Standoff

Whiners in 2015 complaining a texas governor would never behave in this manner must be very curious as why texas and a few other republican dominated states have done absolutely atrocious things during the god-awful Trump Years.

Anyway, the episode is actually solid because it accurately portrays how the state department can be maneuvered into bad situations by individual states and other government agencies. Once again Beth does a fantastic job negotiating rocky terrain, but at this point its all very formulaic and tiresome. Utterly amazing that week after week the Secretary of State encounters a problem that can also be solved inside a week. The concept starts to wear thin. But its still an entertaining hour of television regardless.

Its a good episode for regular fans but casual viewers can probably skip this one, nothing particularly exciting or important happens.

I'm a real fan of Téa's and due to the nature of the show, it's quality really revolves around her acting. More than almost any other show I watch, the whole thing revolves around a single person so without her reactions and inflections, there's not much there to watch.

I think she did a wonderful job in the early episodes, but someone the acting here and at least the few more episodes I watched just don't that quality of moment-by-moment changes that previously appeared on screen.

Although many people then to give actors all the credit for their successes and failures, I'm aware that there are many other factors... it could have been the Director's direction that fall flat, or it could have been problems with the shooting schedule, or whatever...

Either way, I just hope the show improves back the level of quality were it was. For what it's worth, I still enjoy the writing.

The previous 11 episodes of Madam Secretary (through Nov. 30, 2014) all were characterized by mature, intelligent, convincing and realistic scripts, both in the writing and in the delivery by the actors.

Tonight's episode ("Standoff," Jan. 4, 2015) fell flat on all those points. The dialogues were flat, infantile and convincing, which may reflect a change in writers. Added to that, however, was the corresponding failure in the delivery of tonight's script by the actors — the same actors that had performed in a consistently outstanding style in ALL of the previous episodes.

How to explain that fails me. Is it the appearance of a new director, or were the actors themselves challenged beyond reasonable expectations to make gold from the leaden script of a new writer?

Perhaps the answer will be obvious in the next three episodes, which were written by three writers of earlier shows, although two of the three upcoming shows do rely on new directors.

I wish that someone who writes in Hollywood would actually go to Texas before pretending to know anything about this state.

I don't think Texas has had a governor who even remotely resembled Caleb Lockwood since the 1930s, and his nickname was "Pappy." Texas governors wear nice tailored suits, have college educations, and understand the law and diplomacy.

We have had Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, in office for my whole lifetime, and none of them would have done what this one did, even the most conservative of the lot. We do not believe in crossing international borders and stealing prisoners, and if some vigilante group (looks more like Idaho to me) were to steal a prisoner from Mexico and bring him here, our governor would not set up carnival booths and exploit this thing in the media.

Most likely, the governor -- any governor from the past 50 years -- would have personally called the secretary of state and asked for help in resolving this international incident.

This series is fabulous! The writing is (usually) excellent. I love this entire series, and I know that even the best of them have a "rotten" one here and there, but really? Who is the unimaginative, lazy person who actually thinks that Texans elect fat "Boss Hawg" types of politicians to parade around in street clothes, using exaggerated accents, and talk like they are on "Smokey and the Bandit?" I still gave the episode a "6." Most of them, in my opinion, are worth a 9 or a 10, but they need to can the persons who wrote this caricature in, and while they are at it, get rid of whoever it was that cast the actor for the governor. We have not had an overweight governor in my entire lifetime, and they all have dressed the part, even the ones I didn't particularly like, such as the one right before the man we have now.