Jonathan Crowe

It might be time to retire Jeopardy, says Tom Nichols, himself a former Jeopardy champion. The ending of the rule that you had to retire after five wins has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the game. “It is no longer a show that celebrates the smarts of the average citizen; it is now a showcase for people who prep and practice, who enter the studio determined not to shine for a day or even a week but to beat the game itself.”

Mirrored from Jonathan Crowe.

The Muppet Show arrived on Disney+ last Friday; this iteration restores a number of segments that were cut from the DVD releases of seasons one through three, and includes seasons four and five, which never saw DVD release. That’s not to say that the Disney+ version of The Muppet Show is exactly as broadcast. Two episodes are missing, and some musical sequences have been cut due to rights issues that even the Mouse can’t overcome. Internet sleuths have been tracking which episodes are missing segments: see Reddit and the Muppet Wiki. Also, some episodes are getting content warnings.

Mirrored from Jonathan Crowe.

When Amazon announced, in late 2017, that it would be producing a multi-season television series prequel to The Lord of the Rings, there was a lot of speculation as to what ground a prequel series would cover. Some speculated that it would focus on Aragorn in his youth, engaged in knight-errantry in the service of Rohan and Gondor. I held out hopes for stories set earlier in the Third Age: the rise of the Witch-king, the fall of Arnor, the Kinslaying, and various other disasters and tragedies would make fertile material for a TV series, I thought.

Earlier this year, Amazon revealed its true intentions with a map—a map of Middle-earth that was subtly different from the map found in The Lord of the Rings. Gondor and Mordor were not labelled. And the lost island of Númenor, which fell into the sea thousands of years before Bilbo and Frodo, was present at the southwest edge of the map.

“Welcome to the Second Age,” Amazon tweeted. Hold on—was Amazon planning on covering the forging of the Rings of Power and the Downfall of Númenor?

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Mirrored from Jonathan Crowe.