I'll miss you on the comment threads: Commiseration loves company. Starz is bundled with our extras along with the rest we "get" besides analog channels, CNN etc. We subscribe to HBO. I try to catch up on The Knick when Cinemax offers a freebie weekend. DIA has been a real disappointment. Moore's "Outlander" will…

I'm happy for the people who will make money, achieve fame, and receive recognition. I'll watch it the way I do "Black Sails," just for a lark. For quality, I'll look for the next season of "The Last Kingdom" and the new adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities," both by the BBC.

Presto! Your wish is granted! AND THAT'S NOT ALL! Post on this comment thread, and you get an A or at the very least, a B+—just like each episode! What's that, TV spokesperson? OMG, it's graduation time, so you also get . . . A DIPLOMA!!! You can win all this, BUT ONLY if you agree with everyone else in the…

Thank you for this reply. If you have time, you should write posts more
often. One correction I would offer in appreciation of your effort: This is not the only thing I spend my time doing. My problem is that Diana Gabaldon is not the ONLY author whose works fascinate me (she is not even my favorite), nor is Ronald…

It's really unfortunate that you can't stop bullying people with whom you disagree on the Internet. If you weren't so xenophobic, I think you would enjoy reading posts by people who don't think or feel exactly the way you do about everything.

I appreciate your reply. I would only add that my treatment is based not on a scholar's understanding of the 18th century but on my understanding of Gabaldon's depiction of it in her novels. I do respect her scholarship. I think it is one of the explanations for the success of Gabaldon's novels, which have a large…

[SPOILERS: I’ve tried to limit my comments (lately) to how Moore handles the series as something only tangentially related to Gabaldon’s novels. I’ve also tried to give his choices a chance, while being aware that they are choices: He could have developed any particular topic many different ways. So discussing how…

Ronald Moore is the showrunner, so the buck stops there. I point out how Moore has done a mediocre job with the series as television, apart from its identity as an adaptation. IMO the series has departed so far from the books that comparison between the two is now meaningless, except to point out things Moore has…

What I really wish I had written is the Sesame Street episode entitled "Life of Whoopie Pie."

Maybe up north of the U.S. border you didn't get to see Starz's smash-up promos (ad nauseam) blending scenes from "Black Sails," "Outlander," "Ash vs. the Evil Dead," and "The Girlfriend Experience." I remain content with my point of view and consider myself unchallenged, as least by you. Nor do I take offense at…

Any old writer can make us want to see what happens next. The really gifted writers make us forget. For just a moment, it is as if our greatest disappointments in life as well as our proudest achievements disappear. Or we just forget we left the soup boiling on the stove. Or we can’t remember where we put the…

Thanks again for the reply. I will stop bringing up the same points as soon as Moore stops making the same mistakes. Fair enough? Moore's approach has so little to do with the novel that skimming the book is probably useless at this point. I see the series, flaws and all, as virtually stand-alone.

Thanks for the suggestion. Each week I describe how the new episode fits into my point of view about Moore's "Outlander," so it's not really the same post each time. You are a close reader, and even you don't see that. My suspicion is that you don't want to see that nuance, though I'm quite prepared to believe…

I would submit that these scenes (and others) are meant to be humorous and humorous in a very specific way. Of course, there is nothing as unfunny (and conceivably boring) as explaining a joke. That's a variation on Becket's "There is nothing so funny as unhappiness." Sigh. So I won't be offended in at all at all…

IT DOESN'T. Whenever Moore drags out the king's toilette or drags out the scene with Jamie reacting (or not reacting) to bitter cascara, Moore introduces the kind of scatological humor that is the special province of adolescent boys—when I don't think there are that many in the audience. Is there any other…

That would be true if I cared about influencing anyone or expected it in the current climate of suppression of ideas about film and television. I'm just tossing my arguments into the mix. I am rather surprised by how troublesome some people find it.

Starz presents its "opinion" as fact: Asserting that "Outlander" is still a romance, for example, when it no longer is and stopped being so after Season 1 Episode 8. They do not bother to define "obsessable," for another example.
Furthermore, I do not say I present an opinion. I justify my arguments with examples…

Maybe our point of disagreement is with the word "nuanced." I bring up these examples to show that members of the French aristocracy circa the revolution, in Weiss and Dickens and Gabaldon, are not all alike, as they are in Moore's "Outlander." As for Weiss, let's go at this from the point of view of free speech,…

Some people take what I say as an insult if I do not agree with them. If we cannot come at a topic from differing perspectives, it is impossible to have any discussion or come to an understanding about anything. From my point of view, the entertainment industry thrives on the popularity of weak ideas because there…

Yes. But that is not how the content of the program operates. Starz wants to have it both ways.