Ha ha ha ha, is the Bastard Exec's premiere REALLY 2 hours and 6 minutes or are you being satirical? That would be fucking hilarious. Even if you just made that up on the spot, you know it'll turn out to be true of several episodes sooner or later. Somebody at FX needs to get some reins on that lunatic Sutter instead…

I watched half of the Minority Report pilot and turned it off in disgust — it's just so, so clumsy, hitting the viewer really, really hard with constant exposition. I'm usually pretty forgiving with pilots, even major network pilots that talk down to their viewers, but this one really aggravated me for some reason.

This here commentariat turned me on to Person of Interest as well. Don't forget that one unless you're allergic to the limited (but sufficient for this role) acting style of Jim "Christ on a Stick" Caveziel. The first 3 seasons just went up onto Netflix (U.S.).

Can't disagree there, but he was probably getting bored with 12:35 anyway as it was. I'm sure you and I would love to see him at an earlier hour on another channel with smaller ambitions — maybe FX/FXX wants to make another attempt to get into the late-night talk-show biz? Shit, if Netflix can pick up the overrated…

Um, 12:35 (ET/PT) is much more permissive than 11:35 because the potential audience is much smaller. Ferguson openly stated he didn't want the promotion to 11:35 because it would be too restrictive.

It's a bit of a tangent, I know, but I swear to Glob that Sabra hummus used to be AMAZING, but mysteriously went downhill in quality about a few years ago. Coincidentally this was around the same time that Pepsi bought half the company.

Maybe I was expecting too much. I liked the Oreo gag but nothing else made me laugh. The Colbert Report was always funnier, but yeah, I know, maybe it's pilot-itis and maybe they need more time to settle in. Sigh. Good interview with ¡Jeb! though.

But then you'd have to make one of these poor bastard writers actually watch most or all of this show. Wouldn't that be some kind of war crime or something under the Geneva Conventions?

HELL YES. Pilot was awesome. Not familiar with MODOK but everybody who worked on Pilot should be doing something cool for TV and getting paid.

After I traveled to western China in 2007 and met a hell of a lot of really, really rude people, vs. lots of very nice people in Thailand and Laos, I started to wonder what the hell was wrong with China. Then somebody on Reddit made an interesting argument that the Cultural Revolution fucked up manners in China — a…

Nobody was proofreading anything in that "Extraordinary Tales" trailer.

Yes, and when they DID leave Earth, there were usually lots of humans around who didn't seem considerably different from modern Earth humans. RTD seemed more inclined to hire general drama writers than writers with experience in sci-fi, so many of them didn't have much imagination for alien cultures or unusual…

But in several of those, just briefly for a trans-galactic cell phone call.

Look at it this way — Shyamalan is being stuck with an early September release. That surely indicates Hollywood is shoving him down the rungs and he might be at or near the bottom rung at this point. Early September is as bad as being relegated to the dead zone of January or February. In fact, January and February…

There are still second-run movie theaters somewhere in the U.S.?!?!!!?

That's an average. (Or median?) There are huge variances from one area to another depending on various factors (probably mostly real estate prices). Out in the middle of nowhere you might pay as little as $6 or $7 — but then you have to live in the middle of fucking nowhere. Not worth it IMHO.

That's true, but my point is that it conceived that way because RTD & co. were too chickenshit and/or too Earth-obsessed to leave, like ~80% of the concurrent Doctor Who episodes. OK, sure, there was no TARDIS and not leaving Earth was probably the least of Torchwood's problems by far, so I don't know why I like to…

1. I think Capaldi is great as the Doctor and I like his whole grumpy, prickly persona. This is what they were TRYING to do with the 1st and 6th Doctors but Capaldi is getting much better writing (and I'd argue he's a better actor too) and so he can pull it off better. But then I found Tennant kind of bland sometimes,…

Sometimes I like Moffat's writing and sometimes I don't, but up until now, what have the potential REALISTIC alternatives been? I mean on a PRACTICAL level — you can't just pluck somebody out of thin air or somebody from America — that's not going to happen.

I was surprised that they didn't introduce a hot young male companion, maybe a Jamie type, to fill that male eye-candy absence in S8. I'm glad the show seems flexible enough to be able to leave that out and the viewers mostly don't seem to have fled. (You could argue that Danny Pink served that purpose but he barely…