I wish I could agree that Crackers was a breath of fresh air, but to be honest I mostly saw the character-based changes of this season not so much as an evolution of the relationships, but as a rotation of the same character dynamics. In the “real world” of the show, Archer and Lana are the bickering but competent…

And w/r/t the discomfort with the category of “clean” comedians, all this really shows is that you’re comfortable enough with curse words not to worry about whether they’re present in your entertainment. But there are millions of people in this country and around the world for whom a single F-bomb (or J-bomb, or…

The music analogy doesn’t fit very well because with musicians, you can ask “What are your influences?” or hear the echoes of them in the person’s output. Comedy is very much about developing (or trying to develop) a unique voice and perspective that _doesn’t_ sound like anyone else’s.

I mean, you could create a bucket…

I counted one “they”, one “it”, and one “she” from Adolov; Axe was scrupulous about using “they” for whatever that’s worth.

Taiga, not Tyga. She’s named after a cold arboreal habitat.

Though that doesn’t make it a less ridiculous thing to name your daughter.

I think what happened is that Axe pounced on the investment opportunity represented by the guy Taylor and their boyfriend had dinner with (with the technology to eventually deliver drugs straight to the consumer based on their unique genome*), thus robbing Taylor’s boyfriend of that opportunity.

____________

Heavy metal is finally acknowledged: Ozzy Osbourne, “Killer of Giants.”

Sorry Marlize, but you aided and abetted eleven murders! You don’t just get to go out walking the world and inventing solar-powered waffle irons. You gotta go to jail. For, like, ever.

Chain of Command. I don’t personally cotton to the “weepies” choices (The Inner Light and The Visitor) but Chain of Command has an engaging plot, shows us the best of our cast, and if you can’t give Patrick Stewart barking “There...are...FOUR...lights!” into David Warner’s face an A, you don’t deserve tenure at this…

<i> It was Quentin they should have killed instead of Laurel. It made the most sense at that time since it seemed to put Quentin in a nowhere-to-go situation for the character (which only changed because they made Oliver mayor after all in Season 5 allowing Quentin to be part of that world). Quentin dying in Season 4…

Colin, dude, I love Slayer as much as the next metalhead but do you own any other shirts?

That public takedown of Connerty felt very out of character for Chuck, dopamine-high or no dopamine-high. In every other situation where he’s needed to finish someone off, Chuck’s choice of method has been to sit his target in a room with a glass of hemlock and reveal that they have no choice but to drink it down; to…

To be a pompous jackass about it, these arguments are never really about the people they’re about. They’re about a younger generation that desperately wants to prove they are part of a special and exceptional time in human history, not a self-involved, entitled bunch of punks with no respect, and an older generation…

They’re already telling the graphics department to push the action into a top-left-corner box while they advertise their other programming with stupid gif-quality video hijinks when that happens. That’s the kind of programming they’d really prefer to run more of: ads.

I, too, was watching it, but I learned when I tried to get my parents to watch <i>30 Rock</i> that the 10-jokes-a-minute, single-camera, heightened-reality style of comedy isn’t for everybody.

Queens of the Stone Age.

<i>I think it was largely self-selecting; Black and White artists in the ‘70s had interests in different sounds, and both had great success in each.</i>

For sure. To say that black artists were absent from rock ‘n roll music in the ‘60s and ‘70s is to essentially say “I have never heard of funk and am totally unaware…

Interestingly, and along the same lines as your comment, a “History of Punk” docutainment on MTV which aired sometime in the mid/late-90s devoted one of its chapters to Elvis Costello.

For what it’s worth, in a famous essay (reprinted here: https://www.cbr.com/revisiting-mcduffies-six-degrees-of-st-elsewhere/) Dwayne McDuffie (R.I.P.) suggested the same arrangement ought to hold even within the world of comic books. If I’m the writer of Iron Man’s stand-alone series and the writer of an X-Men title…

Re: surveillance, I was dead certain that not only Axe’s entryway but indeed much of his bachelor pad had some kind of video feed going. Guy’s a billionaire! You can’t seriously believe you can just sneak around his house like a Hardy Boy and remain undiscovered, can you?

(In fact, I now give Billions enough credit…