You might start such an inventory with the Crossing Jordan soundtrack, which someone mentioned a week or two ago for the Richard Thompson cover of Donovan's "Season of the Witch."

Yeah, Six Feet Under might have had final episode of all time. Breaking Bad would have been right up there too, if the final ep had been that of the next to last season.

> There’s more joy in hanging out with the six surviving characters at
> Sheridan’s final meal {…} Of course Londo, G’Kar, Marcus, and
> Lennier should be there, as well as Lyta and Zack.

Some years ago I heard a radio interview with Donovan in which he professed to be amazed at his pop-cultural association with smoking various parts of a banana. He explained (maybe with a bit of revisionism from that couple-of-decades-later perspective) that he meant the lyrics to be taken at face value as a…

Few if any shows ever made cringe as funny as "Seinfeld."

When one of the over-the-air nostalgia channels went with wall-to-wall oatburners on Sunday mornings, I decided to look up just how many there were. Expecting to find a few dozen, I was just gobsmacked to learn that the total was somewhere past 200. Most didn't last long and are pretty much forgotten; even in the…

In one of those lines that deserve better attribution than my memory can give it, a critic said that Adam Sandler has an essential sweetness, and movies starring him succeed or fail mostly on the basis of whether the writers and director understand this.

Of course from time to time that was actually funny, whereas the "Real Housewives" franchise just makes you fear for humanity.

Well, that was certainly Papa Freud's own autocorrect at work… sorry about that!

Larry McMurtry's "Iolanthe" has gotta be in there somewhere…

Worse, some maintain that "Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a fictionalization of a particular true story. Certainly it is true in kind if not in documentary fact: plausible and hardly unique. Criminal psychologists and profilers would now call him by one of those terms of art you wish we didn't need: "family…

That's an astute observation about "Breaking Bad."  At first every imaginable cue, short of a volunteer job hand-feeding abandoned kittens, told us that Walter White was a sympathetic character and Jesse Pinkman was a born loser and comprehensive low-level detriment to society.     As this morality play unfolded, it…

No love for the New Riders?

> Have only seen probably four episodes of Dick Van Dyke in my life.

> Have only seen probably four episodes of Dick Van Dyke in my life.

The Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta was still *fairly* new (four or five years old) when they filmed the Burt Reynolds cop movie "Sharky's Machine" there in 1981.  (Says here that the movie's signature scene — as genre flicks go it was pretty good, so I won't spoil the surprise — was actually filmed at a similar…

Shanghai World Financial Center, sometimes praised as a bold statement and sometimes derided as resembling a giant beer-bottle opener (sometime by the same people), is an unmistakable landmark even amid one of the world's most floridly imaginative architectural playgrounds.

Of course, that all-America sweetheart image is what made a certain early episode of Friends work:  the one where Monica ends up with a younger guy, enough younger for her to find it… icky (as well as legally precarious).

I'm trying to pick the story back up in reruns after it lost me somewhere in that timeframe.  Much of the joy has always been in watching the protagonist's transgressive behavior, but somewhere around 6 or 7, I started needing an IV of willing suspension of belief.

Of course it was sort of a  Bond spinoff to begin with, blessed and given a character name (though apparently not much else) by Ian Fleming, and paralleled or even exceeded the descent of that series into high camp.