As the disclaimer in front of every episode mentions, it is a dramatization, which means that where the data doesn’t match the arc of the story they’re telling, the arc of the story takes precedence. (This is also true of almost all documentaries, by the way! Once you start arranging and curating a set of facts to…

Navarro’s 2001 solo album Trust No One is a good one as well.

Once again it falls to me to be the lonely voice who thinks One Hot Minute is the best RHCP album, precisely because it trades Frusciante’s funky wiggle for Dave Navarro’s minor-key melancholy.

This is true! I was specifically highlighting the NBC roles, but he’s fantastic on Mrs. Maisel as well.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Tony Shaloub from NBC’s Wings and (less notably) Stark Raving Mad.

Honestly, the cast is positively stocked with ‘90s-’00s NBC programming talent. Not only Dwight, and Elliot from Just Shoot Me, but Justin Long (Warren Cheswick of TV’s Ed) is also a minor character. Probably others I’m forgetting as well.

My mother always told us that she knew my dad had a crush on Kathleen Turner, because Body Heat was the only movie he ever rented twice.

Not sure why this is surprising — one of Rob’s first jobs in L.A. was famously as a production assistant on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, so he knows his way around child-friendly fare.

A well-written prequel can be a thing of beauty, but many of them do things that make me sigh in boredom and frustration, to wit:

A) “Hey, person I will eventually fall in love with, we’re meeting for the first time and I HATE HATE HATE you! Isn’t that ironic for the people who already know we get together? What a fun…

American Auto really feels more like a sitcom from the “bad old days” of NBC Thursday nights. You draw people in with the familiar face, hope the simmering romance is enough to keep people watching while you work out which characters are actually funny and why, and when you don’t, you get canceled and the next sitcom…

I admit to skipping this one, almost entirely because every time CBS gets a show that I find novel enough to get invested in (anyone else remember The Crazy Ones with Robin Williams and a cavalcade of ringers? Or BrainDead with Mary Elizabeth Winstead vs. brain-eating bugs taking over the U.S. government?) it is…

Sophie has more chemistry with Ryan than she ever did with Kate (zero), so I haven’t really been surprised that they paired up. (Hot people are gonna kiss each other on TV, it’s the law!) I appreciated them making an effort to recognize that Mary had often been ignored in the series to date and giving her some meaty…

I’ve been trying to stay invested in Batwoman, but I feel like the potential for a new direction for the show by making the new Batwoman an orphan who grew up on the fringes of society has been squandered by revealing that no, she’s actually had a family this whole time, a super-rich one in fact, and her new arch-rival…

While it was on the air, I was usually comparing the first series to Hu$tle, a very similar show that focuses specifically on a team of long-con artists based in London. I always found that show to be slightly more clever than Leverage, because the team almost never relied on stunts or fisticuffs to make their plans…

Thanks for all these reviews, Dennis. Even when I didn’t agree that the show would be better if it were a mix of savage, contempt-filled satire and early-Conan-O’Brien-style random goofiness, I respected the fact that you were up-front about that being what you wanted from it, and that you still cared enough to be…

This is the kind of thread a loafer like me enjoys -- heavily laced with puns.

True, she had the unenviable task of playing the balanced/competent one in a cast of more colorfully obsessed/clueless characters. But she did win a BAFTA for it, so there’s that. And I agree, Siobhan Sharpe is brilliantly vapid — it’s no wonder Hynes and Hugh Bonneville were the two actors to make the leap to the…

She’s also very funny in Twenty Twelve, a mockumentary about preparations for the 2012 London Olympics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Twelve

I didn’t have trouble with that; in many if not most of the recent depictions, Batman is the most reluctant Justice League member, despite financing all the cutting-edge bases, satellites, and other high-tech doodads the other heroes rely on. He is generally loath to leave Gotham for any length of time, or for…