If he never left, we would never get Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, so he made the right choice

Since many of the posters here (me included) are often criticizing the writing on the site, it’s worth saying -- this review is very well written.

Character development doesn’t have to have direct forward momentum. It also doesn’t always necessitate a dramatic personality change; that’s a high school English class definition of character development.

I’ll wait to talk about the finale until the AV Club gets there, but I can say that I think it encapsulates this entire season perfectly. If you loved the season you probably loved it, if you were frustrated by the season, you were probably frustrated by it. 

Abby Elliott given a chance to flex her acting chops and she crushed it.

Yeah, but fridges make that crappy white, soft ice. It melts in like two seconds. Those chips were clear and pure. Good commercial ice like the good Lord intended us to enjoy.

Right on the timing. They demonstrated the Nat/Syd connection with the omelette. It’s hard to make friends as an adult but I feel like when you do it’s swift and powerful. There’s real love between them, not least fueled by being caught in the storm of Carmy together.

I can’t believe I didn’t immediately piece together that David and Liza are married, given they’re both named Zayas and that’d be a hell of a coincidence to cast them as a fictional married couple. When he popped up this season the only thing I was thinking was, “Hey, Angel is here, I love that dude!”

the audience for broadcast TV is OLD. CW was a youth-oriented network and youth audiences are completely gone.

For the last two decades and change the CW (and the WB before it) was the best place to go for genre, soapy, teen-to-young-adult dramas that gave us a number of infinite classic shows (Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, Buffy, Angel, Dawson’s Creek, Charmed, Supernatural, Smallville, Vampire Diaries, all of Arrowverse, The…

I liked the CW because it had so much more genre content than the other networks. Like the network equivalent of sci-fi b-movies that occasionally strayed into something more.

Except that the CW’s 58-year-old audience was watching the CW!  Clearly they (we) liked that programming, even if it was ostensibly targeted at a younger audience.  Rather than stick with what drew us to the network, they’re going to give us the same crap we could have watched elsewhere if we had wanted to.

I absolutely get where you’re coming from. After it was over, I said to my wife, “That was basically a 40-minute montage” but I still loved it. Like I said, I get where you’re coming from but it got to a point where I was just in awe of the audacity and confidence in the creative team to keep up that conceit the…

i know you cant please all of the people all of the time. but this episode...

...rocked.

i found myself wanting absolutely NO dialogue, but then it started creeping in and i warmed to it. who hasnt gone through a mental breakdown of “everything that has led to this moment” before? you jump around from incident to…

I dug it.

Bonus Olivia Colman?

Even though I trusted The Bear’s writers to not go down that romance road, I still let out a sigh of relief. The quality they put out for two seasons was damn good so I figured they were smart enough to not do it, but you still never know, especially if execs somewhere start meddling.

Edebiri chimed with this takeaway, in case you need self-control motivation while pressing play: “Nobody is forcing you to watch it all at the same time. You can pace yourself. I find myself with shows releasing weekly sometimes, I wait until the end and pace it out. You have autonomy as a viewer.”

Edebiri is obviously right about the option of pacing yourself or binging a show, but from the actual streamers’ business perspective it seems like they’d do better building buzz around a show (and thus possibly attracting more subs) with weekly releases.

Thank fuck.