"We finally found a way to make paintball cool again!" is possibly the most cringe-inducing line I've ever heard in a TV show, and that's counting things like Peep Show that are *trying* to make me uncomfortable.

I'm just disappointed to see that touring with GY!BE and Explosions didn't mean both of them at once… NIN is fine and all, but I'd be more excited by the two of them together than by NIN paired with either, honestly.

Well, if no one else wanted to do it, I think the question just becomes whether it needed to be reviewed at all. I mean, personally I say 'sure', as I enjoy a good F review and I don't really care whether the AV Club is being 'fair' to the 'garbage reality show' genre.

I once came close to qualifying for the National bee (2nd place in a regional bee), but was put out on 'whodunit', which I spelled 'whodunnit'. Or maybe it was 'whodunnit', which I spelled 'whodunit'.

I imagine there's a sort of positive feedback loop at play here. Kids are increasingly prepared every year, so the words have to be made harder (or the Bee would never end), so kids have to be increasingly prepared, so…

He isn't a producer for very long. A disproportionate chunk of the show's action happens in the last couple months before Cinco.

What 'constant references' are you talking about? There's one brief scene with four of the show's actors making cameos. They have silly nametags. That's it, as far as I can recall.

I seem to be alone in this opinion, but I honestly wasn't impressed — yes, she has all the mannerisms, but they're all grossly exaggerated. (Erik calls it a 'caricature' above, which I think is a good term, though maybe he doesn't mean it in the pejorative sense that I'd want to apply.) I actually liked Seth Rogen as…

Michael moves in with George Michael in the fall of his senior year, is there for ~6 months, and is voted out in the spring, no more than a month or so before Cinco de Cuatro. (Can't be much earlier since the April-September issue of Altitude is coming out.)

In the interest of balance, let me say that Will Arnett is certainly aging well.

I think it's still in progress, but there's a mostly-completed timeline of the broad strokes here: http://remarked.co/arrested…

I think it also makes perfect sense for Michael to be more oblivious than usual in this episode, since there's no way anyone could convince themselves moving into their son's dorm room in the first place was okay without some heavy duty denial.

Oh, absolutely. I don't mean to say it's invalid to criticize ambitious projects. My point has more to do with how we're measuring "success". I believe it should be measured against what the show is trying to do or be. (And I really think that's the metric TVDW applies in most of his reviews of most things.) And from…

That's an interesting point, and something I hadn't really thought of. Somehow it doesn't seem quite right to me, though. I don't think I can subscribe to the idea that a show is bound by the decisions it made in its earliest seasons — even in cases where there *isn't* a 7 year gap. When I talk about engaging with a…

You're probably right that 'concern' is the wrong word, and I absolutely agree that it shouldn't be used as a reason to 'dismiss' anything. (I think I said as much in my comment — that I didn't think it invalidated the review.) Even if TVDW did have a personal hatred for Netflix, that would only translate…

"Why would a television critic, whose job it is to analyze and respond to changes in television culture, be angry about shifting definitions of the concept of television? Netflix's moves into original content—along with initiatives like Amazon's viewer-driven pilot process—are incredibly exciting to television…

I think it's deeper than that. A lot of the criticism seems to come from comparisons not just to AD but to traditional broadcast TV in general. The lack of a strong central narrative, the length of episodes/joke timing, the move into darker territory… I won't mention the one-character-at-a-time thing since there are…

I've seen a lot of people be down on the first few episodes. I think that consensus is going to reverse, or at least soften, once more people get into repeat viewings. Once you've adjusted to the different pace, got some sense of the story, and accepted that Michael really wasn't all that functional in the original…

I think it's legitimate to be uncomfortable with the idea of a story as manipulation, whether or not the story is well told.

I swore never to read again after 'To Kill a Mockingbird' gave me no useful advice on killing mockingbirds. It did teach me not to judge a man based on the color of his skin, but what good does that do me?