To be fair, the reviewer has some generally odd views on morality. Seeing Jon as in the wrong for being rude to Theon - who betrayed his adoptive family and murdered or ordered the murder of lots of Jon's friends and then burned some children to death - is kind of… unexpected.

Well, if Jon is really Dany's nephew, then he's only Arya's cousin, so that pairing wouldn't be creepy at all!

I think it's OK to attack someone when their back is turned in the middle of a battle, when they've just burnt thousands of people to death.

And more specifically, nobody pretended to have a problem with it either!

Oh, I genuinely like both those sitcoms. [and not just because 29-year-old Felicity Kendal was astonishingly cute]. But in an online arena in which Friends is often derided for how 'escapist' and non-edgy and white it was, it's probably not fashionable to mention sitcoms about pleasant white English couples having…

Neither sitcom is going to earn any edginess points, but, from the UK, the central couples in The Good Life and As Time Goes By are really sweet and adorable together, in totally different ways.

Agree. Chandler/Monica was good in principle and they got some good laughs out of them that sustained the show through a lot of that season… but unfortunatly they coincided with the rapid decline of the show as a whole.

And nobody had a problem with how visible her nipples were most of the time…

I think Schwimmer, at least early on, conveyed the most realistically complicated character, and walked a line of endearing/repulsive quite well (yes, we talk now about how horrible Ross was, but in the hands of a lot of actors he'd have been immediately recognised as horrible from the start).

But you were meant to dislike Susan (and wonder whether you were meant to or not).

To be fair, Rachel continually sabotages Ross' life too.

Because he was insensitive and narcissistic. The problem wasn't him being rational and not believing her, or even trying to gently persuade her - the problem was his obsessive need to always be recognised as being right.

Yeah, but Susan did back down over her possessiveness over Ben, iirc. She's the villain in Ross' plot, but she's actually not a bad person (iirc she even has to remind them "I'm a good person!" when they're surprised she does something nice). And I think the early show was about how all these characters were flawed…

Odd target, then. Friends is unusual by the standards of US comedy in how realistic its characters are, and many of its jokes are very intelligent.

Not a producer. A businessman who's bought a "production company" that he "visits" frequently.

Except Littlefinger's genuinely smart… and great with money. And didn't inherit anything.

Heinlein's "Job: A Comedy of Justice" is also inspired by Jurgen (which is also subtitled "A Comedy of Justice"). He was a big influence on that era of fantasy authors too - Leiber, Vance, etc. And some recent ones: Neil Gaiman has listed him as his favourite author.

It's also interesting how someone's (cough Keanu cough) lack of acting talent can serve them perfectly in one role, but then mysterious not be a handicap on the rest of their career at all…

It amused me that the writer went on to continually misspell it 'Handel' throughout. If you're going to be precious about spelling and don't have an umlaut to hand, at least say "Haendel" (as the linked videos do!).

But actually, if you're looking for a great american novel of that era, I'd suggest Cabell's "Jurgen". Considered at the time to be the best American novel since Twain. Mencken and Fitzgerald both called him the greatest living American writer. But now he's almost entirely forgotten. It's kind of a cross between…