That’s basically it, though the stunt coordinator’s name was Jeff Pruitt. And I believe Sophia Crawford initially expected to stay on after her husband was fired, but eventually she too was let go.

Azhy Robertson, already an old pro at playing the son of divorcing parents

I wish Strong had been able to talk more about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is one of my favorite films of the past decade (and probably the most underappreciated of my favorites). Strong gives a standout performance even in a cast of absolute ringers; he plays Jim Prideaux as simultaneously a terrifying badass…

This episode spotlighted something that’s been bugging me all season, which is that I probably wouldn’t be so bothered by the sometimes overly splainy writing if the season weren’t based on the works of Henry James, which are psychologically fraught and sexually repressed and filled with characters that never say what…

Eh, Carnivàle was already dead to me by the time HBO killed it. The first season was breathtakingly good, but I absolutely hated season 2, which gave up on nuanced character work and period world-building to focus on its dorky, prescriptive “mythology.” Brother Justin was especially ill served, suddenly becoming a…

Yeah, I feel like season 3 gets kind of a bum rap. Smit’s character was probably the most interesting iteration of the “fellow sociopath who accepts Dexter for what he really is” concept the series relied on much too often. Instead of serving as just a convenient mirror for Dexter (or a blank get-out-of-hell-free card…

Which rape scene did they add “because they thought it was exciting”? They’re pretty clear that they framed the first Drogo/Dany encounter as nonconsensual because neither they nor the actors could believably get the characters there, which seems like the opposite of being cavalier about consent issues.

So . . . it’s the next season of American Crime Story, but he’s not doing it at FX, so he can’t use the name.

She’s really fantastic here as well, but in a weird way that’s part of why I didn’t love this movie as much as I hoped I would. It rests too often on melodrama and heavy-handed symbolism (the “metaphorical dead horse” mentioned in the review), when Coon can convey so much more in a silent twenty-second scene of her…

Is it accurate to refer to Montrose’s lover and the other ball participants as “trans women,” or is that imposing a modern understanding on a historical phenomenon that wasn’t quite so clear cut? I’m not an expert on ball culture, by any means, but my understanding is that for some participants it was more about expres…

What I don’t understand is why this is being presented as a guest column instead of a reported piece. It’s not a he-said-she-said encounter in some private hotel room or something; the parties are asserting a different series of verifiable or falsifiable facts. Shouldn’t Deadline assign a reporter to determine, for…

Probably my hottest Harry Potter take is that this was actually one of Gambon’s best scenes as Dumbledore, and a solid argument for why he was way, way better in the role than Richard Harris. Harris is the one who, despite being a legendary hellraiser in real life, took a character who needs to be outwardly a little…

Yep. In fact, one of the main focuses of “JMM” across everyone’s storyline is the idea that people think they’re doing things for straightforward external reasons either noble (“Justice Matters Most”) or venal (“Just Make Money”), but in reality they’re driven by messier elements of their more basic character (“James…

When I saw the headline my first thought was “That’s the guy I was telling you about.” Probably my favorite moment in all of The Leftovers.

Earlier this year, Rowling got in trouble for a tweet in which she called out the use of the term “people who menstruate”. She suggested that the correct word to use would be “women”, that the reluctance to use this word was driven by fear of being exclusionary toward trans women

I have no idea why you would think there’s any concordance between Christina and Tic. There’s absolutely nothing in that scene that would suggest Tic had any idea why Christina gave him the ring. Tic had no clue what it would do and was just a passive bystander.

Not sure I can bring myself to watch this, but Jesus, the cast is stacked. Some sound scarily accurate, like Peter Coyote as Robert Mueller and William Sadler as General Flynn, and some sound so crazy they’re kinda fascinating, like Joe Lo Truglio as Attorney General Jeffy Sesesh.

Wait, I misremembered his role in Ghost World. He was the comics store asshole, I wanna say?

When I saw the subject was Healy, the three roles I hoped they’d ask him about were the convenience store asshole in Ghost World, “Officer Daniels” in Compliance, and the pyramid scheme vampire in Angel. It’s funny that of all those, it’s the old Angel ep that made it in.

Netflix is such a juggernaut nowadays that it takes screw-ups like this to remind you that they’re new at this whole entertainment marketing game and don’t really know what the fuck they’re doing.