The trouble with that scenario is that, by all accounts, season 6 was well underway when the show put the brakes on the Dark Willow storyline. (That’s why they had to awkwardly segue from the setup for that arc into the Crack Magic storyline instead of just doing something else entirely.) Hannigan’s contract would’ve…

It’s definitely possible that Hannigan went over Joss’s head, but even if she did, it’s still interesting that his response wasn’t to throw a public snit about how she’d ruined his vision—as he did when Charisma Carpenter got pregnant and when Amber Benson refused to return as Tara in season 7—but just to quickly and…

The tricky thing is that, as far as we know, the issue was the general atmosphere of favoritism, backbiting, and disrespect, rather than any big instances of bright-line harassment or criminality. If Joss was kind of manipulative shit to you on a low but persistent level, you can either just say “He was always kind of…

Not exactly. I believe the first part of season 6 went off as intended, but it was meant to lead to Willow going dark by around the time of “Smashed”/“Wrecked.” At basically the last possible moment, they chickened out and came up with the idiotic “magic is drugs!” metaphor to delay Willow’s turn till the very end of…

Only obliquely, as far as I know: “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon. . . . I stand with all survivors of abuse and am proud of them for speaking out.”

I’m not sure that’s where Whedon drew the line in terms of who to treat well and who to treat badly. One of his favorites, after all, was Alyson Hannigan, a) whom Joss pretty obviously would’ve liked to fuck if she’d have him, and b) who reportedly was allowed to tank Joss’s original plans for season 6 of Buffy by…

Yep. What’s more, Bran’s fate is one of the few instances where we can’t even fall back on the excuse that the book’s author left the show’s producers high and dry, because if there’s one thing Benioff & Weiss must’ve gotten out of GRRM, it’s who was going to end up ruling the Seven Kingdoms. So, forewarned that Bran w…

I mean, Eight and company were a murder squad hunting down former Hawkins Lab employees, so I can understand why El wouldn’t mention them in front of the remaining Hawkins alums.

This is a common opinion, but I’ll stand by my belief that the main difference between season 1 and the subsequent seasons is not that it was better but just that it was more conducive to bingeing. The story and themes of season 1 were clean and straightforward (both amounting to, basically, “Find the ones you love”),…

My main memory of this show (which I never watched) was when it had to apologize to the city of Hyattsville, Maryland, after an episode implied that it was a crime-ridden ghetto.

To be honest, I don’t know if it could have ever worked as the requirement of Theon’s arc and Sansa’s arc were fundamentally different, so you could never truly combine them in a good manner.

Yeah, Langella has been famous for playing soft-spoken but sinister older men since at least the early 1990s. There’s zero chance that anyone thought they were getting something hugely different from that.

I mean, it probably wasn’t Kim’s, given what we know about her fashion choices and personality. Most likely it belonged to some other special lady with whom Saul shared a bath.

I doubt that anyone aside from maybe Trump himself thinks that being back on Twitter would help his campaign. He’d be much better off for voters to have a fuzzy memory of the Trump years as a time when at least we weren’t getting slammed by inflation, rather than be reminded with every insane tweet that it was…

I found the Looper time travel rules surprisingly coherent. Even things that seem weird, like the way Old Joe struggles to differentiate his original memories from the new future caused by his time-hopping, are more of a feature than a bug—illustrating how he’s letting certain changes slip into his consciousness (“He…

Yeah, I feel like at some point contemporary culture settled on the highly simplified notion that the only way to assess the appropriateness of a joke is whether it “punches down,” and consequently the term has lost any descriptive ability beyond simply indicating “I find this joke offensive.”

Yeah, I’m especially disappointed since this seemed like an ideal moment to retool the character’s look, after Will’s season 3 arc was all about him taking a bat to his “Gosh, I’m still a kid who just wants to play D&D” illusions. I would’ve loved to see the character integrate the cheeky, ostentatious side of himself…

Yeah, if anything you’d think there’d be a trend toward making titles more distinctive, so they’re easier to differentiate in online searches and on social media. But maybe there’s some counterintuitive marketing value if a title is more generic and people are more apt to stumble across it when searching for something…

Oh, hey, this is the movie that premiered at Sundance last year as Eight for Silver. I went into it hoping it would sort of be The Witch for werewolves, but it’s just polished but silly costume horror. Hard to say how much I would’ve enjoyed it if I hadn’t set my expectations way too high, but it’s definitely nothing…

Heh, so HBO is finally making the movie they pretended to be making at the beginning of all this with Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm?