If I asked 200 people on the street if a movie was worth seeing and 180 of them said “yeah” I would probably believe them. Definitely going to believe 180 out of 200 people who literally watch movies for a living. That doesn’t mean I’ll see it. I don’t want to see a Top Gun sequel. 98 percent of critics agreeing its good doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to see it. But it’s a perfectly sensible barometer to determine if something you are interested in is worth spending your time and money on.

It’s in impossible for me to believe that no one would be superheroes. Maybe a lot of people would be selfish shits. Maybe most. But we’ve got 80 plus years of media telling us that the correct thing to do when you get powers is put on a costume and fight crime. Some of us would do that. I wouldn’t even have time to put on a costume before I’d be trying to help people.

And if you think about it, for every Spider-Man or Luke Cage or Flash there’s like a dozen people who get superpowers and decide to use them for evil. Every superhero has their own rogues gallery, and most of them are superpowered. The idea that superpowers make most people shits is hardly a new or original idea, we just historically wrote the stories about the exceptions, because the exceptions are the people to idolize.

Sure I’m not saying it’s a plot hole or anything, I’m just saying it happens a lot, so the ghosts are hardly unique in their stubbornness.

The King of Gondor is the only one who can command the ghosts. But they have free will. They’re options are “follow the King of Gondor like they should have 3000 years ago” or “just keep being ghosts.” But they’re cowards. They’re ghosts because they’re cowards and ran away 3000 years ago. Of course their initial response to “you wanna follow me into battle?” is gonna be no. Especially up against Sauron, who I don’t know with 100 percent certainty can’t hurt a ghost. He’s kind of a necromancer, kind of a Lich. He might know how to hurt ghosts, so those ghosts might not be an invulnerable as we think.

They’re ghosts specifically because they refused the commands of the King of Gondor. The fact that a new guy is the King of Gondor isn’t going to be a big selling point, in fact since they’ve spent 3000 years being pissed off at a King of Gondor for making them shitty ghosts, it’s probably the opposite of a selling point.

Now the deeper question of “why wouldn’t the ghosts leap at the chance provided by damn near anyone who offers them a chance to stop being ghosts, especially when they’re ghosts and cannot be harmed?” I dunno. Why don’t the eagles pitch in more? Why do the ents need to be tricked into caring? Why are the elves just fucking bailing? There’s a lot of beings in this world that seem to need to be dragged kicking and screaming into defending their own world.

Why do you need anything from critics other than “yeah I think it’s worth watching” or “no i don’t think it’s worth watching.” That is the purpose of critics. That is their only purpose.

I thought it was a Disney Channel show when I was a kid, but it had already been cancelled on ABC before I even knew it existed.

I love when a guest star character comes back a season or two later, so the main cast has to be like “hey, remember that person we’ve never mentioned again since the moment their episode ended, we talk about them all the time off screen, right? They’re good friends with us” and you’re like “gee I wonder who’s guest starring this week?”

This is my thing, the best parts of the mockumentary show were when they just gave up and made Miss Piggy’s show the Muppet Show by including all the same dumb skits. But to be fair, when they tried a straight up reboot/sequel type thing in the nineties it was also a failure. Maybe they’re still shy about it because of that.

So what we’re saying is the word “underrated” has no real meaning and can be used to describe anything. Like “Smurf”.

> Game of Thrones

I still cannot believe House of the Dragon used the same exact song. So lame.

If I know anything about protagonist matchups they would fight for long enough that each of them could have a moment where they could seem to have the advantage, then they would realize they’re all good guys and team up against bad guys without ever actually deciding who was best so that no fan bases are offended.

81 percent on rottentomatoes, 8.2 on IMDb, how exactly is it “underrated”?

Best: The Wire

Worst: The Wire.

Season 5 is my favorite of the Amazon seasons. None of them are good they weren’t given the budget to be good, but at least 5 mostly follows the plot of the book.

If you don’t like the politics I don’t think you’re going to like the show. That is the show. Human politics. There’s some alien goo about but the alien goo is largely just there to exaggerate the effects of the human politics.

It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Transformers movies got terrible terrible reviews and were all incredibly popular. All the Twilight movies got horrendous reviews, quite popular. People are gonna like what they like, and the idea that they can be convinced by a number on rottentomaotes is ridiculous.

Rottentomatoes is the best because the one question you should be asking a critic: “Is this movie worth spending my time and money on?” is the only question that rottentomatoes answers. “71 percent of critics believe that, yea, it is worth spending your time and money on.” That’s all you get from them.

“Is it the greatest movie this year? Is is barely worth watching?” These are questions you need to answer for yourself. Critics can’t tell you that. They can’t even really tell you if you yourself will agree with their assessment that the movie is worth your time and money. That’s why collecting so many is great.

“I don’t like how it ended up” isn’t the same as “it didn’t go anywhere.” We got resolutions for all these characters. They were boring and unimpressive, but the question isn’t “what stories had unsatisfying endings?”

He died. He fell off the water tower and died. He story wasn’t very good, but we know exactly where it went.

This plan only makes sense if we assume they’re not going to do well at the 2024 without Succession. And I have a sneaking suspicion that HBO will do fine.

The plan also ignores the fact that they release shows in a way as to encourage subscriptions. How many subscribers are they going to lose for how many months because Succession isn’t when it should be on the release schedule? All so that they can win an emmy who’s only real purpose is to encourage people to subscribe to the show?

Invincible was definitely not 2022. Expanse had the final two episodes in 2022, so I guess it’s technically a 2022 show, but I doubt many people count it as a 2022 show.

More outlets doesn’t make more artists. If the networks paid for 60 shows one year and only 25 of them were good, the fact that they paid for 180 shows the next year doesn’t mean 75 of them will be good. There’s still only about the same number of people capable of making something good. Either those folks are gonna stay clumped and make pretty much the same number of good shows, or they’re going to spread out, get outvoted by less good people on their new projects, and the number of good shows will go down.

Why does there have to be better? We got two fantastic shows. Be happy. Stop trying to quantify art.

> I hate that we have to pretend this character was there because the characters were brainwashed into fake memories

There’s like two episodes where we “pretend she was there” and the whole time the show is like “she’s tricking everyone!” The show never asks you to believe Dawn was always around and we just didn’t notice. They even have Joyce mention how she’ll be happy to have the house to herself again when Buffy moves back to the dorms at the beginning of the Dracula episode so that we know that Dawn didn’t exist at the beginning of the episode.