As an American, I've never spoken to an actual human being who was big into Archie. I'd assumed this was like a Carl Barks's duck comic thing where he was big in France or somewhere else because I cannot fathom his longevity based on the fractional niche of a niche audience he seems to have here.

I think your conditions make it hard to find something that really fits. The great ones that got to end on their own terms typically went out really well, so there doesn't seem like much point. I'm not a huge fan of the nostalgia revival because it so rarely seems like there's some great creative impetus behind it…

Yeah, Season 5 is only "bad" when compared to Season 4, arguably the finest season of television ever produced.

I don't think that's really the intended arc.

What do you mean by "ending?" Like, the last 10 seconds? Because I can see a way to Dexter figuring out he probably shouldn't have any close friends or family being not-terrible, but nearly every other detail in the final show is rife with issues.

I think the leads mini-reunion on Flash threw me off here, along with the general feel of the show.

"Are you the perverts who want to go to town on each other while I make a pie?"

It really suffered just because of the nature of American TV. "A genius gets intentionally arrested to break his brother out of prison" is a premise that has an inherently pre-defined arc.

This is weird list. Including The Wire, it's a bunch of all time greats (Breaking Bad, The Shield) next to a bunch of shows that ended up squandering their potential and becoming pretty maddening to watch (Big Love, Glee).

Doakes wasn't much better than the rest of them. His "surprise, motherfucker!" haminess and hostility makes him somewhat more fun to watch, but it's a terrible investigative technique. And given that the end of season 2 makes it clear that the show wasn't willing to have Dexter found out, his character had no real…

What makes me laugh about this is that he leaves the kid with her specifically because he thinks that he personally is unsafe to be around. So even if we buy, as the showrunners probably intended, that the ending is a grim moment of self-discovery, Dexter is still an idiot.

Surely you're looking forward to the legendary apex of Justice League villainy that is Steppenwolf?

Whoa, let's not get crazy here. Maximum Carnage itself is terrible. It's a fistfight that goes on for like 14 issues. Everything that happens is just the two sides fighting to a draw, going off and recruiting different combinations of allies, and returning to fight again. That's it. That's all that happens. For…

It does sort of seem like both "famous" and "friends" should be in quotes there.

Trump literally accused him of founding ISIS. The man has no convictions at all. We've elected a carnival barker.

I honestly think this job might break him. The president is, at any given moment, getting yelled at by let's say, 100 million people on social media alone, even ignoring hostile media outlets, sketch comedy shows, stand-up acts, fake news shows, "real" news pundits, foreign governments, political enemies, and bitter…

Exactly. We've survived evil shitheel presidents. We'll definitely have more.

I don't really buy into that narrative. It was a convenient hook to hand 20 years of Clinton rage on, but how many people do you know that were really ready to vote for Clinton, heard about the e-mails, and flipped to Trump? I'd wager less than one in five people could accurately describe what's even in them that…

As a distraction, though, it kind of fundamentally misunderstands the American public. We don't turn on you for expensive, crooked business deals or legal settlements because those are complicated and boring and by and large, we're not going to read past the headline anyway.

Actually, yeah. I said all this over a year ago. I wasn't quite arrogant enough to stick confidently by my own prediction when every professional pollster was against me, but I clearly should have.