CaliCheeseSucks

Start at the beginning. The first couple of seasons are great. It's now a shell of its former self. For what it's worth, Veep isn't in the running this year. That's why Kimmy Schmidt is pushing the minimum six qualifying episodes out before the deadline - they were delayed by the Mean Girls opening on Broadway - because this is genuinely anyone's best shot to get in and win without Veep, Louis-Dreyfus et. al. sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

This probably isn't much help - it's a list of all Real Time episodes and guests for each. It's hard to parse the divide between interview/panel - especially in those early seasons. I'd assume from the later listings, the first name was the interview (since I recognize many of them as such). It would probably take someone who was watching seasons 1-8 to break down everyone's part on the show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Real_Time_with_Bill_Maher_episodes So much Ann Coulter, Dana Rohrabacher, Jack Kingston.

Completely agree. The majority reason I've hung on is because of Rhys, Ronin, Emmerich, et. al. have sold me on their characters and their conundrums. Even when the writing fails from a narrative standpoint, as I think it's done massively over seasons five and now six, I'm invested in where they've taken these individuals above and beyond the pages of the script. Rhys' climactic scene on the phone in this episode made the hour for me. It doesn't wave away all the stuff I found ridiculous/unbelievable/poorly conceived - to a certain extent, it makes me more annoyed all the other stuff was there. But it does make me go, "Damn. This is why I'm still here."

Exactly. She's become this cartoonish serial killing machine.

It looks like they are images - I would open up the edit button on the post and just zap one of the files.

Wow, Bill's butthurt over a seven-month-old column about Hefner was unreal. With everything going on in the world right now, he whined for how long because of a negative opinion published last September about a sleaze seller? Whatever, Bill.

I honestly don't see any comparison between fan distaste for Paige Jennings and and that towards Skyler White. Breaking Bad fanboys hated Skyler because she was an impediment to Walter's plans. It was a very specific misogyny directed at a woman who wasn't letting her 'man' live the life he wanted to live. Breaking Bad unfortunately had a segment of its fan base that thought Walter White was a 'good guy' - because he finally threw off the oppressive chains of his nagging wife. Fans who understood what an anti-hero was knew that no one was supposed to root for Walter (or the many other bad guys on the show, for that matter). Americans fans that hate Paige hate her because the showrunners have gone all over the place with her character, to the point where it's now practically parody. Nobody here that I've seen hates Paige because she's a problem for her parents doing their thing; we hate that the writers seem to think YA-ifying the show by centering it around Paige was a good idea that would lead to stimulating viewing. Especially in this, its final season. I doubt I would have invested my time had I known from the beginning that this was the endgame. I don't watch Homeland, so I can't speak to that.

Going off my memory of money-related discussions from prior episodes, I think that's another plot hole as the money problems aren't consistent in the family. G.W. is not a cheap school, either.

A million upvotes for that reference!

And for this, they brought Kimmie back, asked us to believe Phillip continued to tape and retrieve tapes from her father's briefcase while she was going to and from Ann Arbor from Washington, D.C. for three years, and attempted to sell us on a Thanksgiving weekend jaunt to Greece. It's so ham-handed, it would be funny if it didn't represent such a spectacularly bad storytelling design.

It honestly angers me that it's just been dropped. He was an important supporting character for four seasons, one in a critical role. The matter of his death, particularly for someone in the sensitive intelligence position he was in, just doesn't seem like one which would be completely insignificant in the long run. Then they cast Peter Jacobsen as Gaad's successor and I thought, "Well, they must have something in mind since they put a recognizable face in this role." Nope, nothing. Honestly, they've shown more concern for fan-servicing mail robot appearances/references than following up on the people and story-lines that we invested our time in watching.

The Elliott School Of International Affairs at GW is highly regarded. I would have expected that by having her attend GW, it would have been part and parcel with getting her into Elliott's program and on that path to a career post in government/international relations/diplomacy. But not only isn't she doing that, they keep revealing her as so dumb, it boggles the mind that she was accepted into any university with a halfway competitive admissions process.

Another exciting episode of Paige Jennings: Teenage Spy Learning To Booze And Her Angry Mother, Who Smokes A Lot. Honeypotting her own husband, a new low – even for Elizabeth. They sure are making easy (easier?) to really want to see Elizabeth dead by the end. Thank god Philip did the right thing with regard to Kimmie. The show's recent suckage aside, Philip (and Rhys) continue to be compelling television. The trailers had telegraphed the climactic assassinations, so there hasn't been any tension on that front for a few episodes. The showrunners, being Inside the Beltway guys, have no excuse for pretending that D.C.'s hometown paper wouldn't be all over this string of high profile murders/'suicide' with front page stories every day. Then again, I can't believe they thought the audience who has been there from the beginning were clamoring for scenes of Claudia, Elizabeth and Paige getting drunk together, the better to teach Junior Spy how to hold her liquor. Yikes. I mean, I can't believe this is the same show that three or four seasons ago, I was begging people to watch.

While I think that Stan has become cartoonishly oblivious over the seasons, why would you root for him to be "brought down"? He's ostensibly a good, if clueless, guy.

It very much had a point: His personal issues were a huge part of the FBI's pushing him out of the job.

I must have perfectly timed the bathroom break. They literally voted for the real-life version of the "Old White Guy Says" Twitter account from Community. Except that at least periodically, Pierce Hawthorne was given some redeeming qualities.

So tired of Avenatti's media mugging all over the place. There's such a thing as overexposure and he's hit it. Love Alex Wagner and wish the panel had been Wagner and Inslee only; Bruni just doesn't add anything special and I've found the two-person panels far more engaging when they've been used. Unless I missed it, there was no mid-panel comedy segment. How I would love for this to become a trend.

History will not be kind to Alfreda Frances Bikowsky (Marsh) or Michael Scheuer (Schmidt).

I should add that yes, because of my inconsistent viewing habit with the show, I was honestly gobsmacked at how weird/stupid the boss acted when he showed up at the party. I remember him being oblivious in the past but seriously, showing up at a child's birthday rambling about cocaine? I guess they have nothing else they can think to do with him. It was embarrassing.

Black-ish has the same issue for me as Fresh Off The Boat: I love everyone (or just about everyone) except the character around whom the show is built. Here, I adore Bow, Jack & Diane, Junior, Ruby and Charlie. Dre's behavior, though, is a reason I tend to watch inconsistently - he's just utterly insufferable, immature and insulting to everyone around him, home and work. I was hoping after season three's "Being Bow-racial" that we might get more Bow-centric POV episodes but alas, that seems to not be in the cards.

Yeah, it made no sense that he was stuck on that side of the Parkway with no one else in sight, while the opposite direction was a bottleneck. Very odd. I wish they'd gone from the last scene of O'Neill in the Tower to perhaps a clearer time jump forward to Soufan's continued intelligence gathering after the fact. Then they could have gone back to 9/11 for the balance of the episode, and closed out with the information about O'Neill's fate. I guess they wanted to give Rahim his big "Brother John is dead" scene but that diversion just drained the emotion of what had happened. Containing those different segments more thoroughly would have been more effective. I'm also torn on the answering machine reveal. It's based on a real detail, though of course, in reality it was multiple messages to multiple women. But it just seemed terribly hokey and unnecessary. I did think the scene with Camp and Parisse was otherwise quite moving.

I understand what strip clubs are and that those are strip clubs. I lived in D.C. for many years and know many of the landmarks, including Camelot, Joanna's and Good Guys simply by reputation. I am simply responding to your use of "go go clubs." Sorry but in my world, "go go clubs" would also be another way of talking about adult night clubs. I've never heard of go-go music clubs in D.C.

Depending on the station, it's possible. Camelot and Joanna's were... I feel gross even talking about them but "acceptable" strip clubs to a certain extent. Their prime location meant that they weren't as seedy as those in Northeast or Southeast. Oh sorry, to me a go-go club means adult/strip.

Ugh. Camelot would fit that bill. Or Joanna's 1819 (now closed).

Ah, gotcha. Yes, please do share what the CC says!