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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spells &amp; Karma" data-source="post: 341119" data-attributes="member: 23">On to Series Five. The first episode, Not In Front Of The Children, takes place the morning after Tunnel Of Love. The equivalent Who's The Boss? episode aired the following week from Seer Of Love. With The Upper Hand, there's a significantly longer break.While four-and-a-half months between aired episodes should make it quite easy to pick up where they next day, The Powers That Be clearly didn't foresee Joe McGann's very noticeable weight loss. There's just no getting around it, and no covering it up and after half an episode it feels like, for want of a better expression, the elephant in the room. McGann is front and centre from the very first moment, with a flashback to the previous episode drawing attention to the different look, and it's said almost immediately that this is the next day. Since Charlie was worried in this opening episode, I found myself trying to explain what the writing didn't by assuming he'd lost a significant amount of weight through worry. However, it's impossible this would happen overnight. Even if the writers didn't want to explicitly mention the difference in appearance, they could at least have changed a couple of sentences so that the episode took place a few weeks later. As it stands, this is the series' most distracting continuity problem to date, because it's there, unaddressed, for the entire first episode.Back in the day, I read a contemporaneous TV magazine interview with Diana Weston in which Joe's weight loss was mentioned and I have foggy recollections of her saying that he looked good at first but he'd taken it too far "and now his head looks too big for his body". I can't find it, and have no idea when this would have been. I'd guess it's from around this time, but perhaps he gets even slimmer in future series. I've long assumed that his weight loss was the result of a health issue (depression, perhaps. Or an eating disorder or some kind of body dysmorphia/exercise addiction). While looking this morning to see if I could find that Diana Weston interview, I found <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/actor-joe-mcgann-suffered-severe-2684780" target="_blank">this article from 2013</a> where Joe McGann says he was suffering from severe depression while filming The Upper Hand. At first I assumed this reinforced my "weight loss through depression" theory, but he says in the article that it's the other way round. So that's my curiosity satisfied.Back to the episode itself... Back when Monica and Chandler were in a similar situation of hiding their relationship from the rest of the characters on Friends, I'd thought the premise original and clever, but it seems Who's The Boss? beat them to it by some way. And I'm sure many others have had similar storylines. Thinking about it, entire series like Butterflies or Duty Free are based around a couple who keep their budding relationship/love affair a secret. No matter who did what and when (to accidentally paraphrase [USER=22]@James from London[/USER]), I'm sure it's a sitcom classic and it works beautifully in this opening episode. It feels reassuring that after a very difficult patch throughout Series Four - where the episodes began to feel workaday, formulaic and even tedious - the two opening episodes lead (or continue) with the strength that S4's final two episodes had regained.It's interesting to see that the first three Series Five episodes have the same running order as the analogous Who's The Boss? episodes. This is perhaps a reason why it feels so surefooted and logical. Most importantly, we're back to The Upper Hand's roots with the focus on the relationship between Caroline and Charlie.First came the admission they love one another. Then two episodes focussing on adjusting to the new status quo, first with the pact to hide their relationship (naturally unsuccessfully. Even Anna Soubry and her film crew got involved in blowing them out of the water). The hat-trick comes with Misery, where Caroline is unnerved by Charlie's suffocating attentions, leading to a dream sequence based on the Stephen King book/play/film referenced in the title (no doubt the homage is mostly inspired by the hugely successful film version, the year before WTB aired their Misery.Two enjoyable guest actors appeared in the cafe scene (which I can easily envisage originating as a roadside diner in the American version).  Geoffrey Hughes - in the middle of his own hugely successful sitcom run as Onslow in Keeping Up Appearances, but who will always be Corrie's Eddie Yeats to me. And playing his wife is Elizabeth Estensen whose own sitcoms credentials go back to The Liver Birds. Most notably here, the role that always springs first to mind for me when I see her is the titular character in T-Bag And The Revenge Of The T-Set... where she starred opposite Kellie Bright. Once again, it's disappointing the two didn't have a scene together, but I like to think they had a bit of a laugh behind the scenes. Just as Geoffrey Hughes had his own legendary soap character, both Elizabeth and Kellie would go on to be key long-term characters in other two big British soaps: Elizabeth would play Emmerdale's Diane for over twenty years, while Kellie's now been in EastEnders for the best part of a decade. And counting.</blockquote>

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