I liked the show passably throughout- it was occasionally very good but never unwatchable. It all depended on who the guest star of the season was. Tim Minchin as "clearly not Noel Gallagher," palling around with Marilyn Mansion, was a highlight of the late period, and the song he wrote for the show, "So Long,"…

TRUE SHOWBIZ TALES #21: The show I am working on now is a song cycle (read: mostly plotless series of individual scenes and songs linked by a common theme) about mental health and neurodiversity, which I am co-writing with an autistic composer rising to prominence as a film orchestrator at the moment.

The campaign group I play with has a recurring character known as the Red Dragon. A nigh-invincible, nigh-inscrutable being, it is exactly what it sounds like: an enormous red dragon. The Dragon was born as part of a joke: DM does not like badgers, so when one of the players evoked a badger just to annoy him, DM…

Miley Cyrus and Gaga are probably tied with, if not surpassing, Madonna for the "pop star most frequently seen intentionally and graphically nude" award.

I'm guessing this will be much more like the Katy Perry/Madonna Super Bowls, but I wish it would be like the Prince Super Bowl. Gaga, as a performer, whiplashes back and forth between spectacle and intimacy, production versus chops.

Hamilton's tragic twist on father-son relationships has the only two people the complicated A. Ham ever loved unequivocally (his best friend/male lover first, his son second) both played by the same actor, and both end up dead, leading him to a series of little breakdowns.

I've heard the rumor repeatedly that the reason "Easy A" feels like "Mean Girls 2" is because it WAS created as "Mean Girls 2" and was released under a generic name; much like "High School Musical" was commissioned as "Grease 3: Grease Today."

Most grandparents would say they love their grandkids more than anything in the world. For Rick Sanchez, his grandkids are the only things he is capable of loving in the world.

Bill Watterson's infamous no-adaptations, no-licensing policy has kept Calvin and Hobbes resolutely tethered to the page; the only time Watterson ever wavered from this was when he allowed the creation of a Calvin and Hobbes musical, which he said he loved but put the kibosh on after a workshop so that it wouldn't…

There actually is a character in the Sharks with that name; Pepe's only line is the setup to a dick joke. Naturally, the whole cast started calling that character Peepee.

It's no Amazing Alexander. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats.

And Harambe will be incorporated into "The Lion King."

Well, if they opened it up to polling, we'd have had five Nickelback Super Bowls by now.

They made a life-size Simba one- I remember my company using the stuffed Simba puppet in "Putnam County Spelling Bee" for autistic savant Leaf Coneybear's communication aid. (It's usually just a finger puppet, but when they brought out Simba as an option from props, the director said "It's gotta be that.")

I went on a road trip to Cleveland a few years ago with a group of people who were all both music-theory nerds AND theatre nerds. When this happens, you get a weird version of a singalong where instead of pumping sing-along anthems, you put on something with a lot of intricate harmonies and see how well you can pick…

Is this a Kate Bush song?

They should make some "alternative offerings." I'd love a Leslie Jordan Séance and Exorcism tape.

Living tissue/Warm fur
Weird Science!

"Charlie Chaplin looks too much like Hitler and can be triggering to Jewish and LGBT students, so we're banning him."

Portlandia does seem like a parody of new liberalism, but created BY the people it parodies. We've seen a decent bit of libertarian comedy, but the only actually successful conservative comedy I've ever seen is "Brookyn Nine-Nine" and "Altar Boyz."