I thought the final-season Angel episode “Damage” did a great job of laying out why Angel/Angelus were so different while Spike/souledSpike were so alike: Angelus was into evil as an artform and labored over every detail of ever crime he perpetrated, while Spike was a thrill killer who didn’t think much about the…

Yeah- I think they would have mentioned if he did, it was a big thing that there was a second vampire with a soul.

The interesting thing about Xander’s gay panic is that it was meant as setup for a potential storyline in which Xander comes to terms with the fact that he’s gay. Joss wanted to do a coming-out storyline for one of his main characters, and it wasn’t until Seth Green left that he settled on doing it with Willow, so…

I thought part of the point of “The Prodigal” was that Liam’s father wasn’t actually that bad—that he said some hurtful things in the heat of frustration, but when it came down to it he actually cared about Liam and genuinely wanted what’s best for him. “I was never in your way, boy!”

Agreed re: Buffy and Faith. And Faith was coded as queer even beyond her relationship with Buffy; there’s that scene on Angel where Lilah lures her away from a bar under pretext of a hookup; there’s even a note in the episode script: “NOTE TO DIRECTOR AND ACTORS: Mind the lesbian subtext—keep it very ‘sub.’”

Whedon always insisted that the script for “The Girl in Question” called for Andrew to be greeted by a party of mixed-gender friends for his night on the town, but wires got crossed somehow in production and it ended up looking like Andy had a date with two hot Italian ladies.

Yeah, I don’t know that I found The Witch to be bone-chillingly scary, but I damn sure found it deeply impressive as a work of drama.

While performing dialogue written entirely in early modern English and making it sound both natural and comprehensible. It’s a truly remarkable debut performance.

I hope I didn’t give the impression that I think “death of the author” is about whether the author is literally dead. I’m speaking figuratively—about the fact that authorship in modern works is frequently an ongoing concern.

The one big hitch in “death of the author” is that with a lot of modern works, the author isn’t dead yet, because the work in question is an ongoing TV series or a franchise of some other sort, and the “author” is still in the process of writing the story and may eventually write something that badly contradicts…

No, they’re not related in any way.

I agree with you, but I wouldn’t phrase the above this way: correctness (or incorrectness) is not a property that interpretations have. Someone interprets work X to mean Y. Someone else interprets it to mean Z (which is incompatible with Y). Nobody is right or wrong; none of these interpretations are correct or…

Are you fucking kidding me?

For the record, I’m completely okay with all the pronoun declarations we are seeing today. I’m getting old and set in my ways, and it’s not easy to remember this extra detail about everyone, but if doing such a little thing makes people’s lives a little better then how can anyone refuse.

Not really wasted, since for all its dramatic intensity Mad Men was often hilariously funny. Hamm absolutely kills in the show’s comedic moments, whether his character is crying like baby on command, plowing through an important pitch while drunk off his ass, deliberately tanking a client’s dumb idea by endorsing it…

That was classic. “This game should be called Wait for Your Death in Real Time.”

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.