2025 has been a bit of a holding pattern for Game of Thrones fans (even beyond whatever is perpetually happening, or not happening, with Winds of Winter). With no House of the Dragon and a long wait until early 2026 for the next Game of Thrones spinoff, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, ravens from Westeros have been few and far between. But with HBO’s new plans, it’s hoping that the next three years will be much more plentiful.
This morning HBO confirmed that it had renewed both Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon for new seasons, setting out an alternative release schedule that will see the shows both broadcast in 2026, before alternating releases in 2027 and 2028.
“We are thrilled to be able to deliver new seasons of these two series for the next three years, for the legion of fans of the Game of Thrones universe,” HBO head of Drama Series and Films Francesca Orsi said in a statement provided via press release. “Together, House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms reveal just how expansive and richly imagined George R. R. Martin’s universe continues to be. In January, I think audiences will be delighted by the inspiring underdog tale of Dunk and Egg that George and Ira Parker have captured so beautifully. And this summer, House of the Dragon is set to ignite once again with some of its most epic battles yet.”
To mark the announcement, HBO also released new images from both shows—check them out below.
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set to premiere January 18 next year, with the third season of House of the Dragon slated for a summer 2026 release window. After that, Knight‘s sophomore season will broadcast in 2027, and House‘s fourth season in 2028.
Although HBO did not confirm it in its renewal announcement today, showrunner Ryan Condal previously stated shortly after the conclusion of House of the Dragon‘s second season that the plan for the Targaryen-focused spinoff would remain to tell the story of the Dance of the Dragons across four seasons, bringing the series to an end in 2028.
What HBO has planned for the future of Game of Thrones beyond 2028 remains to be seen. If House does indeed finish that year, it might be time for another Westerosi spinoff to emerge—although it’s not been for a lack of ideas that another series hasn’t made it to production in the years since Game of Thrones itself came to a controversial end.
And if there isn’t? Well… at least we’ll have Windsat some point.
It’s Maia’s birthday, and she’ll make up with her influencer bestie, Tallulah, if she wants to. Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
When I first moved to Los Angeles, everyone told me to give it “at least two years.” They said that’s how long it would take to find out whether I could live there. But to like it, let alone love it? Who knows! Everything was beautiful and nothing felt real. As a spinning Rachel Sennott put it in a bizarrely compelling 2020 video that’s essentially a succinct thesis statement for the dissertation that is her 2025 HBO show: “Come on! It’s L.A.! Haha! What?! It’s L.A.!” Basically: the girls who get it, get it. The girls who don’t, don’t.
I did, until I didn’t. Still, leaving proved a much more painful breakup than I’d ever expected because I really did learn to love so much about L.A. The food! The arts! The biodiversity! The vibrancy! L.A. can rule! But seeing some of its most insular instincts through Sennott’s eyes (and those of pilot director Lorene Scafaria) feels more familiar than I’d expected, too. As much as I Love LA will inevitably get compared to Lena Dunham’s Girls, I’m gonna throw it out there that its truest HBO ancestor is Entourage, with all the desperate social climbing and grimy Hollywood truths that implies.
This first episode opens with Maia (Sennott) waking up on her 27th birthday. She climbs on top of her sweetiepie boyfriend Dylan (fittingly played by professional onscreen sweetiepie Josh Hutcherson), and does her best to have a great time amid an ongoing earthquake, because “if we’re gonna die, I just wanna come.”
Once this noble mission is accomplished, she begins the traditional birthday tradition of whining about getting older. Dylan does his best to combat her blues, quickly realizing that the lovely sentiment of “every year you become more and more yourself” isn’t half as convincing to his girlfriend as, “and you’re skinnier now, which I know you love.” Yes, yes, she does. One crashout thus avoided, she opens Instagram and skids straight into another one. Her former best friend, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), just posted a pic from a campaign they worked on together in New York, before Tallulah apparently dumped Maia for a bigger-name manager.
Stewing in fresh rage, she sets off to meet her friends Charlie (Jordan Firstman) and Alani (True Whitaker) for a brisk coffee walk around Silver Lake Reservoir, a classic meetup mode for anyone in L.A. vaguely committed to “healthy living” but not enough to hike. Maia absorbs the glow of compliments on her new haircut before going in on Tallulah, because she’s at the point of a friendship breakup where she needs everyone around her to agree that the friend in question sucks. Ever since Tallulah went from It Girl to #influencer, Maia’s resentment has calcified into a bitter pill she refuses to swallow. She was the one who turned Tallulah’s wildness into something marketable, she says. “I’m not gonna sit around and do nothing while she reaps the benefit of my hard work!” And so, with Charlie’s enthusiastic encouragement, Maia blocks Tallulah and feels, she insists, amazing.
Unfortunately, that brief high of righteousness quickly wears off when she clocks in for her thankless job as a publicity assistant. It disappears for good when her #girlboss Alyssa (Leighton Meester, who’s always welcome on my screen even while playing someone who gives me hives) rejects her case for a promotion. Scafaria’s close-ups on Sennott’s face throughout this pilot, such as in this scene with Alyssa hemming and hawing in the background, are so good. When Maia grits her teeth and brings up her experience managing Tallulah — now known to thousands as It Girl Tallulah Steele — it’s clear how much it pains her to pull that card.
Imagine Maia’s shock, then, when she gets home after work only to be tackled by the tornado that is a half-naked Tallulah herself, squealing “happy birthday!!!!1” as if nothing ever happened. Apparently, Alani flew her out to L.A. as a birthday surprise. (Gotta love daddy’s Oscar-winning money!) Sennott’s always had such compelling charisma, so it says something that A’zion immediately makes Tallulah so over-the-top magnetic — with, it must be said, incredible hair — that it’s easy to understand Maia’s insecurities by comparison. Having a friend who’s hot and fun in such a natural way that she can just make things happen is a blessing when it benefits you, and a curse when you inevitably get left behind.
But Sennott’s script is smart not to make Maia such a killjoy straightman opposite Tallulah. All I need to understand how these two were friends is their exchange as they wait in the line for the club Maia swore she didn’t want to go to:
Talullah: “You remember when I got roofied at Mr. Purple?”
Maia: “Yeah, that night was insane. They used to roofie people here, but then they fixed it.”
Tallulah: “Ugh, bummer.”
Maia: “Yeah, I know.”
These two, to quote a dearly departed HBO show, really did used to be The Disgusting Brothers.
We don’t see what happens after Tallulah somehow meets the club owner in the 30 seconds it takes Maia to humiliate herself while trying to cut the line. But it’s enough to leave Maia too hungover the next day to eat the supposedly great bagels Charlie waited so long in line for, or to join Tallulah when she insists they have to blow off her other plans and go to the beach. (What?? It’s L.A.!) Fed up and exhausted, Maia leaves Tallulah and Alani to go off on an idyllic montage — set to Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” obv — of getting stoned, hitting up Erewhon and vintage shops, and looking hot in bathing suits. Maia, meanwhile, spends all day frantically trying to get her fancy birthday dinner reservation to accept a fifth person at the last minute.
But by the time she and Dylan get to dinner, the reservation doesn’t even matter anymore, because Tallulah’s pulled another Tallulah. The extremely unimpressed hostess leads them away from the restaurant and up to an adjoining hotel suite, which Tallulah somehow managed to land for a mini surprise party. Even Charlie’s now “totally obsessed” with her, to Maia’s obvious annoyance. Worse still is the fact that Talullah also invited Alyssa, because Maia had told her that they were “basically best friends” instead of admitting that she didn’t get the promotion. The biggest indignity of all, though? Tallulah got the suite in exchange by telling the hotel that she was celebrating her birthday. When the cake comes floating towards Maia and the words “Happy Birthday, Talullah!” come into focus, it is, understandably, Maia’s 13th reason of the day.
Maia leaves her own party to be alone; Tallulah, refusing to read the room, goes after her. Though Dylan tries to follow, Charlie and Alani know better than to let him. It’s time for the girls to finally be honest in that most sacred of friendship spaces: the bathroom.
Sick of pretending she’s fine, Maia tells Tallulah the truth: “Having you here just reminds me of how good you’re doing without me, and I’m a fucking flop.” Luckily for her ego, though, they’re both flops! Tallulah reveals that she’s not only broke, but that she caught the rich guy she was dating DM’ing women for “titty pics.” At this, Maia’s instantly back on her side. “Ew! I’m sorry, just Google ‘boobs.’” Look, it may not be a cute instinct, but sometimes, all you need to get over a grudge with someone you truly love is to realize you’re on the same level (and that some men are gross and unoriginal, obviously).
With that, Maia and Tallulah are back. With only a Balenciaga bag and an incredible face card to her name, Tallulah decides that she may as well stay in L.A. — with Maia as her manager for real. As Peaches’ “Boys Wanna Be Her” kicks off, they yowl, “we’re gonna fucking KILL IT” in each other’s faces and scamper back into the suite, where a male stripper’s already getting the party started on Alyssa’s lap. After getting her own spin with him, Maia grabs Tallulah’s phone and directs her into the limelight instead. As long as they’re a team again, she doesn’t mind being the brains behind the star — until, inevitably, she does.
• As a Gemini moon (iykyk), I’m comfortable saying that of course Tallulah is a Gemini. Good luck with that Saturn Return, babes!
• Dylan being a guy whose day almost gets ruined by his bookmark falling out is a tiny detail, but a perfect one.
• “I can’t get another UTI. The doctor said if I get another one, I can’t Zoom in for meds anymore.”
• “You don’t see me hanging out with Avicii anymore, do you?” “Yeah, because he died.”
I Love LA doesn’t do a particularly good job announcing itself with its pilot, so to give you a better sense, I’ll spoil a joke. (If you’d prefer not to know this spoiler, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, but I assure you: This is not the show’s best or most interesting punch line.) In the second episode, Rachel Sennott’s Maia and Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah meet with the latter’s rival from New York, a polished blonde influencer who claims Tallulah stole her Balenciaga bag. The visit is meant to mend fences; naturally, it devolves into a cocaine-fueled nightmare caught on video. The footage leaks online, and Maia’s gentle teacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), learns his coke-snorting face has become a meme, “Coke Larry,” while chaperoning the school carnival. (“Because I’m doing coke and they say I look like my name would be Larry,” he tells Maia desperately.) As his dowdy principal approaches, Dylan braces for the inevitable: getting fired, fighting with his girlfriend — the classic spiral. “Are you Coke Larry?” the principal asks and Dylan sheepishly confirms. “I’ve got a … golf trip next weekend?” his boss stammers. “A couple of high-school buddies of mine. I don’t want to let them down …” The beat stretches, the principal is eventually pulled away (“Great job on those snickerdoodles!”), and Dylan realizes he has to procure coke for his boss. That shouldn’t be a problem, though; Maia’s buddy will hook him up. The show moves on, as if to say, This is L.A. after all.
The heart of a series like I Love LA lies in its ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments. When you’re starting your career, you have not yet learned how to be properly cynical (another excellent half-hour debut from this year, FX’s Adults, vibrates at the same frequency), and Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache. This type of striving 20-something comedy draws the unavoidable comparisons — Insecure for the influencer age, Girls for zillennials, Broad City out west — but I Love LA ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its lineage.
As Maia, Sennott plays into and against the flopping-sexpot persona she honed in filmwork like Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maia’s eager and ambitious in the way you have to be to break through in Los Angeles, and her boss at the creative agency Alyssa 180 doesn’t quite take her seriously. (The titular Alyssa is played by a scene-stealing Leighton Meester, on quite the run right after setting the house on fire in Nobody Wants This.) Maia is supported by an inner circle including stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), kind but clueless nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), and Dylan, whose interests skew more toward board games and World War II than TikTok and brand deals. Their status quo shatters when Maia’s former bestie, buzzy “It” girl Tallulah, blows into town, and by the end of the pilot, an estrangement born of distance and perceived success gives way to a renewed connection: Maia sees an opportunity to work with Tallulah, reigniting both her career and their friendship. That first episode suffers from the need to do so much heavy lifting and feels both overstuffed and overly conventional, but once all the pieces are in place, the show relaxes into itself and its actual voice emerges.
I Love LA is a showcase for Sennott, who also created and writes on it, and Maia’s funniest moments spring from cringe humor, including a standout jealous outburst taken to sublime extremes. What makes Maia so compelling is how the character seems to be a mystery to herself. She hustles without knowing why or what it’ll cost her, and that ambition leads to clashes with Alyssa. Whenever their conflict comes to a head, Sennott’s face betrays a fascinating tension: committed yet confused, a deer in the headlights gripping a knife. Her performance syncs with an ensemble teetering at the edge of cartoonishness but never tumbling over, a balance owed to a writing team attuned to the cast’s chemistry and aware of the lines it shouldn’t cross.
It’s tough to pinpoint a standout in a group of killers this sharp, but Whitaker’s Alani, a kindhearted airhead, consistently delivers some of the show’s best asides and strangest beats. Hutcherson, meanwhile, is a straight-man revelation, his earnest, odd-man-out presence grounding the show’s otherwise manic energy. Jury’s still out on whether I Love LA effectively bottles the sensibility of its generation, but at the very least, its visual palette will stand as a time capsule for this peculiar moment in culture when Los Angeles teems with influencers chasing clout. The gang’s costuming is a running progression of world-building and sight gags: Tallulah’s loud, barely-there outfits mirror the hyperperformative ambition of the influencer world she inhabits, while Charlie’s elaborate, layered wardrobe underscores how each character plugs into a different version of the L.A. professional aspiration.
These dynamics animate the show’s set pieces: the scramble for brand deals, encounters with the bizarre fauna of L.A. celebrity, flirtations with the next echelon of fame and wealth. The energy of each episode stems from these pursuits, but at its core, I Love LA believes the fantasy that ambition and friendship might be enough to build a life in a city and professional world designed to break you. The series has a deep bench of accomplished EPs, including Lorene Scafaria, Max Silvestri, Emma Barrie, and Aida Rodgers; Barrie and Rodgers are Barry alums, and their influence seeps into the show’s deadpan Hollywood surreality, though I Love LA swaps Barry’s existential darkness for something more sparkly and hopeful. The result is a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true — a portrait of youthful ambition and friendship that makes someone slightly older both grateful to not be that young anymore and just a little envious of those who are.
@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bit of Hollywood? Okayyy.
Season 1
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO
“@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bit of Hollywood? Okayyy” strikes me as the closest thing we might ever get to an average episode of The Chair Company. That’s not a knock at all, star rating aside; the show is just settling into a more consistent groove, and for me, that means this episode lacks a little of the surprise of the previous weeks.
That says a lot, though, in an episode where a bug crawls into Ron’s phone through its charging port, addressed in one line of dialogue by a weirded-out sales rep and then never mentioned again. There’s a creeping menace underneath everything here, and it makes watching the show a discomfiting experience even when the actual threat of violence isn’t there. In fact, much of this episode plays out as a series of misunderstandings and clarifications, and that might be the dominant mode for this show: introducing something unsettling but then undercutting it one scene (or one episode, or five episodes) later.
Take the opening, which resolves last week’s cliffhanger with the reveal that the man taking photos of Ron in his closet is actually working for Mike Santini. He was supposedly sent here just to keep an eye on Ron and was supposed to send the photo to Mike, but he mixed up the burner numbers. That doesn’t take away from the cliffhanger or the confrontation itself — the episode starts off with an intense chase following LT’s burst from the closet — but it does provide another blueprint for this show’s regular horror subversions.
Of course, it’s not like Ron can forget about what just happened. Each of these scares leaves a lasting imprint on his psyche, and you get the sense that they’re starting to accumulate. At the rate this man is going, he might be a shut-in by the finale. The scene with LT is just the latest nightmare fuel-up, judging by his aggressive broom-stabbing to check the closets in the middle of the night. LT might’ve been a “red herring,” but the scenario leads Ron to imagine the worst, including an intruder who would force him to kill his own family. Those people exist, he points out to Barb, so an expensive security system only makes sense.
As for the actual conspiracy investigation, Ron and Mike make some headway in this episode, traveling several layers deeper down the Tecca rabbit hole. Mike apparently managed to confirm that his employer, Jim X, got paid $50,000 to have Mike scare Ron. (Seems like Mike should be pissed he got a measly fraction of that to do the actual scaring.) So Ron goes to the county clerk’s office (using Douglas’s name) and sees the name RBMG, Inc. on the deed for the abandoned building he visited. Apparently the last man to check out the deed was a mean man named Steven Droyco — intel Ron manages to capture with some not-bad spy work.
A quick Google clarifies that RBMG is short for Red Ball Market Global, a shady company with a photo of that giant red ball from the abandoned office on its website. There are photos and names for board members, including a woman named Ronda whom Mike calls gorgeous, but they go nowhere. And when Ron calls the RBMG phone number, the (amazingly catchy) hold music plays on a loop nonstop. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron vents to Mike over beers. “People make garbage, and you can’t talk to anybody.” Theme of the show?
Aside from a drunk, angry message for National Business Solutions mentioning the RBMG board, the rest of Ron’s progress this week relates to Droyco, whom Mike tracks down. The guy seems unstable, freaking out and taking off as soon as they ask about Tecca. But Ron isn’t leaving empty-handed, so he and Mike break in and grab some random papers. In a spooky touch, they also run into an old woman who supposedly died a couple years ago: Droyco’s mother, who is apparently pretending to be dead because she owes her sister money.
Droyco explains this to Ron during an unannounced visit to Fisher Robay. He’s willing to admit that he worked at Tecca for four days, taking parts off chairs and putting other parts on while in the nude. He recognizes a photo of Ken Tucker, the CFO of Red Ball Global, but doesn’t have any more information to offer. Ron will return his papers to him when he’s ready to chat more. Soon after, though, Ron is getting a security alert with a horror-movie shot of a hooded figure in a hockey mask sitting in a Tecca chair outside the Trosper house, shaking his head manically. “Jason!” Ron exclaims in the final moments, just in case the scene was in danger of falling too far on one side of the horror/comedy divide. I expect the horror to further deflate once we get the context.
Aside from near-misses like the intruder at game night, Ron is still managing to not let his Tecca obsession totally infiltrate his work and family life, though there are signs of discord on both fronts. For one, the choice to keep football out of the Canton mall development gets some pushback and publicity, including from a former Cleveland Browns player who cries on the news about it. Ron wants to stick to his vision, but his boss Jeff and colleague Alon undercut him by coming up with their own nod to football. It’s small, but Ron’s ego is fragile — especially thanks to the pressure to live up to his father’s legacy, a character trait straight out of Detroiters. As Ron explains it to Mike, his dad was a great man with “a bridge named after him.”
Ron’s homelife in this episode feels particularly Breaking Bad-esque: His wife is suspicious about his whereabouts, and his son is acting out. When he sees Seth drinking outside on the security camera, he arranges a meet-up at a café, where Seth explains, “I found out that if you actually don’t drink too much, drinking is actually really fun.” When he’s drunk, he says, he tells jokes because they’re funny, not just to get a laugh. (He also sometimes drinks beers and watches Abbott and Costello, which really has nothing to do with self-consciousness.) Ron doesn’t even fight Seth’s logic, maybe because he experiences that same desire to just be his core self instead of an idealized, hard-working family-man projection of himself.
But Ron breaks one secret to keep another by using the Seth issue to get out of explaining his own recent extracurricular activities to Barb — in the process totally violating his agreement with Seth, a sign that Ron’s efforts to hide are pushing him to be a worse husband and worse father. His recent absences have Barb wondering if he’s escaping the tedium of Fisher Robay by doing “Jeep tours” again, having seen the box that LT and Mike were kicking around in the garage. In this absurd take on a Breaking Bad-esque antihero drama, Ron’s dark past has nothing to do with drugs or gambling or contract killing. He used to be obsessed with Jeep tours.
Whenever I spend too long writing about the actual character drama of The Chair Company, or untangling the increasingly convoluted plot, it starts to feel a little silly. This is a series with a distinct vision and tone, yes, but it’s also just a chance for Tim Robinson and Co. to fuck around, and that’s still true in “@BrownDerbyHistoricVids Little bit of Hollywood? Okayyy.” Look at the clerk who gets sent home to take a shower, because apparently people can smell her. Or Douglas’s supremely creepy “mistakes party,” where people wear either yellow or green wristbands depending on their comfort level with mistake-making. In an episode dense with theories and red herrings, those glorious diversions are what linger most.
• “You put a little guy in my closet?”
• Good background line from a sales rep: “Oh, fuck yeah. We’re just popping in for a fuck-around, but it’s always such a pleasure to see you, Ron Trosper.”
• Ron reassures Barb about their expenses by saying they’ll have “a billion bucks” soon. Sure, Ron.
• Mike’s anecdote about his ex-wife poisoning him with a hundred “sexual stamina pills” raises a lot of questions, but at least we know that the pills made him smell like a duck.
• I would think Ron would be concerned about Mike making direct contact with his son, but maybe he knows Seth is too much of an airhead to even question the guy.
• “I didn’t even want the green. He made me take the green and said, ‘What are you going to do? What mistake do you think you’ll do?’”
Stephen King hasn’t always been supportive of adaptations of his works that make major changes to them—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the best-known example. But he’s also not unilaterally opposed to alterations; he was a fan of Cujo‘s more upbeat ending and was an even bigger fan of The Mist‘s far more devastating conclusion. Most recently, he gave a thumbs-up to the new finale of Edgar Wright’s Running Man.
And though It: Welcome to Derry is taking some liberties with one of his most beloved novels, building out a prequel for Pennywise and the Maine town terrorized by the evil clown, King gave the creators of HBO’s new series the green light.
“Well, we’re very happy, obviously, [to have] the blessing of Stephen King, who inspired this in the first place,” Andy Muschietti—an executive producer and director of several Welcome to Derry episodes; he also directed the two It feature films—said in a roundtable interview attended by io9. “[He’s] our biggest literary hero. It’s just phenomenal. That has been consistent all through this journey. He was very, very excited about this exploration, which departs so much—a lot of Welcome to Derry is taken from the book, but there’s a lot of storylines that are more of an answer to his questions. And that was like a kind of a leap of faith for us when we started this. And he was, you know, he was open and eager to see where we were going.”
Muschietti and his collaborator and sister Barbara Muschietti doubled down on that excitement in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, noting the author didn’t take an active hand in shaping Welcome to Derry‘s story.
“Stephen didn’t approach the show like that,” Andy Muschietti explained. “He wasn’t imposing any kind of guidelines on us. I think his desire was to let us play with his toys because from the beginning, we were clear to him. We said, ‘Your book is a mystery. It’s a puzzle and left unsolved intentionally. And we’re going to create a lot of stuff to bring those enigmas, and also to fill in the gaps in the puzzle.’ Eventually, this creates a story that’s not in the book. It’s a hidden story.”
Added Barbara Muschietti, “We wanted to do a show that basically went backwards, where each season was a cycle of Pennywise and he loved that concept and gave us all the rope we needed.”
With Season 3 of Euphoria finally in production after more than three years, creator Sam Levinson apparently isn’t taking any chances with spoilers.
Jacob Elordi, who reprises his role as Nate Jacobs in the HBO high school drama, admitted that he’s only read his character’s scenes as he compared the script to “the JFK files” with a similar level of secrecy.
“I only know my part in the season, because the whole thing is like the JFK files. It’s all redacted,” he explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “You can’t read the real script.”
Elordi teased one of his lines to come in Season 3, “For mine, I think a good phrase, I guess, for my season is ‘white fritillaries.’ Do with that what you will. Get your tongue around it.”
“I have no idea what that means,” said Fallon, as Elordi admitted: “Me neither.” (For the record, it’s a flower.)
Don’t expect Elordi to continue portraying the high school jock in the middle of a messy love triangle when Euphoria returns, as the season is set after a time jump that brings them into adulthood. It’s appropriate given the long wait for more episodes.
Nearly three years after the Season 2 finale, Season 3 of Euphoria officially went into production in February. The long-delayed shoot also came after speculation that the show was coming to an end.
Yet another streaming platform is asking people to dig deeper into their wallets and pay more to keep using the service. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has jacked up the prices of all HBO Max plans, 16 months after the last increase to the ad-free offerings.
The entry-level, ad-supported plan is now $11 per month (an extra $1) or $110 per year ($10 more). HBO Max Standard will run you an extra $1.50 per month at $18.49 or $15 per year at $185 for the annual plan. As for the HBO Max Premium option, subscribers will now have to pay $23 per month (up by $2) or $230 for an annual plan (an increase of $20).
The new prices kick in immediately for newcomers. Existing monthly subscribers will start paying more as of November 20 (whenever their next billing cycle starts on or after that date). Yearly subscribers will be notified about the price changes 30 days before their plan renews.
WBD CEO David Zaslav suggested in September that price increases were on the way, along with a stricter crackdown on password sharing. “The fact that this is quality — and that’s true across our company, motion picture, TV production and streaming quality — we all think that gives us a chance to raise prices,” Zaslav said. “We think we’re way underpriced.”
The company announced the price increases on the same day that Disney is making several Disney+ plans more expensive. As it happens, some of the Disney+ bundles that are going up in price include HBO Max.
News of the price hikes comes just as WBD sticks a For Sale sign out on its lawn. It was reported this month that the company turned down an acquisition offer from Paramount Skydance for being too low. WBD has now confirmed that “multiple parties” have expressed interest in buying some or all of the company, and that it’s now conducting “a review of strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value.”
In June, WBD announced plans to split into two companies. As things stand, Warner Bros. will retain the namesake film, TV and game studios, as well as New Line Cinema, DC Studios, HBO and HBO Max. Discovery Global will have all of the other live cable channels, such as CNN, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery and TLC (it will also be saddled with the lion’s share of WBD’s debt). That split is slated to take place by mid-2026, but WBD said on Tuesday it would consider other options.
“The Warner Bros. Discovery Board will evaluate a broad range of strategic options, which will include continuing to advance the company’s planned separation to completion by mid-2026, a transaction for the entire company or separate transactions for its Warner Bros. and/or Discovery Global businesses,” WBD said in a press release. “As part of the review, the company will also consider an alternative separation structure that would enable a merger of Warner Bros. and spin-off of Discovery Global to our shareholders.”
WBD hasn’t set a deadline or timetable for completing this review. But given the whole HBO Max naming debacle, it might take the board quite a while to make its mind up.
It: Welcome to Derry will be floating into your nightmares very soon, and while the kids—Pennywise’s favorite feast—will be front and center, adult characters also take a prominent role in the story. Most folks we meet have been created for the HBO series, which is set in 1962 and is a prequel to the events of the It movies. But every Stephen King fan who’s ever checked into the Overlook Hotel knows Dick Hallorann.
Chris Chalk (The Newsroom, Shining Girls) plays the psychically gifted character—most famously seen in The Shining—in It: Welcome to Derry. As he told io9 at a recent HBO press day, he’s well aware of the legacy crafted by Scatman Crothers—who memorably portrayed Hallorann in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie—as well as Carl Lumbly (in 2019’s Doctor Sleep) and Melvin Van Peebles (in the 1997 Shining miniseries). But he’s here to present his own interpretation of the character.
“In order to create and manifest this version of Dick Halloran, I did observe those performances, but I didn’t—’study’ is too strong a word, because that’s not what we’re doing,” Chalk said. “If we were doing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 2025, then I’m going to study that performance in a different way, but all I have to do is see who he is now and break him down backwards to who he was in an earlier time, and then it becomes about creative freedom and the text. So it’s awesome to have all of these options of people who’ve had their versions of the performance, but just as they had their version, I knew I was going to get my version. Nobody asked me to mimic anybody.”
The younger version of Hallorann that we meet in It: Welcome to Derry is an airman stationed at the Air Force base just outside of town. This particular military installation has a fenced-off “Special Projects” area, where Hallorann’s abilities are pressed into service by General Shaw (James Remar). No spoilers on what they’re trying to accomplish, but Hallorann gets certain privileges due to his unique importance to the mission. The drawback is, all those mental gymnastics take a painful toll.
“I think the fact that Dick is even participating in this [mission] is proof that he’ll do anything to not be trapped,” Chalk said. “The worst thing he could possibly do to himself, he has to ultimately do in order to escape this idea of being trapped by General Shaw. He has to essentially assault himself and reopen trauma and reopen trauma and reopen trauma. But he wants to escape it so bad that he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll cut myself if it’ll get me out of this.’ It’s a great thing to get to play a person at their weakest, most fragile, and most desperate points. Like, that’s what we want: to get to dig into the depths of a human.”
Elsewhere in the story, we encounter Hank Grogan, played by Stephen Rider (Daredevil, Luke Cage). He’s the single dad of young Ronnie (Amanda Christine) and the projectionist at Derry’s downtown movie theater. Early in It: Welcome to Derry, he’s dragged into some messy drama that ties into the show’s examination of America, circa 1962—a place full of problems even when there’s not a demonic clown in the picture.
Hank is a new character, but Rider had a lot of reference points even without pages from a King novel to consider.
“The thing about backstory is, it’s not like you’re going to tell it,” he explained. “It’s more about being very clear on his point of view and the world that he comes from and what he values. The fact that it’s the 1960s and he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s and where his parents came from, in terms of even slavery—it’s a lot to draw on. And most of us came up, or our parents came up, through the Great Migration. So there were a lot of things that I had access to. But backstories are tricky because they can become very fantastical. So if all of a sudden I’m like, ‘What do I do with this? It sounds good, but I don’t know what I’m doing with this.’ So I had to make sure it served Hank, not just Stephen’s fantastical world.”
More newcomers in It: Welcome to Derry are played by Jovan Adepo (3 Body Problem, The Leftovers) and Taylour Paige (The Toxic Avenger), though their last name is one It fans will recognize: Hanlon. As the show begins, Major Leroy Hanlon has just been transferred to Derry, with his wife, Charlotte, and their son, Will (Blake James), in tow.
Major Hanlon, we soon learn, has a quality that would be unique in any context, but it’s especially intriguing in a haunted place like Derry: he is literally a man without fear.
“It’s something that occurred through a brain injury, and I think it’s something that he wants to disregard every time someone brings it up, because it does recall a moment in his military career that he’s just not wanting to re-experience,” Adepo said. “I spoke to [director] Andy [Muschietti] about the specifics of the injury and what it truly means to be without fear in this town where the show is about being afraid. I leaned more on the side of not being completely immune to fear but just having a higher threshold for it. And if it’s the most guttural fear that I’m immune to, the other sub-elements of fear are heightened as far as, you know, insecurity, worry, doubt, shame, and any of those smaller elements of it. I never played Leroy as he’s just impervious to any type of jarring moments; he’s just able to withstand a bit more unless it’s something that he really, really cares about, which we can assume is his family.”
Charlotte was active in the civil rights movement in Louisiana, where the Hanlons lived before moving to Maine. Leroy would much rather his wife keep a low profile, especially since he’s trying to advance his military career. But Derry has its share of injustices that catch Charlotte’s interest, and it’s hard for her to resist speaking up for what’s right.
“I think she’s kind of bursting at the seams,” Paige said. “Living in that dissonance is very uncomfortable. Like you’re at home vacuuming and thinking about what to make for dinner, but you also have a sense that you have a lot to offer the world, and you’re curious and interested, and nobody really cares because you look like you. It’s a little bit sad, it’s lonely, it’s boredom, and it’s just living in a world that doesn’t respect or value what you have to offer. I think that’s a really tough inner world, so her inner world is challenging and lonely.”
She added, “I think Charlotte knows her husband’s heart is in the right place, but she’s also confronting [him about] defending a country [that hasn’t given us anything back], and that’s challenging. So [part of their marriage is] kind of understanding [that] this is our lives as Black people in 1962 and what opportunity means and how to kind of climb out of what you were born with.”
As Stephen King fans well know, Pennywise the Dancing Clown emerges every 27 years to feast on the people of Derry, especially the younger generation. That’s why It: Welcome to Derry takes place in 1962, 27 years before the 1989 events of Andy Muschietti’s 2017 It feature film, and 54 years before the 2016 setting of It Chapter Two.
The early ‘60s setting allows It: Welcome to Derry to tap into the broader cultural climate of the era, drawing on issues like the civil rights movement and Cold War dread. io9 recently participated in a press day for the new HBO show ahead of its arrival on October 26, speaking with Muschietti (a co-creator and executive producer on the series, in addition to being the director of multiple episodes) as well as writers, executive producers, and co-showrunners Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs.
“[1962] is part of the story because we are telling the story through Pennywise cycles. So it was unavoidable to go to ‘62; this is our first step into a bigger journey,” explained Muschietti. “Segregation was still around; racial problems [were] at the heart of every town in America, especially the South, but also in the North, as we see in Maine, in the story. And the Cold War [too].”
He continued. “It was actually exciting to talk about these things because it creates not only a look into history, but also dramatic opportunities [for] our characters … Also, ‘62 is very close to the original time [setting] of It, the book. When we did the movie adaptation, we transferred it to the ‘80s. And now we’re telling a prequel that happened in ‘62, but ‘62 is very close to 1958, which is [when the novel takes place]. So it’s a bit of going back to the original feeling of the book and trying to explore a little bit of that world with its own flavors and textures, and also the childhood of Stephen King.”
Kane elaborated on the setting in a separate interview with io9. “You can’t tell a story about an interdimensional being that exploits people’s fears in 1962 without addressing the great fears of the time and the great troubles of the time. We leaned into it,” he said.
“And 1962 is very much considered a time of Norman Rockwell’s America; it’s a time that’s idealized with great innocence. Obviously it wasn’t that way for everybody, but if you think of 1962 in America, before Kennedy was assassinated, as the last moment of innocence in this country, well, what happens when you scratch the surface of that innocence, that idealized time, and you find out what’s underneath? I think you’ll see something very different than the facade, and we tried to lean into that reality as well.”
While most of the show takes place in 1962, it also takes time to explore the deeper history of the Derry area. The local Native American population plays a major role in the new series, bringing in a perspective not represented in King’s original story or any of its previous adaptations.
“They’re the first people that met the monster, and they play a crucial role in the fight against it,” Muschietti teased. “There’s a part of the story that is not even in the book that is a crucial story point in this series, which tells us about the struggle of the Indigenous people against It, and that has tremendous ripple effects on generations to come.”
Kane expanded on why the Indigenous storyline was so important to include in It: Welcome to Derry. “We wanted to go back to the origins of the creature—and we wanted to talk about the stewards of the land. The Indigenous people have lived with this evil much longer than anybody else, having been here longer than anyone else, and they understand that evil is not something that you can necessarily defeat,” he said.
“It’s a constant; it’s a reality in life. It needs to be addressed; it needs to be confronted and understood, most importantly, and in lieu of destroying it, it needs to be contained properly. And that’s what the Indigenous people in Derry seek to do in the story. So we felt that was an important perspective. And obviously, if we’re thinking about Derry as a microcosm of America, you can’t tell America’s story without the Indigenous perspective. And I think that was an important reason for us to do it.”
While the Indigenous characters form a key part of It: Welcome to Derry, the show also aims for a microcosm feel—as Kane suggested, noting King originated the idea of looking at Derry through that lens. We spend time with the kids as they realize there’s a monster in their midst. But we also get to know their parents and other adults in town, as well as the soldiers stationed on the military base nearby. It’s a lot of cards to stack, but co-showrunners Kane and Fuchs didn’t see it as a challenge.
“I think we saw it much more as an opportunity,” Fuchs said. “TV is obviously long-form storytelling and so we had a chance to delve into different perspectives in a way that the two hours of a movie just doesn’t allow you to. We were really excited to get to see grown-up characters who were more aware of the entity than the grown-ups we meet in the context of the films. We were excited to go into different communities. We hadn’t really seen Derry or It through the perspective of the Indigenous community, and it was an opportunity to also get a group of characters at the center of this, the Hanlon family, who are new to Derry, to really provide a way in for new fans who maybe haven’t read the book or seen the films. We have a family at the core of this adventure who are being introduced to the world of Derry themselves for the first time. It was all by design and something we’re really excited about; it felt like this was an opportunity for something a little different.”
While the show draws on a fair amount of new material, the fact that it’s a prequel means viewers have a good idea of what happens next—including the fact that Pennywise has more cycles on the way. Crafting a satisfying ending for viewers who already know the monster won’t be defeated took a certain nuanced approach.
“The benefit of long-form storytelling is really that you can dive into character a lot more deeply. And we’re introducing a whole new set of characters in this than we saw in the movies,” Kane said. “But we try to rip the rug out from underneath people right away so you never know what’s going to happen. You never know what to expect; you never know who you can come to care for that’s not going to be wrenched away from you. We want to give the audience that feeling: to imbue you with love for these new characters and make you fear for their safety.”
“And really, that’s the ride we’re taking. It’s not necessarily, ‘Will It be defeated in the end or not?’ but ‘Will these characters survive? Will they learn lessons? Will they grow up? Will the parents see their children again? Will the evil plan that’s being hatched as the engine of this piece be enacted in some way, or will that snap back on the person enacting it?’”
Kane continued. “We wanted to tell a story about unity and about innocence lost, just like the main themes of the book. Growing up and realizing that fear and hatred and all that stuff can only be really defeated through community and through love and through growth. We try to do all that with the characters, and that kind of journey makes it a lot more expansive than just, ‘Will It be defeated or not?’ We’re trying to paint a story on a much larger canvas.”
It: Welcome to Derry expands what fans know about Pennywise’s history in quite a few aspects, but it’s careful not to shine too bright of a light on things. As Fuchs explained, revealing details but also keeping some of that mystery intact was a delicate task.
“It was a constant balancing act—how much to reveal, how much to keep hidden. I think that what’s great about the richness of Stephen King’s mythology is that the more answers to mysteries you reveal, the more new mysteries suggest themselves,” Fuchs said. “So yeah, Brad and I wanted to know more about It. We wanted to understand why a being like It remains in Derry when it’s a creature of light. It could travel anywhere. Why Derry? We wanted to understand why a shape-shifter who has a virtually infinite number of forms it could take continues to take the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.”
“So you’re going to get, I hope, really satisfying answers to some of those things in the context of the show. But the answers themselves suggest fresh mysteries and new questions. And that’s part of the fun of the genre and of Stephen King’s mythology. You can always go deeper and deeper.”
We’re just a few weeks away from the arrival of It: Welcome to Derry, but fans at San Diego Comic-Con this summer and this past weekend’s New York Comic Con have gotten some early glimpses of what to expect from the Stephen King series. At SDCC, HBO revealed the show’s very first scene, and io9 was lucky enough to be there—though we’ve been haunted by it ever since.
With It: Welcome to Derry‘s premiere dropping October 26, everyone will soon get to feast their eyeballs on the harrowing sequence. And It and It Chapter Two helmer Andy Muschietti, co-creator of the HBO series as well as the director of several episodes, is here to explain/warn you about the thinking behind its opening.
“We wanted to raise the bar higher in terms of shock value,” Muschietti told Deadline. “It’s about a self-imposed mandate of opening with an event that is shocking enough that you put the audience in a position where nothing is taken for granted, where nothing is safe in this world.”
He continued. “You’re immediately putting people on the edge of the seat. We needed a strong opening. One of the things I love about this scene is the build-up. Of course, it has a big, graphic, and shocking conclusion, but the build-up is something that was important.”
That’s quite a build-up to the build-up—but we’re here to tell you the scene does not disappoint. io9 will have more from Andy Muschietti and his producing partner and sister Barbara Muschietti, as well as other cast and crew of It: Welcome to Derry, as the hour of Pennywise approaches.
Leave it to a Tim Robinson character to turn a benign public humiliation into a full-blown conspiracy. Photo: Virginia Sherwood/HBO
I think of Tim Robinson’s characters as existing on a spectrum. Yes, they’re all prone to loud, sudden explosions of cartoonish rage or pain, and they’re almost all anxious, insecure weirdos obsessed with proving they’re in on the joke. But there’s a big difference between the affable “chaotic good” Tim Cramblin from Detroiters and the procession of freaks Robinson plays on his sketch show, I Think You Should Leave. And Craig Waterman, the marketing executive from the 2024 film Friendship, took Robinson into new territory with a darker and more pathetic take on the same neurotic type.
If Friendship was Robinson’s first real character study, his mysterious new HBO comedy The Chair Company is the logical next step. Like Craig Waterman, Ron Trosper is a hard worker and a family man, doing his best to project confidence and competence at the office and at home. But unlike Craig, he’s not actually that bad at it at first. For the most part, people seem to respect Ron. He has the adoration of his wife, Barb (Lake Bell), daughter, Natalie (Sophia Lillis), and son, Seth (Will Price). He’s a project lead at Fisher Robay, overseeing an ambitious new mall development in Canton, Ohio, and seems to have the office’s support. After a surprisingly successful speech at the kickoff meeting for Canton Marketplace, though, the other shoe drops. When Ron takes a seat, the chair falls out from under him and breaks, leaving him dazed and sprawled on the floor. That public humiliation is The Chair Company’s inciting incident.
Friendship is the obvious comparison point for the show, especially with Andrew DeYoung directing this premiere and Keegan DeWitt once again contributing a cool, slightly eerie score. But it’s also the third series co-created by Robinson and Zach Kanin, who collaborated on both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave. There’s a common comic sensibility running through all these projects, an understanding of what people come to a Tim Robinson show to see. Take that argument between Ron and the young server in the opening scene. A celebratory family dinner turns into an embarrassing dispute when Ron bristles at the server insisting she hasn’t been to a mall since she was 14. He takes it as a personal offense, and that’s a common impulse for Ron — he’s also not a fan of his cheerful elderly coworker Douglas (Jim Downey) blowing bubbles everywhere because “life’s just really not all that serious.”
Like most Robinson characters, Ron really cares about fitting in, fearing attention as much as he courts it. The day after the chair incident, he defuses tension at the office by making fun of himself, only to feel uncomfortable as his coworkers revel in the hilarity of the moment. So he travels down the Tecca rabbit hole, desperate to take action against the titular chair company.
Here’s where “Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does” settles into surreal conspiracy thriller mode, a feeling I expect to stick around. The Tecca website’s phone number only gets him to National Business Solutions, which refuses to transfer him to the manufacturer. Messaging with a customer service agent doesn’t accomplish anything, and the obscure support email address bounces back. “What the fuck!?” Ron says, comically dumbfounded.
Most of this premiere is about kicking off Ron’s investigation into Tecca, but it’s already interesting to note what the show is and isn’t interested in showing. We really don’t see much of the Trosper family, all things considered; at this juncture, his wife and kids are all (intentionally) archetypes, blandly supportive projections of the traditional fantasy of a loving, stable nuclear family. We know that Seth is looking into colleges, and Ron is continually adding photos and songs to Natalie’s rehearsal dinner slideshow, but that’s about it. The episode prioritizes strange narrative detours over conventional character-building, and I don’t mind that choice for the time being.
Take the hilarious, unnamed janitor character, who shows up twice: first vehemently denying that his “inside wheelbarrow” goes outside, then appearing outside with the wheelbarrow after all. There’s also Ron’s coworker Amanda, who fully understands that he didn’t intentionally look up her skirt while collapsed on the floor, but still feels the need to report it to HR. Everything at work suddenly seems to be unraveling, especially with annoying Douglas blowing bubbles everywhere and distracting Doris when Ron’s trying to get footage to document her hip problem and the risk of an unsafe chair. (Someone on the phone told him Tecca Legal would contact him directly if there’s proof someone could get hurt.)
The premiere does get pretty harrowing toward the end, beginning with Ron’s visit to the fenced-off building at the old Tecca address in Newark, Ohio. He finds some weird nudes in a printer and what looks like … a giant inflated red ball? And then, right when an old deviled egg sends him on a panicked run to the restroom, he hears footsteps and a long scream. It feels like something from Beau Is Afraid. He’s forced to flee before he can even wipe properly.
Back at work, Ron meets with an exec named Brenda and the head of legal for the Canton development. Apparently, teenagers were drinking at the site last night and one of them almost died. Also, a teacher was there, and he was shirtless.
It’s a weird and underexplained scenario, but the issue is enough to get Ron to lock back into his job and set Tecca aside … for a few minutes. When he leaves for the night, a man swiftly follows him across the parking lot and tells him to stop looking into the chair company, beating him with a baton briefly before walking away. The scene doesn’t stop there, though. When Ron gets his bearings, he stands up and runs after his attacker, the chased becoming the chaser. It’s notable that Ron doesn’t pick up the dropped baton to protect himself, nor does he continue the chase after the guy escapes his reach by leaving his unbuttoned shirt behind. He just stops.
At this stage, it’s impossible to tell what all of this will add up to in the long run. (It reminds me of Nathan Fielder’s underrated series The Curse a lot in that way, and in others.) But so far, The Chair Company is as funny and strange and watchable as I hoped — different from anything else Tim Robinson has done, but also recognizably a Tim Robinson project. I don’t know what any of this shit is, and I’m fucking scared.
• “Why the hell are they trying to take that damn thing? They fucking love taking that thing.”
• “I guess I shouldn’t have had that last Cheez-It this morning.”
• Three-way tie for funniest physical comedy moment of the episode: Ron’s panicked spasming in the cramped space beneath his desk; his loud dinner prep; and Douglas patting down Doris’s hair with printer paper to wipe the bubbles off.
• Good background line: While Ron is on the phone eyeing Doris, you can hear her saying, “Oh, fuck! You gave me that paper too hard.”
• “I just think HR should know that you saw up my skirt. On my birthday.”
• Ron leaves an earnest comment on the YouTube video for “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce about thinking you’ll do something with your life, but not. Curious how those deeper fears will play into his Tecca mania.
Much as it leads Tim Robinson’s Ron down endless rabbit holes, The Chair Company is evocative and weird and captivating enough to make you chase your own theories about the comedian. Photo: HBO
Tim Robinson, who so often plays men consumed by petty fixations or compelled to take things too far, has his own fixations. On I Think You Should Leave, his breakout sketch show with creative partner Zach Kanin, it’s hard not to notice how certain motifs recur across its comedy of unease like intrusive thoughts: peculiar elderly individuals, bursts of yelling, the refusal to take blame, idiosyncratic clothing, denials of reality, and drab corporate workplaces — all of which, the last in particular, were prototyped in the sitcom Detroiters, the pair’s first TV collaboration (alongside co-creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s Friendship, a light riff on male loneliness that follows a man’s spiral into obsession with a cool-guy neighbor played by Paul Rudd, we glimpse the emergence of another Robinson motif: Where his Detroiters character was ambiently married, in the A24 film he plays a devoted family man pretending at normalcy as it slips away. That characterization returns in The Chair Company, Robinson and Kanin’s new HBO series premiering October 12, which once again finds Robinson in an anonymous-looking office, playing yet another man losing his grip. Some artists spend their lives working through the same questions that consume them; Spielberg, for instance, has been processing the dissolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company reveals Robinson as one such artist, picking ever more persistently at the knots he seems to keep untangling in his head.
Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a newly promoted corporate drone at shopping-mall-development firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature With Centers of Commerce.) His misadventure begins, as so many of Robinson’s sketches do, with a humiliation. After delivering his version of a rousing speech at a companywide presentation for a new project in Canton, Ohio, Ron suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It’s the kind of incident a cooler, more well-adjusted person might laugh off and move on from. But Ron is obviously neither. He refuses to let it go, and in the grand tradition of all great Robinson characters, his fixation curdles into mania. Convinced the incident is part of a larger conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation … and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, sending him down a rabbit hole of sketchy scenarios and phantom leads all while he struggles to hold the rest of his life together.
This description makes The Chair Company sound more conventional than it is. In practice, the show feels like an effort to carry the DNA of individual I Think You Should Leave sketches across a collection of scenes comprising Robinson and Kanin’s first serialized narrative. The connective tissue can be loose — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes bafflingly so. One thread follows Ron’s elderly co-worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live legend Jim Downey, making his second onscreen appearance this fall after One Battle After Another), who lost out on a promotion to Ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. It’s not clear how he’ll figure into the bigger picture, but you accept that it may not matter. Another thread has Ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (a possible Dan Flashes callback?) that leads to a surreal encounter with a clothing-store employee who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into a mysterious membership program. At one point, Ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It’s loud and the kitchen is overrun. One table is pelting fries at other customers. A man’s plate shatters on the floor. The scene plays like a fever dream. No explanations, no resolutions, and when Ron gets what he came for, the world spins on as if nothing happened.
Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson’s sensibility than Friendship, which often felt like a single joke stretched too thin. The improvement comes down to shape: The Chair Company adopts the loose framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to corral its spiraling logic and surreal diversions. The series has a hazy, dreamlike quality in which narrative logic bends but emotional coherence holds. The effect is almost Lynchian. Each scene obeys its own strange rhythm, yet together they form a single, deeply felt reality.
Also like Lynch, Robinson’s onscreen world hums with quiet dread, a sense that something sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. His humor has always been rooted in humiliation and helplessness, in the fragile border between male entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron says at one point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t scream at them.” But what The Chair Company really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that’s been hanging out within that humor since, at the very least, the Darmine Doggy Door sketch. You could feel it, too, in Friendship, during one of the film’s rare moments of genuine unease when the wife of Robinson’s character, played by Kate Mara, disappears in the tunnels beneath the city. In The Chair Company, that undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (the payoff is equally unsettling); another finds Ron breaking into someone’s house only to stumble on a tableau straight out of Seven.
That unreality naturally raises questions about what Robinson and Kanin are really after with The Chair Company. Why, again, is Robinson cast as the improbably beloved family man? This time, his wife is played by Lake Bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) adore him, almost comically, despite his weirdness and social transgressions. These scenes of familial harmony feel off, like they belong to another reality entirely. They don’t square with how Ron behaves or even how Robinson looks in the role. It’s as if we’re watching a fever dream of a man hallucinating what normal adulthood is supposed to be. Which leads to a stranger question: When other people in the show look at Ron, do they see Tim Robinson? Are we seeing Ron as he sees himself — the gremlin-man weirdo whom the rest of us have come to associate with Robinson’s persona? How are any of these readings complicated when you learn that Robinson himself is a family man with two kids?
That’s the thing about The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just asking questions. Much as it leads Ron down endless rabbit holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating enough to pull you into chasing your own theories about the work and the comedian himself. Whether that mystery will translate beyond the Tim Robinson sickos, though, is another question. The Chair Company’s rhythms are tuned to a very specific frequency of discomfort that not everyone will find funny or even watchable. But for card-carrying sloppy-steak aficionados, it’s a rich text. The series features Robinson and Kanin pushing their sensibility to the edge, testing whether the anxious, combustible energy of I Think You Should Leave can hold steady in a longer, more fragile form. It mostly does and when it doesn’t, the fissures feel purposeful, like they’re part of the experiment. Not all the gags land, but the gags often don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seems almost like Robinson isn’t mocking obsessive male anxiety so much as sincerely expressing how it feels to be trapped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every drab office, every incongruously adoring wife is another turn through the same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be turning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.
Correction: This review originally misattributed Friendship to Kanin. It has been updated.
Horror fans have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Pennywise the Clown. The Stephen King creation takes many forms, but he exists to inspire terror in his victims before demolishing them, and his most effective and recognizable guise involves a frilly costume, glowing eyes, and a mouth full of way too many razor-sharp teeth.
That’s why this new NECA figure tied to HBO’s upcoming prequel seriesIt: Welcome to Derry is so disconcerting. This is not the Pennywise we’re used to running into in the sewers!
First, and most startlingly, the figure shows a human countenance beneath the clown wig. And the face below that receding hairline is… surprisingly gentle-looking?
As NECA’s website reports, this is the It: Welcome to Derry “Ultimate Bob Gray as Pennywise” seven-inch scale action figure. If you’re more of a casual It fan, “Bob Gray” may not ring any bells, but diehards will know the name. And it seems, at least according to NECA, we’ll be meeting him in the flesh in HBO’s new series:
“Before Pennywise was a demonic clown, he was Bob Gray, a circus performer playing a clown onstage. Based on the show’s flashback scenes, this 7-inch scale figure includes multiple interchangeable heads and hands, stage props, flowers, wooden beaver, wig, and wig stand.”
We did know that Welcome to Derry would be tapping into flashbacks to set the scene in Derry, circa 1962, but getting to see Pennywise the Clown before he became entwined with an entity of evil feels like a pretty big reveal. And that’s not all; the figure includes clown faces that make one of horror’s greatest villains appear alternately gentle, sad, and happy.
Here’s all the accessories the “Ultimate Bob Gray as Pennywise” comes with. A clown is not a clown without his sidekick wooden beaver, after all.
Want a Bob Gray of your own to remind you that even child-chomping monsters might not have been such baddies to begin with? You can preorder now ($38, ships in 2026) at NECA’s website.
How big of a spoiler for Welcome to Derry this collectible is remains to be seen, but Pennywise himself—played in the show by the returning Bill Skarsgård—has barely been glimpsed in any of its official marketing thus far.
If you prefer your Pennywise as a bloody beast, NECA has you covered with a far more ghoulish 7″ version available for pre-order here. Less gory but also way bigger at 18″ tall is this take on the balloon-bearing menace.
It: Welcome to Derry premieres October 26 on HBO. Will Bob Gray turn up with his beaver and wig stand? NECA seems pretty sure.
New photos from the set of the upcoming Harry Potter TV series share a fresh look at Dominic McLaughlin as the Boy Who Lived. The Harry Potter TV series, which is in production at HBO, was announced in April 2023. Although there is no exact release date attached to the project yet, fans can expect it to arrive in late 2026 or early 2027.
Harry Potter TV show set photos show Dominic McLaughlin as Boy Wizard
The new set photos of the Harry Potter TV series were recently posted on X (formerly Twitter), showcasing Dominic McLaughlin as the main protagonist along with other actors.
Harry Potter TV series moves filming to Cornwall as HBO producers go to extreme lengths to keep the plot a secret https://t.co/BLdF96VlU1
As per The Daily Mail, the village of Cadgwith was transformed to match the aesthetics of the wizarding world. Fans can also spot McLaughlin in a green and blue colored jacket and the iconic round frame specs.
Moreover, based on the post by Redanian Intelligence, “Harry Potter series filmed a dramatic scene in Cadgwith today. Filming kicked off at the Cadgwith Cove Inn before moving to the beach, where a dramatic scene in simulated rain was staged involving a car surrounded by fishing boats and extras in traditional Sou’westers. The scene reportedly featured Harry and possibly Bel Powley as Aunt Petunia being ordered out of the vehicle by a man wielding a gun.”
Harry Potter series filmed a dramatic scene in Cadgwith today. According to The Packet, filming kicked off at the Cadgwith Cove Inn before moving to the beach, where a dramatic scene in simulated rain was staged involving a car surrounded by fishing boats and extras in… pic.twitter.com/T17iT7S5QZ
The scene apparently also featured Amos Kitson, who plays Harry’s cousin Dudley, and Daniel Rigby’s Uncle Vernon. Many fans on the internet speculated that the cast is currently filming the hut on the rock scene. This scene from The Sorcerer’s Stone showcases Hagrid finding Harry on his 11th birthday and giving him the Hogwarts acceptance letter.
Child actor Dominic McLaughlin joined the TV reboot of the Harry Potter franchise alongside Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley. Recently, there have been rumors that HBO is eyeing both male and female actors to portray the role of Lord Voldemort.
Originally reported by Ishita Verma on SuperHeroHype.
Remember back in 2022 when you settled in to watch House of the Dragon‘s first episode? Here was a fresh start after Game of Thrones‘ disappointing final season. A clean slate, a new cast, a new (earlier) era of Westeros. But… the exact sameRamin Djawadi theme song?
It made sense on some level—it’s an awfully catchy bit of music—but it also felt a little bit repetitive. Good news for people hoping A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will try something different: HBO’s latest journey to Westeros will not only not use that same opening theme, it won’t even have a theme at all.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Ira Parker explained why that choice was made. It’s a way right from the start to let viewers know that this series is far more scaled down than Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Rather than the massive canvas both of those shows occupy, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms keeps a tight focus on Dunk and Egg, the characters who star in the George R.R. Martin stories it’s adapted from.
“All decisions came down to Dunk, trying to channel the type of person he is into every aspect of this show, even the title sequence,” Parker said. “The title sequences on the original [Game of Thrones] and House of Dragon are big and epic and incredible. Ramin Djawadi’s score is orchestral and large and beautiful. That’s not really Dunk’s MO. He’s plain and he’s simple and he’s to-the-point. He doesn’t have a lot of flash to him.”
Parker also said that unlike those other Westeros-set shows, which revolve around all the drama associated with fighting over who will get to claim the Iron Throne, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—which is set 50 years after House of the Dragon, making it a later prequel to Game of Thrones—will keep its perspective pointed away from the upper classes. “To find a totally different version of this world that everybody seems to know so well was very, very appealing,” he said.
There aren’t any dragons left by the time A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms rolls around. (Obviously, it takes place some time prior to the emergence of a certain Mother of Dragons.) “The fact that we live in this world, though, where magic once existed is very interesting to me,” Parker said. “This is the ground and the grass that has seen dragons and dragon fire before. So everything is just like how the world is, but a little stranger, a little different.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is having a New York Comic Con panel later this week, so presumably we’ll be learning a lot more—like its exact arrival date in 2026, for starters.
Losing a loved one brings pain no matter the circumstances. Not knowing what happened to them only adds more agony. That grief and confusion is what propels The Leftovers, but on a global scale—leading to three fascinating, thought-provoking, audacious, cigarette-filled, and often miraculousseasons of TV.
At the start of the first episode, it happens: two percent of the world’s population vanishes into thin air. The amount of missing isn’t huge, but it’s significant. The people who lost someone dear are personally wounded, but nobody escapes being touched in some way by the event, which leaves humanity with an infuriating array of mystical questions. Why did those who left get “chosen”—and why were those who didn’t go get left behind? Was God or some other cosmic being involved? Where did they go? Will they ever come back? And will it happen again?
As the anniversary of the show’s “Sudden Departure” approaches—October 14, unless you’re in Australia, in which case it’s October 15—and the levels of existential dread in our own world continue to rise, it felt like just the right moment for a rewatch.
Created by Damon Lindelof (course-correcting with a successfully enigmatic story after Lost’s unsatisfying end) and Tom Perrotta (who wrote the source-material novel), The Leftovers ran from 2014-2017 on HBO. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Regina King, Jovan Adepo, Margaret Qualley, Scott Glenn, Kevin Carroll, and the almighty Ann Dowd anchored its core cast, with many other memorable players popping up in its ensemble along the way.
Season one is set in Mapleton, New York—a small town with pockets of dysfunction like any other place—three years after the Sudden Departure.
Throughout its run, The Leftovers’ storytelling made great use of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and events replayed from different points of view. This patchwork approach extended across seasons—even in season three, for instance, we’d get glimpses of life before the Sudden Departure—bringing valuable insights into character motivations and perspectives, particularly useful on a show where reality sometimes meant different things to different people.
It also set up points that paid off sometimes years later in the show’s timeline and did wonders to avoid plot holes, even as The Leftovers kept the answers to its biggest questions carefully ambiguous.
In Mapleton, we meet the Garveys—police officer Kevin Jr. (Theroux) and his teenage daughter Jill (Qualley), and his estranged wife, Laurie (Brenneman). Kevin Sr. (Glenn) has been institutionalized after a breakdown following the Sudden Departure; he claims to hear voices, and the viewer soon suspects that Kevin Jr., who has blackouts and strange visions, may have inherited a similar mental illness… or perhaps an ability of a more metaphysical nature.
Tom (Chris Zylka), Laurie’s son from an earlier relationship, has moved west and is working for a self-styled holy man, a highly marketable calling in the world’s new climate of uncertainty.
Laurie, meanwhile, has joined the Guilty Remnant, a cult-like group that dresses in all-white clothing, discourages talking, encourages smoking, and stands around in menacing groups to remind people that life is meaningless.
The Guilty Remnant is led by Patti (Dowd); one of its new recruits is Meg (Tyler). Both women become important figures in The Leftovers’ expanding drama.
We also meet Matt (Eccleston), a Mapleton pastor struggling with a nosedive in church attendance since the Sudden Departure—not to mention his own newly conflicted feelings about religion. He’s certain what happened wasn’t the Rapture, but he hasn’t ruled out the almighty in having some hand in it.
His sister, Nora (Coon), is still reeling after her entire family—husband, son, and daughter—all vanished, a statistical rarity that’s made her something of a local celebrity. She sparks with Kevin in season one and their passionate but tumultuous romance comes to form The Leftovers’ emotional backbone.
Season one takes us through the Sudden Departure’s aftermath at a time when life has returned to “normal” for all intents and purposes. Bureaucracy has moved on: the ATF has added “Cults” to its jurisdiction, and Nora works for the newly formed Department of Sudden Departures, helping decide who qualifies for survivor benefits.
Commerce has moved on, too, as companies manufacture eerily realistic replicas of departed people so their families can bury them—some small comfort for anyone desperate enough to buy into the lie.
But three years isn’t long enough to forget what happened. The opposing feelings about whether people should just move on with their lives or remain paralyzed in remembrance—as the Guilty Remnant would prefer—is the biggest tension point in season one.
The Sudden Departure itself aside, season one of The Leftovers is mostly rooted in realism, though it strays into magical realism on occasion. It makes its inciting incident vivid and awful; there’s nothing blessed, for instance, about realizing the last interaction you’ll ever have with your family is an angry scolding at the breakfast table—something that haunts Nora every day.
The season ends with Nora realizing she has to “move toward something, anything.” There’s a hopeful promise for the future as Kevin, Nora, and Jill discover an abandoned baby—we know its origins, since we’ve been following Tom’s storyline—on Kevin’s front porch.
By season one’s end, viewers had long since realized The Leftovers wasn’t gearing up for some tidy reveal about the Sudden Departure. It’s all left open-ended—with plenty of room to explore new wells of emotional trauma as the story continues.
Season one feels a bit downbeat overall, given its fascination with grief and regret in a world where reality itself has suddenly become uncertain. But with that world established, season two of The Leftovers has room to inject more surrealism into its characters’ lives—especially Kevin’s—and even some levity, evidenced by the song accompanying season two’s revamped opening credits.
Rather than the instrumental of season one, season two uses Iris DeMent’s upbeat, folky “Let the Mystery Be,” which addresses humanity’s deepest conundrums—where did we come from, and where do we go when we die? Its message also fits perfectly into The Leftovers’ specific puzzle, seemingly encouraging characters and viewers alike not to hope for an answer: “But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me, I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”
“Let the Mystery Be” is the most lingering song The Leftovers uses—it’s repeated each week during season two and pops back up for the series finale in season three, and is an earworm on top of that. But the show’s needle drops throughout its run were cultivated with just as much attention to detail as its writing, furthering themes and emotions as much as the poignant piano score that threaded through each storyline.
The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” was one choice that was maybe too on the nose, but it propels Kevin’s season two arc as Kevin, Jill, Nora, and the newly adopted infant, now named Lily, move from Mapleton to Jarden, Texas, looking for a fresh start. It’s been four years since the Sudden Departure. Matt is already there with his wife, Mary (Janel Moloney), still in a coma-like state after a car accident caused by another driver who vanished from behind the wheel that fateful October 14.
Why trade one small town for another? Jarden, now more commonly called “Miracle,” is a special place: none of its 9,000-ish residents departed. Despite its mysterious earthquakes—an occurrence since prehistoric times, as we see in a prologue that kicks off the season—it’s considered one of the safest places to live.
That makes it especially appealing to Nora—as well as tourists, pilgrims, hucksters, and would-be new residents forced to camp outside its guarded entrance—but in keeping with The Leftovers’ refusal to offer closure, it’s soon clear that moving house is much easier than actually moving on.
In Jarden, Kevin and company are neighbors with the Murphys (Regina King and Kevin Carroll as parents Erika and John; Jovan Adepo and Jasmine Savoy Brown as twins Michael and Evie), and their lives become intertwined. At one point, Patti asks Kevin if they’re part of his story—or if he’s part of theirs.
Patti’s presence in season two is extremely prickly, since she died by suicide in front of Kevin during season one. She appears to Kevin as a vision only he can see, and her constant presence pushes him to the brink of madness. But the show, never revealing its cards fully, makes the case that Patti is neither ghost nor hallucination, but a presence attached to Kevin so fierce he must die to rid himself of it.
Which he does, in “International Assassin,” one of The Leftovers’ most wonderfully audacious episodes. It imagines the afterlife as a sort of alt-reality centered around a hotel. Kevin, who’s suddenly an international assassin, must kill his way out of it to shed his Patti parasite and return to life.
Kevin’s ability to die and revive (always visiting this purgatory realm in between) becomes a recurring theme on The Leftovers, with certain characters coming to believe there’s a holy aspect to it.
The tensions in Jarden come to a head in the season two finale, as a Guilty Remnant faction that’s embraced violence under Meg’s leadership brings chaos and confusion to the town—revealing a possible second Sudden Departure to be a fraud, just as Kevin’s friends and family realize he’s proof that there really are miracles in Miracle. Season two ends with reconciliation and forgiveness, but it also underlines that The Leftovers characters, as well as its audience, will never get concrete answers. “I don’t understand” and “Is this real?” are frequently repeated lines with good reason.
In all honesty, The Leftovers could have ended after season two. It would have been just fine to leave the story there, in Jarden, with everyone reuniting and Kevin realizing “Homeward Bound,” the song he’s assigned while singing afterlife karaoke—yes, it’s a thing—encapsulates where his mind’s been all along.
But season three, which ran just eight episodes after two 10-episode installments, arrived to further elevate The Leftovers. Picking up seven years after the Sudden Departure, as many in the world believe either a repeat Sudden Departure or perhaps a full-on doomsday is looming, the final season indulged an international quest for meaning while filling in some fresh texture.
We learned what pushed Laurie to join the Guilty Remnant, a cause she wisely ended up leaving behind. We got a rich payoff for The Leftovers’ most bizarrely funny running joke, involving the 1980s sitcom Perfect Strangers. Matt finally came to a sort of detente with his God, in a standout episode set aboard a ferry carrying a lion-worshiping sex cult.
And we got to spend a lot of time with the wacky Kevin Sr., whose wanderings bring him to Australia on his own personal fight to prevent the end of the world. His search ends up dovetailing with Kevin Jr.’s own internal struggles; many of the main characters end up together the Outback. One last visit to the afterlife sees Kevin Jr. confront his real enemy—himself, at long last—in a twin-on-twin end-of-the-world scenario that puts a cap on his ever returning to that realm.
As wild as Kevin’s adventures are, season three is Nora’s story. The season kicks off with another historical prologue, this time illustrating the futility of believing in—and waiting for—the Rapture. Later in the premiere, we flash-forward to a much older version of Nora; she’s living in the Australian countryside and when she’s asked, she says the name “Kevin” doesn’t mean anything to her.
With the tease of that strange scene, season three plots Nora’s trajectory by leaning into the themes her character is interconnected with. As someone who lost her entire family on October 14, Nora’s a curiosity for scientists (and kooks) studying the Sudden Departure. She’s targeted by conspiracy theorists, mystics, and even, as it turns out, legitimate physicists who think they’ve figured out where the departed people went. Sort of.
Though she found love with Kevin, Nora has missed her kids terribly, an ache that became newly raw when she agreed to return Lily to her birth mother. So when she gets a phone call asking if she’d like to see her children again, she barely hesitates, though she does initially pretend her interest is part of her fraud-investigation work with the Department of Sudden Departures.
After a falling-out with Kevin in Australia, Nora goes full-throttle on her mission, with the help of Laurie and Matt… and a pair of eccentric doctors in possession of a mysterious machine. Purportedly, it emits just the right sort of radiation to send people into the dimension that claimed so many souls on October 14.
“Families of the departed don’t want closure,” Laurie tells Nora. “With departures there is no end.” But Nora wants closure. She wants an end. If there’s a chance at seeing her kids again, she’s going to take it, even it if means stepping into a machine that ends up just incinerating her into oblivion.
But we know she survives into old age, thanks to that flash-forward. After a season of using different songs for each opening-credits tune, The Leftovers dusts off “Let the Mystery Be,” and unfurls a series finale that further encourages that message.
As always, the show gets away with its most unbelievable elements because the emotions feel real and the stakes feel earned. Kevin, a man who’s died and come back to life multiple times and is now searching for the greatest thing he’s lost, finds Nora living off the grid in rural Australia. After an awkward interaction where he pretends not to remember anything that happened after their first meeting in Mapleton, he comes clean: though he’s aware she went through the machine, he just knew all this time that she was still alive.
The show’s near-perfect final scene is just Nora, who’s reluctant to open up at first, sitting at her kitchen table, explaining to Kevin what happened.
After going through the machine, she tells him, she emerged in a world where 98% of the population vanished on October 14, rather than the 2% of the world we’ve been following all this time. Her kids, when she finally tracks them down in this post-apocalypse, seem so fine without her she doesn’t even approach them.
This alternate reality, she realizes, isn’t where she belongs. But by the time she’s able to find her way way back to the other side, using a version of the same machine constructed in that 98% world, she couldn’t bring herself to contact Kevin. She didn’t think he’d believe her.
“I believe you,” Kevin insists. He’s being sincere. And when I first watched that episode when it aired back in 2017, I fully believed her too.
It wasn’t until “The Book of Nora,” as that finale episode is titled, had time to sink in that I realized: maybe she wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe, that split-second when we see her gasp in the machine and the camera cuts away, she’s putting the brakes on the process. Maybe she’s been living secretly in Australia all this time. Maybe that story she told Kevin is what she wished had happened, rather than whatever really did happen.
The point is that it doesn’t ultimately matter. But not in a Guilty Remnant, “life has no meaning” sort of way. The Leftovers, which teased the mystery of the Sudden Departure across three seasons, uses this wonderful reunion to remind the viewer that it was never about giving evidence or proof.
It was about faith, in all its different meanings. It was about forging emotional connections to help you grapple with all those great unknowns, which are part of life even without a scenario where masses of people suddenly disappear into thin air. It was about believing in those you love—and making peace with letting the mystery be.
The Leftovers is available for streaming on HBO Max.
Sarah Jessica Parker is opening up about the decision to end “And Just Like That,” HBO’s “Sex and the City” revival, while continuing her passion for publishing through SJP Lit, her book imprint known for championing novels “with a big heart.”
During an appearance on “CBS Mornings,” Parker said ending the beloved series was a difficult decision and that she spoke it about it with “And Just Like That” creator Michael Patrick King.
“I think it’s out of respect for this really singular professional experience that you have to consider what you want to do, have you done it, and sometimes it’s best to gracefully walk away when things feel really right and energetic, versus squeezing and exploiting people’s generosity and hospitality,” she said.
Parker suggested the door might not be completely closed.
“I’m not certain I understand that decision means, because I could just be on hiatus,” she said.
Parker’s book club selection
The actor and publisher shifted the conversation to her latest literary selection, “I Am You” by Victoria Redel, a historical novel set in 1600s Amsterdam that follows two female artists navigating their careers and a secret romance.
Parker said she “fell in love with this book” immediately, praising Redel as a “supremely talented author.” The novel centers on Maria van Oosterwijck and her assistant, the younger painter Gerta Pieters — based on real historical figures about whom little is known.
“The fact that these two women, the subjects of this extraordinary story, are in fact real people that very little is known about,” Parker said. “You have an author who is just incredibly skillful at taking fact and history and making this surprising, sensuous, atmospheric, dramatic, wholly unexpected story come to life.”
The novel explores themes of ambition, power, devotion and transformation as a maid becomes a painter under her mistress’s tutelage, eventually surpassing her teacher, hence the title “I Am You.”
“What happens when you step into your own authority, your own sense of self, and that sounds like a beautiful thing and it is a beautiful thing,” Redel said. “But it’s also a messy thing.”
Analisa Novak is a content producer for CBS News and the Emmy Award-winning “CBS Mornings.” She specializes in covering live events and exclusive interviews for the show. Analisa is a United States Army veteran and holds a master’s degree in strategic communication from Quinnipiac University.
You have a talent for getting under people’s skin, even when you aren’t trying to. We have to talk about you skewering the Beast.
[Cackling] I’m missing public beef. It feels like in the social circles of the young entertainment industry right now, everything’s very like, “You’re amazing, girl!” “God, I love you!” “I would do fucking anything to hang out with you!” And in the group chat, it’s like, “Why the fuck were they on this list with me?” I’m like, “Put it on main.” [Laughs]
I loved it. Also, he wasn’t wrong. He has 990 million followers. I just was like, “Whatever, dude.” I thought it was funny. No ill will toward him. Shout out to MrBeast, for real. Go nuts, brother.
What was the hardest joke for you to figure out?
It was the Holocaust material. Oh my God. Honey, I worked so hard on that fucking joke. I workshopped that for a long time, because there’s so many pieces. When you first start doing it, you’re trying to figure out, How much can I get out of this? Should I keep it short? Do I go longer? Is sequential the best way to tell the story? You also have to build a lot of credibility with the audience to prove that it’s okay that I’m even doing this. It really, really, really was tricky to craft. I never bombed with it, but I definitely lost the audience many times working on it. I would just get maybe 6 out of 10 components into the joke and be like, they don’t like this, and we are not going to get them back.
Comedy seems to be at a bit of a fork in the road. On one side you have alternative, inclusive left-leaning comedians like yourself, and on the other side you have right-leaning anti-woke comedians, like the Kill Tony crew. How do you feel about the broader comedy scene?
Well, it’s totally fractured. But I think I’ve always felt very in the middle of everything. I’m gay, but then I’m fat. So that creates a distance between me and a lot of gay guys. I love trans people and I’m very leftist, but I’m from small-town Missouri. And plenty of people who love Kill Tony for some reason also love me. I don’t like Tony Hinchcliffe at all; I don’t think he’s funny. I have very little respect for many of the people on that side of things. But then there’s some people that I do love. I love [new SNL hire and Kill Tony regular] Kam Patterson.
Those guys, some of them don’t have it. Then in the same circle, you’ve got Shane Gillis, who’s one of the most technically talented stand-ups living. He’s really fucking good. I like Shane a lot. You’ve got Theo Von, who will randomly exhibit so much heart and character, and then in the next moment won’t. It’s very confusing.
Euphoria fans got a surprise update this weekend, with the show’s third season release date window being revealed.
When is the Euphoria Season 3 release date window?
Speaking to Variety while at the Emmys over the weekend, HBO head Casey Bloys spoke about a litany of content coming up for the iconic network. When it comes to Euphoria Season 3, though, Bloys was surprisingly open about when to expect the third season of the Zendaya-led show.
“It’ll be the spring, but we don’t have a date confirmed yet,” said Bloys when he was asked about when fans might expect a premiere date for Euphoria Season 3. It’s unclear exactly when the show will arrive, but it does seem to be sooner than some fans previously thought.
Euphoria’s third season has been an up-and-down production. Initially, Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and the rest of the cast of Euphoria were set to begin filming on Season 3 in 2024, but HBO announced that it had postponed production, with stars told to pursue other opportunities while creator Sam Levinson worked on the third season.
Shortly after the postponement, reports began to surface that people at HBO were unsure if a third season would ever happen due to the different visions that the creative team for the show had.
According to reports at the time, early drafts of Season 3 stories were seen as unsatisfying to HBO, with Levinson’s original vision for the new series featuring a five-year time jump. HBO was reportedly happy with the storylines given to Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi’s characters in the early drafts; however, the company took issue with Zendaya’s proposed character arc, which saw her working as a private detective.
Now, though, it seems as if things are progressing well for the show’s highly anticipated third and potentially final season.
We did already know that Game of Thrones spin-offs A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon season three would arrive in 2026. But now we have more concrete details on when we’ll be heading back to Westeros—and the time between visits could be surprisingly short.
As Deadline reports, HBO and HBO Max head Casey Bloys offered some morsels for George R.R. Martin fans as part of an interview celebrating the outlet’s many Emmy wins. (Hell yeah, The Penguin star Cristin Milioti!)
According to the trade, House of the Dragon‘s return is “possibly in June,” based on Bloys’ estimate that “I think it’ll be just outside of [the 2026 Emmy eligibility window],” Bloys said; the window closes May 31.
But even earlier than that, the trade confirms, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms “will premiere in January.” That lines up with reports from May 2024 that the show, originally touted as dropping in 2025, would arrive in early 2026—though a month wasn’t specified at that time.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has already been confirmed to run six episodes. Just speculating here, but if it kicks off the first Sunday of January, it would run through the second week of February. If House of the Dragon arrives the first Sunday of June, that would be just 17 or so weeks between Game of Thrones-adjacent adventures.
Does that feel like overkill, or the right amount of time to maximize the hype? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
