"The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then transitions to asking (sincerely!) how a bad person can become good. You know the show is something special when the Kierkegaard jokes start and don’t let up. Bell plays a selfish woman

"In a review of the show’s first season, Joshua Rothman described Stranger Things as something like “Lovecraft in suburbia.” The looming, multi-armed monster presented as a new archfoe in the latest season certainly suggests the showrunners—identical twins Matt and Ross Duffer—leaned toward the Lovecraftian. Yet there’s still something crucial missing in that description. H. P. Lovecraft’s particular brand of New England nihilism located horror in the unknown, uncaring vastne

"I used “Maryland, My Maryland” as an opening number for a production of Julius Caesar I directed earlier this summer (with the lyrics modified to “Roman land, my Roman land”). It seemed to fit the impetuous idealism of Caesar’s killers and the pride of those reactionary aristocrats in their homeland. Some members of my cast were surprised when I explained the song’s real history. They had assumed from its lyrics it was a song of the American Revolution. Weren’t the first lin