We’re halfway through the second season of The Walking Dead. But where are we, actually? If you didn’t stick around for the “Next week on…” clip, you might’ve missed that there won’t be a “next week” at all. Indeed, AMC has done a piss-poor job of advertising this fact, but The Walking Dead is going off the air until February.

When did TV executives start thinking that this strategy is a good one? The best case scenario is… Well, there isn’t one. The worst case scenario, which seems likely, is that a show’s fan base will be furious when their program is abruptly yanked away from them and take to Internet message boards in outrage. And Hell hath no fury like a nerd scorned. The Walking Dead pulled this stunt last year, too, with a truncated six episode first season to “gauge interest.” Well, people were interested, and subsequently pissed off to learn that their new favorite show was disappearing from the airwaves for a year before it had ever really begun. Now they’re doing it again, yanking the show for about two and half months. Savvy move, executives!

I can kind of see the logic of this move on paper, anyway. I’m sure executives think they’re drumming up suspense and anticipation for the return of the show, ala Apple releasing a limited amount of iPhones to drive up demand. This would probably be true if The Walking Dead was as good of a show as something like Breaking Bad. (For the record, if Breaking Bad split up a season into two parts, the Internet might experience its first full-fledged cyber-riot.) But The Walking Dead simply isn’t good enough to justify pulling this kind of stunt. It’s pretty presumptuous and flat-out arrogant to assume that people will flock back, in droves, two and half months from now to a show with no major plot development, unlikeable characters and no tangible exit strategy. Granted, there isn’t jack shit else on TV right now, so maybe they will. But that’s a pretty bold assumption.

I haven’t written about The Walking Dead in a while because there hasn’t been anything to write about. Nothing ever actually happens. For a show about a zombie apocalypse in rural Georgia, that’s pretty unforgiveable. I can count the major plot developments of this season on one hand: Carl got shot (a quick note: if I ever have to be shot, I pray I get shot in the universe of The Walking Dead. Apparently gunshots are only a minor injury here. Carl recovered remarkably quickly from his seemingly fatal gut shot, and Daryl got shot in the fucking head and was up and about the next day with a spring in his step), Lori is pregnant, there’s a farm with a kooky old man who thinks that zombies are sick and not dead, Shane may or may not be crazy, and Sophia, the little girl we’ve just spent seven agonizing episodes searching for, is actually a zombie in the kooky old man’s zombie barn. We’re almost exactly where we started.

On Shane and the kooky old man’s zombie barn: I’m 100 percent on board with Shane’s decision to shoot all the captured zombies. This was presented as some sort of moral conflict, but it’s really not; Shane is empirically right that zombies are dead and not sick. The old guy can believe what he wants, but that doesn’t make it true. (I was reminded of how I was agreeing with Magneto every step of the way during the X-Men movies. He was presented to the audience as a villain, but all of his points were extremely valid.)

To be fair, the ending of this episode was pretty good. Shane’s decision to kill all of the zombies, and the final reveal of zombie-Sophia, will at least shake up the plot when the show resumes in TWO AND HALF MOTHERFUCKING MONTHS (I’m still not over what a dumb idea that is). I’m not in love with this show, and I’m not even sure I like it. But there is something compelling about it. Maybe it’s my macabre natural predilection for post-apocalyptic pop culture, or just that seeing zombies get their heads blow’d off is purdy cool, but I’ll keep watching this show, come hell or high water. The Walking Dead is like the head case professional athlete who shows just enough promise to continue getting second chances; its flashes of brilliance have so far been enough to outweigh its many flaws.

But out of sight truly is out of mind. The executives at AMC would be wise to adhere to that, and stop ripping their most popular program out of the lineup for vast swaths of time. I can forgive The Walking Dead‘s faults now, but what if something else, something better and in the same vein, comes along before February? It’s a foolish and wholly unnecessary risk to take for AMC, with a heap of risk and very little reward.

The Jerry Sandusky-Penn State child molestation case is the biggest sports-related story to cross into the American mainstream since the OJ murder trial. Like the OJ case, it has all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy: the American icon fallen from grace, our perception of our heroes shaken to its core, a deep and fundamental betrayal of public trust, and even more sickeningly, public belief. The days of Penn State as a premier academic and athletic institution are likely over, and that seems unfathomable. But as monolithic as the school is, it is a human institution created and staffed by human beings. That it should also have human flaws and shortcomings should not be a surprise. It is a profound disappointment, but it is not a surprise. Which is why I’m so dismayed by the ever-growing, media-populated lynch mob that has surrounded the story with pitchforks and torches.

Our society enjoys being outraged. 21st century American culture has embraced the concept of schadenfreude to a frightening extent; we don’t necessarily want to win, but we do want our opponents to lose. We live to pile it on. If someone is down, all the better. (There’s also an envious side to schadenfreude that I see prevalent in my generation. Ex.: Let’s say there’s a wealthy man living in a big house on the hill. Every day, he rolls through the poorer side of town in his gleaming Mercedes-Benz.  Instead of saying, “I want that. If I work hard, I can get it,” our culture all too often says, “Fuck that guy. Who does he think he is?”) It’s an unhealthy attitude, but Americans love to strut about on a moral high ground. (See: Clinton-Lewinsky.) In the wake of scandal, it’ a veritable race to see who can summon the most indignation and outrage.

I thought of all this as I observed the media’s and the public’s reaction to the ever-growing Penn State scandal. Pundits tripped over themselves in a rush to be outraged over the abuse case and subsequent institutional cover-up. Mike Golic of ESPN’s Mike & Mike in The Morning visibly trembled with rage when asked what his reaction was to the case, saying that he couldn’t even say on the air what he would do to the alleged perpetrator of the crimes. I was almost as disturbed by this reaction to the case as I was to the case itself. There have only been allegations, and the case hasn’t been heard in a court of law. Do I think Sandusky did it? He’s as guilty as OJ. But here is a member of the media implying that he wishes to kill Sandusky, facts unseen. How is that okay?

I understand that what (allegedly) happened at Penn State is a terrible thing, the cover-up of the acts even worse. But why the rush to discredit the school? Why the rush to rub salt in the wound, to condemn, to scale Mount Pious and out-moral high horse other media members? It drives me insane that every media pundit has to have a “take” on the case, as if there is another stance to have. It’s like when activists say they’re “anti-abortion.” Absolutely NO ONE, even the most fervent pro-lifer, is pro-abortion. To say you’re anti-abortion is to willfully ignore what the argument is actually about. The same is going on here. To say you’re outraged by the Penn State scandal is to say nothing at all, because what else would you feel?

\What allegedly happened at Penn State is a travesty and a crime, but it has happened before and it will happen again. The kind of blind, group-think public pummeling of Penn State that has gone on can’t undo it. It’s a blessing that the crimes were stopped when they did, that they were not unable to continue. But that is lost in members of the media throwing their hands to the heavens and demanding to know how this could be allowed to happen. But how it happens is disgustingly easy. Human institutions like Penn State also have human failings. But we believe that institutions shouldn’t have failings, that they should somehow be on a higher plane. But anything created by man can be undone by man. To be angry about that is to be angry at the sky for being so blue. All of the outrage and moral preening in the world won’t change our flaws. Expending anger about the failures of man is just the easiest way to deal with not knowing how to solve them.

Chris Johnson ran well against the Carolina Panthers last week, going for 130 yards on 27 carries, averaging a healthy 4.8 yards a clip. He even scored a touchdown. (The Titans have paid him $4 million per touchdown this year. Savvy investment!) Let’s dive right into this week’s 140-character insanity.

The Tweet: Please RETWEET and SIGN this Boosie justicePETITIONhttp://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/Boosiejustice -@ChrisJohnson28 @Icebergdr @Marquis_Daniels #TeamBoosieRT (Retweeted from Team BoosieBoo)

The Analysis: The rapper Lil Boosie has been indicted on first-degree murder charges and three counts of possession with intent to distribute narcotics. Oh, and he’s also being investigated for five other murders. And he poses for pictures like this one. There are a lot of causes that celebrities get behind; I would advise Chris Johnson to perhaps pick another, less murder-y one.

The Tweet: She know she bad

The Analysis: Ah, the old “cryptically addressing a ho” routine. A crazy athlete Twitter feed classic. But it’s none of our business who she is or what she did. She know what she did. And it bad.

The Tweet: This weather is nice in Atlanta

The Analysis: It’s good to know that in between playing football games and supporting the cause of accused murderers, Chris takes some time to reflect on the little things. It isn’t all nightclubs and strippers and dinner with the Wayans brothers. Nature can be beautiful. No, not Atlanta’s hottest strip club, Nature. I mean, like, Mother Nature. Nope, that’s a strip club in Atlanta too. Damn it.

The Tweet: Lol RT @SassySwift: @ChrisJohnson28 fanatic!http://t.co/VFxWeCU8

The Analysis: A vaguely creepy-looking white lady standing next to a poster of Chris Johnson and wearing a t-shirt that says “Superman Wears Chris Johnson PJs”? Not a typical Chris Johnson fan, that’s for sure. But it’s good to know that craziness crosses all racial and gender barriers. Judge us not by the color of our skin, but by the athletes with personality disorders that we worship!

The Tweet: @MikeSimsWalker whole click iPhone been told u dat

The Analysis: Mike Sims-Walker is a wide receiver in the NFL. That is the only part of this tweet that I understand.

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.

I told myself weeks ago that I wouldn’t write a word about Tim Tebow. I thought every possible angle was totally covered. (Unlike the wide-open receivers that Tebow regularly over- or under throws. Zing! I’ll stop.) But golly-gee willikers (something I can picture Tebow saying), I’ve got thoughts about the Boy Wonder.

Here’s what I’m not going to write about. I won’t tell you about Tebow’s religious beliefs. I won’t rehash his pro-life Super Bowl commercial. I won’t talk about his longevity as an NFL quarterback.

What I will talk about is Satchel Paige and the lost art of barnstorming.

In sports, there was once a time when the sideshows were embraced. Hell, the sideshows often made more money than the main attraction. Satchel Paige was one such sideshow. Paige, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, was an African-American athlete at the dawn of integration. His career is one of the most tragic of all time. By all accounts, he was the most dominant athlete to ever play in the Negro Leagues. His stuff was unhittable. He was a pitching savant, untaught and untrained, who invented scores of his own throwing styles.

He spent his life playing for whoever would pay him the most, from teams in North Dakota to Cuba to Kansas City to Puerto Rico. We don’t know how old he was, how many games he won in his life (he estimated over 1,000) and worst of all, we’ll never know how good he could’ve been playing against his true peers in the major leagues. (He eventually did make it to the bigs, but he was in his 40s by then and far past his prime.)

But he knew the art of barnstorming. Paige was a straight-up strikeout mercenary. He was as cynical and sharp of a businessman as there ever was in professional sports. But at that time, barnstorming wasn’t just for fringe athletes trying to eke out a living.

In the early 1950s, the New York Yankees travelled up and down the West Coast, playing semi-pro teams and even some colleges, trying to drum up interest in professional baseball on the other side of the Mississippi. (This was only a few years before the West Coast would claim New York’s other two teams, the Giants and Dodgers, for their own.) By today’s standards, it would’ve looked ridiculous: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra teeing off on some poor 19-year-old pitcher at USC. But it was the standard then. Sports was business, and it was also entertainment. It was more vaudeville and showmanship than serious and sanctimonious.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. TV contracts, slick agents, big endorsements and 24/7 media coverage turned sports from a form of entertainment into something approaching a religion. With this, barnstorming died. If the Yankees went and played a pick-up game at UCLA today, all of the college players would be banned for life, the Yankees would be suspended, every party involved would be sued by somebody and it would get its own news-ticker tag on ESPN.

Buy why? Why does sports have to be so stone-faced and deadly serious all the time? It’s freaking sports. It’s entertainment first and foremost, or at least it should be. And this brings me back to Mr. Timothy Tebow.

What the Denver organization is doing is unprecedented. By starting Tim Tebow, they’re essentially admitting that they’re a novelty. They are a sideshow. They are barnstormers. They are the Harlem Globetrotters of the NFL. And I’ve loved every second of it.

Tim Tebow is wildly charismatic and has a massive following. He also isn’t very good at playing quarterback. Denver knew both of these things when they drafted him, but they did it anyway. Why? Because sports is a business. Tim Tebow is going to put asses in seats at Mile High Stadium and number #15 jerseys on the backs of every Christian lad and lass in the land. Who cares if he’s good? We’ve been talking about Denver for weeks now, haven’t we? Kyle fucking Orton doesn’t exactly cause that kind of publicity firestorm, does he? If the Denver Broncos are on TV, I’m watching. I don’t know if it can last forever, but right now they’re a gimmicky travelling carnival, ripping off last-second win after last-second win. It’s riveting.

A couple days ago, John Fox said that his team would be screwed if they tried to run a conventional offense around Tim Tebow. Steve Young exploded on SportsCenter, saying that Fox is conceding defeat and accepting that his team is a “sideshow.” I don’t think that Fox is conceding defeat. I think he’s embracing the past, a past that was infinitely more fun and entertaining than watching Tom Brady go 20-25 and throw for 300 yards for the umpteenth time.

Sports has a place for the freaks, the novelties, the offbeat, the sideshows and the showmen. It’s entertainment, after all, and it’s business too. Satchel Paige knew it. The Harlem Globetrotters know it. Tim Tebow is it.

Bryan Bishop, affectionately nicknamed Bald Bryan, is the on-air sound effects guy/co-host/comedic foil on The Adam Carolla Show, a wildly popular daily podcast. In May 2011, the show became the Guiness Book of World Records holder for the most downloaded podcast ever, amassing 59,574,843 unique downloads between March 2009 and March 2011. Bishop and his effects often serve as a quick-witted comedic undercut for Carolla’s acerbic take on current events.

Before becoming an on-air talent, Bishop worked his way through various phone screening jobs at terrestrial radio stations, as well as game shows: he was a contestant on both Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (where he won $100,000) and Comedy Central’s Beat the Geeks. In 2009, Bishop was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor located in his brainstem. Doctors originally game him 6 months to a year to live. Today, his tumor has shrunk significantly and the prognosis is far more positive than it was two years ago. Here he talks about his beginnings in terrestrial radio, coping with his illness, and the future of the podcasting medium.

You started by studying creative writing at USC. How did you get into radio, and its production? I know you screened calls at K-Rock[a Los Angeles-based radio station].

I was never in production, so to speak, on the radio side. For a guy who pushes buttons and does sound effects I know shockingly little about the technical, anything, I couldn’t set up anything involving a radio station or a podcast. The sound effects are more of an extension of my creative side, and I don’t really have a technical side. I got into it because when I graduated it was May of 2000, and the Internet dot com bubble was bursting right at that exact moment. I tried to get a job, and got a job at a start-up, but then that went under. By the time I lost my first job, it was only six months later and the job market was terrible.

I needed a part-time job to pay the rent, so I got one part-time job and was looking for a second one when I came across an ad for phone screeners at K-Rock. That was interesting to me, and I always liked radio. I grew up in the Bay Area, and Howard Stern was syndicated out there and I loved Howard Stern. I listened to Loveline at night and I loved Loveline. When the opportunity came to have a part-time job at K-Rock, that was just the coolest thing in the world. Well, not in the world, but you know what’ I’m saying. It was a very cool thing. I took a job, and it was a very low-paying job, but it was cool to be around all that happening stuff, and go to concerts. About a year after I started at K-Rock working part-time, a phone screener spot opened up at Loveline and they asked me to do that. It was more money, not much more, but a little bit more money. I did that for a couple years. That was my first time being around radio, and learning how it works, being around it from the inside.

So how did you get involved with the Carolla podcast?

I was on the Carolla radio show when it was on 97.1 in Los Angeles, and it was on there from 2006 to 2009. I was the phone screener there. I had had a different job between Loveline and the Carolla morning show. When he started up the morming show, I was hired on to be the phone screener. I didn’t think I was going to do it for very long because it didn’t pay very well, but I just wanted to be around a cool radio show. When it was launched, it was kind of historic, so I wanted to be around for that. I was around for five months and a series of events led to me becoming an on-air sound effects guy, and that’s the job I’ve had ever since 2006.

When you started the show, did you have another job? As it has advanced and picked up advertisers, has it become your full-time job?

Well, as you know if you listen to the podcast, I’ve had some health issues. When the podcast came around, I wasn’t working at all. It was a very easy and fortunate way for me to get back into the working world. My wife and I lost our jobs at the same time right before I got diagnosed with cancer. We filed for unemployment for the first six months we were out of work. But we didn’t work for about a year, because I wasn’t capable of it and she was my full time caregiver. So neither of us really could work. We never filed for unemployment after that, partly because number one, it didn’t feel ethically right to us. I don’t know why, I mean, I’m sure we were entitled. But number two, I always had the goal to get back into the working world, and that’s just what would’ve made me feel like I was recovering, that I was getting back to work and doing something for a paycheck and for money. Even though I may have been entitled to some kind of compensation from the government or whatever, it never felt right. In a way, and it’s totally psychological, I’m not saying it’s this way for everyone, but for me it felt like giving up. It felt like throwing in the towel, saying, ‘No, I can’t do this on my own. I’m not gonna get better. I need help.’

So I didn’t have a job, and when the podcast started Adam called me up and said ‘Hey, we’re gonna do a full podcast. Are you interested?’ I was interested, and it was great because I wanted to get back into the working world, and it was a good foray into that arena.

How have you been doing health wise?

I’m doing good, thank you for asking. I feel good. I’m improving incrementally, little by little. A tiny, tiny little bit each day. You look back six months, and I think, I’m doing a lot better. I’m doing this that I wasn’t doing before. I’m excited to get better, and keep improving, and doctors are happy so I’m happy.

You guys joke around on the show a lot about how backwards things were at K-Rock. I see a lot of parallels between terrestrial radio and the newspaper industry, and how that’s going. Why do you think that old guard of media is so stubborn and hesitant, and so resistant to change?

I don’t know. I will say, to set the record straight, K-Rock itself is run fairly well. It’s a successful business, and they run themselves pretty well. Loveline was run in a very strange way. When Adam jokes and laughs about the way things are run, he’s talking more about Loveline specifically and less about K-Rock. For a radio station, they run extremely well. That said, now to address your question, I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of fear on the part of people that work in the industry.

For the most part, the people that have been there a long time and the people that think they have it figured out, the program directors and whoever, it’s a trade [for them]. You work in it long enough, and you think you have the rules down and you know how it works. You have the formula, and if you just apply the formula, you’ll have a successful product. But that’s not really the case anymore. Everything’s turning upside down. Are you familiar with the Portable People Meter?

No, I’m not.

It’s a way of measuring radio ratings. They used to do the Arbitron diaries, which is a really horrible and poorly conceived way to do it, but that’s the way it was done. Program directors thought they had it all figured out, how to manipulate the diaries with all the little tricks they had. There were just tons and tons of tricks to manipulate the ratings and what they thought worked. Then the PPMs came along. The Portable People Meter is a pager, essentially, that they have people wear. Instead of the people Arbitron selects to fill out a diary, saying ‘Oh, this is what I listen to,’ who rely on their memory, which can be a little fuzzy, they give you a little pager device that picks up any radio station near you or that you’re listening to.

Now, the obvious problem with that is if you’re at work, or at the mall, and you’re somewhere that plays light, easy listening or pop-rock, or something that’s just in the background, it’s going to pick it up just the same as if you were listening to The Adam Carolla Show or any kind of thing you would actually be listening to. It was no surprise that when the PPM came out, all of a sudden the oldies station was doing really well, and all of a sudden the pop stations were doing really well. That’s the music that’s in the background of your life, and it’s just there, and you’re not really listening to it, but it’s there. I guess the ultimate end of what I’m saying is, radio has a lot of old school problems with old school people who have their heels really dug in. The idea of the world changing, and podcasts becoming the new cool thing and the new way for people to listen, is pretty scary when your livelihood that you’ve committed yourself to for 20 or 30 years is being threatened. It’s understandable. We’d all be scared of that.

Where do you think the future of podcasting is? Where do you think it’s headed?

The problem with podcasting, as it currently stands, is… The major advantage radio has over podcasting is obviously the fact that it’s there like how you turn on your water and you have water coming out. You get into your car, press one button and your favorite radio station is there. Whereas if you want to listen to a podcast, it’s a barrier entry, which is what they call it in the marketing world. There’s a barrier to get into that world. If you’ve never heard a podcast before, you have to find that podcast, find out what it’s about, download it, sync it to your iTunes and your iPod or whatever else you’re listening on, you’ve gotta get an adapter to listen to it in your car. It’s a several step process.

When podcasts are available in your car as easily as your favorite radio station is, that’s when I think podcasts will sort of become the next accepted medium. For example, a lot of big advertisers are hesitant to get into the podcasting world. It’s hard to justify, if you’re a media buyer working for a big company like Nike or Gatorade or anybody, if you’re in charge of spending millions of dollars, you’ve got to go to your boss or your board of directors and say, ‘Hey, this is a good investment for our money because this reason and this reason.’ It’s hard to do when you’re talking about a new medium like podcasting. I think eventually, and I don’t think it will be long, podcasting will be the hot new, ‘Hey, we’ve gotta get into this game. If you’re in advertising, you’ve gotta get into the podcasting game.’ And you’re seeing that a little bit. We’re attracting more and more ‘legitimate’ advertisers, not that all of our advertisers aren’t legitimate, but the ones that as a casual consumer you would say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen their ads on TV. I’ve heard of this company. I’ve used this product.’ That sort of brand recognition that I think the average person has.

What I think is going to happen, if I had to predict, is it’s going to be… It won’t be a trickle, when the money starts coming in from the Nikes and the Gatorades of the world. I think it’s going to be a flood. It’s going to be, ‘Oh, the games over here, everyone move as fast as your can,’ like a game of musical chairs. That’s the way advertising works. It’s like head coaching in the NFL. You don’t want to make a risky decision, because your job is on the line if it doesn’t work. Someone can easily say, ‘Why didn’t you just play it safe and go with what we’ve done for years?’ But the first company to do it a little bit differently and have results, it’s going to be a great thing for the podcasting world.

Don’t you think that advertising would be easier to attract for podcasts, because the numbers are so cut and dried and easy to point to?

I 100 percent agree with you. It almost feels like a sales pitch when I say it, but the truth is, as a podcaster or podcast, we can tell you exactly how many people listened. We can tell you exactly, to the last number, how many people downloaded your episode. These are active, involved, engaged listeners. If you’re advertising on some random radio station that has high ratings, you’re spending millions of dollars based on, number one, an estimate, and number two, let me ask you a question: what’s the first thing you do when a commercial comes on a radio?

Everyone does. I did. I used to work in radio, and the first thing I would do would be to change the station. I’m not gonna listen to this crap. On The Carolla Show, the way we do it is we weave in advertising into the show, and he tries to make comedy out of it and make content out of it. Yeah, you’re being pitched a product or service or whatever, but we’re going to make it worth your time because your ears are valuable to us and we appreciate that you’re subscribing and listening. Just like radio, it’s free. We know exactly how many people are listening and engaged. I don’t know about you, but it’s the case for me and I assume everybody, but when you’re listening to a podcast a little bit at a time, you’re not going to tune out like when you get to work and turn off your car and walk inside and then you’re not listening to the show anymore. For me, when I get to work I turn off my car I put my iPod on pause and I come back and I listen to the rest of the podcast. Most people who listen to a podcast, I would assume, are listening to the entire thing. It’s people who want to be there and want to listen to what you want to say.

Jack and Jill, the latest Adam Sandler movie/laughter-devouring black hole, looks transcendentally bad. In it, Sandler does his best Norbit/Nutty Professor Eddie Murphy impression and plays both a brother and sister. (As with most Sandler or Murphy-helmed atrocities, Jack and Jill performed decently at the box office, grossing about $26 million in its first weekend.) Al Pacino is somehow in it, playing a version of himself that’s smitten with Sandler’s shrill and obnoxious Jill. This has gone too far, Sandler. You can destroy your own reputation till kingdom come, but sucking an Oscar-winner into your crap vortex is a bridge too far. The man was in The Godfather. If he needs a paycheck this badly, America can pass the plate around.

But Jack and Jill is just the most recent cinematic abortion in the Sandler oeuvre. Note: in order to judge the critical consensus of a movie, I use Metacritic instead of the far more commonly consulted Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic only selects 40 or so top critics’ opinions and aggregates them, while Rotten Tomatoes basically factors in everyone’s opinion who can type and has access to the Internet. For this reason, Rotten Tomatoes is a better tool to judge how a film will produce at the box office, while Metacritic is a more accurate representation of what film critics are saying. (Both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes judge movies on a scale of 1 to 100.)

To read the filmography of Happy Madison Productions, the Sandler-owned and operated film studio, is to witness a total encapsulation of Hollywood cynicism. Here is the Metacritic analysis of some of the most recent Happy Madison stinkers contrasted with their box office revenue.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Metacritic Score: 37 Box Office: $287,572,574

Grown Ups. Metacritic Score: 30 Box Office: $271,419,251

Just Go With It. Metacritic Score: 33 Box Office: $312,741,390 (One can assume this box office uptick is due almost exclusively to Brooklyn Decker’s bikini moment in the film’s trailer.)

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star. Metacritic Score: 9 (Holy Fucking Shit.) Box Office: $2.5 million after two weeks. It was then pulled from motherfucking theaters.)

Jack and Jill. Metacritic Score: 24 Box Office: TBD, though looking good.

And that’s just a small taste of the crap that Sandler has churned out recently; Happy Madison Productions reliably turns out three to four movies a year. I mean… Just look at that. But can you really blame him for mass-producing these crimes against art? People are seeing them, and seeing them in fucking droves. You can’t really argue with those box office bucks. He’s doing something ”right.” We’ll call it The Sandler Formula.

The Sandler Formula is as reliable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. You know the beats by heart.

1. Nut shots. The more times Sandler or one of his buddies/frequent film companions like Rob Schneider or Nick Swardson can get hit in the balls, the better. The afore-linked Just Go With It trailer featured not one but two nut shots in a little under three minutes.

2. Rob Schneider doing something offensive. In Happy Madison’s most blatantly terrible formula component, Rob Schneider is almost always on hand playing a Filipino woman, a gay man, or something else bound to alienate people that went to college. See: Schneider as a foreigner of indeterminate origin in Big Daddy learning to read. Yikes.

3. The Sentimental Ending. No matter how much filth, raunch and juvenilia precedes the ending to a Sandler film, there is always a sappy and sentimental ending. Sandler, who always plays an angry, misanthropic man-child, learns his lesson. (i.e., spending time with family, the importance of love, other ham-handed film lessons, etc.)

What’s ultimately most frustrating about Sandler movies is that he could not care less what you and I and the rest of the non-mouth breathers think. Why should he? I illustrated above how much money he makes on these things. So what if people with brains despair? But I can’t help myself; the whole enterprise is just so fucking cynical. He shits out these movies so frequently, with the express purpose of hitting the same beats he always hits, courting the same audience he always courts, with no regard for the audiences’ intelligence.

I understand that movie-making is a business, and business’ sole purpose is to make money. Businesses also make products with a certain standard that people come to expect. These parameters make Happy Madison Productions an excellent business.  But, God, does the business of movie-making have to be this depressing and insulting? Who’s down to start the Occupy Happy Madison movement?

Last Sunday, Chris Johnson had a decent game. He ran for 64 yards on 14 carries, putting up a  respectable 4.6 yards per rush. (This brings his season average to an anemic but exact 3 yards per attempt.) Unfortunately, rumors also surfaced last Sunday that the Titans may cut Chris this March if he doesn’t improve.

Whether Chris stays in Tennessee or becomes a free agent remains to be seen, but one thing is constant: the insanity of Chris Johnson’s Twitter feed. Here are his five best blasts of craziness from this past week.

The Tweet: @ChrisJohnson28 Basketball game & free toy giveaway this Saturday at The Northwest Community Center at 3pm!! Be there.lockerz.com/s/154365198 (Retweeted from @ThaCockyKind)

The Analysis: Maybe with his recent and very public failures, Johnson is turning to philanthropy for a sense of self-worth. Oh, wait. Look at the poster for this event. It prominently features a sexy woman holding a basketball and swathed in flames. And it’s hosted by a guy named G Money. If you squint closely at the fine print, you’ll see that there’s also a toy drive for kids happening.

The Tweet: Watching film on the panthers gettin some extra film in

The Analysis: Once every couple of days, Johnson throws a tweet into the mix just to let you know that he still plays football. They’re usually pretty half-hearted and forced. It’s easy to picture his agent pulling him aside at a sexy charity basketball game to say, “Hey Chris, maybe you should tweet about, you know, football. That thing you’re paid a lot of money to do.” This is Johnson’s obligatory football tweet of the week. He even name-checks the Panthers just to prove he knows who the Titans are playing this week. Take that, haters!

The Tweet: Yessir RT @wristgamegone: Chicken box me! @ChrisJohnson28 I still owe you! (Insider)

The Analysis: I have little to no idea what this means. When in doubt of what Chris Johnson is trying to say, there’s only one resource I turn to: Urban Dictionary. From what I can gather, a chicken box is exactly what it sounds like.

Per the most popular definition, posted by Big Slim on February 10, 2004: “A cardboard or styrofoam box containing 4 to 5 fried chicken wings and french fries. Some chicken box replace the french fries with western fries. Some chicken boxes are sold as combos, adding a half and half.”

Example (Once again, per Big Slim):

Me: Let me get a chicken box 
Korean Clerk: What’chu want on it 
Me: Salt, peppa. ketchup 
Korean Clerk: You want largey “alf and alf” 
Me: Yeah 
Korean Clerk: Six dala

Big ups to Big Slim for his eloquent definition and example. Truly the poet laureate of Urban Dictionary. So anyway, either Chris Johnson owes @wristgamegone some chicken, or vice versa. I can’t really tell, nor do I understand why this conversation had to happen on Twitter.

The Tweet:   Was at dinner with d will and marlon Waynes funny guy http://lockerz.com/s/155715803

The Analysis: This is a fantastic celebrity name/picture drop. One of the best, actually. Organically integrating a friendship with a celebrity into a tweet is supremely difficult. It requires subtly and finesse. You don’t want your followers thinking that you’re bragging just for the sake of bragging. That’s why I admire Chris for just throwing caution to the wind and dropping that name. (Even if it’s grossly misspelled.) Johnson offers no context for his celebrity name drop. He just says, “Here is a celebrity that I had dinner with.” Boom. Pick that name up off the floor, Chris!

The Tweet: In Charlotte got a little down time before meetings it feel like I’m n Greenville, nc #GOPIRATES

The Analysis: It’s like the Beach Boys once sang: be true to your school. See, Johnson is an alum of perennial football non-powerhouse East Carolina University, located in Greenville, North Carolina, and Johnson and the Titans were in Charlotte this weekend to play the Panthers. Apparently being within the same state as his alma mater gets Chris’ spidey sense a-tinglin’. Charlotte is about four hours away from Greenville. It must’ve killed Johnson that he couldn’t be there to watch his beloved East Carolina Pirates lose to that storied program, the UTEP Miners, 22-17.

Gillian McCain has had a colorful career, to say the least. She currently serves as the president of the Board of Directors of The Poetry Project in New York City. She has curated an exhibition of found photography. But she is best known as the co-author, along with Punk Magazine founder Legs McNeil, of the seminal cult smash Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk. The book traces punk music from its primordial form in Andy Warhol’s late 1960s Factory scene through to its eventual commercialization in the 1980s.

The book is populated with a cast of characters from Iggy Pop, Dee Dee Ramone and Lou Reed to satellite characters on the scene observing the debauchery. It contains dozens of no-holds-barred, frequently disgusting and even moving stories about the men and women that went on to become legends of the genre. Since its original publication in 1996, the book has become one of the most widely-read music books of all time. Here, McCain talks about the legacy of Please Kill Me, the nightmare of trying to adapt it into a Hollywood movie and the next projects she and her writing partner Legs McNeil are tackling, including an oral history of the Manson Family murders.

How have you noticed the response to the book grow as the book has become a cult sensation?

It is weird that it never dies. It’s been translated into 12 languages. I went to get a coffee this morning and the guy said ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I’m a writer.’ And he said, ‘What did you write?’ And I said, ‘Please Kill Me.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I know that book,’ but he hadn’t read it, and he didn’t know what it was about. So that shows what a good title that is. I don’t get recognized a lot and my name doesn’t get recognized a lot. That’s more a question for Legs. When people discover that I co-wrote it, they get very excited if they have read it.

What was your background with punk music ?

I grew up in rural Canada and had much older brothers and sisters. After high school they all moved to various countries in Europe, and I started listening to their record collections, like, in second grade. So whatever they were bringing home I was listening to. So all of sudden it was Patti Smith, Blondie, Ramones, Dead Boys, Talking Heads, and then ‘Live at Max’s Kansas City’ by The Velvet Underground. I just listened to all of that stuff voraciously, and loved it.

How did you get to New York, pursuing poetry, from rural Canada?

I went to school in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I instantly got to know the local bands, and that was my social scene. It sounds stupid, but it was very glamorous. You’re in a small city, you get to meet everyone, there’s a great art college there, there’s great theater and great music. That’s where Sloan came out of. I moved to New York… I was going to spend another year in Halifax because there’s a one year journalism course, but I didn’t get in. The guy actually told a friend of mine it was because my writing was too creative. I did send Please Kill Me to him after we did it.

So I moved to New York and didn’t get into the creative writing programs I wanted to. So I took a one year postgraduate writing course and got into my masters for English lit. But I didn’t get into the creative writing courses, which now I think is kind of a blessing. Oh, and I started writing poetry the summer before I moved to New York. I was having a breakup with a boyfriend, and he wrote poetry. It was just like, ‘Fuck you, I can do it, too.’

When did you end up in NYC and what was the scene like, with poetry and spoken word?

I moved here in 1987. [The scene] kind of hadn’t had that big resurgence yet. It was more what was going on in the East Village, a lot performance art. There was Cafe Bustello, and La Mama, and it seemed more performance art-y. I did immediately take a writing course at The Poetry Project, but it didn’t seem to get a lot of attention until a few years later.

What drove you to create the book at the moment you did, in 1996?

I was just wrapping up at The Poetry Project, doing my last year there. My mother was ill, so I was going back and forth. Then my mother passed away. Legs had started working with Dee Dee Ramone on a memoir, and he had started doing it in an oral history format. He was going to interview Danny Fields every week, and I was getting up early for work, because I just couldn’t put down these interviews. I thought they were hysterical. I had my highlighter out, I was making notes, saying ‘You’ve gotta use this, you’ve gotta use that.’ And then it just didn’t work out with Dee Dee. You know, he’s pretty high maintenance. Nice guy though.

So I said to Legs, I always thought it was a bigger subject than Dee Dee anyway. Or even The Ramones. I said, ‘You should do an oral history of punk. You were there.’ We both loved the book Edie, and that was a big inspiration. And then he said, ‘Okay, do you want to do it with me?’ So I felt like if I said no, there wasn’t any way that I wasn’t going to be doing it witat 6h him anyway. I was already getting up at six o’ clock to read the Danny Fields interviews. And Legs was my best friend.

What was your role in the writing of the book, working closely with Legs? What was your contribution?

Legs is good on structure and I’m good with details and the poetry. He would structure it, and we would say, ‘We need something to link Lou Reed, to The Voidoids to Sylvia Reed [nee Klein] to Lou Reed. So I’m going through interviews, going through interviews, and then I found a thing where [Robert] Quine’s talking to Lou Reed, and he’s friends with Sylvia Klein. It just links. He’d be structuring and I’d be reading over the interviews reminding us what we had, and then cleaning up and editing.

How does the writing partnership with you and Legs work?

Since he hasn’t lived in New York for a long time, thank God for the Internet. When we started, I had just gotten on email. We weren’t emailing the manuscript back and forth. He’s a brilliant writer. He’s brilliant at structure. He just intuitively, we’re just on the same page. But we bring different talents to things. He’s more like the carpenter and I’m the person figuring out the window treatment. [Laughs.] I just thought of that.

What was the most memorable interview for you?

Iggy [Pop]. Yeah. It was only an hour and half or two hours, but he was totally, 100 percent on. We met at a little Italian bakery on first avenue, and it was pretty empty. It was a place he suggested. He walked in with a celery green shirt open almost to the navel, and you could see the scars from Max’s Kansas City. People had said ‘Oh, Iggy’s very handsome,’ but I’d never seen him. He was so charismatic, and so well-spoken, and so intelligent, and so engaging and thoughtful. You couldn’t have asked for a better interviewee.

Can you walk through the process of Please Kill Me being optioned for a movie? I’ve heard that that can be a nightmare.

I think there was quite a bit of interest, and then Jersey Films, Danny DeVito’s production company, made us the best offer. They also hired us to write it. Which is very unusual. Other people were saying, ‘Beware of that, because they’re just going to get you to write it and then they’ll chuck it.’ Which is what they did. But it was okay money to work on it for a couple years. So we’d hand in a draft, they’d fly us out there to have a meeting. Our producer would be getting laser eye surgery and we’d have a meeting with a girl who’d only worked there for two months who had just graduated from Rutgers and who’d bonded from Danny DeVito because they were both from the same hometown. And she’d give us her notes, and they’d be misspelled, and I’d fly back to New York. It was just so appalling. It was so unprofessional. There was so much money wasted. By the time we did the last draft, they said ‘Let’s have a little meeting.’ They didn’t even comment on the draft. The first thing they said was ‘We think it’s time we bring in a new writer/directory. And we were like, ‘Okay.’ And they said, ‘We’re thinking Mary Harron.’ And Legs was like, ‘Great.’ She was an old friend of his. Perfect.

And then Mary started writing this screenplay with this woman Fran who had been around CBGB’s in the days, and they were completely secretive about it. They wouldn’t let us see it. Legs and her aren’t friends anymore. It was so weird. We’d get a copy of the script through a friend of a friend who was an agent. And we read it, and it was, oh man, it was appalling. It wasn’t terribly written, but it was like an afterschool special. There were no drugs or sex in it. And no one died. [Laughs.]

So finally we went through this every year and a half, and by this time Jersey [Films] had disbanded and it was with Universal Pictures. They call us up, say ‘We can’t give you any more option money,’ so we’d negotiate a bit, they’d give us a bit more. They’d just do things. It sounds so ludicrous, but it’s the principle of the whole thing. You’re reading the contract, and all of sudden it says if you’re nominated for an Academy Award, they won’t give you tickets to it. Like, that’s written in it. [Laughs.] It’s just so silly, but it’s like, what the fuck. I mean, there was never any sense of ‘Let’s make a great movie and work together.’

It was just always animosity, like it was a duel or something. Like we were against each other. It was very weird and very upsetting. In the end, they called us a few years ago and said, ‘So, the option’s up. We don’t have any more money to give you. So we’ll give you the contracts with the same amount of money.’ And of course on the back end. And by this time it had been 10 years. So we said, ‘No, we’re not selling you the option.’ Oh, that felt so good. That felt so good.

Do you have any plans with it now? Or did the experience sour it for you?

Soured. Soured. They way they wrote the script, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. They brought in a fictional girl who just moves to New York. But there’s so many different movies in there. I find bio pics really hard to take. And with the star system in Hollywood, the only way the movie would be believable was if it was with unknown actors. You know what I mean? Because then it just becomes so-and-so playing Iggy Pop and there’s no suspension of disbelief. So I just can’t picture it as a great fictionalized movie. It might make a really great documentary, but it would be really expensive.

What was your approach to even trying to adapt a massive oral history into a screenplay?

I think I blanked it out. [Laughs.] We had to decide on a couple main characters, so ours were Dee Dee and Connie. We centered it around CBGB’s. We tried to do it a bunch of different ways. I acted more as advisor or sounding board. Legs wrote it. It turned out pretty good, but I wouldn’t have been that excited to see it made into a movie. I think Legs would agree. Though I would have preferred ours to Mary Harron and Fran Pelzman’s version any day. But we still have people call us up that want to talk about possibly wanting to make it into a movie.

We met this guy about six months ago. It was just… It was kind of weird, because these people call you up, and you go meet them, but they don’t have any ideas. He said, ‘It was such a vibrant book, and it was such a great time in cultural history.’ And Legs said, ‘Yeah, well, what do you want to do with it?’ And the guy was kind of like, ‘Well, what do you guys want to do with it?’ And then, at the end, I said, ‘Can we talk money here?’ And do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Is making money important to you?’ I was just stunned. So this guy just thought that we were going to be so impressed by him that we would just go into business with him and do a labor of love. ‘Is making money important to you?’ I wanted to kill him. By that time Legs was just hating him. He had to get up and leave. The guy called our agent the next day and told him that the meeting had gone great.

In the aftermath of Please Kill Me, what did you work on?

I edted Legs’ porn book, and the Joey book. I went through a lot. My brother died four months later in an accident. I went back to Canada but my immigration was shaky, so I couldn’t come back to New York for eight months. But it was good, because I spent it with my dad. But then the day I came back we signed our Please Kill Me film deal with Jersey Films, and then it was back and forth to LA, trying to write the script. That was about three years. Then my father got really sick so I travelled back and forth from New York to Canada every month to spend time with him. So I’ve only really gotten back to work the last few years.

Legs and I are working on another oral history and a memoir with someone. We finished a really exciting book. Legs’ lives in rural Pennsylvania, and he heard about this local girl who had died and had written these amazing journals. So he asked the mother if we could look at them, and she said yes. And we read them and just flipped out. So we said to the mother, ‘Can we edit these and make them a book?’ and she said ‘Sure.’ We thought it would take about six months. It was so hard. It took two years. I

When did you start work on that project?

Three and a half years ago. It will be interesting to see if they try to sell it as a young adult book or an adult book. Because she’s written them between ages 14 and 17. But they’re really harsh. She had a tough childhood, and drug addiction, alcoholism. And she was raped. She was such a great writer. It was really hard, because they weren’t really diaries. They were journals. We had to put together the narrative and interview her mom. We would ask, ‘What was going on at this time?’ It was just really hard. We would have it done, and then I’d read it and go, ‘Legs, there’s just something missing. It’s not working.’ And he’d agree, and we’d just hash over it.

In the end, the solution was in layout. She’d write expository, expository writing. And then she’d write diaries like ‘Today I did this.’ The book’s called Dear Nobody.  She would write, ‘Dear nobody,’ in her diary thing, and then it’s ‘Dear nobody,’ and she’s writing formal essays. It just didn’t work. So then I had the idea that when it was more expository we’d put it on lined paper so it looked like she was writing something in her notebook, like a school thing. And that just made it work. We had letters that she had written to friends, and it was hard to put them in the right place. I’m so proud of it. It’s been so hard.

What other projects are you working on?

I’m working on a book with a photographer named Kate Simon. It’s 30, 40 years of her portraits. There’s some of her pictures in Please Kill Me. But she worked from early 70s British rock, Rod Stewart, people like that, and then she was at the punk scene in England and New York. It’s gonna be this epic book. I went through her entire archives, and it was a blast. And we’re about to write the text now and then it will be done.

I’m also working on a collaboration with two other poets, and we’re using the movie Valley of the Dolls as a jumping off point, but we’re doing it like the Inferno. We’re mirroring what goes on in the Inferno with scenes that we’ve picked out of the movie. So we’re gonna go through the whole movie and the whole Inferno. We’ve been working on that for about three years. They did a book similar that was all about Eve, and that was about 700 pages. So we’re thinking we’ve got about another 10 years. [Laughs.] So I’ve really been working on long-term projects. They’ll probably all come together at the same time.

What’s the other book you’re working on with Legs?

An oral history of the Manson Family. It’s a big topic. I started researching it about 1998, just thinking maybe a book in the future. I was just obsessed. I’ve been researching it all this time. But Legs and I together started researching it about three years ago and started interviewing people.

I would imagine you’ve been talking to some pretty sordid characters.

It’s like when Legs was doing the porn book. I met a lot of those people with him. It sounds cliché, but you couldn’t meet a nicer bunch of people. [Laughs.] It’s kind of the same. We haven’t interviewed any of the people who have actually done the crimes. Both Legs and I are always more interested, and what makes Please Kill Me so good, is the periphery people. It’s not the people who are the center of the attention. It’s the people who are watching off on the sidelines. They have the best stories, and they saw the most. So it’s the same thing with this.

We’re really interested with people who lived on the ranch and had nothing to do with the murders. It sounds kind of grandiose, but we’re going to try to do kind of a history of Southern California 1965-1970. We’re using the Manson Family as a thread, because there were so many connections with them in rock n’ roll, with the movie industry, and you’ve got the history of the hippies and Haight Ashbury and the history of LSD. So it’s much more broad than the Manson Family. They were going to the Haight Ashbury free clinic where they were studying kids on LSD. It’s a really fascinating story, but it goes on and on and on. I don’t know what you think, but I don’t know if the murders were random at all, so I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of that. Hopefully, but then we’ll probably be killed. [Laughs.]

Sweet Hosanna! Quality programming is back on pay cable, folks: Showtime’s Homeland is straight-up crack-cocaine television. Its sixth episode aired this past Sunday, so I’m a little late to the party. But I’ve been taking a lot of shots to catch up.

Homeland concerns the return of a POW American sergeant from Afghanistan named Nicholas Brody. He has been held prisoner by Al Qaeda for eight years but is suddenly rescued by American troops. CIA analyst Carrie Mathison, played brilliant by Claire “Forget That I was the Star of Terminator 3 Soon, Please” Danes receives information from a soon-to-be executed terrorist informant in Iraq that a terrorist cell has supposedly turned a captured American against the United States. She immediately suspects that the rumored plant is Brody. Let the games begin.

There are many different layers working for this show. First and foremost, Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison is a complete crazy. She pops pills, wears a wedding ring to scare off men, and has the wild, flashing eyes of a genuinely unhinged person. It’s a great performance. Damien Lewis, who plays maybe-terrorist Brody, is equally fine. He’s most recognizable as the stoic and moral Lietenant Winters from HBO’s classic miniseries Band of Brothers, and here he turns that performance on its ear. Brody is a lot like Lieutenant Winters, if Winters had severe PTSD and (maybe) a little Manchurian Candidate-esque brainwashing.

Another extra layer Homeland has in its favor is the role surveillance plays in the show. Mathison is closely observing Brody at home after illegally installing wiretaps and cameras everywhere. We see Brody’s story unfold as Mathison sees it, outside of some flashbacks to his captivity that divulge little. Is Brody actually a terrorist or is Mathison a certifiable nut? Or a little of both? We’re watching her watch him, and the way that interplay works is brilliant. We’re not really sure which one of them is crazy. I just hope the crazy one doesn’t end up being, well, the viewer.

I have two concerns with the show thus far (full disclosure: I’ve only watched the first two episodes, but I will catch up before next week’s episode and start writing weekly reviews.): Rubicon and the plight of the single-season mystery. This show, despite being on Showtime, is strongly reminiscent of AMC’s last two stink bombs, Rubicon and The Killing. Rubicon was all about government intrigue within the bureaucratic system as intelligence analysts tried to deduce whether a wealthy cabal of businessmen was behind an impending terrorist plot. It was hard to understand, and also super boring. Homeland has more than a little of Rubicon in it. (One episode this season has even been written by Rubicon‘s former show-runner. Uh-oh.) As for The Killing, the comparisons are even scarier.

How can you expect to milk an entire television series out of resolving one mystery? The Killing did it by exploring every pointless dead end and cul-de-sac in the mystery, and then ended in an insanely stupid twist. It left the viewer no closer to knowing who committed the titular killing than they were while watching the pilot. And that show was renewed for a second season. So has Homeland. Gulp. I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means, but I’m not optimistic. We may not have any answers to Homeland‘s mysteries by the end of its first season.

Still, Homeland is better than everything else on TV right now. Watch it for the mystery, the intrigue and the solid performances. It’s too early to rush to judgment, but please steel yourself for what could be a season-ending letdown of Killing proportions. But that’s six weeks away. For now, glass half-full it and enjoy the premier thriller on television.

I’m sure many of you think that I hate everything. This isn’t true, but I certainly understand why you would think that. It doesn’t help my case that I love to write about things I hate. (I even use the word “hate” too liberally. I don’t hate AMC’s The Killing the same way I hate, say, neo-Nazis, but I use the same language to describe them both. I have a tendency to indulge in melodrama, hyperbole and absolutes.) Things I hate are just more fun to write about, and thus most of my writing about pop culture deals with trash, crap, guilty pleasures, or whatever else is making steam come out of my ears that day. Describing something that’s good (or even worse, just okay) is difficult, and frequently uninteresting.

I’m also just really fucking picky. In order to sleep well at night, I need a very precise environment to be created. It must be dark. It must be 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I must have a fan blowing to provide white noise. I don’t have a long list of environmental parameters, but the ones I do have are damn specific. I’m the same way with pop culture.

A show has to hit three main points for me. It must:

1. Have a hook that can be explained in one sentence. Think about it: every great TV show has a simple hook. It’s the one or two sentence description that was pitched to network executives. Breaking Bad: “a high school chemistry teacher develops terminal cancer and starts cooking meth to provide for his family when he’s gone. Trouble ensues.” Fuck yeah, I’m watching that show. Mad Men: “Ad executives in the 1960s deal with society’s changes.” Sounds great. Where do I sign? The Sopranos: “A mob boss struggles to keep his personal and professional lives separate in modern day New Jersey.” I’m on board.

It works every time. There are few shows that can’t be broken down like this. (Except for Lost. Good luck explaining Lost to someone who has never seen it. You sound like schizophrenic homeless person, talking about smoke monsters, Egyptian statues and an island that causes infertility.)

2. Bucking formula/predictability. This is a matter of taste, but isn’t all of this? I don’t watch TV for the pleasures of escapism. If I did that, I would never switch off the USA Network. I need my TV (and all the art I absorb) to wring emotions out of me, whether I want it to or not. I want to be shocked and a little mistreated by it. I don’t like being coddled within the warm and fuzzy confines of predictability and formula. I need the sick thrill of surprise.

3. A measure of reality. I love reading fiction books, but as soon as they cross into the realm of fantasy, I’m out. I need my art and entertainment to be grounded in a world that I recognize. It wouldn’t mean a thing to me if it wasn’t. A degree of plausibility must be maintained. (Once again, the obvious exception is Lost. I was invested in that show the way you embrace the madness of a bad acid trip. Just gotta ride it out, man.)

So those are my parameters for a TV show. Not a lot meets those expectations, but when it does I will stick with that show through hell or high water. But I can’t roll with sub-par entertainment for long.  Some people are able to shrug off an awful movie or TV show. Not me. After a terrible movie, all I can think about is how I’m two hours closer to my death than I was before I watched it. I get angry and sad about that lost time. This is why I rarely see movies in theaters, and only when the critical consensus is overwhelmingly positive. I don’t want to be trapped in a movie theater with a shit picture. I’m also pretty cheap. I wouldn’t walk out of a three hour long clown-snuff film if I paid full price. (I don’t know why I would’ve paid full price to see a snuff film in the first place. Don’t ask so many questions. It’s my hypothetical!)

I have a tendency to be more critical of TV, in particular, because I love it so much. TV is the closest a visual medium can come to telling the kind of grand, sweeping epics usually reserved for 600-plus page novels. I’ve seen the heights the medium can reach (The Wire, The Shield, Breaking Bad) and I don’t understand it when other shows can’t match them. “Look at them and do that,” I think rather petulantly, as if it’s that easy to just create an enduring masterpiece. If I lash out at shows like The Walking Dead or Hell on Wheels, it’s only because I want them to succeed so badly, and I know they can. It’s all the more frustrating when you see glimpses of promise that go unfulfilled. I’m like an alcoholic hockey dad screaming at his kid in the post-game parking lot or getting into pushing matches with refs. I do this because I care. I will never root for the failure of a show (reality TV excluded). But when it happens, I won’t just let my disappointment fade, either.