The crushed flusher

The show: Ally McBeal
The episode: "World's Without Love," from Season 2, now on Disc 2 for that season.
What happened: Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith) is sitting on a toilet in the unisex, reading National Law Review, when she hears a weird gurgling noise. She gets up from the toilet when Stephan (John's pet frog, presumed dead in the previous episode) jumps out of the toilet bowl and onto Georgia's face. Horrified, she gets out of the stall and throws the frog over to Nelle (Portia de Rossi) who tosses the animal back to Georgia and Georgia throws him back to Nelle but Richard (Greg Germann) opens the door to his stall and Stephan hits the door and falls to the floor. Soon there are a lot of people around the frog, when they hear the sound of a toilet being remotely flushed. Nelle stalls John (Peter MacNicol), who likes "a fresh bowl," from the entering the unisex bathroom to give Elaine (Jane Krakowski) time to sneak the frog out and over to a vet.
Why it doesn't quite make sense: Putting aside for a minute that we're supposed to believe that a frog could survive in septic plumbing for at least a couple of days, didn't John destroy his remote flusher in the previous episode?
Let's remember how Stephan came to be presumed dead in the previous episode, "Story of Love:" The frog was on the toilet seat of John's preferred stall, but when Richard tried to pick him up, he instead jumped into the bowl. At that very moment, John, about to enter the unisex, pushed the button on his remote flusher, causing Stephan to be flushed away. Later in the episode, Elaine collects the pieces of the remote flusher. It seems that John, angry at himself for pushing the button and causing Stephan's death, took his anger out on the device. Makes sense, given how much he loved that frog.
Now, in this episode, John is using the remote flusher again. I find it a little hard to believe that he'd go back to using it so casually. Even if he had a spare, wouldn't he be a little more judicious in its use, such as checking that the bowl contains only things he wants flushed? This also raises an issue of courtesy: if we're to believe that the most famous restroom in television history is the only restroom at the offices of Cage & Fish, where at least two dozen people are employed, wouldn't John be extremely rude in remotely flushing a toilet that might be in use by someone else?

You have a face for radio

The show: Ally McBeal
The episode: "They Eat Horses, Don't They?" First aired in 1998 and now available on DVD (second season, first disc).
What happened: Ling (Lucy Liu) sues on-air personality Harold Wick (Wayne Newton as a thinly veiled Howard Stern) for contributing to sexual harrassment at a plant she manages. After a judge refuses to dismiss the case, Nelle (Portia de Rossi) convinces Ling to drop the charge and issue a statement at a press conference explaining that she's dropping the case because she's just become aware of an unspecified physical or psychological deficiency Harold Wick has. Soon after, Harold invites Ally to appear on his show. To everyone's surprise, Ally agrees. As she's being made up, Ally expresses surprise at that the show is not just on the radio.
Meanwhile, John defends a restaurateur sued for serving horse to a diner who enjoyed the meat before knowing what it was.
Why it doesn't quite make sense: So Ally is sometimes quite disconnected from reality. But even she should know that Harold Wick's show is not just a radio show. She was watching it on TV with Renee in their apartment earlier in the episode! It's probably the director who's to blame for this one; the script probably did not call for any image of Harold Wick as Ally and Renee listened to his show. Or maybe Ally was just making small talk.

The invisible secretaries

In the real world, much of what happens in the business world wouldn't occur without the hard work of the secretaries. In the legal profession, for example, it is sometimes joked that it is the clerks, couriers and secretaries who actually make justice happen. Yet, in the legal dramas on television, secretaries are conspicuously absent.

Sure, on Ally McBeal there is Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski), but from my understanding of the pilot episode, she's a secretary only for the title character, who is a new associate at the firm. Since she's a busybody, it is easy to get the impression that she's the secretary for all the lawyers in the firm. But with all the different people milling about the offices of Cage & Fish, surely John and Richard each have their own secretaries, too.

On The Practice it made sense for Donnell & Associates to only have one secretary in the first season: Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who later turned out to be a law student going to school at night who then gets to try cases, and whose secretarial duties are taken over by Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff). Perhaps it is Boston Legal which has come closest to showing how vital legal secretaries are to the success of the lawyers they work for. For Alan Shore (James Spader), his secretary's desk practically had a revolving door through which went several people, including a young woman who accused him of sexual harassment, golden girl Catherine Piper (Betty White) and Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a cross-dressing black man. The latter turned out to also become a lawyer, as if perhaps to suggest that only as attorneys do legal professionals reach their fullest potential.

JAG is not a David E. Kelley production, but even there we see only one true secretary: Lt. Harriet Sims (Karri Turner). I know about Chegwidden's yeoman (first the Smithersly Tiner, then Coates), but that was more like a receptionist than a secretary; it was Sims who had the real secretarial duties.

It is understandable that we don't see secretaries much on the various incarnations of Law & Order. Maybe New York's court system can afford secretaries for the district attorneys, but likely not for the public defenders. When the cops barge in on private defense attorneys, the writers and/or directors choose not to show us the cops bypassing the receptionists and secretaries. In the episode in which former Will & Grace star Eric McCormack appeared as a 'sugar daddy' suspected of killing his 'sugar baby,' however, we did see the rich man's secretary running interference between the cops and her boss.

Do action safe nits count?

In the early Ally McBeal episode "One Hundred Tears Away" (oh please, cry me a river), Ally is arrested for tripping up a woman at the supermarket in an argument over potato chips. The woman supposedly does not like ridged potato chips, yet she puts the last remaining can of Pringles back on the shelf. Ally takes the Pringles and the other woman then grabs it from her, claiming that she still intended to buy them despite putting them down on the shelf.

I watched this episode when it first aired, but it wasn't until watching it yesterday that I noticed that there's another can of Pringles visible in the shot. Just look at the right edge of your screen. This did not get past the staff at IMDb, for they also noticed this and listed it under "Goofs" for that episode.

But that's not the reason I hesitated to make a blog post about it. The thing is that the second can of Pringles falls outside of what editors of a decade ago call the "action safe." There is also an area called the "title safe," within which you must place your titles, actor credits, etc., if you want everyone who views you video to see them. The action safe area is slightly larger than the title safe area, but a similar principle applies: don't put action outside the action safe if you want all viewers to see it. For example, if you have someone waiting in ambush on the left edge of the frame, to the left of the action safe, his popping out will be as much a surprise to the viewer as it is to the ambushed character on the screen.

At least that's the case for viewers using old analog 4:3 televisions. The screens on those televisions were almost never straight-edge rectangles, but rather rounded edge rectangles. Nor was the exact shape of the rounded rectangle standardized, though generally TVs from the 1950s clipped a lot more of the edges than TVs from the 1990s.

Now, when I watch a DVD of a show like Ally McBeal on my 16:9 digital TV, with black bars on the left and right of the frame, I will see things that the show's editors probably thought no one else but them would ever see. For that reason I'm not sure that nits for things outside the action safe, or even the title safe for that matter, ought to count or not.

What do you think? Do such nits count? And where do they fit on the hierarchy of nits? Above or below freeze-frame or zoom nits?