He's convincingly slimy as an icky sleazeball (hints of sort of a Space Littlefinger) on Dark Matter, so I say we hold off on ejecting him from the planet just yet. I wasn't even sure it was him at first. I thought it had to be a different, more oleaginous guy. So I guess he's a real actor? Or at least he can do…

I agree, and I'm normally not that crazy for British crime drama. Happy Valley is truly superior. Fortunately, the queen of TV critics, Emily Nussbaum, gave it a great review in The New Yorker recently.

There's a very interesting, (presumably) controversial long article in The Atlantic that's basically about this lack of middle ground that you're talking about, and what's caused it, and how it may not stop any time soon:
http://www.theatlantic.com/…
Despite all the strange things I've read lately, I really had not…

Well damn, Canadian POI fans! You're awesome.

When most networks say "miniseries" or "limited series", they actually mean "this has a limited number of episodes and if it does well, we'll give it a 'surprise' renewal" (a la Wayward Pines) "…but if it doesn't do well, we will just pretend a second season was never, ever, ever a possibility because we don't want a…

I'd say it was only good in the first two to three seasons or so, because what set it apart was that the main character used his mind to get out of tight spots. The science may not have always made sense, but it was usually fun to see what they'd come up with. Sometimes it was pretty clever even if impractical. When…

Others copyeditors may (and probably will) disagree, but I'd argue that "just deserts" is bordering on archaic at this point and should be consigned to the dustbin of grammatical history. Everybody now thinks it refers to deserving something sweet. I'll give it four to one odds that the A.V. Club meant "desserts" and…

Those "unpleasant goings-on in Third World hellholes" articles feature some of the magazine's best writing and hardest-hitting reporting, though they're often telling us very depressing things. But hey, uh, they make you really appreciate things in our daily lives that you normally take for granted, like being able to…

Jesus. Ugh. What could CBS even do to them at this point though? I mean, other than threaten to air the episodes at 1 a.m. or something? I guess you don't want to burn bridges with a major network, but I sure hope Plageman, the Nolans et al. are never working with CBS again anyway. That would be an obvious waste of…

That's partly true; that was the A-plot, but the B-plot was relevant. The ten-parter (or whatever you want to call it) faltered a bit there and also with the dreadful bottle show "Extreme Measures" which was a bit of a tangent and only loosely linked to the rest of those episodes.

I wasn't all that crazy about this episode. It would've been fine if it weren't the third-to-last episode, but the placement is all wrong. Were they still hoping for a back nine order when they wrote this? It seems like it could've been written before the previous episode and then retrofitted with Finch's small…

There have been some rumors of fraud in the Chinese box office, and some have said that some of these recent huge returns from China have been partly faked, though I'm not clear on whether that's supposedly more true for locally-made movies or what. I wonder if there's any way to prove or disprove this kind of thing.…

Joe Biden, is that you?

I love Bamford's work on Adventure Time and I really like the idea of giving a show to a 45-year-old weirdo who has struggled with mental illness. So I really wanted to like this. But it didn't make me laugh. It's just a pilot so I should go easy on it, but some of it was pretty rough. Normally I like artsy weirdness,…

Oh, she taught him some things all right.

Kylie Minogue was like a blank slate in that Doctor Who episode, which was one of the very worst, most clichéd scripts in the show's 35 seasons. Let's not poison the well of potential new viewers here. If some fan of Kylie's music stumbles across this post and watches that episode, they'll think the show is a nonstop…

For all that I dump on S1 as wildly overrated, I really did like this aspect of the show. Just not much else about it. How about we take a character like that and put him in a show with an actual coherent plot and less dead-end macho bullshit and fully fleshed-out female characters with agency, though? Could we do…

Good sir, you and I are a minority here, but we are correct and all others are fools!

This is only because ABC doesn't rerun much of anything. Serialized dramas get terrible rerun ratings. If a net needs the reruns (the CW, which just doesn't have enough programming to put something else in place of those low-rated Arrow reruns) then the show doesn't go up on Netflix until the net is done airing all…

Oh right, the ads for Helix! But IMHO those ads were brilliantly freaky, way better than these ones for Outcast. Sure, sure, the Helix ads were a ridiculously ham-handed and overly direct way to signal "this show is about MAD SCIENCE! Science goes TOO FAR and unleashes HORROR upon the WORLD!" but at least that's a…