Comparing The Shield and The Newsroom shows you the difference between a show with a great story and less-great dialogue and a show with poor story and great dialogue.  Dialogue is a problem that can be worked around (and sometimes it's not a problem at all).  If you don't have the story, though, no amount of…

Darned reasonable interpretation, that.  Shane says in an earlier episode "I'm nothing like my father," so he wasn't an orphan, but there was clearly some bad shit there.  (In a later episode, he talks a little about his mother;

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I know, I'm on the road here and there are formatting issues.  How many people want me to continue posting comments/reviews in the Tuesday "What's On Tonight?" articles?  I'd like to keep the momentum going here. . .

"Everything that came after started with me. I'll set it straight."

Right there is why this is the greatest of all TV dramas.

Donald McCarthy:  well said.  That The Shield never feels the need to tell you that things are wrong is, for better or worse, so essential to its morality.  Corruption, homophobia, violence, all these things are simply part of the setting and they're not going to change, and the writers constructed a morality tale…

@avclub-6a468de7d95c61884c9375028e903849:disqus :  it's in Blood's a Rover, well worth reading.  It's Ellroy's deepest and most unexpected (and craziest) investigation of this kind of character.

I'm not sure I totally agree either, and I'm looking forward to that discussion.  I think The Shield's take on this question is much more nuanced and ambiguous than I made it sound.

I remembered that you said that and I apologize for not including it in the comment.  Good description, and it's interesting to how many of Vic's traits (like the need for control) come from the Neil McCauley side. (EDIT: it's like you took the de Niro and Pacino character and stuffed them into Tom Sizemore's body…

And they continue to get sillier.  At this point, either he's trolling us or he just wants to make sure he includes all the stuff he wrote in his Media Studies 113 essay.

In his most recent novel, Ellroy coined the term "rogue authoritarian" to describe this kind of character.  Given that in some ways Dudley Smith is the archetype, it makes sense that Ellroy would come up with that concise, effective description.

It could be the sequel to Black Dynamite, with CCH as an FBI agent—trying to bring Black Dynamite down!  But she teams up with him—to clean up the streets, awwwww yeah.  So it'd be like The Boondock Saints, except it wouldn't suck.

SPOILERS

“He can hit and miss.  You can’t miss once.”—Nate (Jon Voight) in Heat

Yes.  Or just "opening."

That's not what "cold open" means.

I'm in northern California, I could make SF!

The Thin Red Line.  Not only does it kick ass in all those categories, but it's unique in all those categories.  Malick has a very specific voice, and the actors (particularly Sean Penn and Jim Caveziel) find a style to go with it.  The cinematography (by John Toll) and the music (by Hans Zimmer) are spectacular, and,…

Do not, ever, underestimate the importance of rituals, celebrations, and anniversaries.  As you get older, be sure and make some of your own.