Definitely. There was something insulting about the producers suggesting, "This time the conflict is, like, super deep, because it's about Buffy confronting real-life issues instead of demons and stuff!" The show was always about confronting real-life issues, they were just usually represented allegorically by demons…

Yeeeah, except that the whole "we wanted a mundane Big Bad" thing was just a smoke screen to conceal the fact that Black Magic Willow was supposed to be the Big Bad for the whole season, but the writers chickened out at the last possible second and didn't have anything exciting prepared to take her place.

"I love the idea that the Bolton soldier would be too distracted by
Brienne's gender to avoid having his head cut off. Like, why would that
change the speed of the horse galloping towards you?"

Yep. It reminds me a lot of the show's version of Qarth — which also suffered from a lack of cultural detail and some really kludgy "Let's overthrow the government!" plotting. (If you're trying to open up your city to foreign trade, "Come to Qarth! We just killed our entire Chamber of Commerce!" is perhaps not the…

The reason I mention Cersei is because she's one of the characters book purists most often complain about on the show — how the "real" Cersei is a paranoid narcissist with no redeeming qualities, quite unlike Heady's portrayal of a deeply vulnerable woman with a singular devotion to her children. Considering Cersei is…

Say what? There are countless pieces of writing in this dimension that are dramatically successful despite the fact that they are not based on the work of GRRM. And the ASOIAF series is not such a delicately balanced piece of clockwork that the only possible dramatic choice in any given situation is exactly what GRRM…

"I told you so" not accepted. The Dorne storyline was not egregiously stupid because it deviated from the books; it was egregiously stupid because it depicted a character with no claim to power successfully overthrowing an entire ruling family by demonstrating a monopoly of force over a ten-square-foot area. It would…

I didn't catch on till embarrassingly later, either. But it's going to be much harder for the show to keep people in the dark, since they presumably will have to say the name out loud.

Yep, I think Previously has found a much better balance between snark and civility. Raging hate-fests seem rare, but you also can't get a warning for some weird infraction like "Taking the temperature of the boards" (e.g., saying something like "It looks like a lot of people are thinking X . . .").

Yeah, I did appreciate the depth he was able to mine from things most people would dismiss as mindless entertainment. But sometimes he'd just invent whole constellations of meaning for stuff that was actually dirt stupid. I still remember cringing when he described the positively dreadful Battlestar Galactica episode…

I've always been a little baffled by all the hand-wringing about how impossibly hard Terriers was to market. I mean, it's two guys solving crimes — how hard is it to explain the premise of 70 percent of all shows that exist?

Gooding has taken a lot of flack for not really capturing the public essence of OJ, but I do love this aspect of his performance — the way he can deliver lines like "AC! And he's darker than I am!" and "My hand is bigger than Bob's!" as if he thinks his listener is stupid not to have thought of it already, but…

That seems like reasonable dramatic license to me, considering that in real life the statue of the Confederate soldier holding a rife was located across the street at the old Forsyth County Courthouse, which still housed county offices until well into the 2000s (see http://www.wschronicle.com/… ). Per Google Maps, the…

But at this point that's sort of an outdated concept of the Internet made flesh, isn't it? The 2016 version of the character should probably be, like, a scrawny twentysomething with a Napoleon complex who calls everyone a "cuck."

Yeah, I've long assumed that Snyder screwed up Ozymandias in Watchmen because he didn't understand that the character was intended to be both monstrous and a completely pure-hearted superhero. But I'm starting think Snyder just doesn't believe that "pure-hearted superhero" is an authentic basis for a character. It…

I'm not quite as down on season 3 as you, but I definitely thought there was a significant decline in quality. Hannibal was a beautiful, audacious show from beginning to end, but at a certain point it stopped making any fucking sense at all. By the end, every character is implicated in like an eight-tiered "You knew…

No, I vaguely remember the photograph and being puzzled by it as well, but I was more thrown by (trying to keep it vague here) the uncle's final comments about his own experiences with "chicken fighting." I mean, I get what chicken fighting is supposed to represent for the current generation of young people in the…

I saw this at Sundance last year, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but I found the ending absolutely baffling. Without giving anything away, there's a revelation at the very end that seems to suggest some earlier family secret that echoes the current crisis, but I can't for the life of me figure out how the…

Ugh. I actually like Jack Black, but he would be both the obvious choice for the role and super wrong for the part. Arbuckle needs to be baby-faced but moody with an undercurrent of melancholy, whereas Black always plays guys who are scruffy but mild-mannered with an air of obliviousness.

Oh yeah, that's right, with Eric Stonestreet as Arbuckle. I haven't seen any updates in nearly five years, so it might be dead.