Talk:Unusually Thicke

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Alan's death

Note that despite Alan's death on December 13, it is not yet appropriate for Wikipedia to assume that the show has been cancelled. While we could debate how likely this actually is, for example, it is not at all impossible that another season could still be produced with Robin or Brennan or Tanya as the new "main star". So please do not insert a presumed end date for the show until it is formally announced that production has ended permanently. Bearcat (talk) 16:03, 15 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree--you'll note that my edit kept "is a series," though I justifiably used past simple in other places (though I considered the present perfect simple). I think it is also unreasonable that you have removed the word "late" before "actor Alan Thicke." The man is dead. I'm sorry if you knew him personally or something and are grieving but removing a tactful, simple and pertinent fact from a description is inappropriate and not acting in the spirit of Wikipedia--I won't cite one of those stupid statutes but I'm sure they've got one. I'm not going to edit it back because you clearly are feeling proprietary or something here and I'm not interested in getting into a contest. Nevertheless, please take a deep breath. I'm afraid you'd discover that my reading skills are up to speed. I was taken aback by the tone of the comment with your edit.Alphacat2 (talk) 09:23, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not "feeling proprietary" at all; we have actual rules about how to write encyclopedically about things. For instance, we write about the general, non-time-dependent aspects of a television series in the present tense, not the past — because regardless of whether new episodes are in production or not, the old episodes still exist and can still be reaired by another television station or packaged on DVD or made streamable on Netflix or Hulu. It works the same way as films and novels: even though it was written in 1722 and Daniel Defoe is dead, Moll Flanders still is a novel which still is about a woman named Moll Flanders. It was created almost 300 years ago, but it does still exist. And the film The Gilded Cage, although created 100 years ago, still exists in the present tense — physical copies of the film still exist and can still be shown in theatres or on TV or digitized for a museum or a streaming platform or something.

And we don't insert "the late" in front of the name of a dead actor in our separate articles about every individual film or television series he was in while he was alive, either. If a television series made after he was dead used digital editing to insert Alan Thicke into the show, or if next year's Emmy Awards pull a Tupac and have an award presented by or to a walking and talking hologram of Thicke, then it might be appropriate to refer to those appearance as "the late Alan Thicke" since they were created by other people after his death — but saying that a TV show starred "the late Alan Thicke" implies that he was already dead during the production. Bearcat (talk) 16:33, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]