What was your experience like shooting the big dragon fight scene?
Cool, man. It’s kind of a little boy’s dream. It’s just something that you think of when you’re a child as being the coolest thing in the world. And it really was. They basically build a screen around you so you know where to look: what’s expected, what’s coming at you, what’s leaving you. Your entire perspective is quite clear. And then amongst that, you’re clad in all this armor that has been expertly crafted by some amazing workmanship. But then again, you’re crouched over this big saddle, strapped in, feeling like you can’t move. That crane has really got a lot of work to do to make it look like you’re moving.
At the beginning of the season, Aegon says that Aemond is his closest confidant, and by episode four, Aemond has basically tried to kill him. Where do they stand now? And what’s your relationship with Ewan Mitchell, who plays Aemond?
Oh, Aegon and Aemond’s relationship is very different to Tom and Ewan’s relationship. Let’s put that out there [laughs].
Look, that is sibling rivalry on a very intense scale, isn’t it? It’s the flip of the switch that can happen when somebody feels pushed out or somebody feels like there’s been injustice. I always felt like Aemond saw himself being in that position of power and dealing with it better than Aegon would deal with it. But then again, his birth certificate states otherwise. It was bound to happen at some point, wasn’t it?
Was there a particular scene that you felt extra challenged by or invigorated by?
He’s never in the same frame of mind twice in one day. He’s all over the place. Keeping up with his erratic mood swings was the hard part, and was this thing that I was having to stay really focused on. There wasn’t particularly one scene that I thought, Oh God, not this one, because all of them are challenging in different ways. Even the ones where he’s still and more focused are difficult, because you’ve got that sort of inner Aegon rhythm that is rapid. It’s very different to mine. It’s maintaining that, but still keeping the tension of the scene. I relished the opportunity to play someone with such range and creative potential from an acting point of view.
Olivia Cooke, who plays Alicent, has noted that you two are not very far apart in age at all, and yet are playing mother and son. How did you guys work together to create that filial dynamic?
Every scene that I’ve had with Olivia, there is never a moment that isn’t filled. Everything is just so complex and deeply entrenched in her. She means everything she says. It’s a rare skill to have. As an actor, she has that in truckloads. It’s a gift to be able to work with her, to play her son.
Yeah, [it’s] hilarious. She’s only a year older than me. I think we manage it because we get on so well. We’re pals as well, you know. I love Olivia to bits. Trust her wholeheartedly. We have a laugh. We don’t take it too seriously. We have common ground on that. But then in the moments where the work is happening, it’s all we care about. We care immensely. It’s one of those things where in the downtime, after we wrap, we can go for a drink. We can have a laugh. We connect on a personal level as well as a professional level. I think that’s what sort of breeds a healthy and believable performance thing relationship-wise.
There’s an amusing scene where Aegon is sitting around with the lads and talking about what his sobriquet should be. Should he be “Aegon the Brave,” “Aegon the Whatever,” etc. What do you think he should be called?
Of all the deaths in the Game of Thrones pantheon—the beheadings, stabbings, poisonings, drownings, suffocations, flayings, suicides, burnings, beatings, explosions, and zombie attacks—very little beats the intensely traumatic, harrowing childbirth of Aemma Arryn, wife of King Viserys, in the series premiere of HoD. It is the most realistic of any Game of Thrones death, an unforgettable depiction of the brutalities of childbirth. Aemma’s labor becomes complicated, and it quickly becomes evident that both her life and that of the unborn child are in grave danger. King Viserys, desperate for a male heir to secure the Targaryen succession, faces an excruciating decision when he is informed that the only way to potentially save the baby is through a risky and primitive cesarean section, which would almost certainly result in Aemma’s death. Torn between his love for his wife and his duty as king, Viserys decides to proceed with the procedure. Needless to say, you won’t soon shake the grim sights and sounds of it all.
Depicted with graphic detail and emotional intensity, Aemma is forcibly held down as the maester makes the incision without anesthesia. She dies in agony, begging for her life, grimly aware of the fate that’s been chosen for her. That the baby doesn’t survive is almost beside the point (though it sets in motion the internecine war within House Targaryen). Both GoT and HoD are, if nothing else, odes to the horrors humans inflict on one another. But very little compares to the brutalities inherent in simply living.
This story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season two episode four.
The queen that never was is now officially the queen that never will be. On the fourth episode of House of the Dragon, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” Princess Rhaenys met her untimely demise during an epic battle between Team Black and Team Green that may have also taken the life of King Aegon. Halfway through the second season of House of the Dragon, Still Watching hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy take stock of the show’s mounting death toll and chat with Eve Best, a.k.a. Rhaenys herself, about saying goodbye to the selfless princess.
Before the battle at Rook’s Rest, things are already looking shaky for Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Team Black. Her uncle-husband Daemon (Matt Smith) continues having visions of slaying young Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) during his stay at Harrenhal—an estate which, according to Harrenhal’s substitute maester and probable witch Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), is haunted. Meanwhile, Rhaenyra’s council is in disarray in her absence as she returns from her unsuccessful trip to convince Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) to stop the fighting before it goes any further.
Things are slightly less chaotic for Team Green as Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) continues to conquer castles in his quest to secure King Aegon’s spot on the Iron Throne. But back in King’s Landing, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) feels his his grip on his council slipping and shifting to his younger brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) as Alicent surreptitiously attempts to get rid of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
Everything comes to a head at the small but crucial castle Rook’s Rest, an unexpected diversion devised by Ser Criston and Aemond. As the battle plays out, Rhaenys and her dragon, Maelys, do some serious damage to Aegon’s army, but wind up being no match for Aemond and Aegon—who turns up unexpectedly—and their dragons. After a ferocious effort, Rhaenys falls off Maelys as they both plummet from the sky to their deaths—but not without making their mark. King Aegon and his dragon are both down for the count at the episode’s end, throwing the future of the Iron Throne back up for grabs.
Although Rhaenys’s arc on House of the Dragon has come to an end, for veteran British actress Eve Best, the journey is never really over. “I don’t really feel she’s gone. I never feel that,” Best says while appearing on Still Watching. “I’ve been killed so many different ways in the past with different characters. I’ve been burned, stabbed, bitten by a snake. But I’ve never fallen off a dragon.”
Before that great fall, Rhaenys meets Alyn (Abubakar Salim), the shipman who saved her husband Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint) from death at sea—and who very well might be Corlys illegitimate child and a potential heir to Driftmark. “She’s so heartbroken about it,” says Best of Lord Corlys’s potential indiscretion. “That betrayal and that infidelity. But it remains in a slightly ambiguous place. It’s not spelled out. It feels like by the end her only real ally is her dragon, Maelys.”
Filming that epic final battle scene with Maelys was a strenuous two-week process that she underwent only at the very end of shooting season two. “It was quite intense physically, because it is all CGI,” says Best. “It’s electronic, moving. It’s like the size of a small cottage, really. You’re strapped on what feels like the roof of this small house, and then it starts moving around.” Riding the mechanical dragon, Best said, was “phenomenally uncomfortable,” but nevertheless she persisted. “I kept asking for more cushions because I felt like I just needed more padding on my bum,” she says.
Rhaenys’s death scene was actually the last scene shot of the season. “I was feeling quite emotional and a bit like, ‘Oh god, this is going to be weird and intense,’ but I’ve just got to get on and hope that it goes okay,” says the actor, recalling that final day. “In the morning, Ryan [Condal] got all the crew together, and there was a major lovely speech and a farewell thing. It sort of made it all worse because I was feeling even more emotional, even more pressure.”
Despite the discomfort and the pressure, Best was able to nail the final moments when Rhaenys falls off Maelys. “I don’t think she’s thinking. It’s a letting go of all thought,” says Best of the princess’s state of mind at that moment. “It’s a moment of peace. The movement was a physical release. It was literal letting go of the dragon. And it’s an emotional and spiritual release. A total let go for somebody who has been holding everything and everyone. To let go of all of that, and to surrender is such a relief.”
How will Team Black react to the news of Rhaenys’s death? Did Aegon survive his fall? We’re now halfway through House of the Dragon season two, and the Iron Throne has never felt more up for grabs. Stay tuned and send an email to Still Watching at our new email address stillwatching@vanityfair.com with all your thoughts and theories about who will emerge victorious on House of the Dragon season two.
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, whose House Targaryen history tome Fire & Blood is now hitting screens as HBO and Max’s House of the Dragon, isn’t directly involved in writing the series, which is now in its second season. But he’s been watching, and so far he’s really liking it—with one new addition that he loved so much, he wishes he’d thought of it himself.
If you’re not caught up on House of the Dragon season two, which is about to unveil its fourth episode on Sunday, spoilers follow.
Fans of Fire & Blood all knew that Blood and Cheese—assassins hired by Daemon Targaryen to infiltrate the Red Keep—were going to pop up early in the show’s second season. Daemon’s instructions are to murder Aemond Targaryen, the Team Green young adult responsible for the death of Rhaenyra’s son Luke in the season one finale. It’s payback, trading “A Son for a Son,” as the season premiere episode title goes. But when the ratcatcher (Cheese, played by Mark Stobbart) and the swordsman (Blood, played by Sam C. Wilson) get inside the castle, they can’t locate Aemond. Instead, they grab the next in line to the throne: King Aegon II’s son, just a toddler, and saw his little head off. It’s grim, it’s a PR disaster for Team Black, and it’s yet another gruesome rung on the ladder toward all-out war in Westeros.
But there’s a new character involved: Cheese’s loyal dog. Cheese is not a nice guy, and he’s certainly not always nice to his four-legged companion. But we see just how connected they are when—in the second episode, “Rhaenyra the Cruel”—Aegon orders all the ratcatchers employed by the crown to be publicly executed. Blood didn’t know Cheese’s name, you see, so the king figured he’d better just exterminate all of them to make sure he got the culprit. As ratcatcher-adjacent friends and family spot their loved ones dangling high above King’s Landing, and react with anguished cries, we see one particularly sad face. A furry one.
In his glowing review of the first two episodes, posted on his Not a Blog, Martin gave a special shout-out to House of the Dragon‘s writers for incorporating that new detail. “The show added a brand new character,” Martin wrote. “The dog. I am… ahem… not usually a fan of screenwriters adding characters to the source material when adapting a story. Especially not when the source material is mine. But that dog was brilliant. I was prepared to hate Cheese, but I hated him even more when he kicked that dog. And later, when the dog [sat] at his feet, gazing up… that damn near broke my heart. Such a little thing… such a little dog… but his presence, the few short moments he was on screen, gave the ratcatcher so much humanity. Human beings are such complex creatures. The silent presence of that dog reminded us that even the worst of men, the vile and the venal, can love and be loved.”
Martin also added: “I wish I’d thought of that dog. I didn’t, but someone else did. I am glad of that.”
New episodes of House of the Dragon arrive Sundays on Max and HBO.
House of the Dragon has been teasing a terrible civil war in Westeros since the foundations were laid in season one—and now, with House Targaryen bitterly divided, battles are just over the horizon. This week, in episode three, “The Burning Mill,” we see one last attempt at reconciliation—as well as the beginnings of a few journeys, a mysterious new character, and some spooky-castle shenanigans.
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Ah, the Riverlands. A place of green fields, picturesque windmills, and generations-long feuds between adjacent houses, as we see when young knights from House Bracken and House Blackwood get in each other’s faces at the border dividing their lands. These days, current events are bolstering their anger: one side’s loyal to Queen Rhaenyra, the other calls her a “babekiller” and “kinslayer” and takes the side of Team Green. Insults lead to shoving, shoving leads to swords, then the scene cuts and we see a full-on battle has taken place between the houses. The land is riddled with bodies, and that quaint windmill is now a burned-out husk.
Speaking of bodies, there’s a double burial happening on Dragonstone: the Cargill twins, reunited in their grave. As a somber Rhaenyra ponders her next move—a furious Jace wants to keep the cycle of revenge going—Rhaenys, who correctly senses that Otto Hightower has been shoved aside and that the assassination attempt was the work of “hotter blood,” sidles in with a suggestion, delivering the killer lines we’ve heard in House of the Dragon trailers. “There may be another way: Alicent Hightower … she knows war is coming and that it will be savage beyond all compare,” Rhaenys says. “There is no war so hateful to the gods as a war between kin. And no war so bloody as a war between dragons.” Alicent could be their last hope to prevent a terrible war. Rhaenyra’s skeptical, but Rhaenys’ words make her think of the raven that came from King’s Landing bearing a message from her old friend after Luke was killed… which she has yet to read.
Cole (Fabian Frankel) after reading your opinions about him on social media.Image: Ollie Upton/HBO
Speaking of King’s Landing, Ser Criston Cole–now Hand of the King, in addition to being Lord Commander of the Kingsguard–is dawdling before a Small Council meeting. When he gets there, war is (unsurprisingly) the main topic, with Aemond updating everyone about the Bracken-Blackwood battle, and King Aegon bitchily asking what their next move is. There are many suggestions, to the point where everyone is talking over each other and Alicent speaks sharply about the Council’s lack of discipline, but Cole opines that the Riverlands are the key to winning the war, and that Harrenhal is the key to the Riverlands. He’ll lead the army there himself, he says—this is a guy who really does not want to attend any more of these meetings—with Aemond, but not Vhagar, who is needed on the home front defending King’s Landing. “I’ll come too, with Sunfyre,” King Aegon pipes in, an idea nobody supports; you get the sense it’s partially because they want to travel without drawing too much attention (something a dragon always brings), but also because, let’s face it, nobody wants Aegon in the mix.
Back on Dragonstone, before a gorgeous sunset view featuring a lone dragon flapping around in the distance, Rhaenyra is having a chat with Mysaria—who, having been given her freedom in last week’s episode, turned back at the last minute when she realized a certain ill-meaning twin had just arrived on the island. Mysaria, who says she’s still surprised that Rhaenyra was willing to let her go, would like a reward: a place in Rhaenyra’s court. She has valuable information about the inner workings of the Red Keep, and no love for the Hightowers; she’s also here to advocate for the smallfolk, and figures Rhaenyra is the ruler most likely to show them mercy. “One turn for another, then,” Rhaenyra says, and we can see a mutual respect of sorts forming between these two very differently positioned women.
Inside the castle, we finally spend more than a few passing seconds with Rhaena: Daemon’s daughter, and the younger sister of Baela. (In George R.R. Martin’s text, they’re twins, but she’s definitely positioned as the second sibling here.) Rhaenyra has a task for her, involving the younger Targaryens: she’ll take Joffrey (Rhaenyra’s youngest dark-haired son) and his dragon to the Vale, where he’ll become the ward of Lady Arryn; then, Rhaena will become the de facto mother figure for Rhaenyra’s blonde kids with Daemon (Aegon and Viserys, and yes the repeated names are confusing), taking them to Pentos for safety. As we’ve seen, no cute little kid is safe in this particular war. “Make this sacrifice willingly, for all of us,” Rhaenyra urges her. Rhaena isn’t happy about it, but if there’s one thing women in Westeros know about… it’s making sacrifices.
That’s “Your Grace” to you. Matt Smith as Daemon.Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO
And now, at last, we pick back up with Daemon as he flies through howling night winds into Harrenhal, the biggest castle in Westeros and also, need we remind you, the spookiest. It’s also incredibly damp, thanks to all the damage it’s taken over the years, and Daemon stomps through puddles and flurries of bats indoors, killing a guard on the way just because he can. If this was a vintage horror movie, he’d encounter Lon Chaney Jr. lurking in the dark, but since this is House of the Dragon and not House of Dracula, instead he meets… Ser Simon Strong, played by British stage legend Sir Simon Russell Beale, having dinner in one of the castle’s few vaguely cozy rooms.
Ser Simon has no objection to ceding control of Harrenhal to Team Black—he’s no fan of his cunningly murderous great-nephew, Ser Larys—though Daemon’s skeptical of his hospitality, and snaps at him for mistakenly calling him “my Prince” instead of “Your Grace.” For his part, Ser Simon thinks Daemon’s plan to raise an army in the Riverlands is a dubious one; the region’s liege lord, Lord Grover Tully, is a frail old man unlikely to comprehend what’s at stake. What’s the endgame here, Ser Simon wonders? This very droll exchange follows.
Daemon: “We march on King’s Landing and take the throne.”
Ser Simon: “The throne?”
Daemon: “It’s a big chair… made of swords.”
In King’s Landing, Cole’s army prepares to march with a new face in tow: Ser Gwayne Hightower, Alicent’s brother. He meets Cole with a polite but frosty attitude (Gwayne’s not thrilled Cole took Otto’s place as the Hand), and things get a little weird when Cole says goodbye to Alicent, asking for her favor (which takes the form of a handkerchief she pulls out of her cleavage) as he departs, and Gwayne looks on quizzically. The camera pulls up as the host rides out, and in the foreground we see one of the rat catcher corpses from last week, looking a bit more decayed, and with a crow making short work of its eyes.
Rhaenys (Eve Best) and Corlys (Steve Toussaint)Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO
On Dragonstone, the tension is rising along with the anticipation of this army—which Team Black has yet to spot, but knowsmust be forming; the fact that Daemon hasn’t sent any updates since he flounced away isn’t helping. Rhaenyra’s Small Council wants her to act, be that by sending dragons to burn all who oppose her, or hiding herself away and letting the council (another way of putting that is “the menfolk”) rule in her stead. After Rhaenyra departs in disgust, Rhaenys has another notable quotable to share, reminding everyone that “their Queen wears the crown of my grandsire, Jaeharys the Conciliator, a prudent ruler, the wisest of Targaryen kings, whose reign outlasted every other, even Aegon the Conquerer’s.”
But Rhaenys knows there’s trouble afoot, and she doesn’t correct Corlys in the next scene, in a rainy Driftmark rendezvous, when he refers to the Small Council as “the ditherers of Dragonstone.” The interaction between husband and wife, like so many of their meetings, is shot through with affection as well as subtle disagreements, including that old question of who should inherit Driftmark (currently, it’s little Joffrey, who’s about to be spending the rest of his childhood far from the sea). There’s a new urgency to their talk of heirs, a tumultuous subject—as we saw last season, when Corlys suffered a great injury and it seemed Lucerys Velaryon (RIP) would be inheriting Driftmark sooner than expected. “We are at war,” Rhaenys reminds the Sea Snake, and worries that something might happen to him.
On nearby Dragonstone, Rhaena bids farewell, preparing for her journey with small children and small dragons in tow. She’s resentful; Baela, who’s not only older, but has her own dragon to ride, gets to stay behind and take an active part in the war effort. But there’s a softening when Rhaenyra shows Rhaena that she’ll also be caring for a clutch of precious dragon eggs; if the worst happens in Westeros, she’ll be an important source of hope for the Targaryen future.
Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) and Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy)Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO
After Rhaenyra says good-bye to her sons (except Jace, he gets to stay), we cut to King’s Landing, where Alicent and Heleana have a poignant conversation about motherhood, grief, and loss. And the elephant in the room comes out: “I forgive you,” Heleana tells her teary-eyed mother, and we all know she means her mother’s forbidden affair with Cole. In a nearby chamber, King Aegon (“the magnanimous”) is being fitted with… Aegon the Conquerer’s own snazzy armor. He’s planning to fly into battle, despite everyone else agreeing it’s a terrible idea. Ser Larys appears, as always armed with a bit of information that’s secretly manipulation in disguise, and says there’s talk that Aegon has been tricked into going into battle because that’s what his Small Council, including Alicent, wants, so that she and Aemond can rule in his absence. As Aegon is taking this in, he makes another impulsive appointment, naming Larys his Master of Whisperers.
And it works! Aegon decides that rather than going to battle, he’ll… spend another drunken night out on the town instead. In a scene that immerses us in King’s Landing after hours, we meet a new character. It’s a brief moment, but it’s important, since this is the bastard son of Baelon Targaryen—which makes him Daemon and Viserys’ half-brother, and Rhaenyra’s uncle. Why he’s sharing this information with random strangers (look closely; one is Samson Kayo from Our Flag Means Death) in a tavern isn’t clear, and we learn no more for now because just then King Aegon, who’s unaware of the man’s identity, shows up ready to party his face off.
King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) is the comic relief so far this season, in a truly awful way though.Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO
Awkward family reunion averted–until Aegon walks in on Aemond snuggled up with his favorite lady of the night, to Aegon’s hooting, taunting delight. Aemond’s reaction is to stand on the table—classic Game of Thrones-style full-frontal nudity alert, though there’s tasteful shadowing—and stalk out of the room (wearing not a stitch, not even his eye patch), pretending he’s totally unbothered.
On Dragonstone, a contemplative Rhaenyra decides that now, at last, is the moment to open her message from Alicent. We can’t read the message, but the word “mother” definitely appears.
En route to the Riverlands, Cole and Ser Gwayne Hightower continue to not like each other. Gwayne has decided to take his lieutenants to a nearby tavern so they can enjoy some creature comforts, while Cole’s men are all camped on the hard ground. “We will rendezvous with your army at first light,” Gwayne says breezily, as the camera tilts up to show us the current position of the sun, and—hey now, what’s that in the sky? Dragonnnnnn! Cole, Gwayne, and Gwayne’s men gallop for the safety of nearby tree cover as Baela, riding Moondancer, swoops in overhead. She’s there merely to observe, not engage, but you can see in her face she’s got a bit of that season-one Rhaenys “I want to set you all on fire” urge in her, and she gives the men a good scare. Ser Gwayne, for one, looks like he might have peed his pants a little, and finally admits Cole might know what he’s doing after all. Stealth is now the way forward for this army—“and no fucking inns,” Cole hisses.
When Baela reports back to Rhaenyra and her Small Council, again they urge it’s time to take action. Past time, really. She takes it in and says she’ll consider their arguments, as we cut to Rhaenys—and can tell she’s realizing Rhanyra is finally going to take her advice.
But first, you may be wondering, as the Small Council on Dragonstone certainly has been: what the hell has Daemon been up to? Wandering around the ruins of Harrenhal, it turns out—a place full of dripping water, barricaded doorways, and whispers from the past. He encounters an impossible tableau: young Rhaenyra, played by a returning Milly Alcock. “Always coming and going, aren’t you,” she sighs at Daemon. “And I have to clean up afterwards.” As the camera comes around we see she’s stitching little Jaehaerys Targaryen’s head onto his neck. In an instant, the vision is gone, and a strange woman—someone we saw earlier alongside Ser Simon—appears and says “You will die in this place.”
With that uneasiness lingering, we return to Dragonstone; there’s no sneaking into King’s Landing without the advice of Mysaria, so Rhaenyra gets all the intel she needs to engineer a face-to-face encounter with Alicent. This includes what disguise she’ll need (a septa; it’s not the first time this episode, nor this season, that someone points out most smallfolk won’t recognize a royal out of context) and where she’ll be able to find the Dowager Queen alone (in the Great Sept of Baelor, saying her prayers). And then, it happens: a scene between Rhaenyra and Alicent, something we were not expecting to see at all this season.
Alicent (Olivia Cooke), a nice church-going lady.Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO
And it’s quite a powerful moment. Alicent’s shock when she realizes who’s come to call is one thing; it levels up when she realizes Rhaenyra isn’t there to kill her. Rhaenyra opens with a memory we all share: the tournament that kicked off in season one. “Men trained for battle are eager to fight,” she reminds her old friend. “I know you do not have that desire within you.” But Alicent knows the Dance of the Dragons is past the point of no return. There are no terms they can come to. Too much has happened now.
As they whisper-argue over Luke and Jaeharys, the real meat of the conversation comes to the fore: what did the dying King Viserys say to Alicent that made her think he’d changed his mind about Rhaenyra being his heir? Rhaenyra can’t believe her ears when Alicent, who steadfastly believes she was honoring her husband’s wishes, says he muttered about “Aegon” and “the prince that was promised to unite the realm.” Rhaenyra knows, as we did when we saw it last season, that Viserys was referring to the Song of Ice and Fire, a dream that Aegon the Conquerer had. Wrong Aegon, Alicent! Wrong Aegon. But for Alicent, it’s too late, no matter how much Rhaenyra protests that there’s been a mistake. “There’s been no mistake,” Alicent insists. Otto’s been kicked out of court, Cole is on the march, “you know what Aemond is,” and it’s too late. As Alicent stalks away, Rhaenyra sets her jaw. Time to go to war. At last?
New episodes of House of the Dragon arrive Sundays on HBO and Max.
When The Bear first premiered, it was all in one fell swoop, eight feverish episodes dropped onto Hulu in June of 2022. While the show was beloved by critics, it took a while, relatively speaking, to catch on, popping up as the second most-watched show across all platforms three weeks later and the most watched program the following week. Season two, released in the same bingeable fashion at about the same time a year later, came out of the gate hot, quickly becoming the most streamed TV series in the US.
During both seasons, The Bear’s audience petered out fairly quickly, making it the equivalent of a darkly comedic shooting star. That’s typical for bingeable shows, which industry watchdogs like Parrot Analytics say typically have a “decay rate” of about eight weeks from their initial release. Shows dropped weekly, like The Acolyte or Severance, tend to stay on audience’s minds much longer, from initial release to about nine weeks after the finale hits. Seventy-five percent of the most popular shows in the US in 2023 were released weekly, and shows that come out in installments typically draw more viewers in the lull between seasons, creating fewer peaks and valleys in their viewership numbers in the long term.
Weekly releases also help keep shows in the cultural conversation longer. Just look at Fallout. Amazon Prime Video released all eight episodes of that video game adaptation at once and folks actually got somadabout it the loudest conversation about Fallout ended up being about its rollout, not the show itself.
All of which is to say: Why in the world did The Bear’s entire third season just get dumped in one go? While the show’s cast say the binge model is—as Matty Matheson, who plays Neil Fak, recently put it at a press conference—”tight,” how a series is created artistically seems to have increasingly little to do with how it reaches audiences. (For instance, Bridgerton showrunner Jess Brownell recently told the Los Angeles Times she had no idea Netflix was thinking of dropping the show’s latest season in two parts until after it was shot, creating for an interesting episodic flow.)
“You produce a show from a content standpoint,” says Evan Shapiro, a television producer turned professor and Substack pundit. “The scheduling of it is much more about marketing for new subscribers or for existing subscriber retention.” In other words, just because something like The Bear is excellent television that’s best viewed as an artistic whole, the team at Hulu still seems to treat it like a click-generating subscription driver. Showrunners create hoping you will finish their shows; streaming services often just care about whether or not you start them.
While FX and Hulu are certainly following the precedent set by the past two seasons, there’s a sense that the release plan for the current season—arguably The Bear’s most anticipated to date—is an exercise in foot-shooting. By rolling it out this way, the show burns fast and hot, controls the cultural conversation around Emmy nomination voting, and then crashes right after. The Bear only just started shooting the current season in February, making the turnaround for this 10-episode drop seem downright cruel to every editor, publicist, and marketing professional working behind the scenes.
Warner Bros. was designating DC shows as “Max Originals” rather than “HBO Originals” as late as last week, when the latest trailer for The Penguin dropped. But there’s been a shift in the branding, according to a report in Variety that HBO and Max content CEO Casey Bloys is “moving most of Max’s upcoming big-budget, tentpole Warner Bros. IP projects to under the HBO umbrella.”
This shift covers shows releasing in 2025 and beyond—so 2024 releases The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy are both expected to still be labeled as Max shows; “the process of licensing [The Penguin] internationally has already started,” Bloys explained. But once the calendar turns over, look for Lanterns, Stephen King-inspired It prequel series Welcome to Derry, and the Harry Potter series that WB is insistent upon making to fall under that HBO Originals banner.
This switch undoes the previous intention to keep all shows based on WB properties under the Max Originals label, and it came about when Bloys and other execs realized the WB shows weren’t all that different from HBO’s own creations. “As we started producing those shows, we were using the same methods, the same kind of thinking, as how we would approach HBO shows,” he told Variety, noting that there’s even crossover between talent, such as Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof now working on Lanterns. “The idea of the delineation kind of started to feel unnecessary … Let’s just call them what they are: HBO shows.”
What does that mean for viewers? Not a lot. It means that if you see an HBO Original being marketed, it will get the perceived prestige of being on the HBO linear channel; all HBO shows will still stream on Max. Max-only series will still exist, but they’ll be “more in the broadcast/traditional TV vein” and will have more scaled-down budgets compared to the HBO shows. When asked why the company doesn’t just make every show an HBO show, which would be the least confusing way forward, Bloys said, “I do think it is helpful to have a brand that doesn’t put the expectations or the intention of an HBO show. If it’s not designed to do that, it shouldn’t have to.”
Make of that what you will. The Penguin, perhaps the last of the DC Max Originals, arrives September 8.
Last night’s second season premiere of Game of Thrones’ spinoff House of the Dragon tackled one of George R.R. Martin’s most infamous deaths—in a new way that surprised the fandom.
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In an interview with Variety, showrunner Ryan Condal explained the reasoning for the Max show’s departure from Martin’s original recollection of an event known by readers of Fire and Blood—the author’s historical explanation of Targaryen history in Westeros— as “Blood and Cheese,” named for two assassins who are responsible for the murder of Jaehaerys Targayren. In “A Son for a Son” Blood and Cheese take center stage, hired by Daemon (Matt Smith) to retaliate for the death of Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) son Lucerys at the end of last season. We pick up on the duo’s journey to do the dastardly deed which, in the show, is much more directly orchestrated than in Fire & Blood, having Rhaenyra call for Aemond’s (Ewan Mitchell) death.
“One of the things that’s challenging about adapting Fire & Blood is that there is this intentionally conflicting narrative in the book where there are often these three different viewpoints on the history that don’t line up with one another,” Condal explained, “so it’s our job as adapters to try to find the objective line through this to bring the audience into the narrative as we see it having been laid out.” In the book, it’s a whole lot more messy—Blood and Cheese weren’t given a specific target, just Daemon’s orders for “an eye for an eye, a son for a son,” and so try to kill the first boy they find.
“It felt like Rhaenyra, despite being in grief, she’s looking for vengeance, but she would choose a target that would have some kind of strategic or military advantage,” Condal continued. “Of course, if you did take out Aemond, not only would he be punished directly for his betrayal and murder of Luke, but it would eliminate the rider of the biggest dragon in the world, and immediately create an advantage for their side.” Jaehaerys still dies in House of the Dragon, but it’s presented more as due to Blood and Cheese’s incompetence—instead of finding Aemond, the assassins stumble upon his sister and wife, Queen Helaena, in her room with her twin children.
In the books, Helaena actually offers up her youngest son, Maelor (who isn’t included in House of the Dragon due to how the show has condensed the timeline of Fire and Blood), only for Jaehaerys to be killed by Blood and Cheese anyway—but in the show, Helaena is forced instead to sacrifice him to save her daughter. “We knew it would be horrifying and brutal—we didn’t want it to be gratuitous or over the top,” Condal said of the murder. “The idea of that sequence was to dramatize a heist gone wrong. So we move off the center narrative of Daemon, Rhaenyra, Alicent and Aegon’s world, and suddenly, we’re following these two characters that we’ve just met in an alley in Flea Bottom. Daemon’s given them an assignment to go in and find Aemond Targaryen, and we’re following them, and we’re following them, and we’re not cutting away and we’re not going back to the other narratives—‘oh, God, what’s going to happen?’”
Many of us have long wanted a peek behind the curtain of the Texas Renaissance Festival. The “Ren Fest” has always been a combination of light-hearted middle ages fun mixed with a seedy underbelly that borders on bacchanalia if you know where to look. Rumors and lawsuits have swirled around the Ren Fest and owner George Coulam for years. For all the fun that comes with lifting up your spirits amongst the tall trees of Todd Mission, Texas, the scene there is…complicated.
Which is exactly why so many of us are thrilled at the March announcement that there would be a three-part documentary series, Ren Faire, from the acclaimed documentarians at HBO. More critically, the trailer released just a week ago, two weeks ahead of its June 2 release date, is a mesmerizing combination of scandal and Survivor. pitting multiple long time “rennies” in a battle for taking over the festival when Coulam retires (or dies as he discusses openly).
Let’s consider the trailer.
Coulam is…unique.
The documentary describes him as the person who basically invented the ren fest in the U.S. They may be right. But, the man is far from just some brilliant business mogul (though some might argue otherwise). “The perfect way to go would to have a woman screw me to death,” Coulam says quite matter-of-factly in the trailer, “That’s my goal.” Coulam has been accused of all sorts of sordid claims including forcing a former employee to peruse sugar daddy websites on his behalf. While the documentary revolves around the heirs to the throne, Coulam is the one whose presence will make this most compelling. At least, we hope.
The Lord of Corn is going to be a character.
The documentary pits three would-be kings/queens wanting to take over the rennie empire and Louie Migliaccio (what a name!), the man who wields the popcorn, dubbed the Lord of Corn, looks absolutely perfect. A salt-and-pepper haired middle-aged popcorn vendor, he clearly shoots from the hip and makes it clear what he wants from beat one of the trailer. It might seem odd that someone who sells popcorn could be in line for the throne, but the Ren Fest is a different place with a lot of moving parts. It makes about as much sense as an elephant trainer…oh, wait.
Darla Smith looks like the most pragmatic.
Sipping margaritas and cruising the lake, Smith (aka The Elephant Trainer) looks like the under-the-radar bet. She clearly has savvy and experience, and the pissing contest between the men could be their undoing. She is obviously a woman who no one should underestimate (she says that herself right there in the trailer) and it would make sense to transition from someone with the questionable behavior of Coulam to Smith.
We can only hope plenty is revealed.
Despite being billed as something of a content for the festival itself, we cannot help but hope HBO does its magic and digs up as much dirt on the long-loved East Texas curiosity. The fact that it got a three-part treatment says they have a lot to say. No doubt the characters will make this an absolutely fascinating watch. Huzzah!
The Sympathizer is full of twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to life as a refugee in America as he works to secure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the show wrestles with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).
In the final episode, we finally catch up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting detail. It’s no surprise that the true name of the Commissar — another figure defined by his title more than himself— would be another surprise in the plot. But, like any unveiling of true identity in The Sympathizer, it’s more a twist of the knife than anything else.
[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]
Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO
In the final episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes during the fall of Saigon. Worse yet, this old friend/prison camp supervisoris still going to torture him for information.
It’s a tough way for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an office and highly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam — weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s reflections were a neat framing device and something he saw as mostly a formality, the one thing standing between him and the bright future of Communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now, staring him in the face, is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in keeping with the way The Sympathizer has been using the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) point of view.
“The ghosts really pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to weave his way out, and trying to never be found out, and, obviously, toeing the line between his allegiances.”
In that light, his vision with Mẫn isn’t all that different from his visions of Sonny or the Major; they’re all, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma that he’s been hiding from.” They’re a startling way for the Captain to realize that his actions have been more about finding any means to survive than about following his communist ideals, or fighting for a better Vietnam.
“When they come back to haunt and remind him about the very things he’s been neglecting in his memory, it’s a reminder for him that everything that he believes and thought he was doing for the cause might not actually be right.”
This is an idea that The Sympathizer underlines again and again with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is straightforward or neat, and none of it went the way he planned. Even as he seems to confess to Sonny or carry out the general’s orders to kill him, the Captain is acting for his own reasons, rather than purely “the cause.”
Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO
Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn also knows all too well, seemingly disillusioned with the state of the country at the same time he does his job. He is, as his dual character names speak to, a different person now, much harder than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between every version of Mẫn.
“To develop this character, I had to really dig deep: What is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act around his friend, or does he act alone with just the Captain?” Nguyễn says. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very still; he has to be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stay upright. The way he talks is clear — so those are the parts I keep.
“[In episode 7], he is so damaged, but he still wants to keep the presence in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.”
Which is crucial; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s final turn — comes down to how Mẫn’s turn plays. He is the single person, the crucial vector point, around which the Captain’s story gets suddenly jerked back, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Like the Captain, he is a study of dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause, yet wary; a ghost from the past and a vision of the brave new fractured and corrupted world. After filtering so much of the narrative — and, with it, the war, its aftershocks, and all the complexities contained within those — through the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can match and cut through the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.
And the truth is at once infinitely more complex and far simpler than he was prepared to believe. Through his torture, the Captain finally reconciles with some of the worst things he did for the war, going all the way back to one of the earliest scenes of the show (that we now know was actually the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to accept who he is and where he comes from. And he has to accept that nothing about his trauma and suffering has necessarily fixed his nation. All that hardship might’ve just borne more pain — or, worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually assaulted Communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.
In the end, it’s Mẫn who gets the Captain (and Bon) free of the camp, back on a boat headed for the ol’ U.S. of A. It once again makes him a study in conflict; after so many years of loving (and trying to hate) that place, it might be his salvation after all. As the Captain looks back on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — more clearly than ever.
Glaser knows that’s the roaster’s paradox. “It’s the risk you take,” she says. “That’s what this is. You have to dish it out, you have to take it.”
Glaser certainly proved she can dish it out, ripping Tom Brady a new one without ever having met the man. “My first time meeting him was when I was up on the podium,” she says. “That’s the first time I’ve ever talked to him. We didn’t meet backstage. We didn’t have a Zoom call. There was no preface to this. Which made it easier to go hard.”
Now it’s safe to say Brady knows who she is. “Tom Brady knows my name now,” she says in disbelief. “In his joke, he didn’t say it fully, but he said ‘Glaser.’ He said it right.” It’s clear that Glaser is still processing her whirlwind week. “I will never get this much attention until I die,” she says. “I have an inkling of what it feels like to be Taylor Swift on a really slow day for her.”
But being Taylor Swift on a slow day is still life-changing for Glaser, who has been a professional comedian for more than 20 years. “I ascended in my career more than I ever have, overnight,” she says. “It just doesn’t happen today with how oversaturated the content is—that all eyes are on something like this.” She adds a joke for good measure. “Outside of Will Smith slapping me, I don’t think I’ll get this much attention as a comedian in my life.”
Matt Winkelmeyer/Netflix.
Glaser’s timing couldn’t be better. Her next comedy special, Someday You’ll Die, drops on HBO this Saturday, May 11. In the special, the 39-year-old comedian loudly and proudly declares that she never wants to have kids, expressing her raw, unfiltered emotions about aging and motherhood the only way she knows how. “My truth is that I don’t have kids, and I really do get jealous when my friends have babies because I don’t see them anymore,” she tells VF. “The funniest take on that for me is when my friends are trying, I’m like, Please don’t let this one take. It’s a funny thing to admit because it’s insane, but I can’t help that it did enter my brain. Like, Oh, I want her to have a kid. Just not yet, because we have a girl’s trip coming up.”
That’s not to say Someday You’ll Die is only about one thing. In the special, Glaser wisecracks about topics included but not limited to abortion, suicide, autism, gang bangs, heroin, and, yes, there’s even a non-terrible trans joke or two. In an age where stalwart comedians like Jerry Seinfeld continually lament so-called PC culture and what they see as the corresponding death of comedy, Glaser is proof that you can still say basically anything you want, as long as it’s funny.
“It’s funny that Jerry says that because he’s a clean comedian,” she says. “Who is he offending? I don’t know. He’s mastered the art of being clean, and is as funny as any comic who’s dirty.” Glaser says that she longs to have the type of clean and accessible comedy act that is de rigueur for Seinfeld, but it’s just not in the cards for her. “I can be very filthy and I can be very dark, so I sense that I turn people off a lot,” she says. “But I know at my core, I’m a good person. So if I’m joking about stuff, it’s just because it’s true and I want to draw attention to it.”
“It’s not about wanting to hurt people’s feelings,” she adds. “I want everyone to see what’s going on. Let’s talk about slaves making our clothes. Open your eyes. Making a joke about them is not going to make them any more slaves than they are. It actually might draw more awareness to it, even though it is under the guise of a joke. At least just acknowledge that slaves made your clothes by laughing at this joke, because it is happening and you know it.”
The intersection of truth and comedy has long been a hot-button issue, particularly as comics like Hasan Minhajcome under fire for embellishing or fabricating stories they tell in their stand-up. Glaser isn’t interested in storytelling comedians—“I just do not have the patience for it”—but she is interested in truth, even if it’s at times unflattering. “I’m never really lying on stage,” Glaser says. “People can go, ‘Oh, she’s just hyperbolizing for the sake of comedy.’ But I’m not really. Yes, I do turn it up a notch, but it should be obvious, the things in the story I’m lying about. To a savvy consumer of stand-up comedy, you should be able to tell where I’m doing a punch line and then where there is actual storytelling happening.”
One of my guilty-pleasure filmmakers is the British director Nick Broomfield, who, in the prime of his career making documentaries around lurid tabloid material, including two about the Aileen Wuornos case (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), another about Heidi Fleiss (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam), and two more, back to back, about violent pop-culture tragedies, Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac. All of these cases had been thoroughly picked over in mainstream media, so Broomfield’s approach, particularly in Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, was to poke around at the fringes and find compelling weirdos with minor connections to the major players. His schtick was to put himself in front of the camera and act like he fell off a turnip truck, and it worked like a charm every time.
Now that The Jinx has gotten past its first season, where it played a role in successfully nabbing a murderer, and past the first episode of this season, where it took a victory lap for successfully nabbing a murderer, the show seems to be settling into a Broomfield doc — wholly unnecessary, wildly entertaining. The path from Robert Durst’s apprehension to his conviction is not all crucial for a six-part documentary to follow, which has given The Jinx Part Two the quality of the longest DVD supplement of all time. But Andrew Jarecki and company are obviously interested in seeing this project all the way through, and the case has immediately started to drum up some incredible misfits on the edges. Bob Durst was not an ordinary guy, so it makes sense that his confidants are not ordinary people. Someone normal, like his first wife Kathie, never really fit in his sphere.
Though it introduces some other fun characters — I look forward to more from Michael and David Belcher, the apple-cheeked law clerks known as “the Wonder Twins” — “Friendships Die Hard” focuses intently on three friends who Durst worked hard to keep loyal in the lead-up to his trial in Los Angeles. With the trial on the horizon, Durst has been anxious about using his prison calls to secure their protection and sending his lawyers if that doesn’t work. Meanwhile, our cold case specialist, John Lewin, peppers them with phone calls in an effort to pry them away. Jarecki’s access to all of these calls and prison videos gives us some insight into how the case against Durst was built, but mainly it works as a window into the type of morally feeble misfits whose loyalty could be bought through a checkbook. A question like, “What do you do when your best friend kills your other best friend?” would be easy for 99.9 percent of humanity to answer. Jarecki introduces us to the other .1 percent.
First up is Doug Oliver, a real estate developer who seems awful even by the low standards of real estate developers. Charles Bagli of the New York Times describes Oliver as a would-be playboy in the ‘80s who convinced Durst to buy out a tenement building to rehabilitate the property and got 50 percent of the profits in return. When Lewin calls him about speaking to the prosecutors about Durst, Oliver brusquely declines, then wonders if he’ll have to pay for his flight to Los Angeles if Lewin subpoenas him. That leads to Oliver snootily negotiating for the state to pay for a private plane, knowing full well that Lewin can only offer a coach, and then telling him, “You guys are not going to get me on the commercial flight.” He would rather go to jail in New York than fly commercial. (Honestly, the quality of commercial flights makes that a less ridiculous statement than it should be.)
With Oliver looking like a firm “no,” Lewin turns to the most absurd figure of the three: Nick “Chinga” Chavin, an advertising executive who earned millions when the Durst Organization became his only client. Chavin feels especially grateful to Durst because he wasn’t likely to make his fortune as the frontman of Chinga Chavin, a “country porn” band that made its theoretical bones on country-western numbers with names like “Cum Stains on My Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used to Be).” Chavin met Durst through Susan Berman, who’d reviewed his band positively and become friends promoting his career. The two men were “naughty boys” having fun in New York, and Chavin describes them as sharing “a contempt for the law and for society and for the rules.”
It’s blazingly apparent that Chavin would have kept dodging any involvement in the case at all if not for his wife Terry, whose distaste for Durst and Debrah Lee Charatan, Durst’s second wife and co-conspirator, is rivaled only by her hatred of Chavin’s music. It turns out that Terry, at a low moment in her life, took a job working for Charatan at a real estate firm that sought a niche in the male-dominated field by hiring all women as employees. Yet in Terry’s account, this was not a great step forward for womankind: In maybe the craziest story in an episode full of them, Terry recalls Charatan being so concerned about how the women in the office smelled that she’d line her workers up in her office, have them lift their arms, and sniff their pits for inspection. If they didn’t smell up to standard, they’d have to go home for a shower.
As Terry’s cajoling makes the reluctant Nick more persuadable, Lewin moves on to Susie Giordano, Durst’s assistant and possible girlfriend, who worked with Chavin at his firm. Giordano’s status as a penpal and future love-nest inhabitant makes her a tough get for the prosecution, though the nature of her relationship with Durst naturally puts her at odds with Charaton, who doesn’t want to hear about the $150,000 he transferred to her. Of particular interest to Lewin is a package that Giordano shipped to Durst in New Orleans while he was plotting his getaway. The box was stuffed with clothing and other items that Giordano claimed to have jammed in there over the three minutes she was in his darkened apartment. There was also some cash that she estimated at $1,000 and that the authorities discovered was $114,000 higher than that estimate.
The sad truth of “Friendships Die Hard” is that loyalty can be purchased at various price points that a man like Robert Durst can easily afford. For Susie Giordano, the price was at least six figures. For Chris Lovell, the bald juror from Galveston, the mere promise of money seemed to have been enough.
• Funny callback from the Wonder Twins to Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, who had to clarify in a 2015 Instagram post that he did not, in fact, “Kill ‘em all.” The only thing that Durst killed was rock and roll.
• Digging deeper into the Chinga Chavin phenomenon, the album Country Porn sold over 100,000 copies via mail order through Penthouse magazine and included a song called “Asshole from El Paso,” a parody of Merle Haggard’s notorious “Okie From Muskogee,” that Chavin co-wrote with Kinky Friedman.
• Did Durst dismembering Morris Black bother Chavin? “It just didn’t have any impact on me. I don’t have that same moral hatred of murder and murderers.”
• It may be far down the list of Jarecki and company’s motives for revisiting the Durst case for another season, but staging a reenactment of women lifting their arms in Debrah Lee Charatan’s office is real cinema.
In addition to its impressive catalog of true crime documentaries, Max has some of the best—and best-produced—docuseries chronicling both notorious and lesser-known subjects of the genre.
For the sake of simplicity and quality control, this guide to the best true crime shows on Max doesn’t include titles from Investigation Discovery, which takes a blatantly sensationalist approach to its true crime content. HBO has a long history of producing crime docs and series that predates the streaming era and the onslaught of quickly manufactured content that’s turned much of the true crime genre into the fast-fashion of media.
In this four-part docuseries from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (On the Record), Dylan Farrow recounts her childhood and the alleged sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, filmmaker Woody Allen. Allen v. Farrow is unsparing and deeply empathetic, tracking Farrow’s life in the shadow of immense trauma and her emergence to reclaim her story from the media.
Black and Missing (2021)
(HBO)
Black and Missing follows Derrica Wilson, a former law enforcement officer, and her sister-in-law Natalie—co-founders of the Black and Missing Foundation and two women who have made it their mission to help families search for their missing loved ones. Produced by Soledad O’Brien and directed by Geeta Gandbhir (who previously edited Spike Lee’s If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise), this four-part docuseries examines systemic inequalities in law enforcement and the media’s coverage of crime, both of which play a significant part in the startling statistic at the root of the series: When Black people go missing, their cases remain unsolved four times longer than those of missing white people.
I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter (2019)
(HBO)
Directed by Erin Lee Carr (Mommy Dead and Dearest), I Love You, Now Die cuts through the gristle of the media’s sensationalist coverage of the Michelle Carter case: In 2014, 18-year-old Conrad Roy was found dead of an apparent suicide. Searching his belongings, police discovered an extensive history of text messages between Roy and his girlfriend, Michelle Carter, who encouraged a depressed Roy to take his own life. Carter was subsequently arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter, raising questions about autonomy, mental illness, and personal responsibility. As she did with Mommy Dead and Dearest, Carr crucially employs nuance to examine the complexities of her subjects, viewing them as people instead of characters in a headline.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2020)
(HBO)
Based on Michelle McNamara’s book of the same name, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark smartly intertwines narratives: There’s the fascinating case of the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the ’70s and ’80s, and the metanarrative of McNamara herself, who became obsessed with helping to solve the case and bring justice to the killer’s victims. McNamara died suddenly before she completed work on her book, and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark features archival material and interviews with her loved ones.
Leaving Neverland (2019)
(HBO)
When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Leaving Neverland was screened in its entirety. I cannot imagine watching a nearly four-hour documentary about Michael Jackson’s alleged child sexual abuse. The doc, which was split into two parts for release on HBO, features extensive interviews with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, both of whom recall—in harrowing detail—the protracted abuse they endured as children, when Michael Jackson befriended the boys and their families. Leaving Neverland is a rough watch, but a necessary one.
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (2023)
(HBO)
Months after its premiere, I’m still considering Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God. Produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, Hannah Olson’s three-part series explores the New Age-y cult Love Has Won and its troubled leader, Amy Carlson, whose mummified corpse was discovered in a home in Colorado in 2021. Olson approaches her subjects with curiosity rather than judgment, inviting the viewer to come to their own conclusions about Carlson—a woman who slapped together a religion and built a community around herself as she gave in to her addictions, seemingly unable to confront or cope with the shadows lurking in her past.
McMillions (2020)
(HBO)
Many of the titles on this list are, let’s be real, a total bummer. That is definitely not the case with McMillions, a riveting and wildly entertaining six-part series about a security guard who figured out how to rig McDonald’s popular annual Monopoly game. Over the course of a decade, the con-man known as “Uncle Jerry” and his cohorts ripped off the McDonald’s corporation and nabbed millions of dollars. With a cast of memorable characters and a scheme to defraud one of the biggest, most successful corporations in the world, McMillions is a true crime series you can (mostly) feel good about watching.
Mind Over Murder (2022)
(HBO)
Directed by Nanfu Wang, Mind Over Murder is a fascinating and challenging story that begins with the 1985 murder of 68-year-old Helen Wilson. A group of six people, known as the “Beatrice Six” were convicted and sentenced to prison for their role in the murder. But in 2009, DNA evidence led to their exoneration—a verdict that Wilson’s family couldn’t accept. Over the course of six episodes, Wang excavates the startling complexities of this case and its impact on Wilson’s family, the six people convicted and exonerated in her murder, and the small town where it happened.
Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning (2023)
(HBO)
Jason Hehir’s three-part docuseries takes us to Boston in 1989, when Charles Stuart called 911 to report a crime: he and his pregnant wife, Carol, had been shot, and Carol was dead. Stuart said the man who shot them was Black; the Stuarts were white. Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning revisits the crime that put Boston’s racial inequities on display and how Stuart’s false report exacerbated existing tensions.
Murder on Middle Beach (2020)
(HBO)
In 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found dead in the yard outside her Connecticut home. After nearly a decade without an arrest, her son, Madison, picks up a camera and takes it upon himself to figure out what happened. Murder on Middle Beach is the end result of Madison’s efforts, an impressive four-part docuseries that takes us inside the lives of a suburban family reeling from grief, the pyramid scheme that may or may not have had anything to do with Barbara’s murder, and the gnawing suspicions threatening to break her family apart.
Telemarketers (2023)
(HBO)
Telemarketers still feels like it should be a much bigger deal than it is, and not nearly enough people are talking about it. Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern, Telemarketers centers on Lipman-Stern and his co-worker, Patrick Pespas, and their years-long effort to expose their former employers—a telemarketing company that scams victims out of money under the guise of raising funds for firefighters and police charities. At first glance, you might think Pat and Sam are a couple of Jersey scumbags spouting off a wild conspiracy theory, but they—Pat especially—are honest-to-goodness heroes. By the end of the three-part series, I was pumping my fist in the air and pledging my allegiance to Patrick J. Pespas, a man who must be protected at all costs.
The Jinx (2015)
(HBO)
As of this writing, it’s too early to know if The Jinx Part Two is a worthy follow-up to 2015’s The Jinx. The original six-episode docuseries concerns Robert Durst, the wealthy real estate heir who almost certainly murdered his wife, Kathie McCormick, who disappeared in 1982. And probably killed his best friend, Susan Berman, in 2000. And then killed his neighbor, Morris Black, in 2001. Durst contacted director Andrew Jarecki after seeing his narrative film, All Good Things, and admiring how he was depicted in it (Ryan Gosling plays a younger Durst—as if). Jarecki exploited that relationship to dig deeper into Durst’s psyche, hoping to find out what really happened to all these people in Durst’s life who mysteriously wound up dead.
The Vow (2020)
(HBO)
Speaking of two-parters: HBO’s follow-up to The Vow was an interesting epilogue, but not nearly as engrossing as the original nine-episode docuseries. Directed by Jehane Noujaim (who was once recruited by a member) and Karim Amer, The Vow follows former members of NXIVM, a group that promised to help members devoted to self-improvement. Leader Keith Raniere styled himself as a revolutionary modern guru and manipulated a sect of female followers into creating a subgroup devoted solely to Raniere and his abusive whims. The Vow is not without flaw; some of the former NXIVM members who participate in the doc avoid taking accountability for the part they played in the cult, but the access they grant is crucial to uncovering the depth of Raniere’s depravity.
(featured image: HBO)
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Back in its heyday, Game of Thrones looooooved killing off characters. Whether they were sad, hilarious, or kind of dumb, those ends have been memorable in their own ways, the mark of a good show filled with great actors. And who can forget the death of Jack Gleason’s Joffrey Baratheon, one of the show’s most disliked (in a mostly good way) antagonists?
Lamar Johnson Loves Beyblades and Pokemon
On April 13, 2014, HBO aired the second episode of Game of Thrones’ fourth season. At the end of “The Lion and the Rose,” Joffrey and Margaery Tyrell get married and celebrate their new union at the Red Keep. Everything seems to be going well—relative to the show’s last wedding, I guess—and then in the middle of insulting Tyrion, Joffrey starts choking before blood runs down his nose as he seizes up and dies in his mother’s arms, but not before silently accusing Tyrion of poisoning his wine. Cersei puts Tyrion under arrest, and the episode lingers on Joffrey’s bloody, colorless face. Musical crescendo, cut to black, the audience cheers.
Game Of Thrones (Season.4 ep.2) Death of King Joffrey.
In real life, “Lion and the Rose” received critical acclaim at the time of its airing, with many calling it one of the series’ best episodes ever. Come awards season, it received five Emmy nominations, with two in the acting categories for Lena Heady (Supporting Actress in a Drama) and Diana Rigg (Guest Actress, Drama), and winning one for best costuming. Moreover, this episode set up some plotlines from the books…some of which ended up not getting used. Whoops. And within the show itself, Joffrey’s death caused a domino effect for the rest of the season, resulting in even more deaths and Tyrion getting hell out of dodge to avoid getting his head chopped off. It also paved the way for some of the show’s big moments later on and other members of his family to get some wins of their own. (Well, until theydied.)
With Joffrey dead, Gleason used his character’s exit to take a break from professional acting, which he’d been doing since he was 8 years old. Despite that, he wasn’t gone for too long: after appearing in the 2016 short film Chat, he’s gradually returned in the last several years, appearing on a few episodes of Sex Education and Out of Her Mind. Along with his appearance in last year’s The Famous Five on BBC, he was in 2021’s Rebecca’s Boyfriend and 2023’s In the Land of Saints & Sinners.
Even if you didn’t watch Game of Thrones back then, you probably knew who Joffrey was and how much folks wanted him to get got. “The Lion and the Rose” gave audiences what they wanted and then some, and it’s still one of the most satisfying moments in the show. RIP Joffrey, but at least you went out on such a nice day.
A decade ago, Abubakar Salim lost his father. That grief lives within him. An actor by trade, with credits in Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon’s upcoming season, he searched for years for the right medium to work through the hurt. A film. A TV show. Nothing did it justice—until he tried to make a video game. “If you’re really depicting grief in a truthful and honest way, it is so open and chaotic that actually, you can kind of gamify it,” he says.
Salim is the CEO and creative director of Surgent Studios, the developer behind the upcoming Metroidvania game Tales of Kenzera: Zau. The game, set to launch April 23, follows a young shaman, Zau, who has made a deal with the god of death to bring his father back to life in exchange for three great spirits. Its story is a reflection of coping with loss—even its premise is built on bargaining, a common stage for someone dealing with death. The button-mashing, the mask-switching—these are all, Salim says, representative of the madness people can experience.
Games about grief reflect those feelings in many ways. Platformer Gris turns the stages of grief into literal ones as its heroine silently navigates a world that uses color and music to express emotion. What Remains of Edith Finch explores the death of a family by sifting through their things, alongside vignettes dedicated to those lost.
Kenzera has its own methods. Throughout the game, Zau takes time to pause and talk about his feelings. That’s the result of Salim and the game’s developers trying to figure out how the character would be able to restore his health. The solution wound up being quite literal: creating a space where Zau simply sits under a tree and reflects.
Each biome in the game’s world is a reflection of the journey through that anguish. Salim, who grew up playing games with his dad, reflects on something his father used to tell him as a child: “When you’re born, you’re alone, and when you die, you’re alone.” Kenzera’s developers infused that idea into the Woodlands setting, which is meant to evoke a sense of the questioning: “Will I be remembered? Will I be forgotten?”
Stories that Salim’s father told him heavily influenced the game, as did Bantu culture, which he says was done as a form of celebration rather than an effort to educate people. In recent years, games like God of War and Hades have brought new familiarity to Norse and Greek mythology. A game like Kenzera could do something similar for the culture of southern Africa. “It’s to inspire people to see these stories and lean into these stories,” Salim says.
Although Kenzera’s combat has evolved over time, it is influenced by Dambe, a form of Nigerian boxing. Zau swaps between masks to switch up his fighting style—sun and moon masks that represent life and death. In Bantu culture, Salim explains, the two balance each other. “That’s really where the inspiration for these two masks came from,” he says. The sun mask is heat, flame-heavy by nature, while the moon mask has an icier look and feel. Both masks are beautiful and infused with energy, an ode to how other cultures handle death. “Especially within African cultures, [death] is almost celebrated in a way,” he says. “It’s a passing into the new.”
Max has gotten into the original content game too, with highly acclaimed series like Hacks, Station Eleven, and The Staircase (the owl did it!). So even if you’ve watched all of the HBO classics, there’s more to devour.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of the “it’s not TV” cable network or a Max newbie trying to figure out where to start, the shows below should give you plenty upon which to feast your eyes.
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The Regime
In The Regime, Kate Winslet does that thing that only Kate Winslet can really do: Play someone who is cold, calculating, and highly unlikeable yet immensely watchable. The Titanic star plays Chancellor Elena Vernham, a ruthless dictator who seems to be losing her hold over her people. So she turns to Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), her water diviner, for advice and companionship. But it turns out the former soldier might have some pretty lofty power goals of his own.
The Girls on the Bus
It’s hardly surprising that an election year brings with it an uptick in political content, which helps explain the timing on this new limited series. The show is inspired by series co-creator Amy Chozick’s 2018 memoir, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, about her near-decade spent following Hillary Clinton’s quest for the presidency. In the series, the political campaign is a fictional one, but the bonds forged between four female journalists who are on the trail of the next president are rooted in reality—and very much of the moment.
Tokyo Vice
In 1993, American journalist Jake Adelstein landed a job at the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Shimbun as the newspaper’s first non-Japanese staff writer—a position he held for a dozen years. Nearly 30 years later, in 2022, Max turned Adelstein’s life into a slick crime drama that sees the young journalist (played by Ansel Elgort) forge a deep connection with high-ranking members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, who allow him to get dangerously close to the violence and corruption that exist within the city. The series’ second season is currently airing, and will wrap up in early April, with all episodes available to stream.
Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning
Is Boston the most racist city in America? That’s the question Jason Hehir—a Beantown native and the Emmy-winning director behind The Last Dance—poses in this three-part docuseries that revisits the murder of Carol Stuart. In the fall of 1989, Chuck Stewart called 911 to report that he and his wife, who was pregnant, had been carjacked by a Black man, who shot them both. Carol did not survive, but Charles did. And the crime ignited a months-long manhunt throughout the city with police having little more to go on than the color of the alleged assailant’s skin. Eventually, Willie Bennett—a 39-year-old who had been arrested on separate charges—became the chief suspect and was presumed guilty by mostly everyone, including the media. Until an unlikely witness came forward to reveal the truth of the crime. This series, which is part true-crime mystery and part social-justice documentary, triumphs in revealing how the sins of a city’s past can continue to haunt it decades later.
True Detective: Night Country
Did you take our advice and watch Deadloch and now you want more of that, but far darker and more creepy? We have just the solution: True Detective: Night Country. Truth be told, this anthology series has had a rough go. Following a wildly successful first season that crashed Max’s predecessor, HBO Go, and had everyone talking about how time is a flat circle, the series’ second and third installments failed to capture the same momentum. Night Countryis a return to form. It stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as a pair of investigators trying to uncover a conspiracy and solve a series of bizarre murders. Mysterious symbols are also involved. Yes, that’s pretty much the plot of every season of True Detective, but this season has corpsicles. As with all of those previous iterations, the less you know at the start, the better. Let it pull you in, and never let go.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
“I really did the best under the circumstances of a person who hates people and yet had to be amongst them,” Larry David says in the trailer for the 12th—and final (yes, really)—season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. David—both the real-life comedian and the semi-fictionalized version of himself he plays on TV—has been dipping in and out of our lives for more than 20 years now. And he continually exceeded audience expectations with each new season of Curb, most recently by adding Tracey Ullman to the cast as councilwoman/love interest Irma Kostroski. Even though he cocreated Seinfeld, one of the most game-changing TV series of all time, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to which he’ll always be more closely linked. Pretty good for a social assassin. Pretty, pretty good.
Julia
In the nearly 20 years since her death in 2004, Julia Child has gotten the biopic treatment with Julie & Julia (2009) and was the subject of Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s documentary Julia (2021). In 2022, Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire stepped into Child’s toque to recount the earliest days of her career as a cookbook author and TV chef innovator, and it makes for one tasty dramedy. In January, we learned that the series’ second season—which wrapped up in December—will be its last; all episodes are available to stream now.
Rap Sh!t
Insecure impresario Issa Rae is the brains behind this laugh-out-loud comedy, which follows Mia Knight (KaMillion) and Shawna Clark (Aida Osman), two former high school friends and struggling rappers trying to make it on the Miami music scene. Ultimately, they decide to join forces to form a group, double their chances of success, and use social media as their launching pad—all with mixed results. As much as the series is about music, at its heart it’s really about the unending possibilities of youthdom and the beauty of women supporting women.
The Gilded Age
While it hasn’t made quite the splash that Downton Abbey did, Julian Fellowes’ latest period piece is just as decadent—and really came into its own with its second season. In this case, the drama moves stateside to document the struggle between New York City’s old-money aristocrats and the vulgar new-money types attempting to infiltrate their social circles. There’s also plenty of the Upstairs, Downstairs-type drama that Fellowes is known for, with the servants who cater to Manhattan’s elite playing a big part of the story too. Somewhere in the middle of it all is Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), a young woman attempting to navigate a world she only belongs to by proxy. Christine Baranski, Carrie Coon, and Cynthia Nixon lead a stellar cast.
Starstruck
Jessie (Rose Matafeo) is a twentysomething New Zealander attempting to make ends meet as a nanny in London. One New Year’s Eve, she has a drunken one-night stand, only to sober up and realize she just slept with Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel), a major movie star. But what was presumably a one-off encounter turns into much more over time in this charming romcom series, which is a little bit like Notting Hill—only drunker.
Our Flag Means Death
Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi do what Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi do best as two very different kinds of pirates who cross paths in the 1700s. Darby plays Stede Bonnet, a fictionalized version of a very real member of the landed gentry whose version of a midlife crisis led to him abandon his family and hit the high seas for a swashbuckling adventure. Waititi, meanwhile, plays the infamous Blackbeard, who learns of Bonnet and seeks him out. What begins as a kind of mentorship eventually becomes the gay pirate action-comedy series you never knew you needed.
How to With John Wilson
If Steven Wright and Nathan Fielder decided to create a YouTube channel of how-to tutorials on topics like putting up scaffolding and covering furniture in plastic, it might look a lot like How to With John Wilson. So it probably comes as no surprise that Fielder is an executive producer of the series, which follows Wilson as he attempts to uncover the secrets of such universal dilemmas as how to make small talk. Wilson’s surprising mix of earnestness and deadpan delivery make the series surprising, enlightening, and extremely strange.
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty
John C. Reilly stars as Lakers owner Jerry Buss in a performance that would make Reed Rothchild, his Boogie Nights character, proud. This fast-paced period sports drama, which is based on Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime, chronicles exactly what it promises in the title: the rise of the Los Angeles Lakers, who ruled the NBA throughout much of the ’80s—thanks in large part to owner Buss and rookie player Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah). Though it has been lauded by critics, Winning Time has seemed to fly oddly under the radar. This might explain why it was recently axed by HBO. But it’s still period filmmaking and high-stakes sports drama at its finest.
Project Greenlight: A New Generation
In 2001, just three years after Good Will Hunting made them bona fide Oscar winners, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck launched Project Greenlight, a competition that gave aspiring filmmakers the chance to make a real, live movie—which begat Project Greenlight, a reality series that chronicled the ups and downs (mostly downs) of that experience. While the competition was better known for the TV series it spawned versus the movies that it produced, it’s now more than 20 years later. And, as new mentors Issa Rae, Kumail Nanjiani, and Gina Prince-Bythewood quickly realize, it’s all still a bit of a nightmare. Gray Matter, the movie that was created from the competition’s rebirth, is also streaming on Max, so you can judge for yourself whether things are different this time around.
Full Circle
When a teen goes missing in New York City, the lives—and lies—of several seemingly unconnected characters find a way to intertwine in this twisty crime series from the mind of filmmaker Ed Solomon (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). What at first might seem like a straightforward story of two bereaved parents (Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant) attempting to deal with the kidnapping of their son becomes much more complicated in the hands of Steven Soderbergh, who produced and directs all six episodes of this limited series, where nothing is what it seems.
Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York
This four-part docuseries, based on Elon Green’s book Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust and Murder in Queer New York, looks at the murders of several gay men in the early 1990s. Set against the backdrop of rising homophobia during the AIDS crisis, director Anthony Coronna’s doc talks to the family members of those killed and the LGBTQ+ community advocates who pushed law enforcement to investigate the deaths happening in their community.
The Other Two
Chasedreams (Case Walker) is a 13-year-old internet icon whose overnight rise to global stardom has become the sole focus of his mom (Molly Shannon). Chase’s older siblings, however, are having a much harder time finding success. Brother Cary (Drew Tarver) is an aspiring actor who can’t even land the part of “Man at Party Who Smells Fart,” while sister Brooke (Heléne Yorke) is just trying to figure out who and what she wants to be. All three seasons of the series, which was cocreated by former SNL head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, are available to binge.
Barry
No one seemed particularly wowed when HBO announced that Bill Hader and Alec Berg were cocreating a series in which Hader would play a hitman with a conscience who attempts to go straight. But what might sound like a played-out trope has taken on new dimensions of humor, darkness, humanity, and plain old weirdness, with its recently concluded final season serving as a brilliant crescendo of all of that dark weirdness mixed in with a little time jump. Barry Berkman (Hader) is a traumatized marine whose newfound apathy toward the world and the very act of living makes him perfectly suited to work as a gun for hire. When a job takes him to Los Angeles, Barry stumbles upon an acting class led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler, in what may be the role that finally supplants Fonzie as his most memorable), a failed but charismatic mentor. But transitioning back into the real world isn’t without consequences for Barry, who can spend an entire episode being hunted by a pint-size martial arts master. All four seasons of the Emmy-winning series, each one better than the next, are available to stream in full.
Love & Death
Elizabeth Olsen seamlessly transitions from part-time superhero to cold-blooded seductress in this retelling of the story of Candy Montgomery—a churchgoing wife and mother who turns murderous after having an affair with a fellow parishioner (the always excellent Jesse Plemons). If the plot sounds familiar, that might be because it’s based on the true story of a murder that took place in Texas in 1980. Or perhaps it’s because Hulu got there first with its own limited series, Candy, starring Jessica Biel as the femme fatale.
Succession
Media empires run by dysfunctional families may rise and fall, but we’ll always have Succession. The Emmy-winning series concluded its four-season run in early 2023, but its legacy as one of the most surprising pieces of prestige TV will be felt for decades to come (especially after what happened at Shiv’s wedding … then “Connor’s Wedding,” not to mention on the balcony or in the hand-hold seen ’round the world). At a time when TV shows about rich people, real or imagined, are in ample supply, Succession manages to stand out by being as bitingly funny as it is painfully tragic. The jet-black family dramedy chronicles the Roy family and the people/cronies/tall men who orbit them, all of whom seem to be angling for control of Waystar RoyCo, the family-run global media conglomerate—whether by succession (get it?) or more hostile means. Think of it as King Lear meets Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., only funny. (Unless you’re invited to play a game of Boar on the Floor.)
The Last of Us
The Last of Us managed to succeed where Netflix’s Resident Evil (which was canceled after one season) and other live-action TV shows based on video games failed—by being really, really good. Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and the video game’s original director, Neil Druckmann, cocreated the post-apocalyptic drama, in which one grizzled survivor (Pedro Pascal) is tasked with smuggling a smart-mouthed teenager (Bella Ramsey) who could be the key to finding a cure for the fungal infection-fueled pandemic that has turned most of America into zombie-like creatures. Props to everyone for generating so much interest in the (very real and parasitic) Cordyceps fungus—because fungi nerds like TV, too.
A Black Lady Sketch Show
In 2015, Robin Thede made television history when she was named head writer for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore—making her the first Black woman to hold the head writer position on a late-night talk show. Four years later, she revolutionized the TV landscape once again when she gathered up a group of her funniest friends—including Ashley Nicole Black, (future Abbott Elementary creator) Quinta Brunson, Gabrielle Dennis, and Skye Townsend—and created A Black Lady Sketch Show, the first sketch comedy written, produced, and starring Black women. The four-season series has brought such A-list names as Angela Bassett out as guest stars with its no-holds-barred humor, and the entire series is available to stream now.
Rain Dogs
Costello Jones (Daisy May Cooper) is an aspiring novelist and working-class mom who isn’t always successful at making ends meet for herself and her wise-beyond-her-years daughter, Iris (Fleur Tashjian). So Costello is regularly forced to call upon her violence-prone—but wealthy—gay best friend, Selby (Jack Farthing), to unstick them from whatever jams they’ve managed to get caught in. The series is billed as a black comedy, which it definitely is, although the moments between the levity are sometimes so dark and raw that even the frothiest bits carry weight. This darkly nuanced and sometimes surreal meditation on class, sex, dysfunction, and the varying definitions of “family” makes for a compulsively watchable series.
Abbott Elementary
Abbott Elementary creator/star Quinta Brunson (A Black Lady Sketch Show) has garnered all sorts of accolades with this ABC series and even managed to create streaming deals with both Max and Hulu. The surprise hit follows the lives of a group of teachers who are working at one of the most woefully underfunded public schools in America while doing their best to inspire students. Yes, it all sounds very earnest—and it is—but it’s also the kind of funny we don’t see much of on network TV anymore. The series only just premiered its third season but has managed to rack up enough awards (Emmys, Critics Choice, Indie Spirit, and beyond) to fill a school trophy case.
The White Lotus
Knowing that Jennifer Coolidge stars in the first two seasons of The White Lotus (the only actor to move locations with the series) is reason enough for many people to tune in. While it was originally imagined as a one-off series from the brilliantly screwed-up mind (in a good way) of Mike White—who cocreated the sadly overlooked Enlightenment with Laura Dern, another HBO show you should check out—it has since morphed into a full-on franchise. The series dives below the surface of the seemingly fabulous lives of deep-pocketed guests who can afford to stay at one of the five-star resorts of the title’s locations (first Hawaii, then Sicily, with Thailand scheduled for season 3), and the people who trip over themselves to serve their every need. Somewhere in between, murder always seems to end up on the menu. As season 3 won’t premiere until 2025, you’ve got plenty of time to catch up—and you’ll want to. HBO has already announced that Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Aimee Lou Wood will all appear in the next installment.
I May Destroy You
Michaela Coel is a creative force of nature who delivered on what she promised with the title of this limited series, which she created, wrote, directed, and stars in. Arabella (Coel) is a Londoner living the millennial dream with a thriving writing career, thanks in part to her celebrity as a social media influencer. But Arabella’s Insta-perfect life begins to unravel when, after a night out with friends, she begins to recall—in fragments—being sexually assaulted. Eventually, the need to piece together exactly what happened to her, and who did it, consumes her completely and the past comes knocking at her door.
The Sex Lives of College Girls
Mindy Kaling cocreated this Max series, which puts a new spin on the teenage sex comedy—one in which the women are fully in charge. Nerdy Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet, yes, Timothée’s sister), aspiring professional funny person Bela (Amrit Kaur), snotty Upper East Sider Leighton (Reneé Rapp), and soccer star/senator’s daughter Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) are four college freshmen randomly thrown together as suitemates. But as they get to know each other, and themselves, their forced cohabitation develops into a true bond—one in which there’s no such thing as TMI and a “naked party” is just one way to unwind after a long week. The series’ third season is expected to premiere in the spring and will be the final go-around for costar/Gen Z icon Reneé Rapp, who announced that she’d be exiting the show to focus on her musical career.
The Rehearsal
Good luck trying to explain what The Rehearsal is to anyone who isn’t familiar with Nathan Fielder’s mastery of uncomfortable comedy. What begins as a series in which the awkward star/comedian attempts to help people prepare for big moments in life by rehearsing them until they get it right quickly turns into a bizarre social experiment in which Fielder himself becomes one of the key players. The less you know about it ahead of time, the better. Just be aware that you’ll be encountering people who responded to a Craigslist ad to take part. For more of Fielder’s weird brilliance, all four seasons of Nathan for You—another kind of meta-comedy that will force you to repeatedly cover your eyes in vicarious embarrassment—are also streaming on Max.
Avenue Five
Bad timing may have led to the unfortunately early demise of Avenue 5, which had filming on its second season delayed, and delayed again, due to Covid-19. But the space-set comedy from the brilliant mind of Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep (another classic streaming on HBO Max), and its even swearier predecessor, The Thick of It, is well worth your time, if only to see what could happen when space travel inevitably goes wrong. Hugh Laurie stars as the “captain” of an interplanetary cruise ship, with Josh Gad playing the role of eccentric tech billionaire/huge baby Herman Judd, whose planned eight-week tour of the galaxy turns dire when a gravitational disaster steers the ship off course. The series gets more bonkers as it goes along, and poop plays a massive part in saving thousands of passengers and crew members. Consider yourselves warned—and feel free to laugh at the inanity of it all. Loudly.
The Righteous Gemstones
Danny McBride and HBO are the new Brangelina of television. First they teamed up for the hilariously offensive-for-offense’s sake Eastbound & Down; then there was Vice Principals. The Righteous Gemstones, which McBride created and stars in, is his latest effort to put forth a group of highly unlikeable people and find a way to make you like them even less but still want to keep watching. In this case, it’s a family of televangelists whose real god is greed and power. McBride assembled an all-star cast that includes John Goodman as the family’s patriarch, Adam DeVine and Edi Patterson as the Gemstone children, and national treasure Walton Goggins as Uncle Baby Billy Freeman—a child-star-turned-grifter who has given the series some of its most memorable quotes and moments.
As the birthplace of prestige TV shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, HBO—and, by extension, Max (aka the streamer formerly known as HBO Max)—is best known for its impressive lineup of original series. The network has also been upping the ante with feature-length content that is the stuff of Oscar dreams. However, because Max is not (yet) a production powerhouse like, say, Netflix, hundreds of great movies come and go each month. So if you see something you want to watch, don’t let it linger in your queue for too long.
Below is a list of some of our favorite films streaming on Max—from iconic Westerns to recent Oscar nominees you’ll see near the top of any Best Movies of the Year list. If you decide you’re in more of a TV mood, head over to our picks for the best shows on Max. If you’re looking for even more recommendations, check out our lists of the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime, and the best movies on Disney+.
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Wonka
Timothée Chalamet stars as Willy Wonka in this perfectly entertaining origin story of Roald Dahl’s quirky chocolatier, directed by Paddington’s Paul King. While it doesn’t hit the same as Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—really, who could match Gene Wilder’s somersaulting candy maker?—it also far surpasses Tim Burton’s fairly needless 2005 remake.
Dream Scenario
Like Forrest Gump’s famed box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get from a Nicolas Cage performance. But he’s a one-of-a-kind actor whose roles tend to fall into one of two categories: totally transcendent, or scenery-chewing at its most voracious. Dream Scenario is very much the former, and has been heralded as one of the Oscar-winning actor’s best performances by some critics. Rightfully so. Cage stars as Paul Matthews, an unassuming biology professor who suddenly begins appearing in strangers’ dreams and achieves viral fame as a result of it. Like any good Cage performance, this one is multifaceted and examines the downside of sudden fame and what it really costs.
The Green Knight
Writer-director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, Peter Pan & Wendy) is a master of reimagining well-trodden material in ways that feel inventive and wholly new. That’s exactly what he did with this award-winning fantasy-adventure that sees Dev Patel in the role of Arthurian hero. Sir Gawain (Patel) is the nephew of King Arthur who has spent his life sheltered by his own privilege and decides it’s time to change that. So when the opportunity comes for Gawain to prove himself as a warrior befitting of his seat at the Round Table, he takes it—despite being woefully unprepared for the challenges that will come his way.
Dicks: The Musical
A24—the studio known for its edgy, award-winning indies like Moonlight and Ex Machina (which are both streaming on Max)—takes a dive into the musical genre with this adaptation of the off-Broadway hit Fucking Identical Twins (and you thought Dicks: The Musical was a raunchy title). Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp cowrote and costar in this over-the-top musical as two coworkers who discover that they’re long-lost twin brothers, and they attempt to Parent Trap their parents (played by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). Megan Thee Stallion plays their boss. Anyone offended by an f-bomb—or dozens of them—might want to give this one a skip.
Se7en
What’s in the box?!? The casting of Kevin Spacey as the big bad may not have aged as well as the rest of this dark thriller from David Fincher, in which two detectives (Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) are tasked with figuring out who’s behind a series of homicides that are each tied to one of the seven deadly sins. You’ll never look at an Amazon box the same way again.
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles paved the way for every auteur that followed with this epic retelling of the life of the (fictional) publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane (Welles) and the search for what his final word—Rosebud—meant. You probably already know the ending, but that won’t spoil the film, which redefined movies as we know them. That Welles pissed off the very real William Randolph Hearst, who clearly inspired the Kane character, only adds to the movie’s legacy. Hearst attempted to make the film disappear by banning any mention of it in the massive collection of newspapers he owned. Regardless, the movie found its way on to just about every Greatest Film Ever Made list ever written.
Barbie
Greta Gerwig is a master of breathing new life into old properties (see: Little Women). With Barbie, she has ignited a revolution. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is living her best life in Barbieland—until one day, when her perfectly plastic world, and heels, suddenly begin to collapse. To get her fabulous life back, Barbie must travel to the real world—well, Los Angeles—to determine who or what is causing her existential crisis. The film has grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, meaning you likely may have already seen it. But even if you did, it’s absolutely worth a second watch—if only to lament its many Oscar snubs.
Fargo
Frances McDormand won her first of four (and counting) Oscars for her role as Marge Gunderson, the extremely pregnant and no-nonsense chief of police in Brainerd, Minnesota. When a mysterious crime scene puts Marge on the trail of a car salesman (William H. Macy) with a terrible plan for getting his hands on a boatload of cash, it also puts Marge in the crosshairs of a couple of career thieves (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) with little regard for human life. As is often the case in any Coen brothers movie, there’s a perfectly balanced mix of very bad things and very funny moments, which somehow makes seeing a murderer attempt to dispose of a body in a wood chipper a laugh-out-loud moment.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Sergio Leone is the undisputed master of spaghetti Westerns, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is his masterpiece. A mysterious stranger (Clint Eastwood) decides to partner up with a Mexican outlaw (Eli Wallach), but their kinship is not what it seems. With its clever twists, superb acting, and unforgettable score by Ennio Morricone, the film is a classic for a very good reason.
Eastern Promises
Come for David Cronenberg’s iconic style, stay for Viggo Mortensen’s naked ass-kicking. Nikolai (Mortensen) is a strongman for one of the most ruthless crime families in London. But when a well-meaning midwife (Naomi Watts) comes around, asking questions about the death of a woman who may or may not be connected to Nikolai’s employers, he finds himself at a crossroads. The film is more action-packed than a typical Cronenberg film, which tend to lean toward the side of “bizarre,” and is all the more compelling because of it.
RoboCop
From Total Recall to Showgirls and back to Basic Instinct, director Paul Verhoeven has a track record almost unmatched in modern cinema. RoboCop, his dystopian take on law enforcement, is proof. Set in a bleak vision of Detroit overrun with crime, it follows a cop (Peter Weller) who gets fatally wounded and turned into, yes, a robot cop, who you might think is good at fighting crime, but of course is not. Some of the visual effects may look a little beat up now, but in 1987, they looked like the future. Also, if RoboCop leaves you wanting more, the film’s two sequels and 2014 reboot—none of which, sadly, were directed by Verhoeven—are also available on Max.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
In reality, a great many of the Star Trek films are now on Max, but it’s Wrath of Khan that you need to watch before it leaves the streaming service. The movie that gave a kick in the teeth to the whole franchise and paved the way for Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s the one held up as the Trek film. J. J. Abrams tried rebooting this one with Star Trek Into Darkness but ultimately couldn’t beat the original.
Jodorowsky’s Dune
For years, Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. He intended for H. R. Giger to do character designs, and Pink Floyd to make the soundtrack. He wanted Salvador Dalí to play a role. He had an outline for the film, at one point, that would have come in at around 14 hours. As you might imagine, this movie ultimately never came to pass, but director Frank Pavich’s documentary about Jodorowsky’s efforts is a masterpiece all its own.
Albert Brooks: Defending My Life
Albert Brooks is a comedian’s comedian. Though he might be best known as the filmmaker behind such celebrated comedies as Defending Your Life, Lost in America, Real Life, and Mother, he’s also a brilliant actor (with an Oscar nomination to prove it). Brooks’ longtime pal Rob Reiner directs this charming documentary, which documents Brooks’ one-of-a-kind talent, with a stunning lineup of A-listers—including David Letterman, Steven Spielberg, Sarah Silverman, Judd Apatow, Chris Rock, Larry David, and Ben Stiller—all ready to sing his praises.
Dune
Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of those iconic novels that several directors have attempted to bring to the screen and ended up abandoning. Nearly 40 years before Denis Villeneuve won six Oscars for his 2021 adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel (which is also streaming on Max—and you should absolutely watch it), David Lynch gave it a go—and the results weren’t as admired at the time. But Lynch’s Dune has experienced a bit of a critical reappraisal in recent years, particularly for what we now know to be its very Lynchian style. (Back then, it just seemed strange and surreal.) The film, which is set in the year 10191, sees the fate of the planet Arrakis—and its supply of melange, a unique spice and the most valuable substance in the universe—in the hands of young Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), the untested son of a powerful duke.
Furious 7
You’d be forgiven for thinking a lot of the Fast & Furious movies start to run together. Car chase, fistfight, street race, big booms, Corona, “family”—the end. But this one is special. For starters, it’s the one where the gang parachutes a bunch of souped-up cars out of the back of a cargo plane. For another, it marks Paul Walker’s final appearance in a Fast movie. (He died in a car accident in 2013.) It’s a bittersweet film, and also one of the franchise’s best.
Carrie
Four directors have attempted to mine Stephen King’s debut novel for cinematic inspiration, which ultimately seems pointless after Brian De Palma’s 1976 original. Nearly 50 years after its debut, the film still manages to scare the pants off audiences. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a shy, sheltered, and, yeah, kinda weird teen who is a favorite target of her high school’s clique of mean girls. When one of said mean girls (Nancy Allen) is barred from attending her own senior prom because of her behavior, she and her boyfriend make a plan to get revenge on poor ol’ Carrie. But Carrie has the last laugh when, after being doused by a bucket full of pig’s blood, she shows a gymnasium full of prom-goers why her “Creepy Carrie” nickname is well earned. The film also features an ending that can still make audiences quite literally jump out of their seats.
Pulp Fiction
If you’re a movie buff, chances are you’ve already seen Quentin Tarantino’s seminal Pulp Fiction. But, if you’re a movie buff, you’re also probably the kind of person who likes to revisit it often. But be warned: If you think this might inspire you to indulge in a Tarantino marathon, you’re out of luck. It’s one of the only Tarantino flicks on Max. (This depends a lot on whether you count the director’s appearance in From Dusk Till Dawn.) Still, enjoy your time with Jules and Vincent (and Honey Bunny and the gimp and Marsellus Wallace and Butch) while you can.
Avatar: The Way of Water
James Cameron’s Avatar sequel felt like a movie centuries in the making. In reality, just over a dozen years passed between the original 2009 movie and last year’s The Way of Water. That timeline adds up: The second in a scheduled series of five films takes place 16 years after the events of the original and catches up with Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana)—now married with children, and still blue. Though the movie didn’t seem to make as loud a splash as its predecessor, it managed to wipe Cameron’s own Titanic out of the water—plus all the Star Wars movies—to become the third-highest-grossing movie of all time (with Avatar in the top spot, followed by Avengers: Endgame).
Reality
In 2017, an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was leaked anonymously. One year later, former NSA translator Reality Winner (yes, that’s her real name) was sentenced to more than five years in prison for the crime—the longest sentence ever received by a government whistleblower. HBO’s reigning muse, Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus), shines in this gripping true story, which plays out mostly in real time as the FBI knocks on the 25-year-old’s door and spends more than an hour questioning her.
Parasite
Even if you don’t care about awards, the fact that Parasite is the first—and still only—non-English-language movie to win a Best Picture Oscar should tell you something about the universality of its themes. The Kims, a family struggling to make ends meet, set their scheming sights on the Parks, a well-to-do family with plenty of problems of their own, but also plenty of money to muffle their dysfunction. At least for a time. Just when you think you know how class warfare is playing out in this black comedy, it changes course to reach an unexpected conclusion. As always, Bong Joon-ho knows just how to lead his audience down one path, only to open a trapdoor into another.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Finding success in one’s lifetime might seem like the dream of every artist, but Nan Goldin has bigger ambitions. Though she’s a photographer by trade, she’s an activist by calling and has long used her camera to capture painfully intimate moments of America in crisis, including extensive work focused on the HIV/AIDS and opioid epidemics. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed reveals the artist in conflict: Should she allow her work to be showcased in one of the prominent museums or galleries that have received endowments from the Sackler family—the Big Pharma family that many blame for America’s opioid crisis? It’s a moving portrait of an artist willing to risk it all for her beliefs.
The Menu
A small group of overprivileged foodies (including Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) travel to an island in the middle of nowhere in order to be placed at the culinary mercy of world-renowned master chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), and pay top dollar for the privilege. But during the dinner service in which The Menu takes place, Slowik has plans that go beyond an eight-course tasting menu. It’s probably best to go in knowing as little as you can about where this weird little black-comedy-horror flick is going, but be warned that it’s nowhere nice.
The Dark Knight
First things first: All three of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are currently on Max, and binge-watching all of them in a row is certainly one way to spend an evening. But if you’re opting to watch just one, the second film in the series is the one to beat. Though Christian Bale’s Caped Crusader gets top billing, it’s Heath Ledger’s now-iconic performance as the Joker that makes The Dark Knight the most compulsively watchable Batman movie (even beyond Nolan’s entries). Though Ledger tragically passed away six months before the film’s release, he posthumously won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his villainous turn, in which he managed to find the perfect balance between dark humor and outright insanity.
Hereditary
Ari Aster made a splash—and one memorable splat—with his directorial debut, which took psychological horror to new heights. Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is a miniature artist living a seemingly contented life with her psychiatrist husband (Gabriel Byrne) and their two teenagers, Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro). But any sense of normalcy disappears almost immediately following the death of Annie’s mom, with whom she had a challenging relationship. Is Annie crazy? Is her husband a terrible shrink? Is Peter a terrible person? Why does Charlie make that clicking noise? What’s that in the back seat of the car? These are all valid questions that are answered by Aster, whose deft directorial style has made him an instant Hollywood icon. Aster’s follow-up film, 2019’s equally disturbing Midsommar, is also available to stream.
Oh, how The Foundling has fallen. In the third episode of The Regime, “The Heroes’ Banquet,” Matthias Schoenaerts’s Corporal Zubak is banished from the palace after an intense and violent confrontation with Kate Winslet’s Chancellor Elena. On a new episode of Still Watching, hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy dissect Elena’s sudden change of heart, and how it may shape Zubak’s future. Plus, Guillaume Gallienne drops by the podcast to discuss playing first gentleman Nicky.
Zubak starts the episode riding high as Elena’s right-hand man, convincing her to eat dirt and employ sweeping land reform in the state we’re still calling Genovia. However, Zubak turns on Elena after she reveals that she and her cabinet have been “skimming off the top” of the country, stealing billions from her citizens and storing the money in an offshore bank account called the Belize Fund. But Elena has bigger things to worry about then Zubak, as an impulsive decision to annex the Faban Corridor may have landed her in international hot water, without any allies.
Although Zubak has seemingly driven a wedge between Elena and her husband, Nicky, Regime star Guillaume Gallienne still believes in their relationship. “I’m sure that there is love,” says Gallienne regarding Nicky’s relationship with Elena. “There must have been passion at first, because he left everything, his wife, his kid. He left everything.” And despite being cast out of his marital bed, Gallienne believes Nicky still has a certain sway over Elena that no one else has—not even Zubak. “He’s got one advantage that the others don’t have—he’s not scared of her,” he says. “That is a very important thing. He can actually speak the truth to her.”
While Nicky may be able speak truth to the chancellor, the power dynamics of their relationship are set in stone. “He’s a bit of a masochist,” Gallienne says. “I think he quite likes to be dominated by her. He likes to be her rug.” Gallienne’s offscreen relationship with Winslet was much less fraught. “The first scene we had was in the car, and we laughed so much,” Gallienne says. “We were laughing so much in this car, that Stephen [Frears] came to us and went, ‘Calm down, kids.’”
They apparently had such a great time that Winslet invited Gallienne to stay with her during the shoot. “She very quickly said, ‘I’m living in this house during the shooting. Don’t go to the hotel, come to the house,” Gallienne recalls. “And so we lived together for quite a long time during the shooting.… We got along very, very well. She’s so honest and very clever, and she’s very courageous.”
Will Nicky and Elena make it to the end of The Regime still happily wed? Is this the last we’ll seen of Corporal Zubak? Has Elena unwittingly kicked off a civil war in Genovia by annexing the Faban Corridor? We’re halfway through The Regime, and it’s still anyone’s guess as to who will end up in charge by the series’ end. As always, send any questions, comments, or thoughts about the series to Still Watching at stillwatchingpod@gmail.com.
Two weeks ago, Dune: Part Twocame out in theaters, and became the first big hit of 2024. Even with Kung Fu Panda 4 releasing last weekend, that hasn’t really changed—if anything, it’s looking like Part Two is going to have some hefty legs throughout the rest of its theatrical run.
Denis Villeneuve on Ending Dune: Part Two That Way
Per Variety, the sci-fi film is more than likely going to make over $500 million by Monday. At time of writing, its global take is $494.7 million, putting it slightly over the $434.8 million of the original movie. While the 2021 film had a simultaneous HBO Max release to contend with , Part Two was touted as being exclusively in theaters, and has the word of mouth to keep it going. (If you have Twitter, you’ve probably heard of the guy who’s seen it nearly 20 times by this point.) Currently, i’s the highest-grossing movie in all of 2024 both domestically and worldwide. Going past $500M would make it one of the few movies to do so in our (not entirely) post-pandemic times, and analysts have speculated the movie will do around $600M when all is said and done.
Even with Dune’s new milestone, Kung Fu Panda 4 managed to secure the top spot in the domestic box office. Dreamworks’ animated sequel netted another $30 million in North America and $39.6 million internationally. At $176.5 million worldwide, it still has a ways to go before it touches the box office of the first three films, which each made $500-600M during their individual runs.
Next week, both movies will have some mighty competition in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which has been getting heavy promo in recent weeks. (That, and folks love them some Ghostbusters.) On March 29, the kaiju will go to war in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, though that one may be hurt (or helped) by the recent success of Godzilla Minus One. Given how well it’s doing so far, WB might keep Dune around in theaters for longer than normal—but if not, there’s always streaming.
This past January, HBO canceledOur Flag Means Death after the show’s second season premiered (and wrapped) in October. As with most cancled shows, a fan campaign emerged to try and get HBO to renew the show, while creator David Jenkins said he’d try his best to shop the show around somewhere else that’d be open to a comedy about gay pirates.
Andrew Callaghan Talks ‘This Place Rules’
But those dreams are now over, as Jenkins revealed on Instagram the show wouldn’t be picked up at another network or streamer. “We’ve reached the end of the road, at least as far as this sweet show is concerned,” he wrote. “After many complimentary meetings, conversations, etc., it seems there is no alternate home for our crew.” Jenkins went on to thank their fans for their efforts, which were “noticed across the industry”—they’d fundraised enough money for billboards in New York and London, which he says went a ways in helping the cast and crew “deal with the loss.”
“A love like ours can’t disappear in an instant,” he concluded. “When we see each other off in mystic, say hello. We won’t say goodbye, because we’re not leaving. We’re just taking a breather until next time we can share something together.”
Our Flag Means Death was just the latest cancellation in a decent-sized streak from HBO. Along with the likes of Rap Sh!t and The Flight Attendant, the network binned Westworldafter four seasons, in a move that came a surprise to that show’s cast and crew, given it was ready to close things out with season five. Its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a tear this week—media company Rooster Teeth is being shut down, while it’s preparing to delist titles published by Adult Swim Games, and reportedly refusing to just transfer Steam publishing rights over to those individuals.
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