The short version is, I don’t disagree with your assessment of the factors of why Roy might be down, or feeling stuck, or anything anyone has described him as this season. What the problem is is that the season isn’t playing out through his actions like he feels that way; it isn’t showing us that he feels that way.…

Nailed it, especially about Game of Thrones-- it was so incredibly obvious the writers were done even trying.

It’s funny that I feel like my opinion on the Seinfeld finale has trended to the opposite of the consensus: I liked it when it first aired and everyone was bitching about it; but with time, as more people have come around to it, I find it makes less and less sense. The characters are selfish and self-absorbed; they’re…

Grant talking him out of taking Suzanne up on it was so cruel and brutal, haha. But it was what came after that that really got me. Forrest is really now alone and isolated forever, in a mental prison of his own making, all because he followed this stupid idea of his all the way through.

That reminds me, we’ll get Raylan’s (and Timothy Olyphant’s) actual daughter quite soon. Justified: City Primeval, July 18, baby!

Oh, forgot to reply to your last part. I never watched LOST— when it premiered I didn’t have much opportunity to watch TV, and by the time I did, I’d heard too many complaints about it to give it a real shot. Didn’t watch the HBO Watchmen either (or the movie, come to think of it), but the biggest criticism I heard…

Well, regarding The Shield, one thing about the network-ness of it that I think actually helps is that, coming from a network TV background (as did a lot of showrunners from the initial prestige TV era), Shawn Ryan understood how to structure individual episodes to make them satisfying, rather than as one chapter in an…

Even there, what I appreciated about The Shield is that it’s not a scene that exists purely for shock value. It’s part of the narrative in both directions. It’s set up by Vic jamming the bong in the criminal’s mouth a few scenes prior, and it has huge consequences for Aceveda-- in his home life, in his own psychology…

The really effective one for me was Joe and Gerry watching the TV news report in the season 1 finale. Joe loves his grandkids and his daughters, but he can’t stand his son-in-law, so it was really telling to see him set that aside at a moment where it really mattered and the stakes were too high for petty sniping.

Love that moment where she just pushes Boon’s gun away from his hand with her foot and watches him as he goes out.

Heh, I have plenty of criticisms of Better Call Saul, too— one of the bigger gaps for me between what a show was at its best and what it could have been, vs. what it actually ended up being; and a pretty big gap between the critical consensus about the show and what I thought of it in the end, too. (Really, I thought…

Exactly! My favorite moments of BoJack were those glimmers of hope and optimism underneath it all, that BoJack could change. (The final scene of season 2 might be the best thing the show ever did for this exact reason.)

I gotta admit I never actually watched the final season— I dunno why; lots of TV out there, maybe I just lost interest after Richard Harrow died. I was thinking about it a few months ago, though, and your comments are making me think I need to go back and do it when I have the time.

That’s something I feel like I’ve noticed increasingly with critics and Prestige TV, for both comedy and drama— comedies are prestigious to the extent they’re not comedies; dramas are prestigious to the extent they’re not dramas. By that I mean: Every well-regarded comedy isn’t well-regarded for how funny it is; it’s…

Hmm. I’m a little mixed on this, thinking about another Prestigious show I’ve been watching that was great in its first season but hasn’t been quite as good since, Ted Lasso. That show definitely hasn’t stuck to half-hour episodes and often the result is overlong and bloated— and somehow still leaves out crucial…

I agree! For some reason this show has chosen to have a lot of the important plot or character moments just happen off-screen this season. (As I was joking with someone else yesterday, "Prestige TV is like jazz: The plot points are in the scenes you *don’t* see.")

I was joking with another friend today about a different show that similarly skipped over what could’ve been some of its best and most satisfying moments that “Prestige TV is like jazz: The plot beats are in the scenes you *don’t* see." Your comment makes me think it could apply to this season of this show as well.

Review’s ending was incredible-- what a perfectly executed twist. I never saw it coming and it was perfectly fitting.

“Granite State” would’ve been a great finale, too. The final cost of Walt’s actions: All alone, the world knows who he is, his family hates him, and all his work is for nothing, because all he has left is a barrel of money and a guy he has to pay to hang out and play cards, who’s just waiting for him to die so he can…

Also, if you like to read other stuff about this, Grace Robertson’s article on Michael Schur’s worldview as expressed through his TV shows really elucidated a lot of this stuff for me. (Not to mention, it helped me realize the problems I have with The Good Place and his book on moral philosophy suffer from similar…