It helped that the person he slurred was a paparazzi dickwad. It was clearly a terrible go-to insult, but it was a go-to insult, not any kind of active attempt to hate on gay people.

I don't get the distaste for 4:3, at least for shows actually shot in that aspect ratio. For something like this, it's not a sign of cropping or of inferior picture. That's how the show was meant to look. I was baffled by how allergic some viewers are to 4:3 when news of 'The Wire HD' was coming out, and in a case…

Even on a list that doesn't cover the major hard news of the year, this just reminds me how down 2014 was. Ebola, Russia, ISIS, police shootings and racial unrest, disappearing airplanes…this list was shorter when I started and then just kept going, and could keep on and on for several more terrible news briefs, but…

The NewsHour on PBS does what I consider a very decent job, and I watch it nightly. If other people don't, that's their problem. It exists, and does what this show claimed to aspire to far better than NewsNight was ever shown to.

I'd love to read "hindsight is 20/20" "Lost" reviews. Particularly of the final season.

"The End" is frustrating as hell for me, but I don't think in and of itself it's a bad three-plus hours of TV. Parts of it affected me a lot in exactly the way the writers seemed to want. I'll also concede it was given an impossible jobl, as there's no way anything could have tied up "Lost" in a way that satisfied…

I mainly wanted to say I've really enjoyed these reviews, and the excuse to revisit what remains - despite its many flaws and dead-ends - one of my favorite TV shows of all time.

That letter touches on what drives me nuts about this. A lot of the language around it seems to want to reduce the variety that can and should exist in what it means to be male or female. I'm a woman. I hate to wear skirts because I find them uncomfortable and often inconvenient, not because I have deep gender…

Same. I've never met anyone in actual life who wanted to be an 'alternative' pronoun, outside a trans person being correctly identified as he or she.

I quit the show long ago (the school shooting - not so much the thing itself but what a non-event it became in the larger landscape of the narrative), but I've still followed the reviews. Always enjoy your work, Zack. Looking forward to your liberation and coverage of something with fewer 8+-minute musical montages.

The only show that made me go "WHAT!?" is 'New Girl' (which I don't think has bounced back as much as some would like to claim and I don't think was strong enough to stand up to the murderer's row of TV this year), and the reviewers here have always had more affection for it than I can drum up, so fair enough. Solid…

The leads are two white dudes, which always makes me meh on that as an explanation. I'm sure it broadens the appeal, but I feel like there is some intangible thing about that show that is totally awesome for foreign audiences that we just don't see.

The piece focuses on new shows.

Supposedly, "Hawaii Five-O" is INSANELY successful internationally. For reasons I can't entirely fathom, but people outside the US love it, so CBS will happily keep making episodes. It's not a show that bothers me (I'll take light, fun cop procedural over 'dour, exploitative procedural' any day), so I wish everyone…

Eh, maybe. I never feel like the movie itself operates on enough of a plot and character level to be anything other than a charming technical artifact. I watched it when I was a kid, and even then it didn't feel like a story in the same way other movies of its ilk did. I definitely didn't want to BE Snow White…

"Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty" aren't really classic 'princess movie' cases to me, and I'm puzzled when people try to cite them as such (not that I see princess movies as huge societal evils, but even within that particular paradigm I've always seen them as pretty different animals).

I'm not a S6 apologist (didn't care for it! I understand what it was going for, fair enough, still don't think it pulled it off), but I never understood the hate-on for Noxon. She did a lot of very good writing on "Buffy," in addition to episodes I didn't like. She's plainly talented, and I hold her far less…

"And Then There Were None" was the first Christie book I read (also in middle school). It raised my expectations for the rest of her stuff (which is deservedly criticized for being middling as mysteries go), but it remains one of my favorite books. It's a lot of fun to reread, because once you know the admittedly…

The new "Dragon Age" isn't an option to vote for, for some reason in the Games category.

Either UCLA or 'Stand-In That's Obviously UCLA But We Can't Use Any Trademarks.' Will and Carlton were clearly going to a major California state university, at any rate. Though I think there might've been an 'arc' of sorts about Carlton not getting into Princeton and then flailing for awhile because he hadn't…