I absolutely hate AV Club’s new (ish) front page, and I have from the get go. Its visually distracting and has the opposite effect (at least for me) of what I assume they were going for. I read less of AV Club than I did with the old format. 

I think the main issue with Bly Manor is that it keeps telling, rather than showing. Whether it is the narrator, or a character monologue or even a - very - on-the-nose sequence like the one with the wedding dress, the writing insists in blatantly telling us what to understand.

Dani’s final scene with Eddie who went nowhere even with the cracking of the glasses in the fire as she was just so resigned that she could never have that life she desired as he would be there. Also, I’m far from as certain than the review that Eddie isn’t really a ghost as some of the scenes don’t feel like they…

With this episode, I found myself once again comparing it to Haunting of Hill House and how the focus is different. The main narrative focus in HoHH was about family bonds, about how they can be be strained or become these twisted destructive things, but how the can also be that support and force to help you in your…

Way, way too many subplots and characters that the show tries to do justice through flashbacks at the expense of a compelling narrative in the present.

“I didn’t want the whole review to turn too much into a diatribe about queer representation”

I’m just starting episode 3 and the accents Are highly distracting to me as a Brit. US viewers, do they stand out to you or sound ok? The children are unbelievably posh (stage school diction there kids!) the staff are ok, but Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino... erm... Oliver Jackson-Cohen appears to be channeling Sean…

Damn, I knew I kept a Hulu subscription for a reason. Ballingrud is legit.

I’m sorry, it is literally impossible to be a “Twitter legend”.

Eh, he seems like more a of a healer to me.  

I was about to the say the same thing. This seems like more of case of not liking Johnson’s directorial style on set or something, because nobody sidelined Finn and Rose more than Abrams.

He’s got me when he says they didn’t know how to handle characters of color. I mean, Finn ultimately has no fucking character arc whatsoever. But he loses me when he criticizes TLJ and Rian Johnson while defending Abrams. Because Abrams, by being in charge of the beginning and end is ultimately responsible for the…

I mean if I understood it correctly, Della is single in the books, but I also don’t think that needs to be a constraint here and that’s not why I think Hazel’s going to die or that Della would remain alone after that.

I think it is a bit of head-fake. Ya, Ennis (that is his name, not Ellis, as eloquently highlighted by the Denver mining secretary as “one letter from penis”) is an instrumentality but the “big confession on the stand” that is the hallmark of Perry Mason will show who is the true big bad.

I mean, sort of. The Soviets annexed the region of Bessarabia in 1940 and shifted the borders, substracting territory in the south and north where the Romanians were a minority and adding territory on the left bank of the Nistru/Dniester (hence the state’s name) which had never been part of either Romania or…

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1992, Moldova—a country of 13,000 square miles between Ukraine and Romania—became independent for the first time since 1538, having been part of the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Romania, and the USSR

perry busting out the n-word was pretty jarring considering our current point in history, but what was interesting was that he used it to provoke paul into giving him what he wanted and paul, although clearly angry about the whole situation, wasn’t gonna let perry get to him that easily. his response was great.

As a sidenote, as the comparison is inevitable, while this show has its flaws, it is astonishing how it does everything better than Penny Dreadful did. Starting from the seemingly baffling assumption that if you start your show with a horrific ritualistic murder, maybe that should then be the focus of your show and…

Aside from certain aspects of the pacing, I’d argue the show’s biggest issue is that it assumes everyone watching knows that Perry Mason will end up being this big time trial attorney. Thus it keeps hitting and setting up a lot of groundwork to establish how that will happen, including EB’s sickness, but it ends up…

It gets better, especially when Tatiana Maslaney starts showing up.  It’s not perfect I’m still not a fan of the slow burn approach, but my goodness, it’s gorgeous to look at.  It’s some of the best production design I’ve ever seen.