You're confusing rationalization with excuses.  Rationalizations are how you justify your own thought processes to yourself, and is basically internal.  Excuses are reasons you come up with for why things external to your consciousness aren't the way you would like them to be.  And in the same way that Mencken's quote…

He's really a remarkable concoction isn't he?  Gentle to a fault, and yet it just cuts through 50 layers of crap and makes you smile at the humorous little tragedies present in any situation.  Apart from that one guy who used to claim that Newhart ripped off the "telephone" routine from him (several other people had…

If she doesn't know that a potato can produce an electrical charge in the first place, is it so unreasonable that she wouldn't know the amount of electricity it generates, or the amount of electricity required to power a pacemaker?  She'd already thrown out the inane question as to whether potatoes could solve the…

Bob, no contest.  No offense to Jason Bateman, but Newhart's in the all-time top 5 with Rowan Atkinson, George Carlin, Jack Benny and Victor Borge.  Deadpan humor is Bob Newhart's bread and butter, and that style of humor more than any other lives and dies with the rhythm.  Even more impressive when you consider that…

Nah, Williamson's off somewhere counting his money.  If he put as much time into writing the show as Conley puts in to writing on these boards, it might have been a better written show. ;)

They would have been tied up in Congressional hearings forever.  But to be fair, in real life the FBI would be rather more adept at tracking the parking lot full of cars Joe and his followers kept using for long drives across multiple states, since if nothing else they'd catch them on gas station security cam.

Spartacus was romanticized violence.  This was just torture-porn-lite, ala Hostel.

Nope.  Random point that never went anywhere.  I guess it was trying to show that she was both fascinated by and frightened of him at the same time?

Except Cancel/Renew isn't strictly ratings numbers either (TV by the Numbers admits as much).  If a show is appreciably more expensive to produce (and this one is between the cast's salaries - Bacon in particular - and poor bang-for-the-buck production values), the ratings have to be higher to justify keeping it…

"Forgetting" how to make s'mores may have perfectly captured the stupidity of this show. ;)

At least it's mercifully much shorter. ;)  Yeah, Hannibal the movie was rather gorgeously shot, but you knew going in they didn't have the balls to go with the ending from the novel, and the absence of Jodie Foster and the presence of considerably "more" Anthony Hopkins (especially around the mid-section) didn't help.…

IMDB's ratings of TV shows always seem to be severely out of whack. I think it might be because less people vote on/rate them than do the movies.

Which might have more bite if I were a film or television critic.  As it was, I don't think Ebert ever tried to "do" something else and failed, he described himself as having been a critic since adolescence, taking the piss out of pulp science fiction and Mad magazine.

Ah, okay, makes more sense now.  Though I'm still dubious that the hate-watchers were a big enough percentage of the audience to make the difference between renewal and cancellation.  "I'm not giving up on this show" didn't turn into earnest hate-watching for a lot of people until it went really off the rails around…

"You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

Any excuses you'd like to make on behalf of the show being as putrid as it is?  "People watch it, it must be good" and "FOX wouldn't renew something that wasn't good" are pretty weak sauce.  By that logic and those metrics, American Idol is the greatest thing ever achieved in the history of television.

Yeah, the Killing started off with much stronger atmospherics, but I think the key beefs were that it quickly fell into a pattern of Scooby-Doo like red herring one week after another - every episode would end on a "we have a new lead," and then it would be revealed to be nothing (usually through a rather unlikely…

In a better show or movie, yeah, you could have shot those in a way that was truly shocking.  The spear gun was still worth a mild jump.  But as they piled up, we just got more and more blase about it.  The cartoonishness of the characters made it harder and harder to make the connection "oh, that's supposed to be a…

Heck, the FBI agents on Dexter were smarter than this.  I feel like they intended for Joe Carroll to come off as a cross of Hannibal Lecter and Gerard Butler's character in Law-Abiding Citizen.  In the end he was about as scary as Tim Curry's Pennywise - ludicrous.

Movie?