[chemgear]

Going back to Frank's rant about "Paying attention to things, it's how we show love." and then seeing Bill evolving to happily taking care of the flowers as his partner is getting sicker.




And there is a two hour version of the episode:

https://deadline.com/2023/01/the-las...al-1235242560/

DEADLINE: This episode is already being praised by critics as one of the best in television. But when did you know that you had something substantial during the creative process?

MAZIN: Well, we felt really good about the script, and we felt really good about our cast, and we felt really good about our director. But I felt good about scripts, cast and directors before, and then sometimes the soufflé doesn’t rise. And with this one, in being there each day and watching the episode take shape, I was feeling pretty good about it. But it wasn’t until I saw the director’s cut that I knew. Peter Hoar did his director’s cut with our editor, Tim Good, which was quite long. When they sent it to me, I think it was almost two hours or something like that. So, I was like, oh, that’s probably not good.And I sat down, but I’m like, “OK, I’ll watch the two-hour version of this episode.” And I cried so hard that at one point, I actually said out loud, “Ow.” I mean, it hurt. I cried so hard; it hurt. And I thought,” Well, if these guys can do this to me and I wrote this ######ing thing, then I think it might work pretty well on other people” Now, we did work really hard to, but we knew we couldn’t put a two-hour version of this thing out there, but HBO—

DEADLINE: OK, wait. But you could. It sounds like we need the painful, longer cut. We could see more of Bill and Frank falling in love with each other …