Was it? I definitely could be wrong, I wasn't parsing it detail-for-detail the was some people were. I remember him just opening his trunk and there it was without any clear explanation.

He has that gun when he rolls into Albuquerque, there's no implication that he was scrounging around town beforehand. Even if they had shown him getting that gun from that guy it would have strained credibility a bit, but as it is it's "say hello to my little friend"-ex machina. The stated goal of the show was to…

It's no the destination, man, it's the journey.

The Wire always seemed like an anti-Sopranos to me. In the Sopranos, all the crime plotting is in service to the deep and conflicted portrayals of personalities in crisis. In the Wire the characters are humanized with some of the most efficient character-building scenes in television in service of the Upton Sinclair…

It's different on a structural level as well. It's an 8 episode miniseries with a single writer and single director. It's different from long-running multi-season stories. A better comparison would be to Generation Kill or Top of the Lake (Top of the Lake especially)

I would say that "style over substance" and "lack of realism" aren't really the same thing, and either aspect can exist independently of the other.

I get you. It's definitely the kind of thing that can be used to lazily dismiss something without much thought.

Well, I'm certainly not a studied critic, so I'll take your word for it, but I think saying "this show isn't about very much and it looks like it put all its effort into presentation and tone" is a legit comment to make. In my mind "style over substance" doesn't mean style is defeating substance, just that the object…

Hasn't been revealed yet. It's been suggested, but my money is on that being a red herring. This show feels too twisty for the investigators suspicions in episode 5 to be fully correct.

Oh and Style over Substance is totally a thing. Think The Matrix sequels. Think music videos. You can always put gorgeous cinematic lipstick on a pig. But I'll admit, it's a too-easy criticism to lob at something that deserves closer attention.

This has got to be the first anti-hero show where the viewer is in no way expected to identify with the hero.

I really can't overstate my distaste for serial killer plotlines. The serial killer is a lazy plot device to put a comic book supervillain into a procedural. True Detective engages the absolute minimum of serial-killerness to make its philosophical maybe supernatural plot work, so it gets a pass.

You cannot, anywhere in the country, walk into a store and get a same-day fully-automatic high-caliber machine gun with no background check. If you have some pretty deep criminal connections, and know the underbelly of your local gun-show network real damn well, you could do it with time and work, but Walt doesn't…

There's just too much omnipotence on the part of Walt. The ending bugged me. When he pulls into the Nazi's (and ugh.. the villains are Nazis, really? Could they have been any lazier coming up with people who were worse than Walt?) and parks the car in the exact right spot so that the machine gun will mow down the…

Season 4 of the Wire is the best season of The Wire. Season 2 of The Wire is the best season of *television*.

Eh… seems like a lot of style over substance. As opposed to True Detective which is a delicate and carefully balanced equal partnership between style and substance. On that note though, I will say that Hannibal is probably the prettiest network show I've ever seen.

But you never really suffer for your long list of crimes. The whole thing was a suicide mission from the get-go, so (spoiler spoiler spoiler) dying of not-cancer is a victory. Plus your family gets a million dollars. You're a serial murderer who has been motivated by pure hubris and greed and there are basically no…

It indulges in the "serial killers are super villains" thing. Take that as you will. True Detective is a lot better. But Hannibal is very pretty.

(Breaking Bad isn't one of the best shows of all time, it's fun, and the plotting got really good in the last two seasons, but it's also pretty silly and kind of morally irresponsible)

Serial killers are way way overdone. There really aren't that many of them. City police departments do not have special serial killer task forces that always have cases to work. It's nuts. Having a serial killer be the villain in a show is usually as lazy as having the villain in an action movie be time-traveling…