What I meant when I was talking about picking and choosing certain scenes and characters is exactly this. It's easy to read "conservative implications" in the mockery of left-ish characters like Maude Lebowski or Barton Fink, but you could just as easily read the similarly-mocked right-wing characters or more heroic…

Mostly, that it feed the rich while it buries the poo-oooor, I think.

This makes me the happiest JD in Baltimore

I see the Coens characterized as "neo-conservative" all the time, but I don't really get it. Aside from accepting an award in Israel one time, they haven't really done a lot to reflect political views of any kind in their personal lives, so I can only assume the idea comes from their films, which I also don't really…

It really depends on who you ask. Tropes are pretty fluid things, that both expand over time and then get backlash for growing too broad.

Yeah, I agree. I remember being incredibly surprised when I learned this was, and somewhat remains, one of their less well-received outings. It also does a lot of really cool formal stuff that you don't see in much other Coen output, which strangely never really gets that much attention.

I don't think the problem with his reviews is that they're narrow-minded in the sense of not even trying to find the good in the show, but in the sense that he's only really looking for one particular, pretty specific kind of good. Fowle seems to have a pretty clear, immobile idea of what kind of show Flaked is, and…

BRUTAL FUCKING MURDER

Right? I was a huge Tick fan as a kid, and stayed one into adulthood, so I every time I hear he's working on something, I check it out and all I get for my troubles is a little bit more disillusionment and a headache.

I think it's super weird that the reviewer thinks the only possible readings of Chip and Dennis's conversation about London are "pop-culture satire" and "completely straightforward discussion between two nice dudes who are totally in the right." I think Fowle is right that there's really nothing to suggest the scene…

I'm somewhere in between. I think the comedy/drama balance generally worked, but I'd certainly never say the balance was perfect. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I don't even have a high tolerance for tonal whiplash/confusion so much as I actively enjoy those things.

I'm not sure I liked the show as much as you did, but I agree that the reviewer's/commentariat's disdain is between unwarranted and outright misguided. I wrote a longer comment about where I think some of the failure to connect comes from in the Spoiler Space thread, but to shorten a pretty long-winded post, Flaked…

Oh, yeah. I'm not contesting that he's an asshole. I'm just contesting exactly what makes him an asshole.

I really enjoyed both the naturalistic feel and the plot picking up, separately, but I think they crashed together pretty badly. I think the brevity worked against it, here. When the plot picked up, there weren't a lot of episodes left to fit it in and suddenly we were alternating between naturalistic scenes and kinda…

I secretly wonder if it was meant to have a longer season? Eight episodes is an oddly short run, and I think a lot of the problems stem from that, either directly or indirectly.

I think the show's structure hurt London more than anything else. The first season of Agents of SHIELD is a pretty good parallel, strange though that may seem. To avoid spoiling plot twists from the upcoming Captain America movie, Agents was basically forced to tread water for a lot of its first season, and really…

Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel. For me, the season was a pretty flat, tentative B. I think it does some interesting stuff, and it really breezes by you — I had an easier time accidentally binge-watching Flaked than intentionally marathoning much better shows — but it has pretty significant flaws and nothing…

I don't think London is really the bad guy, or even presented as the bad guy. Rather, I think Dennis/George are suspicious of her motives while Chip is, on multiple levels, shaken by the figure from his past. It forces him to engage on a direct, real level with things he's only really dealt with superficially. He…

The show is called Flaked, dude. Flaking isn't about failing when faced with an insurmountable task, it's about failing because you just don't really care.

Yeah, exactly. One of Chip's last platitudes of the season is "Everything doesn't have to be one way or another. . . . We don't live in a black and white world," which I think sums up a lot of why some critics and viewers have had trouble connecting with the series. While *Flaked* is by no means Shakespeare, it's…