This is great news! HBO and Whedon are an exciting combination. I hope this comes to fruition, and look forward to discussing it somewhere else, since the AV Club has devolved into a paltry collection of insufferable complainers.

Not to worry: that ep looks not so bad by comparison, after they made the horrendous fourth season. (Of which the BEST part might have been Mycroft’s umbrella-sword-gun.)

Extras had weak bits, but much of it was at least as great as The Office, IMO. I think Extras largely flew under the radar in the U.S. (partly since some British guest stars like Les Dennis, Ross Kemp, Keith Chegwin aren’t really known here, though their scenes are brilliant), so I always try to recommend it.

Those last eps you mentioned are very tough, emotionally, but I don’t think I’d ever skip anything on a Sopranos re-watch. There’s just too much great stuff throughout, and my god, the acting performances from Gandolfini and Falco (and Imperioli) are just stellar.

“The shooters were described as two black males wearing hoodies”?!? What a typically racist thing to — ... oh wait, never mind.

Is it strange, though? (that they stay in business.) Are you from NY area like me, where we have good Italian food, so OG is awful by comparison? Because you don’t have to go far to enter the enormous bulk of America where cuisine is dominated by chain restaurants.

There ain’t no party like a Leslie Knope / Liz Lemon party!

So much for that old saying — “What happens in Poontang County, Taiwan stays in Poontang County, Taiwan.” 

That’s interesting - I didn’t know that teachers often use Frankenstein as a gateway to the great romantic poets. Percy Shelley wrote two of his earliest masterpieces (Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) on that same 1816 trip to Switzerland; they’re extraordinary poems from the mind of an inspired freethinker…

♫”It’s the Jorge’s getting horny song... The Jorge’s getting horny song...” ♫ 

Amazon Studios, which yesterday was “poised to pull out”

Such quaint times, the early-2000s. Yet another tantalizing perversion rendered humdrum by Pornhub & Chaturbate.

Oh look, an article about two celebrities I always liked WAIT WHAAAAT?!?

BIG BOTTOM
BIG BOTTOM
Talk about mud flaps
My gal’s got ‘em.
BIG BOTTOM

On my desk are some 19th/20th c. poets I’ve meant to get further into: Robert Bridges, George Meredith, Walter de la Mare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Léonie Adams... all wrote beautiful and compelling poetry. You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch (2016) is a fun read about great reference books through history, up through…

LONG MAY SHE REIGN

Salieri was highly regarded in his time, but almost nothing from his entire long career of composition, in any genre, remains in the repertoire today, because Mozart (and Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert) wrote music immensely greater and more satisfying.

You’re right that AD got plenty of time in 3 seasons to be great. I just mean that it was so strong (at its best) and unique, that cancellation felt like robbing it of more potentially awesome episodes. And, like Futurama before it, a resurrection 7 years later was never quite going to be the same.

Meanwhile the creators of Firefly and Better Off Ted and Freaks & Geeks and Party Down and Arrested Development are going “Why couldn’t we have been on the CW?!” (or earlier, the WB). Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is so very lucky... and often endearing and wacky and awesome! But insanely lucky.

If you’re visiting any of those shite subreddits — or using the godforsaken Reddit front page — then you’re doing it wrong. Might I recommend humorous diversions such as /r/CrappyDesign, or perhaps the delightfully uninhibited lovelies of /r/nsfwcosplay?