If ANY author can be called sui generis, it's Lafferty. His work used to appear in a variety of SF anthologies and there's currently an effort to publish all his stories; there have been two or three volumes so far.

Ellison and Bester "literary"? Most of Ellison's first 10-15 years of story publication were in cheap black-and-white competitors to Playboy, such as Knave; Bester started out writing for comic books and radio drama. Retrospectively, perhaps, their work attained "literary" status, but I highly doubt that either of…

Corollary: Instrumental music will endure, even if vocal music doesn't.

Despite living in Minneapolis or St. Paul during nearly the whole period of their existence and a little beyond, I never went to a 'Mats show. I was exposed to a lot of their studio work, however.

Anyone with both a spouse and one or more children would have an impossible task trying to answer this question; how do you choose? Better if future prompts aren't (implicitly) intended for singles only, if I may be permitted to dispense a fragment of editorial advice.

No, it's Bert Parks, former Miss America host. See elsewhere above/below. Yes, he should have been mentioned: I love how the entire long scene at the Gourmet Club begins with turning up the lights on him and his combo, as he kicks off "Tequila!"

The small parts are all great too. "We are the same - Leo and Big Leo."

The same people created a similar dental appliance for Al Pacino, for the period after Sterling Hayden breaks(?) his jaw.

Well, that was my intent. It repels me, therefore I don't watch it.

"He's a physicist, all right."

What are you talking about? Even if it were the only series on TV, it would still repel me.

Well, technically the earlier one, "Prescription: Murder," was a TV movie years earlier (1968), not a pilot for the series as such. It was based on a play of the same title (by Levinson and Link, the eventual series creators) that had starred Thomas Mitchell as Columbo. See www.columbo-site.freeuk.com….

I had been a fan of Lost off-and-on, and watched rather frequently during the final season, hoping for moments as memorable as (for example) the first scene of season 2. I wanted all the sideways stories to somehow lead to a final episode that would do what "Fall Out" did - pull down the walls of the show itself, or…

You can enjoy The Prisoner on its own terms, you know - no need to look for allegory.

Yes, but cleverness under time pressure is (to me, anyway) very admirable. I especially enjoy how the pilot's final shot of Captain Pike together with Vina is repurposed at the end of the two-parter: the same image, but with an entirely different meaning because of the framing story.

The headline The whole sitcom's out of order (which I couldn't help but hear in Al Pacino's late-1970s voice, with his idea of a Baltimore accent) made me think of the possibilities of adapting And Justice for All… as a sitcom. It was half a sitcom already, wasn't it? Both Jeffrey Tambor and the late Jack Warden were…

Yes, but given that the (unequivocally) final episode is "Fall Out," the mother of ALL narrative incongruities, any other such incongruities fade by comparison.

I don't trust Wikipedia implicitly. In any case, when show runners for whatever reason decide to kill off a character, it's generally not by suicide, so I thought it was worth mentioning - if it had been a different manner of death, NBC might have decided differently with respect to episode order in fall '94.

Well, since it was a suicide (apparently), perhaps "killed off" isn't the right description of Crossetti's fate… I trust a spoiler alert isn't necessary for episodes that aired more than 20 years ago. Supposedly Jon Polito was "not asked to return" when NBC finally gave Homicide a full-season pickup for 1994-95, after…

The reuse of the first Star Trek pilot (with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike, and Majel Barrett - billed as "M. Leigh Hudec" - as his Number One) was really very clever, creating a framing story for the present-day crew and a previously unsuspected history for Mr. Spock. I think the resulting two-parter would have…