(via Slate)
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Apart from gearing up for Season Four tomorrow, what’s on the agenda, television- or other-wise?
Saturday Night Open PopCult Thread: GoT Is Coming…Post + Comments (190)
This post is in: Open Threads, Popular Culture, Television
(via Slate)
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Apart from gearing up for Season Four tomorrow, what’s on the agenda, television- or other-wise?
Saturday Night Open PopCult Thread: GoT Is Coming…Post + Comments (190)
This post is in: Television
I’ve been putting this off because I didn’t want to deal with the finality of it all, but I am about to watch the Pysch series finale. Chuck and Psych have a special place in my heart.
There will be spoilers, so don’t comment if you have not seen it.
*** Update ***
I seriously hate all of you people. DO NOT READ THE FUCKING COMMENTS UNLESS YOU ARE NOT CONCERNED ABOUT SPOILERS.
Assholes.
More tussin.
This post is in: Open Threads, Popular Culture, Television
Via Slate, which also linked to George R.R. Martin’s latest teaser.
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Apart from popkulcha, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
This post is in: Excellent Links, Media, Open Threads, Television
(Ted Rall’s blog)
Steve Coll, in the New York Review of Books, discussing the latest Roger Ailes bio:
… One of the most fascinating aspects of Fox News’s business model is how its audience’s passion shapes and lifts the network’s profits. Normally, when a media company has an audience as old as Fox’s—the network’s median audience age is more than sixty-five—the business struggles financially. That is because younger people buy the most consumer goods and so advertisers prefer them. But Fox News does not make most of its money from advertising. About 60 percent of its revenue—more than $1 billion annually, or about the entirety of its reported profit—comes from fees paid by cable companies for the right to carry Fox News programming, according to Pew. Cable operators who pay these fees don’t care so much about whether Fox’s viewers are young or old; they care more about having viewers who are addicted enough to what’s on cable TV to fork over monthly subscription fees.
The Fox News audience’s fervor also assures that if a cable company ever tried to throw the network off its system, or reduce programming fees, the operator could expect intense, politicized protests. Call this a kind of extortion, or call it leverage in a market economy, but as a result Fox News today receives from the fees paid to it about ninety-four cents per cable subscriber per month, one of the highest rates in the industry, a third greater than what CNN receives and more than double what MSNBC gets. Fox’s high fees are mainly attributable to its superior ratings, but as the industry analyst Craig Moffett told The New York Times last year, the “level of passion and engagement” within Fox’s following has also lifted its revenue because such intense devotion is not easy for cable operators to find…
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Apart from learning, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Numbers I Did Not KnowPost + Comments (47)
This post is in: Television, Assholes
From here on out, when you see a commercial with a doorbell or someone knocking on the door, please note the product in this thread. If I have one more peaceful moment in the recliner interrupted by a commercial with a doorbell, causing both dogs to jump off my lap and bag me in the process, I’m going to go all Mad Men on someone.
This insanity has got to stop.
by John Cole| 74 Comments
This post is in: Television
This is a true Detective Spoiler thread, so it will be beneath the fold.
I think the most satisfying portion of the show was the arc and the closure we had tonight. For me, what mattered was the closing discussion, after it was all over, and both of them had come to their own peace. Obviously Rust Cohle still had his demons that he will always have, but for me the closing scene was about two people coming to terms and becoming one. Becoming True Detectives and True Partners.
Remember, earlier in the season, any time that Rust would speak openly, it made Hart feel uncomfortable. There was the atheistic/nihilistic scene in the car where Rust spoke about the philosophical underpinnings of his existence, in which his whole belief that humans were just an aberration and that we had grown consciousness beyond our understanding, and Hart was upset he had tried to get him to open up and declared the car (and I think I am getting this right) a “place of quiet reflection.”
Then, tonight, we watch Hart start to think like Rust- it was Hart who put the green ears on the man with the scars together with the picture of the green house. That was something his character would not have been able to intuit in the earlier episodes when he was a younger man. But as he and the show progressed, he and Rust became more and more alike. They went from different, disparate individuals, went through their own progression through life over a few decades, and they changed.
And what we saw at the end was the end of the arc. They had both changed, and the scene that ended the series said it all. Whereas before, Hart would have never listened to Rust talk that way in the past, this time, not only did he sit and listen, but he understood, because the bond had been formed and they had become one. A team. True Detectives.
And that is my take. Just a beautiful, intricately layered, brilliantly written show, and what is so amazing is that all the clues were there, but the dialogue and acting were so good we missed the signs and clues. This show will serve as a writing and acting clinic for decades to come.
There is just such a perfect sense of completion with this finale. This story was never about the murders. It was about the journey of Hart and Cohle.
*** Update ***
Now that I have distilled my thoughts, let me put it more succinctly. In my opinion, the entire show was an elaborate misdirection. We were completely distracted by the exquisite dialog, the imagery, the gruesomeness of the murders and the gothic intrigue, and we spent eight episodes trying to figure out who the murderer was and what clues we had missed. But that was all a ruse, and what we were supposed to take from the show was the relationship between Hart and Cohle. We missed the story they were telling while looking for the clues to a murder mystery.
This post is in: Open Threads, Television
Really excited for the end of this.