Some seasons are better than others at elevating the "season arc" (or what there is of one) enough so that there's more going on than any given episode's Larry predicament. I especially love the Producers season, the Blacks, and Seinfeld.

Be forewarned . . . IIRC, takes a lot of effort if you want to follow that one all the way.

Which is why I said "not just in its use of . . ."

Season one was pretty amazing in how it played around with narrative - not just in its use of achronology, but in how it was integral to the story that was being told. It was also pretty formally bold, and managed to mix dirty noir pop with some fairly authentic philosophical inquiry. It was a pretty great season of…

Interesting, I would never think to do that. To each her/his own, of course, and I don't at all mean this as a criticism, but it seems a bit consumption-driven. Like the point is to "get through" the shows in order to own them, or something like that. Which is fine, I guess, if having viewed the shows is the goal. But…

You mean in quick succession, or you actually speed them up?

I teach the occasional university screenwriting course, and while we look at a lot of old movies, indie movies, etc., one of the joys is introducing students to Die Hard. It gets its share of sighs and huffs when I go over the syllabus on day one, but almost everybody ends up appreciating (if not downright loving it).

If I were you, I'd substitute Buffy for both GGs in your list above and come to them after. IMO it's a much better show (they're good, too), and also doing so might give you a better sense of the ways a certain type of protagonist has/hasn't developed on TV in the wake of Buffy.

The board game is a helluva lot of fun, too. I love the way it's strategic and open, but the definite end points (unlike, say, Risk, which is great but for other reasons). You can play it in 60-90 min, and if your group's in the mood, play it again!

phone cops, man.

What did Scotty find in the toilet?

Didn't Cracked even have its own Neuman ripoff? Blonde, with a cap?

When I was in fourth grade, around 1980, there was a kid in my class (Kevin?) who was really good at copying just about every MAD cartoon style. He was also a pretty clever story teller. He did up a multi-panel Don Martin cartoon and sent it off to MAD. They wrote him a really nice letter back, a sort of "keep it up,…

Yeah, it was difficult to know which came first, the accent or the attitude. He definitely had unpleasant attitudes about the Roma. I didn't know him well, but I knew him a bit and when he wasn't on the subject of ethnicity, he was a funny, clever guy, a bit more naive than he thought he was. He was big on the anti-PC…

I taught for a long time in Hungary and I once had a student who had a distinct southern American accent. As I got to know him a bit better, I asked him if he'd spent time there, or had family there. Nope. That's just the variety of English he'd decided to learn.

Same here - but at least the prospect for this week just got a little bit better!

I think the ship stuff was the one area of S4 that might have suffered for being truncated by the writers' strike - there was supposedly a bit more about the illness/madness that didn't really get fleshed out. But I also sort of like that it went unexplained because it fed into the overall growing sense of "madness"…

I think George built up a lot of serious resentment during the Beatles years that he sort of unleashed on the world in the early-mid '70s (aided by a pretty gargantuan intake of cocaine), but that for the most part he was a pretty decent guy.

But S6 Buffy isn't just a typical girl out of college. She's dealing with serious amounts of trauma and their after effects - not only brought back from Heaven against her will and with no sense of purpose, but also still dealing with the death of her mother, the loss of a stable love interest, and what amounts to…

I really like S6, while admitting that it has some execution problems. It's season-long narrative is actually pretty delicately woven, and it holds up well watching on dvd/streaming when you can watch eps in close succession.