How is there no way that Blanchett could have known about this? The initial allegations were big tabloid gossip in the early '90s. I'll give the benefit of the doubt to people like Scarlett Johansson and Emma Stone, who were very young when the initial allegations went public—I'm the same age as Johansson and didn't…

It isn't a "single written statement." Read the 1992 Vanity Fair article. There are plenty of witnesses willing to attest to Woody Allen's behavior with Dylan, which—without even getting into the act of penetration that Dylan is alleging occurred—is really fucked-up at best, and child abuse at worst.

It would have been nice for Weide to do the barest minimum of research on child molestation and how prosecution of it has changed over the years. We now understand that children who have been assaulted will change their stories for all kinds of reasons (embarrassment, wanting to please certain authority figures), and…

Hasn't Disney pretty much always used Broadway stars in their musicals, at least for the women? Mandy Moore in Tangled is the only exception I can think of, and her voice fit the character, so I can't really quibble with that. But before that there was Jodi Benson, Paige O'Hara, Irene Beddard, Lea Salonga, Anika Noni…

Ansa Stark? Wood Walkers? DO YOU EVEN WATCH THIS SHOW, SEAN?

If this movie does well, I think some of his other books (Looking for Alaska especially) have a shot, and certainly whatever book he writes next will be heavily considered. (If he ever writes another book. I'm tired of waiting for updates on that!) And this movie will definitely sell tickets, because he has one of…

Yeah, I liked the book a lot but never thought it would make that good of a movie, and nothing about this is reassuring me. Green's prose is inevitably going to sound pretentious when spoken, and on a shallower note, I can't get past Hazel's mid-'90s soccer mom haircut.

John Green says she's wearing it for basically the entire movie, which I also wasn't expecting.

Well, I'm certainly not arguing that they shouldn't add Indian characters. But I think that quote fundamentally mis-describes what Rimes is trying to do. She isn't trying to create a world that racially mirrors the one we live in because she thinks verisimilitude is an important component of storytelling. She's a)…

Yeah, I was surprised not to see Teddy Dunn on this list. A lot of the actors they did include (Shelley Long, Lisa Bonet, Katherine Heigl, Paul Schneider) seem to be just cases of coincidence—the show got better after they left (or just didn't decline), but not BECAUSE they left. But Teddy Dunn and Mischa Barton get…

I can see Rashida wanting to leave after spending years on a show that seems to have no idea what to do with her. She's in the prime years of her acting career, and she barely gets to do any acting—I'd be very surprised if she didn't want out. I can see a similar situation for Lowe—he's still in a very good position…

Most of these seem to be "shows that weren't hurt by an actor leaving" rather than "shows that were specifically made better by their leaving." P&R maintained about the same quality in seasons two and three. Cheers didn't get better after Long's departure; it just stayed great. A Different World DID get substantially…

Part of Rent's problem is that it's aged very poorly. Most of the things that it did that were so interesting and revolutionary at the time—rock opera, focusing on LGBT characters, having a racially diverse cast—have now been done by other shows, and often done much better, so it's hard to remember a time when this…

It's a ridiculous set-up because it's based on a 19th century opera. There's no way you can adapt La Boheme's plot to a modern musical without asking your audience to exercise a little willing suspension of disbelief. (A better argument might be "Why try to adapt an opera with a plot that won't make sense in modern…

Since other shows aren't committed to displaying a racially realistic portrait of their own settings (i.e. 95 percent white), I see no reason why Gray's Anatomy should be held to some higher standard.

It means the writer didn't want to do the research on whether or not she's the sole black female showrunner in television, so this was an easy shortcut.

The backstory here is that Benny was, at the time he offered them the deal, their best friend and roommate who had just married up and bought the building, so of course they trusted him and assumed the deal was legit. Over the course of the next year they grew apart, and Benny decided to charge them for the entire…

Really? Because Rent just made the characters in La Boheme insufferable for me. It really hit home how they're basically just 19th century versions of Mark/Mimi/et al. I suspect somebody who hadn't seen Rent would find La Boheme's character far more sympathetic than I did.

Given the fact that Rent's plot is stolen wholesale from a 19th century opera, I have a hard time blaming it for the origination of this trope.

I can forgive most of the bizarre plot points (like Angel's murderous drum-playing) in Rent since those are mostly Puccini's fault. The bad songs, however, are all on Larson.