My problem with this episode is that when you wholly remove Allison from Kevin’s sitcom-world, there ceases to be any additional layers to sitcom-world. It’s just Kevin running some idiotic manchild scheme.

It’s an unfortunate legacy of Perlmutter’s influence over the early period of the MCU that when Natasha finally gets a story of her own it’s at least as much about introducing the character’s replacement.

It feels like it because it is.  We can thank Ike Perlmutter for that.

It always irritated me that the MCU took so much from the Ed Brubaker run, but reduced its female lead to what was effectively a cameo part.

She’s solid in Carnival Row, I will say.

I didn’t say “only” (I suspect that if there was only one award for limited series lead this year, for instance, a woman would win it), but anyone at all familiar with how perceptions of prestige and overall popularity play into awards would see that men will prevail most of the time.  There would have been no female…

I’ve really liked Guthrie.

It’s a good change, even if it feels like a half-measure that doesn’t really address why there are gendered categories in the first place, and it could be a step closer in the direction of awards shows like the MTV Movie & TV Awards (which already doesn’t have gendered categories).

Wikipedia apparently thinks it’s a romantic comedy.

Young Avengers was a well-liked title when it debuted. It never quite had the run it could have because its creators were a TV guy whose script delivery was erratic and a really slow artist.  But it’s absolutely in the works, almost every recent Marvel project has some linkage to it.

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste interested me as it’s from an Ethiopian-American writer and is set during the Ethiopian resistance to Mussolini’s invasion in 1935, this being one of the preludes to World War II that tends to only receive cursory mentions in history books. I don’t think the book really lives up to…

American Sniper is noteworthy insofar as it is the last non-franchise movie to be the year’s box office #1.

That’s certainly an antecedent, as is the more general concept of “modern gladiator games” which pops up a lot in dystopic fiction.

At the midpoint of the 2010s Lawrence started scaling back and did a couple of decidedly un-commercial ventures (plus a couple of residual franchise appearances) while spending more time on her private life.

They really are not that similar beyond both involving games where kids kill each other, and Hunger Games is very much focused on parodying 2000s reality show and celebrity culture, which have nothing to do with Battle Royale.

My impression from watching American Sniper was that Eastwood had some more critical ideas about Chris Kyle that were never going to make it into the film because his family was supervising the whole thing, though that would also call into question why you would make the film in the first place.

Mayim has the all-important support my mother, who talks about how much she likes her as host after every episode.

(have their characters even interacted on Stranger Things?)

Mary Poppins Returns is only eight minutes longer than the original film.

Chris Evans’ Captain America might be Marvel Studios’ real masterpiece—an aw-shucks all-decency good guy who’s so sincere and well-meaning that he never even feels corny.