I loved the fake idol, but it didn't end up having much of an effect on Jay's exit. He was going home regardless; the fake idol was just a fun way to create dramatic irony.

Adam earned his win based on his gameplay. Certainly he was the most viable winner of the top-3 (Ken having basically no shot at winning, and Hannah suffering the classic flipper's fate). He probably would have won without having an emotional story to carry him over the top. I don't think he won because of a pity vote.

The Good Place is really, well, good. But I often wonder how much better it would be if Eleanor and Michael were played by Amy Poehler and Rob Lowe.

I really enjoyed Shearwater's version of of Lodger, but I kind of wish they'd been more innovative and transformed the songs more.

Nice to see Boy King on your list. People seem to be violently turned off by that record, but I think it's amazing.

I'm liking The Vampire Lestat much more than Interview with the Vampire, which just drove me crazy. Lestat's story (so far, at least) is much more interesting and vibrant, whereas Louis' was just so much endless, tortured, introspection. Plus "I'm Lestat, I'm sassy, and I'm writing a tell-all book about my life!" is a…

For some late this year I made the seemingly unfathomable decision to read Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles front-to-back. I'm only on The Vampire Lestat, so I haven't gotten very far, and Interview with the Vampire really tried my patience. Am I masochist for striving to get through a widely ballyhooed, seemingly…

It was clear Zeke wasn't going to make it much farther once he started talking about his alliance as "his soldiers" and generally getting way too full of himself. Sure, he was in a great position, but you can't be too cocky.

When I show up at a party and there's a thing of onion dip and chips, I pretty much stand there and eat it until I feel either traumatically full or the acute shame of being The Guy that ate all the dip.

I can say without any degree of uncertainty that if someone put a container of onion dip (store bought, made from a mix, anything) and rippled potato chips in front of me at this very moment, or any moment, really, I would be powerless not to eat the whole damn thing, probably using my finger to clean out whatever…

That's true, it did sort of have that case-of-the-week style. In that sense it excused a lot of its tangents as, like, Eric Stonestreet is a ghost who was killed by the Pigman! and Murder House Dad treats takes him as a patient cause he doesn't know that he's dead.

The thing about Murder House is that, while the central character arcs mostly work out and make sense, all the stuff around them is just nuts, not least the fact that a story that begins a story about a haunted house exploiting the cracks in an already damaged marriage ends with Jessica Lange raising the antichrist…

People say that about Asylum, but it was still a steaming mess of tangents and inconsistencies. It probably built to the most emotionally satisfying finale, but let's not forget about how it tried to stitch together Satanic possession, Nazism, aliens, racism, sex addiction, serial murder, Ian McShane as evil Santa,…

Yeah, that's a typical Ryan Murphy Plot Hole. I thought more would be made of the fact that Lee had become somehow supernatural too, considering the "big moment" at the end of the penultimate episode was Audrey getting gunned down by the police as she tried to kill Lee, who she knew had turned evil. But nope. As usual…

Other than the form they took after they died, there's really no in-story reason for the Chens to be Asian. I get the feeling that Ryan Murphy wanted to have J-horror ghosts and worked backwards from there.

It should have been unbelievably satisfying to see Taylor crash and burn but his whole "This is just the next step in my awesome life adventure! Me and Figs are going to sail around the world!" attitude just undercut all my enjoyment. Now, I think the whole "Gen-X vs. Millennials" conceit is ridiculously contrived–the…

I would reverse the order of "Half Blood Prince" and "Order of the Phoenix;" HBP bungles, backgrounds (and, at time, simply forgets) its central mystery in favor of a renewed focus on horny teenage shenanigans and the intricacies of Horace Slughorn's vaguely creepy "Slug Club." Sure, it does have Jim Broadbent, who…

You may be right; having Shelby and Matt so prominent for the first half of the season did work as a misdirect. But the thing about this show is that they always favor the twist or the misdirect over good storytelling. If the show had focused more on Lee from the beginning the finale would have been a much richer…

But still it does seem strange in retrospect how much time we spent with Shelby and Matt at the top of the season, when their story ended up being profoundly secondary to Lee's. Not to mention the weird dissonance of Adina Porter being a "guest star" the whole season.

The Black List tends to have a ton of scripts on it that have clever ideas that sound good in a logline, regardless of whether those ideas actually work or are executed well. See: every movie you listed.