Jipijapa

Empire. I was only going to check it out, out of loyalty to Taraji Henson (her exit from Person of Interest still smarts), and I don't even like nighttime soaps, or hip hop, or shows with songs in them. But, it keeps me coming back.

"which is that John Noble's agent saw the ship going down and demanded a prompt and reasonably irreversible demise" I think his budding off-Broadway career has more to do with it, actually.

OMG. Triple points if it's the father/mother in the armed forces returning home to surprise the kids and/or their dog. Instant sappy soppy waterworks for me...

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

I think that was all a David Chase fascination. He loved them Jersey boys. Look it it this way: we got The Sopranos out of it.

No, because it was actually a bit ahead of its time... because no one really imagined in the mid 1980s that there would be lots of kids like Alex Keaton who would later grow up to be world-ruining neoconservative assholes. If it had been on in the 1990s or later, it could have been taken seriously as a political statement, but in the 1980s it was just considered an amusing "turnabout" gimmick.

I'm of the opinion that any show, no matter how old (or even any talented person, no matter how old) can still produce wonderful stuff. And in fact, that the wonderful stuff brought forth by old shows/people is often some of their most wonderful work. HOWEVER... those wonderful moments are harder and harder to find, fewer and farther between. There is a lot of dross, retread, and bad uninspired stuff you have to plow through to get to the wonderful moments. Mainly because the low-hanging creative fruit, the obvious good stuff, has already been plucked in the show's early or middle years. I particularly hate it when older shows introduce new characters to go through the same old character beats that the show's core characters (many of whom have moved on) already went through years ago. Selling the same stuff in new bottles. Even worse - when shows force the same character to undergo the same development epiphanies that they really went through years ago, hoping the audience won't notice that it already happened. For instance, on Fringe when Walter "finally" called Astrid by her correct name in the final episode. (Erm... he'd actually done that several times in earlier seasons.) That's a tiny example though - most of the problem is when a character has to "learn to love again" due to some past trauma or "finally pay for their sins" and we've already seen them go through this process at least once a season. And also, the truth is, great characters can actually be used up. You can take them through all their beats and still have a few seasons left over, and usually the solution is to have them become a parent which... really isn't all that interesting TBH (because little kids are boring and not drama-drivers). So, I think it's good when shows quit while they are ahead.

I would like to see a reboot of The Rockford Files, but without Jim Rockford. Call it Paradise Cove, and have it be about three or four private eyes who all grew up under old Jim Rockford's tutelage. Now that he's gone to that great trailer in the sky, they are all sort of frenemies with each other, occasionally competing for clients, getting serially arrested by the LAPD for crimes they didn't commit, getting beaten up by thugs, and at the end of every episode they have a beer at the Sand Castle and reminisce about things old Jimbo once did, or the PI advice he gave them. (Also, at least one of the PI's will have a lovingly framed black and white glossy of James Garner on his desk)

Downton Abbey! I normally love British period dramas of stuffy manners. I can't get into this one. Even the dreary theme music sends me into fits.

TV tropes! So easy to hate them... perhaps harder to admit that there are some tropes that we love? Maybe there are some tropes you don't even know that you love, but which become apparent only when you compare notes on your various favorite shows over the years? My favorite TV trope of all time? Sons and dads who have a love-hate (or at least Mutt and Jeff) relationship. Or, more generally, platonic friendships between older men and younger men (could be father-son, or just colleagues). I'm a total sucker for this, and it seems to be a common feature of many of my favorite shows across any genre (e.g. Fringe, Quantum Leap, the Rockford Files). Also, to a lesser exent, Carter and Benton on E.R.

Possible UO: Many shows on TV are dragging on way too long. I still believe any show older than 7 seasons is essentially phoning it in.

Do we know the proper spelling of Portia/Porsche/Porsha's name, by the way? (Please let it be "Porsche")

There's another episode from the following year that features an obviously gay couple (two men), but their being gay has no bearing on the plot at all. They are a pair of art collectors who get robbed. This role could have been filled by any traditional straight couple. This episode was more noteworthy to me than the other one, because it portrayed the men as being in a longtime relationship (15 years). Although , there was also a nice scene at the end where it was made clear that a loving gay relationship was nothing to make fun of. (The pilot episode of The Rockford Files is another matter, using "queer" as a pejorative - but that attitude is never shown in the rest of the series and in fact the show was quite gay-positive for its time.) That was the big problem with gay characters on TV in the 70s or earlier: oh, they were obviously there. But they were either (very offensively) shown as perverted killers (Police Woman had a notorious episode about lesbians along those lines, which was shown only once because of outcry from gay organizations), or more usually, as people you were supposed to laugh at. Nobody took these characters' pain, or even their happiness seriously.

Blast from the past: A gay mobster comes out to his father... in 1977. The most interesting thing is that this wasn't even a major subplot of the episode - the gay mobster wasn't even the pivotal character. (Story does not have a happy ending: )

It's not my kind of show either, but it is definitely not a cheap-looking show from what I've seen. Production values are excellent. (yes, I do watch it)

Ronald Colman was a hottie.

I don't understand, who decides how long you have to wait until something is not a spoiler? "They could stand to wait for one or two days..." but then what about people who don't watch it for a week? Or until next year? Where do we draw the line? I watch Empire on a one-day delay... I don't find it hard to stay away from spoilers.

Orphan Black is an example of a show I ought to love, but just can't really get into. For one thing, you have to reeeaaaaaaallly love Tatiana Maslany. I mean, she's okay, but I would start to get tired of even my favorite actors if they played most of the roles on a show. Second, I'm glad I wasn't around for the male/transgender Tatiana clone, because when I was watching the first episodes, I thought, "I really don't want to stick around for the male Tatiana clone."

I grew up on the rerun packages of Carol Burnett, so I probably didn't see a lot of the original skits, particularly from early seasons which is where they seem to be at the moment. I didn't realize how much of the stuff on that show was absurdist humor. There's one skit where Carol is a housewife whose kitchen is being invaded by people shouting or enacting advertising slogans, but it's so random that it almost seems intentionally surreal. I am wondering if they were trying to emulate Laugh-In more during the early seasons. It seems to me that later, they had more structured, better written skits with recurring characters almost all the time. (BTW, Carol Burnett's housewife persona almost seemed to be a parody of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman -- except that show didn't even exist until a few seasons later!)

So is anyone watching (or DVR-ing) MeTV's Carol Burnett stuff? I have a sinking feeling that MeTV only got the leftovers from the DVDs that CBS (or whoever owns it) hawks on infomercials. Basically there are two skits per night, and they're Not The Ones You Remember. (ie, they're mostly... not that funny) Except Tim Conway, who is always funny in everything. Have been enjoying some of the Mr Tudball sketches.

I admit to being a huge snob about movie soundtracks in that I really hate meaningless song compilations that are shoved into a movie. When film composers actually do the lion's share of the work of supporting scenes and such. Only to have their work overshadowed by some shitty pop star's latest throwaway song slapped onto the credits. Yuck.

I didn't have quite the same reaction, but your description is making me laugh oh so hard. Thanks. This episode was lower key than the others, which is fine because they can't all be "superb," and I'm still into this story. Keep in mind they probably only wrote enough story for 13 episodes because they didn't know if it would be picked up or not. There's plenty of time for them to bring on "dangerous" characters later on. Finally I actually can see Andre as at least a two-dimensional character now that we understand his relationship with Lucious (growing up). I'll try to forget the kinky sex games with his horrible wife. Terence Howard is awesome but I do think they need to tone down the crying every week. Dude, we know you can summon the tears on command, very impressive skill to have, but it's starting to become a cliche that's distracting me from a pretty compelling character.

I like to think these are just the pre-teens who are doing this. On the Internet it's so hard to tell how old people are. Before the Internet, all age groups might have been watching a show, but they weren't generally mixing together and discussing it. The Internet has now become a huge talk pool that is not segregated by age, which probably muddies the waters quite a bit.

Sometimes I binge-watch shows running in the background while I'm doing something else. That's how I learned to like Continuum. For me, daily "strip watching" was like my daily treat. I could have saved them up and watched them in a row on the weekend, but I liked it being part of my routine. Even when I am trying to catch up on episodes of a show I'm already familiar with (if I joined it in progress), I can't really sit through more than 2 episodes at a time. I like to save some for later, you know? It's also possible that the experience of binge-watching is overhyped and people really aren't doing it as much the media thinks they are. I also don't understand the concept of releasing an entire Netflix show at once. Why bother even separating it into episodes? Why not just make a 13-hour movie called Orange Is the New Black?

I used to get a little obsessed with the still shots in the opening credits of The Rockford Files, because they were not from any known episode. Why was Jim in jail arguing emotionally with someone, who was that chick he was eating with in the car, and what kind of food was in the "fancy food" aisle at the supermarket? I mean, after seeing these over and over, you started to wonder.