down to the Best Buy (or the post-apocalyptic variant thereof) and go all the way to the back of the TV on DVD section and find a DVD set on the bottom shelf of the last stand, covered in dust, and they’ll take it home, and they’ll pop it in the DVD player, and they’ll realize that guy was a fucking idiot.

Really, if you’re among the few people who’s been suffering along with me watching this stupidity, you should read VanDerWerff’s recap. FlashForward is a terrible show that could be criticized from a thousand angles, but it’s a rare treat to see someone take such a wide target and pinpoint with such surgical precision exactly what went wrong.

But I’m with Alan Sepinwall on this one: Heroes has lost me for good, and not because of anything in particular, but because of the sum total of its stupidity.

I was trying to explain why I still like Lost but am deleting my Heroes season pass to a friend, since both shows are often horrifically confusing and unnecessarily convoluted. It comes down to this: Motivation.

Characters on Lost have either had slowly evolving motivations or still are motivated by many of the same things that they were at the outset of the show. Most of the characters on Heroes seem to be motivated by whatever fits the plot that “chapter”, or even that week.

It becomes impossible to care who’s doing what or why when a character’s motivation can change so frequently and so capriciously, and you find yourself wondering why the hell you’re still watching this show in the first place.

It says a lot about how wrong you’ve gone when an unemployed person with nothing but time to kill decides that watching your show is not worth her time.

Credit to Sars of Tomato Nation for coining the phrase “DVR Break-Up“. Brilliant in its simplification of the process of deleting all recorded episodes of a show, then torpedoing the season pass. Amusing that she inaugurated it with Heroes six months ago, because she does not posess the patience (read: stupidity) that I do.

There are many shows that, for whatever reason, have their characters do things that are either entirely out of character, wholly implausible, or both. Usually this reason is that the writers have run out of ideas, but sometimes they’re just weird.

The question becomes: How do you address this within the show? Two shows I watch have pulled really odd and implausible plot twists out of their asses, and have gone with entirely different tacks in terms of how the other characters react to the weirdness.

Grey’s Anatomy has had Katherine Heigl’s character, Izzie, fucking the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Like, having actual sex with a ghost. No other characters find out about it for a couple episodes, and when Izzie’s actual living, breathing, boyfriend, Alex, finds out about it, his reaction is roughly, “Whatever.”

The whole fucking-a-ghost thing is weird and implausible enough on its own, but for Alex to not really have a reaction to it made it that much stupider. As a doctor, he should at least be concerned about someone having massive hallucinations. As her boyfriend, he should really be concerned that she’s cheating on him with said hallucinations.

The whole thing’s just been handled atrociously, and what’s worse is that it’s STILL dragging out. There was some resolution in the last episode (apparently, Dead Boyfriend came back to tell Izzie that she’s sick, but he wasn’t an omniscient enough ghost to actually tell her what she has), but there’s still a lot of unraveling that arc has to do.

Meanwhile, The L Word, usually a show I still watch because it’s grown so cartoonishly bad it’s actually funny, actually handled an out-of-character moment for two of its characters really, really well.

Jenny is the resident flake/screenwriter, Shane is the resident seductress/slut. The characters have been good friends for several seasons, but apparently Jenny decided she was in love with Shane, and at the end of the episode two Sundays ago, declared said love.

Shane reacted to this by sleeping with her, eliciting a collective, “What the FUCK?!” from the lesbians and friends of lesbians who still watch this show, because such a pairing really makes no sense for either character. Even in a show infamous for lack of continuity and character inconsistency, this stood out as really bizarre.

But the payoff to the hookup that happens in the first few minutes of the next episode made me completely ignore its irrationality. Alice, a friend of both Jenny and Shane, comes over the morning after the ridiculous hookup, and has an awesome moment of revelation where she realizes Jenny and Shane had sex.

The camera pushes in on her face like in a Hitchcock movie where someone’s just realized they know who the killer is. Due credit to Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice: The way her facial expression morphs into a truly horrified grimace as the camera pushes in is absolutely hysterical.

Alice immediately excuses herself to use the restroom, and sends out a freaked-out mass text to all their mutual friends. The montage of reactions (one person falls off a treadmill, one person busts out laughing in the middle of a meeting, one person even gives an out loud, “What the fuck?”) is truly the best sequence they’ve done in years.

And why was this so funny? Because they took the bomb they just dropped on the audience and showed that even within the show, people were completely flummoxed and thrown by the development, just as much as the audience was. They effectively told the audience, “We know what we’re doing is insane. Stick with us on this one,” by making every other character in the show a proxy for the audience’s reaction.

Now I will grant the Grey’s folks one thing: They have to fill 22 episodes, where as the L Word writers only had to fill 8 episodes for their truncated final season. Part of the reason the L Word writers may have moved to address the issue so quickly was that they really didn’t have time not to.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fascinating contrast in how writers approach plotlines that take both the characters and the audience out of their comfort zones.

While in DH‘s case I hear I may have given up right before the show creatively resurrected itself, this spoilery item indicates I checked out of Prison Break at the right time.

Because seriously? That’s the most implausible plot twist they’ve come up with, and this is a show that’s pretty much a maze of implausible plot twists.

While I’m not nearly as eloquent a reviewer as Tim (and I actually look forward to his take on this movie), I’ll give the short version.

This is a movie with several major flaws, the most notable of which is a grating, failed attempt to capture the way teens talk to each other. It has its moments of hilarity, but the overall effect is distracting.

That said, if you want to see a LOT of outstanding acting, you should definitely see this movie.

Starting with Ellen Page (who does an outstanding job as the titular protagonist) and going down through every single supporting character, these actors do a really great job of selling material that often does not deserve it.

I’ll throw in a mention of Jennifer Garner, who I’ve always enjoyed but have never been terribly impressed with until now. She really sells the quiet desperation in a role that could have been made shrewishly hysterical by the wrong actress. Luckily, they cast Garner, and she’s great in a pivotal role.

There are a few very strong moments in the story, which I won’t spoil for those who wish to see it. But the bottom line is that while this movie has its issues, it’s certainly still worth being seen just for Page and Garner’s performances.

Also, I’d just like to note that I now have a huge crush on Ellen Page, which feels slightly less wrong after finding out she’s not quite as young as she looks and is actually 20, although still fairly wrong as she cannot legally drink.

Now, I have to see it. This is why Tim should be writing reviews for a living. God bless Rotten Tomatoes for adding him to the Tomatometer, giving him at least some of the exposure he richly deserves.

I’d absolutely loved the first two episodes, with their bizarre hyper-techincolor acid trip set design, extremely strong acting, and cute (but without crossing the fine line into too cute) stories.

I was worried, however, because both episodes were directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Men in Black and The Addams Family, and whose excellent, ebullient visual storytelling leaned heavily on what turned out to be an absolutely obscene budget.

You saw every penny of the lavish spending on the screen, but in the world of television, that kind of outlay over 22 weeks becomes simply unsustainable.

So unsustainable, in fact, that ABC actually took the draconian step of banning Sonnenfeld from directing future episodes and slashing the budget to the bone. I worried that without the wild, inspired world they were able to paint with all that money, the whole house of cards would fall down.

I’m pleased to report that the writing of this week’s episode was inspired enough that I barely noticed the more drab and dimly lit surroundings.

Trying to explain what actually happens in the show is a bit of a mess. The basic premise is moderately understandable (though is annoyingly reiterated in every episode thus far): The main character touches a dead person once, they are resurrected. If he touches them again, they die, and stay dead.

If he does not touch them again to re-kill them in a minute, however, someone or something nearby will die in their place. He uses this power to help solve murders, and collect rewards. Oh, and he also revives dead fruit to make delicious pies at his awesomely named pie restaurant, the Pie Hole.

But trying to capture the texture of this show in words is totally impossible, other than to say it’s the most wildly inventive show I’ve seen in some time, and it’s clear that both the writers and the production designers have found themselves some truly excellent hallucinogens.

If you’re willing to read some spoilers, professional TV critic Alan Sepinwall sums up why this ridiculousness works a lot better than I can. Even he can’t capture the true level of weirdness, so if you haven’t seen any of the episodes yet, you should try and get the ABC.com streaming to work for you, and watch whatever episodes they have up.

Pushing Daisies‘ weird, wild house of cards could still all collapse in on itself. I’ll certainly admit to some misgivings about how long they can sustain the delicate balance they’ve struck. But until it does collapse, missing it would be a real shame.