The unique agony of finding a podcast starring several of your favorite actors only to realize several episodes in that they're all ROCK STUPID.

How Did This Get Made, incidentally. It's a bad cinema podcast, and I'm actually enjoying it, snark aside. It's Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas -- who are all funny as hell on TV, and are actually pretty charming and fun on HDTGM.

But good lord, they're just... thick. Anything that's remotely abstract in any film seems to confuse the hell out of them. They have no knowledge of anything outside pop culture. One of them just tried to pronounce "cloaca" something like "colacular." I just wanna put 'em in a cage and feed 'em peanuts.

@zebratron2084 Don't know that podcast, but I am regularly amazed at let's-just-say-nerds who can't work out, like, a running joke is not a dangling plot thread. Or that an allusion and a ripoff are different things. Or, for comic strip snarkers, that there is a substantial lead time for story comics and that affects how they can handle fast-breaking stuff like the pandemic.

Some days I feel like the only person to have gotten media-literacy and context-clues instruction as a cub.

@Austin_Dern Yeah, treating a comedy like it's even got Heavy Canon in the first place is a particular pet peeve of mine. One of the reasons I love Red Dwarf so much--because it actively works to make nitpickers' lives miserable. Same with the Simpsons meticulously eliminating EVERY possible state for Springfield to be in over the years...

@zebratron2084 @Austin_Dern

And now it all comes flooding back to me how, no matter how explicit the writers made Smithers' sexuality, it never seemed to stem the tide of "IS SMITHERS GAY?" posts on alt.tv.simpsons.