You know what else is awesome? That movie Avatar. Too bad it didn't make any money.

@GhaleonQ: I'm intrigued by We Need to Talk about Kevin, too, but I have no idea how they're going to pull off that final twist.

Personally, I think that Rabbit, Run is the weakest of the four—it's a young man's novel, and Updike's style, still a work in progress, is occasionally fussy. But I also think that the argument over the respective merits of these four novels is a testament to their astonishing quality overall.

Wow. If I were still working at my old overpaid job—instead of blissfully unemployed—I would totally buy the shit out of that typewriter.

@Yesyes: Agreed on the finale, which might be my favorite episode of the entire series. Season 3 is like a massive game of Mouse Trap: it spends twelve episodes slowly and painstakingly laying the groundwork for that final chapter, and when the payoff finally comes, it's dazzling.

I'm not saying it's the best idea I've ever had, but given my current schedule, it really is a choice between doing it this way and not watching the series at all.

@Lone: I just finished the third season on Blu-Ray. Everything you've heard is true.

By the way, after looking over some of the lists in these comments, I realized that I'd inexplicably never seen "Field Trip." (I was in college at the time, so that's my excuse.)

In Rainbows is so good that when Twilight played "15 Step" over its closing credits, I was momentarily brainwashed into thinking that I'd enjoyed that movie.

How to Disappear Completely and Motion Picture Soundtrack would also be good choices for a lonely, lonely suicide. Thanks, Radiohead!

Now that I've finished the first season of Lost, my plan is to get some consensus on the best 15-20 episodes of the series (much as people have been doing with The X-Files above) and stick with those, along with the season premieres and finales, with episode summaries on Wikipedia filling in the rest. I haven't…

The funny thing about Armond White is that his style isn't far removed from that of David Thomson, who I think is the most interesting film writer in the history of the medium: both clearly enjoy holding unpopular opinions, both use movie reviews as an excuse to go off on Kinbote-level tangents and digressions, and…

Nice list. It seems that the phenomenon of TV staff writers with their own followings was greatly assisted by the emergence of online fandoms: it can be hard for a solitary viewer to remember enough names to identify the outstanding writers in the run of a long series, but it's much easier for a community. (It reminds…

Agreed about Swartzwelder. You could argue for days over whether he's the best writer The Simpsons ever produced—a strong case could also be made for Jon Vitti, the team of Oakley and Weinstein, and others—but his voice was so distinctive that I remember being very pleased whenever his name appeared in the credits.…

My aversion to Shiban probably stems from the fact that his first credited teleplay, "The Walk," was awful, and it aired at the exact moment when I was making more of an effort to link writers to particular episodes. He probably got better with time, but my sense of him as a writer never quite recovered from that…

The DVD commentary track for the original version of "Some Enchanted Evening" is hilarious. It's basically just the producers groaning for ten minutes, followed by James L. Brooks abruptly leaving the room.

His Millennium stuff is definitely worth seeking out. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense," which was Morgan's directorial debut, is one of the densest and craziest episodes of television ever produced. I wasn't quite sure what to think of it at first, since the tone is completely off the wall, but I've since come to…

"Teso Dos Bichos" is pretty bad, but it mostly suffers by comparison by what came immediately before and after: other episodes in that four-month period include "War of the Coprophages," "Syzygy," "Piper Maru/Apocrypha," "Pusher," and "Jose Chung," an unparalleled run of awesomeness, so it's not surprising that "Teso…

None of which is to say, incidentally, that Morgan in a lighter mode isn't also worthwhile: in particular, "War of the Coprophages" and "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense," despite some dark moments, are basically just intricate, satirical larks, and they're great. Bottom line, I guess, is that Morgan isn't just one of…

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