This is the key difference. You can skip six or ten or twenty episodes ahead on the major, non-series-ending Whedon death, and in virtually all cases, it's possible to talk about how that death is still affecting the status quo in meaningful ways, how different characters have changed because of it, etc.

I agree with the sentiment so this is mostly hair-splitting, but the odds of an average American police officer being killed on the job in any given year is around .00015%. A precinct that had the casualties of Grey's Anatomy would probably be the subject of serious internal and/or federal investigations.

I don't even necessarily question that Marvel might have taken some overall aesthetics for the new look from these guys (I mean, it certainly isn't conclusive, but it's possible), but it seems to me that it's been proven multiple times that this level of, at most, loose inspiration isn't legally actionable.

None of your conclusions about morality actually follow from any statements you made.

About half of it is really speaking to the tone of modern TV in general. The AVclub's top show last year, Hannibal, checks at least 3-5 boxes, for example.

It's a pretty big leap. If you assume he's blind but are somehow explaining away the whole leaping around like a ninja thing, then you're probably open to the dozens, maybe hundreds of other possible reasons a Marvel superhero wouldn't need eyeholes. Just offhand, Mystique, Professor X, Dr. Strange, Wolverine, Iron…

My radical right, conservative Christian uncle, who stopped subscribing to the local paper because it had a story about a serial killer in it, has a PhD in Middle English lit with a Chaucer emphasis.

That's exactly the same as Star Trek movies, else I await your defense of Final Frontier.

But sex confectioners are so expensive here! Plus one time I accidentally hired a confection sexer, which I don't even want to talk about.

The Good Wife is set in Chicago, though, yes?

Well, with an excellent argument like that, you're sure to win many a convert! Godspeed to you, crusader!

That scene was played so ridiculously over the top. While gouging out her own eye, she never loses "Seagal movie badass face." Pinkett-Smith is playing a villain from the 60s Batman show, but they're apparently just going have her occasionally defile corpses or whatever.

When, oh, when, is Hollywood going to address the lack of white representation in movies?

I grew up in an "abstinence only" environment, and that's a pretty good summation of how it tends to work. In contrast to how they usually view things, I found almost without fail that Christian youth clubs talked a lot more about sex (and trials and failures of attempting to not have it) FAR more often than their…

Yeah, but the more accurate boiling down of the whole thing is:

I think it's hard to find the right balance here between two points that are both really important to make, and though they're not incompatible, it's hard to talk about them simultaneously without it looking like you're minimizing one or the other.

Virtually all of Hemingway's unpublished early work was in a suitcase that was stolen in Paris. It's either worth a fortune to whoever finds it, or the thief, pissed to find it contained some unknown kid's poetry, tossed it into the Seine.

"Homer, that's not God, that's just a waffle that Bart tossed up there!"

I was on a band bus with a kid and The Usual Suspects. After like the fourth "hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker" our assistant principle shut it off. Then he apologized to the kid, explaining that he would probably enjoy the movie privately.

Jonah, you're not even a man, you're like an early draft of a man where they just sketched out a giant, mangled skeleton but they didn't have time to add details like pigment or self-respect. You're Frankenstein's monster if his monster was made entirely of dead dicks.