Great to have you around still, Jesse.

I’ve noticed there’s this tenor to a lot of coverage where Tendler gets to slot into the aggrieved long-suffering spouse role and praised for a tell-all book, while Mulaney is disparaged for not talking publicly about it. And I feel like people are mistaking disclosure for truth, and intimating that we’re owed any…

It’s a bit tough with movie scores to divorce the quality of the score itself from the memories it brings up from watching the film (or the qualities it furthers in the context of the film itself) but there’s no doubt Williams is one of the greatest film composers, and arguably the greatest still living. I think he…

I take a different view: Taylor Swift has potentially reached the maximum amount of fame possible, but it’s simply not on the same level of past cultural juggernauts. As much as the internet and social media has allowed her to be a worldwide sensation and reach audiences that an artist, even a successful American one,…

Yeah I always thought the game was influenced by the Dusk Til Dawn switcheroo, and in that sense I think making a less tropey version of the game with the shift halfway from slasher suspicion to monster survival could work. The advantage of adapting virtually any game as opposed to novels is that there’s relatively…

I feel like broadly, especially with the idea that every film must be the jumping-off point of a multimedia franchise and the idea of catering to hardcore nerds, the fact that you don’t need to tell us everything about the world and that people will be more engaged if they’re not spoon-fed is a lost art. Star Wars…

Presumably because the people watching cult docs are not exactly the target demos that cults target, these things are always frustrating watches. But the combination of someone being badgered into believing they are trans while the doc regularly cuts to the Twin Flame people outright being extreme jackasses to their…

Yeah I think that’s part of the conversation that gets left out when discussing the MCU—it’s that superhero movies are the tentpoles holding up the entire box office right now, and if that goes kaput, it spells disaster for the wider movie landscape (and probably even more doubling down on “safe” IP getting recycled,…

Yeah, I think Witherspoon is probably right, and also that she (and the public) are forgetting that a lot of her films had plenty of dark to cut the sweetness. Even Legally Blonde’s candy aesthetic is still dealing with issues of sexism and workplace harassment.

Yeah I think describing them as “flawed to terrible people who get karmic payback” describes early Seinfeld, where you have situations like “Jerry and George screw up their chance with hot women because of their hangups” or “their car gets smashed up because they parked in a handicapped space”, but over the entire run…

Not that they weren’t interested... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PX

I think as much as Michelle Remembers gets credited for the Satanic panic, the fact that the book was cobbled together from pop culture depictions of satanism proves and took off as it did suggestions that it was very much following the zeitgeist rather than leading from the front.

I’d say it’s better than Riverdale or The Newsroom, but if you enjoy those shows for how off-the-wall the former is or how ridiculously high on its own pomposity the latter is, The Morning Show can feel like it’s sort of trapped in the middle and not committing. The crack about it masquerading as a prestige drama is I…

I get that the language of this stuff is probable for a legal reason, but coming back to those allegations with language like saying the plaintiffs “ratified, acquiesced, condoned, and/or approved of the acts” and that if the dancers were harmed, they “contributed, in whole or in part [to harming themselves]”... that…

My best explanation is that it ties into Donna’s aside about doing anything for her kids. In the face of a terrible play, she thought it was better to scuttle it all with the death of the lead than have her son’s first show become a laughingstock. (I’m not totally sold on Donna doing it, at least not without someone…

I think most people basically only think the first two existed and view the franchise in relation to them. 

Seems like something you would probably know before going in, although I’m sure some people think they’ll beat the odds and be the Bill Haders and Tina Feys of the cast and get more variety, or at least a springboard to greener pastures.

I don’t feel like the question of “can Frasier exist in 2023” is a concern. You just have to have the young-in’s spar back, just like they had characters to do so in the original. More crucially, the fact that it’s not a show running indefinitely on network TV means Frasier could actually be a less terrible version of…

Obviously this is limited to movie adaptations, but I think the fact I’d rank most of David Suchet’s Poirot above all the films on this list I’ve seen is partially down to the fact that Christie’s works generally work best on the small screen. You can lavish up the production design, but fundamentally whodunnits are…

It can be both.