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Yay for the sixth season! The budget supposedly won't be reduced, but neither Jonathan Banks nor John Oliver will be coming back and both were quasi-regulars in the fifth season, so I wonder if they'll cast another quasi-regular or try to budget for some exterior shots instead. I could see them going either way, because IMO the group needs a Pierce-like character and a Troy-like character -- they never did fill that void though in the fifth season.

I think Ally McBeal might have been the first time I really paid attention to who a showrunner was, because everything I read about the show said something like "David E Kelley is great and makes great shows and has a tendency to leave them behind for new shows -- but his lieutenants can never maintain the balance of weird but good that he did."

Danny Pudi and Donald Glover at E3! http://www.gamespot.com/videos/e3-2014-donald-glover-and-danny-pudi-floor-report/2300-6419504/

I've just become an SMBC regular reader in the last few months. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella is on a break right now following its 400th update (it updates weekly) but it's so great. Basically Wonder Woman but pragmatic and apathetic. Amazing Super Powers updates MWF, and note that they not only have a hover-cursor joke (like XKCD and some others) but also another hidden joke -- click the white-on-white question mark in the upper right next to the strip. They're super funny. Buttersafe updates Tuesdays and Thursdays. Very clever comedy. They don't do hover-cursor jokes, but if you scroll down, there's sometimes some explanatory text at the bottom. I read Freakangels every week when it was new. (Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield do a full on comic book about what if the Midwich Cuckoos had grown up to be 21). Then I bought all the collected trade paperbacks in print form even though it's still available to read for free online, because it's really good. I started reading Cleopatra in Space but gave it up because I think I'd rather read it in book form. And I still check in on Penny Arcade, PVP, Sinfest every now and then.

Oh, Garol. And man did I love Abbi punting that rotisserie chicken. BTW, I recently found out North Brother Island is a real place. (I'm not a New Yorker and didn't know city history...) http://sometimes-interesting.com/2013/01/03/the-forgotten-island-of-new-york-north-brother/

The Indoctrination Theory is entertaining, but the way Bioware talks about it, I think it's at best a great fan theory that they never intended but just lucked into. OK, but this theme is contradicted by the win-win geth-quarian resolution you can get in ME3...

A hilarious (spoilery) image about why ME3's ending was so disappointing:

Solid stuff. I've had a crush on Lindsay Sloane for forever, so I'm always happy to see her, and Tina's a character that's pretty solidly in her wheelhouse. I liked the detail that Maggie had "had a piece of Mark". Too often these shows about big city people returning to their hometowns seem to treat the town as being preserved in amber since they left, but Maggie, Mark, etc really did live their own lives while Emma was away. Also, I just totally wasn't expecting that little twist.

ME 1 is pretty flawed. 2 and 3 are actual shooters while 1 is considerably more of a dice-rolling game that happens to superficially look like a shooter, and its systems can be very clunky. But the endgame/climax of 1 is really quite spectacular. For me the ending to 3, even in extended cut versions, was gruesomely unsatisfying.

It makes a certain demented sense... Why submit anything else from the final season when everything leading up to the last five minutes of this season was a total stall/misdirect?

"Who's More Over Their Ex?"was freaking brilliant.

Neither of the clips you both provided is , where

There's an approximately four minute long single take where he fights his way up a tower with an internal courtyard, and that's pretty badass, but I was thinking of the flooded room on fire where he takes on three masters in succession.

I can't say for sure, but I think it is common to "undercrank" fight footage so it's filmed at 22fps, say, such that when it's played back at 24 fps, it's just a bit faster.A bunch of my favorites were listed here already, so I'll just go with Drunken Master 2, particularly the tea house scene and the final fight. Tony Jaa in The Protector was also great.

Well, that would have kept her safe in the short to medium term. But given Hannibal's skills, she wouldn't have been completely safe from Hannibal as long as he was alive. Even in this show's continuity, Will managed to nearly kill Hannibal while incarcerated at BSHCI. If I were her I wouldn't have put my trust in the FBI either.

I thought that too. I asked elsewhere and someone said there was a sound of him dropping the gun.

I didn't watch 2 Broke Girls as a guilty pleasure, I legit hate-watched it. As in, I hated it, and I watched it because I hated it. It gave me spiteful energy: "if this shit is on TV, how am I not writing better than this?"

Heroes, though IMO it was never great. It was very good and had tremendous potential, but I distinctly remember (1) being blown away that they would name November - the election - as being their first big milestone and then (2) that initial sense of dread I felt when the writers then made interview comments about how they might stretch out show time so "November" wouldn't actually happen in November. It was only nine years ago, but back then sweeps still kinda counted for something and I really thought they would make something happen for November sweeps. I still think they chickened out of the task of finding themselves anything bigger to end the first season than their November cliffhanger so they embarked on a massive stall. But even so, most of S1 was pretty good; it's just that I think the cracks in the foundation were there almost from the beginning. (And I felt the show and network -- OK, maybe it was NBC -- was leaning on the stupid S1 catchphrase way too hard. Especially since saving the damn cheerleader had fuck-all to do with actually saving the world. (Ypu're a better fan than I am if you remember the chain of logic behind this. I asked fans elsewhere and it turned out to be bone-stupid: The Simpsons. This used to be the funniest thing in the world. The quality of the writing, acting, and animation were all top notch. I used to be an uber Simpsons nerd. My friends and I could quote large chunks of the show from memory, and we pretty much always had a quote for any situation. I bought up to season 9 of the DVDs, but in real time I watched up to about season 12 or so. It struck me when I was buying s9 that it was sad in a way that the Simpsons effectively ended for me about there. And now "Zombie Simpsons" is, depending how you measure it, about twice as long-lived as "real" Simpsons. Over years since I stopped regularly watching, people would occasionally tell me the Simpsons were back, and I would watch, and it was genuinely hurtful for me how bad the show had gotten. HIMYM. Compared to Rinaldo, I'm a very recent latecomer. I actually only started regularly watching in the final season, and I never did binge-watch my way through previous seasons. Big parts of the final season were pretty lame, but the finale -- or really, most of all the finale's last few minutes -- were still a complete clusterfuck of a disappointment after a season I'd largely enjoyed. The finale alone, in about three major moments, two right at the end, managed to wreck most everything they'd built up over the last season as well as what I gather had come before. ... I actually liked the first ten episodes each of S6 and S7. I haven't rewatched in a while, but I remember thinking ep 10 or 11 of each was where each season went off the rails. The way Buffy and the gang won s7's fight against the "big bad" -- by a deux ex machina she had no way of knowing was there -- really put the cherry on top, though this moment from the S6 finale also counts:

Aw, I like aspic. I've never seen so much "meat jello" altogether by itself, used just to create a kind of scene as in the kholodets*, but in, say, a Vietnamese headcheese? I'm totally happy to eat it. * BTW, while Janice Poon's blog about it was fascinating, the other kholodets I've seen online just tonight seem to just be straightforward meat-in-aspic, not a 3D diorama frozen in aspic. Hannibal's really nuts just as far as how much he'll do just for presentation.

Ep was good overall and I liked how Maggie gradually understood the reality of CJ vs the nostalgia for High School CJ. But to respond to your question, Valny, it wasn't quite as funny as "Bird Bones".

But isn't hip hop posturing kind of Eddie Huang's deal in real life? To me, he's kind of both kidding and not kidding when he does it.

For what it's worth, the next two episodes had less of the yelly kind of humor...

It was obvious right from the start that Maggie was interested in Gary, but then because Andy Daly and Jessica St Clair are show-married over on Review, I was rooting against Maggie & Gary anyways. Nice use of parallels throughout, from Gary and Emma to Maggie and Emma's mom to the little capper of Emma's mom and Steve.

Nah, she wouldn't have fled (nor displayed such obvious if restrained terror last time) if she didn't fear for her life.

Structurally, though, what an amazing fake-out by Fuller and company. "We're twisting up the lore all through this show, and Mason's got vicious homicidal pigs now. So we're totally going to swap pigs for dogs... Except no, we aren't!" According to Fuller, Anderson only made it back to the show for this episode for six hours of filming on the one day she had between Crisis and The Fall by flying to/from Toronto. A tremendous effort on her part already, so I'm glad she was here at all.