New York Times, Monday, January 30, 2017

I don't normally stack themers when there are five or more overlapping letters, afraid of iffy crossing fill. But sometimes this setup seems to work better than unstacked grid, especially when there is a central spanner.

Neat hidden theme, MALE LEADS interpreted as "entries starting with male animals." Not too-obvious-that-it-isn't-fun, and clear enough to give a nice a-ha moment. A great balance for a Monday puzzle.

(I highlighted the hidden terms below. Elegant touch that they're all four letters!)

Interesting themer layout. Direct overlapping (STAGNATED sitting right atop COCKTAIL HOUR) can often help out greatly when a puzzle has high theme density. As long as you don't have any weird letter pairings, overlapping can often be easier than spacing themers out, surprisingly enough. It becomes like working with three very long themers, instead of five longish ones.

C.C. did a great job of themer placement. I bet anything she originally tried MALE LEADS in the bottom right corner — the typical place for a revealer — but the letter pairs in the overlapping sections weren't friendly. I spend a huge percentage of my gridwork time in testing themer placements and black square layouts to make sure the entire grid will work. I imagine C.C. did a lot of that before landing on this arrangement.

Good choice of themers, COCKTAIL HOUR, BULLETPROOF VEST, BUCKEYE STATE all great. STAGNATED stagnated for me though, feeling more like a neutral filler entry. A shame, considering it kicked off the puzzle. Not sure if there is a better alternative with STAG — STAGNANT WATER isn't a very pretty image.

I usually am a big fan of C.C.'s bonus fill, and VIP ENTRANCE was another example of that. OLD VIC worked well for me, too. EPIC FAILURE though ... I've seen mostly the EPIC FAIL meme. Given that there are only two long bonus entries, it's so important to make those shine. To my ear, EPIC FAILURE didn't work very well; a bit out of tune.

Pretty good short fill given all these constraints, although there were gluey bits like ETE, APAL, ANAT, MST, TRE. Thankfully, all minor, but as a whole, it was on the verge of being too much for me.

I really liked the theme concept. Would have been a POW! contender if STAGNATED had been replaced with a more interesting themer, and EPIC FAILURE had sung more.