Thanks for this entry, David. Andrew was a significant American critic whose good works (on behalf of the shows and movies he loved, and fellow critics seeking a foothold in the business) remained invisible to the general public because Andrew wasn't the sort to crow about them. A lot of it was self-interest: as an editor, he wanted the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people to write about a given subject, and if that took him outside the usual channels and ended up giving a byline to somebody readers had never heard of, so be it.

And while it's certainly accurate to describe him as a genre-loving, tech-crazy geek-type with super-eclectic taste, his contribution to both film and TV criticism in that regard was deeper and more philosophical in origin. He was primarily interested in all media as vehicles of personal expression; thus he could locate and describe the personal imprint in everything from "The Thin Red Line" and "Return of the King" to Visconti’s "La Terra Trema" to "Mad Men" and "Friday Night Lights" to the graphic novels and under-the-radar bands he was always recommending to me (and that I wish I'd appreciated when he was still around to argue with).

He was the kind of critic who could segue, in a "Mad Men" recap on the episode titled "The Wheel," into a discussion of the same-titled Grateful Dead song (with lyric quotes) and a mention of the industrial-age nightmare imagery in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times."

(Check out that article, by the way -- the link is here. It's a great introduction to the methodical madness of Andrew's writing.)

If every critic as smart as Andrew were as much fun to read, more people would read criticism.