I watched "Triangle" again the other week, and was surprised at how well it holds up. The extended-take thing looks less revolutionary than it did at the time, but some of the staging is still wonderfully ingenious, and the episode as a whole is terrifically fun. I'm still amazed that Chris Carter, who directed this…

I agree that the show's sense of place is consistently astonishing, even in weaker episodes. At the time, I just took it for granted, but it's pretty impressive how they were able to turn each week's story into a self-contained movie with a distinct setting, cast, and tone—especially early in the show's run, when…

It's amazing how well "Quagmire" holds up: I liked it well enough when it first aired, but these days, it's one of a handful of episodes—"Pusher," "Ice," the Darin Morgan eps, and a few others—that I'll turn to when I need a quick X-Files fix. And it isn't just for the interlude on the rock: maybe it was Morgan's…

This bandstand wasn't double-bolted!

I think I've found my new avatar.

The Departed
Think about it. HBO. Original cast. Week after week of DiCaprio undercover with Nicholson's crew, Damon sweating and scheming, Sheen running the operation, Wahlberg and Baldwin (!) toe to toe in the squad room. Christ. It could've run for years.

Cache
After years of avoiding this guy, and being only impressed in the abstract by The White Ribbon, I finally rented Cache from Netflix earlier this year. The disc sat around my apartment for something like two months before I finally got around to watching it—and guess what? It's stunning. Haneke is the real thing,…

Dicks nix Mxyzptlk pix?

I'd put Dick Van Dyke on top, too. Just a brilliant show, with a great cast and writers. Watching it on Nick at Nite as a kid permanently shaped my ideas about marriage: Rob and Laura are still the ultimate cool couple, to the point where they even seem like the prototype for the Obamas.

Chris Doyle
He's my favorite living cinematographer, so I may need to check this movie out. He isn't as flashy as Richardson or Lubezki, but his work with Wong Kar-Wai, especially "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love," represents some kind of peak of the medium. And while "2046" has its problems, it might be…

Daniel Okrent
Interesting guy. Former public editor of the New York Times and the inventor of rotisserie baseball. Although I'll always like him best for his appearance in "Wordplay," where he says he keeps a notebook of all his crossword-solving times "because I'm an obsessive creep."

When I first glanced at this headline, I thought it said something like "Milk's Dustin Lance Black to write graphic-novel adaptation of Toy Story 3," which would have been considerably more interesting.

I used to wonder why people felt so venomously towards bands like Vampire Weekend and, say, Coldplay—groups that make (to my ears) perfectly competent, nicely produced, occasionally very good pop music. Sure, it isn't going to change anyone's life, but there's something to be said for skill and professionalism, even…

Bloatedness
I thought the first novel was incredibly padded as well. It had some good scenes, but I felt that I could have spent half an hour with a red pencil, crossed out a third of the pages (a la William Goldman in "The Princess Bride"), and nobody would have noticed or cared.

In that vein, one of my favorite movie posters is for Bad Boys II. Martin Lawrence inherited top billing from the first movie, so the studio compensated by making Will Smith roughly 2x his size:

Monsters Inside Me
I love Discovery Health. It pretends to be an educational channel, but really, it's a freak show. Fat ladies, surgery gone wrong, intestinal parasites: all they're missing is someone who bites the heads off chickens. (Or have they already done that?)

Todd, it's funny, but I had the opposite reaction to Season 6: it made me appreciate the first five seasons even more. It wasn't that Season 6 was necessarily more absurd or contrived than previous seasons, but the magic was gone, which made the special qualities of the show's earlier incarnations more obvious than…

I, too, was a little surprised at its exclusion from the best of the decade roundup, especially because the list included shows (like "Mad Men," for example) that haven't had five good seasons yet, and still have plenty of time to jump the shark. "24" had five great years and shaped the culture in meaningful ways…

The funny thing about Glee is that when the stakes are high, it usually follows through: the pilot, the sectionals episode, the Madonna show, and the NPH episode were all terrific. It's only when it comes to telling a coherent story from week to week—or from minute to minute—that it drops the ball.

It was less his organ's massiveness than its description as a "heavy shaft of flesh" that I found slightly disconcerting.