A great example of that type of story is Ted Chiang’s short story “Hell Is the Absence of God.” It basically imagines a world where violent angelic visitations are the equivalent of terrorist attacks.

I honestly find the mycelia concept sort of fussy and implausible compared to the spores—really, we can watch them grow and move in real time?—but it’s ultimately an extremely minor part of the show, so I’m willing to go with it.

Yep. What’s more, it’s healthy to be able to recognize and mock your own side’s failures and weaknesses. I’ve long been worried about the liberal tendency to insist that adhering to progressive ideals is always done in good faith and can never have unintended negative consequences when that’s so clearly not the case.

Yeah, my suspicion is that slotting in the Christmas episode may have actually entailed deleting a pivotal moment from the Dubai Air storyline, since it’s presented as a tremendously consequential fuckup when the team’s activism loses them their biggest sponsor, but then we get back from the Christmas episode and…

I think it was also hard for her, in a weird way, because even though Whedon didn’t treat her great, she kind of trusted him as a creator and director (which is at least partly indicative of how manipulative he could be) - when Noxon asked her to do dark things, the same level of trust wasn’t there - I think…

I mean, I can only assume HBO didn’t keep Girls on the air for five years for fear of how Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham would react if it were canceled, so it must’ve been a success for them according to some metric other than nepotism points. Probably some combination of being relatively cheap to produce, always…

Eventually? I remember that as ending with him being left faceplanted into a salad bar by said friend precisely because he couldn’t!

Season 8 of the original show did give Dan an extended redemption arc that turned him from a cartoonist sleazebag into an equally cartoonish do-gooder—but then the show unexpectedly got renewed for season 9 and they walked it back.

I’d say the first half of season 6 was merely very good, but the second half was Better Call Saul at its absolute best. I haven’t seen any of the other nominated series aside from Severance, but BCS would’ve had my vote for definitively sticking the landing.

Sure, but would it be better if she took roles she didn’t want or need when other actors might want and need them?

The main thing that frustrates me about Mythic Quest is that while it’s a dramedy that leans pretty heavily in the dram- direction at times, it’s still operating largely as a sitcom, in the sense that it’s got this central scenario and ensemble of characters that it’s always going to return to. The end of season 2…

“A sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues” is a direct quote from the pitch packet for the series, which predates both season 1 and Schnapp’s casting. The character was always intended to be queer, which even season 1 references with things like the homophobic bullying directed at the character (and his…

Well, they were casting a role that was conceived as “a sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues,” so it’s likely they were looking for someone who a) would be cool with playing a gay character (and whose parents/managers/etc. would be cool with it) and b) would give a performance that read as possibly gay…

Agreed. In terms of the show itself, I’ve always appreciated the subtlety, but with Schnapp’s coming-out it’s also clear that it was the right decision in terms of protecting the actor from really inappropriate personal scrutiny. If Will’s sexuality had been obvious the whole time, and he’d been forced to respond to…

Dangit. I was excited about this show when it was being characterized as “Natasha Lyonne is basically Columbo, but they don’t have the rights, so it’s a new character instead.” I don’t love the idea that it’s actually about a woman with some dumb fucking investigative superpower, which is about as far from Columbo as…

In fact, the suit itself (I can never get Kinja to handle links correctly, but it’s available via the Deadline article about the suit) accuses the studio of “repackaging what is essentially pornography and evidence of a crime,” referring to the footage in question as a “poisonous product” and saying that “the knowing…

So the movie was shallow for suggesting that liberal Democrats use race as an empty signifier because . . . in reality liberal Democrats use race as an empty signifier?

Definitely. The main difference is that plenty of moviegoers want to believe that Wall Street bros are the ultimate party animals (including, probably, the Wall Street bros themselves), whereas I don’t think there’s a big constituency that wants to believe that about 1930s film stars.

And Hollywood Babylon is a notoriously inaccurate account of Hollywood scandal, and Arbuckle is now widely believed to have been innocent of the lechery the film alludes to.

I was not Noxon’s biggest fan when she was a writer on Buffy, but I think she gets something of a bad rap for supposedly taking over and ruining the show in its later seasons. (To the point that she even jokes about it herself; her Twitter bio is “I ruined Buffy and I will RUIN YOU TOO.”)