Thank you! I know I rattle on a bit, especially by message board standards—I find the secret to encouraging people to overcome the tl;dr reaction is to open with some kind of obscenity. "Bullshit! And now that I have your attention…"

Eh, those of us who lived during the Reagan years had a Commander In Chief who called his wife "Mommy." Compared to that, Libby's Electral issues are just weak tea.

I'm going to call "shenanigans"—no, make that "bullshit"—on the assertion that Langham's impotence is "a fun little side plot." While impotence encourages a sniggering contempt that's always good for cheap humor (and the show is, to be sure, kinda encouraging us to laugh at his cry to the heavens in the lab), it's…

Me and my fellow lily-white liberal-ass friends love this show, which leads us to the most agonizing next-day discussions:

It's worth noting that alert viewers who paused the image of the first Keaton letter Mrs. Schmidt wrote to her son, discovered that Mr. Keaton advised the young man's twin problems of overeating and bed-wetting. Schmidtty got problems, yo.

Jess has been a dick to Schmidt because he cheated on her best friend. (And on Elizabeth, who was way cool her own damn self.) Since Jess is too much of an Oregonian to junk-punch Schmidt and get all the negativity over with in one cathartic swipe, she's parceling out the abuse over several weeks. I love Schmidt too,…

I will hereafter refer to Jess as "Jessica Damn Day" in casual conversation. Kudos to you, Sir Winston of the 4th Floor. Kudos.

Again, not really a SPOILER, but maybe: He didn't, according to the account given by a lot of people—Johnson included—which admittedly involved a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking after their divorce, and was understandably tinged with bitterness on Johnson's part. The 'accepted narrative' is that neither of them…

…yes, that's what I'm doing. A harmless reference to a universally beloved film. And *not*, by any means, sending a coded message to my fellow wayfarers in the Bitcoin-paved highway through Central Asia and the murderous pleasures we traffic in along its winding paths. No, no…just referring to William Goldman's…

The show is shooting itself in the foot here, really—the whole point of Virginia is that she's supposed to be the exceptional (for the era) young woman who *gasp* goes ALL THE WAY before marriage. Ethan's fixation on her makes sense if she's the only one who's ever bedded him—hell, you could almost forgive the…

Well, but consider how obtuse he was even then: "When you've been to Oz, who wants to go back to Kansas?" Well, Dorothy, for one—that's kind of the plot, Ethan—did you actually see the movie?

Not exactly—he's too aware of how incredibly easy it is to hurt them to ever be comfortable around them, and the only type of parental model he had was an abusive monster. (In real life, he wasn't that bad—not good, he was a workaholic who was never home—but again, you get the sense that he was terrified of turning…

This may or may not constitute a spoiler—I really think it's too imprecise to be one, and it's also been a feature of interviews with Michael Sheen, so, no, it isn't, but inasmuch as it refers to what will or won't happen at some point in the future of the show: SPOILER ALERT (only not really):

Never entirely made clear—he told Lizzie Caplan's character that he quit about 2 years in when he realized he hated lawyers, which seems plausible enough. It's also entirely likely that his toxic relationship with Caroline was a factor if they were dating at the time. Schmidt, in a moment of anger, claimed that it was…

A couple weeks ago, the writers let us in on the source of Jake J.'s comedy super-powers, when Nick confessed that he didn't learn to read—he just memorized a bunch of words (a prospect that threw me into a several-days'-long bout of self-questioning)—Nick's fabulous word-salad incoherence always comes when he has…

He was indeed referring to the Kinsey scale—which lists human sexual "response" (I don't think the term "orientation" was in use yet) on a scale of 0 to 6—0 being wholly heterosexual, 6 being wholly homosexual. (I don't know what the Kinsey study found to be the 'norm'—presumably it wasn't 3, since that would have…

I'm glad the show is touching on the role of homosexuality and its initial exclusion from the Masters & Johnson research, because it's too easy for shows like this to turn into either hagiographies of their subjects (like the KINSEY biopic pretty much was) or else veer too far the other way and turn into "This Person…

I found Branagh's Hamlet whiny (a fault of his high-tenor voice, but still) and unintellectual (which is a flat contradiction of the character as I've always read it.) But I wanted to pop back on to add that, as a Shakespeare enthusiast, I'm never going to fault anyone for liking any performance or production. "It…

I suspect that a lot of the hate directed at Branagh has to do with the man rather than the director/performer. For being the "cocky little shit" who dared to start his career by filming one of Olivier's self-directed Shakespeares, thus setting himself up in contention with the old man, declaring himself the Next Big…

The real answer to this question lies in the book of the same name by Thomas Maier,  which gives us a lot of the small details (like the doctor listening in on the secret laboratory goings-on with a stethoscope or the design of Ulysses), but which repeatedly points out that the personal side of things was and…