Hot take endorsed. Unlike some of the finicky TV critics here (and elsewhere), I don’t demand that every episode of a show stand on its own. Increased serialization and more complex narratives sometimes require that an hour of your run-time be devoted to moving the pieces around the chessboard, and as long as that can…

As someone whose familiarity with Jamaican culture approaches Mariah’s characterization of it (later) as “Marley, marijuana, and gang wars” I have to say I appreciated the subtitles rendering much of their dialogue into Standard American grammar. My ear for accents isn’t bad for a white dude, but it would have taken…

As a life-long Chicagoan, I appreciate the Detroit-specific references as a kind of ersatz cultural tourism. And Sam Richardson is a national treasure.

In terms of favorite quotes, I’m partial to: “[S]omewhere in some town there really are the best waffles in the world. So delicious, and rich, and golden brown that anyone who tasted them would decide never to leave that town. Somewhere those waffles exist. Why can’t it be here?”

Maybe it wasn’t carved, but molded.

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.

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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.