Well, I had to clarify - I have a lot of followers from here on there!

As I said on Twitter, the show got to have its cake and eat it too with Walt's morality. Yeah, he rewarded the good and punished the bad, but in the end, it made absolutely clear that it was always the power through chemistry that he loved the most.

1) Because loss and/or trauma always turns someone into a child rapist.

@avclub-489acfbfa4d2424403acb81699170ac2:disqus kind of gets where I was going for with that. It's not just a question of making sure people have 'equal' access, it's ensuring that people know where to access it. And that requires educating people about different strata of culture (no matter how slowly or painfully),…

I understand Sturgeon's Law, but does it have to be THIS shitty?

How soon before we start seeing networks going down, then? And how does 'good stuff' start getting funded after they do so? (Netflix can't do it all, and largely depends on those networks anyway.)

@avclub-eac75edc18b8546c46893fe4b75ab995:disqus  I guess so. It just depresses me how limited their imaginations are.

That's part of what concerns me, though. I don't want the solution to our terrible culture to be "we got our good shit, they got their bad shit". It reminds me of what's going on with gentrification - there has to be something in between 'vibrant', Whole Foods-adjacent neighborhoods and flat-out ghettos.

Good point. But doesn't the same principle work with, say, NCIS or Big Bang reruns?

I've never seen that, but given the ratings, I'm clearly in the minority. 11 million? Christ.

Because it's easier to shoot for crappy irony than crappy sincerity. Which is a shame, because as any lover of bad pop culture knows, it's actually not much fun to riff on something when that thing is already so eager to do it for you.

The continued existence of most reality television utterly baffles me. I understand that they're rock-bottom cheap to produce, but couldn't that money be just as easily spent on reruns? They'd probably pull in the same numbers - no one that I know watches much of it, and I live in the suburban Deep South. I mean, are…

That's the direction I was about to go in - the reason that the 90s don't seem as distant as they actually are is because they've just atrophied into today's culture. There hasn't really been a massive disruption in the system since then, so everything's just been allowed to progress beyond their natural lifespans…

I actually thought that she had already played her.

@avclub-6ce1861d265248f9c9dd2ed2f88dbdf9:disqus For what it's worth, I fucking hate Swanberg.

So it's the Stephen King's "Hearts In Atlantis" of songs?

"If rage-filled Alec Baldwin was a song, he'd be Dirty Laundry."

It goes to St. Vincent, presumably. Not sure what she needs with it, though…

Wow. That's really weird if it's true.

*crickets*