The same as the reverence that today's bands have for folk or old school hip hop: because it seemed authentic and more "real".

Colbert has given interviews that give the impression that he is the kind of person who'd join a Draft Bloomberg movement, for sure.

The books contain an instance of a cousin ascending to a lordship and agreeing to take on the previous holder's surname as a condition of this, no? Same thing would likely happen writ large.

My working theory is the AVC editorial staff reads the New York Times reviews and then uses them as it's criterion for what it should like or dislike.

Stannis has a loud and loyal fanbase, but I think a lot of people who read the books are either meh or eh on him

Dorne exists, so far as I can tell, to give Danny allies when she gets to Westeros. The show is just taking a more direct path than the books, which is fine as one has ~4500 pages to get to the endgame and the other has 23 episodes.

with everyone else dead, the Sandsnakes are the best claimants to the throne. Especially if Oberyn legitimized them all (and who is to say he didn't? Ellaria can say he did at least). She could then be regent. Really simple.

And, honestly, does anyone think the Dorne stuff in the books is anything more than nipple ridden filler? It's all just table setting for an end game that only involves Doran's plotting indirectly.

I watched the show in the gap between season 4 and season 5, and for whatever reason I found season 1 and season 2 to be a slog while 3-5 really captured me. I recognize the quality in individual episodes of those seasons, but they're never my favorites.

Season 5 has this running theme of Don giving people advice they SHOULD take (Lane, Pete, Joan) and being ignored. In Lane's case, he just never had the fortitude to be that man who rose from the ashes.

Season 1 to me is like a different show, still finding out who these characters are. There are tonally weird moments and character beats and a lot of time is spent on people who prove inconsequential to the other 7 seasons.

5, 4, 3, 7, 2, 1, 6

I'm very down on seasons 1 and 6. Season 1, imo, is like a totally different show

I kept waiting for them to make more hey out of Ruby being a quote unquote Damocrat with the most regressive. conservative views imaginable. But alas

And he was married for 9 of those years!

after he jumps out of the building/plane/realizes he's been dead all along?

what made Mad Men en vogue for a time had nothing to do with the show itself and was more or less all about the clothing and period aesthetic. For the first few seasons, it could largely be watched as a period soap opera by those who chose to ignore it's larger themes… as it's become more and more character driven,…

Joan knows that a shark is going to eat her on her 200th birthday, and
it doesn’t bother her at all. Every evening, she gets a phone call from a
wizard in the middle of the night, and the wizard says, “A shark will
swallow you when you are ancient,” and Joan always says, “So fucking
what? I can’t wait.” The reason why…

Don Draper is really Dick Whitman and now Hamm is Draper

Pete becomes D.B. Cooper, this week ended with him boarding a plane in Oregon