Fair enough, though I don’t know that my response would be that different. Yes, season 2 is self-consciously following the typical beats of a sequel (heck, the Duffers even insisted on renaming the series Stranger Things 2 to drive that point home!), but it’s in service of interesting ideas and character work and the…

It’s almost as if a show about a terrifying parallel reality intruding into ours is deliberately using mirrored characters as a thematically appropriate narrative device.

Here’s the Huffington Post story about two of the other accusations from last week: www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/al-franken-two-more-women-groping_us_5a15a455e4b09650540ec295

“We’re not entirely sure what to think yet about the theology of the upcoming show, which will likely depict the war between heaven and hell as little more than a turf war over a prize (Earth) that neither side really cares all that much about.”

The press has vetted the Franken allegations the same way they’ve vetted any of the other recent allegations of harassment and abuse—by interviewing friends and acquaintances who say the accuser told them about the incident years ago. In one case, the accuser’s confidants included one of the Huffington Post reporters…

There are two types of contract for a series regular: one pays the actor for every episode regardless of whether he/she is featured, and the other pays only when the actor makes an appearance in a particular episode. I don’t know of any way to determine which one is in effect based on screen credits or other public…

(shrug) I don’t see any particular reason to give the benefit of the doubt to a completely unknown showrunner whose only identifiable characteristic at this point is that he/she will be hired by the same FremantleMedia execs who just made the extremely stupid decision to part ways with Fuller and Green.

I think the trick is to claim that “current NBC News management was never made aware of any complaints about Matt Lauer’s conduct.” The current president of NBC News has only been in the position since February, so they may just be saying that they didn’t get any formal complaints in the past nine months.

I’ve only seen the first episode, but that was exactly my reaction: Rarely have I seen a show with such a fascinating premise that immediately starts pulling against that premise with all its might. I would be happy to watch a western about Jeff Daniels and Sam Waterston facing off on opposite sides of the law, but…

The Veritas guys probably do believe it. You can usually tell how much these creeps drink their own Kool-Aid by how clownishly incompetent they are. The ones who are cynically exploiting the idiocy of others are usually careful to keep their accusations vague and their worst assumptions plausibly deniable, so they…

M’eh, I tend to think the strategic brilliance of today’s GOP operatives is significantly overstated. It’s basically all just grievance politics and weaponized yelling, and it only works because their base are angry and desperate enough to believe complete shrieking nonsense.

So it was a secret operation to bring down Franken that was engineered by the diabolical Roger Stone—and promptly exposed by the imbecilic Roger Stone by tweeting about it ahead of time?

The only two times I can remember ever being ass-grabbed out of the blue were once in college, and one by a drunk woman at a bar, and in neither instance was I at all traumatized. But I feel like those are both hugely different circumstances from what Franken’s being accused of. In both his cases, he was an adult male …

As I recall, the book is kind of like that, too: There’s a core story that’s pretty coherent and compelling, and then embroidered around it is a lot of sort of episodic weirdness. The trailers haven’t shown much of the core story, but from the little glimpses they seem to be hewing close to the source material, and…

Has Kater Gordon said that Weiner went out of his way to destroy her career and blackball her? I’m honestly curious, because that would be hideous.

I’d argue that Mr. Incredible wasn’t right to summarily dismiss young Buddy’s abilities at the beginning of the film—and that this is exactly the point. Bob’s original sin is that he is overly enamored by his own specialness and insists on working alone; it’s what turns Buddy into a villain, and it’s what makes Bob…

Responding to my old comment with a very important update on the cordless phone: this evening I rewatched the finale of season 1, and I had forgotten that we do indeed witness the phone’s fate. After the demogorgon first attacks the teens in the Byers home, Nancy and Jonathan try to get Steve to leave before it comes…

It was most of the staff but not all of them; Lisa Albert stayed around for the next season and was a consulting producer for the remainder of the series, and Maria and André Jacquemetton were mainstays of the writers room for almost the entire run.

“But her description of Weiner as a showrunner rings true to what I already know about him”

As I mentioned over in the last Matt Weiner thread, Noxon’s “Pete Campbell would totally say that” argument is pretty dumb; I could just as easily point to some loathsome characters in her oeuvre who would say and do even more horrible shit. But her description of Weiner as a showrunner rings true to what I already…