Most TV, movies, books... fiction in general don't exist. This is obvious. That's sort of the point of fiction. but what if it didn't exist beyond the obvious fact that we imagined it. What if all we didn't even imagine it... or maybe most of us didn't. What if the vast majority of fiction ever produced actually happened in th daydream of one single autistic boy on a single evening in the Spring of 1988. This is the Tommy Westphall hypothesis, based on the finale of a mostly otherwise forgotten (but critically acclaimed) dramedy, St. Elsewhere. This is actually a well known theory amongst hardcore television geekdom and we've eluded to it in passing before, but we thought it was time we dove into it. So on today's episode, Wayne...
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Call for Comments: What did we miss this time?
From Mav: Way back at the end of 2019… you know, so like 47 years ago, we did a year in review show that we called “what did you miss?”. The idea was, rather than just reviewing the year and talking about the huge things in pop culture, we would cover the things that we…
e140. Why Do We Suddenly Love Musicals?
From Broadway to London, music has been a part of the history of drama for over a thousand years. The genre is enough of a part of American pop culture that it’s major award, the Tony, has become part of the EGOT, the grand slam of acting. And yet somehow, it has always seemed somehow…
e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID
It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…
Call for Comments: Cheesy Christmas Movies: Part II
From Hannah: Two years ago, I somehow convinced everyone to let me do a show on cheesy Christmas movies. And by wanting to talk about “cheesy” holiday films, what I really meant was “let’s talk about all these really ‘bad’ (but also sometimes kind of really fun and good in their own way) romantic comedies…
Call for Comments: Do we really like holidays anyway?
From Mav: As I finished teaching one of my Friday only classes, one of my students wished me a “Have a Happy Thanksgiving… or whatever” on his way out the door. It struck me that he was not just trying to be nice; as he was finishing the statement he realized the relative futility of…
Call For Comments: The Virtual Office (Only Avatars Please.)
Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay From Katya: We’ve recently all been spending more time in virtual space — conference calls on Zoom, happy hours on Hangouts, and I guess somewhere, someone has been making a good old fashioned phone call. Probably. 2020 has made remote living more commonplace for many of us but remote…
Call for Comments: “The Queen’s Gambit,” or Chess is a Virus now
December 16, 2020
From Katya: The world, it seems, has lost its collective mind over The Queen’s Gambit. Released in October, it quickly became the most-watched limited scripted series ever and hit number 1 in 63 countries, according to Netflix. I’m not going to lie, I fell into the binge too. Give me an aesthetically pleasing show with…