[S1E1] The Life Of The Party
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[S1E1] The Life of the Party
The first season of Party Down holds an 87% approval rating with an average score of 8.5 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes based on 30 critical reviews. The website's critical consensus is, "Before shows about struggling actors were done to death, there was Party Down."[25] On Metacritic, it has a score of 66 based on 12 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[26] Andrew Wallenstein of The Hollywood Reporter said, "Lurking behind the surface of this raucous comedy is an astute meditation on the promise and peril of leading an unconventional life, something about which aspiring actors know a thing or two."[9] The American Film Institute named Party Down one of the 10 best shows of 2009.[27]
Nate and Maddy had just broken up. They spent the night trying to make each other jealous. Maddy found a guy to have sex with in the pool. After Nate found them, he stormed into the kitchen. Jules had just arrived from her motel room encounter. Nate singled her out and confronted her about who it was she knew at the party. To get him to back off, Jules took a knife and cut herself.
Erika finally gets the chance to speak to her crush, Jake C in an awkward but sweet exchange. She then becomes the life and soul of the party, winning a beer pong tournament, with everyone chanting her name. Jake C breaks up with girlfriend Riley and then nearly kisses Erika. Our likeable lead goes in for the kiss but almost vomits on her heartthrob. She settles for his phone number instead. As they swap digits, Riley watches furiously from the shadows, silently plotting further revenge.
The gang arrives at a house party, where Rue quickly sniffs out some cocaine, bonding with another intoxicant enthusiastic, Elliott, and has a little overdose, only to be soothed by Adderall, the chemicals in her body dissolving into a stable combination, somehow.
Desperate, Nate convinces Cassie to lie flat in the bath and closes the shower curtain, allowing Maddie to enter without suspicion. For her trouble, Cassie receives a urine-soaked towel in the face, carelessly thrown by Maddie, and is forced to remain in the bathtub while Maddie graciously endures some flirting from Travis, a smooth, confident partygoer armed with a strong joint.
HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty episode 1 tells the true story of Jerry Buss buying the Los Angeles Lakers and drafting Magic Johnson; here's how accurate the story is to what happened in real life. The 10-episode sports drama for HBO Max focuses on the rise of Lakers during the 1980s and is based on Jeff Pearlman's 2014 book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. John C. Reilly leads Winning Time's cast as real-estate mogul Jerry Buss, who has dreams of buying the Lakers and turning the successful NBA franchise into one of the premier professional sports organizations.
The very beginning of Winning Time episode 1 shows Magic Johnson at a doctor's office on November 5, 1991. The show doesn't detail why he is at the doctor's or what happened to him before going back twelve years to 1979. Magic Johnson's doctor's visit in 1991 is a pivotal moment in his real life, and Winning Time only teases the news he received by having a man who went with Magic start crying once they left. Prior to the 1991-1992 NBA season, Magic went to get a routine physical so he'd be cleared to play and discovered that he had HIV. The positive test for HIV completely changed his life, as Magic Johnson shared the news at a press conference two days later on November 7, 1991. This is also where he announced he was immediately retiring from the NBA.
Near the beginning of Winning Time episode 1, Jerry Buss delivers a fourth-wall-breaking monologue, and viewers might be somewhat surprised to see the 46-year-old do so while inside Playboy Mansion. Jerry Buss was a frequent visitor to the Playboy Mansion during his life. He was not officially affiliated with the business in any way, but he did spend plenty of time there and became close friends with Playboy owner Hugh Hefner as a result. Jerry even famously brought Magic Johnson to the mansion when the basketball star was just 19 years old. As a result, Winning Time putting Jerry in Playboy at the start is quite accurate.
When it comes time for Jerry Buss to actually buy the Los Angeles Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke, they come to an agreed selling price of $67.5 million. This is exactly the same price as Jerry Buss paid in real-life to buy the team. The deal was much more complex than Buss paying Cooke the $67.5M to own the Lakers, The Forum arena, and the Los Angeles Kings NHL team, though. Cooke wanted the Chrysler Building in New York that Buss owned, and the deal evolved to include several different pieces of property that would swap owners. With the Lakers currently valued at over $5 billion, it became a brilliant acquisition by Dr. Buss.
One of Winning Time episode 1's most intriguing moments is when Magic Johnson meets Los Angeles Lakers point guard Norm Nixon at a party, and a game of 1 v 1 erupts between them. This is one element in Winning Time that appears to be fake. There is no record of Magic and Norm Nixon competing with each other in this fashion. It is known that Norm was quite jealous of Magic and felt threatened by him, but a public 1 v 1 game as presented in Winning Time episode 1 seems far-fetched still. If the two basketball stars did compete in a head-to-head game like this, it likely happened behind closed doors in the future.
The NBA Draft process in Winning Time episode 1 is brought to life in a very accurate fashion. The coin toss to decide if the Los Angeles Lakers would get the first pick, and the Chicago Bulls team incorrectly chose heads. Once the Lakers officially had the first overall pick in the 1979 draft, they began discussing a future with Magic Johnson. This includes the sand dabs meal depicted in Winning Time episode 1 and Magic asking for $600K a year as his salary. Both of these moments did happen in real-life, as did Magic threatening to not declare for the draft inadequate compensation couldn't be agreed upon. The one inconsistency with Winning Time episode 1's draft and what happened in real life, though, seems to be Magic's salary. The show says that his rookie deal was worth $500K per year, but there are conflicting reports and records about whether he earned $460K or $500K.
It is also true that Magic Johnson did consider going back to college in real life, although not exactly for the same reasons depicted in Winning Time episode 1. The HBO Max 2022 show indicates that Magic thought about returning to Michigan State for his junior year due to a shaken confidence or not receiving a high enough salary. However, the closest Magic came to going back to college was in the lead-up to the coin flip. He wasn't totally ready to give up being a college student and the fun that came with that. Magic was also determined to play for the Lakers if he was leaving. He went on to say that he would've gone back to school if the Chicago Bulls won the coin toss because he didn't want to play in Chicago.
Wrigley invites them to his party later that night, where all of them go. In the dorm, while getting ready, Lucy confesses to her friends that she does not feel she is a good person and also expresses her apathy towards everything in life. It is almost as if she is just sitting there, watching other people have great experiences in life.
He returns to a dark, empty house and only turns on the over the counter light in the kitchen while he gets a beer from the fridge. Then he drinks the beer and watches television by the light of a single reading lamp over his chair in the living room, with just his two pet fish for company. He watches a nature program about gnats with a 3-7 day life cycle, emphasizing the seeming insignificance of his own life.
This was absolutely chilling. Patton described life as consciousness and movement, which means life can be whatever machine we create and call sentient or sentience that thinks and evolves without a flesh body. Meanwhile, he described flesh bodies as food, fuel, mere calories that keep other beings alive, and definitely inferior to sentience without a flesh body.
Finn and Princess Bubblegum are in the Graveyard doing a science experiment aimed to bring dead Candy People back to life, while Jake and Lady Rainicorn are playing in the forest. She tests her decorpsinator serum on the dead Mr. Cream Puff. However, he's resurrected into a Candy Zombie that craves sugar. Mr. Cream Puff then spills the serum all over the graves of the dead Candy People, and they rise as zombies too. Princess Bubblegum tells Finn that the Candy Zombies will go to the Candy Kingdom and consume the Candy People.
At the kingdom, Princess Bubblegum evacuated all of the Candy People to the main candy foyer, where she announces that they are all going to have a slumber party. She explains to Finn that if the Candy People find out about the zombies, they'll explode in fright (although they don't explode in later episodes when they become afraid). At the same time, Starchie searches for Princess Bubblegum in the Graveyard to give her a bigger corpse shovel, but he explodes upon seeing a Candy Zombie. Back at the Candy Kingdom, Bubblegum makes Finn royal promise not to tell anyone about the candy zombies, then gives him orders to keep the people distracted while she tries to finish the serum in her lab. Jake hears part of the discussion and begins asking what Princess Bubblegum and Finn were up to. In an attempt to keep the promise, Finn avoids answering Jake and tries playing Truth Or Dare, where Chocoberry dares Mr. Cupcake to take off his wrapper. Mr. Cupcake then asks Jake whether he prefers chocolate or fudge. Jake says he can't eat either because he is a dog, and if he eats either, he would probably die. But he says if he had to choose, he would choose neither fudge nor chocolate. Finally, Jake dares Finn to tell the truth about what's going on. 041b061a72