I love Saul but they just don’t make enough episodes for it to stand as a full-fledged series.

Between that and his exaggerated flat line reading—annoying.

I have. I’ve seen the flasks. Not the Beer and Wine stand. Not a cop, even if he’s from the big city, walking around with a beer.

No, someone has been to these kinds of events in the South and knows the South very well.

The open availability of booze and the casual and rampant public drinking—from the Beer (and Wine!) stand at the Calhoun fest to the open liquor bar at a post-Methodist-funeral reception—is fairly ridiculous. Our Kansas City detective is walking around the grounds with gun and handcuffs on his belt and a beer in his…

Great. I’m not endorsing the writing; just saying that it’s not inaccurate to portray a Bootheel town as pretty Southern in manner. Besides, Missouri has always had a split feeling to it.

Is this show meant to be watched with just one straight-through viewing, or can it only be appreciated with a DVR to keep going back and dissecting the quick cuts and flashbacks?  OK, you can even watch it twice, but straight through; can the human eye and brain actually process all the “meaningful” stuff? It seems…

It’s the Bootheel of Missouri, which is closer to and has more in common with Memphis and Jackson than Chicago or Des Moines. But even it actually were an Alabama town, they go overboard trying to make it “Southern.”

Apart from the way the glacial pace of the plot is masked in a flurry of presumably meaning-heavy quick cuts and flashbacks, I’m coming to realize that another reason this show is losing its appeal for me is that most of the actors and/or their characters besides Adams are undistinguished or downright out of place and…

News reporting isn’t dead. There are plenty of people trying to do it and disseminate it. But there aren’t enough people who will pay for it.

Yes, but plenty of us pay for digital subscriptions. Just not enough of us. I pay for the digital Times, the WaPo, the two local papers in my city, and several other niche news sites. More people who say they care about journalism need to do this.

The rise of Sinclair and other right-wing corporate media powers is something of a tangential issue, although a profoundly distressing one in its own right. Actual market forces, mostly related to the arrival of the Internet, and public apathy and unwillingness to pay for what seems to be available for free (but…

Unfortunately nothing is replacing the difficult and gritty work of covering local government that real newspapers did. The predicted ascension of hyperlocal web sites that would take over this role fizzled out, and now we are increasingly in the dark over what our local and even state governments are doing. 

“Attend school” is common American usage. Oddly, we say “go to college” but “Go to university” is plainly Canadian/British snootiness.

If you are serious that you don’t really want to tell people you don’t watch the NFL, and you just need a response for the trash talk, just tell them you finally have had it with the Bills. No one is going to think that is haughty. But really, it is like not having a television: nobody really cares and they definitely…

Pig barn/farm, not slaughterhouse.

I get so tired of the “flight attendants are there for your safety not to serve you a drink, you little brat.” No, I’m not going to hit the button when they are in the midst of drink service. Two hours into a four-hour flight, when they aren’t doing much and I’d like to buy a drink they are offering for sale, yes, I…

A league that isn’t desperately wishing for higher visibility.

“Now, like no other time in our lives, we’re all yearning to be proven wrong.”

It’s a cheap, pretentious way to give it an air of elusiveness and sophisticated story telling. Ooh, there is stuff going on here that you can barely understand, so it must be complex.