I listened to the podcast but I missed any mention of that ‘format breaking episode’, whichever it is. They both agreed on the #1 episode of the series but only gave its title, which does nothing to refresh my memory of which one it was.

K-pop seems to be big on ‘collaborations’ even if it involves little more than the guest artist singing one verse. Its not so much about the music as about gaining access to the other artist’s fan base, like symbiotic organisms nourishing each other. If you go to the far side of the globe I wonder who would be bigger,…

Y’know, the company Morton-Thiokol had a long lucrative career in the field of rocket engineering without the need to form a cult of personality around its CEO, whose name nobody here would recall.

As an aside, in the short couple days following the announcement of 100k COVID-19 deaths, America lost more citizens to the disease than were killed in the entire Iraq war. Enjoy your mask-free crowded beaches this weekend.

The original TV Perry Mason is problematic because he was a *defense attorney*. That implies (1) the accused deserve to get their day in court and (2) that the criminal justice bueaucracy often makes mistakes. The polar opposite of the fascistic vigilantism of the superhero genre.

In 2018 Korean TV redid the ‘Three Men And a Baby’ premise with the series ‘Welcome to Waikiki’ but made it closer to The Three Stooges (who, I recall, also had a ‘discovered baby’ plot once). Plus they had the good sense to return the mother early to rescue the poor child from the idiots. Baby Sol was awfully cute,…

Its too bad the English language doesn’t have a proper word for a drama with comic elements intertwined. I’ve seen so many non-comedies labeled as ‘comedies’ simply because there wasn’t a better description. The term ‘dramady’ pops up sometimes.

A reminder that during the 2016 election Trump called on his followers to commit political assassinations of federal judges. After he got in hot water for his indefensible statement he went to his go-to defense - he was just ‘joking’. Though two days later, in typical Trump fashion, he rescinded his own ‘just joking’…

My impression at the time was that they had taken another decent little foreign film,  run it through the ‘Hollywood’ sausage maker and ruined it again. I have a (perhaps faulty) memory of the French film having understated Gallic humor while the American version was loud and grating and obnoxious. I recall a joke at…

Its interesting how K-pop is spreading around the globe. Its as though the rest of the world is saying “America’s only giving us Miley Cyrus and Kayne West? Time to look elsewhere.” Sure, K-pop is in a foreign language, but to most of the world English is a foreign language too so there’s no great difference.

I watched a foreign drama recently about a guy struggling to be hired as a full time office worker from his contract worker post. It was ten times more gripping than anything I’ve seen involving leotard wearing superheroes fighting alien monsters wanting to exterminate all life on earth. Back-in-the-day superhero…

AT&T is toxic. They bought-up a well respected Asian TV streaming service only to killed it, only buying it to cannibalize it for its streaming platform architecture.

The big streaming services have so much $$$ these days they don’t know what to do with it. I half expect to see ‘Lone Ranger 2' announced at some point.

When I first read about this elsewhere yesterday the very first poster comment was “B*tch should sit down and shut up and be grateful she has a job”. A type of comment I’ve noticed posters only use against women. I call it the ‘Catherine Heigel reponse.’

Last year I caught an episode of a Korean variety show named ‘Night of Hate Comments’. Celebrities would come on and read their worst hate mail. One of the hosts was an actress named Sulli. Shortly after watching I learned that Sulli had died, one of three high profile celebrity suicides within a short space of time.…

The early 2000s was the era of ‘hip ironic bigotry’. We got ‘Family Guy’, ‘HOUSE’, Sarah Silverman around that time. I think the winking intention was “Look how stupid bigots look” but bigots were never known for their subtlety and saw ‘ironic bigotry’ as validation of their beliefs

The US officially passed 100 thousands deaths overnight and, oddly enough, no news outlet I’ve visited has mentioned it. In the past three months more Americans have died form COVID-19 than died in the Korean war, the Vietnam war and, I believe, the Iraq war combined.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Harry Potter movie all the way through. Usually, I’d just get up and wander away to do something else. I find CGI-heavy films where anything can ‘magically’ happen to be boring. Because if anything can happen it no longer matters what happens.

I attempted to watch the series a couple times and found it to be sick and voyeuristic in the depictions of its crimes, like they were getting off on showing sadistic behavior. Say what you want about ‘Law and Order SVU’ but at least they didn’t linger voyeuristically on shots of random women being tortured and raped.

SNL is the go-to destination for moron humor. You can feel you brain cells dying while watching it. Back when it started it had pretensions of being ‘subversive’ (in a post-hippie baby boomer kind’a way). Now its a comedy sketch show run by a 75 year old rich guy.