Both main actors speak with American accents in this one, and they both do a decent-to-excellent job. (Actually, I guess her character is Canadian, but she doesn't go overboard with the aboots, which is good.)

My favorite part is what is surely the most dramatic reveal of an on/off switch ever committed to film at around the 1:38 mark.

I see what you're saying, but I think Grossman's Narnia fandom really comes through in the book, and kind of damages, to my mind, the more interesting literary fiction bits of the book. I liked the trilogy, but the farther away the characters were from Fillory the more I liked the book - the whole hedge magician…

Well, good answer, you've got me about 75% convinced (with the caveat that it's a little early in the season to tell what really drives Cameron).

Er, confirmation bias.

I see your point, but if you won't take arguments in favor of the shows being the same because any examples indicate selection bias, there's not much of a conversation to be had. Maybe you can come up with some ways the shows are significantly different?

Personally I thought the aspect of this show as a Mad Men pastiche was blindingly obvious throughout. It's not about a one-to-one correspondence between the characters on the different shows, it's about the broad themes and situations.

The miracle is that you survived a Scandinavian childhood, what with all the serial killers, human trafficking gangs, and disinterested institutions that seem to be there.

Fun fact: the Norwegian pronunciation of "Hole" is "hoo-leh."

As much as I don't love Amazon as a company, they actually have a pretty good track record of acquiring other companies and then leaving them largely alone instead of rolling them up into amazon.com or something (eg IMDB, GoodReads, and even the venerable AbeBooks which surprisingly still exists).

Mike Leigh is one of the warmest, most humanist directors we've got these days. I wouldn't call him a miserablist by any stretch.

Well, in fairness it's 1979 Quadrophenia-era Sting, not 2013 tantric Sting.

In that he never got stabbed in the face, no.

God, that pilot was just one rubbish cliche after another. Maybe they can improve it, but I'm not hopeful (and I generally like Chris Carter).

Yes indeed! Just like machines, we have no need to eat, and the spark of consciousness is provided to us by a series of digital switches. That's why we're all at peak capacity when we emerge fully formed from the human being factory, exactly identical to every other human being.

Your thinkpiece was a lot better than this one, cheers.