CASTING DIRECTOR: Hey, I recognize you from somewhere?

Things I hope Matt Wiener thinks about during the next 6 months:

Love & Mercy

Kanye's career progression reminds me a lot of Bret Easton Ellis. Both introspective and self-critical, but portray themselves in an obnoxious light, seemingly to get a rise. Both seem to home moments that bounce between this guy is a genius and this guy is a hack.

Basically every underground rapper/group meets your criteria. You already mentioned Atmosphere and Brother Ali, so I think you would be pretty familiar with A Tribe Called Quest, Pharcyde, Aesop Rock and Jurassic Five. Other honorable mentions - LA Symphony, People Under the Stairs, EPMD, Souls of Mischief, The…

Where did I say I didn't like the show? The writing is very good and it's a pretty fun 20 minutes of TV each week. There are some issues I have with the characters, but I don't think they necessarily have to be likable or I have to root for them for this show to be enjoyable.

Stray thoughts:

He'll figure it out when he has his first case of morning wood.

Since their music is especially awful and their general message pretty generic, I was surprised at how well spoken and presented their court arguments were. The Court scenes - from their speeches to the lawyers - were straight out of a David Mamet play. Maybe - in general, Russians are much better linguists and…

If you don't want to explain adult content to your kid - tell him that is not something you are going to tell him and to figure it out. He'll google skeet and figure out what semen is, oh well.

a) Ad Hominem.

"Here’s the thing about weird, crazy bullshit episodes: They need to have a core, or else they’re just weird, crazy bullshit."
Can someone pass that note along to Pynchon, David Foster Wallace (I guess you can leave it at his grave), David Lynch, and the Lost guys?

This week on Madderall Men…

It doesn't really make sense to me to have actors spend hours and hours improvising and then spending hours and hours in the editing bay coming up with the best scene. Why not, you know, actually write a funny scene and be done with it? Seems to work for the Coen brothers.

Teacher Rape. Aids. Cancer (twice - once resulting in death, once tbd). Teenage marriage (twice - once resulting in death, the other in divorce). Drug problem. Mental health issues. Horrific car accident. Teen pregnancy/Abortion. Attempted teen pregnancy/surrogacy miscarriage. Misogynist player coming out as gay. Hit…

I know the Creative Writing teacher/class is a device to get Jenna to look deeper into herself than her general blogging musings in previous seasons, but it's annoying that writing continues to be perpetuated as something you need to grab from a buried, dark place.

Nas does. And Jay-Z is awful. Coming from someone who likes hip-hop. Or is there some significance of 'Big Pimpin' that I'm missing?

Yeah he pretty much jumped in bed with a dude, like why not?

I like to think of 'Catcher in the Rye' as 'A Confederacy of Dunces' with a much worse protagonist. If the main characters were entertainers of the last 30 years, it would be like replacing John Belushi with Justin Bieber.

EXT. GATSBY PARTY NIGHT
Gatsby, standing over a large indoor waterfall in his luxurious living room, taps his microphone, drawing the attention of the party.