Harsh: How a scathing review made The A.V. Club part of Legends Of Tomorrow
People behind The CW superhero spin-off explain how this very site entered the Arrowverse
TV Features Legends of Tomorrow
No CW show ever seemed like it was meant to be the biggest thing in the world. As popular as Riverdale or Supernatural were at the height of their powers, they were still CW shows, the kind you don’t watch live but rather binge over a weekend on Netflix. They weren’t trying to appeal to everyone; they were trying to appeal to the people who got it, the people who were already predisposed, for whatever reason, to fall head-over-heels in love with whatever that show was doing.
And that was never more true than it was for DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow. A spin-off of a spin-off of the Batman Begins-inspired Arrow, the show seemed to require so much homework that it never had a chance to be the next Riverdale or Supernatural. But it still managed to build a head-over-heels fanbase that carried it through seven seasons of stories about a found family of time-traveling superheroes who took it upon themselves to save history from aliens and immortal warlords and demons and fantastical creatures.
One of the things that made Legends Of Tomorrow special, though, was that it had worked hard to earn the love of its fans. The show’s first season, the one that was most explicitly set up by the events of Arrow and The Flash, was—to put it charitably—lousy. It was the kind of (mostly) serious superhero action with soapy CW drama that its forebearers had found success with. But with a whole team of heroes to worry about, there wasn’t enough time or budget for any of it to get the attention it needed. By all rights, Legends Of Tomorrow could’ve or should’ve ended there, but over its second and third seasons, it shifted into a different kind of show, one that would use superhero action and soapy drama as seasoning rather than the whole dish, embracing its status as an outsider and becoming a phenomenal high-concept comedy series in the process.
But, of course, Legends Of Tomorrow isn’t the only thing to reject the boring path to mainstream success in favor of embracing outsider status to better serve a more loyal and dedicated fanbase. Beginning life as the back-page supplement to a satirical newspaper and later setting up a home base in Chicago—a city that prides itself on rejecting the mainstream appeal of the coasts—The A.V. Club built its reputation on being a website that preferred to be a little outside. Rather than catering exclusively to the Hollywood scene or to hip New Yorkers, it was made for the regular folks who wanted to read a funny Onion headline and then check out a thoughtful take on an obscure David Lynch project.
So it makes perfect sense that Legends Of Tomorrow and The A.V. Club would have a shared affinity for each other. We are who we want to be and we like who and what we want to like, and we want to build spaces for people who feel the same way. We covered Legends throughout its entire seven-season run here at The A.V. Club, with reviews of every episode and occasional essays on absurd moments that went viral (yes, there’s one where classic comics villain Gorilla Grodd attacks a young Barack Obama), so you’d be hard-pressed to find any more thorough chronicle of Legends’ transformation from—as we once put it—“bad superhero show to best superhero show.” Like with everyone else in its head-over-heels fanbase, it worked its way into our hearts to become something worth loving.
The funny thing, though, is that Legends felt the same way about The A.V. Club. In the season-four episode “Wet Hot American Bummer,” Caity Lotz’s time-traveling spaceship captain Sara Lance is laying in bed with her girlfriend, Ava (Jes Macallan), enjoying some downtime by watching a terrible horror movie called Swamp Thaaaang. (You can watch this opening scene on Netflix—season 4, episode 4, around the 1:20 mark.) Sara wonders where this movie she’s never heard of came from, since she’s a horror fan, so Ava decides to figure out what’s going on by looking up a review of Swamp Thaaaang from The A.V. Club:
Ava: “Okay, Swamp Thaaaang. Apparently there are four As in the name because it’s the fourth film in the franchise. The A.V. Club gave it a D+, saying, ‘the production design is as lazy as the action staging.’”
Sara: “Harsh.”
It’s a fun meta nod to The A.V. Club and our reputation as tough critics (a reputation that The Simpsons also once paid homage to), but it goes even deeper than that: The line Ava reads is actually a nearly direct quote from an actual D+ A.V. Club review written by longtime contributor Oliver Sava from the first season of Legends Of Tomorrow:
“That big action sequence takes place in one of the Time Masters’ outposts in the time stream, which is just a big airplane hangar with a few light-up cylinders set up to give it a vaguely sci-fi look. The design is as lazy as the action staging, which there is hardly any of because The Pilgrim can manipulate time in the immediate area surrounding her.”
Here at The A.V. Club, we always took that nod as a friendly nudge in the ribs, as if the show was saying “we have fun together, don’t we?” to both us and to any fans who are obsessive enough to catch the reference. But how did it happen?
To answer that question, we reached out to David Geddes, the episode’s director (and, in-universe, credited as the director of Swamp Thaaaang), and Ray Utarnachitt, one of the credited writers, to ask: Does this canonically mean The A.V. Club, and all of its writers and readers, exist as part of the Arrowverse? We’re out there somewhere, getting swept up in the Crisis On Infinite Earths? Seeing a red blur from the Flash at CC Jitters? Being attacked by roving Deathstroke gangs in Star City?
Ray Utarnachitt: I can only assume that IF The A.V. Club exists in the Arrowverse, then you and everyone at The A.V. Club, past and present, must exist there, too.
Confirmed! Sort of. We’ll take it. So how did it happen in the first place?
David Geddes: It was part of the original script. [Sara’s] “harsh” was ad-libbed. The scripted response was supposed to be Sara saying “ouch.”
Utarnachitt: My best guess is that it was a room pitch! Which means it’s virtually impossible to cite where the idea originated and most likely came from a bunch of ideas building off each other and coming together. Just like a lot of ideas that come from the writers’ room, it was a confluence of things that led us to the idea.
First, writer Matthew Maala always remembered The A.V. Club’s scathing review for his very first episode of TV he’d ever written [the first-season Legends episode “Last Refuge”]. In fact, he would often quote a specific line from the review: “The design is as lazy as the action staging.” It was sort of a badge of honor, especially because we believe it’s A.V. Club’s lowest-rated episode of Legends! [Editor’s note: It is.]
So when we came up with the beat where Ava looks up a synopsis of Swamp Thaaaang, we immediately thought about how funny it would be if they read an A.V. Club review of the film. And of course, why not make it an inside joke between Legends Of Tomorrow and The A.V. Club?
Utarnachitt also confirmed, via fellow writer Tyron B. Carter (who was on set the day they filmed the scene), that Lotz and Macallan were informed that the quote was from a real review from the show’s first season and that “they all laughed.” That probably explains why Lotz ad-libbed “harsh” instead of “ouch,” which reads as a more playful reaction when you know what the quotes refers to.
Legends Of Tomorrow has since been unceremoniously canceled as part of a cost-cutting campaign at The CW ahead of a potential sale, depriving the show of a proper finale and fans of getting to see more from a superhero series that had enough faith in its characters and storytelling to dedicate a scene to watching two of its leads read a movie review.
The A.V. Club is still here, obviously, but it has similarly gone through changes and is no longer just the back page of The Onion. New things will always come along to eschew generic mainstream popularity in favor of cultivating a head-over-heels fanbase, but for at least one quiet moment, Legends Of Tomorrow was part of ours and we were part of theirs.
107 Comments
It’s a fun thing to look back on, now that both LoT and the AV Club are over.
Ouch.
Harsh!
*harsh
That was definitely the Marenghi-esque subtext
Sam Barsanti knows writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards
LoT used to be a future shock, that would shit you up.
Just a friendly reminder that this epic thread still existshttps://disqus.com/home/discussion/avclub/ltigtthe_av_clubltigt_is_switching_to_kinja_on_august_23/oldest/
Cruel…but Fair.
Let’s screw things up for the better!
https://www.savelegendsoftomorrow.com/
I always thought that, if anything, the old A.V. Club was more leg-humping enthusiastic in its reviews, especially of
television shows. It all too often called to mind Orson Welles’ criticism of Pauline Kael, that her preciousness made
her reviews as amateurish as a high school newspaper.
I guess we have to define “old” AV Club, but I kept reading their reviews beginning in the 1990s because they were fairly critical yet to-the-point (2-3 paragraphs in the print edition compared to the lengthy rambling essays more recent reviews indulged in)
Beginning life as the back-page supplement to a satirical newspaper and
later setting up a home base in Chicago—a city that prides itself on
rejecting the mainstream appeal of the coasts—The A.V. Club built
its reputation on being a website that preferred to be a little
outside. Rather than catering exclusively to the Hollywood sceneThat was then, this is now.
…does anyone at the site even remember they – along with that satirical newspaper – started in Madison, Wisconsin?
It does at least say “later” in reference to Chicago.
I do; I was there!
I used to walk by their offices across from the Capitol in Madison all the time. Also, The Onion’s offices were in NYC for over a decade when they thought they were going to be a film & TV studio
Pretty sure the AV Club was Chicago based from when they spun off their own website in the early 2000s until a few months ago – they were separate from the Onion and up in Ravenswood IIRC.
Yeah, AV Club was a supplement of The Onion and moved to Chicago not long after The Onion moved to NYC. But they remained sister publications until they were swallowed up whole by Univision and shoehorned into G/O Media. Kind of funny now that AV Club is based in LA while The Onion remains in Chicago.
My college girlfriend was from Madison, and her family would send her care packages and a couple editions of the Onion were always included. Love at first sight/everlasting love (with the Onion, not the girl). Later, in grad school in like 1999, we were asked what cultural criticism publications we read, and a lot of people said the usual suspects like the New Yorker etc… I said the AV Club. No one had heard of it, but I always felt validated for years after. Now… ugh.
I do. I lived in Madison for a year in the mid-90’s and used to love getting the paper edition.
Probably because Madison, WI is a college town, so they could hire smart young writers cheap.
I remember watching Supernatural on a television, once a week, because there were no streaming services. No wonder people have no patience.
I loved this site so much. Idk why I continue hanging around in the graveyard. Nostalgia, I guess.
I hang around only because Vulture’s behind a paywall and I have to get my fill of frivolous pop culture content somewhere.Any recommendations, anyone?
I second this request.
I suggested to LaurenceQ The Avocado, which was started by former AV Club regular readers: https://the-avocado.org/
A bunch of former AV Clubbers (readers, not writers, for the most part) party over at The Avocado: https://the-avocado.org/
Lovely! Thank you!
Great talkbacks. Not enough articles.
IndieWire.com
You can still read Vulture if you use incognito mode (or the equivalent depending on browser). You have to close it and reopen for each article, which is tedious – I usually open the main page in the regular browser, then open the individual articles in incognito mode one at a time, but the one article limit resets each time you close and reopen incognito mode.
It sees through my incognito mode. I can jump between browsers and clear cookies, but the latter is tedious and it usually keeps me from visiting the site more than about once a week. And I think the “free article limit” per month is literally two.
Reflex.
Ah, yes, you covered seven years of Legends while ignoring coverage of countless better series, and films. You certainly have been “building spaces”, AV Club.
Do you have a toothache
Rather than catering exclusively to the Hollywood scene or to hip New
Yorkers, it was made for the regular folks who wanted to read a funny Onion headline and then check out a thoughtful take on an obscure David Lynch project.
oh buddy….
Good lord, absolute zero self-awareness with this deeply weird man
This.
Also, Chicagoans are city people at the end of the day. Yeah, cities like Chicago, Paris, Miami, LA, New York, etc. have pretty significant differences culturally. But at the the end of the day a Chicagoan has more an common with a New Yorker than they will ever have in common with a person born and raised in Smalltown, Illinois with population 2,000. City people are so weird about their status as city people and particularly differentiating themselves from other cities.
Ding. Chicago has always seemed to have this weird “hey, it’s cool, we don’t want to be like you WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE’RE NOT LIKE YOU? YOU WANNA MAKE SOMETHIN OF IT?” vibe. Like they’re only too cool for school if someone directly asks them about it, while they just spend their entire lives seething in the background. The City With The Giant Chip On Its Shoulder.
chicago with the massive short man syndrome for sure
Lots of binge drinking and eating, sarcasm, and passive aggressiveness. They want to be happy with their city, but the 5 months of frigid cold, 2 months of jungle-like humid heat, make that impossible.
There’s a pretty funny West Wing exchange that gets at this dynamic: Leo: You’re scared of Babish.
Bartlet: Oh, like you’re not.
Leo: No, because we are both men of Chicago.
Bartlet: What is it with people from Chicago that they’re so happy to have been born there? I meet so many people who can’t wait to tell me they’re from Chicago and when I meet them, they’re living anywhere but Chicago.
Leo: You wouldn’t understand.
In my experience, Boston has this overwhelming inferiority complex (especially w/r/t NYC). Chicago also has it to a degree but almost everything Boston does feels like it’s because they want to be seen as a “world-class city”.Like, guys, you’re a handful of good to amazing universities with some pharma and tech companies stapled on.(Source: I lived there for a few years)
Funny thing, my experience living in Chicago for a total of five years? Chicago was packed with small town people from the surrounding states, using the city as a “training wheels city” when Minneapolis, Detroit, or Louisville wasn’t going to be enough, but LA and NY were too scary.
That being said, my experience in LA is that it’s packed with people from all over the country. But those transplants comprise the *vast* majority of the “LA People” jackasses the rest of the country dislikes. I’m sure Chicago has a similar transformative effect on transplants.
My point is writing to your Chicago fanbase is writing to city people or the type of person who wants to live in a city. Which means they want the sensibilities of city person which is why they are moving to the city. That sounds nonsensical but it’s true. lol
No, no, I think we are basically in agreement.
Agree, and my experience living in NYC is that everyone in Brooklyn complains about the hipster Midwesterners ruining the place with their beards and pickles.
The thing about relating to small towners is that it’s pointless to try to relate to them because there are so few of them. Most people live in cities. Even if they don’t live in the biggest, most expensive cities, they live in cities that have 20,000-500,000 residents. Sorry, I can’t relate to people who get their groceries at the gas station and have no access to Chinese food. And I don’t need to.
You’d be amazed at how many tiny ass towns on state highways in the boonies have at least one Chinese place.
If you can’t see that something about “regular folks” wanting a take on “obscure David Lynch” is very obviously tongue and cheek, I don’t know what to tell you lol
Praise Beebo! Legends was the reason why I stayed on AV Club so long, it was so nice of them to feature AV Club on the show. Now if only someone would pick up the show for a shortened, final season!
The campaign for Legends Of Tomorrow: The Peacekeeper Wars starts here.
Wouldnt it be TimeMasters Wars??
Given that the sets are likely already taken down and/or getting ready to be recycled for another show, it’d probably be cheaper overall to just do an Arrowverse animated series on HBO Max to wrap things up.
The sets have most definitely been taken down, but when I think of Legends, the only set that I think of was really “needed” is the Waverider, and for a continuation/revival all they really need is the bridge, which wasn’t even that big (so how hard could it be to recreate?). IDK. I think that all things considered (COVID, the network being sold, not actually knowing whether they were cancelled or not), season 7 is a fitting end to the group of misfits. I’d like to see a reunion movie (made for TV, of course) that has them getting themselves out of their mess, giving Booster Gold a chance to shine, and then… well, I’d like to see them get their happily ever after that the penultimate episode promised for them anyway.
Heck, they’re adaptable. It started out as a superhero show that didn’t need superheroes at the end of it!
Warner Bros owns the show and characters, and doesn’t really like sharing. That pretty much leaves HBO Max as the corporate sister option, but Netflix has streaming rights to the show through the deal they struck with The CW years ago (which is why they were canceling so few shows for so long, and which no longer applies to new shows, hence the bloodbath of shows that were tied up in that deal this spring). So it’s pretty much a no-go.
This is some A+ navel gazing!
Trying to reclaim some past glory? So funny to read how this site as it exists now has anything to do with the site that existed seven years ago.I guess if tv episode scene-by-scene explanations are what you’re going for these days, A+ to you. Otherwise D+.
Stop pretending this is the same AV Club as 6 months ago.
In their favor, it’s not like Legends was a static lineup. Literally the only OG cast members on the show were Sara and Gideon, and even then, technically probably not even the same Sara and Gideon that were there in the beginning depending on how Ship of Theseus you get.
I think that management may be the point here.
Sounds like you’re not actually aware of how AVClub’s owners recently moved the site’s offices to LA and forced the staff to make the shitty choice between quitting or relocating without a cost-of-living adjustment. Nearly everyone quit.
(I guess Sam was one of the exceptions; I do not hold any ill will toward him for it)
I know of the exodus and the reasoning but it’s not like this is the first top-level change and dramatic shift in AVClub’s history. So no, it’s not the same AVClub as it was 6 months ago, just as that wasn’t the same AVC that Univision bought, etc., etc. Again, Ship of Theseus applies here.
As far as content, I would say the two big changes were the univision purchase and the recent forced relocation. Changing staff members outside of those incidents did not affect the quality of the site.
I guess Sam was one of the exceptions; I do not hold any ill will toward him for it
No ill-will—I just figure Barsanti’s a Scab!!!!
Or a year ago. Or five years ago. Or eight years ago. Or when St. James (nee Vanderwerff) was here. Or ten years ago. Or fifteen years ago for pity’s sake.
I just last night finished watching LOT for the first time, and while season 7 wasn’t particularly strong (presumably covid and budget cuts greatly limited the show), I’m still deeply sad it’s over. As cliffhangers go, season 7 didn’t end too badly, but it’s probably the only show I can think of that so naturally cycles through characters and actors and yet always made it work. The running system that a starring cast member would come back as a new version in a starring role was particularly inspired.
Legends of Tomorrow is sort of like its fellow time-travel show Doctor Who, in that I would always be sad & angry when one of my favorites departed, and then the new cast member coming in would almost immediately become also one of my favorites.
The most ingenuous thing they ever did in regards to casting was taking the fairly drab vixen in season 3 and instead using her actor to play the shapeshifting demon who joined their crew in seasons 4 and 5. For me the best thing in season 7 was seeing Matt Ryan play a starkly different character from Constantine and witnessing Ryan still knock it out the park. Gary as well was a character for the ages.
Keeping Tala Ashe as a regular but as a different Zari was the kind of thing that at first infuriated and saddened me, but then turned into a triumph, especially as the two Zaris became supportive of each other
Absolutely agree there. New Zari annoyed the hell out of me at first (I think that was intentional) but I loved both how she became far more likable and how they brought back the older one. It was such a stunning unique concept for a time travel show, to have one actor play two versions of the same character, separated by alterations to the timeline. Zari’s brother was delightful as well, and the comically abrupt way he joined the cast was perfect.
Yeah, Donut Zari is my all time favorite Legend, but Influencer Zari won me over in time as well
Plus the brilliant touch that everyone thinks his new character looks like a different former crew member, but none of them land on Constantine.
Except for Zari 2.0, of course, and then everyone else was like “nah.”
Yes, absolutely LoT has a DOCTOR WHO vibe—right down to casting a former Companion as its initial lead!Too bad it wasn’t Billie Piper, Alex Kingston or Karen Gillan….
The big problem with s1 of Legends of Tomorrow was that they had not yet promoted Sara Lance to being the captain & Caity Lotz to being the star of the show. Also the tone was too serious & Rip & Vandal Savage did not really work as characters. (Harsh?)
Rip was always an annoying character and Hawkbarista was a wasted opportunity, but it’s all worth it for the epic Vandal Savage-in-Hell cameo during Crisis
Oh my god the Hawkpeople, hands down the worst ever Legends team members, even including Mona and Gary
Incredible how this show made me happy to see Vandal Savage again.
Season 2 doesn’t get enough credit for upgrading from dead-serious Casper Crump to scenery-chewing Matt Letscher, John Barrowman, and Neal McDonough who all seemed to realize they were in a comedy.
s2 also added underrated Legends glue guy Nick Zano as Nate
Yes! Making the three best Arrowverse villains into a team and letting us watch them bicker was exactly what LoT needed to reset from the Hawkpeople vs. Vandal Savage doldrums. And Rip was believable as a desperate man who would break every rule and tell lie after lie to his team to save his family, but that also made him a terrible leader. At least he admitted it and put a great leader in charge at the end, though. Once Sara takes over, the Legends actually become a team instead of a bunch of misfit toys being mean to Ray Palmer.
I think I may have mentioned it before, but the moment Sara took the Captain’s chair in season one, it changed the trajectory of the show. Then, the chicken people left, and season two opened with a bang. After that, the Legends could do no wrong in my opinion, and that held true up to the very end.
I feel like the uptick in quality for LoT is usually attributed to the writers embracing a lighter tone. But I think Sara’s expanded role was even more important.
And so much credit to Caity Lotz, who was very rough around the edges when she started out on Arrow and grew into a very capable actress on LoT. Even back on Arrow, there was a playful, immensely likable element to her that went untapped for awhile on LoT (I always loved her dynamic with Felicity in terms of humoring her as a friend even while knowing there’s an underlying love triangle with the two of them and Oliver) and once she elevated to the captains chair, she pretty much became the heart and soul of the whole Arrowverse for me, especially when The Flash made the ill-advised decision to drop most of its lighter elements as time went on. Her relationship with Ava was one of the warmest things on TV and her general spiritedness filled that sense of high adventure that LoT was so great about. I hate talking about LoT in the past tense.
When my mom was piqued by Legends, I told her straight up “start at Season 2”.
It always baffled me why Sava reviewed these superhero shows. He seemed to hate all that he reviewed. And he loved to bag on these shows, which remember all had a production budget of $12, about their set design, with Agents of SHIELD frequently taken to task for their inadequate set dressing. The only one he frequently complemented was Arrow, despite every action setpiece taking place in Star City’s Abandoned Warehouse District. Dude must have had a real love of wet floors and cardboard boxes.
Every time he dragged Agents’ set design, I just thought “Do you seriously not think you’ve made your point about this by now?”Also, his accusing Daredevil of being sexist because its female characters weren’t impossibly perfect action heroes who were always on top of every situation.
Reminds me of the person they had review Venture Bros. the last couple seasons, who brought up in every review that the show was voiced by like 5 people. By that time in the series’ run, that was kinda their thing. No need to hammer the point every time.
Sava clearly had a love for comic books, I think he started at AV Club with the restrospective reviews of the DCAU – from Batman to Justice League Unlimited. I appreciated his enthusiasm, but they often read like an undergrad paper desperate to find both criticism and deep meaning.
I remember when he reviewed “Star City 2046″ he went on a tangent about how it was problematic that Iron Fist hadn’t cast an Asian actor and praised Legends for making Connor Hawke nonwhite, apparently unaware that Connor has always been a nonwhite character.
Aw, I didn’t know it got cancelled. It was a fun show for awhile. Especially when Constantine showed up (before they made him a part of the gang).
“The show’s first season, the one that was most explicitly set up by the events of Arrow and The Flash, was—to put it charitably—lousy.
I know Facebook gets a bad rep for memes made for racists aunts, but the biggest indictment of Facebook users to me is the fact that every single time I come across a post about Legends of Tomorrow, nearly all the comments say something to the effect of “I’m glad it’s canceled! The first season was the only good one anyway!”
The surest sign of creative bankruptcy is going lazily “meta”, referencing back to when there was still relevance (see also: about 80% of Scream & Halloween sequels). RK is right: this is just a reminder that this site used to matter.
Beginning life as the back-page supplement to a satirical newspaper and
later setting up a home base in Chicago—a city that prides itself on
rejecting the mainstream appeal of the coasts—The A.V. Club built its reputation on being a website that preferred to be a little outside.
Oh, Sam Barsanti who still works for the Zombie AV Club out of Los Angeles—Prince of Irony!
For a brief shining moment this was one of the best shows on TV. Then what always happens happened, the writers started buying into their own hype and every episode just felt like they were throwing darts at a wall of unconnected plot points. Things went from delightfully whimsey to super cringey because they were trying too hard.
And the villain for the unproduced 8th season: Kinja!
“our reputation as tough critics” talk about something that doesn’t exist anymore!
“As popular as Riverdale or Supernatural were at the height of their powers…”Comparing Supernatural to Riverdale, both in quality and popularity, is like comparing Kobe beef and Bar S hotdogs.
“…they were still CW shows, the kind you don’t watch live but rather binge over a weekend on Netflix.”So happy to see this, since it confirms that they way I prefer to watch CW shows is correct! For whatever reason, watching them weekly doesn’t quite work, but running through several episodes at a stretch without commercials is perfect!
That’s how the sausage gets made.
There was also this season’s “why the hell not?” Line that was totally hat tipping Shoemaker!
I still remember when Barsanti was the unmemorable plumberduck.
Legends Of Tomorrow has since been unceremoniously canceledYeah, I gotta’ keep pushing back against this claim. Did people watch the final season? It was giving off huge “this show is ending” vibes. People online were speculating, “Wait, is the show ending?” The show had the characters say good-bye to each other.We know the CW CEO Mark Pedowitz gave heads up to the writers of several shows informing them that the odds of renewal weren’t looking good, but he couldn’t give them a final “Yes you’ve been canceled” that early. That’s why Legends ended on a cliffhanger; they were betting on a last-minute save that didn’t pan out.