The show always had these great settings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show where terror and humor were so ideally balanced—the villains were genuinely scary, the characters genuinely funny.
The thing that messes me up about the whole “the butler did it” trope is that we literally have no idea where it comes from.
The earliest known piece of detective fiction in which the butler, in fact, did it? Published in 1930.
The earliest known article calling out “the butler did it” as an egregious cliché in detective fiction? Published in 1928.
Obviously there must have been earlier examples of detective fiction in which the butler did it, but none of them have survived to the present day, leaving us in this bizarre situation where the earliest known callout post about the trope pre-dates its earliest known actual use by a full two years.
horror game where you play a knight who goes to slay a dragon but you immediately get caved in and have to find your way out of its lair before it tracks you down
Back in publishing school, I wrote a paper on Victorian yellow back books, cheaply-printed predecessors to the paperback that were available at railway stations (“One should always have something sensational to read on the train” after all.) Although many novels that would become classic came out in yellow back format, including some by Mark Twain and Robert Lewis Stevenson, many were basically what we’d call beach reading.
And, most importantly, they had the best titles EVER.
