@HipsterDBag: Interesting. Yeah, your experience was much different from mine, and from the people in my circle (though I'm sure that others around us might have had experiences more similar to yours than to ours). I remember high school and the early years of college in the early to mid 90s as a period of extreme…

As someone who has only seen a little of Angel and who is no big fan of post-season three Buffy, I would suggest that a crucial reason for the greater tolerance of Angel's tackling of "dark" themes is that that show seems to have always positioned itself as random people with differing agendas fighting dark forces…

Rock the Casbah
Is it really accurate to dismiss Rock the Casbah for having "incomprehensible, slang-filled verses bookended by a chorus precision tooled for drunken sing-alongs"? It's a pretty straightforward narrative about the people in an Islamic country ignoring a fundamentalist leader's ban on Western music…

"Kill- Angel, since you'd have to kill him anyway if you did bang him or marry him, unless you believe you can't bang someone after you marry them."

"And the peer that pressured him into experimenting? None other than a young Tom Hanks (well, a character played by a young Tom Hanks.)"

@Mr Guy: That's how I'd remembered it most of my life, but it turns out there was another similar character named J. T. Martin, as I discovered re-watching the show on on-demand a couple of years ago. I also remembered the nerdy friend as Peter Billingsley, which was also incorrect.

@Ricky Coogin: It wasn't Ricky's dad who caught them, it was the dad's assistant/love interest Kate. Ricky was having a sleepover with two friends and they sneaked into the dad's office because the dad had locked the cable box in Ricky's room (with an actual key). Somewhere along the line, the nerdy friend's glasses…

I just did some research into this, and it looks like Coleman's condition was known pretty much from the start—it gets referenced in profiles of him in '78 and '79. Reading through the early reviews of the show is an odd experience—the reviewers don't outright pan it, and they invariably heap praise on Coleman as a…