It's definitely a tough game on onboard new people, too, once you start learning the cards yourself — IIRC the manual recommends that the teaching player use the USSR so they can introduce the mechanics, score a quick win, and then start over.

I thought they were riffing on British Christmas specials in general, in that they don't exist in the US, with the lost-footage element being a callout to the Star Wars Christmas Special…

"V." was Pynchon's first novel, so I figure the never-really-gelling thing is on him. Parts of it were really well-observed, but it kept asking us to look for a plot when there wasn't… as far as I can tell.

I tried watching "Mad Men", and it wasn't so much the pace as the fact that that show is for white people.