Vexed was a nice find on Netflix. I won't say it is a great detective show, I won't say it is the best comedy, and I won't say it is the best British comedy, but I will say it's worth watching because it was the last funny thing to come out of England. England used to be a place where comedy could be irreverent, where radio programs and television shows poked fun at prevailing pieties. Current television shows I'm seeing are either so tendentious to be unwatchable, or have an embarrassment-style humor that makes me feel like I'm watching Different Strokes. Vexed seems to have been written just before the UK went stupid. It has two seasons of very different character. Both have the same male lead, Toby Stephens DI Jack Armstrong, a lazy caricature of a chauvinistic detective, and the female lead changes between seasons, but present two different kinds of competent woman. In the first season the lead is Lucy Punch as DI Kate Bishop, an accomplished insp
Robot or Not? is my favorite podcast. And not just because it averages about 3 minutes in length. Robot or Not? is everything the internet should be: pedantic, opinionated, and, ultimately, inconsequential. In every episode, one host (Jason Snell) asks the other (John Siracusa) whether a robot-like something is a robot (or not), and Siracusa answers him by reference to either a Platonic robot in his head or the master list of robot criteria (also in his head), mostly the latter. And depending on unknown factors, Siracusa talks for two to twenty minutes about his categorization of the robot-like something. Those factors are obviously not the difficulty of the situation. I think Siracusa shows doubt about one and a half times over the first one hundred episodes, but that may be three times too many. In his mind, Siracusa's categorization are clear and immediate, although it takes several episodes for you to figure out what they are. I won't spoil the show for you by g