You catch the public execution of Robert-Francois Damiens? The drawing and quartering scene dragged a bit, but that sulphur torture scene was a revelation! 

You could always just pay for Endgame twice, just leave early during the first time, and arrive late the second time.

Kind of feel like there’s a lot better run of the Office episodes as s2-s3 are all pretty consistently great. Such as S2's Christmas Party, Booze Cruise, and the Injury. S2 has a pretty great start too: the Dundies, Sexual harassment, and the Office Olympics (followed by the Fire and Halloween). There’s also S3's The…

Yeah, that was really the secret to The Simpsons enduring fandom. Not simply that it could be excellent television, but that it could be such consistently excellent television for so many years on end.

My own list is also a trio of Simpsons episodes: in fact it’s a trio of episodes that aired just a couple of weeks after Erik’s choices. “Much Apu About Nothing” gives us The Simpsons at its satirical best, with an episode about Apu’s immigration status that feels even more relevant now than when it aired. It really…

Jesus, what a murder’s row. Though to be fair, I think you could genuinely pick any 3 episodes from S3-7 that don’t include the clip show and I’d have the same reaction.

Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2

TNG I’d also give a shout out to probably the only 3 episode run it had of connected episodes, Parts 1 & 2 of Best of Both Worlds, which showed us a fight and enemy like we had never seen before, followed by Family, where we see Picard dealing with the trauma of those episodes, which is another area/idea that had been…

TNG's best three episode run should be an article in itself. I would submit "Cause and Effect", "The First Duty", and "Cost of Living" (even though it's a Lwaxana episode, it's very solid and raises yet another Prime Directive issue). Granted, if this were a two episode run, I'd submit Season 7s "Parallels" and "The…

The beginning of Simpsons season 5 is:

I lot of shows I love can offer this (at least a couple are even mentioned above), but I’ll go with two examples from one of my favorite shows since childhood, “Doctor Who”.

Series 3 of the current run gave us “Human Nature/The Family of Blood”, which mined terrific emotional heft from giving our alien hero the life…

TNG I’d go with season 5's “I, Borg”, “The Next Phase,” “The Inner Light”. You’ve got a classic Trek ethical dilemma with Borg, some great concept Sci-Fi with Phase, and The Inner Light is the best episode of any Trek series.

It’s unbelievable that anybody is still shilling for the new BattleStar Galactica.

Star Trek TOS: Devil in the Dark, Errand of Mercy, City on the Edge of Forever

My original idea was to start in 1939, with Gone With the Wind, but A.A. Dowd convinced me that nobody wants to read about a whole bunch of random-ass ‘40s movies that don’t even get talked about anymore. 1960, as others have noted, is a pretty good intermediary point, a place where the studio system is still humming…

Great write-up. People often don’t understand why when I say that Spartacus is among, if not my favorite movie. The contrast between Spartacus and Crassus is incredible. Olivier’s Crassus is pitch perfect with many subtle nuances, looks, expressions, etc. Putting him opposite Charles Laughton’s Gracchus was an…

Standard plug: The Starz TV show Spartacus rules, what it lacks in budget for some of the stuff here it more than makes up for in carnage and carnality and outsize characters (John Hannah and Lucy Lawless in particular), and it is no less vicious toward the ruling class while still giving them compelling motivations…

it was a news story, for instance, when John F. Kennedy, just two weeks into his presidency, went out to see Spartacus

Douglas needed a new director after he fired Anthony Mann a week into production

Downvoted for not including enough racism, misogyny and far-right politics disguised as far-left politics.