Half-hour drama/comedy about a white New Yorker suddenly unmoored in life, wondering what they might or might not be owed, navigating the city and a weird new paradigm with similarly sardonic and clueless friends, having bad sex, fostering generally destructive lifestyle habits, caring/not caring about being chubby, making lots of non-politically-correct jokes, interacting with very few nonwhite people despite living in one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., helmed by a controversial yet mostly beloved figure and a cast comprised largely of that person’s social/professional peers.

And it ain’t Girls.

My main beef with “Girls,” having only seen the trailer

…is that overeducated and privileged white twentysomethings “navigate their lives” in places other than New York City, too! I mean, COME ON PEOPLE. In Atlanta we have all the same problems except with INSANE HUMIDITY and PALMETTO BUGS and EVEN WORSE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION and NO GAY MARRAIGE and…

OK, I am totally kidding (although all those things are true). I am actually feeling fairly neutral about the show, possibly because I don’t have HBO so it hardly seems to matter anyway. But here is a smart thing and here is another smart thing I enjoyed reading about it earlier today, and Lena Dunham seems like someone I’d like to have a beer/a cupcake/a beer and a cupcake with.

Also I totally just learned that “palmetto bugs” are absolutely completely the same thing as cockroaches (which we also have). So gross.

Downton Abbey - Laura Linney replaces Janie Haddad Tompkins (by janiehaddad) (via)

“Oh, this is tea?”

"Cranston is married to Robin Dearden, whom he met on the set of the show Airwolf (1984). He was playing the villain of the week, and she played his hostage (held at gunpoint)."

Bryan Cranston - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joe and I finished season four of Breaking Bad last night (nb: HOLY SHIT AAAAHHHRRGGGHHHAAAAHHH FAAAACE!!) so now I’m Googling all the things I wanted to Google but was afraid to Google for all the lurking spoilers and whatnot. I was really itching for some resolution re: Anna North’s wildly evolving face/body situation (I figured she was pregnant at some point but she doesn’t appear to have had a kid since 2006 so now I am feeling like an awful bodyshaming asshole but seriously what is going on she looks like a totally different person which is weird for a show that’s supposed to take place in a compressed period of time when no one else looks markedly different except I feel like Walt’s goatee was looking a little glued on a few times in the last season) but oh well. This is really sweet, at least! Also Aaron Paul was in some Korn videos.

"The shows that came after are supposed to be “aspirational,” but [their characters] are really aspiring be show business stars, which is about the least functional, least useful thing in the world. … Clarissa was a girl who stood up for herself and other people around her that she cared about. She never wavered or backed down and always went after whatever it was she wanted. She always did things her own way and would have a plan. If the first plan didn’t work out, then she would go to her next plan. And if that plan didn’t work out, then she would have another plan. That’s truly aspirational."

Splitsider | Inside Clarissa Explains It All with Creator Mitchell Kriegman

I mean, you should probably just read this.

"I wanted to create a character that would be Nickelodeon, so to speak. I had decided that a girl could really do that. No one wanted to do that at the time because the belief was that it was all Barbie and GI Joe. The belief was that boys wouldn’t want to watch Barbie. A few girls would watch GI Joe, but no one would buy advertising on a show that boys wouldn’t watch. Nickelodeon wasn’t sure if it would work either, but they were willing to take a fly on it. I believed that boys and girls had a lot more in common. I think part of that was growing up with older sisters who could beat me up sometimes. I didn’t grow up with the same sort of stereotypes. So the distinction was never really an issue for me, and I thought that if we could create a “cool” girl who boys liked and girls wanted to watch, then we could prove it to America that you could make a show with a girl protagonist."

Splitsider | Inside Clarissa Explains It All with Creator Mitchell Kriegman

"…the man now living in the Hamptons with his 14-year-old daughter (whom he assures — with apologies to Hart — is “much cooler than Clarissa… or anything else I could have imagined”)…"

Splitsider | Inside Clarissa Explains It All with Creator Mitchell Kriegman

Ahh what is this liquid coming out my eyeholes?!

Skip to around the three-minute mark to hear a Jill Andrews song play as American Idol judges sit on a giant Oreo cookie floating in a pool of burbling magma and break some poor girl’s heart.

(Source: youtube.com)

"Favorite “Simpsons” Episode: There’s one where Lisa becomes vegetarian and falls in love with a protester. She’s like, “I’m a vegetarian.” And he’s like, “I’m a level-five vegan— I don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.” I tried being vegetarian in high school, but I didn’t stick to it."

Guest Lists: Sharon Van Etten | Features | Pitchfork

Ahem hem (pushes glasses up nose) those are actually two separate episodes—”Lisa the Vegetarian” and “Lisa the Tree Hugger”—which I only know because “Lisa the Vegetarian,” from season seven, is one of MY favorite episodes and because I didn’t recognize that line which is because “Lisa the Tree Hugger” is from season 12 which I pretend does not exist. EITHER WAY YO SHARON LET’S HANG OUT