There was also being a monorail conductor/running out on the field during a baseball game in "Marge vs. the Monorail," and managing a country singer/eating the world's biggest hoagie in "Colonel Homer."

It has sex appeal and a catchy name!

I'm just glad they didn't try Wadded Beef.

@avclub-04d524031f29c89d78cae864bd6f0de7:disqus Next week, isn't it?

Yeah, I found it hard to watch because it reminded me of a time when I was in Kira's position, and because of that, seeing the way this sort of situation is generally depicted is kind of difficult.

You mean there was a point where Dick Cheney wasn't a changeling?

James VI wasn't a Catholic though — his mother was, but he was raised Protestant. Although it's true that (for some reason) English Catholics hoped that his accession would lead to greater tolerance, the Gunpower Plot pretty much wrecked that. But at any rate the Cecils weren't Puritans either, so it's kind of a wash;…

Ben Whishaw is spectacular. In fact, that Richard II is so good that the rest of the series could have consisted of people reading the phone book and I'd still have been pretty happy with it. But I may be biased because it's my favorite Shakespeare play.

Yeah, I thought Henry V was kind of a wreck for reasons that were mostly not Hiddleston's fault, because although the acting was generally fine, a lot of the cuts to the text were fairly inexplicable, and there were also some completely bizarre directorial choices (such as having him deliver the St. Crispin's Day…

PBS really needs to get around to showing The Hollow Crown. Irons is splendid in that — Henry IV is often seen as something of a thankless part, but in this production he's the most compelling character.

Tom Hiddleston actually does a terrifyingly uncanny impression of him in The Hollow Crown (during the scene where Hal and Falstaff rehearse what Hal will say to his father when he comes back to court). It actually kind of undermined the comedy because it was so unnerving.

It would definitely be unnerving to have Zombie Lynn Redgrave in a Die Hard movie…

Yeah, I'm given to understand that KB is actually a pretty nice guy, and that everyone assumes he's a prick because he directs himself in Shakespeare. Well, he doesn't, really, anymore, but you know what I mean.

Also great is that he cites actual antitheatrical rhetoric from Shakespeare's day — there were a lot of pamphlets published in the late 16th/early 17th century about how the theater was basically the Church of Satan, and his speech lifts directly from about three of them.

I have a small role in a Broadway musical! It's not much, but it's a start.

Also there's the one with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench — it was a stage production filmed for TV in the '70s, and it's now available on DVD (I dunno if Netflix has it, but it's not that hard to find). It's basically spoiled me for all other Macbeths (except for Throne of Blood which is its own thing). Granted I haven't…

Oh, I did indeed! It hasn't aired in the States yet, but I have the DVDs from the UK, and I adored it (except for Henry V which was kind of a wreck).

Felicity Kendall was Viola in the 80s BBC series — the same one where Helen Mirren played Rosalind.

Oh, I'm pretty sure there's at least one, although I don't generally look for that sort of thing. There's also a tongue-in-cheek one called History Play, by Rodney Bolt, which is a sort of meta version that's not really about that but pretends to be.

Mostly it's just that Oxford's descendants are pretty aggressive in defending their ancestor's supposed claim, although his case (like any other, but I think Oxford's most of all) is based entirely on snobbery, bullshit, and avoidance of the fact that Oxford was actually a complete shitstain of a human being (given…