Wow, is China that bad? I thought it was RUSSIA that was the big homophobic problem in selling blockbusters overseas. And "entire Asian market" seems a bit much — Thailand is a pretty LGBTQ-friendly place (though I don't know how their media representation is). Of course, Thailand is a measly 68 million vs. China's…

Lexx is a truly unique televisual fiasco. I *love* that the writers were aiming for a sci-fi/horror/comedy experience totally contrary to expectations, surely the most total anti-Star Trek sci-fi TV experience ever attempted (although other shows like Farscape were already trying to be the anti-Star Trek to various…

RTD just seemed afraid to leave Earth. Given how cheaply the original 26 years of Doctor Who did stuff on alien planets, I don't see why Torchwood couldn't've occasionally left the planet and just filmed those planets in some quarries or something, with some cheap CGI making the sky look weird or whatever. But nope,…

Will NBC just give up and air British snooker in that half-hour they'd planned for Coach instead? They probably could. The film division of Universal is raking in such astonishing heaps of cash this year that NBC is probably off the hook. Comcast already has its swimming pools full of money, so its execs are surely…

Jeez, if I couldn't watch any TV shows with obnoxious assclown conservatives in supporting roles then that would really limit me. What about Firefly? I'm not giving up re-watching Firefly just because of Baldwin, are you? Jayne is a great character. Sometimes artists and actors are scumbags and still do great work.…

Unpopular opinion: The host segments in EVERY era were terrible. I LOVED watching them tear apart terrible movies, but all that dumb shit on the space station, HAAAAAATE! We frequently fast-forwarded through that tiresome slop. (Bring the downvotes, maniacs! BRING IT! I *warned* you that it's an unpopular opinion,…

But the topic of this list is "TV characters who buoyed shows midstream," not "TV characters added midstream who were the only bright spots in otherwise turgid pathetic dismal pointless piles of shit."

I'm a huge fan of DS9 but the first season was really rough. I'm not sure I'd say it was as bad as TNG's or Voyager's, but it was a mess. When I was watching it first-run, I gave up on it after the dreadful, cringe-worthy episode "If Wishes Were Horses," and didn't come back until the middle of season 2, when it got…

She's capable of being incredibly spooky and ominous, and does great with "violent badass" as well — Person of Interest has exploited all of those qualities of her well — so as heartrending as Fred's death was, I can't blame Whedon for wanting to use that. I thought Illyria was really interesting.

I was keeping an eye on the ratings at the time (insofar as you COULD find any reliable ratings reports — first-run syndication numbers were hard to come by) and adding Worf only worked briefly — as great as season 4 was, the extra viewers didn't stick around, IIRC (which I found baffling). It remained competitive,…

When the show premiered, the writers seemed convinced that Neelix was going to be the "breakout character" a la Spock or Odo, and I'm not sure what they were thinking at the end of season 3, but I'm guessing they never did let go of this bizarre belief that Neelix was going to be popular in the face of tons of…

FUCK YES, WHERE IS THIS SPIN-OFF? We must go to the parallel quantum reality where this is a thing that happened, and buy the DVDs and bring them back.

To be fair, the writers of the article themselves included Worf (he's even in the header image) even though DS9 was already very good in season 3. So the article as a whole doesn't keep to the theme of "show picked up out of doldrums by cast addition."

Yeah, that would be my recommendation. S1 ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger but nothing really comes of it — they just kind of drop that whole issue in S2.

You, sir, are a monster. Bob's Burgers is a great and hilarious program, heartfelt without being sappy or schmaltzy, and I assure you that I am a real human being — with real hopes and dreams and all the crap! — who exists separately from the Internet, sometimes for whole minutes or even entire hours at a time.…

Andy Breckman (showrunner and co-creator of Monk) is well-known for his horrendous taste in music. He co-hosts a comedic call-in show/podcast on WFMU and refers to most of the other shows' music there as "hippie noise." On rare occasions, they allow him to spin a few tunes in order to torture the audience, or during…

Good choice not to finish S3, as it precipitously declines in quality as it goes along, and the worst bit is at the end, if I recall correctly.

For a while most of the Internet seemed to be raving about it, but only season 1 (six episodes) is actually much good (not coincidentally, that's the season where Ruth Wilson gets a lot to do — well, more than in season 2 anyway). And even there, the performances are much better than the writing. Season 2 (four…

So you're saying the villains for season 3 should be a bunch of pasty old white guys sitting around a table in the dark and yelling at each other? OK, that checks out.

Oooo, here's an idea for another silly but fun article listing things from throughout the history of TV. The top nine villains who started out great but then wore out their welcomes because everybody liked the actor too much! Or something like that. Hey A.V. Club, you can have this one for free — but in exchange, we'd…