Two additional thoughts on the timing of Thompson’s announcement and his HBO movie May 29 and Sam Waterston’s good cheer about a Fred Thompson run, and whether it would affect his residuals for Law and Order reruns…

Some questioned whether HBO would be subjected to the “equal time” laws. As the Washington Post noted:

The FCC rules have never been applied to cable channels, though several legal experts said cable often abides by an equal-time guideline in the hopes of avoiding a legal case that would set a precedent.

All it takes is one rival candidate or do-gooder NGO to file a suit, and one judge to determine that HBO’s airing the show amounted to an unfair exposure for Thompson, and then an unpleasant precedent is set. (How about John McCain’s cameo in Wedding Crashers? How about a “E” rerun of his hosting of Saturday Night Live?)

The second point, sent in by several readers, is that there are a lot of Law and Order episodes with Waterston that don’t have Thompson. If TNT decides to just use pre-2002 episodes, Waterston will keep collecting the residuals from the earlier episodes. (No wonder he’s so easygoing about this.) However, members of the cast and crew who joined after Thompson might be the ones losing out on some back-end money.

Or, I suppose, since Thompson is usually in about two scenes per episode ( “Jack, I sure hope you know what you’re doing. Once that girl gets up on the stand and brings up the sob story of parental neglect, the jury might forget that she killed three people with an axe.” ), they could probably just cut the scenes.