This Week You Will Never Let Go of:

• a cancelled American sitcom
• a cancelled Australian sitcom
• a defunct punk label
• filming in dangerous situations
• (sigh) “nicecore”

Contributors staying golden this week are Casper, Drunk Napoleon, Rosy Fingers, Conor Malcolm Crockford. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

At The New York Times Erik Piepenburg reports on Golden-Con, the world’s largest Golden Girls-themed party:

Here, the show’s bawdy spirit — confined mostly to winks, purrs and innuendo for network television — flourished uncensored. Golden-Coners, mostly gay men and straight women, hustled from gossipy panel discussions to raucous trivia games and reverent autograph signings. Drag queens, including the troupe The Golden Gays, promenaded in stretchy ’80s cougarwear with drop shoulders and batwing sleeves. Vendors hawked “Golden Girls”-branded tote bags, T-shirts and a shocking amount of coasters.

Charles Bramesco takes to The Guardian to lament the difficulty of criticizing nice shows and movies:

Again, it’s hard to stand against something too ardently when it gives so many people so much, but partisans have made it a lot easier by turning preferences about art into a referendum on character. Were I inclined to meet them on these uncharitable grounds, the response would probably go something like this: the attachment to and fierce protection of niceness is a sign of weakness, of needing to be coddled as literally and directly as possible. This is to say that mandated kindness compels an equal and opposite reaction of meanness, which isn’t how I prefer to live. Nice things are indeed nice, to quote a big-hearted show studied enough in its attitude to exclude itself from this trend [Bob’s Burgers]. It’s a matter of an oversized market share on the conversation for pop culture without the heft to sustain its what-we-need-right-now reputation. The online dictum about the importance of letting people like things cuts both ways, the right to dislike things every bit as sacred.

IndieWire runs down history’s most grueling movie shoots. There’s been a lot of talk about method acting recently. Is it time to talk about method directing?

The making of John Boorman’s “Deliverance” is full of horrific production stories, one of which includes an alleged fistfight that broke out between the director and screenwriter James Dickey. Even more worrisome was Boorman’s decision to have his leading actors perform all of their own stunts in the movie, which was dangerous since the plot follows the characters as they head out on a perilous canoe trip. Burt Reynolds once said Boorman was adamant about filming the movie in chronological order in case an actor died. In one scene, Reynolds was in a canoe when it went barreling over a waterfall and he cracked his tailbone. Jon Voight, meanwhile, put his life on the line to film a rock climbing sequence without a harness or any wires. Boorman wanted the scene to be shot in a close-up, preventing Voight from using a stunt double. 

Critical Mass‘s Michael Friedrich on a new book about the unraveling of legendary punk label SST Records:

The rugged rebel attitude, of course, is something of an American tradition. Before punks there were hippies, before hippies the beats. Born under the appropriative logic of capitalism, these oppositional movements have rarely been much more than an annex of mainstream structures—at least not for long. It was probably inevitable that the ’80s underground, however alienating at its outset, would eventually give rise to the ’90s “alternative” explosion, the major-label feeding frenzy that followed, Vans Warped Tour, Pitchfork, and the rest of the indie-industrial complex. Only monks, poets, and members of the band Fugazi remain untainted. 

And finally, in the continuing saga of the end of Aussie soap opera Neighbours, power couple Kylie Minogue (singer/songwriter/model) and Jason Donovan (dating Kylie Minogue) will return for a final cameo:

The show’s executive producer Jason Herbison announced the return of Minogue and Donovan’s characters, Charlene and Scott, in a message on Twitter. “Scott and Charlene are the ultimate Neighbours couple and it would not feel right to end the show without them,” he wrote. “We are thrilled that Jason and Kylie have come home to play a very special part in our series finale.”