"To help clarify the issue, The A.V. Club decided to compare the
ages of award-winning roles for men and women. To date, 23 women age 40
or older have won an Academy Award. By comparison, 56 men have earned
the award while in that age bracket. So—at least when it comes to award
winning material for older actors—the…

"Unusual behavior"? What's unusual about it? In my extensive experience most women enjoy being dominated at times.

BBT is shit. Brainless shit. The only thing watchable about the show was Cuoco's hair, and she cut it off.

Sometimes fees are discounted for schools.

Whether we approve or not, what's wrong with standing (or sitting) by your principles?

Precisely. It's a significant hole in the show, in the sense of being one of the few instances of characters behaving completely out of character. Mike is not the kind of dad who would put up with any of this. In addition to trashing Frankie Axl's often outright abusive towards his siblings.

The play within the ep of The Middle went on far, far too long. It was only briefly funny for what Brad and Sue thought they were doing. Making great art and not the disaster we saw. The play itself wasn't funny, only excruciating. Probably the only weak episode of the show I've seen.

So… not worth much, then?

An odd thing about Seinfeld that doesn't seem to get noticed is how wildly the characters changed between seasons 3 and 5. I don't recall exactly when, but they went from being largely sympathetic oddballs to misanthropic, self absorbed creeps. But no one talks about it.

Well said. And Roseanne was unwatchable for me because of that.

Claire fits that description.

That's the sort of crap we hear from people who don't do any real thinking:
"Sure, women live five years longer than men and we spend more on their health care, but women are oppressed! Sure, women get huge sentencing discounts for the same crime, but misogyny!"

No, that was AD.

Anger's easy. Bittersweetness is hard. The Middle makes bittersweet look easy. That's even harder.

Your life has no meaning.

"The Middle is delightful. I don't think it's "pretty good" for its
genre, I think it raises the bar for the whole genre and in some
episodes transcends it."

Yup. It's garbage. But then, look at any primetime schedule from, say, ten and twenty years ago. There's never a shortage of junk.

At times, unfortunately, Louie is as contemptible as Two and a Half Men in its resort to smirky, gross out humor for laughs.

After its best half dozen shows cable in 2014 is very, very thin.

I find The Middle much more inventive and, in its ability to find humor in its blue collar characters, rare than a show such as New Girl, which spends far too much time recycling material we sniggered a decade ago and the beats of which far more predictable than The Middle's.