The worst part? He's a Democrat. (Or at least was—he ran as an independent in the mayoral election.) It's so demoralizing that this fuckery isn't even limited to conservatives.

The split in this series made sense in theory—there are thematic, tonal, setting- and plot-related differences between the two halves of the story—but I'm not sure the way they actually split it made sense.

Yeah, the ending is only depressing when you consider all the possible endings the story could have had, regardless of plausibility. Given the events that lead up to it, it's the happiest ending that is reasonably plausible.

Yeah, there are a bunch of really interesting, gutsy authorial decisions that Collins made in the second half of that book that undermine that traditional hero narrative. I don't know that they all work, necessarily, but I'm glad Collins tried them anyway. It makes for good discussion, at least.

Yeah, and in these books it at least makes sense. The narrator is starving, and she's being ushered into this world of insane excess and waste. She would take that much notice of the food.

There is a huge part of the series that's all about deconstructing the traditional literary/cinematic rebel-heroes-take-on-the-vastly-more-powerful-tyrants-and-usher-in-a-glorious-new-era trope, and how Katniss is an extremely reluctant hero (if in fact you qualify her as a hero at all). A lot of that late-book stuff…

Every interview I've read with him makes me hate him a little bit more. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Not the OP, but I would argue that Fukunaga and McConaughey did manage to do great things with writing that otherwise could have done over very badly—McConaughey via his delivery and acting job and Fukunaga atmospherically. There are a lot of things in season one that could have fallen flat with less talented actors…

I haven't seen season 2 yet, but just based off of reading a couple of interviews with Pizzolatto, I'm now convinced that 90 percent of what was good about season one was due to Cary Fukunaga and the two lead actors. Pizzolatto is a pretentious, self-absorbed idiot with no self-awareness; he just got massively lucky…

I think the problem is that that one man is Nic Pizzolatto, though.

I think the revenue generated by the show outweighs all cost, not including the fame and hype.

Yeah, it feels like there's still too much story left to be done in seven seasons, but I don't see HBO trying to shell out for ten after what will almost definitely be a huge jump in cast pay after seven (which is all they're currently contracted for, right?). Eight sounds about right.

Authors don't have the bargaining power that actors do. There are a hundred other books out there that'll make good movies. If you don't take what they're offering—unless your book is an insane smash hit—they're probably going to just move on, not negotiate with you.

Yeah, given that it's Sheen, I find that by far the most plausible version of events. He's always been a dick; that's not going to suddenly change. I hope he gets taken to task for every partner he didn't disclose his status to.

I watched some episodes while it was on and revisited a few more on YouTube a couple years back. It wasn't very good, but that was probably more due to network meddling than Cho herself. They forced it into a very typical family sitcom box, which didn't work, and pushed the cast into playing up a lot of stereotypes.…

According to her she's been tested regularly (including within the last week) and all those tests have come back negative.

Amongst people in Hollywood? Nah. Amongst the middle Americans who were responsible for Two and a Half Men's popularity? Absolutely.

The Enquirer was going to break the story in a week or two, so he had no opportunity to hide it anymore. If they hadn't planned on doing that, I have no doubt he'd still be hiding it.

I think it just benefited from perfect timing, coming out right at the time that Hunger Games fans were desperate to get more of the same, and Divergent was one of the closest things out there. But yeah, the writing is mediocre in the first book and just goes downhill from there. I feel bad saying this, because…

It irrationally bugs me that the house faction names in this series are three nouns and two adjectives. Where is the symmetry, dammit?