Against the Day may not be The Biggest Disappointment (entertainment division) in my life, but it's up there.  It was like Pynchon was trying to write a Pynchon novel.  Tossed it aside 200 or so pages in, which is not something I do — esp. when it comes to favored authors.

I assumed that the super-capable serial killer hacked the newspaper's webpage to put the live-cast there, and the police/IT guys at the paper were unable to do anything about it.  Which is … slightly less implausible than the paper going along with it?

Likewise.  At this point, I'm pretty much left to hope that the show gets through the serial killer story with a minimum of fuss and idiocy, and leaves itself enough goodwill to turn into the interesting show that threatens to break out whenever the 'Bridge Butcher' (or whatever) shit recedes.

Just as an aside: Atomic Robo looks really cool, and I'm excited for it to come out.  There's a lot of great stuff happening in the pen-and-paper RPG world right now, but it's the FATE stuff I like the most.

I thought the back-and-forths with Elizabeth and Philip were a bit much for one season, but the moment when she tells him — in Russian — to come home … man.  Is it dusty in here?

"Decoy" was so fucking fantastic, I didn't even think about it in the context of this conversation, for to think about it is to be struck with the painful realization that the apex of OWNAGE may very well have been reached.

The scene where Will reenacts Dr. Gideon's murder of the nurse made the Red Wedding look like Ben & Leslie's wedding.

Liked for the concluding understatement.

I think an Un-Emmy Awards would be pretty fantastic — nomination criteria are the same as the Emmys, plus you can't have been nominated for an Emmy.  How many categories from the Un-Emmys would produce fields just as good or better than their official counterparts?

I think Mikkelsen submitted for Supporting Actor (despite playing the titular character … but, whatever), which is a pretty loaded category.  It probably didn't help that the particular flavor of his excellence came in understatement and subtlety, which are rarely the kinds of things award shows recognize, much less…

I'm not really that surprised, but I sure am disappointed — first of all because it was excellent in several respects, and rewarding excellence is the nominal function of these awards; and second because its tenuous position in the public consciousness and NBC's future plans could've been significantly bolstered by an…

How on earth does this reference make me laugh every goddamn time?

Emmy nominations make a lot more sense if you think of them being based on mainstream critical consensus over a rolling … oh, I dunno, 3 year period.  So while it doesn't make much sense to nominate Dinklage over Coster-Waldau for this season of GoT, the former has a couple years' momentum behind him.  Jaime has a…

On balance, I doubt the Emmys this year got more wrong than they did in any other year, and it's probably true that they corrected some past oversights.  Which is probably not terribly surprising: the Emmys make much more sense as a lagging indicator of mainstream critical opinion than as a straightforward present-day…

There is so much to dislike in the Emmy nominations.  So, so much.

It was the way he killed the neighbor that triggered the association for me — dropping on his back to choke her, like Chigurh did with the sheriff's deputy (IIRC).  But where Chigurh was staring up into space with a look of intense, malevolent defiance, dude on the show had a look like, "Oy, what a day."

Having never heard or read the term 'hangry', I experienced that brief but illuminating sort of joy that comes when you happen across a new word that helps you make sense of your life.

Netflix doesn't release its viewing numbers, apparently.  So about all we can infer from their talk about a S5 is that S4 wasn't an unmitigated disaster.

Well I'd have to guess that the concept isn't exactly the same — I bet the original pitch for the American version, to be set on the US/Canada border, would've been a lot closer.

I'm on the fence about the character myself, but I really hope we don't see a 'Sonya gets humanized' arc.  That'd be a pretty flip way to treat Asperger's, and I expect more out of a 'prestige' drama.  (I think the creator's Homeland connection gives reason for optimism on this score.)