In retrospect, what John Stewart’s run on the Daily Show did most was to highlight the futility of his particular brand of satire. That haughty, white, urban, affluent, college educated, Northeastern, always acting like they’re above-it-all, “I’m basically a moderately liberal Democrat but I come from a generation…

Please. Stop. Now.

The trans thing is like the new sagging. As in, conservative old white people were sponsoring town ordinances about teenagers sagging their pants years beyond when it was even a trend. But for them, it just symbolized the ultimate corruption and downfall of society (and for old right wingers, society is always…

I saw a lot of videos older white women doing the same thing. Really, the women almost seemed more aggressive. The men were more whiny.

It depends... Sitcoms can do okay with 20 episodes. Seinfeld (particularly in later seasons) had its share of misses, but generally it was more hits than misses. Ditto Cheers, both Newhart shows, many others that made it into syndication. Heck, something like The Addams Family or The Munsters, which were both…

I’m not sure you could have a Norman Lear now. In a lot of ways, something like All in the Family or Maude relies upon a captive audience. They were good shows because they were funny, well written and acted, but also because they confronted the audience with topics and ideas that made them feel uncomfortable. That…

This is the consequence of everybody siloing their IP, plus the end of over the air broadcasts as a cultural thing. When I was a kid The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner/Tweety Show was a Saturday morning ritual. Following that, the local independent station would play hours of even older Warner Bro.’s cartoons that they’d…

Well, phrasing aside, I would argue that most of the new music that gets played for the most people isn’t that great. There are people all over who are making great music right now in pretty much every genre or style you can think of, and maybe a few you haven’t even heard of yet. But unless you happen to be at a…

I think the idea is a lot of those people were either already paid, or have deals so crummy they can’t expect to get much money from them anyway. If studios make a ton of money off projects that were already in the pipeline before the strike, they can afford to try and sit it out longer and perhaps break the unions’…

Look, I refuse to be “triggered” by the invocation of Bill Maher. He’s an unabashedly hetero male boomer libertarian. That’s fine. In a truly diverse media environment, I fail to see why that shouldn’t be one of many different perspectives, even if you or I may personally find his perspective annoying. He doesn’t have…

So, like the original hook of Charlie’s Angels was isn’t it rather fun and exciting, these women who are attractive yet smart as a whip and can kick ass? However, once you got past that hook, Charlie’s Angels was pretty much a standard 1970's detective show, along the lines of Mannix or The Rockford Files, or perhaps…

I don’t know what hit harder: Hearing he’d died, or hearing he was already 70. Is there a word for the sensation of suddenly realizing you’re an old man and your childhood was many, many years gone and there’s not a lot of time left?

So among the very first SNL’s I remember watching was the Andrew Dice Clay episode where she and Nora Dunn pulled out. I remember the controversy surrounding it, as well as my parents saying, “SNL is still on? But it hasn’t been funny in years.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thank you for that belated tribute to the late, lovely, immensely talented Jan Hooks. Seriously, I don’t want to take away from Ms. O’Connor, but Jan Hooks never really got the recognition she deserved for being a key part of a fantastic cast. Her and Nora Dunn’s “Sweeney Sisters” could have sung circles around Bill…

Dial of Destiny’s underperformance probably isn’t from a lack of enthusiasm for Indiana Jones, but because it’s apparently kind of a crappy movie. The main lesson to draw there is that IP alone doesn’t sell tickets.

So when I was growing up, you’d go to the movies and sometimes what you saw was either a continuation or a remake of something you’d already seen, but often times (wait for it) it wasn’t. Crazy, right?

And for them to lose so much money that their corporate stranglehold on cinema breaks, and the medium thus becomes more diverse, egalitarian, and interesting?

Indiana Jones being a bit problematic is basically tradition.

Ramius’ unseen wife in Hunt for Red October

Yeah, I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say with this. The way they did it almost read like they were saying she deserved to die for collaborating with the (theoretically reformed but in reality not at all) reformed Nazis. Of course, when the Nazi bodyguards started killing innocent civilians she didn’t really do…