Outside of hating what it says about our culture, when Sesame Street goes to HBO, I sort of hope they have him do a sketch with the Count using that voice—like the Count encounters the first human who talks like him and can't fathom it or something.

The second episode's tone makes me think the show takes itself seriously, so I think we're watching a show that is bad and not a deliberate exercise in camp.

If the end of the show is not some version of a season-long adaptation of the novel, that's just a wasted opportunity.

A lot of her recent work in short stories is deeply fucked up and weird, which I like.

Aw. The hyper-sensitive and needlessly rude poster. Such a cute type.

They just halted production on Westworld for some reason.

I haven't seen the first two shows but given the direction both of the latter two took after their respective first seasons, I'm going to have to ask you about your definition of 'great.'

HBO also has noticeable programming challenges on the hour-long side these days. I think it's part of why they seem to finally be moving forward with bringing back the mid-oughts shows they killed when their CEO went nuts and beat that hooker with the Deadwood movie. Not only will it satisfy a long-delayed promise…

To be fair, Showtime's reputation is not one of airing dumb shows that think they are high-brow. (That's more or less FX's reputation.) Their reputation is that they take a show with a smart premise, pressure the writers to burn through all the story at the front-end of the show to keep subscribers riveted for the…

Giamatti's dialogue during the "showdown" with his father and friends is both way too on the nose for the scene and insulting to the intelligence of the audience. According to the show, these guys slap each other on the wrist all the time because they're friends and family NOT because we live in a late-stage…

Season 3 is what convinced me to stop watching the show. Particularly the private prison industry subplot. That story is where a discerning viewer goes from 'perhaps these are just the growing pains of a show trying to dramatize the prison experience in a way that works for a comedy' to 'oh, the writing staff is…

I'd put money on August. They seem to like using the common birthdate of the cast as a marketing gimmick.

I just think the guy is overrated as an actor. He basically has three modes: 1) Scowling and whispering in an attempt to portray "intense"—basically he gives the kind of performances Get Shorty makes the butt of its Danny Devito-related jokes. 2) Screaming. 3) Laughing like an idiot.

This has a ton of actors I like but it is kind of horribly written and also—I strongly suspect—its existence is why Milch's The Money wasn't taken to series.

No. Outside of what others have said, the Punisher is basically the rational Mysterious Stranger/Man with No Name archetype from Westerns transposed to a modern urban setting. Those guys never die.

This is more or less the premise of every Luc Besson English language production outside of The Fifth Element—but even in those it's more a case of "Every white person on Earth except for this one strange woman/prostitute/little girl is Evil, Greed, and Corruption Incarnate and has an irrational interest in picking…

I sort of trust this writing team to pull it off. You're basically describing a less Aspergers-afflicted version of their characterization of Kingpin.

Carrey has turned into a kind of weird unwitting tool for evil. If you told me when I was in third grade that the guy who split his time between making being a burn victim look funny and literally talking out his ass would be leading the charge to bring back previously eradicated childhood diseases on behalf of a…

What you can see is about the same scale as your larger sculpture installations in a municipal park in North America—and in bad shape due to environmental factors and the fact that before it was roped off lot jerks thought carving pieces of it off for souvenirs was a great idea.

We walked around it. When actually standing outside at the rope at the points closest to the site, I found it to be kind of a compromise between what the tourism boards present in commercials and what the Cambridge RAs were saying, i.e. definitely not what you're expecting—so checking expectations was a good thing—but…