After hearing him I can buy that he was a giant, deluded idiot, which isn't unusual for a not-smart guy in his 20s. Serial has made me less sympathetic toward him, rather than more, though I'm meh on whether or not he actually deserves a long-term stretch in prison.

Don't ship Harry/Hermione at all in the books, but in the movies the chemistry between Radcliffe/Watson was making me hope they'd make some changes to the story.

I'll believe it when I am sitting in front of my TV watching it, and not a moment before (but if it does come to pass, I will be watching it with the pure joy of a cocksucker).

Same, mainly because Clemons was under-used enough that I really could just pretend he was alt-universe Lester Freamon. Alack, alas. RIP. I hope you are making your dollhouse furniture in a better place.

GoT is INSANELY lucky none of those kids was a dud. Even Bran is fine, he's out-classed by Sophie Turner and especially Maisie Williams. You could say the same about the Harry Potter movies.

Amazing hour of TV. When I was initially spoiled that they were eventually doing an episode that was almost entirely Kilgrave and Jessica together, I couldn't imagine how it would work. The answer is: wonderfully. Part of me wishes the season had ended the episode after this, as I don't think JJ ever tops what it…

It's a couple of really great performances (Elba and Ruth Wilson's Alice) elevating a kind of hacky show. Once I accepted it on that level I was fine with it.

I don't really think so. They still have a primarily American subscriber base, and you see abortion storylines on cable not so infrequently that they're a total surprise (Halt and Catch Fire dealt with it really well this year). I think it's primarily about advertisers (ie: money) and complaints from harpies like…

I don't know if you're a Mad Men fan, but it's what I was thinking of most in comparison to Jessica Jones. It always managed to be an incredibly sexy show to me with no full-frontal nudity. It wasn't nearly as explicit as Jessica Jones, but I think they're both good examples of how to do sex that's actually sexy,…

I thought the sex scenes in JJ were as graphic as anything you'd see on most cable channels.

I'm not surprised Netflix did it. Broadcast TV is terrified to engage with abortion (though Scandal recently did), but on cable it's less A Thing That Must Not Be Named, and that'd be even moreso for streaming.

Yeah, this was my assumption. Reva was tied up with Kilgrave in some way and Jessica wanted to know what it was. Luke was her only link to Reva, so she PI's him. The surveillance she did was pretty standard for her line of work. Whatever you feel about the ethics of what a private investigator does (largely follow…

It was so very clearly 10 hours of story in a 13-episode body.

I don't think it's really made to be binged, as much as all my friends seemed to be doing that. I watched over a couple of weeks and that was a better way to process it. Then again, I don't like just straight-up watching 13 hours of TV in a weekend.

"The Son" is a masterpiece.

And there are. They just make no money and get no exposure. There are albums tossed out into the ether on ITunes/Spotify that less than 100 people will ever buy or listen to, and tons of indie movies that play at festivals that will never, ever get wide release. It's not only possible, but probable, that the "best"…

Speaking seriously, I don't think it's so much about a lack of passion or even Kids Today Bein' Different as it is about a death of any kind of monoculture. Whether or not you liked Nirvana and/or Tupac and/or Britney Spears in the 1990s, you couldn't avoid them and had an opinion about them. Everybody was inundated…

It's easy to miss how good he is, since he's playing the World's Biggest Douchebag in Noah. Dominic West plays charming so well in stuff like The Hour and even The Wire. I find it funny that he's the pseudo "romantic" lead in this show and it's by far the least attractive I've ever found him.

"I feel like I came in at the end." Tony Soprano, 1999, voicing 90s ennui and not knowing how much worse it was going to get.

VanDerWerff's problem seems to have been that he had essentially no editor when he became an editor here. Or, at least, no one was giving him enough critical feedback. I've liked his stuff at Vox, and it's reminded me how much I enjoyed his early stuff here.