He was the best part of Believe, which only deserved to last at most one season. But yeah, I definitely could have done with more The Chicago Code. The show Blue Bloods *wished* it was.

Vodka *is* the crystal meth of the hard-liquor world. Pure, cheap, tasteless and lethal. And for some reason people keep wanting to put weird crap in both, like banana, sherbert, cake, and chili powder.

They couldn't possibly hide that under the show's preposterous wigs.

I thought it was "tea"?

There were brains, does that count?

The main link is here, this is the first post.

It ended when everybody with sense and taste realized it was a crap show and stopped watching it. As far as I'm concerned, that series lasted four episodes.

I follow a blogger who spent six months breaking down language from The Great Gatsby as if it were poetry, and there's a lot of lines in there which aren't at all inconsistent with the last line, it's just that they float along in the plot so swiftly that you might not notice on a quick narrative-oriented read that…

The ending of the director's cut is "It's a shame she won't live - but then again, who does?" But I'm told that there's a "final cut" where some idiot re-ran the line *again*, as if it adds pathos to repeat it?

More like the prequel trilogy. I mean, have you tried to read the book of Mormon? It's like bad scriptural fanfic.

It works as an ironic ending for a movie about how 80s New York City might not actually have been hell on earth, but it certainly doubled for purgatory. And makes a nice marathon pair with Quick Change on the subject of "why New York City is the nexus of all evil".

The grand secret: Margulies has an uncontrollable tic in the presence of Panjabi. By which I mean, when she sees Archie's face, she goes for the jugular. I'm talking full-bore rage-zombie mataglap. After a few filming incidents (and at least one permanently maimed DA now on disability), they had to separate them.

That was the plot armor being drained off of her.

When they're not kicking down the doors of counterfeiters and hackers. Since there's at least two pulp comics out there about the swashbuckling adventures of Isaac Newton, Scourge of the Counterfeiters out there, I'm mildly surprised that the only TV show we've ever gotten about the Secret Service has been Wild, Wild…

Now's the time for any semi-credible Democratic state powerhouses to make a swing for the VP slot, if they have any appetite for the bucket of warm piss at all. The bench is so amazingly bare that laughingstocks like Martin O'Malley and that New England Socialist are plausible candidates.

I don't know, I'm picturing a much more Jacobean version of The Merchant of Venice with Portia in cahoots with Shylock.

So you're saying she's the Bulgarian in that old Russian saying?

It's also a NYC-oriented show. It's easier to imagine yourself in a literal panopticon when you live in a place permeated with people and cameras like Manhattan or London. Note that the electrical dragnet for The Machine was contained entirely within the continental US. There's nothing more parochial than a New…

Emphasis on "cult". It requires some fairly specialized ritual and indoctrination, work at an emotional level. It *can* be done in the context of criminal organizations - there's some of that in the traditional mafioso milieu, and it's my fairly limited understanding that a lot of the narcotraficante Santa Muerta…

They can execute their atrocities in the name of abstracted tribal loyalty, though - say, class identity, or racial identity. Great line the other day from one of my favorite political bloggers: "To be a traitor to one's Class is to be a patriot towards humanity." Hard principle to live up to, though.