Kathryn Bigelow. She started out as an abstract painter and I suspect her kinetic, yet highly aestheticized approach to inherently pulpy material, particularly in her early films, would translate really interestingly to comics.

Herrmann could certainly do "lush" — Vertigo and Obsession come to mind — but, yeah, Psycho isn't really the best example of this.

I liked Lost Girl myself. Even though it eventually disappeared into weeds of its own needlessly convoluted mythology to the point that toward the end it seemed like even the people making it no longer had any idea what it was about, but as long as one didn't take it too seriously it was pretty reliable…

I meant faded in the sense that they don't seem to occupy the same space in the popular consciousness: T&L in particular was for several years a reliable go-to reference in discussions of female empowerment in pop culture, but seems to have fallen off the radar in recent years.

He probably has the shallowest bench of any "name" filmmaker I can think of. Near as I can tell, his reputation rests on exactly two films which are genuine classics (Alien and Blade Runner), plus a couple of others like Thelma and Louise or Gladiator that were part of the popular zeitgeist for a couple of years…

Possibly. Though I would still have to conclude that Pizzolatto, being as familiar with noir as he obviously is, almost certainly didn't just pick the name "Bezzerides" out of a hat.

So, I apologize in advance if this was brought up already, but I assume we're supposed to believe that the Bezzerides sisters' name is a nod to famous Greek-American screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, of They Drive By Night and Kiss Me Deadly fame.

I was guessing the bird mask was a reference to Georges Franju's Judex, which was itself a reference to Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté because, hell, if you're going for pretentiousness, you might as well go all the way.

Yeah, but I was thinking specifically about Lifetime. Them doing a remake of The Bad Seed seems like such a no-brainer that I was legitimately surprised to realize they hadn't done one already.

That would be the one.

There was another reality show — I don't remember what network it was on or what it was called and can't be arsed to look it up — which was essentially a rigged American Idol-type competition, designed so that this one specific, spectacularly untalented contestant would win without realizing she'd been played the…

There was also G.W.M. Reynolds' Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf, published in 1847, which was one of the original penny dreadfuls.

How can they not have done this already?

I went once when I was a kid (I grew up nearby in Rhode Island). I remember it being a mix of the usual sort of dry historical exhibits that the whole region is lousy with, along with a fair amount of sideshow-type hokum that even then I realized was in rather questionable taste given the atrocities it was…

You left out "architect" and "sportswriter" as major sitcom jobs.

Yeah, I've always liked Davis, but she really stands out here. There's a weird theatricality to her performance that makes everything she says seem slightly off, to the point that even though we were being given actual visual confirmation of the stuff she was saying (at least to the extent anything in this show can be…

Wait, so this is yet another one of those situations like The Goonies or Space Jam where an objectively terrible movie otherwise inexplicably achieves cult status simply because there's a large cohort of people who saw it repeatedly at an impressionable age and haven't reevaluated their earlier opinions since then?

In retrospect, I feel like I should have picked up on it more quickly than I did, if I hadn't immediately written off the character's unlikelihood to "oh, cool, they got a Veronica Mars alum another gig, good for them!"

Prep for dust-off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Still, these weren't the lowest Milland ever sunk — see, f'rinstance, Frogs.