Ugh, that one is way too blunt for my tastes. Like NTDP suggested above, it should reference the Fourth Wall, not break it. An example that heavy-handed should be called… hmmm… lump-shading? Lamp-pumping? Lunk-shading? Body-slamming the lampshade through the Spanish Announcers' table? Help me out here, people.

Somebody in another thread was asking me about this, because (s)he watched the first three episodes and started getting impatient with it. But there really aren't many *completely* inconsequential episodes in S1. Most of them are stand-alones but many of them also introduce recurring characters and/or thread in…

Oops, duh, I forgot all about good old "Qwikster," heh.

None of these are on Netflix USA. What country are you in, or are you actually talking about Hulu or something?

True, but that by itself won't improve the quality. The counter-example is "Love & Monsters." (Well, I actually liked the first half before it went all self-indulgent and hammy, but when it went bad it went REALLY bad.)

Oh Glob yes, the QUIET! Another thing I miss terribly! I've wondered for 10 years now why modern Doctor Who is SO FUCKING LOUD. Turns out, according to a giant coffee table book that some relatives gave me for Xmas, RTD believed he HAD to make the show as loud as possible because all the other UK shows on Saturday…

I gave up a few episodes into season three. It didn't seem like the writers had any more idea what was going on than the viewers did. So you're saying it doesn't get any better in terms of plotting?

I wonder if Capaldi himself could come up with a good script for the show, *if* he had the time to do so. Maybe if the Doctor wasn't in almost every freaking scene in modern Doctor Who, it would be possible. The first 26 years of the show got a lot of things wrong, sure, but it almost never had the Doctor in nearly…

I'm baffled that Gunfighters is getting some reverse-backlash lately and is getting redemptive revisionist reviews. It's fucking awful. The forced attempts at "comedy" are lame, and the music is torturous (though it would fit in well with the old WFMU program Incorrect Music, a.k.a. Atrocious Music, or the Atrocious…

It's a long fucking flight from Cardiff to L.A.

I bet that's PRECISELY what they're doing, and why it's taking so long. Coding a feature like that is probably more complicated than we might realize.

So then IMHO you should know better than to think Heroes Reborn has more than a snowball's chance in Yemen of being any good. Tim Kring is the King of Disappointment, a true master of slop and wasted potential.

There's a pretty large contingent of us who think that the visuals are perfect but that it doesn't have much actual substance. Ridley Scott elevated a pretty run-of-the-mill sci-fi screenplay into something astonishing-LOOKING and mesmerizing, but there's not really that much to it.

"Company Man" was written by Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, etc.). He left shortly after that, and perhaps not coincidentally, the quality of Heroes collapsed completely. No Fuller in this revival, so no hope.

Well, this is tricky. It's not like Star Trek (all incarnations) or Doctor Who where there are specific TERRIBLE (and 100% irrelevant) episodes which you can skip and never look back. It's hard to say which episodes of POI you can skip and which episodes you absolutely HAVE to watch, because they keep sprinkling…

My understanding is that they did the iconic establishing/bumper shots (and a few location shots?) in WA. I wonder if they'll do the same thing again? After all, apparently Fear the Walking Dead is a mix of L.A. and Vancouver. (What a strange mix.) Or is it all really going to be WA this time?

Cable doesn't premiere most of its shows in the fall. That's the good stuff. This is mostly broadcast network TV, which is now the chaff in this crazy new era.

I'm excited by that too, except that they've qualified that by saying some of them aren't REALLY two-parters, just interconnected (loosely?) in some way, so that makes me more skeptical. I want more ACTUAL honest-to-Glob two-parters.

So Ant & Dec is a terrible live comedy/variety show then? Please describe and/or humorously disparage it. I only know it as "that thing that beat revived Doctor Who season 1 a couple of times in 2005 in the British ratings." Is it just for chavs or something? (Are "chavs" still a thing or is this a meaningless term…

I'm just glad to hear they're actually filming in Washington state (at least in part, one presumes). I bet Vancouver is cheaper but it just wouldn't be the same.