I was sitting in a Creative Writing workshop with a group of people of varying ages, including a white couple in their 70s. They’d decided to return to college to get their undergraduate degrees. I hadn’t talked to them much, but I thought it was cool to see them earning college credits together. That is, until it was time to get an evaluation on a few fiction drafts. Immediately, one of them spoke up about a “colored” character in someone’s story.

Last week I spent some time with my old friend and fellow critic Scott Tobias; and as always happens when a couple of culture writers get together, we talked a lot of shop. Specifically we talked about episodic TV reviewing, and what it’s like to cover a show that we’re not enjoying as much as we thought we would. This has happened to me a few times in my career—Smash, Roadies, Vinyl, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, others—and generally what results is a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, where the sheer amount of time spent watching and thinking about a show leads to a grudging understanding, bordering on respect, for what it’s trying to do.

Early in “I Don’t Want to Be the Worm,” Jake passes out for a second time, in an incident extremely similar to the one from a few episodes ago. It triggers an emotional package about his battle with a binge eating problem, showcasing two years of work to get himself into better shape both physically and mentally. And it comes after a lengthy interlude at Belo where the players talk about the impact that 10 days of little to no food is having on all players’ minds and bodies.

In January, The Last of Us aired an episode, entitled “Long, Long Time,” that sent the internet into a tizzy. “Long, Long Time” is the third installment in the show’s first season and serves as a semi-bottle episode that broke from what the show had been building towards over the first two hours. To recap, the episode centers on Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s characters falling in love amidst the end times.

We are now 21.6 percent of the way through the 2024 season and the Kansas City Royals are on pace for 92 or 93 wins. By any measure, the start of this season, with a seemingly grueling schedule at the outset has been a success. And yet, they seem to be falling just short of beating the teams that are among baseball’s best. They’ve lost two of three twice to the Orioles with a run differential of -2.