Veeeery iiiintersting. I'll have to split the difference - I think inconsistencies and contradictions create life-like complexity, but I also think there's a point when you just have to kick an author in the shins for not even bothering.

"Buffy" - LOOOOVE it.
Shakespeare - blah. And I don't care if that DOES make me look stupid.
"Angels in America" - Really like "Millenium Approaches," like "Perestroika" less. And I find Harper totally believable, but it's possible that's because I find Mary Louise Parker as Harper to be totally believable.

During both summers that I've owned all seven seasons of "Buffy" I've had a summer-long marathon (which doesn't actually last all summer because I get obsessive and watch all day). I plan to make this an annual event, and will die old and alone and covered in Ben & Jerry's, and my headstone will read: "At least she got to watch "Buffy" a lot."

Shakespeare - blah. And I don't care if that DOES make me look stupid.

I say something pretty similar to my students every so often. I mean, OK, he was a genius, but Romeo and Juliet irritates me--I think it's over-rated. I wrote a really long paper on Hamlet my first year in a PhD program, and one of the things I figured out was that he's a putz. I mean, there's a reason I specialized in contemporary American literature and not that renaissance crap.

"Angels in America" - Really like "Millenium Approaches," like "Perestroika" less. And I find Harper totally believable, but it's possible that's because I find Mary Louise Parker as Harper to be totally believable.

Yeah.... Maybe it's because I read the plays long before I ever saw them; maybe it's because I was a very unhappy woman on the verge of leaving the church, who took psycho-active drugs and whose name begins with an H, and who was in love with a gay man during the Reagan era, but I just find Harper such a sloppily written character.

I don't have marathons of Buffy watching as much as I sometimes just put the disks in and let them run and run and run while I do other stuff. And I sometimes decide to take notes, and will watch each episode in order and write down all the dialogue regarding sex. And sometimes I just have to watch my favorite episodes, rewinding to see the very best bits again and again.

Hey Holly -- Romeo and Juliet: too right. Hamlet: Kenneth Branagh unintentionally convinced me of the same. But I'm a big fan of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Rebecca, I love and envy your etipaph. Holly has a brilliant epitaph as well. I never seem to get to have a Buffy marathon because apparently, I have become a bit of a proselytizer and some discs or even whole seasons seem to be on loan to the unenlightened.