I got an extension on this nightmare of a project that I didn't manage to finish! (This is kind of a mixed bag since I pulled an all-nighter last night to work on it and really hoped I'd be just done by tonight, for better or for worse. But it keeps my hopes for a B alive, so I'll take it. And I'm still going to go…

I liked it! I mean, it's definitely not on par with Mockingbird in terms of quality, but it makes a really fascinating companion piece to it. I think it suffered mostly from sky-high expectations.

I loved the idea of a detective novel that wasn't a detective novel—I just couldn't get into the actual execution of it. I think even Ishiguro has admitted it wasn't his best, haha.

I don't think Coates' strength is in novel ideas (and I think he'd be the first to agree with this) so much as it is being a good enough writer to present old ideas in ways that make you think about them in ways you hadn't considered.

It's weird because Ishiguro's shtick is basically writing novels in completely different genres that are still very tonally similar—The Buried Giant is obviously fantasy and Never Let Me Go is essentially sci-fi, but he's also done detective novels (When We Were Orphans), historical fiction (The Remains of the Day), I…

I think the problem with doing that at this point is

Literally the only channels we need in my house are TCM and . . . whatever channels show the Premier League. And yet we get, like, 300 channels because that's the lowest tier that either of those are offered under.

I like it when Caroline Siede writes about musicals!

Maybe all the other albums were essential this year.

I used to be in an internet community with girls who were, on average, about five years younger than me, and I will never forget the moment when one of the girls claimed how much she loved "dad rock, like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, and Ryan Adams." The first two are legit, the third is stretching it (or at…

I checked his(?) profile and he's commented since then, so I think he's okay. (Or, you know, at least alive if not okay.) Hopefully he's turned a corner.

I'm gonna guess the A.V. Club used to have more money than it does. Print has gone under, online ad rates have dropped. The only way to survive is to do a fuck-ton of sponsored content or put your good stuff behind a paywall. A.V. Club doesn't have enough money to pay most of their employees a reasonable wage, so they…

NBC got the rights to The Music Man around the same time as Peter Pan and kind of implied it'd be their third musical, but then replaced it. I don't know if that means it'll be next year's choice or if they decided to skip it entirely. It's a great musical with great songs, but it pretty much succeeds or fails on the…

It was their strongest cast but their weakest musical. I really want to like The Wiz, but I just don't. I'd only seen the movie before this, and so was willing to give it a shot, but . . . meh.

BUT IPAs apparently produce a physical sensation similar to a marijuana high, so I'm gonna assume that something with 658 IBUs makes you feel super-stoned. That's gotta be the draw, right?

Also . . . the thing about these re-releases is that they're not really for you. (Generic you.) I bought 1 in 2000 because I was 16 and just starting to solidify the classics realm of my musical education, and that made it easy to feel like the Beatles portion of that education was reasonably covered. There are always…

This pretty much echoes my thoughts to the letter. They finally got the casting dynamic right—put a talented unknown in the lead and there'll be fewer haters tuning in solely to snark, then cast all the celebrities as supporting roles so people have a reason to stick with it. The Wiz is a good choice in that respect,…

She'll outlive all of us.

Absolutely.

That stuff is serving a purpose, though. When Frankenstein's hiding out behind that house, he's basically in the infant/toddler stage of his development where his family is his whole world. He latches on to them as "his" family because he doesn't have anything else—that's why he becomes so obsessed with them. And…