Best article in a long time. The spirit is now dependent upon you, TVDW, to keep alive why we used to come here so long ago…

That presupposes that there's anything even remotely more complicated going on with our current AV Club: TNG of writers than "OMG! I liked this! OMG! I didn't like that!". Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Beyond the SP/B66/BL trio (which came along at an impressionable point of life for me), his bizarre efforts with Cassavettes (and Falk) were so far into something else that the results move past a good/bad judgment. Husbands is some kind of kind of fucking movie, man… And that's just a couple phases of his work.

Wow, here's where the Crash trolls hide. Weird place… have fun, lads!

I've watched every episode, largely (entirely?) because of my love of Meaney and Noonan as actors. And Mount's not been bad and this Heyerdal guy is interesting. But the show hasn't been close to even potentially cracking 'good' since, oh, 6 minutes into the premier?

Danske Skum!

"I'm really sorry about what happened. Lt. washington was a nice lady. She saved us."

Absolutely correct - this is Hamlet, people! Also, the CIA shit was hilarious, because this (local law enforcement encounters backed 'organization', is trumped) has been happening in various forms since the mid-70s (and before), but we never get any of that on the screen. Other than Black Dynamite.

I think not mentioning Top Ten's take on supe/glad combining in the same article you casually mention a possible happy ending to a realized Watchmen 2 concept is sadly revealing, Mr. Sava…

To JP - both.

Maura Tierney is the ultimate unheralded point guard of sitcoms. This was the tremendously successful shift into the new dynamic they needed.

I agree with you (and Mr. Pickleshitter) that the team dynamic brought everyone up (including Carla - who was like a Toni Kukoc - killer with the right teammates, but too thin to carry a team on her own). I just find Diane portrayed far too sympathetically by the show direction, which (especially in seasons 1-3) 'saw'…

She's utilized as the audience empathy instrument. That's the function of the outsider within the Bostonian universe, for audience members too beholden to the defanged comic universe of the late-70s TV to be able to completely commit to the real-life fanged way in which we (or, at least, these Bostonians) deal with…

Honestly, I cannot fathom the universal love heaped upon Long's Diane here.

Pumpers need to pump…

Isn't that part of the fun with a show as perversely anti-character as this is?

But it has dinosaurs. I feel like a Barksdale customer when they were cutting that shit down to like 3%.

Please, PLEASE - retain the TNKR. It was fun.

The motherfucking kid actually said 'ginormous'. Fact.

I was thinking a flashback to good times with Leslie Easterbrook and family…