Oh god, the speculations.

The problem is that instead of retelling this story from a female perspective, the author instead crowbarred Elizabeth Woodville into events that were beyond influence, ignoring other women actors who were key to these - and often aggressively demonising said women (see: Anjou, Marguerite of) in order to make her…

Bang on the nose.

The series peaks in the middle, when there's so many machinations going on that the charisma void that is Elizabeth making lovey-dovey eyes at the King is mercifully shelved in favour of the infinitely more interesting supporting cast.

It's the author's usual trick of contorting history to make their (always female) protagonist more significant than they actually were, in this case by the ludicrous means of having them magically influence important events in history.

Au contraire!  In the second episode or so, Jacquetta wears a pointy princess hat, although lightly concealed by a pretty princess veil.

The worst thing is that the BBC clobbered together £25 million for a miniseries based in one of the most-interesting, least-covered periods in British history, assembled a fantastic cast to film it, and then squandered it all on that hack Philippa Gregory's latest excrement.

Why is watching a show to mock it any less justified than watching a show to like it?  Do you think people watch Megashark vs. Giant Octopus and Sharknado for their artistic merit?  They watch them because they're hilarious - and it goes ditto for The Newsroom.

And it was made even more compelling by Charlie calling her out on her violation of journalistic integrity.

My mother planned not to get married before she was 30, and not to have children until she was in her mids.

Michael Shoemaker does sound like the Asylum mockbuster counterpart of a Formula One biopic.

@avclub-62812d8eb06386505986efff8b5e43ac:disqus They don't even necessarily mean the same thing.
Verisimilitude is when you give something the appearance of truth - hence veri (truth) plus similitude (resemblance, likeness).  Realism, on the other hand, is representation without edification or abstraction.

He doesn't write characters; he writes a character.  Even back in West Wing, everyone seemed to be the part of the same Borgesque hive-mind.

The public policy in the West Wing was always awful, since no one seemed to grasp the concept of the US having regular elections (so you should probably start concentrating on those before you get booted out of office, Bartlett).

And the whole reason why that project (Mars One) is based on permanent settlement is that it's much, much easier to simply get to Mars and stay there than to try and get back again.

"I'm not sure what the review said, not going to read it."

Yeah, entirely necessary.  After all, what those Neanderthals who watch niche political shows on HBO are in desperate need of is a good civilising.

If the film industry democratised itself, then it would have to give the people what they want: more films of titanic mechas laying the pipe into each other while Hans Zimmer batters pot-pans together before a microphone.

I found the Spiderman remake as unnecessary as any one, but good god is Andrew Garfield superior to Maguire.

THANKS, OBA- ah, crap.