If it's Mark Lisanti who does that ranking column, he's proven himself to be not a very attentive viewer of the show. He's left Don at the top, despite everything and some of his observations of motive were facile and superficial. As of week seven I am officially unimpressed.

'The Cleveland Show' could eventually develop a 'Newhart' type dynamic, wherein he functions as the relatively calm, normal and sane center in a world full of crazy characters—that would bring a dynamic different from any of McFarlane's other shows, and could make it the best of the three.

It's possible to have mixed feelings about one's regrets.

This is my fallback position:

I liked the universe of misleading portraiture. I have to say that my favorite episodes of 'Family Guy' are the ones that focus on Stewie and Brian, because I think they have a complementary outsider status on the show—they both shouldn't be talking at all, yet they each represent almost oppositional intellectual…

In that single moment, Cooper must have shot to the top of the rankings. But Roger and Betty also both got over on him thanks to that contract, and those two drifters took him down still another peg—And despite Don's dressing her down, even Peggy could be said to have bested him by lifting up her dress for Duck.

"Stop barging in here and infecting me with your anxiety"—I don't usually correct quotes, but that turn of phrase was evidence of the eloquence that got her where she is.

Who she was thinking about: Glenn.

I actually did a bunch of searches for 723 and variations of it to no avail. I'm going with Mr. Smith's reading, unless that number comes back later, and you know it might.

It may be a backward looking reworking of the narrative of history, but I was pretty sure the talk of Vietnam wouldn't have been so prevalent until after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in late '64—the point where the escalation argument Mr. Smith alludes to was first being made. I loved the sort of insider information…

When she was in Don's Den on the phone, she checked the locked drawer after hanging up.

"his first exposure to the counter-culture movement that was just getting underway"—Don't forget, he got high with Midge and her beatnik friends in season one. He was kind of adversarial with them, but I think he's ultimately going to resent their freedom as he gets further tied down.

When we learned explicitly that the baby was taken by the state.

"It just seems more focused" Isn't that the opposite of what people were saying before last week? Maybe the show just moves so slowly and deliberately, that you don't see it's trajectory until its well on its way.

But remember, she too is getting back at Don after his little tantrum at her expense.

They were not hippies. They belong to some nascent transitional phase between hipsters and hippies—even their drug of choice, barbiturates, points more to the past than the future of the counter culture.

Emeritus Hobo—have you also kept in touch with Freddie Rumsen? I understand you too move in the same circles now.

Galleys continue to circulate after a book comes out—especially among those who as Roger implies, don't want to pay for the hardcover. As a bookseller I used to give them away as Christmas gifts.

Don's power was repeatedly, literally and figuratively assaulted last night, all through miscalculations of his own. Even Pete and Peggy were able to see him more for what he was when they were discussing the power play of squeezing out Duck. Peggy says, "It's always the world against Don" (or was it vice versa?).…

"his usual fluffy-half in the nursing home"—I've always suspected it was an act and a disarming affectation, one he recognizes in Conrad Hilton. It's no oblivious coincidence that the man with the Colonel Sanders Van Dyke put his sock feet up on the coffee table before pointing out he's a bit of an eccentric. I think…