Because academics and similar are raised in a soup of words, and are generally not very visual in nature, it’s taken a while for them to be able to analyze TV and movies with any sort of rigor. That transition is not at all complete.

Before this year I hadn’t thought deeply about it much, but now that I have I enjoy finding reviews of movies and TV shows where the viewer (invariably an “intelligent” academic type) obviously did not understand the work in the least. It’s good comedy, because it’s like a four-year-old explaining cytology or atmospheric thermodynamics. It’s just hilariously and obliviously wrong.