No, no, you see, two middle-aged men with families and high pressure jobs had trouble staying best friends with each other, and they sometimes made career decisions without fully considering the other’s feelings. It’s fascinating.

What makes me nervous when I see that sentiment is that it feels like it’s often used to just shrug off the long term effects of historical atrocities under a sort of trite “everybody makes mistakes” justification. Because sure, almost everyone before about 1992 and most people after were assholes by modern standards,…

Yeah, a more accurate headline might be “New reports detail how Tom Hardy was kind of an asshole on the Fury Road set.” At worst, it sounds like Theron didn’t handle a shitty coworker as magnanimously as she could have, a pretty minor sin by comparison.

I think we’re still in a societal backlash period from 1,000 years of stories of noble Christian warriors triumphing over hordes of bloodthirsty pagan savages (and some people still aren’t on board). It might just be culturally necessary to get a few of the inverse on the books before we can have a more nuanced…

Nomadland was a small indie film released during a pandemic. It’s not representative of how best picture winners usually do. Green Book made $320 million, Shape of Water $200. These movies may not be worldbeaters, but they do fine. They’re not really synced up with the year’s top-earners, but the Best Picture winners…

You’re right. If the Oscars are serious about ratings, cut it to the six categories normies care about, eliminate everything else, and air it in a sitcom’s time slot. I have a casual interest in who wins best picture, but I’m not sitting through a four hour telecast of fluff when I have a news ticker.  I might watch a…

The Lissons seem like the most obvious suspects at this point since their only role in the story so far has been to ask Jesse for money and then almost violently overreact when he doesn’t come through, but because of that, I feel like the odds that they actually did it decrease the longer they draw out the revelation.…

I get the sense that a few too many people consider Peacemaker a hero with some rough edges and not an asshole who’s working it.  But he’s definitely the latter.

I’m also not sure people where in the mood right now for a sci-fi epic about a plague upending life as we know it in their escapism.

It did feel a bit like a victim of peak television, in that it mostly had potential to grow into something interesting than being great from the jump.  But shows don’t really get room to breathe anymore, particularly expensive ones, and if you don’t arrive fully formed, that’s it for you.

Boardwalk Empire relies a lot on the style, tone, and tropes of modern gangster movies and prestige TV, so this notion that it’s a faithful recreation of the 1920s doesn’t feel quite right to begin with, let alone like something so unyielding that it needs to be applied to the theme song.

Yeah, one thing I actually like about the Shield’s is that it’s like four seconds long. In some ways, theme songs feel like an artifact of a time when entertainment options were more limited so stretching out the experience of a show made more sense. But I can only think of a handful, like Vikings or Peacemaker, that…

Yeah, I’d say that’s roughly the critical consensus. I was a fan, too, and while I love the city, I’ve only visited a few times, mostly when my brother lived there for a few years.  But it was definitely a show about an atmosphere more than big dramatic moves, and those are always a tough sell to the general public.  

Mad Men had a very strong, well-developed supporting cast, but the same guy had the most screen time and (I’d bet money) was #1 on the call sheet in every season. He also plays a significant role in almost every other major character’s arc. The two main groups the show focuses on can roughly be divided into “Don…

You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think it’s representative of the city. Here’s a New Orleans-based GQ writer theorizing that its problem was partially that it was too insular and relied to much on a preexisting knowledge of and love for the locale, and ends by calling it “ one of the best…

I think what Simon has that those other guys don’t is the hard journalism background. His projects always feel meticulously researched and have a deep sense of been rooted in a real physical place where he’s been trained to see relationships between vastly different subcultures. His shows cast a wide net and attempt…

I didn’t say anyone was comparing Mulaney to proven abusers (although c’mon, it’s the internet, you know I could find someone). I’m explaining that a drug problem and divorce don’t affect the elements of the “persona” -- really just his jokes -- that I enjoy and giving an example of someone whose actions did rise to…

Honestly, a drug addict who hasn’t been caught hurling racial slurs, sexually harassing anyone, or pissing in hotel lobby still seems relatively wholesome in the internet age. I’m sure the last few years weren’t a great experience for his ex-wife, but even she’s not publicly accusing him of anything unusually heinous…

I think the four year gap had a lot to do with it. That’s a long time to stay at the forefront of the popular consciousness without any new material. Glover himself has been slightly more productive, but neither of the two movies he did in 2019 were that well-received critically, and those were his last acting gigs.…

Death certificates are public records, and I can kinda see why in a broad sense. If, say, Acme Corp’s drainage facilities are close to the public water supply, it’s helpful to know if your town has 15x times the national cancer rates. All of TV’s crime shows make people think of criminal proceedings in specific cases,…