Super random, but when I saw James Carville I wondered how old he was these days (I would have taken the over on 75), and looked him up.

WTF at the parenthetical after his height.

Well, just gives you reference. I mean, it's easy to imagine Tom Clancy standing next to you, so James Carville is the same height. I can picture that now.

The Office Ladies doing "Branch Closing" this week brings me back to one of my least favorite Jim Halpert moments. His Stamford boss, Josh, leverages his position with Dunder Mifflin to get a better position with Staples.

Halpert does a talking head and says, "Say what you will about Michael Scott, but he would not do that." As if Josh did anything wrong. Not only is Jim wrong to frame that as some sort of wrongful act, but him feeling that way does not even fit with the character that said he would throw himself in front of a train if Dunder Mifflin became his career.

The only way I can really reconcile it is that he's on tilt over the fact that he's suddenly being put in a position where he'll likely either be out of a job or forced to return to Scranton when he doesn't want to, and Josh is the person he can blame for that.

This week, Angela says she reached out to Paul to ask him his thoughts on the running joke of Angela's crush on Roy. Conclusion: she does not have heat with her former brother-in-law if she's contacting him for random research that she doesn't have to do.

(I concede this was an odd thing for me to actually care about. It's just a thought that occurred to me early in the podcast, so I kept listening for some sort of resolution.)

I think anyone who really liked their boss would feel betrayed by that move as well. They obviously aren't immediately going to think "I'm happy for them, that makes sense for their own career". Was probably on tilt for the reason you mentioned, though. He may not have liked Michael as much, but he respected him for that.

I think there's a pretty normal reaction in between the two things, which is, "Welp, that sucks," minus the anger at the person for making a career decision. Any knee-jerk sense of betrayal would probably necessarily be tied to someone generally believing in the notion of loyalty to an employer. In the absence of maybe being tied to a family business, loyalty to an employer is pretty much always a scam for the same reason that almost any other expectation of one-way loyalty is a scam.

I know it's still a relatively common thing for people to buy into it, and for instance I wouldn't bat an eye at Dwight pitching a fit about it since that's the type of thing that obviously fits him, but I've always just found that to not really fit Jim at all.

I just finished my first rewatch of the Office.

I really dislike Jim the second go-around. Especially in the later seasons.

Jim certainly degrades into utter worthlessness after he proposes to Pam, but no amount of rewatching has caused me stop liking seasons 1 through 4 of him.

Both Jim and Pam were insufferable after they got married.

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Okay, so season 9 is when The Simpsons actually hits a downslope. I definitely grant I was being premature by suggesting it about season 6.

Yeah, why did that happen?

Jim's prudishness is what gets me most.

What did it for me was when they found out they were having a baby, and Pam wanted everyone to change their habits around the office because of it. I always found that really obnoxious.

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Sincerely,
Disappointed

I accept apologies in the form of cash or money order

Imo

Master,

I think you probably still overshot by two seasons of The Simpsons in terms of putting it up as a candidate for going 10 strong.

That said, Simpsons did have a consistently higher ceiling, so I'll take season 1-8 of The Simpsons over seasons 1-10 of Frasier. I still think there's something truly impressive, even possibly unprecedented, about a TV show going strong for 10 seasons.

I will say, Curb season 10 was very strong, but I think season 9 broke up its streak.

Bacon my dude, Bacon.

I think all of those takes are correct. S2-S8 of the Simpsons is (essentially) flawless, so thats 7. 1 and 9 have majority good episodes, but certainly some downspots, but I would still put both as strong (not great) seasons, so that would be 9. Season 10 has some good, and some great episodes, but overall is a huge downturn of a season that the show never recovered from, despite some great episodes up to S14.

Also, while I agree about Curb, you have to consider overall episodes numbers along with season count. The Simpsons had more episodes in Season 3-7 than the entire 10 season run of Curb.

Top 5 episodes from there, please. Any positive memories I have of the Simpsons I attribute to being less than 10 years old.

Top 5 from S3-7 or from S10-14?

"Homer's Enemy" is season 8, and it remains my all-time favorite despite having a completely worthless B-plot.

Fozzy of a bear of a problem.

Id really love to wanna help you Flanders, but Marge was... taken prisoner in the.... Holy Land

A lot of people consider this the end of the golden era, as by having what amounts to a real person show up in Springfield, it outlines just how much of a cartoon Homer is. And when the conceit of the entire golden era run is "The exploits of a down on their luck modern family" having a truly down on their luck character arrive and point out just how well the Simpsons are actually doing in spite of Homer's stupidity and oafishness kinda destroys the premise of the show as a whole.