Only the Wuhan Institute of Virology rivals the lab in Alien: Earth for poor biosafety protocols. I don’t know what BSL the WIV was operating at in reality, but the Prodigy lab in Alien: Earth lately is operating at BSL negative eleventy-billion.
TV Shows
Nothing Remaherkable
I went to the Greg Gutfeld show a couple of years ago
The laughter is real but it’s directed by the warm up comedian, whose directions you’re asked to follow
I assume Bill Maher’s audience gets the same direction from a comedian standing in the aisle. Those directions probably… https://t.co/OSIsRQwJI6
— Catherine Johnson (@smarterparrot) August 20, 2025
All TV shows with a studio audience work this way. I’ve been to a couple of live filmings and that’s just how it’s done.
Plant
Sydney Chandler does such an amazing job in Alien: Earth of duplicating the mannerisms of a child in an adult’s body.
(The backstory is that she’s a terminally-ill kid transplanted into a synthetic body. Since synths don’t grow, they migrate her consciousness into the body of fully-adult-mimicking synthetic body.)
She gives my favorite performance I’ve seen lately. Sydney manages to perfectly reproduce the gawky impulsiveness and awkwardness of a ten-year-old without overdoing it or seeming like an adult pretending to be a kid. She just gives total “kid” aura. It’s quite amazing.
Like, damn girl, leave some talent of the rest of us.
Not Pittiful
The Pitt is a good show. It reminds me of the first few seasons of ER1. It’s repetitive but that’s something to like about it in this rare case.
And more impressively, more than 90% of the medical terminology and practices are correct (though more rushed than most in real life). It’s worth watching.
Storied
One of the reasons I love movies and TV shows and thinking about how they’re made — the immense care and craft that goes into them — is I spent so much of my life with others telling me how my story would go. What my limitations were and how I deserved nothing because I was weak and terrible. That’s the tale they had me signed up for against my wishes.
I like seeing how you can take control of the narrative, seize the diegesis and shape it to your own will. All the world’s a stage and all that. It’s a cliché but it’s also true.
Movies and TV shows taught me how I could direct my own story. And I did just that.
Tradeoff Tradein
Agreed, she is excellent there. Samanatha makes a great villain and seems like the uber-religious nutters I grew up with in North Florida, most of whom were absolute hypocrites as well.
There is no one more harmful than someone who thinks they are doing things for the best reasons and/or “for your own good.”
Tracht
Too bad about Michelle Trachtenberg. She was still young and though not a favorite actor of mine, she was good in everything I ever saw her in.
I like that she never had plastic surgery and so still looked like a human being and not a doll. It made her feel more real (understandably) in roles.
Episodic
Why ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Resonates Beyond Italy.
The TV show is good, but the books are great (in either English or Italian).
I think it’s one of the few works I’ve ever experienced that gets female intrasexual competition exactly right and does not flinch away from how it actually works in the real world.
Daryl
Daryl Dixon on The Walking Dead is the only person in any popular fictional work that I can think of who is very high on both openness and on disagreeableness. Are there any others?
Maybe Betty Gilpin as Simone in Mrs. Davis?
Round Sound
I’m pretty competent with understanding spoken Spanish, but Úrsula Corberó talks so goddamn fast in La casa de papel that I have to use the subtitles as I can only get about half of what she says.
She’s good in the show, but her delivery is like an M60 spraying.
Tonality
This show was not completely successful, but I love this scene at least partially because it and the show itself feels really tonally different from all the other shows recently which seem so monotonous and ultra-pasteurized.
And here’s the same clip by someone who didn’t understand the “terrible” dialogue was intentional; this is two people interacting who are socially inept, stunted, having had very few normal interactions and both living in repressed, horrible societies. The woman is the extrovert side of that and the guy is the introvert. They have zero social skills and very little experience with anyone different from them. That’s the whole point of the scene — that is, them learning how to interact despite their chasm of inexperience and social cluelessness.
It’s fascinating how many people can watch something and just not understand it at all. Like, not in the least.
Citadeleted
Too bad about this show. Neither the Italian version nor the English-language one is worth a crap. It had such potential. And Matilda De Angelis is really fucking good but everything else lets her down. The directing is sophomoric, the story is garbage, and the editing choppy and too chaotic. There are some nice stunts at least.
Too damn bad indeed.
TVB
My guess is that in moderation reality TV has no effect either way. Like most things. Some of the dumbest and some of the smartest humans I’ve ever met have been fans of reality TV shows of various stripes.
If anything, in small doses they are likely mildly palliative but it’d be hard to measure. And very individual-specific (I find them all annoying and they make me low-level angry).
In large doses, of course, yes reality TV shows make you dumber if for no other reason is that time devoted to one activity cannot be used for anything else.
Ryan Air
Regardless of why Jeri Ryan was added to the cast of Voyager, as an actor she was the best part of the show. The eps focused on her were better than all the rest, and she exhibited more range than the rest of the cast except perhaps Katherine Mulgrew (Janeway).
I couldn’t find it on YouTube and it’s been twenty years since I watched it, but there was one episode where Seven was talking about her difficulty in integrating back into human society after the trauma of being assimilated into the Borg and then the further shock of having to leave that behind and adapt to a now-foreign culture. It was just perfect and heartbreaking. Jeri did a lot with a little and I always appreciated how much she gave to what could’ve been just a trivial eye candy part.
Unfortunately, she helped elect Obama by accident. She didn’t mean to, so I don’t hate her for it.
Cathy
Lynda Carter, Original Wonder Woman, Isn’t Backing Her Sister’s Run For Arizona House.
The first actor to play Wonder Woman in live action was Cathy Lee Crosby, not Lynda Carter. So Crosby is arguably the original Wonder Woman.
I’ve seen that terrible made-for-TV movie that featured Crosby. Absolutely do not recommend.