As the new year rolled in, social media became obsessed with traveling backward; 10 years back, to be exact, to 2016. At first, this fixation might seem strange as few who lived through 2016 are likely to remember it fondly or be eager to relive it. It’s become clear, however, that the nostalgia people are craving isn’t for the year itself, but for what we were observing in pop culture during it.
2016 was a golden era for television. Not only did it introduce new shows that would grow into cultural landmarks, but many series also delivered their strongest and most confident seasons right when audiences were most receptive to them. Looking back, it makes sense why we keep returning to these seasons as they captured something fleeting about that moment in time.
What follows isn’t a ranking of the “best” shows of 2016, but a case for why these particular seasons deserve a rewatch, and why returning to them now offers a glimpse of a cultural moment we didn’t realize we’d miss.
Fleabag Season 1
I’m personally nostalgic for the 2010s because it was when actress/writer/producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge was at her creative peak. While she’s now off to more mainstream pursuits (including Prime Video’s upcoming Tomb Raider series), I’ll always be grateful for her contribution to the “women behaving badly in metropolitan areas” genre in 2016 when she gave us the first season of Fleabag. Waller-Bridge’s writing alone is scripture; the script is literally called Fleabag: The Scriptures, and it reads like gospel for anyone who’s ever coped with their self-awareness with more bad decisions.
Fleabag almost starts as a comedy, but it quickly becomes clear that the central character and her story are much more than a funny show about a woman spiraling. Since it first aired in 2016, no other series has been able to present characters grappling with grief and self-sabotage with the same level of precision and emotional resonance than Fleabag.
While its second season is universally regarded as a TV masterpiece, what makes Fleabag’s first season worth returning to now is it marked Waller-Bridge’s leap from stage to television. The show carries the thrill of what someone testing that medium could hold. In 2016, that kind of creative risk felt electric, and rewatching it now is a reminder of how fun it is for a genuinely talented writer to break into a scene and bend it around their voice.
Stranger Things Season 1
No matter how you felt about the series finale, there’s no denying that the first season of Stranger Things was captivating television. I remember being sick and binging all eight episodes in one day, completely pulled into Hawkins, Indiana. This initial season captivates viewers in a similar way watching Twin Peaks for the first time does. While it’s admittedly not a perfect comparison, both shows use mystery and looming stakes to establish the sense that anything can happen.
If you cheated and skipped season 1 while trying to refamiliarize yourself with the series, you have to go back. Rewatching parts of the first season also serves as a reminder of just how deeply Stranger Things was embedded in culture in 2016. Like yes, I did own a ringer tee from Hot Topic featuring the fairy lights and letters Joyce Beyers used to communicate with Will. That was the climate at the time.
Season 1 also stands apart in a way the later seasons simply can’t, largely because of how fresh everything felt. The mystery isn’t too confusing, the world hasn’t been over-explained yet, and somehow the stakes feel higher than ever. It was a phenomenon before it knew it was one, and that initial spark is impossible to recreate.
The Good Place Season 1
2016 really was the year of ambitious sitcoms, but few laid the kind of foundation that the first season of NBC’s The Good Place did, presenting a batch of episodes strong enough to support a series whose episodes and themes still resonate nearly a decade later.
The Good Place also stuck out among the sea of cookie cutter network offerings because of its creative premise. The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop, who isn’t exactly an outstanding citizen but somehow ends up in a utopian afterlife and must frantically learn moral philosophy to hide her identity. The series took its time to develop, with major twists not revealed until the end of the first batch of episodes. Season 1 also showcased the acting chops of its phenomenal cast. The show propelled the careers of William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil, and D’Arcy Carden, who’ve all gone on to do amazing work.
The show also feels like a product of its moment, too. It was perfect for 2016 when a thoughtful and hopeful sitcom could still find an audience without being immediately written off. Creator Michael Schur has worked on many iconic sitcoms, but there’s a reason people point to The Good Place as a moment in TV history for its high-concept. It’s hard to imagine a show this gentle and philosophically curious given the same room to grow today, making it a nostalgic rewatch.
Girls Season 5
In 2025, young writers Benito Skinner, Ben Kronengold, and Rebecca Shaw swung hard with their series Overcompensating and Adults, exploring the awkward, hilarious, and isolating parts of young adulthood. While these series were all successful in their own right, they lack the restless self-reflection that writer/actor Lena Dunham poured into Girls.
Girls at large is a mandatory rewatch in general, but if someone told me they only wanted to revisit one season, I’d point them straight to season 5. It carried a certain veil of optimism and denial that perfectly matched the stage of life the characters were stumbling through. The relationships, locations, and careers the characters explored didn’t last, but the consequences of their choices in this season carried through to the end. It was also experimental in its formatting, making episodes feel more cinematic than usual.
Dunham, much like her lead character Hannah, didn’t always respond well to criticism. So when co-star Christopher Abbott left the show because it no longer interested him as an actor, she responded to that challenge by writing, in my opinion, two of the best episodes of television ever: season 5’s “Panic in Central Park” and “Hello Kitty.” The 2016 season of Girls was perfect in every way and laid the groundwork for the series conclusion the following season.
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 8
Many Drag Race fans view season 7 as the weakest installment of the U.S. franchise, so when the show returned, it needed to come back strong to shake off that lingering bad energy. Most people point to seasons 4 through 6 as the golden era, packed with iconic RuGirls who went on to become Drag Race superstars, regardless if they won or lost. But in that conversation, we often overlook what season 8 gave us.
The top four, Bob the Drag Queen, Kim Chi, Naomi Smalls, and Chi Chi DeVayne, remain one of the strongest lineups in the franchise’s history. Beyond the small-but-mighty cast, season 8 also featured some of the best challenge ideas Drag Race has ever showcased. Whatever AI-tools they use now to write and produce Rusicals could never hold a candle to “Bitch Perfect” from season 8.
Season 8 is often overlooked because it was short, but it also gave us one of the all-time best winners: Bob the Drag Queen. She wasn’t perfect, her runways weren’t always flawless, and her makeup has certainly evolved, but her star quality was undeniable, from her acting to the way she carried herself. Rewatching this season now, it’s clear how much talent and charisma it packed, which is why season 8 still feels special and worth revisiting.
Crashing Season 1
I guess Phoebe Waller-Bridge decided 2016 was the year to fully lock in, giving us two emotionally vulnerable and genuinely hilarious television gems. Although one may be far more widely celebrated than the other, that doesn’t mean her six-episode Netflix series Crashing doesn’t deserve its flowers.
Crashing follows a mismatched group of young people forced into adulthood, stripped of the buffer of being students. Faced with rising rent costs, the strangers decide to squat in an abandoned hospital where they form a chaotic, temporary family built on proximity and a lot of bad decisions.
I don’t think Crashing could work in 2026, but 10 years ago, being broke, emotionally reckless, and vaguely ambitious still felt romantic. In 2026, I’m sure our distaste of millennial cringe would completely change how Zoomers would absorb the show. Like Fleabag, however, Crashing grows funnier and smarter the longer it goes, capturing a very specific 2016 energy that still makes it worth revisiting today.
Netflix Presents: The Characters Season 1
Finding fans of Tim Robinson sketch series I Think You Should Leave who haven’t watched The Characters is a bittersweet discovery. It’s a shame they’ve missed it, but a thrill to introduce them to one of the funniest shows Netflix has ever made. Few comedy specials have topped the audacity of giving eight comedians 30 minutes each to star in their own sketch shows and just letting them cook.
Not every episode is a 10/10, and I definitely have my favorites (Tim Robinson and John Early, forever). But every single episode has at least one sketch so unhinged and memorable that it’s permanently burned into my brain. I will never forget Lauren Lapkus’ Todd Tyson Chicklet calling his mom a “binch” at Dick N’ Boners. It’s the kind of sketch that just rewires you.
The Characters also captured something from its era that feels rare now, which was a willingness to give up-and-coming comedians the space to fully showcase their voices. It trusted the weirdness of the actors’ comedy, and it trusted that audiences would appreciate that risk. All eight episodes deserve a rewatch.
Deborah Ann Woll Reveals How Daredevil: Born Again Won Her Back for Karen Page
Nobody stays dead forever in comic books. Nobody but Karen Page, apparently. Page died in a 1999 issue of Daredevil (written by Kevin Smith) and she’s stayed that way, as nobody cares enough about poor Karen to resurrect her. Deborah Ann Woll, who portrayed Karen Page for three seasons on the Netflix series Daredevil, had the opposite problem. She cared too much about Karen. She cared so much, in fact, that when Daredevil: Born Again showrunner Dario Scardapane approached her about reprising her role in the MCU, she initially turned it down.
During a Daredevil panel at the Rhode Island Comic Con, Woll admitted that, unlike her fellow panelists and castmates Wilson Bethel and Vincent D’Onofrio, she wasn’t so quick to agree to return for Born Again. “I have a lot of loyalty to this character and this story,” she explained, before adding, “on a personal level… I was a little bit hurt to have not been included the first time around.” That is, until Scardapane laid out his vision.
First introduced alongside Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson in 1964’s Daredevil #1, by Bill Everett and Stan Lee, Karen Page was a key part of the character’s supporting cast. However, by the time she had died in 1999, Karen was a fairly minor character in the series, and one not treated very well by writers.
In contrast, Page was an integral part of the Netflix series. First introduced as a secretary who gets caught in Wilson’s Fisk’s machinations, and later an employee of Nelson and Murdock, Page soon becomes a more complicated character who has her own storylines, separate from the title superhero. Much of the character’s success owes to Woll’s portrayal of Karen as a person who works through her past issues and, crucially, knows how to walk away from Matt’s self-destructive behavior.
Woll and her co-star Elden Henson made Karen and Foggy into fan-favorites. Yet, the original version of Daredevil: Born Again did not include those characters, one of many decisions that worried fans and stars Charlie Cox and D’Onofrio. When the show retooled midway through production and Scardapane came aboard as show runner, Karen and Foggy were reintegrated into the show… as long as Woll agreed.
“Darrio had some great ideas, and he really sold me on the story,” Woll recalled, which brought back her initial interest in Karen. “Even when I first got the job back in 2014, I needed to know who this character is,” she told the panel attendees. “Because if she’s just going to be someone’s girlfriend, I don’t want to do it.”
In the case of Born Again, Woll learned that Karen would indeed be absent from much of the middle part of the series, as Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead needed to use footage that was already shot for the show. However, she would be a key part in the first episode, in which Bullseye kills Foggy, driving Matt to run from his friends and his duties as Daredevil. Further, Karen would be an important character in the final episodes, helping Matt as he resumes his vigilante identity.
With Woll back for Daredevil: Born Again season 2, which Scardapane gets to produce without any of the previous showrunners’ baggage, Karen will likely have even more to do. This second season follows Matt and Karen as they put together a resistance against Mayor Fisk, who has instituted martial law on New York City.
Things may not be going great for Matt and Karen, but for herself, Woll is optimistic. “I’m glad to be back, it all worked out,” she concluded. And even if that means more suffering for Karen, at least it also means that somebody cares about her.
Daredevil: Born Again season two streams on Disney+ on March 24, 2026.
Supergirl’s Puppy Bowl Promo Continues the New DCU’s Cute Animal Focus
Avengers: Doomsday is not expected to premiere a new trailer during the Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean no superheroes will show up this Sunday. Milly Alcock will be promoting Supergirl at the other big game this weekend, the Puppy Bowl.
Obviously, Supergirl has a pretty clear connection to the Puppy Bowl, as Superman established that Krypto is her dog. After arriving at the end of that movie to retrieve her unruly pup from her cousin, she immediately blasts off to space with him in tow, setting off the adventure that unfolds in Supergirl.
However, Krypton is hardly the only super-pet in the DC Universe. In fact, DC Comics is filled with critters with all sorts of powers, and it’s about time that they start showing up in the movies and TV shows.
When Otto Binder, Curt Swan, and Sy Barry introduced Krypton the Superdog in 1955’s Adventure Comics #210, he was just an extension of the Superboy stories they were telling. Superboy chronicled the adventures of teenaged Clark Kent, when he lived on the farm in Smallville, before he went off to Metropolis. Like any Midwestern boy of the Eisenhower era, Clark needed a dog, and thus Krypto was born.
Not only did Krypto fit perfectly with the low-stakes nature of these early Silver Age tales, in which Superboy dealt with pranks and shenanigans more than he did fighting supervillains, but he also became an immediate fan favorite. DC responded by bringing in more and more superpets. Batman got Ace the Bat-Hound months later in Batman #92. Beppo the Supermonkey showed up in a 1959 issue of Superboy. Supergirl got a pet in the form of Streaky the Supercat in 1960’s Adventure Comics #261, and then Comet the Super-Horse two years later in Adventure Comics #293.
Together with Proty II, the shape-shifting glop of something who hung around with Chameleon Boy in the Legion of Super-Heroes, they formed the Legion of Super-Pets, a team that took care of problems when their owners were indisposed. And then there was the time that Comet turned into a human and Supergirl fell in love with him, but that’s been thankfully retconned away.
In addition to super-pets, DC has a host of other animal characters who aren’t companions to another hero. There’s the evil Gorilla Grodd and his noble opposite Solovar from Gorilla City. Detective Chimp, a chimpanzee in a deerstalker cap, may be even a greater sleuth than Batman. Giant apes Titano and the Ultra-Humanite battle the Justice League, while the squirrels Ch’p and B’dg and the former house cat Dex-Starr all exist in the Green Lantern mythos. And that’s not even getting into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, superheroes from a universe filled with funny animals.
For a long time, super-pets and evil gorillas were embarrassments to superfans. Sure, they might show up in a kid-focused property like the various Krypto cartoon series that get produced. But you’d never see them in a major motion picture.
All of that changed with Superman, in which the arrival of Krypto was a key part of the first trailer. Krypto appears again in promotional material for Supergirl, but he’s not just there to carry over a popular character from one movie to another. Krypto’s return in Supergirl shows that James Gunn is ready to bring even the silliest parts of the DC Comics universe onto the big screen—and it’s not just the comic book fans who love it.
Supergirl arrives on June 26, 2026.
Blue Beetle Deserves to Return in the New DCU
Jaime Reyes didn’t set out to be a hero. As seen throughout the 2023 movie Blue Beetle, Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) was thrust into the role when a powerful alien scarab ended up in his possession and later bonded with him. Taking the name of Blue Beetle, the superhero identity of missing inventor Ted Kord, Jaime fights against Ted’s weapons-dealing sister Victoria (Susan Sarandon), protecting his family and putting an end to Victoria’s war machines. Yet, since that victory, Blue Beetle has never been seen again.
According to Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto, the story isn’t over. “I don’t think that chapter has been closed,” Soto told CBR. “I’ve had friendly conversations with [DC Studios co-head] Peter Safran and John Rickard. And I know James [Gunn] is a huge fan of Blue Beetle, and he’s said multiple times that Blue Beetle is part of the DCU.” If that last point is true, then it is more than time for Jaime to suit up again in the universe.
The Rise of the Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle fits particularly well in the new universe that Safran and Gunn have created, because he’s a legacy character with a weird backstory. The character Blue Beetle has been around since 1939, initially created by Charles Wojtkoski as part of the post-Superman superhero boom. The character was reimagined as the superhero identity of inventor Ted Kord in 1966 and then brought into the DC Universe in 1983, where he became a fan favorite as part of Justice League International, especially when paired with Booster Gold.
After Ted was killed in an attempt by DC editorial to drum up excitement for the 2005 company-wide event Infinite Crisis, Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner introduced Jaime Reyes as the new Blue Beetle. Jaime was a hero in the Spider-Man mold, a regular kid who loves his friends and family, and whose new superpowers add extra stress to his life.
Although the 2023 movie transplants Jaime and his family from El Paso, Texas, to Palmera City, Florida, it retains the core elements of the character. Rather than present Jaime as a lone hero who must do his own thing, the film positions him within the context of his family, which includes loving parents Alberto and Rocio (Damián Alcázar and Elpidia Carrillo), sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo), along with his conspiracy-minded Uncle Rudy (George Lopez) and his grandmother (Adriana Barraza).
More than just supporting characters, the Reyes family add weight to Jaime’s mission. Unlike most power fantasies, where the hero grasps the power given to him, Jaime takes time to consider how becoming Blue Beetle will affect them. In fact, it’s only when Victoria and her right-hand man Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) threaten the Reyeses that Jaime fully embraces his role. And when the movie reveals Nana’s past as a Leftist revolutionary and ties Victoria to the real-world School of the Americas, then Jaime’s heroic journey becomes a continuation of his family struggle against oppression.
To his credit, Soto never lets these heady themes weigh down Blue Beetle. Its neon color palette and electronic score by Bobby Krlic infuses the requisite “neophyte discovers his powers” section of the movie with energy. Even better is Maridueña’s likable turn as Jaime, playing both the weight of his character’s plight and the pure delight of a teen who can suddenly fly.
The Search for Blue Beetle
As Soto notes, James Gunn has spoken highly of Blue Beetle. Although it went into production before he and Safran took over, it was released under their leadership, and Gunn took to the press to support it. Moreover, because it released after the events of The Flash, Blue Beetle sort of exists within the DCU.
Gunn, of course, has been dodgy on the details of the new DCU’s relationship to the previous incarnation. As Gunn told Den of Geek when speaking about Peacemaker‘s second season, nothing from the previous incarnation is canon until someone expressly declares it. Blue Beetle hasn’t shown up in any of the official DCU entries—we don’t even see the Golden Age or Silver Age incarnations in the Justice Gang mural from Superman. However, Gunn announced a Booster Gold TV series as part of his Gods and Monsters plans, and where Booster is, Beetle is not far behind.
For Soto’s part, he’s ready to go as soon as he gets the call, even if Jaime doesn’t come back in live action. “We have had conversations of how we can expand the adventures of the Reyes family via animation,” he revealed. “And if that’s something that finally happens, whether it happens or not, conversations have been had. It would be nice. I think that you can do so much with animation, and it’s also a fun medium that I’ve always wanted to explore. So if the movie gods and the people and our dear friends at DC and Warner Bros. see it fit, I would love nothing more than to continue to tell that story.”
That’s one prayer that we’d love the movie gods to answer. Jaime Reyes may not have set out to be a hero, but Blue Beetle proved that he is a hero. And the DCU will be richer with Jaime in it.
Blue Beetle is now streaming on HBO Max.
Send Help Screenwriters Reveal Plans for Lost Friday the 13th Sequel
One of the great tragedies of horror cinema is that the Friday the 13thfranchise does not consist of 13 movies. Worse, it has been stuck at 12 entries since the release of the 2009 reboot film, simply called Friday the 13th. But if the screenwriters of that movie, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, had their way, we would have had a 13th Jason movie years ago.
Speaking to ComicBook.com about their current movie Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi, Swift and Shannon revealed some details about their planned sequel. “It would have been Friday the 13th Part 13. We had big ambitions for it,” Shannon recalled. “I think it was called The Death of Jason Voorhees. Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees.”
That title will certainly raise some eyebrows among F13 fans, because Jason Voorhees has died several times. There was the excellent Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which ended with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) killing the masked murderer, a death that producers at Paramount intended to stick. And then there was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which began with Jason getting blown up to little bits by the FBI… only to reveal that he is in fact a demon worm that hops from body to body. Heck, the whole franchise is based on the premise that Jason is dead, since it was his drowning as a boy at Camp Crystal lake that sent mama Pamela Voorhees on a killing spree for the first film.
However, it’s important to remember that, a.) strict continuity has never been part of the Friday the 13th franchise; and b.) that Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees would be a sequel to the reboot film. The 2009 movie paid homage to the first three films by opening with Pamela (played by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame) being beheaded at the end of her murder rampage. Then, it went into an extended sequence of Jason killing people while wearing a bag over his head, as he does in Friday the 13th Part 2, before he gets his hockey mask in the movie’s present day, replicating the arrival of the mask in the third film.
Even though the remake did well at the box office and, according to the screenwriting duo “everyone loved” the script for the sequel, it never happened because of legal trouble. For years, original Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller has been locked in a lawsuit with producer Sean S. Cunningham, which has halted production of any new movies. Whenever it finally releases, the long-in-development television series Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela before young Jason’s death (or “death”), will be the first new entry since the 2009 movie.
For Swift and Shannon, that’s a shame because they had something really nasty cooked up for their sequel. “There were bigger kills. They were crazier,” teased Swift. “We had a really awesome zipline kill that I always loved,” added Shannon.
What does that mean? Swift and Shannon don’t elaborate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some of those acts of violence in a thirteenth movie. But good luck rarely has anything to do with Friday the 13th.
Send Help is now playing in theaters worldwide.
Pillion: Alexander Skarsgård Keeps BDSM Love Story Uncut and Intact for Americans
On a typical film shoot, Alexander Skarsgård can appreciate the expected mode of prep work. You meet with your co-stars and scene partners regularly, you discuss the motivations and the underlying subtext of an exchange, and you rehearse as much as possible. Time permitting.
The thing about Pillion, Harry Lighton’s simultaneously elegiac and kinky love story between a dominant and his inexperienced submissive in a queer BDSM biker gang, is that things stray far from the typical path. And that trajectory created a unique opportunity for stars like Skarsgård, who plays the dom, and Harry Melling of Harry Potter and The Queen’s Gambit fame, who portrays the half-a-foot shorter sub.
“We didn’t dissect the scenes throughout the shoot or sit and talk about where we wanted it to go,” Skarsgård says. “But it was also not a case of us avoiding each other either. We hung out. It wasn’t, ‘I gotta be in my corner and you and yours,’ and then we clashed in front of the camera.”
Be that as it may, it remained a conscious choice on Skarsgård’s part to not meet Melling until two days before shooting. There were opportunities, as Skarsgård acknowledges: “I was in London for stuff or we could have had a Zoom.” But while he talked with Lighton beforehand, who rehearsed extensively with Melling since the latter plays the film’s heart and soul, the Swedish actor kept some distance. “There was something quite fun about having this discovery and letting this relationship play out in front of the camera.” And it’s a relationship that’s left a mark on every viewer who has seen it to date.
When we catch up with the director and his two leading men, it’s at the tail-end of a press tour that’s taken them from Cannes to London, and finally now back to New York City ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere. It is, in fact, the second time we have met, the first being briefly after the picture premiered in Gotham a few months ago during a raucous New York Film Festival screening. At the time, Skarsgård quipped, “It’s gonna be a good afterparty, guys,” following a round of catcalls.
But there’s been curiosity, too, about how the film would release into American cinemas this Friday following its UK premiere late last year. Rumors continue to circulate that it would be cut significantly to earn an R-rating stateside due to the generally more puritanical notions toward sex scenes in the MPA. And to be sure, Pillion has some memorable ones involving Ray (Skarsgård) and Colin (Melling).
“There weren’t any cuts as far as I’m aware,” Lighton confirms to us. “I know that the version which has been released in cinemas in the U.S. is the same one which was released in the UK, and that’s exactly the version I want people to see.” He goes on to add that A24 was always onboard of bringing a love story as unorthodox but honest as Pillion to the screen, noting, “I think anyone who read the script knew what it was about. It was a very explicit script. There’s like five paragraphs describing an erection in the script. So people knew what they were kind of getting into bed with.”
But what seems to most strike audiences who’ve watched Pillion isn’t so much the frankness of the sex scenes, but the quiet universality of a love story about a young, impressionable person, discovering something in himself that might be unorthodox but fills a need beyond just desire.
The film walks a careful line in this way since the first scene involves Colin as a young, lonely lad on Christmas Eve, singing in an antiquated barbershop quartet for his doting parents and a blind date going nowhere. So enters the leather-clad Ray, the Mysterio biker who picks Colin up and invites him to a fairly physical first date the next night. One reading might be Colin is indoctrinated into a subculture. Another interpretation, which is also Melling’s, is that he has found his tribe.
“I like to think of it as that thing when you don’t consciously know you want something, but when something happens in your life, you suddenly realize, ‘Oh wait a minute! This actually makes a lot of sense to what I’ve been looking for or what I’ve been wanting,’” Melling muses. “It’s not like he’s thinking secretly, ‘You know what I need to be in? I need to be in a sub-dom relationship. That’s going to make sense to me.’ But the fact that this opportunity gets presented to him, and the fact that clearly he’s so attracted to this man, and then this dynamic is presented to him, I think things start to click. Things start to make sense about how he wants to express himself and how he wants to experience love.”
Exploring that epiphany is one of the main attractions to the material for Lighton, a first-time feature director who came to the material as an adapter. While the Hampshire-born Lighton pulls from Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill novel, he also made bold changes to the story, including by setting the screenplay in a modern context as opposed to its literary 1970s roots.
“Primarily, I thought the change made Ray’s mystery more interesting to me,” Lighton explains. “If the novel’s set in the ‘70s, when I think about why Ray withholds his background from Colin, there is quite an easy explanation for me: it was probably because he’s in the closet, which was much more common in Britain in the ‘70s than it is now. So I like the fact that if you put it in a contemporary setting, it opened up all these new questions. It could be an erotic game on Ray’s part; it’s not necessarily because of some kind of homophobic landscape he’s in.”
Furthermore, a 21st century backdrop allows Lighton to interrogate what is considered “normal” and what might still be construed as taboo, even with ostensibly open-minded parents of a queer child. As opposed to the novel, where Colin’s parents attempt to ignore their son’s homosexuality, Colin’s mother (a touching Lesley Sharp) and father (Douglas Hodge) are supportive—up to a point.
“[I wanted to] explore where the limits of acceptance are and what is an acceptable version of homosexuality in some people’s eyes versus an unacceptable one,” Lighton explains. “We see the parents go from acceptance at the beginning to some version of rejection, which in a way is the reverse of the normal trajectory you go on in a queer film where parents initially aren’t supportive and then grow to support over the course of the film.”
A big reason for the parents’ reservations though is, of course, Ray, a figure who by design remains aloof and almost unknowable. Skarsgård admits he has his own personal explanation for the choices Ray makes in the movie, yet even those shifted as they filmed the thing.
Says Skarsgård, “I noticed that throughout the shoot [my motivations] kept changing. I didn’t really know how Harry was going to play Colin, and I felt that Harry’s reactions in those scenes informed my version of Ray. So I felt it was a journey of discovery. I kept kind of revising my thoughts on Ray, not that I had a fully fleshed out backstory, but I had some thoughts, and then I was like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s not the case?’”
The evolution of the characterization was part of the pleasure of the shoot. “It was not scary,” the Swede continues. “It was kind of exciting to be like, ‘Oh, I learned something new about the character today. That was surprising!’”
The discovery has proven exciting for audiences, too, even those from a family of filmmakers. When we meet with the Pillion trio, it’s only about a week since Skarsgård’s father, Stellan, received his first Oscar nomination for Sentimental Value, a beautiful movie that Alexander has been fielding questions about all awards season. So it seemed prudent to ask: what was Stellan’s review of Pillion?
Dropping his voice down an octave, and adding a well studied layer of scratchy gravel atop his cadence, Alex leans back in his chair to imitate a father’s posture, and exclaims, “‘This is the movie of the year!’”
For more than a few audience members, he’s not wrong.
Pillion is playing everywhere now.
The Best and Most Memorable Super Bowl Trailers and Teasers
The big game is rarely about the big game. Yes, the Super Bowl easily draws more eyes than any other television event, but not everyone is watching to see the football. That’s especially true of nerds, who couldn’t care less about the San Diego Pie Pans scoring more touch backs than the Cheboygan Sea Anemones or whatever. Those nerds just want to see the nerdy trailers.
Fortunately, the one leads into the other. Because the Super Bowl is such a major television event, studios will shell out big bucks to advertise their films. Moreover, because they know that they have so many eyes on the screen, they do their best to make the movie palatable to everyone, even those who do care about the Pie-Pans and Sea Anemones. So let’s take a look back at some of the most compelling, memorable, or downright strange trailers of Super Bowls past.
Independence Day (1996)
Most of the 30-second clip that 20th Century Fox aired during the Super Bowl contains exactly what you’d expect from the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. No shots of stars Jeff Goldblum or Will Smith, just lots of ominous images of shadows looming over various locations, with random extras looking up in awe. Of course, this builds to the movie’s money shot, a beam blowing up the White House. It’s effective and exciting, but the best part of the clip comes right at the end, when it declares, “Enjoy the Super Bowl… It may be your last.”
Daredevil (2003)
20th Century Fox really thought they had something back in 2003. The Daredevil clip that aired during the Super Bowl for that year promises superhero action, with lots of shots of Ben Affleck as the Man Without Fear bending backwards to dodge a throwing star or swinging from a building. Between the brightly-lit action sequences and techno-infused soundtrack, the clip presents Daredevil as a good time, a continuation of the studio’s superhero hit from a year earlier, Spider-Man. It’s such a good clip that we almost believe it… but of course, we’ve seen Daredevil and know that the dour, plodding mess is a far cry from the movie teased here, let alone Spider-Man.
Troy (2004)
To see how much Hollywood has changed over the past two decades, just contrast the current marketing campaign for Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey to the Super Bowl teaser released in 2004 for Troy. Greek mythology takes a back seat to dreamy movie stars, as the names Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom flash on screen, proceeded by shots of each respective A-lister staring out from behind locks of hair. Troy‘s less-than-legendary box office receipts aren’t what killed the movie star, but the clip sure seems like it comes from a different era.
Batman Begins (2005)
In 2005, Batman‘s name was mud. Okay, we nerds loved the Dark Knight, but the average cinema goer still had the bad taste of George Clooney in Batman & Robin in their mouth. In fact, when this writer found himself at a Super Bowl party that year, he had to demand that everyone be quiet as soon as the teaser for Batman Begins started playing. Yes, there were chuckles and snickers, but between the bits of the Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard score and images of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne assembling the iconic bat-suit, something changed. By the time 30 seconds had ended, Batman had gone from a big joke to something that everyone wanted to see.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
When the first Transformers movie released in 2007, Paramount didn’t even bother buying a Super Bowl ad for the update of the ’80s toy franchise. Two years and $709.7 million in box office returns later, the studio wasn’t going to repeat the mistake. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen got a full press push, including a Super Bowl spot that highlighted returning stars Shia LaBeouf and Josh Duhamel, but especially the incoherent action that director Michael Bay provided throughout the 2000s.
Star Trek (2009)
To this days, Trekkies continue to bemoan how J. J. Abrams turned the voyages of the starship Enterprise into something that felt like a space dogfight out of Star Wars. Whether or not that’s a fair assessment of Abrams’s approach to the franchise, it sure describes the way Paramount advertised the 2009 reboot Star Trek. The 30-second spot is all cut after cut, pausing a moment for someone to say something meaningful or recognizable so we know that we are indeed looking at Kirk and Spock and Bones, but then moving onto the next action set piece. Nerds might have hated what they were seeing, but regular folks sure were thrilled.
Fast & Furious (2009)
Traditionally, the Super Bowl is the domain of jocks. But, as this list shows, Super Bowl movie ads are for nerds. No franchise brought the two together like The Fast and the Furious, especially after its reassurance with 2009’s Fast & Furious. The TV spot for that Justin Lin-directed fourth entry doesn’t foreground the excess and absurdity that would become hallmarks of the series. However, it does invite the viewers to celebrate the return of Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner and especially Vin Diesel as Dom Toretto, who had been largely absent since the original movie.
Avengers (2012)
Superhero movies certainly existed and did well at the box office before the MCU. But 2008’s Iron Man ignited a passion for cape and cowl pictures, even if the average moviegoer couldn’t quite imagine a shared universe movie. If Marvel Studios felt the weight of expectation, you can’t tell by their Super Bowl ad for The Avengers. The clip is all celebration, giving the viewers looks at their new favorites together for the first time, and even teasing a bit of the great oner of all the Avengers assembled. By the time the clip ended, there was no question that Marvel would rule the cinemas for the rest of the decade.
Logan (2017)
No matter how many times Marvel resurrects Wolverine and Professor X, Logan remains a powerful, moving take on the superhero genre. The pathos of the project is clear even in the trailer that 20th Century Fox aired during the big game. Instead of simply repeating the somber first trailer, which used Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt,” the Super Bowl trailer contrasts lots of onscreen chaos with the sounds of “Amazing Grace.” The combination works, foregrounding the weight that Hugh Jackman’s Canucklehead carries throughout the film, and his ongoing search for forgiveness.
Mission: Impossible—Fallout (2018)
There’s nothing particularly unique about the fact that Paramount debuted a trailer for Mission: Impossible—Fallout during the Super Bowl. What is unique is the trailer itself, easily one of the best trailers ever made. It’s not just that get glimpses of the base jumping stunt that the ever-reckless Tom Cruise performs as Ethan Hunt. It’s that we also get to see Cruise hang off a cliff face, that we get to see Hunt and Ilsa Faust stare one another down. It’s that we get to see Henry Cavill apparently reload his biceps before throwing a punch, and we get to hear Angela Bassett deliver the words, “That’s the job.” How could anything on a football field compete with such awesomeness?
Top Gun: Maverick (2020)
Like the Mission: Impossible franchise, Top Gun: Maverick distills Tom Cruise‘s movie star persona into pure blockbuster spectacle. However, unlike Mission: Impossible, a lot of time had passed between the original movie in 1986 and the 2020 sequel. As a result, general audiences were skeptical of another patriotic plane movie. That is, until the trailer played… in the first commercial break after the singing of the national anthem. By the time the clip finished, even the biggest skeptic was ready to watch Tom fly fighter jets against faceless pilots of some unidentified enemy nation.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Here’s what the average viewer knew about Sonic the Hedgehog before he made the jump from video games to movies in 2020: he’s blue, he’s fast, and he’s got attitude. Rather than try to further educate the public, the Super Bowl trailer for the first Sonic movie plays up those qualities. The first half consists of real-world athletes talking about the one person who can best them, before revealing that person to be Sonic himself, voiced by Ben Schwartz. Only then do we get a smattering of clips from the film, including a healthy dose of Jim Carrey returning to Ace Ventura mode to play Dr. Eggman. Clearly, the gambit worked, as the Sonic franchise has been a steady earner for Paramount, certainly nothing they need to be embarrassed about anymore.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 4 Review: Seven
The following contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 4. Note: The episode is available to stream on HBO Max now. It will have its HBO premiere at 10 p.m. ET on Sunday, February 8.
Events begin snowballing rapidly in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’fourth episode, which sees the truth come out about Egg’s background and Dunk face some potentially deadly consequences for doing the right thing. From Dunk and Egg’s reunion to their preparation for the hedge knight’s trial by combat, “Seven” is full of richly charged emotional moments that ask what it means to be a true knight or to fight against injustice. How much good can one person do against a system that is rigged against those without power? It’s not clear, but Dunk — brave, dumb, gloriously sincere Dunk — is sure going to try.
He certainly has his work cut out for him. Not content with having Dunk arrested for attacking a member of the royal family, Aerion Targaryen is also working overtime to pin Egg’s disappearance on him, insisting that he kidnapped the kid from the inn where they met. Young Aegon was technically meant to be squire to his brother Daeron (Henry Ashton), the messy drunk from the series’s first episode, who chose a bender over participating in the Ashford tourney. (Hey, his nickname isn’t Daeron the Drunken for nothing!) Left to his own devices, Aegon decides to fake it until he makes it as Dunk’s squire.
To his credit, Egg does genuinely regret the harm his lies have caused. Or maybe only a monster is incapable of resisting Dexter Sol Ansell’s giant eyes full of tears, who can say? Not Dunk, apparently, who, although giving peak disappointed dad vibes, can’t stop himself from singing the lad’s praises when he’s brought before Prince Baelor.
Given that this show is called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, we don’t spend as much time with Baelor Targaryen as some of us (read: me) might like, but gosh, it’s hard not to wish we could. Thoughtful, deliberate, and serious, he’s a fascinating figure and appears to have summoned Dunk to his presence not to berate him but to try and find a way to save his life. He may be heir to the Iron Throne, but even he can’t prevent Aerion from insisting on a trial. The hedge knight did strike the king’s grandson, and in defense of a girl who is being — however unfairly — branded a traitor.
So he encourages Dunk to request a trial by combat, in the hopes that he’s a good enough fighter to save himself. Aerion, a huge jerk, turns the tables by insisting that they engage in something known as a trial of seven, an ancient, rarely invoked Andal custom in which seven champions face off against one another, in the hopes that the gods favor those seeking to punish the guilty. In short: It’s all extremely extra, which seems rather up this particular Targaryen’s alley. (A throwaway line from Daeron reveals Aerion literally thinks he’s a dragon in human form, which is objectively bonkers, but not a surprising amount of crazy for this family.)
The morning of the trial dawns, and it turns out that Dunk has more champions than he realized. Thanks in no small part to Aegon, who has apparently been running around all night looking for people who either hate his family or are just out for a good time. For his part, Aerion’s champions include his father, Prince Maekar, and his brother, Daeron, alongside Ser Steffon Fossoway, who traded his honor and his promise to help Dunk for a lordship; as well as three members of King Daeron’s Kingsguard who are ordered to fight: Donnel of Duskendale, Roland Crakehall, and a third man, whose name hasn’t really been mentioned on the show, but who is called Willem Wylde.
Standing for Dunk are the newly knighted Ser Ramun Fossoway; the badly injured Ser Humfrey Hardying, who really wants to kill Aerion for breaking his leg; Hardying’s brother by marriage, Ser Humfrey Beesbury; the one-eyed madman Ser Robyn Rhysling; and everyone’s favorite hot mess, Ser Lyonel Baratheon, who is super hype to take part in the first trial by seven in a hundred years. Unfortunately, thanks to Ser Steffon’s betrayal, Dunk doesn’t have the numbers he needs and is told that if he can’t rustle up one more champion, it’s all forfeit and he’ll be found guilty of his crimes with no fighting involved.
Dunk gives an exceptionally rousing speech, exhorting someone, anyone among the various spectators and gawkers looking on, to step up and do the right thing, to be the kind of true knight that Westeros was once famous for. Thankfully, someone answers, but it’s probably not the person that most viewers expected.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has been very deliberately holding itself apart from the larger shared universe it exists in. Sure, there are more than a few references that will make hardcore fans of George R.R. Martin’s world do that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, but for the most part, it’s been happy to be its own thing, a simpler, smaller-stakes story. So when this episode finally pulls out composer Ramin Djawadi’s iconic Thrones theme music — and actually lets it play out this time, albeit remixed a bit for this series — as Prince Baelor Targaryen takes the field, it pretty much hits like crack cocaine.
Not sure that there could be a more badass way to end this episode than with Baelor riding onto the field to stand alongside Dunk against multiple members of his own (admittedly awful) family. It’s the sort of big, genuine hero moment that’s rarely given to anyone in the Targaryen clan, and certainly not in a way that is presented as so unquestionably good. Because that is, as it turns out, what Baelor is. Good.
Sure, you don’t get the sense that he particularly likes his nephew — Bertie Carvel is a master at making sure his character is deliberately side-eyeing Aerion whenever they happen to be in the same room — but this isn’t a vengeance thing. It’s a justice thing. It’s the right thing. If only it weren’t exactly the kind of move that this universe usually loves to punish.
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.
The Pitt Season 2 Episode 5 Review: Banished to Scut Purgatory
This article contains spoilers for THE PITT season 2 episode 5.
We’re five hours into Dr. Frank Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) first shift back at the Pitt, and the prodigal son’s return is not proceeding how he hoped.
Sure, Langdon probably expected a lukewarm reception at best, given how severe his infraction was. But the muted response of his peers combined with the freezing cold shoulder from his former friend and mentor Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is starting to take its toll. Now with the arrival of “11:00 A.M.,” some of these microaggressions against Langdon finally begin to blossom into macroaggressions.
Fittingly, the inciting incident here is the return of a prodigal patient. First introduced in the season 2 premiere, harried office worker Debbie Cohen (Mara Klein) initially presented with some acute leg pain, a condition harmless enough that Robby relegated her to Langdon in triage. It doesn’t seem so simple now though, with the rash having extended beyond the Sharpie borders that Langdon drew on Debbie’s shin. If Langdon and nurse Donnie’s pained reactions in the closing moments of episode 4 weren’t revealing enough, the opening moments of episode 5 confirm that this advancing cellulitis is Very Bad. To borrow a euphemism I love from nurses on TikTok: Ms. Cohen is about to meet everyone in the hospital.
While no one would accuse any episode of The Pittof dragging its feet, the ticking clock nature of Debbie’s rapidly spreading rash imbues this installment with an even more intense sense of urgency than usual. Langdon, Robby, and a host of other doctors, nurses, and surgeons rush in and out of Ms. Cohen’s trauma room no fewer than seven times. And each time, we learn something more troubling about her condition. The cellulitis was on the dorsum of the foot and now it’s spreading to the leg. Her maximum heart rate is good…until it’s not. Suddenly the patient has a bulla (blister) developing and is entering into septic shock.
In a morning already marked by multiple “zebra” cases, the Pitt is now home to necrotizing fasciitis a.k.a. honest-to-goodness flesh-eating bacteria.
“You ever see nec fash?” Robby asks the young surgeon who finally comes downstairs to investigate. The man has not, having just graduated medical school two weeks ago. And few of us have probably seen it either, on television or anywhere else. Robby promptly asks for another surgeon.
In addition to operating as a tension-ratcheting narrative device, Ms. Cohen’s leg also serves to force Robby and Langdon in the same room for an extended period of time, with predictably disappointing results. Robby is still fuming over his acolyte’s betrayal and is displaying little effort in hiding his loathing. At the moment though, Robby might be just as frustrated with himself for failing in his primary goal of the day: to keep Langdon away from him.
“Did you bring Langdon back here?” he asks Dana.
“No, Al-Hashimi did. You banished him to scut purgatory. He did everything you would have done with that cellulitis patient. If you think he missed something, tell him.”
There is almost certainly nothing Robby would have done differently than Langdon. Very few doctors would see a simple foot rash and jump to the conclusion that, within hours, it will evolve into a condition so gnarly that a stunned surgical resident will take photos of it like he’s at a concert. Indeed Nurgle’s blessings rarely arrive when expected. Robby might have sent Langdon to scut purgatory but the Pitt itself might is the real purgatory – a liminal space where larger-than-life forces conscript mortals to confront the same problems over and over.
For his part, Langdon is clearly starting to feel the restricting weight of it all. (It’s probably not a coincidence that one of the patients introduced in this episode is literally handcuffed.) The most heartbreaking moment for him isn’t Robby’s disgust – that’s personal, it’s understandable, it’s even potentially fixable. What hurts worse is Whitaker (Gerran Howell) reflexively logging in to the hospital computer to order meds for a patient before Langdon can. Realizing the questionable optics, Whitaker swears he hastily put in the order because the patient was technically assigned to him, not because he was afraid of Langdon abusing the drugs. Still, it’s a sign that Langon’s “junkie” brand isn’t going away any time soon.
Elsewhere in the Pitt, the doctors start to come up against their respective brands for better or worse. Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) continues to shed his early goldenboy status and gets a (literally) shitty lesson that medicine isn’t all the reciting of facts from med school. Sometimes it’s disimpacting an old woman’s stools…and then not getting out of the way of the ensuing poop-alanche. After coming off a particularly tough hour that saw her poked with broken glass, Joy (Irene Choi) comes through with a clutch suggestion to lower the uninsured Mr. Diaz’ untenable hospital bill.
“If the system doesn’t work for you, you’ve gotta work the system,” she tells Dr. Garcia after revealing her family did a similar trick when her grandmother fell ill.
Even Dr. Robby’s medicine ubermensch brand begins to take some hits this hour. While he has his usual “hell yeah” moments of heroism (his hopping on the phone with Ms. Cohen’s employer to report, in no uncertain terms, that she will not be coming to work that day and she will not be fired for that is awesome), his clear disdain for Langdon, Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), and anyone keeping him from his beloved motorcycle trip is an increasingly bad look. So much so that his current hospital lady friend Noelle Hastings (Meta Golding) playfully dubs him “Motorcycle Mike.”
Unshakeable as some of these labels may seem, the ER always provides many an opportunity to rise above them. This hour alone sees the arrival of new patients Gus Varney, a prisoner severely wounded in an assault; Alex, a dumbass kid burned with dry-ice by his brother; and Roxie Hamler, a home hospice patient with a history of lung cancer who just suffered a seizure. Alex, bless him, provides a rare moment of comedic relief for Langdon and the audience, revealing that he was trying to get branded with the family crest (literally just the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team logo). He also says “You goonin’ me?” to his brother, accidentally revealing that the show’s writers’ room has no contact with any members of Gen Z.
Of the new crop, Roxie undoubtedly provides the biggest potential for dramatic resonance going forward. She also might prove to be a redemptive tool for the doctors assigned to treat her. For now, that’s Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) and night shift nurse Lena (Lesley Boone), who is moonlighting as Roxie’s “death doula” for her family. But one would hope that Robby and Langdon at least stop by to meet her and get some much-needed perspective.
Based on the final moments of “11:00 A.M.,” however, it might not even take Robby and Langdon that long to reconcile or at least work better together. If the two can’t put aside their differences to save a flatlining Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.), then Motorcycle Mike might need that sabbatical even more than previously realized.
New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.
Avengers Doomsday – Halle Berry Teases ‘Wait and See’ About How She’d Update Storm
Halle Berry is not expected to appear as Storm in Avengers: Doomsday. That is the official, oft-repeated party line about the upcoming superhero event film. Nonetheless, it does seem a curious omission when so many other beloved actors from the original line of X-Men movies are expected to make their Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in the December release—including James Marsden, Ian McKellen, and Alan Cumming. In fact, the very appeal of reunions was in the air when we sat down with Berry and Chris Hemsworth to discuss their new film due out later this month, Crime 101.
“It’s fantastic,” Hemsworth says about sitting across from old pals like Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. for the Avengers: Doomsday table read. “[There’s] the old guys like myself, the people who kind of kicked it off, and then new folks coming in. It’s just such a joy. It’s like a high school reunion in a way, catching up with old friends and new friends.”
Yet when we raise the prospect about Berry not being among those new friends, the Oscar-winning actress laughs, “Chris is going to fix that.” Her Crime 101 co-star seems more than game to entertain the possibility, agreeing, “I’m going to fix that.”
Whether that’s an actual tease of what to expect in Avengers: Doomsday or a bit of playful banter is not immediately clear. However, what is abundant is that Berry still has things she’d like to do with Storm, and she seems comfortable musing we might see them yet in the MCU. This includes the prospect of Storm getting a visual makeover that could be as colorful (and comic book-y) as Hugh Jackman and James Marsden’s new threads as Wolverine and Cyclops in MCU pictures.
“I think Storm could use some updating, change her [look] a little bit,” Berry says. But when pressed for details she simply adds, “I don’t know, you’re going to have to wait and see. But she should definitely up her game.”
Whether that game includes Avengers: Doomsday remains unknown, however that Marvel event stands in some ways as the culmination of an entire quarter-century’s worth of superhero movies. While the Marvel Studios brand already had a kind of crescendo seven years ago in Avengers: Endgame—the last time Hemsworth co-starred with Evans and Downey—Doomsday will be using the multiverse to not only merge the 2010s era of superhero movies with the current status quo of the MCU, but also presumably every previous era of Marvel movies. Hence the return of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men line-up from the 2000s.
In some ways it’s validation for the path Berry and her colleagues forged on that first X-Men 26 years ago, the first modern superhero movie. However, the star does not look back on it that way.
“I didn’t see it as a risk,” Berry says of the original X-Men. “Maybe I was ignorant to the situation, but I saw it as a wonderful opportunity. I was such a fan of X-Men and what the story was about, and what this mutant life [meant]. I related to that, growing up on the outside as a woman of color, so I didn’t see it as a risk. I saw it as a great way to help people understand the differences in each other.”
It’s a difference that will be explored further, including hopefully with Berry, in Doomsday and beyond. In the meantime, expect more of our conversation with Hemsworth and Berry ahead of Crime 101’s release on Friday, Feb. 13.
Star Trek: Captain Sisko’s Best Return Happened in the Comics
This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.
This Sisko has returned! Just… not in the way you might expect. The fifth episode of Starfleet Academy, “Series Acclimation Mil,” was indeed the much-vaunted “love letter” to Deep Space Nine, the oddball ’90s series that has become a favorite among Star Trek fans. The episode managed to pay loving tribute to the show in general and Captain Sisko in particular, complete with shots of his uniform, an appearance by Cirroc Lofton as a now-grown Jake Sisko, and even a recording of actor Avery Brooks’ voice. However, Sisko himself did not appear—heck, Brooks’ likeness didn’t even show up on screen.
Disappointing as that might be for DS9 fans tuning into Starfleet Academy, the TV series isn’t the only place to find Captain Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. Sisko’s return was a major part of the Star Trek ongoing comic book series that IDW launched in 2022. Written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing and illustrated by various artists, Star Trek gives Captain Sisko the homecoming he deserves.
As “Series Acclimation Mil” recounts, Sisko was chosen by the Prophets—aliens who lived within the wormhole outside of Deep Space Nine, and who were worshiped by the people of Bajor. At the end of the series, Sisko gets called away from the mortal plane by the Prophets, and is never heard from again. Within Starfleet Academy, he makes his presence known to Jake, but there’s no official record of his actions.
The Star Trek comic book series imagines something different, in part because of plot points from other shows. In the Next Generation season six episode “Rightful Heir,” we meet a clone of Kahless the Unforgettable, the mythical warrior king venerated by Klingons. That episode ends with a question of faith, indicating that the clone and those involved with creating the myth understand that Kahless is not a god. However, in the comic, everything has changed. The Kahless clone has decided to prove his worth by slaughtering the god-like beings of the Star Trek universe. And, as anyone who has watched The Original Series can tell you, Star Trek has a lot of god-like beings.
As god-like beings themselves, the Prophets worry about Kahless’ rampage, and so they bring Sisko back to the mortal plane to deal with the destroyer.
A lot of what follows could be dismissed as mere fan-service. On his new ship, the appropriately-named USS Theseus, Sisko assembles a team of all-stars, including Dr. Crusher and Data, Tom Paris from Voyager, and Scotty from TOS (still in the 24th century after the TNG episode “Relics”). Even Enterprise is represented in the form of Ensign Sato, a human-Andorian related to Hoshi. Across the issues that follow, the team meets other fan favorites—which eventually leads to a sister series called Star Trek: Defiant, following a team led by Worf that includes Lore, Spock, Ro Laren, and B’Elanna Torres.
And, of course, the series makes time for interpersonal moments that one would expect. Sisko’s disappearance at the end of Deep Space Nine, in which he abandons not just Jake, but also his new wife Kasidy Yates and his newborn daughter, always rubbed some people the wrong way, particularly Brooks himself. Issue #1 of Star Trek addresses that problem, making “Jake” the first word that the reconstituted Sisko speaks. Not only do we get a better idea of how little agency Sisko had in his disappearance, but we get a beautiful reunion between father and son in the form of a hug the two share on the station’s promenade.
Were Star Trek just moments such as these, it would be an enjoyable, but cloying comic. But the fan-service moments are secondary to a satisfying Star Trek adventure, one that combines the promise of exploration with the philosophical quandaries that made the franchise great.
As demonstrated in their work for DC and Marvel, especially the Guardians of the Galaxy and Kang the Conqueror runs they did for the latter, Kelly and Lanzing understand how to pepper their big, high-concept stories with plenty of action. The “When the Walls Fell” arc that runs across issues 25 through 30 is a particular highlight. The storyline takes full advantage of a rift and time and space to further play with Trek lore, bringing aboard a young Kirk and even taking a dip into the Kelvin timeline, while staying focused on Sisko’s conflicted feelings about his allegiances to the Prophets and Starfleet.
To its credit, “Series Acclimation Mil” refuses to deify Sisko. The episode is keenly aware of fans’ reverence for Sisko the character and Brooks’s performance, but it retains a playfulness that never lets the nods become too serious.
However, the Star Trek comic series does one better. Not only does it once again show us Sisko the man, it shows us Sisko the man in a complicated relationship to the gods. It brings him back into the Star Trek universe, but never in a way that feels expected or comfortable. The Star Trek comic a strange, idiosyncratic riff on Star Trek storytelling, just like Benjamin Sisko himself.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Writer Resolves a Deep Space Nine Mystery
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.
Technically speaking, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “Series Acclimation Mil” is a Sam-focused episode, an origin story of sorts for the first Kasquian student ever to attend the institution. But its traditional coming-of-age tale, in which she must figure out the sort of person (hologram?) she wants to become, is a story that looks to the past as much as the future. Old school fans will doubtless love this episode’s connections to underrated franchise gem Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but the hour is at its best when it’s using its legacy to help define its future.
Ordered by her makers to help them better understand the lives and motivations of organics, Sam (a.k.a. Series Acclimation Mil) finds herself undertaking a research project into the life of former Starfleet captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks). His career was full of many notable achievements, but ultimately concluded in mystery, as he seemingly sacrificed himself during the series finale “What You Leave Behind.” But his spiritual form appears to live on — he wakes up in the Celestial Temple and is told his work as an emissary for the non-corporeal pantheon of beings known as The Prophets was just beginning. Determined to earn a spot in a class called “Confronting the Unexplainable,” Sam decides to solve the mystery of his disappearance, and in the process, begins to define herself. Along the way, Starfleet Academy takes a very unique opportunity to pay homage to what’s come before.
“We were just massively intentional,” co-writer (and former Star Trek: Lower Decks star) Tawny Newsome tells Den of Geek. “It’s Sam’s story, and she’s a new character from a new species of aliens that we are just introducing in canon. And we also have to honor this massive legacy character that has been largely overlooked in modern Trek and is the only reason we have characters like Michael Burnham, [Beckett] Mariner, or even Sam. That’s a huge thing. Then we are bringing back in the flesh Jake Sisko, another massive legacy character who’s been overlooked and underutilized and under-loved in my opinion. There’s so much to honor and to uphold.”
At the same time, “Series Acclimation Mil’s” is also an episode about moving Sam’s story forward.
“It was so important because Sam herself is an Emissary,” Newsome says. “She is a bridge between worlds, as Jake Sisko puts it, written by my incredible co-writer, Kirsten Beyer. She is the bridge between the Kasquians and the organics. And she didn’t necessarily choose that, but we’re seeing her rise to the challenge, and that to me so clearly mirrored what Mr. Brooks did as Sisko. He didn’t necessarily choose to be the Emissary to the Prophets, but he sure did an incredible job for them and for the Bajoran people and for his crew. It was a no-brainer that as soon as we started calling Sam an Emissary in the writer’s room, I was raising my hand like, “Ooh, oh, oh, oh, I know who we need to talk about.”
The hour’s Sisko-focused subplot doesn’t exist simply for nostalgia’s sake. It’s through her research into the captain’s life that Sam begins to understand her own agency and purpose — something that’s both true and valuable whether or not she ever truly figures out what happened to him.
“I say it in my last monologue to Sisko: I have to learn how to do things my own way,” Kerrice Brooks, who plays Sam, says. “You did things your own way. You found your own way to be an Emissary, so I guess I have to find my own way to do it too. And I think that’s what I took away from [her] trying to reach out to him.”
For Brooks, Sam’s search for Sisko is as internal a process as it is an external one. And, for her, the question of what happened to him isn’t as important as what knowing him, even in this roundabout way, has done for her own story.
“I think he responds in his own way, even though I don’t know how conscious she is of it, but in that search for him and in talking to him on her own, it’s kind of like you’re talking to the spirit. You download whatever you can receive,” Brooks says. “For Sam, it’s a matter of her opening up to receive. And the only way to open herself up is to find herself. And to find herself, she’s got to explore.”
Though the episode technically leaves the question of Sisko’s ultimate fate unanswered, the folks behind the scenes feel as though “Series Acclimation Mil” is a confirmation that the beloved character lived on past the ending we saw onscreen (and may still, in some way).
“I think Jake does tell us,” Newsome says. “As we all know, Mr. [Avery] Brooks requested at the end of Deep Space Nine to add that line saying he would come back because, as an actor, he said, ‘Don’t make me a Black man who leaves his family.’ And so we honored that by having Jake insist that, ‘Yeah, maybe I can’t prove it scientifically. Maybe it’s not in the Starfleet records. But he was there, he didn’t miss those moments.’ I think, in a way…technically we don’t answer it. But in our hearts, it’s answered for me.”
This view is bolstered by the return of Cirroc Lofton, who originally played Sisko’s son Jake on Deep Space Nine. Since Starfleet Academy is set hundreds of years after that series, his character’s presence is presented as something of a historical artifact — a presence in a museum archive, a hologram hidden within a book — that nevertheless helps Sam better understand the man his father was.
“This was an opportunity for me to revisit this character as an adult, having lived now 47 years and gone through all of these things,” Lofton says when asked about returning to the Star Trekfranchise after so long away. “One thing I admire about Avery Brooks is that he was so conscious of the material and the work he did throughout our time on Deep Space Nine. He was always involved in making sure that things were accurate, that it was believable, that this is what his character would do. For example, we did an episode where Sisko went back to Vegas in the 1950s, and he was adamant that he wouldn’t be in the casino because Black people weren’t allowed in the casinos at that time. And so he always made sure to instruct, inform, and deliberate on what was going to be put on screen.”
To hear Newsome tell it, Lofton himself played a key role in how this episode came together in the first place.
“Cirroc has been a part of this episode’s creation from before it was even an outline,” she said. “It was literally just a pitch, and then I immediately took Cirroc to lunch. It might’ve broken an NDA or two, but I was like, ‘I have to make sure that I’m doing this right. I have to make sure we’re getting your blessing. We’re getting Mr. Brooks’ blessing before we even proceed.’ It was very organic. It was just a lot of us going to lunch or having a drink at a con and talking about the best way to do this, both for Jake and for Benjamin.”
As an episode, “Series Acclimation Mil,” wrestles with many of the same questions Star Trek has addressed over its 60-year run, finding new ways to express much of the same hope and optimism it always has. But for the creators who brought this story to life, it was also a labor of love, meant to honor those who have come before.
“For me, this was an opportunity to approach this creative process in the way where I actually have an input on what’s being done,” Lofton said. “It’s a deliberate way of performing. I learned that from watching Avery perform, and I finally got a chance to do the same in honoring him.”
And, for Lofton, too, the answer to the question of what happened to Sisko is clear.
“In my head canon, he was there,” he says. “And whether he appeared in visions or in dreams, he was always in communication with Jake. I felt like that was also translated in the episode as well, that he was this ever-present being that was just watching over [his son], and that’s what he feels like in my life, because he’s always been there for me, so it resonated.”
The episode ends on a philosophical note. While Brooks doesn’t appear in “Series Acclimation Mil,” despite the many references to the character he once played, his voice does. As Sam thanks whatever aspect of Sisko that may be listening to her, she hears back a snippet of something that sounds like a mission statement for much of this episode — and the larger franchise itself.
“Divine laws are simpler than human laws, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them,” a voice that is clearly Brooks’s reads. “Only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.”
Googling this quote isn’t going to tell you much — that way leads frustration and madness, I can confirm — but it is Brooks, from an album many fans may not be aware he made. And its inclusion was very deliberate.
“The snippet is from Avery Brooks’s album that he recorded,” Lofton explains. “The album is called ‘Here,’ which is a play on words on Paul Robeson’s biography, which was called ‘Here I Stand.’ And so Avery did a jazz album, and in there is some spoken word and those words you may find in poetry, ancient poetry of someone by the name of Rumi.”
“The album isn’t widely available,” Newsome adds. “Cirroc literally had to meet me at a dumpling restaurant and handed me a physical CD that I put on my laptop and then sent to production. The whole process of bringing this episode to light was very analog, very personal, and very heartfelt. It could not have happened without literal handoffs between loved ones to make this possible.”
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5 Review – Series Acclimation Mil
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academyis finally starting to hit its stride as the series hits the midpoint of its first season. After last week’s largely excellent “Vox in Excelso,” the show switches up the vibe entirely with “Series Acclimation Mil,” a Sam-focused hour with a decidedly youthful feel and a deftly handled story that mixes familiar coming of age tropes with a love letter to what is perhaps the franchise’s most underrated installment. Written by Kirsten Beyer and former Star Trek: Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome, the episode is a delightful blend of old and new, using its plentiful connections to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to honor the stories that have come before, even as it uses those same threads to inform where the franchise is headed next.
Everybody’s undoubtedly going to be talking about the hour’s Benjamin Sisko focus, the glimpse into his son Jake’s future, the mostly-still-unanswered question of what really happened to him, and the gorgeous spoken word coda from none other than Avery Brooks himself at its end. And, of course, the revelation that Sam’s professor is also the new Trill host of the Dax symbiote that played such a key role in Deep Space Nine. There’s a lot to dig into in terms of larger Trek lore. But, even without all that, “Series Acclimation Mil” is also just a really satisfying story of a young woman learning how to navigate the conflict between the duty that’s been thrust upon her and the things she really wants.
The overall vibe of the episode is fun and bubbly, complete with colorful onscreen graphics, text descriptions, and fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience. It’s all very reflective of what we know of Sam’s character thus far, and gives the show the kind of definitive POV and tone that its earlier episodes largely lacked. It’s genuinely charming and engaging enough to make you hope that the show finds a way to do something similar for the rest of its cadets. Yes, there’s a lot of exposition dumping, involving the history of Sam’s people, their curiosity about the experiences of organics, and why she’s been sent to Starfleet Academy in the first place. But because it’s all deployed in the service of deepening our emotional connection to and understanding of Sam, it’s surprisingly effective. The tension between a young woman and her parents — or makers in this case — when it comes to who she’s supposed to be, is precisely the sort of universal coming-of-age story that resonates in any universe or timeline, and one that this series is uniquely equipped to tell.
It helps, of course, that Kerrice Brooks is a literal ray of sunshine throughout, with an infectious demeanor that fully conveys Sam’s excitement and wonder at the situations she finds herself in, from drinking and bar fighting to recreating classic New Orleans dishes she can’t actually eat herself. Sam’s makers insist that she must gain admission to a course called “Confronting the Unexplainable” to remain at the Academy, as they are, for some reason, convinced it will hold the secrets of the organic experience. In an attempt to impress Professor Ayla, she learns about the life (and mysterious disappearance) of Deep Space Nine’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, and in the process, ends up questioning both what it means to be an Emissary of her people and the duty that comes along with it.
Longtime Trek fans will, of course, enjoy the ways this episode connects to the franchise’s past, from the return of Cirroc Lofton as an adult version of Sisko’s son Jake to the various items from the Earth-based Sisko Museum recreated in virtual form. There’s even a Bajoran children’s book that recounts his role as an Emissary of the Prophets. Thankfully, the hour smartly doesn’t attempt to really answer the question of what happened to Sisko at the end of Deep Space Nine. (Several characters seem to draw their own conclusions, but the show itself doesn’t put its foot down one way or another, and viewers can decide for themselves how they feel.)
Instead, the journey is more important than the destination, and it’s a lesson for Sam about what it means to carry both a destiny and a personal identity, and finding a way to thread the needle between the two. As she follows in the footsteps of the man she’s sort of adopted as a role model, it helps her not only understand that she’s something more than a conduit for the hopes and dreams of those who made her, but someone capable of making her own choices for her own reasons. And for a being who’s something like 200 days old, that’s no small thing.
The hour’s more young adult vibe means we also get the chance to see the students just, well, being students. Thus far, Starfleet Academy seems to work best when it leans into the inexperience of its protagonists. Though this episode still just cannot seem to help itself when it comes to reminding us that Caleb is some kind of genius hacker, the majority of it focuses on the sort of escapades one might expect from a show with this name. The gang’s trip to a cadet bar night is the highlight of the hour, full of the kind of dumb hijinks most of us probably remember from college.
Unfortunately, the episode stalls out whenever we switch back to its more adult-focused B-plot, which involves a complicated rehearsal for a fully ridiculous diplomatic dinner that War College Commander Kelrec has set up with a visiting alien chancellor. Pretty much everything about this subplot is awful, from Holly Hunter attempting a very weird posh accent and dinner guests being forced to talk to one another through cone shaped mouth trumpets to a strange blob fish-based main course that occasionally passes gas in a deeply uncomfortable way. We really all could have survived not knowing what Chancellor Ahke and the grown-ups were up to this week, is what I’m saying.
Thankfully, none of the blobfish stuff is remotely relevant to the rest of the episode, which concludes with a Sam who’s confident enough to claim agency over her own fate in a way she never realized was possible before. Its positively lovely to see Lofton’s Jake get the chance to give her the same sort of heartfelt pep talk he so often received from his father, and the confirmation that, no matter what actually happened to him, Sisko’s legacy still lives on in so many ways — through Jake’s book, through Dax’s instruction, and now through Sam herself — is ridiculously moving. But more importantly, “Series Acclimation Mil” isn’t a nostalgia fest for its own sake. It’s a story that makes use of the franchise’s past to truly inform its present, and it’s a lesson we can only hope the rest of the season will follow.
New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.
Could Avengers: Doomsday Be Adapting This Forgotten Marvel Team?
Because of Marvel‘s strangely sparse way of advertising Avengers: Doomsday, fans have had to turn to other leaks and announcements to learn more about the upcoming multiversal adventure. So desperate are they, that even an Italian presentation to cinema owners caught their attention. As fans poured over what amounted to little more than a cast announcement, one thing stood out. The announcer seems to describe one set of heroes as “The Mighty Avengers.”
For readers of Marvel Comics in the mid-2000s, around the time that the New Avengers were a going concern, that phrase stands out. More than just a moniker describing the strength of the combined heroes, the Mighty Avengers signified a team of mainline heroes who went on big, blockbuster style adventures, despite the dark circumstances surrounding their formation. It’s those circumstances that have led Marvel to basically ignore that line-up of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and it’s those circumstances that make their potential return in Doomsday so interesting.
A Different Assemblage
Mighty Avengers #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Frank Cho, felt like a throwback to the Silver Age when it released in 2007. It’s not just the use of thought bubbles, which had been almost completely replaced by internal monologues conveyed through caption boxes. Rather, it’s the construction of the issue. In the main timeline, the Mighty Avengers battle monsters who emerge from the underground, in a manner reminiscent of Giganto from 1961’s Fantastic Four #1. In flashbacks, we see Tony Stark and Carol Danvers pick members of their new team, staring at a giant monitor filled with portraits of Marvel’s mightiest.
Cho, an artist best known for his cheesecake pin-ups, renders the heroes as bright and idealized, with colorist Jason Keith providing extra pop. Cho uses wide panels and near-splash pages to convey the awe of the battles, as befits a team full of heavy hitters such as Ms. Marvel (the moniker Danvers used before taking the name Captain Marvel), Sentry, Wonder Man, Iron Man, the Wasp, and the God of War Ares.
Fun as it is, the pop-art nature of Mighty Avengers #1 is more than a mere nostalgia play. Rather, it serves a thematic purpose, both for Tony Stark and for Marvel Comics. The formation of the Mighty Avengers comes as part of The Initiative storyline, the follow-up to the Civil War storyline. As in the MCU movie that bears its name, the Civil War in Marvel Comics saw Iron Man and Captain America come to blows over the issue of superhero registration.
However, writer Mark Millar, who served as architect for the Civil War event, was much more willing than Kevin Feige to have fans hate the belligerents. Framing himself as a futurist who saw what the people would demand, Stark demanded that his fellow superheroes unmask and register with the government. He went so far in his quest that he hunted down other heroes, he enlisted Reed Richards to create a secret prison in the Negative Zone for those who would not register, and created a clone of his recently-deceased ally Thor to help him carry out his plan. His actions even led to the death of Steve Rogers, a death that lasted quite a while by comic book standards.
In short, things looked pretty grim for Iron Man at the end of Civil War. Thus, The Initiative offered a chance at redemption, as Stark—who took the place of Nick Fury as director of SHIELD—starts to give the world its superheroes again. And the flagship of The Initiative was the Mighty Avengers.
The Mighty, The Fallen
As fun as the first issue of Mighty Avengers is, the series never forgot its relationship to the superhero Civil War. In fact, Marvel published another Avengers book at the same time, New Avengers, which focused on a team of heroes who kept up the fight, despite refusing to register. These heroes—led by Luke Cage, and including Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, and Clint Barton in his Ronin guise—did their good deeds knowing that the Mighty Avengers would arrest them on sight.
Indeed, both series gave plenty of time for the characters to wonder about the morality of their decisions. As the more street-level heroes, the New Avengers saw themselves as the authentic group, a position that Marvel seemed to endorse by having Cage and company discover a hidden Skrull attack long before the Secret Invasion crossover began in earnest. For their part, the Mighty Avengers insisted that they were doing the necessary work of superheroes, that they put aside their own personal feelings about secret identities and government regulations to save the world.
At its best, Mighty Avengers operated something like a superhero deconstruction. Bendis and Cho, the latter eventually replaced by the ever-reliable Mark Bagley, would serve up a heaping helping of two-fisted action. Issue after issue pit the team against monsters and Ultron and symbiotes, to say nothing of the Skrulls. At the same time, the series would stop for the heroes to consider their moral positions.
Those qualities only increased after the Secret Invasion forced the heroic factions to work together, especially when Norman Osborn, the respectable businessman who spends his evenings as Spider-Man’s archenemy the Green Goblin, becomes the world’s hero after ending the Skrull attack. During the Dark Reign event that followed Secret Invasion, Osborn used his influence to exercise control over the United States, essentially turning heroes into his tools.
A Mighty Good Time
We know that Avengers: Doomsday will feature two versions of the Avengers. The Thunderbolts have become the New Avengers, led by Bucky, but under the influence of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Although he lost government backing with President Ross turned into the Red Hulk in Brave New World, Sam Wilson has his own Avengers that he leads as Captain America. This group, which the Italian leak described as the Mighty Avengers, includes, of course, Captain America and Joaquin Torres as the Falcon, as well as Ant-Man, Thor, and, surprisingly, Loki.
The teaser at the end of Thunderbolts* suggested that the two Avengers groups do not get along, which matches the status quo at the start of the last major Marvel event, Avengers: Infinity War. In that movie, the two groups bury the hatchet almost immediately, as the threat of Thanos renders any other concerns unimportant.
One would think that the multiversal collapse and the coming of Doctor Doom would certainly also make Bucky and Sam get over their hurt feelings and combine their two groups. But if Doomsday and Secret Wars follow the model set by the Mighty Avengers comic, then the tensions are going to linger for a while.
That might be bad news for the people of the MCU. But for us MCU fans, more Mighty Avengers action is always a good thing, especially if the movie can replicate some of the bold action of the comics.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.
The Moment Review: Charli XCX Movie Is Not Nearly as Brat as It Needs to Be
What does it mean to be brat? The generational riddle wrapped in a TikTok quandary has befuddled talking heads and boomers for the last 18 months (which amounts to a couple of epochs in social media years). But the general definition passed down by Charli XCX herself is that it’s “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things, sometimes… It is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.”
Youth in revolt.
It’s a great ideal, but an even better idea for a marketing gimmick. And that uneasy tension between those aspirations and the general assholishness that comes with commercialism has bedeviled pop music since time immemorial, and seems likely to gnaw at Charli too, as judged by the “brat” credit card laid out for free at every table of the Alamo Drafthouse screening room Tuesday night. Replicas of a literal prop in the movie, they are as empty and devoid of value as the queasy green paint slapped across their faces. They’re a brand intended to sell you something and nothing, which in this case is a movie ironically decrying the commercialization of music, art, rebellion, and the brattishness that Charli XCX espouses.
As an exercise in post-modern irony, the resulting movie of The Moment is bold—or at least it desperately wants to be so. From another perspective, it’s just self-satisfied enough with its metatextual quality to grate. Personally, however, the film largely amounts to a missed opportunity.
There is something always delicious about public figures willing to play themselves as fools, and Charli’s fictionalized version of herself in The Moment is needy, insecure, and just tragic enough to dimly recognize her own vapidity. It doesn’t stop her, though, from letting her label, handlers, and other music industry users in co-opting the “brat summer” of 2024 when the film’s faux-documentary is set. The sycophants turn a movement in the movie into a regular Madison Avenue Ad Men’s Frankenstein Monster, unleashed this time on the Snapchat generation. Yet the movie from writer-director Aidan Zamiri lacks the humor, imagination, or fanged menace to let this creature do anything too mean, or for that matter funny, during its rampage.
A tonal blending of ostensible cringe comedy, slow-burn horror perfectly in line with the film’s own A24 branding, and the uncanny valley of severe navel-gazing, there are intermittent scenes of ruthless schadenfreude in The Moment. This begins with the film having more than a passing resemblance to cult darling mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap in the film’s opening.
The time is early summer 2024, and Charli is introduced rocking out in what looks like the ruins of a derelict nightclub. Strobing, chic lights throb over music-video ready imagery and rapid editing, evoking the essence of Charli’s onstage and online persona. This turns out to be a soundstage where the pop star is building the look of her upcoming concert tour, and ground zero for real-life filmmaker Zamiri to do something a little playful. During the opening, the logos of production companies and distributors that made his film possible, including 2AM, Studio365, and A24, flash by in their patented brat-green stylings. Shades of the commodification of Charli’s music—including this movie—are already manifest.
Yet structurally what this self-skewering means proves elusive, as the mockumentary setup of the film turns out to be inexplicably filming the making of another more typical concert film-within-a-film, this one directed by industry veteran and sycophant extraordinaire, Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård). Johannes apparently has a penchant for making the streaming-ready gloss-ups you might associate with a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber. Confusingly, though, The Moment becomes a documentary about Skarsgård’s attempt to make this even thinner slice of onscreen superficiality. Of course the narrative muddiness of this nesting doll structure wouldn’t matter if the film’s satire of the modern music industry was as sharp or funny as it thinks it is.
Zamiri certainly conjures the anxiety and dread that sustains so many comedy and horror movies this decade. Charli’s steady corruption by the banalities of fame and capitalism come across as a slow-motion car wreck while her handlers seduce her into selling “brat credit cards” to marginalized LGBTQ kids on IG and TikTok. Meanwhile Johannes slowly pushes out Charli’s most protective inner-circle, including BFF creative director Celeste Collins (Hailey Benton Gates), all so he can vibe-shift the upcoming concert tour’s nightclub aesthetic into an insipid paean to self-empowerment, and replace the word cunt on Charli’s concert stage to the more parent-friendly b!tc#. “The song is literally about cocaine,” Celeste protests when told to think of the potential children demographic. “What if the cocaine is a metaphor?!” Johannes suggests, without much rhyme or reason to explain for what.
Sequences like the above have an obvious but effective bite, as do almost all of Skarsgård’s overcaffeinated, strained smiles that appear too acute to not be based on a person or 12 the Swedish actor has met along the way. The film also gets mileage out of other celebrities willing to play themselves, be it I Love LA’s Rachel Sennott as a jelly cokehead needling Charli in a bar’s bathroom, or Kylie Jenner as the superficial ideal for empty fame. The fact Kylie shows up in a bikini and 4K-ready makeup at a spa as the devil on Charli’s shoulder, convincing her to sell her soul to the suits to extend brat summer’s 15 minutes, shows a fair amount of self-awareness and self-deprecation.
Then again, the Jenner-Kardashian brand is a testimonial for fame as an end unto itself, so whether symbolizing supposed perfection, or celebrity-life rot as in The Moment, it all plays the same. For Charli XCX, though, the film is meant to clearly be a cautionary tale of the road taken by so many other pop stars. It seeks to weaponize and mock the whole media cycle of the brat meme, yet like a carefully curated marketing campaign, the film refuses to go in for the most thrilling or provocative kill.
Not nearly funny enough to work as a comedy, or scary enough to be an unnerving thriller, there is the possibility for The Moment to still be a subversive, transgressive satire. The third act—after movie-Charli goes full sellout—indeed flirts with something as triumphantly nihilistic as the ending of Network from 50-odd years ago. Near the end, Johannes, Charli’s record exec overlord (Rosanna Arquette), and a fleet of hangers-on, begin contemplating life without Charli.
Alas, the movie lacks the courage of its convictions. It footsies with doing something truly blunt, honest, or volatile, but by Charli’s own definition, it’s unable to achieve full brat. Or, to use a different music mockumentary’s slang, it fails to take things to 11.
The Moment is in theaters Friday, Feb. 6.
An A24/Texas Chainsaw Massacre Pairing Actually Makes a Lot of Sense
At first glance, that collaboration seems unlikely, and not because of Powell. The name A24 is synonymous with “elevated” horror, scary movies with high ideas and ambitions beyond grossing out viewers. With its garish name and (completely made-up) true crime pretensions, 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an exemplar of the sort of nasty, low-brow stuff that elevated horror was supposed to replace. However, the Texas Chainsaw series has always had a self-aware, dare we say even intellectual streak, behind all of its blood and guts.
Nowhere is the franchise’s self-awareness more apparent than in the second entry, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 from 1986. Partly out of spite for being forced to return to his most famous movie, partly out of frustration that no one saw how funny the first movie was, and partly because he had a huge budget (at least by the standards of the Cannon Group), Hooper made his sequel into an over the top comedy.
The film barely cares about continuity from the first entry, swapping out the hitchhiker from the first movie (Edwin Neal) with Bill Moseley as Chop Top. Instead, it goes for over-the-top sequences, culminating with Dennis Hopper as a vengeful sheriff who bellows a sermon while wielding multiple saws. And just in case anyone didn’t get the joke, the film’s poster pays homage to The Breakfast Club, with Leatherface and Cook standing in for Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson.
However, Texas Chainsaw 2 isn’t the only entry with a brain in its about-to-be-bashed-in head. The first film operates as a dark mirror on America’s involvement in Vietnam, when the country essentially ground up its young people in the same way the Sawyers turned teens into BBQ. Later entries continued to find allegories in the ultra violence, as in the school shooting themes running through 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Even Powell’s involvement makes a bit of sense. Not only is the handsome star a Texas native, but he’s following in the footsteps of fellow A-listers from the Lone Star State, as Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger both appeared in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
For its part, A24 has never shied away from grizzly images and plots. The head trauma in Hereditary, Midsommar, Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back alone is as bad as anything in a TCM movie, and that’s just the work of two filmmakers.
Most importantly, both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A24 have changed the face of horror for the better. Together, they may be able to make something special; something gross, weird, and smarter than you’d think, but also special.
The Underrated Muppets Who Deserve More Love
Among the many joys of the new Disney+ special The Muppet Showis the chance to catch up with some of our favorite characters. Sure, Kermit, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy may sound a little different. But they’re still the same beloved variety show performers that we’ve been following for years.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the special is that it’s only one episode, which means that we can’t spend too much time with any of the second and third-level Muppets. That’s a shame, because Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the Muppet performers have created a host of lovable characters in a cast that goes far deeper than the regular big names.
Until The Muppet Show gets a full revival season, we’ll celebrate those underrated Muppets here.
Beauregard
Were Beauregard just a standard dumb guy, he would still be wonderful. Performer Dave Goelz imbues him with such an innocent sweetness that we find ourselves laughing with him instead of at him, especially when he gets to do absurd bits like his tour of London in The Great Muppet Caper. But Beauregard gets even better within The Muppet Show milieu, where he serves as the janitor. Even more than behind-the-scenes guys like Scooter, Beauregard reminds us that it takes many hands to pull off a performance, and the people off-stage are just as weird as the people on the stage.
Lew Zealand
Lew Zealand, originally performed by Jerry Nelson and now by Matt Vogel, began as one of the many one-off weirdos on The Muppet Show, a guy who could do one thing and would stick to that one thing, even if it wasn’t very interesting. Namely, Lew Zealand would throw fish. However, Lew became so much weirder and so much more interesting when he moved off the stage and into “normal” situations. We never fail to laugh when flying fish start popping out of crowd scenes, and his devotion to using paper towels in jewel heists goes beyond any sort of logic into a whole new level of weirdness.
Clifford
The many failed attempts to revive The Muppet Show past the early eighties aren’t exactly a point of pride for Muppet fans, but that doesn’t mean they lack charm. One of the more interesting experiments involved Clifford, the cool catfish-looking Muppet who took over hosting duties for Muppets Tonight. Performed by Kevin Clash, Clifford brought a different energy than the constantly-frazzled Kermit, which helped set apart Muppets Tonight from other iterations. Since that show came to an end, Clifford has been a background player at best, but it would be nice if new projects put him back in the spotlight.
Pepe the King Prawn
While Clifford has been largely forgotten since Muppets Tonight, Pepe the King Prawn has only grown in prominence over the past years, to the point that he may not even belong on this list. Still, we’re including him just because he’s not from the franchise’s most successful era and, therefore, doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. And he really does deserve attention, as performer Bill Barretta has created an infectious character, a guy whose self-confidence goes far beyond the limits of his stature. Need proof? Just go to social media, where you’re sure to find plenty of clips featuring Pepe charming, or attempting to charm, anyone who might find him attractive.
Zoot
Zoot doesn’t do much. Zoot doesn’t say much. But when he does, it always matters. I’m not just referring to the note he sounds (or attempts to sound) at the end of every episode of The Muppet Show. I’m also referring to the one-liners and reactions he gets to give. Take the moment when he jolts awake in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Yes, bandmate Floyd Pepper gets the more prominent joke (“Go back to sleep, nobody’s landed”), but it’s the combination of relief and annoyance that performer Goelz plays that suggests that Zoot’s very still waters do indeed run deep.
Bobo the Bear
Like Pepe, Bobo the Bear debuted in Muppets Tonight and continues to appear in projects. However, unlike Pepe, he doesn’t have a frequent social media presence or a following. And yet, he remains a delightful member of the Muppet cast, precisely because he has the exact opposite energy as Pepe and Clifford. Performer Bill Barretta somehow makes Bobo’s desire to just be part of the gang into something endearing instead of annoying, and his genuinely good attitude makes for a nice, calming presence amongst the overall chaos of the various Muppet shows.
Big Mean Carl
Most Muppet fans first encounter the franchise as children, and, as they age, the fans talk about these characters as a source of warmth and comfort. But there’s another aspect to some Muppet characters, an aspect that many young children first watching the Muppets know well: some of the Muppets are scary. Over time, guys like Sweetums reveal themselves to be big softies, and that’s why we need characters such as Big Mean Carl, first played by Goelz and now by Barretta. There’s an affability to Carl that softens his big meanness, but you never know when he’s going to suddenly swallow a bag-pipe.
Digit
Speaking of scary Muppets: Digit. Digit made his first appearance in The Jim Henson Hour as the show’s technical advisor, and has only made a few background appearances since. Yet, you’re certain to notice Digit every time he shows up, and not just because of Goelz’s strong puppeteering. Digit has a completely unique look, one that has only become more distinctive—and disturbing—as we move away from the ’80s video art that initially inspired his creation.
The Amazing Mumford
Despite Congress’s attempts to gut it, Sesame Street continues to live on, which means that the Muppets for Henson’s other great series get plenty of screen time. One notable exception is the guy who feels like he should have made a few more visits to the Muppet Theater, the Amazing Mumford. Played by Jerry Nelson, Mumford is a magician whose tricks don’t always go right, most memorable for his magic phrase, “A la peanut butter sandwiches!” His indefatigable desire to put on a show makes him unique to Sesame Street, and he needs more attention.
Marvin Suggs
The Muppet Show is a vaudeville-esque show, so it follows that many of its lesser cast members would be performers with one hook for their act. But, with apologies to Crazy Harry, the weirdest and most wonderful of the bunch is Marvin Suggs. Dressed in a flashy flamenco outfit and performed by Frank Oz, Marvin would simply play musical numbers for his audience. It’s just that his instrument was the Muppaphone, a xylophone-like instrument consisting of ball Muppets that say “ow” in different tones when struck. It’s a bizarre bit, and we never get enough of it.
The Muppet Show is now streaming on Disney+.
Lauren LaVera: Horror’s Next Scream Queen Is Ready to Kick Back
Years before Art the Clown and the Terrifier franchise, horror conventions and the double-edged sword of “Scream Queen” being bestowed by fans, Lauren LaVera was simply a Philly kid answering a casting call in her hometown. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to pursue acting professionally. Nonetheless, the young, undeniable performer found herself drawn to opportunity after learning M. Night Shyamalan was shooting his next Blumhouse feature, Split, in the City of Brotherly Love.
“It was maybe my first on-set experience,” LaVera recalls of the gig years later from another northeast metropolis, this one on the Hudson. Back then, she was initially hired to appear in a single scene behind principals that included Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula. However, during the lone day of work’s lunch, LaVera and her mother happened to walk past the ever-observant director. And Shyamalan stopped to study the extra.
“I didn’t notice this, but he kind of turned around and looked at me like he knew me,” LaVera says. “My mom told me when I sat down. She asked, ‘Have you met him before?’ And I was like, ‘No, I love him, but no!’ The next day, though, I get a call from the casting director asking if instead of being just the background actor, I could be the stand-in, the body double for Anya Taylor-Joy and the other two girls.”
It marked LaVera’s first taste of professional moviemaking, as well as a bit of a crash course in film school where every day LaVera would be on the set, and Shyamalan more than once would bring her beside the monitor to witness what he looked for in a shot or a performance. The makeshift coursework also came during a turning point for the would-be student, as LaVera had actually just finished school, and her studies included a major in literature and a minor in Italian. Cinema and performance was nowhere to be seen in the curriculum.
“I was an optician for about two years,” LaVera reveals. “It was a really good job, right out of college… and I was becoming quite accomplished at it.” Yet there was something in her, the same thing that led to her walking onto a Split set, which was left wondering and wanting.
Looking back at it now, LaVera credits her acting bug coming from beloved grandmother Joan, a matriarch who dreamed of pursuing dance professionally and who counted Ginger Rogers and Vera-Ellen among her idols. Joan passed that passion to her granddaughter, as well as a story about the dream waylaid by life and a different time.
“When my mommom was on her deathbed, and I was losing one of the most important people in my life, I became more aware of my own mortality and it made me realize I was at a defining crossroads,” LaVera says. “I’d just recently got married and now my boss was offering me a comfortable [raise] and lucrative position. I could’ve done what my grandmother did, really settle down in my job, maybe consider children, even. I just couldn’t shake the longing in her eyes whenever we discussed her dreams. So shortly after her passing, I quit my job and that same night I attended my first proper acting class.” She says she cried all the way to the first lesson.
Michael J. Lepor
Thorns on a Scream Queen’s Crown
LaVera’s road on-set beginning with Split seems apropos given her onscreen persona these days. Playing Sienna Shaw in the Terrifier films has placed the actor in rarefied company, with the intentionally archetypal final girl of Terrifier 2 and 3 fame being mentioned by fans in the same breath as Laurie Strode of the Halloween franchise or Nancy Thompson of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The woman who brought Sienna to life might be wary of making quite such grand comparisons, just as she seems flattered if a bit surprised by those who describe her as a scream queen: “That I’ve done enough to earn that feels like a lot for me,” she admits while also pointing out the Sienna character is more inclined to yell with righteous, bloody anger as she stabs David Howard Thornton’s Art the Clown with a sword, as she is to scream in terror.
Still, the performer feels fortunate to have fallen into a singular and tightly woven community with other horror genre faves. The day we meet, LaVera still has sending Linda Blair a “happy birthday” text message on her to-do list. They met at a convention. She also is ready to go to bat for Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, an uncharacteristically feel-good Stephen King adaptation from a fellow maestro of the macabre, and in which LaVera enjoys a small cameo as an Italian reporter.
“He asked me to do a voiceover, which I was thrilled to do, because he remembered I spoke Italian and he needed different voices with different languages,” the actor says.
This bilingual talent is also on display in her latest genre effort, Twisted, which is due out on VOD on Friday, Feb. 6. In the film from director Darren Lynn Bousman, LaVera plays confidence woman Paloma, an ambiguous grifter who along with her romantic and professional partner, Smith (Mia Healey), has made a habit of renting out luxury homes and New York City apartments they don’t actually own. This eventually gets them into trouble when they pull this shtick on a unit in the possession of a doctor with deceptively pleasant beside manner (Djimon Hounsou).
“It is interesting,” LaVera says of the generational dynamics between her heroine and Hounsou’s not-so-good doctor. “I do feel that my generation and generations below me will probably continue to struggle greatly to buy property. So I feel that [the movie] is current in its own fun way. It’s like, ‘Fuck you if you’re not gonna let us afford houses. You’ve been scamming us for so long, so why don’t we scam the scammers?’”
A major appeal of the film was also working with Hounsou whose resume runs the gamut from Gladiator to Jim Sheridan’s In America. LaVera describes the legendary character actor as having a regal presence about him: “I believe he was a king in his past life.” It made doing the movie easy, as did seeing so much of herself in Paloma. After all, they’re women who both love putting on a show.
“I think Paloma had a secret want to perform in some way, and I think that’s why she goes above and beyond to put on these accents for these different characters,” LaVera explains about her characterization. “I think it’s her way of releasing this desire she always had. So I made diaries for every single one of those characters Paloma plays.”
The choice further allowed LaVera and Paloma both to have fun with developing cadence and rhythms, with the actress saying she developed the con woman’s various accents, right down to which regions of Ireland or the UK each persona supposedly hailed from. When it comes to using an Italian accent, however, LaVera sheepishly confides she’s a bit more predetermined to connotations since they match her family, who hail from Naples, Capri, and other parts of Southern Italy. “I learned Italian in college. My family didn’t teach me Italian. But now that I speak with my family and friends, they live in Naples, and Neapolitan is completely different from Italian.”
Michael J. Lepor
One More Dance with Art the Clown
Twisted is the first time LaVera has collaborated with Bousman, a cult favorite for his work on many of the Saw sequels, beginning with Saw II, III, and IV. LaVera grew up with them all, and in fact counts the first Saw (from director James Wan) as one of the formative moviegoing experiences of her life. The film left her completely shaken when the killer turned out to be hiding in plain sight on a scuzzy bathroom floor.
Truth be told, though, her favorite genres as a child were more likely to be the kind of comedies her grandmother enjoyed, and the martial arts movies Lauren discovered along the way.
“My mommom loved watching I Love Lucy with Lucille Ball, and I would put on skits from them when I was like two or three,” says LaVera. “I would just jump out and shout, ‘Presenting Lauren!’ and I would imitate the skit that I saw in a scene. And then I started watching Bruce Lee movie and Jackie Chan movies, and Michelle Yeoh, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to kick something really hard!’”
The dream of combining the comedy of Lucille Ball with the physicality and also distinct comedic genius of Jackie Chan caused LaVera to pursue martial arts lessons long before that fateful acting class. And ironically, it was also this physicality which led her to horror after Terrifier writer-director Damien Leone saw some boxing reels that LaVera was talked into filming by her management at the time. The choice paid off since in her intentionally half-hearted kicks and punches (she was embarrassed about releasing them online), Leone saw an action heroine in them nonetheless, and one who could stand up to the nastiest movie slasher this side of the 1980s.
“I think a big piece of Sienna is Damien,” LaVera considers, “even though he wrote her as a woman, or as a girl for the second film, I think there’s something about her that is just a part of him entirely, which I think is quite beautiful.”
The pair bonded over conceptualizing Sienna’s musical loves and influences, with LaVera journaling those interests in Sienna’s voice, and Leone in turn creating playlists he thought his heroine would listen to (and which LaVera suspects are largely Leone’s favorites). They also compared notes on many of the final girls of yore, with LaVera going down a rabbit hole of binging Final Destination,Scream, and more.
The approach worked, with Sienna carving out her own place in the final girl pantheon, even as the iconography she cuts is one which LaVera freely admits to having complicated feelings about.
“It’s no secret at this point that I really did not enjoy that costume,” LaVera says of the angelic, and sparse, Halloween costume Sienna spends much of Terrifier 2 wearing. “It was so uncomfortable. It wasn’t finished; it wasn’t really properly put together and there was no lining on the inside, so I got a lot of blisters, a lot of cuts.”
When asked to think of the most extreme thing she experienced on a Terrifier set, it was not a prosthetic effect or mountain of gore that springs to mind (though LaVera notes being forced by Art to bite into a viscera of “pink goo” during Terrifier 3 comes close). No, it’s shooting in the Fright Factory in Philadelphia during winter in that costume: “I’ve never been colder than on that set, especially in that costume. I was freezing in Terrifier 2.”
The amount of pride LaVera feels for Sienna, however, and the impact that image has had, extending into Terrifier 3where a more seasonally prepared Sienna is all but crucified by Art the Clown who adorns her with a crown of thorns, is palpable.
“It’s so easy to kind of pin her as this guardian angel, this savior,” says LaVera, “but in my mind, she’s more in this Grecian epic. Like I think there’s something very Greek about it all and very tragic. She’s experiencing this hero’s journey which is cloaked in mysticism.”
Grecian might be a good term, too, heading into Terrifier 4, which Leone has confirmed will be the grand finale of the saga and will pick up after Sienna saw her younger cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) vanish into an abyss, which might as well be Hades by another word. Now Sienna is vowing to enter the proverbial underworld and bring her cousin back.
Unlike on Terrifier 3, Leone is apparently keeping the fourth installment close to the chest from even LaVera and Thornton, who were given hints and ideas in the past of where things were going. They also in turn could offer their own ideas.
“I haven’t read any of the script yet,” LaVera confirms. “I don’t think Damien’s even done writing it as of right now. I’m sure he’s close to done based off things he has texted me and what he’s been telling the press, but no, he’s kept it completely under wraps from David, from myself, from all of the other cast and crew. So it’ll be a surprise.”
With that said, the actress can reveal what she would like to see.
“I want Jonathan to be alive; I want Gabbie to be saved; and I want some sort of retribution for Sienna, however that will look. I think our girl’s been through enough and she deserves a win, whatever it will look like for her. Whether or not she survives, I don’t know, but I think she deserves a win.”
Michael J. Lepor
A Final Escape
When we catch up with LaVera, she’s in New York City preparing for what would turn out to be the first of several snowstorms to bear down on the east coast inside of a week. Having lived her whole life around this neck of the woods, she doesn’t seem rattled by the weather. In fact, she ponders if the darkness and general lack of sunlight might explain why so many horror filmmakers come out of the places she calls home.
And with Twisted on the eve of release, and Terrifier 4 in the offing, she has plenty of horror still to come. This might likewise explain when looking to the future, she is hoping for subject matter that is perhaps a little sunnier.
Getting a chance to do an action movie still remains the dream for the actor, as would perhaps working on a layered television series like her current rewatch obsession, Succession. Really though, she seems just ready to laugh.
“I want to do a rom-com,” LaVera reveals. “I just want someone to pay to fly me to an island where I cannot be cold like I was in the Terrifier franchise. There would be a spa so I can get a massage, or just be on a beach. I do love lighthearted storytelling, but that would just be a nice change and a nice break on my body. It’s very stressful doing horror.”
Heavy still lies the crown, thorns or otherwise.
The Muppet Show Revival Is Not for Gen X and That’s OK
Why do Statler and Waldorf, the two curmudgeons sitting in the balcony during every episode of The Muppet Show, have box seats to a show they supposedly hate? In the opening credits, they even have their own refrain: “Why do we always come here? / I guess we’ll never know. / It’s like a kind of torture / to have to watch the show.” In truth, these two old men were the original trolls before social media made hate-watching commonplace, and they’d never admit that they simply enjoy a good train wreck.
But of course that’s the meta of The Muppet Show: everything goes wrong behind and in front of the curtain, and we get to enjoy the backstage shenanigans. The mayhem is the entertainment! But what if Statler and Waldorf represented a different aging demographic: the original audience of The Muppet Show from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Would they watch the current special airing on Disney+ and find it lacking in the spark that made The Muppet Show of their youth remarkable? Would they throw metaphorical tomatoes from the balcony?
This isn’t entirely a hypothetical. I, a Gen X-er watched the Sabrina Carpenter special with my family, wanting to share and recapture the magic of the show I remembered from when I was in elementary school. But when the show was over, I felt underwhelmed. Aside from a Miss Piggy skit and a Bunsen Honeydew & Beaker segment, it was mostly musical numbers. Was this The Muppet Show I grew up with? Why did it feel so… insufficient?
Meanwhile, my teenaged daughter loved it! As someone whose exposure to The Muppets mostly consisted of YouTube snippets like the iconic cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the Swedish Chef’s “Popcorn” earworm, seeing a full-blown variety show with a current artist like Sabrina Carpenter was a revelation. She immediately asked if we could go back and watch the old episodes somehow.
And that’s when I realized why I found the special lacking. I was unfairly expecting it to be everything all at once, even though this event episode was the same half hour as a regular installment of The Muppet Show. It wasn’t enough for me because Sabrina Carpenter was a modern artist getting in the way of Fozzy Bear the prop comic and Pigs in Space and all the other acts I remembered. Obviously, the guest host wasn’t for a 50+ viewer who might as well have been seated with the geezers in the balcony.
My daughter and I agreed on one thing: there needs to be more of The Muppet Show. I’ll freely admit to welling up during Rowlf’s piano montage at the beginning as the footlights came up on the familiar stage, and the final ensemble number, another Queen cover, was inspiring to say the least. In these times when everything seems to be going wrong behind the scenes, it would be nice to know that Kermit and Scooter could be there to make it alright in the end… no matter what those cynics Statler and Waldorf say.
The Muppet Show event special is available to stream on Disney+ now.
Every Marvel TV Show in the MCU Era Ranked
Seven years after Netflix’sDaredevil series ended with its third season, Daredevil: Born Againbrought back stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, this time for Disney+.
Daredevil’s journey from star of a canceled, violent Netflix series to a new entry completely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe highlighted the strange history of Marvel shows. Although Marvel has been a constant presence on television since the cartoons of the 1960s, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe reinvigorated public interest in the characters.
Yet, while the movies boasted a shared universe, in which Captain America can drop by Asgard (albeit as a Loki projection) in Thor: The Dark World, the TV shows were strangely sequestered for a long time. Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones lived on Netflix. Cloak & Dagger and Runaways stayed on Freeform. Characters from the movies got spun off into shows on Disney+.
However, with Born Again bringing the Netflix series back, it’s time to look at all of the shows produced under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner… mostly. A few shows that came out during the MCU era fall a bit outside the scope of this list. Legion and Gifted both deal with the X-Men, but they don’t even wink at the MCU and instead tell their own idiosyncratic stories. Likewise, the animated series Spidey and His Amazing Spider-Friends, Hit-Monkey, and M.O.D.O.K. might have some overlap with characters that appear in the MCU, but they have radically different takes and don’t even acknowledge the multiverse like shows that are on this list.
Even cutting out those shows leaves a ton of superhero action left to cover, some better than others. So let’s dive into the world of Marvel heroes that have been forever changed by the MCU.
33. Inhumans
Perhaps the least essential creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Inhumans work best as supporting characters within the Fantastic Four franchise. A messy royal family who support eugenics, the Inhumans are hardly the most likable characters from the House of Ideas. Yet, back when the X-Men adaptation rights were with 20th Century Fox instead of Disney/Marvel, Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter pushed the Inhumans as replacements for the mutants.
To that end Perlmutter advocated an Inhumans movie, something that Kevin Feige resisted as much as he could, bumping the project to a short ABC miniseries. And what a terrible miniseries it was. Despite some likable actors such as Anson Mount and Ken Leung, Inhumans never justified its own existence. When Medusa (Serinda Swan), a character with the cool power of long hair she can control, gets her head shaved at the start of the series, smart people forgot about Inhumans until Black Bolt’s delightful death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
32. Marvel’s Runaways
Here’s the thing about the Runaways: they have to run away. By issue #2 of the acclaimed comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, the primary teens had escaped from home, upon learning that their parents were supervillains. For some reason, the television adaptation kept the kids in the house for almost the entirety of the series. Even when the kids officially left home, they kept breaking into one another’s houses for one reason or another.
Without actually much running away and with superpower usage limited by television budgets, Runaways only had generic teen angst left to portray. It portrayed the angst ably, but covered the same ground that other shows had done first and better, leaving us viewers wondering why anyone even bothered making Runaways.
31. Helstrom
The best shows on this list figure out a way to take concepts from Marvel Comics and translate them to the medium of television. The worst get that balance wrong, hoping that the slightest gestures at one end can make up for deficiencies on the other. Case in point, the supernatural crime series Helstrom, starring Tom Austen and Sydney Lemmon as Daimon and Ana Helstrom.
In the comics, Daimon and Satana Hellstrom are the literal children of Satan and a human woman, who struggle to make sense of their conflicting heritages. The television show turns the two into children of a demon-possessed serial killer and send them to investigate spiritual mysteries, not unlike Supernatural or Lucifer (a show that does a much better job adapting a comic book to procedural television). The result is a show that trades in tired tv tropes that it’s occasional concessions to the comics cannot overcome.
30. Secret Invasion
The most damning thing that anyone can say about Secret Invasion is that it doesn’t matter at all. You could skip it and not be confused at all when Nick Fury shows up again in The Marvels, seemingly unfazed by what happened in his own show — a show that included the deaths of strong supporting characters Maria Hill and Talos and revealed that Fury had a wife who was a Skrull.
Frankly, those who skipped Secret Invasion were probably the happiest with the show. Despite strong work from the reliably great Samuel L. Jackson and Olivia Colman being Olivia Colman, the show couldn’t decide if it was a sci-fi show about aliens, a spy thriller, or a political satire, resulting in a forgettable, sloppy mess.
29. The Defenders
As this list will show, the Netflix Marvel series were a mixed bag, never able to balance the superheroics of the characters with the more grounded tone the shows wanted to achieve. It’s fitting, then, that the crossover miniseries The Defenders exemplifies all of the other shows’ problems.
The eight-episode mini wisely builds out of Daredevil, the strongest of the Netflix shows, with a plot that involves Hand ninjas trying to gain control of a super weapon called Black Sky, which turns out to be Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra. As much as the Hand leader Alexandria, played by a disinterested Sigourney Weaver, talks about the end of the world, The Defenders feels shockingly tiny, mostly a bunch of people in business suits having conversations in officers.
28. Eyes of Wakanda
When Eyes of Wakanda was first announced, it sounded like the ideal Disney+ MCU show. Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole created something special with Black Panther, a world so rich and varied that no one movie could fully explore it. The first stills released for the series only heightened that excitement, promising something rich and beautiful.
Unfortunately, what we ended up getting fell far short of that promise. Eyes of Wakanda looks good, for sure, but somehow, the series never seems to justify its existence. The decision to focus on Wakanda’s history made the show feel disconnected from the films. And despite the strong voice work from stars Winnie Harlow and Black Lightning’s Cress Williams, none of the new characters captured our imagination like T’Challa, M’Baku, and Okoye. Even two episodes into Eyes of Wakanda, the eyes of the viewer start to glaze over.
27. Iron Fist
Like The Defenders, Iron Fist also confuses conversations in office buildings with compelling genre television. Somehow, a comic book series about a young man who becomes kung fu master after thrusting his hands into a dragon’s heart transformed into a show about corporate intrigue. Then again, given star Finn Jones’s nothing of a take on the main character Danny Rand, maybe producers didn’t have faith that he could carry the action scenes.
The show’s second season benefits from a change in showrunner and more of a focus on the strong supporting cast, which includes an outstanding turn by Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing. However, it was too little too late, and very few people even cared enough to tune in for a second season.
26. Echo
Unlike the aforementioned Helstrom siblings, at least Maya Lopez had a strong MCU showing before getting spun off into her own miniseries Echo. As portrayed by Alaqua Cox, Lopez made for a compelling antagonist to Clint Barton in Hawkeye. But Maya’s connection to Wilson Fisk, which does exist in the Daredevil comics in which she debuted, overshadowed the character, making her feel like a supporting character in her own show.
Then again, there’s not much to the show itself. Despite gathering some of the best Native actors working today (including most of the cast of the far superior Reservation Dogs), Echo drags across its five episodes, biding time until Maya can finally face off with Fisk. At least creative leads Marion Dayre, Amy Rardin, and Sydney Freeland work in enough underseen elements of Choctaw culture to give Echo some flavor it would otherwise lack.
25. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Easily the most divisive show on this list, She-Hulk: Attorney at Lawwill certainly rank much higher for some and perhaps even lower for others. No one would place the show in the middle. On one hand, the strong reactions speak to the show’s willingness to break the MCU model, something to be applauded. Harnessing the irreverent humor of writer and artist John Byrne’s comic run, She-Hulk stars Tatiana Maslany in a self-aware legal comedy.
However, the show’s success relies entirely on how much the audience finds the jokes actually funny. If watching She-Hulk twerk with Megan Thee Stallion is the height of comedy, then you probably enjoyed the show. If the series felt like watching the charming Maslany try to sell sub-UCB improv, then everything about the show — including the terrible effects and awkward MCU connections — felt like a drag.
24. Cloak and Dagger
Cloak and Dagger are two of the trickier characters to bring out of their genesis as moralizing characters from the “Just Say No” 1980s. Not only does the story of teenage runaways Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen, who gain powers after being subjected to flawed street drugs, feel preachy, but Dagger has one of the most improbable costumes in comics history.
The television adaptation, starring Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt, ditches the costumes and instead plays up the teen drama. As a result, the show works as a melodrama with supernatural elements, gaining a solid following across its two seasons. Fans of weird Marvel characters might be disappointed with the series’ downplaying of the superhero aspects, but those who wanted off-kilter YA tales were pleased.
23. Ironheart
Marvel’s release of Ironheart was long delayed. By the time it finally landed on Disney+, there was little hope it would be good, but in the end, it wasn’t as bad as most fans expected. Arguably, it was fine. But that’s why we see it so low on the list here. “Fine” is not “good.”
Spinning off the character of Riri Williams into her own show wasn’t a bad idea. Dominique Thorne’s performance as Riri had proved to be a highlight of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But the plot of Ironheart didn’t seem well thought-out. Making Riri an antihero who works for a bad guy didn’t work, and the show’s ethical themes fell flat. The characters in Riri’s orbit were also largely underutilized. A late-stage appearance from Mephisto livened things up a bit, but it wasn’t enough to save a largely lacklustre series that felt quite generic when compared to other, riskier MCU shows.
22. I Am Groot
Kids love Groot, so what would be better than a kids’ series about baby Groot getting into misadventures? I Am Groot is beautifully animated and each show’s six-minute runtime meant that the adventures had to stay small and focused.
And yet, even members of the target demographic get bored after one or two episodes. Ten episodes of the series feel like far too many, especially in the second season, which adds characters like the Watcher and alienates young children even more.
21. Marvel’s What If…?
What If…? might be the most perfect adaptation of a comic book series. Like the long-running comic series, What If…? features alternate reality versions of familiar characters, playing out various thought experiments. And like the comic series, What If…? was occasionally interesting and mostly dull.
Which isn’t to say that the entire show was a waste of time. What If…? gave us one more chance to see/hear Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and the series recently featured Storm in her Asgardian armor, a fan favorite from the comics. Moreover, Jeffrey Wright proved to be the ideal person to voice the all-powerful Watcher, thanks to his ability to keep tongue in cheek without sacrificing gravitas. Still, it’s hard to believe that anyone remembers the episodes as soon as the credits roll.
20. Moon Knight
One’s enjoyment of Moon Knight might depend entirely on one’s feelings about Oscar Isaac. For those who like Isaac, but see the actor’s limitations, then Moon Knight drags every time he deploys his goofy English accent to portray Steven Grant, and depictions of his alternate (and American) identity Marc Spector don’t help things. By the time the show ended with a television CG equivalent of a kaiju battle, Moon Knight was a lost cause.
For those who love everything that Isaac’s handing out, Moon Knight is a lot of fun. The series wisely adapts the great Moon Knight run by Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood, combining psychological exploration with archaeological adventure. Even better, May Calamawy steals every single scene she’s in as Layla El-Faouly, leaving us still clamoring for more Silver Scarab.
19. Luke Cage
The tragedy of the Neftlix Marvel shows is that they could have been really, really good. Luke Cage brims with potential, thanks to a captivating performance by Mike Colter in the lead and ambitious storytelling from showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, who did not shy away from the social relevance of the characters. Add in ringers such as Mahershala Ali and Alfre Woodard as villains, and Luke Cage was set to match Daredevil for excitement and intensity.
Yet, the Netflix shows were mired by some requirement instituted by Marvel, most notably a mandatory minimum of 13 episodes per season. As a result, most of the Netflix shows felt oddly paced, none worse than Luke Cage. The electric charge of the first season fizzled out, even before the show unwisely killed off Ali’s character and replaced him with the much sillier Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey). Coming out of The Defenders, the show lost any direction, saddling the series with uninspired team-ups and a generic mystery plot.
18. Marvel Zombies
Marvel Zombies had some great runs in the pages of Marvel Comics, and a zombie-themed episode of What If…? had already proved that they could hold their own in an animated series, so when a four-episode Marvel Zombies miniseries hit Disney+, it promised to be a home run.
Perhaps shy of that, Marvel Zombies is still pretty fun TV that doesn’t hold back on the blood and guts we expect from a zombie property. It’s not original, but dang is it entertaining! It helps that so many MCU actors, like Simu Liu and Elizabeth Olsen, agreed to lend their voices to the characters. And hey, who doesn’t want more Blade??
17. The Punisher
The Punisher might be one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe, but he’s not one of the richest. The entire appeal of the Punisher comes from the misery of watching broken man Frank Castle inflict all manner of pain on the worst of the worst. So it’s remarkable that the MCU has wrung two seasons of compelling television out of the character and a bonus appearance in Daredevil: Born Again.
A lot of the show’s success can be attributed to Jon Bernthal, who first played the character in Daredevil. Bernthal finds empathy for Castle, ensuring that he feels human, even when he goes to incredibly dark lengths in his war on crime. Then again, the show didn’t always match Bernthal’s efforts, too often falling back into the standard doom and gloom of the Punisher’s world.
16. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
At times, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pays off the promise of the MCU shows. Where the movies have to tell big stories that leave little room for proper character development, the shows could take their time and flesh out the person behind the mask. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, intended to be the first of the Disney+ series, devotes its best parts to Sam Wilson wrestling with the idea of becoming the next Captain America and to Bucky dealing with the fallout of his crimes as the Winter Soldier.
But the show doesn’t seem to trust the characters enough to really focus on them. Instead, it borrows from excellent Mark Gruenwald-written Captain America comics from the 1980s to tell a thriller dealing with refugees from the Blip who call themselves the Flag Smashers. Throw in Wyatt Russell as an unstable new Captain America, and there’s very little room left over for character growth. Still, the stuff that’s there is pretty compelling, and the series ends with Sam fully grown into the Captain America role.
15. Daredevil: Born Again
Something miraculous happened in the middle of shooting Daredevil: Born Again: Marvel realized that their revived version of the Netflix show wasn’t working, and went back to the drawing board. Other creatives were brought in, and the result was far better than it should have been. Having learned the lessons of previous shows, Marvel didn’t want to finally put Charlie Cox back in the suit and risk underwhelming fans, and the extra effort was well worth it.
But the result is a mixed bag. Some episodes of Born Again are simply incredible, but others in the middle of the season linger from the first round of shooting and aren’t particularly impressive. Still, the influence of Loki season 2 directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead on the better installments easily lifts the first season of Born Again into the sunlight, and their episodes seem to promise that season 2 will be even better with their increased creative input.
14. Jessica Jones
Nowhere was the 13-episode requirement of the Netflix shows felt more keenly than midway through the first season of Jessica Jones. The series had a fantastic hook, with a perfectly cast Krysten Ritter as the acerbic private investigator facing off against David Tennant as Kilgrave, the mind-controlling Purple Man. And yet, all of the tension dissipated midway through the first season, when a subplot involving Jessica’s best pal and an unstable cop took center stage while Jones and Kilgrave bided their time.
Jessica Jones settled into a better rhythm for its second and third seasons, and Ritter remained strong throughout. But without Tennant’s Kilgrave as the main villain, those later seasons feel solid if unremarkable. Still, that’s all a testament to what a remarkable show Jessica Jones was with Kilgrave as the antagonist, adding a level of true menace to the procedural structure and adding true pathos to Ritter’s disaffected exterior.
13. Agatha All Along
For its first few episodes, Agatha All Along felt like Marvel at its least essential. The draw to the series seemed to be watching the always-delightful Kathryn Hahn pal around with other great actors, including Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp as back-biting witches, alongside Joe Locke as a mysterious magic user mostly just called “Teen” and Aubrey Plaza as a flirtatious enemy.
But by the time that the second half of the season kicks in, Agatha All Along finds surprising pathos. It’s not just the depths of Agatha’s backstory, but especially a Doctor Who-style twist to LuPone’s time-displaced witch and a tale of displacement and found family with the Teen. What began as a lackluster spin-off became a starting point for one of the Young Avengers, giving the MCU a shared universe boost that once was the franchise’s calling card.
12. Agents of SHIELD
It’s hard to judge Agents of SHIELD for what it was, not what it could have been. Agents of SHIELD debuted at the height of Marvel mania, promising more MCU action by following fan-favorite Phil Coulson and his secret agents as they do superhero espionage. Yet, that first season quickly revealed itself as a pretty by-the-numbers procedural with only the slightest MCU trappings. When the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier ended by completely recreating SHIELD, it seemed like the series would find its footing in season two, but that didn’t happen either.
Once expectations fell away (and, frankly, a lot of people stopped watching), Agents of SHIELD got room to breathe. It’s likable ensemble cast settled into their roles and the show got room to be more experimental and fun. Kree soldiers, Ghost Rider, and actual supervillains became part of the story. The less that people paid attention to Agents of SHIELD, the more it got to be itself, and the show was better for it.
11. Werewolf by Night
By this point, readers have certainly noticed a recurring complaint across this list, that some shows waste even good ideas because they stretch their stories across too many episodes. The first of two specials created for Disney+, Werewolf by Night fills every one of its 53 minutes with delightful detail, not wasting a second.
Directed by composer turned first-time filmmaker Michael Giacchino, Werewolf by Night pairs Gael García Bernal at his most lovable with a flinty Laura Donnelly, the former playing a good man cursed with lycanthropy and the latter the unwilling scion of monster hunters. Giacchino channels the gothic thrills of Universal Horror and even manages to put Man-Thing on screen without generating any guffaws. By the time Werewolf by Night ends, we’re still hungry for more, a rarity among MCU shows.
10. Agent Carter
Obviously, Agent Carter isn’t the best show on this list. But Agent Carter does the best job at translating the Marvel Universe to television. The series spun-off Hayley Atwell‘s scene-stealing Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger and lets her be so much more than the long-lost girlfriend of Steve Rogers.
Even better, the World War II setting protected Agent Carter from the expectations that hobbled Agents of SHIELD, letting it play in its own corner of the universe. Yes, Edwin Jarvis and Howard Stark show up, but Agent Carter mostly got to be a high-energy spy show. The fact that it lasted just two seasons proves that Marvel didn’t always know what to do with its shows.
9. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
Given all of the changes that the show experienced in pre-production, given its cast overstuffed with Marvel supporting characters, it’s remarkable that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man managed to be as breezy and fresh as it is. Showrunner Jeff Trammell remixes over-familiar story beats to give us a modern-day take on Peter Parker, unlike any version seen in movies, comics, or television.
All of the changes work. Perennial B-list villain Tombstone gets a tragic arc, Harry feels like proper 2024 rich boy, and Colman Domingo gives us one of the most compelling takes on Norman Osborn ever seen. The entire show comes via stylized animation that recalls both the Spider-Verse films and Steve Ditko’s pop art, capturing the timeless quality of Spider-Man.
8. Hawkeye
No one in their right mind would pick Clint Barton as their favorite Avenger. Although played well by Jeremy Renner, he could never shake the fact that he was just a normal guy with bows and arrows among gods. Avengers: Age of Ultron effectively turned Clint’s weaknesses into strengths, but no one expected him to carry a television series.
Hawkeye works, in part, because he doesn’t have to carry it. The MCU gets a shot in the arm by adding Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, a rich girl who takes up the mantle of Hawkeye. Bishop’s tangled life, which includes a dashing Tony Dalton as a potential villain and a cameo by Florence Pugh as the White Widow, pairs nicely with Clint’s domestic stress. Plus, the series uses its Christmas setting and gives us Rogers: The Musical. What more could you want?
7. Wonder Man
Caught between changes of TV strategy over at Marvel, Wonder Man dropped into the world with no pretensions and very little hype under its wings. This is a show where superheroes and the MCU are almost entirely irrelevant. It’s just here to tell a lovely tale of a budding friendship between two grown men who have become quite lost. The fact that one of them had incredibly dangerous superpowers is largely beside the point.
Wonder Man is that rare thing from Marvel: low stakes and high drama. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II shines as Simon Williams, a struggling actor who meets the washed-up Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) in Hollywood and teams up with him to land the part of a lifetime. Here, CGI battles and easter eggs are abandoned in favor of a good old-fashioned story. How can anyone hate that? Its success is something that Marvel could definitely learn from…
6. Loki
If Loki didn’t come back for a second season, it would have ranked much lower. The first series gave fans more of the MCU’s first real breakout Tom Hiddleston and paired him with the only person he could love, a variation of himself called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) as well as a perfectly-cast Owen Wilson as company man Mobius. M. Mobius. Fun, yes, but the multiverse shenanigans muted the show’s emotional stakes.
To the shock of everyone, Loki’s second season did the exact opposite, amping up the emotional power by leaning into the multiversal elements. Even adding Jonathan Majors, then burdened with scandal and failed franchise plans, doesn’t slow things down, as the second show combines the end of all realities as an existential crisis for the God of Lies. The show sticks the landing, giving Loki something so rare among Marvel characters: a proper ending.
5. Ms. Marvel
After Avengers: Endgame, Marvel hoped that younger characters could fill the gaps left by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. The execution of these new characters has been hit or miss, but Marvel absolutely scored a home run when they got Iman Vellani to play Kamala Khan, the fangirl who becomes superhero Ms. Marvel.
The idea of making a Marvel superfan into a superhero could be self-congratulatory, but Villani plays it with such a lack of guile that no one feels upset. Grounded by a great ensemble cast playing her friends and family, Ms. Marvel takes surprising chances, from the pop art look of the first two episodes to an episode that depicts the Partition of India to an unexpected X-Men twist. Ms. Marvel could be the future of MCU, if only the franchise would let her lead.
4. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
Leaving aside the fact that the only holiday celebrated in the Guardians of the Galaxy HolidaySpecial is Christmas, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect use of the MCU’s Disney+ connection. After two movies and supporting parts in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, the Guardians of the Galaxy had become some of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Universe, and that affection helps us forgive some of the clunky setups in the special.
Even better, the Holiday Special shows off what James Gunn does best, finding an unexpected genuine pathos in what seems like a goofy, somewhat metatextual tale, in which Mantis and Drax kidnap Kevin Bacon to give Starlord some Christmas cheer. And, of course, it has a killer soundtrack.
3. Daredevil
Daredevil isn’t exempt from the problems that plagued the other Netflix series. The second season in particular sags under the weight of too many plots and characters, and even the mostly-great first season spends way too much time with Matt Murdock recovering from his injuries. But when Daredevil is working, it’s among the best in superhero television.
The show establishes itself within its first three episodes. We meet Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, an endlessly charming man whose tragic history and complicated Catholicism drive him to dress up as a devil and pummel baddies. He’s matched by the Kingpin of Crime, Wilson Fisk, whom Vincent D’Onofrio plays as a hurt child in the body of a massive killer. The electricity between the two powered the series through its low points and beyond.
2. X-Men ’97
X-Men ’97 didn’t have to be this good. It could have just brought back the characters and cast from the ’90s show and made us all feel like kids again. It could have been fantasy escapism, letting us grown-ups ignore the problems in the real world.
X-Men ’97 does the exact opposite. Yes, we have the same characters from the ’90s show, many of whom have the same voice actors. And yes, the series continues to adapt stories from the incredibly popular but artistically questionable X-Men comics of the era. But the series leans hard into our current situation, making the mutant-as-minority metaphor more explicit than ever and offering a thrilling vision of resistance.
1. WandaVision
For a minute, it seemed like Marvel television would be something truly special. Intended to air after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision ended up making it to Disney+ first and announced itself as the ideal television adaptation. For its first two-thirds, WandaVision took favorites from the MCU, namely Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as her robot husband Vision, and put them in riffs on classic television.
One could argue that the drops in quality toward the end, when the television aspect falls away and traditional Marvel heroics take over. But the show does an excellent job weaving larger universe mystery throughout those early episodes, earning its big ending. Plus, the show wisely balances Wanda’s CGI off against Agatha with Vision having a deep conversation with himself. By the time it finished, WandaVision set a standard no other MCU show has been able to match. Yet.
The Best House Episodes to Rewatch
Dr. Gregory House was never the nicest person in the room. In fact, he was usually the rudest by a lot, but for eight thoroughly enjoyable seasons between 2004 and 2012, Princeton-Plainsboro’s medical Sherlock-in-residence had us in a chokehold.
And guess what? House is also enormously fun to rewatch! We understand that now might not be the right occasion to revisit the entire series (it would take a significant amount of time to do so), but if you’re looking to go back and cherry-pick some absolutely incredible episodes of House, here are some humble suggestions on where to start…
“Three Stories”
Season 1 Episode 21
“Three Stories” is an Emmy Award-winning early episode of the series that really cements how good Hugh Laurie’s performance is going to be in the central role of House going forward.
When House fills in for a sick professor and has to lecture a class of medical students on diagnostics, he decides to tell them about three patients who all had leg pain and how his team treated them. After he tells the final tale, it becomes clear that he’s describing what happened to his own leg, and how he went against his ex’s advice to endure a risky surgery that left him in a coma. While under, his ex made a medical choice that left him with his limp and chronic pain.
The episode has shades of The Usual Suspects, throwing you off the trail of House’s trauma until its staggering twist, and Laurie helps it all play out perfectly, like the conductor of the episode’s emotional orchestra.
“Autopsy”
Season 2 Episode 2
This series is jam-packed with emotional episodes, but the ones where kids are suffering always seem to hit harder. Here, House and the team have to perform a living autopsy on a young girl with terminal cancer when she starts hallucinating, and the cause is traced to a blood clot. If they cool her body temperature down and stop her heart, they may be able to remove the clot and give her one more year.
“Autopsy” is one of those special episodes where House is not only forced to admit he’s wrong, but also really think about how he approaches life.
“Deception”
Season 2 Episode 9
House is at the racetrack when a fellow gambler (Cynthia Nixon) collapses with a seizure. House sends her off to Princeton-Plainsboro and has the team begin working on a diagnosis. After establishing that she previously may have had Cushing’s syndrome, it becomes clear that the patient definitely has Münchausen’s syndrome and has been taking every advantage to become sick.
“Deception” is a cracking episode of House that keeps you guessing until the end. Although it sets up a classic conundrum, there are also a whole bunch of clever diagnostic misdirections that make the patient and her symptoms consistently unreliable, which is why it works so well on rewatch. This is also the episode where Foreman first takes charge of House, and House makes him absolutely miserable as a result. Good stuff all around.
“Euphoria, Part 1 & 2”
Season 2 Episodes 20–21
A superb two-parter begging for a rewatch, “Euphoria” puts Foreman in a life-or-death situation where he seems to have contracted something deadly from one of House’s patients, but the team can’t work out what it is and is also hampered in their efforts to find the cause. After the patient dies, it’s a race against time to cure Foreman before the clock runs out.
The episodes explore Foreman’s relationships with both House and his estranged father, adding significant emotional weight to the unfolding drama.
“No Reason”
Season 2 Episode 24
Season 2 closes out with a humdinger that’s super fun to rewatch, especially if you’ve forgotten how it plays out. It starts with House being shot by a former patient and having to share a room with the shooter after the incident. He’s also asked to diagnose a new patient while he remains in intensive care, but as his investigations continue, he realizes that everything he’s experiencing might be a hallucination.
One of the show’s darker, more psychological installments, “No Reason” blurs the line between fact and fiction in House’s world. It may be the first time he ends up reckoning with himself through a real-life avatar, but it certainly won’t be the last.
“Lines in the Sand”
Season 3 Episode 4
House is thrilled to be treating a patient who can’t talk in this early episode from season 3 that explores the case of an autistic boy who has eaten feces out of his sandbox. House is determined to get the boy back to health, but his work is littered with rude, thoughtless remarks that hurt the boy’s parents and undermine their attempts to care for him unconditionally.
“Lines in the Sand” is a darkly funny episode, but it’s also the only one in which the show goes out on a limb to suggest that House himself is autistic. It’s a suggestion that never really finds its footing – Wilson says he’s just a jerk – but House is clearly experiencing some complex feelings when treating the patient, and upon rewatch, this one is both fascinating and thought-provoking.
“One Day, One Room”
Season 3 Episode 12
A raw, compelling episode that shows us House at his most human, “One Day, One Room” follows House around the hospital while he’s stuck doing clinic duty for Cuddy. He meets one hapless patient after another until he finally meets a rape victim who won’t talk to anyone but him. After she attempts suicide, House stops resisting her wishes to speak to him, and she finally opens up about the rape. In turn, House recalls the terrible abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father.
There’s a lot here to unpack – the switch of focus to House’s abuse overshadows his “patient of the week’s” devastating story – but the two have met under exceptional circumstances and eventually both move forwards by understanding each other’s pain.
“House’s Head / Wilson’s Heart”
Season 4 Episodes 15–16
Yep, it’s the bus accident episodes, and we would only recommend you rewatch them if you have a lot of tissues handy! In the first part, you may recall that House is injured while travelling home and has to try to get back his memory of what happened. In the second, well, he’s remembered who was on the bus with him, and Wilson gets his heart smashed into a million pieces.
It’s an incredible arc with a huge emotional payoff that’s hard to recover from. Although we’re saying these are some of the best episodes to rewatch, please, please remember how you felt the first time before revisiting them!
“Simple Explanation”
Season 5 Episode 20
When House star Kal Penn got a job working for the Obama administration, he had to leave the show very quickly. Rather than say that his character, Dr Lawrence Kutner, went to another hospital or to live on a farm or something, the series had him suddenly and shockingly end his life, leaving House and the medical team to process his death under terribly traumatic circumstances. While House becomes convinced that Kutner’s death might be murder, the others are left to wonder what was going through his mind when he made his devastating choice.
It’s an upsetting but highly rewatchable episode that gets to the heart of why House can never be “fixed.” He cannot stop trying to work out the puzzle of Kutner’s suicide. Five seasons in, House is making no progress. This one really drives it home.
“Everybody Dies”
Season 8 Episode 22
The series finale of House is very reflective, but it definitely sticks the landing on a story that was never too concerned with happy endings.
Having found out that his best friend Wilson only has months to live, House makes the extremely normal and cool decision to fake his own death to avoid felony vandalism charges, opting to go on a cross-country motorcycle ride into the sunset with Wilson in his final months instead of doing time. Meanwhile, Chase gets House’s job, Taub patches things up with the many women in his life, and Cameron returns to medicine.
It’s a heartbreaking but satisfying ending to the show for fans, and still hits on rewatch. The later seasons of House had some episodes that weren’t quite up there with the best of them, but this finale is good stuff, even if Cuddy’s absence from it still feels wrong all these years later.
DC’s Superman vs. Homelander Showdown is a Super Let-Down
This article contains full spoilers for DC K.O.: Boss Battle #1.
Sadly, the issue falls far short of our expectations. Superman and Homelander appear together on just seven pages of the one-shot comic, four of which involve a single panel. While the two do trade a few punches and a headbutt, most of the fight consists of them shooting heat vision at one another. Worst of all, the fight has no clear conclusion. The showdown manages to disappoint everyone: fans of Superman, fans of The Boys, and, worst of all, fans of weird crossovers.
A Battle Royale
Boss Battle should have worked so much better than most comic book crossovers, simply because it’s part of the already gonzo DC K.O. storyline. The latest chapter in the company’s ongoing storyline about the death of Darkseid and the creation of the Absolute Universe, DC K.O. puts the company’s heroes and villains into a massive fighting tournament. The winner gets to claim the title of King Omega, which might be enough to stop Darkseid’s return.
Written by Joshua Williamson and Scott Snyder and illustrated by Javi Fernandez and Alejandro Sánchez, DC K.O. and its various tie-ins go deep into DC lore. Not only do we see unlikely battles (Hawkman vs Aquaman) and surprising team-ups (Lex Luthor and Supergirl), but we also see variations of the characters from across comic history. That means everyone from Electric Blue Superman to 1960s Captain Atom to Guy Gardner: Warrior gets a little attention in the series. And yet, as dense and weird as it is, DC K.O. is fundamentally a simple fighting story. It feels like a kid taking his toys and smashing them together until one falls over.
Because of the haphazard nature of the overall storyline, DC K.O.: Boss Battle made certain sense. The issue begins with those responsible for sending the mainline heroes into the tournament—Booster Gold, Doomsday as the Time Trapper, and the World Forger—experiencing ruptures in the multiverse. The ruptures send six mainline characters into alternate realities, where they meet the issue’s special guest stars.
Plastic Man and Black Lightning arrive in a different tournament, and find themselves fighting Scorpion and Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat. Lex Luthor meets Samantha Strong, the sweet serial killer bear from IDW‘s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. Batgirl encounters the classic alien bloodsucker Vampirella. Star Sapphire lands in Sabrina’s hometown Greendale, while the Joker arrives at the Warrens’s house to meet Annabelle. Wonder Woman clashes with sword and sorcery character Red Sonja and Superman fights Homelander.
Or rather, we think that’s what happens, because we only get a few looks at each meet-up, leaving most the action off-screen.
Too Much is Too Little
In most cases, the excess of D.C. KO has been a good thing. The series has been a logic-free romp, one that celebrates even the goofiest parts of comic book storytelling while still staying true to the main characters. But Boss Battle‘s story exceeds the limits of its 31 pages. Writer Jeremy Adams, who has been one of the most reliable storytellers in DC’s current era, simply cannot find enough room to do justice for the 16 characters. The team of artists—Ronan Cliquet, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Kieran McKeown, Pablo M. Collar—do their best to make the scenes distinctive, but they can do little more than create splash pages.
In some cases, that’s fine. Wonder Woman and Red Sonja look cool facing off with one another, and it’s not like there’s thematic resonance to be gained by watching Plastic Man shout “You get over here!” while throwing Scorpion into Sub-Zero. These are fan debates on Reddit come to life in official form. And Adams does try to get creative where he can, as in the case of Annabelle vs. the Joker. Because Annabelle doesn’t actually do anything in The Conjuring movies, other than look creepy while scary things happen around her, the Joker just has a tea party with the doll, babbling about how he knows something weird is happening while staring at her.
But the Homelander and Superman fight could have and should have carried weight. While writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson have no ambition for The Boys beyond just using superheroes to depict depravity on every level, the Prime Video series has been some of the sharpest satire of our era. More than just an adolescent thought exercise in what someone would do if they could do anything, Homelander has come to stand in the emptiness of America’s current power politics.
So when Superman, comic books’ ultimate symbol of someone using their power for good, shows up in front of Vought American headquarters, we want to see him show Homelander that power isn’t all that matters. Or we want to see a darker story where Homelander’s amorality crushes Superman’s optimism. Or, at the very least, we want to see an exciting fight.
Instead, we get a couple shots of them punching, and then a handful of panels showing them shooting lasers at each other. No big points, no proof that one super-person is stronger than the other, no crazy reveals. Just the most perfunctory fight scenes before the end.
The Never-Finished Battle
Half the fun of a comic book crossover is just seeing unlikely combinations of characters. In that regard, Boss Battle succeeds. Even a longtime DC reader like myself never expected to see the Joker sitting down with Annabelle, and I really wanted to see Superman fight Homelander.
But a good crossover also uses the unlikely meeting to reveal something about the two characters. Even if the meeting doesn’t prove that one character is better than the other (and they rarely do),it at least should help us gain a new perspective.
DC K.O.: Boss Battle gives us no new perspective, no satisfying fights, and no compelling ideas. The fact that the story barely goes deeper than a plot synopsis means that fans of most characters involved will just have to keep arguing the merits of their faves online. In case of Superman vs Homelander, we’ll still never know if pure power wins the day or if truth and justice can win out, leaving us readers disheartened and disappointed.
DC K.O.: Boss Battle #1 is now in comic book stores across the country.
Fallout: Todd Howard Teases New Factions and Locations for Season 3
This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 8.
One could plan quite the road trip through Fallout’s post-apocalyptic United States of America. Between the mainline games, their expansions, and the Prime Video TV series, the beloved franchise has introduced numerous Wasteland locations like the New California Republic, New Vegas, and more. Now it seems as though Fallout is ready to add some fresh pins to the irradiated map in season 3.
The Fallout season 2 finale finds the Ghoul and his unwelcome companion, a virtual Robert House, arriving at a secret New Vegas Vault in search of cryopods containing the Ghoul’s wife Barb and daughter Janet. When the cowboy formerly known as Cooper Howard unfreezes Barb and Janet’s chambers he discovers them to be empty, save for one postcard conspicuously marked Colorado. Barbara’s handwritten message on the back confirms that she and Janet have escaped to the Rocky Mountains and Cooper’s quest for them must start anew.
While the state of Colorado exists in the Fallout games’ pre-War canon (where it’s grouped alongside three other states as one of 13 “Commonwealth” regions that make up the U.S., which explains why all American flags have 13 stars rather than the traditional 50), little is known about it in the post-War Wasteland era. According to Bethesda Game Studios director and Fallout TV series producer Todd Howard, that relative blank slate is what made the location an appealing tease.
“We’ve always wanted to do that, where each season we want to go to new places. Just like the games, geography is such a part of the world of Fallout,” Howard tells Den of Geek.“Obviously, there’s going to be a journey to Colorado. But that journey might take us to some other places as well.”
In acknowledging the potential for season 3’s Colorado trip to include some detours, Howard is invoking the Wasteland’s Golden Rule: “thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every god damn time.” The roughly 750 miles that separate Las Vegas, Nevada from Denver, Colorado provide enough opportunities for bullshit that the Ghoul himself isn’t even sure if he’ll make it.
“You just don’t know. And I genuinely mean that,” Walton Goggins tells Den of Geek about Fallout season 3’s potential Colorado setting. “A lot of things can happen right after that camera cuts. But we’ll see. If he does go to Colorado, I’ll be jumping for joy. If he doesn’t go to Colorado, I’ll be jumping for joy. I can promise you this: the story will be thought through and what happens will happen the way it’s supposed to happen for us.”
Whether the Ghoul makes it through the Rockies or not, Howard teases that audiences will be exposed to new Wasteland communities, cultures, and experiences all the same.
“I think it’s good to go new places, even where the games haven’t been. Develop that and [explore]: ‘Who are the people there? What are some new factions? What are they doing to survive?’ It’s the same approach we have with the games.”
Colorado was originally intended to be a major setting of Black Isle Studios’ never-completed version of Fallout 3 in 2003. Under Bethesda’s stewardship of the franchise, beginning with 2008’s Fallout 3, details about Wasteland Colorado have been sparse. According to dialogue in Fallout: New Vegas, however, Denver became home to large packs of wild dogs sometime after the bombs dropped. If that means the Ghoul’s Belgian Malinois buddy meets some new puppers in season 3 then the new setting will be just fine with us.
All eight episodes of Fallout season 2 are available to stream on Prime Video now.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles Trailer Is an Antidote to Our Wealth Obsession
Look, we all love to hate the rich. It’s fun to see the emptiness of the lives of the guests on The White Lotus, the cruelty of the Roy family on Succession, and Benoit Blanc speaks for us all when he chews out the privileged killers in Knives Out. But where are the movies and shows that reflect our lives?
Anyone tired of watching rich people on screen will feel relief while watching the trailer for Margo’s Got Money Troubles, at the same moment when things get stressful for the protagonist. After rifling through multiple pregnancy tests, the titular character, played by Elle Fanning, watches the total of her grocery bill get larger and larger, only to hear her debit card get declined. Even the non-pregnant among us can relate with Margo when she collapses on a store floor midway through the teaser.
The Apple TV series comes from legendary television producer David E. Kelley, who previously chronicled the lives of people under pressure by creating Ally McBeal, Boston Common, and Big Little Lies. But where many of his previous shows rarely dipped below the lower middle classes, Margo’s Got Money Troubles looks at those living gig to gig.
Based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles stars Fanning as a would-be writer and currently-is college student who becomes pregnant by her English professor. While her mother, a former Hooter’s waitress portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer, has her own thoughts about what her daughter should do, Margo chooses instead to reconnect with her estranged father, an ex-professional wrestler played by Nick Offerman. Thanks to her father’s advice, Margo finds success on OnlyFans, which comes with its own set of pressures.
Even 15 years ago, the premise of Margo’s Got Money Troubles would sound like a twee indie movie trying to ape Wes Anderson’s style. Only the rich could afford to let so many members of the family have idiosyncratic dreams like becoming a wrestling hero or a social media star. Most people would have to work in a factory or sling burgers at a McDonalds. But as even entry-level jobs demand several years of experience and none of them pay a living wage, regular careers are just as unrealistic as the weird ones.
If the show can capture this economic trend, then Margo’s Got Money Troubles could restore a once-important television tradition. While the first TV shows focused on upper-middle class suburbanites who could afford a television set, some of the great series of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were all about people living modestly; shows like Sanford and Son, Roseanne, and All in the Family. Even The Simpsons and King of the Hill started out as more working-class shows, even if the world around them turned Homer and Hank into top earners.
Even better, if Margo’s Got Money Troubles can make us laugh at the character’s plight, it helps us viewers make sense of our own situation. Not only can we enjoy the relief of someone else getting denied in the checkout line, but we can start to see each other on screen, instead of just always watching the rich.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles premieres on Apple TV on April 15, 2026.
