Hadn't there already been a Curtis Armstrong Random Roles? In which he recounted a tale of Gary Busey and an extra getting into a fist fight over how furniture was arranged in Heaven? Or am I just imagining that?

Yeah, it's weird. The standard belief is that MTV made it easier for pretty people without much talent to get popular at the expense of more talented un-pretty people. But the guys I mentioned above kind of test the theory that not conventionally attractive sorts had a hard time in the MTV age, as those guys were some…

Thank you for elevating my fairly meh joke to a higher level.

It was Pete Townshend. When his love wouldn't open the door, he knocked.

I love how off-model pop stars were allowed to look in the 80s. Would it be possible for anyone who looked like Colin Hay, Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, Joe Jackson or Bruce Hornsby to be allowed to become massive pop stars nowadays?

We'll never know. Like I said in another post, season 1 works better on a second viewing than it did on the first, but that may be because the feeling of disappointment is already out of the way. Personally, I do think that having almost a full season before Winter Soldier helped make it a bigger shock when SHIELD was…

Yeah, like I said, not everything about the first 2/3 of the season that didn't work can be written off due to this. But I do think having the crossover hanging over them was an almost unprecedented obstacle for a new show to try to overcome. They could've done a lot of stuff a lot better than what they did, but that…

I still say that it was probably the "corporate synergy-mandated tie-in" that kept Agents of SHIELD from finding its footing sooner. It can't be easy to develop a show with the instructions that "Okay, 2/3 of the way through your first season, we're going to blow up your entire status quo, so you have to hint at that…

When other legends are forgotten, we'll remember back when things were rotten.

It cracked me up when I rewatched the first season of Deadwood a year or so ago and saw Omundsun playing the ill-fated prospector husband of what's her name - I hadn't watched the show since before I began watching Psych. But then I promptly forgot all about Lassiter, due to Omundson being a damn fine actor.

Replace "cinema" with "concert venue" and I'm completely on board.

"Anna, you've been folding that same load of laundry since 1915."

This show began losing me with the second season, when the entirety of World War 1 took place while people at Downton dithered about who was going to marry who (I think that was the main plot line). Those people sure didn't accomplish very much over the course of four years - they carried on single conversations from…

Way back in the 70s, the Jefferson's famously had a mixed race couple as part of the main ensemble - they were the parents of Lionel Jefferson's fiancé. I remember it very well, as it outraged a lot of the old Baptists in the church I grew up in.

LBJ is one of the most unfairly slimed presidents in history. I'm sure a lot of it is due to allowing the US to be dragged into Vietnam - which is a fair enough reason to hold a grudge - but an awful lot of it is also driven by the nation's weird need to see JFK as a virtuous demigod. People have to dump on LBJ to…

Good-bye, Selfie. You left a beautiful corpse.

No, no, no. Jennifer Love Hewitt! All her friends call her Love.

I always felt like Spider-Man 3 was Raimi dealing with studio interference and just saying "Screw it, you want Venom in this movie, I'll put him in the damn movie. Just give me my paycheck." Didn't his non-screenwriting brother-in-law get credit for the screenplay, or some such thing? The whole movie has the stink of…

Happy Endings is kind of like Buffy. When you go back and watch the early episodes after seeing the later ones, yeah, you notice there were some rough spots. But you didn't notice them so much the first time you saw them.

I've tried to like this show, but it just ain't going to happen. It's to Happy Endings what the local bar band performing a cover of "Honky Tonk Women" is to the Stones. They may be playing the correct notes, but there's something crucial missing.