Nailed it. There's not even a REASON for them to fight besides "prize money" and "fragile masculinity". C'mon, someone steal the other guy's girlfriend! Slam his arm in the car door! Y'all don't even hate each other!

I am DEEPLY ambivalent about letting my five-year-old watch wrestling. I think he'd understand that it's "just a TV show", but I have serious concerns about him internalizing what he sees - not just the "resolve all your problems by beating the shit out of the other guy" aspect but the broader, uh, lurid-ness of the…

it's melodrama, in the literary sense - it's a high stakes battle between right and wrong that will have a clear resolution. I've always compared it to soap operas, in that sense - the heightened "reality", I mean. Nobody can take the sort of simulated punishment in the ring and walk away, and nobody actually has…

I love wrestling. Fuckin' love it. But I can't bring myself to keep watching it, knowing full well what kind of shit it does to the people who do it for a living.

excellent account name, questionable opinion. that's a feature, not a bug.

Great piece. One of these days, I'm gonna teach a course on pro wrestling using that Barthes one and Erving Goffman's work on impression management as the linchpins. It's a performance, but the performance has to both "over the top" and "believable" - MMA bores me because it's just dudes clubbering on each other…

It was pushing the same tired old WWF castoffs instead of building their roster around the future icons in their midst. Fuck YES you put Rey Mysterio over Kevin Nash, David vs Goliath is a beloved story for a REASON. Push Jericho to the fucking moon. Fuck it, just give him the mic and let him say whatever he…

"Lebron: The Decision", anyone?

"All sports fans are marks in one way or another."

I will always remember Alex Wright for getting burned by real life in the most awful way. Dude is repackaged as "Matrix"/industrial rivethead character called "Berlyn" with those little Neo sunglasses and a long black trenchcoat and an industrial entrance theme…. like two weeks before Columbine happened. They…

Well, Rick was from Kentucky, so I give him a small pass on GA geography, but yeah, the rest of the shitty survivor crew should know better.

I want an RDR-type game set in the Depression. You're a bank robber and you can either be a spree-murdering asshole and run for your life, or you can be Pretty Boy Floyd and burn all the mortgage statements and the farmers will hide you from the cops.

I don't know about that. There are NO functional human settlements because only shitty garbage people (and I'm absolutely calling Rick and his group shitty garbage people) survived?

I kind of wouldn't mind them stealing a page from Zombieland and having one of the supporting cast be a semi-recognizable actor playing "themselves." Not Bill Murray famous, but the sort of actor who'd do Random Roles for AVC and we'd all go "oh yeah, her!" Play it completely straight, though.

The show's sense of geography has always been suspect, yes.

Harry Crane Failing Upward is a concept I can get behind. He's the one who realizes that the porn theater is on the way out when he sees his first VCR.

Georgia has outrageously good tax incentives for TV production.

there are easier ways to do that than blow up the fucking building.

I think we brainstormed this around the finale and I came up with some of the following:

The breakdown of logistics and supply chains is the real meat of any apocalypse story. Even the military has to get their fuel and ammo and whatnot from somewhere.