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When told she’d have been more likely to threaten Diane, Carla’s nemesis, played by Shelley Long, Johnson agrees — and Lyonne quickly throws out Long’s name for a future guest spot.

Lee and Chen’s script is naturalistic — i.e., most of Long’s back story goes unsaid and exists simply in the wrinkles in Nghia’s face — but flashbacks give us glimpses of his years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Once, when Aden’s in the middle of telling Long exactly how to behave, Lee takes us inside Long’s head and we hear muffled gibberish.

But then we see scenes where Long’s vulnerability works against him, too.

His words eerily prefigure the rise of Andrew Jackson’s “spoils system,” Gov. Huey Long’s Louisiana fiefdom, and our current era of autocracy amplified by social media.