Apple Considering Severance Spinoffs to Fill Gaps Between Seasons
As a show about company employees who split their identities into two halves, Severance is uniquely suited to expansion. Each episode follows Mark S (Adam Scott) as he learns more about Lumon Industries and its procedure that divides Mark’s work identity (or “innie”) from his out-of-work identity (“outie”). Although the show has been a critical and commercial hit, its slow release schedule has frustrated some viewers. Since Severance debuted on February 18, 2022, only nineteen episodes have been released, and season three is still in early production.
To help fill that gap, Apple is considering severing the show. According to a deep dive by Deadline, Apple Studios have acquired full rights to the series, created by Dan Erickson and produced by Ben Stiller. While Erickson and Stiller aren’t sure if there will be a fifth season of the show, the report reveals that “the duo are open to the idea of doing more with the Severance universe; possibilities include a prequel, spinoffs, and foreign versions.”
That news may worry some fans of the show. One of the great pleasures of Severance has been its tight focus on Mark S. and his immediate co-workers: the abrasive Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), the elegant Irving B. (John Turturro), and newcomer Helly R. (Britt Lower). Although we learn more about Lumon’s power structure and strange history, as well as the company’s upper management, and the lives of the employees’ outies, these bits of information have come to us through the main characters’ stories.
However, it’s also clear that Erickson and Stiller’s interests go far beyond the lives of these four people. What began as a light sci-fi take on corporate work culture, as Mark and his co-workers navigate absurd banalities such as waffle parties, has expanded into an almost Lost-esque mythology.
Over two seasons, we’ve seen how Lumon is more than just a mega-corporation. It takes on a vast, almost religious quality, as demonstrated by the higher-ups’ cult-like devotion to founder Kier Eagan. Moreover, season two gave us glimpses of other divisions and employees within Lumon, including one staffed by characters played by Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat and some strange livestock division where Gwendoline Christie works with sheep.
Spinoffs and prequels may be the perfect way to develop the show’s mythology without losing sight of the central human story. The series began with a powerful, empathetic shot: Mark crying in his car before going into the office, his emotional state suddenly changing. It’s those human moments that keep us coming back to the show, moments such as Seth Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) reprimand or Irving’s romance with Burt G. (Christopher Walken).
But, as Deadline notes, those moments can only do so much with such huge gaps between seasons. Spinoff shows are one way “to keep the show’s fandom engaged by releasing a smaller-scale offshoot in-between that also would increase the franchise’s value,” the report notes, citing similar experiments with Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.
By splitting the show into multiple series, Apple may be able to give us a fuller Severance experience, letting us see not just innies and outies, but every aspect of Lumon and its employees.
Severance seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Apple TV.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 6 Review – Come, Let’s Away
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 6.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academycontinues its run of midseason bangers with “Come, Let’s Away,” an hour that sees both the return of Paul Giamatti’s Nus Braka and the cadets’ first real-life mission—that comes complete with unexpected and terrifying stakes. An hour that deftly balances its student-focused plot with a larger Federation-level catastrophe, it’s an episode that not only sets up some intriguing narrative threads for the back half of the season, but it also lets one of the show’s most underrated characters step into the spotlight on her own terms.
“Come, Let’s Away” isn’t an origin story for Betazoid War College cadet Tarima Sadal, since we covered her background — in broad strokes — back in “Beta Test”. But it is, in its own way, an emotional coming-of-age tale, in much the same way that “Vox in Excelso” and “Series Acclimation Mil” are for Jay-Den and Sam, respectively. Tarima’s decision to remove the implant that dampens her telepathic abilities is as life-changing a choice for her as anything we’ve seen happen to her classmates, just with the added bonus of literal life-or-death stakes attached.
One of the more intriguing aspects of Starfleet Academy’s set-up is the fact that it’s a school that isn’t necessarily a fixed location, and that students aboard the U.S.S. Athena still get the chance to have various adventures (though they probably refer to them as “learning opportunities”) across the galaxy despite their Earth-bound San Francisco home base. This episode sees the kids from both the Academy and the War College head out to run missions on the wreckage of a starship whose experimental drive — ostensibly an attempt to replace the warp cores that were destroyed during The Burn — melted down. The poor lighting and overall ship-graveyard vibes give everything a sort of thinly veiled horror feel, which is only exacerbated by the arrival of a particularly violent and frightening new alien species, known as the Furies.
Looking like nothing so much as the Star Trek take on the Mouth of Sauron from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the Furies are violent and manipulative, threatening to kill all the cadets if their demands aren’t met. Enter Nus Braka. Given how prevalent the news of Giamatti’s involvement in this series has been throughout its pre-release marketing, we all pretty much had to know that he’d be back at some point. And the sketchy plot — which involves everything from overt lying and theft to emotional manipulation —that unfolds feels perfectly in keeping with everything we’ve come to know about this character up until this point. That he becomes the best of a lot of bad options kind of feels like the story of his life in microcosm.
Even though it feels like it should be obvious from the jump that Braka is basically using Captain Ake for his own purposes, Giamatti and Holly Hunter are dynamite together and make what is, admittedly, a fairly thinly drawn vendetta feel incredibly compelling. The two play these characters as though they have the complex, established history of Professor X and Magneto, rather than the fairly shallow and poorly sketched revenge plot they’ve shared to date. Giamatti’s gleeful cruelty and harsh truths — he gets downright nasty about Ake’s son’s death and the emotional compromises required of any being forced to live on a long enough timeline — strike with painful precision, and though Hunter keeps Ake stoic and grounded enough that her breakdown at episode’s end lands all the harder.
Whether Braka’s decision to team up with the Furies to execute a secret third plot involving stealing advanced experimental weaponry from a nearby Federation starbase for his own ends is a story any of us will care about past this point is a question only the rest of this season can answer, but it’s always nice when the show cares enough about its viewers to at least try to surprise them. And to its credit, “Come, Let’s Away” actually manages to do that several times.
It’s a given that at least some of these kids were likely only introduced for the sake of being cannon fodder, but it feels particularly rude to kill off one of the only two War College students who’d be given enough of a personality to be recognizable to viewers. Alas, poor B’Avi, we hardly knew you. But at least you fought bravely and managed to teach Caleb some valuable lessons about the humanity of those we dislike! (And, look, burying him with his favorite space adventure comic book got me. I’m not made of stone!!)
But while Caleb gets to be…well, predictably Caleb, throughout most of this hour, this is Tarima’s episode through and through. (Even though she’s never even technically part of the kidnapped mission.) It’s a particularly satisfying swerve given that this is a character who hasn’t had a ton to do beyond serve as a love interest and the revelation that she’s powerful enough to turn an entire squad of alien enemies into dust with her mind is….well, let’s just call it unexpected. (And very exciting.) Don’t get me wrong, Tarima and Caleb have a super sweet bond, and Starfleet Academy has smartly dialed down his initial playboy-esque instincts in favor of giving his connection with Tarima time to build some real layers. But we’ve already seen one Betazoid in the Star Trek universe consigned to being little more than a romantic partner; we don’t need to do it again. (And I say what as someone for whom The Next Generation’s Troi and Riker were a formative romance.)
Zoë Steiner’s performance walks a fine line between softness and steel, and there’s something deeply gratifying about the way Tarima refuses to make herself smaller in order to win Caleb’s approval or affection. In fact, if anything, this whole episode is about this character finally deciding to unleash her true self — to stop limiting what she’s capable of in order to make those around her feel better or safer or more like her equal — and it’s not just an act that saves a lot of lives, but one that completely reorients our understanding of this character and what the future holds for her. For the moment, that future appears to be a coma, but this is Star Trek; we all know that’s not going to last. But, for my part, I’m really excited to meet the young woman who comes out the other side of it.
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.
Dan Trachtenberg Confirms He’s Working on Paramount Franchises and More Predator Movies
When we meet Dan Trachtenberg over Zoom, the writer-director is feeling pretty good. He seemed pretty jazzed, too, when he spoke to Den of Geek magazine for a cover story last fall. But by his own admission, that was before Predator: Badlandshad come out or—for that matter—been completed in the edit. So he had no idea if anyone was going to dig his “a Predator and Weyland-Yutani robot walk into a bar” setup at the time.
“I was terrified,” Trachtenberg admits of his mindset late last year. Yet after he saw folks “were picking up what we’re putting down and stirred by the movie,” a wave of relief descended upon him. And that relief presumably included the box office where Predator: Badlands became the highest-grossing film in the franchise to date, both in terms of opening weekend, with its $40 million debut toppling Alien vs. Predator’s benchmark, as well as Badlands’ worldwide gross of $185 million setting a franchise best.
It’s at least partially for this reason that Paramount Pictures, the studio which first worked with Trachtenberg as a director way back in 2016 on 10 Cloverfield Lane, just signed a first-look deal with the helmer earlier this month. Now Trachtenberg is happy to chat—to a point—about what that future will look like both at Paramount and in the land of Predators and the robots they meet along the way.
“All things are true,” Trachtenberg confirms. “I’m still very much figuring out Predator movie stuff, but also insanely excited about what Paramount and I have discussed.”
The filmmaker further reveals that he’s developing original stories at Paramount in addition to beginning to open up that studio’s vault to see what franchises they might have on the shelf: “I definitely am thrilled at their excitement for some of my more original ideas, as well as looking into some of the stuff they have over there and see if there’s any fun unique ways into their IP.”
With that said, Trachtenberg confirms he is going to continue to work with 20th Century Studios/Disney on the future of the Predator franchise. In fact, he is toying with the prospect of the protagonists of Predator: Badlands, rogue Yautja short king Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and his robo-bae Thia (Elle Fanning), crossing paths with Naru (Amber Midthunder), the Comanche protagonist of his other wildly bold live-action Predator reimagining, Prey(2022).
While Prey might be set in the 18th century, and Badlands in the 25th or further, the animated film that Trachtenberg also directed last year, Predator: Killer of Killers, featured a surprise easter egg where it turned out the Yautja deep-freeze any humans that best one of their species. Trachtenberg says the potential crossover that unlocks was “in the back of my mind, the side of my mind,” and everywhere else. He would also seem to tease that these dangling threads could mean a return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose beloved Dutch from the OG Predator (1987) is also seen in that Killer of Killers easter egg next to Naru.
“Basically where we are now is figuring out not only what would happen next with these Badlands characters but really all of the characters,” he cryptically doles out. “Like what would happen next for any of them, as well as, what have we not seen? What else has not happened yet in this franchise or in science fiction movies in general? So all things are being figured out now, as I had [to do] after Prey and then came up with Killer of Killers and Badlands.”
In the here and now, though, the filmmaker seems to still be basking in the victory of a film which he sheepishly admits took one of the most ferocious of movie monsters from the testosterone-heavy age of “Guns ’n Guns” action flicks in the 1980s, and put him in a scene that better echoed The Wizard of Oz (1939). It’s the one where Dek first meets a bisected Thia, hence her being absent her bottom half but not her chipper sense of humor. She’s strung up on an alien vulture’s nest asking for help, all but singing “if I only had a… pair of legs.”
“Definitely Wizard of Oz came up from time and time again, and yes, there’s a bit of Scarecrow there,” says Trachtenberg. “I was just talking about this with an actor the other day, there’s also a little bit of Willow, when they meet Madmartigan [Val Kilmer] for the first time, and he’s in the cage. There’s something in the vibe of that which is similar, even though for me the tone of Madmartigan is a little bit more [analogous] to Dek rather than Thia. But yeah that was a touching point as well as certainly Scarecrow.”
It’s the type of bold tonal mischief that both scared and thrilled Trachtenberg in the first place. He even recalls being on set and looking at three different actors of various enormity dressed to the nines as a paterfamilias Yautja and his two sons, and having an incredibly disquieting thought.
“When you’re talking to people about the movie while you’re still working on it, you don’t know if any of what you’re saying is going to be mocked and laughed at later because of how much you may have missed the mark,” Trachtenberg explains. “There was a big moment, halfway through shooting the movie, when I suddenly had this realization of ‘we could be making Howard the Duck right now!’ Like Howard the Duck, [George Lucas] made after Star Wars, and they had ILM working on it; they had an incredible costume designer; they built an awesome duck costume for the time; and they must have been feeling like, ‘We’re making something bold here. No one’s made a movie like this before!’ Which is how we were. No one’s done this. And then I realized that this could be ridiculous and silly, and people will mock us forever for thinking this was a good idea.”
Instead it would seem Trachtenberg was invited to level up to a bigger arena. There might be a lesson in that.
Predator: Badlands arrives on Hulu on Thursday, Feb. 12 and on 4K Blu-ray and home media on Tuesday, Feb. 17.
Paramount’s Plan for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Gets Their Multi-Generational Appeal
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been such an enduring concept, in part because everything you need to know about the characters is right there in the title. They are mutant turtles who do martial arts, and they like to party and eat pizza because they are teenagers. The simplicity of that concept has allowed TMNT to remain a pop culture phenomenon since the launch of their first animated series in 1987 up through today.
Paramount Studios is planning on banking on that popularity by ordering more Turtles content. However, instead of just doing another series about Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Leonardo, Paramount is doing several shows, a movie, an updated toy line, and more, each for very different audiences. The strategy embraces the inherent elasticity of the Turtles, which have always worked best when reinterpreted for different audiences.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio is still planning to make a sequel to Mutant Mayhem, the well-received animated reimagining from 2023. However, it is also giving the green light to Teeny Mutant Ninja Turtles, “30-episode CG-animated series exploring the early days of the brothers as ninjas-in-training” in the vein of the pre-K focused Spidey and his Amazing Friends. At the same time, the studio is developing an R-rated movie adaptation of The Last Ronin, a bleak dystopian tale about Michelangelo continuing the fight after the death of his brothers.
That’s three very different versions of the Turtles, but multiple versions of the team have always coexisted—even if the rights holders acted like there was only one. As most fans know, the Turtles came to be when cartoonists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird self-published their black and white Daredevil homage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 in 1984. Three years later, the duo softened their characters for a younger audience by licensing the Turtles to toy maker Playmates. The toy deal led to the creation of the 1987 animated series, a smash hit that sold not just toys, but also tie-in food, clothes, and, of course, a rock album and concert tour.
But when the 1990 movie combined elements of both the cartoon and the original comic book series (including swear words, much to the dismay of this writer, who saw the film in theaters with very conservative parents), fans had to face the fact that there were two very different sets of TMNT stories, for very different audiences.
Over the years, it seems like the TMNT franchise has wrestled against that fact. While the characters get regularly rebooted in films and television to appeal to a new audience, it generally seems as if 4Kids Entertainment, Paramount/Nickelodeon, or whoever owns the rights at the time wants there to be just one version of the team at any given moment. The prime audience tends to be new kids who can jump onto whatever take has been most recently launched. The 2009 movie Turtles Forever, in which the team from the 2003 relaunch met the original characters from 1987, was the exception that proved the rule.
While that approach tended to work with new sets of 10-to-14-year-olds, it seemed to leave out a lot of potential fans. Those who grew up with the series were given a clean jumping-off point with every new take on the characters, and those who were younger felt like the team belonged to their big siblings.
However, the new strategy shows that Paramount has realized that there are enough Turtles for everyone. Fundamentally, the team is both a violent sci-fi tale and a goofy story about outrageous amphibians. The new approach lets creators emphasize different elements, giving everyone their own favorite version of the Turtles. Moreover, it proves that, like a deep dish slice of pizza, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles concept offers plenty to chew on.
Debatably Gruesome Predator: Badlands Ad Banned in the UK
The Predator franchise has delighted audiences everywhere with its brutal scenes of violence ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger and his elite paramilitary rescue team first made their way into the jungle and got largely equalized by a menacing alien visitor in the original 1987 movie. So it seems vaguely amusing that the PG-13 installment Predator: Badlands has somehow gone beyond the pale in the U.K. in the year of our lord 2026.
Still, that is indeed the case, as the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority has now banned Disney from using a version of a digital video poster for Dan Trachtenberg’s hit movie, saying it could “cause fear or distress for young children.”
The poster, which shows the severed torso of damaged synthetic Thia (Elle Fanning) being hoisted into the air by predator Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), received [checks notes] two complaints from the public according to the ASA (via THR.) Disney had previously battled the ban on the ad – first launched in November of last year – by pointing out that Thia is not human.
“Whilst we acknowledged Twentieth Century Studio’s comment that the smaller figure was not actually a human, but rather a ‘synth’ robot, we considered that was not clear from the ad, and that the figure was likely to be interpreted as a human,” the ASA clapped back. “We further considered that the realistic depiction of the smaller figure’s severed torso and exposed spine was gory and likely to be disturbing to younger children.”
It’s not yet clear if Disney will relaunch the ad without the offending image, but they accepted the ASA’s ruling, stating, “We take our responsibilities to audiences very seriously and strive to work closely with partners to meet the required standards.”
The ban is extremely unlikely to have any impact whatsoever on the future of the Predator franchise, with Trachtenberg teasing his involvement in a third new installment by explaining to SFX (via Games Radar) that, “The reason why I felt possessed to make [these movies] and sort of why I rushed was because I was so eager to get to the third thing.”
The Mummy: Can Fraser and Weisz’ Chemistry Overcome Legacy Sequel Blandness?
It’s official: Rick and Evie are back. Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz had been in talks to reprise their roles from the 1999 classic since the end of last year, but we now have confirmation that a fourth Mummy film is on its way, directed by Ready or Not duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.
As excited as we are to see this last, inevitable step in the Fraserssance, a certain worry sinks in. While there have certainly been some smart legacy sequels—Creed and Trainspotting 2leap to mind—the returning heroes rarely crackle with energy. And even more than the spooky set pieces or classic monsters, the Mummy franchise needs Rick to crackle with energy, especially in his relationship with Evie.
The Mummy franchise contains not one, but two instances that show the importance of the chemistry between Fraser and Weisz. The first, of course, is the original film, specifically the movie’s reclamation over the past decade.
To be sure, the first film wowed audiences back in 1999, pulling in $422.5 million at the box office. But by 2009, excitement for the franchise had died down significantly. Between the disappointing 2008 entry The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and a glut of Scorpion King sequels and spinoffs—to say nothing of the ascending MCU—The Mummy felt old and stodgy.
Yet, as The Mummy neared its 20th birthday, moviegoers began to sense that they had lost something important. From social media posts to boutique bumper stickers, fans grew nostalgic for Rick and Evie. They didn’t long to see the now-clunky digital effects, nor did they really care about the titular ancient Egyptian villain (see: the tepid response to the terrible Tom Cruise version). No, they wanted to see Rick and Evie fight and flirt with one another again.
That desire was only stoked by the disastrous decision to recast Evie for Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Reportedly, Weisz did not care for the movie’s script or perhaps director Rob Cohen, who took Stephen Sommers’s place for the third movie. Whatever the reason, they chose Maria Bello to be the new Evie. Bello is a great actress and seemed to be a fine choice to replace Weisz. But on the screen, Rick and Evie felt less like an exciting pair of lovers and more like a tired, bored married couple.
Which brings us to the present. On paper, the idea of a Fraser and Weisz reunion in The Mummy 4 sounds great. Both actors have continued to do great work since their last on-screen pairing, and the goodwill they’ve built up will certainly help overcome any bumps in the new film.
However, The Mummy 4 is still a legacy sequel, one that will have to address the fact that decades have passed since Rick and Evie first met. Their son Alex will himself be in his 40s now, and the duo will likely have been out of commission for a while. Previous legacy sequels lean into time passed, and often even have the central couple separated for one reason or another: think of Indy and Marion in the last two Indiana Jones movies, or the Creed movies with Rocky as a widower after Adrian’s death.
The Mummy 4 cannot pull the same move. No, they cannot ignore the passage of time, and yes, we want to acknowledge that Rick and Evie aren’t the same youngsters they once were. But the movie cannot downplay their chemistry. Only that electricity can revive the Mummy franchise from the dead, just like the endless love that called forth its central monster.
The Mummy 4 is set for release on May 19, 2028.
The Insult That Helped Michael Douglas Win His Wall Street Oscar
Michael Douglas’ performance as corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 crime drama Wall Street was so good that it earned him a Best Actor Oscar, but the director gave him some absolutely brutal feedback on his acting while they were working on the movie.
At the TCM Classic Film Festival last month (via People), Douglas revealed that during the second week of shooting, Stone even came into his trailer and asked if he was doing drugs. “‘No, I’m not doing drugs,’” Douglas said, to which Stone replied, “Because you look like you’ve never acted before in your life.”
Douglas, who admitted he didn’t like to look at dailies on the set of his films because “I’m one of those guys that always sees what’s wrong,” agreed to accompany Stone to the editing room to check out how bad his acting really was. “I’m looking at them really hard, and critically, and they seemed pretty good. So I keep saying, ‘I think it’s pretty good,’ and [Stone said], ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it.'”
The 81-year-old actor says he didn’t take Stone’s insult to heart, noting that the celebrated director of JFK and Salvador was known for getting the best possible performances from his actors and just wanted Douglas to inject extra “nastiness,” “vengeance,” and “meanness” into his portrayal of Gekko. “He was willing for me to hate his guts for the rest of this movie to get that extra little push.”
He added, “His record of successes with actors is quite impressive. So I’m deeply, deeply appreciative of the fact that he gave me the part and the fact that he pushed me to another level.”
Douglas would go on to reprise the role of Gekko in Stone’s 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. At this point in Stone’s career, Douglas found him to be “mellow”, while co-star Shia LaBeouf recalled having a pretty raw on-set experience with the director.
“Oliver would just say, ‘Go to that bar, get fucked-up, and come back,’” he told GQ. “I’d walk over, get smashed, and go back to work. He would really fuck with me when I was smashed. I get aggressive when I’m smashed, and he’d film that. He would just open you up completely, make you fucking naked – and then call, ‘Action!'”
Controversial “Holy Grail” Project to Restore Classic Movie Using AI
We’re going out on a limb here, but if you had to pick someone to restore a classic Orson Welles movie, an AI startup using an Amazon-backed generative platform probably wouldn’t be your first choice. Yet that’s what’s been happening at Fable, thanks to its founder, Edward Saatchi.
Fable launched the project last year, using Showrunner’s generative AI to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ film The Magnificent Ambersons, which explores the declining fortunes of a wealthy 19th-century Midwestern family. Studio RKO famously made heavy cuts to the movie before its original release in 1942, added a happy ending, and destroyed the cut footage.
These were unfortunate decisions that scuppered Welles’s original vision, but this isn’t the first attempt to restore the movie to what it might have been. Filmmaker Brian Rose, who previously recreated lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons with animated scenes, is also on board Saatchi’s project.
Saatchi’s motivation does seem to stem from a genuine passion for Welles’ work. “To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi told The New Yorker of the ongoing project, which layers AI over live-action footage. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”
Notably, Fable’s restored version of The Magnificent Ambersons was originally thought to be an internal project because the company didn’t even have the rights to the movie. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking, ‘Might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’” Saatchi mused last September, but he has reportedly since been making behind-the-scenes moves to convince the Welles estate and Warner Bros. that it could go further.
Welles’ daughter, Beatrice, who formerly worked with filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza and producer Frank Marshall to edit and release her father’s unfinished final film, The Other Side of the Wind, admits she remains skeptical, but says, “They are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.”
Your mileage may vary on whether you personally think the juice is worth the squeeze.
Halle Berry Knows What It’s Like for ‘Your Industry to Do Away with You If They Could’
The first time Halle Berry and Bart Layton met was, appropriately enough, in Los Angeles. The Oscar-winning actor had just read Layton’s screenplay, an adaptation of Don Winslow’s hardboiled novella Crime 101, and appreciated the cops and robbers of it all. And yet, it was the image Layton intended to craft of a character named Sharon, an insurance broker to the rich and powerful in the City of Angels, which most spoke to Berry.
“I just don’t understand this character, I know her because I’ve been her,” Berry told the filmmaker in their first meeting. And it’s a kinship she still feels months later when she sits down to speak with us about the finished film.
“I understand what it means to be a woman of a certain age and to feel marginalized, and to feel like there’s no place for you,” Berry says when we catch up in New York City. “That your industry that you loved so much would rather do away with you if they could. You know, most women, when they get to be about 40, we see them less and less, and it’s harder for them to procure really meaningful work. And not just work, but work that really exemplifies who they are and where they are. So I related to that in Sharon, because she has worked so hard to get to the top in her industry just to be told that because of the number that’s assigned to her due to her birth, she’s aged out and she has no more value. That’s a really hard pill to swallow.”
It’s a telling context, too, for a crime thriller that’s set in the sun-soaked hills around Hollywood. As Layton notes, “Those looks, youth, and beauty are the currency of LA.” And like every other monetary value in his and Winslow’s brutally sober-eyed estimation of our world, they are leveraged by the most affluent and insulated (and male) to exploit the perpetual underclasses, even those who precariously think they have “made it.”
It’s a distinct context for a nuanced web of thievery, greed, and grievance, even as Crime 101 more than passingly resembles the great crime films of yesteryear. At one point in the new movie, an extraordinarily successful jewel thief who calls himself Mike (Chris Hemsworth) and the cop trying to bring him down, Lou (Mark Ruffalo), outright debate what is the best Steve McQueen flick: Bullitt with its car chases or The Thomas Crown Affair with its gentleman thief playing confidence games of his own. Hemsworth tells us the scene was fun to play in part because he loved so many of the great cops and robbers movies that Crime 101 intentionally evokes.
“In films from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and even up to the early 2000s, it was allowed to be left up to the audience if this was a good person or a bad person,” Hemsworth remembers. “It wasn’t so defined or trope-y. Each of these characters [in Crime 101], I found, to be quite surprising and didn’t fit the mold or the archetype. It’s just a beautiful nostalgia.”
“Adult films,” his co-star Berry adds.
That nostalgia for a certain kind of onscreen moral ambiguity is something that director Layton appreciated even before he was an adult.
“I think the first thing I watched when I was nine or 10, which my mum introduced me to, was The Sting,” the director says. “That was like the first properly adult movie that I ever watched, and I was just totally captivated by it. I come back to that a lot, and then I guess I loved the Billy Friedkin movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s [like The French Connection and Sorcerer]. They had this very visceral quality, the characters were real, they were flawed, they existed in the same world that you and I inhabit.”
That more nuanced world, painted in shades of gray despite the Beverly Hills sunshine, is something Crime 101 exudes with Ray-Bans on. A bit like another iconic Los Angeles heist movie, Michael Mann’s Heat, Layton’s new thriller is an ensemble piece with three protagonists: Hemsworth’s introverted and isolated thief; Ruffalo’s over-the-hill detective who was never good at playing the politics of the department; and Berry’s insurance liaison who still can talk bored billionaires into insuring every facet of their home.
These people should ostensibly be adversarial to one another, yet things are a bit more complicated when paths cross. It’s less “good guys” and “bad guys,” and more as if colleagues in the same industry get the chance to compare notes at a convention.
“Our characters are sort of salt of the earth,” says Berry. “They come from the same cloth.” Meanwhile Hemsworth points out there is even a line he loves in the script where Sharon says those who come from chaos crave order.
“It sort of sums up the two of them,” the Australian muses, “having come from difficult backgrounds and difficult times, and in an attempt to sort of find that foundation they didn’t get as children, they’re building themselves up through protection mechanisms, through superficial wealth.”
Their director acknowledges the film is first and foremost a thriller, one with car chases, violent jewelry robberies, and gun-pointing standoffs. But within this scenario, he hopes to raise some questions.
Says Layton: “For me, this was about the kind of social strata of Los Angeles and the incredible status pressure that motivates people. You might find people who devote their whole life to the pursuit of something, which wasn’t really about what they felt was important. It was about how other people would see them, and if other people saw themselves as successful, they would feel successful… so what unites these characters is they’re all coming to a crisis point where the thing that they’ve been doing and devoting their lives to is not working anymore, and they need a change. Something radical has to shift.”
Whether as a Hollywood player, a jewel thief, or the claims adjustor insuring those jewels, there comes a time when it makes more sense to stop playing off each other in a rigged game. Such a thought might even be “crime 101.”
Crime 101 opens only in theaters on Friday, Feb. 13.
Outlander Shot Multiple Season 8 Endings to Avoid Spoilers
The eighth season of Starz’s popular historical fantasy series Outlander is set to reveal its final secrets next month when it bids farewell to its fans after 12 years on the network. But if anyone is waiting for spoilers to emerge before the season 8 premiere on March 6, they can forget about it – not even stars Sam Heughan and Caitríona Balfe know how Outlander ends.
Executive producer Matthew B. Roberts told Entertainment Weekly that he wrote and shot multiple season 8 endings to prevent spoilers from leaking, which is understandable given there are a few major mysteries left to solve before the long-running series concludes. One of them even goes all the way back to the first season!
Yep, fans are still hoping that season 8 will finally solve the appearance of Jamie’s ghost in the very first episode of Outlander, when Frank Randall seemed to spot the Highlander gazing up at Claire’s window in 1945 Inverness. What was he doing there? Was he real or an apparition? The author of the Outlander book series has confirmed that it was indeed the ghost of Jamie we saw, but since the TV adaptation is wrapping up before the final book is released, there’s a chance that the people behind the show could make different decisions.
“What we tried to do is answer as many questions as we could authentically,” Roberts said coyly. “There’s so many great storylines that get tied up — whether it’s in a tight bow or a very loose bow, that’s for the fans to judge.”
Faith’s fate is another lingering mystery going into season 8. Last season, we discovered that Claire and Jamie’s daughter didn’t die as they first thought. What really happened to her? Roberts insists fans won’t have to wait too long for the answer, but that it also “spawns about a thousand more questions, and those are what gets answered throughout the season.”
A new twist has also been added to the pile fairly recently in the Outlander prequel series, Blood of My Blood, where it was revealed that Claire’s parents were actually time travelers. It’s not yet clear whether the mainline series will acknowledge this or whether the two stories will blend in a new way.
With so much left to unravel, Outlander’s final season is likely to be full of the kind of fantastic storytelling that has continued to delight us over the years – and then some!
Outlander season 8 premieres March 6 on Starz.
Ciarán Hinds Looks Back on Rome and Caesar as a Cautionary Tale for Today
Hardly more than 20 years ago, HBO took a gamble on its first foray into epic television. The series that resulted, burned brilliant and bright. And briefly, as the gargantuan portrait of how a centuries-old republic transitioned into permanent one-man rule only lasted two seasons before the premium cable network pulled the plug on Rome—prematurely as they later admitted.
While the difficulties of bringing Rome to the world ended up acting as a kind of test run for Game of Thrones and the glut of epic and “cinematic” television shows that followed, the 22 episodes masterminded by showrunner Bruno Heller between 2005 and 2007 remain a beloved favorite two decades on because of their scale, their writing, and most certainly their acting. To this day, many count Ciarán Hinds’ portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar as their favorite interpretation of the man who almost became dictator for life in the Roman republic—at least until his longtime friends and colleagues skewered him to death with knives on the senate floor.
Cool, surprisingly compassionate (except to the Gauls), and intensely intellectual behind his curt smiles, Hinds’ interpretation of Caesar carried himself like a consummate gentleman, even as such airs belied a bottomless appetite for power, prestige, and still further honors. In 2005, it was a thrilling example of epic storytelling and a re-contextualization of a familiar history lesson about how the charisma of one man—and the blueprint he left for others after his death—transitioned the greatest power of antiquity into a permanent autocracy. By the end of Rome, Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian (Simon Woods) claims his title is simply “first citizen,” but his power over the ghost of the Senate and his homeland is ironclad after the last of his enemies have been silenced.
In other words, it plays differently now, including to Hinds who we caught up with earlier this month to discuss his new film Midwinter Break. And during our conversation, the Irish actor admits he never dreamed they were making a cautionary tale for the modern world when going back to the time of Caesar and Cleopatra.
“I had no idea, and it saddens me desperately, not as an American but just as a human being for the people I know over there,” Hinds says. “When I was looking at the analogies of that time and that period, I was going mostly in the past, but also in Ireland there was Taoiseach [Charles] Haughey, who was a very stylish man, or [Silvio] Berlusconi. These people who were modern and in the world then, and there was a sense of whatever goes on underneath as the dealings of politicians, they’ll always present themselves in a way that’s very charming. But we could still see through them.”
The heads of state that Hinds refer to include the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) who governed as chief of the government for three separate terms in the 1980s and ‘90s, and who after leaving office was discovered to have reportedly taken millions of pounds as secret gifts from businessmen using offshore accounts. Berlusconi, meanwhile, is the infamous on/off prime minister of Italy in the ‘90s and 2000s whose allegations, trials, and even convictions are the stuff of legend. Still, there is something more extreme about what Caesar and a true cult of personality can achieve.
“It was kind of that idea of ‘why are these people continually getting voted in?’” Hinds says. “And it’s a charisma that’s beyond my [reasoning]. I can see manipulation. But it seems to work, and certainly in your country at the moment. It’s kind of extraordinary from what I see.”
While Hinds’ strategic tactician on the HBO series might be a little more cerebral than current analogies, perhaps one of the reasons his rise so fascinates as it is a lesson that never goes out of date about the popular man.
We’ll have more on the site in our conversation with Hinds about Midwinter Break later in the week.
Spider-Noir Photos Reveal New Takes on Classic Spider-Man Characters
Well, a version of Spider-Man anyway. The MGM+ series Spider-Noir gives us a very different type of wall-crawler. Like the character we saw in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the Spider-Man of Spider-Noir wears a fedora and trench coat when he crawls the walls, and he talks like Nicolas Cage, not like Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, or any other Spider-Man we’ve seen before.
But that doesn’t mean that Spider-Noir is totally unfamiliar. Not only does it stem from a 2009 miniseries published by Marvel Comics, but the series also features key members of Spider-Man’s supporting cast, several of whom were revealed in new photos published by Esquire. As we see in those photos, Spider-Noir will bring new life to Robbie Robertson, the Black Cat, and Ben Reilly.
Spider-Man By Any Other Name
Where the original Spider-Man Noir series imagined Peter Parker as an avenger who fights corrupt political machines after the murder of his anarchist uncle, Spider-Noir follows the lead of Into the Spider-Verse to take a more playful tone. The series directly homages classic films such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, while adding plenty of Bugs Bunny silliness.
That playfulness can be seen in the decision to have Cage play Ben Reilly instead of Peter Parker… which isn’t quite the big difference some might expect. Ben Reilly first appeared in 1974’s Amazing Spider-Man #149, as a clone of Peter Parker created by mad scientist Miles Warren. Although the clone seems to die at the end of the issue, he resurfaced decades later in an infamous storyline known as The Clone Saga. We can’t get into the details here, but The Clone Saga was a convoluted mess that initially suggested that the Peter Parker we knew and loved was in fact the clone, and the real Peter had been living on the West Coast under the name Ben Reilly.
“Ben Reilly” (Nicolas Cage) in a scene from Prime Video’s Spider-Noir (Courtesy of Prime Video)
Many, many, many issues and twists and editorial about-faces later, Marvel decided that our Peter was the real Peter, and Ben died trying to save our hero. Yet, Ben has since returned, usually under the name Scarlet Spider and becoming a fan favorite. By using that name for its hero, Spider-Noir hopes to carry the good feelings that Ben has built up in the comics, while also showing viewers that its brooding, black and white Spider-Man isn’t completely different from the guy we’ve been following.
The Black Cat Strikes.. Sort Of
Spider-Noir‘s more daring revision involves another key member of Spider-Man’s universe, Felicia Hardy a.k.a. the Black Cat. First introduced five years after Ben Reilly in Amazing Spider-Man #194, Felicia Hardy was a rich girl who followed in the footsteps of her father to become a master cat burglar. Like the Batman villain she resembles, Black Cat has a flirtatious, antagonistic relationship to Spider-Man, which sometimes gets him to follow her into trouble.
“Cat” (Li Jun Li) in a scene from Prime Video’s Spider-Noir (Courtesy of Aaron Epstein)
It’s that last feature that Spider-Noir retains for its version of Black Cat, even if other aspects have changed. Played by Li Jun Li, Cat Hardy is a lounge singer who works in a club owned by Silvermane, the gangster portrayed by Brendan Gleeson. Judging by her picture in Esquire, Cat Hardy won’t be donning the comic book character’s skin-tight outfit, but she will be a classic femme fatale, one who Ben Reilly will find hard to resist.
The Rise of Robbie Robertson
While Ben Reilly and Cat Hardy deviate from their comic book counterparts, the third character revealed by Esquire feels pretty faithful to the original, and that’s a good thing. Lamorne Morris plays Robbie Robertson, a hardscrabble reporter who is on the trail of both Silvermane and Spider-Man.
“Robbie Robertson” (Lamorne Morris) in a scene from Prime Video’s Spider-Noir (Courtesy of Aaron Epstein)
Since his introduction in 1967’s Amazing Spider-Man #51, Robbie has been one of the most important people in Spider-Man’s supporting cast. A top editor at the Daily Bugle, Robbie serves as a counter-point to the blustering J. Jonah Jameson. His kindness to Peter, and ability to bring out the best in Jonah, has been the lynchpin of many great Spidey stories.
And yet, Robbie has rarely appeared in major adaptations of the Spider-Man comics. Bill Nunn plays Robbie in the 2002 Spider-Man movie, but he only gets a couple of lines and is overshadowed by J. K. Simmons as JJJ. The character has been completely absent from the Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland movies, and although he appears in most animated Spider-Man shows, and even some video games, he tends to be a background figure, with the ’90s cartoon show as the exception that proves the rule.
Spider-Noir is the perfect place to introduce fans to Robbie. Even though the comics rarely show Robbie outside the offices of the Daily Bugle, we know that he’s a dedicated reporter who cares about the truth. By putting him on the streets of New York City—and getting a performer as talented and charismatic as Morris to portray him, we’ll get to see everything that makes Robbie such an integral part of Spider-Man’s life, no matter what reality he’s in.
Spider-Noir streams on MGM+ in Spring 2026.
Ranking Every Season of Gilmore Girls
According to Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, there’s “no way” the show would get made today, but holy hell, are we glad it was. Dripping in cozy, small-town charm, Gilmore Girls paired its zany, quick-fire dialogue with some of the most emotionally honest relationships on TV.
Over seven long seasons and a revival, the series explored themes of ambition, family feuds, and the cost of wanting more for your children than you ever had, all while maintaining a genuine reverence for the minutiae of daily life. Still, over 150+ episodes, you’d think there’d be some real stinkers.
What’s incredible is that there aren’t any truly bad episodes of Gilmore Girls; they’re all entertaining on some level because if an episode was ever light on humor or plot, it could always choose from a stable of delightful supporting characters to save the day.
There was Taylor, the tyrannical overlord of Stars Hollow, whose obsession with civic law and order bit him in the ass over and over again. Hapless Kirk, popping up with another new scheme or identity. Mrs. Kim, Lane’s strict mother, who struck fear in the heart of her daughter but also came in clutch at the wildest of times. The list of fascinating oddballs could go on and on. So, while there were standout episodes over the years and certainly ones that felt a little too invested in just maintaining the vibe, it’s interesting to look at how well each season landed as a whole.
Here’s our ranking of all the seasons of Gilmore Girls, including the Netflix revival…
8. Season 7
This is the only season of Gilmore Girls without creator Amy Sherman-Palladino or Daniel Palladino as a showrunner or a writer, and it shows. Season 7 lacks the series’ fundamental spark, and its screwball dialogue often feels like someone else trying to write (fairly decent, as it goes) Gilmore Girls fanfic rather than the real deal.
Season 7 explores the inevitable end of both Lorelai and Christopher’s rushed marriage and of Rory and Logan’s fragile relationship, but it also ends the series entirely until Netflix’s revival 10 years later. And what are we left with when we think it’s all over? Rory goes off to cover Barack Obama’s election campaign, Lorelai and Luke get closer again but don’t fully get back together, and there’s a bittersweet last meal at Luke’s diner, where so many jokes have kept us going over the years.
Season 7 is an imperfect and uneven farewell to Stars Hollow and the Gilmore women, but at least it’s an ending. And we had no idea that we’d get another one a decade later…
7. Season 6
Fans started to feel like the show was running out of steam in season 6, which seemed to spin its wheels with a lot of filler.
Luke and Lorelai almost get married, then break up. Rory and Logan break up but make amends. Rory makes up with Lorelai and goes back to school. Luke gets a surprisingly annoying daughter he wasn’t aware existed, who feels like a contrived plot device deployed to drive a wedge between him and Lorelai so she can get back with Christopher and everyone watching can cry “oh no!” in unison. That’s about all season 6 has to offer in terms of major developments, as it serves as an attempted reset for a show that had run into narrative problems after so many years on the air.
The romantic tension between Luke and Lorelai is gone; there is virtually no spark left between Rory and Logan, and the many supporting characters of Stars Hollow have very little left to do, aside from Kirk, a perfect angel who never did anything wrong and became a very unlikely standout in the series as it unfolded.
Season 6 is definitely better than season 7, but it’s still far from the show’s best.
6. Season 3
Season 3 is definitely darker than the previous two seasons, which is one reason it divided fans who were used to the show leaning into its more lighthearted stories. This is where the fractures between the main characters really set in and expose who they think they are versus who they’re actually becoming.
Rory’s breakup with Dean and her blooming relationship with Jess are the backbone of the season: Rory chooses romantic chaos over sweet comfort and has to reckon with the consequences. As a result, we start to suspect that Rory’s glorious, successful future as an award-winning journalist is at risk because she has her mother’s impulsiveness.
Some of the episodes leading up to Rory’s choice are brilliant, particularly the kinetic Stars Hollow Dance Marathon in “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?” But Rory’s will-they-won’t-they with the volatile Jess has built up so much tension that when they finally get together, the air goes out of the season and it never really recovers. We’re left to watch the inevitable fallout of a shitty teen relationship unfold.
Lorelai is also completely underserved in season 3, taking a backseat to Rory’s relationship drama, though her increasing conflict with Emily and Richard, particularly around Rory’s future, becomes more personal. Her interfering folks are no longer obstacles; they’re rivals.
Gilmore Girls’ third season is about how you don’t grow up all at once, but rather through a series of often painful decisions. It’s compelling stuff, just intermittently compelling.
5. A Year in the Life
Amy Sherman-Palladino’s triumphant return to Netflix’s Gilmore Girls revival series came with a caveat: these new installments wouldn’t necessarily be the snappy, tightly-paced stuff we were used to in the original run, but rather four feature-length episodes covering a year in the life of the Gilmore women. It turned out to be a rather melancholic reflection on the passage of time, which meant losing some of the pace that the old version of the show maintained. Still, A Year in the Life had payoffs to spare, offering an overload of nostalgia (and a surprisingly divisive ending.)
Pretty much everyone gets a moment to shine in the revival series. The episodes make room for most of the show’s iconic characters, big and small. We find a despondent Rory, whose career has flatlined in her 30s, having an affair with an already married Logan, while Lorelai isn’t sure if she and Luke will ever get married. Emily is grieving Richard and is clinging to Lorelai, but she ultimately embraces single life in the most Emily way possible. The whole thing ends with Luke and Lorelai tying the knot and Rory admitting she’s pregnant. We never find out who the father is, but she runs into basically everyone she’s ever slept with during the series, so it could potentially be any of them. Arguably, none of them would be worth keeping around at this point, though Jess remains the best fit for Rory after turning his life around.
More an emotional aftermath than a continuation of the original show, A Year in the Life wasn’t a hit with every fan, but it certainly wasn’t low on emotional depth. Whether it was enough to make for a satisfying ending to the series is honestly a matter of opinion, but we enjoyed it.
4. Season 4
The fourth season of Gilmore Girls feels massively unbalanced. It’s inevitable because Rory has to go off to Yale eventually, but the separation between the college and Stars Hollow makes for uneven stuff as we switch between some less-than-thrilling small-town events and the reality of Rory’s tough education.
For the first time, Rory isn’t the smartest person around. She’s surrounded by equally smart people. The constant affirmation from the denizens of Stars Hollow is gone. Rory is simply not getting the validation she craves, and how can she really achieve anything if there’s no one there to pat her on the back and tell her she’s such a special snowflake? Finding some semblance of safety in Dean’s (married!) arms is a real low point for her here.
Back in Stars Hollow, Lorelai has empty nest syndrome and pours all of her energy into opening the Dragonfly Inn. Luckily, the friendship between Lorelai and her best friend Sookie becomes so delightful that we can’t help but root for them as they girlboss the crap out of their new endeavor. This season also sets up the reality of a Luke and Lorelai relationship so well – it feels completely earned when they finally show each other how they really feel.
Though season 4 sets the stage for future seasons, it gets a little lost along the way and has too many low points to rank higher on this list.
3. Season 5
A string of relentless consequences, season 5 thrives on Rory’s spiral into being a fairly loathsome character as she gives up on her dreams after meeting Logan Huntzberger, a rich, privileged playboy who isn’t so much a romantic choice as a lifestyle that Rory decides to embrace after her dalliance with small-town Dean goes absolutely nowhere and she becomes overwhelmed by the pressure she’s put on herself to succeed.
Logan is glamorous and toxic (not to mention highly punchable), which effortlessly keys into Rory’s penchant for recklessness. By the end of the season, she’s dropped out of Yale and is living in her grandparents’ pool house as her potential dwindles in this depressing but rather more realistic season of the show.
Season 5 also thrives when it explores the new relationship between Luke and Lorelai. It’s sweet, but the cracks start to show because Lorelai still hasn’t reckoned with so many of her personal flaws. Elsewhere, Lane and Paris’ storylines become more compelling when Lane starts dating Zach, and Paris mourns old man Asher by jumping into a relationship with Doyle, whose personality immediately complements hers.
This season’s place on the ranking may rankle Logan haters (he is intensely problematic,) but the drama is rarely higher in the series than in season 5, with the unbearable divide between Rory and Lorelai seriously at its peak.
2. Season 1
Straight out of the gate, Gilmore Girls feels fresh and different, with the eccentric town of Stars Hollow coming off as remarkably dynamic given the low stakes of the season’s plots.
When we’re first introduced to the mother-daughter team of Lorelai and Rory in season 1, their rapid-fire banter easily finds its pace and we’re just along for the ride. Through Amy Sherman-Palladino’s sparkling dialogue, the pair takes us on an exhaustive tour of Stars Hollow and Chilton, and we meet so many kooky characters that our heads are spinning by the final episode. Luke, Miss Patty, Babette, Taylor, Sookie, Lane, Jackson, Paris, Tristan, Emily, Richard, Kirk …they’re all so, so much, but we cannot get enough!
There are also key conflicts in play where the comedy gives way to real drama: Lorelai is not happy about making a deal with her rich, estranged parents to ensure Rory gets the best possible schooling, and Rory is meek and out of place among the rich kids at Chilton.
Season 1 is great at building the world of Gilmore Girls, but it’s still a little rough around the edges. Rory is in her passive era here, more reactive than active – defined as a good kid admired by almost everyone around her. She’s just a little too perfect. But there’s also too much in the way of good stuff to be entirely bothered by it.
The pilot is spectacular, the explorations of class divide in “Kill Me Now” and “Rory’s Birthday Parties” still hit hard, and the evolution of Paris into one of the show’s top-tier characters truly begins in “Paris is Burning.” Some episodes haven’t aged particularly well (the awkward gender politics of “That Damn Donna Reed” stand out), but season 1 remains a terrific watch overall.
1. Season 2
The second season of Gilmore Girls is where the show really hits its stride, and it’s hard not to rank it lower as a result. Where season 1 was still focused on the basics, season 2 is much less interested in them, choosing instead to deepen the characters and introduce flaws in Rory that lay the foundation for her mistakes in later seasons.
No longer a wide-eyed newcomer at Chilton, Rory’s unlikely friendship with the neurotic Paris becomes one of the show’s quiet triumphs as they compete for attention yet truly see each other for who they really are. While Paris breaks her own back to be the best, Rory starts lying and misjudging people as her once-admirable intelligence begins to muddy her relationships. Meanwhile, Lorelai’s fear of commitment is infuriating but understandable; her romantic choices with Max reflect the arrested development that set in when she decided to have Rory at such a young age. Yes, Lorelai is witty and independent, but she is also low-key terrified of being alone, which is why people who hate Christopher always get a free pass.
Season 2 is not without its flaws. Sometimes it does coast by on cozy vibes, but the Rory-Dean-Jess love triangle is electric, and the tension building between everyone who knows that Jess and Rory are doomed starts in earnest. The pair’s first kiss in “I Can’t Get Started” is up there with the show’s most dangerous and thrilling moments.
That’s all, folks! Would you rank these seasons differently? As always, let us know in the comments!
Wuthering Heights Review: Bastardization of Brontë Still Makes for Bodice-Ripping Delight
In the 19th century, the French had a nickname for sex that translates to “the little death.” Something about the stillness after release. Well, in Emerald Fennell’s skewed but seductive reworking of Wuthering Heights, death is loud, violent, and might best be described as the biggest, er, pleasure. It’s an aphrodisiac; a lightly seasoned fetish where morbidity and mortality entangle themselves along a fog-strewn countryside.
This is clear in the movie’s opening moments where the presumable sounds of a man’s groping excitements turn out to be his final death rattles as we see him swing from a noose into view. As he reaches his final convulsions, a titillated public gawks on, holding its breath in anticipation. In an instant, the filmmaker seems eager to acknowledge her kinship with a fella who knows how to transfix the leering crowd.
Fennell’s lurid and dramatic reimagining of Emily Brontë’s literary classic is similarly stormy, aggressive, and distracted with kink. And its biggest turn-ons would seem to be the kind of lush excesses associated with studio melodramas of yesteryear. In the press, the writer-director has name-dropped James Cameron’s Titanic as a formative influence, and it’s definitely a touchstone in this Wuthering Heights’ more maudlin moments. However, the director and her department heads seem to take much and more gratification from emulating the lushness of Golden Age Hollywood romances of the 1930s, including most vividly Gone with the Windand its blood-red sunsets being transferred from Tara to north Yorkshire. Yet there are wider, more perverse influences too.
Never mind the crumbling old house of the film’s title, the very landscape on which this ruin sags evokes the expressionism of Weimar Germany and the earliest onscreen oddities of the literary Gothic that the Brontë sisters helped pioneer. The drooping, jagged rock faces of the English moors loom over the shabby Wuthering Heights house to the point of virtually collapsing atop the damn thing. It’s as if both hearth and land have become exhausted after centuries of overstimulation.
This is not the Victorian England in which the Brontës lived, nor the feel-good fairytale land of modern streaming service bodice-rippers, which gloss the genre over with a veneer as hot as a season’s greetings card from Hallmark. Nay, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights lives in a seething, ancient decrepit place that only existed in the movies of yore, and in its best moments she transports viewers back to the kind of sweeping spectacle that can beguile and enrapture. At one point upon “moving up” in the world, Margot Robbie’s vain and capricious Cathy Earnshaw even enters a new bedroom that literalizes the basic conceit of German Expressionism, with the walls painted by her dithering husband to resemble her freckled skin.
The sumptuous designs—derived from what must be the fevered dreams of production designer Suzie Davies, costumer Jacqueline Durran, and cinematographer Linus Sandgren—conspire, casting a spell so blinding in its orgy for the eyes that it even distracts from whatever litany of sins the movie might conceal. Which for English professors and purists of the page, will surely be legion.
This is immediately apparent after the aforementioned opening prologue at a hanging witnessed by a young, nameless boy who will one day soon be known as Heathcliff (Owen Cooper as a child, Jacob Elordi for the rest of the picture). Gone is the framing device about a ghost on the moors and a lost love. This Wuthering Heights is instead a pitch black fairytale about a boy and a girl, with only the morality of the Marquis de Sade between them. Heathcliff is a wild, feral thing, who earns his name after he is adopted (stolen, really) by a drunk and hateful man from generations of squandered wealth, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes).
Earnshaw brings the boy home to his dying house on the moors, and to his daughter Cathy (initially Charlotte Mellington), whom he allows to name the vagrant. Young Cathy also quite visibly falls in love with the lad, despite the cruel patriarch using young Heathcliff as both a servant and glorified whipping boy. The old man even savors denying the child an education in basic reading and writing. Somehow, despite this unhappy childhood, Heathcliff grows up to be the strapping Elordi while Cathy blossoms into Margot Robbie at her most bewitching. As adults, the infatuation between Cathy and Heathcliff is inescapable to everyone. Yet they will not consummate.
Cathy is acutely, selfishly, aware of her beauty, and the effect it has on Heathcliff as well as the new neighbor, poor, clueless Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Mr. Linton and his young, impressionable ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) have moved into the luxurious estate across the moors, Thrushcross Grange, where every room is bedecked in crystal or pastels more perfect than the six-foot dollhouse Isabella has brought with her. In short order, Cathy has a marriage proposal from the kind but diffident wealthy man, and a choice to make between the desires of her heart—and flesh—which lean toward the dark, brooding silhouette of Elordi’s six-and-a-half foot frame, and Edgar’s comforts. Yet it is what occurs after she errs, causing Heathcliff to abandon the range for five years before returning as a man of mysterious wealth, where the real duplicities and depravity begin.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is less an adaptation of the novel than it is a lascivious daydream of what every young, repressed non-reader imagines when staring up at its stylized title on a dorm room wall, or while listening to the spooky synths of Kate Bush crooning about running along ‘em moors. It is Fifty Shades of Technicolor Rouge, wherein each fetid desire, and implicit moral corruption that’s simply suggested on the page, is made achingly, swooningly vivid in a movie that jettisons the multigenerational degradation and even supernatural underpinnings of the book in favor of an epically bad romance.
The thing has as much concern with literary fidelity as Cathy or Heathcliff do for their eventual spouses. Its sense of historical verisimilitude is also proudly abandoned for wondrous postmodern costumes with plunging necklines and 1980s music video accoutrements that suggest this has a better chance of existing in the same world as Coppola’s equally indulgent Draculaas it does our own.
The thing is that, for the most part, these liberties work. At its best moments, Wuthering Heights is a thunderclap of lurid melodrama flashing across the gloom of night!
It has indeed been decades since a major Hollywood studio has produced a populist and overwhelmingly romantic fantasy like this. As a Millennial, Fennell grew up with many of the aforementioned touchstones from the ‘90s and she succeeds in echoing their transportive qualities via the florid escapism of rainy rendezvouses and snapped corsets.
There has been plenty of chatter before release about Elordi’s casting in the film and whether he matches the ambiguous complexion described in the book as having a “dark” and “gypsy” like affectation. However, the choice of the looming Australian proves to be Fennell’s masterstroke. He brings a rugged dynamism to Heathcliff (he’s also the only member of the ensemble who bothers attempting a Yorkshire accent). Even the way he smokes his pipe while surveying Cathy’s pampered married life with smiling contempt burns to the touch.
When matched with a Robbie who’s willing to lean into every inch of her ethereal beauty, and in a role where she need not pretend to be oblivious of its effect, the chemistry begs to come with a warning label about handling with fire-repellent gloves. Fennell might shamelessly borrow from Selznick and Curtiz with grandiose shots of Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors, but when Elordi lifts the foot-shorter Robbie up to meet him by her corset, the crackle is all-consuming.
Even so, I suspect the relationship that will provoke the most discourse after release is not Heathcliff and Cathy’s, but what occurs when a vengeful other man decides to set his sights on Oliver’s poor, hapless Isabella. Heathcliff’s loveless seduction of an innocent was always among his greatest cruelties of the novel, but in this film it takes on perverse dimensions, particularly with Oliver playing the younger Linton with the pent up lust of a tumblr fangirl who spends her days reading Wuthering Heights fan fiction. Which is to say, she might embody much of the film and novel’s modern target audience, making the depravities of our Byronic womanizer take on a loaded context that transgresses lines you’re not entirely sure the movie is aware exists.
In fact, the film’s entire footsying with slash-fiction fancies while maintaining the dark malice at the core of Heathcliff and Cathy’s shared souls is where the picture runs into its biggest hurdles. Wuthering Heights ’26 approaches the end of its story with the conventionality of a standard BBC melodrama. But the thing about the Wuthering Heights is Cathy and Heathcliff are the worst, which makes their doomed dalliances pitiful but hardly aspirational. Yet 11th hour attempts to paint this with a Jack-and-Rose brush onscreen seem sudden, unearned, and smear the picture Fennell had so meticulously composed moments earlier. The final minutes of the movie, in fact, peter out when they should be crescendoing.
Despite warping and drastically reducing the scope of the story, it still feels too vast and unwieldy for Fennell to firmly get her arms around. That probably won’t matter though to most audiences, including ultimately myself. The filmmaker has such command of the tone and vibe she seeks that it is easy to become drunk on the sheer beauty of her and Sandgren’s cavernous compositions in the dilapidated ruins of Wuthering Heights’ carriage house. Sunlight steals through a hundred cracks in the ceiling, creating an unlikely halo around Heathcliff and Cathy, even in moments of exquisite damnation.
It’s not Brontë, and will likely be reviled in literature classrooms for generations to come. Still, one imagines the students will nevertheless swoon, or smirk, while partaking in this most decadent of infidelities.
Wuthering Heights opens in theaters everywhere Friday, Feb. 13.
Supergirl Super Bowl Trailer Reveals the DCU Krypton
There are some things that everyone knows about Supergirl and her cousin Superman. They possess the powers of super-strength, invulnerability, and flight. They become weakened by exposure to the green glowing rock known as kryptonite. And they hail from the planet Krypton, which exploded when Superman was an infant and Supergirl was a teen.
But what, exactly, was Krypton like? That’s a question that even comic book readers have trouble answering. However, we get some clues in the latest trailer for Supergirl. At the start of the teaser, we see images of young Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) alongside her father Zor-El (David Krumholtz) at a funeral, before the fate of their planet. While the specifics of Krypton are new to the DCU, elements do recall both previous Superman movies and even some variations of the comics.
The concept of Krypton developed slowly and across several different types of media. As a result, there’s rarely been one accepted depiction of the doomed planet. Superman #1 from 1939 first names the planet Krypton, but the first looks at Superman’s parents, Jor-El and Lara (or, Jor-L and Lora, as they were initially called), come in the daily newspaper strips that began that same year. Those strips, and eventually the comic books that followed, present Krypton as a planet filled with intellectually and physically advanced superpeople.
In the 1960s and ’70s, DC Comics began to further revise Superman’s home planet. First came the addition of a red sun orbiting Krypton, which rendered all of its residents no stronger than an average human. In 1972, the sun is named Roa, for a god worshiped by the Kryptonians, introducing a religious aspect to what was heretofore a society ruled by logic and science.
Important as these elements were, none were as influential as the depiction of Krypton in the 1978 movie Superman. Between the crystalline caverns made by set designer John Barry and the ornate robes created by Yvonne Blake, Krypton became a cold, logical, but regal place.
Superman‘s depiction of Krypton remained popular, even as DC Comics tried to establish an official version with the 1987 miniseries The World of Krypton, written by John Byrne and penciled by Mike Mignola. That series reasserts the Kryptonians’ focus on science, but also develops the planet’s religious side, presenting various factions who worship different deities.
Officially, DC Comics now accepts all stories as canon, which means that most modern depictions of Krypton tend to blend the 1978 movie version with the 1987 World of Krypton, while sometimes nodding to Jor-El’s headband or other Silver Age elements.
That blend of depictions can be seen in the trailer for Supergirl. The movie’s tan color palette may differ from the blue and silver of the 1978 movie, but the robes worn by Kara and her father certainly recall those that Marlon Brando sported as Jor-El. However, the funeral depicted has a religious feel, which seems more like something a cleric from The World of Krypton would lead.
By mixing together elements from the movies and the comics, the Krypton of Supergirl once again reminds us of the approach James Gunn has been taking since becoming Co-Head of DC Studios. He’ll use aspects of the comics and past movies when it helps to set the foundation. But instead of simply repeating what’s been done, he’s moving forward, which makes Supergirl and its image of Krypton something new to everyone.
Supergirl arrives in theaters on June 26, 2026.
The Mandalorian and Grogu Super Bowl Trailer Cost a Lot of Money for Nothing
Star Wars fans clamoring for a glimpse of The Mandalorian and Grogu during the Super Bowl were left blinking at the screen after an ad for the movie debuted with no new footage this past weekend.
Instead, the 30-second big game spot directed by Jon Favreau delivered a spoof of the classic Budweiser Clydesdales commercials, featuring Tauntauns in place of horses. Mando and Grogu both took turns handling the Tauntaun reins as they dashed through the snow. A gruff voiceover narrated the whole scene, which naturally ended with the line, “This is the way.”
While some viewers found this tribute to the iconic Budweiser commercials endearing, others were disappointed not to see a fresh trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie, which is set to be released in May. It’s now been four long months since the last trailer debuted eye-popping footage of AT-ATs, Sigourney Weaver’s Republic character, a new Razor Crest, and more besides.
It’s certainly a cute ad, but that disappointment is understandable. This is the first time that Disney and Lucasfilm have had the opportunity to market a Star Wars film at the Super Bowl in over six years, and those spots don’t come cheap. At the low end, it costs $8 million to purchase 30 seconds of time, with some brands paying $10 million. That’s a lot of money to spend on a Mando and Grogu-themed Budweiser parody ad that probably cost a fair bit to create in the first place.
“I genuinely hope that 10 Mil didn’t go to waste and there’s an actual second trailer dropping today,” commented one viewer who definitely did not get their wish, while another thought it looked like an A.I. video. THR assures viewers that Favreau shot the spot in live-action with the Lucasfilm creature team, puppeteers, and ILM.
On the positive side, some said they appreciated the gag. “Thought Mando was gonna toss me a cold Bud Light,” one wrote; another admitted that “Nostalgia baiting with the Tauntauns: 100% effective.”
Yep, if there’s one thing Star Wars consistently finds effective, it’s nostalgia baiting with member berries, and this ad will surely have delighted a section of the fan base with its sense of fun. Anyone waiting for new The Mandalorian and Grogu footage, however, will just have to keep on waiting.
The Mandalorian and Grogu comes to theaters on May 22, 2026.
The Surprising Truth About TV Budgets and Viewer Engagement
Throw enough money at a new TV show, and it’s bound to be a success. That might be the thinking in some executive suites, but it’s not always true, and that seems to be driving some behind-the-scenes changes.
At a National Association of Television Program Executives panel this month, senior scripted programming execs ended up discussing the runaway success of Crave’s relatively low-budget queer hockey romance series, Heated Rivalry. The show, which has been adapted from Rachel Reid’s steamy Game Changers book series, has turned into an unexpected smash hit to the point where you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about it. Reflecting on the phenomenon, the execs all had thoughts on why it has garnered so much attention in an overstuffed TV environment.
Bell VP of Content Development and Programming Justin Stockman reckoned that Heated Rivalry benefited from getting sexy quickly without watering down its creative side. Suzanna Makkos, head of comedy for ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals, praised the show’s fast pace. But Robert Schildhouse, president of BritBox, had a more interesting take.
“I think there’s a lot of theme here, whether it’s smut, or murder, or Christmas movies,” he said. “We see almost no correlation between budget and audience consumption and engagement. And we see incredible engagement on shows that cost very little.”
Schildhouse is likely privy to spreadsheets full of numbers we’ll never see, but we can look at examples that indicate he’s probably not wrong. There have been a number of costly shows lately that seem to have flopped in those key aspects.
Take Prime Video, which apparently had a disaster on its hands after launching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Reports suggested that only 37% of viewers made it to the end of the first season, which is thought to have cost $465 million, in addition to the $250 million Amazon paid for the rights. If that wasn’t bad enough, season 2 reportedly performed 60% worse.
Then there’s the critically panned Citadel, a globetrotting spy series starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, which reportedly cost Amazon $50 million per episode to produce. Almost three years later, there’s still no release date set for its second season, despite spawning several smaller international spinoffs.
Even Marvel hasn’t consistently hit it out of the park with its expensive Disney+ shows, leading to a strategic rethink behind the scenes. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law reportedly had a budget of $225 million and became only the seventh most-streamed series on Disney+ in 2022, while Apple has spent a ton of cash on shows with smaller audiences like See and Foundation. The latter is still planning a long haul, but its ongoing production is said to have faced budgetary clashes.
None of this means that big-budget shows won’t become successes. Stranger Things, House of the Dragon, and The Mandalorian were all pricey. But when shows like Heated Rivalry and The Pitt, which reportedly only costs around $4 million per episode to make, are grabbing eyeballs and acclaim, it might be time to consider spending all that TV cash a little more wisely.
Rachel McAdams Always Deserved a Better MCU Role Than the One She Got
Anyone who’s watched more than a handful of Rachel McAdams movies knows she’s an incredible actress. Mean Girls and Game Night proved she had the right delivery and timing to make audiences laugh, Red Eye proved she could handle herself in the horror genre, and The Notebook and About Time proved she could move audiences to tears. But when Marvel came knocking for the first Doctor Strange movie, she was cast as …the lead character’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Christine Palmer.
McAdams did her best with the material and got to play an alternate version of the character in Sam Raimi’s uneven 2022 sequel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but she was still largely there to support Stephen Strange in his quest to be a better version of himself. Even Raimi seems to understand that McAdams was cast in an underwhelming Marvel role, which is one of the main reasons she got the lead in his latest horror-comedy, Send Help.
“She was the perfect person because she’s such a brilliant actress,” he told Total Film. “I had a chance to work with her on my last film and saw how talented she was, and actually underutilized. And I promised myself that I would work with her again.”
Of course, there have been plenty of smaller supporting roles in the MCU for terrific actors over the years. Oscar-nominated Stellan Skarsgård had mostly “science stuff” to do around the main characters as Erik Selvig in Thor, its sequel, and a couple of Avengers movies. South Korean powerhouse Ma Dong-seok, Barry Keoghan, and Angelina Jolie were among the many Eternals competing for screen time in Chloé Zhao’s ambitious but misunderstood 2021 Marvel film. Sir Ben Kingsley was used as an MCU punchline twice before Wonder Man finally did right by him. The list could go on for a while!
Still, there’s something about “underutilizing” McAdams in the Doctor Strange movies that really rubs people the wrong way, and for good reason. It’s not just that she’s a brilliant actress who deserves better; she’s also pretty much perfect for a range of other notable Marvel roles. Close your eyes and imagine McAdams as Jean Grey. Imagine her as Mockingbird or Moira MacTaggert. While we’re at it, imagine her as a delicious Marvel villain, like Emma Frost or Morgan le Fay. It’s super easy (barely an inconvenience)!
In the multiverse, all things are possible. Though Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wrapped up the relationship between Stephen Strange and Christine Palmer quite nicely, Marvel has never been shy about using the same actors for other roles, and there’s a lot of road ahead to recast McAdams in a juicier one. Frankly, it would be a real shame not to.
Netflix’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Sequel Super Bowl Trailer Sends Brad Pitt to the ‘70s
Once upon a time in Hollywood, stuntman Cliff Booth helped past his prime actor Rick Dalton save Sharon Tate from the Manson Family. Now, once upon a time in the 1970s, Dalton is back, looking cooler than ever.
The first trailer for The Adventures of Cliff Booth has dropped, checking in with Brad Pitt as the titular daredevil. Set to the tune of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and apparently shot on film that’s been rotting in the corner of an adult bookstore for 40 years, The Adventures of Cliff Booth trailer looks like something that Quentin Tarantino would have included in 2007’s Grindhouse. Which is shocking, because Tarantino chose not to helm his Once Upon a Time follow-up, turning the reigns over to Pitt’s Seven director David Fincher.
Once Upon a Time found Cliff at a particularly low point, having been reduced to driving Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) around all day and hanging out in a trailer with his dog at night. But Booth came with a legend built up around him, ranging from defeating Bruce Lee in a fight to maybe killing his wife with a harpoon. The latter incident, which the film and some cool narration by Kurt Russell leaves ambiguous, was enough to get Booth black-listed, resulting in his job with Dalton. That turned out to be a good thing, as he and Dalton were able to fight off an invasion by the Manson followers, sparing Tate (Margot Robbie) from her real-world fate.
The trailer for The Adventures of Cliff Booth doesn’t give us any indication that changing the course of Hollywood has helped Cliff’s fortunes. However, it does show that the incident enhanced his already considerable swagger. Over the course of the minute-long clip, we see Booth drop charming one-liners to a variety of colorful characters, played by character actors such as Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Holt McCallany.
Even more than Cliff’s style, it’s the look and feel of the movie that stands out. Tarantino has made his career on doing metatextual homages to genre films of the past, but he’s only writing the script for Cliff Booth. Conversely, Fincher has a reputation for exactness, a coolness to his style that lent dread and weight to even pulpy material like Gone Girl and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. As demonstrated by the heavy film grain in the trailer and the use of neon squiggles to censor things that cannot be shown during the Super Bowl, a little of Tarantino’s playfulness has influenced Fincher.
Will that make for a great movie? We won’t know that until the time of the movie’s release… a time still not made public.
The Adventures of Cliff Booth releases soon to Netflix and theaters.
Peak TV Seasons from 2016 You Need to Rewatch
As the new year rolled in, social media became obsessed with traveling backward; 10 years back, to be exact, to 2016. At first, this fixation might seem strange as few who lived through 2016 are likely to remember it fondly or be eager to relive it. It’s become clear, however, that the nostalgia people are craving isn’t for the year itself, but for what we were observing in pop culture during it.
2016 was a golden era for television. Not only did it introduce new shows that would grow into cultural landmarks, but many series also delivered their strongest and most confident seasons right when audiences were most receptive to them. Looking back, it makes sense why we keep returning to these seasons as they captured something fleeting about that moment in time.
What follows isn’t a ranking of the “best” shows of 2016, but a case for why these particular seasons deserve a rewatch, and why returning to them now offers a glimpse of a cultural moment we didn’t realize we’d miss.
Fleabag Season 1
I’m personally nostalgic for the 2010s because it was when actress/writer/producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge was at her creative peak. While she’s now off to more mainstream pursuits (including Prime Video’s upcoming Tomb Raider series), I’ll always be grateful for her contribution to the “women behaving badly in metropolitan areas” genre in 2016 when she gave us the first season of Fleabag. Waller-Bridge’s writing alone is scripture; the script is literally called Fleabag: The Scriptures, and it reads like gospel for anyone who’s ever coped with their self-awareness with more bad decisions.
Fleabag almost starts as a comedy, but it quickly becomes clear that the central character and her story are much more than a funny show about a woman spiraling. Since it first aired in 2016, no other series has been able to present characters grappling with grief and self-sabotage with the same level of precision and emotional resonance than Fleabag.
While its second season is universally regarded as a TV masterpiece, what makes Fleabag’s first season worth returning to now is it marked Waller-Bridge’s leap from stage to television. The show carries the thrill of what someone testing that medium could hold. In 2016, that kind of creative risk felt electric, and rewatching it now is a reminder of how fun it is for a genuinely talented writer to break into a scene and bend it around their voice.
Stranger Things Season 1
No matter how you felt about the series finale, there’s no denying that the first season of Stranger Things was captivating television. I remember being sick and binging all eight episodes in one day, completely pulled into Hawkins, Indiana. This initial season captivates viewers in a similar way watching Twin Peaks for the first time does. While it’s admittedly not a perfect comparison, both shows use mystery and looming stakes to establish the sense that anything can happen.
If you cheated and skipped season 1 while trying to refamiliarize yourself with the series, you have to go back. Rewatching parts of the first season also serves as a reminder of just how deeply Stranger Things was embedded in culture in 2016. Like yes, I did own a ringer tee from Hot Topic featuring the fairy lights and letters Joyce Beyers used to communicate with Will. That was the climate at the time.
Season 1 also stands apart in a way the later seasons simply can’t, largely because of how fresh everything felt. The mystery isn’t too confusing, the world hasn’t been over-explained yet, and somehow the stakes feel higher than ever. It was a phenomenon before it knew it was one, and that initial spark is impossible to recreate.
The Good Place Season 1
2016 really was the year of ambitious sitcoms, but few laid the kind of foundation that the first season of NBC’s The Good Place did, presenting a batch of episodes strong enough to support a series whose episodes and themes still resonate nearly a decade later.
The Good Place also stuck out among the sea of cookie cutter network offerings because of its creative premise. The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop, who isn’t exactly an outstanding citizen but somehow ends up in a utopian afterlife and must frantically learn moral philosophy to hide her identity. The series took its time to develop, with major twists not revealed until the end of the first batch of episodes. Season 1 also showcased the acting chops of its phenomenal cast. The show propelled the careers of William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, and D’Arcy Carden, who’ve all gone on to do amazing work.
The show also feels like a product of its moment, too. It was perfect for 2016 when a thoughtful and hopeful sitcom could still find an audience without being immediately written off. Creator Michael Schur has worked on many iconic sitcoms, but there’s a reason people point to The Good Place as a moment in TV history for its high-concept. It’s hard to imagine a show this gentle and philosophically curious given the same room to grow today, making it a nostalgic rewatch.
Girls Season 5
In 2025, young writers Benito Skinner, Ben Kronengold, and Rebecca Shaw swung hard with their series Overcompensating and Adults, exploring the awkward, hilarious, and isolating parts of young adulthood. While these series were all successful in their own right, they lack the restless self-reflection that writer/actor Lena Dunham poured into Girls.
Girls at large is a mandatory rewatch in general, but if someone told me they only wanted to revisit one season, I’d point them straight to season 5. It carried a certain veil of optimism and denial that perfectly matched the stage of life the characters were stumbling through. The relationships, locations, and careers the characters explored didn’t last, but the consequences of their choices in this season carried through to the end. It was also experimental in its formatting, making episodes feel more cinematic than usual.
Dunham, much like her lead character Hannah, didn’t always respond well to criticism. So when co-star Christopher Abbott left the show because it no longer interested him as an actor, she responded to that challenge by writing, in my opinion, two of the best episodes of television ever: season 5’s “Panic in Central Park” and “Hello Kitty.” The 2016 season of Girls was perfect in every way and laid the groundwork for the series conclusion the following season.
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 8
Many Drag Race fans view season 7 as the weakest installment of the U.S. franchise, so when the show returned, it needed to come back strong to shake off that lingering bad energy. Most people point to seasons 4 through 6 as the golden era, packed with iconic RuGirls who went on to become Drag Race superstars, regardless if they won or lost. But in that conversation, we often overlook what season 8 gave us.
The top four, Bob the Drag Queen, Kim Chi, Naomi Smalls, and Chi Chi DeVayne, remain one of the strongest lineups in the franchise’s history. Beyond the small-but-mighty cast, season 8 also featured some of the best challenge ideas Drag Race has ever showcased. Whatever AI-tools they use now to write and produce Rusicals could never hold a candle to “Bitch Perfect” from season 8.
Season 8 is often overlooked because it was short, but it also gave us one of the all-time best winners: Bob the Drag Queen. She wasn’t perfect, her runways weren’t always flawless, and her makeup has certainly evolved, but her star quality was undeniable, from her acting to the way she carried herself. Rewatching this season now, it’s clear how much talent and charisma it packed, which is why season 8 still feels special and worth revisiting.
Crashing Season 1
I guess Phoebe Waller-Bridge decided 2016 was the year to fully lock in, giving us two emotionally vulnerable and genuinely hilarious television gems. Although one may be far more widely celebrated than the other, that doesn’t mean her six-episode Netflix series Crashing doesn’t deserve its flowers.
Crashing follows a mismatched group of young people forced into adulthood, stripped of the buffer of being students. Faced with rising rent costs, the strangers decide to squat in an abandoned hospital where they form a chaotic, temporary family built on proximity and a lot of bad decisions.
I don’t think Crashing could work in 2026, but 10 years ago, being broke, emotionally reckless, and vaguely ambitious still felt romantic. In 2026, I’m sure our distaste of millennial cringe would completely change how Zoomers would absorb the show. Like Fleabag, however, Crashing grows funnier and smarter the longer it goes, capturing a very specific 2016 energy that still makes it worth revisiting today.
Netflix Presents: The Characters Season 1
Finding fans of Tim Robinson sketch series I Think You Should Leave who haven’t watched The Characters is a bittersweet discovery. It’s a shame they’ve missed it, but a thrill to introduce them to one of the funniest shows Netflix has ever made. Few comedy specials have topped the audacity of giving eight comedians 30 minutes each to star in their own sketch shows and just letting them cook.
Not every episode is a 10/10, and I definitely have my favorites (Tim Robinson and John Early, forever). But every single episode has at least one sketch so unhinged and memorable that it’s permanently burned into my brain. I will never forget Lauren Lapkus’ Todd Tyson Chicklet calling his mom a “binch” at Dick N’ Boners. It’s the kind of sketch that just rewires you.
The Characters also captured something from its era that feels rare now, which was a willingness to give up-and-coming comedians the space to fully showcase their voices. It trusted the weirdness of the actors’ comedy, and it trusted that audiences would appreciate that risk. All eight episodes deserve a rewatch.
Deborah Ann Woll Reveals How Daredevil: Born Again Won Her Back for Karen Page
Nobody stays dead forever in comic books. Nobody but Karen Page, apparently. Page died in a 1999 issue of Daredevil (written by Kevin Smith) and she’s stayed that way, as nobody cares enough about poor Karen to resurrect her. Deborah Ann Woll, who portrayed Karen Page for three seasons on the Netflix series Daredevil, had the opposite problem. She cared too much about Karen. She cared so much, in fact, that when Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane approached her about reprising her role in the MCU, she initially turned it down.
During a Daredevil panel at the Rhode Island Comic Con, Woll admitted that, unlike her fellow panelists and castmates Wilson Bethel and Vincent D’Onofrio, she wasn’t so quick to agree to return for Born Again. “I have a lot of loyalty to this character and this story,” she explained, before adding, “on a personal level… I was a little bit hurt to have not been included the first time around.” That is, until Scardapane laid out his vision.
First introduced alongside Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson in 1964’s Daredevil #1, by Bill Everett and Stan Lee, Karen Page was a key part of the character’s supporting cast. However, by the time she had died in 1999, Karen was a fairly minor character in the series, and one not treated very well by writers.
In contrast, Page was an integral part of the Netflix series. First introduced as a secretary who gets caught in Wilson’s Fisk’s machinations, and later an employee of Nelson and Murdock, Page soon becomes a more complicated character who has her own storylines, separate from the title superhero. Much of the character’s success owes to Woll’s portrayal of Karen as a person who works through her past issues and, crucially, knows how to walk away from Matt’s self-destructive behavior.
Woll and her co-star Elden Henson made Karen and Foggy into fan-favorites. Yet, the original version of Daredevil: Born Again did not include those characters, one of many decisions that worried fans and stars Charlie Cox and D’Onofrio. When the show retooled midway through production and Scardapane came aboard as show runner, Karen and Foggy were reintegrated into the show… as long as Woll agreed.
“Darrio had some great ideas, and he really sold me on the story,” Woll recalled, which brought back her initial interest in Karen. “Even when I first got the job back in 2014, I needed to know who this character is,” she told the panel attendees. “Because if she’s just going to be someone’s girlfriend, I don’t want to do it.”
In the case of Born Again, Woll learned that Karen would indeed be absent from much of the middle part of the series, as Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead needed to use footage that was already shot for the show. However, she would be a key part in the first episode, in which Bullseye kills Foggy, driving Matt to run from his friends and his duties as Daredevil. Further, Karen would be an important character in the final episodes, helping Matt as he resumes his vigilante identity.
With Woll back for Daredevil: Born Again season 2, which Scardapane gets to produce without any of the previous showrunners’ baggage, Karen will likely have even more to do. This second season follows Matt and Karen as they put together a resistance against Mayor Fisk, who has instituted martial law on New York City.
Things may not be going great for Matt and Karen, but for herself, Woll is optimistic. “I’m glad to be back, it all worked out,” she concluded. And even if that means more suffering for Karen, at least it also means that somebody cares about her.
Daredevil: Born Again season two streams on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.
Supergirl’s Puppy Bowl Promo Continues the New DCU’s Cute Animal Focus
Avengers: Doomsday is not expected to premiere a new trailer during the Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean no superheroes will show up this Sunday. Milly Alcock will be promoting Supergirl at the other big game this weekend, the Puppy Bowl.
Obviously, Supergirl has a pretty clear connection to the Puppy Bowl, as Superman established that Krypto is her dog. After arriving at the end of that movie to retrieve her unruly pup from her cousin, she immediately blasts off to space with him in tow, setting off the adventure that unfolds in Supergirl.
However, Krypton is hardly the only super-pet in the DC Universe. In fact, DC Comics is filled with critters with all sorts of powers, and it’s about time that they start showing up in the movies and TV shows.
When Otto Binder, Curt Swan, and Sy Barry introduced Krypton the Superdog in 1955’s Adventure Comics #210, he was just an extension of the Superboy stories they were telling. Superboy chronicled the adventures of teenaged Clark Kent, when he lived on the farm in Smallville, before he went off to Metropolis. Like any Midwestern boy of the Eisenhower era, Clark needed a dog, and thus Krypto was born.
Not only did Krypto fit perfectly with the low-stakes nature of these early Silver Age tales, in which Superboy dealt with pranks and shenanigans more than he did fighting supervillains, but he also became an immediate fan favorite. DC responded by bringing in more and more superpets. Batman got Ace the Bat-Hound months later in Batman #92. Beppo the Supermonkey showed up in a 1959 issue of Superboy. Supergirl got a pet in the form of Streaky the Supercat in 1960’s Adventure Comics #261, and then Comet the Super-Horse two years later in Adventure Comics #293.
Together with Proty II, the shape-shifting glop of something who hung around with Chameleon Boy in the Legion of Super-Heroes, they formed the Legion of Super-Pets, a team that took care of problems when their owners were indisposed. And then there was the time that Comet turned into a human and Supergirl fell in love with him, but that’s been thankfully retconned away.
In addition to super-pets, DC has a host of other animal characters who aren’t companions to another hero. There’s the evil Gorilla Grodd and his noble opposite Solovar from Gorilla City. Detective Chimp, a chimpanzee in a deerstalker cap, may be even a greater sleuth than Batman. Giant apes Titano and the Ultra-Humanite battle the Justice League, while the squirrels Ch’p and B’dg and the former house cat Dex-Starr all exist in the Green Lantern mythos. And that’s not even getting into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, superheroes from a universe filled with funny animals.
For a long time, super-pets and evil gorillas were embarrassments to superfans. Sure, they might show up in a kid-focused property like the various Krypto cartoon series that get produced. But you’d never see them in a major motion picture.
All of that changed with Superman, in which the arrival of Krypto was a key part of the first trailer. Krypto appears again in promotional material for Supergirl, but he’s not just there to carry over a popular character from one movie to another. Krypto’s return in Supergirl shows that James Gunn is ready to bring even the silliest parts of the DC Comics universe onto the big screen—and it’s not just the comic book fans who love it.
Supergirl arrives on June 26, 2026.
Blue Beetle Deserves to Return in the New DCU
Jaime Reyes didn’t set out to be a hero. As seen throughout the 2023 movie Blue Beetle, Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) was thrust into the role when a powerful alien scarab ended up in his possession and later bonded with him. Taking the name of Blue Beetle, the superhero identity of missing inventor Ted Kord, Jaime fights against Ted’s weapons-dealing sister Victoria (Susan Sarandon), protecting his family and putting an end to Victoria’s war machines. Yet, since that victory, Blue Beetle has never been seen again.
According to Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto, the story isn’t over. “I don’t think that chapter has been closed,” Soto told CBR. “I’ve had friendly conversations with [DC Studios co-head] Peter Safran and John Rickard. And I know James [Gunn] is a huge fan of Blue Beetle, and he’s said multiple times that Blue Beetle is part of the DCU.” If that last point is true, then it is more than time for Jaime to suit up again in the universe.
The Rise of the Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle fits particularly well in the new universe that Safran and Gunn have created, because he’s a legacy character with a weird backstory. The character Blue Beetle has been around since 1939, initially created by Charles Wojtkoski as part of the post-Superman superhero boom. The character was reimagined as the superhero identity of inventor Ted Kord in 1966 and then brought into the DC Universe in 1983, where he became a fan favorite as part of Justice League International, especially when paired with Booster Gold.
After Ted was killed in an attempt by DC editorial to drum up excitement for the 2005 company-wide event Infinite Crisis, Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner introduced Jaime Reyes as the new Blue Beetle. Jaime was a hero in the Spider-Man mold, a regular kid who loves his friends and family, and whose new superpowers add extra stress to his life.
Although the 2023 movie transplants Jaime and his family from El Paso, Texas, to Palmera City, Florida, it retains the core elements of the character. Rather than present Jaime as a lone hero who must do his own thing, the film positions him within the context of his family, which includes loving parents Alberto and Rocio (Damián Alcázar and Elpidia Carrillo), sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), along with his conspiracy-minded Uncle Rudy (George Lopez) and his grandmother (Adriana Barraza).
More than just supporting characters, the Reyes family add weight to Jaime’s mission. Unlike most power fantasies, where the hero grasps the power given to him, Jaime takes time to consider how becoming Blue Beetle will affect them. In fact, it’s only when Victoria and her right-hand man Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) threaten the Reyeses that Jaime fully embraces his role. And when the movie reveals Nana’s past as a Leftist revolutionary and ties Victoria to the real-world School of the Americas, then Jaime’s heroic journey becomes a continuation of his family struggle against oppression.
To his credit, Soto never lets these heady themes weigh down Blue Beetle. Its neon color palette and electronic score by Bobby Krlic infuses the requisite “neophyte discovers his powers” section of the movie with energy. Even better is Maridueña’s likable turn as Jaime, playing both the weight of his character’s plight and the pure delight of a teen who can suddenly fly.
The Search for Blue Beetle
As Soto notes, James Gunn has spoken highly of Blue Beetle. Although it went into production before he and Safran took over, it was released under their leadership, and Gunn took to the press to support it. Moreover, because it released after the events of The Flash, Blue Beetle sort of exists within the DCU.
Gunn, of course, has been dodgy on the details of the new DCU’s relationship to the previous incarnation. As Gunn told Den of Geek when speaking about Peacemaker‘s second season, nothing from the previous incarnation is canon until someone expressly declares it. Blue Beetle hasn’t shown up in any of the official DCU entries—we don’t even see the Golden Age or Silver Age incarnations in the Justice Gang mural from Superman. However, Gunn announced a Booster Gold TV series as part of his Gods and Monsters plans, and where Booster is, Beetle is not far behind.
For Soto’s part, he’s ready to go as soon as he gets the call, even if Jaime doesn’t come back in live action. “We have had conversations of how we can expand the adventures of the Reyes family via animation,” he revealed. “And if that’s something that finally happens, whether it happens or not, conversations have been had. It would be nice. I think that you can do so much with animation, and it’s also a fun medium that I’ve always wanted to explore. So if the movie gods and the people and our dear friends at DC and Warner Bros. see it fit, I would love nothing more than to continue to tell that story.”
That’s one prayer that we’d love the movie gods to answer. Jaime Reyes may not have set out to be a hero, but Blue Beetle proved that he is a hero. And the DCU will be richer with Jaime in it.
Blue Beetle is now streaming on HBO Max.
Send Help Screenwriters Reveal Plans for Lost Friday the 13th Sequel
One of the great tragedies of horror cinema is that the Friday the 13thfranchise does not consist of 13 movies. Worse, it has been stuck at 12 entries since the release of the 2009 reboot film, simply called Friday the 13th. But if the screenwriters of that movie, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, had their way, we would have had a 13th Jason movie years ago.
Speaking to ComicBook.com about their current movie Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi, Swift and Shannon revealed some details about their planned sequel. “It would have been Friday the 13th Part 13. We had big ambitions for it,” Shannon recalled. “I think it was called The Death of Jason Voorhees. Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees.”
That title will certainly raise some eyebrows among F13 fans, because Jason Voorhees has died several times. There was the excellent Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which ended with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) killing the masked murderer, a death that producers at Paramount intended to stick. And then there was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which began with Jason getting blown up to little bits by the FBI… only to reveal that he is in fact a demon worm that hops from body to body. Heck, the whole franchise is based on the premise that Jason is dead, since it was his drowning as a boy at Camp Crystal lake that sent mama Pamela Voorhees on a killing spree for the first film.
However, it’s important to remember that, a.) strict continuity has never been part of the Friday the 13th franchise; and b.) that Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees would be a sequel to the reboot film. The 2009 movie paid homage to the first three films by opening with Pamela (played by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame) being beheaded at the end of her murder rampage. Then, it went into an extended sequence of Jason killing people while wearing a bag over his head, as he does in Friday the 13th Part 2, before he gets his hockey mask in the movie’s present day, replicating the arrival of the mask in the third film.
Even though the remake did well at the box office and, according to the screenwriting duo “everyone loved” the script for the sequel, it never happened because of legal trouble. For years, original Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller has been locked in a lawsuit with producer Sean S. Cunningham, which has halted production of any new movies. Whenever it finally releases, the long-in-development television series Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela before young Jason’s death (or “death”), will be the first new entry since the 2009 movie.
For Swift and Shannon, that’s a shame because they had something really nasty cooked up for their sequel. “There were bigger kills. They were crazier,” teased Swift. “We had a really awesome zipline kill that I always loved,” added Shannon.
What does that mean? Swift and Shannon don’t elaborate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some of those acts of violence in a thirteenth movie. But good luck rarely has anything to do with Friday the 13th.
