Oh, absolutely, David Fisher was one of the most brilliantly written gay characters TV had ever seen up to that point, with the most fully realized and three-dimensional and just plain real storyline. But just for the record, SFU also came in the wake of, rather than preceding, Ellen.

"Representatives Issa & King would like a word."

Yeah, it's because it was on cable in the 1980s. It certainly had an audience, but not a particularly large one — so its impact was somewhat muted by that. Even though there were certainly a few original shows getting made on cable channels, none of them were having the kind of cultural impact that cable shows…

Doctor Doctor was also never highly rated enough for that fact to have had any real impact on anything; even people who are pretty knowledgeable about LGBT representation in media don't necessarily know that it ever existed in the first place.

You're right, even at its best it was never a brilliant sitcom — rather, it was the kind of generic "likable enough but not really anything special" comedy that TV used to be able to get away with when there were only three or four channels to choose from, but that would die a quick and merciless death today. And it…

Billy Crystal was a supporting character, not the lead. He was also the type of gay character who TVTropes would call "But Not Too Gay", in that while he was allowed to make the occasional gay reference in dialogue he was never shown *actually* being "gay" in any meaningful way — such as actually going out on an…

Even California and New York — the bluest of the blue overall — have red patches, although admittedly their red-teamers aren't usually as extreme (or at least haven't become as internationally famous for it) as Bachman. And, for that matter, even many of the hardcore red states have pockets that are blue enough to…

I, on the other hand, am old enough to remember when even the *idea* of a show having an openly gay regular character in it at *all*, let alone as the lead character, was an impossible dream.

With you five for five.

I didn't say it was a problem that he's recycling his old stuff; it's just *funny* that he's already done it twice in two appearances this season.

I got a good laugh out of Nigel's rant about the demise of SYTYCD Canada. The funniest part was that I don't know if he realizes just how *literally* he's cannibalizing its corpse — the "gypsy woman stealing a man's soul" routine that Sean Cheesman gave to Nico and Hayley was the *second* time this season that he's…

For my part, I generally agree with a lot of the reviews I've read so far in other publications — while the series still has a lot of problems (the rom-com polygon being the most glaring one), so far I've liked this season much more than I liked most of the first.

Just the tip?

Except that "Sports Night" and "The West Wing" were both fictionalized glosses of real things. SN was ESPN's "SportsCenter", right down to the fact that Dan and Casey were literally Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann, and Jed Bartlet was an idealized Bill Clinton — and both shows quite regularly featured storylines that…

You know what happens to writers who work under Sorkin, right?

Well, there is a real-life project that's trying to find people who are willing to go to Mars and never come back. So while I did get a definite hoot out of how random that snippet of dialogue was in context, it's no mystery how it got into Sorkin's head…

"inserted the Bartlet Administration into our world and had the
characters reacting to the real events encountered by the Clinton and
Bush White Houses"

He's fictionalizing Operation Tailwind, which actually happened to CNN (the real life "best fuckin' news team" of its day) in the 1990s; basically the only way he's changed it at all is that the "real" use of sarin gas was alleged to have happened in Vietnam in 1970, and thus wasn't putting the current president at…

The storyline is based on a real incident from the 1990s called "Operation Tailwind", when CNN actually got roped by bad sources into reporting a dubious story about the US using sarin gas in Vietnam. The very first episode of the season already established that "Operation Genoa" was a false story which ACN has…

Addiction is fundamentally a mental health issue, not a moral one. You can't separate the "choice" involved from the fact that it's being made by a person who doesn't have the clarity of mind and spirit to be fully cognizant of what their healthier alternatives are.