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It's entirely possible, due to the nature of JB, that the Good Place representatives don't even realize how long it's been in Earth time since anyone got in.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:55 AM on December 11, 2018

This has been bugging me for the entire arc: which way does Beacon's blade coil up? I mean, does it coil up like a Fruit Roll-Up, with the flat of the blade curling over on itself so that the dormant sword is short and compact--or does it coil up in a flat spiral configuration, with the point at the center but the entire blade still visible, making the dormant sword more of a lollipop shape?

I had mostly been imagining the former, but the way Justin… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:27 PM on December 7, 2018

Oh hey also? This episode was awesome. I've been enjoying the Pine Guard stuff more and more as it went along, but this might have been the best episode of it yet. Original Flavor TAZ will probably always be first in my heart, but maybe for the first time, I didn't have even a moment of missing it.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:14 PM on December 7, 2018

I think Ivy's sword might be the closest comparison.

But the resting state of that sword is just "a sword," not "a sword that's been coiled".
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:37 PM on December 9, 2018

One of the little details I've really enjoyed about this show is the period-accurate way pedestrians and cars and bicycles interact on the streets - which is to say, pedestrians use the streets pretty freely, and a much smaller volume of cars and cyclists work around them.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:06 AM on November 29, 2018

I think the outdoor baking challenge could have been very cool, but--in addition to agreeing that it should have been earlier in the season--they should have been given a solid extra hour to do it. Just like with the majority of the challenges this year, honestly.

Actually, when they led the contestants outside I was hoping they were going to be making spit cakes, which are similar to schichttortes but much, much weirder to bake. Now spit cakes have been added to my… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:32 PM on November 27, 2018

Yeah the terrible thing about this wonderful podcast is the number of people who will eventually wind up watching Paul Blart 2 out of sheer curiosity.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:34 AM on November 23, 2018

One of my favorite podcasts is The Flop House, so I'm amused by the notion that you'd need to watch a bad movie before listening to a podcast make fun of it. I've seen maybe 2% of the movies covered by The Flop House but it's still funny to listen to other people suffer through them.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:50 AM on November 27, 2018

reality-tv editing hi-jinks like cutting it to make the final minute look completely out of control when the actual final minute is almost certainly quite different

This has been driving me bonkers all season. They've really started overusing the fakery, and now every episode is structured to make it look as if someone completely iced and decorated a cake in thirty seconds.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:52 PM on November 26, 2018

The wikipedia page for smørrebrød gave me this wonderful factoid: a traditional topping combo is a layer of liver pâté topped with a slice of salt beef and a slice of meat aspic. The name of this smørrebrød is "veterinarian's midnight snack."
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:04 PM on November 26, 2018

I loved the homage to Desmond's LOST Introduction with Doug.

I just got a new roommate who persuaded me, after all these years, to finally watch LOST with her. So I just saw that episode for the first time earlier this week!
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:58 PM on November 17, 2018

I would have preferred to hear Janet give a eulogy for the snail than Michael.

They were still under cover as journalists, though.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:32 AM on November 19, 2018

(But what about Jason? you ask. And what about Jon Snow? Friends, I think that problem solves itself...)

Aw dip, people used to tell me I knew nothing all the time back on Earth! We have so much in common homie!
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:37 PM on November 19, 2018

If drinking rainwater is actually bad for his point total, then we're pretty much back to the idea that literally everyone who has ever lived is in the Bad Place, which I personally would be really pissed off at given the existence of the Medium Place -- if Mindy St. Claire is the only person who ever escaped the Bad Place, then she is the best person who ever lived. That doesn't seem correct, even if Mike Schur is writing the world.

I'm coming… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:31 PM on November 26, 2018

Yeah, it really pays to watch Michael closely on a second rewatch of season 1. My favorite example of this (can't remember the specific episode): right after Michael and Eleanor learn that one of their wacky solutions won't work after all, Michael sighs and walks away saying "The nightmare continues... the nightmare continues." And when he repeats the line, there's something sinister in his tone that was invisible the first time but just leaps out at you on rewatch.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:12 PM on November 20, 2018

Though "oeuvre and fandom is comparable to that of Stephen King and Anne Rice" gives me pause, because I don't tend to think of those two authors as sharing a sentence like that.

That sounds like a sentence written by a person who couldn't think of any other genre authors because they stopped paying even slight attention to genre fiction ~30 years ago. (But yeah Let The Right One In is amazing.)
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:45 AM on November 19, 2018

I've also wondered if the lack of temperature control in the tent has to do with noise. But honestly I think at this point it's just a way to passively spur drama.

I think I remember reading somewhere that they submit their recipe ideas in advance for the whole season, maybe even as part of the final audition process?

If this is true, they must still have some freedom to make changes as they go, right? I'm sure I remember… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:39 PM on September 11, 2018

Hell of a lot of Hawaiian shirts in this episode.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:17 PM on November 17, 2018

Something occurred to me while belatedly watching the last episode, and I think it still holds up:

The gang decided/were told by Michael and Janet that the moment they learned the true nature of the universe, they were auto-damned because their motivations to do good had become corrupted. But then, once they decided "even if we're going to hell, maybe we can save other people," didn't that decision serve to un-corrupt… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:31 PM on November 9, 2018

And my god, the CARS! Everyone in this universe has a classic car with a flawless paint job.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:53 AM on October 28, 2018

Oh man, when I posted about the cars I hadn't even gotten to the ambulances at the mine collapse. Freaking gorgeous.

I watched the first few episodes when I was pretty sleepy and I've still got a couple to go, so forgive me if this is covered at some point, but- do we ever see Zelda's or Ambrose's familiars? Do we know what they are, or if they even have any?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:02 AM on October 28, 2018

Harvey. My man. My dude. Have you heard of pillows.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:56 AM on October 28, 2018

I think it makes sense that killing someone and resurrecting someone are on different levels of "screwing with the ruling forces of the universe" though. Searching for a simile here, it seems like the difference between... I dunno, like the difference between eating your roommate's last toaster strudel when you know he was really looking forward to having it for breakfast, vs. stealing his grandma's china in the dead of night so you can hock it to buy heroin.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:09 AM on October 31, 2018

I just binged the first three episodes, and I'm trying to decide if I'm going to watch more. I am sort of openly hostile about the whole Witches owe Allegiance To Satan thing. Because, for so many reasons, but the primary of which is taking a female power and making it all about the Horned God is just offensive, and a tired old trope. Especially when the story is theoretically about busting the patriarchy s balls.

They actually do get into this… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:23 PM on November 2, 2018

The manifesto kind of got buried under everything else (CHIDI!!), but I have a theory: suppose it gets found and published/put online? Does that damn everyone who reads it? And what happens after that? Five bucks says it happens.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:19 PM on October 19, 2018

This is so, so minor, but when Jace looks meaningfully at the photo of his family in his office, I was immediately struck by the fact that the photo was taken in the same park where the daughter died - you can see the exact same skyscraper behind them and everything.

It took me right out of the narrative because I just kept wondering "is this supposed to be some sort of deliberate talisman of his loss and rage, or is it just the hilariously ghoulish result of the… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:17 PM on October 18, 2018

The copy and picture from that Munch Squad really are _something_.

It looks like a very stoned restaurant staff left a pizza in the oven for seven hours, then thought they could fix it by just adding fresh sauce and cheese.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:25 AM on October 17, 2018

Next, two types of cheese’s are added.

I'm enraged
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:26 AM on October 17, 2018

That crystallized something that's been bugging me about Tahani this season. I feel like she didn't used to be as... obvious? about her references as she is now. Like, previously, she would have just said "...so I introduced him to my friend Gisele." and moved on without hammering it in. I haven't gone back and checked, but does anyone else have that feeling?

I did think that this particular instance was a little much, but it actually makes… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:31 AM on October 12, 2018

You know, assuming the Judge is too busy freaking out about everything else to notice that the experiment got spoiled.

I bet the humans get captured and damned, which is what finally makes Janet realize that she has developed literally godlike powers. She's been dragging her feet this season but it seems like she could basically remake the universe at this point, once off Earth.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:07 AM on October 13, 2018

If a good-according-to-the-algorithm person got into the good place and found out about the bad place, wouldn't they feel awful and try to do something about it? So what if everyone in the real good place has to be constantly rebooted and mindwiped just to keep them appropriately blissful?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:16 AM on October 14, 2018

Completely apart from who my favorite characters are, I usually identify with Chidi's issues the most, as a fellow anxious person - but I don't think I've ever identified with a person on this show more than when Eleanor asks Simone "why did I do that?" I mean SAME.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:09 PM on October 14, 2018

Realistically, the show should have ended as the titular killing of Eve should have gone down about a minute after Bill's stabbing.

I agree that Bill was super obviously a dead idiot from the moment he followed Villanelle out of the station, but I can't agree with this part. Villanelle is obsessed with Eve, she doesn't want to just kill her (yet, anyway) - she wouldn't break her most favoritist new toy just after she got it.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:41 PM on October 11, 2018

I love this show so far! It's got such a weirdly charming, funny tone for what could easily have been a pretty standard spy thriller - I'm having trouble thinking of anything comparable right now.

I also need to state for the record that I currently suspect the fuck out of Carolyn. The moment Villanelle's boss told her that Eve was heading the team looking for her, I wondered why he'd name her rather than Carolyn - and then I realized that Carolyn… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:51 PM on October 11, 2018

There doesn't seem to be any disincentive to "splitting up the party" as there is in d&d.

I was curious enough about the structure of Monster of the Week to take a look at the publicly available PDFs for the game, and the instructions for the Keeper specifically suggest splitting up the party in the list of story moves. It's part of the overall "TV procedural monster show" archetype that the game goes for.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:36 AM on October 9, 2018

I actually just went back and listened from the beginning of Amnesty over several days - after missing the two most recent eps I decided to go back and binge it. And I have to say, I'm much more into it now than I was before!

One thing I noticed was that the guys are slowly but surely becoming more comfortable with telling stories within the mechanics of the new game system, which works very differently than D&D. MotW isn't a game where you can just say "I do… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:39 AM on October 10, 2018

Also, upon re-listening I am 90% sure that Minerva (or her species) is meant to be the origin of the grey alien cryptid.

This first occurred to me when Griffin had an NPC go off on a long rambling story about being abducted by aliens, including the classic trope of seeing a bright light when it happened. I can’t remember if this scene happened before or after the flashback to when Minerva first came to Duck – but that flashback is still a big unresolved question mark.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:59 AM on October 10, 2018

That said, my favorite was the Doorman’s response to the frog: “that is amazing! Aw, this guy’s a jumper, you can tell.”

Anybody else think that the self-described "frog guy" doorman is going to turn out to be a literal Guy Who Is A Frog?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:41 PM on October 1, 2018

What with the whole bending actual reality/spawning a new timeline thing, I'm getting highly sceptical of there being a real Good Place, surely those guys would notice.

I'm certain we've heard the Bad Place representatives talking about the Good Place representatives without any humans around to potentially overhear them. (Assuming that the Medium Place is legit, we also saw one on a videotape at Mindy St Claire's - which I think might be the only… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:55 PM on October 1, 2018

I watched the first two episodes of this last night, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I love surreal genre TV so this should be right up my alley, but both episodes dragged for me, and some of the quirk felt forced.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:10 PM on September 24, 2018

there's no reason he couldn't actually be the archangel Michael on a secret undercover mission to undermine the whole premise of The Bad Place.

IF that's true, I think it's crucial to the narrative of the show that he doesn't know it (ie, he's been mindwiped just like the humans have been). Otherwise a lot of the things I like about this show would be undermined.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:48 AM on September 21, 2018

Maybe the ultimate endgame of the show is to reboot the entire universe from the beginning of time, with fairer rules this time around.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:54 PM on September 21, 2018

I too am from the Greensboro-High Point metropolitan area, and this episode was absolutely spot-on. I have literally that exact same conversation about sausage biscuits every time I go back for a visit.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:09 PM on September 17, 2018

Oh I should also say - it all felt like very gentle teasing to me right up until Sadie said she'd slept with all her cousins, and then I was like HEY NOW, and then when she said "just kidding, we're not from Tennessee" I lost my goddamn mind, because if there's anything all Tar Heels love, it is talking shit about our neighbors.

Also I thought the regional accents were very accurate (rather than just 'generic southern') and that was without realizing that the… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:02 PM on September 18, 2018

(Honestly, the only part of this episode that felt inaccurate to me was that there is totally light pollution in Eden, though of course it's nowhere near as bad as LA)
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 4:07 PM on September 18, 2018

I'm guessing $3,000 is a lot less than what it would cost to sponsor a single episode of MBMBAM

Significantly less. I looked into it once for work, and at this point it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10K.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:26 AM on September 13, 2018

I just finished up this season on Netflix, and I noticed something odd - right before the winner is announced, the engraved cake stand Paul is holding very clearly reads The Great British Baking Show (whereas in reality and in the original broadcast, it must certainly have said The Great British Bake Off).

Did they change the cake stand digitally (which would seem hard to do, since it's transparent)? Or did they make a second dummy cake stand and get a shot of Paul… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:49 PM on September 11, 2018

I felt the same way about Anna! And perversely, I think it might be because I felt like the show wanted me to like her too much. She was given flaws and she made mistakes but they were always forgiven so fast (by other characters, by her, by the show itself). If Anna had been allowed to grapple with her flaws more fully instead of flitting around being angelic, I would have liked her a lot more. But maybe we'll see more of that later on?

How come the Belters… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:58 AM on September 5, 2018

Melba's quest for vengeance (for her LIVING father!) was just stupid to me. Nobody actually does that -- carries out vengeance for their alive, rich-ass fathers. And definitely not an embittered party planner like Melba.

My god. I just realized that Melba is Tahani from The Good Place.

The actress was fine, many of the character's individual scenes were fine or even interesting, but the character arc overall was… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:15 AM on September 5, 2018

That makes sense. I guess I just would've wanted to see a tiny bit more in the flashbacks of Melba to set this up as something she'd be capable of. I do remember (now that we're talking about it) that there was the one flashback where Melba tried to volunteer to fly the Razorback and her dad blew her off - so presumably she knew how to pilot a racing ship, even if she wasn't as good as her sister. I wonder if that aspect of her character was better established in the books?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:52 AM on September 6, 2018