Muddy's the wrong word. Hollow maybe? Something about their tone puts me off more often than not. Definitely not in Eno's league though!

A good gateway to understanding the shift from radio to TV in the 40s/50s is Dragnet - it started on radio in late-40s, and became TV's #1 drama by 1952, filming many of the radio scripts directly. You can listen & watch the same story to really get a sense of how the two media worked similarly and distinctly. True…

Yeah, Benny's TV show is really nothing compared to his radio work. Burns & Allen too, but their TV show is pretty outstanding in its own right. But Benny was probably radio's greatest comedian. (Some would say Fred Allen - especially the less-than-humble Fred Allen - but he holds up far less today.)

None in particular. But I guess sometimes Radiohead fits that description, especially the production - my respect eclipses actual love for their music.

I'm sure this will get lost in the flood, but I'm mostly with Steven. I always admire Community, and often quite like it, but rarely love it. It's all about tone for me - something about the show always sounds a little shrill, a little grating, a little off. It's like when you hear a band that has great songs, great…

I don't feel sad that TV schedules don't structure my kids' lives. I feel a bit sad that something so formative in my childhood is completely foreign to them. And it's not just rotary phones or cassette tapes, where the same function is replaced with new technology - my kids just don't have any sense of a media-driven…

Agreed - great piece that really resonates as a fellow child of the 1970s. For me, it was Match Game, the consolation prize for being sick that often made me want to be sick.

Since there's an album ranking thread, how about a Favorite Decemberists video thread? They've got some great ones - I'm partial to the Rushmore-tinted "16 Military Wives": http://www.youtube.com/watc…

I was surprised that Hyden didn't mention that The Decemberists have more songs about murdering children than most metal bands do. Definitely adds to their Satanic street cred.

All of the above! Secor was the first AIDS case on the show, a self-contained plotline that was quite moving & groundbreaking at the time. Then Harmon's character contracted HIV (I think it was from a heterosexual one-night stand, not the face-slash) and left the show after the hospital disallowed him from seeing…

Nice write-up, Todd - St. E was my favorite drama as a teenager, and I'd contend it's TV's best drama pre-Buffy. I think it's a more consistent & successful program than Hill St. Blues, even though Hill St. is the one that gets most of the retrospective love.

He did get to sleep with a young Helen Hunt. So it all balances out.

My house came with the previous family's growth chart on a door. We haven't painted over it, as it seems like a nice reminder of the house's history.

Check out the 1950s original Dragnet - it was inspired by noir films, and had a much more bleak & subtle tone. It was enormously innovative, essentially inventing single-camera telefilms, on-location shooting, and close-ups for television.

I do think there is still a taboo in representing rape, especially when compared to murder. Could you imagine if Dexter were a show about a vigilante serial rapist who rapes other rapists? It would be so much more horrifying & unsettling.

There are a few academic studies on representations of TV rape, focused mostly on 1990s programs - see Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Sujata Moorti, Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres (Albany: State…

I'm disappointed than people aren't talking about Reiner more - the man's a legend! Ken Tremendous tweeted that Reiner improv-ed in the episode, so I've got to think the "flat man" riff was all his. Let's hope we get more Ned Jones!

Another parallel is Veronica Mars: one of the best crafted, mythology heavy pilots ever made, then 5-6 eps of fairly bland teen crime plots with a bad boyfriend - and then kicking into one of the best first seasons ever on network TV. Let's hope NBC lets Awake ride beyond its growing pains.

I love this film as well, and was disappointed Scott's review wasn't twice as long, and that he didn't reference the term that Jackson coined for this subgenre of horror/comedy: "splatstick."

I think it's less "privacy concerns" (a simple opt-out option like TiVo has would take care of that), but rather because the entire ratings system is based on a "neutral" third party of Nielsen establishing a uniform currency that all invested players can reference. The fact that Nielsen ratings are unscientific,…