Dot Campbell is one of the few characters from a TV show I think about fairly frequently. Shannon Berry is just so fucking good in that role in The Wilds; one of my favorite TV performances.

And I identified with Dot, of course. She’s someone always underestimated, invisible to her peers, but on top of things. Always watchful and always a bit apart. That’s me, basically.

Mia Healey also did a great job with Shelby Goodkind. The whole cast of the first season of that show was top notch, actually. They elevated the show beyond what it should have been.

But it’s only Dot that I think about sometimes. She seemed completely real to me.

Midnight Mass Rewatch.

Why do all my favorites have to get canceled? Midnight Mass was better than nearly all the other Mike Flanagan works. It was so textured and it had a frame story and was just so much fun.

And with The Peripheral being renewed and then canceled, I am truly verklempt. In that show I dearly love the scene where the protag Flynne gets annoyed that when she is not occupying it they keep her robot body in some ugly wooden crate. I don’t know what she was expecting with that.

Flynne was such a great character and one that I wish I’d gotten to see more of. However, I wouldn’t want some creepy empty body staring at me either, so I would’ve also stored her peripheral out of sight when not in use. But perhaps not in a wooden box.

To be more serious, Flynne feels it’s dehumanizing that her peripheral be stored in an ugly crate as the body she occupies is her for all intents and purposes. And that’s what makes it a great scene and setup: We can understand both her point of view and that of those who toss her empty vessel in a crate when she’s not “there.”

Two of my favorite shows, both nuked before their times.

I wish Ahsoka had been a better show, because Ivanna Sakhno as Shin Hati was fucking fantastic.

What a fierce piece of absolute crazy. Love it.

I went to the Greg Gutfeld show a couple of years ago

The laughter is real but it’s directed by the warm up comedian, whose directions you’re asked to follow

I assume Bill Maher’s audience gets the same direction from a comedian standing in the aisle. Those directions probably… https://t.co/OSIsRQwJI6

— Catherine Johnson (@smarterparrot) August 20, 2025

All TV shows with a studio audience work this way. I’ve been to a couple of live filmings and that’s just how it’s done.

Sydney Chandler does such an amazing job in Alien: Earth of duplicating the mannerisms of a child in an adult’s body.

(The backstory is that she’s a terminally-ill kid transplanted into a synthetic body. Since synths don’t grow, they migrate her consciousness into the body of fully-adult-mimicking synthetic body.)

She gives my favorite performance I’ve seen lately. Sydney manages to perfectly reproduce the gawky impulsiveness and awkwardness of a ten-year-old without overdoing it or seeming like an adult pretending to be a kid. She just gives total “kid” aura. It’s quite amazing.

Like, damn girl, leave some talent of the rest of us.

Appreciation post for Samantha Sloyan because Bev Keane in Midnight Mass is one of the most effectively deplorable characters I have ever watched.

Agreed, she is excellent there. Samanatha makes a great villain and seems like the uber-religious nutters I grew up with in North Florida, most of whom were absolute hypocrites as well.

There is no one more harmful than someone who thinks they are doing things for the best reasons and/or “for your own good.”

I’m pretty competent with understanding spoken Spanish, but Úrsula Corberó talks so goddamn fast in La casa de papel that I have to use the subtitles as I can only get about half of what she says.

She’s good in the show, but her delivery is like an M60 spraying.