But it rained! All the time! What could be more authentically Seattle than that?

…only if you stopped watching after three episodes. The rest of the season got progressively better as the show focused more on Will's team at API and less on Miranda Richardson wandering around in a completely unrelated story.

That means something slightly different when you've conquered Eastern Europe and have set up slave camps there.

I love Germans. They're lovely people. But sometimes they're just so damn…German.

From a business standpoint? Heck, yes. Creatively? The show hit its stride four or five episodes in (around the time the new show runner burned off the episodes the original show runner had worked on), and kept on improving even as the ratings flatlined.

The Sopranos definitely started the current serialized TV golden age, but it took a while for everyone else to catch up. The networks, which were still at that point the TV mainstream, considered Sopranos an outlier because it was on pay cable. Sopranos probably led to increased serialization of network shows—even Law…

That dude never got the message that you can actually erase things drawn in pencil.

That might've been good, but I don't think that's what Kring had in mind. He seemed to be one of the many people in Hollywood who thinks that the main thing about superheroes was the origin story. For a short while, NBC had greenlit a spinoff that was supposed to follow Kring's original vision. It was basically an…

When the show became a hit, Kring took a victory lap with the press bragging how he'd never read a comic book. And that's one place where it shows: anyone with a passing familiarity to comics would've told you that having so many super-duper powered people without any weaknesses won't work. If you have two characters…

Yup. And Petrelli's dad, IIRC.

I'll defend S1, although I don't know if it holds up if you know in advance that the series is going to go off the rails. I've heard more than one person claim that watching S1 and stopping just before the season finale is a good experience.

With a heavily serialized show, it's very hard to enjoy a quality part of it if you know that it's eventually going to suck. Part of what makes the journey enjoyable is the faith that the destination will be worthwhile. What made S1 of Heroes so good was that, particularly in the early going, it told the story in an…

It feels like something that happened in the '90s.

Nah, that's because tank Girl was Lori Petty, and she always seemed like sex with a Kangaroo was one of the less unwholesome things she might do in a given day.

It would obviously be the best of both worlds for that Dog-Person.

"True, in strictly cinematic terms, neither is as spectacularly and consistently great as the first, but they are nowhere near as bad - Reloaded is actually pretty strong, Revolutions an overambitious mess - than their reputations suggest."

Maybe her reshoots wig can team up with the Clark wig from the Americans!

"Upvote! Upvote before Doom!"

I'm betting Civil War will not be faithful at all to the comics. The context hasn't been established for Stamford or Spidey's unmasking to have the desired effect. Unless they did it in Ant Man, we haven't established a world with lots of superheroes operating in independent groups, so it's hard to imagine them…

Throughout his comeback, Affleck's been really smart in the way he's leveraged his acting and directing careers to boost each other. I'd be surprised if he wasn't at least eyeing the opportunity to direct a DCCU film when he signed on to play Batman in Bats v. Supes. I doubt he directs more than one Batman film, but…