Jason Priestley and Brad Pitt lived together (?!?!) in the late 1980s, apparently read Bibles and didn’t shower that often

It’s always funny to think of people who got big before they were big — like Leo in a Lassie movie, for example. Above is Brad Pitt from the TV show 21 Jump Street, which is one of his earlier “moderately-well-known”roles. Apparently, as he… Continue Reading

Whenever your friends tell you viewership numbers for House of Cards or Orange is the New Black, uh, they’re lying to your face

This is a good lesson in the context I reference in the title of this blog: Netflix is all the rage in certain friend groups/socioeconomic sectors as “Oh, is (such-and-such) streaming?” But here’s the important thing to remember: Netflix is a subscriber-based… Continue Reading

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Can you make money (revenue) off social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc? And if you can’t, will social someday become a fad?

Let’s start with a couple of basics: Facebook and Twitter, the two behemoths in the general social media space right now (I’d classify Instagram as Facebook, and I might include YouTube as the third behemoth), are now both public companies.… Continue Reading

Is HBO’s “Veep” the most underrated (or even the best) comedy on TV right now?

Veep just got renewed for Season 4 (Season 3 is airing right now) and there’s lots of scuttlebutt these days about Julia Louis-Dreyfus — having sex with a clown for GQ, posing naked on the cover of Rolling Stone — and in some ways… Continue Reading

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Did Mad Men use the same foreshadowing clue as How I Met Your Mother once did?

You won’t see Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother compared that often — although Neil Patrick Harris could probably fit seamlessly on both — but they may have dropped a similar foreshadowing technique in their final couple of seasons. Above, you see… Continue Reading

Is it really fair to evaluate a cable show (say, Mad Men) against a network show (say, The Good Wife) for an awards season?

Little bit of controversy in the TV world recently, because The Good Wife (CBS) is out stumping for Emmy love and decided to run a campaign basically attacking the differences between cable shows and network shows. (There’s more context here.) From a logic standpoint, the… Continue Reading

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“The Neighbors” on ABC will likely get cancelled, but in some ways, it’s better than “Modern Family”

Ridiculous headline? Perhaps. Modern Family is beloved by the Emmys and starting to be beloved by syndication. The Neighbors was a show seemingly doomed from the start — aliens in suburbia, with the most famous person being Jami Gertz — that is likely to… Continue Reading

Brief thought exercise: does Mad Men need to end with Don, Roger or Pete dying?

You all know the theory by now, hopefully: because Mad Men‘s title sequence contains a man plummeting towards Madison Avenue, there’s been speculation for about seven years now that one of the main characters will die as the series ends. Well,… Continue Reading