Yes. That is an excellent point. It was never supposed to be anything other than what it was—the mistakes were all the critics'; and that is why ultimately I respect it where I do not respect Larry Clark.

I certainly hope not. I thought we'd seen the last of Ed Hardy's clothes line ten years ago.

The Brits did traditionally seem to make especially stiff-looking work of the already highly nonrealist staging conventions of television (thus the extras standing around in places almost more signify "party" than attempt to depict it realistically). I always chalked this up to a strong "teleplay" philosophy of…

I'm actually only a Generation 1 fan, although I understand Generation 2 was considered the best. I'm easily disappointed, but I think I was able to appreciate it almost unreservedly because I never thought of it as anything more than good fun: Goodlooking young people fucking everything in sight, eating every drug in…

I did consider that; one of my pet peeves is how often media commentators seem to forget that audiences tend to be distinctly younger than the characters they like to follow; this effect doesn't peter out fully until well into middle age but is very pronounced indeed for "teen" TV. I guess I just thought even younger…

Say what you want about that show, it certainly had the balls to lay all its cards on the table in its first few seconds—and I still remember it after all these years. That bit where TV Bueller smirks at the camera and goes, "Matthew Broderick? As me?" and chainsaws the head off the movie promotional cutout was an…

That trip was worth it if only for this:

I always thought that was a particularly well known moment among culture buffs of a certain age, especially Headroom fans.

Cody did a good, memorably charismatic comedic job on that show (the cast as a whole was quite strong, of course, compared to the writing); he did a very different good, memorably charismatic first-billed job as a working-class Italian mook in Spike of Bensonhurst (in reality he was a rich Jewish kid from Los Angeles…

In fairness, all those shows were so immunocompromised by that time that catching the sniffles was going to do them in.

Haven't seen many, but few U.S. remakes can be as substandard as MTV Skins, which you may not even remember because it was so abysmal that it was cancelled almost immediately by a network that almost never does that. The show was so painfully atrocious that, in retrospect, they probably manufactured a controversy…

Woops! didn't have a Mrs. Howell. Cut them some slack.

Fun fact: George Clooney got his big TV break in a show set in a Chicago hospital emergency room. I am speaking, of course, of E/R. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Yes. This comment and the others hits the nail right on the head. Family Matters was awesome, because by the time it ended, Family Matters was—at least in viewer experience—not so much a show as it was the show-within-a-show of a show about comedy writers. And that show was fucking mesmerizing.

That sketch was seeing-the-face-of-God good. It was like staring at a Rembrandt.

Be honest. That one is even further up.

There's been a new, totally rebooted Sexy Archie now in the comics, too for a couple years, with all the Riverdale universe lines included. Seriously, the artwork is gorgeous. (Unlike that hideous-looking "modern" update they tried a few years ago.) They kept the classic-look ones too, and continue to do things with…

Ringo Starr but no Kenn Starr?

This is actually the first time I have noticed it's over the second oh. Weird as fuck that it's taken me this long.

Glad I'm not the only one who fucking hates "Imagine." For some reason, "Xmas" and even, God help us, "Give Peace a Chance" never bothered me that much (maybe because the former wears itself far more lightly and the latter barely professes to be a song). But "Imagine" I cannot abide, and it's fucking everywhere. I'm…