I’m so glad this is finally getting a release. It was my favorite film of Sundance 2020, a finely observed, real, and heartbreaking examination of family and community in small-town America much in the vein of Crawford’s previous, criminally overlooked series Rectify.

Basically, according to White, Jo Marie Payton, Reginald VelJohnson, and Telma Hopkins, who played Harriet, Carl, and Rachel, respectively, all thought they were the show’s stars.

“They ruined everything! Seriously, they ruined everything. They ruined the sound of children playing, and they ruined all of our living relatives, and they ruined people who wear sunglasses, like, even during the day. They ruined going to dinner, which they know we love. They ruined colors. They ruined pillows. They…

Though I’m still annoyed that they cast Bardem instead of Oscar Isaac as Desi Arnaz, and Kidman seems too old to play Lucy, the casting of Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance strikes me as a real good sign. There was a tendency when folks were wishcasting the film to pick someone who’d be perfect as Ethel Mertz (someone…

I assume it’s because they did another Eminem parody video a few weeks ago—the “Stan” riff with Santa—that was well received and actually kinda funny, so they couldn’t resist going back to the well again, to immediately diminished returns.

Wetterlund has actually been pretty careful to clarify what she is and isn’t alleging, as with this response when someone referred to her as a “survivor”:

Yeah, say what you will about the pitfalls of modern “woke culture,” but I for one am happy to live in a world where this kind of bigoted argument, which was once depressingly common (people used to call Ellen DeGeneres, one of the normiest women in showbiz, “Ellen Degenerate,” for Chrissakes!), has fallen so…

As I understand it, Carpenter got cast in Angel because Joss developed the show with fellow Buffy producer David Greenwalt, and Greenwalt was a big fan of Cordelia and pushed for her to be a part of the show. I always assumed it was more than a coincidence that as soon as Greenwalt left the show at the end of season…

Yeah, the whole character of Kendra didn’t do her any favors. The accent was weird, the writing of her intro episodes wasn’t great, and the styling of the character was kind of incoherent, where she was supposed to be this single-minded warrior in contrast to Buffy, but she was even more heavily made up and fashionably…

I’ve heard two different stories: First, that Joss wanted Bianca Lawson to play Cordelia, but she had to turn down the role because she was contracted to another series. Second, that Joss wanted a black actress to play Cordy, but the WB warned him that they were nervous about interracial relationships and Joss thought…

My issue has never been with the “sterility = monster” interpretation but the default understanding that it was an inappropriate and antifeminist thing for Whedon to write. Yes, “sterility = monster” is a bad and false equivalency, but since when is it inherently wrong for characters to make bad and false…

Yep, this. In fact, I’ve always argued that Joss’s work got markedly worse, both in its craftsmanship and its representation of women, when people stopped treating him as a skilled artisan who wrote well-constructed stories about the sort of women who interested him and started lauding him as this Genius Artiste…

Well, Gina’s character was Cordelia’s replacement, in the sense that the Jasmine arc replaced the “Cordelia goes evil” arc that the writer had originally planned for the end of season 4. But that was a change mandated by Charisma Carpenter’s pregnancy, not by her firing, which didn’t take place until the beginning of…

There’s some stuff in season 4, though, that doesn’t really make sense if you assume she was 100 percent possessed from”Spin the Bottle” on. For instance, Cordy has a vision at early in the season that motivates her actions, whereas if she’d been fully taken over, she would only need to pretend she’d had a vision.…

I actually prefer the Hannibal of the first movie to the one of the TV series, precisely because he’s not presented as preternaturally insightful. People tend to forget that when the Hannibal of Silence tries to intuit facts about Clarice, he’s wildly wrong as often as he’s right—about her being the daughter of a…

While I would never argue that an absurd Grand Guignol character like Buffalo Bill was the representative of anything real, I don’t think it’s improbable that somewhere in the world there has been a psychotic murderer who was motivated at least in part by gender dysphoria. (The potential example I thought of was…

Or, potentially, that it was based on an existing rule that the production was loosey-goosey about, but then something happened and they were like, “Oh shit, we better not let Joss break that rule anymore.”

I guess my assumption is that the latitude is probably related less to the severity of the abuse and more to the fact that Trachtenberg’s age would’ve mandated certain safeguards that wouldn’t have been there for the adult actors. (It also probably didn’t hurt that she was very close to SMG, one of the few people who…

Wait, how is she saying that? I would assume that the same kind of emotional abuse detailed by Charisma Carpenter, if directed at a very young teen actor, would provoke a “Don’t let him be alone with her” response from other people in authority—whereas I would hope that actual physical abuse would provoke a “Fire him…