One of the very first pieces I ever wrote for this site was about Mandy Moore. It was called What Will It Take and I remember because A) We were in Paris, and B) because of the look Lainey gave me like “good luck with this uphill battle trying to get people onside”.

That was – good God – almost six years ago. Since then I’ve become something of a Mandy Moore scholar. I follow her moves, I see what she does. I…I wait to be surprised. The Ryan Adams marriage was kind of a surprise. But other than that, I dunno.  

So she’s cast in a pilot about a couple who go to therapy to find out what’s wrong with their relationship before they have children. Sure, fine. 

Except she was in two pilots last year – one that she left (or was excused from?) because the creative went in a different way, and one with Ben McKenzie that just didn’t get picked up. There have been a number of near misses along the way.

To me, I think it’s just one of those things where it’s not her time. Sometimes it’s not your time. Sometimes your time will come, as per Elisabeth Moss. But for Moore, whose specialty is and always has been good girls, it might just be that it’s not her time because we’re not interested in those characters anymore. The character is written as a ‘Type A, career-driven” blah blah blah and then you fell asleep because who wants to see those characters? Nobody.

And I guess if you’re Mandy Moore, you can try and try to get people to see you in a different light, but why should they bother? When everyone out there is like a smorgasbord of every small variation in actress you could possibly want, why try to see anyone you already know differently?