A Post In the Machine.

Chat launch fun-time experiment, "Extrapolations" on Apple TV+ extrapolated, oh dear; "Succession" Box Set is starting; YouTubeTV ups the cost; what's a "comfort" show?

We had the “soft launch” of the Chat this week and it was fun and educational in its own hilarious way, especially since we didn’t have any defining topic to discuss. But at least it made some things clear to me for the future, which I shall enumerate:

1. This is going to work as a nice feature and I’m excited to tap its potential, up to and including live-Chatting certain episodes of shows or big events (Oscars would have been nice).

2. Substack sent out a one-time email that I had (finally, maybe?) launched a Chat. Future emails will be from me, telling you what day and time I’m going to do it. Also, many people said the Chat feature is a lot better on the app than the desk top version, but who knows. You decide. I do think, broken record here, that you should have the app. It’s also the only way that it alerts you to the start of a Chat at this point, though I think that’s really only if I do it spur of the moment (like the first one) and you’ll otherwise have plenty of notice when send out date/time details.

3. It’s easier for me to respond in the timeline, live, rather than going back and answering directly (which is an option and when things are moving slow I can do that). If I somehow miss a question in the Chat, just ask it again.

4. As Twitter dims — I haven’t tweeted in ages and I only follow a handful of sportswriters — this will be a nice arena to talk about television, film and all culture and multiple random topics to a community I like and who get me. In turn, they get to chat with each other in a troll-free environment of like minded TV, film and culture fans. That’s a nice bonus.

5. I’ll have prompts next time.

As a reminder, the Chat is a paid subscription feature. If having a community you can engage with sounds cool to you, think about jumping in.

Quick reminder up top here that HBO’s final season of “Succession” starts on March 26, which is this Sunday, and I’m going to deconstruct every episode as part of the Box Set paid feature. I’m very much looking forward to what Roy family dysfunction brings as it heads into what is sure to be a (funny) war. Or maybe a sad war? Dunno. Anyway, readers seem super pumped for that show and that weekly feature, so if you can catch up beforehand that’s great. More details in this previous post:

News & Notes in the Machine...

There’s like 700 famous cast members missing from this photo.

It’s hard not to want to peek at the new Apple TV+ series, “Extrapolations.” It’s overstuffed with famous actors and there’s a pretty cool trailer. Having done this long enough to know what it means when there are an egregious amount of bold face star names in the cast, I went in more than a little suspicious.