"Is he right to get offended that a scarred woman wouldn’t find him attractive?"

Is the porn star cut to look like Lana Turner?

You know, I was initially thinking that the Platinum Suite plot was a little too on-the-nose, but then it occurred to me that it's *so* close to home that it probably was intended as a hat-tip to Frasier, to acknowledge how close to the formula the room-shuffle climax was.

"The writers can’t randomly draw character names out of a hat and watch the story write itself." I would have thought that would be exactly the strength of such a large, diverse cast. Pick any combo, imagine a scenario where they're stuck with each other and explore how they'd clash and how they'd connect. There was a…

I really don't think Leslie Knope is a good illustration of the problem. At what point in the series did you get the impression that her life plan DIDN'T involve having kids?

Actually a good question. You'd think even the fringiest of creationist grants would want to avoid this for making them look bad.

I was waiting for it to come up organically in the conversation, but I'm starting to believe it may never happen.

"Everyone just shrugged" Well they are French. Some cultural sensitivity, please.

We prefer to call it Post-Mortem Communications.

The narrator rarely does any of the heavy lifting on these kinds of shows. All vague important-sounding stuff to segue from one (out of context, misrepresented) talking head to the next. I imagine they had fun writing the narrator's lines in such a way that they wouldn't cotton on to the exact nature of the subject…

They do when they're about anything the slightest bit cutting edge. Science docs these days are ridiculously overblown, especially when it comes to new discoveries. "Oh hey, we've discovered a gene that maybe contributes to how readily people store excess calories as body fat" EVERYTHING WE THOUGHT WE KNEW ABOUT…

If anything, it's quite an amusing insight on how vapid and lightweight sci-doc narration usually is. If it were a prank, it would be genius.

I mean, surely it's essentially meaningless to say that one thing orbits "around" another — they both rotate around a common centre of mass, right? And the centre of mass of the Earth/Sun is obviously well within the much more massive body. Because, you know, "centre" of "mass". So saying the Sun goes around the Earth…

You're right, pilots are rarely top-quality. A pretty good description of what one would expect from a pilot is for it to "show some potential for originality around the corner". Episode 2 is that corner (you've introduced the characters, now they can start doing stuff). Episode 3 is around the corner. If the show…