Filled in for Robert Osborne on TCM this week

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She's horrible! She can't even read the monitor and mispronounces so many names. BARis Karloff?! Charlston Helston?! And, her voice is so grating that I finally started muting as often as possible. She is the absolutely worst host they have ever had, and I hope we won't have to endure her much longer. How many more names and details can she mangle? I shudder to think of what's to come!

Get her out of there ASAP! She managed to get me to reappraise Ben Mankiewicz.

~~MystMoonstruck~~

I agree! She seems just plain retarded.

I came to this board because, having just heard her struggle through another intro, I was wondering if anyone else was seeing the same thing I was.

I don't know her work (never watched The Sopranos), other than Radio Flyer, in which I vaguely remember her being good.

But reading these intros expressively (or even well enough to make sense) seems to be beyond her.

Maybe it's the teacher in me, but I can't even be annoyed by it, or snark on her. I just hurt for her.

She sounds almost like a small child with reading comprehension issues -- it's like she can't process what she is seeing fast enough to make sense of it.

If this is so hard for her, why not get the material in advance and work on it like she would a script?

That's what my friends said: that she sounds like a child reading something she can't possibly understand! I agree that she certainly should have seen a copy of what she would be reading later. Obviously, she has no notion of how to pronounce actors' names, as I've caught her in a number of errors; and, these are not difficult names! How difficult is it to say "Boris", for example? She trips over words and is simply excruciating to listen to. I've seen her in "Medicine Man" and thought she was dreadful. I felt so sorry for Sean Connery because she was embarrassingly bad. I confess that I never tried to watch anything else she's in after that experience. If she did happen to be in something I watched, perhaps she didn't get to say much. Needless to say, I would never watch "The Sopranos", even if I found the subject matter of interest.

I hope she will be gone soon. Next time, I'll simply mute so I don't have to endure her.

~~MystMoonstruck~~

Another person who came here after watching her on TCM and seeing her stumble through the intros with mispronunciations.

It was strange because it almost sounded like a speech impediment at some points, and she didn't sound that way in her films.

Maybe it was a reading problem as someone else mentioned. A couple of times I felt particularly bad for her and wondered why they didn't just shoot another take. Maybe it was awkward and they didn't want to say anything.

I have nothing against her, but it was odd.

The one she just did sounded somewhat better. Maybe she got some advice to preview them, slow down, or something, between taping the earlier ones and tonight's (I have no idea what their timeframe is for this stuff).

But she still sounded like she was struggling.

It was hard to watch.