The Pokémon Company’s life-size Psyduck is back. It’s up for preorder on The Pokémon Center United States-based store, just weeks after it was restocked on the Japanese site. The Pokémon Company originally released its 31-inch Psyduck plush back in 2020, a blessing to Pokémon fans during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. It’s been back in stock a few times before, and here it is again, with perfect timing with Netflix’s Pokémon Concierge, starring Psyduck.
Psyduck remains exactly the same as it was then, both stunning and perpetually stunned by its chronic headaches. (Psyduck is a migraine-haver’s icon.) Psyduck measures 31 inches in its Pokédex entry, making the big yellow duck true to life. The only problem is that it’s $324.99 — $45 more expensive than it was in 2020. That’s inflation for you.
The good news, though, is that you now can read user reviews to tell you how awesome owning a life-size Psyduck is:
Words cannot express how pleased I am with this massive Psyduck. Truly, massive. I’m thrilled that he finally came back in stock, and I had no qualms about purchasing him this time around. He shows up in random places around the house and it’s always a shock at first when I see him (most definitely he is using his confusion attack) but then a calmness quickly washes over me, and I feel comfort in knowing that he too, is confused all the time. Be aware that the shipping box is quite large, and says Psyduck on the outside, so don’t let him sit unattended for too long or someone else might try to capture him! He is way too rare and precious. Trust me – buy him and you will not regret it!! PS…he looks fantastic in hats.
There are actually two four star reviews out of the total 70 — the rest are top scores. The main gripe is that Psyduck is a little top heavy, so it falls over relatively easily. But for the most part, Psyduck has been worth the purchase for many Pokémon fans:
He is incredibly rotund and looks confused and distressed at all times, it’s like looking into a mirror! I couldn’t bring myself to place Psyduck on the floor so he takes up half my bed instead. A small price to pay for Psyduck to watch over me while I dream about an Appletun plush restock.
Also, Psyduck came in a box that was not discrete at all. Anyone will be able to read in big bold letters that a 31” Psyduck plush is inside so be ready to intercept the package once it is dropped off otherwise Team Rocket might steal him away.
The Pokémon Company expects to start shipping this new batch of yellow ducks in October. If you can’t wait until then but don’t care about what big Pokémon you have, a tall Lucario, big round Spheal, and massive Wailord are all in stock. In the past, The Pokémon Company’s sold big Mareeps, Slowpokes, and Gigantamax Pikachus among several other large dudes.
Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin live in Chicago to rewatch 1993 action-thriller ‘The Fugitive,’ with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones
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To Tom Ewing’s knowledge, only two prominent musical artists have publicly used the phrase “imperial phase”: Neil Tennant and Taylor Swift.
Tennant, the taller half of British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, coined the term in his notes for a 2001 reissue of the group’s 1987 album, Actually. Ewing helped popularize it in a 2010 piece for Pitchfork. And Swift completed the trifecta last December, when she invoked the concept in an interview for the cover story that accompanied her selection as the first entertainer to be named Time’s Person of the Year. As the author of the piece, Sam Lansky, wrote: “She went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world—‘an imperial phase,’ she calls it.”
Ewing, who writes about no. 1 songs, has become a kind of oracle of the imperial phase ever since he introduced the idea to anyone who couldn’t already quote the liner notes for Pet Shop Boys reissues. So it didn’t take long for him to be alerted to the fact that the world’s most imperial pop star had veered into his lane with a metatextual take on her career. “I got a message saying, ‘Oh my God, have you seen this?’” he says. “And I thought it was very funny.”
It was also potentially telling, as Ewing saw it, that Swift was the second pop star to employ the self-referential phrase. Swift’s fame is to Tennant’s as Tennant’s is (or was) to a subway busker’s, yet the two share a common quality. “Both Neil Tennant and Taylor Swift think very carefully about their careers, about their career moves, about the shape of their careers, and the ‘What did I do before? What am I going to do now?’” Ewing says. “There’s a real level of directional thinking, which obviously is balanced against instinct and all the other things that creators have. But both of them, they feel like the kind of stars who would think in those slightly helicopter-view terms.”
Those terms are where this term comes in handy, however vague it is. Tennant applied it to a roughly yearlong run of chart-topping singles from 1987-88, a period when Pet Shop Boys, he said, possessed “the secret of contemporary pop music” and “knew what was required.” When Ewing attempted to refine the definition further in 2010, he proposed three prerequisites: “command, permission, and self-definition.” In other words, being in the zone, creatively; generating “public interest, excitement, and goodwill” toward one’s work; and forever being associated with and judged against that work.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Ewing also intimated that imperial phases are inherently short-lived: They’re “accelerated moments in a career, times where intense scrutiny meets intense opportunity,” which makes them “a mix of world-conquering swagger and inevitable obsolescence.” According to Tennant, Pet Shop Boys’ phase ended in September ’88, when “Domino Dancing,” whose Latin sound represented a departure for the group, debuted at no. 9 on the U.K. charts—a relatively chilly reception to the lead single from their (on the whole, pretty popular) third album, Introspective.
If Tennant—himself a former music journalist during a pre-imperial, early-’80s stint as an editor of Smash Hits—hadn’t supplied such a seductive designation, some other expression would suffice. We could call one of these fleeting, incandescent streaks “owning the moment,” as Ewing did elsewhere in his seminal piece. We could call it “being on a roll.” We could even call it “Reaganing,” if we were Jack Donaghy. It’s more than a mere creative and/or commercial peak, though it often overlaps with one; it’s the point when a pop star seemingly can’t make a misstep. Cyndi Lauper was sensational; Madonna was imperial.
Last year, Swift was the world’s most-streamed artist on Spotify, and five of the top 10 albums in the U.S. (including two rerecordings of old albums) were hers. This Sunday, Swift swallowed the Grammys, becoming the first artist to win Album of the Year four times and announcing her next album, The Tortured Poets Department—available April 19, preorder now—during her acceptance speech for Best Pop Vocal Album (just as she announced Midnights during her acceptance speech for Video of the Year at the 2022 VMAs). Next Sunday, her boyfriend will be in the Super Bowl, with Swift presumably looking on—which, in a sign of her status, is seen as a windfallfortheNFL. In between, she’ll play four shows at the Tokyo Dome on the Eras Tour, which has broken revenue records both live and in theaters (and threatened to topple the ticketing cartel).
By all appearances, she’s in love and beloved, except by right-wingers who say she’s a psyop. Even those conspiracy theories are, in some sense, a testament to Swift’s ever-increasing sway: You have to be pretty popular and powerful for people to posit that the country’s preeminent entertainment (professional football) could be rigged in your favor or that your endorsement could decide the presidential election. Swift has gone imperial before, but never quite like this.
The appeal of the imperial phase is its potential to impose precision on the nebulous arena of artistic achievement. It’s a rubric that makes it possible to apply sports-style analysis to art—to delineate dynasties in the absence of objective indicators such as winning percentages and championships. Yet even in sports, dynasty definitions are divisive and squishy, and half the fun of discussing imperial phases is trying to pinpoint when they start and stop. We can have this debate about Taylor, too. (Though even Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless can’t muster a contrarianTaylortake.) Shockingly, Swift’s publicist did not respond to my request for clarification about how Swift defines the “imperial phase” and how she views her “eras” in relation to it. Thus, it falls to us to classify the success of the inescapable star.
However we slice it, Swift is unique. The difficulty lies in determining the exact way in which her supremacy is unprecedented. So why consider just one way? With assistance from Ewing and other Swift whisperers, let’s examine three possible interpretations of Taylor’s career through the lens of the imperial phase: that she’s had the most imperial phases ever; that she’s had the longest imperial phase ever; and that she’s simply transcended the idea of the imperial phase, rendering the notion obsolete.
The Most Imperial Phases
Last October, Billboard published a staff ranking of the 500 best pop songs that have made the Hot 100 since its genesis in 1958. “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Taylor’s 10th album, 2022’s Midnights, placed 364th. Billboard called it “the undeniable four-quadrant pop detonation to blast off Taylor Swift’s third and somehow-biggest-yet imperial phase.”
Three imperial phases! That’s one for each Cleon clone on Foundation that Demerzel calls “Empire.” It’s one foreachNapoleon named Emperor of the French. It’s one for each incarnation of Swift in the “Anti-Hero” video!
That “Anti-Hero” blurb was written by Billboard deputy editor Andrew Unterberger, who explains his thinking via email: “Not scientific, obviously, but I’d generally say her two prior imperial phases were the Fearless era (2008–2009) and the 1989 era (late 2014–early 2016)—two absolutely monster blockbuster albums with myriad hit singles, award wins, and plenty of extracurricular stuff both on and off-record. (And two extremely defined and distinct periods where it generally seemed like she was everywhere and could basically do no wrong.)”
Swift was the bestselling album artist of 2008, and Fearless, which made Swift the youngest artist ever to win a Grammy for Album of the Year, was the bestselling album of 2009. On the other hand, none of the singles from Fearless went to no. 1 (even though the album did), and critics weren’t overwhelmed.
There’s no disputing Taylor’s contention that the 1989 boom was an imperial phase. As for what’s happening now, Ewing says, “It’s huge and fits the definition of an imperial phase, except for the fact that she’s already had her imperial phase.” Just to play devil’s advocate, Ewing notes, “What she’s doing now, so much of it is about looking back and career overview. The Rolling Stones don’t go into a new imperial phase every time they do a massive, arena, ‘This is all our hits’ [tour]. … So it can’t just be ‘OK, it’s making an unbelievable amount of money.’” As Ewing acknowledges, though, it’s not just that: It’s Midnights, it’s the concert film that’s “more like an artistically arranged retrospective,” and it’s the “astonishing marketing coup” of turning the traditionally “slightly desperate,” post-imperial tactic of rerecording classic albums into a means of empowerment. (Which helped inspire other artists to do the same.) Heck, if eliciting “public interest, excitement, and goodwill” is a key component, then maybe meet-cutes and kisses with Travis Kelce count too.
Thus, if we accept Unterberger’s version of events—and does a Fearless-era imperial phase seem like such a stretch?—Swift may already be in uncharted territory. Very few of the artists in the ultra-selective imperial-phase club have had a second one, let alone an imperial trilogy. Ewing argues that even though the Beatles never ceased to be popular, they had two separate imperial phases—the mop-top, British Invasion, “yeah, yeah, yeah” imperial phase and the bearded, druggy, studio-only imperial phase, each of which received itsown greatest hits compilation. David Bowie had two, Ewing adds, sandwiching the critically acclaimed but less mainstream Berlin Trilogy. “If you could locate three distinct ones,” Ewing says, “then, yeah—three distinct ones, I think, would be unique.”
Madonna may be the closest competitor. “If you think of the ’87, ’88 period as a dip, then she has one, and then she comes back with Like a Prayer and has another one,” Ewing says. “And then does she have a third one with Ray of Light and Music? That’s a possibility. … But I don’t think that she monopolized world attention to the extent that she did in the Like a Virgin and Blond Ambition eras.” Admittedly, one could say the same about Fearless-era Taylor; her ascendance since then—in contrast to other imperialists of the late 2000s or early 2010s, like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga—may make her earlier period appear more imperial in retrospect. (It probably says something about the evolving perception of Swift that the review scores for Taylor’s Version albums are so much higher than the originals’ corresponding scores.)
If we count the Fearless phase and give Madonna credit for the maximum imaginable number, we would have a tie. Unless … well, let me get my auctioneer on. Two Taylor imperial phases, three Taylor imperial phases. Do I hear four?
Sold, to Stereogum’s Tom Breihan—a different Tom who writes about no. 1 songs.“The ‘eras’ are basically all imperial phases,” Breihan contends. For him, the country-inflected early albums “would be anybody else’s career peak, … a gigantic imperial phase.” Then there’s the pure-pop phase, starting with Red or 1989 (when Swift called her pop metamorphosis “official”). “And then,” he continues, “Folklore is this quarantine record that has to even outperform her expectations, I would expect. That thing was so big.”
Put it all together, and Breihan sees the present Taylor imperial phase “as the beginning of a fourth, with Folklore as its own little thing. … This seems like the most imperial of the imperial phases, but there’s been so many.”
Of course, if Swift has arguably crammed more than two imperial phases into a recording career that spans less than 20 years, she can’t have had any very long lulls. Essentially, Swift’s case in this category comes down to whether her late-2000s breakout qualifies as imperial—and, maybe more importantly, whether she ever actually lost enough steam after entering her first imperial phase that she had to build back up to the imperial level again. If you aren’t sold on the latter, then have I ever got the theory for you!
The Longest Imperial Phase
For critic David Cooper Moore, the primary problem with the “most imperial phases” position is that it presupposes that Taylor’s reign was ever interrupted. In the fourth installment of a recent six-part Substack series on Swift, Moore argues, “By November of 2008 it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Taylor Swift.” In Moore’s mind, the poppier trappings that helped Fearless become a crossover hit didn’t usher in a series of ups and relative downs; they were the start of “what looks to be a 20-year unabated imperial phase.”
Moore elaborates via email: “My main claim in the Taylor Swift series is that we’ve been living in Taylor Swift’s 2008 for about 15 years. I think you can debate when it was obvious Taylor was at the top of the pop star heap, but I think it’s hard to argue she was very far from the top after Fearless was released, and it’s indisputable by Red.” Like Moore, both Breihan and Ewing argue (persuasively) that Red was at least as big as the records that preceded it, which makes the idea of a Fearless-only imperial phase that wasn’t repeated until 1989 seem slightly more tenuous. As Breihan puts it, “Any metric that you can look at, she’s been so far beyond everybody for so long. … Taylor Swift’s biggest flop would be almost anybody else’s biggest hit.”
Moore continues: “The other big claim that I make is that her 15 years have been remarkably steady. Most Taylor Swift drama plays out as a sort of kayfabe, which makes it easy to forget that she’s never really had major competition—she’s never been ‘dethroned.’”
In the Time piece, Swift implies that her 1989 imperial phase ended amid the backlash to her spike in popularity, her spat with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, her 2016-17 hiatus, and the less rapturous critical response to her Joe Alwyn–era records, Reputation and Lover. (Lover was better regarded than Reputation but didn’t produce any no. 1 singles—until the unparalleled impact of Swift’s latest peak catapulted the 4-year-old “Cruel Summer” to the top of the charts last October.) “The most interesting question of Taylor’s career, critically, is: What do you make of Reputation?” Ewing says. “Because if you’re saying she’s in a perpetual imperial phase, or if you’re saying she’s had two, Reputation feels like, … ‘OK, I am enormous, I can’t get any bigger at the moment, so I need to take the pressure off myself a bit.’”
This is what Moore is driving at with his kayfabe comparison: Can an imperial phase end if the star in question doesn’t dim that much and is never outshined? Even if the star feels like they’ve lost some luster? As Defector’s Kelsey McKinney noted, even Lansky had his doubts about the comeback narrative, though he held them in until after the interview. Here’s how he expressed his reservations in Time:
Swift has told me a story about redemption, about rising and falling only to rise again—a hero’s journey. I do not say to her, in our conversation, that it did not always look that way from the outside—that, for example, when Reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” reached No. 1 on the charts, or when the album sold 1.3 million albums in the first week, second only to 1989, she did not look like someone whose career had died. She looked like a superstar who was mining her personal experience as successfully as ever.
As post-imperial drop-offs go, that’s not exactly “Domino Dancing.” As Ewing recalls, “There was definitely a slight critical falloff when [Reputation] came out. And then there were also people who were like, ‘No, this is just as good.’” Reputation poses a quandary for imperial-phase scholars, he says, because “it’s very common for stars to release [a] ‘This is my stepping back’ album, [but] it’s less common for it to be, ‘This is my stepping back, but I’m still going to be the most famous pop star in the world.’”
This question is important for our purposes, because if Reputation wasn’t the, um, endgame of the post-1989 phase, then Taylor almost indisputably holds the record for the longest continuous imperial phase. (Provided a cameo in Cats doesn’t disqualify her; that debacle clearlywasn’tTaylor’sfault.)This is all somewhat subjective, but the most prolonged phase to date, Ewing believes, would be about seven years: the Beatles from Beatlemania to breakup; or Prince from, say, 1999 to Batman (also seven years). If we give Michael Jackson Off the Wall to Bad (despite the five-year gap between Thriller and Bad) or stretch Madonna’s imperial phase from Like a Virgin through the lead-up to Erotica, we could push the previous record to eight years.
Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images
If Swift gets credit for Fearless through the present, then she’s almost doubled the lengths of those legendary runs, even as she’s pivoted from country to pop to the “folklorian woods” of the lockdown albums to the more electronic elements of Midnights. “She’s obviously matured as a songwriter and tried different things,” Ewing says. “She shows a different enough facet each time that it never becomes stale, which is one of the risks of a very long imperial phase. She’s very Prince in that [way], … where every new album was very recognizably Prince being Prince, but each of them was also playing with a different stylistic palette.” Whatever twists and turns she takes along the way, personally or sonically, Ewing says, “the narrative always ends at, ‘And she’s done it again. She’s back on top.’” (As if she ever left.)
Even if we start the clock at 1989, Swift’s imperial phase (or is it an imperial era?) is coming up on a decade, which would still take the title—unless Reputation resetthe clock. So, was Swift’s sixth album a streak stopper or a streak extender? Call it what you want.
There’s one other way we could go with this, though. You say the most imperial phases, I say the longest imperial phase. Let’s call the whole thing off.
Overthrowing the Imperial Phase
The matter of Taylor Swift’s claim to imperial-phase fame defies easy answers. But maybe, as Chief Danvers would say, we’re just not asking the right questions. Maybe what we should be asking is: Does the concept of an imperial phase still apply to Taylor Swift in 2024? Or, for that matter, to popular music more broadly?
When Ewing codified Tennant’s term in 2010, one hallmark, he wrote, was that “the phase always ends.” If it doesn’t end, it’s no longer a phase—it’s just an empire. And if we can conceive of an indefinite tenure at the top, it’s a sign of a serious phase shift (so to speak). As Swift sang in part of a line from a previously unreleased track on the rerecorded Red: “It’s not just a phase I’m in.”
Maybe, then, we should era-adjust the imperial phase to account for changing economic and cultural conditions, as we do with sports stats (anddynasties) that were compiled in wildly different scoring and competitive environments. Which takes us to the Ewing Theory (no, not that one): The era of the imperial phase is over.
“When I originally wrote about imperial phases,” Ewing says, “it was very much working from an assumption that pop audiences work in the same way they worked when Neil Tennant coined the phrase; i.e., they’re inherently transient. They are deeply interested in something and then move on to something else. … It feels to me what Taylor is doing—and is the best at doing out of a bunch of people who attempt it—is cultivating an audience that is invested in her to the extent that they don’t move on, and she keeps that attention perpetually.”
As it turns out, this is basically the Breihan and/or Moore Theory as well. Both see Swift as being, in Breihan’s words, “ridiculously global-level famous for about 15 years now,” but both also see it as somewhat oxymoronic to describe that sort of sustained dominance as a phase. “I think Taylor Swift has done something different from maintaining an imperial phase or having multiple imperial phases,” Moore says. “I think she’s essentially risen above the (American/Western) pop music landscape that made an imperial phase possible. She’s just putting out Taylor Swift records, and there’s no one next in line.”
A few factors have created the conditions that promote permanent pop stardom. In earlier eras, Ewing notes, most pop fans followed music through the mass media, which had “built-in novelty-seeking incentives.” (The fact that physical albums were one-time purchases that didn’t generate revenue each time they were played also made it more important for record companies to serve up something new.) In the social internet age, consumers can get info on artists straight from the source, which fosters intense attachment to fan favorites.
“Fandom is not a new phenomenon,” Breihan says. “People identifying with a famous person is not a new phenomenon. But when people kind of construct online identities around fandom, that strikes me as being relatively new.” Swift, he adds, has “really engaged with and stoked” those stans.
Which may be another reason to retire Tennant’s phrase. “The imperial phase posits that stars are ‘cashing in’ their broad success for something weirder, more personal, etc.,” Moore says. “By spending this capital, it ultimately comes back to bite you. … It’s not clear to me that Taylor Swift has ever had to ‘spend’ anything of her credibility or reputation to do whatever she wants. And whatever Taylor Swift wants always seems to be exactly what her audience wants.”
Photo by Fernando Leon/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
And, perhaps, what it will always want. Because in modern music, Ewing says, “Once you have a level of fan attention and engagement, it’s now very hard to lose it.” If they let you into the imperial lounge, youbelongforlife. As a result, Breihan says, “A lot of the people who in previous eras would’ve faded away are still huge,” while “the age of one-hit wonders seems to be mostly over.” It’s like Tony tellsChristopher in The Sopranos Season 1, when the younger mobster pleads to be a made man: “The books are closed. They’re not accepting any new members, OK?” (Imperioli phase—is that anything?)
All of that said: If, as the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War contends, ‘all empires fall,’ then how might Taylor’s?
On one level, it can’t, barring some Lizzo-like blow to her, er, reputation. If she never released another song, she could sell out stadiums as long as she lived, à la Billy Joel (who, to be fair, did just release a song). “She’s become a franchise,” Ewing says. “Her fandom is something more similar [to] Star Wars or Marvel—stronger, at the moment, because obviously those brands have put out too much substandard product, and they’re now paying the penalty. But as long as she puts out stuff that is good enough, or just re-puts out the old stuff, it’s difficult to imagine people stopping being a Taylor Swift fan.”
Eight years after her latest album, Rihanna remains an A-lister, and Swift herself has hit a new high-water mark for fame almost a year and a half after releasing her last new, original song (though even her newly unearthed leftovers can climb to no. 1). If anything, it’s safer not to release something: At this level of stardom, you can only decline, and the overexposure pitfall is real. Swift’s ubiquity has built up to the point that she inspires passive publicity, whether she wants to or not. Even when she isn’t onstage or in the studio, she makes headlines because of the stories surrounding her, such as the “Gaylor” wars, “main character”–type tweets, or, more dismayingly, a stir surrounding AI-generated graphicdeepfakes.
It’s probably easier to not know Swift’s music in the 2020sthan it was to not know the tune to every track on Thriller in the ’80s, when musical tastes and listening habits weren’t so siloed. But Swift’s celebrity is almost omnipresent, andsome people are pretty tired of Taylor updates. Granted, they may mostly be people who were non-Swifties to start, like Larry David and dudes who can’t stand seeing Swift on their screens for roughly 0.4percent of a football broadcast. But even Richie Jerimovich, a man who blasts “Love Story” in the car, can reach a point of too much Taylor.
Swift is savvy enough to know when she’s less wanted. As her 2015 tour wound down, she admitted, “I think people might need a break from me.” A rumored announcement of a Reputation remake (which Swift appeared to tease before the real reveal of an all-new album) seemed like it might give her another chance to lie low for a while. “Just as Reputation was the curtain on her original imperial phase, Reputation (Taylor’s Version) might be a very knowing, ‘OK, I’m stepping away from it again,’” Ewing speculated before the Grammys. And then, on Sunday, Swift started the countdown to her next inevitable blockbuster, which will surely extend her stay on center stage for many more months.
But even if Swift never willingly withdraws from the spotlight, the passage of time could pose a threat. You can be a pop icon at virtually any age, based on career accomplishments. But broadly and historically speaking, pop stardom—in terms of active, vital contributions to the zeitgeist and the perception that a performer is still doing their best work—has been the province of the young. Can the 34-year-old Swift keep reaching new listeners and retain her intergenerational hold on the culture in the decades to come? (Pet Shop Boys are still releasing records, but “Domino Dancing” ended their imperial phase when Tennant was as old as Taylor is now.) What if Kelce is her soulmate, they settle down, and she no longer writes songs or fuels tabloid stories about losing or looking for love? Can she conquer music’s aging curve like she’s conquered its charts?
“I don’t think it’s impossible at all, because I don’t think anything that she’s doing with her music requires a youth’s perspective,” Ewing says. “And I think she’s primed her audience, partly with the Eras Tour, to say, ‘This is my journey from girlhood to young womanhood to maturity.’ And the implication in that is, ‘And the journey is going to keep on going.’”
There’s also every indication that listeners will want to go with her. Instead of aging out of the audience, Ewing says, “People are now pop music fans for life. And that then means, because we’re an aging population generally, that the slice of attention given to music that is mainly or exclusively listened to by young people just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.” In that respect, pop stars could age like actors and politicians, as the few who broke through before the monoculture cratered serve as headliners for longer and longer (for better or worse). Maybe that’s already happening: The Beatles broke up before they were 30 (though their success persisted solo) and Elvis had to make a comeback at 33, but Drake and Beyoncé are about as big as ever at 37 and 42, respectively.
Swift will soon run out of old albums to rerecord, and her current tour wraps at the end of the year, so she needs a new era to enter. “She’s probably got the next five moves plotted out already,” Breihan told me, and now we know one of them: the 16-track Tortured Poets Department. (Plus a bonus track called “The Manuscript,” to highlight the literary theme and sell lots of vinyl.) And after that? Maybe she’ll make movies or really write a book or start a label or be a brand and a business tycoon—the millennial Dolly Parton. Maybe she’ll just keep cranking out hits. “All I wanna do is keep doing this,” she proclaimed on Sunday, lining up her next award while grasping the last one.
At some point, Ewing says, “There will undoubtedly be a step down. … What I can see is, in 10 years or so, the people who like Taylor Swift being not as big a force in media and in terms of what gets covered, … and she moves into a phase where she is just a huge star and everyone knows who she is, but the extent to which she owns the culture has receded a bit, in the way that it did for Madonna.”
For a worst-case scenario, that doesn’t sound so bad. It beats the first verse of “Castles Crumbling,” a previously unreleased track on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version):
Once I had an empire in a golden age I was held up so high, I used to be great They used to cheer when they saw my face Now, I fear I have fallen from grace
That’s the sentiment of someone who’s mourning the end of an imperial phase. Which, for the foreseeable future, doesn’t seem like something Swift has to fear.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 4.
Who Done It?
If endless darkness in the Arctic Circle didn’t sound isolating enough, try spending that time alone on Christmas. Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country sees pretty much every resident of Ennis spending the holiday solo or reckoning with some form of personal turmoil—but it wouldn’t be True Detective without festering psychological trauma and existential dread, would it? But hey, it’s still Christmas—sit down, relax, and let your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery crime drama promote your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery Christmas movie.
Screenshots via HBO
Episode 4 presents some significant progress in the Tsalal murder case. Last episode, Liz Danvers and Co. discovered a chilling video of Annie Kowtok that she took of herself just before her death. It shows Annie in an ice cave with unidentified bones embedded in the wall, which leads the crew to deduce that Annie’s body was moved from that location into town to make some sort of statement to the locals.
Meanwhile, when tasked with tracking down anyone who had suffered similar injuries to the Tsalal scientists, Pete discovers the record of Otis Heiss, a seemingly crucial piece of the Night Country puzzle. After surviving the injuries—which included burned corneas and self-inflicted bites, with no reported cause—Heiss went off the grid. (He’s traceable only through his police record of disorderly conduct.) When Danvers and Evangeline Navarro seek out Ennis High School teacher Adam Bryce for assistance in locating the cave Annie was likely killed in, he suggests tracking down whoever mapped out the dangerous tunnels. A quick Google search reveals none other than Heiss as the man responsible.
This episode also has no shortage of flirtations with the spirit realm—which probably shouldn’t even be described as flirtations anymore. We just flat out saw multiple Conjuring-ass ghosts. Night Country has been very clear about the possibility of the supernatural at play; True Detective Season 1 never went far beyond merely hinting at it. I still don’t believe the killer will end up being a wholly supernatural force, but visions of the dead have been shown so frequently and assuredly by multiple characters that the existence of the paranormal doesn’t seem to be just speculation at this point.
Heartbreakingly, these visions lead to the death of Julia, Eve’s tormented sister whose persistent encounters with the dead drove her to walk into the freezing ocean. In Episode 3, we discovered that Eve and Julia’s mother was also driven mad by hearing voices, and she eventually left home and was murdered by someone who was never found. With her sister now gone too, Eve fears she’s next in line to be targeted by these specters, though it wouldn’t be her first brush with the supernatural. Episode 3 showed us that Danvers and Navarro’s last case involved a man named William Wheeler who abused and killed his girlfriend—it’s suggested that either Danvers or Navarro killed him upon arriving at the crime scene and covered it up by falsely reporting his death as a suicide. Episode 4 reveals that Navarro saw the dead girlfriend’s ghost in the room before one of the cops likely pulled the trigger on Wheeler.
The episode culminates with the spotting of a man wearing Annie’s pink jacket—the same one Raymond Clark was seen wearing in a Tsalal video—near the town dredges. Navarro and Danvers go to scope it out and basically find themselves in a game of Silent Hill. They quickly locate the mysterious figure, and Danvers chases him up the ladders of a dredge, only to discover the man is actually Heiss rather than Clark. So where is Clark? “He went back down to hide,” Heiss says. “He’s hiding in the night country. We’re all in the night country now.” Hey, that’s the name of the show! As Danvers races after Heiss, Navarro starts hearing voices calling her name and follows a trail of footsteps to an ominous Christmas tree. There, she stumbles upon an apparition resembling Julia—Eve’s haunted by another woman she couldn’t save. Danvers comes down to find Eve in a catatonic state with blood dripping from her ear (akin to the ruptured eardrums the scientists suffered, perhaps?) after the encounter.
Oh yeah, this episode also treated us to more oranges and one-eyed polar bears, plus Billie Eilish songs. Are we any closer to solving the Tsalal mystery? Let’s round up the suspects.
1. Raymond Clark
The Nikola Jokic of murder suspects, our boy Raymond remains atop the list. His whereabouts are still unknown (unless “hiding in the night country” counts as a location), but that Danvers found Heiss in the state he was in, in the same Annie jacket that was last seen on Clark, indicates that something went down there. Speaking of “down there,” what exactly did Heiss mean by saying Clark “went down” to hide? Last week in this column, my colleague Ben Lindbergh introduced the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the Adlivun underworld, Sedna, as a potential suspect. It doesn’t get much more “down” than the underworld, and “night country” seems like an apt description of a frozen wasteland where souls are imprisoned. Could Clark be posing as, or possessed by, Sedna?
Clark has been built up to be such a prime suspect over the course of these four episodes that it seems almost too obvious for him to be the sole perpetrator. But the mounting evidence shows he is clearly involved in the murders somehow. That he’s been missing for so long also seems to be foreshadowing a big showdown for when Danvers and Navarro do eventually track him down.
2. Oliver Tagaq
Even though Tagaq wasn’t seen in this episode, he was still key in an important scene. As Danvers obsessively rewatches the Annie Kowtok video, she notices that it ends with the lights getting cut in the same way they do at the end of the Raymond Clark Tsalal video. Danvers surmises that there was some sort of power outage at the end of both videos, but Annie’s video was evidently taken in an ice cave—how could there have been power in there in the first place? Danvers remembers that Tagaq was an equipment engineer at Tsalal and would likely have access to the lab’s emergency generators. She sends Eve and Pete back to Tagaq’s place to investigate and, what do you know, he’s vanished. Tagaq left right after Danvers and Navarro confronted him in the previous episode, according to the others at his camp. Eve and Pete find a spiral symbol drawn on the ground and carved into a stone, and when they ask Oliver’s former neighbors if they know what the symbol is, they don’t answer—their dogs start barking, and they kind of just … stare menacingly.
My hunch is that Tagaq is a red herring who’s just very distrusting of authority. (Understandably so, after how the Indigenous population has been treated.) But he obviously knows something, and his connection to the spirals can’t be meaningless.
3. Kate McKittrick
Even if Kate didn’t actually murder the Tsalal scientists with her own two hands, she’s still evil as hell and guilty of something. Actually, we already know she’s complicit in polluting Ennis’s water supply as an executive of the Silver Sky mining company, which Annie had been protesting against before her death. Plus, we know Kate is close with Hank from their interaction at the ice rink in Episode 2, and he’s the one who hid Annie’s case files and failed to report some key evidence in her investigation.
In Episode 4, we see a brief scene with Kate after Danvers’s daughter, Leah, was caught vandalizing the mining offices, spray-painting the word “MURDERERS” across the front door (badass!). If Leah becomes a target next, that would further heighten my suspicion that Kate is involved somehow, but even if not, Kate seems very unhappy with the reputation of her company. Unhappy enough to commit murder? I’m not sure. She does have a potential motive for killing Annie, but theorizing why she would kill the Tsalal scientists is just conjecture—maybe they discovered something in their research that would be detrimental to Silver Sky if made public? And since Night Country takes so much inspiration from Season 1, Kate could ultimately serve as a Billy Lee Tuttle figure in a web of corruption.
4. Sedna
Not to copy Ben’s homework from last week, but the supernatural is still a huge possibility in unlocking the Tsalal mystery, and Sedna is still the best explanation. And Heiss’s description of Clark’s location wasn’t the only clue we got in this episode that could lead to Sedna.
Listen to the way Eve describes her family’s relationship with spirits to Danvers: “It’s a curse,” she says. “Something calls us, and we follow.” It’s been said that Sedna can imprison the souls of the living, and Julia’s death was due to walking into the ocean, which happens to be Sedna’s domain. As Julia marched in, it did seem as though she was being led somewhere—could it have been Sedna calling to her?
The prevalence of these visions makes it seem like the paranormal will play a part in solving this mystery in a way that it didn’t in past seasons of True Detective. I still believe a human will ultimately be found responsible for the murders, but there were simply too many ghosts in this episode to ignore.
5. Hank Prior
I almost feel bad including Prior here because my guy had a horrendous outing in Episode 4. He was supposed to finally meet his Russian fiancée, Alina, at the airport, but, alas, she never showed. Well, he might have seen her briefly get off the plane, make eye contact with him, and get right back on, which is an
extreme case of getting curved. But in all likelihood, Alina is probably just some dude with an internet connection catfishing Prior into sending him money. Still, Prior does a terrible job of pretending to brush off the whole situation to his son, saying that Alina’s cell service is probably just out (a classic rationale for victims of ghosting). As we see Prior sulk in front of a bottle of champagne and a rose-petal-adorned bedspread intended for a romantic night with Alina, we know he’s pretty heartbroken.
But that we get such a sympathetic portrayal of Hank in this episode doesn’t necessarily absolve him of culpability in the murders. He obviously tried to cover something up with Annie’s case, and he’s overall been a pretty big asshole to Danvers, Navarro, and his own son. But the Alina situation shows how naive Hank is, and that probably makes him a pretty terrible cop. With the Annie case, it seems possible that Hank is doing the bidding for some powerful person—maybe Kate?—while being kind of oblivious, or even willfully ignorant, about the severity of these cases. Which, again … really shoddy stuff for a cop to do. But it probably means he’s not the one committing the murders himself.
6. Captain Connelly
Let me cook for a second. The thing that raised my eyebrows this week was the way Captain Connelly responded when Danvers asked if he’d seen the Annie Kowtok video she’d sent him: a short nod and then, “You keep that on a need-to-know basis.” Yes, he’s a police captain who probably doesn’t want evidence leaking to the public, but it just struck me as a bizarre reaction to the uncovering of a crucial and traumatic clue in a years-old murder case. Plus, he’s been trying to wrangle control of the Tsalal case ever since it opened.
Danvers has made a lot of comments about how Connelly wants to look good for his future mayoral campaign (which Connelly himself has never really responded to), and that might be true—and that could certainly include ensuring that any skeletons in his closet never come out. Prior is, in all probability, compromised by his connections to Silver Sky one way or another, so why couldn’t Connelly be too? True Detective Season 1’s Errol Childress murders had connections all the way up to the Louisiana governor. A powerful and ambitious man like Connelly could easily get his hands dirty, too.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
Now let me really cook for a second. There have been multiple visions of a of one-eyed polar bear throughout Night Country so far (which have been presented in a sort of dreamlike manner but could be a real sighting in an Alaskan town). Both Navarro and Danvers have experienced these visions in the same way: by almost crashing into the bear in Episodes 1 and 4, respectively. A plush one-eyed polar bear that once belonged to Danvers’s son, Holden, has been a recurring image as well. It almost reminds me of another polar bear sighting …
Look, I realize it’s probably a different experience running into a polar bear in the Alaskan tundra than it is on a deserted island. But the polar bear sightings on Lost, surprisingly enough, actually had an explanation: They were brought to the island by the DHARMA Initiative for studies in electromagnetic research. So those polar bears had to come from somewhere. Who’s to say that the DHARMA Initiative never had a study-abroad program at the Tsalal research station specializing in polar bear recruitment? I don’t know, man, I’ll just take any opportunity I can to bring up Lost again. What a program.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Julianna: I have to be honest with you, Vikram—I’m four episodes into True Detective: Night Country and my California mind is still unable to comprehend just how cold Alaska is. I’ve lived in the Golden State my entire life and am currently typing this from Los Angeles, where it’s a lovely 73 degrees in January, and I still saw jackets and beanies outside. I could count the number of times I’ve seen snow in my life on one hand, and at least a couple of those times I’ve foolishly worn jeans and sneakers that quickly got sopping wet.
So my question is: How do you adapt to extreme cold? Do you ever get used to it? What are the wardrobe essentials for an Alaskan winter? Is an Andy Reid frozen mustache a common sighting? I realize that was multiple questions, but this is truly a world that boggles my mind.
Vikram: Like you, Julianna, I am from California. When I first moved to Alaska, I hadn’t had much exposure to cold weather, and it showed. The first winter I spent in Anchorage, my “coat” was a thin corduroy jacket, and I mostly wore a lot of sweatshirts and jeans. As many locals warned me, cotton kills. But I was too stubborn to buy myself a puffy jacket or the stretchy technical clothing that my friends wore to exercise in the cold. I was neither warm nor fashionable.
Fortunately, despite my inadequate wardrobe, my body did adjust. Exposure to cold weather activates something in our bodies called “brown fat,” which helps keep our bodies warmer, a sort of internal layer of long underwear. I noticed this effect most when I would visit my family in Los Angeles during the winter; they wore sweaters and jackets all day, while I could wear shorts and T-shirts without a shiver. It felt like a superpower.
But there’s a limit to what our bodies can withstand.
The coldest temperature I have ever been in is negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a whole different kind of cold than I had grown accustomed to in Anchorage, where the temperature rarely drops below zero. The layer of ice covering the road in Fairbanks was a few inches thick but not as slippery as warmer ice (the thin layer of melting water on the surface of the ice is what makes your car slide around on the road). Taking a deep breath at negative 35 is an adventure—air that cold tends to cause an instant coughing fit. We visited some hot springs on that trip; I remember dunking my head in the water, coming up for air, and feeling my hair freeze in seconds. Extreme cold can be delightful.
But does Ennis get that cold? It’s hard to say—there isn’t a weather almanac to consult for fictional Alaskan villages. But we can make an educated guess. Night Country creator Issa López described Ennis as a “fictionalized amalgam of northern villages Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and Nome.” These villages are further north than Fairbanks, but they are located on the water, which can help keep temperatures relatively mild—the brown fat of meteorology.
Stuck in weather-estimating hell, I reached out to Brian Brettschneider, Alaska’s leading climatologist. Brian told me that Ennis is likely “not as cold as Fairbanks, but notably colder than Anchorage. Nome, Kotzebue, and Utqiagvik are also quite windy places and are in the tundra,” where, he reminded me, trees cannot grow. Brian also sent me this handy dynamic temperature map. By my estimation, Ennis likely sees temps as low as negative 15 or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the depths of winter. In a word: brrrrr!
If you are planning to visit a northern Alaska community next winter, here are some items you will want to bring along, courtesy of my Real Alaskan Advisory Committee (Tara, Emily, Zach, and Barry):
A wool hat that covers your ears
A thick neck gaiter that you can pull up to protect your face
Heavyweight thermal underwear—this is your second skin
Mittens (not gloves!), preferably with a long gauntlet—covering your wrist and lower forearm—to keep the warmth in and the snow out
A down parka, ideally 600 fill or above, that goes down to at least your thighs and has a proper fur ruff (synthetics don’t cut it when snow is blowing sideways)
Wool socks
Bunny boots, which are cartoonish snow-white boots that keep your feet warm by trapping air and leaving room for thick socks—if you can’t find any, a pair of Bogs or Muck boots (cold-weather boots all seem to have exceptional names) will also do
Hand and foot warmers to tuck into your mittens and boots—get the foot warmers with adhesives, or you’ll end up with a crumpled mass far away from your toes
Julianna, now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll decide to visit Alaska in the winter sometime. I can’t guarantee you’ll see anything supernatural, but a snowy, dark Alaskan winter is magical all the same. The juice is worth the squeeze, even if it’s a little bit frozen.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
Rose Aguineau’s little Christmas party (and dress!) looked lovely. She seems like a great hang. Other than the fact that she has to deal with, as she says, “all the fuckin’ dead.”
Bro put on his best turtleneck and brought along a well-dressed stuffed animal only to leave the airport alone thinking he got stood up on sight. It’s so sad it almost makes me forget he’s a terrible person.
You ever look so good you cause a stranger to spiral into an abyss of loneliness and heartbreak?
Have you watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the 2005 Brad-and-Angelina action comedy, recently? Like, actually watched it, not just let your nostalgic memories of it play in your head. Mr. & Mrs. Smith was at the center of pop culture in the mid-aughts for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with the actual movie, and a few that did: It’s sexy fun with massive stars, and director Doug Liman knows how to put together a good action scene. The elevator pitch — two professional assassins are married to each other, but don’t know about the other’s job — is a good one.
But right now, in 2024, it’s almost unwatchably strange. It’s one of those not-that-old movies that are so specific to their time they seem to have aged beyond their years. The bitter, marriage-is-hell humor lands wrong. The two leads look hot but sort of unreal, like they’re the premature product of de-aging technology. There are some iffy digital shots, and the cinematography and camera work — all handheld, all high-contrast, all orange and teal, all the time — are extremely 2005. It’s just not a film that plays anymore, and although it was a huge hit and the eye of a tabloid storm, it’s not much talked about today.
Which makes it an odd choice to be adapted into a Prime Video streaming series. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe, in fact, the choice by star Donald Glover and co-creator Francesca Sloane is a genius one.
In the current phase of the streaming wars (a phase we might be on the precipice of leaving behind, but that’s another story), the studios have not been shaken in their belief that any level of intellectual property name recognition is better than none, and creatives have been barraged with invitations to rework this or that old movie. Very rarely, as in the improbable success of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, an anthology series made in the spirit of the Coen brothers’ cinematic masterpiece, this has worked. More often it has not. Sometimes, the misbegotten results have at least been interesting, like Amazon’s curious reinterpretation of Dead Ringers. Sometimes, as in the case of the uninspired retread of Fatal Attraction, they have been both pointless and dull.
Photo: David Lee/Prime Video
Glover and Sloane’s inspired choice was to select a movie from the studios’ menu that is famous but unsophisticated and not especially beloved, with a dated iconography that could easily be junked and a strong concept that could be stripped to its core and rebuilt completely from scratch. This is exactly what they’ve done, creating a delightful series that is almost the inverse of its inspiration, while sharing its core values: It’s funny, sexy, glossy, and exciting, and built around the chemistry of its two leads.
The setup is markedly different. Rather than rival assassins who got hitched by accident, Glover and Maya Erskine’s John and Jane Smith have been purposefully paired up by the same shadowy employer, shedding their previous lives to begin a new one together. Where Pitt and Jolie begin the film as flawless pros trapped in domestic tedium, Glover and Erskine are awkward, hesitant newbies exploring their dangerous new profession and budding relationship together.
This sets up a show that is a lightly spiced, well-observed take on contemporary work and relationships with a side order of covert-ops hijinks. It might take viewers a couple of episodes to adjust to Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s unique world. It’s intimate and chatty, with a casual approach to the action stuff that isn’t concerned with realism or plausibility, and constantly lowers the dramatic temperature and the stakes, even as the Smiths get involved in increasingly outlandish mission-of-the-week scenarios. It’s a cool, easygoing relationship dramedy about people who just happen to be elite contract agents (but also gig workers, kind of). That’s not to say it doesn’t deliver thrills — there are some close scrapes, and one later episode set on Lake Como has an outstanding protracted chase scene — but it’s easy to tell where Glover and Sloane’s interest really lies: The action is as broad-brush and goofy as the Smiths’ dialogue is plausible, intricate, and nifty in its detail.
Photo: David Lee/Prime Video
Photo: David Lee/Prime Video
Mr. & Mrs. Smith — unlike the cinematically ambitious Fargo show, for example, which Sloane worked on, as well as contributing to Glover’s Atlanta — is also under no illusions about what medium it belongs to. This is very much a TV show. It has slick, aspirational visuals, with lovely location shoots around New York and Europe, handsome architecture, and cool fashion (Glover’s looks are on point). But the scale is small, and the 40-minute episodes are tight, discrete, satisfying short stories. Each one moves the Smiths’ relationship on while pairing them with a string of one-off guest stars, often as the couple’s mission target. It’s a murderer’s row of iconic actors: John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Michaela Coel, and more. Perlman is magnificent as a mournful, childish oligarch with a killer Hitler joke, while Paulson provides a savagely accurate parody of a couples therapist.
This is just a great TV format, and in theory Mr. & Mrs. Smith could run forever like this; it’s reminiscent of Poker Face in the way it seeks to rehabilitate old-school case-of-the-week TV. Glover, however, likes to play games with form, as with Altanta — albeit to a much less experimental extent in this case. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is only a few episodes old before it starts to break its own format. It’s cunningly done, but it perhaps doesn’t leave Glover and Sloane with a lot of room to maneuver in a potential second season.
Perhaps, though, that’s because Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s primary motivator is John and Jane’s relationship, and it’s essential to the drama that this keeps moving forward. Glover and Erskine are simply irresistible: likable, simultaneously spiky and smooth, damaged but competent (up to a point), and very plausibly into each other. Their scenes together radiate with the comfortingly bitchy intimacy of two people who are inseparable partners in absolutely everything, and when things go wrong between them, the show’s insouciant surface cracks enough to expose real hurt.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a fun bit of escapism wrapped around a complex, warm, and relatable love story. Glover and Sloane made something new and refreshing out of a movie that is past its sell-by date. If we’re only allowed to watch new things based on other, older things, we’ll be lucky if a fraction of them are made with as much wit and creativity as this.
The Gods are among us as Joanna and Mal return to dive deep into the season finale of Percy Jackson and the Olympians (08:10). They take an extended look at the season’s final episode and break down all of the significant story elements of the show (15:41). Later, they talk about book spoilers to see what may happen next in a potential Season 2 (02:03:42).
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Finally reunited after a brief hiatus, Rachel Lindsay and Jodi Walker kick off today’s Morally Corrupt by recapping Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz’s chaotic Viall Files episode (1:58), before diving into the Season 11 premiere of Vanderpump Rules (10:39). Then, Rachel and Jodi break down Season 13, Episode 14 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (33:24). Finally, Rachel is joined by Callie Curry to chat about Season 6, Episode 14 of The Real Housewives of Miami (50:01).
Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home. So quiet up and listen down; no, scratch that, reverse it!
This week, Wonka, the musical fantasy starring Timothée Chalamet as the irrepressibly whimsical chocolatier, is finally available to stream on VOD. There’s other exciting new releases available to rent as well, like David Ayer’s latest action thriller The Beekeeper starring Jason Statham and Makoto Shinkai’s fantasy romance anime Suzume. There are a ton of other new movies on streaming to watch as well, like Orion and the Dark on Netflix, Freelance on Hulu, Past Lives on Paramount Plus with Showtime, and more!
Here’s everything new to watch this weekend!
New on Netflix
Orion and the Dark
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: DreamWorks Animation
Genre: Fantasy comedy Run time: 1h 30m Director: Sean Charmatz Cast: Jacob Tremblay, Paul Walter Hauser, Angela Bassett
Written by cerebral screenwriter-director Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and based on the children’s book by Emma Yarlett, this animated fantasy adventure follows the story of a child with an overactive imagination and a constant fear of the future who is befriended by the anthropomorphic personification of darkness. Together, the pair embark on an adventure to conquer Orion’s fear of the unknown and embrace the many wonders the world has to offer.
By the end, Orion and the Dark has boldly transformed into a delightfully eccentric story, taking on even more metatextual layers. But it never loses its heart: It’s still a bedtime story, a parent and child working together to assemble an ending that satisfies the both of them. Their voices combine in a convincing way, with zany, kid-fueled ideas on one hand, and the careful guiding hand of an adult on the other. But child and parent both learn something from the other, and that turns Orion and the Dark from a simple fairy tale into a beautifully bizarre ride, and finally into a movie with a message that hits deeply for both adults and kids.
The Greatest Night in Pop
Image: Netflix
Genre: Music documentary Run time: 1h 36m Director: Bao Nguyen Cast: The biggest music stars of the 1980s
A behind-the-scenes doc of the making of one of the most popular singles of all-time, The Greatest Night in Pop takes you behind the scenes of the star-studded lineup that recorded “We Are the World.”
It doesn’t quite reach the heights of documentary classics, falling short of the insight into the tortured circumstances and frustrated production of Original Cast Album: Company, or the pure musical excellence of Monterey Pop. But there’s something special about seeing these stars mingle that makes this movie a fascinating document on fame and the people behind it.
Shortcomings
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Sony Picture Classics
Genre: Romance comedy Run time: 1h 32m Director: Randall Park Cast: Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki
Justin H. Min (The Umbrella Academy) stars in this new comedy from actor-director Randall Park (WandaVision). Shortcomings follows the misadventures of Ben, a struggling filmmaker living in Los Angeles. When his girlfriend, Miko, moves to New York for an internship, Ben is forced to assess his lifestyle choices up to this point in order to learn to grow as both a romantic partner and a person.
New on Prime Video
Fist of the Condor
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Image: Well Go USA Entertainment
Genre: Martial arts drama Run time: 1h 20m Director: Ernesto Díaz Espinoza Cast: Marko Zaror, Eyal Meyer, Gina Aguad
One of my (Ed. note: PV) very favorite action movies of a stacked 2023, Fist of the Condor is at once a throwback to the Shaw Brothers era of old school Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking, and a new exciting step for Chilean martial arts cinema.
At the end of the day, Fist of the Condor is the Marko Zaror show. And boy, does he deliver. The movie is at its best when it is a series of jaw-dropping fights, one after another, leaning on his incredible star power. As an actor, Zaror brings life and deep pain to the star-crossed brothers, and as a fighter and acrobat, he is unmatched. He seems to be able to alternate from raw animalistic movements to robotic, hypnotic defense (he calls it an “electrical impulse” in the movie) and balletic, gravity-defying spinning kicks that are simply poetry in motion.
Genre: Action comedy Run time: 1h 48m Director: Pierre Morel Cast: John Cena, Alison Brie, Juan Pablo Raba
Taken director Pierre Morel moves to a more comedic mode in this movie about a former Special Forces officer (John Cena) and a journalist (Alison Brie) who travel to a fictional country together to interview the nation’s dictator.
Genre: Musical comedy Run time: 1h 26m Director: Larry Charles Cast: Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Nathan Lane
This musical comedy follows two longtime business rivals who inadvertently discover they are identical twin brothers separated at birth. Concocting a scheme to get their divorced parents back together, they switch places in order to orchestrate a reunion. Think The Parent Trap, but with more musical numbers, dick jokes, and Megan Thee Stallion.
Dicks takes shots at different kinds of modern movies early on, starting with other A24 movies. A24’s logo is accompanied by grandiose music, and its signature elevated horror threatens to become a tongue-in-cheek thematic inspiration when Trevor and Craig wonder whether their predicament meets the qualifications for abuse and trauma. The film’s New York-set, American Psycho-esque corporate saga is clearly filmed in Los Angeles, with the seams of several sets and stages showing in the margins, while the stock footage it uses of NYC is all distinctly anachronistic.
Genre: Romantic drama Run time: 1h 46m Director: Celine Song Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
Greta Lee (Sisters) and Teo Yoo (Decision to Leave) star in director Celine Song’s romantic drama debut as Nora and Hae-sung, two childhood friends who are seperated when the former emigrates from South Korea to Toronto with her family.
Reunited 12 years later, the pair find themselves unmistakably drawn together. As their respective lives and obligations pull them further and farther apart, Nora and Hae-sung must confront their feelings about the life they might have shared together had their past choices been different, and what to do with those feelings now in the present.
Song spoke with Polygon about how the film is all about “the way that life reflects upon itself,” as well as her brief foray into The Sims 4 theater production.
Genre: Documentary Run time: 1h 13m Director: D. Smith Cast: Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell
The first film from Grammy-nominated producer D. Smith follows the stories of four transgender sex workers living in New York and Georgia. Shot in black and white, the film offers insight into the embattled nature of not only their profession, but the cultural fault lines of gender and identity that intersect with their daily lives.
Genre: Action adventure Run time: 1h 24m Directors: Raman Hui, Yong Duk Jhun, Paul Watling Cast: Henry Golding, Brandon Soo Hoo, Lucy Liu
Based on Laurence Yep’s 2003 novel, this action fantasy movie follows the story of Tom (Brandon Soo Hoo), a Chinese American boy living in Los Angeles who inherits the responsibility of acting as the guardian of an ancient phoenix after the passing of his grandmother. Aided by a talking tiger named Mr. Hu (Henry Golding), Tom must learn to harness his new powers in order to prevent the phoenix from falling into the wrong hands.
This documentary unpacks the storied 58-plus-year career of Dario Argento, one of the most prolific directors behind Italian “giallo” horror and the acclaimed mind behind such films as Suspiria and Tenebrae. Featuring guest appearances from the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noé, Panico also follows Argento as he writes the script for a new horror film.
New on Tubi
Sri Asih
Where to watch: Available to stream on Tubi
Image: Premiere Entertainment Group
Genre: Superhero action Run time: 2h 15m Director: Upi Avianto Cast: Pevita Pearce, Ario Bayu, Christine Hakim
The second entry in Indonesia’s Bumilangit Cinematic Universe, adapting comic book stories, is finally more widely available to watch in the US. The first, Gundala, was a very fun time, and director Joko Anwar returns as co-writer on this entry, which follows a young woman who learns she is the reincarnation of a goddess.
New to rent
The Beekeeper
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
Genre: Action thriller Run time: 1h 45m Director: David Ayer Cast: Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Bobby Naderi
Jason Statham stars in David Ayer’s latest action film as Adam Clay, a retired “Beekeeper” (see: black ops secret agent) working as an actual beekeeper in Massachusetts. When Adam’s kindly employer loses her entire life savings to a nefarious phishing operation, he embarks on a one-man mission to avenge her and bring justice to those who wronged her.
Statham is his reliable self, mixing his effortless gruff charm with his comedy chops to help sell the ridiculous lines he has to deliver. And the movie looks great — Ayer and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain cleverly infuse the visuals with a yellow/amber color palette to match the title and the vibe, often making you feel like you’re watching the movie from inside a honeycomb.
Suzume
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: CoMix Wave Films/Crunchyroll
Genre: Coming-of-age fantasy adventure Run time: 2h 2m Director: Makoto Shinkai Cast: Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu
Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering with You) is back with another animated fantasy romance adventure about young people struggling with supernatural forces and the general ennui of youth. When high school student Suzume crosses paths with Souta Munakata, a mysterious wanderer on a quest to seal a series of magical doors around Japan to avert disaster, she joins him on his quest in an effort to save her home.
Also, Souta is transformed into a sentient chair by a malevolent cat. It’s complicated.
Suzume is about processing trauma and finally learning to live. Even after the movie’s turning point, Suzume is still recklessly throwing herself into danger to save others. Like Your Name and Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest sees its young heroes racing against time to stop an impending disaster. But some key differences in Suzume make the final act cinch together in a way that soars above the previous two movies. Suzume has a personal connection to the looming catastrophe, one that snugly wraps around her entire character journey. The event itself feels vast and all-encompassing, but because the movie focuses on her instead of on the action, it gives the payoff more emotional impact. And when Suzume steps up to fight her battles, it’s less about making a dramatic choice or defying all odds. She simply reframes what she’s trying to do in a way that feels more personal than most action heroes’ journeys. She doesn’t want to give her life to save the world; she just wants to stay in it.
Wonka
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Genre: Musical fantasy Run time: 1h 56m Director: Paul King Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key
Timothée Chalamet (Dune: Part One) stars in this new musical prequel to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory as everyone’s soon-to-be-favorite chocolatier, now simply an aspiring magician looking to break into the candy business. He’ll have to find a way to overcome the nefarious chocolate cartel and build a factory of his own if he’ll any hope of achieving his dream, though.
Normally, I consider it unfair to compare two movies like this, but as I said, I’m a huge fan. Yet more importantly, Wonka directly invokes the previous film in ways big and small, going so far as to have Chalamet’s version of the character speak in the same diction as Wilder’s, complete with a “Scratch that, reverse it” line. As this is a story about a young Willy Wonka, the film must leave a little room to get from here to there, so Chalamet is granted the space to make the character his own. But this is a version of Willy that’s too sanded-down, too approachable to be truly memorable.
I heard the news, and my face fell, but then my face brightened again at the mere thought of him yelling MANDO!! repeatedly, warmly, boisterously. A dear old friend of Mando’s greeting his old friend Mando, and a dear old friend of ours greeting all of us.
Maybe you miss his voice already, in which case I encourage you to just sit with this and luxuriate in his warm, boisterous, too-loud-but-that’s-why-we-love-him voice for a while. Ahhhh! Mando! They all hate you, Mando! Only you, Mando! Welcome back, Mando! Sorry for the remote rendezvous, Mando! His name, in the quite popular Star Wars Disney+ series The Mandalorian, is Greef Karga, but of course that’s not his name. His name, in any context and on any planet, is Carl Weathers, and we are forever delighted to hear his voice, to see our warm and boisterous old friend who greets us too loudly and claps us on the back so hard it hurts. Carl Weathers died on Thursday. He was 76. He is immortal for any one of roughly a dozen roles across a dozen beloved pop-cultural universes, and maybe Greef Karga makes your personal list of Most Beloved Carl Weathers Roles and maybe Greef Karga doesn’t, because that’s the towering stature of the beloved actor and old friend we’re dealing with here.
Carl Weathers was born in New Orleans, played defensive end for San Diego State (where he helped win the 1969 Pasadena Bowl and also got his master’s in theater arts), played eight games at linebacker for the Raiders (no stats but presumably fantastic vibes), and moved on to the Canadian Football League (where he once recovered a fumble as a member of the BC Lions). Then he became heavyweight champion of the world.
With apologies to that time in 1975 when he almost beat J.J. into oblivion on Good Times, the wider world first met Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed, ultra-charismatic semi-villain of the original 1976 Rocky, an astoundingly dapper champ (he had a 46-0 record with 46 KOs!) angrily boasting about how “none of ’em got a prayer of whippin’ me,” which nobody did, in that one anyway. What follows, over the first four Rocky movies—including Rocky II in 1979 (Creed loses, Rocky wins); Rocky III in 1982 (Creed trains, Rocky wins); and Rocky IV in 1985 (Creed dies, Rocky avenges)—is one of the great franchise-spanning character arcs in American cinema, from the mountain the hero has to climb to the wise mentor that spurs the hero to climb the next mountain. And it all peaks with the super-macho and absurdly joyous Rocky + Creed training montage in the third movie, which remains the purest Dudes Rock moment in global cultural history.
Apollo Creed is an all-timer, noble beyond measure in both victory and defeat, and the sheer embodiment of tender-badass American greatness, his hallowed last name alone fueling the greatest boxing franchise of our time. “See, we’re born with a killer instinct that you can’t just turn off and on like some radio,” Creed tells Rocky in Rocky IV, inspiring several generations of rapt moviegoers to run through walls. “’Cause we the warriors. And without some challenge—without some damn war to fight—then the warrior may as well be dead, Stallion.”
And then, with absurdly genial aplomb, Weathers found so many other damn wars to fight. In 1987, for example, he bursts onto (and off of) the screen in the original Predator, hooking up with Arnold Schwarzenegger for literally the single most macho handshake in recorded human history.
Who else could’ve possibly embodied the titular supercop role in the delightfully cheeseball 1988 action movie called Action Jackson? (“Mr. Jackson is so vicious we don’t even let him have a gun.”) Who else do you get to lead your two-season early-’90s TV cop drama literally called Street Justice? (All TV intros should feature all the characters smiling, or at least they should when Carl Weathers is one of the smilers.) Who else do you get to lend gravitas and credibility to the later mid-’90s seasons of the TV cop drama they actually had the balls to call In the Heat of the Night? And then. And then! Who else do you get to sell this?
Who else could’ve seen hapless ol’ Happy Gilmore as golf-pro material? Who else do you get to sell that pastel sweater-hat combo, that ludicrously too-long prosthetic hand, that alligator eye in the jar he still carries with him everywhere because Carl Weathers doesn’t even lose the fights he loses? Who else fits the character name “Chubbs Peterson”? Carl’s turn to pure screwball bliss in the 1996 Adam Sandler no-bullshit classic Happy Gilmore was long overdue and warmly received, giving our dear friend yet another iconic death scene and a second life in comedy. He’d go on to play a fictionialized version of himself and a less effective mentor in Arrested Development (where he always managed to get a stew going) and voice the battle-hardened Combat Carl in the Toy Story universe, where he occasionally gets to say things like, “Combat Carl’s seen things. Horrible things.” Because who else do you get to voice a character called Combat Carl?
A true great man. Great dad. Great actor. Great athlete. So much fun to be around always. Smart as hell. Loyal as hell. Funny as hell. Loved his sons more than anything. What a guy!! Everyone loved him. My wife and I had the best times with him every time we saw him. Love to… pic.twitter.com/Gi2lPWFTgt
And so, when Carl Weathers yells, Ahhhh! Mando!, the response from literally everyone watching is grateful, boisterous, warm: Ahhhh! Carl! Only you, Carl! They all love you, Carl! He got to host Saturday Night Live, too, in 1988, where he touted his role as Apollo Creed (“Only in a movie could a white man beat a Black man who was bigger, stronger, faster, and a better fighter”) and then sang a goofy little song called “What About a Rainbow” in a perfectly imperfect falsetto. Just a cheerful and beloved warrior who’d found another challenge to meet, another damn war to fight and win. He was the People’s Champion. He died undefeated.
Nora and Nathan are here to walk you through everything you need to know before two big Taylor Swift events: the Super Bowl and the Grammy’s. They give a rundown on the Chiefs and the 49ers and how the game might go for Travis Kelce (1:00), the logistics of Taylor getting from Tokyo to Las Vegas in time for the game (37:01), and what squad she might be bringing along with her (60:14). Then they preview the Grammy’s and make some predictions on what awards Taylor might be bringing home with her (1:08:15).
Hosts: Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard Producer: Kaya McMullen
Perhaps the most telling—if cynical—part of Amazon’s new Mr. & Mrs. Smith series occurs in the opening minutes of the second episode. Over bagels and lox, Maya Erskine’s Jane asks Donald Glover’s John what inspired him to go down the path of high-risk espionage and 40-hour-a-week drudgery. In his winking and meta way, Glover simply responds “money,” as the couple laugh, knowing there’s rarely another answer.
For almost two decades, this hyper self-awareness has been Glover’s signature. Mr. & Mrs. Smith revels in a mischievous and playful hubris. Glover knows that you know about his lucrative, eight-figure deal with the Bezos behemoth. Just like he understands that Donald and Maya aren’t Brangelina, and that a show originally meant to star Phoebe Waller-Bridge before Erskine joined is the type of discourse machine few creators can stoke.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and by extension Glover, feels caught between two eras of TV struggling to coexist. On paper, Glover’s and co-creator/showrunner Francesca Sloane’s show nestles nicely into Amazon’s growing portfolio of four-quadrant, IP-spy thrillers. It’s a remake of a beloved 2005 movie, starring two darlings of the prestige TV era with a cast of supporting players—Paul Dano, Michaela Coel, Alexander Skarsgard, Sarah Paulson, Ron Perlman—that’d put most comparable programming to shame. Its ballooned budget is so tastefully deployed across its wardrobe and locales that it feels like a sentient Instagram feed of those vacation girls Drake is always complaining about.
Like Atlanta before it, Mr. & Mrs. Smith lives and dies by the audacity of its swings. If Brad and Angelina’s original was pitching the rebirth of domestic bliss as aspirationally sexy, the reboot’s vision is more earnestly sober. Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith asks the type of questions—Can love survive the gig economy? How much of ourselves do we lose in an interracial relationship? How many times is it socially acceptable to call your mom on a given day?—that can make couples therapy feel like a lobotomy. In other words, it’s a Donald Glover show.
Eight years ago, the novel proposition of Atlanta was that it was in constant conversation with the hyper-online and underrepresented Black spaces it mined for inspiration. In the deflating final days of the Obama era, a convergence of multiple factors—Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, streaming wars—meant white America had a lot of time and money to spend on Black art that was deemed “important” and also made them feel good.
Careers were minted. Creatives turned mogul. A generation of Black showrunners became recognizable by one half of their name: Glover, Issa, Rhimes, Waithe, Carmichael. We were inundated with a bounty of great art (and just as much schlock) with no sign of an end.
Then the pandemic struck, and soon the entire era of “peak TV” came under scrutiny. The white guilt and easy PR born from 2020 protests and social movements could only last so long in Hollywood, a place where the illusion of change is usually mistaken for the real thing. “Prestige” shows began to fade. Shows like Lovecraft Country, Them, and Love Life came and went without securing the same type of rabid fan bases that Atlanta and Insecure could boast (and even those shows were never ratings juggernauts).
The 2023 Hollywood strikes didn’t help matters. In November, returning Disney CEO Bob Iger said the quiet part out loud when he declared, “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.” The not-so-subtle jab at diversity as the main culprit for Disney+’s stagnation arrived right on schedule. A couple months later, Issa Rae acknowledged what this prevailing new Hollywood order meant for the darkest people in the room. “You’re seeing so many Black shows get canceled, you’re seeing so many executives—especially on the DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] side—get canned,” Rae told Net-A-Porter. In January, Rap Sh!t, Rae’s follow-up to Insecure, was canceled at Max after two seasons. “You’re seeing very clearly now that our stories are less of a priority. I am pessimistic, because there’s no one holding anybody accountable.”
Mr. & Mrs. Smith isn’t a Black show in the way we’ve been taught to view any mass media originated by a powerful Black person. Sloane hails from El Salvador, and the show’s creative duties are split up between a host of creatives from Hiro Murai to Carla Ching. While the series’ best moments can’t help but interrogate ideas on race and power, it’s always through the prism of matrimony and the ways it can drive the people stuck within it mad.
The pilot episode doesn’t begin with our new John and Jane but instead with two conventionally attractive stand-ins for Pitt and Jolie played by Alexander Skarsgard and Eiza González. Naturally, in the show’s winking manner, Skarsgard’s neck is blown off within minutes, metaphorically signaling that our traditional spies need to die for Glover and Erskine to provide something a tad more esoteric. Perhaps the show’s most loaded (and hilarious) moment arrives when our new half-Japanese, half-white Jane murders three Black targets when she gets jealous that John is connecting with these men over Asian jokes. The racial complications of the situation volley back and forth until they’re too absurd to take seriously. John thinks his Japanese wife is jealous of his Black male bonding, which she’s chastised for by their wealthy white marriage counselor.
Like its protagonists, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is at war with itself,sweating profusely with ideas and ambitions. It’s a self-conscious examination of whether greatness in romance, career aspirations, and art can flourish within the confines of domesticity. The show is enamored of its own sense of subversion, but it most often succeeds when it’s more conventional.
Similar to the institution it seeks to mock and venerate, the pace and emotional fallout of the series is brutal, closer to Marriage Story than Mission: Impossible. It has all the ugly and tortured contours of witnessing a good friend’s marriage disintegrate before your eyes.
Glover’s and Erskine’s portrayals of John and Jane are awkward and cringe-inducing, and the camera often lingers on their most intimate moments with a voyeuristic quality. The duo’s chemistry is slippery. True to life, there’s less of a spark and more of a sloppy runaway freight train of existential and boredom-fueled horniness. You believe their love in the same way you would the word of your hopelessly romantic friend. Time, life, and rapidly decreasing hormonal levels will always tell them what you cannot.
But the sincerity baked into the elevated rom-com premise gives the show its electricity. Glover still has an uncanny ability to disarm the audience, his laugh and innocent charm as infectious as it was behind the Greendale table. While Glover and Erskine’s chemistry waxes and wanes from episode to episode, the show’s comedic moments—Jane warming John’s dangerously frostbitten penis, Jane going to great lengths to hide her farts, John lying about smelling said farts—are its most refreshing.
The conundrum of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that marriage—like love, vulnerability, and moguldom—is inherently corny because growing older is corny. At 40, Glover is no longer “Trojan horsing” his concepts through the Hollywood system. He’s been part of the industry for almost 20 years, dating back to his time working on 30 Rock. Like James Harden before him, Donald has become a system, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the first of his shows to interrogate life from that perspective. Glover’s John is distrusted by the faceless spy corporation in a way Jane is not. Rarely does John follow rules, plans, or conventional thinking even when it becomes clear his life hangs in the balance. Ever since Donald made the leap from network sitcom star to auteur status, he’s chafed against rewriting the history of his ascent.
Part of the myth of Atlanta is how much John Landgraf—the FX executive who coined the phrase “peak TV”—didn’t want the show they ended up getting. “Steve always reminds me, ‘FX didn’t want to do this show—you had to beg them. Fuck them,’” Glover told The New Yorker in a 2018 profile, paraphrasing his brother and Atlanta co-creator. “I like Landgraf, I’ve learned a lot from him, but FX is a business. It’s not there to make some kid from Stone Mountain, Georgia’s dreams come true.” (Landgraf, for his part, didn’t dispute Glover’s narrative. “I don’t have a problem with the Trojan-horse narrative if it’s important to Donald,” Landgraf responded. “We’re in the business of making pieces of commercial television that mask deeper artistic narratives.”)
By Episode 4 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, this fraught subtext is made plain when Glover and Erskine meet fellow Agents Smith (played by Wagner Moura and Parker Posey) years into their spycraft and relationship. The humor and tragedy of the generational divide between the young and old Smiths is illustrated when the older John is unable to distinguish between a Clipse and Eminem song, in very much the same way most don’t care to interrogate the rise of FX’s Dave in the wake of Atlanta.
“It’s hard to be old and famous and stay punk,” Moura waxes poetically.
“I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think you’re supposed to be punk,” Donald responds.
Glover returns to the idea of who and what isn’t “punk” a lot. He reportedly told the Atlanta writing staff, “We’re the punk show—what’s the most punk thing to do?” during its conception, and after the disappointing critical reception to Atlanta’s third season, his wife’s response was “You do punk things, you get punk results.” By the time Atlanta returned for the following season, it was competing in a crowded landscape it had paved the way for, as shows like Reservation Dogs, Barry, Ramy, and Dave followed their own lanes of subversion to acclaim of their own.
One of the unspoken tragedies about the end of whatever you want to call the last 20 years of television is that it presented a convenient truth. For a moment, there was a belief—as nurturing as it was naive—that by virtue of TV finally becoming artistically “important” it could also inspire change. Maybe if we watched and related to the depths of Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Don Draper enough we’d come to find out something about ourselves. Naturally, that extended to Earn and Issa and Dre. But that rarely if ever happens. TV is mass media entertainment, and all it’s ever known is the mean. Transcendent television always existed in opposition to that.
In that same New Yorker article, Glover spoke about Atlanta’s capacity to teach something important. Critical consensus was still on the show’s side and we were yet to see the other side of the streaming boom. “I don’t even want them laughing if they’re laughing at the caged animal in the zoo. I want them to really experience racism, to really feel what it’s like to be black in America,” Glover said. “It’s scary to be at the bottom, yelling up out of the hole, and all they shout down is ‘Keep digging! We’ll reach God soon!’”
We’re back to digging. And maybe that’s the joy of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. A series this messy being made by a team that still seems to care when the market says they don’t have to is still an entertaining proposition.
Every frame isn’t perfect. Often the show’s world seems to adhere around the joke or punch line, leaving characters to seem far more stupid or downright illogical than they probably should be. But then Ron Perlman delivers a terrible Holocaust joke or Glover punctuates a scene by cocking his hat to the side like a 2007 Derrick Comedy skit and it all comes back into focus.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith found a reason to exist and managed to get there in the most peculiar way possible. It didn’t need to save or change the world, because no amount of peak TV—even the shows by Black creators—could. Like marriage, eras can only last so long until a new pair of Smiths comes around.
Juliet is back with What’s Up Thursday, where she goes over what’s up in Bachelor Nation, on Bachelor Reddit, and in the broader world of reality TV. This week, Juliet discusses Daisy’s Lyme disease, Lauren’s cake moment, and Jason Tartick’s new book. She also discusses Bachelor Reddit comments, and other reality shows including Traitors, Love Is Blind, and Love Island All-Stars.
Pork chop suey, duck fat-infused corn dogs and more are served at Ramova Grill.|
Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago
Chicago — we’re in a leap year, so the city gets an extra day of February antics. For cynics, that might feel like we’re an extra day away from spring, but don’t be one of those fools. A beautiful way to avoid wintertime blues is to enjoy a great meal at a great, new restaurant. With that in mind, welcome to the Eater Chicago Heatmap for February.
The Heatmap features new restaurants and old favorites creating a new buzz. Whereas the Eater 38 is a collection of can’t-miss stalwarts and bucket-list entries, the Heatmap is about the now — focused on recent openings that have the city’s diners talking.
The February update includes four updates: a reskinned hot dog stand, a renovated South Side icon, a tasting menu with a late-night fine dining taco menu, and a hip Lincoln Park steakhouse.
My dog was put to sleep last night. She was my first dog and I had her for almost 10 years. She was the moodiest bitch on the planet but was always super sweet to me. I’ll miss hearing her close the laundry room door to hide from my kids and catch a break. This is a toast to a real one. Fry up some bacon just for your puppies once in a while. They deserve it.
Tyson and Riley are back with another offseason episode! For today’s new-era “game changer,” they are joined by Mike Gabler from Season 43. They expand on the season’s edit of Gabler’s ambiguous job, talk about the secret to making a good Survivor audition tape, and then discuss the reasoning behind Gabler’s decision to donate all of his winnings to charity.
Hosts: Tyson Apostol and Riley McAtee Guest: Mike Gabler Producer: Ashleigh Smith Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Have you heard the story of Truman Capote’s downfall? That elaborate yarn about one of the 20th century’s literary lions double-crossing his closest friends, developing a terminal case of writer’s block, and slowly drinking himself to death? It’s the postscript in Capote, the 2005 film about the writing of In Cold Blood that’s drawn from Gerald Clarke’s biography about the writer. The 2006 movie Infamous, based on a dishy oral history by George Plimpton, ends with a similar summary. The saga was detailed in Sam Kashner’s Vanity Fair article from 2012, and again in Melanie Benjamin’s bestselling 2016 novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue. It’s covered in the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes, and it’s the central focus of Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, which is the source material for the new FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans.
Forty years after Capote’s passing, pop culture is still fascinated with this sophisticated soap opera. Maybe that has to do with its Americanness: the gay arriviste who fled a troubled childhood in the Deep South and reinvented himself among New York high society, only to sink as spectacularly as he soared. Maybe it’s because Capote was tied to so many other beloved mid-century luminaries, from Audrey Hepburn and Marlon Brando to longtime friend Harper Lee, who based the crafty To Kill a Mockingbird character Dill on him. Whatever the cause, each Capote chronicle is rendered through contemporary concerns about authorship, fame, relationships, and the passage of time. As the marketing for Feud suggests, the socialites in Capote’s orbit were the “original” Real Housewives of New York City, making him a sort of highbrow Andy Cohen.
Many writers have left colossal footprints over the past 100 years—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer. But the Capote legend is the one that seems to enchant people the most. “It’s a testament to how he crafted his own celebrity,” Thomas Fahy, director of English graduate studies at Long Island University and the author of Understanding Truman Capote, tells The Ringer. “His wit, his charm, his talent, and his association with the ultra-wealthy were certainly part of that, and they reflect our own obsessions with access to celebrity culture. We got to watch the trajectory of his life, and that includes the darker side of our celebrity worship, which is relishing or taking some kind of pleasure in the decline of a celebrity.”
Feud explores that decline at length. By the end of its first episode, Capote (Tom Hollander) has already become persona non grata among his core social circle, the posh women whose catty secrets he spilled in a thinly veiled 1975 Esquire short story meant to be an excerpt from a novel he never published. Over lunch at Manhattan’s chic La Côte Basque, Capote’s cohort would exchange wicked gossip. Among the group was the favored Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), married to the mighty chairman of CBS; Slim Keith (Diane Lane), a stylish jet-setter who hobnobbed with Cary Grant and William Randolph Hearst; C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), commemorated in Diego Rivera paintings, Slim Aarons photographs, and the cover of Time magazine; and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), a blue blood forever stuck in her sister Jackie Kennedy’s shadow. Perhaps naively, none of them expected Capote to use their chitchat as material. They were furious when he did.
Tom Hollander as Truman Capote in Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans FX
Hopscotching across the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, Feud recounts what drew Capote and the women to one another—and the toll it took when most of the group ostracized him in climactic fashion. Ryan Murphy, the anthology series’ originator, outlined the season, after which Jon Robin Baitz, the Pulitzer-nominated playwright who created the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, wrote all eight episodes. “We have so few models of outrageousness amidst glamor,” Baitz says of his attraction to Capote’s pageantry. “He represents a kind of gay outsider, and some of that lives on. YouTube is filled with interviews where he’s a little bit worse for wear, to say the least.” Baitz and director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) structured some of Feud according to whether they could pinpoint the right actresses opposite Hollander’s flowery dialogue. Other so-called swans, like Gloria Vanderbilt, Vogue darling Marella Agnelli, and Harper’s Bazaar contributing editor Gloria Guinness, were excised from the narrative.
Each Capote portrait allows its makers to project different hypotheses onto this treble-voiced smoothie whose outsized personality offset his diminutive frame—or, as Baitz puts it, the “ornately decorated, little gay elf.” Capote (which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar) and Infamous (starring Toby Jones) dramatize the cost of In Cold Blood, the true-crime pacesetter about two brothers executed for murder in small-town Kansas. Both films present a vampiric Capote ingratiating himself with locals in exchange for access. A sensation that made Capote even more of a talk show perennial than he already was, the book saddled him with insurmountable pressure to produce another masterpiece. The Esquire story supplied an easy way to stay relevant in the face of such anticipation. It, too, was an act of vampirism. But unlike In Cold Blood, it was Capote’s undoing. After his friends abandoned him, he had something of a nervous breakdown, subsisting on a buffet of pills, vodka, and regret.
Those friendships, and their deterioration, are also the foundation of The Swans of Fifth Avenue. Baitz avoided reading Benjamin’s novel, assuming it would cover too much of the same ground. He wasn’t wrong: Swans begins the same way the inaugural episode of Capote Vs. the Swans ends, with the women gathering at La Côte Basque to rant about Capote’s recent treachery. The two depictions have ample overlap—including the starry Black and White Ball that Capote threw in 1966, which is also the subject of Deborah Davis’s 2006 nonfiction book, The Party of the Century,and a forthcoming stage musical—but some of their inventions differ. Feud imagines a tormented Capote communing with Paley’s ghost after she dies of lung cancer in 1978, while Swans of Fifth Avenue envisions a scene in which Capote stations himself outside her funeral, watching surreptitiously as the clique he once commanded convenes without him.
Benjamin says her book was optioned multiple times after its success. At one point, it was going to be a limited series featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. Rob Roth, a visual artist who wrote a 2022 play about the creative kinship between Capote and Andy Warhol, was interested in turning the novel into a musical. Various adaptations lingered in what Hollywood calls development hell. Benjamin was close to inking a final deal when Feud was announced, she says.
“This huge scandal had never really been fictionalized before,” Benjamin says of Swans. “Facts are for the historians, and emotions are what a novelist can do. To me, the relationship between Babe and Truman is the heart of the novel. She had an uninterested husband cheating on her all the time and not much purpose in her life. She was only known for her beauty, and then along comes this giant intellectual who seemed to see something in her. She’s a mother figure in a lot of ways. … She didn’t live long after the fallout. She wasn’t the same old Babe, and neither was Truman.”
Any novelist, screenwriter, or reporter probing the Capote mythology gets to interrogate the “why” of it all. Why did he sell out his friends, knowing how image conscious they were? Did he believe his charisma made him bulletproof? Had he known the whole time that he would use their words as literary grist? If they hadn’t dismissed him, would Capote have finished Answered Prayers, the novel the Esquire story teased? And how much did his own biography inform his decisions? As a boy in Alabama, Capote felt abandoned by his mother, who frequently locked him away while entertaining gentleman callers. She, too, wanted to ingratiate herself into elite Park Avenue circles, depositing Capote with relatives until she summoned him to New York years later. That early rejection haunted Capote throughout his life. Rebranding himself as a bon vivant was a way to overcome it. As that status faded, what did he have left? “He put himself in the position where he was again kind of orphaned,” says Kashner, the author of the Vanity Fair article. In The Capote Tapes, following a clip from one of Capote’s appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett says to the camera, “It almost was sort of suicide,” referring to his banishment from the swans’ inner circle.
There is, of course, a generous way to interpret Capote’s actions: He didn’t deceive his pals—he immortalized them in the pages of an influential magazine. Nothing Edith Wharton wouldn’t have done. “I don’t think his initial impulse was that this was going to be a betrayal,” Fahy says. “I think he thought that these were lifelong friends who were going to be happy for him and that he’d disguised their names well enough—no hurt, no foul, right? He was desperate to get this material out there as a way to inspire himself to get back to work. I don’t think he anticipated the depth of the controversy.”
Fahy and others cite Capote’s combustion as a precursor to reality television. (A recent Vanity Fair headline dubbed his former sidekicks “the original influencers.”) Capote’s late-’70s slump was documented on Dick Cavettand The Stanley Siegel Show, where he slurred his words and struggled to replicate the aplomb that had made him popular. Unlike certain celebrities who predated the modern media era or tried to hide their foibles from the public, Capote was willful about retaining his spotlight. Perhaps that is what makes him so contemporary. “Truman enjoyed it all, but I think that deep down he wished that he could have just gone to lunch with Babe Paley,” Warhol associate Bob Colacello told Kashner. During Capote’s final years, he contributed to Interview and Playboy, attempted to get sober so that he could finish Answered Prayers, published a handful of short stories, and reportedly planned a follow-up to the Black and White Ball that never materialized. Until alcoholism got the best of him in 1984, he often seemed one move away from a comeback. What happened in between those events remains, more or less, a mystery. And so we do what any captive audience would: We speculate.
“Especially in our age, he was somebody that cultivated celebrity,” says Infamous producer Christine Vachon. “There was a lot of drama around the way he lived his life, and I think all of that is very beguiling. I just have a tremendous amount of empathy for somebody who was as talented as he was, and as damaged. He was unable, ultimately, to bring his talents and the way that he wanted to live together in a way that was not dangerous for him.”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.
The finale episode of the first season of Disney Plus’ Percy Jackson series finishes up the adaptation of The Lightning Thiefwith a fight on the beach, a traitor revealed, and a teary reunion.
Previous episodes ended with a post-credits tease of what comes next, but is there a preview for season 2? No, but there is a little post-credits scene that shows the fate of one important character.
In the post-credits scene, Sally Jackson’s scumbag ex-husband Gabe (Timm Sharp) tries to get inside her apartment while on the phone with his lawyer. She wisely changed the locks, though, so he can’t get in. But he spots a package on the Jacksons’ doorstep and decides to open it. This happens to be a return-to-sender package, addressed to Percy — aka the one containing Medusa’s severed head.
He opens it, looks directly inside, and immediately gets turned to stone. Get wrecked, Gabe.
Gabe doesn’t appear in any of the books after the first one, and considering the only reason Sally married him is because his gross mortal-stink masked Percy’s scent from monsters, it’s no one’s loss. In fact, we’re all pretty glad to see him out of the way.
Image: Disney
This is actually similar to the infamous movie’s post-credits scene, where Gabe returns to the apartment to pack up his stuff. He goes to the kitchen to get a beer, only to find the fridge locked and a note from Percy saying that no one should open the fridge. Unperturbed, Gabe smashes open the lock — and then is frozen by Medusa’s head.
Yet, somehow, neither of these versions is anywhere near as deliciously brutal as his fate in the book series. In the books, it’s actually Sally who uses the head to freeze Gabe and then sells his petrified corpse as a sculpture. It’s a big hit in the art world, and she uses the proceeds to put down a deposit for a new apartment and fund a semester of tuition at NYU, where she goes on to study writing. She reports Gabe as missing, but he never turns up! (“Goodbye Earl” by The Chicks plays in the background.)
Word’s out on if Sally will find the frozen Gabe and profit off him in the show, but she definitely deserves to make a splash in the art world and finance her passion for writing.
Jo and Rob return to break down the third episode of True Detective: Night Country. They discuss the vast use of teal and what it might symbolize, why the flashback sequences are so effective, and Danvers’s (at times misguided) maternal instincts. Along the way, they talk about Hank’s ongoing suspiciousness and Navarro opening up for the first time. Later, they highlight some of the show’s most significant unanswered questions.
Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady
A glider is essential for getting around Enshrouded’s Embervale, a sprawling realm that usually demands a lot of walking. While there are a few fast travel points — called Ancient Spires — due to their spire-iness, they make perfect places to jump off of with a glider and explore new corners of the world.
Our Enshrouded guide will explain how to craft the glider, and run down what you need to craft the two improved versions: the advanced glider and the extraordinary glider.
How to craft the glider in Enshrouded
Image: Keen Games via Polygon
Your first glider can be made pretty early in your game. You’ll need:
8 Shroud wood. Shroud wood is, get this, wood you find in the Shroud. Not just any wood is Shroud wood, though. You’ll need to find a tree that is fully in the Shroud and chop it down with an axe. The Shroud wood that drops will look different from normal wood — it’s grayer and more twisted.
2 animal fur. The goats and the wolves you encounter on the surface drop these.
2 string. String can be manually crafted (no workbench necessary) from 2 plant fiber that you pick up just about anywhere.
2 Shroud spores. The human-like Fell that populate the Shroud (and spawn outside of your Flame Altar’s influence at night) will drop Shroud spores when you kill them.
Once you’ve gathered the materials, head to your workbench to craft the glider.
That basic glider doesn’t have the best glide ratio — you lose a lot of elevation for the distance you fly forward — but it will revolutionize how you get around.
That first glider is also going to last you a while — at least until you start making linen.
How to craft the advanced glider in Enshrouded
A lot of things need to happen before you can craft the next glider — the improved glider. You’ll need to find the Hunter and the Carpenter, and you’ll need to find the Hunter’s Hand Spindle.
The Hunter and the Carpenter can be found in their respective Ancient Vaults. You’ll find them as part of “Hunter Becomes The Hunted” and “Carpentry Assistance” quests. You’ll be tasked with finding the Hunter’s hand spindle in the Revelwood for the aptly named “The Hunter’s Hand Spindle” quest.
Image: Keen Games via Polygon
Once the Carpenter, Hunter, and hand spindle are all in place, you’ll be able to craft the improved glider at the Carpenter with:
6 Shroud wood.
4 linen. Linen is made at the Hunter’s hand spindle and requires 2 flax for each 1 linen. Flax is a purple flower that you’ll find around the Revelwood biome in the north.
4 string.
8 Shroud sack. Around the Revelwood biome, you’ll also find spitting plants. You’ll get poison sacks from the regular, purple and orange ones. Inside the Shroud, you’ll find similar plants that glow blue and drop Shroud sacks when killed.
How to craft the extraordinary glider in Enshrouded
Just like crafting the advanced glider, there’s a lot of work you’ll need to do before you can craft the extraordinary glider.
The Hunter will ask you to retrieve a tanning station from the Nomad Highlands to the east as part of her “In Need Of A Tanning Station” quest.
You’ll have to have gotten the Blacksmith’s crucible as part of “Crucible Needed For A Smelter” and be able to make copper bars.
The Carpenter will need a table saw from the “Table Saw For The Carpenter” quest that takes you to Thornhold to the northeast.
You’ll need to get the both the Alchemist’s mortar for “The Alchemist’s Mortar” (if you haven’t yet) and the black cauldron he requests for “A Black Cauldron For The Alchemist.” You’ll find his mortar in Lone Thistle north-northeast of the Ancient Spire — Springlands fast travel tower. The black cauldron takes a lot more work (and more fighting) to find in Rattlebleak far to the northeast.
Image: Keen Games via Polygon
When you return to the Alchemist with the black cauldron, you can craft an alchemy station (20 fired brick, 6 wood planks, 10 nails, 3 wood logs, 5 copper bars,and 1 black cauldron).
4 Shroud wood.
2 leather. Leather can be made at the Hunter’s tanning station from 10 dried fur, 20 salt, and 2 ammonia glands. For ammonia glands, you’ll have to head into the Shroud in the Nomad Highlands to the northeast of your starting point. You’re looking for the red walking mushrooms. Those creatures(?) drop ammonia glands when you kill them.
2 linen.
4 alchemical base. Alchemical base can be made at the alchemy station from 1 Shroud liquid, 1 mycelium, 1 water, and 1 Shroud Spore.
Once you (finally — it’s going to take you a long time) have everything in place, head to the Carpenter to craft the advanced glider.
How to equip the glider
Image: Keen Games via Polygon
Once you craft any of the gliders, you have to equip it before you can use the wing suit. Head to the Character menu. The fourth slot down on the left is for your glider. Open it and select the best glider you’ve crafted.
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