Throughout its 41-year history, “Saturday Night Live” has sought to incorporate the location of its filming (Manhattan) as a “setting” for the show even as the actual contents of the show—its comedy sketches—have been more likely to take place elsewhere. In this sense, every “SNL” sketch has two settings: the setting of the fictional comic…

Have you ever encountered a situation in which, upon hearing that some misfortune has befallen a friend or acquaintance (a breakup, a death in the family, a lost wallet), you’ve felt compelled to say something like “I’m so sorry” to that friend or acquaintance? Have you ever, then, had your friend or acquaintance turn to…

Ponder with me one of the great mysteries of the universe: how can it be that the 2012 romantic drama “The Best of Me,” starring Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden, has an average rating of 4.3 stars out of five on Netflix? A little information to help you understand why this is a serious question:…

Kirstie Alley What she’s famous for: a sitcom about alcohol abuse, a series of movies about talking babies What she said about Trump: “I want someone that will rev us up and make us pay attention. Donald Trump, whether you like him or you don’t like him, is waking this country up. And I think…

Have you guys noticed anything different about Barack lately? Doesn’t he seem a little more confident—not just politically, in his State of the Union addresses and gun control efforts, but socially? A little more willing to “put himself out there” and try to make new friends? I saw him hanging out with Bear Grylls and…

I missed Adult Swim’s initial December airing of the five-part miniseries “Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter,” but when I found out that the show was set in Vermont, I hastened to catch up. An absurdist melodrama about a gun-toting, neon-clad vagabond and the werewolf-plagued small town that commissions him as a bounty hunter, the show is…

Did you hear about the 2,000-person brawl that took place at Kentucky’s second-largest indoor shopping mall last week? A teenage riot of epic proportions, it shut down the Mall St. Matthews in suburban Louisville two hours early on Boxing Day, as local police, responding to alleged gunshots and general unruliness, strove to break up fights…

I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten at Chipotle: the company operates a single restaurant in Vermont (in Burlington), but with roughly 2,000 locations worldwide and billions in yearly revenue, the fast-casual Mexican chain has reigned for the past decade as the trendiest large-scale dining enterprise in the United States. Chipotle Mexican Grill is Taco…

Editor’s note: The following is the third in a series of reviews of randomly selected, low-quality, made-for-TV Christmas movies. Why do adults watch Christmas movies? I think we do it in large part to convince ourselves that Christmas exists. The made-for-TV Christmas movie, in particular, transports us to an alternate reality in which Christmas occupies…

Editor’s note: The following is the second in a series of reviews of randomly selected, low-quality, made-for-TV Christmas movies. In the first scene of “The Mistle-Tones” (2012), our heroine—running late for an audition—slips in the shower, tumbling into a pratfall that deposits her uninjured on the bathroom floor, the torn-down shower curtain handily covering her…

The following is the first in a series of reviews of randomly selected, low-quality, made-for-TV Christmas movies. The most disconcerting element of the fictional universe of the 2011 ABC Family movie “12 Dates of Christmas”—the tale of a Manhattanite named Kate (Amy Smart) who goes on a blind date on Christmas Eve with the Perfect…

A full month has passed in which my minor obsession with Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” music video has not subsided; I suppose it may be time to come clean. Released on Oct. 22, 2015, the clip has so far notched only about half as many YouTube views as “What Do You Mean?” the lead single from…

I’ve just listened to Adele’s newly released album “25,” which a lot of people expect to be the bestselling album of 2015—which is the reason I listened to it, I guess, even though I don’t particularly care for Adele as a musician. The album strikes me as loud, overproduced, emotionally unsubtle, lyrically and musically repetitive,…

“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big—when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course…

Remember when Stephen Colbert was really funny on Comedy Central for nine years while pretending to be an egotistical ignorant right-wing pundit, and then he announced that he was moving to CBS to take over the Letterman show but wouldn’t be taking his eponymous character along with him, and for a few months we all…