Fey/Palin is possibly the best political pairing they've ever done, though I'm always fond of Hartman's Reagan. And The Onion had a better take on Biden than SNL ever developed, though the whole "Scranton sucks" rant was pretty great.

I really liked both of them, though they never gave Pharoah a comedic angle on Obama to which his masterful impression would be worth applying. Still, how can you not have an Obama in the cast while he's still in office? (Also, his Ben Carson was delightfully weird.) And Killam … shit, between Les Jeunes de Paris,…

It's a very nice movie. Had some interesting resonances in my mind with REALITY BITES, which it mentions in passing, on the whole question of whether it's ok to be ambitious and successful, whether "selling out" matters, and what happens to everyone else along the way.

In the Shales/Miller book, she makes clear that she was dealing with a severe alcohol addiction issue at the time.

On TGW, Alicia turns down the gaming commission, but she still ends up getting placed on …. the board of elections, of all things. Because Chicago.

Raw GM: Corporate Kane
Smackdown GM: Demon Kane

"Hell, no. I did *not* leave the South Side for this!"

Aaron is uncomfortable receiving help from Tom, but he does it. The deeper problem is that he looks down on what Tom's talents are and thinks the whole enterprise is beneath him. (And that Tom is beneath him.)

The entire second half of the movie involves peeling the layers off Brooks' character to show that he's not such a swell guy after all.

And he didn't understand, as Tom did, that he job was being a credible narrator of the news, which involved something different from just reading the text and understanding it.

Query: in 2016 televised news coverage, is it still considered unethical for a reporter to retake his or her reaction shots and splice them in later, or has that line in fact been eroded?

I use "I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time" at least weekly.

Richard Linklater's BOYHOOD is similarly generous with its characters.

Flash forward more than a decade, and his line reading of "How do you fuck THAT up?" in A History of Violence is one of the greatest things ever.

Plus the chilling scene, just before the last one, in which Aaron lets out his full ugliness: "Six years from now, I'll be back here with my wife and two kids. And I'll see you, and one of my kids will say, 'Daddy, who is that?' And I'll say it's not nice to point at single fat women."

Might he be on a network whose letters are in alphabetical order?

I have many things to say about this movie, but I'll try to stay on topic: I think Mike slightly misrepresents things in calling Tom Grunick stupid, or below the 50th percentile. That all but suggests he has trouble functioning. I think it's more accurate to say that he's not book-smart, and he's out of depth compared…

You mean, you haven't gone back to rewatch Driving Miss Daisy or Mississippi Burning lately?

Query: are Match Game and @midnight actually game shows at all, or just comedy shows presented in the form of a game show? (Put another way, is contestant skill and the identity of the winner pretty much irrelevant to it all?)

But what if she doesn't want to reach into Bob Barker's pocket?