Plus, like a lot of comedies, 30 Rock was pretty weak when it was just starting out. But eventually, Studio 60 was buried under the weight of its own self-importance, and 30 Rock found its legs and became one of the most influential comedies of the last decade.

The fact that Studio 60 made Paulson - an actress who has never been less than completely magnetic in everything else I've seen her in, including really dodgy material such as certain American Horror Story seasons - seem annoying and tedious is surely one of its greatest sins, and an indication that there was probably…

What makes it worse is knowing that the real-life person Sorkin is basing the character on is Kristin Chenoweth, one of the funniest and most vivacious women in Hollywood. If you make an expy of them and the best you can come up with is a humorless scold like Harriet Hayes, you've done something really wrong.

It's not as if there haven't been a million books written about that show and how it functions. Or as if there aren't plenty of former castmembers who might be happy to talk to someone like Aaron Sorkin about their experiences.

Oh man, the very notion that people had their knives out for Studio 60… Look, you can say that about The Newsroom - by that point, the bloom was off the rose as far as Sorkin was concerned, and the very idea that he was going to teach the world how to do journalism was plainly ridiculous. But people - fans and…

Why is Dev Patel considered a supporting actor in Lion?

If that were true, I'd expect to have heard some hints about it by now. By this point before the premieres of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist there had been Q&As and interviews with the creators where they laid out their visions for the shows. Not to mention trailers that gave you a sense of what made the…

Well, it's not as if anyone was forcing Netflix or Marvel to make a fourth Defenders show.

You've just described about a million characters, none of whom are getting TV series, and most of whom have a more obvious, more obviously appealing hook than Iron Fist.

I'd say Kilgrave is the only villain who is both genuinely interesting in his own right, and used well by the show to drive the story and reveal interesting things about the other characters. Kingpin and Black Mariah hit the first criteria, but not the second.

On the one hand, I suspect there might be more life in the Netflix shows after Defenders happens, because then the individual shows might be able to go back to being about their own stories rather than setting up the team-up (seriously, can you think of a single reason for Iron Fist's existence except that he feeds…

I suspect it's some variation of "it sounds cool". In much the same way that Arrival takes the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I don't think anyone believes in) to its (il)logical conclusion.

I'd be shocked if it wasn't. I mean, Obama's foreign policy was pretty isolationist, for reasons both good and bad, and for that reason it got pretty easy for world leaders to ignore the US (see strongarm tactics by Putin, the slide into tyranny in Turkey, probably other examples in Asia I'm less familiar with). …

Also, unlike The Mentalist, Elementary doesn't have an overarching story that needs an ending. It would have been cruel to Mentalist fans to leave them hanging, but for Elementary, a victory lap would just be a way to spend more time with the characters on a procedural show that has been coasting for a while.

Obviously, I am dropping This is Us. I'm replacing it with Pitch, which makes me sad because these are two quite similar shows and the wrong one has been a success, but there you go.

I think I'd be fine with a Ginny/Mike pairing happening in season 3 or 4, but I don't like the show pulling the trigger on it so soon. Mainly because they're clearly not going to become a couple right away, so realistically what we're looking at is a couple of season of will-they-won't-they, stupid misunderstandings,…

I think her Jimmy Fallon interview suggests that she has a pretty fair level of feminist awareness, at least where her own field is concerned, and is able to articulate it well.

And the thing is, Little Women, despite being based on Alcott's life, is fiction, which has never been Rory's interest. A non-fiction book about Lorelai and Rory's life actually sounds pretty boring.

I think the implication is meant to be that Jane is being extremely defensive of faith in general because she doesn't want to face up to how much her own faith has been shaken. Hence her wanting to bring Mateo to church, getting annoyed at Michael's suggestion that nuns are shady, and that moment. But I agree that…

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too. In principle, I like the idea of Rafael finding out that he isn't actually a part of his family's messed-up drama and potentially reinventing himself. But given this show's history, it just seems unlikely that that's going to happen. We've been down this road with him,…