Monthly Archives: July 2018

The Dark Knight and the Dangerous Legacy of the Charismatic Villain

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Andrew Bloom

The Joker had left an indelible mark on pop culture long before Heath Ledger assumed the role. He’s one of the few super villains to be consistently featured on merchandise going as far back as the 1960s. His classic semi-origin story in 1998’s Batman: The Killing Joke spurred a dramatic shift in the medium that left fans demanding more of its darkness in their comics. The Joker’s place in the cultural firmament was enough to lure the likes of Jack Nicholson to portray the character on the silver screen. For decades, despite his myriad misdeeds and sizable body count, The Joker nevertheless garnered a consistent crowd of acolytes who saw him as a sort of harlequin antihero.

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“Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” and the Inscrutability of The Simpsons’ Fall From Grace

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Andrew Bloom

There’s a cottage industry devoted to trying to explain how and why The Simpsons fell from greatness. Every year or so, there’s a new YouTube video, or multi-part essay, or investigative deep dive that claims to have the answer for what made the show plummet from its perch as a pure television achievement to a series that became nigh-unrecognizable, both to casual audiences and the show’s biggest fans.

But as I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the truth is that there isn’t one answer to that question, let alone an easy answer. Everything from an exodus of talent, to a shift in the approach used to make the show, to the inevitable cracks that emerge in long-running series, contribute to the “why” part of it. And elements as varied as differences in the storytelling, technological changes in the animation, shifts in the characters’ personalities, and changing trends and norms in T.V. humor contribute to the “how” of it.

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Season 2 of Westworld Had Bigger Challenges Than Before, But Couldn’t Overcome Them in “The Passenger”

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Andrew Bloom

Season 1 of Westworld had an easier task than Season 2 did. The first season of the show, as Clementine might put it, didn’t have much of a rind on it. All of its mysteries, all of its characters, all of its ideas, were completely new. The audience was starting from square one, and the show was able to spoon feed details and reveal important facts bit-by-bit until the shocking twists burst out. The first season also had a clearer trajectory for its season-length mega arc, with early hints that there was something amiss with the hosts, building to a full blown revolt at the end.

But as I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Season 2 had no such luxuries. Despite the introduction of a handful of new characters, when the second season rolled around, Westworld’s major figures had become known quantities. How the park worked, the contours of this artificial world, was no longer as burning a question after ten episodes’ worth of worldbuilding. And the path from business as usual in Westworld to all hell breaking loose proved a much clearer and more direct path than Season 2’s disparate collections of characters who each want different things, and are all marauding around the park in a far less unified fashion.

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ReBoot: The Guardian Code Earns Its Fan Backlash

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Andrew Bloom


I’m old enough to be able to remember when The Simpsons first started using Comic Book Guy — the portly, surly, and above all opinionated proprietor of Springfield’s local comic shop — as a stand-in so the show could poke fun at its die hard fans. The reaction was as swift and negative as you’d expect, with series’s biggest devotees (often its biggest critics) taking great offense, not only at being cast as schlubby lowlifes, but at having their concerns dismissed as pointless, nerdy nitpickery.

So it felt like deja vu when ReBoot: The Guardian Code — the 2018 revival of the groundbreaking 1994 computer-animated television show, ReBoot — depicted the hardcore fans of the original series in nearly the exact same way and received the same sort of response.

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Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television | Tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments