Friday the 13th Part VII Should Have Been the Model for the Franchise
By 1988, Jason Voorhees was a shambling corpse without purpose, both literally and metaphorically. Paramount Studios, who released the original 1980 film by director Sean S. Cunningham and writer Victor Miller, had ordered Jason’s death for the third entry, 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. When that too proved a money-maker, Paramount allowed the franchise to continue, first by putting another person behind the mask for 1985’s A New Beginning and then resurrecting Jason as a zombie for the comedic, self-aware Jason Lives (1986).
In 1988, Paramount found something new to do with the late Mr. Voorhees: pit him against another monster, a troubled teen named Tina Shepherd, who had telekinetic powers and an abusive parent, just like Carrie White of the Stephen King novel and Brian De Palma film. The monster mash gave Jason a level of excitement and direction that he would not have again until Freddy vs. Jason, proving that the Friday the 13th series could have, and should have, evolved into a monster fight franchise.
Jason Lives, Barely
By this point, it’s no slander to say that originality was never part of Friday the 13th‘s origin. After seeing the profit turned by John Carpenter’s Halloween, Cunningham decided to make his own holiday-based slasher. Writer Victor Miller stuck closer to the giallo model that inspired early slashers like Halloween and Black Christmas, with a whodunnit based around Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) seeking revenge for the drowning death of her son, Jason. Throw in some great effects by Tom Savini and a surprise ending stolen (by Cunningham’s own admission) from Carrie, and Friday the 13th served its purpose, making $59,754,601 worldwide off a budget of no more than $650,000.
And that’s where things start to get messy. Obviously, a movie that successful calls for a sequel. But Pamela Voorhees was beheaded at the end of the first movie, and her entire motivation was revenge for her son’s death. So who would haunt Camp Crystal Lake now?
Turns out, it would be Jason, who was not in fact dead, but was living in the woods and just watching his mom from afar? It’s not clear.
Which is, of course, the secret pleasure of the franchise. Nothing really makes sense in Friday the 13th, certainly not between films. The amount of time that’s passed, the actual day on which an individual entry takes place; these things are explained about as well as Jason’s apparent ability to teleport to his latest victim.
As with the teleportation, no fan of the series really needs an explanation of the timeline or of Jason’s status among the living. They just want to see Jason kill people in spectacular ways. Jason did that best in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a tightly-constructed slasher with interesting characters and memorable kills. After the misfire of A New Beginning, Jason Lives added humor and classic Universal scares into the mix, making Jason a gothic monster.
Both of these movies evolved Jason, bringing him to his full culmination with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
Jason vs. Carrie… er, Tina
The New Blood opens like every other Friday the 13th sequel, with a series of flashbacks from previous movies, giving the illusion of a coherent narrative. After the credits, however, we get something very different. Young Tina Shepherd (Jennifer Banko), a blond moppet who resembles Carol Anne Freeling from Poltergeist more than any of the franchise’s doomed counselors, runs from her lakeside home and into a canoe after witnessing her father (John Otrin) beat her mother (Susan Blu). When her father comes out to console her, he gets no farther than the dock before Tina uses her telekinetic abilities to collapse the dock, drowning her dad.
The movie then jumps several years ahead, to a teenage Tina living with her mother and trying to cope with her powers and her trauma. Working closely with the Shepherds is Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser), who hopes to turn his study of Tina’s powers into a bestselling book. Pretending to care for Tina, but rather hoping an extreme move will trigger her powers, Dr. Crews brings Tina and her mother to a cabin at Crystal Lake, the same place where her father died. And, because this is Crystal Lake, it’s also the same place where a bunch of teens are partying.
The return to the lake does indeed trigger Tina’s powers, and her memories of her father lead to a telekinetic explosion that frees Jason from the chains that have been holding him at the bottom. As Jason arises and does what he does so well, Tina wonders if she’s not the one responsible for all of the carnage.
All of this builds to a stand-off between Tina and Jason, giving the unkillable zombie a true challenge (sorry, Tommy Jarvis). Using her powers, she stands up to Jason better than even the plucky Ginny Field (Amy Steel) from Part II. Even better, it gives us a glimpse of what would have happened if Carrie White would have left the prom and went to Crystal Lake to relax, a concept that appeals to horror nerds of any stripe.
In short, The New Blood did exactly what it said it would do, injecting the franchise with new energy—energy that was immediately squandered.
Bad Old Blood
At this point, some readers may point out that The New Blood is hardly the best Friday the 13th movie, a point no one can dispute. Director John Carl Buechler, a special effects great who is also known for lesser horror films such as Troll (the predecessor to the infamous best worst movie), struggles to balance the character work and even the kill scenes with his forte, the special effects. The effects are good, but like most Friday movies in the second half of the Paramount era, they were so heavily censored that the good stuff didn’t make it on screen.
But the idea behind The New Blood stands out, even if the execution is lacking. Need proof? Just look at what followed. Unable to actually bring Voorhees to NYC, Jason Takes Manhattan plays as a tired retread of better mainline Friday movies. The first two New Line Cinema movies completely reinvented the character, first unsuccessfully (Jason Goes to Hell) and then successfully (Jason X). Even the 2009 remake fails to make much of an impression, outside of some truly nasty kills.
No, only the uneven Freddy vs. Jason has any juice, and for one good reason: it pits Jason against another monster. We could have had so many more exciting, if not exactly good, Friday the 13th movies if only the franchise had learned its lesson sooner and followed the lead of The New Blood.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood is now streaming on Paramount+.
Best Picture Nominee Train Dreams is a Beautiful Movie About America’s Sins
The Best Picture nominee Train Dreams features a rarity in Western fiction: a protagonist with little agency and even less interior life. Where most stories, especially American stories about men, the heroes are strivers and individualists—the untamable Huckleberry Finn, the self-made Jay Gatsby, the indomitable Charles Foster Kane—Robert Grainier of Train Dreams simply seems to float on the periphery of his life in late 19th century and early 20th century Idaho. As played by Joel Edgerton, Grainier is a man most comfortable when working felling trees, and seems to do his best to push away thoughts rather than exploring them.
One particular memory that Grainier wants to avoid comes from a moment from his boyhood, when he witnessed the Chinese citizens in his town forcefully removed. The narrator, voiced by Will Patton and reading directly from the Denis Johnson novella the film adapts, tells us that the violence of the moment confused the young Grainier. Yet, as much as he tries to forget about that and other unpleasant moments of his life, Grainier cannot completely avoid them—nor, crucially, can we viewers. This combination of lyrical narration and obstinate protagonist allows director Clint Bentley to make Train Dreams into a beautiful, heartbreaking film about the sins that America cannot forget, no matter how much it tries.
Blazing a Solemn Path
Co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams follows 80 years in the life of the logger Grainier. With its lush nature photography, meditative pace, and heavy use of voiceover, Train Dreams has drawn comparisons to Terrence Malick films such as Days of Heaven. But Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shot the film in Academy ratio, underscoring a more limited scope than most of Malick’s work, which can sometimes span from the dawn of creation to the 1960s.
Moreover, Grainier is hardly as soulful as even the murderers of Malick’s debut Badlands. He wants only to work and to spend his time with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their infant daughter Kate. Even the former becomes less interesting after the birth of Kate, as he and Gladys make plans to build a sawmill, which would allow him to spend less time felling trees with teams of laborers and more time with his family. However, when he returns from one final lumbering job to find his home destroyed and Gladys and Kate missing, Grainier returns to logging. He only stops when younger men and heightened technology render him obsolete, forcing him to work as a carriage driver for a time and then to finally retire and spend his days in his secluded cabin.
Despite the simplicity of its main character, Train Dreams feels rich. Some of that depth comes from the narration, with Patton’s warm, inviting voice bringing out the best in Johnson’s prose. Some comes from the beauty of the cinematography, which fills the boxy frame with the lushness of nature, and some comes from the score by Bryce Dessner of The National, all warm crescendos and tinkling harpsichord and tentative violins.
Train Dreams‘s ability to create depth beyond the limitations of its main character reveals a theme running throughout the film, one that uses Grainier’s work aiding the Westward expansion of the United States and his proximity to racial violence to draw attention to America’s national sins.
Guilt By Association
The expulsion of Chinese workers that Grainier witnessed as a child has an echo later in adulthood, in a scene that occurs mere minutes from the first. While Grainier works on a portion of the Spokane International Railway, the narrator tells us that he took comfort in the easy coalition of the various men who came together there. To illustrate the point, the camera captures Grainier and a Chinese worker called Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) sawing in perfect rhythm, each on either side of the tool.
Their work comes to an end when a group of men grabs Fu, drag him up to the bridge, and hurl him off the edge. As soon as the men take Fu, Grainier begins asking “What’s he done?” and he even grabs Fu’s legs, potentially to free him or potentially to help with the execution. But after Fu kicks him away, Grainier simply watches, neither supporting nor stopping the atrocity.
In the very next scene, the overseer who led the lynching gives a pep talk to the workers. “You boys have shown this old river valley who’s boss,” he bellows. “You have helped save Spokane International. Eleven miles it used to take to get around this gorge. And you opened up a new part of the country.” Some men scoff at the boss’s declaration, others cheer along. Grainier simply stares.
Grainier may not be able to make sense of the combination he just experienced, but we viewers can. We understand that we saw American expansion in miniature, both the destruction of natural spaces for the sake of industry and the elimination of a non-white person whose labor had been deemed no longer worthwhile.
Even if we read Grainier as a willing participant in the murder of Fu, he does not present himself as a virulent racist. Even though he spends much of his life cutting down trees for the sake of the railroad, he isn’t a committed capitalist. Grainier is just a man trying to exist.
Yet the Grainier’s proximity to the events indicts him in the nation’s larger sins. He may not have caused racism or rampant industrialization, but he’s certainly haunted by them, as demonstrated by the visions of burning trees and of Fu’s ghost that visit him throughout the film.
Quiet Condemnation
As in their previous collaboration, the excellent 2023 drama Sing Sing, Bentley and Kwedar are clear, but not strident, in their politics. They’re more interested in the human drama of a person caught in an unjust system than they are having those people declare their anger against systemic wrongs.
That approach allows Train Dreams to be a beautiful, quiet movie. The combination of natural imagery, subtle music, and Johnson’s prose allows the audience to invest in the emotional depth of the story, and even lets them leave the film thinking they’ve just watched a simple life, well lived, forgetting all of the themes after a good cry.
But anyone who pays closer attention to Grainier’s dreams and the thoughts he tries to hard to avoid will see something different. There, they’ll find a tragedy that goes far beyond the unremarkable life of one man, a tragedy at the roots of the American experiment.
Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.
Project Hail Mary Review: Hard Sci-Fi That Goes Down Easy
Too often storytelling treats science like magic, a hand-waving variation of “abracadabra” for the modern world. This might be one of the reasons Andy Weir’s novels have proven such fertile ground at the movies. Despite penning wildly outlandish scenarios set almost entirely in space, the one-time video game programmer drills down into the nuts and bolts of his flights of fancy in a way that makes nerds swoon at the page. And even on a screen, where Weir’s zippy first-person narration is generally absent, it can still provide enough wonk fuel for a genuine movie star to cross the celestial heavens.
In 2015 that star was Matt Damon, and the adaptation, Ridley Scott’s light-footed The Martian. Eleven years later, it works almost as well for Ryan Gosling in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s similarly charming Project Hail Mary. Despite Gosling playing largely the same character as Damon’s Mark Watney—except that Gosling’s even more bookish Ryland Grace cannot remember why he’s alone in space when he wakes aboard a spaceship, five years from earth and traveling in the wrong direction—the page-turner premise remains a winner. It’s a showcase for an actor who can hold the camera without another soul in sight (at least of the human variety); and it’s an opportunity for filmmakers who enjoy breaking the abstract and erudite down into addictive popcorn entertainment.
That ability of transforming the complex into the accessible is doubly appropriate here since we learn in flashback that Gosling’s Grace was a schoolteacher back on Earth, a gregarious big kid geek who just happens to wear a tie and facial hair while excitedly explaining the way the world works to younger curious minds. He also reveals how it doesn’t when Grace is forced to exposit for his class the chillingly ingenious villain of the film: astrophage, or “dots” as the kids (and most assuredly the viewers) will call them. These are microscopic alien lifeforms that travel the cosmos in search of stars’ heat. When they find one, they feast on the gas giants until their light is put on a proverbial dimmer.
These little space bastards have apparently made our sun their next meal, and while only a faint problem right now, in about 30 years, the temperatures of the Earth will drop a clean 15-20 degrees, ushering in a new ice age. Hence the Hail Mary, Grace’s rocketship which was designed to send three scientists out to the only verifiable star the astrophage has visited but didn’t dim. The goal is to learn what makes that sun special and discover a way to replicate the trick back home.
Yet by virtue of the movie’s setup, something transparently went wrong between the flashbacks and the present. Grace is alone when he wakes up with only a groggy notion of who he is, and his mission seems close to hopeless in the present tense. And all of that is before the movie’s real penny drops with Grace learning this isn’t a solo act; it’s a two-hander, and an alien ship from another solar system is right outside the Hail Mary’s hull.
When I read Project Hail Mary in 2021, the publisher had concealed the fact that this save-the-world premise was secretly a launch pad for a first-contact yarn. Amazon MGM has been more forthcoming in their marketing. That’s liberating for lowly film critics who like to convey what a movie is about without speaking only in euphemisms and riddles. And indeed, the sheer pleasure of Project Hail Mary as a moviegoing experience derives from its “when worlds collide” meet-cute. Rather than the twist transitioning the story into the realm of the fantastical, it creates cosmic real estate for first Weir, and now Lord and Miller, to brazenly replicate the hard science fiction that made The Martian a feast for wonks in the most outlandish context imaginable. The results elevate the inherent optimism of Weir’s storytelling to an interspecies degree.
Beyond all the science jargon and merits of theoretical soundness in the author’s books, there remains his clear-eyed and unapologetic celebration of expertise and hard-earned wisdom saving the day. He envisions futures where rationality and the universal language of math, or at least respect for those who speak it by running the numbers, triumphs over fear, division, and selfishness. And in spite of such musings seeming increasingly remote from our daily reality in the decade since The Martian, that rosy belief in the scientific method has not faded. It’s just pivoted to the stars in what becomes the most unlikely buddy comedy this side of Turner and Hooch.
Without giving away what the extraterrestrial looks like here, or how exactly its relationship with Grace plays out, the creature is a visual coup of puppeteering and discreet digital add-ons for Lord and Miller, who create a sheltie-sized sidekick that is equal parts pupil and the unknowable heptapod from Arrival. Its dynamic with Grace is the heart of the movie, providing a parable about the benefits of cooperation trumping cynical self-interest.
The high-concept beguiles, but the human element remains present since Project Hail Mary continuously fixates on Grace’s sense of dread from being alone amongst the stars, as well as his dawning memory of how he got there being revealed by numerous flashbacks that introduce us to the people who put him onboard this vessel, including a coolly practical German project leader (Sandra Hüller). Hüller’s Eva sees the potential in Grace’s school teacher and is given just enough humanity to echo the canny political players and public servants of The Martian, but the chilliness of her utilitarian logic is never really developed beyond the familiar German efficiency stereotype that the movie leans heavily on.
It is these same flashbacks that ultimately overpack Gosling’s space odyssey. Running at a healthy 156 minutes, Project Hail Mary is not a short film. Before it is over, you will get the sensation you’ve been up there too long as well. And yet, despite the indulgent running time, Lord and Miller never let the pace lag or dither. The movie is just as propulsive and engaging as their best animated films—including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verseand The Lego Movie—and gets a lot of mileage out of playing with aspect ratios and filming techniques, with cinematographer Greg Fraser (Dune, The Batman) shooting the digital photography in the space scenes on a 1.43:1 frame, which is designed for the verticality of IMAX. Conversely, the earthbound flashbacks are presented in a more traditional 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio.
The film is, in other words, as visually thoughtful and pleasing in its imagery as Gosling’s many monologues about solar luminescence and selective microbiological breeding tend to be. So it is hard to ever be overwhelmed when there is always something engaging to reel you back into orbit, be it the aesthetic or extraterrestrial. It’s hard science fiction that goes down easy. So you can even forgive it when the picture over-imbibes on its vices, because even those are covertly its virtues.
Project Hail Mary opens only in theaters on March 20.
Best Picture Oscar Nominees from the ’00s That Should Have Won
As Oscar season heats up, we’ve been taking a critical eye to the Best Picture winners of the past, and having already tackled the ’80s and ’90s, we’re now moving on to the ’00s, where we will not be disputing the recognition that Gladiator, Chicago, and Slumdog Millionaire got from the Academy. We will, however, be risking it all on some thoughts elsewhere.
Without further ado, brace yourself for some potentially controversial opinions, as we take a look back at some of the Best Picture winners of the 2000s and decide who really should have won…
The Sixth Sense
We’re kicking off at the awards in 2000, which celebrated films released in 1999. It was a different time. Literally, but also culturally. American Beauty won Best Picture that year, and Kevin Spacey won Best Actor. So, you see what I mean. A different time! Looking back at the nominees, there are definitely some options that would have aged better than American Beauty: The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, and The Insider were all vying for the statue. As was M. Night Shyamalan’s iconic horror movie, The Sixth Sense.
I genuinely love most of Shyamalan’s subsequent projects (I’ll even go in the ring for Signs if I have to) but still think The Sixth Sense remains his best, with every element of the movie coming together perfectly to create a wonderful, scary, and touching ghost story that would still blow someone’s mind today if they had no idea how it ended. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give great performances here, but it’s Toni Collette who makes the whole thing work as well as it does, putting in a gut-wrenching turn as a gifted young boy’s frantic mother. Horror rarely gets its due at the Oscars; a win for The Sixth Sense would have been a nice change of pace.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
A Beautiful Mind proved way too Oscar-baity for voters in 2002. Ron Howard also snagged Best Director for his emotional biopic about the life of mathematician John Nash, which is absolute friggin scenes when you consider that he was up against David Lynch for Mulholland Drive (one of the greatest movies ever made!) and Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which should have easily taken Best Picture that year.
Russell Crowe’s powerful performance as Nash carries A Beautiful Mind, a movie riddled with historical inaccuracies that also simplifies schizophrenia and culminates in one of the most predictable twists of all time. It’s simply no match for the epic storytelling and Middle-earth worldbuilding that The Fellowship of the Ring gives us.
Moulin Rouge!
Sometimes, there’s more than one nominee in the running that deserved the Oscar more than the ultimate winner, and that certainly feels like it was the case in 2002, where A Beautiful Mind triumphed over not just The Fellowship of the Ring, but Baz Luhrmann’s entirely different but utterly audacious Moulin Rouge!. With as many influences on its sleeve as edits per minute, Moulin Rouge! courts elements of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, vaudeville, and even La bohème as it tells the tragic tale of Ewan McGregor’s English poet Christian, who falls in love with Satine, a waning courtesan at the heart of the Moulin Rouge caberet.
It’s a postmodern musical that weaves some more contemporary pop bangers into the aesthetic of fin de siècle France and pounds with an energy that thrills some people and gives others a proper bloody headache. I’m in the former camp, but whatever you think of Moulin Rouge!, it’s a fair bit more exhilarating than Howard’s formulaic A Beautiful Mind, and dug its nails into pop culture with a much more enduring severity.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Since we’ve just spent a while theoretically removing a Russell Crowe movie from our Best Picture winners, let’s add one in to make us square: Peter Weir’s epic period drama should have beaten The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the Best Picture race. Putting aside its eye-watering attention to detail and its immersive and practical action (the kind you rarely see anywhere anymore) it feels like Master and Commander largely lost out that year because every nominee that wasn’t Return of the King was doomed. Having lost the statue on the previous two installments of the LOTR trilogy, the Academy seemingly felt obliged to recognize Jackson’s efforts in making it, despite Return of the King perhaps being the weakest of the bunch.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is high-key the favorite movie of that one person you know who watches every historical TV documentary and owns more books about naval warfare than there are endings in 2004’s actual Best Picture winner. Given the chance, they will also bang the drum that Master and Commander deserved to win that year, and y’know what? They’ve got a good goddamn point.
Sideways
Voters were once again faced with a couple of worthy biopics in 2005, as Martin Scorsese’s glossy The Aviator and Taylor Hackford’s Ray jostled for attention. They seemed to cancel each other out in the end; Million Dollar Baby walked away with Best Picture and a slew of other awards that congratulated Clint Eastwood and co. on a job well done in bringing their depressing sports drama to the screen. Yet, the project that lost out the most that year was Sideways, a movie packed with sharp dialogue and unlikable characters that proved too divisive for some but has actually stood the test of time.
Over two decades later, I reckon that general audiences are better at coping with unlikable characters in their comedies, but Sideways was released in a pre-Breaking Bad, pre-Succession world. A couple of selfish, immature men going on a road trip through wine country would easily be an 8-episode HBO series these days. We wouldn’t be able to get enough of Miles and Jack’s nonsense! And we would still not be drinking any fuckin Merlot.
Brokeback Mountain
Welp, we’ve hit what I consider to be “the big one” on this particular list. A travesty so wild that people were justifiably yelling about it for years. After winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director awards, Ang Lee’s incredible Brokeback Mountain seemed sure to grab Best Picture, too. And then it didn’t. To a gasp heard around the world, Crash won instead. Not the David Cronenberg car sex movie, of course. No, that would have been cool (if belated.) The heavy-handed and reductive Paul Haggis ensemble flick.
Look, maybe you love Crash. I’ve never met someone who does, but I guess anything’s possible. But Brokeback Mountain is not just one of the best films of the 2000s, or of the 21st century. It’s one of the best films of all time. It’s so good that you can even forget Randy Quaid is in it. What the hell were they thinking that year? Sweet lord.
Little Miss Sunshine
I know deep down in my heart and bowels that I’m about to make some people very cross, but I have to follow my own truth on this one: The Departed isn’t close to being the best Martin Scorsese movie. I mean, he’s made some great ones, hasn’t he? Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, After Hours. I could go on. It’s not that I don’t think a Scorsese movie should have won Best Picture. I just don’t think this should have been the one. The Departed is… fine. It’s fine. But it’s a remake of a better Chinese movie, and I stand by that. Andy Lau and Tony Leung are phenomenal in Infernal Affairs, a benchmark of Hong Kong crime cinema that is much more tightly paced than Scorsese’s less subtle, tonally messier version of the story.
The idea of a dark indie comedy going toe-to-toe with The Departed tickles me, even now. Little Miss Sunshine is such a strong ensemble movie, featuring a standout performance by Paul Dano (stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tarantino) that hits deep in a way that Scorsese’s star-studded crime drama just doesn’t. Was it the “best” film of the year? Debatable, but the only movie that could have beaten Little Miss Sunshine in terms of awards contenders for me was Pan’s Labyrinth, which didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. So here we are.
There Will Be Blood
The 2008 Academy Awards were absolutely brutal. In line for Best Picture were Atonement (good), Juno (good), Michael Clayton (underrated as hell), and No Country for Old Men (also good.) The thing is, all those movies may be really good, but There Will Be Blood is great. I get that Oscar voters must have felt like they were scoffing their faces at the fine cinema buffet that year, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s period drama was the main course; the bloody, buttery steak that they should have been pacing themselves for!
Daniel Day-Lewis dishes up an acting masterclass in Anderson’s morally complex character study. He got Best Actor for that, but his performance never overshadowed a sublime movie across the board. Robert Elswit’s stunning composition and natural lighting make you feel as if you are actually there during the California oil boom, Jonny Greenwood’s score is positively haunting, and Anderson’s direction is meticulous. There Will Be Blood is a memorable, modern classic that unfortunately lost out in what was simply a great year for cinema.
Hamnet’s Power is in Its Emotional Immediacy, Not Historical Accuracy
Each of these complaints has merit. Any viewer who finds themselves distracted by historical inaccuracies should take that into account when discussing their reception of the film. However, there are many other viewers who do not come to Hamnet looking for an accurate representation of the past. Rather, they enjoy the movie for the way it makes them feel, for the immediacy and depth of emotion on display. In that regard, Hamnet succeeds better than any other film in recent memory.
The Bard, Barely
Hamnet irritates the history nitpickers right away, opening with a title card that seems to state the obvious. “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” it declares, citing the 2004 article “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet,” but not, strangely, its author Stephen Greenblatt.
Even those who haven’t Greenblatt or any other work of new historicist literary criticism could probably guess that Hamnet and Hamlet are pretty much the same name. And they could have guessed that the death of young Hamnet affected the creation of Hamlet as much as Danish politics, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or anything else that influenced Shakespeare.
Rather than act as a statement of purpose, however, the title card acts as a lightning rod. It gathers all the expectations for historical accuracy that its viewers might have and dissolves them by stating the obvious. It gets those expectations out of the way, so that Zhao—who co-wrote the script with O’Farrell—can move onto the cathartic purging that she really wants to do.
Big explosions of feeling begin immediately afterward. There’s Will firing back at his father (David Wilmot) for failing to take glove-making seriously, followed by him shouting at his mother (Emily Watson) over his relationship with Agnes. There’s the courtship of Agnes and William, which consists of one quick flirtation followed by a retelling of the myth of Orpheus, leading to a pagan tryst in the woods. There’s the couple’s first argument, a typical artist breakdown and Will shouts about his inability to finish his play. And all that in the first twenty minutes.
Were the scenes nothing but characters shouting about their passions, then Hamnet would not receive the criticism leveled against it because it wouldn’t be successful enough to warrant much attention. But the film does resonate with viewers, and not just because they’re easily manipulated. Rather, they are affected by the unique way Zhao presents the film’s big emotional moments.
Artificial Scene, Real Catharsis
The standout scene in Hamnet occurs in the final ten minutes, when Agnes attends a performance of Hamlet. By this point in the movie, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) has died, in a surreal sequence that sees him apparently trade his life for that of his twin sister Judith (Olivia Lynes). The death leaves Anges wracked with guilt, but Will spends his time in London, working on his plays and apparently refusing to acknowledge his wife or what happened to their son.
Upon learning that Will is mounting a play named after Hamnet, Agnes travels to London and pushes her way to the front of the Globe’s stage, where she watches the play unfold. At first, Agnes refuses to engage with the play, asking aloud obvious questions to her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) obvious questions about the staging and paying no attention to the annoyed hushes of those around her. But as soon as the actor playing Hamlet (Noah Jupe, older brother of Jacobi) takes the stage, Agnes becomes transfixed.
She watches the story about death, about madness in indecision, about a father who leaves the afterlife to speak to his son, about the tragedy that ends with so many corpses, and she interprets it all as Will finally acknowledging the grief he could not speak directly. And through his art, he allows her to find meaning and peace, helping her make sense of a senseless loss.
Of course, the thousands of essays written on Hamlet demonstrate that there are many, many other ways to read the tragedy. But that’s not the point of the scene. Instead, Zhao focuses on Agnes’s specific experiences, showing how her feelings override everything: the words, the actors, even the other viewers. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal shoots the scene in hand-held, almost entirely in close up on Buckley’s face, breaking occasionally to let us see what she’s watching. Zhao and sound designer Maximilian Behrens give equal attention to almost everything in the mix, making the shuffling of feet and the shushes of audience members as loud as anything spoken by the actors. Max Richter’s score stays silent until the play nears its end, entering as a low rumble as Hamlet fights Laertes.
That approach changes at the moment that Hamlet succumbs to poison and injury and collapses onto the stage, right in front of Agnes. After screaming, “I die!” Agnes reaches out into the stage area and grasps the actor’s hand, which the actor accepts and holds. At that point, the music grows louder, with Richter’s score becoming rich and sumptuous, drowning out almost all other sounds. The audience follows Agnes’s lead, and they all reach out for the boy too, an image that Zhao captures with an overhead shot.
Nothing about that moment is subtle or real or historically accurate. It’s all artifice, downplaying the demands of reality to celebrate the power of false and the pretend. With the shift comes an invitation for the movie-watching audience to join with Agnes and let themselves cry, if only because the movie demands that we cry. And if reports from theaters across the country are to be believed, viewers answered that demand.
For Crying Out Loud
Hamnet has one goal. It exists to make the audience cry, and every line, performance, image, and sound works to that end. For some critics, this single-minded pursuit of a particular response is even worse than its disregard for historical accuracy, as if making people cry is useless.
For some, it certainly is. They come to art for some other form of experience, and that’s certainly valid. But Hamnet is adamant that art has the ability to create catharsis, to move the audience beyond words, to help them make sense of emotions that escape expression in every other form. Moreover, Hamnet insists that art’s ability to make us cry matters.
Some will disagree with that claim, just as they dismiss Hamnet as a film. And that’s fine, not every movie works for every person. But the powerful reactions to Hamnet demonstrate that many others disagree, proving that the film’s ability to reduce viewers to tears is not a drawback; rather, it’s proof of the movie’s claim that strong feelings matter.
Hamnet is now streaming on Peacock.
Thirty Years Later, Fargo Remains the Best and Most Beguiling Coen Bros Movie
In 2013, former Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman began his review of Inside Llewyn Davis by declaring Joel and Ethan Coen as masters of the “art of contempt.” Where forerunners such as Marcel Duchamp or Johnny Rotten only dabbled in the medium, the Coens perfected it. “An undeniably talented two-man band of brothers, the Coens take pleasure less in confronting their audience or authority in general, than in bullying the characters they invent for their own amusement,” Hoberman wrote. “Theirs is a comic theater of cruelty populated by a battered cast of action figures and a worldview that might have been formulated not from a Buick 6, à la Dylan but the Olympian heights of a bunk bed in suburbia.”
Hoberman is hardly alone in his assessment of the Coens’ talent and taste for condescension. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Ebert, and other stalwarts of film criticism have heard a condescending giggle behind the travails of self-destructive folk singer Llewyn Davis, would-be parents H.I. and Ed McDonnough, and even the laid back Dude. Strong as the arguments are, they all dissolve at the sound of one short monologue, delivered by Frances McDormand as police chief Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo. Released thirty years ago today, Fargo remains the Coens’ best movie and, because of that sweet and sincere speech, their most beguiling film.
Minnesota Nice and Minnesota Nightmares
By the end of Fargo‘s climax, several people have died, some in horrific ways. Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) gets shot in the face and shoved into a wood chipper. A traffic cop gets shot in the head for pulling over Carl and his partner Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). Gaear kills two more passers-by because they saw the two with the cop’s body, while Carl murders businessman Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell) and a parking lot attendant (Bix Skahill) for getting in his way. And Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrüd), the housewife whose husband Jerry (William H. Macy) came up with the whole fake ransom plot to bulk his father-in-law Wade, dies off screen.
That’s a lot of death for a movie that immediately entered the zeitgeist, in part because of the thick Minnesota accents the main characters use. If one only knows Fargo from Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons, then they would reasonably expect the film to be a bit of folksy comedy, celebrating the weird and wonderful antics of people in a unique community.
That’s not a completely wrong reading of Fargo. Minnesota natives themselves, Joel and Ethan Coen do clearly take pleasure in putting their home state on the big screen. The rhythms of the accent and especially the practice of “Minnesota Nice”—a cultural emphasis on superficial politeness even over deep despair—drive much of the film’s dialogue. A scene in which Marge interviews two local sex workers about Carl and Gaear ends with the former asking, “Oh yah?” and the latter responding, “Yah!” with the camera holding for to give the audience place to laugh.
The movie knows that there’s something offbeat about the way the people of Brainerd, Minnesota, and the nearby metropolis Fargo, North Dakota. But the film never forgets their rich inner lives, as demonstrated in Marge’s standout moment.
A Beautiful Day in an Ugly World
After the climax of Fargo, with all the dead bodies discovered and Gaear Grimsrud in her custody, Marge tallies up the count and drives him to the police station. “And for what? For a little bit of money?” she asks, disbelieving. “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.”
Read on the page, Marge’s response falls in line with both the cultural understanding of Fargo and with the critical consensus of the Coens. Marge seems hilariously out of touch with the bleakness of a world in which so much murder could happen. Her declaration that there’s more to life than money, delivered to a man as cold and uncaring as Gaear Grimsrud, seems at once obvious and useless. To those who insist that the Coen Brothers hate their characters and want us to laugh at their suffering, “I just don’t understand it” is the truest line that Marge speaks in the movie.
And that’s the point: Marge doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t misunderstand because of naiveté. Throughout the movie, she demonstrates her understanding of the evil that people can do, as demonstrated by her clear-eyed analysis of the murder scene that Carl and Graear left after shooting the traffic cop. Nor does she trust people blindly, as shown by her handling of former classmate Mike Yanagita (Stephen Park), who makes an unwelcome pass at her. She’s a good enough detective to keep putting pressure on Jerry Lundegaard and to not back down when he gets defensive, even if she’s a bit too slow to realize that he’d rather run than give her the information she needs.
Rather, Marge doesn’t understand how Carl and Graeer and Jerry can cause so much destruction because she chooses to not understand. When she finishes the death tally in her monologue and looks in the mirror to see that Graear refuses to acknowledge her point, she chooses to look away from him and up at the sky. She pronounces the day beautiful because she chooses to believe that it’s beautiful, because that’s the type of world she’s trying to create, no matter what people like Carl and Graear and Jerry do.
Choosing a Good Life
The very last scene in Fargo could be its most laughable. Throughout the movie, Marge’s husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) submits a nature painting to a state contest. At the end, he announces that he lost to the Hauffman brothers, that their work would adorn the new 29-cent stamp while his would be relegated to the 3-cent stamp.
Compared to the pile of bodies accumulated throughout the movie, the stakes are so low and quotidian that they make the moment laughable. But Marge isn’t laughing. Instead, she snuggles closer to Norm and reminds him that people will need the 3-cent stamp to supplement the 26-cent stamps they already have, a point that Norm accepts. The two snuggle together, warm in their bed, and instead of looking at the evil around them or even their small embarrassment, they look to the future, reminding each other that Marge will give birth in two months.
The need for 3-cent stamps does not negate the fact that Norm lost to the Hautman Brothers. The birth of the Gundersons’ child does not undo the many deaths throughout the film. The warmth of their bed doesn’t stop the Minnesota cold outside.
But the decision that Marge and Norm make to choose that small bit of sweetness has value, not only within Fargo, but also within the larger Coen oeuvre. The Gundersons’ decisions reveal the Coens’ characters to be more than bumpkins to whom bad things happen. Rather, they are people who try to make a life in a cruel and uncaring world. Sometimes, those decisions are inexplicably self-destructive, as seen by every selfish thing that Llewyn Davis does. Sometimes, those decisions are as unlikely as they are hopeful, as when H.I. takes one of Nathan Arizona’s many kids. Sometimes, the Dude just chooses to abide.
Obviously, these decisions rarely work out for the characters, and we can laugh at them as much as we can feel sympathy or horror at their outcomes. But any viewer who feels contempt for the characters and their decisions cannot blame the Coens. They’re missing the sympathy and dignity the Coen Brothers give their characters, none more so than Marge Gunderson.
Ready or Not 2: Exclusive Look Inside Radio Silence and Samara Weaving’s BBQ of the Rich
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
The future of horror is spontaneously combusting bodies! You heard it here first.
Arriving seven years after Ready or Not saw Samara Weaving’s new bride engage in a deadly game of hide and seek, the sequel Here I Come ups the ante with more blood, more kills, more locations, and higher stakes that include no less than the future of the entire known world. And yes, there’s another exploding body or two.
Back in the dress to see it all is Weaving’s Grace, who we catch up with seconds after the gloriously gory ending of the last film, with the newly widowed bride sitting on the steps of the mansion where she was hunted. She’s won the game, but there are consequences to her survival.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who work as part of the Radio Silence collective, also return in the directors’ chairs with Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy once again on scripting duties. The Radio Silence team say they had an appetite to take a second dip into the Ready or Not universe after the first film became such a hit with audiences, but only if they had the right story to tell.
“The idea that we could expand the mythology and build another story in that same universe and in that same tone was really exciting to us,” explains Gillett. “It was exciting because it wasn’t premeditated, we didn’t go into the first movie planning on something else, and so there was a feeling of freedom in that.”
Since the first movie, the helming pair had been off making raucous vampire-ballet horror, Abigail (with Kathryn Newton), and Scream 5 and VI (which briefly, but memorably, also featured Weaving). Meanwhile, Weaving was making, among other things, the sequel The Babysitter: Killer Queen, high-end TV show Nine Perfect Strangers, and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon opposite an all-star cast. The planets would need to align to get the gang back together.
The Story So Far
Shot in 2018 and released in 2019, Ready or Not saw former foster child Grace marry into the affluent Le Domas family. On her wedding night, she takes part in a family tradition—an initiation ceremony where she must pick a card from the box of a mysterious figure named Mr. Le Bail. Grace’s card reads “Hide and Seek,” but far from a fun kids’ game, this is a deadly cat-and-mouse chase. The Le Domas family must hunt and kill Grace to fulfill their demonic pact with Le Bail. If she survives till dawn, they all die. Sure enough, Grace does, and the Le Domas family explodes into a morning red mist.
The Radio Silence team considers themselves fortunate to be able to brazenly pick up seconds after the last movie, despite it being more than half a decade later since they were on that set. “Obviously, we lucked out that Sam literally hasn’t aged a day in seven years, which I know we certainly can’t say the same for ourselves,” Gillett laughs. Grace is in fact still sitting bloodied and broken on the steps outside the Le Domas house as the interior burns. Merging the first movie seamlessly with the second in that opening shot was a complicated affair that could fill an hour-long “making of,” according to Bettinelli-Olpin, and involved all departments.
“The linchpin that holds it all together is Samara,” he says.
Again in that blood-splattered gown, Weaving’s Grace is about to suffer another 24-hour ordeal.
“I had to remember what I was doing all those years ago,” says Weaving, chatting to us from LA. “It was tricky because where, emotionally, does she go from here? I thought in the first one I’d been stretched and seen a rainbow of emotions, and now, how do we make this interesting for the audience so it’s not repetitive at all? I think Kathryn [Newton] is so helpful in that.”
Sister Act
Enter Faith, Grace’s estranged younger sister played by Newton. Grace is cuffed and in the hospital when Faith walks back into her life, mad as hell because Grace abandoned her as a teenager. But all that drama will have to be dealt with later since Grace’s survival has had major repercussions for the elite group of families who have made deals with the literal Devil for untold power and influence over the world.
It hasn’t escaped the cast and directors how horribly current that last plot point is with the movie coming after the staggered release of the Epstein files: “They’ve always been a satire, but I don’t think we imagined that they would be quite as sharp a satire as the two Ready or Not movies currently feel,” says Gillett.
Newton’s been an actor since she was four years old but describes working with Radio Silence on Abigail as giving her “a new sense of wonder all over again.” So when the duo approached her to play Faith, she “was jumping up and down and screaming.”
Radio Silence say they “Parent Trapped” Newton and Weaving, inviting Newton along to a Ready or Not reunion screening and encouraging the two to bond and hang out. It clearly worked. On screen, their chemistry is infectious. Not only do the two look like siblings—“If you think we look alike, I’ll take it!” laughs Newton—but they easily slip into a rhythm.
“She is one of my favorite people, I’m obsessed with her,” Weaving smiles when we ask about her co-star. “We very quickly fell into a sisterly relationship where I just was making fun of her all day and doing impressions of her on set, embarrassing her. I was like texting boys for her because I don’t understand how she doesn’t have a boyfriend. We need to remedy this…”
Newton is equally enamored of Weaving, saying she started to copy her tastes and habits.
“She’s way cooler than me,” Newton says. “She’s a little older than me, she’s a little more worldly. I’m still growing. I’m still kind of in eighth grade in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to boys and stuff, but she’s just really cool. Sam made it really easy for me to be myself and to shine in my own way, which only makes her shine too.”
The Dark Council
Handing off the Scream Queen baton is no less than Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Not a final girl this time, she’s Ursula, one half of a pair of evil twins with Shawn Hatosy’s Titus as her brother. The two are the offspring of patriarch Chester Danforth (played by legendary horror director David Cronenberg), holder of the “high seat.” But after the demise of the Le Domas clan that claim is contested. Titus and Ursula will have to compete against other powerful families to be the first to destroy Grace and claim back the most powerful spot in the world.
Ursula is beautiful, cold, callous, and violent, and Gellar looks like she’s having a blast in the role of villain. While she might be best known for playing Buffy, she’s been on both sides of the spectrum plenty of times.
“It’s so funny because I first got some notoriety in my career when I was a teenager and I was on All My Children, and I played this very bad character,” she says. “I thought that’s what my future was. It took me a while to convince people that I could be Buffy. I was originally cast as Cordelia. Then Buffy was such a success, and when I wanted to do Cruel Intentions, everybody kept trying to talk me out of it and say, ‘Don’t you want to play [good girl] Annette?’ I’m so incredibly grateful to be accepted in both roles.”
With the various different factions competing to murder Grace first, it was a large ensemble cast, and Gellar says it was a joy how much everyone wanted to be together between takes. Newton describes Gellar as a massive influence in her career and recalls a special moment.
“We were sitting on set one day [in costume], I had the ball gag in my mouth… and she’s like, ‘Hmm, this looks familiar,’ and she pulls up this picture of her as Buffy, and she had on a denim shirt, hair up in a bun just like mine with the bangs and a sword. I had chills, like full-body chills.”
Seeing Gellar, Weaving, and Newton share screen time is a treat, even when they are trying to kill each other.
“Her doing this movie is such an honor because she’s a scream queen,” says Newton. “Now we have Samara, I’m a baby scream queen. We’re all coming together, and she’s opening the door and continuing that legacy.”
Factions and Families
Other families competing for the “high seat” are clans from London, Spain, China, and more. The rules of the game are thus:
The head of the family must be the first to attempt to kill Grace. If they die, the next in their bloodline must take over.
Members of the council are not allowed to kill each other, a crime punishable by death.
Each family must use a weapon contemporary to when their blood line first made their pact. Grace, meanwhile, must simply survive until dawn again.
The person to enforce these rules is Elijah Wood’s character, known only as “the Lawyer.” He works for Mr. Le Bail, and while his backstory isn’t conveyed in the film, Wood and Radio Silence discussed what it could be at length, leaving the audience with tantalizing questions.
“It’s toeing that line between being someone who is neutral, to articulate the rules, but also giving him some personality in regards to what he is observing internally,” Wood says. “He’s probably seen this process through multiple times, and maybe even has his own opinions about these individuals that are ultimately irrelevant in regard to what his task is.”
Though it’s a relatively small role, Wood relished working with Cronenberg’s Chester Danforth. While Gellar says she was tempted to ask for tips from her on-screen father—“It was funny, after every take, I would say, ‘What do you think? Do you have any notes for me?’ And he would look at me and he’d be like, ‘I’m not the director.’”—horror nut Wood, who has his own genre production studio, SpectreVision, was nervous to ask for stories from the genre auteur.
“He was incredibly forthcoming, really lovely, and such a sweet individual,” Wood says.
Gore Galore
With the players in place and the rules established, the game is afoot. What results is massive carnage, including notable setpieces dubbed “death by washing machine,” “bride on bride,” and what Radio Silence refers to as “the paffening.” No spoilers here, but there are complex stunts and a lot of gore. Specifically, 325 gallons of blood, with 100 gallons for the “paffening” alone, which required 14 huge pneumatic cannons, according to Radio Silence.
The two say that they are sticklers for practical effects, meaning the set becomes hard to be in after some of the major moments (“you don’t wear your nice shoes to work,” jokes Gillett).
Weaving and Newton bear the brunt of the onslaught, but both knew what they were getting into after Ready or Not and Abigail.
“You just have to be in acceptance. Otherwise, why are we doing a second one?” Weaving considers. “I think a big reason why we wanted to do another one was that we had so much fun. It’s camp, you’re gonna be cold and sticky and uncomfortable, but it’s also gonna be fun.” Indeed, Weaving lost the security deposit on her apartment after the first film due to the blood stains she left behind.
“They must have thought some serial killer had lived there!” she laughs. “The bathtub was stained pink from all the blood coming out of my hair, and there were just trails of fake syrup blood everywhere. Fair enough, by the way, it’s really hard to get out. They were going, ‘You’re not getting your deposit back because that apartment is pink now.’ Yeah, sign of a good time.”
Fun with Frights
At the end of the day, on top of the politics and kills, Ready or Not 2is a really good time. It’s the kind of good time that Radio Silence have developed as their calling card over the last decade and more.
“We want to put our characters through something really tough, and we want to see them make it out the other side having learned something about themselves. The world is a scary place, and I think we want our movies to be an escape from that,” Gillett says.
It’s an emerging trend in horror where stories can be taken seriously while also being gory, funny, and wild.
“There’s nothing silly about this movie,” Newton says. “That movie is hilarious, the original, but it’s also very grounded. So we had to be careful not to go too big.” The actor even recalls one of her main notes from Radio Silence was not to be “too funny.”
The GOAT Goat
The final showdown in Ready or Not: Here I Come is as massive and outrageous as anything Radio Silence has done, with most of the cast gathered together, decked out in spectacular costumes, not least of which include the Lawyer’s incredible hat and Grace’s new dress.
“It’s one of the best dresses I’ve ever worn,” Weaving says. “The train was so long, though, and I had to work with a goat.”
Ah, yes, the goat. Adding to the general melee is a farm animal, which has to kneel on command.
“The goat was terrified of the dress, thought it was like a long snake or something,” Weaving continues. “So it was a little tricky when it was 4 a.m., and the sun was coming up, and we had to get this shot, and this goat was not a fan of this dress at all.”
Crowd Pleaser
At the time of our interviews, the cast and team hasn’t yet seen the film with a theatrical audience. The movie premieres at SXSW, and the gang cannot wait to witness the reactions of the crowd. Bettinelli-Olpin equates it to being in a band.
“When you’re in a band and you play a live show, that’s the moment. It’s not the recording, it’s the interaction with the audience, and I think that we’re always searching for that feeling with our movies. Hopefully they play great at home, but they play much differently in a theater when you’re surrounded by people having the same experience, and where there is a very real moment-to-moment interaction with the audience.”
Contemporary and grounded, but also exploring ancient mythology, there could even be scope for a third installment.
“We didn’t save any good ideas to use later,” says Gillett. “We want the audience to feel like they are getting a complete and satisfying story from beginning to end, and there’s no tease or tag, or ‘to be continued.’ [But] given the way we expand the mythology in this one, there’s certainly a bonkers, absurdist way of continuing the saga, and we’re here for it should it happen.” For now, sit back, enjoy, and let the combustion commence.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come premieres at SXSW on March 13 and opens wide in theaters on March 20.
Daredevil: Born Again’s Central Romance is the Most Comic Accurate Part of the Show
You might think that the Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Againshould be about Matt Murdock putting on a bright red devil costume and leaping along the rooftops of buildings to fight supervillains like Stilt-Man and Mr. Hyde. After all, the show is based on a Marvel comic book, and superhero comics are primarily concerned with good guys and bad guys punching each other in the face.
But like all the other comics that began with the dawn of the Marvel Age in the 1960s, Daredevil has always been just as much about Matt’s romantic relationships, something that will be a focus in season two of Born Again.
Deborah Ann Woll told The Direct that her character Karen Page and Matt Murdock, played by Charlie Cox, will find themselves getting even closer in the show’s second season, not necessarily in the way they would have hoped. “I think from where we left everything off last season, they have a really big job ahead of them. Matt and Karen are both loners, and so they are pretty much the only other person that the other one has left,” she explained. “And so I think there’s a dependence and a reliance and a support of one another that you know will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
That will probably play out badly, for a number of reasons, not least of is that Matt is dating therapist Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva). The two certainly seem to be headed for a breakup at the end of season one, for reasons that include Heather’s new job working for Mayor Fisk and her research, which takes a skeptical view of masked vigilantes in general. But the biggest reason they’re going to end is the same reason that Karen and Matt find themselves together again: because Matt Murdock sucks at relationships.
Matt’s inability to keep a steady girlfriend comes directly from the comics. Unlike Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, or Superman—people who more or less always end up with Mary Jane, Steve Trevor, or Lois Lane—Matt Murdock has never truly had a single partner. Karen Page was introduced in that role way back when 1964’s Daredevil #1 called her “Gorgeous Karen Page” on the font cover. Yet, she eventually fell away, replaced by various other love interests, including Heather Glenn (a troubled socialite in the comics, not a therapist), assassin Elektra Natchios, District Attorney Kirsten McDuffie, and more. And each and every time, the relationships end badly.
The relationships fail because of an aspect of Matt’s personality that Frank Miller underscored in his reinvention of the character in the 1980s, an aspect that’s driven all of the great Daredevil runs that followed. Matt Murdock is a man against himself, a guilty Catholic who dresses up like the Devil. There’s a self-destructiveness to Daredevil that makes him both alluring and untenable, someone who women cannot resist, but who they must leave for their own well-being.
As Woll’s comments indicate, leaving Matt is going to be difficult in the second season of Born Again. The first season ended with Mayor Fisk declaring martial law in New York and sending his Anti-Vigilante Task Force against anyone who crosses him, especially Daredevil. As she and Matt both continue to grieve their late friend Foggy Nelson, and as Fisk turns up the heat on both of them, Karen will once again be stuck with Daredevil.
They’re sure to have some passionate times together, but it will just as certainly end as badly as every other Matt Murdock relationship, in the comics or on TV.
Daredevil: Born Again season two premieres on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.
Corey Parker’s Most Underrated ‘80s Movie Feels More Relevant Than Ever
After news arrived that Corey Parker had died of cancer at 60 this March, loving tributes flooded in for the Memphis-born actor, who had starred in such ’80s movies as Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, Scream for Help, and Biloxi Blues, before also becoming an acting coach for shows like Ms. Marvel in later years. Less spoken about was the underrated How I Got Into College, in which Parker starred as Marlon Browne, an underachiever who pulls out all the stops to get admitted to the same college as his talented high school crush, Jessica Kailo (Lara Flynn Boyle.)
The film did not do well, critically or commercially, and curious cinephiles seeking it out in the decades since its release have found it hard to get hold of. That’s a real shame, because where the themes of other ’80s teen comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and Porky’s have aged like milk, How I Got Into College deals with a coming-of-age scenario that feels more relevant than ever.
In Savage Steve Holland’s lesser-known 1989 movie, we follow a group of young characters whose post-high-school worth is suddenly defined by their academic achievements. The endearing Marlon seems to be a hopeless case, while two African-American seniors from Detroit also have to fight for consideration by the admissions team at Ramsey College. On the team is the sneering Leo (Charles Rocket) who is entirely focused on SAT scores and clashes with former students Kip and Nina (Anthony Edwards and Finn Carter) who want to take a more holistic approach to admissions.
Satirizing a system that prioritizes credentials over character and attempting to break the myth of “the perfect applicant,” How I Got Into College explores whether the will to push forwards into higher education is enough and whether the ladder is being pulled up by those who have already benefited from it. The students applying to Ramsey College feel they need to stand out, whatever it takes, but this tale of their efforts still seems pretty quaint compared to today’s college admissions arms race.
The film certainly understood the problems of its time, yet it also became a harbinger for worse to come. The competition among students and their families to build the most impressive college applications has only escalated. These days, colleges receive far more applications than they can admit. Academic credentials alone are no longer enough to stand out from the crowd, but not in the idealistic way that How I Got Into College fantasized about. The movie also touches on the desire to pile up skills and the need for extracurriculars, like honors courses, internships, and volunteer experiences, that now plague so many college applicants. So much so that more than half of them rank the process as their most stressful academic experience.
The level of competition is just one problem for students who are pursuing increasingly ambitious activities to differentiate themselves. Some suggest that personal growth and genuine learning are declining as they race to outperform their peers, and as some fight to be noticed, they may also discover that there are even more factors beyond their control influencing the outcome. Federal prosecutors unearthed a major U.S. college admissions scandal as recently as 2019, where wealthy parents were paying millions of dollars to fraudulently secure their children’s admission to elite universities. Manipulating a path into higher education was apparently an option for some wealthy and influential people, so what chance did regular kids who bent over backwards really have in a scenario like that?
Ultimately, How I Got Into College’s dismissal of “the perfect applicant” myth was indeed well ahead of its time. It remains a sweet movie with a great performance by Parker, and more people should discover it on their hunt for underrated ’80s gems. Though the college admissions process has evolved since its release, it should hit home for anyone who has had to face this kind of intense, exhausting competition, or those who have noticed that privilege and connections can just get some people further in life. Almost 40 years later, these often-questionable ethics of success endure.
Elain, Azriel, Mor: Which Characters Will the Next Two ACOTAR Books Be About?
Rejoice, romantasy lovers! After five long years, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series is finally set to continue, with not one but two new books headed our way. Releasing in October 2026 and January 2027, respectively, the next installments in her sprawling story of a magical kingdom of High Fae, bonded mates, political intrigue, and ancient grudges are set to set the publishing world on fire.
No information has been shared about the content of these next two books — we don’t even have titles yet — but that doesn’t mean we can’t start speculating wildly about what (and who) they’re likely to be about. During her appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Maas indicated that ACOTAR Books 6 and 7 would be closely connected, pieces of a larger four-part story that will span several titles. (Yes, this also means an ACOTAR 8 is in the works. Buckle up.)
Here are some of the most likely options for the characters Maas might focus on next.
Elain
Elain Archeron is certainly the most likely pick for the lead character of ACOTAR 6. She’s tied to the bulk of the series’ current ongoing stories, and we’ve all been wondering about how the whole Lucien/Elain/Azriel triangle is going to play out for ages now. Lucien is technically Elain’s mate, but her deep and complicated connection with Azriel means that she’ll have to choose between the two sooner or later. (Preferably sooner.) Plus, it might be interesting to find out what happens to those who reject that powerful mating bond we’ve spent so much of this series hearing about.
She’s also the last of the three Acheron sisters to have her story told. The first three books (and a novella) focused on Feyre, and A Court of Silver Flames was Nesta’s story, which just leaves Elain to go. Maas has said for years that all three sisters would get their own books, and with so many outstanding plot threads connected to Elain, it just seems like the most natural choice. (Not to mention the right time.)
Azriel
While Azriel is almost certain to play a huge role if either of the next two ACOTAR books is focused on Elain — in much the same way that Cassian was prominently featured in Nesta’s story — wouldn’t it be interesting if Maas just surprised us all by giving the most mysterious member of the Inner Circle his own story outright?
It’s certainly possible. Though most of us have assumed that the bonus Azriel POV chapter from A Court of Silver Flames is a hint that Elain’s story is coming, it could just as easily be a sign that the book will focus on the Shadowsinger himself rather than Feyre’s sister. Or that it will be the focus of the seventh book, which Maas has said is connected enough to the sixth to warrant such relatively close release dates. After all, there are plenty of intriguing plot threads to dig into that have nothing to do with Elain, from his unrequited feelings for Mor and his growing closeness with Gwyn to the strange connection he (and his weapons) shares with Bryce Quinlan from Maas’s Crescent City novels.
Mor
Mor is an intriguing figure in her own right within the world of Prythian. Third in command at the Night Court, a trusted member of Rhysand’s Inner Circle, and the overseer of both the Court of Nightmares and the Court of Dreams, she’s got a whole lot going on without the messy business of Feyre and her sisters crashing into her life.
Beyond her role in the larger story of ACOTAR, Mor has a tremendous amount of personal trauma and history worth unpacking in greater detail. She’s got mysterious powers we don’t actually know all that much about, has survived both assault and abandonment, and is such a badass fighter that she’s still a legend to the Mortal Queens in the human world. (Don’t believe me? Google “Morrigan” sometime.) She has complicated personal relationships with almost every other major character on the series’s canvas, and a demeanor that implies she’s much more than she initially appears to be. (Plus, who doesn’t want to see if all those Mor and Emerie relationship hints pay off?)
Amren
This is almost certainly not happening (or at least, not right now), but a girl can dream.
Surely we deserve to finally see the backstory of this bizarre, incredibly powerful (dare I say angel-like) being from another world who has somehow bound herself to a High Fae body? Is she, as the most popular fan theories attest, actually an Asteri from the Cresecent City universe who has fled to the world of Prythian? The people want to know.
Nesta
Yes, yes, technically, the series’s fifth book, A Court of Silver Flames, was already about Nesta. But Feyre got a three-book trilogy dedicated to her story, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that her sister might too. (Especially since Nesta was involved in the ACOTAR/Crescent City crossover that took place in that series’s third book.)
The Orville Season 4 Gets an Unexpected Update
After the Kelvin timeline emerged to revitalize Star Trek in 2009, there were hits and misses, but the most unlikely hit of all had nothing to do with the official content being pushed out by Paramount.
Inspired by The Original Series and The Next Generation, Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville was a love letter to Trek’s past, and after a wobbly first season in which the show struggled to find its tone amid jokes woven into the script by the Family Guy creator and his writing team, The Orville suddenly hit its stride. The next two seasons were straight up terrific, and Trek fans began to give it a chance.
Arguably, The Orville has since become known as the best “Star Trek” series of modern times, which is why it feels so frustrating that four years after The Orville: New Horizons debuted, a fourth season still hasn’t made its way to our screens. However, that doesn’t mean that any interest in making season 4 has waned. MacFarlane has confirmed in a recent interview with THR that he simply hasn’t found the time to do it.
“I will be honest with you: season 4 is written. It’s just a question of when we have the time to produce it,” MacFarlane said, adding, “The 10 scripts are done. I’m the problem. It’s [a matter of] when I can make that my year, with all the other stuff we have in the works. But we can hit the ground running when it happens.”
Set in the 25th century and following the exploratory missions of the titular spaceship, The Orville is shaped around the classic Trek model of an earnest crew encountering new civilizations, which naturally forces them to explore political dilemmas and ethical challenges across the galaxy. At the center of all this is MacFarlane’s Captain Ed Mercer, a capable but occasionally awkward leader who has to try and prove he’s got the stuff while also reckoning with the strengths and weaknesses of his crew, including ex-wife Commander Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki.)
The third season of The Orville debuted on Hulu to rave reviews in the wake of the Disney-Fox merger, and ever since its last bittersweet episode was released in 2022, fans have longed for a continuation. Hopefully, MacFarlane will find time to add season 4 to his busy schedule, but who knows how many cigarettes Bortus could smoke between now and then?
“Life Had Moved On” – Outlander Stars Open Up On Strange Aftermath of Leaving the Show
When Outlander began in 2014, it promised to be a time-traveling epic that would span decades in the lives of Claire Randall, Jamie Fraser, Brianna Fraser MacKenzie, and Roger MacKenzie – all beloved characters in Diana Gabaldon’s celebrated books. Now, well over a decade later, the Starz show is finally coming to a close with its eighth season, even as prequel series Blood of My Blood continues to revisit the familial history of some of the show’s characters.
Actors Sophie Skelton and Richard Rankin, who portrayed Brianna and Roger in Outlander from 2016 onwards, tell Den of Geek that they had to process some rather unexpected temporal anomalies of their own after spending so much time on the hit Starz show, as they returned to a world that had moved on without them.
“No one prepared me for the kind of time capsule that Outlander was,” Skelton says. “When I left the show, a lot of our cast and crew had gotten married and had kids, but when I left Scotland and that decade of my life, I felt like I had to start from scratch a little bit. Life had moved on around us. I moved back to London, like, ‘I’ll hang out with my friends again,’ and now they’re all married with kids. And I was like, ‘Oh, life’s moved on. While I was in little old Glasgow.”
Rankin describes a similarly strange experience: “All of a sudden, it’s nine or 10 years condensed into what feels like the blink of an eye and so much has happened within that time. With social media, you’ll have reminders on your phone or memories, and you look at them and feel like it was like yesterday, but actually it was like seven years ago. You were in a very different place in your life, but you had that constant of the show and everyone on it. It’s a weird perception of the time that’s passed.”
Skelton and Rankin’s characters would be present at different points in both American and Scottish history throughout Outlander’s tenure, so they initially visited key historical sites to understand the past, whether that was the Wardlaw Mausoleum or the fields of Culloden. Skelton recalls that the duo’s visit to Culloden also involved a trip to a local bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest book in Gabaldon’s series. “The man in the store said, ‘They’re making a series out of this,’ and we were like, ‘Oh, really?’ We didn’t have the heart to tell him.”
The first episode of Outlander season 8 is available to stream on Starz now.
Daredevil: Born Again Teaser Features the Return of an Underserved Marvel TV Character
As seen at the end of Daredevil: Born Again‘s first season, things are bad for the Man Without Fear, even by Matt Murdock’s standards. Mayor Wilson Fisk has declared martial law in New York City, openly waging war against masked vigilantes.
But as we see in the latest trailer, Daredevil (Charlie Cox) isn’t fighting alone. He has the support of not only Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), but also his Defenders ally Jessica Jones, played by a returning Krysten Ritter. But the most surprising potential aid in the trailer is the one we only see for a moment: Tony Dalton as Jack Duquesne, the Avenger known as the Swordsman.
Of course, Duquesne isn’t new to the MCU. He first appeared in the series Hawkeye as the nephew of the filthy rich Armand Duquesne (Simon Callow) and new fiancé of Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga), mother of Kate (Hailee Steinfeld). In that series, Jack certainly had a chance to show off some of his swashbuckling skills, and he participated in the series’ central mystery, but we never saw him suit up.
That started to change in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again. After young journalist BB Urich (Genneya Walton) caught video of a masked vigilante using a sword to help someone in trouble, Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) directly confronted Duquesne, and even referred to him as the Swordsman. Duquesne tried to laugh it off, but by the end of the season, he was captured by the Anti-Vigilante Task Force and held in Fisk’s private prison.
All of that sounds like a set-up for Duquesne to fully embrace his destiny, one that brings the character closer to his comic book counterpart.
The Swordsman first appeared in 1965’s Avengers #19, written by Stan Lee and penciled by Don Heck. A one-time circus performer, Duquesne helped care for and train Clint Barton and his brother Barney, before the former became the Avenger Hawkeye and the latter became the villain Trickshot. Gambling debts drove Duquesne to commit crimes under the name Swordsman, but he had a change of heart and helped the Avengers, soon earning membership on their roster. Swordsman remained a member on the team for several years, developing a relationship with fellow member Mantis.
When Mantis was revealed to be the cosmically-powerful Celestial Madonna, she attracted the attention of Kang the Conqueror and his Variants, Immortus and Rama-Tut. Swordsman died to protect Mantis, but was resurrected years later as a member of the plant people known as the Cotati.
Since then, Swordsman has returned as both an ally and enemy to the Avengers, which only underscores his importance to the team.
In short, Swordsman might not be the most trustworthy member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. But as the teaser makes abundantly clear, Daredevil’s going to need all the help he can get in Born Again season two. If the Swordsman will lend his blade, Matt Murdock would be a fool to turn him down.
Daredevil: Born Again season two premieres on March 24, 2026.
Are Firefly Fans Being Trolled?
It can only mean one thing, can’t it? Nathan Fillion knocks on a door and Summer Glau answers asking, “Well, well, well. Has the day finally come?” Fillion nods and answers, “The day has finally come.” Spoken by actors who played principal characters in the sci-fi one-season wonder Firefly, this exchange would lead less skeptical fans to believe a revival of the show was in the works. Especially since similar videos of Fillion visiting former Firefly co-stars Morena Baccarin, Jewel Staite, Gina Torres, Sean Maher, and Adam Baldwin also appeared on the Once We Were Spacemen Instagram account.
Once We Were Spacemen, a title that also acts as a nod to their time on on Firefly, is a podcast co-hosted by Fillion and another former cast member, Alan Tudyk. Does this chosen venue mean the announcements are simply referring to guest appearances on future episodes of the interview series? Not according to the account comments, which clearly state, “Some of you have guessed convention, podcast, or cross-over. You are wrong.” The full announcement doesn’t arrive until March 15, though, which leaves a week for fans to tear their hair out in speculation.
Some commenters wax eloquent about the exquisite torture the possibilities these videos present: “I hope you all recognize that most of your fan base is currently perimenopausal and hanging on by the threads of our pretty floral bonnets,” says one fan on Instagram. “If this is a tease, we will make reavers look like golden retriever puppies.” With a week of the rumor mill ahead of us, misguided theories about a full revival are bound to arise, but what else could it be?
Firefly is no stranger to clickbait articles and false rumors of a reunion show during the 20+ years since the show went off the air, but cast members have always been clear that those prospects are unlikely at best and impossible at worst. Among other commitments, Fillion and Baccarin are currently involved with their respective cop shows, The Rookie and Sheriff Country; they even appeared in police uniform in their video tease together. And then there’s the fallen star of Firefly creator Joss Whedon…
The dominant theory at the moment is that the announcement will introduce a Firefly animated series with the actors lending their voices to the characters they once embodied aboard the trusty spaceship Serenity, and that would certainly be an exciting prospect. But the question remains: will the final reveal be satisfying to a majority of fans of the show, or will the build-up result in deflating disappointment? Either way, the danger that the videos end up being a giant troll is very real, despite the best of intentions.
In the meantime, it’s probably best just to enjoy the video shorts for their own sake. Watching Torres look wistfully skyward while Fillion confusedly glances up to see what she’s viewing has comedic and nostalgic value by itself, as does Glau displaying River-like psychic vision or Maher mistaking Fillion for a door-to-door solicitor. Captain Mal Reynolds has briefly called his crew together, and whatever results is bound to be “shiny” in its way.
Sarah J. Maas Wants to Make an ACOTAR TV Show on Her Own Terms
High fantasy television is everywhere right now, from HBO’s Game of Thrones universe and Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And even more heavy hitters are waiting in the wings, with big-budget adaptations of everything from Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing saga to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe in the works. But, despite the genre’s massive popularity, somehow we’re still waiting for a take on the most popular romantasy title of them all: Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses.
This isn’t for lack of trying. Tempo optioned the film rights in 2015, and the project progressed to the point where Maas herself teased an early look at the script, but it sputtered out soon thereafter. In 2021, a TV version was in the works at Hulu, with no less than Ronald D. Moore (of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander fame) attached. But it, too, was ultimately scrapped. Now, the project is back in limbo, but hopefully not shelved forever, at least if f the author herself has anything to say about it.
During an interview on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, in which Maas announced the release dates for the next two books in her megapopular ACOTAR series (arriving in October 2026 and January 2027, respectively), she also addressed the question of the television series we’re all still waiting to see.
Like Taylor Swift before her, Maas has reclaimed the rights to her works and, though she says she’s focusing on the books for the foreseeable future, she is also clearly thinking about what onscreen versions of those stories might look like one day.
“I have the rights back to everything now,” she told host Alex Cooper. “Getting the rights back to all my things has been a big part of my journey in recent years that maybe at some point soon I will talk more about, but right now my focus is on books, and it’s been a little while since you guys have had something, so I’m focusing on that.”
A Court of Thorns and Roses ostensibly follows the story of Feyre Archeron, who finds herself journeying to the magical world of Prythian after she accidentally kills a fairy wolf to feed her family. What follows is a sprawling tale of magic, royal fae courts, bonded mates, ancient curses, and complex political intrigue. And Maas apparently has a very specific idea about how it should be brought to life.
“Any TV movie adaptation is kind of like another facet of the worlds that I’ve created, and it’s something that I want to be in charge of—I want to be figuring out,” Maas said. “I want to be learning everything that I can. I’m a type A, like, control freak a little bit. I want to know everything about how it gets made—not because of that control but just because I love movies. I love TV. I want to be a part of that, and I want to see everything adapted the way I envision it and the way I know fans want it.”
While that insistence may (and likely has) hindered development on any onscreen projects connected to her work, it’s comforting for fans to know that Maas is so determined to adapt her works on her own terms.
“I don’t ever want to hear like, ‘Oh, we need to change this to appeal to XYZ’s demographic’,” she said. “I’m like, ‘No, that’s not how you make art. That’s not how I create my stories.’ So when I do it, it’s gonna be me, and I will dedicate everything that I have to making it right.”
Maas is also the author of two other popular romantasy series — Throne of Glass and Crescent City — which could also theoretically get live adaptations someday. And she’s as fiercely protective of those stories as she is of ACOTAR.
“I view it as my legacy in a way where I’m like, I put my books out into the world. That’s one way that the fans are interacting and seeing these characters, but the physical version of that needs to be aligned,” she noted. “It can’t just be someone’s take on that.”
Removal of a Beloved Torchwood Memorial Marks the End of a Doctor Who Era
Doctor Whofans are, as most of them will freely tell you, occasionally an odd bunch. From hosting conventions and traveling to filming locations to cosplaying their favorite Time Lord on the regular, it’s a fandom that loves its chosen subject hard. (And I say this as someone who’s part of it.) Now, Whovians worldwide are mourning the true end of an era: The removal of Ianto’s Shrine, a fan installation in honor of a popular Torchwoodcharacter that has existed in Wales’s Cardiff Bay for nearly two decades.
The shrine was created following the broadcast of Torchwood’s third season. Subtitled Children of Earth, it’s particularly memorable for its dark themes, super creepy aliens who wanted to steal kids, and the unexpected death of Ianto. The show had only recently begun to focus on Ianto’s romance with the series’ lead, Captain Jack Harkness, and many viewers criticized the decision to kill off such a fan favorite character as a prominent example of the “bury your gays” trope in action. Fans were so upset at this development that they not only created websites lobbying for the character’s resurrection and raising money for charity, but also an honest-to-goodness real-life memorial in Mermaid Quay, near where the fictional entrance to Torchwood headquarters was located in the show.
Visitors from all over the world would leave messages, flowers, stuffed toys, and other trinkets. (And a surprising amount of Starbucks cups.) But all good things must come to an end, and it seems the shrine will be officially dismantled this spring to make way for necessary maintenance work on the area’s lower boardwalk. It will apparently not be restored, though there’s no word about what will happen to all the materials already on display there.
Fans everywhere are quite upset about this development, and not only because Ianto’s Shrine has become a regular stop for tourists in Cardiff. It’s one of the only real pieces of public Doctor Who history left in the area where the series does the bulk of its filming. The Doctor Who Experience, a permanent museum-style exhibition that once hosted costumes, sets, props, and even a TARDIS, closed down in 2017.
But while the shrine itself’s days are numbered, the legacy of Ianto will live on. Per the Radio Times, a spokesperson for Mermaid Quay has confirmed that they “hope to work with the local community to explore a new plaque for Ianto once the maintenance works have completed.”
Outlander Boss Reveals the Biggest Creative Challenge Behind the Scenes
Starz’s beloved historical fantasy series Outlander will take its final bow this May, wrapping up over a decade of storytelling adapted from the pages of Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling books. But choosing how to do so has never been an easy task, showrunner Matthew B. Roberts tells Den of Geek ahead of the final season’s debut. “We always thought it was going to get easier. We were wrong. It always got harder.”
Roberts explains that when Gabaldon writes, she can access “any character, anytime, anywhere,” whereas the series has to tackle logistical problems that shape how the Outlander team tells its version of her stories.
“We found that when you deal with real human beings who have real lives, scheduling is probably the biggest challenge,” Roberts says. “If you hope you have someone for an arc that you want to do in the show, and you don’t have that character, then you have to figure out, ‘okay, how do we still get this story in the show, but without that particular character?’ Because we don’t have that particular actor.”
The show started out relatively small, telling the tale of former WWII nurse Claire Randall (Caitríona Balfe) traveling back in time to 1743 and falling in love with Highland warrior Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), but as Gabaldon’s books expanded beyond Scotland to Paris and then North Carolina, so did Outlander, along with the hundreds of extras needed to make its settings believable and historically accurate.
“Bringing hundreds of people out to certain locations is always challenging,” Roberts explains. “And we do have time and budget constraints. All those things are huge challenges. As Diana’s books upped the ante, the show had to do that as well.”
Despite the show’s challenges, both creatively and logistically, Roberts describes making it as an amazing experience.
“We were wrapping up the second season of [prequel series] Blood of my Blood recently, and my assistant put together all the crew photos from all the seasons of Outlander on one big poster. For the first season, there was just this small crew, and it just kept growing and growing. In the last one, there are hundreds of people, and I think that was the thing that really struck me, how huge Outlander became, not only in our lives, but in Scotland and for our crew and cast. It was pretty astonishing to see that poster.”
Outlander season 8 begins streaming on Starz on March 6.
SXSW VP of Music Brian Hobbs Teases 2026 Festival’s Biggest Shows
South by Southwest has long given stages to emerging musicians, casting them a wider line to attract new fans and adapt the scene. This year, many of those artists have the chance to perform at multiple locations over the course of the seven-day festival; a benefit to both the musicians and audiences that felt necessary for SXSW vice president of music Brian Hobbs, who understands the time and money people spend to travel for the event.
Coordinating all aspects of SXSW this year, which will be running in tandem for the first time in the festival’s history, is no easy feat. Hobbs invited the challenge as a way to make this 2026 SXSW stand out by meticulously coordinating with other areas of the festival, whether that be TV and film, comedy, or technology, to collaborate with even more artists.
Den of Geek got the chance to speak with the VP about all the innovations to this year’s music lineup and the artists and experiences Hobbs is looking forward to. Below is a transcript of the interview.
DEN OF GEEK: This year is especially exciting for SXSW because the comedy, film and television, and music programming are all running concurrently for the first time. What level of coordination and collaboration does it take to pull it off?
BRIAN HOBBS: We have a really good relationship with all the festivals inside SXSW, but this year music and film have been killing it together because they have some really great music documentaries and films premiering and then those artists are turning around and doing showcases with us. They’re already here promoting their films, so why not give the fans what they want, too?
For instance, that’s how the Lainey Wilson performance came about. Lainey is down here with a Netflix documentary and we have one combo with her team. Cool organic stuff like that comes together. I don’t know what changed this year, but the collaboration has been for the better and things have been running so smoothly. We have six high-level film and music collaborations, which is the most that I can remember us ever having.
There’s Charley Crockett. He’s been on a tear recently and spoke out about some stuff that country music artists don’t usually speak out about, politically, and we were like, hell, we’ve got to support Charley. So he’s coming with a full-blown film. He’s doing his film premiere and then headlining the Luck Reunion showcase. Los Lobos have a documentary and they’re going to come down and do like a pop-up set at the iconic Continental Club. Zhu, the DJ, did the score for a film called He Bled Neon and they’re doing an afterparty show and Zhu is going to do the DJ set there.
What was the selection process for assembling this year’s programming? What are you looking for?
By the end of the festival, we’ll have over a thousand artists, whether that’s solo artists or bands. I think our peak number ever was in 2015 when we invited 2200 bands. It’s wild, but it’s also too much! We had to book a lot of venues and it was really chaotic. We’ve found a really good spot now where we’re booking about 50 to 55 venues a night and we’ve got a thousand total artists booked. So that gives them more opportunities to perform multiple times.
We respect how much time, money, and energy it takes to come to SXSW, especially if you’re an international artist who has traveled across the world. We don’t want them to just have one performance once they’re in town, we want them to be able to perform multiple times in front of multiple different audiences and reach as many people as possible. We want them to have the best experience possible. We want SXSW to be part of your journey where you leveled up to the next level, no matter where you’re at.
You’ve also got some exciting headliners assembled this year, including Junior H, Lola Young, The All-American Rejects, and Gogol Bordello. Why did these feel like the right groups to showcase and represent this year’s Music Festival?
I’ll start with All-American Rejects because that came together through such crazy synergy. I’m doing a lot of music discovery when one of my team members, Berkli Johnson, and I were seeing these like pop-up house party shows that All-American Rejects were doing. We knew we had to figure something out with them. I looked up who their agent is and it’s someone who I have a really long, successful history of booking shows at SXSW with. I sent him an email and he was like, “Man, get out of here, I just talked to the band about SXSW two days ago!” It was like fate.
They’ve been so cool to work with and they’re going to headline our music opening party. This is my 13th festival and this is the biggest music opening party that we’ve done since I’ve been here. Then with Junior, we’ve been trying to get Junior for three years. I think some of that is the effect of his team seeing that Peso was here, Frontera was here. It makes sense for him to be here. There’s going to be people crying and falling out in the crowd! With Gogol, it was a situation of them coming through on tour and their booking agent hit us up.
We’re so fortunate with Lola Young, too. We’re so blessed that she kept us on her schedule because she trimmed her 2026 schedule down to just a couple of things. She’s locked in now and stuck with us. She’s coming off her Grammy win and she’s just such a dope authentic artist. She’s played SXSW before as a developing act, so now it’s so cool to have her on this side of things. That’s what this shit is all about. We love an artist who comes here, plays a small show, and then their career blows up – whether we had an effect on it or not. It’s just cool to see whenever someone plays some smaller shows and then a few years later they’re headlining for Rolling Stone at one of our biggest shows of the week.
You’ve been with SXSW for nearly 15 years now. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed in both the music industry’s trends and the types of people attending the festival?
We always try to either stay on the wave of the trend or like right in front of it. I think we’ve done a really good job of that, especially in the past five years or so. Our Latin music programming has just absolutely exploded through the stratosphere, but I also think that reflects the music industry in general. I mean, we just had Bad Bunny do one of the greatest Super Bowl Halftime Shows of all-time, in Spanish, and the explosion of regional Mexican music out here has just been like out of control.
Our Latin music programming has kind of mirrored that. It really started in 2023 when we did a showcase with Del Records and they had Eslabon Armado perform – they were the headliners – and the night of their showcase they were releasing their new single, “Ella Baila Sola” with Peso Pluma. It was played at SXSW publicly for the first time before it was officially released and now it’s the highest streaming regional Mexican song of all time. This year we have Sony, Universal, Interscope, and Warner all coming in just to do Latin music showcases. So I think that we were definitely ahead of the curve on that.
This year we have a lot of country, and we haven’t had a lot of country music in the past. We had a Garth Brooks show in 2017. We had a Keith Urban show and then some low-key Texas country stuff. This year though it’s the doors being kicked open. We’ve got Lainey Wilson. Charley Crockett. Los Lobos are back. We have a lot of really cool country stuff. That’s reflective of the music industry in general. Country radio used to kind of run it and now country streaming has blown up so much in the last few years. I think it’s opened it up to like a younger generation of fans.
I haven’t seen a huge change in attendees, except maybe a little bit less of the spring break party crowd who want to come to just party. We’re seeing more real, dedicated music fans. The industry’s not going anywhere so we try to keep everybody in mind with our programming, but first and foremost we’re always going to program out showcases with talent discovery in mind. We’re always trying to introduce somebody to their next favorite band.
Lastly, what are one or two under the radar selections from your SXSW Festival block that people need to check out?
I wish the whole team could answer this because everybody on the team has something that’s their speciality. For me, it’s a lot of the bigger stuff now. So it’s not going to be as underground, low-key. A band that I really love that’s coming this year is The Paradox. They’re in that same vein as the mid- to late-’90s, skate punk, pop punk explosion. You could throw a Paradox song in the middle of a mixtape with Blink-182, Goldfinger, and Less Than Jake, and they would fit in perfectly with them. So I’m super excited to see what The Paradox does down here. They’re playing a show at the Mohawk, which is the perfect venue for them. I expect some mosh pit action, some stage-diving, some real hot going on in the crowd.
There’s a guy from Louisiana, but he’s based in Texas. He’s a soulful singer. His name’s Gavin Copeland, but he fits in perfectly doing hooks on hip-hop songs, too. Personally, he’s probably the artist who I could see coming out of the festival this year with agents, labels, and people chasing him. He’s had some real success on TikTok, but his music is deep, soulful, Southern, and he’s just incredibly talented. I’m really excited to see him come down here and open up a lot of people’s eyes.
Heated Rivalry Show Creator Is Bringing an Unlikely Epic Project to Netflix
Though we’re unlikely to see the second season of everyone’s favorite gay hockey romance until 2027, Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney isn’t slowing down at all. He’s already announced his next project, and it’s something of an unexpected swerve for him. (Read: it’s not about Canadians in any way.) Tierney’s focus will shift from fictional NHL teams to Ancient Greece to tell the story of one of the most influential men the world has ever known: Alexander the Great. Netflix has given a straight-to-series order to Alexander, a sprawling epic that explores the little-known story of the young Alexander and his tutor, Aristotle.
For those whose memories of ancient history are poor, Alexander was the son of King Philip II of Macedon and rose to power after his father was assassinated by a member of his personal guard at a wedding banquet. Aristotle is still considered one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, a polymath who pioneered the scientific disciplines of biology and zoology, and greatly influenced Western thought through his ideas about logic and deductive reasoning. He also spent somewhere around three years as a tutor to Alexander during his teenage years.
That teen would go on to conquer the largest empire in history, which stretched from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle, and his military prowess reshaped much of the Middle East and Asia, founding anywhere from 20 to 70 cities, depending on who you read, most of which were named after himself or close friends. (One, in Egypt, still exists today.) He created centers of learning and trade that lasted well beyond his death, and some of his military tactics are still studied today. And he did all of this by the time he was just 30 years old.
Tierney’s series will be based on the novel The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, which is narrated by Aristotle and begins just as the philosopher arrives in Macedonia. But since the Netflix series is called Alexander, we likely have to assume that it will focus more heavily on the story of the young prince. Plus, since this show is also apparently a passion project from the same guy who gave us Heated Rivalry, it also seems like a pretty safe bet that it will, at least to some degree, dive into questions of Alexander’s sexuality. Same-sex relationships weren’t uncommon in ancient Macedonia, and though Alexander had multiple wives and fathered an heir, he also had extremely close emotional attachments with men, most notably his childhood friend Hephaestion, who also studied alongside him with Aristotle.
The title of Lyon’s novel refers to the philosophical principle of the same name, a desirable middle between two extremes, an idea that may point to the way that Teirney will approach telling this particular story. (Or maybe it’s just a cool title, who can say?) But either way, it’s going to be an interesting shift for him as a storyteller, and something definitely worth keeping an eye out for.
The Boys Season 5 Trailer Breakdown: Homelander’s Endgame, Supernatural Reunion, and More
The Boys are back, one last time. The fifth and final season of the Prime Video adaptation of the comic book series reaches its conclusion, leading to a stand-off between amoral cape killer Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the all-powerful and all-insane Homelander (Antony Starr).
Where The Boys began life as a nasty takedown of superheroes by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson, showrunner Eric Kripke has found a way to turn the unpleasant source material into biting political satire, and has even managed to insert some real human emotions.
We get peeks of all that absurdity and urgency in the latest trailer for The Boys season 5, so let’s break it down before Butcher and Homelander break it all apart.
Homelander and Butcher’s Endgame
“My power is absolute,” declares Homelander at the opening of the trailer, a declaration matched by images of him entering the Oval Office. “But I have a bigger destiny.” Over the course of the trailer, we learn that the destiny in question involves immortality, something Homelander can accomplish if he gets ahold of V-One, the original and still most potent version of Compound V. We’ve seen V-One at work recently in The Boys universe, as Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater) used it in Gen V to launch his own power grab. By the end of Gen V‘s second season, Godolkin had failed, but if an extremely powerful Supe like Homelander took V-One, the results would be different.
To stop him, Butcher has sacrificed everything, even becoming what he hates. He has been taking Compound V since season 3 to battle Homelander, which eventually manifested in a darker alter-ego with tentacle powers called Joe Kessler (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). While we get plenty of shots in the trailer of Butcher using his tentacles, it’s not clear how much of that is him and how much is Kessler’s influence. Regardless, Butcher seems committed to releasing a Supe-killing virus, even if it takes him out in the process.
Supernatural Reunion
To help him against Butcher, Homelander calls upon the one person who almost took him down, his own father, Soldier Boy. Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) has been frozen by President Calhoun (David Andrews) since his defeat in season 3, during which Homelander learned that the patriotic Supe is his father. The TV show’s depiction of Soldier Boy differs quite a bit from the comics—a point underscored by the trailer, in which Homelander insists he did not have sex with Soldier Boy—which makes their team-up new territory, story-wise.
However, the trailer also teases a far more familiar team-up, at least in the credits. Ackles is joined by his Supernatural co-star Jared Padalecki, seen briefly in the trailer. We don’t know yet who Padalecki is playing, but he sure looks freaked out about whatever he’s seeing, which means more funny reaction gifs for the internet!
New Roles for the Seven
As the Justice League of The Boys universe, the Seven have been in flux for as long as the series has been on the air. Homelander has largely turned them into his personal goon squad, and Firecracker (Valorie Curry) appears to be happy to continue playing that role. But the trailer also suggests that A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is ready to completely run away from his past as the air-headed jock who couldn’t care less about killing the girlfriend of Hughie (Jack Quaid).
Throughout the trailer, we see A-Train running past pro-Homelander propaganda signs and joining up with Hughie and Starlight (Erin Moriarty). Does all this attention mean that A-Train will be one of the big heroes of season 5? Or is this all a tease for an early demise at Homelander’s hand? If it’s the latter, then Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) is sure to be involved. The brilliant recent addition to the Seven gets lots of screen time in the trailer, but we mostly see her watching and reacting, which means that she’s playing angles that no one sees coming, especially not her teammates.
The Female No More
Even those who love Garth Ennis’s style of writing have pointed out that he doesn’t always take much interest in his female characters, especially the one woman in the Boys, named just the Female. In the comics, the Female is hardly human, a feral, nonspeaking figure who only shows hints of kindness to Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and respects Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso).
The show has taken pains to flesh out the Female, giving her both a full backstory and a proper name, Kimiko. Moreover, Karen Fukuhara has done wonders with her facial expressions and body language to give Kimiko a voice even before she could speak. However, the very fact that she speaks a line of dialogue in the trailer (“You guys are friends?”) shows that she’s matured far past being just the Female.
Resistance and Religion
Even though we’re headed toward the end, the series still has some new characters to add. We briefly get a glimpse of Daveed Diggs as Oh-Father, a Superman-like revival preacher. In the comics, Oh-Father leads Capes for Christ, the fundamentalist Christian organization for teen heroes. Eventually, Oh-Father joins Homelander’s efforts to conquer the world, but dies during the coup. Also, because he’s in a Garth Ennis comic, he regularly molests his young charges. Although the show made Ezekiel (Shaun Benson) the head of Capes for Christ, his death leaves an opening for Oh-Father, especially as Homelander plots his final mission.
Oh-Father’s charisma and religious rhetoric will certainly help convince some humans to submit to Homelander’s rule. For those who don’t, there are Freedom Camps, glimpsed briefly in the trailer. The Freedom Camps are one of the more obvious bits of political satire in the otherwise plot-heavy trailer, showing how empty patriotic rhetoric can cover a host of human rights violations in the world of The Boys as easily as it does in the real world.
Gen V Graduates
The spinoff series Gen V introduced viewers to the Godolkin University School of Crimefighting, a college for young Supes. As with everything else in the world of The Boys, not even the education system could escape the clutches of Vought International, and the series both expanded on the Nazi origins of the Compound V that gives people their powers and poked fun at influencer culture.
With Gen V seemingly concluded after season 2, the main characters are ready to join the big leagues and fight against Homelander. The trailer gives a brief look at Starlight recruiting Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), the one-time Seven hopeful who can manipulate her blood, and Jordan Li, who can shift between male and female forms (London Thor and Derek Luh). The knowledge they and their classmates gathered about the history of Compound V may be essential for preventing Homelander from gaining access to V-One.
The Deep Gets Deep, Bro
The Deep has a podcast. Of course he does.
The Deep (Chace Crawford) has been one of the most fascinating characters in the show, a himbo with gills who cannot seem to stop sacrificing his genuine (sometimes physical) love of aquatic life to his admiration for Homelander’s power. While actor Chace Crawford has brought enough pathos to the Deep to make us love him despite his many failures, that sympathy may come to the end now that the Deep has found his final form, as a manosphere podcaster with a co-host in the form of Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) on a soundboard.
The Boys season 5 premieres on April 8, 2026, on Prime Video.
“This Show Has Balls” – Jonathan Frakes Talks Directing Starfleet Academy Episode 9
The following contains spoilers for Starfleet Academy episode 9.
The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’sfirst season has to serve many masters. From a high-stakes plotline that puts the very future of the Federation at risk once more to the conclusion of the institution’s first school year and all the conflicting emotions that big change can spark, it’s an hour full of both big feelings and big threats. So it makes sense that the show brought in someone who knows the franchise well to help guide it.
Jonathan Frakes is best known for playing William Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but he’s also a talented and prolific director. He’s helmed episodes across seven different Trek series and directed two feature films, all while continuing to make guest appearances onscreen in various properties, including an extended run on Star Trek: Picard season 3. And, according to him, Starfleet Academy is doing just fine — despite the negative criticism the more youthfully-minded property is getting from some corners of the internet.
“What’s with the haters? This show is great,” Frakes tells Den of Geek. “Really, I’m thrilled with it. I think it has a real optimism. It’s representative of Star Trek moving into the future. I mean, it’s all really in the future, but this is after the Burn, this is after so much other stuff. There’s a lot of canon that is in place that Starfleet Academy is reestablishing itself in San Francisco after a hundred years, so there’s a lot for the hardcore Trekkies to dig into, to say, ‘Oh, okay, this is where they are now’ while still being [full of] surprises.”
Frakes takes the helm on one of the season’s more complicated episodes, which reveals the extent of space pirate Nus Braka’s plan to cripple the Federation, pays off a big emotional moment for Caleb, and sees Chancellor Ake break the rules to save a group of missing cadets. But for the man behind the camera, it’s the emotion underneath the action that was most interesting to highlight onscreen.
“Alex Kurtzman and Noga [Landau], they laid out the season in a way that I thought brilliantly gave a lot of the characters key moments to reveal who they are, which let the audience get to know them,” Frakes says. “So by the time I got there at episode nine, Alex had really already established a lot of things, including a motif of how he wanted the show shot. He shared the first two episodes with me when I got there, and he was using these new lenses, these anamorphic spherical lenses. They’re wide, but we could shoot very tight with them on people’s faces. And this episode, as you see, is filled with emotion for that kind of shooting.”
Though the season’s penultimate episode features a fair amount of action set pieces – a face-off between the runaway cadets and police, the sudden arrival of the Athena to rescue them — its heart revolves around a key character moment: The long-awaited reunion between Caleb and the mother he’s been searching for since he was a child.
“It’s really all about the emotions of these scenes,” Frakes continues. “Especially the reunion of mother and son. But my favorite is the confrontation where I lined up the cadets opposite Sandro [Rosta, who plays Caleb], and he goes down the line just reading them the riot act, ‘you’re full of shit’ and this and that. But then Sam turns the tables on him and throws herself into his chest. It’s such a great payoff for that scene that she can totally see through him, can see how much he’s struggling with what’s going on. It really shows off the relationship he has reluctantly developed with all these cadets with whom he was in such conflict at the beginning. So I love this episode and everything it teased up for Tunde’s [referring to frequent Trek director Olatunde Osunsanmi] finale.”
“300th Night” is the first half of Starfleet Academy’s first two-part story, and the events of this episode lead directly into the season finale, an episode that Frakes isn’t directing. But, to hear him tell it, a lot of thought went into the transition between the two halves of the story.
“Tunde and I have done this before on Discovery, where we did the two-parter finale together,” Frakes says. “The handoff takes place in that little medbay with the two actors, and he and I were together to set up the way he wanted to start. So certainly that, specifically, was in place. But when I prep, I prep. He’s around all the time. I’m very close with him, and we’ve worked together quite a bit, and we’re very competitive. He inspires me, and I think I inspire him, and we have a ball making stuff.”
Frakes also delighted in the opportunity to work closely with the “brilliant” Holly Hunter, whose casting he describes as “magical.”
“She’s spectacular,” Frakes says when asked about working with Hunter. “What brilliant casting! She’s funny. She’s so smart, she’s tough… and she works barefoot! She’s fearless. By the time I got there, it was clear she has a methodology for how she works. We had built in Sunday rehearsals so that we could go through the scenes in her office and on the bridge, because she finds her blocking organically. So she and I and the other actors and my cinematographer and the first AD, we spent hours going through the beats in the scenes and figuring out the blocking we all wanted to pursue, so by the time we got on the floor to do the scenes, we had a pretty good idea of where we were going to put the cameras. To have the privilege of the company giving us the time to rehearse without a hundred people waiting around for us to find a scene was a really good choice.”
Frakes himself once played a character who was known for his… let’s just call it a cavalier approach to furniture. His famous “Riker manuever” is so well known that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds even poked fun at it during a season 2 crossover with Star Trek: Lower Decks. (A move Frakes himself apparently found hilarious.) Hunter’s Chancellor Ake is something of a spiritual successor to this trend, draping, lounging, and sprawling across virtually any surface she encounters.
“I’ll tell you how Frakes reacted,” he laughs when asked about how his famous character might see Ake’s sprawling approach to interacting with the set. “When I saw that in the first episode, I said, ‘This is going to be it. This is the defining moment of her captainship.’ It made me smile. I thought, ‘This show has balls doing this.’ And she just embraced it.”
The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 1 finale premieres Thursday, March 12 on Paramount+.
Revisiting the Forgotten DC Animated Series: Batwheels, Vixen, Plastic Man, and More
In 1938, the DC Universe as we know it was born with the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1. An equally important event occurred three years later, when brothers Max and Dave Fleischer released the first Superman animated short. From that moment on, animation became inextricably tied to Superman, Batman, and the Justice League.
For that reason, DC has seen its characters appear in cartoon series that range from the goofy but influential Super Friends to the perhaps perfect Batman: The Animated Series to the exciting Creature Commandos. But not every DC animated series has been as influential or as remembered. So let’s look back at some of the cartoon adventures of DC heroes that haven’t had quite the same legacy.
The New Adventures of Superman (1966–1970)
Given how well the fluid and dynamic Fleischer cartoons are today, the Filmation series cannot help but pale in comparison. Even Super Friends and its spinoffs are more well-remembered for their embrace of the wild, weird DC Comics world than for their quality. For that reason, it’s easy to dismiss the 68 shorts that Filmation released as The New Adventures of Superman as janky time wasters. Indeed, they do suffer from stiff animation, inconsistent models, and voice-over narration that explains exactly what’s on screen. Yet, as silly as they are, The New Adventures of Superman does have a jolt of pop art energy that matches the hip Batman animated series or the comics published by Marvel.
The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure (1967–1969)
We’re cheating a bit here, because The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure is effectively the second and third seasons of The New Adventures of Superman. But we’re including it because enough material was added to Superman and Superboy stories to count as its own show. The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure plays like a test run of Super Friends, with Filmation digging deeper into the DC bullpen to give animated adventures to the Atom, the Teen Titans, and more. Surprisingly enough, the standout hero was Aquaman, whose underwater confines gave Filmation’s animators something to play with.
Plastic Man (1979–1981)
Few superheroes are better suited to animation than Plastic Man. The original comics by Jack Cole stretched the limits of the comic book form as much as Plas himself reshaped his body, and movement would only make his exploits more wacky. Some of that playfulness certainly makes it into the Plastic Man cartoon show, which eventually expanded into The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show.
However, the series mostly avoided stuff from the comics, making Plastic Man into a secret agent, replacing his comic sidekick Woozy Winks with a Polynesian man named (ugh) Hula-Hula, and eventually giving him a wife and a child called Baby Plas. The series was a hit for about a year, but the buzz quickly died, living today only as a half-memory for Gen Xers.
The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam! (1981-1982)
Like Plastic Man, the hero originally called Captain Marvel (now called Shazam, for copyright reasons) is uniquely well-suited to cartoons. After all, what kid wouldn’t want to see themselves in Billy Batson, the boy who gets Superman-style powers whenever he says “Shazam!” The series did a nice job adapting Captain Marvel’s whimsical adventures to animation, and Filmation hoped to capitalize on the appeal by pairing them with Hero High, a series about students at a superhero high school. However, the potential never paid off and The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam! ended after one season.
Swamp Thing (1990–1991)
As a big green pile of mush who protects the environment, Swamp Thing makes perfect sense as the star of a Captain Planet-type show. But the Swamp Thing cartoon that ran for five episodes across 1990 and 1991 was less a standard comic book adaptation and another instance of that strange ’80s phenomenon of making a kid’s cartoon out of an R-rated property. Instead of drawing from Swamp Thing’s more superhero stories, the cartoon followed the 1982 Wes Craven movie and the horror-focused live action series that debuted on the USA Network at the same time. Despite a toy line and a theme song based on “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, Swamp Thing failed to grow on kids.
Wild C.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams (1994–1995)
We’re going to cheat a bit here, as Wild C.A.T.s was not a DC property when the cartoon aired for one season on CBS. Instead, creator Jim Lee published the series through Image Comics. When X-Men: The Animated Series became a big hit using his art style, Lee managed to bring his Wild C.A.T.s to the screen. But like their comic book counterparts, the animated Wild C.A.T.s didn’t have nearly the same level of characterization or drama as Marvel’s mutants, and the series remains a footnote, especially now that the team is part of the DC Universe.
Lobo (2000)
Writer Keith Giffen may have introduced Lobo in the 1980s, but the character hit it big in the ’90s, when Giffen, co-writer Alan Grant, and artist Simon Bisely used him to parody the edgy comics of the era. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Lobo would star in a then-relevant and now dated cartoon series in 2000. A series of webtoons animated in Flash, Lobo offered 14 episodes of swears and gory, random violence, all presented in herky jerky movements that would stress the graphics card on your new Dell.
Gotham Girls (2000–2002)
Like Lobo, Gotham Girls spun out of the DCAU that began with Batman: The Animated Series, even bringing producer Paul Dini along to co-write the episodes with veteran Hilary Bader. Watched today, the choppy animation distracts, but the rest of the show is classic DC animation. While Dini and Bader go for a more comedic tone for the first two 10-episode seasons, the final set of episodes tell a more coherent story. Even better, Gotham Girls retains the great voice actors from the mainline Batman show, including Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn, Adrienne Barbeau as Catwoman, and Diane Pershing as Poison Ivy.
The Zeta Project (2001–2003)
Even more than Gotham Girls, The Zeta Project is the lost Timm-verse show. The Zeta Project takes place within the DCAU and has designs consistent with Bruce Timm‘s work on the Batman and Superman animated series. Moreover, the show spins directly out of Batman Beyond, following the Infiltration Unit Zeta introduced in season two episode “Zeta.” However, Warner Bros. wanted a lighter, more kid-friendly show than the other DCAU series, which meant that The Zeta Project felt very different from Batman Beyond. The network gave the show two seasons to catch on and canceled it after 26 episodes.
Krypto the Superdog (2005–2006)
Speaking of kid-friendly projects, Krypto the Superdog attempted to launch Krypto-mania twenty years before James Gunn made him a screen king in Superman. Krypto the Superdog comes from Batman: The Animated Series producers Paul Dini and Alan Burnett, but it takes a decidedly more silly approach.
Krypto (voiced by Samuel Vincent) is still Superman’s pet from his home planet, but he has now been adopted by a nine-year-old named Kevin, who thinks he’s just a normal dog. When duty calls, Krypto joins with fellow super-pets Streaky the Supercat (Brian Drummond) and Ace the Bat-Hound (Scott McNeil) to stop animal-based baddies.
Legion of Super-Heroes (2006–2008)
The Legion of Super-Heroes are one of DC’s oldest and most beloved superhero teams, having spun out of Superboy comics in the 1950s. But the Legion has yet to break out into the mainstream, in part because they exist 1000 years from the future, which separates them from more well-known heroes.
Across two seasons, the cartoon show Legion of Super-Heroes tried to fix that problem by putting the team into the spotlight. Creator James Tucker, formerly a producer on Justice League Unlimited, gives viewers a clean entry point by focusing on a teenage Superman (Yuri Lowenthal), who goes to the future to learn about being a hero from a streamlined Legion line-up, which includes visually-interesting characters Bouncing Boy (Michael Cornacchia) and Triplicate Girl (Kari Wahlgren).
DC Nation (2011–2014)
Again, a bit of a stretch here, but we have to pay tribute to perhaps the most wonderful set of DC animated episodes, the shorts that aired as part of the DC Nation programming block. Each short lasted a couple of minutes, and while some featured well-known characters—including a comedic take on the Teen Titans that eventually became the mega hit Teen Titans Go!—the best either went deep into character bench or reimagined familiar characters.
The Animal Man shorts starred Weird Al Yankovic as a particularly ineffective hero who’s more interested in pets than people. Indie comics legends Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer created episodes about the robot team the Metal Men. And Rich Webber of Aardman Animations created claymation versions of the Justice League for “Worlds Funniest.”
Beware the Batman (2013–2014)
Even to this day, Batman: The Animated Series remains the most beloved and well-known cartoon about the Dark Knight. However, later entries such as The Batman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold have acquired their own followings. The same cannot be said about Beware the Batman, the strange CGI cartoon produced by Glen Murakami of Teen Titans fame. The series paired a younger Batman (Anthony Ruivivar) with former MI6 agent Alfred (JB Blanc) and Katana (Sumalee Montano) instead of Robin. The series had some interesting ideas, but between scheduling shenanigans by Cartoon Network and its radically different visual style, Beware the Batman never had the chance to catch on.
Vixen (2015–2016)
Vixen is truly an odd series, and not just because it starred a perennial C-lister and played on the streaming platform CW Seed. Rather, Vixen takes place in the Arrowverse, and features cameos by Grant Gustin as the Flash and Stephen Amell as Green Arrow, as well as others from the franchise. Vixen itself isn’t a bad idea, as the character’s animal-based powers are always compelling and star Megalyn Echikunwoke gives a strong performance. But the exuberance that made the Arrowverse shows so exciting in live action gets dulled in animation.
Justice League Action (2016–2018)
Justice League Action is to Justice League Unlimited what Batman: The Brave and the Bold is to Batman: The Animated Series. That is, the silly, young kid-friendly Justice League Action doesn’t try for the dramatic depths of Justice League Unlimited. But it does take full advantage of the weirder corners of the DC Universe. Shazam (formerly known as Captain Marvel) gets a lot more attention than one would expect, but that leads to delightful moments, such as a story in which Space Cabbie (voiced by Patton Oswalt, of course) helps Superman and Hawkman protect the evil inchworm Mister Mind from Lobo. Thematically rich? No. Ridiculously fun? Yes!
Batwheels (2021–Present)
Even for a superhero show, the premise of Batwheels sounds insane at first. Its heroes are not Batman and Robin, but rather the Batmobile (Jacob Bertrand) and Robin’s car (Jordan Reed and Titus Blake) and Batgirl’s motorcycle (Madigan Kacmar). Also, Ethan Hawke voices Batman. Yet, the show totally works for its young audience by injecting the energy of the Cars franchise into Batman’s wonderful toys.
Beast Boy: Lone Wolf (2024)
Beast Boy: Lone Wolf may be the most forgotten of the forgotten series on this list, at least outside of the U.K., where it played on Cartoon Network. The 10 three-minute shorts find Beast Boy taking a break from the Teen Titans and going on his own adventures under the moniker Lone Wolf, fighting mostly animal-themed villains. The series splits the tonal difference between the original Teen Titans cartoon from 2003 and the far goofier Teen Titans Go!, letting Beast Boy do superhero things while still leaving plenty of room for silliness. However, after voice actor Greg Cipes was fired for reasons that are still unclear, the show is unlikely to make it to the US, let alone continue for more seasons.
SXSW Comedy Director Sam Schles on the Stand-Ups, Podcasts, and Game Shows of 2026 Festival
South by Southwest is known for showcasing exciting innovations in entertainment and technology, and based on this year’s hefty lineup, the 2026 festival will be no exception. Staying with the ethos of identifying and spotlighting emerging trends, the 2026 SXSW Comedy Festival is sure to deliver innovative performances by established comedic icons, while also spotlighting the next generation of comedy.
Sam Schles, the director of comedy for SXSW, is dedicated to showcasing comedy influenced by contemporary culture. In doing so, the festival’s lineup will feature stand-up comedians, podcasters, social media influencers, and improv troupes across a wide range of styles and formats.
The festival’s lineup, featuring heavyweight comedians Eric André, Bill Burr, and Chelsea Peretti, will showcase where comedy is now as well as where it’s heading. But beyond the big names, this year’s programming is rooted in discovery and experimentation; two facets Schles is proud to spotlight.
Den of Geek got the chance to speak with Schles about her thought-process behind this year’s lineup, the challenges of curating a wide-ranging program, and what audiences can expect from the 2026 SXSW Comedy Festival. Below is the transcript of the interview.
DEN OF GEEK: This year is especially exciting for SXSW because the comedy, film and television, and music programming are all running concurrently for the first time. What level of coordination and collaboration does it take to pull it off?
SAM SCHLES: That was actually a huge priority of mine coming in. This is my first year at the festival and that’s exactly what I wanted to take advantage of. I see comedy as this nexus point where there’s a confluence of culture. That’s all coming together at SXSW and comedy has an awesome opportunity to spotlight the talent that we have in a different way.
It made sense to look at what comedy movies and talent were coming through and featuring them as guests on podcasts or elsewhere. We’re working with the music programmers to see which artists can get invited into one of our spaces that highlights them in a funny or unexpected light. That was definitely top of mind for me when I started programming.
What was the selection process for assembling this year’s programming? What are you looking for?
I see it as an opportunity to speak to all the different types of comedy that are happening today, whether that’s inviting a lot of digital native talent or brands or shows that could pop up live at SXSW. It’s improv, sketch, stand-up, game shows, podcasts, and even drag and cabaret. I see SXSW as the perfect place to spotlight all different types of voices, so making sure we’re hitting all of those points is integral to what defines the SXSW Comedy Festival.
I’m glad you brought that up because the Comedy Festival in particular is not just screenings or musical performances. There’s such a variety in what’s put together. There’s experimental stuff that you’re not going to see anywhere else. Was it difficult to find a balance so that there’s something for everyone and not weighted too much in one field?
That’s always on the mind from both a talent perspective and a showcase perspective. It also speaks to the other festivals too. There’s this element of discovery alongside hearing from luminaries and the people that are at the top of their field. There are people who are disrupting, alongside the previous disruptors. We have our marquee SXSW stand-up showcases that pull in a mix across the festival where you might see somebody that you already know. You might discover a new stand-up. You might see a podcast that you’re familiar with or be introduced to one that you’ve never heard before. That level of discoverability, even if you’re coming to a showcase that’s presented by a certain brand. Hopefully it offers a taste that both stretches people’s appetites for comedy and gives them something that’s also a little new in addition to fan-favorites.
It’s so much fun to see talent doing something that you haven’t seen them do before. Something I’m really excited about is that we’re bringing CHAOS to SXSW — that’s Chelsea Peretti, Natasha Leggero, and Sabrina Jalees. I think a lot of comedy fans are familiar with them, but maybe haven’t seen them do this type of show before. It’s a great opportunity to see folks in different lights.
You’ve always done a good job at amplifying female voices and it’s encouraging to see that carried over into SXSW, in terms of the diversity of comedy that’s on display.
I think it’s part of what comedy is today. I don’t think it’s something that you need to be too intentional about. That’s just where all the comedy is coming from. For example, one of the partnerships that I’m excited about this year that’s coming here for the first time is Reductress. They’re known online for being feminist, but also just having generally relatable types of content. They’re breaking out more to stand-up. They have a monthly show at Union Hall in New York. This is their first time bringing a stand-up showcase to somewhere else.
Partnering with them and comedians that fit within the ethos of what Reductress is is something that I’m excited about. The headline for me would be that there’s something for everybody and something unexpected. It speaks to the roots of the Austin comedy scene, too. I think this is a very cutting-edge city in so many different ways. That was another thing that was just exciting to me about the opportunity of leading the Comedy Festival here.
Is there a broader theme or message to this year’s festival that you’re trying to convey?
That’s going to be something that we’re really growing into. The Comedy Festival has always been amazing, but it maybe hasn’t been as visible or people didn’t come to SXSW with a comedy show top of mind. I think a big focus of this year is integrating it more into everything that’s happening at SXSW so attendees know to make comedy a priority, too. It’s something that we can definitely grow into. If this is year one, then what can we do next? I think we have a huge ramp upwards from here.
Dropout Comedy is featured at this year’s Comedy Festival and I’ve just been so impressed with their branding and evolution. What about their growth has impressed you, and why were they talent that you wanted to showcase this year?
Dropout was one of the first people that I wanted to reach out to for this festival. The partnership that we were able to create with them this year was bigger than I even imagined. We have this ACL Live show that’s a Platinum perk exclusive for SXSW Platinum badgeholders. We have something for the public and something for SXSW and then we’re also doing two live shows in our venue with them. We’re doing a live version of Dirty Laundry and a live version of Crowd Control.
As somebody who comes from a TV, digital, and film background, Dropout is taking the model of what I’ve loved about working with comedians and developing with them. They’re able to talk to their fans so organically and I’m so impressed with how they connect with their audiences. It just felt like a no-brainer to me. This is the type of brand that is indicative of where comedy is today and what people want. They have interactivity, live, digital. They have all these different parts of their machine that are so cool and non-stop funny. I’m just completely thrilled with their partnership with us this year. I’m excited to see where we can take it.
After working in comedy for so long, what emerging trends are you noticing right now in the industry and how is SXSW responding to those? What do you see in the festival’s future?
Somewhere that SXSW is uniquely positioned to amplify, and perhaps hasn’t taken full advantage of yet, is how it can really grow in the podcast space, both in terms of comedy and other topics. We can really grow as podcasts and big emerging talent move into live spaces. I think that’s strangely been the biggest growth in comedy. It’s already a huge genre, but digital creators are moving into live experiences that aren’t necessarily comedy-first. For example, Mary Beth Barone doing the Golden Globes Red Carpet content, to me, is a no-brainer. She’s a fantastic comedian and actress.
SXSW happens once a year and it’s on top of a city with all these different people coming in from all over the world. I think comedy is uniquely positioned here to play an unexpected role. Even going back to like in the early 2000s there were those Fred Armisen music journalist videos. That kind of unique comedy has always been happening, but I want it to happen more. I want SXSW to facilitate that more and play into it.
What are some of the biggest highlights from this year’s SXSW Comedy Festival that you’re excited for fans to experience?
The big one is Dropout. We have three shows with them — three different types of shows. CHAOS is a big one for me. The Reductress showcase we’re doing. Eric Andre’s podcast is going to be here and it’s sure to be nutty. I have no idea what’s going to happen and I’m glad I don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re also really excited about our opening night. We have banger after banger every day, but opening night in particular is great.
Lastly, what are one or two under the radar selections from your SXSW Festival block that people need to check out?
Our curated showcases, like SXSW stand-up, you might not know the name of everybody in the line-up, but trust me, they’re here for a reason. They’re great at what they do and they’ll be your next new favorite. So if you want to discover somebody that you haven’t heard before or see an unexpected drop-in then definitely check out one of those shows. A cabaret and drag show is something that we’ve never done at SXSW before, so if you’re looking for a totally different type of flavor then that’s going to be happening at Esther’s Follies. And then, just for some good old-fashioned stand-up, bringing Reductress here for the first time just really speaks to audiences here in a different way.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 9 Review — 300th Night
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 9.
The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s first season is a story of endings and new beginnings. Set at the conclusion of the newly reformed institution’s first year, there’s a sense of success and accomplishment mixed in with the bittersweet feel that also accompanies major change. And there’s plenty of it. Betazed is about to be dedicated as the new seat of the Federation government, post-Burn. And an attack from Nus Braka and his Venari Ral seems imminent, as we finally uncover what it is that the space pirate stole back at the season’s midpoint. The kids have all finished their tests and assignments, and several are struggling with how to reconcile the people they were when they arrived at Starfleet Academy with who they are now.
Sam is struggling to reconcile her memory of her previous self with her newfound life, shaped by a childhood growing up with the Doctor. Jay-Den is embracing his new Starfleet found family by inviting them to become members of the Kraag clan. But Caleb, in particular, is going through it, torn between the life he’s managed to build with his classmates and friends and the one he thought he was meant to be living. (Look, his decision to reject Jay-Den’s invitation to join his family by way of a Klingon drinking ceremony was rude.) There’s a certain level of guilt at work here — Caleb’s had little luck in his search for his mom, but he also doesn’t seem to be dedicating all that much time to it anymore. He’s settling into a very different kind of life, one he never expected to have and isn’t supposed to want but clearly does, despite himself.
This interior conflict becomes very literal when Sam helps him realize he’s had messages from his mother for months, but he just didn’t come up with the right encryption code to read them. To the surprise of exactly zero people, Caleb springs into action without telling anyone what’s going on, despite having regular access to the most powerful people in his organization who might be able to help him get to his mom without putting her or himself in danger. But, because this is Starfleet Academy and we love some youthful hijinks, Sam, Darem, and Genesis end up getting sucked into his crazy scheme to steal a shuttle and cross the Federation border on their own.
He immediately plots a trip to Ukek, a planet just outside the border of Federation space that has a real rundown cantina from Star Wars vibe, full of rough types, criminals, and people living on the fringes. It’s also being targeted for annexation by the Venari Ral, the powerful group of marauders and space pirates of which Nus Braka is a member. And now they have more power than ever before, thanks to the Miyazaki-related heist he managed to pull off back at midseason.
Braka’s crew stole a very dangerous substance called Omega-47, a synthetic variant with apocalyptic-level destructive properties. A single particle is capable of shredding space and subspace so thoroughly that it makes warp travel through the area impossible, and Braka has managed to use some of the other high-tech weaponry to turn the Omega time-delayed mines that can be detonated remotely. This is all standard Star Trek technobabble that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the result is a nightmare scenario for the Federation, the prospect of another Burn-level event that might cripple warp travel and cut off all Federation worlds from each other once more, just as they’ve started to finally rebuild.
It is, admittedly, wildly convenient that Caleb manages to stumble upon his mother within roughly 120 seconds of beaming into Ukek’s run-down space market, but their reunion is very moving, even if it comes complete with some uncomfortable undertones. After all, these two people may love each other, but they don’t know each other anymore, and Caleb’s been on his own and making his own decisions for a long time. That Anisha steps back into his life and starts making choices for him is almost certainly something they’re going to butt heads about repeatedly in the future, particularly since now that Caleb’s achieved his impossible dream of finding his mother, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s meant to do next.
Your mileage may vary about whether or not you think he’d have left his Starfleet friends behind for good if they hadn’t all almost been arrested and/or shot, but his angry outburst toward Genesis and Darem seems to be more about forcing them to push him away than anything else. But it’s very evident that Caleb has had few people in his life he’s felt he can count on — his mother included — and really doesn’t know what to do with those who actually try and show up for him. And one of those people, clearly, is Chancellor Ake, who immediately starts breaking rules to save Caleb and the other cadets.
Ake’s guilt-based blind spot where this kid is concerned has been mildly to extremely annoying over the course of this season so far, and on some level, I wish this show were more interested in exploring some of the psychological issues Braka called her out on when it comes to her relationship with him. But Holly Hunter plays a determined avenging angel well, and Ake’s insistence that she keep the promises made to protect these kids is perfectly in keeping with the woman we’ve come to know her as. (Plus, the Doctor’s peak dad vibes the minute he learns Sam’s in danger are so great.) How she and Anisha will react to one another is something I’m very much looking forward to (hopefully) seeing next week.
“300th Night” is Starfleet Academy’s first real cliffhanger, an hour that ends with what appears to be Braka and the Venari Ral’s fairly complete victory. With Federation space ringed with destructive omega mines, the entire Starfleet fleet is boxed in, essentially leaving the rest of the galaxy open to a hostile takeover. Ake, Reno, the Doctor, six Academy cadets, and Caleb’s mom are stuck on the Athena’s saucer section, hiding just outside the minefield. They can’t get back to Betazed, the Federation can’t get to them, and they’re not exactly equipped for surviving on their own for very long. It’s…less than ideal, and that’s before we consider that Ake defied some very specific orders to go rescue her students. That’s a lot of ground for the season’s final episode to cover, but at this point, Starfleet Academy’s earned a certain degree of trust that the show will manage to pull it off.
