Same deal with Blood & Wine, and nobody lost their shit.

At minimum, go with drug testing rules: A missed test is a positive.

Are you under the impression the Lakers get $900 million a year in national TV money, and that the NBA’s national TV deal is worth $27 billion a year?

Even if they get one back, there was a cost to saving the money — a decade-plus without a (very good) team. That might be a reasonable cost, but it’s a real one.

The Lakers TV deal is estimated at $3 billion over 20 years.

Yes, the victory conditions defined here are a bit odd. The Oak View deal, if I’m getting the numbers right here, costs ~$40 million in public money instead of $220 million that Clay Bennett wanted, so you save $$180 million (not chump change) and it costs you a team for at least a decade and maybe indefinitely.…

“TV ratings do not matter to NBA or NFL teams, everyone gets the same cut of the TV money.”

Now he knows how it feels to be the one thrown out before reaching second base.

Those are basically all thing he has done in the same game.

Thiiiiiis. They gained absolutely nothing from it. They didn’t get him to give up a *single* thing that brought him down. They just fucked around for weeks and then went “oh JK, we kill you now.”

It was *incredibly* useless. If they had gotten literally anything out of it — new evidence, political cover, a slip-up on his part — I would have at least understood what they were going for. But no! Nothing! As you said, they convicted him based *entirely* on things they already knew, had known for a long time and…

The problem with this is they didn’t need to maneuver around or toward anything. They didn’t lay some trap that he walked into to give them the evidence they needed to do him in. They just f***ed around for a few episodes and then convicted and killed him based on stuff they had always known. There was no payoff from…

"Or is it?"

They are not unrelated, but I agree strongly with Brakeman that issues of time and space are far lesser sins than issues of character development and motivation. It's not ideal if characters can move about the map freely without limitation, but if the rest of the pieces are well executed and believably, it's eminently…

This is *exactly* it. As the saying in sci-fi goes, starships move at the speed of plot. Same for horses, police cars, superheroes, whatever. Shit gets there when it needs to get there, and nobody cares if the characters are strong and believable.

The timelines and logistics are a symptom of broader issues. If the episode had been strong, if the character motivations had made sense, if the story had been told well, it'd be a silly afterthought. Look no further than the dragon battle episode. Plenty of issues to nitpick there, but the consensus was the episode…

The other possibility is that it used to be really good and now it's kind of bad and people don't like that.

This deserves better.

Agreed. This is the kind of weird shift in tone and quality I expect when there's a change in showrunners or something — very much like Community's "gas leak year" season, when the characters are suddenly strangers and you can tell the new writers are trying to mimic the elements but don't really understand them.

It's not just that, though. In early seasons, they took source material and adapted it deftly with strong, engaging storytelling. Not only have they run out of material to adapt (and I'm sure they have plenty of GRRM bullet points to work with), they've utterly lost their touch in execution as well.