I’m guessing it’s supposed to be some chain of criminal connections—like, say, there’s an important figure in South American drug smuggling who looks back fondly on the Pinochet regime for whatever reason, and Eladio’s cartel can’t afford to piss them off.

Eh, I’ve never really been on board with the clamoring to see more of Gus’s backstory. The implication seems clear enough—that he was a high-ranking member of Pinochet’s brutal regime in Chile—and it doesn’t seem like great fodder for a fun crime thriller. We’re talking less about “Young Gus muscles out a competing…

I think she tried to do non-impression stuff, but none of it ever really broke out. Her only original recurring character that I can recall was the woman who weirds out her boyfriend in bed by . . . doing silly impressions, and her one recurring Weekend Update bit was about how she shows up under a flimsy pretext but…

Hammond was the rare cast member who made a place for himself as a pure impressionist. Usually the show’s best impressionist roles are snapped up by the comic actor who find a memorable set of quirks to caricature rather than the gifted mimic who can exactly imitate the real person—see, e.g., Dana Carvey’s and Will…

See, that’s exactly why I’m one of the few people who thought it did mostly work. It wasn’t about how Hillary would’ve been such a great president and it’s sad that we get Trump instead; it was about the tragedy of a politician who’s on paper impeccably qualified but just can’t connect with people the way she needed…

I think the lesson there is “Don’t put yourself on a super high pedestal if you’re almost certainly going to fall off it.” Joss the talented wordsmith who’s great at writing about the kind of ass-kicking hot chicks he happens to find attractive would’ve been more likely to weather the controversy than Joss the genius…

It’s also a sad echo of his motto as an elder law specialist: “A Lawyer You Can Trust.”

There’s also the suggestion that if Kim had remained a lawyer, Jesse might have brought Badger to HER instead, since he has the same sort of story about how she was a miracle worker on Combo’s case that he had in BB about Saul getting Emilio off.

I found it interesting that his character was essentially another version of Marco: a big round guy using bar tricks to shake down credulous drunkards. And then there’s the cancer guy who reminds Gene of Walt, and Jeff and Buddy echoing Walt and Jesse.

As someone who saw the movie at Sundance and came away thinking it was well-acted macabre nonsense, I find this take interesting. I also don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just say this: I wonder if I would’ve liked it better if I agreed that the twist was genuinely supernatural.

I think the point is just that he has a whole bowl of breakfast bars set out for all the special ladies who inevitably find themselves popping into his dining room to get paid early in the morning.

Yeah, the “Paramount steered the writers into plagiarism” allegations have always been pretty ludicrous. The development of Deep Space Nine is uncommonly well documented: the out-of-print book The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine incorporated writer interviews, handwritten notes, and multiple screenplay drafts…

Well, as I mention elsewhere in the discussion, I disagree with the notion that a subtextual point is inherently less “official” than a textual one. And the increasing obviousness of the subtext seemed well-paced to me: In season 1 I registered the homophobic rumors and bullying but wasn’t sure whether they were meant…

I fundamentally disagree with the notion that subtext is somehow a less “official” form of dramatic expression, such that you can never assume that it means anything until and unless it gets spelled out in the text. I mean, obviously subtext can be ambiguous, the same way text can be ambiguous (if, say, you had a…

Precisely the opposite, believe it or not: Will was described in the original pitch packet for the series as “a sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues.”

Yeah, but that’s partly because people have a tendency to glom on to the first thing a character says about himself as if it’s the gospel truth (see also: the viewers who think Mad Men is about a man who thinks love was invented by guys like him to sell nylons), so it didn’t quite register that when a character…

Yeah, I remember seeing some of those “anonymous Emmy voters speak” articles at the time, and several of them got really excited about the scale of Game of Thrones, how it was doing all this hugely ambitious, world-spanning stuff that no other series on TV had ever done. Which I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with, but…

Ugh, that year of the Emmys was the absolute worst. The most egregious was the Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series award, in which the worst-written episode of Games of Thrones to date (the hurry-up-and-kill-everyone season 5 finale) won out over “Five-O,” the much-lauded “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?”…

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…