Beyond Bond: Alt-Spy Dramas Swap Angst for Action

It’s a gray day in London and two men in suits contemplate chess pieces crowned with crumpled photographs of double agents employed by Britain’s secret spy service, code-named “The Circus.”“There’s a rotten apple,” whispers curmudgeonly MI6 boss Control played by John Hurt to his underling. “And we have to find it.”It’s not Tom Cruise dangling from the world’s tallest office building, but the mind games played in upcoming espionage thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy prove every bit as riveting — and a hell of a lot more realistic — than the shoot-’em-ups we’ve come to expect from Hollywood spy spectacles.

via Beyond Bond: Alt-Spy Dramas Swap Angst for Action | Underwire | Wired.com.

Community and their three-year old Beetlejuice joke

Community just became the best-ever comedy in my eyes. From Wired:

If there was any doubt that Community was one of the smartest half-hour comedies to ever air on network television, allow us to enter this into evidence: The show spent three years setting up a joke about Beetlejuice, and that joke was simply an Easter egg hidden amongst other already amazing gags.

Here’s how it played out. Over the last three seasons of the show, the writers have worked the word “Beetlejuice” into three separate scripts. On the third utterance, what happened on the show is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you say the ghost’s name three times.