To find a more elegant ending to the whole series than the one we got, I guess. I watched the Cassie one and I think the Effie one. The fact that I can barely remember a thing that happens in them says a lot.

Yeah, in retrospect it probably falls into the same category as HIMYM. Went too long, and strung some storylines out beyond their natural end. I don't know that I could handle Elliott and JD's endless making up and breaking up another time round.

Very true. Same with a lot of series from that era. I'd add Chicago Hope and Picket Fences.

I've done the rewatch from Episode 1 to the finale, and I can confirm that there is absolutely no good reason to revisit anything from Season 7 onwards (arguably other than the finale).

I must admit that I tried sitting down for a few Buffy marathons and was amazed that it just wasn't doing it for me. All that wiseacre Whedon / Sherman-Palladino dialogue seemed a lot more clever at the time than it does now.

Skins (the UK version). Absolutely brilliant first season. Pretty good second season. There was a rapid downward slide from there, but it was at the end of season 4, when a main character randomly gets beaten to death by a mad psychiatrist where I said "Nope, no more of this shit."

Funnily enough, we were discussing this very thing over Thanksgiving dinner. So much of each episode is a recap that you could probably just watch all the recap sections and get the whole thing over with in half the time.

There's three kinds of these:

Where do I start? Traditionally, fishing has been highly self-governed - you stay outta my area and I'll stay outta yours - so they're basically nature's libertarians. They loathe the idea of marine parks or other preservation initiatives, and make arguments like "My grandpappy caught as many fish as he wanted, and…

2016 thought it could slip one under the radar while we were all full of turkey. Damn you, 2016. She was one of the good ones.

And like the Wachowskis, he made one really great movie and has spent the rest of his career making less good variations of it.

I was the oldest cousin, and it sucked, because you felt like a giant if you sat at the kid's table, and like you were being condescended to if you sat at the grown-ups table.

Avatar has a reputation for people being indifferent to it, but at least half of my friends loathed it with a passion.

This will probably work better as a documentary in any case, because there are some major holes in the guy's story.

Fair point. It's gross to think that someone is so controlling as to check his fiancee's emails, but it happens.

"Haha, democracy, isn't it adorable? Just like that Hitler guy. Yeah, he was a bit of a grump, but he dressed so well, huh? And how did he get his skin so peachy-clean?"

It's a good question. I think it's always worthwhile sending constituent letters. Particularly amongst staffers, policy positions aren't as cut-and-dried as they seem to the public, and a critical mass of letters, emails or calls on a particular issue goes a long way towards at least putting doubts in a rep's mind,…

Back when newspapers were still a thing, we actually had a local newspaper publish a cut-out-and-send protest letter to my boss (I think the issue was banning pet shops; I honestly can't remember). It was like that scene in Miracle on 34th Street. We were just emptying out whole sacks of the damn things.

It's a job that crystalized my positions on a number of things, including MRAs, extremist animal right's activists, and weirdly, hobby fishermen. Hobby fisherman are complete nutcases.

"A book that everyone thought was funny about seven years ago,"