You're going to have to have a pretty liberal definition of "sacrifice, contribute, and produce"- not to mention "this country"!- to fit LDV into there.

Well, that pretty much reads any creative-type out of the will.

I mean, if the book were about "novels for television", than B5 is just about the least egregious ommission…Lonesome Dove, Roots…

That doesn't mean that the book is "about" "novels for television" anymore than "Deadwood" is about curse words.

Well, that is why I called his book a "starting point".

That's pretty much Sepinwall's argument in the book; he's too polite to point out that 24 often sucked.

I hope you're right, I'm just afraid that the appeal of the show to some people is time period fetishization (as opposed to me where it's coyly-stated-but-omnipresent theme fetishization).

There's a pretty good argument that the series in Sepinwall's book (Oz, Sopranos, Deadwood, Wire, The Shield, Lost, Buffy, 24, BSG, FNL, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad) are a good starting point for this discussion, though I would immediately take out Lost, 24, and BSG.

I think, Mad Men will fade (I don't hope for that, it might be my second favorite). Seems like it's already suffered a zeitgeist-falloff that the others never really did (though part of that might have been because The Wire never actually made it into the zeitgeist).

I feel like there was a lot of hasty and inorganic (for The Wire, at least) table-setting to get the characters where they needed to be for S5, but agree that they all pretty much ended in the "right" spot.

Yup.

I don't think those things were any less dominant in the genre in 2001, though.

Yeah, Leo is the right answer from WW, if only for the "guy falls down a hole" speech.

I didn't watch the video, 'cause jesus, some kid with pre-pubescent beard and a flat-brimmed Phillies hat doing nothing more than singing a popular song in silly voices sounds completely insufferable. They're not even HIS silly voices! He's just taking two things two other people did, putting them together, and asking…

"strengthening the sci-fi bona fides of various projects simply by reminding audiences of the Alien series"

All I took out of this was that OF COURSE the liberal elitest show served LOBSTER.

Yeah. Non-Sorkin writers just never "got" the Sorkin characters besides Josh.

I have a tough time arguing it, though, and I love West Wing.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I feel like I would have enjoyed this show a lot more on another network. There's something about CBS- maybe a "house" cinematography style, or network notes on scripts, or some kind of communication to the actors?- that just seemed to take the teeth out of a lot of the jokes.…

"And it's not implausible to think of a scenario where, if a particular set of rules was released before a vote, there could be a groundswell of public opposition that could alter the voting."