This has some pretty big implications for sitcom plots too.

Angela Bassett was my favorite part of that episode. As you point out, landing her seemed kind of huge (I don’t know anything about the mechanics of getting an actual movie star on a show that’s so deliberately small in scope, but it seems like a big deal) and it was such a generous performance.

Being in eleven different bands is Nashville as fuck. Which makes their openers also worth noting: both Thelma and the Sleaze and Music Band (first two and last three dates of the mini-tour, respectively) are extremely fun and good.

I know a pair of 40 year olds that have been playing out their entire separation, reconciliation, half-finished divorce, re-reconciliation, and concluding divorce on facebook for the past two or three years. They’ve got kids and good jobs and advanced degrees and all that other very adult stuff. They’re just a pair of…

She may not have known. My wife and I had some blinds that seemed perfectly adequate (they were made of cool, thin wood slats) and used them on a windows facing the courtyard and the apartment across our U-shaped building. We were on the second floor then so really never got a clear understanding of how easy they were…

Yeah, this would have been a good opportunity for our author to resist the impulse to hot-take something nice. Brenda Martinez is relentlessly gracious and generous with fans and media and gave an answer that is perfectly in tune with that reputation even moments (I’m assuming this is when she was asked) after a…

This gives me opinions about the three hours of VIRTUS training I had to sit through when I volunteered at a Catholic school.

The workout scheme doesn’t have to have a cult-y vibe for this story to be really believable. I started doing fly wheel (it appeals to the part of me that’s unpleasant and competitive but leaves me alone so nobody else has to deal with it) recently and realized after suddenly coming unclipped from the pedals once that…

This record is so good. Like if X-Ray Spex had been ambitious enough to actually want a career. They’re really fun live too. I saw them like a year and a half ago with Protomartyr and the contrast in style was deeply entertaining.

I was caught in the traffic of this thing for a couple minutes on my way home from work yesterday. It drastically improved my mood to realize what was going on, since I initially thought it was a weird, evening motorcade obstruction out in the suburbs. In any case - good work, queer dance partiers on the trenchant and…

I saw it last night and thought it was completely wonderful. My wife agreed. So that’s two recommendations from complete strangers.

Did Nic Pizzolatto do something besides disappoint people with the second season of “True Detective?” And did he actually get away with that?

Also, I liked S2.

This was well put, and important to say. She’s probably not going to get credit for putting on some kind of debate master class because her opponent is such an absurd idiot that the whole situation might be too weird to be instructive. But it’s great to see the very careful way she played him articulated like this.…

I wonder how weirdly this conversation would have taken off if he’d gone fully off the rails (instead of the usual clumsy excuses) and made it purely aesthetic, like that he treats actors as wallpaper. Because he doesn’t just seem to cast white actors as an ethnicity. He casts people who look like 8x11" plain copy…

Yeah. I saw the screenshots below. It’s their space, so I certainly can’t argue with how they want it presented. I guess where I end up is that there’s an explanation for the sign issue that I would have understood - that since the show (in my limited exposure to it) parodies progressive politics drifting toward the…

Is it possible that keeping a BLM sign up would have implicitly made it a subject of mockery? I don’t need to bend over backwards to be charitable to the production of Portlandia (which I’ve seen, like, twice), but my first thought was that keeping BLM outside the irony splatter zone might have been a decent idea.