Everyone settles down to a nice, post-Cold War life. Then Putin reactivates all the old power pipe-lines because, well, life is just boring without super-power secret wars. This is not a plot line, this is pretty much my actual take on Putin's rise to power and policy guidelines.

This seems like its pretty much the setup for the show (and I love it): something is wrong, we are at war with someone, somebody is watching us; it's just the specifics of who, what and where that continually fuck everyone over

While people often clamor for changes in a stale status quo with shows (GW has actually been more fluid in this regard than many) there are also real logistical problems. In order to see most of the main players, there is now a split between four workplaces (Governer's, State Supreme Court, A&F and L&G… now just "G" I…

Nobody "likes" American Horror Story, people only feel a kaldescopic fever dream of competing emotional and mental reactions that beat them into submission before it.

It's true, they seem almost afraid of real development that would break the show's motw formula, which is strange given how little they've used it as the show has become more serialized. This is the only explanation I can come up with as to why they are constantly killing side-characters who threaten the brother's…

That's a nice list of tautologies there. We must be watching different shows, because in the the show I'm enjoying "good" and "evil" aren't the same as "legal" and "illegal"; almost everybody believes they're one of the good guys, and find ways of justifying the hurt they cause others. It's pretty good.

Super-late catchup reply! I see that Jared Padalecki gets a lot of shit for his acting, but seriously his "Sam-less" vs "Sam" performance was pretty amazing. "Sam-less" was basically spot on for being Sam without a soul: not some super-evil villain Sam, just exactly the same guy missing the crucial emotional reactions…

Late catchup reply! There's also an hilarious scene in which Crowley explicitly plays on the "young, hot, female" crossroads demon kiss by forcing a right-wing banker to make out with him for bail-outs. I'm pretty sure he's an amoralist who likes to mock the various macho characters' security in their homosexuality,…

I forgive a lot of his apparent cliche by reading it as a kind of schtick that he is consciously playing out, and that he tends to drop when the situation calls for it, such as when Sarah or Kira need him to be a real person. This is mostly based on only a few scenes so far, so I'll have to see how it plays out over…

She seemed surprised by her own proficiency, which leads me to believe this is some foreshadowing regarding the nature of the clones

But by showing cat abuse and making light of it as "funny" and "entertainment" they are both making condoning and encouraging further vehicular feline homicide.

Come on, Don! 20% is realistic, but boring. Amp it up to like 95% and just have fun with the paranoia, become convinced that it's actually because television is watching YOU, force your wife to write a new novel staring yourselves and your life, including her writing the novel, and then scour family genre shows for…

Somebody's mother didn't love her enough.

It would be pretty interesting to have Red Dragon play out with a well-established background of trust and betrayal between Will and Lecter; an advantage that neither the novel nor the movie was capable of producing. A very "only on television" possibility.

That first discovery really did my head in; it was just so strange and potent in its imagery, but I had such a hard time placing what the meaning of it was, how it fit, what possible motivations for the killer could be in play. To have an image like that, that makes such an impact while being so ambiguous as to what…

Eh, the idea of getting rid of Poehler or Leslie is absurd, but it is true that they need to avoid shying away from the harder hitting issues grounded in character and instead subsituting false and cartoonish outside antagonists (Jamm or Bobby Newport are hardly obstacles, more like distractions). Remember at the…

I find it a little sad that a show almost explicitly designed to question and complicate this line between "good guys" and "bad guys" is still desperately being reduced to that kind of a binary.

The basketball… and it had credits… why did it have credits? That has to be my biggest laugh in the last six months.

Checkout "The Long Firm" (name of endless punning hilarity). It's a British miniseries with him as a famous crime figure in the '60s and '70s

It's the premise of auteur theory from the Cahiers du Cinema school, isn't it?