My favorite part of this episode is Barry Shubbins' song "Put in a half-day of work" -Nathan Rabin

I think they did a TV Club Classic on The Critic some years back, if you haven't read it.

The AV Club
I'm stuck here 'til I can steal a car

I'm pretty sure Quentin Tarantino just really likes weird, old cereal boxes.

The AV Club
Not 'Til You're Fifteen

Works for me; I just watched the episode and you can tell how padded out the show is with aside gags that don't fit into the main plot. Gwen mentions The Critic when talking about the final gag, but to me it's pretty obvious all the aside parodies, especially in the third act (when they're watching a show that's…

Pimping FOX shows, private activity… shill theory checks out.

Ah, good, I always enjoy when a criticism of Girls is deflected by comparing it to another show rather than directly addressed. As though Frasier's foibles somehow make Girls funny.

I did play football and I'm well aware that coaches do some things for no seeming reason other than "that's how it's always been done." I don't know why you assumed I thought all coaches were geniuses.

a. Find me one CB or MLB whose presence or absence for a game will move the Vegas line as much as any of the top half of the league's starting QBs. Just one.
b. I didn't say I'd replace it. I just said the best team doesn't win every time.

Because a single-elimination playoff is a very high-variance format. Because being the most valuable player on the team is still being one player out of 53. For starters.

That's an odd assumption for you to make.

I almost don't know if I'd prefer this, or, like, a really ludicrous voice-over, like a British guy doing a Texan accent (i.e. Patrick Marber's voice for the gambler in the Knowing Me, Knowing You radio series).

"And Mick Hucknall had agreed to perform because he was, in his words, 'trying to bang one of them.'"

Some took it with good grace, some caused a bit of a stink about it afterwards (Fox in particular)

Not quite as well, but in large part because I wasn't sure who were actors and who weren't. It does it make it better that they actually convinced other people to say these inane things.

Apparently Neil Fox is a crab.

Well, like I said elsewhere, Bob Kraft and Steve Bisciotti are his buddies, and Tom Benson isn't.

I don't think the all-white-men aspect was even necessarily as much of the problem as that none of the guys seemed to really have distinctive personalities or enough star power to stand out as a performer.

You'll enjoy this, then. Sexual adventurousness, but presumably with more consent: