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  • ‘Oh My God, They’re Ruining the Show’

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    From the day it premiered, Twin Peaks had a problem. Audiences wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer; David Lynch and Mark Frost weren’t interested in telling them who killed Laura Palmer. When they agreed to reveal the killer, the network was apparently vindicated. Some 17 million viewers tuned in — the highest ratings the show had achieved since the season-two premiere.

    But now that the murder mystery had been resolved, the show had a new, even more vexing problem: If it wasn’t about solving the murder of Laura Palmer, what was Twin Peaks about? Even Bob Iger concedes he may have been too hasty. “Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced I was right,” he said. “Deep down, I felt David was frustrating the audience, but it may well be that my demands for an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer threw the show into another kind of narrative disarray.” Mark Frost agrees. “We paid a big price for it. You know, that was something that contributed as much as anything to the momentum falling apart.” David Lynch was even blunter. “That killed Twin Peaks,” he said. “Totally dead. Over. Finished.”

    The problem, of course, was that Twin Peaks wasn’t finished. It was in the middle of its second season, and the story would continue, one way or another, for at least 13 more episodes. “Especially network television— when you’re dealing with 22 episodes, and the production monster’s chasing you, you don’t really have any other choice,” says Mark Frost. “I don’t think it had been fully figured out,” says Scott Frost. “Production is like jumping out of a plane. And you have a parachute, but it’s actually not attached to you yet.”

    The resolution of Laura Palmer’s murder isn’t so much a period at the end of a sentence as it is an ellipsis: Leland may be dead, but BOB is still out there, hunting for another host. Or, to put it another way: With the central mystery resolved, the show’s writers had unprecedented freedom to redefine what Twin Peaks could be. “I don’t know if there was a master plan there at all. We got so good at resolving things we thought up that we were kind of fearless about what we put in,” says writer Robert Engels. “That was one of the things that was fun about the show — that we had the sense that we could pretty much do or try anything,” says writer Harley Peyton. “There were times when that took us down weird avenues, but there were times when it took us in absolutely the right direction. I think we took some wrong turns along the way, but that, to me, is part of the process, and part of making something under sort of insane circumstances.”

    There’s a palpable sense of desperation as Twin Peaks — just one episode removed from Leland’s death — manufactures another, flimsier reason for Cooper to stick around town. Targeted (correctly) by the FBI’s internal affairs division for his extralegal undercover mission at One Eyed Jack’s and (incorrectly) for stealing a large amount of cocaine, Cooper is suspended from the FBI and forced to hand over his badge and gun. Twin Peaks had already flirted with turning Cooper, a consummate outsider, into a Twin Peaks insider. (At the very least, it was hard to imagine him saying good-bye, forever, to the Double R’s coffee and cherry pie.) But Cooper’s dismissal from the FBI, even temporarily, altered the show’s fundamental building blocks in a way that proved challenging to reverse. So much care had been put into crafting the show’s look and feel: What happened when you upended it? “We were doomed the day that Agent Cooper turned in his black suit for lumberjack flannel,” says editor-director Duwayne Dunham.

    Twin Peaks had always managed to juggle its darkest moments with its silliest, but the show’s unique tone was becoming harder and harder to balance. “If we made mistakes along the way, one of them was maybe falling in love with comedy a little too much,” says Peyton. “This is the thing you always have to be careful of as a writer: Are you entertaining yourself, or are you entertaining the audience? We were certainly entertaining ourselves, and the hope was that we would entertain the audience as well.”

    No sustained analysis of season two would be complete without a brief survey of some of the show’s wackier story lines. Nadine Hurley waking from a coma with the strength of a superhero and the mind of a teenager? “I was a big comic book fan, so I brought in Nadine’s superpowers, which I thought was hilarious. That’s on me,” says Peyton. The emergence of Lana Milford (Robyn Lively), a black widow who seduces both of the elderly Milford brothers while turning every other man in Twin Peaks — even, uncharacteristically, Cooper — into a drooling idiot? “That was meant to have a supernatural aspect, but that supernatural aspect never actually comes in, so it’s just unresolved,” says Peyton. Ben Horne, trying to reverse the Civil War while delusionally believing himself to be Robert E. Lee? “That idea came about at the same time Ken Burns’s [The] Civil War miniseries happened. Had that miniseries not come out, I doubt that story ever would have gone into the series,” says writer Scott Frost.

    And then there’s what Peyton acknowledges as “the most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe”: James Hurley’s brief, stand-alone detour into a film noir after he crosses paths with a femme fatale named Evelyn Marsh. “James is just such a wonderful actor, and he had this wonderful vibe that sort of made him a perfect fit for that kind of story, which is why we wanted to do it in the first place,” says Peyton.

    At this point in the story, James’s love life has gone full Peyton Place. “The only thing I really, really wish they would have done is kept James with Donna,” says actor James Marshall. “When Laura died, the reality of their attraction came around. And when they got together, they should’ve stayed together. They could help each other through their grief, and you actually see two people heal while everything else is going crazy. Instead: Evelyn Marsh.”

    “The most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe.”
    Photo: ABC

    In a rare subplot that takes place entirely outside Twin Peaks, James — on a sullen solo motorcycle trip after Maddy is murdered — suddenly wanders into a James M. Cain novel. Twin Peaks had nodded at classic noir tropes before; Neff, the insurance agent who alerted Catherine Martell to a shady policy in the show’s first season, was named in tribute to the protagonist of Cain’s 1943 crime classic Double Indemnity. This particular subplot owes Cain an obvious debt and stretches across five episodes, as the married Marsh picks up James at a bar, hires him as a mechanic, sleeps with him, and frames him for killing her husband before having a change of heart and letting him go.

    It is as paint-by-numbers as a noir story can get, and those responsible for translating it to the small screen were just as dubious of the story line as the audience. “You hadn’t seen a character like Evelyn in Twin Peaks. She felt like she came from, I don’t know, Dynasty or something,” says Dunham, who directed one of the episodes in which the Evelyn Marsh subplot unfolds. “I regret that I didn’t do a better job with it. But it just didn’t fit. It was completely wrong, and it was wrong for James. James — that character — would not be attracted to that. James was one of the Bookhouse Boys.” Marshall agrees. “I think there were a lot of actors on the show who were reputable, seasoned actors — who’ve been around a long time — doing exactly what I was scared to do: going to production and fighting for their parts,” he says.

    “So much happened on the show where I didn’t know if my character was coming or going,” said Lara Flynn Boyle. “I called [David Lynch] every day, like, ‘Oh my God, they’re ruining the show.’ He got sick of hearing from me,” says Sherilyn Fenn. “This costumer, in the second season, said, ‘Oh, I’ve got 20 hula skirts.’ And I was like … ‘Do you think Twin Peaks is just this random, let’s-be-weird-to-be-weird? Because it isn’t. It never was.’”

    “It just was getting weird for weird’s sake,” agrees Dunham. “My thing is: That’s not an accurate understanding of David’s work. It’s not just weird for weird’s sake. There’s a purpose and a reason. That’s why, in David’s hands, he can make that stuff work.”

    The problem reached its nadir in “Episode 21,” the first (and only) episode directed by Uli Edel. As the director of the acclaimed, noirish drama Last Exit to Brooklyn, Edel had earned a reputation as a talent to watch. But his abrasive style clashed with the cast, who were justifiably confident, by then, that they knew what they were doing. During the filming of one scene, “Uli said, ‘You’re just furniture to me, man. Just go where I tell you,’” says Michael Horse. “So I go to the crew and said, ‘This guy, Uli, is he good?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he’s really good.’ And I went to Uli and said, ‘Hey, man, you can say that to me. But if this isn’t Emmy-quality shit, I’ll come to your house and kick your ass.’”

    Horse’s conflict with Edel was a representative example of the cast’s larger sense that Twin Peaks had been handed to some unfit caretakers while Frost and Lynch were busy elsewhere. “I hope I’m not making anybody mad, but they claimed David and Mark were totally on top of the Twin Peaks stuff — that they were giving yeses and noes and overseeing everything in every detail. But I know that, working with David, it was a way different show. So I just don’t believe that,” says Marshall. “I do think that it had an effect on the show. How could it not? You could be the most talented person on earth. You’re not going to be able to imitate David Lynch.”

    It’s true that the Leland reveal in “Episode 14” was Lynch’s last directing credit until the season-two finale. But while there are Twin Peaks fans who believe season two’s missteps were due to Lynch’s absence, it was Mark Frost who spent some time away from the show during its perceived dip in quality. Just as Lynch spent a chunk of Twin Peaks’s first season directing Wild at Heart, Frost took a leave of absence from season two to direct Storyville, a moody, James Spader–starring political thriller. “His absence made things complicated. Certainly for my relationship with David,” says Peyton.

    By this point, Peyton and Engels — long established as two of Twin Peaks’s most reliable writers — had been given producer credits and taken on some duties that, today, would fall under the umbrella of “showrunning.” When Frost went to New Orleans to shoot Storyville, he left Peyton in charge. “It’s not like I had to somehow convene a writers’ room and figure out what we’re going to do next. We know what every episode is going to be, and Mark was talking to me every day,” says Peyton. “But one night — at, like, almost midnight — my phone rings, and it’s Todd Holland. And Todd is freaking out because he just got off the phone with David Lynch, who gave him a raft of script notes that were going to impact his shooting the following morning. Now, I’m already a little irritated, so I say, ‘Look. Ignore David’s notes. He has no business calling you up at 11 o’clock at night with script notes. Just shoot your day and let it be.’ He’s very thankful, and I feel I’ve done my job.”

    “My phone rings the next day. And David yelled at me for ten minutes. And I’m telling you: Ten minutes is a long time to have someone yell at you. His temper … you didn’t see it very often, but I saw it, and he was fucking furious, yelling at the top of his lungs: How dare I? What the fuck am I doing? Who the fuck do I think I am? The phone call, obviously, did not end well. And my relationship with David — whatever relationship I had — that was the end of our relationship.”

    The disagreements among creatives at the top of the show were further complicated by the actors, who continued to use their own power to try to shape the stories written for their characters. “There were some political things that were starting to happen, and I just got out of the way for the whole thing,” says Marshall. “There were several other actors on the show who were vying for different things, and it was like … I didn’t want to be involved in that.”

    Most significant was the scrapping of a plotline that had been simmering since the beginning of season one: the flirtation between Cooper and Audrey Horne. “As far as I remember, we all believed that they were a couple or going to be a couple,” said Tina Rathborne, who directed one of season one’s many sexually charged scenes between Audrey and Cooper. “Audrey’s seduction of Coop seems part of the dual lesson that Coop is learning. He’s learning about his more innocent side, and he’s learning about his darker side, that he’s willing to be seduced by this young girl. This young, somewhat raunchy girl. But he’s also willing to defend his higher side.”

    In season one, Cooper’s so-called “higher side” seemed to win out. When he found Audrey waiting for him, naked, in his bed at the Great Northern, he let her down by gently explaining that what she really needed was a friend. But owing to Kyle MacLachlan and Fenn’s undeniable onscreen chemistry, the writers kept looping Cooper and Audrey back together. Audrey goes undercover at One Eyed Jack’s to help the man she calls “my special agent”; Cooper risks his career to rescue her. When Audrey meets Denise Bryson and feels threatened by the presence of Cooper’s female FBI peer, she marks her territory by planting a kiss on his lips.

    If the writers didn’t want the audience to be invested in a romance between Cooper and Audrey, they were doing a very, very bad job backing away from the story. That’s because they had every intention of doubling down on what had obviously emerged as the show’s most potent will they/won’t they. “David took me to dinner and basically asked me if I was in love with Kyle,” says Fenn. “And I burst out laughing. Not even slightly! He’s a great guy, he’s a nice person, but that’s it. I didn’t have any feelings that way. At all. The truth is that as human beings, he and I didn’t have that kind of chemistry. But those characters, for some really weird reason, did.” Peyton adds, “We were going to do a — ‘romance’ may be the wrong word, but certainly an exploration of the relationship between Audrey and Cooper. That didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen because Kyle refused.”

    For years, the official story has been that MacLachlan rejected the plotline because he didn’t believe Cooper would get involved with a high-schooler. There’s a solid plot justification for that argument; Cooper did, after all, gently reject Audrey for the same reason back in season one. But whatever the merits of that argument, there’s no question that offscreen dynamics were also in play. At the time, MacLachlan was dating Lara Flynn Boyle, whose push for Donna’s unconvincing bad-girl makeover in season two was judged, by some, to have been a response to Fenn getting more attention for her coquettish performance.

    “I still remember talking with Mark [Frost],” says Peyton. “Mark was saying, ‘No, we’re going to draw a line in the sand. We can’t do this. We planned this pretty carefully, and it’s going to upend our second season.’ Then Kyle went into Mark’s office with David. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting. And then he came out and said, ‘No, we’re not doing it.’ And that was because David was the one who was basically saying, ‘We’re going to go with what the actors prefer.’ The thing about David that I learned over time is that he will sort of do anything for the actors. And because he’ll do anything for them, they will do anything for him.”

    Whatever the underlying reasons for it, even those who were frustrated by MacLachlan’s justification now concede it was better that the Cooper-Audrey plotline didn’t move forward. “It’s hard to say, because nowadays, I would say, ‘No, we can’t do that, because he’s in a position of power and she’s much younger.’ All the things Kyle was saying. It’s easy to say he did it because of Lara Flynn Boyle. But who knows why?” says Peyton. “I mean … he did end up with a love interest who was the same age [as Audrey]. And she was from a convent, for crying out loud.”

    Cooper’s formerly cloistered paramour was Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), a half-sister of Norma Jennings whose sudden arrival in Twin Peaks was written to fill in the gap where the Cooper-Audrey romance would have been, and actor Heather Graham knew what she was walking into. Prior to being cast, Graham had already made her way into the outskirts of Lynchland by co-starring, opposite Benicio del Toro, in a Calvin Klein commercial Lynch directed. But playing a woman capable of instantly bewitching Dale Cooper would be an entirely different challenge, and Graham met Lynch at his home to discuss the character — after he showed off another ongoing project. “He was doing some kind of experiment where he was putting meat into this kind of art piece and letting ants crawl on it,” says Graham.

    Graham recalls Lynch describing Annie as “a finely tuned machine. Like a Ferrari or a sports car that’s very amazing — but that it can be easily thrown off-balance, if something goes wrong.” Peyton had a blunter appraisal: “Sad to say, Annie was — at least when the character was initially conceived — a damsel in distress. And not a great deal more than that,” he says.

    “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ [Harley Peyton] said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”
    Photo: ABC

    Audrey, for her part, got a new love interest of her own — though not before the show teased a flirtation between Audrey and Bobby, who was briefly positioned as Ben Horne’s new right-hand man. “I don’t know if they were definitely going to go with it. I thought they were definitely going to go with it, and we had those moments,” said Dana Ashbrook. “I think it was either a MacGuffin, or a change of someone’s mind, or I don’t know. It was so on the fly, always, the story.” In the end, Bobby stayed true to Shelly — though not before Gordon Cole planted a kiss on her — and Audrey got her own new love interest in John Justice Wheeler, a dashing young businessman-pilot played by Billy Zane. “It was Harley who came up with [John Justice Wheeler],” says Mark Frost. “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ he said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”

    Wheeler does, in fact, throw on a cowboy hat, take Audrey on a picnic, and serenade her with a rendition of the cowboy folk standard “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Fenn herself was unconvinced. “He’s a really nice guy. But the first time I met him was at 6 in the morning. And he goes, ‘What would you do if I leaned over the table and kissed you?’ And I go, ‘I’d have a problem with that.’” Still, Wheeler’s routine is enough, apparently, to knock Audrey’s crush on Cooper out of her brain entirely; the episode’s script describes her as “warm and certain” as she reassures Wheeler that she doesn’t have feelings for anyone else.

    With Cooper and Audrey splintering off into their own separate love stories — and much of the other main cast engaged in their own semi-stand-alone arcs — Twin Peaks needed both a villain and an event to justify weaving everything back together. If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, revealed early in season two as having escaped custody hell-bent on revenge. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, Earle’s clash with Cooper would become Twin Peaks’s most significant arc following the resolution of Laura’s murder. “That was supposed to be short-lived,” says Engels. “I talked those guys into hiring [Kenneth Welsh]. He was a friend of mine, and they just loved him, so that character became bigger.”

    After escaping a mental institution and stalking Cooper to Twin Peaks, Earle engages Cooper in a grotesque version of the daily chess game they played when they were partners. Whenever Earle takes a piece, he commits an equivalent murder; the loss of a pawn, for example, leads to the murder of a drifter with no direct connection to the larger narrative.

    Once Cooper realizes the game Earle is playing, he’s savvy enough to build a strategy not aimed at winning the game, but at protecting the pieces remaining on his side of the board. Still: You’d think he’d be smart enough to realize that protecting his queen is paramount — especially since he’s simultaneously falling in love with Annie, whose innocence and lack of worldliness makes her an especially ripe target. And you’d definitely think he’d be smart enough to recognize the danger when the Giant literally appears in front of him, waving his arms and mouthing the word no, after Annie suggests she’ll enter the Miss Twin Peaks pageant. But when Cooper falls in love, it seems, his deductive powers vanish; just a few episodes earlier, he flirts with Annie at the Double R, then walks right by the not-especially-well-disguised Windom Earle.

    If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, played by Kenneth Welsh.
    Photo: ABC

    All these plotlines converge in the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks, which also turns out to be the last gasp of the comedy-focused storytelling that had come to the forefront of the first season. The Miss Twin Peaks pageant was designed, among other things, to bring the increasingly scattered group of characters back together: Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson, Lucy Moran, Nadine Hurley, Lana Milford, and Annie Blackburn all compete, and Norma Jennings, Doc Hayward, Pete Martell, and Dick Tremayne all play a role in judging the pageant. Though she had been targeted by Windom Earle alongside Donna and Shelly just a few episodes earlier, Audrey is noticeably absent for much of the competition. “I called David right away and said, ‘I’m not doing it,’” says Fenn. “No fucking way. Audrey was there, but I didn’t, like, parade up and down a fucking catwalk in a bathing suit.”

    Goofy as it is, the levity feels welcome before Twin Peaks takes its final plunge into the darkness. Lana Milford does something called “contortionistic jazz exotica,” and Lucy Moran does a dance that ends in the splits, which led to actress Kimmy Robertson needing to reassure people that there was no damage to the baby. (Robertson, for the record, was not actually pregnant.) But when Annie Blackburn is crowned Miss Twin Peaks — after a speech that leans heavily on the words of Chief Seattle, a leader of Washington’s Suquamish and Duwamish tribes — Earle, who has infiltrated the Miss Twin Peaks pageant disguised as the Log Lady, makes his move. A queen has been crowned; he’s ready to claim her.

    It’s a strong cliffhanger for the season finale, but that’s not how it originally aired. By this point, ABC’s scheduling of Twin Peaks had become erratic, with lengthy hiatuses in December and January — a problem further exacerbated when the show was preempted by coverage of the Gulf War. After the memorably bizarre cliffhanger of “Episode 23” — which concluded with Josie Packard, revealed as the mysterious shooter who shot Cooper in the season-one finale, somehow trapped in a drawer pull in a Great Northern Hotel room — ABC put the show on hiatus. That troubling sign prompted a fan campaign called COOP, or Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks, to place hundreds of phone calls and send thousands of letters and packages, some containing logs or doughnuts, to ABC. David Lynch goosed the campaign further in a February appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, where the host gamely posted Bob Iger’s mailing address. (“I love annoying these network weasels,” said Letterman.)

    ABC relented, and Twin Peaks returned on Thursday, March 28 — an escape, at last, from the wasteland of Saturday night. But the reprieve was short-lived. Less than a month later, on April 18, 1991, “Episode 27” aired — a return to form that ended, promisingly, with BOB reemerging from the Black Lodge. But anyone intrigued by that cliffhanger was forced to wait nearly two months, to June 10, when the network unceremoniously dumped the final two episodes as a double feature. Though Twin Peaks hadn’t been formally canceled, everyone involved knew the writing was on the wall. “As a phenomenon,” Mark Frost conceded a month before the season-two finale aired, “the show is over.”

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    Scott Meslow

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  • Every Single Thing Happening at the 2026 Grammys

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    It’s once again Music’s Biggest Night, where heavy hitters vie for the most esteemed qualifiers to stick onto album packaging. There’s a lot for five-time host Trevor Noah to get into after this weekend in Los Angeles saw huge ICE Out demonstrations and <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/do… More »

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    Vulture Editors

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  • The Invite Is Occasionally Funny, But That’s About It

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    Photo: The Invite/All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

    It makes perfect sense that, as a director, Olivia Wilde would want to follow the extravagant, ambitious disaster of Don’t Worry Darling with a four-character chamber piece confined to one location. The Invite, based on the Spanish director Cesc Gay’s 2020 movie The People Upstairs (which was itself based on an earlier play by Gay), features an unhappy couple inviting their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that quickly goes to some strange places; it’s the kind of supposedly focused character study that probably felt nourishing after all the off-camera craziness of Wilde’s previous directorial outing.

    We can sense the theatrical origins of the story right from the start, with downcast music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) arriving home one evening only to find that his fussy, anxious wife Angela (Wilde) is in the middle of preparing for a dinner party for their upstairs neighbors. Joe is not only unprepared for this, he doesn’t even like these neighbors, who weird them out and keep them up at all hours having extremely loud sex. Joe and Angela’s incessant bickering early on — every observation prompting an objection or a counter-observation — telegraphs that their neighbors will probably turn out to be a lot better adjusted than they are. Sure enough, when Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz) arrive, they seem both relaxed and all-knowing: They confess that they heard Joe and Angela arguing loudly before they even rang the doorbell. He’s a retired firefighter, she’s a sexologist, and suddenly the upstairs neighbors have the upper hand, psychologically speaking.

    The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early. Angela, we’re told, is hypervigilant and neurotic — their daughter is at a sleepover and Angela tells Joe she called beforehand to ensure that there will be no men or weapons present in the friend’s house — and she’s apparently also on top of current mores and attitudes from days spent listening to podcasts. Funny, sure, but somehow, Angela also manages to organize an entire meal based on meat and cheese without ever checking to make sure her neighbors can eat such things. (It turns out, of course, that Pina can’t.) This is minor stuff, meant to add to an accumulation of interpersonal awkwardness, but such inconsistencies add up and deflate the characters’ believability. If in something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf the characters’ inadequacies and resentments fuel their increasingly erratic behavior, here these people feel like grab bags of punchlines, their actions there primarily to get laughs.

    More worryingly, the film’s stylized, theatrical dialogue only really works onscreen if there’s a musicality to the words and a rhythm to the back and forth. Wilde manages to undermine that through aggressive, insistent music cues that flatten everything out — almost as if she doesn’t trust the script, credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, to do the trick. Still, these are good actors, and each brings their unique style. As a comic performer, Wilde (who also gives a tremendous performance in another Sundance movie this year, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex) excels at going big — precise in her timing, unafraid to exaggerate for comic effect — while Rogen deploys his usual goofy, improv-style cadences — stumbling over words, anxiously repeating himself, swallowing punchlines.

    When Norton and Cruz show up, they bring their own vibes: He’s soft-spoken and even keeled, she’s a bit of a flower child. This is all intentional, surely. You don’t go with a cast like this if you don’t want these actors to do their own individual things. And it does pay off, occasionally: Entering the apartment, Hawk and Pina talk a lot about the décor and the energy in the room, and Joe responds, snarkily, “We talked a lot about capturing energy, as if it’s a thing we could actually do.” But it takes seriously sharp writing and directorial control to make all these people feel like they exist in the same movie, and the truth is that the performances don’t really cohere.

    Wilde leans into the comedy as much as possible, often framing shots for maximum visual humor. At its best, The Invite uses the spaces of this apartment well, putting dead air between its alienated characters and bringing them physically closer over the course of the film. But even here, the tonal whipsawing can backfire. As I noted earlier, The Invite goes to some odd places, but with each new turn in these relationships, the picture loses steam, perhaps because they’ve never come across as real people and these emotional twists don’t feel fully earned. Meanwhile, the shticky humor of the first hour makes for a disappointing mismatch with the awkward earnestness of the finale, as the characters all get their sentimental, tedious monologues, now complete with soft music on the soundtrack. (The movie is, frankly, a clinic in how not to use a score.)

    Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart, released in 2019 to great acclaim, worked in large part because she brought so much inventiveness to a familiar and chaotic coming-of-age tale, using technique to overcome the story’s tonal challenges. Don’t Worry Darling, by contrast, felt too stilted and controlled, too programmed and predictable, almost as if the director felt obligated to rein in her stylistic impulses against a supposedly more complicated story. The Invite feels at times like a film that could have benefited from more control. It’s too baggy to really work as a chamber piece. (It’s not a particularly long movie, but it drags considerably after a while.) But it also doesn’t really give Wilde any real opportunities to cut loose and demonstrate her strengths as a director, which once seemed so considerable.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • I Miss When the Golden Globes Were Deranged

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    Aaron Taylor Johnson winning a Globe for Nocturnal Animals in a year when Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali was winning everywhere else.
    Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

    If the 2026 Golden Globes had a theme, it was “Normal service restored.” After four months of Oscars season lifting up some contenders and humbling others, the Globes in many ways looped us back to where we thought we’d be in September: One Battle After Another cleaning up, Hamnet as the runner-up, Sinners as a crafts-only play.

    That message was sent early in the night with the ceremony’s first two categories, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress. These were the two least predictable races on the film side, and they’d recently gotten more chaotic thanks to the Critics Choice Awards the weekend before. In Supporting Actress, which has been as wide-open an acting race as we’ve seen in years, Critics Choice went with Amy Madigan in Weapons — an extremely gonzo, extremely Internet-friendly pick. In Supporting Actor, the two nominees from One Battle After Another apparently split the vote at the CCAs, clearing a path for Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi, a challenge to the conventional wisdom that 28-year-old hunks don’t win trophies. (Being a 28-year-old hunk is usually considered its own reward.)

    Neither of these wins repeated at the Globes, where the supporting prizes went to Teyana Taylor of OBAA and Stellan Skarsgård of Sentimental Value. For better and for worse, this duo feels like a much more plausible pair of Oscar winners: Taylor as an electric performer in the Best Picture front-runner, Skarsgård as a venerable European near the end of a long career. So plausible, in fact, that many pundits fingered each for the win at the beginning of the season. Taylor and Skarsgård were both worthy winners who gave memorable speeches, but taken together, their wins seemed like a sign of Globes voters preemptively aligning their tastes with the Academy’s, rather than delivering distinctive wins in their own right.

    Something similar occurred with Hamnet. Since the literary adaptation won the TIFF People’s Choice Award in September, its buzz had gotten awfully quiet. As Blank Check’s JJ Bersch wrote a few weeks ago, “it barely feels like the movie even exists at this point, weirdly.” Once Rose Byrne started taking critics’ prizes for her turn as a frazzled mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, fans wondered if she could possibly upset Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley, who since Telluride had been pegged as the race’s indomitable Goliath. Byrne’s hot streak continued when she won Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Globes, but while she delivered a lovely, charming speech — which ended with the news that her husband, Bobby Cannavale, couldn’t make it because he was attending a reptile convention in New Jersey — it was probably the last speech she’ll get to give this season. As expected, Buckley won the other Best Actress trophy, and Hamnet’s 11th-hour Best Drama win seemed to prove the film does indeed have enough juice for the Irish actress to sweep from here on out.

    As will be the case in a three-hour show, there were a couple small surprises. Brazil’s The Secret Agent taking Best Foreign-Language Film, alongside star Wagner Moura’s win for Best Actor in a Drama, indicates that the hierarchy of power in the Neon universe may be about to change. Is the movie the new front-runner for the International Film Oscar, and if so, what does that mean for the presumed heavyweights in that category, It Was Just an Accident and Sentimental Value, and their chances of sneaking into Best Picture? (Or is this just a case of Brazilians, the largest international contingent in the Globes’ membership, having a home-field advantage at this ceremony?)

    Now, there’s nothing wrong, exactly, with any of the Globes’ picks. If they wanted to vote for Stellan Skarsgård, let them vote for Stellan Skarsgård! (Especially since Skarsgård wasn’t nominated at SAG, giving his win Sunday night a little extra weight.) It’s just that this is the exact opposite of the way the Globes used to be. Usually, they’d be the ones injecting a little insanity into the race, like when they handed Best Supporting Actor to Aaron Taylor Johnson in Nocturnal Animals in a year when Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali was winning everywhere else. Or, that same night, awarded one of their Best Actress awards to Isabelle Huppert for Elle when everyone assumed Jackie’s Natalie Portman had it in the bag. In an alternate awards-season universe, it would have been the Globes who gave Jacob Elordi and Amy Madigan their trophies and made us all question reality. Now, after having been canceled and reborn, the show has lost its signature sense of derangement, and there’s something a little sad about that.

    Still, the old Globes live on in one respect. By snubbing Sinners in Best Drama, handing it a consolation-prize Box Office Achievement award, and punting its only other win (Best Score) to a commercial break, Sunday’s ceremony continued the proud Golden Globes tradition of disrespecting Black-led films. That’s one piece of awards-season heritage they just can’t quit.


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    Nate Jones

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  • Every Single Thing Happening at the 2026 Golden Globes

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    How many awards will One Battle After Another win?
    As the season’s overwhelming Oscar favorite, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film looks likely to take Best Picture – Musical or Comedy as well as Best Director. But will it sweep categories like Screenplay and Supporting Actress, or can other contenders get a boost?

    Can Sinners hold up its end of the ballot?
    Sinners and OBAA are both Warner Bros. films, and — totally coincidentally — they’re slotted on opposite sides of the Globes’ ballot. With its biggest rival competing as a comedy, can Sinners dominate the Drama categories?

    Which international contender will pull ahead?
    The Globes went hard for global cinema, handing nearly two-dozen nominations to Neon’s international slate. Pundits tend to assume the Iranian Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident is leading the pack, but watch out for the Norwegian family drama Sentimental Value or the Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent to make a leap.

    Will the Globes shed some light on the Supporting Actress race?
    Nobody knows what’s going on over in Supporting Actress, which means the Globes can wield a ton of influence. Weapons’ Amy Madigan has the momentum right now, and another televised victory would secure her place as the season’s most unlikely front-runner. But there’s space for OBAA’s Teyana Taylor, or a dark-horse candidate like Sentimental Value’s Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas to eke out a win.

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    Vulture Editors

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  • The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy

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    Photo-Illustration: Dewey Saunders; source photos: Warner Bros. Pictures; Getty Images.

    When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print — understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of an adulterous fantasy, who drifts through a series of lustful but unconsummated encounters before crashing a masked sex party thrown by an elite secret society in a Long Island mansion. The film’s dreamlike atmosphere veered toward the surreal, with Cruise and Kidman doing the weirdest acting of their lives and the orgygoers’ portrayal — the masks, the password, the choreography — striking many viewers as more goofy than sexy or sinister.

    But Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out, and Eyes Wide Shut eventually came to be seen in a different light. Beyond the orgy, there are subtler, more disturbing moments — including a scene in which a costume-shop owner appears to offer his underage daughter to Cruise’s character — that hint at a world where sex, power, and predation blur. With hindsight, those undertones seemed to foreshadow real-world horrors to come. In the 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon dragged rumors of elite sex-trafficking rings from the fringes into the mainstream of American paranoia. Then came Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death, and suddenly an underappreciated film from two decades earlier started to look like an uncanny premonition.

    After a while, some began to wonder if perhaps Eyes Wide Shut hadn’t been a little too prescient. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist who spent years on each of his films and demanded dozens, sometimes hundreds, of takes per scene. So, the thinking went, every costume, prop, and line reading is there for a reason, infinite symbolism scattered across the frame for anyone determined enough to decipher it. This was the logic that led some to believe that he’d helped NASA fake the moon landing and then confessed to it by putting Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining. That idea, along with a handful of even farther-fetched ones, was presented without comment in Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary, Room 237, a film presumably meant to mock such readings that may have only encouraged them. And Kubrick didn’t exactly tamp down the mythmaking. In the final years of his life, he rarely left his estate north of London and all but stopped giving interviews, allowing his work to speak for itself — and, in the absence of explanation, to be interpreted however anyone pleased. So when Eyes Wide Shut seemed to anticipate a scandal that wouldn’t come fully into view until decades later, it raised a question: What if Kubrick knew?

    Soon, in exactly the parts of the internet you’d expect, a conspiracy theory took shape: Kubrick had made Eyes Wide Shut as a warning, an exposé of an actual pedophile cult hiding in plain sight among the global elite. The masked orgy wasn’t just a metaphor — for the sexual hypocrisies of the upper class, or the transactional nature of intimacy, or the secret compromises of monogamy, or whatever — it was a re-enactment of what really happened behind mansion doors. And once the wrong people caught wind of it, they had Kubrick killed so that the movie could be reedited to scrub the most incriminating details. Some claim an entire 24 minutes were cut. And yet, the theory goes, Kubrick had so masterfully embedded his clues in the film that some of them survived the posthumous meddling.

    There are multiple strains of this theory, each with its own twist on which real cabal Kubrick was supposedly exposing. Some point to the usual suspects — the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, garden-variety Satanists. Others zoom in on the Rothschild family, noting that it once owned the 19th-century mansion used for some of the movie’s orgy exteriors. Others go a few steps further, claiming that Eyes Wide Shut was not just predictive of Epstein’s crimes; it was literally about him. (The evidence? Well, for starters, in a party scene near the beginning of the movie, a couple idling behind Kidman is said to look like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or at least the man has gray hair.)

    Across these variants, one detail is usually cited as the smoking gun. In the movie’s last scene, Bill and Alice Harford (Cruise and Kidman) are walking through a toy store with their young daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton). Just before credits roll, Helena is shown standing near two adult male extras — who, believers claim, also appear at the party that opens the film — and then following them as they head toward another aisle. This half-second beat, according to breathless video essays and blog posts stitched together from freeze-frames, is Kubrick’s final, chilling reveal: The Harfords have handed their daughter over to the cult.

    This theory has become surprisingly popular. Versions of it circulate constantly on Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, where today Kubrick may be remembered less as a filmmaker than as a whistleblower who died for telling the truth about high-society pedophiles. And if it once lived mainly in the sewers of social media, it broke into the daylight in December of last year, when Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction and the director of The Rules of Attraction, laid out his own variation of the conspiracy on The Joe Rogan Experience.

    On the podcast, Avary told Rogan that he’d recently reread his copy of the Eyes Wide Shut shooting script, and it had gotten him thinking about all the ways the movie might’ve been different if Kubrick had lived. “It’s definitely missing third-person narration,” he said, arguing that, in particular, the scene where Cruise visits a morgue seems designed for voice-over. Avary also discussed the toy-store theory: “You see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They’re taking her away. They’ve given their daughter to the pedo cult.” Then he relayed a story he’d heard — secondhand, he admitted — about an early screening of the movie for studio executives. According to Avary, “There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, ‘It’s my movie! You can’t cut it! You can’t fucking cut my film!’ Big argument going on and then he dies like four days later.”

    I should probably unmask myself here as a skeptic of this alleged conspiracy, which strains credulity not just for interpretive reasons but also for extremely basic logistical ones. If someone had truly uncovered an elite sex-trafficking operation and wanted to alert the public, why on earth would he spend years of his life and a studio’s $65 million making a coded allegory about it rather than, say, telling the police or a reporter? And even if you grant that premise, why would a panicked sex cult — powerful enough to murder an internationally beloved director — then allow the film to play, even in sanitized form, on thousands of screens around the world? 

    These theories may have once been a fun way to overread a slippery movie, but lately they seem to be on the verge of overtaking it. And with a new Criterion Collection 4K remaster of the film available, the hunt for “hidden clues” seems likely to intensify as every Christmas light and billiard ball can now be scrutinized in even higher resolution.

    That would be a shame. Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I love and one I think ranks among Kubrick’s best. For all its controlled craft, it’s looser, stranger, and more dramatically flammable than anything else he ever made. It’s also unclassifiable, never bothering to explain what exactly it is. That ambiguity is part of its power, but it’s also the void into which conspiracists pour their fantasies. Before those fantasies become the movie’s legacy, I wondered if a few calls and emails to people who worked on the film might bring some clarity.

    Many were happy to help. “I can assure you that all of these speculations are total nonsense,” says Jan Harlan, a producer of five Kubrick movies as well as the director’s brother-in-law. “Stanley would’ve found these people amusing,” says Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s longtime assistant and archivist. “This is spurious and unfounded, just another fine example of the irrelevant rubbish that followed Kubrick throughout his career,” says Nigel Galt, Eyes Wide Shut’s editor. “It’s ludicrous to think that, at that time, Kubrick would’ve been aware of Jeffrey Epstein,” says Denise Chamian, one of the film’s casting directors. “I don’t think Stanley gave a flying fuck about warning the world about anything,” says Kubrick’s co-writer, Frederic Raphael. (Cruise and Kidman declined through representatives to participate in this story.)

    It’s not just that it’s doubtful or unprovable that Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut to disrupt a secret clan of wealthy pedophiles, say his collaborators. It’s that the theory is untethered from everything we know about the movie’s origins. Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, Traumnovelle, which Kubrick was already discussing in 1968 as a potential follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He bought the rights in 1970 — when Jeffrey Epstein was still a teenager — and at one point considered adapting it as a comedy, possibly with Steve Martin in the lead. He returned to the material on and off over the years but focused on other projects for nearly three decades. If he was really on a mission to thwart real-world sex trafficking, he wasn’t in much of a hurry.

    Also, what many now interpret as Kubrick’s exposé of elite perverts was, in fact, mostly Schnitzler’s doing. Eyes Wide Shut is an extremely faithful adaptation of Traumnovelle. “Of course you can see where it varies,” says Raphael, who was hired to help with the screenplay in 1994, “but the basis of the movie is still the Schnitzler story, and Stanley always insisted that we preserve its beats.” The novella includes all of the film’s major characters and story elements — including the doctor, his wife’s fantasy, the sex worker whose services he declines, the piano player who sneaks him the orgy password, and the mysterious woman who sacrifices herself to save him — except it’s set in early-20th-century Vienna instead of 1990s New York and its protagonist is named Fridolin instead of Bill. It was even adapted into an Austrian TV movie in 1969, and that version’s plot is largely the same as Kubrick’s.

    The people I spoke to also say they doubt Kubrick had any special knowledge of real-world sex cults, and the one in Eyes Wide Shut was something he was still trying to conceptualize as he made the film. In Raphael’s 1999 memoir, Eyes Wide Open, he recalls that Kubrick wasn’t entirely sure what might motivate such a group. At one point, he asked Raphael to help fill in the blanks, so the writer drafted a backstory in the form of a fake FBI dossier, an imagined history of a clandestine network of powerful hedonists called “the Free” who murdered anyone who leaked their secrets. He faxed it to Kubrick, who promptly called, worried that Raphael had somehow hacked into an FBI computer. When the writer explained he’d made the whole thing up, Kubrick was relieved. “Okay. As long as we’re not,” he said, “on potentially dangerous ground here.” As Raphael tells me, “If Stanley had known about anything like that in real life, I’m sure he would’ve been much too apprehensive to get anywhere near it.”

    For help imagining Eyes Wide Shut’s orgy sequence, Kubrick sought the expertise of two unconventional scholars: Gershon Legman, an erotic folklorist who provided historical context on the sexual customs of Schnitzler-era Vienna, and Dr. C.J. Scheiner, a New York emergency-room physician with a Ph.D. in erotology, who, over a series of long phone calls, gave him a crash course in 4,000 years of group sex. As production neared, Kubrick asked Scheiner about his personal knowledge of modern orgies. “I had, as a nonparticipating observer, researched this part of the social scene since the 1960s and had extensive first- and secondhand knowledge of American and European organized group sexual activity, from home parties to elegant weekend orgies in a château outside of Paris,” Scheiner tells me. Nothing in their conversations, he says, suggested the film was inspired by any real sex cult. And, “based on the questions he asked,” Scheiner adds, “my impression is that Kubrick had no — or very little — firsthand experience with orgies himself.”

    Much of the conspiracy talk around Eyes Wide Shut centers on another of the film’s advisors: Larry Celona, a longtime New York Post reporter who’s credited as a “media consultant” — for one scene, Kubrick had him write a mock Post article about the death of Mandy, the woman who spares Cruise’s character from the cult’s punishment by offering herself in his place. In 2019, Celona happened to break the news of Epstein’s death, a coincidence some found too eerie to ignore. But, as Celona tells me, he’s a crime reporter for New York’s biggest tabloid, “so it’s not a far reach that I’d be the first to know” about a famous death in the city. (He was also the first to report JFK Jr.’s fatal plane crash, which occurred, in another uncanny coincidence, on July 16, 1999, the same day Eyes Wide Shut opened in theaters. In certain corners of the internet, this alignment of dates is treated like the Rosetta stone; in QAnon lore, JFK Jr. didn’t die at all but supposedly went into hiding to join a generations-long war against elite pedophiles.) Later, some theorists’ heads nearly exploded when they thought they saw “Celona” listed in Epstein’s private-jet logs, but it turned out to be sloppy handwriting; the name was actually “Celina,” which might have been Celina Midelfart, a known Epstein associate. “I obviously was never on Epstein’s plane — I’ve never met him,” Celona says. He did speak to Kubrick by phone a couple of times, but they never discussed Epstein. “Kubrick was born in the Bronx,” Celona says, “so he wanted to talk about the Yankees.”

    Even the fake Post story Celona wrote for Kubrick has been overscrutinized. Some viewers noticed that a line in the second paragraph is repeated twice — a “mistake” that, to them, suggests hidden meaning. Celona noticed it, too, but never found out why it was left in. He suggests I ask Frewin, Kubrick’s former assistant, about it, and when I do, Frewin sounds surprised: “I never noticed that, and I was the one who had it typeset. Oh well, it adds to the authenticity.”

    Eyes Wide Shut had a reputation for opacity even before the internet got involved. It was an unusually secretive project. Working mostly in London’s Pinewood Studios, Kubrick employed only a small crew, kept the set tightly controlled, and filmed for a long time. Production began in November 1996 and lasted for more than 15 months, a Guinness World Record for the longest continuous shoot in history. So he must have filmed much more than what ended up in the movie, right?

    There were outtakes — “snippets which did not make it into the film,” says producer Jan Harlan — but nothing that would’ve gotten Kubrick in hot water with any real sex cults, say his collaborators. By most accounts, the director spent the bulk of the shoot filming take after take of the scenes that do appear in the movie. One story that’s passed into legend has the director forcing Cruise to walk through a doorway 95 times before deeming the performance believable. (Cruise, who now regularly flings himself off cliffs for fun, reportedly developed an ulcer during production.)

    Madison Eick (née Eginton), who played Helena, the Harfords’ daughter, and turned 8 during the production, hasn’t given many interviews about Eyes Wide Shut since its original release. Only in retrospect did she realize how unique the shooting process was. “I never saw a full script,” she says. “In the majority of my scenes, the dialogue was improvised. Stanley would tell us the premise of the scene and then we would rehearse and rehearse and just talk naturally. There’s a scene where I talk about wanting a dog for Christmas, and all of that was improvised.” She recalls that Kubrick applied his obsessive precision to even small moments, including one brief scene that takes place in front of the Harfords’ bathroom mirror. “Stanley had me brush my teeth for — I’m not kidding — two weeks,” she says. “He was like, ‘Why aren’t you spitting while you’re brushing your teeth?’ And I was like, ‘I just spit at the end.’ And he wanted me to spit and then keep going back to brushing.” Eick is now 36 and retired from film acting. “My dentist just told me my gums are starting to recede, and I wonder if that’s why,” she joked.

    When I ask Eick about the talk around the toy-store scene — the cornerstone of the entire conspiracy theory, in which some viewers claim her character is being handed off to cult members — she tells me it’s news to her. “There wasn’t ever any secret meaning about that scene that was communicated to me,” she says. “There was definitely never any suggestion from Stanley that I should go and stand by or walk off with two men.” Were those men the same background actors who also appear at the party scene at the beginning of the movie? Harlan admits that “they were from the same pool of extras” — but even if they were the same performers, it was “not deliberate. There is no ‘meaning’” to it, he says.

    Some of the more baroque readings of the scene assign symbolic weight to the toys Helena picks up as she moves through the store, including a stuffed tiger (supposedly a callback to a similar toy seen earlier in the film in a sex worker’s bedroom) and a Barbie (a stand-in for sexualized innocence). Eick waves this off too. “I remember that I was improvising,” she says, “and the toys I picked up were just the ones I wanted, not because anyone told me to.”

    After the shoot wrapped, Kubrick and the editor Galt spent the next 15 months shaping Eyes Wide Shut into more or less the exact movie you now know, says the latter. According to Galt, the last version Kubrick touched was “pretty much identical” to the one released in theaters. “After we showed Warner Bros. a cut,” he says, “Stanley and I discussed the things that remained outstanding. This was mostly about changing or adding a couple of establishing shots. The main titles had been set. The orgy scene is exactly the same length now as it was at the time of Stanley’s passing, and not a frame of that has ever changed” — aside from a few strategically placed computer-generated cloaked figures, added after Kubrick’s death to obscure the most explicit action and secure an R rating. Galt says that throughout the long postproduction process, to the best of his memory, Kubrick never once hinted at any real-life cults. “I sat next to Stanley in the edit room for 15 months, and the news that held his attention at the time was the war in Kosovo and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.”

    The edit was nearly complete, the finishing touches underway. Then, on March 7, 1999, Kubrick died. It probably wasn’t foul play. “He had a bad heart and died in his bedroom,” says Harlan. “He was 70 years old and looked about 120,” says Raphael. “He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it.”

    Of course, it’s always possible that everyone I spoke to was either in on a cover-up or too afraid of being murdered by a sex cult themselves to tell me the truth. Perhaps they coordinated their stories and lied. But if so, they didn’t coordinate very well. On some points, they directly contradicted each other. For example, Raphael insists that Sydney Pollack — who plays Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and is an Oscar-winning director himself — did some editing work on the film’s billiards scene after Kubrick’s death. Galt calls this “utter nonsense.”

    But one thing nearly everyone seems to agree on is that they’re dubious of what Roger Avary told Joe Rogan. Frewin says it’s “very unlikely” that Avary ever got his hands on a real shooting script for Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody I spoke to believed the film was missing any narration, either. A couple of Raphael’s early drafts included voice-over, but that idea was abandoned before postproduction. “Stanley never discussed the possibility of using narration during the edit,” says Galt.

    And that explosive screening Avary claims to have heard about, the one where Kubrick supposedly got into a shouting match with studio execs? It never happened, according to Kubrick’s collaborators, who tell me Eyes Wide Shut had only three screenings while its director was still alive and there were no arguments at any of them. On March 2, 1999, Galt flew a print to New York and showed it first to Warner Bros. bosses Terry Semel and Bob Daly, then later that day to Cruise and Kidman, while Kubrick stayed home in England awaiting their reactions, which were reportedly positive. On March 5, two days before Kubrick’s death, Cruise’s then-publicist, Pat Kingsley, watched it alone in the director’s home. “I didn’t see Stanley that day because he had a cold and stayed upstairs,” Kingsley tells me. “But we talked afterward by phone. I told him I was mesmerized by the movie.”

    Still, maybe Avary knows something I don’t. He’s an Oscar winner and presumably knows more Illuminati than I do, so who am I to doubt him? I sent him an email. He initially agreed to talk, then disappeared for months, then finally replied to questions from a New York fact-checker.

    Avary says he heard the anecdote about the post-screening fight from “a William Morris agent who claimed to have been outside the screening room of the studio in England.” He says it “should be taken with a grain of salt” and that he mentioned it on Rogan only because the agent in question is now deceased. As for his copy of the screenplay, he says that it’s dated August 4, 1996, and that it was given to him by a key member of the filmmaking team. It does include narration, notably during the morgue scene.

    Asked about the toy-store sequence, Avary suggests Kubrick may not have shared the scene’s alleged subtext with Madison Eick. “I’ve worked with child actresses myself, and you never tell them everything,” he says. “In fact, you never tell any actor everything that’s happening. Too much information, especially for a child, creates a false artifice.” He also notes that his version of the script mentions, at several points, two anonymous men — like the ones who supposedly kidnap Helena — who seem to be trailing Cruise’s character.

    The script Avary describes appears to match the purported early draft of Eyes Wide Shut that has circulated online for years. (Avary says his “was not downloaded from the internet and looks completely different.”) Neither Frewin or Galt or Harlan say they can confirm the legitimacy of that version, though some of its elements do correspond with fragments that are apparently preserved in the Kubrick archives. In any case, in this supposed draft, there is no suggestion that Helena is kidnapped. There’s no toy-store scene at all.

    None of this, however, is likely to put a stop to any theorizing. Kubrick made movies in a time when ambiguity was better tolerated, a pact with the audience now seems outdated. Today’s viewers, trained by prestige TV, true-crime podcasts, and algorithmically optimized streaming movies—where characters routinely announce who they are, what they want, and what everything means—demand legibility. When a film refuses answers, or defies a single, authoritative meaning, it can feel less ambiguous than deliberately redacted. It’s not lost on me that, in undertaking this reporting, I was chasing a definitive answer, too.

    “Kubrick’s films are riddled with knowledge of secret societies,” Avary says. “And Eyes Wide Shut feels like his most direct shot at it. It’s explicitly about a hidden elite cult wielding sex, death, and influence as tools of control. Eyes Wide Shut ends up feeling like a final chess move against power.” But, he adds, “it’s not that I endorse these conspiracy theories. It’s just cinema speculation, which for a suspicious guy like me and as a fan of Kubrick is fun to posit.”

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    Lane Brown

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  • 6 New Books You Should Read This December

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    Photo-Illustration: Vulture

    Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.

    The Award, by Matthew Pearl

    The Award, by Matthew Pearl

    An aspiring — you might say grasping — novelist named David Trent moves into an unheated attic apartment with his fiancée. They can’t really afford it, but one of David’s heroes lives below, an important writer in the John Cheever–Philip Roth mold. It turns out the author is hostile and cruel, as far from a mentor as you could imagine — until David’s modest first novel wins a prestigious literary prize. A publishing-industry satire in the vein of Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort, The Award takes a dim view of its characters’ ambitions. Every bad and selfish choice made by the protagonist just adds to the pleasure of it. —Emma Alpern

    $30 at Amazon

    $28 at Bookshop

    The Lord, by Soraya Antonius

    The Lord, by Soraya Antonius

    A reporter-narrator in early-’80s Lebanon meets Miss Alice, an English woman who was stationed in Mandatory Palestine in a Jaffa mission school founded by her parents. Alice reminisces about her student Tareq, an exceptionally talented boy who went on to travel the region performing miracles — and eventually to risk his life by leading the Palestinian resistance against the British. Antonius’s first novel is a rare and rich work representing pre-Nakba Palestine. —Jasmine Vojdani

    $18 at Amazon

    $17 at Bookshop

    Television, by Lauren Rothery

    Television, by Lauren Rothery

    The skies are sunnier in Los Angeles, and the sentences shorter. Rothery’s debut is generous with its style — its clipped, cynical cadence is part Dashiell Hammett, part J.D. Salinger. That’s especially true for one of its two main narrators, Verity, an aging franchise movie star who acts, thinks, and pontificates like an adolescent. He trades chapters with his old writer friend Helen, who supported them in the years before his big commercial break. When Verity isn’t with someone too young for him, the two are also occasional lovers, each aware of how their attachment flickers in and out based on neediness, resentment, and actual affection. —E.A.

    $28 at Amazon

    $26 at Bookshop

    House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

    House of Day, House of Night, by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

    From the beloved Polish writer who won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in 2018 comes a translation of House of Day, House of Night, a “constellation novel” that preceded Flights by nearly ten years. House of Day proceeds as a suite of observations and anecdotes by a narrator who has moved to a small rural community in territory once occupied by Germany, where characters seem haunted or at least in contact with the dead. In a landscape of darkness, dreams, and drink, this novel is more than the sum of its eerie parts. —J.V.

    $28 at Amazon

    $26 at Bookshop

    Galápagos, by Fátima Vélez; translated by Hannah Kauders

    Galapagos, by Fátima Vélez; translated by Hannah Kauders

    It’s 1992, and a painter named Lorenzo notices his fingernails are falling off without explanation; similar things are happening to his friends. Unsettled, he travels from Colombia to Paris to see them, where all of their illnesses escalate. Vélez’s debut is surreal from the outset, with commas standing in for periods and unexplained phenomena all around, but it crescendos with a voyage to Galápagos that might also be a trip to the underworld. It’s an AIDS novel that’s both poetic and totally physical. —E.A.

    $22 at Amazon

    $21 at Bookshop

    The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits
    Photo: Vendor

    The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits

    Tom Layward has been waiting until his daughter goes off to college to make good on his promise to himself to leave his wife, Amy, who he reveals had an affair earlier in their marriage. Things in the law professor’s academic life aren’t going great, either; Tom unwittingly gave legal advice to an un-woke basketball-team owner and is convinced his university will find out. All of which is why, after dropping his daughter off at college, Tom embarks on a solo cross-country road trip. Markovits’s Booker-nominated novel marvelously inspects love that has been tested by infidelity, child-rearing, transgression, and — perhaps most injurious of all to the whole endeavor — time. —J.V.

    $25 at Amazon

    $26 at Bookshop

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    Emma Alpern,Jasmine Vojdani

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  • Whose Time Is It Anyway?

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    Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael B. Jordan, and Ariana Grande might be chasing the same murky Oscars narrative.
    Photo: Merrick Morton/Warner Bros.

    Nate Jones is back from leave and will be officially taking back the reins of Gold Rush on December 5. This week, he and Movies Fantasy League commissioner Joe Reid are splitting duties — Joe is capping off his three-month stint as this newsletter’s host by leading a conversation about this year’s moment-having Oscar contenders, and Nate is launching his season’s “Oscar Futures.”

    If you’ve been around the Oscars conversation long enough, a few oft-repeated phrases and clichés get lodged into your brain. You become an expert in concepts like “category fraud” and “lone director” and how many nominations Diane Warren has accumulated (16). One superlative Oscars nerds especially like to play around with is “It’s their time” or “It’s their year.” Christopher Nolan winning for Oppenheimer? It was his time. Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis winning for Everything Everywhere All at Once? Finally, it was their time! The phrase sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy, or at least so vibes-based that you can’t really assign meaning to it. But we would argue that you can. And in fact, it applies to several people currently in the mix for this year’s Oscars.

    Joe Reid: Nate, I’d begin by saying that “It’s their year” isn’t something that can apply to just anyone in the Oscar race. Renate Reinsve is very much in the Best Actress Oscar race for Sentimental Value, but I’m not sure anyone can make the argument that this feels like her time. Sean Penn is on most people’s short lists of Supporting Actor contenders for One Battle After Another, but I wouldn’t say this is his year. “It’s their time” is more encompassing. It’s when everything seems to be coming together for an actor or filmmaker: They’re in a widely appreciated movie showcasing good work, popular opinion on them is cresting, and an Oscar win would feel both presently earned and reflective of where they are in their career. Would you say that’s about right?

    Nate Jones: Hi, Joe! First off, thanks for handling Gold Rush while I dealt with some roommate drama. (This new person is emotionally volatile, keeps a very odd diet, and hasn’t yet paid for her share of the rent or utilities.) When it comes to the sense of it being someone’s time, you’ve pinpointed a fascinating phenomenon. I’d add that “It’s their year” is actually two separate but related narratives. The first type is the one we saw for Will Smith with King Richard, Viola Davis with Fences, and Leonardo DiCaprio with The Revenant — an esteemed industry figure who hasn’t yet gotten their due from the Academy receives an entire career’s worth of hosannas all at once. (What separates this from a “career win” like Curtis’s is the sense that this project is genuinely considered one of the artistic high points on their résumé.) The second type is the one we saw for Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook — a performance that’s so undeniable that it doesn’t really matter what you’ve done before. You’ve made a leap, and everyone else just has to get out of your way.

    This season brings one standout example of an “It’s their time” campaign. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most acclaimed and influential directors of his generation. He has been nominated for 11 Oscars over the course of his career and lost them all. Now here he comes with One Battle After Another, a film that has not only earned critical raves and the best box office of his career, but seems almost preternaturally plugged into the Zeitgeist of the second Trump era. No other film in the race feels as “2025” as One Battle, which of course only bolsters the argument for this being PTA’s year. By most pundits’ estimations, Best Picture and Best Director are both his to lose.

    Apart from PTA, though, are there any other “It’s their year” picks you have your eye on, Joe?

    J.R.: I’ll stick with the Best Director category, because you’re right that PTA makes for the best “It’s his time”/“It’s his year” case. But why couldn’t it also be Ryan Coogler’s year? Sinners is a bigger box-office hit than One Battle After Another, and Coogler’s career has been far more broadly consumed than Anderson’s has. With the Black Panther and Creed films backing him up, this feels like the exact right time for Hollywood to hold him up as their standard-bearer. Though I wonder if, because Coogler has never been nominated in Best Director before, a nomination in that category might be seen as sufficient recognition of his year.

    Then there’s Josh Safdie, another director looking for his first-ever Oscar nomination. Marty Supreme hasn’t opened yet, but the buzz on the movie has it surpassing brother Benny’s The Smashing Machine. And while the brothers are insistent that there isn’t a competition between them, if there is, Josh is winning. And who doesn’t want to get onboard with a winner? That’s one of the messages of his movie!

    I think the best argument against it being Josh Safdie’s year is that it’s actually his lead actor’s year. More than any other actor in contention this year, Timothée Chalamet has the potential to own the year’s best “It’s his time” narrative. At age 29 (he turns 30 in a month), he’s rounding up on his third Best Actor nomination, and if Marty Supreme gets into the Best Picture field it will be his eighth such movie to do so. His performance in Marty Supreme is a feat of chutzpah and kinetic energy that lends itself to terms like “undeniable.” And if the movie is a box-office hit, it’ll be his third December success in as many years (after A Complete Unknown and Wonka). Is there any argument against him being the leading man of the moment?

    N.J.: The only counterargument to this being Timmy’s time is the fact that, traditionally, the Academy lags a few years behind the wider culture when it comes to acknowledging young leading men of the moment. Chalamet has had the best come-up of any young actor since DiCaprio, but recall that Leo didn’t win until his sixth acting nomination, when he was in his 40s. It might feel like Timmy’s year to us, but voters may still feel as if he hasn’t quite paid his dues. Especially as it seems like Chalamet is once again running a nontraditional campaign more focused on Gen-Z cinephiles than middle-age Academy members.

    Which is why, weirdly, I think the Original Recipe Timmy might have just as good a case for an “It’s his year” in Best Actor. DiCaprio spent the first 20 years of his career being snubbed by Oscar voters, and his trophy cabinet’s looking pretty threadbare compared to his reputation. Shouldn’t he have more than one Oscar, the argument might go, and if so, isn’t now the time to give him his second? You may say Leo was overshadowed by his castmates; I say, “How many Bob Ferguson costumes did you see at Halloween this year?” He created an instantly iconic character in what’s shaping up to be the biggest awards movie of the season — there’s a narrative to be had here if DiCaprio, never the most dedicated campaigner, wants to grab it.

    And what of the other major contender in Best Actor, Michael B. Jordan, who can claim as much credit as Coogler for making Sinners a sensation? He’s a huge star who’s never been honored by the Academy before, and there’s two of him. Couldn’t that make it “his year”? He’s halfway between Timmy and Leo — a veteran who’s also of the moment — though does that mean he’s the best of both worlds, or stuck in no-man’s-land?

    J.R.: On the subject of Leo, I want to answer two of your questions in the reverse order of which you posed them: “How many Bob Ferguson costumes did you see at Halloween this year?” Well, lots, because the Bob Ferguson costume is a bathrobe, a knit hat, some blue blockers, and a dingy T-shirt and slacks. This is like how my best idea for a group Halloween costume was to get a bunch of friends together, dress normal, and go as the newsroom from Spotlight. As for “Shouldn’t Leo have two Oscars by now?”, this is my favorite kind of Oscar argument. If Daniel Day-Lewis and Frances McDormand have three, shouldn’t Leo have two? I think the answer is yes. And the above two examples — plus more recent second wins by Adrien Brody, Emma Stone, Anthony Hopkins, and Renée Zellweger — are proof that the Academy is less reluctant to bestow second or third Oscars than they used to be.

    I like your Michael B. Jordan argument, and I’m intrigued by the possibility that he could take advantage of an even split between Timmy and Leo supporters and ride to victory. I’d feel more optimistic if Sinners were more The Michael B. Jordan Show, but he doesn’t dominate the way that, say, Ariana Grande does in Wicked: For Good. That sequel hasn’t been enjoying as pink and sparkly a reception among critics as the first one did, but most reviews point to Grande’s Glinda as the film’s highlight. And after two years’ worth of viral press appearances and the near-universal agreement that she’s even more talented than we may have thought, it feels like it’s been her time for a minute now. Certainly there will be quibbles about whether a second nomination in two years is overkill, or whether For Good is just plain not good enough of a movie to produce an Oscar winner. But you can already feel the exception being carved out for Grande. And with the rest of the Supporting Actress field crammed with pairs of actresses from the same movie cannibalizing each other’s votes (Hailee Steinfeld and Wunmi Mosaku from Sinners; Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas from Sentimental Value; Teyana Taylor and Regina Hall from One Battle After Another), it’s a lot less complicated to just surrender to the girl in the bubble.

    Speaking of surrender, does the fact that the Oscar-observant community is forming a consensus around Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley as Best Actress make this her moment by default? Or should we be talking about how this year feels like the result of several years of steadily breaking through?

    N.J.: I think it can be both! Jessie Buckley in Hamnet feels to me like the closest thing we’ve seen recently to a J.Law moment. She’s not exactly an unknown — like Lawrence at the time of Silver Linings Playbook, she’s already a previous nominee — but her performance in Chloé Zhao’s film marks her transformation over a few short years from admired indie actress to everyone’s favorite new star. At the same time, her situation illustrates how much context matters when we declare it someone’s “year.” Ahead of the season, insiders were already whispering that this was a weak Best Actress field, so once Buckley wowed the crowds at Telluride, it was easier for pundits to simply call it early and move on to more interesting races. And without casting any aspersions on her performance, she’s also benefitting from the way the category has shaken out. The same way Brad Pitt’s path to an Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was made easier once he was nominated against four previous winners, Buckley is going up against performances that are superficially similar — traumatized moms like Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Jennifer Lawrence in Die, My Love, plus another grief-stricken Olde Englander in The Testament of Ann Lee’s Amanda Seyfried — from films that are way less audience-friendly than Hamnet.

    But talking about an actor who’s seen everything align for her this year also brings to mind a few awards hopefuls who haven’t been so lucky. There are two guys who, if you’d have asked me in August, I would have said were looking forward to it being “their year”: Jesse Plemons in Bugonia and Adam Sandler in Jay Kelly. Plemons seemed like he was on track to be the male Jessie Buckley, an actor who was highly regarded within the industry, previously nominated for a supporting performance, getting a plumb role in a two-hander acting showcase. Was he finally making the leap? Sandler, meanwhile, had preheated his Supporting Actor campaign with a charming appearance at March’s Oscar ceremony and was reuniting with Noah Baumbach, who directed one of his career-best performances in The Meyerowitz Stories. The stage was set for a “We never appreciated him enough” campaign, which is of course a subvariation of “It’s his year.” Bugonia and Jay Kelly both premiered in Venice, and while each received some positive reviews, neither was met with effusive acclaim. Plemons and Sandler could still both get nominated, but any sense that it is “their time” has dissipated.

    Sandler’s Supporting Actor bid in particular had the bad luck to go up against two different types of “It’s his year” campaigns: Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value and Benicio del Toro in One Battle After Another. Joe, who ya got?

    J.R.: Stellan Skarsgård is an interesting case for an “It’s his time” Oscar. We’ve seen character actors pull off that narrative before — I’m thinking specifically of J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. In that case, Simmons played such a forceful, dynamic character that it was hard to deny his impact. Skarsgård feels a bit more like an Alan Arkin type: endearing older actor making his mark within an ensemble in a Best Picture nominee. That being said, I don’t think Alan Arkin ever laid claim to an “It’s his time” narrative when he won for Little Miss Sunshine, so maybe that tells me everything about Skarsgård’s chances to do the same. Maybe his first-ever Oscar nomination will be enough.

    Benicio del Toro, on the other hand … It might be his year. Despite being surrounded by actors giving bigger, more bombastic performances in One Battle After Another, the word of mouth was immediately strong for del Toro’s disarmingly quiet, funny, “a few small beers”–enjoying performance. The more you think about One Battle, it’s del Toro’s sensei, Sergio, who carries off the film’s themes of resistance on a community level. His Oscar win for Traffic came 25 years ago, and he’s certainly attained the level of respect in the industry to warrant a second, especially if One Battle ends up as the Best Picture winner. Getting two actors from the same movie to win second Oscars would be an exceedingly rare feat, so maybe we’re talking either-or for Leo or Benicio.

    What’s fun about the Oscar race is that the “It’s their year” picture becomes clearer as the season rolls on. In the next few weeks, the critics will have their say, with the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and National Board of Review announcing their winners. Theirs won’t be the final word on the subject — it can be your year even if the critics don’t agree — but I think they can push a few narratives forward. Anyone you’re keeping an eye on for critics awards?

    N.J.: You mentioned that Grande has become the Supporting Actress front-runner almost by default. But what if I told you there was another well-respected veteran, a previous nominee in fact, hiding in plain sight and ready to stake a claim that, actually, it’s her time? I’m talking about Amy Madigan of Weapons, who feels primed for a left-field critics-group win that vaults her into Oscar contention. Madigan feels so perfect a New York Film Critics Circle pick that, in the event the NYFCC goes elsewhere, the only reason would be a fear of being obvious.

    Every week between now and January 22, when the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced, Vulture will consult its crystal ball to determine the changing fortunes in this year’s Oscar race. In our “Oscar Futures” column, we’ll let you in on insider gossip, parse brand-new developments, and track industry buzz to figure out who’s up, who’s down, and who’s currently leading the race for a coveted Oscar nomination.

    Photo: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features

    The TIFF People’s Choice Award winner hit theaters this week under the cloud of becoming, if not yet the season’s official Oscar villain, then at least the official Oscar punchline. None of that looks likely to dent Hamnet’s awards fortunes at the moment: The Tudor tearjerker has plenty of fans among industry types I talk to, and even viewers allergic to its woo-woo nonsense (ahem) may ultimately find themselves a little misty by the end. If Chloé Zhao’s film winds up one of the year’s major Oscar players — it should, since it’s being put out by Focus, and not Tubi — that’ll be worth suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous Twitter jokes.

    Photo: Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

    A $147 million opening — 30 percent higher than its predecessor — is just what the musical needed to maintain its Best Picture bona fides, especially since so many other awards hopefuls crashed and burned at the fall box office. But those boffo receipts came alongside mixed reviews, which all but kills For Good’s already-slim chances of pulling a Return of the King–style win for the series as a whole. The sequel’s best chance at an above-the-line trophy will come in another category.

    Frankenstein, Hamnet, Is This Thing On?, It Was Just an Accident, Jay Kelly, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams

    Photo: Tim P. Whitby/Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

    Skim the generally positive Hamnet reviews, like Justin Chang’s, and note critics’ side-eyes regarding Zhao’s “forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism.” Says Chang: “The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.” (He also quips, “What is Hamnet, or Hamlet, without a little ham?” Get thee to a punnery!) The lady doth impress too much? Maybe so, but if there’s one thing you can say about a director who leads breathing exercises before screenings, she is certainly to her own self being true.

    Photo: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

    Chu has cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most reliable IP guys, which is not exactly an honor the directors’ branch holds in high regard. If a nom didn’t happen last year, it’s not gonna happen this year.

    Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Ryan Coogler, Sinners; Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident; Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value; Chloé Zhao, Hamnet

    Photo: Neon/Everett Collection

    With the Rock and Jeremy Allen White dropping down the ranks, could there be space for an international contender like Moura, who won Best Actor at Cannes for his turn in this Brazilian political thriller? Neon certainly thinks so, bringing Moura out to schmooze with critics groups last week. It helps that the actor, who lives in L.A., is a familiar face from Narcos — he even has his own meme — and that reviews have been strong in limited release. (Melissa Anderson calls him “so spellbinding that he constitutes his own magnetic field.”) Neon is juggling a lot of foreign-language entries, but Moura is its No. 1 priority in this race.

    For the first two hours or so of Marty Supreme, I was skeptical of all the headlines proclaiming this Timmy’s year. A charismatic, live-wire performance? Sure. But wasn’t this reptilian oddball simply too unsympathetic a part to catapult young Chalamet to Oscar glory? I won’t spoil what happened next, but let’s just say that, by the movie’s final shot, I no longer had those concerns.

    Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon; Michael B. Jordan, Sinners; Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

    Photo: Agata Grzybowska/FOCUS FEATURES

    “The usual adjectives barely seem adequate when discussing Buckley’s extraordinary performance,” says Keith Phipps, who echoes his fellow critics in declaring this Buckley’s film: “Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget.” We’ll see how the sense of inevitability holds up over the course of the season, but for now, even rival campaigns are operating under the assumption that this is Buckley’s year.

    Erivo has been pencilled in for a follow-up nod for the past 12 months, but I’m joining Joe in holding space for the possibility that she could miss out. Her character takes a backseat in the sequel, and while Part One ended with Erivo’s thunderous “Defying Gravity,” For Good’s titular number turns into a showcase for Ariana Grande. At least she’ll always have the sex cardigan.

    Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good; Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value; Amanda Seyfried, The Testament of Ann Lee

    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features, James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures

    Alas, poor Mescal! I knew him, Vulture reader; a fellow that Dana Stevens thinks was miscast. (She feels his character’s “rough edges are largely sanded off” by the actor’s “heart-on-his-sleeve expressiveness.”) Still, Alyssa Wilkinson declares he “knocked me flat.” Hamnet is strong enough — and the role emotive enough — that Mescal and Buckley will probably be considered a package deal. Recall, though, that Joseph Fiennes was not nominated for Shakespeare in Love. Will Shakespeare in Grief fare better?

    Photo: Netflix

    Who did Stevens wish would have played Shakespeare instead? None other than Mescal’s History of Sound co-star, who also pops up this week for the Knives Out threequel’s limited run in theaters. Despite sending increasingly frantic emails to Netflix, I’m still waiting to see it, but critics like John Nugent say his turn as a priest “brilliantly” walks a “tonal tightrope between unprocessed inner darkness, youthful befuddlement and gentle decency.” It didn’t happen for Ana de Armas, and it didn’t happen for Janelle Monáe, so anyone predicting O’Connor must do so on faith.

    Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another; Delroy Lindo, Sinners; Paul Mescal, Hamnet; Sean Penn, One Battle After Another; Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

    Photo: YouTube

    Is she gonna be pop-uUu-lar? (Sorry, wrong installment.) As Joe mentioned above, this category is so unsettled, and so rife with internal competition, that Grande feels like the front-runner almost by default. Think of it this way: By rewarding her, it’s almost like they’d be awarding two press tours for the price of one.

    Photo: A24

    Credit to Josh Safdie and casting director Jennifer Venditti for filling this ’50s period piece with the most never-seen-a-cell-phone faces put onscreen this year. The only exception is Gwyneth, who never quite un-Goop-ifies herself as an aging silver-screen star. It works for the character, though.

    Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value; Amy Madigan, Weapons; Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners; Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good; Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another


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    Joe Reid

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  • Initiative Has 18 Charisma, 19 Dexterity, 20 Strength

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    The windows are down, the sun is a kaleidoscope through the reddening leaves, and I’m listening to Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are on the car CD-player, on the way to play Soul Caliber and hold hands with my boyfriend after school … It’s cold, and you can still hear the dull thud of the music from the goth club in the basement under the sushi bar, and I’m wearing a cheap polyester corset, and I think I’m about to be kissed in this parking lot under a full moon … It’s Homecoming, and I’m talking with the friend I’ve known since we were three, because we both came with guys who are in fact a couple, but one of them has parents who can’t find out he’s gay, so we’re their covers so they can meet up at the dance …

    I don’t know what it is about adolescence—maybe it’s something to do with those underbaked prefrontal cortexes—but I doubt I’m alone in retaining memories from my teenage life that still feel as vivid, twenty-plus years on, as last week’s. It’s another world, in almost every sense another person, and at the same time its tiniest details, ecstatic or embarrassing, are still definitive, ephemeral and yet indelible.

    It’s this sensation—a feeling of swimming through waters that long ago flowed on and out into the ocean—that the playwright Else Went captures so potently in Initiative. Developed over the last ten years with the collaboration of their wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, as well as many of the actors who are now on stage in its premiere at the Public, the show has both the patience and the pain of maturity. It feels slow-cooked, basted in rich juices and allowed to simmer. That the production is five hours long—three 90-minute acts unfolding over the course of the central characters’ four years in high school, plus intermissions—is certainly crucial to this quality, but it’s the pace and texture, rather than the length per se, that really distinguish Initiative. A play can run a marathon (see Gatz) or it can brew like tea, building a somatic experience that concentrates and darkens over time. This steeped and tannic quality is what keeps the Wents’ project—notwithstanding the Jimmy Eat World and Sugarcult blasting during the preshow, the dramatized AIM chats of its characters, and the Dungeons & Dragons sessions that become central to its story—distinct from nostalgia. Nostalgia is about consuming a version of the past as comfort food. Initiative is—to steal a “good 50-cent word” from one of its characters—elegiac. It’s about loss and survival and the way in which imagination can become as tangible and critical as a climbing rope on a cliff face.

    If, unlike the play’s characters, you weren’t experiencing your own high-school odyssey over a fistful of D20s, here’s a brief nerd primer: Most role-playing games are a mash-up of make-believe and chance. You play a character with “ability stats,” number scores that represent things like Charisma, Strength, and Intelligence, which in turn determine how successful you might be at performing certain actions during the game (like seducing an innkeeper or smashing a skull). But to generate those stats and perform those actions, you’ve always got to roll a die. “Initiative” is rolled for when your party of characters enters combat: In the face of a threat, who gets to make the first move? Who will attack and who will defend? Who’s got the agility to maneuver or the constitution to endure, and whose fate comes down to luck alone?

    The whole endeavor—the danger, the thrill, the arcane rules and the fun of breaking them, the conscious, experimental creating of self—presents a meaty metaphor for coming of age, and, like all seasoned D&D players, the Wents and their actors take its stakes entirely seriously. Initiative is no parody, nor is it rarefied content meant solely for former Wizards of the Coast aficionados. Its characters don’t even begin “the game,” as they call it, until almost a third of the way through. Before, during, and after, they’re fighting the comparatively banal yet infinitely more harrowing battle of their own young lives, weathering high school while facing down the new millennium and, soon enough, a new war, from their home in “Coastal Podunk” California.

    “Nothing happens here,” says the aspiring writer Riley (the fantastically malleable Greg Cuellar, reminiscent of a young Alan Rickman) to his English teacher, Mr. Stone (played in live voiceover by Brandon Burk; adults have no physical presence in this world). Riley dreams of escape, and, in their own ways, so do all the characters of Initiative — the driven, pure-hearted former homeschooler, Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who’s aiming for Yale by way of perfect SATs; the brothers Lo (Carson Higgins) and Em (a heartbreaking Christopher Dylan White), who take opposite tacks as they cope with an absent father and opioid-addicted mother; the free spirit Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez) and the shy, sweet misfit transfer student Ty (Harrison Densmore). Even Em’s big lug of a buddy Tony (Jamie Sanders), who casually throws slurs around (like a true early-2000s gamer bro) and groans over how long it takes to download porn on dial-up, is desperately looking for a way out. Like the others, he needs a path toward a solid sense of self, a place where wounds aren’t simply being triaged but can begin to heal.

    It’s this desire for some control over their own destinies—especially in what, says Clara, panicking in the face of post-9/11 American aggression, feels like its own “really horrible time to be alive in America”—that draws the wandering young souls of Initiative toward D&D. Getting to be a brilliant spell-caster or a divinely inspired paladin doesn’t hurt either. Confronted with a real world that hardly makes the case for the existence of love or kindness, let alone magic or God, who wouldn’t choose fantasy? (The show’s creative team, especially projection designer S. Katy Tucker, does rich conjuring work where this fantasy is concerned, and my only regret is that they and their director are confined to the LuEsther, a theater that clearly partitions action and audience in a way that saps some of the energetic potential of Initiative’s emotionally immersive story.)

    As if in refutation of the puritanical outcry over D&D in its early days, Went’s characters use the game to attempt to construct a more just moral universe. In this sense, the play’s location in time is crucial, not simply for the facts of that moment—George W. Bush, Lil John and Avril Lavigne, shouting at your mom who wants to use the phone that you’ll be done with the internet in “LITERALLY ONE MINUTE”—but for its ethos. Millennials are, at least for now, the last generation of believers. We grew up wanting to “fix the world” and thinking it could be done. We didn’t know the word “problematic.” Clara and Riley—with their big hearts and weak armor, untempered by irony, vulnerable to the catastrophes of disillusionment—might as well be our patron saints.

    These smart, soulful best friends are at the heart of Initiative, and their conversations, whether casual or charged with heartbreak, showcase some of Went’s most sensitive writing. (Though, the play is full of gems, like this one from Kendall to Em: “How come every time we hang out I feel sad? … Like… it’s comforting kinda. Like I can be myself with you, and myself is actually kinda sad, and that’s okay.”) Barresi and Cuellar hold each other up with palpable tenderness, each one crafting a long, poignant arc from innocence through the fogs and thorns of experience. A scene in which Riley (who naturally becomes the Dungeon Master in the game) narrates a solo campaign for the suffering Clara—literally taking her out of herself by leading her through an adventure as the paladin Andromeda—is profoundly moving in its generosity. Likewise the care that Lo, an increasingly aggressive jock and in plenty of outward ways a “bad kid,” shows as he shields his recessive younger brother from the brunt of their mother’s violent illness. Or the gentleness with which Kendall applies makeup to Ty’s face to hide a bruise. Initiative is stitched through with moments like these, like colorful patches on a heavy pall, little saving throws against the dark. Depending on when you were born and how much time you’ve spent rolling dice in basements, it might take you back, but its real achievement, bracing and compassionate, lies in its encouragement to keep walking forward.

    Initiative is at the Public Theater through December 7.

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    Sara Holdren

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  • Death to the Penultimate Flashback Episode

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    Even when done well, the penultimate flashback episode has become such an endemic storytelling strategy in TV dramas that it should be abandoned on principle.
    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Netflix, Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK

    There’s a pattern in TV storytelling that’s been hanging around for a long time, but it’s recently proliferated into a full-blown scourge. If you’ve watched almost any streaming dramas in the past several years, you’ve likely seen at least one or two examples. It goes like this: Just as the story finally gets fun, with all the action careening toward the end of a season so all the mysteries can get solved and all the tension can explode, the second-to-last episode halts all that electric forward momentum. The episode probably follows a cliffhanger at the end of episode six — a secret identity gets unveiled, a dead body is discovered, or a person we all thought was dead is revealed as alive. And then, instead of giving the viewer the next scene in the story — the thing everyone desperately wants — episode seven says, “No. You don’t get to know who the murderer is yet. You don’t get the fun of everyone reacting to the secret identity. You don’t get to see what happens now that the dead character is back among the living. Before you get to the good part, you have to watch a stupid, homeworklike flashback about how everyone got here in the first place.”

    Even when done well, the penultimate flashback episode has become such an endemic storytelling strategy in TV dramas that it should be abandoned on principle. It’s happened too many times, and whatever sense of surprise and curiosity this trope may have once engendered has been long since lost. But more than for overuse, the penultimate flashback episode should get thrown into TV-writing jail because it’s a condensed expression of a particularly infuriating hang-up in so much television from the past few years, one in which a character is not just a character but a question with a straightforward answer that requires solving. Why is this woman so mean? She is grieving her child. What caused this man to snap and kill his wife? Daddy issues.

    Plots, similarly, are treated not like longer series of events, but crises developing because something terrible happened in the past: death, abuse, abandonment, bullying. The plot itself is the aftermath — it’s all a revenge plot to get back at his wife’s killer — but the energy of the show all goes toward locating the original source of the damage. That structure turns plot into an unconscious patient brought in with a bullet wound. No one cares what happens when the patient heals and goes home and has to go back to work. No one cares who the patient is, really, or what else may be going on with them. The whole point is to find and remove the bullet that entered before our part of the story even began. When the second-to-last episode flashes back to an origin story, the message is “Look, we found the source of the pain! Wrap it up. Time to go home.”

    If this were the second-to-last episode of a streaming series, I would now flash back to the first time I noticed this structure. Maybe it was in the last season of Glee, where the penultimate episode was a revisitation of the show’s pilot episode, telling the story of how everyone joined the glee club. Or it could have been season two of The Crown, when the gathering tension in Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage is halted to provide a whole backstory episode about Philip’s childhood in a dismal boarding school. That episode on its own is a striking hour of TV, but in the context of a full season of television, it also leans into everything that’s now most exasperating about this structure. Sometimes the pattern gets shifted slightly and the flashback happens near the end but not quite in the penultimate episode. So maybe my flashback-episode frustration origin story is Ozark season one, where episode eight jumps to a decade in the past to explain that the show’s villain is not just bad, she also has depression. Or maybe it was even earlier than all of those, watching the end-of-season episodes of The West Wing that rewind to Bartlet’s childhood, or how the gang all got jobs at the White House. They aren’t penultimate episodes, and the structure isn’t quite the same in a long network season as it is in the current short-season streaming model, but the same impulse is there.

    Whatever the source of this initial wound may have been, it’s now become a widespread model for how to shape a season of TV across genres and styles. Agatha All Along and WandaVision both use penultimate flashbacks before arriving at a grand finale of superhero trauma-therapy derring-do. It happens in serious prestige-style dramas like Escape at Dannemora and Fleishman Is in Trouble. It happens in HBO shows like The Leftovers, Apple shows like The Morning Show, and big sci-fi adaptations like Prime’s Fallout. In 2025 alone, Paradise, The Last of Us, The Hunting Wives, All Her Fault, and The Beast in Me all get to the final couple episodes of the season and decide that it’s time to go backward. (And I’m not even counting Alien: Earth, because that flashback episode arrives at No. 5 out of eight, rather than six or seven.)

    It’s not that the flashback episodes themselves are bad. Like all stand-alone episodes, some are abysmal, some mediocre, and some, like in The Last of Us and The Crown, are the best parts of a whole series. But when the entire season is built around a late-stage reveal that transforms one-dimensional characters into nuanced people or clarifies which specific trauma kicked off all the action, the whole show is made worse because of it. Characters can be three-dimensional from the start. Traumas, buried or otherwise, can be meaningful backstories without getting put up high on a pedestal of narrative significance. If the story in the flashback is exciting enough to be in the show, why is that the flashback? Why is that not just what the show is about?

    All Her Fault and The Beast in Me are the most egregious current offenders, in part because that choice makes two different shows doing two very different things feel like boring retreads of each other, highlighting their cookie-cutter similarities rather than allowing them to feel like distinct stories. Peacock’s All Her Fault is, as Roxana Hadadi has argued, a cautionary misandrist parable about women with idiot husbands who are so burdened by the expectations of career femininity that they can’t see the rot creeping in their own homes. The Beast in Me on Netflix, by comparison, is a fully deranged serial-killer thriller closer to You than it is to All Her Fault. Matthew Rhys rips into a chicken carcass with his bare hands, and someone gets thrown in a secret torture bunker, and in the end a lingering frame suggests the whole thing is playing on The Bad Seed.

    Both of those shows, which premiered within a week of each other, shape their stories around that same old boring framework. In the second-to-last episode, they halt the fun cliffhanger left dangling in episode six to rewind the clock and introduce a new set of characters the audience has no interest in or attachment to in order to give a beat-by-beat rundown of all the emotional devastation that led up to the concluding arc of the season. Even worse, because both shows actually rest on the same traumatic inciting incident (child died in a car crash), those penultimate episodes mean that these shows look even more like an awkward copy-paste job.

    Penultimate flashbacks have become so ho-hum typical that it’s easy to forget that, believe it or not, plotting does not have to work this way. Adolescence is captivating precisely because its one-shot conceit prevents it from skipping around through time and space. A flashback would feel like relief, which would collapse all of that show’s thoughtful uncertainty into easy, obvious clarity. The Lowdown manages to solve an elaborate noir mystery without ever wallowing in lengthy “But why did Lee Raybon want to be a detective?” hindsight. The Gilded Age didn’t deign to go all the way back to why Bertha and George got married in the first place, because current-day exposition makes that plenty clear without over-burdened explanatory backstory. They were hot for each other, and they are ambitious monsters!

    Flashbacks aren’t entirely bad, either. The Pitt, constrained by its hour-by-hour design, is forced to march resolutely forward but still peppers the tiniest hints of flashback here and there as in-text PTSD episodes. But the origin story is not the sole thrust of the season because the flashbacks aren’t providing some mysterious clues to a hidden backstory. It’s obvious from the beginning that Dr. Robby has COVID-related trauma. The show’s conflict isn’t what’s in the flashbacks; the conflict is that he’s having flashbacks. Flashbacks can exist without becoming load-bearing forms of character development. When they arrive right before the end of the season, and when that structure happens over and over again, all the power of the flashback gets drained away. Any thrill it once carried has deteriorated into a lazy delay tactic, a mathematical equation that promises all complexity in human behavior can be explained with one neat backward-looking trick.

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    Kathryn VanArendonk

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  • Dawn of a Dull Day: Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow

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    Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow at the Shed.
    Photo: Marc J. Franklin/Courtesy The Shed

    Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

    This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day, Midnight in Paris, and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers, all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.

    There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

    I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-driven drama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?

    Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.

    Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.

    This World of Tomorrow is at the Shed through December 21.

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    Jackson McHenry

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  • All Her Fault Is a Misandrist Masterpiece

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    The rich white mommy drama sets its sights on the patriarchy in Sarah Snook’s first live-action TV series since Succession.
    Photo: PEACOCK

    The men in All Her Fault never utter the titular three words. But you know they’re thinking them when a young boy goes missing from a playdate his mother set up (all her fault), when a husband has to rearrange his work schedule because his wife has a meeting (all her fault), and when a teen’s overspending sends her boyfriend into a life of crime (all her fault). These women exist to their partners primarily as an inconvenience, and the Peacock adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel of the same name hammers home the inequity in their relationships, family dynamics, and workplace over and over again. And yet it doesn’t get monotonous. Rather, All Her Fault gathers fury as it goes, particularly for anyone who would dare dismiss women as the fairer sex. And that “anyone” — well, it’s mostly the guys, because beneath the motherthriller shenanigans, All Her Fault reveals itself to be a misandrist masterpiece.

    Created by Megan Gallagher and starring and executive-produced by Sarah Snook in her first live-action TV role since Succession, All Her Fault is compulsively watchable, worthy of the type of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions. With sprinting momentum, it introduces and amplifies an overlapping series of mysteries that begins with the disappearance of the young son of a very wealthy couple, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy). The inciting action is a bit convoluted: Marissa goes to pick up Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has no idea who Milo is. She is not Jenny, mom of Jacob, who texted Marissa to set up the playdate, nor is she Jenny’s nanny. The phone number that texted Marissa claiming to be Jenny is now out of service, and the real Jenny (Dakota Fanning) says she never sent the text. She’s only hung out with Marissa once. Why would someone use her name to kidnap Milo?

    All Her Fault lays out this information at a rapid clip in the premiere, using detectives Alcaras (Michael Peña) and Greco (Johnny Carr) to sort through the details and bring other characters into the mix: Peter’s younger sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict with a persecution complex; Peter’s younger brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), who uses a cane and lives in Peter and Marissa’s guest house; and Marissa’s business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis), who steps up to run their wealth-management firm after Marissa’s family life explodes. Each has their own secrets, of course. But All Her Fault’s visceral entertainment value is driven less by the reveals of these characters’ hidden motivations than the unexpected friendship that grows between Marissa and Jenny, who are discouraged by their husbands from communicating after Milo disappears but find in each other not just confidantes but allies.

    Marissa and Jenny are very different women with very similar problems. Fanning is in the clipped-and-icy mode she recently perfected in Ripley and The Perfect Couple, all placid smiles and unbroken eye contact, while Snook keeps inventing new ways to manipulate her face into expressions of adrift, devastated distress. (Snook’s eyebrows are so raised at each new revelation they sometimes seem as if they’ll levitate off her face.) The two actresses’ contrasting energies gel when they find common ground in the increasingly curtailed nature of their lives. Even as they meet their professional goals and find joy in raising children, something’s missing. A husband who acts like an adult, perhaps? A scene in which Marissa and Jenny drink wine while hiding in the bathroom during a school fundraiser has that chummy feminine quality that makes their friendship so familiar and this genre such a comfort, even as its ultrarich, ultrawhite characters navigate unrelatable scenarios, like tending to an Olympic-size pool or realizing the nanny’s been lying to you for months. Although Marissa Irvine is a far more conventionally likable character than Succession’s Shiv Roy, it’s fun to see Snook allude to her work as Waystar Royco’s most complicit woman, peppering little “yeah”s and “hey”s at the end of her sentences that transform innocuous lines into conversational challenges. Snook’s talent is playing women who seem like the only thing preventing them from falling apart is their gritted teeth, and Marissa is another well-rounded entry in that canon.

    Zoom out on the past year’s mountain of TV, and All Her Fault is one pebble in a cairn of series positioning their female characters against abusive lovers or uniting them against a common enemy. (Bad Sisters, Sirens, The Better Sister, and The Hunting Wives qualify here.) All Her Fault puts its own twist on that formula by dissecting Marissa and Jenny’s comparably frustrating marriages: how both husbands call their wives “amazing” whenever the women make sacrifices the men would never consider making, or how their domestic labor never ends, despite the means to pay for assistance, thanks to their husbands’ talent for removing themselves from things like dinner planning and schedule coordination. All Her Fault allows the two women to lament this normalized condescension and consider whether they’ve shrunk themselves in order to please their small men, then renders their husbands so selfish and negligent viewers can’t help but root for their riotous downfalls. (Jenny’s husband sabotages her meeting with an important client because he can’t figure out how to put their son to bed. Jail.) Once Marissa and Jenny finally confront them, All Her Fault revels in the husbands’ evisceration and their wives’ lack of guilt. “All her fault,” then, takes on another meaning: Marissa and Jenny’s payback is their responsibility, but the surprise of the series is their complete lack of remorse, how brusquely they wash their hands and move on, eyes open and resolve set.

    Not all the men in All Her Fault are terrible. Peña does well playing against type as Alcaras, who intuits that Marissa and Jenny’s bond is based on more than just the shock of Milo’s disappearance. Of the men who are terrible, Lacy is exceptionally hatable as Peter, a less bro-y spin on his character from The White Lotus. An early scene when Peter asks Marissa why she didn’t double-check any of the details of Milo’s playdate, and Alcaras turns the question around on Peter as Milo’s other parent, has a delicious let-them-fight charge. But really, the men in All Her Fault are ancillary, little more than obstructions yelling for attention, figures whose fall from grace delivers operatic melodrama before the show settles into a story about the dignity women can find through determining their own identities as individuals, rather than through the magnanimous terms like team or partners used in modern marriage. All Her Fault’s short-term gratification is in those big tell-off scenes, the moments Marissa and Jenny get to rip apart men who refuse to take any ownership over their actions. Its larger contribution to this specific subgenre, though, is the way it elevates and celebrates women who choose to reject the expectations of house-baby-mommy heternormative society. Who could blame them?


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    Roxana Hadadi

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  • I Love LA Is Young, Dumb, and Full of Fun

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    I Love LA doesn’t do a particularly good job announcing itself with its pilot, so to give you a better sense, I’ll spoil a joke. (If you’d prefer not to know this spoiler, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, but I assure you: This is not the show’s best or most interesting punch line.) In the second episode, Rachel Sennott’s Maia and Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah meet with the latter’s rival from New York, a polished blonde influencer who claims Tallulah stole her Balenciaga bag. The visit is meant to mend fences; naturally, it devolves into a cocaine-fueled nightmare caught on video. The footage leaks online, and Maia’s gentle teacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), learns his coke-snorting face has become a meme, “Coke Larry,” while chaperoning the school carnival. (“Because I’m doing coke and they say I look like my name would be Larry,” he tells Maia desperately.) As his dowdy principal approaches, Dylan braces for the inevitable: getting fired, fighting with his girlfriend — the classic spiral. “Are you Coke Larry?” the principal asks and Dylan sheepishly confirms. “I’ve got a … golf trip next weekend?” his boss stammers. “A couple of high-school buddies of mine. I don’t want to let them down …” The beat stretches, the principal is eventually pulled away (“Great job on those snickerdoodles!”), and Dylan realizes he has to procure coke for his boss. That shouldn’t be a problem, though; Maia’s buddy will hook him up. The show moves on, as if to say, This is L.A. after all.

    The heart of a series like I Love LA lies in its ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments. When you’re starting your career, you have not yet learned how to be properly cynical (another excellent half-hour debut from this year, FX’s Adults, vibrates at the same frequency), and Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache. This type of striving 20-something comedy draws the unavoidable comparisons — Insecure for the influencer age, Girls for zillennials, Broad City out west — but I Love LA ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its lineage.

    As Maia, Sennott plays into and against the flopping-sexpot persona she honed in filmwork like Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maia’s eager and ambitious in the way you have to be to break through in Los Angeles, and her boss at the creative agency Alyssa 180 doesn’t quite take her seriously. (The titular Alyssa is played by a scene-stealing Leighton Meester, on quite the run right after setting the house on fire in Nobody Wants This.) Maia is supported by an inner circle including stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), kind but clueless nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), and Dylan, whose interests skew more toward board games and World War II than TikTok and brand deals. Their status quo shatters when Maia’s former bestie, buzzy “It” girl Tallulah, blows into town, and by the end of the pilot, an estrangement born of distance and perceived success gives way to a renewed connection: Maia sees an opportunity to work with Tallulah, reigniting both her career and their friendship. That first episode suffers from the need to do so much heavy lifting and feels both overstuffed and overly conventional, but once all the pieces are in place, the show relaxes into itself and its actual voice emerges.

    I Love LA is a showcase for Sennott, who also created and writes on it, and Maia’s funniest moments spring from cringe humor, including a standout jealous outburst taken to sublime extremes. What makes Maia so compelling is how the character seems to be a mystery to herself. She hustles without knowing why or what it’ll cost her, and that ambition leads to clashes with Alyssa. Whenever their conflict comes to a head, Sennott’s face betrays a fascinating tension: committed yet confused, a deer in the headlights gripping a knife. Her performance syncs with an ensemble teetering at the edge of cartoonishness but never tumbling over, a balance owed to a writing team attuned to the cast’s chemistry and aware of the lines it shouldn’t cross.

    It’s tough to pinpoint a standout in a group of killers this sharp, but Whitaker’s Alani, a kindhearted airhead, consistently delivers some of the show’s best asides and strangest beats. Hutcherson, meanwhile, is a straight-man revelation, his earnest, odd-man-out presence grounding the show’s otherwise manic energy. Jury’s still out on whether I Love LA effectively bottles the sensibility of its generation, but at the very least, its visual palette will stand as a time capsule for this peculiar moment in culture when Los Angeles teems with influencers chasing clout. The gang’s costuming is a running progression of world-building and sight gags: Tallulah’s loud, barely-there outfits mirror the hyperperformative ambition of the influencer world she inhabits, while Charlie’s elaborate, layered wardrobe underscores how each character plugs into a different version of the L.A. professional aspiration.

    These dynamics animate the show’s set pieces: the scramble for brand deals, encounters with the bizarre fauna of L.A. celebrity, flirtations with the next echelon of fame and wealth. The energy of each episode stems from these pursuits, but at its core, I Love LA believes the fantasy that ambition and friendship might be enough to build a life in a city and professional world designed to break you. The series has a deep bench of accomplished EPs, including Lorene Scafaria, Max Silvestri, Emma Barrie, and Aida Rodgers; Barrie and Rodgers are Barry alums, and their influence seeps into the show’s deadpan Hollywood surreality, though I Love LA swaps Barry’s existential darkness for something more sparkly and hopeful. The result is a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true — a portrait of youthful ambition and friendship that makes someone slightly older both grateful to not be that young anymore and just a little envious of those who are.


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    Nicholas Quah

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  • MFL Week Five Recap: Gothams Kick Off the Awards Rush

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    Illustration: James Clapham

    The first major nominations of awards season are here and everything is still coming up PTA. Thanks to a 2023 rule change that removed a $35 million budget cap on eligible films, One Battle After Another led the Gotham Awards nominations with a record total of six nods (Best Feature, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Outstanding Supporting Performance for both Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor, and Breakthrough Performer for Chase Infiniti). The points have been tallied and added to the leaderboard, but you’ll have to wait till next week’s newsletter for a full analysis of the Gotham noms and how they will affect the league. In the meantime, let’s just say you should be feeling pretty good if you bet on Rose Byrne’s performance carrying If I Had Legs I’d Kick You into the awards conversation.

    If you’re not already signed up for the MFL, it’s not too late to join — you can still build a contending team with movies that haven’t yet been released. Joe Reid’s draft guide runs through each eligible film. The final draft deadline will be Thursday, December 18. If you don’t want to miss out, draft now.

    Join us on Discord for expanded stats and discussions.

    Leaderboard

    Last updated October 28

    The Basics

    ➼ The first step is to draft a team of eight eligible movies released in 2025 using a budget of 100 fake dollars. Each movie has been assigned a value based on its points-earning potential.

    ➼ New for This Season: In past years, we closed registration when the season started: If you didn’t sign up by that date, you couldn’t play. This year, we’re extending registration through December — with a catch: drafting after September 25 means you’ll be limited to only films that haven’t yet started accruing points (i.e. you can only draft unreleased movies that haven’t been nominated for any awards.)

    ➼ Starting on September 26, you’ll accrue points based on the box-office performance, awards haul, and critical reception of the movies you picked. Each week starting Tuesday, September 30, the updated leaderboard will be available on this page and in the weekly MFL newsletter.

    ➼ The teams that earn the most points when the game ends after the 2026 Oscars will win one or more of the great prizes below.

    ➼ If you want to compete against your friends, family, or co-workers, you can create a mini-league. Alternatively, you can join a mini-league associated with your favorite creator. You’ll find more details on that below.

    ➼ There’s a limit of one entry per email address. You can’t modify your team once it has been submitted, even if a movie you picked gets rescheduled to next year.

    See the complete Official Rules. Questions? Need help? You can email us at moviesleague@vulture.com.

    Mini-Leagues

    The Creators Division: Dozens of our favorite culture-podcast hosts and producers, Substackers, and newsletter writers are competing in a subset of the MFL. When the leaderboard is live, you’ll be able to filter to see how the various creators are faring against each other. At the end of the season, the winner will receive an ostentatious championship belt, because why not?

    Mini-Leagues: You can play against a set of friends in a mini-league. Have everyone in your crew enter the same league name on the ballot when you each register, and then you’ll be able to filter the standings to see how everyone in your group is doing. There will also be mini-leagues associated with most of the participants in the Creators Division; stay tuned for more info on those groups. You can only participate in one mini-league, so that may mean choosing between your friends and your favorite creator.

    Prizes

    Oh, look, it’s an array of fantastic prizes. Here’s what’s up for grabs:

    Grand Prizes (1st–3rd Place)

    The overall winner gets to select one of the following devices:

    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Retailers

    ➼ 70-Inch Pioneer Roku 4K TV
    ➼ Xbox Series X
    ➼ Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 Noise-Canceling Headphones

    The second-place finisher gets to choose between the remaining two, and third place will get the final item. You can’t go wrong.

    Criterion Channel Subscription (1st–10th Place)

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    Everyone who finishes in the top ten will be rewarded for their efforts with a yearlong subscription to the Criterion Channel’s streaming library, otherwise known as Ben Affleck’s idea of heaven.

    Pick Your Players

    Registration is open for the 2025–26 season. Once you’ve done your research, you can select your team by clicking the ostentatiously colored button below. Now that the early draft window is closed, you’re limited only to unreleased films that haven’t started accruing points. Sign-ups will close for the season on December 18.

    DRAFT YOUR TEAM

    Not ready to draft yet? Sign up here for a reminder to build your team before the draft window closes for good.

    Scoring Categories

    Once your roster is selected, you will earn points in three categories:

    1. Domestic Box-Office Performance

    Movies will only be eligible for box-office points if they are released on or after September 26 (once the scoring window begins). Points will be awarded in the following manner (based on Box Office Mojo):

    Every $1 million earned: 1 point
    Clears $25 million: 10-point bonus
    Clears $50 million: 15-point bonus
    Clears $75 million: 15-point bonus
    Clears $100 million: 20-point bonus
    Clears $125 million: 15-point bonus
    Clears $150 million: 15-point bonus
    Clears $175 million: 15-point bonus
    Clears $200 million: 25-point bonus
    Reaches No. 1 at the domestic box office: 20 points per week spent at No. 1

    2. Critical Performance

    Points will be awarded in the following manner (based on the Metacritic “Metascore”):

    0-19: -5 points
    20-39: 0 points
    40-49: 10 points
    50-59: 20 points
    60-69: 25 points
    70-79: 40 points
    80-89: 50 points
    90-100: 100 points

    Metacritic points will be awarded all at once on January 6 and will not be adjusted based on subsequent score fluctuations. Only movies that have been released and have a Metascore score at the time of scoring are eligible for Critical Performance points.

    3. Awards

    Points will be awarded for both awards nominations and wins. See the calendar below for points associated with each event.

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  • ‘MTV Was a Lot Like Kabul’

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    Cyndi Lauper leading the crowd at the first MTV New Year’s Eve party at Times Square.
    Photo: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

    The news that MTV is shutting down its music channels does not come as a surprise to me. Starting in 1986, I ran MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and other cable TV networks for 17 years as the CEO of MTV Networks, the sun in Viacom’s solar system. It hasn’t been that for a while. MTV has been losing credibility for years, and it’s devolved into a dumping ground for B-grade reality shows. No new music energy has been pumped into it for ages. 

    Only the U.K. music channels are affected for now, but the United States can’t be far behind. The business case for running music videos on a linear TV cable network in this increasingly digital, on-demand world is terrible and only getting worse. Why sit around and wait for Beyoncé when you can summon her video with a simple click?

    David Ellison, who recently acquired Paramount Global from Viacom, has an opportunity to step back and try to reimagine MTV as a new destination outside the confines of a linear TV network. The music space is now dominated with increasingly predictive and boring algorithms. Maybe there is a way to shake up at least a corner of the huge music market like we did back in 1981, when I was just the marketing guy arriving at the start-up that would become MTV. 

    After we busted through the cable-operator gates with “I Want My MTV,” we became the new gatekeepers. Everyone wanted to be on MTV. Labels and artists lobbied to get their videos in heavy rotation. We could catapult nobodies to stardom in weeks. There was a lot of power to wield, and power doesn’t always bring out the best in people.

    We were in the Zeitgeist business, so we took a lot of chances with new things, not always successfully. If something didn’t work, it died a quick death, and we moved on. We decided we weren’t going to grow old with our audience the way Rolling Stone magazine had — they were still writing about Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. We would refresh and reinvent MTV every four to five years as one group aged out and a new one replaced it.

    Advertisers pay a higher premium to reach young people. The thinking is: Hook them on Crest or Pepsi or Ford early on and you’ve got a customer for life. When MTV said, “We have a direct line to them,” Madison Avenue lined up at our door.

    One by one, record labels agreed to give us clips for free, and they set up whole departments dedicated to servicing MTV. But they never stopped grumbling. They complained about the money they had to spend to increase the quantity and quality of their music videos. So we agreed to pay them millions of dollars through new, multiyear “output deals.” Buried in those deals was a clause granting us exclusivity for six months over any other 24-hour channel on 20 percent of their music videos. The 20 percent of the videos we picked were all the big hits. No potential competitor could take a run at us without access to the hits.

    I was against using hard-nosed tactics with the record companies and artists. Gatekeepers with a heart seemed the best way to prolong our prominence. As “the biggest radio station in the nation,” I argued, we should be fair, humble, and walk softly; the labels were predisposed to resent us. My opinion didn’t always carry the day. I watched some of our talent-relations people blossom into megalomaniacs. I guess it’s human nature that if you are hanging out on boats with Billy Idol and partying with Van Halen and strolling into every dressing room while giving thumbs-up or down to anxious managers, it will eventually turn you into an asshole. I saw it happen again and again.

    A recruit to the Music & Talent department with good ears and a deep knowledge of pop and rock might last three years. To fire them, we might have to find a concierge to kick down a door in an L.A. hotel and revive them after a three-day cocaine binge. We needed a strong human-resources department.

    Tom Freston at a promotional event in 1987.
    Photo: Alan Gilbert/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

    We were witnesses and eager participants in the last display of the legendary excesses of the music business. The party really kicked into gear when Bob Pittman made former radio DJ and label executive Les Garland the head of programming. Les was the one who had gotten Mick Jagger to scream, “I want my MTV.” He referred to himself in the third person as “the Gar Man,” which tells you a lot. Les Garland wasn’t his real name. Like many former radio people on our staff, he created a radio name. “Les Garland” was really Lester Schweikert.

    He looked about my age, but to this day I don’t think his date of birth has ever been revealed. He was an effervescent, good-looking guy with stylish curly brown hair, confident that he was the king of cool. In many ways he was. MTV’s fingers were in every pie of the music-industry machinery and for a while, most things came through or went out from Les. He arrived with deep music-business relationships, full of war stories from the rock-and-roll trenches of the ’70s, which he recounted to entertain his younger minions. It was like David Lee Roth had arrived in an Armani suit and taken over the floor.

    Amid towering speakers, gold records, stacks of videotapes, Sony Trinitrons, overflowing ashtrays, and a bar stocked with tequila and a lineup of squat green Dom Pérignon bottles sent over by the labels, the Les Garland Show streamed. Every time a big ad sale landed, he rang a huge bell. Grizzled label-promotion men in satin jackets and facial hair would slink in and out, usually laughing. Rod Stewart would drop by to play his newest tracks. When female artists came calling, his staff would vacate, and according to office lore, the Gar Man would fornicate with a lucky few. At least, that’s the legend. With Les, it was hard to tell what was true, what was myth, and what was scandal.

    When he wasn’t there, others would sneak in to have sex in his office. At one Christmas party, a staffer full of holiday bravado cozied up to Garland and said, “Les, I just want you to know that I fucked one of your assistants last night on your desk.” Les clinked his glass, said, “Congratulations, Bud,” and walked away.

    Big blowout parties became part of company mythology. “Tequila girls” in short shorts and cowboy hats, decked out in bandolier sashes packed with shot glasses, always circulated. Tequila bottles were nestled in holsters strapped across their hips. Bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds would play. These parties could go on to three or four in the morning, sometimes devolving into after-parties. You could never get away with this kind of office party nowadays. Nonetheless, the next day, a line would form outside the human-resources offices.

    The Gar Man undeniably upped our game, our profile, our whole tempo. I had spent nearly a decade in the 1970s running a clothing export company out of India and Afghanistan and to me, MTV was a lot like Kabul. An exotic new place with a crazy cast of wild characters and few rules.

    A superfan myself, I had the privilege of attending any concert I wanted. Every day we dealt with the biggest stars in the world, along with all the black sheep and characters who handled them. Even though music drove the culture, the business of music was still considered the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder. To people in film and television, it was a lowbrow world of payola, shysters, and semi-gangsters in sharkskin suits. But these were the folks I liked the most. They had hustle, were clever, and loved music. They were also the most fun. Some label heads, like Gil Friesen, who ran A&M, Jeff Ayeroff, who ran Virgin, and Jimmy Iovine, who ran Interscope, became good friends. Many in the MTV crowd had not been to or finished college. I went undercover with my academic credentials. It sounded a lot better to be “the man from Afghanistan” than the M.B.A. from NYU.

    People worked in flip-flops and bathing suits; some slept in their offices. In 1988, at 2 a.m., an overnighter flipped a lit cigarette into his garbage can and burned down a whole floor at 1775 Broadway. Nineteen firefighters were hospitalized. The local radio stations would play Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” and dedicate it to us.

    “Exotic dancers” would be sent over by the music labels. Bands passed through all the time. Lemmy from Motörhead might wander by with a bottle of tequila. We had one receptionist who sold cocaine. Many of the staff found that convenient. Cocaine was rampant in the ’80s, especially in the music industry. Even your dry cleaner was doing it then. People thought coke was the new No-Doz, a harmless pick-me-up powder.

    One of the programming guys, a jovial, former radio hotshot whom Howard Stern had crowned “Pig Virus,” kept his stash in a little plastic receptacle in his desk drawer, the place where you’d put paper clips. In a meeting, he’d nonchalantly open the drawer and take a hit off a collar stay, then politely look around. “Anyone need their beak packed?”

    MTV wasn’t a job; MTV was a life. We were a second family. People would duck out all the time to the bar around the corner. At night, there was always a smorgasbord of things to choose from … concerts, dinners, listening parties, movie screenings. We were in the middle of everything, so we were invited to everything. Not everybody made it out the other side; there were casualties with all the late nights, alcohol, and drugs. No one except me had a family. Margaret and I had a young son, Andrew, at home, which kept me pretty much on the straight and narrow. Once he went to sleep, I could head back out on the town.

    To try to prop up the business side and bring order to the chaos, Pittman installed a series of general managers. They didn’t take. One, David Hilton, undermined his predecessor and then went down in flames. Hilton had zero music chops, which earned him zero respect. I’ve never seen anyone do a worse job at anything. He sent around a note to announce that if anyone was even one minute late to a meeting, they’d be locked out. He locked his door and put a chair under the doorknob. Sometimes we’d all be purposely late so he’d have to have his meeting by himself.

    Robert Downey Jr. and Slash at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards.
    Photo: Barry King/WireImage

    In 1984, MTV held the first Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. We were positioning ourselves as the irreverent alternative to the self-serious Grammy Awards. Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd hosted. The Cars’ “You Might Think” won Best Video, and Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” won pretty much everything else. Madonna rolled around on the stage in a wedding dress while singing “Like a Virgin,” and a star was born.

    When MTV began, we played almost any video we could get our hands on. As we proved our ability to sell records, the bigger stars with bigger budgets pushed aside the punkier stuff. The record companies began to crank up music-video production. Instead of four or five new clips a week, we began to get 50 or 60. Big star holdouts like Bruce Springsteen joined in. Older acts like ZZ Top reengineered their image. Lionel Richie spent $1 million on his “Dancing on the Ceiling” video.

    As MTV became more influential, we also got more scrutiny, and not just from the Christian right. The criticism that stung was that we were not playing Black artists. In a very awkward interview with VJ Mark Goodman, David Bowie challenged him about the channel’s color line. Rick James went on a public crusade about us rejecting his “Super Freak.” He was right.

    Rock radio went backward after the 1960s, when the Beatles and Stones shared airtime and formats with the Supremes and Aretha. The early MTV music programmers came from the world of ’70s FM rock radio, which relied on a format called “album-oriented rock,” or AOR. It was a very researched system but predicated on an underlying racism. “Our audience wants to hear a guitar,” was the refrain from the programming guys. AOR resegregated rock and roll.

    In the 1980s, the record companies all had “Black Music” departments. The trade magazines, Billboard, Cash Box, and Radio & Records, all had separate Black Music charts. It wasn’t just MTV. But we were the only music channel on television. Early MTV did play some Black artists who fit the AOR format — Joan Armatrading, Grace Jones, Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” We gave heavy play to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and “1999.” But that doesn’t excuse the sad fact that the music department would put Hall & Oates doing R&B in heavy rotation, while ignoring Luther Vandross and the Brothers Johnson.

    The wall was finally knocked down by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff always claimed that he forced MTV to play Michael Jackson by saying that if we did not, he would pull all Columbia and Epic videos from the channel. It’s a good story, but I have never found anyone who worked at MTV who had any idea what Walter was talking about. “Billie Jean” was a smash from day one. We wanted that video on our channel. “Beat It” was even better. By the time MJ released the video for “Thriller” toward the end of 1983, he and MTV were in a mutually beneficial relationship. We played his 13-minute mini-movie on the hour, every hour. I ran ads in People magazine with start times. Our ratings went through the roof, and so did Jackson’s album sales.

    In the late ’80s, we opened the aperture further. We were the biggest music outlet in the world; there was no need to follow anyone. MTV would be the first to mainline hip-hop into Middle America’s living rooms with Yo! MTV Raps, hosted by downtown Renaissance man Fab 5 Freddy. Aerosmith and Run-DMC sanctified the rock-rap connection with the clever video “Walk This Way,” and we were off into a whole new world.

    But before that came our next powerhouse: the July 1985 16-hour Live Aid extravaganza held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. At the time, it was the biggest satellite linkup and television broadcast ever. It raised almost $200 million for African famine relief and would set a template for the many all-star fundraising concerts to follow.

    Paul McCartney, Elton John, and David Bowie were on the bill in London. Fans saw a career-making performance by U2 and a showstopper by Queen. Phil Collins performed at Wembley, then jumped on the Concorde to play another set at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, where Mick Jagger tore off Tina Turner’s skirt.

    I rented a car and drove from New York with Bob Friedman, my eager marketing foot soldier, known internally as “the V” for reasons no one remembers. When we got there, we realized our credentials were in the hands of a producer who had disappeared. This was the pre-cell-phone era. There was no one to call. We finally found our way to the artists’ enclosure and jumped the fence. I landed in the dirt right in front of Bob Dylan’s trailer, dusted myself off, and then calmly strolled down lanes of trailers, striking the pose of someone who belonged.

    It was like wandering through the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame trailer park. Signs read: Tom Petty, Santana, Madonna, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, Neil Young. We finally made it to the stage, and I spent the entire show at our news desk, 20 feet from the action. Live Aid was the final step in the legitimization of MTV. We were now like “Kleenex” and “Coke.” That year, we made the covers of Time and Newsweek. As for David Hilton, Pittman finally showed him the door and crowned me general manager. It was my 40th birthday. I had finished my apprenticeship and was ready to run the beast. I got a very warm welcome. Always follow an unpopular person into a job if you can.

    Copyright © 2025 by Tom Freston. From the forthcoming book UNPLUGGED: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu by Tom Freston, to be published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

    ‘Unplugged: Adventures From MTV to Timbuktu’ by Tom Freston









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  • Mr. Scorsese Could Be Twice as Long and It Still Wouldn’t Be Enough

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    Rebecca Miller has a clear thesis in Mr. Scorsese: There will never be another Martin Scorsese. Over five episodes of the Apple TV+ docuseries, Miller augments this argument through interviews with Scorsese and people from his life — childhood friends, recurring collaborators like editor Thelma Schoonmaker and actor Robert De Niro, relatives including his three daughters — and select clips from his decades of work. Every time Miller whips out a split screen to trace common themes between Scorsese’s various films and influences (like a comparison between the fights in Raging Bull and the shower-stabbing scene in Psycho), she proves her own deep understanding of Scorsese as an artist. Mr. Scorsese is an eye-opening and deeply moving viewing experience, one that had me crying within the first three minutes of the premiere episode. It is also, at a run time of 287 minutes, not nearly enough. Not! Nearly! Enough!

    Mr. Scorsese is convincing in its suggestion that Scorsese is perhaps the defining American filmmaker of his time, someone whose persistent interest in masculinity and money and the corrupting influence of both on our morality is a mirror held up to our national identity. The docuseries is so successful in hitting these points that I wanted to see more of the connections Miller was making; Scorsese’s career is rich and varied enough that Mr. Scorsese could have been, I don’t know, five more episodes? Ten more episodes? An episode released weekly until the end of time? I am being conservative and reasonable, I think! Here are 12 elements of Mr. Scorsese just begging for more screen time.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese is chronological, so premiere “Stranger in a Strange Land” spends time with the guys he grew up with in the Bowery. Scorsese bickering with Joe Morale and Robert Uricola about how they met is lovely and warm, which counters the discussion about the prevalent violence in their neighborhood. These men provide real color to Scorsese’s biographical details, like how his asthma led his father to take him to movie theaters for the air-conditioning, helping spark the filmmaker’s early love of cinema. Two men are particularly engaging: childhood neighbor Dominick Ferraro, who talks about a fight they were in at the West Side Club, and Uricola’s cousin Sally, who inspired De Niro’s character in Mean Streets. Ferraro’s description of Scorsese’s reaction after the fight is gold (“Scorsese turns around and says, ‘I wish I had a camera.’ I said, ‘This fucking guy wants a camera, I want a gun’”), and Sally deserves a memoir of his own. When Miller asks if he really blew up a mailbox, as depicted in Mean Streets, his casual admission and shrugging, “Let them arrest me now,” is hilarious.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Real ones know that Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, is a major reason why his films look so good and move so well. Mr. Scorsese pieces together how Scorsese and Schoonmaker met, separated for nearly a decade after he was taken off the 1970 documentary Woodstock, then reunited for 1980’s Raging Bull and have stayed together since. Schoonmaker is an unparalleled figure in America’s cinematic history, and while I relished the behind-the-scenes information Miller got about how she cut Raging Bull and popularized the use of jump cuts with 1990’s GoodFellas, it would have been wonderful to see a joint interview with her and Scorsese sharing memories of prior projects.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s career has long been fixated on the different layers of the American myth and why they allure and trap us. Mr. Scorsese tackles this through-line from a couple different directions. First is the story of Louis Frezza, Scorsese’s friend who died at 18 from cancer and was buried in a Queens cemetery, above which loomed a gigantic sign for the Continental Can Company. The omnipresence of capitalism in what should have been a place of faith disgusted Scorsese: “I was thinking, What is life? Screw you. I’m not gonna work for the Continental Can Company. … I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it,” he says now. Criticism of capitalism and imperialism undermining individual dignity drives a ton of his work, from the 1967 anti–Vietnam War short film The Big Shave to his 2002 NYC origin story Gangs of New York, and Scorsese comparing that film’s Natives gang to the Proud Boys is thought provoking as hell. I wish Mr. Scorsese had let him cook a little longer about the political angles to his work.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese doesn’t feel especially compromised by the filmmaker’s involvement, but there are moments throughout the series when it feels like certain things are only being alluded to. Did Scorsese have an affair with Liza Minnelli in 1977’s New York, New York? Did he and Harvey Keitel fall out, and that’s why they didn’t work together for 30 years? What about Steven Prince, the subject of Scorsese’s 1978 documentary American Boy? Prince was an actor who served as Scorsese’s assistant during his cocaine era and partially inspired Eric Stoltz’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Five years ago, he was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile for which Scorsese declined to be interviewed; it would be fascinating to get his perspective on that time in Scorsese’s life. Mr. Scorsese didn’t have to be messy, necessarily, but this man has lived a life. May we please have some gossip?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    This is how you talk about an ex: with warm affection and a sly read.

    She’s right: Sometimes it is just easier to think about lunch! Please, more of Isabella lightly teasing Marty about his tendency to flagellate himself while considering the agony of the human condition.

    It is simply hilarious to watch Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks talk shit about Harvey Weinstein, who produced Gangs of New York and was constantly butting heads with Scorsese. I have many times watched this scene in which Scorsese in an exasperated tone and with pinched fingers complains about how Weinstein wanted to cut the movie’s wardrobe budget because he didn’t understand why so many characters were wearing hats. I would hear a million more of his complaints about Weinstein.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s films have been nominated for more than 100 Oscars, but he only has one personal win for directing 2006’s The Departed. A clip from The Aviator press tour in 2004 shows Scorsese’s gracious answer to an interviewer’s question about whether he wants an Oscar (“Me, personally? The time has gone, I think”), but I refuse to accept that one Oscar is enough for this man. Billie Eilish is 23 years old, and she has two! I don’t care that the categories are different; it’s the principle of the thing. Rebecca Miller, please call every person you know in the Oscars’ Directors Branch and grill them on why Scorsese has been so overlooked. I will happily wait for that companion docuseries in which every one of Scorsese’s peers is interrogated for their lack of respect.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Taxi Driver was a shot in the arm to American cinema: a wildly dark movie about a man lost in his own fantasies and obsessions with access to guns and a strict moral code that he’s willing to die to defend. The MPAA originally gave it an X rating, and the film’s studio told Scorsese to cut it to an R rating, or they would. A classic story of artist versus overlords — which took a turn, well, fitting of Taxi Driver when Scorsese threatened to kill the head of the studio. Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma describe Scorsese telling them that he was going to get a gun, and the contrast between their bemused recounting of this story and Scorsese’s aggressive eye roll and laughter about the threat is highly entertaining. He now seems to be underplaying the sincerity of his outsize reaction, but it’s illuminating when Scorsese says, “Violence is scary, in yourself,” because he admits he was willing to get wild to defend his art. Hearing more about whether Scorsese felt pushed into violence to defend his other movies would have been compelling, too.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s cocaine addiction in the 1970s was clearly not a good time — Rossellini talking about how he woke up once to find himself black and blue all over, then learned at the hospital that he was bleeding internally from his heavy drug use, is harrowing. More details about that would feel perhaps voyeuristic. There’s an interesting connection, though, between Scorsese’s near-death experience and his relationship with De Niro, who asked him in the hospital if he really wanted to “die like this” and urged him to get better and direct Raging Bull. I cried when Scorsese quietly said of De Niro’s offer, “I looked at him, and I said, ‘Okay,’” but how much did Scorsese then feel grateful (or indebted) to De Niro? When they worked on movies together that Scorsese says he didn’t particularly enjoy (The King of Comedy) or isn’t sure entirely worked (Cape Fear), did Scorsese agree to the gigs because De Niro was there for him in his worst moment? A little more discussion of how hitting rock bottom affected his working relationships could have helped round out this section.

    Scorsese’s been famous for a long time. He’s been protected by the FBI twice, after John Hinckley Jr.’s Taxi Driver–inspired attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and after the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. You’ve probably seen at least one of his daughter Francesca’s viral TikTok videos or Instagram photos of her dad. We probably think we know Scorsese, or at least the version of him that comedians like Kyle Mooney have played on Saturday Night Live — which makes his discomfort with fame worth hearing more about. His daughters talk most about this, with Francesca mentioning a time when he didn’t leave their apartment except to go to his office. But how does Scorsese feel about this? He doesn’t speak much about how the ebbs and flows of celebrity have affected him, but I would like to know how he deals with not being able to experience New York City as casually as he once did.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    You probably know that people were very angry about The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Willem Dafoe plays a Jesus Christ who fucks, and Mr. Scorsese traces how the outcry against the movie was led by the increasingly powerful religious right in the U.S. But what about Kundun? Scorsese’s film about the Dalai Lama is only briefly discussed in terms of its amateur cast and its reception as “beautiful but dull.” The missing context is that Disney severely curtailed the release of the film because of the Chinese government’s pushback. Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner publicly apologized for the movie, saying, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it.” Kundun has remained incredibly difficult to find — the physical-media release was limited, it’s not streaming in the U.S., and repertory screenings are rare. Why not dig into any of this?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    1991’s Cape Fear, 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, and 2011’s Hugo all get only a line or so of commentary and a brief little montage clip, so if one of those is your Scorsese favorite you’re not getting much. And if one of your favorites is Killers of the Flower Moon, as it is mine, well, we’re out of luck, too. Despite KOTFM also being an Apple TV production, Mr. Scorsese relegates it solely to a few minutes at the end of “Method Director.” There’s footage of Scorsese prepping a couple of gigantic cork boards and directing scenes, but no real discussion of his motivations for tackling the film. Perhaps Mr. Scorsese wrapped sometime before the film’s release, but the series could have done a way better job encouraging people who already pay for Apple TV+ to fire up KOTFM. Eliding Scorsese’s most recent film makes for a really abrupt ending, and leaves Mr. Scorsese feeling undeservedly incomplete. Where art thou, Lily Gladstone?


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  • The Chair Company Is a Rich Text for Tim Robinson Sickos

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    Much as it leads Tim Robinson’s Ron down endless rabbit holes, The Chair Company is evocative and weird and captivating enough to make you chase your own theories about the comedian.
    Photo: HBO

    Tim Robinson, who so often plays men consumed by petty fixations or compelled to take things too far, has his own fixations. On I Think You Should Leave, his breakout sketch show with creative partner Zach Kanin, it’s hard not to notice how certain motifs recur across its comedy of unease like intrusive thoughts: peculiar elderly individuals, bursts of yelling, the refusal to take blame, idiosyncratic clothing, denials of reality, and drab corporate workplaces — all of which, the last in particular, were prototyped in the sitcom Detroiters, the pair’s first TV collaboration (alongside co-creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s Friendship, a light riff on male loneliness that follows a man’s spiral into obsession with a cool-guy neighbor played by Paul Rudd, we glimpse the emergence of another Robinson motif: Where his Detroiters character was ambiently married, in the A24 film he plays a devoted family man pretending at normalcy as it slips away. That characterization returns in The Chair Company, Robinson and Kanin’s new HBO series premiering October 12, which once again finds Robinson in an anonymous-looking office, playing yet another man losing his grip. Some artists spend their lives working through the same questions that consume them; Spielberg, for instance, has been processing the dissolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company reveals Robinson as one such artist, picking ever more persistently at the knots he seems to keep untangling in his head.

    Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a newly promoted corporate drone at shopping-mall-development firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature With Centers of Commerce.) His misadventure begins, as so many of Robinson’s sketches do, with a humiliation. After delivering his version of a rousing speech at a companywide presentation for a new project in Canton, Ohio, Ron suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It’s the kind of incident a cooler, more well-adjusted person might laugh off and move on from. But Ron is obviously neither. He refuses to let it go, and in the grand tradition of all great Robinson characters, his fixation curdles into mania. Convinced the incident is part of a larger conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation … and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, sending him down a rabbit hole of sketchy scenarios and phantom leads all while he struggles to hold the rest of his life together.

    This description makes The Chair Company sound more conventional than it is. In practice, the show feels like an effort to carry the DNA of individual I Think You Should Leave sketches across a collection of scenes comprising Robinson and Kanin’s first serialized narrative. The connective tissue can be loose — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes bafflingly so. One thread follows Ron’s elderly co-worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live legend Jim Downey, making his second onscreen appearance this fall after One Battle After Another), who lost out on a promotion to Ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. It’s not clear how he’ll figure into the bigger picture, but you accept that it may not matter. Another thread has Ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (a possible Dan Flashes callback?) that leads to a surreal encounter with a clothing-store employee who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into a mysterious membership program. At one point, Ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It’s loud and the kitchen is overrun. One table is pelting fries at other customers. A man’s plate shatters on the floor. The scene plays like a fever dream. No explanations, no resolutions, and when Ron gets what he came for, the world spins on as if nothing happened.

    Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson’s sensibility than Friendship, which often felt like a single joke stretched too thin. The improvement comes down to shape: The Chair Company adopts the loose framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to corral its spiraling logic and surreal diversions. The series has a hazy, dreamlike quality in which narrative logic bends but emotional coherence holds. The effect is almost Lynchian. Each scene obeys its own strange rhythm, yet together they form a single, deeply felt reality.

    Also like Lynch, Robinson’s onscreen world hums with quiet dread, a sense that something sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. His humor has always been rooted in humiliation and helplessness, in the fragile border between male entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron says at one point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t scream at them.” But what The Chair Company really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that’s been hanging out within that humor since, at the very least, the Darmine Doggy Door sketch. You could feel it, too, in Friendship, during one of the film’s rare moments of genuine unease when the wife of Robinson’s character, played by Kate Mara, disappears in the tunnels beneath the city. In The Chair Company, that undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (the payoff is equally unsettling); another finds Ron breaking into someone’s house only to stumble on a tableau straight out of Seven.

    That unreality naturally raises questions about what Robinson and Kanin are really after with The Chair Company. Why, again, is Robinson cast as the improbably beloved family man? This time, his wife is played by Lake Bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) adore him, almost comically, despite his weirdness and social transgressions. These scenes of familial harmony feel off, like they belong to another reality entirely. They don’t square with how Ron behaves or even how Robinson looks in the role. It’s as if we’re watching a fever dream of a man hallucinating what normal adulthood is supposed to be. Which leads to a stranger question: When other people in the show look at Ron, do they see Tim Robinson? Are we seeing Ron as he sees himself — the gremlin-man weirdo whom the rest of us have come to associate with Robinson’s persona? How are any of these readings complicated when you learn that Robinson himself is a family man with two kids?

    That’s the thing about The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just asking questions. Much as it leads Ron down endless rabbit holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating enough to pull you into chasing your own theories about the work and the comedian himself. Whether that mystery will translate beyond the Tim Robinson sickos, though, is another question. The Chair Company’s rhythms are tuned to a very specific frequency of discomfort that not everyone will find funny or even watchable. But for card-carrying sloppy-steak aficionados, it’s a rich text. The series features Robinson and Kanin pushing their sensibility to the edge, testing whether the anxious, combustible energy of I Think You Should Leave can hold steady in a longer, more fragile form. It mostly does and when it doesn’t, the fissures feel purposeful, like they’re part of the experiment. Not all the gags land, but the gags often don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seems almost like Robinson isn’t mocking obsessive male anxiety so much as sincerely expressing how it feels to be trapped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every drab office, every incongruously adoring wife is another turn through the same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be turning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.

    Correction: This review originally misattributed Friendship to Kanin. It has been updated.


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    Nicholas Quah

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  • Ozzy Osbourne, Prince of Pilates?

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    “I want to feel confident enough to pull it off. Because it’s gotta be the fucking best show in the world.”
    Photo: Paramount+

    Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days after his spectacular farewell concert in July, an event that had millions of metalheads in big, beautiful tears over his legacy. It’s doubtful, though, that Osbourne would’ve made the trek to Birmingham, England — or, to be more blunt, still been alive — if it weren’t for the intensive physical therapy he received in the months leading up to the concert. Such is revealed in Ozzy: No Escape From Now, a documentary whose creators had unbridled access to the Osbourne family and their patriarch for the past four years. (It’s now available to stream on Paramount+.) Initially conceived as a project to chronicle Osbourne’s recovery and career bounce-back following a fall in his home in February 2019, No Escape From Now has since morphed into a posthumous opus that ends with the Back to the Beginning send-off in his hometown. There’s also an unexpected detour that chronicles Osbourne’s solo induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in late 2024, which he almost wasn’t cleared to travel to by doctors due to severe blood clots in his legs.

    Those legs were spiritually in Lululemon leggings for most of 2025. In order to maintain his strength in the lead-up to Back to the Beginning — Osbourne joked several times that he could no longer build strength, given, well, his batty lifestyle choices in the past — he hired a live-in physical therapist to get him into good-enough working order. The documentary shows him and the therapist, Gary Viles, making use of a Pilates reformer machine to get his lower body and core into a state of movement. “It’s a slow process. I’m not a very good patient,” Osbourne said. “I wanna get it over and done with. I go from nought to fucking 300 in one day. I wonder why I can’t walk the next day, you know.” Viles would guide Osbourne, makeup free and in a sweatband, through rounds of basic footwork and spring changes. Just add a caffè latte and he could’ve been on track to becoming a West Village Girl.

    Osbourne in his unnatural habitat. Paramount+.

    Osbourne in his unnatural habitat. Paramount+.

    “Obviously, one of the objectives is to get him functionally capable for the concert, but more importantly for me is to enhance his overall health for the rest of his life,” Viles explained. “I want to get Ozzy healthy.” At that point, Osbourne was using a cane to walk and suffered from Parkinson’s disease in addition to various other ailments that had plagued the rocker since his fall. Sometimes he used a wheelchair if he was having a particularly bad day because of his spinal damage. “All I can say is I’m working my balls off to get myself ready for the Villa,” Osbourne explained, referring to the benefit concert’s venue. “I want to feel confident enough to pull it off. Because it’s gotta be the fucking best show in the world. It’s gotta be just the best show in the world when I do it. Otherwise, what’s the point in doing it?” His eldest daughter, Aimee Osbourne — who refused to appear on The Osbournes and has maintained a life out of the public eye — enjoyed seeing the men develop an unlikely friendship as their sessions progressed. “Gary couldn’t care less about who he is or who he’s not,” she said, “and just sees a person that has the ability to overcome this and knows exactly how to get him through those moments where he’s about ready to throw the towel in.”

    Osbourne, of course, was able to ride the crazy train straight to Back to the Beginning, where he reunited with his Black Sabbath brothers and watched 17 other acts — including Metallica and Guns N’ Roses — pay their respects to his metal holiness. (He even did a five-song set of his own hits, perched on a custom throne festooned with bats.) The concert reportedly raised 140 million pounds for various charities selected by Osbourne, who would later die, surrounded by his family, on July 22. That’s one hell of a way to go out.

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    Devon Ivie

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  • Monster Doesn’t Know When to Quit

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    Monster: The Ed Gein Story tiptoes toward a thought-provoking read on the American obsession with true crime. Then it blows right past it.
    Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

    Spoilers follow for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, all eight episodes of which premiered on Netflix on October 3. 

    Much like the other installments of Monster, you can guess the point The Ed Gein Story is making: We don’t know the full story of killer Ed Gein, and maybe if we did, we’d sympathize instead of judging him, and we’d better understand America, its crassness and consumerism. Creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy aren’t implicating themselves in that formula, of course, because they’re doing the important work of pointing out all the other filmmakers, law-enforcement authorities, and media professionals who spun the Gein story for their own devices. But their pointed fingers would feel a little cleaner if they weren’t delivered alongside lengthy scenes of Charlie Hunnam’s Gein having sex with a corpse or dancing around in the snow while wearing a suit made of women’s skin. Brennan and Murphy could’ve ended the season with its fourth episode, which features its most insightful observations about the United States’ blinkered perspective on political violence. Monster tip-toes very close to delivering a thought-provoking argument about the way we use entertainment to avoid taking responsibility for our collective sins of complacency and cultural narcissism. Alas. Like Gein, Monster doesn’t know when to stop.

    Monster starts in the early 1940s with Gein’s life in remote Wisconsin, trapped at a failing farm with his abusive religious mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf). The pair’s routine basically goes like this: She screams at him that he should never have sex, catches him masturbating while wearing her underwear and choking himself with a belt, then screams some more Bible quotes at him until the cycle starts again. Ed’s repressed and lonely, a cowed boy trapped in a broad-shouldered man’s body, and Hunnam’s falsetto-voiced, wide-eyed performance is a little bit Lennie from Of Mice and Men, a little bit Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. When his on-again, off-again girlfriend Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) shows him Polaroids taken by a soldier in the Nazi concentration camps and a kinky fetish comic featuring Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), the German war criminal nicknamed “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” Gein becomes obsessed. After his mother dies in 1945, he starts digging up graves to mimic Koch’s hobby of using human skin to make home furnishings and furniture, and eventually, remains from more than 200 bodies litter his house, like belts made out of nipples and bowls made out of skulls. Later, Gein begins killing people around town and using their bodies for his creations, too. (It cannot be overstated how distressing this show is to watch. Kudos to the props department, but also, what in the actual hell.)

    Once Monster establishes these rushed motivations for Gein’s increasingly horrifying activities, it jumps around in time: to 1959, when Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) began thinking about making Psycho; 1968, when Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) tapped into his childhood fear of Gein to conceive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and the late 1980s, when Gein inspired Buffalo Bill’s crossdressing in The Silence of the Lambs. Monster traces the massive shadow Gein left on 20th-century horror to convey how far Gein’s lore spread, how well-known he became for acts he didn’t entirely understand himself, and eventually, how disconnected he felt from both those crimes and that reputation. But it’s also trying to make a broader argument that is less about Gein as an individual and more about why we as Americans are more comfortable with ingesting some kinds of gore and brutality over others. Why do we pay money to see Leatherface shove his chainsaw into people’s torsos, but turn off the TV when news coverage of the Vietnam War comes on? Why do we transform images of Jewish misery into lurid soldier’s mementos, shrug off war crimes like My Lai, and treat New York City crime-scene photographer Weegee like a minor celebrity?

    Monster doesn’t have answers for these questions, just a general disdain for Americans and broad observations about our own cowardice. It’s frustrating that the series presents this bloodlust and apathy as a post-World War II development in the American psyche, thus tidily ignoring that the U.S. was born out of genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people. But Brennan and Murphy find thought-provoking tension in these imbalances, contrasting our disinterest in keeping up with America’s imperialist destruction with our never-ending fascination with Gein’s brutality and depravity. And the series incriminates us, of course, when Hunnam looks straight into the camera and says, “You’re the one who can’t look away.” By fourth episode “Green,” Monster has hit all these points, and hit them well. The episode’s final minutes feature Hooper ranting about how he was “fucking bored” by Psycho. When someone tells him he can’t make his movie, he replies, “Why not? They’re mowing down whole villages and putting it on TV. They’re burning babies … I’m not making the movie this country wants. I’m making the movie it deserves. They created it. The ugliness, the violence, the cruelty, the depravity, the lies. We’re humans, but we’re not human anymore.” His tirade is nihilistic and grandiose, but he makes some good points! Gein is the bogeyman, Hooper argues, but he’s a bogeyman for an America that’s already deeply lost its way, and maybe never had it.

    Imagine if Monster had ended there. We’ve seen Gein infantilized and mistreated by his mother, led on and corrupted by Adeline, have his schizophrenia activated by those horrific images from the concentration camps, and become a ruthless murderer of women who made him angry. We understand that headlines about Gein were inspiring copycats and changing true crime as we know it. We feel Brennan and Murphy’s contempt. But Monster just keeps going, making the same arguments and piling on the stomach-churningly awful visuals until you lose all sense of whatever nuance the show once had.

    Consider the finale, which floats a bunch of big-brained ideas about the cruelty of religious moralizing, the churning depravity of the American audience, and the failures of our criminal-justice and public-health systems, only to let them all splatter to the ground like the organs of so many of Gein’s victims. In “The Godfather,” Gein is reformed. With therapy and the appropriate medication, he’s lucid and penitent, but he’s still stuck in an underfunded asylum, surrounded by inmates who insult and bite him. The only people who write him letters are serial killers who adore him, especially serial killers who were portrayed on the Netflix series Mindhunter (which Monster, for some reason, takes a swipe at with a frankly exhausting, metatextual parody). He has information from serial killer “Birdman” Richard Speck about Ted Bundy, who is still on the loose beheading young women, but the FBI is ignoring Gein’s tips — until finally, a cop meets with Gein and uses his information to catch Bundy. This is allegedly a fantasy sequence, but one of Monster’s greatest flaws is how flimsy it is at differentiating Gein’s imagination from what the series is presenting as objective truth.

    The most needless scene of all is a bizarro fantastical sequence where Speck, who describes Gein as his role model and hero for faking insanity (even the killers who idolize Gein didn’t know him, Monster argues), narrates a letter he wrote to Gein in which he asks Gein if he’d like to masturbate while touching Speck’s estrogen-enhanced breasts. Look at all these freaks and opportunists, Monster tells us, unlike good boy Gein, who as he dies imagines himself going down the middle of a Soul Train-style line of asylum patients and employees and the people from his life, all bumping and grinding to Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” His final thoughts are of reuniting with Augusta, who greets him warmly at the top of a set of stairs. (If you’re picturing a Glee performance mashed up with Leo and Kate’s reunion at the ending of Titanic, that’s exactly what it’s like.) Ed has made her proud, Augusta tells him, and although “only a mother could love you,” she does.

    The final image of Monster is the pair drinking lemonade on the front porch of their home. Is this a rare moment of familial pleasantness we didn’t see? A hypothetical, what the Geins could have been like if Ed had received treatment earlier? Or a vision of Ed and Augusta in heaven, somehow? It’s unclear! Regardless, this is an exceedingly genteel way to end a show that previously had shown us not one, not two, but three shots of removed and preserved vulvas. Monster practically insists that Gein changed in the later years of his life, and Hunnam’s performance shifts into a man more self-possessed and calm, his voice pitched downward and his body language steady after years of proper treatment for his schizophrenia. (Although the show struggles to really clue us into Gein’s interiority, Hunnam admittedly tries his hardest to make him accessible.) But Monster is gratuitous in conveying both Gein’s deviance and reform, leaning into the excessive characterizations and flourishes it previously criticized Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter for demonstrating, too. In the season’s back half, neither its overloading of vile desecrations nor maudlin sentimentality adds anything that Monster hadn’t already established four episodes ago. We already know how the tale of Ed Gein ends, with commercialization and infamy. What Monster fails to consider is that it’s part of the problem.

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    Roxana Hadadi

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  • This Isn’t Your Typical Regina Hall

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    Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

    Regina Hall’s inherent Regina Hall–ness — her magnetic fusion of poise and charisma — never shows in One Battle After Another. Instead of that usual charm, Hall is sober-minded and serious. As Deandra, a guerilla involved with a revolutionary sect called the French 75, she’s waging war against oppression, whether that’s militarized police, migrant detention camps, Christmas-worshipping white nationalists, or fascism at large. Paul Thomas Anderon’s newest movie is very much a comedy, but Hall is mostly on hand during its graver political insinuations. Even as the French 75 splinters, Deandra remains committed to the cause, resurfacing when called to shepherd the targeted teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) of a dopey ex-radical (Leonardo DiCaprio) to what she hopes will be safety. To fail the mission would be to fail herself.

    Having made her name with The Best Man, Scary Movie, and Ally McBeal, this new, different note satisfies Hall’s longtime dream of working with Anderson. They’re neighbors in Los Angeles, and one day the director approached her to say that, finally, he had a part for her. One Battle also exemplifies where Hall’s career has taken her, which is to say across genres, moods, and Hollywood whims. Even when she’s bossing her way through movies like About Last Night and Little, Hall’s well-dressed polish carries an immense likability. Soon enough, Hall will return to the Scary Movie franchise for the first time since 2006. But for now, she’s soaking in the momentum around One Battle. To her, this film is “special.”

    Not every movie can be special. What’s different about this one? 
    You certainly don’t feel it with every job. The timing of this movie feels divine. This certainly isn’t what the film is about, but it couldn’t feel more pertinent to many things that are going on. It’s also a time when we really need to laugh, and there’s a lot of levity in the way the story is told.

    It’s fascinating that Paul wrote this movie in 2023 and shot it in early 2024, before our current president had been elected.
    And Paul actually started thinking about this project 20 years ago.

    Based on Vineland. 
    I think he was going to shoot it as early as 2017. Now it’s just incredibly — let’s call it psychic.

    Did you, Paul, and the rest of the cast discuss its real-world politics while making the movie?
    You know, we didn’t. We discussed the world that Paul wrote about and what would feel real. We were looking for authenticity. I read books about these times in our history and what revolutionaries are like, so it was, What’s truly in the heart of these characters? What do they do? Why do they do it? How do they feel about it? I think it’s taking the judgment off of it, and that includes the Christmas Adventurers with Tony Goldwyn and all of them.

    That divinity you talked about, though — in the months since you shot it, we’ve seen federal troops sent into cities, new migrant detention camps, and political violence. Was there a moment when everyone involved realized the movie’s relevance had been magnified?  
    Just speaking for me, I certainly thought that. I think there’s no way to be informed and not see some commonalities.

    What did Paul tell you about why he thought of you for this role?
    He didn’t say why. He said, “I have a role I would love for you to do,” and I was like, “Yes.” Deandra is not a role that I’ve played before, but I didn’t wonder why he thought of me. I’m gonna ask him. When he told me about it, he said he’d give me the script, and I didn’t get it until a few months later. I was like, Oh boy, did he forget? Did he change his mind? It’s interesting to see what someone sees in you.

    Now that you’ve had such a wide-ranging career, how do you think you are perceived as an actress?
    I think I am perceived in many different ways. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know! How do you perceive me? It’s a good question.

    I think you’re primarily perceived as a comedic actress, but I think that canvas has broadened. One thing I notice is that you often play ambitious characters, and many of those characters are high glam. It goes back to Ally McBeal. We see it in About Last Night, Little, Black Monday, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul — ambitious characters who are also very presentational. Deandra, in her own way, is quite ambitious, but without the glam. That’s an interesting change. I guess you could say the same thing for Master.
    Maybe Support the Girls.

    Yes, although your character in that film, Lisa, is very put-together in spite of what’s going on in her life.
    Yeah, a small-town kind of put-together. Even Dawn in Black Monday was very put-together, but she was a mess. Deandra is probably the most stoic character that I’ve ever played, coming from characters that are quite verbose or animated, like Brenda in Scary Movie. There was a lot of performance that had to exist nonverbally, and that was certainly different. With revolutionaries and what they’re doing, anything else wouldn’t feel honest.

    Was there a moment when you first saw yourself in that all-black, seemingly makeup-free look?
    Paul did a lot of camera tests just to see what cameras he was going to use. I think my first time in wardrobe was my first test, which was with Shayna — Junglepussy — and I will say, it felt alive. Deandra is stripped of many things, but she’s strong. I was in the beginning stages of working with PTA, and that had always been something that I really wanted to do. I was about to experience a dream. And the next time we toyed with the cameras, Leo was there. It was building, and it was such a ride.

    You mentioned reading about revolutionaries and this particular type of activism. What of that did you put into Deandra?
    I talked to people who had been a part of the Black Panthers. For me, it wasn’t about what they did. It was about, “What did you feel like, and what did you think you were doing?” Many of them were very young, and it’s a very idealistic time. You think that you’re going to be at the beginning and on the precipice of change, so I really was curious about the idealism in terms of what they were up against and who they were fighting for and how. Deandra is still part of the fight all those years later, so I used that to create her backstory. When you’re young, you kind of think you’re the first to have gone through something.

    Did you come away with any grand ideas about this particular type of extremist activism?
    There’s something to be said about the human spirit when it believes that it is right, when you believe you have cause or reason or purpose. What was interesting in Paul’s movie is we see that, with Willa, it continues. Whatever a collective believes in, it continues. For me, it was really wonderful to meet people who fought but who believed their purpose is to do good. There was a self-righteousness that they held about it. With the French 75, we saw goodness from them, even if many times things do go wrong. I walked away with more understanding of idealism.

    Tell me about your first encounter with one Leonardo DiCaprio.
    In real life, I saw him somewhere years ago, said hi, and that was it. When he and Teyana met, they had a big moment at Diana Ross’s birthday party. I had just seen him around. I think the first time I spoke to him was when we had our work session where we were auditioning with Chase. From then on, he was very funny, great to work with, and sweet. He was down-to-earth.

    In terms of where culture has gone, it feels like there’s a sort of spiritual progression from screaming into the void at the end of Support the Girls to the all-out political scream that this movie lets out. Several years out, can you take in what that Support the Girls ending has meant to people?
    Gosh. Support the Girls was such a special film. In doing research, I went to a lot of those restaurants, and I was surprised to see that there did exist this familial feeling — how protective some of the female managers were and how hard-working people were. With the scream, it’s that cathartic moment that we all need. After what had happened to all of them, in those last moments, they got to be together. I didn’t necessarily know how it would resonate, but I loved the ending when I read it. I think all of us knew what that scream meant.

    What did it say on the page?
    It just said, “They let out a scream.” I don’t know if it explained it or not, but I inherently knew what it meant. I remember when I read the script, I was thinking, Oh my goodness, what does she do? Something terrible? She’s going to steal the money. I was so used to reading that sort of thing. But they were just people, and when they screamed at the end, it’s a moment where life’s been a little bit hard. The whole film just had a sweet feeling. Ironically, Paul Thomas Anderson went to see the movie, which I gather he enjoyed. Junglepussy is in it!

    I wondered if there might have been something in Support the Girls that Paul pinpointed for Deandra. 
    That would make sense. Lisa in Support the Girls went through everything to take care of those girls, and Deandra does have a heart and a capacity to be incredibly selfless. We talked about the moment in One Battle After Another at the end when they got caught. She feels like she failed. She doesn’t have the girl anymore. That was her job. She wasn’t five steps ahead, and I think for her, she had failed the mission.

    When Support the Girls came out and got all that acclaim, a lot of Oscar pundits were rooting for you to get a nomination. Was it a disappointment for that not to come to fruition? 
    No. I had never really thought I was necessarily in the conversation. I was really happy with all the critical acclaim that the film had gotten. It would have been great, but it wasn’t anything I was disappointed by. Because it was an independent film, I was really, really thrilled to get the Gotham and Indie Spirit nominations. That was truly like the pinnacle for me because it’s an indie film.

    What have you observed thus far about the early awards-season momentum that One Battle After Another is picking up?
    The great thing is that the critics have really responded well, and audiences who have seen it also love it. You want the people to love it. I haven’t gone beyond that, but it’s incredible to feel that amount of energy surrounding the film from the start.

    One of the movies that launched your career, Scary Movie, required a type of broad comedy that I think a lot of actors probably can’t pull off. What was your audition like?
    I had about four or five. I had a lot of auditions. I hadn’t done a comedy. I had only done The Best Man. I had to preread for casting, and then go in for casting, and then go back, because this was when you were not submitting a tape. You had to go in person and do callbacks, and then another set of callbacks for Keenen Wayans. It was exciting. I wasn’t the first person cast. I was cast in the movie-theater scene, which was a separate scene, as Marlon’s cousin who was coming to visit. Brenda was a different character. A wonderful actress, Tamala Jones, had been cast, but Tamala couldn’t do it. They were going to offer Brenda to someone else, but the studio said, “We like this girl right here,” which was myself. Keenen combined the roles. It was a long process — months!

    That feels like a tough audition to me because you might not know exactly what tone the movie is going to take until you’re making it. 
    One scene I for sure did was the movie-theater scene. And where I talk to Cindy in the beginning and say, “She’s as fake as press-on nails.” Really, at that point, regardless of getting the movie, I just wanted to make Keenen laugh. I was a big fan of his from In Living Color. I was excited for any part that I could have gotten. I thought I was just going to go work for three or four days in the movie theater, so when I found out it was going to be run of picture, I didn’t even know what comedy was, necessarily. I didn’t know anything about intonation, and I was so green.

    How did your experience of the franchise change once Keenen and Marlon left after the second movie?
    Yeah, that was tough. You never know what’s happening with the powers that be, but it was scary. Anna Faris and I had to just be like, “Okay.” David Zucker and Craig Mazin were great too, but it’s great to be able to go back with that history. We’ve come full circle.

    The Wayans are returning for the first time since Scary Movie 2. Was their involvement crucial in your agreeing to do another one?
    Hm. Yes, I would say so. It was really important to have the original cast and directors back from Scary Movie 1 and 2 because that’s what made it nostalgic.

    In the years since Scary Movie 5, the horror genre has really widened. Are we going to get a parody of the whole A24 elevated-horror thing? Feels like an obvious target. 
    I don’t think so from what we’ve discussed. I signed my NDA and I should be getting something any second now.

    Oh, you haven’t seen a script yet?
    I have seen a very early draft, but that script has since had rewrites and other ideas. It sounds amazing.

    Did you really sign an NDA?
    Yes, I did.

    Is that because this is such a high-profile franchise? 
    Yeah, but it also is dependent on the jokes not being known.

    You and I spoke in 2021 when Nine Perfect Strangers was coming out, and at the time, you told me that you were writing an anthology series that Showtime had picked up, and Barry Jenkins was attached as a producer. What’s happened with that in the years since?
    Yeah, that was a tough one. Barry was doing Lion King, which was great, and at the time it was at Showtime. It’s done, and we’re headed out to pitch it now to networks. Hopefully we’ll know soon where it will have a home.

    When you say it was a tough one, do you mean because it didn’t come together as quickly as you might have liked?
    No, but we had done a lot of work and there were many changes that happened at Showtime. My executive left, and then you get it handed back to you. I think the timing for us was just tough.

    We’re talked about the range you’ve shown over the years, and you said working with Paul Thomas Anderson is like living out a dream. What else are you hungry to do?
    If you would ask me a year ago, I certainly wouldn’t have thought about a revolutionary. I just want to be in great hands and be able to have fun. I look forward to Girls Trip 2. I want to do some jobs that are scary and out of the box. I feel like my career has been a journey, and I look forward to the journey because it’s always better than I can imagine anyway. Imagine calling and telling your agent you got a PTA film!


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    One Battle After Another is a loose update of the Thomas Pynchon novel, a Reagan-era satire that’s also about an ex-revolutionary tracking down his daughter after she’s kidnapped by the opposition. In addition to Inherent Vice, this is Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation.

    Anderson first met with DiCaprio about the role after wrapping Phantom Thread, but he opted to make Licorice Pizza next instead.

    As Hall told the Associated Press, “She came from a good home, a loving home, [and] thought she could take that into the world. When she joined the French 75, she had a very strong awakening about the realities of life. Cut to 17 years later, she had seen things that had left a few scars. She had quite a bit of loss, but she still had a hopefulness — and a sadness.”

    Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, the leader of the French 75 and girlfriend of DiCaprio’s character. “I had on this Diana Ross kind of dress, and I had [a wig on]. I was living when she was performing. I either bumped him or, like, hit him with the hair,” Taylor recently told Jimmy Fallon.

    They made Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

    Hall signed a first-look deal with Showtime in 2020 while Black Monday was airing on the network. She hasn’t wanted to disclose the series’ plot publicly. In 2021, she told Vulture, “It’s kind of based on real things.”

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    Matthew Jacobs

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