"In the 21st century, greatest-hits collections are about as hip as three-camera sitcoms." That just proves wisdom does not always come with hindsight. Many acts are listenable only on a greatest hits/best of/anthology basis. Not everybody had a Beatles-like ability to make every (or even most) album cuts worthwhile.…

That's a regular feature of this. Last week it was Darkwing Duck. It's a random writing prompt, like your grade school English teacher used to assign. "Write 500 words about this picture."

Remember, like, 20 years ago when there was an uproar because CBS killed "Murder, She Wrote" and "Diagnosis Murder" even though they were popular because they wanted to skew younger? And if you look back before that, they cancelled a bunch of shows like "Green Acres" and "Mayberry, RFD" for exactly the same reason.…

They mean syndication as in reruns.

Reentering TV is typically an actor's punishment for all the missteps he makes in his movie career. Or maybe his last, best hope, depending upon how you look at it.

Yeah, that one's a classic My favorite line is when there doing a flashback about the time when they thought Jennifer was going to die, and one of them is like, "I feel like we should be there at the hospital with her," and Carvey as Alex says something like, "You know the doctor said the best thing we could do for…

"[S]implistic (not simple, which can be a good thing), heavy-handed and
utterly lacking in the ability to enhance, rather than overwhelm, any
given film." Well, that describes so many modern film scores.

"Despise" is kind of a harsh word, and a more accurate description of this article would probably be "What beloved masterpiece can you just not get into?" Though that's less click-batey, I guess.

"First-rate drama generally consists of people not quite saying what they really mean…"

Well, a title can at least consist of an inference ("God is Not Great" or "God's Not Dead"). I see it as sort of analogous to saying that a title "states" something (Roses are Red), rather than saying that the title is a statement.

"According to ProjectKnow, cartoons are one of the worst offenders in terms of improbable body shapes." Why, how horrific it is to think of the number of digits that have been needlessly sacrificed by tykes who want to obtain that "four fingers to a hand" look popularized by cartoons.

I love previews. They're the reason I know I have an extra 20+ minutes from the listed show time to park, get concessions, reply to email, and/or use the washroom if I don't want to miss the start of the movie.

Of course, the reason why the "Shining" parody (linked below for the two people who still haven't seen it) worked so well is that previews are so wrote now, you could take a horror movie and sell it as a comedy or vice versa with the right cues. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

A few years ago The Onion had a feature called "Weekender," which spoofed the covers of weekend features magazines inserted into Sunday papers, such as "Parade." One of the titles said something like "A statement, followed by a colon, followed by a question: Effective journalism technique?"

Seriously after seeing it I recall thinking, "Really, is that all?"

That would've been '81-'82, when Pardo was let go at the directive of Michael O'Donoghue (supposedly he wanted Ebersol to fire him live, on-air, but Ebersol demurred). Of course, they hired back Pardo after O'Donoghue's (acrimonious) departure .

Aside from Eddy Murphy, those Ebersol produced seasons from '81-'84 don't get a lot of love, but the giant red block lettering and grainy black and white photography of the intro from those years really did do a good job of evoking the atmosphere of "dangerous yet exciting" old New York.

Well, that Beatles tribute number goes from inanely bad, to interminably bad, to sublimely bad, and ultimately excruciatingly bad (around the time the guy in the Jimmy Carter mask shows up to sing "Mother Nature's Son"). Yet you still have to appreciate the effort and resources that went into making bad TV at one…

So the title of next week's finale is "Norman." Boy, that's loaded. I've said it before elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating: I really think "Bates Motel" has transcended the source material. "Psycho" remains an iconic film. But it still works on a primarily expressionistic level. We tend to think of it in terms…

In "Psycho" you sort of got the impression of Mrs. Bates as a prudish old crone, which is of course very different from the way Norma "Bates Motel" has depicted her. But this makes sense: The longer the real Norma is gone, and the more that Norman's mental condition degenerates, the more distorted his conception of…