A brief word about that other Thursday NBC show. The latest episode of 'Powerless' was pretty darned bad. It was as though they had unthawed a bunch of lower-tier male nightclub comics from the late 80s to write a show explaining 'feminism'. I'm an aging white male with insufficient secondary education and even I felt…

The guy hunts rhinos to feel alive. So he's at least in the class of the Trump children.

Whenever critics hit on a film they can't easily classify they usually shove it into the 'comedy' category. I recall Bill Murray's film 'Broken Flowers' was described as a comedy simply because Bill Murray was in it. There was no other indication it was a comedy.

I recall an old story of a big film critic, perhaps it was Pauline Kael, who wrote a scathing review of "The Sound of Music". She considered the film reprehensible on many many levels. Who in Austria would hike INTO the mountains to escape Germany? They were walking in the wrong direction! She received death threats…

A treasure trove of bad "in-theater" films for us old-timers are from the days before VCR rentals when your only choice was see a film in a theater (before many of you were born). Bad films on your Netfix queue is not quite the same as being in an audience for the experience.

Oh yeh, 'Hereafter' was atrocious. A bizarre pivotal plot point was the hero was a rabid Charles Dickens groupie. But he didn't read the books, he just listened to books on tape!
But I have to go far back for my worst in-theater movie, the 1979 "The Seduction of Joe Tynan". Tedious doesn't half describe it. It was as…

Spotted this article the immediately jumped to the NBC website to watch. Hmmmm, does that mean I might perhaps LIKE this show?

I didn't make it all the way through. Not the episode's fault, it a thing between me and teenage parties. Archie remains dense as a wood plank. I'm kind'a getting used to it.

I was reading of a literary lion of the 19th century who had published his first story at age eleven. Some of his most dense and difficult novels had been serialized chapter-by-chapter in popular magazines. I think people underestimate just how literate the American public was at the time. Dickinson didn't go…

The show does seem to be more of a joke factory than it really needs to be. Compare this show, which feels the need to give out one joke every 25 seconds, to Big Bang Theory which has one joke ever three episodes.

'Peak TV' profit models can get weird. For some shows it appears broadcasting them is considered to be a 'loss leader', merely a way to increase name exposure for when they eventually pop up on Netflix where the real money is. I was listening to a recent podcast where a big fan of one TV series had pointedly avoided…

What about covering the life of that middle-aged woman who raised Luke from infancy in a desert backwater outpost only to be incinerated for her troubles by Luke's own father? About Rey, I could never figure out how a malnourished orphan junk collector was also a master of martial arts.

I recall they abruptly pulled the plug on the last Fear Factor after they forced contestants to drink donkey semen.

This episode is a good example to newbies why this show is worth watching. Because the actors have so much FUN in their roles! This isn't the proctologist-appointment-grimness of 'The Walking Dead', This is actors getting paid to play a teenage girl one week, a mercenary the next, a sex fiend, a hit man, a…

Yeh yeh, I get it. You're a Tolkien groupie. 'Hobbits' are a literary embarrassment, not a 'subversion' of anything. Unless you mean they're an effete desiccated Oxford professor's insulting caricature of the British lower classes. Even as a child the Hobbits-as-working-class lampoon made me cringe. I don't really…

That's like originally wanting John Ritter to play the president on the West Wing. As much as you may like the actor that's a really really bad piece of miscasting.

Tolkien has his own fascist link. He concocted his faux English mythology books out of jealousy of Fascist Germany's 'Nibelungenlied' heroic national epic. All Britain had for a national epic was Chaucer gossiping about horny housewives.

iZombie, dude! Eh… I mean non-gender-assigned 'dude', I guess, since I can't tell your gender from your avatar.

As a child I read all the books (which were certainly more adventurous than Harry Potter!), in 1970 the first Marvel comic books arrived. I was primed for the film in 1982. My initial reaction was "What a piece of shit!" Despite the great James Earl Jones playing the bad guy.

A mention of two series not covered on AV Club. The latest episode of 'Powerless' last week was moderately funny in an unfortunately mediocre way. And the Fox comedy 'Making History' has been consistently laugh-out-loud funny, though it feels less like a TV series and more like an extended Youtube comedy sketch video.…