It probably was, but that was in my cable dark ages, when all we got were Christian networks and the Disney Channel.

This is one of my favorite movies. But, then, it would be, since it's sort of capturing a blend of Cassavetes and Altman.

I'm aware! But I know that there are a lot of people who think the site fell apart when the Dissolvers left and/or I had them fired because they were better writers than me.

Taxi was low-rated, but it was in the Nielsen top 10 for its first season, and it won a boatload of Emmys. It was much less cultish than WKRP.

But that's the appeal of TV Roundtable and how the feature works and what makes it our most popular regular TV feature: It's all luck of the draw. Somebody always hasn't seen the episode, and somebody has, and then we bounce them off of each other. It's not intended as a celebration; it's intended as a conversation.

Again, this is one of the most famous episodes of TV ever made. A TV Club Classic of THIS EPISODE would probably do very well. But of this show? It's probably not going to do well at all. And our pageview guidelines are very, very, very lax, much less restrictive than a lot of other sites. Writing about a show one…

Isn't it already? How many reviews of The Michael J. Fox Show have complained about its documentary aesthetic and its inherent pointlessness? TV, more than any other medium, wears out trends quickly, probably because it's always with us.

We were going to do one, but the end of year stuff is crowding a lot of the regular features out. Fortunately, I think you're going to really like the end of year stuff!

In general, we don't talk enough about how production choices in TV can affect our enjoyment of the product. There's a huge barrier there that is one of the reasons so much TV discussion tends to focus on the here and now and why there's so much recency bias in TV criticism. (Also: TV has always been a medium that…

TVC10 and 100 Episodes are for more scholarly approaches (and we'll be doing WKRP in one of them very soon), but not everybody watches TV that way. So we want features that reflect that fact, and this is one of them. (It's also, perhaps not coincidentally, by far the most read TV feature, week in and week out.)

I should have you know four people who work at The Dissolve have told me, on four separate occasions, they're really impressed by Dowd and his writing and his attempts to keep the section going in the face of some pretty massive changes and readership suspicions. So every time you read something by him, imagine a…

We have a really great editorial staff, and this didn't bump a one of them (or me) as condescending or patronizing. I really, really think that's being read into the piece by the commenters.

Have you met Phil Dyess-Nugent?

Don't kill me, but I think the WKRP theme is highly overrated!

The People demand a People's Court TV Club 10.

Also, this assignment was very last minute because of some communication errors, which probably contributed to it feeling even more tossed-off than usual.

This is a low blow. I've never once gotten that the whole speech is meant to be a riff on the Hindenberg broadcast (outside of "Oh, the humanity!") until I read Stephen's piece. Not everybody's brain works in the same way.

I will give you 10 '70s sitcoms I would want all of my writers to be familiar with before WKRP, in an ideal world (and I like WKRP):

The '70s sitcoms Sepinwall hasn't seen would make your hair turn grey. Every single TV critic out there has huge, huge blind spots. Like, I've seen a lot of '70s sitcoms but very few from the '80s and even '90s. There are times my wife will talk to me about an episode of Seinfeld and I will be, like, "???"

It was on the Nick at Nite/TV Land circuit for only about a year. It was rather famously a bomb for them (because it had been widely seen elsewhere by the net's target audience at the time). If it had been there longer, I would have seen more of it!