Frank Fritz appeared on American Pickers for the last time in March 2020, during season 21 — no farewell episode, no on-air explanation. He never filmed with the show again. Here is what happened next, date by date, drawn from his own interviews and the public record.

2020: the exit nobody announced

Fritz stepped away to undergo back surgery, on top of the Crohn's disease he'd managed for more than 30 years — a condition he'd been open about, and which had already cost him significant weight. When production resumed during the pandemic in 2021, he wasn't invited back, and for over a year the show simply carried on without addressing it.

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July 2021: the interview, then the replacement

Fritz broke the silence himself in a July 2021 interview with The U.S. Sun. He confirmed the back surgery, discussed the Crohn's battle, revealed he'd done a stint in rehab for drinking, and said he hadn't spoken to Mike Wolfe in two years — noting Wolfe never called after the surgery.

"The show is tilted towards him 1,000 percent," Fritz told The U.S. Sun in July 2021.

Days later, on July 21, 2021, Wolfe confirmed via Instagram that Fritz would not be returning to American Pickers. Wolfe's brother Robbie took the passenger seat instead. Wolfe would later attribute the rupture partly to Fritz's struggles with addiction; Fritz put it down to ego and a show built around one man. Both versions went unreconciled for years.

July 2022: the stroke

On July 14, 2022, a friend found Fritz unresponsive at home and called 911. He had suffered a debilitating stroke and was hospitalized; Wolfe, notably, was the one who shared the news publicly and asked fans for prayers. The following month, an Iowa court placed Fritz under guardianship and conservatorship, with filings stating he was unable to communicate or manage his own financial affairs. He moved into assisted living, and his conservator later asked the court to seal the records of his health and finances.

2023: the reconciliation

Sometime in 2023, at Fritz's request, Wolfe visited him — their first real contact in years. A mutual friend described the meeting to the Quad-City Times:

"They were both in tears. Both were crying," the friend said, recalling the two reminiscing about their first Letterman appearance.

The same friend's summary of the whole feud: they weren't enemies, they just needed separation to appreciate each other.

September 30, 2024: the end

Fritz died in hospice care on September 30, 2024, at age 60. His death certificate, obtained by TMZ, listed complications of the 2022 stroke as the cause, with aortic stenosis and COPD as contributing factors. History Channel and Cineflix remembered him in a joint statement as "the bearded charmer," and Wolfe announced the death on Instagram, writing that he'd been there "by his side when he took one last journey home."

American Pickers, meanwhile, is still on the road — now deep into its 27th season, six of which aired after its co-founder last appeared. The bikes and signs Fritz spent a career hunting outlasted the feud, the show contract, and the man himself. In the picking business, that's roughly how it's supposed to go.

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Ransom Canyon opens with Staten Kirkland (Josh Duhamel) already a widower — his wife, Amalah Kirkland, died of cancer before the series begins, roughly three years ahead of season 1's main timeline. The Netflix drama, which premiered April 17, 2025 and is based on Jodi Thomas' novels, never shows her death. It shows everything the death left behind.

Who Amalah was

Amalah was born a Collins — the younger sister of rival rancher Davis Collins (Eoin Macken), which makes Staten and Davis in-laws as well as adversaries in the show's three-way land feud. She was also Quinn O'Grady's (Minka Kelly) best friend since their school days, and that friendship is the show's original wound: Quinn had feelings for Staten as a teenager and buried them the moment Amalah went after him first.

• Amalah Kirkland (née Collins) — Staten's late wife, Quinn's best friend, dead of cancer before episode 1.
• Randall Kirkland — her only son with Staten, killed in a car crash on his 16th birthday in the premiere.
• Davis Collins — her older brother, who processes the family losses by feuding with Staten over land and Quinn.
• Quinn O'Grady — the best friend who waited out the marriage, now the widower's love interest.

So when Staten and Quinn circle each other, they're both circling Amalah.

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The double loss

The premiere stacks the second tragedy on top of the first. Davis gifts Randall a sports car for his 16th birthday — without asking Staten — and the boy dies in it that same night. The season proper picks up a year later, with Staten convinced the crash wasn't an accident. He's right: the finale reveals Margaret Brigman, the sheriff's wife, was behind the wheel of the other car, and her own husband arrests her.

Amalah, dead before any of it, is the reason the show's grief math is so lopsided. Staten lost his entire household in the space of about two years.

Ava Phillippe played her — once

Season 1 gives Amalah exactly one on-screen appearance: a brief flashback to her youth, played by Ava Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon's daughter. Showrunner April Blair told TV Insider in April 2025 the casting was deliberate — the character looms so large in everyone's dialogue that her single glimpse needed a face worth waiting for, and a crew member spotted the Witherspoon resemblance without being told.

"We would love for her to come back. She was amazing," Blair told TV Insider — floating more flashbacks, or even a spin-off about the original teenage love triangle.

Season 2 keeps her in the frame

Season 2, released July 23, 2026, doesn't retcon the grief so much as let Staten make peace with it. His reconciliation with Quinn in the finale comes with a line about his late family:

"Amalah and Randall, I don't regret a single moment of my life with them," Staten says in the season 2 finale.

Which doubles as the show's answer to the headline question. Nothing mysterious happened to Staten's wife — cancer took her before the cameras arrived. What Ransom Canyon keeps mining is how long a dead woman can run a love triangle from off screen. Two seasons and counting.

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MI6 liaison officer Clayton Reeves arrived on NCIS as a guest star in season 13 in 2016, became a regular, and was gone by the end of season 15 — shot dead in the May 2018 episode "One Step Forward," with his death confirmed on an autopsy table in the following hour, "Two Steps Back." The character never got a long run. The actor has explained exactly why.

How Reeves died on the show

Reeves and Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) are approached by an armed mugger outside a diner. Reeves hands over his wallet; when the man turns the gun on Abby, Reeves steps in front of her and takes the bullet. The follow-up episode lands the real twist: the "mugging" was a contracted hit on Abby, making Reeves' death not bad luck but a sacrifice that foiled an assassination. It was the same two-episode arc that wrote Perrette out of the show after 15 seasons — she survived; he didn't.

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The reason, per Henry

Reeves was the creation of showrunner Gary Glasberg, who died unexpectedly on September 28, 2016, at age 50, just as season 14 was starting. Henry laid out the aftermath in a 2018 TVLine interview: Glasberg had been his champion since the first audition, and without him, nobody in the writers' room had a plan for the character.

"I was feeling a bit of panic in people's faces," Henry told TVLine in 2018.

Henry could tell the writers were unsure what future Reeves had — so he raised the question himself. He was also getting restless, admitting he had idle thumbs and wanted far more to do than an ensemble procedural could offer a supporting player. The write-off was, by his account, a mutual call between him and the producers, and he considered dying to save Abby about the best exit an actor could ask for.

Why the Perrette pairing mattered to him

There's a personal layer to who he died protecting. During his time on the show, Perrette had taken Henry in after learning he was homeless and couch surfing in Los Angeles — so his final scene was spent shielding the co-star who had once sheltered him. In an emotional social media post after the episode, Henry also revealed he'd lost both his girlfriend and a mentor while filming NCIS, credited putting on Reeves' suit with getting him through it, and thanked Glasberg's family, writing that Gary "changed my life."

Where Reeves sits in NCIS history

Permanent deaths of main-credit characters are rarer on NCIS than the body count suggests:

• Kate Todd (2005) — shot by Ari in the season 2 finale.
• Director Jenny Shepard (2008) — killed in a season 5 shootout.
• Mike Franks (2011) — Gibbs' mentor, killed defending the team.
• Clayton Reeves (2018) — the most recent, and still the last, main character the show has actually buried.

Ziva David, famously "killed" in 2016, turned out to be alive. Reeves stayed dead — which, given how Henry talks about the exit, is exactly how he wanted it.

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Speaking onstage at the BofA Securities 2026 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in New York, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Ravi Ahuja said the newest Spider-Man swings not just on action but on feeling — and that the reaction has been unmistakable.

“It’s a lot of fun. But it’s emotional. Some people come away crying, so that is something clearly that resonated with the audience,” Ahuja said.

He added that even Sony was caught off guard by just how big the movie became.

“It is a tremendous result. We obviously had not forecast that. We thought it would do incredibly well, but we did not know that would do that well,” he acknowledged.

The setup hits hard

Part of what’s connecting, Ahuja suggested, is where Spider-Man: Brand New Day finds Peter Parker. After the end of No Way Home, Peter is living in a world that doesn’t remember him. He’s thrown himself into fighting crime full-time, but the isolation starts to push him toward a transformation he may not be able to control.

The film is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and led by a cast that brings familiar faces and new energy:

• Tom Holland
• Zendaya
• Sadie Sink
• Jon Bernthal

The numbers are massive

The movie has led the box office for six consecutive weeks and helped power a robust summer for theaters. Per Variety, it has crossed $2.4 billion worldwide, ranking among the biggest theatrical releases ever.

In a new conversation with friend Jennifer Aniston, Sandra Bullock looked back at the rough launch of Practical Magic and the surprising way it found its audience years later. She remembers the early critics’ pans landing hard before the movie slowly morphed into a cozy, cable-era staple.

“I had a decent amount of shame because I thought I’d done something wrong. You just go, ‘Okay, okay, okay. I won’t do that again.’ And then it just took off.”

Aniston didn’t disagree.

“It turned into a cult classic.”

That “cult classic” energy came from late-night rewatches and word of mouth: the witchy New England vibe, midnight margaritas in the kitchen, and that storybook Victorian house that launched a thousand Pinterest boards. The 1998 film may have stumbled theatrically, but VHS, DVD and cable turned it into comfort viewing.

From flop to sequel

Bullock credited modern social media for supercharging the resurgence—fans trading favorite scenes and sharing first-time reactions long after release. Seeing that, she reached out to producer Denise Di Novi and learned there was more to adapt from author Alice Hoffman’s books.

“So I said if we can say these things for the people who deserve to hear them, we should make it.”

The result is Practical Magic 2, reuniting Bullock with Nicole Kidman as the Owens sisters on a new quest to break a generational curse. The follow-up leans into the family-first heart of the original while raising the stakes for the next generation.

Who’s back

• Dianne Wiest — Aunt Jet
• Stockard Channing — Aunt Frances
• Joey King — Kylie, Sally’s now-grown daughter
• Maisie Williams — Antonia, Sally’s other daughter

Early reaction has been mixed: critics say the sequel keeps a strong emotional core but struggles to fully recapture the 1998 movie’s charm, pointing to a wonkier, more scattered script. On Rotten Tomatoes, it’s hovering around 35%.

Justin Hartley's wife is actress Sofia Pernas — and if her face looks familiar to Tracker viewers, that's because she's on the show too, playing Billie Matalon, the fellow reward-seeker from Colter Shaw's past. Off camera, the two go back a full decade, to a soap stage in Burbank.

First meeting: Genoa City, 2015

Hartley and Pernas met on The Young and the Restless, where he played Adam Newman and she played Marisa Sierras from 2015 to 2016. Nothing romantic happened. Hartley was with Chrishell Stause at the time; he married Stause in October 2017 and the two announced their split in late 2019, a divorce later chronicled — to Hartley's visible displeasure — on Selling Sunset.

The reconnection with Pernas came in 2020. They were dating by that fall and went Instagram-official on New Year's Eve, with Hartley posting a black-and-white photo captioned with a farewell to 2020.

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The wedding: two swimsuits, one masked officiant

They married in spring 2021 and told nobody. The confirmation came sideways — both showed up to the May 2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards wearing wedding bands, and People confirmed the marriage shortly after. Hartley finally described the ceremony on The Tonight Show in October 2024, calling it "the best wedding in the world."

The actual ceremony: a justice of the peace arrived at the house in a Covid mask, and the couple climbed out of their own pool to say their vows — still in bathing suits.

The idea came together in that same pool, mid-conversation. As courtship-to-altar pipelines go, it's hard to beat for efficiency.

Who Sofia Pernas is

Born in Morocco to a Spanish father and Moroccan mother, Pernas moved to California at age five and speaks Arabic, English, Spanish, and German. Her resume runs well beyond daytime:

• The Young and the Restless (2015–2016) — Marisa Sierras, the role that put her on Hartley's set.
• Jane the Virgin — Catalina, Jane's glamorous Venezuelan cousin.
• The Brave (2017) — NBC's special-ops drama.
• Blood & Treasure (2019–2022) — lead role as antiquities thief Lexi Vaziri on CBS.
• Quantum Leap (2022) — a guest arc opposite her husband, their first on-screen pairing as a married couple.

Billie on Tracker

Pernas debuted on Tracker on March 24, 2024 — a few weeks after the series premiered in the post-Super Bowl slot — helping Colter track down a missing racehorse. Billie has kept recurring since, through the season 3 finale on May 24, 2026. Speaking to TV Insider in 2024, Pernas said the cliché about marrying your best friend happens to be true in her case, and praised Hartley as the rare co-star who always knows his lines.

Hartley, for his part, told Haute Living in December 2021:

"I'm very lucky to not only have found 'The One,' but I found her when she was available and the timing was right."

Eleven years after Genoa City, CBS is effectively paying them to flirt on camera. Some career arcs work out.

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In a new interview, Chris Hansen said he turned down an A24 invitation tied to Primetime and hasn’t seen the finished film, adding that the studio, according to his account, asked him to sign paperwork involving rights to his name, image and brand, along with potential legal claims connected to the movie. He objected to what he sees as a dramatic spin on the dangerous, nuts-and-bolts work behind To Catch a Predator, the NBC investigations he fronted in the mid-2000s.

“I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators.”

Hansen told The Hollywood Reporter he’s uncomfortable with the way the story has been fictionalized without his input and compared the tone to a horror film. He said he appreciates Robert Pattinson’s public comments hoping the movie adds to Hansen’s legacy, but he’s not on board with the approach.

The pushback lands as Primetime builds heat off its Venice premiere this month, with Pattinson both starring as Hansen and serving as a producer.

What the movie covers

Directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut and written by Ajon Singh, the film revisits To Catch a Predator at its 2006 peak. Rather than a straight biopic, it looks at the machinery around the NBC program and the blur between journalism, TV spectacle and ratings pressure as the show chases a coveted primetime slot.

• Robert Pattinson — Chris Hansen
• Merritt Wever
• Skyler Gisondo
• Phoebe Bridgers
• Matthew Maher
• Bokeem Woodbine

Pattinson has publicly defended the film’s broader creative lens on the era; Hansen, for his part, questioned why the team dramatized the story without consulting him and said he declined to be involved under the terms presented to him.

Primetime premiered at Venice on September 5 and opens in U.S. theaters September 25 via A24.

Netflix released Godless on November 22, 2017 — seven episodes, written and directed by Scott Frank, with Steven Soderbergh producing. Unlike a lot of Westerns that settle for a vague "1870s-ish," this one is dated precisely, and the date matters: the entire premise depends on a single catastrophe that hit the town shortly before the story picks up.

The year is 1884

The series opens with US Marshal John Cook (Sam Waterston) surveying a massacred train in Creede, Colorado, in 1884 — the work of Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his gang of roughly 30 riders. The main action then moves south to La Belle, in northern New Mexico, where wounded outlaw Roy Goode (Jack O'Connell) holes up at Alice Fletcher's (Michelle Dockery) ranch outside town.

One year, one place: 1884, northern New Mexico — still a territory at that point, and 28 years away from statehood.

That territorial status isn't set dressing. Law in Godless is a marshal based in distant Santa Fe, a sheriff nobody respects, and whatever the townspeople can manage themselves.

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The disaster that emptied the town

Sometime before the story begins, the silver mine that sustained La Belle collapsed, killing 83 men — nearly the entire male population in a single day. What's left is a town of widows and a very short list of exceptions:

• Mary Agnes McNue (Merritt Wever) — widow of the late mayor, who reclaims her maiden name, wears her husband's clothes, and runs the town in practice.
• Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy) — her brother, the sheriff, dismissed as a coward by his own citizens and quietly losing his eyesight.
• Whitey Winn (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) — the teenage deputy who can outshoot his boss.
• Alice Fletcher — technically not a townswoman at all; a twice-widowed outcast ranching outside the limits with her Paiute mother-in-law and her son.

The disaster is also the plot engine. A town sitting on silver, defended by two lawmen and a schoolteacher, is exactly the kind of place a 30-man gang rides toward.

Is La Belle real?

Yes and no. There is a real La Belle — today a ghost town in Taos County, New Mexico — though the show invents its version freely. Production stayed local anyway: Godless was shot in New Mexico, including at San Cristobal Ranch near Lamy, outside Santa Fe, with a purpose-built town set.

The project itself predates Netflix by a long stretch.

Frank wrote Godless as a three-hour feature that sat unproduced for more than a decade — until Soderbergh talked him into expanding it to seven hours for television.

Which explains why it plays like one very long film rather than a season of TV.

How long is it, while we're at it

Seven episodes of uneven length, from about 40 minutes to a feature-sized 80, running roughly seven and a half hours total. It was conceived and sold as a limited series, so 1884 is where it starts and where it stays — no season 2 was ever planned.

For the record: at the 2018 Emmys, Godless won awards for both of its heavies — Jeff Daniels and Merritt Wever each took home a statue for playing, respectively, the man threatening La Belle and the woman running it.

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On September 9, 2026, Mark Ruffalo reignited his fight with Paramount on X, sharing a Techdirt report that accuses the studio of trying to gin up fake grassroots support for its proposed tie-up with Warner Bros. Discovery. In his post, he linked to the piece and leveled a blunt charge at the company.

“Paramount cannot be trusted. They just don’t act in good faith on any level.”

Techdirt’s write-up, citing reporting from The Intercept, says a nonprofit called Neighbors for Strong Communities has been texting Californians to pressure state Attorney General Rob Bonta to drop an antitrust lawsuit tied to the merger effort. The campaign, per those reports, is an “astroturf” push — a manufactured show of public enthusiasm designed to look like a grassroots movement.

• Texts allegedly framed antitrust enforcement as harmful to Californians, according to The Intercept.
• The effort was reportedly aimed at creating the appearance of broad public backing for the merger.
• The messaging was tied to the fight over Bonta’s antitrust case, per the reports.

Ruffalo’s latest post follows a summer of back-and-forth. As he publicly criticized consolidation, Paramount fired back, accusing the actor of leaning on discriminatory tropes in his commentary — a shot that turned a policy debate into a personal feud.

Critics have also pointed to other flashpoints around the deal, including reporting that the company or its allies have floated moving operations out of California if antitrust enforcement proceeds, and PR efforts touting the benefits of more consolidation. Those claims have been described in coverage by Techdirt and others.

Opposition isn’t limited to high-profile actors. The Writers Guild of America has come out against the merger, and a coalition of twelve state attorneys general is also opposing it. For the guild, the stakes include pay, residuals, and how many projects actually make it to production.

For a character who appears in exactly four episodes of a five-season show, Hannah Durant does a startling amount of damage. Virginia Madsen — fresh off her Oscar nomination for Sideways — was announced by Deadline in July 2012 for a three-episode arc as the wife of railroad baron Thomas "Doc" Durant (Colm Meaney). It grew to four, all in season 2, and she never came back. Here's why, and what the show did with her.

The four episodes

Madsen's Hannah appears briefly in the season 2 premiere, then returns for the season's final three hours:

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• "The Lord's Day" — Hannah escorts Durant back to camp after his recovery in Chicago, where he'd been recuperating from a gunshot. She reads the town's politics in about a day.
• "Blood Moon" and "Blood Moon Rising" — the two-part finale, in which she methodically dismantles her husband's other life.

Her first target is Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott), Durant's confidante and mistress, who has effectively been running things in his absence. Hannah sizes her up without raising her voice:

"I understand, she's attractive and capable, and very smart," she tells Durant.

The governess ticket

Hannah's signature move is a masterpiece of polite hostility. She hands Lily a train ticket to New York, along with the offer of a check and a personal introduction to a family in need of a governess — a demotion from railroad manager to the help, delivered as charity. She then stands over Durant's shoulder while he writes Lily her severance check.

It backfires expensively. A cornered Lily breaks into the railroad office and steals Durant's ledger from the safe — the ledger documenting his embezzlement of Union Pacific funds. In the finale, Durant is arrested for it, marched off as the season closes.

Four episodes of screen time; one mistress exiled, one ledger loose, one railroad baron in federal custody.

Where the show left Hannah

Hannah never appears again after season 2. The series accounts for her only in passing: by the time Durant is out of prison and back at the railroad in season 3, the show establishes that Hannah left him while he served his sentence. No return visit, no recasting — Durant simply carries on alone through the Crédit Mobilier hearings that end his story in the 2016 series finale. Given that Madsen went straight on to a busy film and TV run, the exit reads as a guest arc that did its job and closed.

The real Hannah Durant

The show's version is invented, but the woman existed. The real Thomas C. Durant married Héloïse Hannah Timbrel — English-born, arrived in America as a child — in 1847, and their marriage lasted until his death in 1885, prison-free. In 1861 he shipped Hannah and the children to England aboard the SS Great Eastern while he built his railroad empire. Their son, William West Durant, went on to invent the Adirondack Great Camp style of architecture, selling camps to J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts; their daughter Héloïse became a poet and playwright.

For the record: the real Durants lost the fortune anyway — Crédit Mobilier saw to that, no ledger theft required.

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In a recent sit-down with Deadline, Christopher Nolan revealed the most-quoted line from The Dark Knight wasn’t his — and admitted he wishes it were. The filmmaker said he first spotted the sentence in his brother Jonathan Nolan’s draft and didn’t quite know what to make of it.

“He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’”

Nolan remembered wondering if that idea was “really a thing” when he read it, only to watch the line grow in relevance over time. He called it “truer and truer” with each passing year — a sentiment that lines up with how the movie turns public adoration into condemnation as Gotham’s white knight, Harvey Dent, crumbles and Batman chooses to be blamed.

In the film, the line is spoken by Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and it ends up foreshadowing the entire moral arc of the story — from Dent’s fall to Batman’s decision to protect Gotham’s hope by shouldering its scorn.

Brother in the room

The moment is also a reminder of how deeply Jonathan Nolan has been woven into his brother’s biggest movies. Their creative partnership has quietly shaped some of Nolan’s sharpest ideas and most enduring lines:

• Memento — based on Jonathan’s short story that sparked the film’s fractured memory puzzle.
• The Prestige — co-written by the brothers, steeped in obsession and deception.
• The Dark Knight — the duo’s collaboration delivered the film’s bruising moral framework (and that unforgettable Dent line).
• Interstellar — originated as a long-developed sci-fi project of Jonathan’s before Christopher turned it into a space epic; the final screenplay credits both.

Nolan’s candid admission came during 2024 awards-season chatter around Oppenheimer, where he credited his brother for the line that continues to echo through pop culture — and, apparently, through his own head — “truer and truer” as the years stack up.

Band of Brothers turns 25 on September 9, 2026, and the anniversary math is stark in one column and surprisingly kind in the other. The two groups the question covers — the real men of Easy Company and the actors who played them — have had very different quarter-centuries.

The veterans: the roll call is closed

No veteran of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, is still alive. The unit's last man, Bradford Freeman, died on July 3, 2022, at 97 — a mortarman who jumped into Normandy at 19 with an 18-pound base plate strapped to his chest, then delivered mail in Caledonia, Mississippi for 32 years. His daughters' obituary remembered him as "a country boy from Mississippi" perpetually amazed at where life took him.

The final years of the roll, name by name:

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• Maj. Dick Winters — Easy's commander, died January 2011 at 92 after years with Parkinson's disease.
• Lynn "Buck" Compton — died February 25, 2012, at 90; he'd also prosecuted Sirhan Sirhan in civilian life.
• Edward "Babe" Heffron — died December 2013 at 90.
• William "Wild Bill" Guarnere — died March 2014 at 90, of a ruptured aneurysm; he'd lost a leg at Bastogne.
• Edward Tipper — died February 1, 2017, at 95.
• Don Malarkey — died September 30, 2017, at 96.
• Bill Wingett — died 2020 at 98.
• Col. Ed Shames — the last surviving officer, died December 3, 2021, at 99; he was the first man of the 101st into Dachau.
• Bradford Freeman — the last of them all, died July 3, 2022, at 97.

The cast: remarkably, everyone

Here's the unusual part. Twenty-five years on, no death of a principal Band of Brothers cast member has been reported — a rare statistic for an ensemble this size.

The scorecard as of September 2026: zero surviving veterans, zero reported deaths among the principal cast.

The evidence was on stage in New Orleans this summer, when the National WWII Museum — founded by Stephen Ambrose, whose 1992 book started all this — hosted a 25th-anniversary symposium on July 31 and August 1, 2026. Attendees included Frank John Hughes (Guarnere), Michael Cudlitz (Randleman), James Madio (Perconte), Ross McCall (Liebgott), Kirk Acevedo (Toye), Shane Taylor (Doc Roe), Robin Laing (Heffron), Rick Warden (Welsh), plus Eion Bailey, Dexter Fletcher, Matthew Settle, Richard Speight Jr. and military adviser Dale Dye. Damian Lewis (Winters) couldn't attend and sent a video message; he's been busy with Wolf Hall and, improbably, a music career. Ron Livingston, David Schwimmer, Donnie Wahlberg, Neal McDonough, and Scott Grimes are all alive and working — as are the then-unknowns buried in the credits: Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Simon Pegg, Andrew Scott, Colin Hanks, and Jimmy Fallon.

"We are all brothers and friends," Madio told Military Times in July 2026, describing a cast group that still talks daily.

The anniversary itself

HBO Max is marking the date with a new documentary, Band of Brothers: Legacy. It caps a strange arc: the $120 million series premiered on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11, watched its audience drop from 10 million to nearly half that as HBO pulled its marketing, and won the Outstanding Miniseries Emmy anyway.

For the record: the men interviewed in those episode-opening segments were the veterans themselves. The show now doubles as their archive.

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Neon-lit streets, a packed rave, swordplay in the rain, and motorcycles knifing through traffic — the latest on-location shoot for Highlander put Henry Cavill right in the thick of Hong Kong night life, complete with recreated storefronts and towering signage. The footage circulating from set has the bruising, practical feel you’d expect from director Chad Stahelski, whose John Wick pedigree is written all over the choreography and camera moves.

Principal photography began January 28, 2026, in Scotland.

The world tour started after a bumpy lead‑up — production faced multiple delays, including a pre‑production training injury to Cavill — then quickly settled into a rhythm. The unit bounced between London and the Scottish Highlands, hitting real locations like Eilean Donan Castle, the Isle of Skye, Glencoe and Glen Nevis to ground the centuries-spanning story in places you can actually stand.

From there the shoot widened out: filming moved to Poland in May and then to Hong Kong, where fans shared set photos and video on X of Cavill weaving through neon and traditional shopfronts. The international run matches the premise — immortals roaming the globe — and signals a clear preference for streets, castles and valleys over green screens.

Who’s in it

• Henry Cavill — Connor MacLeod
• Russell Crowe — Ramirez
• Dave Bautista — the Kurgan
• Karen Gillan
• Marisa Abela
• Djimon Hounsou
• Drew McIntyre
• Max Zhang
• Jeremy Irons

What it adapts

Stahelski’s film is a reboot and reimagining of the 1986 original, keeping the core mythology of Immortals battling toward the Gathering and the mysterious Prize. Cavill’s Connor MacLeod — a Scottish warrior who can’t die — is once again drawn into conflict with other Immortals, including the brutal Kurgan, and the creative team has indicated the new movie can pull from the wider Highlander canon beyond the first film.

Behind the camera, Stahelski directs from a screenplay by Kerry Williamson and Mike Finch, with longtime collaborator Dan Laustsen shooting and Tyler Bates composing the score. Amazon MGM Studios is backing the project, with a 2027 release expected.

Some TV deaths are dictated by contracts, some by history books. Richard Harrow's was neither — Boardwalk Empire's half-masked sniper was entirely fictional, played by Jack Huston, and HBO would happily have kept him around. The decision came from the writers' room, and Terence Winter has laid out the reasoning in detail.

What Winter actually said

Speaking to TheWrap after the season 4 finale aired on November 24, 2013, Winter was direct about it:

"We just felt we took him as far as we could as a character."

He added that he didn't want Richard degraded into the show's in-house fixer, trotted out whenever the plot needed somebody shot. And he revealed the rule the room had set well in advance: once Richard renounced killing at the start of season 4, the writers agreed that if he ever picked up a gun again, it would almost certainly be his last act. The ending was built into the character before the finale was even outlined.

Read more: That Margo Got Money Troubles character’s jacket? Nick Offerman says it has a real-life backstory

The accidental star

Part of what made the death land so hard is that Richard was never supposed to matter. Huston told Rolling Stone in 2013 that the part was written as a three-episode role when he joined in season 1's "Home" — a disfigured World War I sharpshooter in a tin half-mask, meant to pass through Jimmy Darmody's orbit and move on. Instead he stayed four seasons and became the show's most beloved invention.

"It's amazing how far we went," Huston said.

Huston, who learned of the death only when the finale's script call came, argued the ending fit: Richard was conceived as a tragedy, and tragedies end a particular way. He said he felt honored rather than upset.

How it happens on screen

In "Farewell Daddy Blues," Richard — married to Julia, raising Tommy, out of the killing business — makes one last deal with Nucky: assassinate Dr. Valentine Narcisse at the Onyx Club, and Nucky reveals where Jimmy's body is buried, sealing Gillian's murder conviction. The precise mechanics of the finale:

• The shot — Richard's hands, steady through an entire war, shake. He misses Narcisse.
• The victim — the bullet kills Maybelle White, Chalky's daughter, standing feet away.
• The escape — Richard is hit by return fire on his way out of the club.
• The end — he makes it under the boardwalk, dreams of arriving at the family farm with his face whole, and dies in the sand.

Why the logic holds up

Winter's math was simple: a hitman who finds peace has two possible stories left — relapse or retirement — and retirement isn't drama. The show had already run the redemption arc; season 4 opened with Richard unable to pull a trigger. Bringing him back to the gun once more, and having the gun fail him, closed the circle the writers had drawn a season earlier.

For the record: Narcisse, the man Richard couldn't shoot, outlived him by a full season — Luciano's gunmen got him in the 1931-set series finale.

Earlier we wrote: All the Creative Arts Emmys 2026 winners from both nights, in one place

Pressed in a new Variety interview tied to his upcoming film Misty Green, Chris Rock said he still hasn’t returned to the actual Oscars telecast since the 2022 onstage slap by Will Smith — though he has popped into Oscar-night parties. If he’s going back to the ceremony itself, he wants a nomination attached.

“The only way I’ll go back is if I’m nominated, and I’m not getting nominated. And that’s OK. We’ll deal with that if it happens. Like, let’s manage expectations.”

Rock also told the magazine he wishes the 2022 incident hadn’t happened, and he downplayed it in the broader scheme of things, saying a bad day for him isn’t the worst thing in the world.

His new film

The interview centered on Misty Green, which Rock wrote, directed and co-stars in. The drama follows Misty, played by Rosalind Eleazar, a gifted actress trying to rebuild her life after addiction. Her shot at a comeback comes from a director from her past, Jordan — played by Rock — who has to decide whether to forgive her after her career stalls for smacking a colleague.

The storyline inevitably echoes the Oscars moment that’s followed Rock for two years, but he said the parallel wasn’t planned and he hadn’t even considered the connection until it came up in conversation with Variety.

Director Peter Berg is building The Mosquito Bowl around four real-life college standouts who traded fall Saturdays for the Pacific front after Pearl Harbor. Netflix’s WWII drama centers on Marines who were stars on campus before they were shipped overseas, with the story anchored by the gridiron leaders they once were — and the brutal choices they faced far from any stadium.

• Nicholas Galitzine — John McLaughry, the disciplined Brown University quarterback and team captain whose leadership follows him into the Marines.
• Bill Skarsgård — Bob Baumann, a University of Wisconsin tackle whose toughness carries from the line of scrimmage to the Pacific Theater.
• Ray Nicholson — Tony Butkovich, Purdue’s powerhouse fullback and one of college football’s feared offensive weapons before enlistment.
• Tom Francis — David Schreiner, Wisconsin’s All-American end, stepping into the film fresh off his West End run in Sunset Boulevard.

The Marines around them are just as sharply cast. Brent Comer appears as Notre Dame quarterback George Murphy, Pat McAfee takes on a Marine Drill Instructor, Dominic Bogart plays battle-hardened Sergeant Wilkes, and Ella Newton is Jane. Stacy Clausen and Scott Lee portray fellow Marines, and Claudia Ware steps in as USO-era star Frances Langford.

The real “Mosquito Bowl”

The title nods to an infamous wartime matchup. On Christmas Eve 1944, Marines on Guadalcanal cleared a regulation football field from dirt and sharp coral and staged a full-on exhibition — lineups, ceremony, everything — amid swarms of actual mosquitoes.

On Christmas Eve 1944, U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal staged a full football game that became known as the Mosquito Bowl.

The island’s Mosquito Radio Network broadcast the game with play-by-play and starting lineups, and between the bugs and the tongue-in-cheek pomp, the “bowl” nickname stuck. Berg’s film folds that slice of wartime life into a story about athletes-turned-Marines whose biggest game was never about a trophy.

Netflix will release The Mosquito Bowl; a premiere date hasn’t been announced.

Week one numbers back up the buzz: Lanterns arrived on HBO with a 95% critics score and 89% audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and pulled in 9.3 million global viewers across its first three days on HBO and Max — the biggest DC Studios premiere on the platform to date. The series is rolling out on Sundays instead of dropping all at once, keeping the conversation going week to week.

Lanterns drew 9.3 million global viewers in its first three days.

The slow-burn approach fits the Green Lantern Corps. These cosmic “space cops” work inside knotty politics and moral gray zones; cramming Hal Jordan and John Stewart’s partnership into a two-hour movie has never served the mythology well. On HBO, the show has room to wrestle with willpower, fear and intergalactic law without rushing the character work.

HBO is where DC is humming

HBO’s playbook — the one that made The Sopranos and Game of Thrones watercooler staples — is paying off for DC. Recent series have landed strong with both critics and viewers, and Lanterns now stands as the highest-rated live-action DCU project so far.

• Peacemaker — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes
• The Penguin — 95%
• Creature Commandos — 93%
• Lanterns — 95% critics, 89% audience

The weekly release strategy — Sundays on HBO, streaming on Max — mirrors the cadence that once kept Game of Thrones in the cultural bloodstream for years. It’s tailor-made for shows built on character depth and tough choices instead of constant spectacle.

The big-screen picture is shakier

Superman kicked off the rebooted movie slate with $618.7 million worldwide and solid word of mouth for its heartfelt tone and David Corenswet’s take on the icon. Still, it fell shy of the billion‑dollar watermark studios crave for a cornerstone franchise, including just $264 million from overseas markets.

Then came Supergirl in June 2026. It opened to $38 million domestically (below the $55 million projections) and finished with $126.3 million worldwide against a reported $170 million budget — DC’s worst box-office showing since 2004’s Catwoman. The film dropped 62% by its fourth weekend, posted the lowest fourth‑weekend domestic haul in DCU/DCEU history, slid out of the top five faster than The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and mustered only $54 million overseas.

Warner Bros. Discovery is adjusting. Clayface, a horror‑leaning Batman villain story, is set for October 2026 with a modest $40 million budget; industry analysts say it needs roughly $100 million worldwide to land in the black — a far lower bar than recent tentpoles.

Match the story to the medium

Some DC sagas belong on HBO. A cosmic police procedural like Lanterns lives on layered world‑building and patient character beats — the same qualities that defined Green Lantern: Rebirth and Geoff Johns’ long‑form runs, or arcs like Secret Origin and Emerald Twilight that unfolded over dozens of issues. Redemption journeys such as Peacemaker and crime epics like The Penguin also thrive with time to breathe.

Theaters, meanwhile, make sense for true events: icons with built‑in gravity and scale, like Superman and the upcoming The Batman Part II. There’s even chatter that Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow — a character study by design — might fit better as a limited series, much as Creature Commandos used animation to tackle darker material.

On the film side, next up is Clayface in October 2026.

If you’ve been meaning to revisit the spider invasion that made you check your shoes for weeks, Arachnophobia is easy to find again. The 1990 horror-comedy is streaming in the U.S. on Prime Video and Fandango at Home, bringing its mix of small-town charm and eight-legged chaos back to living rooms.

Directed by Frank Marshall and written by Don Jakoby, Al Williams, and Wesley Strick, the film hit theaters in 1990 and found a long life as a crowd-pleasing gateway into creature features.

It grossed $53,208,180 in theaters.

The story

A rare spider species hitches a ride from the South American jungle to a quiet California town, mates, and unleashes a lethal brood. As bodies start to pile up, it falls to Dr. Ross Jennings and a few unlikely allies to track the source and stop the killings before the nest fully takes hold.

Who’s in it

• Jeff Daniels
• Harley Jane Kozak
• Julian Sands
• John Goodman

Where to watch

• Prime Video (U.S.)
• Fandango at Home (U.S.)

Runtime: 1 hour 49 minutes.

It starts with a stranger’s dog nosing into the mud and its owner quietly walking on instead of calling it in. By morning, police are pulling child-size remains from the shore, and former detective turned dispatcher Ian Ridley is on the sand staring at what might be the first tangible lead in eleven years. On Last Seen — the new thriller on Apple TV+ — that uneasy discovery cracks open more than one case file.

Eleven years after three-year-old Margaret vanished, a dog leads police to child-size remains on the shore.

At work, Ian is hanging onto sobriety — six months and one day — and trying to shut down a messy office romance. His coworker and sometime lover Polly rolls in 45 minutes late after lunch; as her supervisor, he tries to end it. Then a call comes in from Tyra Kennedy, a desperate plea about danger at home, and Ian is suddenly parked on Bonnets Road watching from his car. He clocks Tyra’s little boy looking content through the window, and it hits him like a freight train: his own daughter Margaret, gone at three, still lives on in crayon drawings and missing posters he keeps close.

Back at the beach, Senior Sergeant Isabel Pena is not thrilled to see Ian in the crime scene mix, but he notices something everyone else seems to skate past: distinctive pawprints circling the spot. He can’t shake the idea that the dog — and whoever was with it — matters. The timing couldn’t be worse; his ex Debbie McGuire is pregnant, and the remains could be their daughter. Still, when colleague Bill counsels patience and an autopsy, Ian does what he does best: he digs on his own.

The dog, the prints, the pajamas

Using his desk and login like a backdoor, Ian searches for every recent incident involving dogs, odd finds and maps them against the coastline. A lead sends him up to Mount Larou. There, he tracks down the man whose dog uncovered the remains — a man who never reported it, reportedly too spooked by what he’d seen the animal pull from the mud.

In the police interview room, something worse drops: among the items is a small set of pajamas Ian recognizes instantly. He tells investigators they’re the exact pajamas Margaret wore the night she disappeared. Detectives counter with a cold, procedural explanation — the clothes were wrapped in plastic and buried near the body, and the dog may have dragged them out. And a gut punch twist: the man with the dog was serving time back when Margaret vanished, so he couldn’t have taken her.

Ian can’t swallow it. He goes home, the eleven-year dam finally breaking, and falls off the wagon. He drinks through the night by the sea, waves crashing until daylight, the bottle his only company.

Ian spirals

He drifts back to Bonnets Road, watching Tyra’s house like it’s a pressure valve. That night, he tails the family to a carnival — fairy lights, a musical performance, the husband downing beers — and lurks at the back like a fuse with nowhere safe to spark. Polly finds him in the crowd and admits she didn’t know about Margaret; Lydia told her the disappearance happened around this time of year. Ian flashes back: the festival with Debbie, leaving Margaret with her then–sixteen-year-old brother Dean, the gut-emptying moment they got home and she was gone.

When the husband finally turns aggressive, Ian stops thinking and starts swinging. He pummels the man, unleashing eleven years of fury, and spends the night in a cell for it. A friend shows up the next morning to collect him, while another worker pointedly asks that friend whether he really knows Ian at all. Outside, framed by that same unhelpful ocean, the friend tears into him for nearly wrecking a stranger’s life because his own is on the rocks.

He tries a different kind of amends at Debbie’s. Ian brings over the baby’s cot he couldn’t bear to part with, and the air between the former spouses goes from awkward to raw. He tells Debbie he wants to help with Margaret’s funeral because he needs to move forward, and it lands with the complicated weight of everything they’ve survived and everything they haven’t.

A final chill

Elsewhere, the episode cuts to Henry Reid coming home to his wife, played by Mazine Peak. She’s painting before heading out to check the animals; he wears worry like a coat he can’t take off. He offers the standard “long day” — and the scene doesn’t buy it any more than we do.

Back by the beach, the past seems to move on its own. The old file on Margaret flutters open in the wind, pages flipping to an age-progressed sketch of what she might look like now. The hour doesn’t end on death — it lands on the eerie possibility that Margaret Ridley is out there somewhere.

• Ian Ridley — former detective, now a police dispatcher; Margaret’s father struggling to stay sober.
• Margaret Ridley — vanished at age three; her case reopens when remains turn up by the sea.
• Polly — Ian’s coworker and sometime lover, whose late arrivals and secrets complicate everything.
• Debbie McGuire — Ian’s ex and Margaret’s mother; now pregnant.
• Senior Sergeant Isabel Pena — the officer side-eyeing Ian at the crime scene.
• Bill — the colleague urging Ian to wait for the autopsy.
• Tyra Kennedy — the caller whose plea draws Ian to Bonnets Road.
• Dean — Margaret’s brother, 16 the night she disappeared.
• Henry Reid — a man rattled by more than a “long day.”
• Mazine Peak — portrays Henry’s wife.
• Lydia — the acquaintance who told Polly the disappearance happened around this time of year.

Here's the thing about Chester Goode: he never died at all. Gunsmoke's limping, coffee-obsessed deputy simply walked out of Dodge City in 1964 and the show carried on for another eleven years as if he'd never existed. The death people are usually asking about belongs to Dennis Weaver, the man who played him — and that came 42 years later.

Chester's last episode

Weaver's final appearance was "Bently," the 28th episode of season 9 and the 333rd of the series, aired April 11, 1964. Fittingly, Chester carries the episode: with Marshal Dillon out of town, he doubts a dying man's murder confession and hunts down the real killer himself. His last words on the show, spoken to the widow:

"I think maybe I'll take you down to the stage."

That was it. No farewell scene, and the next episode carried on without him. Ken Curtis's Festus Haggen took over the sidekick slot — with an actual deputy's title, which Chester never got in nine years.

Read more: Tommy & Tuppence cast guide: Agatha Christie’s classic gets a modern take

Why Weaver left

Money wasn't the issue. Weaver had gone from delivering flowers for $60 a week to $9,000 a week by the end of his run, and he'd won a Supporting Actor Emmy in 1959. He was simply done.

"I pretty much exhausted all creative possibilities with the character," he said in a 2002 Television Academy interview.

He also feared typecasting, and the limp — his own invention, added along with the twang to make a leading man read as a sidekick — was taking a physical toll after nearly a decade. James Arness later said Weaver struggled for a while to lose Chester's stiff-legged gait off camera.

The one time Gunsmoke explained it

Eleven seasons after the exit, in 1975, Dillon finally addressed the mystery. Reading through old records with Newly, he comes across Chester's name.

"He used to work for me here. He was before your time," Dillon says.

He adds that Chester left "right after the trial." Twelve words of closure, eleven years late.

Weaver's second act, and his last years

The gamble paid off. After the short-lived Kentucky Jones and the film Gentle Ben, Weaver landed McCloud, which ran on NBC from 1970 to 1977 and made him a lead at last. In 1971 he starred in Duel, Steven Spielberg's first film. He served as Screen Actors Guild president from 1973 to 1975.

Then he mostly stopped acting and started building. In the late 1980s, Weaver and his wife Gerry commissioned architect Michael Reynolds to build an "Earthship" outside Ridgway, Colorado — a 10,000-square-foot solar home made from roughly 3,000 used tires and 300,000 recycled cans, with a $50 monthly electric bill. Jay Leno asked, of the garbage man, "how does he know where the garbage begins and the house ends?" Weaver also founded the Institute of Ecolonomics and led LIFE, a charity feeding 150,000 people a week in Los Angeles County, and in 2001 drove a Prius from Los Angeles to Denver to promote alternative fuels.

Weaver died on February 24, 2006, at his Ridgway home, of complications from cancer. He was 81, still married to Gerry after 61 years, and still working — his final role, on ABC Family's Wildfire, aired the year he died.

For the record: his ashes were scattered on his own Colorado ranch. Chester finally got out of Dodge for good.

Earlier we wrote: A five-year prognosis frames Bruce Campbell’s candid dive into the cancer rabbit-hole

If you missed its limited theatrical run, you can now watch A Mosquito in the Ear at home in the U.S. via digital rental or purchase. The movie is available on the major storefronts, including Amazon and Apple, with standard and 4K options.

• Amazon Video — digital rental from $4.99; 4K rental where available for $5.99; digital purchase also offered
• Apple TV Store — digital rental from $4.99; 4K rental where available for $5.99; digital purchase also offered

Digital rentals start at $4.99 in the U.S., with 4K at $5.99 where available.

What it’s about

Writer-director Nicola Rinciari makes his feature debut with this adaptation of Andrea Ferraris’ graphic novel Una Zanzara nell’Orecchio. The film stars Jake Lacy as Andrew, Nazanin Boniadi as Daniela, and newcomer Ruhi Pal as Sarvari, a four-year-old girl they’ve adopted from India.

Andrew and Daniela travel to Goa to meet Sarvari and bring her home to the U.S., but the plan unravels when Sarvari resists leaving the orphanage she’s always known. The couple has to navigate her distress along with cultural and language barriers, turning their first days as parents into a delicate exercise in trust and communication.

How it got here

The comedy-drama premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February before a limited theatrical release in June 2026.

As of now, there’s no U.S. subscription streaming option or free, ad-supported stream listed; digital rental or purchase is the way to watch at home.

Netflix's Ransom Canyon opens on a birthday party and gets to a funeral with remarkable speed. Within the first few minutes of the April 17, 2025 premiere, Staten Kirkland's teenage son Randall is dead, and the question of exactly how becomes the engine of the entire first season. With season 2 out as of July 2026, here's the full account.

The crash

Randall (Hubert Smielecki) storms out of his own birthday party after a fight with his father (Josh Duhamel) and drives off in the sports car his uncle, Davis Collins (Eoin Macken), gave him as a gift. On a dark road outside town, his car flips, and he dies of his injuries. Police rule it a single-vehicle accident and close the file.

Read more: A modern twist on an Agatha Christie classic: Tommy & Tuppence cast, plot, release date

Staten — who buried his wife Amala not long before — never accepts the ruling. A year later, he's still insisting there was a second vehicle on that road. The town writes it off as grief. He's right anyway.

"It has been a dark couple of years for this dude. It really has," Duhamel told Entertainment Weekly in 2025.

Who was actually driving

Episode 5 hands viewers the name; the finale supplies the circumstances. Margaret Brigman (Sarah Minnich), the estranged, alcoholic wife of Sheriff Dan Brigman (Philip Winchester), was drunk at the wheel of a blue Ford pickup that night, heading home from an evening with her lover. Her swerving forced Randall off the road, and she kept driving.

The lover, in classic small-town fashion, was Kit Russell (Casey W. Johnson) — the local outcast, Lucas's older brother, and the first man police arrested for the crash.

The cover-up

The truck didn't disappear on its own. Piece by piece:

• Kit — tried to take the blame himself to shield Margaret.
• Reid and Nick — owed Kit a favor, scraped the VIN off the pickup, and sank it in a nearby lake.
• Lucas — found the submerged truck while swimming with Lauren, which reopened the case.
• Lauren — overheard the truth about her mother and insisted her father make the arrest.

The season ends with Sheriff Brigman knocking on his own wife's door and taking her in on manslaughter charges. Showrunner April Blair told TVLine in April 2025 that "that mystery has been put to bed" — the writers wanted Staten to finally get room to grow.

Where season 2 takes it

Season 2, released in July 2026, deals in consequences rather than reopened files. Margaret is in prison. Lauren, her cheerleading scholarship gone after an injury, drifts toward the worst possible person — Kit. And Staten gets to be something other than the grieving father: in the season 2 finale, back together with Quinn, he closes the book himself.

"Amalah and Randall, I don't regret a single moment of my life with them," he tells her.

For the record: Blair's writers had this aftermath mapped before Netflix even ordered season 2 — the room was already at work when the renewal came through.

Earlier we wrote: Nathan Fielder’s A24 doc ‘A Secret’ spotlights Elizabeth Holmes—here’s who she is

Masters of the Air — the nine-part Apple TV+ series from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, adapted from Donald L. Miller's 2007 book — is set almost entirely at Thorpe Abbotts, the Norfolk airfield where the 100th Bomb Group flew from in 1943. Filming, which began in spring 2021 on a reported $250 million budget, never went to Norfolk at all. The real Thorpe Abbotts barely exists anymore, so the production built its own.

The £5 million airbase in Buckinghamshire

The series' Thorpe Abbotts was constructed at Newland Park, a Grade II listed country estate near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire — also home to the Chiltern Open Air Museum — on grounds that previously held a disused university campus and hotel. The build reportedly cost around £5 million: Nissen huts, wartime outbuildings, and imported US Army vehicles, assembled into a working replica of a 1943 bomber station. The site was chosen for the same reason the original airfields went where they did — flat, open, untouched green land. As Caroline Comer of the site's developer told the Bucks Free Press, the appeal was its

"natural untouched surroundings and wide-open green spaces."

For runway work — B-17s taxiing and landing — the production used Dalton Barracks in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, the former RAF Abingdon. Studio and effects-heavy flying sequences were based at Bovingdon Airfield Studios in Hertfordshire, itself a genuine wartime Eighth Air Force base that also served Band of Brothers.

Read more: All the Creative Arts Emmys 2026 winners from both nights, in one place

The towns playing Norfolk

• Bledlow, Buckinghamshire — dressed as a 1940s Norfolk village; the Lions of Bledlow pub became the "Kings Head," complete with a Bullards Ales sign and a village-green signpost pointing to the real Norfolk villages of Dickleburgh, Thorpe Abbotts, and Burston.
• Hemel Hempstead Old Town, Hertfordshire — its High Street was converted into bombed-out streets with sandbagged air-raid shelters and vintage military vehicles.
• Oxford — Catte Street, Radcliffe Square, and the Bodleian Library appear in Crosby's Oxford sequences, playing themselves.
• The Hinds Head, Bray — the Michelin-starred pub got a 1940s makeover for the series.
• A Buckinghamshire farm — stood in for occupied Belgium.

The real Thorpe Abbotts

The actual RAF Thorpe Abbotts sits four miles east of Diss, Norfolk, built in 1942–43 by John Laing & Son and handed to the US Army Air Forces as the Eighth Air Force ballooned — part of the "Friendly Invasion" that put some 350,000 Americans into East Anglia, up to 3,500 per base. The 100th flew 306 missions from there and dropped over 19,000 tons of bombs, earning the "Bloody Hundredth" nickname the hard way. The runways are largely gone, which is why filming there was never an option — but the restored control tower now houses the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum, and visitors can climb to the same viewing platform the show's characters use.

Production designer Chris Seagers, who grew up in the region, told The Daily Beast that as kids

"they were just great places to mess about on" — the disused airfields were simply part of the East Anglian landscape.

Which is the neat irony of the whole shoot: to recreate a place children later played on, the production built a brand-new one for adults to play on — 150 miles away, in the wrong county, and accurate to the rivet.

Earlier we wrote: Where to watch The Poughkeepsie Tapes, the 2007 horror film?

Sterling Point, the eight-episode Prime Video drama that premiered August 5, 2026, follows 17-year-old Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin), who inherits a mysterious island from her grandfather and leaves New York for a lakeside town that isn't on any map. The town is invented. Almost everything around it is real, and most of it is reachable by boat.

Ontario, split down the middle

The series was shot entirely in Ontario, Canada. Per Rubin herself, the production ran:

"Half in Toronto and half in Muskoka."

Muskoka is Ontario's cottage country — a district about two hours north of Toronto with more than 1,600 lakes, centered on the big three: Lake Muskoka, Lake Rosseau, and Lake Joseph. Additional filming happened in Severn and Caledon. If the waterfront estates look like places where extremely wealthy people summer, that's documentary accuracy — Muskoka's shoreline is famous for exactly that, which is rather the point of the show's old-money-versus-new-money tension.

Read more: That Margo Got Money Troubles character’s jacket? Nick Offerman says it has a real-life backstory

The locations you can actually visit

• Mortimer's Marina, Port Carling — the family-run, working marina at 1930 Mortimers Point Road that appears in the series. It sells fuel and propane, docks float planes, and runs a coffee, smoothie, and ice cream bar. Summer hours currently list Friday through Monday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — worth checking before you drive two hours.
• Sparrow Lake Camp, Severn — a real summer camp operating since 1912, used for filming, and the most bookable location of the lot: it offers nightly tent stays to the public.
• The lakes themselves — the boat-hopping geography of the show, where getting anywhere means a dock rather than a driveway, is just how the Muskoka Lakes function.

The cottage that had the name first

Here's the trivia the title quietly borrowed: a real, privately owned cottage called Sterling Point exists on Lake Joseph. It appeared in creator Megan Park's 2024 film My Old Ass — not as the island in this series — and no, you can't rent it. Park grew up spending 1990s summers in Muskoka, mined that for both projects, and has been open about wanting the show to capture the region as it actually is, gentrification included:

"We can really show Muskoka for what it really is," Park told CBC.

Is any of it in the United States?

None. Annie's New York framing aside, this is a rare case of a streaming series shooting Canada as Canada rather than dressing it up as somewhere else — Park has said that was deliberate. The seaplane, sadly, you'll have to source yourself.

Earlier we wrote: Zoe’s secret shakes up Lanterns episode 4, with Hal’s betrayal and a Manhunter twist

Matthew Gray Gubler played Dr. Spencer Reid for all 15 seasons of Criminal Minds, from 2005 to the 2020 finale. When the show came back as Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount+ in November 2022, the BAU's genius was missing — and stayed missing for three years, save for one appearance that lasted roughly the length of a handshake.

The showrunner's version

Showrunner Erica Messer told Deadline around the 2022 premiere that Gubler's absence came down to scheduling — his calendar and Evolution's production window didn't line up, and the presumption that he'd simply refused wasn't accurate. She's kept that line ever since, and put numbers on it for Us Weekly in 2024: the original series shot ten months a year, the revival shoots four.

"It just actually can be a scheduling nightmare to try to get anyone," Messer said.

Gubler backed the account on Ireland's The Six O'Clock Show in 2023: the revival filmed while he was shooting something else, and as for returning — "I would be honored. I would absolutely love that."

Read more: What happened to Kareem in The Oval? His billing quietly slipped after season 4

On screen, Reid was never written out. The Evolution premiere explained that the bureau had split agents up for cost efficiency, with Reid and Matt Simmons away on a confidential assignment; season 2 upgraded that to a sabbatical. His books stayed on his desk for three seasons. The FBI, apparently, doesn't clear cubicles.

The funeral and the single line

The return finally came on May 22, 2025 — season 3, episode 3, "Time to Say Goodbye." After Will LaMontagne (Josh Stewart), JJ's husband, dies suddenly, the funeral flowers arrive from the franchise's absent legends: Hotch, Morgan, and Reid. Then Reid walks into the church in person, hugs JJ and her sons, sits in the pews with Emily, Penelope, and Rossi, and stays at the graveside after everyone else leaves.

His entire spoken contribution, when JJ says she can't believe he came:

"I'm always here for you guys."

That's it — one line in the episode, and to date one line in the entire revival. A.J. Cook, who plays JJ, personally called Gubler to ask him to come, and later defended the near-silence as deliberate: no monologue needed, it's all in looks. Gubler, for his part, said in a statement he'd cherish any chance to slip back into "my dear friend Spencer's oversized wingtips."

Will he be back?

Not imminently. Messer confirmed in May 2026 that no original-series characters appear in the next season — the compressed 10-episode run left no room to schedule anyone. And Gubler now has a structural conflict with a network attached: he stars in Einstein, a CBS procedural casting him as a crime-solving descendant of Albert Einstein, slotted for the 2026–27 season after being bumped from 2025–26.

Twenty years in, the math on Spencer Reid stands at 15 seasons, one confidential assignment, one sabbatical, one funeral, and one sentence. For a character with an eidetic memory, the franchise is being awfully economical with his dialogue.

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Landman has an unusual distinction among Taylor Sheridan shows: it's been formally fact-checked twice — once by Newsweek's fact-check desk, once, episode by episode, by the actual trade association for landmen, headquartered in Fort Worth. The two reviews came from opposite directions and agreed on the main point: it's a drama, and it drifts.

Newsweek vs. the wind turbine monologue

The scene in question is season 1, episode 3 — Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) stands next to a wind turbine and tells attorney Rebecca Falcone that in its 20-year lifespan it will never offset the carbon cost of building it. The clip went viral within days of the show's November 2024 debut.

Newsweek's December 2024 fact-check ran the claim past renewable-energy researchers, and the numbers came back off by roughly two orders of magnitude. Turbine maker Vestas publishes life-cycle assessments showing a 2-megawatt turbine pays back its manufacturing, operation, and disposal footprint in about seven months of medium wind. A 2016 study put the figure at around 64 days for a 3.4-megawatt unit; a 2019 study averaged 5.3 months. Professor Alasdair McDonald of the University of Edinburgh gave Newsweek the tidiest verdict on Tommy:

"That character is misinformed and wrong," McDonald said — while conceding Thornton plays that guy very well.

Newsweek contacted representatives for Sheridan and Paramount for comment. The monologue stayed viral anyway.

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The landmen grade their own show

The American Association of Professional Landmen took a friendlier but no less thorough approach. The AAPL had history with the production — the group supplied Sheridan with educational material, got the title corrected from "Land Man" to the industry's one-word "Landman," hosted a season 1 scene at its Fort Worth headquarters, and put staff in season 2 as extras. Then it launched Landman Now, a companion podcast that convenes credentialed landmen every Thursday after each Sunday episode to sort fact from fiction.

Their recurring corrections, across both seasons:

• Landmen don't fix wells. Tommy sealing a burning blowout with a hammer in episode 2 is not in the job description — the job is negotiating leases and managing land agreements, not oilfield heroics.
• Nobody negotiates with cartels. Incoming AAPL president Julie Woodard has said cartel dealings and emergency rescues "are not typical in a landman's daily life," which is a trade association's way of saying never.
• The paperwork wouldn't hold. At a Texas Tech panel on the show, AAPL's Wade Maloy needled the very first scene:

"Where is the notary while Tommy is negotiating under duress?" he joked — the opening two minutes, he said, are full of technicalities.

• The safety culture is inverted. Real crews stress that anyone on site, from geologist to well worker, has authority to shut down an unsafe operation. Tommy's improvised fixes would get a real M-Tex sued into the ground.

What both reviews say it gets right

Neither rebuttal calls the show worthless — quite the opposite. Houston Chronicle's own running fact-checks note the cartel presence in West Texas is real (a DEA initiative ending in 2023 made 235 arrests across 17 West Texas counties), just nowhere near planes-falling-from-the-sky levels. Working landmen credit the show for nailing the relentless phone calls, the 24/7 on-call culture, and the Midland–Odessa divide. One Lubbock landman confirmed Cooper's 75/25 royalty split is the modern industry standard, even if the show's $78-a-barrel crude ran about $18 above the actual 2025 market.

The scorecard, then: economics dramatized, chemistry exaggerated, job description rewritten for television — and the phone bill, apparently, dead accurate.

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For all of season 1, Landman treated Monty Miller (Jon Hamm) as the richest man in the room — a Fort Worth oil titan running "multibillion-dollar" M-Tex, private-club lunches, a fortune so large that Tommy Norris tells Cami her grandchildren would never need to work. Season 2 opened the books. The audit is less flattering.

The paper fortune

Taylor Sheridan built Monty as a composite of real Permian Basin executives — he interviewed a number of Texas oil CEOs before writing the character. On screen, the wealth looked like this: sole ownership of M-Tex Oil, a foundation earmarked for his philanthropic legacy, and a personal estate that recaps and fan estimates put somewhere around $1 billion. In the season 1 finale, Cami (Demi Moore) is offered a clean exit — take the inheritance — and instead tells Tommy to gamble it on Monty's farm-out deal, chasing a projected $1.4 billion in profit. She wanted a bigger number on the foundation plaque.

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The $400 million that started it all

Before season 1's timeline, a hurricane destroyed an M-Tex offshore well in the Gulf. The insurer — Blanton — paid a lump-sum settlement to fund a replacement well. Fans call it the $400 million settlement; the show's own dialogue puts it at $420 million. Either way, Monty never drilled the replacement. He knew the destroyed well had stopped producing before the storm hit, so redrilling would have been wildcatting with the insurer's money. Instead he parked the payout in a separate C-corp, M Miller Insurance and Casualty, to soften the tax hit, then spread it across private equity funds — where it now sits, fully illiquid, while Blanton's lawyers demand their well.

The corporate structure, or: where the money isn't

Season 2, episode 3 is essentially a forensic accounting episode. M-Tex turns out to be split into LLCs — M-Tex Exploration, M-Tex Oil Services, M-Tex Land Trust — with all revenue flowing up into an M. Miller holding company and, per in-house counsel Rebecca Falcone, nothing coming back down:

"No money flows from the holdco to the LLCs," Rebecca explains — the LLCs run entirely on lines of credit.

Monty's personal lawyer adds another layer: revenue routes through a holding account that funds an offshore drilling entity out of Nassau. The lawyers keep finding loans and can't figure out how Monty was servicing them. The mansion, the lifestyle, much of M-Tex's day-to-day — credit, all the way down.

So what did Cami actually inherit?

A company with a nine-figure legal exposure, no liquid cash, and a widow's choice between bankruptcy and creative financing. Her solution: a $400 million loan from cartel boss Gallino (Andy Garcia), secured against royalties on M-Tex's existing wells, to fund an offshore drill with a stated 10 percent chance of success.

The honest balance sheet: one settlement Monty spent twice, one fortune that existed mostly as collateral, and one lender who wins whether the well hits or not.

Was Monty rich? Enormously — in assets, leverage, and nerve. In cash, M-Tex couldn't cover its own payables. The man died before anyone marked his portfolio to market, which, given the alternative, may have been his best-timed exit of all.

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On the “Seen on the Screen with Jacqueline Coley” podcast, director Zach Cregger pushed back on the idea that his upcoming Resident Evil is just a generic horror film with a famous logo slapped on. He said the worries are understandable — and premature.

“When they watch the movie, they will be thoroughly convinced that that is not the case.”

Cregger’s approach isn’t a straight retelling of a game like Resident Evil 2, and it won’t roll out familiar faces like Leon S. Kennedy. Instead, he’s aiming for the games’ survival-horror feel — that under-equipped, constantly-in-danger scramble that defines the series — rather than recreating a specific plot beat-for-beat.

The film centers on a brand-new lead: Bryan, a medical courier whose routine delivery turns into a fight to stay alive when an outbreak erupts. Cregger has also said he avoided watching the previous Resident Evil movies so he could build this take off the games themselves, not earlier screen versions.

• Original story set in the Resident Evil universe
• New protagonist: Bryan, a medical courier
• No Leon S. Kennedy or direct adaptation of RE2
• Focus on survival-horror tension and resourcefulness
• Release date: September 18, 2026

Why not adapt the games?

Addressing backlash after the first teaser, Cregger said he knows many fans want to see specific game storylines — but argued a literal adaptation could let those same fans down. In a recent conversation with Curry Barker, he framed it as both a creative choice and a fan-service trap to avoid.

“But if I did that (following the same pattern) I don’t think I’d be creatively fulfilled, and I don’t even think they would enjoy it. If I just did the story of the games, I think the most diehard fans would be bummed.”

He’s previously described the movie’s form as “one gigantic sequence,” and said its structure borrows from in-game design — another sign he’s chasing how Resident Evil feels to play, not just what it looks like on a plot summary.

The movie arrives September 18, 2026.

Yes, that's really him. Jimmy Fallon appears in episode 5 of Band of Brothers, "Crossroads," which HBO first aired on September 30, 2001 — an episode directed, conveniently for this story, by Tom Hanks. The cameo lasts about a minute, lands at the exact hinge of the miniseries, and portrays a real World War II officer.

The scene

"Crossroads" ends with Easy Company rushed to the Ardennes in December 1944 — no winter clothing, almost no ammunition — marching toward Bastogne and scrounging rounds off the retreating soldiers streaming the other way. Into this rolls Fallon's 2nd Lt. George C. Rice in a jeep stacked with ammunition, handing out crates and delivering the warning that sets up the rest of the series:

"Looks like you guys are going to be surrounded." — "We're paratroopers, Lieutenant. We're supposed to be surrounded."

That reply belongs to Captain Winters (Damian Lewis). Fallon gets a "Good luck, boys" and drives off. At the time, he was three years into his Saturday Night Live run — easily the most famous face ever to hold a one-scene part in the production.

Read more: All the Creative Arts Emmys 2026 winners from both nights, in one place

The jeep he couldn't drive

Fallon told the story on The Tonight Show in 2018, after guest Julianna Margulies mentioned her 10-year-old son had spotted him in the episode. The scene required driving an actual World War II jeep — manual transmission — and Fallon, a New Yorker, couldn't drive stick. Hanks's solution was to have two crew members physically push the vehicle to fake forward motion.

"I forget to press the clutch, and these two dudes are pushing the car," Fallon said on The Tonight Show in 2018 — with 200 extras watching and the wheels not turning.

The postscript writes itself: the man who couldn't move a jeep now fronts "Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon," a driving-themed simulator ride at Universal Studios Florida.

The real Lieutenant Rice

The character is no invention. George C. Rice was the S-4 — supply officer — of the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion, 10th Armored Division, attached to Team Desobry, which held the town of Noville outside Bastogne for the better part of two days against German armor in December 1944. As the 101st Airborne marched up the road into the siege, Rice ran repeated jeep shuttles loaded with ammunition, handing off supplies trip after trip — the episode compresses his multiple runs into a single stop. Stephen Ambrose's 1992 book, the source text for the whole series, records the effort; the episode named "Bastogne," covering the siege Rice helped arm, aired one week later, on October 7, 2001.

Other cameos you probably missed

Band of Brothers is a farm system in retrospect, and Fallon is the only one who arrived already famous:

• Tom Hardy — Pfc. John Janovec, in the final episodes.
• Michael Fassbender — Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson, throughout the series.
• James McAvoy — Pvt. James Miller, a young replacement.
• Simon Pegg — Sgt. William Evans, in the early Toccoa episodes.
• Andrew Scott — Pvt. John "Cowboy" Hall, in "Day of Days."
• Colin Hanks — Lt. Henry Jones, in "The Last Patrol."

For the record: Fallon's screen time runs about 60 seconds. The real Rice's ammunition runs helped keep Easy Company shooting through the entire siege that follows. One of the better minute-to-impact ratios on television.

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At the Venice Film Festival, Luca Guadagnino dug into how he works with actors, likening the vibe on his sets to kids building a sandcastle together — tender, playful, and always chasing something true without tipping into cliché. Then he made it even simpler: he just loves the people he hires.

“I’ve been lucky because, honestly, I have worked with some of the finest, most committed, bold performers I could have worked with. But I think they know that I love them.”

It’s a through line that runs across his filmography, where he regularly puts big-name performers in riskier, rawer spaces than audiences expect.

• Julia Roberts — After the Hunt
• Daniel Craig — Queer
• Tilda Swinton — I Am Love
• Ralph Fiennes — A Bigger Splash

Guadagnino shared a small, telling moment from After the Hunt: between takes, Julia Roberts would knit. She eventually handed him the finished scarf for his birthday — a gesture he remembered warmly as he called her fantastic and the shoot “inspiring” from start to finish.

His bond with Tilda Swinton goes back to seeing her in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, which sparked a friendship that turned into a career-long collaboration. That partnership crystalized with I Am Love and has kept resurfacing, film after film.

Artificial heads to NYFF

Next up is Artificial, Guadagnino’s Silicon Valley drama that reunites him with Andrew Garfield after After the Hunt. Garfield plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the whiplash 2023 episode when Altman was fired and then brought back within days.

• Monica Barbaro
• Yura Borisov
• Ike Barinholtz
• Jason Schwartzman
• Cooper Hoffman
• Mark Rylance

The film’s release plan hit turbulence when Amazon MGM dropped its planned rollout of the nearly finished movie. Neon has stepped in and acquired worldwide distribution rights, giving the project a clear path to theaters.

October 5 is now circled: Artificial will have its world premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival, with Guadagnino and members of the cast expected to attend.

On a recent visit to Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Adria Arjona was asked about the worst “note” she’s ever gotten on set. She didn’t hesitate: a director once told her, “less of an accent” and to be “less domesticated.”

“Do that with less of an accent and less domesticated,” she recalled.

Arjona didn’t name the filmmaker, but she made clear how the direction landed with her.

“He was like less accent, less domestication, being domesticated. So I was like great be less Latina is what you're talking awesome cool,” she said.

She added that she didn’t push back in the moment, but after that exchange she stopped putting much stock in that director’s notes.

Career snapshot

Arjona has been steadily building a résumé across TV and movies. A few of the credits that put her on the map:

• True Detective
• Good Omens
• 6 Underground
• Morbius
• Hit Man

Past pushback

This isn’t the first time Arjona has talked candidly about behavior on sets. On John Feitelberg’s Scene Stealers podcast, she took aim at performers who hide behind “method” to be difficult to work with.

“Can we cancel method acting? Because there are a lot of assholes in there,” she said.

DCU mystery role

Arjona has also been linked to James Gunn’s next Superman film, reportedly titled Man of Tomorrow. On Happy Sad Confused, she kept her role under wraps even as Horowitz tried to guess which DC character she might be playing.

When Horowitz floated Maxima, Arjona coyly said she could be. He then wagered she’s actually Wonder Woman and put money on it. Arjona suggested a counter bet on Maxima.

• Josh Horowitz bet $500 that Arjona is playing Wonder Woman.
• If she turns out to be Maxima instead, Horowitz loses and pays $500.

Asked in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun how closely Hayao Miyazaki has followed the surge of Ghibli‑style AI imagery online, Studio Ghibli chairman and producer Toshio Suzuki said the director simply isn’t plugged in — by choice. Suzuki explained that since finishing The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki has walled himself off from outside noise to protect his focus in the studio.

“Miya-san doesn't even know about generative AI.”

Suzuki added that Ghibli’s identity is built on human hands making artistic decisions, not on replicable looks or tools.

“A cultural institution that demonstrates what it means for humans to create art,” he said of where the studio aims to stand, noting that Miyazaki’s expression can’t be replicated by AI or CGI.

The stance lands amid waves of AI images mimicking Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic — a trend that drew backlash from fans and artists who pointed to the painstaking labor behind Ghibli animation. Miyazaki’s skepticism of computers in animation isn’t new: in a 2016 documentary segment about an experimental CGI project, he criticized what he saw as “an insult to life itself.” That footage predates today’s generative AI boom and wasn’t a response to modern image generators.

‘Spirited Away’ on stage

While the AI debate rages outside his bubble, Miyazaki’s most celebrated film is heading back to U.S. theaters in a very different form. GKIDS and Fathom Events will bring Spirited Away: Live On Stage — a filmed version of the 2022 production at Tokyo’s historic Imperial Theatre — to cinemas nationwide for two nights this fall, complete with elaborate sets, original musical numbers, and intricate puppetry bringing the bathhouse world to life.

• Dates: October 1 and October 8, 2026 (two-night nationwide event)
• Source production: Filmed during the show’s 2022 run at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre
• Presentation: The stage adaptation features large-scale sets, new musical numbers, and puppetry inspired by the film’s spirits and creatures

The engagement marks the 25th anniversary of Spirited Away and leads into Ghibli Fest 2026, which is set to screen the original animated feature in theaters across North America from October 17–21.

When season 4 of Power Book III: Raising Kanan premiered in March 2025, Kanan's best friend was already gone. No calls, no sightings — Shawn "Famous" Figueroa (Antonio Ortiz) had been missing for three months of story time, and the show let the question sit for four full episodes before answering it.

How Famous died

Episode 5 delivered the confirmation, off-screen: Famous had been tortured and killed, his body dumped in an abandoned house in Mott Haven and hidden under a mattress. The discovery landed just as his mother arrived in Queens looking for him. A day after the episode aired, on April 5, 2025, Ortiz posted a farewell to the role on Instagram, and the show's official account ran a goodbye reel — confirmation that a season 1 mainstay was gone for good.

Read more: Who killed Krystal in Raising Kanan? The reveal comes in the very first minute of one episode

The exposure that got him killed was already on the board. Famous had shot Freddy Williams back in season 3, and he'd been giving statements to police in the Detective Malcolm Howard murder investigation — the kind of talking that gets noticed by people with police sources.

Marvin had already told Kanan, cryptically, that Famous might never come back from wherever he'd gone. The line played as concern at the time and as information in hindsight.

Who ordered it — and why

Episode 8 named the culprits: Snaps (Wendell Pierce) and Pop (Erika Woods), the old-school power couple who'd been mentoring Kanan. Crooked NYPD officers on their payroll had flagged Famous's cooperation with the police, and the pair decided his statements — along with rap lyrics that put too much street business on record — could lead back to them. The same officers carried out the killing; Snaps and Pop later summoned them to complain about the sloppy body disposal.

The detail that stings most in rewatch: Kanan went to Snaps and Pop to ask if their police contacts could help find Famous's killer. He was commissioning the investigation from the people who ordered the hit.

The timeline, in order

• Season 3 (2023–24) — Famous kills Freddy Williams, then assists police in the Howard investigation.
• Three months, off-screen — He vanishes between seasons; season 4 opens with the disappearance unexplained.
• Season 4, episode 5 (April 2025) — His body is found in Mott Haven.
• Season 4, episode 8 (May 2025) — Snaps and Pop are revealed as the ones who ordered the killing.
• Season 4 finale (May 2025) — Kanan, fed a lie that Raq was behind Famous and O-Cee's deaths, ends the season holding his mother at gunpoint.

The cover-up kept spreading in the meantime: the same officers pulled Kanan's girlfriend Krystal off a bus and delivered her to the couple, and Pop shot her mid-conversation over what she might know.

What the final season did about it

Season 5, the show's last, settled the account in July 2026: Jukebox worked out the truth and ambushed Snaps and Pop herself in episode 7, killing them both.

"She outgained us in the end," Erika Woods told Deadline in July 2026, arguing Jukebox was the perfect choice precisely because Kanan was the obvious one.

Wendell Pierce, in the same interview, chalked it up to the occupational reality that nobody in the game watches their back perfectly forever. Famous waited fifteen months of real time for that answer. It arrived from the friend nobody saw coming.

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More than 50 days into its run, The Odyssey has turned the giant screen into the story. By early September, IMAX showings had pulled in roughly $457 million worldwide, after the film rocketed to $289 million in the format in under a month — enough to leap past Avatar and claim IMAX’s all-time crown on the way to something even bigger.

On track to be the first movie to top $500 million in IMAX alone.

The momentum started immediately. The film opened to $264.1 million globally — the best worldwide debut of Christopher Nolan’s career — crossed $1 billion in under three weeks and has now passed $1.6 billion worldwide, putting it within sight of Universal’s all-time record holder, Jurassic World ($1.67 billion). Premium auditoriums have stayed packed, with repeat viewings keeping those giant-format numbers unusually strong well past opening month.

The records so far

Per box office tallies tracked by DiscussingFilm on X, here’s what the movie has knocked down on its voyage:

• Nolan’s biggest worldwide opening ($264.1 million).
• Universal’s biggest opening for an R-rated movie.
• Fastest film ever to hit $200 million in IMAX.
• Powered IMAX’s biggest July on record.
• Nolan’s highest-grossing film, surpassing The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.
• Highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, passing Deadpool & Wolverine.
• Biggest IMAX movie in history (already ahead of Avatar).

The next milestones are clear: that unprecedented $500 million mark from IMAX screens alone — now within reach — and Universal’s all-time global benchmark, Jurassic World at $1.67 billion.

The question has a clean answer and a very long footnote. Jerry ends Seinfeld with no one — single, unengaged, and starting a one-year prison sentence alongside George, Elaine, and Kramer when the finale aired on May 14, 1998, to 76 million viewers. The footnote is the 73 women it took to get there.

The official count: 73

The season 9 DVD extras and the finale's own relationship counter put Jerry at 73 girlfriends across nine seasons — ahead of George's 62, Elaine's 50, and Kramer's 27. Over 180 episodes, that averages a new girlfriend roughly every two and a half installments. Fan tallies of women who actually appear on screen land lower — the fan site Kramer's Apartment counts 66 — with the gap covered by girlfriends mentioned but never shown.

Read more: Curious no more: Simon Helberg tackles a major mystery from The Big Bang Theory

The ones who lasted more than one episode

Only five relationships cleared the single-episode bar, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man:

• Elaine Benes — the longest by miles: they dated from 1986 until just before the 1989 pilot, rekindled things in season 2's "The Deal" under the famous "this, that, and the other" arrangement, and lapsed once more in "The Mango."
• Vanessa — a four-episode season 1 relationship (actress Lynn Clark only appears in two of them), sunk by a Vermont bed-and-breakfast weekend Jerry spent worrying about a stock purchase.
• Rachel Goldstein (Melanie Smith) — four episodes: caught making out with Jerry during Schindler's List, present for George's shrinkage incident, and the one who did the dumping, at Monk's.
• Dolores (Susan Walters) — two episodes, four seasons apart, and the owner of the name Jerry could only remember rhymed with a part of the female anatomy.
• Jeannie Steinman (Janeane Garofalo) — the only fiancée. She saved his life in the season 7 finale, turned out to be exactly like him, and got engaged to him the same day. The engagement dissolved off-screen in what Jerry proudly describes as the first fully mutual breakup in history.

The famous one-episode exits

The other 60-plus formed the show's real engine. Sidra (a pre-Lois & Clark Teri Hatcher) walked out over the sauna espionage. Marla the virgin (Jane Leeves) fled upon learning about "the contest." Meryl (Courteney Cox, six months before Friends premiered) played Jerry's fake wife for a dry-cleaning discount. Jodi the masseuse (Jennifer Coolidge) refused to massage him even once. Jenna went in the toilet-toothbrush incident, Gillian had man hands, Donna Chang wasn't Chinese, and Sheila — "Schmoopie" — had the historical misfortune of dating Jerry within earshot of the Soup Nazi.

"They're real, and they're spectacular" — Sidra's exit line from "The Implant" (1993), still the most quoted breakup in the series.

What the finale leaves him with

Nothing, by design. The plane carrying the four to Paris malfunctions, and as it dives, Elaine starts a deathbed confession — "Jerry, I've always loved…" — only for the plane to level off and the sentence to end in "…United Airlines." The show declines its last chance at a romantic ending, convicts all four under a Massachusetts Good Samaritan law, and closes with Jerry doing stand-up for inmates.

For the record: the closest Jerry ever came to ending up with anyone arrived 11 years later, in Curb Your Enthusiasm's 2009 reunion arc — where, inside the fake reunion special, Elaine has a daughter conceived with Jerry as the sperm donor. Canonically: nobody. Adjacent-canonically: a donor kid in someone else's show.

Earlier we wrote: Kitchen Nightmares: where are they now?

The year’s unlikeliest date movie is also one of its gnarliest. In Obsession, writer-director Curry Barker remixes rom-com beats into body-horror mayhem when Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy clerk at a neighborhood music shop, buys a cursed trinket called the One Wish Willow to make his crush, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), fall in love with him. The spell works — and then curdles — as Nikki’s affection twists into violent possessiveness that turns every sweet moment into a threat.

Made for just $750,000, Barker’s film leans on practical effects and razor-sharp tonal pivots rather than CG spectacle, parlaying a YouTube-born sensibility into something raw, funny, and vicious. It’s one half of 2026’s creator-led horror surge — the other would go on to rewrite the box office record book.

Moody imports

Damian McCarthy’s Hokum strands Adam Scott at The Bilberry Woods Hotel, a creaking inn tucked into rural West Cork, Ireland. Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a famed horror novelist who arrives to scatter his parents’ ashes and instead finds himself stalked by the kind of silence that makes floorboards feel alive. McCarthy, who built his rep on Caveat and Oddity, dials the jump scares way down and the tension way up; the film breathes in long, unnerving beats that never quite let you settle.

• Adam Scott — Ohm Bauman, a grieving horror writer
• Peter Coonan — supporting role
• David Wilmot — supporting role
• Florence Ordesh — supporting role

From Ireland to an endless corridor: Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 adapts a viral Japanese game into a pressure-cooker head trip. Kazunari Ninomiya is an unnamed commuter stuck in a looping subway passage governed by one cruel rule — if you spot an anomaly, turn back; if everything looks normal, move forward. The film weaponizes repetition and tiny visual glitches until paranoia is the only stable ground.

• Kazunari Ninomiya — the unnamed traveler
• Nana Komatsu — key supporting role
• Yamato Kochi — key supporting role

Faith, love, and monsters

Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus refracts a fraught love story through supernatural dread in rural Australia. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen play teens whose relationship draws the attention of a shape-shifting demon inside a zealously religious community. Mia Wasikowska is devastating as Bird’s mother, pulled between protection and doctrine as the film stares down conversion therapy, internalized shame, and the cost of stepping outside the lines — without skimping on the scares.

The internet’s scariest maze

Teen filmmaker Kane Parsons turns his YouTube phenomenon into a full-blown A24 event with Backrooms — a hypnotic fall into a mustard-yellow labyrinth that seems to stretch forever. Chiwetel Ejiofor anchors the story as Clark, a struggling furniture-store owner who finds a hidden portal and slips out of reality; Renate Reinsve is the therapist who follows him when he disappears. Parsons scales up his analog-horror aesthetic with tactile production design and a streak of melancholy, never losing the eerie spirit that made the shorts explode online.

• Chiwetel Ejiofor — Clark, a down-on-his-luck shop owner
• Renate Reinsve — Clark’s therapist
• Mark Duplass — supporting role
• Finn Bennett — supporting role
• Lukita Maxwell — supporting role

Backrooms has earned nearly $390 million worldwide and begins streaming exclusively on HBO Max in September 2026.

During a last-minute scramble at a The Big Bang Theory table read, Simon Helberg was asked to cover lines for Bob Newhart when the comedy icon couldn’t make it. There was no warning, no rehearsal — just Helberg trying to channel Newhart’s unmistakable cadence on the fly. He’s done plenty of impressions on the show (from Stephen Hawking to Kevin Sussman), but he says this one was the toughest.

Helberg explained on the show’s YouTube channel that the challenge wasn’t the voice — it was the rhythm. Newhart’s comedy is built on strategic pauses and slow-burn setups, and trying to re-create that timing without prep was its own high-wire act.

“I sort of felt compelled to like get that timing which was fun.”

“That timing, that like, just going the long way around a joke and being like, is he ever going to come back? And he’s come and boom.”

As Helberg tells it, Newhart’s signature is stretching silence until the audience leans in, then snapping the punchline into place. Replicating that “long way around” approach in a cold read pushed Helberg into brand-new territory.

Offstage comfort

Helberg also shared a very different story from the same conversation: Billy Crystal once pulled him aside at a party to say the sitcom became a quiet refuge during a brutal day. Crystal was traveling when he learned of Robin Williams’s death and, mid-flight, put on The Big Bang Theory to get through it.

Crystal wasn’t the only unexpected admirer Helberg mentioned. Others who found their way to the show included:

• Mark Hamill
• Selena Gomez

Helberg shared both the Newhart table-read story and the Crystal encounter on The Big Bang Theory YouTube channel.

NCIS has run through plenty of season-long villains, but the season 8 arc remains one of the most consequential the show ever staged. The Port-to-Port killer murdered Navy personnel from Japan to Spain before surfacing stateside — and by the finale on May 17, 2011, the case had permanently thinned out Gibbs's corner of the series.

The name: Lieutenant Jonas Cobb

The killer was Jonas Cobb, a US Navy lieutenant played by Kerr Smith — casting that traded openly on his clean-cut Dawson's Creek image. The backstory the show gave him starts on a Maryland farm, where his father, Navy Captain Lowell Cobb, answered young Jonas's question about their dying horse by shooting the animal point-blank in front of him. The Navy came later. So did the CIA.

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Operation Frankenstein

Cobb was a test subject in Operation Frankenstein, a covert CIA behavior-modification program built to turn sailors into deniable sleeper assassins who kept their Navy cover between jobs. He passed the training, carried out his first kill — an al-Qaeda operative — and never reported back. Instead he resurfaced as the Port-to-Port killer, working through Navy victims and then hunting the people connected to the program itself.

The reveal wasn't that a serial killer was stalking the Navy. It was that the government's own intelligence apparatus had built him, lost him, and told no one — including NCIS.

The CIA, in the person of one-eyed operative Trent Kort, had been chasing Cobb for months without informing anyone. SECNAV Phillip Davenport and Director Vance both turned out to have ties to the program, which Gibbs, freshly grieving, received about as well as you'd expect.

The season 8 body count

• Danny Price — DiNozzo's old Baltimore PD partner, murdered in "Baltimore" (episode 22, May 3, 2011).
• An NCIS agent inside the Navy Yard — killed for his access card so Cobb could walk the building and study Gibbs's team up close.
• Mike Franks — stabbed to death in "Swan Song" (episode 23, May 10, 2011).
• Agent Gayne Levin — a member of EJ Barrett's team, killed in the finale, "Pyramid."

The one the team lost

Mike Franks (Muse Watson) was Gibbs's mentor — the retired agent who recruited him into the service, recurring on the show since season 3. In "Swan Song," Franks spotted Cobb outside Gibbs's house on a rainy night and went after him alone rather than calling it in. He managed to wound Cobb before Cobb killed him. The autopsy then turned up terminal cancer that Franks had mentioned to no one. Cinema Blend later reported that writer Jesse Stern initially resisted when executive producer Gary Glasberg instructed him to kill the character, then wrote it anyway.

Franks kept appearing on NCIS for years afterward — in flashbacks and as a hallucination Gibbs argues with. Dying slowed the character down less than you'd think.

How it ended

In "Pyramid," Cobb turned himself in and sat through a Gibbs interrogation, then broke loose and took hostages, abducting Agent EJ Barrett and Ziva David. The standoff ended with Gibbs and Vance shooting him dead. Davenport resigned as Secretary of the Navy in the fallout, replaced by Clayton Jarvis — a rare case of an NCIS villain claiming a cabinet-level scalp from beyond the grave.

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Showrunner Terry Matalas is steering VisionQuest into unexpectedly intimate ground: he says the season will be told through F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s experience of Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame and will treat Stark’s AIs as full characters — not just voices in a helmet. In his new SFX Magazine interview, Matalas also revealed that several of those digital assistants will appear in human form for the first time.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y. was there when Tony Stark died. What’s that like for an AI, to not be able to protect the one they’re programmed to protect?”

Matalas said that question is the spine of the story. It’s a swing Marvel hasn’t really taken before: putting an AI’s grief at the emotional center of an MCU project and following it where it leads.

• F.R.I.D.A.Y. — Stark’s suit interface introduced after J.A.R.V.I.S.
• J.A.R.V.I.S. — the original assistant whose code helped birth Vision
• E.D.I.T.H. — the glasses-based system Tony left behind

The revival lands five years after Vision’s brief return in WandaVision, where the rebuilt “White Vision” flew off and never circled back into the larger saga. After years of Marvel reshuffling and a project that seemed to drift in and out of focus, Matalas’ comments are the clearest sign yet of what this show intends to be.

Endgame echoes

Framing the series around F.R.I.D.A.Y. also rewires a familiar moment. The AI was literally inside Tony’s suit during his last stand in Endgame, and VisionQuest is poised to ask what that felt like for the program built to protect him — and what “survivor’s guilt” looks like when the survivor is code given a body.

There’s another wrinkle from the filmmakers behind those Avengers finales. Months before VisionQuest resurfaced, Joe Russo told CBR that he and Anthony Russo once considered ending Stark’s arc in Avengers: Infinity War for shock value, before deciding to save it for Endgame so the character could, in Joe’s words, earn his ending. That choice is exactly why the image of F.R.I.D.A.Y. being present at the end still hits — and why building a whole series around that presence could sting in a new way.

For now, Matalas is keeping the focus on that central question — what it cost an AI designed to save Tony when she couldn’t — and says VisionQuest is built to answer it.

When Sebastian Stan sat down with New York Magazine, he admitted he’d already taken his best swing at getting Bucky Barnes his own movie: a half-joking pitch to Marvel boss Kevin Feige for a grounded, Denis Villeneuve–style thriller. Stan said Feige humored him — and even called the idea “cool.”

“It’s about a guy who thinks he recognizes someone from his past that had something to do with when, you know, he was brainwashed, and he gets obsessed with this person. He goes on a whole journey to try to figure out who this person is. It’s a thriller.”

The tone Stan has in mind nods to Denis Villeneuve and the icy tension of Sicario, with Bucky tracking a ghost from his Winter Soldier days. It’s the kind of one-man, boots-on-the-ground story the character has rarely gotten in the MCU, despite being a pillar of the Captain America films and beyond.

For now, there’s no sign Marvel is developing a standalone Winter Soldier movie. Stan is expected to keep suiting up as Bucky in upcoming MCU projects, including the next Avengers team-up, though Marvel keeps specifics under wraps.

About those Batman rumors

Separate from Marvel, speculation has swirled around Stan and The Batman Part II. After a French interview with Le Journal du Dimanche briefly went viral suggesting he’d play Harvey Dent, the outlet corrected the piece, saying Stan had been misquoted. The correction shut down that specific rumor, but his exact involvement — if any — remains unannounced.

Bottom line: Stan’s Bucky thriller is just an idea he floated — not a greenlit movie — and Marvel hasn’t announced a solo Winter Soldier project.

Lonesome Dove gets called the greatest Western ever made for television often enough that the label has stopped being controversial. It's also a genuine time commitment, so before you start, here's exactly how much television you're signing up for.

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The full runtime

Four parts, 384 minutes total — six hours and 24 minutes of actual story. CBS aired it on four consecutive nights, from Sunday, February 5 through Wednesday, February 8, 1989, giving each part a two-hour broadcast slot. Strip out the commercials and every installment runs roughly 90 to 100 minutes, which means each night was essentially a standalone feature film.

Four nights, one cattle drive, six and a half hours. That's less screen time than a single season of most current dramas, covering considerably more ground.

Part by part

• Part 1: "Leaving" — Retired Texas Rangers Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) commit to driving a cattle herd from the border town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, all the way to Montana. About 96 minutes.
• Part 2: "On the Trail" — The drive reaches the open plains, and the outlaw Blue Duck kidnaps Lorena (Diane Lane), sending Gus off alone to retrieve her. About 95 minutes.
• Part 3: "The Plains" — Jake Spoon (Robert Urich) drifts into company that costs him everything, while Gus reunites with his old flame Clara (Anjelica Huston) in Nebraska. About 95 minutes.
• Part 4: "Return" — The herd reaches Montana, the bill for the whole journey comes due, and a promise sends Call back to Texas. About 98 minutes.

Each part ends at a natural stopping point, so the original one-per-night rhythm still works, as does two doubleheaders across a weekend.

Where all that runtime came from

The source is Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel — 843 pages, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story actually began in 1972 as a film script called Streets of Laredo, written for John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Wayne passed, the movie collapsed, and a decade later McMurtry expanded the material into the novel that director Simon Wincer then shot across Texas and New Mexico.

The gamble paid off in hardware: 18 Emmy nominations and seven wins, including Outstanding Directing for Wincer, plus Golden Globes for Best Miniseries and Best Actor for Duvall — who has spent the decades since calling Gus McCrae the favorite role of his career.

"Uva uvam vivendo varia fit" — the mangled Latin motto on the Hat Creek Cattle Company sign, which Gus proudly displays and cannot translate. Neither the novel nor the miniseries ever corrects the grammar.

If six and a half hours isn't enough

The franchise kept going: Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), Streets of Laredo (1995), Dead Man's Walk (1996), and Comanche Moon (2008) — each a multi-night miniseries of its own, and the two McMurtry adaptations (Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk) have their defenders. None of them are required. The 1989 original opens and closes its own story in 384 minutes, and that's the version the reputation rests on.

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In the recording booth for Hoppers, Dave Franco says he finally got to unleash the kind of anything-goes energy that live-action rarely allows. He voices Titus, the Insect King — a manic butterfly villain built to zig where you expect him to zag — and the team leaned into that chaos, urging him to keep pushing takes while the script’s spine stayed put.

“You can try each line a million different ways,”

Franco explained in a promotional chat for the film, as reported by Discussing Film. He also came armed with alts.

“I’m a nerd, I’ll do my homework and look through the script and I’ll come in with alternate jokes.”

Working without a camera or marks meant fewer limits and more trial-and-error until the read popped. It’s not Franco’s first time behind a mic — he previously voiced Lloyd in The Lego Ninjago Movie — but he says this one offered far more room to experiment.

On the mic, off the cuff

That looseness carried into a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. When host Josh Horowitz mentioned his wife often calls him an “idiot,” Franco didn’t miss the chance to flip it into a bit, joking that if it’s happening that often, Horowitz must be doing something wrong — and he should probably own it.

The quick-draw riff tracks with the off-script persona friends and fans know. Even at his wedding to Alison Brie, guests reportedly left with playful keepsakes — and plenty of leftover pizza — a night that doubled as a comedy hang as much as a party.

Timothy McGee (Sean Murray) marries Delilah Fielding (Margo Harshman), the Department of Defense intelligence analyst he starts dating in season 11. The proposal lands in season 14, episode 4, "Love Boat" (October 11, 2016); the wedding follows in season 14, episode 23, "Something Blue" (May 9, 2017) — improvised, at home, with the morgue's Jimmy Palmer presiding.

Here's the whole arc, including the parts the casual searcher usually gets in fragments.

Who Delilah is

Delilah debuts in the season 11 premiere, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (2013), as a DoD analyst specializing in cyber security and counterterrorism. Later that season, in "Kill Chain," she's gravely injured in terrorist Benham Parsa's attack on a Washington gala; the spinal damage leaves her using a wheelchair permanently. The show kept her career moving anyway — including a posting in Dubai — and kept the relationship long-distance-tested rather than ending it, which by network procedural standards counts as radical patience.

Read more: Where are NCIS actors now? Two of the departed ended up with a whole new show together

The elevator proposal

McGee being McGee, the original proposal plan was engineered: a specific date, a specific spot, and sunlight hitting at a specific angle — an alignment that wasn't due for another six months. The case of the week changed his mind. While Gibbs, Quinn, and Palmer investigate a woman's murder aboard a Navy ship during a tiger cruise, the victim's grieving boyfriend tells McGee he regrets waiting to propose. McGee retrieves the ring from its hiding place in Bishop's desk and heads for the elevator — where the doors open on Delilah herself. He pulls the emergency brake, drops to one knee under the fluorescent lighting, and asks. She says yes. The famous orange NCIS elevator has hosted interrogations, firings, and at least one bombing; this remains its only engagement.

The wedding Jimmy Palmer ran

"Something Blue" stacks the events: mid-wedding-planning, Delilah and McGee learn she's pregnant — and Abby, told in confidence, leaks it to the entire team within the episode. Instead of the big ceremony on the app's checklist, the couple marries on the spot in their apartment (Tony DiNozzo's old apartment, which McGee took over in season 14). The role assignments are the episode's actual gift:

• Officiant — Jimmy Palmer, who got ordained online that same morning specifically to do it.
• Best man — Abby Sciuto, in a tuxedo and fascinator. Pauley Perrette teased it herself on Twitter that night: "Abby's in a Tux and Fascinator on #NCIS tonight. There's a reason :)"
• "Man of honor" — Gibbs, standing in for Delilah's out-of-town sister.
• Giving the bride away — Ducky.

McGee wears his late father's admiral stars. And before the ceremony, Gibbs hands him the watch Gibbs' own father gave him on his wedding day, newly engraved:

"Breathe, Tim."

What came after

The twins reveal arrives in "Voices," and Delilah gives birth in the season 15 Thanksgiving episode "Ready or Not" (2017) — a boy and a girl, named John, after McGee's father, and Morgan, after a hospital security guard killed during the episode's case. The marriage has stayed intact ever since, which on this show is a genuine statistical anomaly. The most recent complication is a late-series curveball: in the episode "In Too Deep," McGee learns he has an 18-year-old son, Mateo Garcia, he never knew existed — predating Delilah, and presumably the subject of one very long off-screen conversation.

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The House of the Dragon season 2 finale ended in August 2024 with a montage that included a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot: Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), former Hand of the King, sitting in an unidentified cell. No location, no captor, no explanation — and then a nearly two-year hiatus for fans to argue about it.

Season 3, episode 2, "Queen's Landing," answers all of it in one scene, and the answer is very on-brand for the person responsible. Full spoilers below.

Where the cell is, and who put him there

The cell is in the dungeons beneath the Red Keep — Otto spent the entire mystery imprisoned in King's Landing itself, the city he effectively ran for two kings. After the Battle of the Gullet, with Aegon, Aemond, and Helaena all elsewhere, Rhaenyra takes the capital, and Daemon goes down into the cells. There he finds Otto, considerably worse for wear, and learns who arranged it: Larys Strong, who locked up the former Hand and left him behind as a "gift" for Rhaenyra and Daemon should they ever take the city.

It's a characteristic Larys move — a hedge that costs him nothing. If the Greens win, no one need know. If the Blacks win, he's pre-delivered them a high-value prisoner and redirected the new queen's anger toward someone other than the escaped Aegon. Both outcomes covered, one man in a hole.

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What happens in the throne room

Daemon hauls Otto before Rhaenyra in the Great Hall. With the usurper king unavailable for execution, Daemon proposes a substitute: behead the man who built the usurpation. Otto — the architect of the green council, the one who put Aegon on the throne while Viserys was still cooling — kneels and invokes the late king to Rhaenyra, muttering that her father could never have imagined this. His last words on the floor of the hall:

"I did my best…"

Rhaenyra takes his head herself, and not cleanly — it takes multiple strokes. Coming an episode after Jacaerys' death at the Gullet, it plays as her formal enrollment in the war's actual rules. Moments later, Alicent and Helaena are brought in before her, which is episode 3's problem.

How he got from Hand to a hole in the ground

The chain of events, for anyone who lost the thread during the hiatus:

• Season 2, episode 2 — Aegon fires his grandfather as Hand and replaces him with Criston Cole.
• His exit from King's Landing — Otto plans for Oldtown; Alicent redirects him toward Highgarden to shore up Tyrell support. That's the last anyone sees of him.
• The silence — Alicent's letters go unanswered; Aemond tasks Larys with locating him so he can be reinstated as Hand. Larys, evidently, located him just fine.
• Season 2 finale — the cell shot, with zero context, holding until mid-2026.

Does this match the book?

Broadly, yes. In Fire & Blood, Otto Hightower is executed after Rhaenyra takes King's Landing, so his destination was never really in doubt for book readers — the show's additions are the two-year cell mystery and Larys' fingerprints on it, neither of which exists on the page. The invention gives Larys a better long game and gives Rhaenyra a named, kneeling target at the exact moment the show needs her to use one.

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In May 1998, roughly 76 million Americans watched the Seinfeld finale — the third-largest audience in US television history. British viewers got that same episode on October 24, 2001, on BBC Two, at 11:20 p.m., three and a half years late. That single scheduling decision is a decent summary of the whole story.

Seinfeld didn't fail in the UK because Britain rejected it. Most of Britain never got a fair chance to see it.

The scheduling record

The BBC held the rights and treated the biggest comedy in America like contractual homework. The show bounced between Wednesday, Tuesday, Saturday, and Friday slots on BBC Two, usually near midnight, with no consistent promotion. By 1999 — the year after the show ended in the US as a cultural event — BBC Two was airing up to four episodes a week at midnight, working through its remaining episode commitment at speed.

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Shortlist's 2017 retrospective put the placement about as precisely as anyone has:

The show was "shunted around the sweaty nethers of the BBC 2 schedule," often airing close to midnight.

Sitcoms live on habit. Nobody forms a habit around a program that moves four times and airs while they're asleep.

The Friends comparison

The comparison stings because it's a controlled experiment. Friends arrived on Channel 4 on April 28, 1995 — seven months after its US debut — and got what Seinfeld never did: a stable, promoted, prime slot, then years of back-to-back repeats on Channel 4, Sky1, and E4. Frasier got the same treatment. Both became furniture in British living rooms.

The results are measurable. In 2018, UK regulator Ofcom found Friends was the single most-watched show on British streaming services — fourteen years after it ended, beating The Crown and every original Netflix and Amazon production. Seinfeld, the show that made the New-York-friends sitcom a viable format in the first place, has no comparable UK footprint.

The cultural theory

There's also the standard explanation: Seinfeld is intensely New York, built on Jewish-American comic rhythms, stand-up interstitials, and four people who know they're terrible and decline to improve — the famous "no hugging, no learning" rule. Friends offered a chosen family; Seinfeld offered a support group for grudges. The theory says British audiences bounced off the former's absence.

The theory has one obvious problem: unsentimental comedy about dreadful people is arguably Britain's home turf. The country that produced Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, and later Peep Show did not need Elaine Benes explained to it. Given an actual audience, the sensibility would likely have traveled fine — which points the blame back at the timeslot.

Did the UK ever come around?

Partially. All 180 episodes hit Netflix worldwide on October 1, 2021, in a deal reportedly worth around $500 million, giving British viewers their first genuinely convenient access in the show's history. It has picked up a steady second-generation audience there — but a cult acquisition three decades on is a different thing from the shared national event Friends became. The window for that closed at midnight, sometime in the late '90s, on BBC Two.

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Onstage at the Peacock Theater, Betty Gilpin accepted her Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy with something you don’t often hear at an awards show: a self-penned poem. The room really lit up at one pointed couplet that name-checked a tech CEO by name.

“Our business is stupid, but actors are the bomb. From Martindale to Milioti, my dad and my mom, to be cringe and elitist, which you’re free to find fault in. Let’s all lean toward Sam Shepard and less toward Sam Altman.”

The jab landed in a year when Hollywood has been loudly debating AI’s place in filmmaking — and it drew a burst of applause before Gilpin moved on with her thanks.

The role that won it

Gilpin won for guest-starring on Widow’s Bay (Apple TV+) in the flashback episode “Our History,” playing Sarah Westcott Warren, the patient wife of town founder Richard Warren, portrayed by Hamish Linklater. The period hour pulls the series back to 1702, when Sarah arrives on the island to marry Richard and starts sensing that something is very wrong.

Across the episode, Sarah uncovers unexplained disappearances, strange illnesses and buried secrets she connects to her husband’s rumored pact with a demon. She makes a desperate bid to flee the island with Richard’s children — a plan that ends in tragedy, with Sarah and all but one of the kids losing their lives.

Backstage, Gilpin said the poem only existed because Linklater — who was also up for Guest Actor in a Comedy for the same episode — pushed her to prepare on the flight to Los Angeles. She didn’t think she’d win; he told her to write something anyway. The result, she joked, was a “manic poem.”

Her category featured a high-profile face-off between Apple TV+’s rising mystery and Max’s Hacks, with Kaitlin Olson widely forecast to take the trophy. Gilpin upset those predictions.

• Award — Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series
• Show — Widow’s Bay (Apple TV+)
• Episode — “Our History” (flashback)
• Role — Sarah Westcott Warren
• Co-star also nominated — Hamish Linklater as Richard Warren
• Venue — Peacock Theater, Los Angeles

By the end of Night 2 of the 78th Emmys, Widow’s Bay had eight wins — more than any other program this year.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new short Flesh Impact, Ellen Burstyn steps into an audacious what-if: Marilyn Monroe at 100, alone on a stage, auditioning. The film, screening at the Venice Film Festival, pairs Burstyn’s centenarian Monroe with Dakota Johnson as the star in her heyday, switching between the woman and the persona the world thought it knew.

Gyllenhaal keeps the setup stark and theatrical—just an empty stage and an audition—to press on the vulnerability of performing and the gulf between who Monroe was and the image she engineered. The short runs about 17 minutes and was commissioned to mark what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday.

• Ellen Burstyn — Marilyn Monroe at 100
• Dakota Johnson — Monroe during her years of fame
• Peter Sarsgaard
• Sepideh Moafi

Burstyn on Monroe

Burstyn told People she sees Monroe’s public allure as a carefully constructed performance, not an accident—and she speaks from unusually close proximity. Her longtime masseur, Ralph Roberts, had also been Monroe’s confidant and masseur, and, according to Burstyn, he described the clear divide between Norma Jeane the person and “Marilyn Monroe” the phenomenon.

“She did some deep thinking about what qualities make a movie star. She combined innocence and s********. What a brilliant concept,” she said.

That understanding threads through Flesh Impact. Gyllenhaal—who, like Burstyn, trained in the Actors Studio tradition—has said the film evolved into a conversation among Monroe and the women making it: Burstyn, Johnson and herself.

Why Venice matters

The short lands as Burstyn, now 93, receives Venice’s lifetime honor, the Golden Lion, a capstone recognizing a six-decade career that includes The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She’s already among the industry’s “Triple Crown” performers with an Oscar, a Tony and two Emmys.

Flesh Impact is screening at the Venice Film Festival and runs approximately 17 minutes.

Minutes after celebrating in Los Angeles, the official South Park account posted a new gag aimed squarely at Donald Trump: a cartoon Trump, pants around his ankles, clutching an Emmy. The on-image text delivered the punchline.

"You finally got your Emmy."

The jab followed the show’s win for Outstanding Animated Program at the 78th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sunday. The same post also congratulated creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and “the entire South Park team” on the victory — a very South Park mix of victory lap and needle.

On-screen jabs, then a social one

The Emmy-night post capped a stretch where the series leaned into Trump as a target. Last year’s Season 27, which ran July through September, repeatedly went after the former president. The premiere, titled Sermon on the ’Mount, depicted Trump in bed with Satan, and the season’s storyline revolved around the two getting pregnant — classic, boundary-blurring South Park provocation.

According to the report, a statement attributed to White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers dismissed the show after that season premiere, arguing it had lost cultural relevance and was chasing attention. South Park, for its part, has long described itself as an “equal opportunity offender,” and the latest post doubled down on that posture.

A long-running Emmy sore spot

Why the Emmy dig lands: Trump has publicly bristled at the Television Academy before, particularly over The Apprentice coming up short.

• The Apprentice — nominated for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program from 2004 to 2006; lost to The Amazing Race each time.
• In 2012, Trump called the Emmys “all politics” and said the show should have won.
• Across its run (2004–2017), The Apprentice collected eight Emmy nominations.

After a rocky road to release, Coyote vs. Acme is drawing real crowds. The live-action/animation mash-up opened at No. 2 domestically with $15.5 million, then kept its footing through the week for a $22.5 million seven-day total. It trailed “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” on opening weekend but has held the runner-up slot as word of mouth builds.

Opened to $15.5 million — the biggest weekend in Ketchup Entertainment’s history.

From write-off to wide release

Warner Bros. infamously shelved the completed film in November 2023 for a tax write-off, sparking backlash that pushed the studio to let the filmmakers shop it elsewhere. Indie outfit Ketchup Entertainment stepped in, acquiring U.S. distribution for roughly $50 million and sending the movie into theaters this summer. The project itself cost about $70 million to make.

The debut didn’t just put the movie back on the map — it smashed Ketchup’s prior opening-weekend best, which was $3.1 million for “The Day the Earth Blew Up” in 2024.

What the movie is

Based on Ian Frazier’s satirical essay “Coyote v. Acme,” the film blends Looney Tunes chaos with a modern courtroom comedy. Wile E. Coyote finally sues the ACME Corporation — with help from a personal-injury lawyer — for decades of defective gizmos that blew up in his face while chasing the Road Runner.

Here’s who made it:

• Dave Green — director
• Samy Burch — screenplay, from a story co-developed with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater
• James Gunn — producer under the Troll Court Entertainment banner

And here’s who’s in it:

• Will Forte
• Lana Condor
• John Cena
• Luis Guzmán
• Martha Kelly

While it hasn’t grabbed the top spot, “Coyote vs. Acme” has consistently finished second since opening — including that first weekend behind “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” — and reached $22.5 million domestic in its first seven days in theaters.

Moments before she walked onstage at the Lido, Maggie Gyllenhaal told the crowd that Ellen Burstyn had recently taken a fall and was fine, just moving a little slower — a note that drew warm applause from the room, per Variety. Then the 93-year-old actor took the mic, visibly moved by the weight of the night.

“You can’t imagine how meaningful this is to me,” she said. “It’s one thing to win an Oscar, a Tony or an Emmy, all of which I’ve won. But this … it’s a lot.”

The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement adds a new peak to a résumé that already includes acting’s rare Triple Crown:

• Academy Award — Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (directed by Martin Scorsese)
• Tony Award — Same Time, Next Year
• Two Emmys — for television work

For American audiences, Burstyn’s legacy stretches from single mom Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist, and the indelible Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream — roles that helped define five decades of screen acting.

“At 93, it means you have a far amount of lifetime to look back on,” she said, adding that perhaps the honor is “not just a record of what you’ve accomplished, but what you’ve learned.”

A 100-year-old Marilyn

Venice is also premiering a surprise new turn: in Gyllenhaal’s 17-minute short Flesh Impact, Burstyn plays Marilyn Monroe at 100, while Dakota Johnson portrays Monroe in her younger years. The film reframes Monroe’s life and legacy through fantasy and the personal perspectives of the three women.

In the short, Burstyn’s Monroe arrives at a theater to audition for a play — a simple act that becomes a what-if portrait of the icon aging on her own terms.

The collaboration comes with an Actors Studio throughline: both Burstyn and Gyllenhaal trace their craft to the teachings of Lee Strasberg, the mentor who also loomed large in Monroe’s real life and training.

The Swede outlasted every other villain on Hell on Wheels — five seasons, one faked identity, one survived hanging, and a body count that included the show's original female lead. AMC settled his account in season 5, episode 8, "Two Soldiers," which aired June 11, 2016 as the first of the series' final seven episodes.

He dies at the end of a rope. The interesting part is everything it takes to get him there.

The episode itself

"Two Soldiers" opens with a flashback to Andersonville, the Confederate prison camp where bookkeeper Thor Gundersen (Christopher Heyerdahl) starved into the man the railroad knew as the Swede — a detail the show had referenced for years and finally staged. In the present, the Swede attacks the Hatch family farm, kills members of Cullen Bohannon's Mormon in-laws, and comes within reach of Bohannon's wife Naomi and their infant son before Cullen arrives. In the fight, the Swede puts a bullet in Bohannon's leg; Naomi returns fire; Bohannon beats him unconscious anyway.

Then comes the decision that defines the episode: with the Swede half-drowned under his hands in a creek, Bohannon stops. He wants a hanging, not a killing — so he hauls his prisoner on a two-day ride to the Army at Fort Douglas, cauterizing his own leg wound with gunpowder along the way. When the horses bolt, a barely conscious Bohannon drags the Swede's body through the Utah desert by hand. Anson Mount told Yahoo in a 2016 postmortem that the dragging scene wasn't even how it was scripted; the location in Drumheller, Alberta forced improvising.

Read more: Tommy & Tuppence cast guide: Agatha Christie’s classic gets a modern take

The hanging

At the fort, the camp doctor (Jeff Fahey) operates on Bohannon's leg while a military tribunal tries the Swede, convicts him, and sentences him to death. He begs Bohannon's forgiveness. He doesn't get it. Offered last words on the gallows, the man who spent five seasons wearing other people's identities uses them to reclaim his own:

"I am Thor Gundersen. From Norway."

The show then refuses him a clean drop — it's a slow strangulation, filmed at length, and Bohannon looks away before it ends. For a character introduced as a hangman's enthusiast, the method was chosen with some care.

Why Bohannon didn't just shoot him

Because he'd tried everything else. A quick tour of the ledger:

• Season 1 — Gundersen jails Bohannon and plans to hang him; Bohannon escapes and takes his job running the railroad.
• Season 2 — the Swede strangles Lily Bell to hurt Bohannon, is marched to a bridge to hang for it, and jumps into the river before the noose is set.
• Season 3 — presumed dead, he resurfaces and murders his way into the identity of Mormon bishop Dutson.
• Season 4 — the impersonation unravels; Brigham Young hands him over, and he lands at the Hatch farm within reach of Bohannon's family.
• Season 5 — the farm attack, the ride, the rope.

Heyerdahl, asked by AMC why the Swede shot Bohannon in the leg rather than the head, pointed at the codependency underneath the feud:

"Bohannon will forever walk away with Thor Gunderson … as a part of him."

One footnote the show never let anyone forget: the Swede was Norwegian the entire time. He corrected people about it for five seasons, and the correction only stuck in his last ten words.

Earlier we wrote: All the Creative Arts Emmys 2026 winners from both nights, in one place

Richard Linklater, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar and other top directors have signed onto a new French-backed program — IRIS, the International Resilience Initiative for Independent Screens — unveiled Monday at the Lumière Summit in France. The effort is squarely aimed at keeping independently financed films in theaters and moving across borders.

Materials shared at the summit describe IRIS as a plan to protect, strengthen and connect the indie ecosystem — theaters, distributors and nonprofit networks — and to help circulate independent films globally, especially in places where local players are isolated, vulnerable or under threat.

Who’s on board

Filmmakers who agreed to participate in IRIS include:

• Richard Linklater
• Rebecca Zlotowski
• Jafar Panahi
• Jane Campion
• Pedro Almodóvar
• Wim Wenders
• Tarik Saleh
• Jia Zhang-ke

A separate worldwide council tied to the initiative will feature:

• Agnieszka Holland
• Costa-Gavras
• Jim Jarmusch
• Tilda Swinton
• Juliette Binoche
• Vicky Krieps
• Ira Sachs
• Ruben Östlund
• Kaouther Ben Hania
• Thomas Vinterberg

What France is building

IRIS arrives as part of a broader French push to rally partners around the future of cinema. Alongside the program, France is proposing a “Lumière Alliance” linking international film commissions — an effort backed in recent weeks by President Emmanuel Macron and the national film body CNC.

France expects other countries to pledge support. A central goal is to tighten ties between filmmakers and the nonprofits, government commissions and private investors that underwrite independent film financing.

Macron will host a meeting in New York on September 22 to discuss IRIS.

On Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Adria Arjona didn’t dodge the question that keeps trailing her: is she the new Wonder Woman in Man of Tomorrow? When Horowitz pushed his theory, he literally put money on it, and Arjona quickly turned the moment into a friendly wager for charity.

“It feels like you're going to lose either way. You're giving me $500. I'll take this bet… I like the charity element of it. You want We'll take that bet. $500 you donate to one of my charities,”

Rather than shut it down, Arjona upped the stakes by floating Maxima as a counter-guess, asking for the bet to cut both ways on the show. She’s previously said she knew exactly which character she was auditioning for — she’s just not sharing that name yet.

Why the rumor won’t die

Part of the intrigue is coming straight from the top: James Gunn has publicly said Arjona would make a great Diana, while stressing that early chatter about her wasn’t a casting confirmation — more a reflection of their existing working relationship. Add to that Arjona’s intense prep for Man of Tomorrow and the guessing game keeps rolling.

Her current training plan, which she’s shown off online, includes about 45 minutes of cardio, two hours of weightlifting and six rounds of boxing — plenty of fuel for fans reading tea leaves, even if a rigorous regimen isn’t proof of the character she’s playing.

A busy run for Arjona

The wager lands in the middle of a streak that’s pushed Arjona deeper into both big franchises and sharp genre pieces. She’s already crossed into a galaxy far, far away and scored a breakout in a Netflix hit, and her next set of projects keeps widening the lane.

• Andor — Star Wars series role that put her on the franchise map
• Hit Man — action-comedy opposite Glen Powell
• Blink Twice — Zoë Kravitz’s thriller
• Onslaught — upcoming genre project
• The Thomas Crown Affair — new take co-starring Michael B. Jordan
• Man of Tomorrow — the DCU film at the center of all the speculation

She’s also been candid about pushing herself into tougher territory: with the erotic thriller Scorn, Arjona said she nearly walked away because she worried she didn’t have the tools to play its morally knotty lead — then did it anyway.

For now, the $500 sits as a playful bet without an official winner, and DC still hasn’t announced who Arjona is playing in Man of Tomorrow.

During an appearance on Canada’s The Morning Show, Gary Oldman did more than cheer on a colleague — he suggested the next James Bond has already been chosen and threw his support behind his Slow Horses co-star Jack Lowden.

“It’s been rumored that he’s on the shortlist. We’re going to find out pretty soon, aren’t we? Because they have picked him. They have made their choice, but they have not announced it yet. So my fingers are crossed for Jack.”

Oldman’s wording left some wiggle room — it isn’t clear whether he meant Lowden specifically or that Bond’s producers have settled on someone — but it’s the strongest on-the-record nudge yet toward a decision. As of now, there’s no official word from the Bond team.

Why Jack Lowden

Lowden stars opposite Oldman on Slow Horses (Apple TV+), a breakout turn that’s kept his name in the 007 rumor mill. The franchise has a history of turning rising actors into global stars, and former Bond casting boss Debbie McWilliams has argued the role works best when the actor remains a “total enigma” to audiences — a lane Lowden still fits.

The speculation machine has been spinning for years. Even Idris Elba — a perennial fan pick — recently shut it down in his case, saying the Bond chatter around him was “never legit.”

What might carry over

As talk swirls about a new direction, there could still be connective tissue to the Daniel Craig era. Rory Kinnear, who played Bill Tanner across those films, has suggested some familiar faces might return even as the series takes “a whole different approach.”

Despite Oldman’s tease, the next Bond hasn’t been announced, and no casting has been confirmed by the producers.

The plug was pulled not over creative issues but simple math: the lavish, black‑and‑white look of Spider-Noir came with a steep price tag, and the audience on Prime Video didn’t grow enough to justify it. After a single season, the period superhero spinoff is done.

The move stings because the show wasn’t a shrug with critics. Its freshman run drew strong reviews and 11 Emmy nominations, the kind of reception that usually buys time for a series to find a bigger crowd.

At the center of it all was Nicolas Cage, playing an older, 1930s-set take on Spider-Man that leaned hard into smoky noir vibes and trench‑coat sleuthing. His performance anchored a show that looked and felt unlike anything else in the comic-book lane.

Fans push back

Once news of the cancellation spread, replies piled up under an X post from Film Updates that shared Cage’s reaction. The throughline: viewers weren’t ready to say goodbye.

• “Uhh no… one season is only perfect when you’re watching She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” one user wrote.
• “Nick Cage was perfect in that role, I hate that we'll most likely never see him play Spider-Man again,” another said.
• “Nicolas Cage as a middle-aged Spider-Man was anything but boring. You made him so hilariously relatable! Hahaha, everyone is going to be ripping off your playbook from now on,” read one comment.
• “Well, that’s lame,” another user posted.
• Not everyone wanted more: “One season was the perfect runway for that fit, no need to overstay the drip,” one fan argued.
• “I’m happy this crossed my feed. Nice one,” another added.

With the series shelved, fans are already wondering if Cage’s noirish webslinger could pop up elsewhere—especially in Sony’s multiverse projects. There’s chatter about a possible animated cameo down the line, but no announcements have been made.

Cage, for his part, sounded content to leave it as a one‑and‑done. In a note to Deadline, he wrote:

“For me, one season is perfect, having said what I wanted to say with this dangerous, innovative, pop-art Spider-Man. Onwards, upwards, inwards.”

On X, J.K. Rowling compared certain online political activists to the behavior of abusive men, a post that ricocheted across social media and pulled the brewing fight around HBO’s new Harry Potter series back into the spotlight.

“quite uncanny.”

The dust-up lands as activists and some longtime fans push a boycott of the show. Because Rowling remains an executive producer and profits from the franchise, critics argue that tuning in would support her financially; some queer creatives have also distanced themselves from the production.

This latest flare-up adds to Rowling’s long-running dispute over gender. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint have publicly backed transgender people while stepping away from Rowling’s views, and she has continued to defend her stance on sex-based protections, noting that her own experiences of abuse inform her concerns about women’s safety.

Casting shuffle at Hogwarts

Even before the new series has fully taken shape, the production has seen several early cast changes:

• Gracie Cochrane — originally set to play Ginny Weasley, exited citing “unforeseen circumstances.”
• Bonnie Hill — stepping in as Ginny Weasley.
• Nicholas Hoult — left the planned role of Gilderoy Lockhart.
• Kit Harington — taking over as Gilderoy Lockhart.

Hoult’s departure was officially chalked up to scheduling conflicts tied to his upcoming work on Man of Tomorrow. Online, some critics of Rowling have speculated the broader backlash could be influencing decisions around the show, though that remains unconfirmed.

There are 30 full-length Jack Reacher novels as of 2026, published one per year like clockwork since Killing Floor in 1997. Lee Child wrote the first 24 solo; his younger brother Andrew came aboard as co-writer with The Sentinel in 2020 and has been steering the series since, with book 31, Chain Reaction, due October 20, 2026.

Our top pick is Persuader — and the ranking below covers every single one of the 30, in three tiers. Every book stands alone, so nothing here requires homework.

"I was arrested in Eno's diner. At twelve o'clock." — the opening of Killing Floor (1997), still the best two-sentence job application in the genre.

The top ten

1. Persuader (2003) — First-person Reacher undercover in a smuggler's fortified mansion in Maine, settling a ten-year-old score. The tightest plotting Child ever managed, and the best villain reveal. 2. Killing Floor (1997) — The debut. Reacher steps off a bus in Margrave, Georgia, and gets arrested for murder within the hour. The coincidence at its center is enormous, and nobody has ever cared. 3. One Shot (2005) — A sniper kills five people, then says only: get Jack Reacher. The basis for the 2012 Tom Cruise movie and season 1 of Amazon's earlier planning notwithstanding, the book out-plots both. 4. Die Trying (1998) — Reacher gets kidnapped by accident alongside an FBI agent and hauled to a militia compound in Montana. The long-range shooting sequence remains series-best. 5. The Enemy (2004) — A prequel set in 1990, with Major Reacher still in uniform investigating a two-star general found dead in a motel. Explains where his mother's story ends and his drifting begins. 6. Worth Dying For (2010) — Reacher, still broken from 61 Hours, takes apart the Duncan clan in rural Nebraska. The closest the series comes to a horror novel, and a regular fan-poll favorite. 7. Bad Luck and Trouble (2007) — Someone is throwing members of Reacher's old Army unit out of helicopters. The Neagley showcase, and the source for Reacher season 2. 8. Tripwire (1999) — Hook Hobbs is the series' nastiest villain, and the Vietnam backstory gives the book actual weight. Also the last time Reacher seriously considers a mortgage. 9. 61 Hours (2010) — A countdown structure, a snowbound South Dakota town, and an ending Child left genuinely unresolved. Starts the loose four-book run that continues in Worth Dying For, A Wanted Man, and Never Go Back. 10. Gone Tomorrow (2009) — Opens with Reacher watching a suicide bomber checklist play out on a 2 a.m. New York subway car. The pick for Reacher season 4, and the strongest opening chapter in the series.

Read more: Canceled? Prime Video’s Spider-Noir just walked away with five Emmys

The dependable middle (11–20)

11. The Hard Way (2006) — A kidnapping case run from a New York café that relocates to a Norfolk farmhouse siege. Watch Reacher be wrong for 300 pages, which almost never happens. 12. Without Fail (2002) — The Secret Service hires Reacher to test whether the vice president can be assassinated. Bonus: his brother Joe's ex, and the M.E. Froelich, one of the better love interests. 13. Make Me (2015) — Starts with a town called Mother's Rest and a missing man, ends somewhere considerably darker than the series usually goes. The last unambiguously first-rate solo Child. 14. The Affair (2011) — The 1997-set prequel that shows the exact week Reacher leaves the Army. Pairs neatly with The Enemy. 15. Never Go Back (2013) — Reacher finally reaches Virginia to meet Major Susan Turner, who is in a cell, while he's facing a paternity claim. The basis for the second Cruise film. 16. Running Blind (2000) — Women from Reacher's past are dying in baths of Army-green paint with no visible cause of death. The solution cheats a little; the ride doesn't. 17. Past Tense (2018) — Reacher visits his father's hometown and finds the family history doesn't check out, while a parallel plot traps two Canadians in a very bad motel. The motel half is superb. 18. The Midnight Line (2017) — Reacher traces a pawned West Point ring to the opioid trade in Wyoming. The most somber book in the series; readers split on whether that's a feature. 19. Echo Burning (2001) — West Texas heat, a woman who wants her husband dead or possibly doesn't. Great atmosphere, slow middle. 20. Exit Strategy (2025) — Book 30. Reacher is slipped a note asking for help in Baltimore and pulls the thread. The Andrew era's most confident entry so far.

The back of the pack (21–30)

21. In Too Deep (2024) — Reacher wakes up handcuffed to a bed with a damaged arm and no memory of arriving. The Washington Post said the 29th installment "feels fresh, with a mid-book twist." It's a fair verdict; the amnesia hook does most of the lifting. 22. The Secret (2023) — A 1992-set prequel with Reacher on an interagency task force. Serviceable, and the dual-assassin gimmick is fun. 23. Blue Moon (2019) — Reacher versus Ukrainian and Albanian mobs simultaneously. The body count triples the series average and the plot logic thins accordingly. 24. Personal (2014) — Reacher goes to Paris and London chasing a sniper with a grudge. The rare Reacher abroad, and it shows why he stays home. 25. Nothing to Lose (2008) — The Hope/Despair setup between two Colorado towns is a great hook, spent on the series' wobbliest conspiracy. 26. Night School (2016) — A 1996 prequel with a Hamburg jihadist cell and a $100 million McGuffin. More procedural than propulsive. 27. A Wanted Man (2012) — Mostly set inside cars on the interstate. There's a good code-phrase sequence in the first act, and then a lot of driving. 28. No Plan B (2022) — A conspiracy centered on a private prison in Mississippi, with three separate plotlines that arrive by bus. Efficient, anonymous. 29. Better Off Dead (2021) — Reacher fakes his own death near the Arizona border. The plan-recital tic of the co-written era peaks here. 30. The Sentinel (2020) — The handover book: ransomware, Nashville, and a Reacher who suddenly narrates his own fight choreography like an instruction manual. The brothers course-corrected afterward, but somebody has to be 30th.

Where should a new reader start?

Killing Floor, or Persuader if the 1997 pacing feels dated. The only internal chronology that matters is the 61 Hours → Worth Dying For → A Wanted Man → Never Go Back stretch; everything else can be read in any order, which is exactly how the books were designed.

The series' actual formula, per Lee Child himself, has never been a secret: the same story every year, told better than anyone else tells it. Twenty-nine sequels later, that's still roughly the deal.

For screen cross-referencing: Reacher season 1 adapts Killing Floor, season 2 adapts Bad Luck and Trouble, season 3 adapts Persuader, and season 4 — alongside the Neagley spinoff — takes on Gone Tomorrow.

Earlier we wrote: James Gunn hints Tom Holland won’t want to play Aqualad at 30

At a press conference on Sept. 6 at the Venice Film Festival, Susan Sarandon said that speaking out about Palestine has come with real professional fallout. Promoting The Echo Chamber, the Oscar winner described a split between what she sees as a shifting public conversation and what she calls a slower-moving Hollywood gatekeeping class — alleging that “films have been” “taken away” and that agencies have advised people not to hire her.

Sarandon pointed to a growing willingness outside the U.S. industry to engage her, even as she characterized the big-studio landscape as “particularly difficult territory.” She said she’s felt more welcome internationally, but claimed that in Hollywood, the power centers haven’t fully caught up with that change.

Sarandon says agencies have told people not to hire her.

Backstory

Her comments follow a rocky stretch that began after she addressed a pro-Palestinian rally in New York in 2023, after which her longtime agency UTA dropped her. She later apologized, calling part of what she said “a mistake in phrasing.”

The Echo Chamber

Directed by Andrea Pallaoro, The Echo Chamber centers on the complicated relationship between two characters, Anne and Leonardo. Sarandon plays Ava May, an established artist whose life experience — and musical presence — adds a different emotional register to the story and forges an unexpected connection with Leonardo.

The movie unfolds largely in a single location, with detailed production design and carefully composed cinematography under Pallaoro’s restrained approach. Onstage in Venice, Sarandon credited Pallaoro with casting her despite what she described as warnings against working with her.

Out on the edge of Rushville, the investigation snaps back into place when Hal gets one brutal piece of intel from Sinestro: a Manhunter can mimic almost anything about a person — except a human heart. It’s a surgical detail with massive consequences, and Sinestro uses it to needle Hal about John Stewart too, framing the younger Lantern as his eventual replacement and a potential liability.

Sinestro’s clue, John’s past

Back on Earth, John opens up in a way Hal isn’t expecting. He admits he went to art school, a curveball for a Marine whose life has been built on discipline and fear. That creative streak nods to Green Lantern lore — shades of Kyle Rayner — and becomes a thread the episode keeps tugging.

The Lanterns zero in on cattle kingpin William Macon, who’s sitting on alien tech and acting like he owns the town. At his ranch, Macon spirals from swagger to bizarre, demanding John sketch him nude and babbling about a mysterious savior who once saved his life and now expects protection. Every answer points back to a benefactor with off-world reach.

John’s connection to Zoe deepens alongside the case. She urges him to leave Rushville — “staying could get you killed” — and says she was there when Macon was dying and helped save him. Moments later a red laser lances her car; the blast looks fatal, but the bracelet she wore is all that’s left behind, a breadcrumb that refuses to add up.

• Sinestro’s tell: Manhunters can’t replicate a human heart.
• Macon’s ranch: alien tech, erratic behavior, and a nude drawing request.
• Zoe’s warning: “Leave town,” then a red-laser strike and a vanished body.

Slaughterhouse detour

The laser gives the case a trail. Hal recovers a small satellite near the firing site, and Sheriff Kerry helps trace it through shell companies tied to Macon. That leads to a nightmare of chrome and conveyor belts: a high-tech slaughterhouse run by a man calling himself Hector Hammond — a name DC fans know well, which is exactly the point.

Inside, the Lanterns wade through robotic workers and bone-cold precision. “Hammond” goads them, threatens John’s family, even plays audio of John talking with a Guardian — more fuel for Hal’s growing suspicion that John’s not telling him everything. Hal doesn’t bite. Using Sinestro’s heart test, he corners the impostor into owning the truth: he’s human.

The man gives his real name, Hector Gutierrez, and says Macon armed him with advanced tech he used to help his community. It’s a misdirect with a moral gray zone — and it shoves Hal and John straight back to Macon’s door.

By then, the trust gap is a canyon. John had a gut feeling Zoe was hiding something, but no hard proof; when Hal learns that, he reads it as another omission. John insists he never knowingly protected a Manhunter. Hal hears betrayal.

Revelation and fallout

Hal connects the dots in the final minutes: the “death” no one could survive, the unexplained survival evidence at the crash site, and the tell that never lies — the heart. The conclusion hits like a ring blast: Zoe is the Manhunter.

Episode 4 confirms it: Zoe is the Manhunter.

Actor Poorna Jagannathan, who plays Zoe, told Entertainment Weekly she didn’t know the twist when she took the part and only discovered it reading the Episode 4 script. The reveal reframed her earlier scenes for her — Zoe as someone built by programming, executing a mission — and it colors her intimacy with John too. What began as strategy seems to turn into something real; her plea for him to leave Rushville reads like a genuine attempt to keep him alive.

Hal isn’t in a forgiving mood. He says he believed John until learning John had suspicions about Zoe and kept them to himself. The argument turns physical, and Hal makes a brutal call: he bails, leaving John trapped in a moving car. The vehicle slams into a telephone pole, and John is left without his ring.

On a recent episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, Nick Offerman watched a clip of commentator Ben Shapiro sprinting through a recap of his standalone hour of The Last of Us — played back at 1.5x speed. Offerman laughed at the turbo delivery, then started picking apart the take point by point.

“I’m embarrassed for his reading comprehension. I think he got eight things wrong in his recap besides his rampant homophobia.”

Shapiro had blasted Season 1’s Episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” for dialing down the zombie threat and dismissed Offerman’s survivalist Bill as a “gay Ron Swanson.” The episode, a tender love story between Bill and Frank (played by Murray Bartlett) set amid the apocalypse, went on to become one of the season’s most talked-about hours — and Offerman later won an Emmy for the performance.

Moving on, not sparring

Offerman said he even wrote a song about the dust-up while on tour, but ultimately decided not to get pulled into an ongoing back-and-forth. He added that he’d rather keep his focus on the work itself, taking on roles that push past his Parks and Recreation image of Ron Swanson.

Days after Prime Video and MGM+ pulled the plug on its eight-episode first season, Spider-Noir walked into the 2026 Creative Arts Emmys and walked out with five trophies, all on the craft side.

Canceled after eight episodes, Spider-Noir won five Creative Arts Emmys.

What it won

• Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming
• Outstanding Sound Editing for a One-Hour Comedy or Drama Series
• Outstanding Title Design
• Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode
• Outstanding Cinematography for a Series

Built as a rain-soaked, black-and-white pulp set in the 1930s, the show leaned hard into mood and period detail: jazz joints, cigarette haze, and a trench-coated detective named Ben Reilly. Nicolas Cage played the weary antihero, haunted by the loss of his wife — a choice that put more weight than usual on cinematography, sound, design and stunts to sell the world.

Before the cancellation news, the series headed into Emmy weekend with 11 nominations, the most for any Prime Video title. It also carried a 92% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and amassed 2.6 billion U.S. viewing minutes in its first six weeks, according to Nielsen data cited by multiple outlets.

David Harbour’s milestone

David Harbour picked up his first Emmy, winning Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for the Max series DTF St. Louis. The honor follows two previous nominations for Stranger Things.

Harbour executive produced DTF St. Louis with creator Steven Conrad and plays Floyd Smernitch, a vulnerable man at the center of a love triangle that spirals into a murder mystery. The limited series entered the Emmys with 13 nominations spanning writing, directing and multiple technical categories.

Next up for Harbour: he’s set to portray Major Trautman in John Rambo, a prequel film starring Noah Centineo as a young Rambo.

Asked yet again on the official The Big Bang Theory YouTube channel, Simon Helberg said he never asked anyone in the writers’ room what, exactly, was in Howard’s father’s letter—and that the production never wrote a definitive version for him to play. As far as he’s concerned, the mystery works better unsolved.

"I wasn't going to ask because it doesn't exist in the in reality, and it's sort of, you know, I could play into that," Helberg said on The Big Bang Theory YouTube channel.

On the show, the letter from Howard’s estranged dad was a recurring thread that was referenced but never shown or read aloud. Helberg added that only writer Steven Molaro knows what he imagined it might say. Even whether Bernadette ever learned the contents is left fuzzy in the story, he noted, joking he could ask Molaro over dinner someday—if he ever really wants to know.

Who watched, and why

Helberg also shared how the sitcom hit people at unexpected moments. He recalled Billy Crystal pulling him aside at a party shortly after Robin Williams died. Crystal had been traveling when the news broke and, mid-flight, turned to the show; Helberg said watching an episode helped Crystal process the loss in a way little else could.

• Mark Hamill — Tuned in at first to support Helberg, then kept up so faithfully he’d plan treadmill sessions overseas around new episodes.
• Selena Gomez — Posted about her love for Sheldon Cooper with such enthusiasm that writers briefly floated bringing her onto the show.

All of it came up during a fan Q&A on The Big Bang Theory YouTube channel—where Helberg kept the letter closed but confirmed the room once even toyed with casting Gomez.

Reiner’s Emmy puts him in a small, bittersweet club of performers recognized for work that arrived after they were gone — a list that stretches from Marvel’s king of Wakanda to the nosy neighbor on Bewitched, with Hollywood royalty in between. Here are five standout posthumous Emmy wins and the roles that earned them.

Audrey Hepburn’s 1993 Emmy and her 1994 Grammy completed her EGOT — both awarded after her death.

Five others, at a glance

• Chadwick Boseman — Won in 2022 for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance, bringing T’Challa to life one last time in Marvel’s animated What If...? on Disney+. Boseman died in August 2020 at 43 after a private battle with colon cancer.
• Raúl Juliá — Honored in 1995 with Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Special for HBO’s The Burning Season (as Brazilian activist Chico Mendes). The Addams Family favorite died in 1994 at 54.
• Alice Pearce — Recognized in 1966 with Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for playing ultra-curious neighbor Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched. Pearce died of ovarian cancer that same year.
• Audrey Hepburn — Received a 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Informational Programming for Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn. The screen icon died earlier that year at 63; a 1994 Grammy later cemented her rare EGOT status.
• Ingrid Bergman — Awarded in 1982 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or a Special thanks to her final role as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda. Bergman died later that year on her 67th birthday after living with breast cancer.

Phones were sealed in bags and the title wasn’t announced until the lights went down: that’s how the Telluride Film Festival unveiled You Can See Everything, a new Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim. The A24 film screened as a surprise event and will head to theaters in October, with festivalgoers sworn to keep what they saw to themselves.

The filmmakers’ official logline keeps it simple — and tense — describing a camera trained on Holmes in the final stretch before prison: “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move.” Rumors had swirled ahead of Telluride that Fielder visited Holmes behind bars; what’s actually in the movie is being kept under wraps by design.

Holmes, in brief

• Stanford dropout at 19, Holmes founded Theranos and claimed its Edison device could detect a range of conditions — even cancer — from just a few drops of blood. The company raised about $724 million and hit an estimated $9–10 billion valuation around 2013–14.
• Investigations later found Theranos’ tests were inaccurate and that the company relied on third‑party lab equipment — details investors hadn’t been told.
• Holmes was federally charged on June 14, 2018. In January 2022, a jury convicted her on four counts — three of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud — tied to defrauding investors. She was acquitted on charges related to patients.
• In November 2022, a judge sentenced Holmes to 11 years and 3 months in prison, plus three years of supervised release. She reported to federal custody in 2023.

With You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have delivered one of the most transfixing and jaw-dropping documentaries of ALL TIME. I implore you to know as little as possible about this film before seeing it.

Fielder — working here with Oppenheim and distributor A24 — kept the rollout as controlled as the subject herself once tried to be. Beyond Telluride’s “no phones” screening, the film remains under tight wraps until its theatrical release in October.

Across two nights of Creative Arts ceremonies on Sept. 5–6, the Television Academy handed out more than a hundred Emmys — and a few clear front-runners emerged. The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny dominated the first evening with seven trophies, while Apple’s Widow’s Bay surged on Night 2 with eight wins as acting prizes joined the craft races.

Widow’s Bay led Night 2 with eight Emmys; Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show topped Night 1 with seven.

Night 1: Live shows rule

The opening night produced a crowded scoreboard: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl spectacle took home seven Emmys; The Traitors collected six; The Late Show with Stephen Colbert grabbed five; The Muppet Show earned four; and Love on the Spectrum finished with three, including casting and editing. Mariska Hargitay’s deeply personal documentary won two, as did Ocean with David Attenborough.

• Outstanding Game Show — Jeopardy!
• Outstanding Host for a Game Show — Jimmy Kimmel (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire)
• Outstanding Variety Special (Live) — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) — The Muppet Show
• Outstanding Reality Competition Program — The Traitors
• Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program — Alan Cumming (The Traitors), his third straight win
• Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program — Love on the Spectrum (also won for casting and picture editing)
• Outstanding Structured Reality Program — Antiques Roadshow
• Outstanding Casting for a Reality Program — Love on the Spectrum
• Outstanding Directing for a Reality Program — The Traitors (Ben Archard)
• Outstanding Cinematography for a Reality Program — The Traitors
• Outstanding Production Design for a Variety or Reality Series — The Traitors (“The Black Banquet”)
• Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series — The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
• Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series — The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
• Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction for a Series — The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
• Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming — The Muppet Show
• Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special — The Muppet Show
• Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Music Direction — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Choreography (Variety or Reality) — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction for a Special — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series or Special — The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny
• Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special — My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay
• Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program — Mariska Hargitay (My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay)
• Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series — Mr. Scorsese
• Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special — Tucci in Italy (hosted by Stanley Tucci)
• Outstanding Narrator — Octavia Spencer (Lost Women of Alaska: The Missing), her first Emmy
• Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program — Ocean with David Attenborough
• Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program — Sean Combs: The Reckoning
• Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction Program — Billy Joel: And So It Goes
• Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series — Colbert Before Air
• Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series — Inside the Pitt

Night 2: Acting and scripted highlights

The second evening moved key acting races into the Creative Arts spotlight for the first time alongside a fresh slate of scripted and craft wins. Totals told the story: Widow’s Bay scored eight, DTF St. Louis six, canceled-but-victorious Spider-Noir five, and both The Pitt and Pluribus collected four. Beef, Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Palm Royale each took home three.

• Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series — Rob Reiner (The Bear), awarded posthumously
• Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series — Betty Gilpin (Widow’s Bay)
• Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series — Ernest Harden Jr. (The Pitt)
• Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series — Shailene Woodley (Paradise), her first Emmy and the show’s first win
• Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — David Harbour (DTF St. Louis), his first Emmy
• Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — Linda Cardellini (DTF St. Louis)
• Outstanding Animated Program — South Park
• Outstanding Cinematography for a Comedy Series — Spider-Noir
• Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — DTF St. Louis (the HBO limited series also won for acting, writing, directing and picture editing)
• Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Program — Widow’s Bay (part of an eight-trophy night that also included casting, cinematography, sound editing, sound mixing, music supervision and music composition)
• Outstanding Production Design for a Period or Fantasy Program — Fallout (also recognized for costumes)
• Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series — Widow’s Bay
• Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series — The Pitt
• Outstanding Casting for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — DTF St. Louis
• Outstanding Picture Editing for a Comedy Series — DTF St. Louis
• Outstanding Picture Editing for a Drama Series — Pluribus (also won for main title theme music, production design and sound mixing)
• Outstanding Costumes for a Comedy Series — Margo’s Got Money Troubles (along with hairstyling and makeup)
• Outstanding Costumes for a Period or Fantasy Series — Bridgerton (added a character voice-over win for Julie Andrews)
• Outstanding Costumes for a Contemporary Series — Beef (also took sound editing and sound mixing)
• Outstanding Hairstyling for a Comedy Series — Margo’s Got Money Troubles
• Outstanding Hairstyling for a Period or Fantasy Program — Bridgerton
• Outstanding Makeup for a Comedy Series — Margo’s Got Money Troubles
• Outstanding Makeup (Prosthetic) for a Period or Fantasy Program — The Pitt
• Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series — Spider-Noir
• Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — Beef
• Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series — Widow’s Bay
• Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — Beef
• Outstanding Music Composition for a Series — The Pitt (music and lyrics for “Need Someone”)
• Outstanding Main Title Theme Music — Pluribus
• Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie — The Beast in Me (Sean Callery and Sara Barone)
• Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Drama Series — The Boys
• Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Comedy Series — Spider-Noir
• Outstanding Stunt Performance — A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• Outstanding Special Visual Effects — Spider-Noir
• Outstanding Title Design — Spider-Noir
• Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance — Julie Andrews (Bridgerton)
• Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation (Juried) — Uzoma Dunkwu (Eyes of Wakanda); David Krentz and Scott Wills (Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal); Howard Chen (The Mighty Nein); Takashi Okazaki (Star Wars: Visions)
• Legacy Award — I Love Lucy, the inaugural honor

The Primetime Emmys cap the festivities on Saturday, Sept. 14 from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, with Mariska Hargitay hosting live on NBC and streaming on Peacock.

Episode 2 of Lanterns drops the kind of throwaway detail that lights up fan radar: Sheriff Kerry Kane says she left Gotham for Nebraska “on a whim.” Up to that point, the Rushville law officer — played by Kelly Macdonald — looked like a small-town foil for the Green Lanterns’ investigation. Tie her to Gotham, though, and suddenly she’s standing a lot closer to the Bat-family’s front door.

The breadcrumbs started even earlier. In Episode 1, Kerry tells someone on the phone to “tell Barb” hello — a tiny moment that outlets including Forbes and ComicBook.com flagged as a possible nod to Barbara Gordon. Add her last name, Kane, and the internet did the rest: could Kerry be connected to Kate Kane, a.k.a. Batwoman?

The clues so far

• She’s a Gotham native who moved to Rushville “on a whim.”
• She casually mentions “Barb” on a phone call — potentially Barbara Gordon.
• Her surname, Kane, matches Kate Kane — better known as Batwoman.
• In the present-day story, she’s the local sheriff working with — and sometimes against — Hal Jordan and John Stewart.

Here’s what’s text, not theory: DC describes Kerry as the Rushville sheriff whose path crosses with the Lanterns. What the show has not said anywhere is that she’s related to Kate or that Batwoman is part of this storyline. There is no official announcement connecting Macdonald’s character to Batwoman.

“finding out you’re a Disney princess.”

That’s how Kelly Macdonald told Entertainment Weekly the Gotham reveal felt when she learned it was part of Kerry’s backstory.

How it fits the DCU

James Gunn and Peter Safran have laid out a connected DCU where characters can move between projects. Their initial slate included The Brave and the Bold as the new DCU Batman movie, set to feature Damian Wayne as Robin and make room for members of the wider Bat-Family. That framework easily accommodates a Kate Kane down the road — but it doesn’t confirm she’s being introduced on Lanterns.

There’s also a current DC comic headlined by Kate Kane as Batwoman, which keeps the character in the spotlight but doesn’t guarantee a live-action DCU arrival. As of now, Lanterns itself hasn’t stated any family connection for Kerry, and there’s no official tie to Batwoman on the record.

In a quick back-and-forth with a fan on social media, James Gunn said he isn’t sure a 30-year-old Tom Holland would be up for playing Aqualad after headlining Spider-Man. The fan floated Holland for a handful of teen DC heroes — including Aqualad, Kid Flash and even “Best Boy” — and Gunn replied with the age question mark rather than a tease or confirmation.

There’s no casting here — just Gunn acknowledging the chatter while he keeps building out a younger tier of heroes for his DC Universe. But Aqualad isn’t just one person in the comics, which is why the name keeps coming up whenever fans speculate about the DCU’s next generation.

Two Aqualads to know

• Garth — Debuted in Adventure Comics #269 (1960). An Atlantean from the Idyllist tribe, he was ostracized for his distinctive purple eyes until Aquaman took him under his wing. He later helped found the Teen Titans and eventually graduated from sidekick status to the mantle Tempest.
• Jackson Hyde (Kaldur’ahm) — Created for Young Justice and introduced to comics around 2010. Commonly portrayed as Black Manta’s son, he mixes Atlantean strength with hydrokinesis and bioelectric powers, shaping water into weapons. Jackson has also become a key LGBTQ+ character in modern DC stories.

Between Garth’s Titan legacy and Jackson’s visually striking powerset — water blades and crackling bioelectricity — Aqualad gives DCU filmmakers a lot of options if and when the character surfaces alongside Aquaman in live action.

What this means for the DCU

Amid the speculation, reporter Jeff Sneider said on The InSneider that Gunn’s contract has been extended, framing the filmmaker’s DCU stewardship as a long-term play.

“He will [stick around]. He just extended,” Sneider said.

The extension talk arrived as fans debated Gunn’s footing after corporate what-ifs and mixed box office headlines. Superman (2025) reportedly finished around $618 million worldwide, short of some billion-dollar predictions, while Supergirl bowed well under expectations with a roughly $62.6 million global opening frame.

Even so, Gunn still has a sizable DCU slate in various stages of development, with room for new heroes to enter the continuity. For now, there’s no confirmed casting tying Tom Holland to Aqualad — only a fan prompt and Gunn’s age-based reality check.

Got it on your spooky-season list? The 2007 shocker The Poughkeepsie Tapes is streaming now on Tubi, but it won’t be there for long — the title rotates off the service at the end of the month.

Leaves Tubi on September 30.

The film is staged like a true-crime documentary, but the story is fictional. It pieces together police interviews, mock news segments and chilling “found” footage to chronicle an investigation into a serial killer named Edward Carver — a predator who recorded his crimes and left behind a cache of videotapes discovered in Poughkeepsie, New York.

That collage of grainy visuals and talking heads is the whole point: it blurs the line between doc and horror movie so thoroughly that it’s often mistaken for the real thing. It isn’t. No real cases are depicted, and the characters are invented for the film.

How it got here

Written and directed by John Erick Dowdle, the movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007, then went quiet for years before finally finding a home audience.

• 2007 — World premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival
• 2014 — Arrived on video-on-demand
• 2017 — Released on DVD and Blu-ray

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is available to stream on Tubi now. It’s scheduled to exit the platform on September 30.

In a candid new interview, Bruce Campbell said he’s living with a doctor-advised, five-year outlook and is trying to protect his headspace by not drowning in online chatter about his diagnosis. Speaking on The Adam Carolla Show, the actor described how he’s staying focused without getting lost in message boards and support groups.

“In my world, I’m in a five-year prognosis.”

“You can go down a massive rabbit hole. The cancer rabbit hole is enormous. You can go into focus groups of 10,000 guys who have the exact thing you have. I won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.”

Campbell first told fans about his cancer in March, posting on X that his condition is “treatable” but “not curable,” and that he’d briefly step back from work to prioritize treatment. Support poured in at the time — including messages from fellow entertainers like Kid Cudi — as he promised to stay strong through the process.

Back at work

The actor has since resumed a measured work schedule and is now out promoting Ernie & Emma, a project he wrote, directed and stars in. The comedy follows a man determined to spread his late wife’s ashes, and Campbell has been spacing out appearances as he balances promo with treatment.

As for the franchise that made him a cult icon, Campbell hasn’t played Ash Williams since 2018, but he’s still in the mix behind the scenes. He remains an executive producer on upcoming Evil Dead installments.

Ernie & Emma is slated for 2026.

The actor behind Thaal Sinestro is already game for more. Ulrich Thomsen says he’d happily keep returning to the role on HBO’s Lanterns—even after spending three to four hours in the chair for full-body makeup and prosthetics. He added that the team even dialed back Sinestro’s hue after an early camera test made him look “a little too pink.”

“It’s a great world. It’s a great take on the Lanterns, I think. Bring it on. I’m ready,” Thomsen told TheWrap.

Thomsen’s Sinestro arrives with the comic’s unmistakable look—pink complexion, razor-sharp brows, and that signature mustache—but the show is threading it through his uneasy history with Hal Jordan. The season has only begun to unpack that fractured mentor-student bond, and Thomsen’s ready-for-more stance hints at deeper dives into Sinestro’s past and ideology if the series keeps going.

• Ulrich Thomsen — Thaal Sinestro
• Kyle Chandler — Hal Jordan
• Aaron Pierre — John Stewart

Reynolds floats a cameo

There’s another Green Lantern alum circling the conversation. Asked by Entertainment Tonight about dropping by the new show, Ryan Reynolds—who played Hal in the 2011 movie—didn’t hesitate.

“I would totally do a cameo in that. I love it,” Reynolds said.

There’s no confirmation he’ll actually appear, and the series’ current lineup stands with Kyle Chandler as Hal and Aaron Pierre as John. Still, HBO Max’s social team leaned into Reynolds’ comment with a playful video reply on social media, which helped kick up the chatter.

Momentum is building for Lanterns: Episode 3 drew 10 million global viewers in its first three days, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. And Pierre’s John Stewart is set to continue into James Gunn’s big-screen DCU in Man of Tomorrow, now slated for theaters on July 9, 2027.

A lavish London wedding brings former flames back into the same room — and straight into a whodunit. When a guest is found dead, actress Tuppence Cowley and crime novelist Tommy Beresford, exes who haven’t spoken in about a decade, decide to sleuth on their own after an old friend lands in the crosshairs. She’s just moved back to the city; he’s stuck with writer’s block. The tension between them is as tricky as the case.

Set in present-day London, Tommy & Tuppence folds smartphones, social media and modern dating into classic Christie-style misdirection. The six-episode season is built around three separate mysteries and is billed as the duo’s first modern English-language TV adaptation, aiming to keep the twists while refreshing the romance.

Cast and characters

• Antonia Thomas — Tuppence Cowley, an energetic actress newly back in London
• Josh Dylan — Tommy Beresford, a meticulous crime writer battling writer’s block
• Imelda Staunton — Aunt Ada, Tommy’s formidable aunt and former detective-agency owner
• Nicholas Richardson — Julius
• Charlie Condou — Albert
• Callie Cooke — Detective Sergeant Draper
• Chizzy Akudolu — Detective Inspector Merriot

Familiar faces pop in as suspects and scene-stealers, including:

• Sebastian De Souza
• Sean Pertwee
• Saffron Burrows
• Alex Jennings
• Denise Black
• Alice Krige

Across the season, Aunt Ada’s old-school know-how nudges the pair through a maze of secrets and red herrings, while working cases together jump-starts Tommy’s stalled career and rekindles that will-they/won’t-they spark. The show takes cues from Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence stories — including nods to The Secret Adversary — rather than retelling them beat for beat.

Behind the camera, writer–executive producer Phoebe Eclair-Powell steers the update. Fergus O’Brien directs the first four episodes, with Ellie Heydon handling the final two. The series, from Lookout Point (part of BBC Studios) in association with Agatha Christie Limited, was filmed around London.

When and where to watch

Premieres September 15, 2026 on BritBox in the US and Canada.

The six-part mystery rolls out weekly after the premiere.

The black moto jacket worn by Nick Offerman as Jinx Millet on Margo’s Got Money Troubles isn’t a costume piece at all — it’s his own jacket from college, complete with a hand-painted warning across the back: “Watch me burn.” Offerman says he pulled it out of storage because it fit the character’s bruised, larger-than-life swagger, and because there’s a wild origin story baked into the leather.

Speaking on the podcast Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, Offerman explained that the words came from a teenage mishap on a construction site that singed off his hair and eyebrows and turned into a running bit among the crew.

“I was framing houses for these born-again Christian brothers. And I accidentally lit this big pile of refuse on fire and blew myself off of it and burned off my hair and eyebrows. And I was screaming, "Watch me burn, boys." is cuz I they used to admonish me jokingly for engaging in sin as a teenager, and so I was splashing gasoline on the fire,”

Offerman said on the show he was about 18 or 19 at the time. Two friends from back then — Rob Kimmel and Martin McClendon — airbrushed the artwork on the jacket’s back, which he then resurrected for Jinx, the former pro wrestler he plays in the series.

The jacket’s second act

For viewers, the choice adds a real scuff-and-scar history to Jinx’s look. Offerman, best known to many as Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, said wearing the same beat-up jacket he once wore as a kid made sense for a character who’s bombastic on the outside but tender with his family.

About the show

Margo’s Got Money Troubles follows Margo, a college dropout and aspiring writer who becomes pregnant after an affair with her married professor. As she struggles to raise her newborn, her estranged dad Jinx (Offerman) reenters her life to help, while the series also digs into Margo’s complicated relationship with her mother.

The series picked up three Emmy Awards this year, including recognition for its on-screen style:

• Outstanding Contemporary Hairstyling
• Outstanding Contemporary Makeup (Non-Prosthetic)
• Outstanding Contemporary Costumes for a Series

On night two of Kanye West’s Chicago homecoming at Soldier Field, Kid Cudi walked out to join Ye for the first time in years. The pair ran through a trio of favorites that defined their creative peak together, turning a football stadium into a nostalgia loop for fans who never thought they’d see it again.

• Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1
• Ghost Town
• Pursuit of Happiness

The reunion — part of West’s two-night homecoming in his hometown — landed big with the crowd, but it also kicked up immediate debate online over West’s recent controversies and how quickly audiences should embrace him.

New York radio host Peter Rosenberg weighed in on X after the shows, saying he was uneasy with how warmly West was received. He pointed to West’s recent history and what he described as a “Heil Hitler” song from last year, arguing that it’s too soon to cheer him as a conquering hero.

Cudi replied by sharing Rosenberg’s post and defending his decision to stand beside West. In his response, he said their nearly two-decade relationship makes West “family,” added that West has apologized to him, and said he believes West is in a better place mentally. Cudi also wrote that he held West accountable privately before accepting his apology.

"That man is my brother. U dont have a relationship w him like I do. Damn near 2 decades of art and friendship."

Rosenberg later clarified in a reply that his criticism wasn’t aimed at Cudi specifically, but at fans celebrating West’s return. While he said forgiveness and empathy matter, he argued West should seek real help, step away from the spotlight, and come back only after taking accountability.

Long, messy history

West signed Cudi to G.O.O.D. Music in 2008, and their early partnership helped shape both careers. Cudi’s fingerprints are all over West’s “808s & Heartbreak,” and West helped launch Cudi’s solo run.

The relationship blew up in 2016 when Cudi criticized West and others over the use of songwriters; West fired back from the stage, then later softened and called Cudi his “brother.” They reunited for the acclaimed 2018 joint project “Kids See Ghosts.”

Things fractured again afterward — by 2022, Cudi said it would take a “miracle” for them to be friends. That’s why the Soldier Field performance, and Cudi publicly defending West this week, landed with so much weight for fans on both sides of the debate.

Former flames Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley run into each other at a lavish London wedding after nearly a decade apart — and the night ends with a guest dead. He’s a blocked crime novelist; she’s an actress who barrels through obstacles. When an old friend is named the prime suspect, the pair decide to dig in themselves, reigniting both their investigative spark and the chemistry they never quite left behind.

Guiding — and sometimes corralling — their comeback is Aunt Ada, a retired private eye with little patience for dithering, played by Imelda Staunton. Stirring the pot further is Julius, a charismatic film producer and Tuppence’s husband in this update, determined to win her back and complicate whatever is rekindling with Tommy.

Who’s who

• Antonia Thomas — Tuppence Cowley, a force‑of‑nature actress who refuses to take no for an answer (The Good Doctor).
• Josh Dylan — Tommy Beresford, a once‑hot crime writer who’s lost his spark (The Buccaneers).
• Imelda Staunton — Aunt Ada, Tommy’s formidable great‑aunt and a seasoned, retired private detective.
• Nicholas Richardson — Julius, a smooth film producer and Tuppence’s husband, intent on winning her back.
• Charlie Condou — Albert.
• Callie Cooke — Detective Sergeant Draper, a smart, idealistic cop who openly admires Tommy.
• Chizzy Akudolu — Detective Inspector Merriot, a sharp, no‑nonsense counterweight to the amateur sleuths.
• Fola Evans-Akingbola — Tatiana.
• Lucie Shorthouse — Mary (Peaky Blinders, Red Dwarf, Extraordinary).
• Della Saba — Lina Weaver (The End of the F***ing World, Black Mirror, The Power).
• Alara‑Star Khan — Hetty Copleigh.
• Alexa Davies — Fran (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Raised by Wolves, Dead Pixels).

Set in present‑day London, the six‑episode run blends red herrings and razor‑sharp banter with a will‑they/won’t‑they throughline. As the cases pile up, Aunt Ada’s old‑school instincts meet the duo’s off‑the‑books style, while working with Tuppence nudges Tommy’s writing mojo back to life.

Tommy & Tuppence debuts on BritBox on September 15, 2026 with two episodes, then rolls out weekly.

The season consists of six approximately 45‑minute episodes, premiering in the U.S. on BritBox with two installments on launch day, followed by one episode each week.

Krystal is shot by Pop Henry, played by Erika Woods, at the top of season 4, episode 9, "It's About That Time," which aired May 9, 2025 on Starz. Pop is the wife of Snaps (Wendell Pierce), and the pair had already been revealed the week before as the people behind Famous's murder.

How Krystal ended up there

Krystal, played by Aliyah Turner, was Jukebox's former Butta bandmate turned Kanan's girlfriend. The sequence runs like this:

• End of episode 8 — Kanan warns her to leave town before a war starts. She takes a bus.
• Off the bus — NYPD officers pull her aside, saying detectives have questions about Famous's death. The officers are on Snaps and Pop's payroll.
• Top of episode 9 — she's drugged and chained in an unknown room. A figure approaches.
• The kitchen — Pop arrives playing the rescuer, makes her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and asks who Kanan thinks killed Famous.
• The answer — Krystal says Kanan blames his mother, Raq. Pop shoots her in the back of the head while her back is turned.

Why Pop did it

Snaps and Pop ordered Famous's killing through the same dirty cops, and their entire concern was whether Kanan had figured it out. Once Krystal confirmed his suspicion was pointed at Raq, she stopped being a source and started being a witness. The couple then went ahead and fed Kanan the Raq story directly.

Woods rated the moment more shocking than the Famous reveal that preceded it.

"really going to throw the fans into a frenzy" — Erika Woods on the scene, PEOPLE, 2025

What it sets off

The season 4 finale, "Gimme The Weight," opens with Jukebox telling Kanan that Krystal's body has been found. He trashes his apartment. Detective Garcia then tells him a Black woman was seen leaving the site — which Kanan reads as confirmation that Raq did it. Jukebox warns him that Snaps and Pop have every reason to lie; he pulls a gun on her for saying so.

By the closing minutes he has a gun on Raq herself, accusing her of killing everyone he cares about so he'll have nobody but her. She denies both Krystal and Famous. He doesn't lower it.

Could she come back?

The Power universe has a documented habit of resurrecting people, but this one is about as unambiguous as the franchise gets: a point-blank shot, a recovered body, and a funeral-adjacent finale built around it.

Bonus detail: before she died, Krystal made peace with Jukebox — the bandmate she'd spent the earlier seasons feuding with. The show gave her that scene, then took the payoff away five episodes later.

According to the long-running Kitchen Nightmares Updates tracker, as of August 2026: 64 of those 100 restaurants have closed, 34 are still open, two have been sold, and two have relocated. Other tallies put the survival rate anywhere from 30 to 40 percent depending on how they count sales and moves, but the direction is the same.

Seasons 1 and 2 are a clean sweep

Of the 21 restaurants featured in 2007 and 2008–09, exactly zero are still operating under their original ownership. One, The Olde Stone Mill in Tuckahoe, New York, was sold in 2009 and still trades under the same name. The other 20 are gone.

Season-by-season survivors from the original Fox run:

• Season 3 (2010) — 2 of 11 open
• Season 4 (2011) — 2 of 12 open
• Season 5 (2011–12) — 4 of 14 open
• Season 6 (2012–13) — 4 of 13 open, plus one sold and one relocated
• Season 7 (2014) — 2 of 6 open

The ones still standing

Pantaleone's in Denver, from the season 7 premiere, is among the longest-running survivors and still draws praise for its pizza — though the owner has said they're still struggling. Le Bistro in Lighthouse Point, Florida, is one of the town's top-rated restaurants on Tripadvisor. Lido di Manhattan in Manhattan Beach, Oceana in New Orleans, Mama Maria's in Brooklyn, Yanni's in Seattle, Spin-A-Yarn Steakhouse in Fremont, and Zayna Flaming Grill in Redondo Beach are all still trading.

Amy's Baking Company

The one everyone asks about. The Scottsdale, Arizona bakery aired in season 6 in May 2013 and remains the only episode where Ramsay quit mid-intervention. Amy and Samy Bouzaglo were pocketing server tips, serving bought-in desserts, and operating under a house motto:

"The customer is not always right."

The restaurant closed permanently on September 1, 2015. Reports since indicate the couple separated, with Samy relocating to Israel. Amy still bakes and posts her cakes on Instagram.

The revival is doing far better

The 2023 reboot and the seasons that followed have a much healthier record, though the sample is young and the industry average is brutal. Season 8 (2023) is 4 of 6 open — Da Mimmo in Dumont, New Jersey closed in September 2024, and Love Bites Cafe in Saugerties, New York closed a month after its makeover and before its episode even aired, with the owners citing health reasons. Season 9 (2025) is 9 of 10, the exception being Kindred in New Orleans, which also closed before broadcast. Season 10 aired July 21 to August 18, 2026, and all seven are open.

Whether that holds is the part nobody can answer yet. Roughly 80 percent of U.S. restaurants fail within five years without a camera crew involved.

He didn't. Kareem, played by Matthew Law, has never been written out, never been killed, and is still appearing in season 7 as of August 2026. What changed is his position in the credits, not his pulse.

The credit change

Law joined in episode 4, "Rats Can Smell Poison," on November 13, 2019, as the pharmacy owner who turns out to be running drugs. IMDb credits him on 106 episodes between 2019 and 2025 — one of the largest episode counts in the entire cast.

He was carried as main cast through the season 6 finale, "Counterblow," on December 23, 2025. From season 7 onward, TVmaze lists him as guest cast. Season 7 is also the season that moved the show off BET proper and onto Paramount+ with BET, premiering May 20, 2026.

Despite the demotion, he has appeared in a dozen season 7 episodes so far, running through "Chicken and Rice" on August 26, 2026. Neither Law nor Tyler Perry Studios has issued a statement about the change, because by the usual standards of TV exits there isn't one to make.

What Law has been doing instead

Six days before The Oval's season 7 premiere, Netflix dropped all eight episodes of Nemesis, a Los Angeles heist thriller from Power creator Courtney A. Kemp and co-creator Tani Marole. Law leads it as Isaiah Stiles, an LAPD Robbery-Homicide lieutenant chasing Y'lan Noel's master thief Coltrane Wilder.

"This is a man who is literally on the edge," Law told Essence in 2026 about the role.

His other current credits:

• Abbott Elementary — O'Shon, the school IT specialist romantically entangled with Principal Ava Coleman.
• Tyler Perry's The Paynes (2018) — Kendrick, 27 episodes, his first big Perry credit.
• A Fall from Grace (2020) — Jordan Bryant in Perry's Netflix thriller.
• This Is Me... Now: A Love Story (2024) — The Cynic in the Jennifer Lopez film.

Compare that with Barry

If you want to see what an actual exit looks like on this show, look at Vaughn W. Hebron's Barry Hallsen. Barry was effectively written out in season 4 while searching for his kidnapped daughter, and his death was confirmed on screen in the season 5 episode "Breaking News." Hebron then posted an Instagram tribute thanking Perry for launching his career.

Kareem got none of that treatment, which is the tell. Characters who are finished get a body and a farewell post. Characters whose actors booked a Netflix lead get fewer scenes.

Is he coming back full-time?

Unclear. The Oval has now run 137 episodes across seven seasons, and Perry's shows have a long history of pulling supporting players back into heavy rotation without warning. Law's availability is the variable, and Nemesis has not yet been renewed.

For the record: Kareem's original job was owning a pharmacy in Washington, D.C., with his father. He has outlasted almost everyone who ever shopped there.

Two of them went to the same place. Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo reunited as Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David in NCIS: Tony & Ziva, a 10-episode Paramount+ spinoff that premiered September 4, 2025, and ran through an October 23 finale. It was canceled after one season on December 19, 2025.

The spinoff that lasted one year

Tony & Ziva was a passion project for both stars, created by John McNamara, and it put the couple in Paris raising their daughter Tali before an attack on Tony's security firm sent them running across Europe. It debuted at No. 8 on Nielsen's streaming chart with 371 million viewing minutes, then fell off in the following weeks. Eighty percent of its audience was 50 or older.

In their joint statement on the cancellation, the pair thanked the crew, the network, and the fans who, as they put it, got to see the couple reach their ending:

"finally got to see Tony and Ziva find their happily ever after" — Weatherly and de Pablo, joint statement, December 2025

Six months later, CBS announced Weatherly would return to the mothership for a season-long arc in season 24. Tony is back in Washington running his private security company, Salus Mondiale, and Weatherly says the arc will not retcon the spinoff. CBS has said nothing about de Pablo.

Mark Harmon never really left

Harmon's Gibbs retired in season 19 in October 2021, but he stayed on as an executive producer and narrates the prequel NCIS: Origins. In summer 2026 CBS confirmed he will take a season-long on-camera role on Origins — his first regular acting work in the franchise in five years.

Pauley Perrette quit acting altogether

Abby Sciuto's exit after season 15 in 2018 ended a 352-episode run and came with a very public falling-out with Harmon over an on-set dog incident. Perrette followed it with the CBS sitcom Broke, retired from acting in 2020, and survived what she described as a massive stroke in 2021. She now produces documentaries, including 2023's Studio One Forever, and told Hello! in 2024 the retirement is permanent: "I want to be me all the time."

The rest of the original lineup

• Sasha Alexander — Kate Todd was shot dead in the season 2 finale in 2005 after 49 episodes; Alexander left over the shooting schedule and went on to Rizzoli & Isles.
• David McCallum — Ducky Mallard's actor died September 25, 2023, at 90. Season 21 wrote the character out with a tribute episode, and Weatherly returned for the funeral.
• Emily Wickersham — Ellie Bishop exited in season 18 in 2021, then came back for an episode in March 2026 and told Us Weekly the door was left open.
• Sean Murray — still there. McGee joined in episode seven of season 1 and has outlasted everyone.

Season 24 premieres in October, with Weatherly having started filming on July 14, 2026.

It is not him. Sal Vulcano has never left Impractical Jokers, and as of August 2026 he is still on truTV alongside Brian "Q" Quinn and James "Murr" Murray. The Joker who actually left was Joe Gatto, who announced his exit in December 2021 after nine seasons, citing issues in his personal life and a focus on co-parenting.

The Ohio church in those captions

The details in the viral captions line up with a real and heavily covered story that has nothing to do with Staten Island comedy. Chris Avell founded Dad's Place, a non-denominational church in Bryan, Ohio, in 2018, and in March 2023 began keeping it open around the clock so unhoused people could stay overnight. What followed:

• January 2024 — Avell pleads not guilty to 18 zoning code violations brought by the city of Bryan.
• January 2024 — the church files a federal lawsuit against the city and its officials.
• January 2025 — he is convicted of a fire code violation, fined $200, and given a 60-day suspended jail sentence.
• February 2025 — Ohio's Sixth District Court of Appeals grants a stay on the sentence.

Local and national news footage of Avell preaching and defending the shelter is all over TikTok. Somewhere along the way, someone slapped Vulcano's name on it.

Why the mix-up has legs

Vulcano is an ordained minister, which gives the rumor just enough surface plausibility to survive a fact-check. He officiated Joe Gatto's 2013 wedding, and he married two fans on an episode of Impractical Jokers: After Party.

That combination — an ordained comedian, a lookalike pastor, and a nine-year-old memory of one Joker actually quitting — is enough to keep the search query alive.

What did happen to Sal in 2026

In January 2026, Vulcano's TikTok account posted a graphic for his Everything's Fine Tour with no audio selected. TikTok auto-assigned a trending sound, and the sound turned out to be racially charged. He posted a video addressing it:

"Obviously, I would never post anything like that."

His response passed 12 million views. His social team had not chosen the audio, and the platform's default selection did. That episode is the other reason people have been typing his name into search bars this year — and the reason "Sal Vulcano cancelled" and "Sal Vulcano leaving" started autocompleting together.

Is he still on the show?

Yes. Impractical Jokers has continued as a three-man show since Gatto's exit, with rotating guest comedians filling the fourth slot. Vulcano tours stand-up, co-hosts the podcasts Hey Babe with Chris DiStefano and Taste Buds with Joe DeRosa, and holds the franchise record for punishments taken.

For the record: the "Prince Herb" bit that convinced a generation of viewers Sal was a different person entirely was also Sal. That one at least was on purpose.

Outside the Bricks — the settlement Hilltop became after it relocated north — a plaque reads "Founded 17 P.D.I." That places the community's founding 17 years after the outbreak, which puts the show somewhere around the 17th to 18th year and makes it the furthest-forward story in the entire franchise.

What P.D.I. means

Nobody on screen explains it. It functions the way A.D. does: a dating system the New Babylon Federation invented for the world that started when the dead did. The abbreviation itself has never been spelled out in dialogue or in an official release, which hasn't stopped anyone from guessing.

Doing the math

The pieces fans have had to assemble:

• 2010 — the outbreak begins, established across the franchise via World Beyond.
• About 12 years — the span the original series covers, putting its finale around 2022 or 2023 in-universe.
• Negan's estimate — in season 1, episode 3, he pegs his Savior days at "12, 15 years ago."
• Five to six years — Lauren Cohan's figure, given to Ouch! Magazine in June 2023, for the gap between the finale and Dead City.
• 17 P.D.I. — the Bricks' founding date, which the community predates by some margin.

Add the months-long jump between seasons 1 and 2, plus Negan's line in season 2 that a year has passed, and the show sits closer to year 18 than 15.

The problem it creates

Setting Dead City that far ahead means Rick and Michonne have been back in Virginia for years while Maggie relocates her whole community to a walker-infested island and never places a call. Daryl Dixon and The Ones Who Live both sit much closer to the original finale, and Dead City references neither. The timeline works; the geography of who knows what does not.

Where season 3 leaves it

Season 3 premiered July 26, 2026 and ran eight episodes through a September 13 finale, with Seth Hoffman taking over as showrunner from creator Eli Jorné. The premise — Maggie and Negan building the first functioning community Manhattan has had since the outbreak — only makes sense this deep into the calendar.

For the record: the franchise's fan-maintained timeline puts Dead City's first season in the summer of 2027 and its current events in early 2028. AMC has never confirmed a single one of those dates.

The TV series that premiered on September 10, 1955 was adapted from the CBS radio drama that debuted April 26, 1952 — created by writer John Meston and producer Norman Macdonnell, and developed for television by Charles Marquis Warren, who directed and wrote the pilot.

The radio version came first

CBS chairman William S. Paley had asked for a hard-edged adult Western — the pitch was a Philip Marlowe of the Old West. Meston and Macdonnell delivered it, with William Conrad voicing Marshal Matt Dillon and the first episode, "Billy the Kid," written by Walter Newman.

The radio show didn't stop when the TV show started. It ran more than 400 episodes and stayed on the air until June 18, 1961, six years of the two versions running side by side. Early television scripts were adapted straight from radio scripts, which is why the pilot plays a little stiff.

Why Wayne fronted the premiere

Wayne was the producers' first choice for Dillon and turned it down — movie stars didn't do weekly television in 1955. He recommended a friend instead: Arness, a 6-foot-7 ex-infantryman wounded at Anzio, then best known as the creature in The Thing From Another World. Wayne also agreed to film an on-camera introduction, in full cowboy dress, for the first episode.

"I've worked with him and I predict he'll be a big star."

The cast and crew gathered at Arness' house to watch the premiere. Nobody had told them the intro existed.

What changed on the way to TV

• Matt Dillon — Conrad was cut because he didn't look the part; Raymond Burr was considered and passed over; 26 actors screen-tested before Arness got it.
• The writing — Meston stayed on and ended up writing or co-writing close to 300 episodes.
• The character — Dillon has no family, few friends, and makes mistakes, which was unusual for a screen lawman at the time.
• The premiere — "Matt Gets It" opens with Dillon critically wounded by a fast-drawing outlaw named Dan Grat. Entertainment Weekly later ranked it No. 47 on its list of the 100 greatest moments in television.

Gunsmoke ran 20 years and 635 episodes before CBS ended it in 1975.

For the record: there's a wanted poster on the wall of Dillon's office in the pilot. It's for William H. Bonney — the killer from the very first radio episode.

The reason is contractual, not narrative. Daniel Sharman asked to leave, and Jeff Davis wrote Isaac out of Beacon Hills rather than into a grave — a distinction Sharman specifically requested.

Why Sharman left

Davis broke the news to E! News in March 2014, days after the finale killed off Allison Argent and Aiden. Sharman had come to him the same way Crystal Reed had:

He "wanted to go out for pilot season and for movies and try something new."

Davis also confirmed the actor had asked that the character be spared, so a return would stay possible if the right story ever showed up. Isaac's grief over Allison gave the writers an easy off-ramp: Chris takes a sabbatical in France, and Isaac goes with him.

Chris came back. Isaac didn't.

JR Bourne returned as Chris Argent during season 4, which left an obvious question the show declined to answer. Isaac's whereabouts were never addressed, never referenced, and never revisited across seasons 4, 5, or 6. He'd been Derek's first beta and a member of Scott's pack. Then he was a name nobody said.

The movie skipped him too

Teen Wolf: The Movie landed on Paramount+ on January 26, 2023 and built its plot around resurrecting Allison — the single storyline that would most plausibly require the guy who was dating her when she died. Sharman wasn't in it. Isaac wasn't mentioned. Colton Haynes' Jackson came back from London; Isaac stayed in France indefinitely.

What Sharman did instead

The pilot-season gamble worked out. His post-Beacon Hills run:

• The Originals (2014–15) — Kaleb Westphall / Kol Mikaelson.
• Fear the Walking Dead (2017, and again in 2023) — Troy Otto.
• Medici: The Magnificent (2018) — Lorenzo de' Medici.
• Cursed (2020) — the Weeping Monk.

For the record: Sharman was never a series regular on Teen Wolf. He was recurring across two seasons — and appeared in nearly every episode of season 3 anyway.

That scene aired in the U.K. on Christmas Day 2012, and it happened because Dan Stevens wanted out. His initial contract ran three years, he declined to extend it, and Julian Fellowes wrote the crash.

The contract ran out

Stevens has been consistent about the reason for a decade. He told The Telegraph the series was a very monopolizing job and that he wanted room for other work. Speaking to Deadline in 2022, he framed the choice as a straight trade — more money and the same part for another decade, or an open field. He picked the field.

He added a second motive in a 2021 interview with The Australian: he was worried about being permanently typecast as a romantic lead if he stayed.

The Christmas Day problem

The timing was not his call. Viewers who had sat down after Christmas dinner watched Matthew die in a car wreck minutes after meeting his son, and the complaints ran through the papers and social media for days. Stevens apologized to Radio Times, noting he had no say in how the character went:

"You're not supposed to die on British television on Christmas Day."

He did defend the choice of exit itself, arguing that killing Matthew was better than the alternative on the table — sending him off to have an affair, which he thought would have been wrong for the character.

Fellowes tried to buy him back

The show's creator wanted one more episode. He told the Express in 2013 that he'd pushed for a brief return so Matthew and Mary could get a happier sendoff, and got nowhere:

"Dan would not stay — he was determined to go."

Season 4 instead rebuilt itself around a widowed Lady Mary running the estate, which is roughly the show Fellowes had wanted to make anyway.

Did he ever come back?

No. Stevens sat out all three films — the 2019 original, A New Era in 2022, and The Grand Finale, released September 12, 2025 — and has said he's regularly surprised by fans who don't realize he wasn't in the first one either.

For the record: the crash was staged well enough that some viewers assumed Matthew survived offscreen. The show never entertained it.

He wasn't dead. He fell into the pond on the family farm and surfaced in 1790, where he was taken in by his own ancestor, Elijah Landry, and raised in the 1800s. He comes back to the present as a grown man in the season 3 premiere, played by Spencer MacPherson.

Where he actually went

The pond doesn't explain itself, so the show doles the answer out across three seasons. The sequence:

• 1999 — Jacob chases the family dog into the pond during the summer carnival and vanishes at age eight.
• 1790 — He surfaces two centuries earlier and is taken in by Elijah and Rebecca Landry, who raise him as their own.
• 1814 — Now an adult, he's engaged to Susanna Augustine, an ancestor of Kat's love interest, Elliot.
• 1816 — Wanted by Cyrus Goodwin, he goes back through the pond. Not by choice.
• January 2025 — The season 3 premiere puts him in Del's kitchen, 25 years late.

The "open book" line

The reunion isn't the tidy part. Showrunner Heather Conkie told TV Insider in 2025 that the character had learned to survive in the 1800s by being slippery, which is why he shades the truth even with his own family:

"Jacob isn't an open book."

The Landrys also have to explain a missing man to the outside world. Their cover story for the news crews: Jacob fell off a cliff the night he disappeared, was rescued by an off-grid couple with no internet access, lost his memory, and only learned where he came from when one of them was dying. Kat later finds out he didn't want to come home at all — the 1816 exit was an escape from jail.

Then he leaves again

Season 3 doesn't let him settle. Hired to run the Goodwin vineyard, Jacob tries to burn it down; Del stops him in the driveway. Lewis Goodwin threatens arson charges, and Casey turns up with Susanna's will to dig him out of it. In the finale, Jacob finds the threatening letters Del has been receiving, decides he's the reason for them, and disappears — leaving a letter of his own on the table.

How it ends

Season 4, which premiered April 19, 2026, was the last. The series finale hands Jacob the ending the pilot didn't suggest: he marries Abby Goodwin at the pond, with both families watching, which formally retires the Landry–Goodwin feud. Kat and Elliot get engaged. Elliot survives being shot at Lingermore because Kat drags him to the water in time. Cliff doesn't make it out.

For the record: the kid who fell into the pond in 1999 closes the show getting married next to it.

None of it is true. Daniel Lawrence Whitney, 63, is alive, still touring theaters, and last voiced Mater in the Disney+ series Cars on the Road in 2022. The most recent rumor, a June 2026 post attributing an anti-Trump statement to him, was traced by Snopes to a completely different person.

The fake statement

The post circulated on Facebook, Instagram, and X in June and July 2026, quoting him asking Trump supporters to unfollow him and calling the president a "malignant, racist, corrupt man." Snopes found no trace of it on his official accounts or in any reporting.

What they did find: a February 6, 2026 Threads post from musician Rosanne Cash that opened with the exact same wording and went somewhere else entirely. Nearly identical versions of the fake post were also attached to Paul McCartney and Dale Earnhardt Jr. The McCartney version was the earliest one Snopes could date, which points at a template — the kind of engagement-bait post built to drive clicks to ad-stuffed blogs.

The death hoax, which keeps coming back

This one has a longer history. In July 2023, tribute posts spread claiming he'd died at 60. Some versions added sleep apnea and diabetes to the story. He shot all of it down himself on Twitter on July 24, 2023, noting he was:

"still alive and currently putting icy hot on 65 percent of my body," he wrote, after struggling to put his socks on.

He also mentioned the rumor seems to make the rounds roughly once a year. It has.

What he's actually been doing

• Touring — regular theater dates across the U.S., including a run through 2025 and into 2026.
• Cars — voiced Mater in Cars on the Road on Disney+ in 2022, after three feature films and a decade of Cars Toons shorts.
• Radio — Jeff and Larry's Comedy Roundup, his SiriusXM channel with Jeff Foxworthy.
• Git-R-Done Foundation — the charity he runs with his wife Cara, which he told Fox News in 2020 had given away close to $9.5 million, mostly to children's and veterans' causes.

Why he's an easy target

He's recognizable, he's been off network television since Only in America ended on History in 2013, and his politics are public enough that a fabricated political statement gets shared before anyone checks. That combination — famous, low current news volume, politically legible — is exactly what the hoax template selects for.

For the record: he hasn't released a solo stand-up special since Remain Seated in 2020. The next real Larry the Cable Guy news will almost certainly arrive quieter than the fake kind.

Asked point-blank about chatter that Meghan Markle might join a future season of The Gentlemen, star Theo James couldn’t resist a jab before setting the record straight in a new Town & Country interview.

“Yes, Fergie is joining. She’ll be playing my love interest.”

Then he shut the door on the speculation.

“No, I think [reports of Markle joining the show] was mainly a lot of hot air.”

James added that his focus is squarely on the new batch of episodes: “At the moment, we’re just trying to get as many eyes on season two, and then season three will happen soon,” he told Town & Country.

Season 3 on deck

Netflix renewed season 3 in August 2026 with Guy Ritchie returning to direct. Beyond that, James acknowledged the specifics are still unsettled. That tracks with Netflix UK scripted chief Manda Levin, who said “all bets are off” when asked about Markle at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

What season 2 brings

The new chapter picks up one year after Eddie Horniman and Susie Glass got pulled into Bobby Glass’ empire. Their ambitions now stretch to Italy’s lake country, as they set their sights on a string of gleaming lakeside villas. Benedetta Porcaroli’s Bella enters Eddie’s orbit this season too, with a romance brewing between them.

Complicating it all: Bobby’s increasingly erratic decisions, which threaten to blow up Eddie and Susie’s carefully laid plans.

Returning cast and roles include:

• Theo James — Eddie Horniman
• Kaya Scodelario — Susie Glass
• Ray Winstone — Bobby Glass
• Daniel Ings — Freddy
• Joely Richardson — Lady Sabrina
• Vinnie Jones — Geoff Seacombe
• Giancarlo Esposito — Uncle Stan

New faces this season include:

• Hugh Bonneville
• Benjamin Clementine
• Benedetta Porcaroli
• Michele Morrone
• Sergio Castellitto
• Amra Mallassi
• Tyler Conti
• Chris Eubank Jr.
• Maya Jama

All eight episodes stream on Netflix starting September 3.

After her turn as Julia Cornwall in Sony’s much-maligned Madame Web, Sydney Sweeney keeps popping up in Marvel chatter. Unverified scoop accounts have tossed her name around for everything from the X-Men bench to Spider-adjacent roles, and fan art has only poured fuel on the fire. One rumor stream even linked her to Emma Frost before other online buzz pointed to Samara Weaving — none of it confirmed by the studios.

Sweeney played Julia Cornwall — a future Spider-Woman — in 2024’s Madame Web.

Five smart fits

• Black Cat (Felicia Hardy) — Spider-Man’s flirtatious frenemy is an acrobatic thief with a moral gray streak. Sweeney’s mix of charm and danger — plus her existing spider-verse footprint — makes this a clean handoff into the Spidey corner of the MCU.
• Mystique (Raven Darkholme) — A shape-shifting spy built on secrets and shifting loyalties. With Rebecca Romijn and Jennifer Lawrence defining past takes, an MCU reboot could use a new gear; Sweeney’s work in Euphoria and The White Lotus shows she can play complicated and cold-blooded without losing the human thread.
• Dazzler (Alison Blaire) — Pop star by day, light-blasting mutant by night. It’s a rare MCU lane that lets an actor perform on stage and in battle; Sweeney’s music-adjacent roles (and comfort in the spotlight) could make Dazzler’s disco-to-pop reinvention actually sing on screen.
• Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) — A heavy lift, given Elizabeth Olsen’s signature run, but the fan-casting persists. If Marvel ever wanted a fresh interpretation, Sweeney’s intensity could carry a grief-and-chaos-magic arc — though there’s no sign of a recast on Marvel’s slate.
• Spider-Woman — In comics, Julia Cornwall becomes Julia Carpenter, the second Spider-Woman. Continuing that evolution would be the most direct path for Sweeney, though bridging Sony’s universe and the MCU would require studio cooperation (and a clear plan for how the spider-corners connect).

What Marvel has said

Officially, nothing. Marvel Studios has kept any live-action X-Men casting and future Spider-Woman plans under wraps, and there’s no deal announced for Sweeney. For now, the roles above live where they started — in the fan wish list.

Marvel has not announced Sydney Sweeney for any MCU project.

Asked point‑blank by Entertainment Tonight if he’d pop up in Lanterns on Max, Ryan Reynolds didn’t dodge. He talked about what the 2011 Green Lantern taught him — and how, despite all the jokes he’s made about it, he hasn’t closed the door on the ring‑slinger’s world.

"I love it," he said. "I learned so much making that movie, and I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, ' Oh, learn what not to do. In some part, yes, but also that anytime you're making that large, there are core lessons that come of it, and I owe my entire career to that movie."

Reynolds also tied the film to a major life turn: he met Blake Lively while making it. She played Carol Ferris opposite his Hal Jordan, a set connection that became a marriage — and, as he put it, a career pivot he still credits to that experience.

Finding a second wind

Maligned at the time — it earned $237 million worldwide on a reported $200 million budget — Green Lantern quietly found fresh attention in 2026. Tracking site FlixPatrol says the movie briefly topped the service’s movie chart in the U.K. and hovered around No. 7–8 on Max’s U.S. movie chart, sending viewers back to Hal Jordan’s first clash with Parallax.

That bump has faded as the film slipped down the rankings, but the timing lined up with Lanterns gaining traction on Max and sparked a new round of curiosity about Reynolds’ take — CGI suit jokes and all.

As for a cameo, Reynolds kept it simple: he’s interested, but he didn’t share any plans beyond that.

Carlton Cuse, who co-created the series with Graham Roland and ran its first two seasons, gave Deadline a direct answer about the resemblance. He called it plausibility rather than prophecy — the result of building a thriller on real geopolitics, not of guessing an outcome.

"The goal of that season wasn't prophecy — it was plausibility," Cuse told Deadline in January 2026.

What the show actually did

Jack Ryan's second season, released in November 2019, centers on Venezuela. In the viral lecture scene, Ryan describes the country as arguably the greatest concentration of oil and minerals on the planet, sitting alongside one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history.

The fictional president is Nicolás Reyes, played by Jordi Mollà — a name one syllable away from the real one, written while Nicolás Maduro's contested 2018 election was fresh. Reyes runs a secret jungle prison camp and kills anyone who threatens the regime.

Where fiction and reality diverge

The season ends with Reyes exposed and out of power. But the mechanism isn't the same one that played out in January 2026:

• In the show — Ryan and the CIA station chief fly a helicopter into the presidential palace, confront Reyes with evidence of the prison camp, and the opposition wins the election.
• In reality — a U.S. military operation resulted in Maduro's capture and removal, with Maduro and Cilia Flores facing narco-terrorism charges in New York and Delcy Rodríguez stepping in as interim head of state.

One is an election plot. The other is a special forces operation. The overlap is the setting, the oil, and the outcome for the man in charge.

Why Cuse picked Venezuela in the first place

He told Deadline the season was conceived more than seven years before the events, and that he and Roland weren't making a statement — they were writing a character thriller rooted in a country with long-standing strategic relevance, where economic reality and geopolitical interest have been in tension for decades. The job, as he framed it, was making the situation feel credible on screen.

The clip wasn't the only old thing resurfacing. A 2007 Carlos Latuff cartoon showing Uncle Sam with a regime-change to-do list also went back into circulation, read as vindication by people on both sides of the argument.

Has Jack Ryan "predicted" anything else?

The franchise has a long history of this. Tom Clancy's 1994 novel Debt of Honor ends with a jet flown into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress. Clancy spent the rest of his life fielding questions about it after September 2001, and gave a version of the same answer Cuse gave: research plus plausibility, not foresight.

A Jack Ryan feature film was in production as of early 2026. Whatever country it picks, expect the clip to resurface in about seven years.

The newest face between the posts for AFC Richmond’s women’s side — the Lady Greyhounds — is Katie “Boots” Quinn, a gloveless, stare-you-down keeper who treats every shot like a personal dare. The character’s no-gloves look isn’t just a vibe; it’s a running statement about toughness that’s already made Boots one of Season 4’s most talked-about additions to Ted Lasso.

Playing a keeper at TV speed meant standing in against real strikes. Mack has said the on-field work demanded a poker face even when the ball was screaming in.

“I think most of my acting in this show is me trying not to scream and flinch when those pro footballers were kicking the ball at like 90 mph at the goal. And I have to be like, ‘I don’t fear the ball!’ It was crazy,” Mack told Decider.

Where you’ve seen Mack

Before landing in Richmond, British actor, writer, and director Jude Mack trained at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (MFA, 2021) after earning a BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Stage credits include Much Ado About Nothing and Women Beware Women.

• Such Brave Girls
• Prime Target
• Back in Action
• I Hate Suzie
• The Man Who Fell to Earth
• Waiting for the Out

Mack has also balanced work behind the camera, reportedly co-creating and starring in the comedy pilot Amicable.

As Season 4 unfolds, Boots’ arc is set to deepen beyond the early shock-and-awe saves. Ted Lasso Season 4 is now streaming on Apple TV+.

The do-or-die game against Texas turns into a nightmare the second the ball is snapped: Chad Powers is throwing ducks, firing straight to defenders, and getting booed off the field. It isn’t a slump. It’s sabotage — and it’s coming from inside the huddle. A few hours earlier, Gerry summoned Chad to an empty theater, handed over a note loaded with betting slips and specific “don’ts” that would tank the Catfish’s game plan, and made his terms clear. He doesn’t care who’s under the wig and prosthetics; his revenge is aimed squarely at the persona that stole his spotlight.

That note lands after Gerry finally puts together the last piece he’s been clawing toward all season: Chad Powers is a mask. The real man underneath — Russ Holliday — is the one who “took everything” from him. After threatening the person Chad loves most earlier this season, Gerry swerved the misdirect and went after Danny instead, beating him bloody and getting close to the secret Danny was hiding in his basement. By kickoff, Gerry has Chad boxed into a lose-ugly ultimatum.

At halftime, Ricky clocks what’s really happening. She spots Danny in the stands, corners him, and calls it: she’s watched every Russ Holliday tape — this isn’t an off night, it’s intentional. Danny caves and produces Gerry’s note. The restrictions leave Chad doomed to fail in ways the whole stadium can see.

Allies step in

On her way out, Danny runs into Tricia and the cheer squad. He’s already been banned from the stadium for “deliberately injuring” Gerry, the squad’s head informs her. Danny doesn’t spell everything out, but he drops just enough for Tricia to connect the dots — and we don’t see what she does with that info yet.

Ricky finds Chad and delivers two things at once: she’s taking a job at Syracuse, and before she goes, they’re winning this game. She leans on her dad, Coach Hudson, to greenlight a second-half scheme that threads every needle in Gerry’s rulebook. What follows is the most inventive football the show’s staged so far — misdirection on misdirection, all legally inside Gerry’s trap.

Then the ref’s flag nukes the loopholes. A late penalty wipes the trickery off the table; the Catfish have to punch in a straight-ahead touchdown that will require Chad to violate Gerry’s demands. He does it. He goes for the win. The stadium erupts.

The season ends with Coach Hudson walking in as Chad’s prosthetics slip during a kiss with Ricky.

Celebration lasts about two seconds. Gerry charges at Chad on the field — and gets leveled by Chrisha, Tricia’s bodyguard. The bigger shock is what he calls Chad as he drags Gerry off: “Mr. Holliday.” That’s confirmation Tricia now knows who’s under the latex. Russ pieces it together instantly: Danny told her. Tricia doesn’t argue. She tells Russ and Danny they’re both coming to her ranch, where she can “protect” their secret.

Elsewhere, Ricky and Chad steal a private moment that turns into a kiss — and then into panic as the makeup slips. Coach Hudson walks in on them. The disguise is literally coming apart, and the coach has seen enough to know something’s off.

What the finale sets up

• Coach vs. quarterback: With that locker-room walk-in, Hudson’s trust in his QB — and his relationship with his daughter — is on shaky ground.
• Ricky’s next chapter: She’s accepted the Syracuse job, putting both her future with Chad and her role with the Catfish in flux.
• Two fronts of trouble: Tricia, now fully aware of Russ’s identity, looks ready to control the mask to keep winning. And Jay Palmer has set his sights on Ricky, a rivalry that could get messy fast.

Tricia’s immediate move is non-negotiable: Russ and Danny are going to her ranch so she can keep the secret on her terms.

The consensus answer is The Sopranos, and the awards record backs it up: 21 Emmys across six seasons, including Outstanding Drama Series in 2004 and 2007. Boardwalk Empire won 20 Emmys on 57 nominations, but lost Outstanding Drama both times it was nominated and won exactly one acting award in five years.

The tale of the tape

• The Sopranos — 86 episodes over six seasons, 1999 to 2007, created by David Chase. Named the best-written series of all time by the Writers Guild of America.
• Boardwalk Empire — 56 episodes over five seasons, 2010 to 2014, created by Terence Winter, who wrote 25 episodes of The Sopranos and won four Emmys there.
• The pilot gap — Martin Scorsese directed Boardwalk's first episode on an $18 million budget and won the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Directing. Nothing on The Sopranos ever cost close to that.
• Acting hardware — James Gandolfini won Lead Actor three years running from 2000. Steve Buscemi was nominated twice for Nucky Thompson and never won, though he took the Golden Globe in 2011.

What Boardwalk does better

Production, without much argument. The reconstructed Atlantic City boardwalk, the costume work, the 1920s Chicago and New York detail — Boardwalk won Emmys for art direction, costumes, casting, cinematography, and editing repeatedly. It also has a wider canvas: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, and a federal government inventing itself around Prohibition, rather than one man in a New Jersey basement.

Its supporting bench is deep. Michael Shannon's ruined Prohibition agent, Jack Huston's Richard Harrow, Michael Kenneth Williams as Chalky White, and Bobby Cannavale's Gyp Rosetti, which won the show's only acting Emmy in 2013.

What The Sopranos does better

Everything that isn't set dressing. Chase built the series around interiority — therapy sessions, dream sequences, a lead character the audience is never allowed to comfortably root for. Boardwalk's Nucky is a fascinating operator; Tony Soprano is a psychological case study that reshaped what television drama was allowed to do.

The writing is also funnier and stranger. "Pine Barrens," which Winter co-wrote, is closer to a Beckett play than a crime procedural.

So which should you watch first?

The Sopranos, if you're picking one. Boardwalk Empire, if you've already done The Sopranos and want the period-piece version with a bigger budget and a colder center. They're not really in competition — Winter has said the greatest thing about television is seeing a story idea reach the screen within months, and he clearly used the first show to learn how to build the second.

For the record: Boardwalk Empire's final season jumps to 1931 and flashes back to Nucky's childhood, which is either the boldest swing in the series or the moment it lost the plot, depending entirely on who you ask.

Three adult siblings, New York City, and one wildly ill‑timed reunion — that’s the engine driving Dang!, Netflix’s next adult animated comedy. The show drops viewers into the messy lives of two younger siblings whose older sister shows up out of the blue asking to “hang out,” kicking off a run of shocks, rivalry, and family drama — exactly the kind of chaos the title promises.

Voice cast

The series leans on a sharp, comedy-forward ensemble, led by an Oscar nominee and a Hacks standout — plus its own creator stepping behind the mic.

• Stephanie Hsu — Everything Everywhere All at Once (Joy/Jobu Tupaki); Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress; also in Joy Ride
• Poppy Liu — Hacks; The Afterparty
• Andrew Law — writer/producer on The Good Place and Hacks; part of the voice cast

Who’s making it

Law serves as showrunner, writer, and executive producer. He co-wrote the series with his The Good Place colleague Matt Murray, reuniting some of that team’s comedy DNA. It’s also a mini-Hacks reunion with Law and Liu both on board.

• Mike Schur — attached to the project
• Alan Yang — producing team
• David Miner — producing team
• Chris Prynoski — producing team
• Ben Kalina — producing team
• Shannon Prynoski — producing team

Dang! premieres on Netflix September 8, 2026.

The adult animated series streams on Netflix starting September 8, 2026.

Slip on a tux, pour a martini, and then toss both in the backseat: the first look at Fortitude finds Nicolas Cage swaggering through World War II espionage as real-life double agent Dusko Popov while an entire fake invasion is built out of decoys. The trailer leans into the Allied ruse known as Operation Fortitude — think bogus armies, inflatable tanks and a web of double-crosses — with Cage toggling between polished charm and barely contained chaos.

Director Simon West frames it as a caper rather than a solemn history lesson, giving Cage room to play Popov’s cool operator one moment and an agent of mayhem the next. It’s tuxes and tailfins on the surface, with the comic snap of a wartime con underneath.

Cast roll call

• Matthew Goode
• Ed Skrein
• Ben Kingsley
• Alice Eve
• Art Malik — Ian Fleming
• Michael Sheen

The cheekiest touch lands with Art Malik as Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond — a wink to Popov’s place in 007 lore baked right into the cast list.

From Popov to 007

Popov wasn’t just a spy; he lived like the fictional agent he helped inspire: wealthy, multilingual and notoriously reckless, moving through luxury hotels, fast cars and dangerous assignments. Fleming reportedly watched some of it up close, then poured those details into Bond — from the appetite for risk to the hard drinking to a legendary scene rooted in Casino Estoril, where Popov once rattled an opponent by slapping down $50,000 at the table.

Popov’s $50,000 gamble at Casino Estoril later echoed through Fleming’s Casino Royale.

The Fortitude trailer is out now; a U.S. release date has not been announced.

The awkward beat came after a clean denial. Cornered on camera and asked again if he’s in the next Avengers movie, Andrew Garfield didn’t give the usual coy shrug. He shot back a flat answer, then repeated it straight into the lens when the reporter asked him to do it again.

“No, I’m not.”

“I’m not. I’m not.”

That should have been the end of it. Instead, when the interviewer reminded him of his track record of evasions before Spider-Man: No Way Home, Garfield didn’t push back. He added a line that set off alarms for fans who remember that last round of denials.

“Yeah, so you’ll find out, I suppose, one way or the other.”

The exchange, captured by Variety, immediately rekindled speculation that Garfield might again be playing the long game—especially with the internet buzzing about the next Avengers film, widely talked about online as Avengers: Doomsday. Official materials currently circulating for the movie do not list Garfield or Tobey Maguire, and neither actor has been announced by Marvel Studios.

That hasn’t stopped the rumor mill. Unverified chatter has tied a pile of marquee MCU names to the project—up to and including Robert Downey Jr. in a surprising Doctor Doom turn, plus Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and the new Fantastic Four ensemble—and even claimed principal photography has wrapped. None of that has been confirmed by Marvel, and there’s still no studio-sanctioned slot for either former Spider-Man.

• What’s public now: Garfield and Maguire are not on the film’s official cast lists.
• Garfield’s on-camera denial came via Variety, followed by his “you’ll find out” add-on.
• Marvel has not announced Garfield’s involvement nor commented on cameo rumors.

AI chatter hits the art book

Separate from the casting noise, a stranger claim bubbled up online: an account known for parody posts alleged that every image in an Avengers: Doomsday art book showed signs of generative AI. The post linked to an article that has since disappeared, and the provenance is murky at best. Marvel has issued no confirmation that AI tools were used on artwork for Doomsday or for Avengers: Secret Wars.

Old comments from filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo about AI being a potential tool—one they framed as needing human oversight—resurfaced as the rumor spread. Adding to the sensitivity, a recent Spider-Man: Brand New Day art book drew backlash when fans flagged a warped taxi and a bent fire escape in one image as telltale AI artifacts. Those flare-ups have made any hint of AI in Marvel-adjacent art a lightning rod.

As of now, Marvel Studios has not commented publicly on the AI claims around Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars.

In a new training clip on Instagram, Dave Bautista says he’s three weeks back into heavy lifting as he gears up to play Kratos in Prime Video’s live-action God of War. He added he needs “two more months” to hit his target, offering the clearest hint yet at where his physical prep stands.

“Third week in to weight training again. Two more months to get to where I need to be. Like ridin’ a bike!”

The update is Bautista’s first substantial glimpse at his Kratos regimen since stepping in for Ryan Hurst, who exited the role after an on-set injury reportedly caused a severe bicep tear earlier this year. For the former WWE standout and Guardians of the Galaxy alum, packing on size isn’t new — but the timeline suggests the production’s clock is being reset around his transformation.

Where the schedule stands

Filming had been expected to resume in mid-October, according to earlier guidance. If Bautista’s two-month window holds, cameras are now more likely to roll in late October or early November.

When production does restart, Bautista will lead a cast that currently includes:

• Callum Vinson — Atreus
• Teresa Palmer — Sif
• Ólafur Darri Ólafsson — Thor

Developed for Prime Video, the series draws from Sony’s 2018 God of War and 2022’s God of War Ragnarök, following Kratos and his son Atreus on a perilous trek through the realm of Norse mythology.

Prime Video has not announced a release date.

Matthew Needham voices the Joker in season 2. The Caped Crusader Joker who appeared in the last 30 seconds of season 1 was voiced by John DiMaggio, the same actor who plays Detective Harvey Bullock across the series. Amazon revealed Needham's casting at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2026, days before season 2 dropped.

The season 1 tease

The reveal came at the very end of "Savage Night," episode 10, which landed with the rest of season 1 on Prime Video on August 1, 2024. After the final shot of Batman, the episode cuts to a remote shack where a group of victims lie on the floor with rictus grins, injected with an early version of laughing gas while someone studies the results.

Chemistry sets in the background. A low, unamused voice. Not much face.

That version of the character was uncredited in the season 1 cast list, which is why Joker searches turned up nothing at the time.

Who Matthew Needham is

Needham is best known as Larys Strong, the scheming Clubfoot of House of the Dragon. He appeared on the Comic-Con panel alongside Hamish Linklater (Batman) and Jamie Chung (Harley Quinn), plus executive producers James Tucker and Geoffrey Thorne, after a screening of the season 2 premiere.

His take is deliberately not the cackling Clown Prince. Needham plays the character straight and humorless, with a European accent — a nod to Conrad Veidt, whose face in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs inspired the Joker's original 1940 comic design.

The rest of the season 2 voice cast

• Hamish Linklater — Batman/Bruce Wayne, returning from season 1.
• Jamie Chung — Harley Quinn, whose season 1 arc ended with an apparent death in "The Stress of Her Regard."
• John DiMaggio — back as Harvey Bullock, no longer pulling double duty as a supervillain.
• Wunmi Mosaku, Jason Watkins, Grey DeLisle, Krystal Joy Brown — among the returning and new ensemble.

Season 2 runs 10 episodes and premiered on Prime Video on July 31, 2026.

Is this Joker connected to Harley Quinn?

Not in the usual way. Caped Crusader introduced Dr. Harleen Quinzel as a manipulative psychiatrist with her own agenda, independent of any Joker relationship — a structural change from the Batman: The Animated Series version that showrunner Bruce Timm co-created in 1992.

Tucker has described this Joker as a new approach for anyone who knows the famous versions, while feeling familiar to readers of the earliest Batman comics. Which is to say: a serial killer with a chemistry background, working in a 1940s Gotham, played by a man doing none of the voices you expect.

At a masterclass at the Venice Film Festival, George Clooney didn’t talk about his own career first. Asked about the Clooney Foundation for Justice, the nonprofit he co-founded with his wife Amal, he immediately turned the spotlight to her work as an international human rights lawyer — and did it with a mix of pride and bite.

“She’s a b*****, and she gets the job done.”

Clooney said Amal has spent years bringing people accused of serious crimes into courtrooms, and he added that she’s the only person to have ever put a “very infamous extremist organization” on trial and won — a line that drew thunderous applause from the Venice audience.

He tied their foundation’s mission to something personal, saying the push for accountability isn’t abstract for them.

“We do it for our families. We do it for our friends.”

The comments came during a wide-ranging talk that touched on his career, politics and the changing nature of movie stardom, but his admiration for Amal Clooney clearly took center stage. Earlier at Venice, during his Golden Lion acceptance speech, he also took time to honor Amal and their children.

Flashback: Golden Globes 2015

If the moment felt familiar, it’s because awards-season TV already turned it into a classic. At the Golden Globes in 2015, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler rattled off Amal Alamuddin’s legal bona fides — then dropped the punchline heard ’round the room:

“So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”

Clooney laughed, smiled over at Amal and bowed his head while the room exploded. And when it was his turn at the mic, he returned the favor with a line that’s stuck ever since.

“I could not be more proud to be your husband.”

Asked point-blank in a new JoBlo Celebrity Access interview whether she’d put the armor back on if Zack Snyder were brought in to make Justice League 2 and 3, Gal Gadot didn’t hedge or stall.

“If Zack [Snyder] comes back to run DC, I’ll come back,” she said.

That answer hits differently coming from Gadot. Snyder didn’t just direct her; he helped shape her take on Diana Prince from the ground up, with the first Wonder Woman film carrying a story credit for Snyder alongside Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs.

The Snyder connection

Snyder stepped away from Justice League in 2017 after a family tragedy, with Joss Whedon overseeing the version that reached theaters. Years later, fans got the four-hour redo as Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021, one of the rare cases where a filmmaker’s alternate cut became a full-on release.

Gadot’s stance is still a hypothetical. There’s no indication Snyder is returning to run DC, and the current regime under James Gunn and Peter Safran has been building a new continuity rather than reviving the old one. Gadot has previously said the way her exit — and Henry Cavill’s — was handled wasn’t especially elegant, which only adds intrigue to her very specific caveat.

What she’s doing now

Gadot is out promoting The Runner, a new action-thriller for Prime Video directed by Kevin Macdonald. She plays a London defense attorney whose routine morning jog turns into a race against the clock after her son is abducted — a grounded, panic-on-the-pavement shift from Diana’s mythic battles.

The shoot demanded punishing running sequences and training; Gadot was injured badly enough that she finished production on crutches. For now, that’s where her screen time is headed — with one very notable DC-sized asterisk attached.

Then Amazon handed him a CIA analyst and a franchise budget. Krasinski earned a reported $2.5 million per episode for season 3 of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, combining his acting fee and his executive producer fee. Eight episodes, roughly $20 million for the season. Puck reported in 2023 that the figure made him the highest-paid actor on television at the time, ahead of Kevin Costner on Yellowstone.

The Office math

His sitcom money looked very different:

• Seasons 1–3 (2005–2007) — $20,000 per episode, standard rate for an untested cast.
• Seasons 4–9 (2007–2013) — roughly $100,000 per episode after the show became a hit.
• Career total on the series — at least $14.72 million across 201 episodes, before residuals.

So the nine-year run on NBC brought in less than one eight-episode season of a Prime Video spy show. That's the gap between network sitcom rates in the mid-2000s and streaming's arms race two decades later.

What he made across the whole Jack Ryan run

Krasinski reportedly signed a four-year deal. At the same rate, season 4's six episodes in 2023 would have paid around $15 million. Season 1 and season 2 figures have never been made public, and Krasinski has consistently declined to discuss his salary in interviews.

The show ran 32 episodes total between 2018 and 2023. He was, by any account, the most expensive part of it.

Why Amazon paid it

Jack Ryan was Amazon's first attempt at a broad, four-quadrant franchise, and Krasinski was both the face and a producer on it. He'd also just directed and starred in A Quiet Place, which grossed over $340 million worldwide in 2018 and turned him into a bankable filmmaker rather than a sitcom guy. The producer credit is where a lot of the money sits — that $2.5 million figure is a combined fee, not a straight acting rate.

He's said the role meant something beyond the check. Talking to USA Today about the show's ending:

"Growing up, Jack Ryan was bigger than Batman in my house," Krasinski said in 2023.

Is there more Jack Ryan money coming?

Yes. A Jack Ryan feature film was in production as of early 2026, with Krasinski attached. No salary figure has surfaced, though film deals for an established franchise lead typically pay differently than a per-episode television rate.

For the record: Steve Carell was the only Office cast member reported to have any meaningful stake in the show's syndication windfall, including the $500 million Netflix streaming deal. Everyone else, Krasinski included, gets standard SAG-AFTRA residuals on reruns of the most-streamed sitcom in America.

That swap wasn't a creative decision. It was a scheduling collision at ABC.

Damon Wayans Jr. was already employed

Wayans was starring as Brad Williams on Happy Endings, a first-season ABC sitcom that looked unlikely to be renewed. Assuming he'd be free, he took the Coach role and shot the New Girl pilot in 2011.

Then ABC renewed Happy Endings. His contract there took priority, and Fox lost him after a single episode.

Why they didn't just recast

Producers considered it. The problem was how much Coach is in that pilot — recasting or cutting him would have meant expensive reshoots on an episode already in the can. Creator Elizabeth Meriwether went the other way: keep the pilot as shot, introduce a different friend in episode two, and let the audience sort it out.

Enter Lamorne Morris as Winston, a former basketball player and another old friend of Nick and Schmidt. In-universe, Coach moved out to live with his girlfriend Malia — which the loft treats as entirely in character, since Coach only ever leaves for a serious relationship.

The return

Happy Endings was canceled after its third season in 2013. Within months, Wayans was back on New Girl.

• Season 3 premiere (2013) — the episode is literally titled "Coach." He's broken up with Malia and needs a place to live, which mirrors how Jess arrived in the first place.
• Season 3 — announced in July 2013 for at least four episodes, extended in November to the rest of the season.
• Season 4 — promoted to series regular.
• End of season 4 — he leaves again, this time moving to New York with his girlfriend May.
• Seasons 5 and 7 — a two-episode arc, then a one-off appearance in the final season.

That adds up to 44 episodes for a character who was supposed to be a one-episode casualty.

Why he left the second time

Nothing dramatic — Wayans stayed in demand and took other work. Since New Girl he's done voice work, films, TV roles, and hosted the competition series Frogger.

The odd result of all this is that both versions of the loft worked. Winston became one of the show's best-loved characters, complete with Prank Sinatra and an unhealthy relationship with a cat named Ferguson, and by the time Coach came back there was room for both of them without anyone being redundant.

For the record: Wayans's father, Damon Wayans, played Brad's dad on Happy Endings — the show that took him off New Girl in the first place.

The in-story reason is simple. The production story is the interesting one.

The plot reason

Paulie is Xavier Quinn's enforcer, guarding the Beck estate in coastal Maine. Reacher spends all eight episodes undercover inside that operation, and Paulie never buys the cover for a second — the tension between them is set up long before either throws a punch.

In the finale, Reacher's team moves on the estate to stop Quinn and recover Teresa. Paulie is on guard duty. He isn't a target Reacher goes looking for; he's the obstacle standing between Reacher and the man who killed Dominique Kohl. It ends the only way that setup can.

How the fight actually ends

It runs long. The two go into the water and try to drown each other, and Paulie sinks — then resurfaces on the highway and follows Reacher back to the guardhouse. There they wrestle over a belt-fed machine gun hanging from the ceiling.

Paulie wins that struggle. He gets the barrel on Reacher and fires. What he doesn't know is that Reacher pulled a round from the belt and plugged the barrel, so the gun detonates in his face.

Reacher's exit line: "You might be bigger and stronger. But I'm smarter."

Three weeks, and the injuries were real

Alan Ritchson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2025 that the sequence took three weeks to shoot and described it plainly:

"Those were the three hardest weeks of my life."

Ritchson also said he broke his shins during preparation and added around 12 inches of height to his training to match Richters's reach. Richters, for his part, spent roughly four months building the fight skills before shooting started.

The tally afterward, per Richters's account to CNET in 2025:

• Broken bones — one each, both actors.
• Lost toenails — an unglamorous byproduct of three weeks of night shoots.
• Damaged ligaments — on both sides.
• Seven months of rehab — Richters's recovery time after the shoot wrapped.

Ritchson had already taken an accidental live punch from Richters earlier in the season, which he mentioned to Business Insider with the observation that he wouldn't want to fight the man for real.

Was it worth it?

Richters thinks so — he's called it possibly the best fight sequence ever put on television, which is a large claim from a participant, though the season 3 reception did little to contradict him. Ritchson fought his own team to do the shot where Paulie puts his face through a table, because they wanted a stunt double for it.

For the record: Richters got the audition partly because Ritchson flagged him. The message to production was reportedly a question about whether the giant could act.

Merriell Shelton, K/3/5

Merriell Allesandro Shelton was born January 21, 1922, the youngest of six. He worked as an HVAC technician and served in the Civilian Conservation Corps before enlisting in the Marine Corps, where he was assigned as a 60mm mortarman to K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division — the same unit as Sledge and R.V. Burgin.

He fought at Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, and Okinawa. He reached corporal. The nickname came from military shorthand — Situation Normal: All Fouled Up — and it stuck so completely that nobody in his mortar section used his first name again.

He came home and said nothing

After the war Shelton went back to Louisiana, worked in the lumber business and in air conditioning repair, married a woman named Gladys, and raised two sons, Floyd and Allen. For about 35 years he had no contact with anyone he'd served with.

Writer Rod Dreher grew up a mile down Highway 61 from the Sheltons and has written about this repeatedly — including a detail about a scar on his parents' living room ceiling, where Snafu once put a foot through the sheetrock while installing ductwork.

"Nobody — not even Snafu's wife — knew what he had done in the war," Dreher wrote in 2023.

The reunion came sideways. Dreher's Uncle Murphy read Sledge's memoir With the Old Breed, recognized the neighborhood air conditioning man in its pages, tracked down Sledge, and put the two of them at the same dinner table. Retired Marine Corps commandant Robert Barrow, who lived nearby, was invited too.

How much of the show is accurate

Malek was careful about this when the series aired. Asked whether Shelton really did the things the miniseries shows, he pointed out to the Detroit News in 2010 that Shelton appears in Sledge's book but that the production couldn't verify every specific act on screen.

A few things the show adjusted:

• The accent — the series played Snafu as a New Orleans Cajun. Dreher, who knew him, says the accent was strong but not Cajun, and that Shelton was from north Louisiana.
• The train scene — the moment where Snafu leaves without waking Sledge is dramatized, but the long silence afterward is real.
• The gold teeth — that grim habit is documented in Sledge's own account, not invented for television.

What happened to him

Shelton died May 3, 1993, in Jackson, Louisiana, at 71. Sledge — the young Alabama private he'd tormented, taught, and eventually trusted — was one of his pallbearers. He's buried in Bowman-Dedon Cemetery in West Feliciana Parish, next to Gladys.

Sledge died eight years later, in 2001. Neither man lived to see Malek and Joe Mazzello play them.

Shot like a throwback and paced to move, Mayday drops U.S. Navy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) into the worst kind of trouble: stranded behind enemy lines after a covert op in Soviet territory goes sideways. He’s found by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB officer holed up in the Russian wilderness — the kind of man who should be Troy’s nightmare. Instead, the encounter flips the movie on its head, turning a survival scrape into a two-hander about unlikely allies on the run from the KGB.

The hook is how quickly “enemy” becomes “accomplice.” Nik isn’t a mustache-twirler; he’s a Russified sponge for American pop culture, rhapsodizing about Top Gun, U.S. music and a life he imagines across the Iron Curtain. That tilt not only fuels the comedy — it reframes the whole chase. Troy’s hard-edged view of the Soviet machine clashes with Nik’s starry-eyed America; both men learn their mental snapshots are propaganda-tinged and incomplete.

Reynolds and Branagh click

Reynolds leans into his comfort zone — the quick jabs, the skeptical smirk — but plays Troy a notch more grounded than his quip-machine personas. The difference is Branagh. As Nik, he’s warm without being goofy, a character that could have been a cartoon Russian but isn’t. His delight in everything American does the comic lifting, while his unexpected physicality keeps it from floating away.

Kenneth Branagh, 65, dives into the bruising action and looks like he’s enjoying every minute.

That energy matters because the movie’s heart is the pairing, and the two actors make the odd-couple engine hum. The directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, give them room to bicker, bond and improvise a plan as bullets and loyalties fly.

Back-to-basics action

Stylistically, Mayday keeps it simple: clear stakes, clean geography and set pieces that don’t need a flowchart. You get aerial clashes, vehicle chases and a couple of nasty, close-quarters beatdowns. It’s not always as glossy as a mega-budget theatrical release, but it’s zippy and tactile, and the ’80s-flavored needle drops do exactly what they’re supposed to — goose the momentum.

Crucially, the film brushes up against politics without drowning in them. It’s more interested in how two people carry the stories their governments tell than in arguing any thesis, so it makes its point and moves — back to the chase.

• Ryan Reynolds — Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a U.S. Navy pilot stranded behind enemy lines
• Kenneth Branagh — Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB officer with a soft spot for American pop culture
• Directed by — Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley
• Platform — Apple TV+

Where it stumbles

The comfort-food formula does show. Some beats feel familiar, and the supporting players barely register. Visually, the movie’s a touch too tidy to fully sell the gritty ’80s vibe it’s nodding to, even as the soundtrack leans into that era. But the chemistry covers a lot of ground — enough that the Reynolds/Branagh duo feels sequel-ready, whether the next mission hits the big screen or another streamer slot.

Mayday premieres exclusively on Apple TV+ on September 4.

No exit story, no farewell. The explanation turned out to be a contract that had been running on a timer since April.

He only ever signed for four months

Dean — who acted as Nathan Parsons during his original 2009–2013 run — came back as Luke and Holly's son on April 17, 2026, after six years away. ABC wanted a long-term commitment. He didn't.

"Initially, they wanted three years," Dean told TV Insider in July 2026.

He turned down three, then turned down two, citing family: he and his wife announced in March 2026 that they were expecting. The deal landed at four months, with the writers building a return arc to fit that window. His final episode aired July 17, 2026.

Why the show recast instead of writing him out

Because Ethan had too much story left. In roughly three months on air, the character had been wired into several ongoing plots:

• Ava Jerome — a slow-building connection with Maura West's Ava, right as it was becoming the more interesting version of that story.
• Baby Phoebe — Ethan knew the truth about the infant Chase and Brook Lynn are adopting.
• Hudson and Delilah — a hidden link to the new characters arriving at the end of July.
• The Spencer/Quartermaine orbit — scenes with Alexa Havins's Lulu, Maurice Benard's Sonny, and Jane Elliot's Tracy.

Untangling all of that on two weeks' notice wasn't practical, so the role changed hands instead. Christian Howard debuted July 27, 2026, opposite West, with the network voiceover doing the explaining.

Was there any backstage drama?

Nothing anyone has reported. Dean's own account of the return is warm — he said the comeback came together fast after Anthony Geary's death got him thinking about the role, and that executive producer Frank Valentini and casting director Mark Teschner reached out shortly after. He described the four months as a good experience, particularly the scenes with Benard and Elliot.

The abruptness was structural, not personal. His contract had an end date from the start; most viewers just didn't know it.

Will Nathan Dean come back?

Nobody has ruled it out, and daytime has a long history of actors reclaiming recast roles. But the timing works against it in the short term — he left specifically to be home for a new baby, and Howard is currently playing the part.

For the record: Ethan's story didn't slow down after the swap. Summer spoilers pointed to the character going on the run as his history caught up with him, which is roughly what a recast is for.

Pressed at the Venice Film Festival after Wild Horse Nine premiered Thursday, John Malkovich brushed off talk of an acceptance speech and awards handicapping. He wasn’t interested in turning the post-screening glow into a victory lap, stressing he doesn’t see acting as a competition.

“I’ve had a long career, and I’ve had spectacular collaborations with writers, directors and actors. I never feel in competition with any of them. For me, it’s a very nice thing. But the nicest thing is the film getting attention.”

Looking ahead, Malkovich said he plans to keep working as long as the roles keep coming, telling Variety he has no retirement timeline in mind.

“I’ve been doing what I love my whole life. I plan to keep doing that. I don’t plan to retire because I think they’ll retire me when it’s time.”

As for why he signed on, Malkovich told Variety playing a “crackling” CIA agent in Wild Horse Nine was an “easy decision.” The two-time Oscar nominee has been at it since 1976, with a breakout in 1984’s Places in the Heart (his first nomination) and another nod for 1993’s In the Line of Fire.

Why the buzz

Beyond Malkovich’s turn, the movie arrives loaded with pedigree. It’s directed by Martin McDonagh and stacks an ensemble of familiar faces:

• Sam Rockwell
• Steve Buscemi
• Parker Posey

McDonagh’s last two features, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, also debuted at Venice before racking up major Oscar nominations. With that track record and a star showcase for Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine is already being talked up as a player for the 2027 Oscars.

Asked point-blank in a new interview published by Deadline on September 3, Theo James didn’t bite on the chatter that Meghan Markle could pop up in a potential third season of The Gentlemen. With the show’s second season hitting Netflix the same day, James said the focus is firmly on what’s out now — and that a Season 3 isn’t even taking shape yet.

“I think that’s unlikely.”

He kept the spotlight on the current run, telling Deadline he isn’t looking past the new episodes.

“I want to concentrate on Season 2 – the thing that’s coming out right now,” he said, adding there’s still “a lot of building to do” before a third season takes shape.

Season 2 is here

Now streaming on Netflix, Season 2 brings James back as Eddie Horniman as his covert empire grows more complicated. Eddie and Susie Glass keep expanding the business they inherited from kingpin Bobby Glass — who’s still behind bars — and the operation pushes beyond Britain into Italy, bringing fresh alliances and new threats with it. The tone remains very much Guy Ritchie: crime, snap decisions and dark laughs.

Who’s in the mix

Returning cast with roles:

• Theo James — Eddie Horniman
• Kaya Scodelario — Susie Glass
• Daniel Ings — Freddy Horniman
• Ray Winstone — Bobby Glass
• Joely Richardson — Sabrina Horniman
• Vinnie Jones — Geoffrey Seacombe
• Giancarlo Esposito — Stanley Johnston

Also returning:

• Jasmine Blackborow
• Michael Vu
• Harry Goodwins
• Ruby Sear
• Pearce Quigley

New this season:

• Hugh Bonneville
• Benjamin Clementine
• Benedetta Porcaroli
• Michele Morrone
• Sergio Castellitto
• Maya Jama
• Amra Mallassi
• Tyler Conti
• Chris Eubank Jr.

There’s no third season mapped out yet. For now, The Gentlemen Season 2 is streaming on Netflix after premiering September 3.

At 2:25 a.m., Simu Liu hopped on X and dropped a sleepy little gut punch of nostalgia. The actor marked the five-year mark of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings with a one-line post that pretty much said it all.

i can’t believe it’s been five years.

The movie hit U.S. theaters on September 3, 2021, introducing Marvel’s first Asian lead and a fresh corner of the MCU. Liu’s debut came with set pieces that stuck — the San Francisco bus brawl, that nerve-racking skyscraper scaffolding fight — and a family showdown that ended with Shang-Chi mastering the Ten Rings.

What’s next for Shang-Chi

Liu has been teasing his Marvel return, saying he’s already done wardrobe fittings and hinting that Shang-Chi will be more confident and creative with his powers next time out. He’s also promised an all-new tactical suit when he’s back on the big screen in Avengers: Doomsday.

• Avengers: Doomsday — Liu is expected to suit up for the ensemble, with that new look he’s tried on in fittings.
• Shang-Chi 2 — Director Destin Daniel Cretton and Marvel Studios have said a sequel remains in development, setting up another solo adventure after the team-up.

Five years later, the Ten Rings clearly aren’t going back in the box — and Liu’s already prepping for the next round.

The new FX project Legends doesn’t put the Sons of Anarchy crew back on their bikes — it puts them on a convention floor as themselves. Created and written by Charlie Hunnam, the meta series follows the former cast reuniting at a fan event when a very real danger forces the once-tight crew to lock in together again, off-camera.

While promoting his indie thriller Come With Me with Ron Perlman, Theo Rossi told Entertainment Weekly that Hunnam has been quietly shaping the show for years and that the finished scripts lean into a big, risky swing.

“So Charlie had this idea, and it’s one of those that is just so crazy it might work,”

Rossi said the tone is playfully self-aware — not a straight biker revival — and name-checked two surprising touchstones to explain the vibe.

“Charlie’s such a great writer, and he has so much passion for how he wanted to do this. It’s like Galaxy Quest meets Curb Your Enthusiasm; it’s this heightened, crazy world.”

Who’s back together

The cast will play heightened versions of themselves, not their old characters. On deck for the reunion:

• Charlie Hunnam — himself
• Ron Perlman — himself
• Theo Rossi — himself
• Katey Sagal — herself
• Maggie Siff — herself
• Mark Boone Junior — himself
• Tommy Flanagan — himself
• Kim Coates — himself

Rossi said the idea taps into a real bond that never really broke after Sons of Anarchy. He described eight years of holidays together, weekend hangs at Dayton Callie’s pool, and group motorcycle rides to neighborhood spots — and noted he’s worked on five projects with castmates since the show ended. They were “a bunch of character actors hoping it might hit,” he recalled, and the show’s success changed their lives and cemented a family feel that’s hard to find.

According to Rossi, Hunnam’s reunion concept took time because so many moving parts had to align, but the scripts convinced him the approach is smart and different. Hunnam is also on board as a producer.

Legends is set up at FX. A premiere date has not been announced.

The new Netflix thriller The Operator is pulling together a punchy team: Joe Carnahan is set to direct, with Mark Wahlberg starring as a former Tier One operative who now moonlights as one of the CIA’s most discreet fixers. His latest assignment flips the job on its head — he has to extract and protect the one target he can’t stand.

That dynamic turns a standard escort mission into a lethal chess match, with old grudges and professional duty colliding mid–extraction. Wahlberg’s character is described as a quiet, surgical CIA clean-up specialist, which suggests less swagger and more ruthless efficiency.

The script comes from Harrison Query, whose original screenplay set off a bidding fight before landing at Netflix, according to Deadline. Carnahan’s hire signals the streamer is steering this one toward hard-edged action with a character-first tilt.

Harrison Query’s script sold to Netflix in December 2025 after a competitive bidding race.

For Wahlberg, it’s a lane he knows well. He’s anchored straight-ahead action like Shooter and military drama with Lone Survivor, even as he’s bounced into comedy with equal ease.

Who’s producing

• Alex Heineman and Andrew Rona — The Picture Company
• Mark Wahlberg — producer
• Stephen Levinson — producer
• Municipal Pictures
• Scott Glassgold — 12:01 Films

So here's where the number actually comes from.

What the show tells you

Nothing directly. Ellis Anderson, played by Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie, is never given an age in dialogue, in the official synopsis, or in any of the episode-five birthday business that pins down Annie and her twin brother Connor. He's described as a local who grew up on the island and works at the marina alongside his father Joe, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

The best estimate is 18. Two things point there: he's a plausible love interest for a 17-year-old who ages up mid-season, and he flies a seaplane for the family business in episode one. Canadian commercial pilot licensing starts at 18, which puts a floor under him even if the show never says so.

The actor is a lot older

Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie was born in March 2003, making him 23. That's a five-year gap on a character who is probably a recent high school graduate — and by Sterling Point standards, that's on the modest end.

• Ella Rubin (Annie) — born September 2, 2001, so 24 playing 17.
• Amelie Hoeferle (Ramona) — born June 5, 2002, so 24 playing 17.
• Bo Bragason (Oona) — born March 27, 2004, so 22 playing roughly 17. She's the next live-action Zelda.
• Daniel Quinn-Toye (Rory) — born November 3, 2002, so 23 playing around 18.
• Keen Ruffalo (Connor) — 25, playing Annie's twin. He's Mark Ruffalo's eldest.

Casting adults as teenagers isn't new — Stranger Things and The Summer I Turned Pretty run the same math — but Sterling Point's line-up skews old even by that standard.

Why Ellis stays vague

The ages the show does confirm all do narrative work. Annie's 17-to-18 turn matters because she's inheriting an island. Ramona's 17 matters because it establishes how close in age she is to the sister she didn't know she had. Ellis's age does nothing for the plot, so the writers left it alone.

Which is also why every "how old is Ellis" answer online is an estimate rather than a citation.

Who is Ellis, exactly

He's the deuteragonist opposite Annie — a boat driver and pilot at the marina, and one point of a triangle with Rory, the wealthy New Yorker from Annie's middle school who turns up on the island. The complication is generational: Ellis's father Joe was involved with Annie's mother years earlier, which means the kids' romance sits on top of an older one nobody has fully explained.

Season one dropped on Prime Video on August 5. Created by Megan Park, who made My Old Ass, it's set in the Muskoka region of Ontario, which is why the marina and the seaplane are doing so much work in the first place. If a second season ever puts a number on Ellis, it'll be the first time.

The B.B. King Music Company and the Estate of B.B. King are partnering with Winter State Entertainment on a feature documentary about the “King of the Blues,” with filmmaker Leslie Small set to direct. The estate’s involvement means the production will have access to King’s archives and historical materials, opening the door to rarely seen footage and firsthand artifacts.

The estate-backed film will tap B.B. King’s archives to cover a 66-year career from the Delta to global stages.

Producers say the film will chart King’s rise from the Mississippi Delta to international acclaim and trace how his sound bled into rock, soul, jazz and pop. Expect screen time for Lucille—King’s beloved Gibson ES-355—and the road-warrior work ethic that turned his vocal-like guitar style into a language other musicians still study.

Who’s making it

• Leslie Small — director
• Vassal Benford — executive producer (Grammy winner)
• Hamid Torabpour — producer (Winter State Entertainment)
• Camille Torabpour — producer (Winter State Entertainment)
• Lani Evans — producer
• Dr. Mark Smith — producer
• Nick Hagen — producer
• Sylvester Stewart Jr. — producer

From Delta roots

Born Riley B. King in 1925 on a Mississippi plantation, he picked cotton and drove a tractor before music became a calling. Gospel was his first stage—he formed the Famous St. John’s Gospel Singers—until Memphis and a radio booth helped forge the name the world would learn: B.B. King.

As a street performer, he learned the blues filled the hat faster than hymns, even repurposing melodies by swapping “Lord” for “baby.” Singing helped him overcome a severe childhood stutter. And after he rushed into a burning Arkansas dance hall to rescue his guitar—he later learned the blaze began over a woman named Lucille—he christened the instrument Lucille and carried the name for life.

The documentary is in development; title, release date and distribution plans have not been announced.

Prime Video’s new thriller wastes no time. Within minutes of The Runner, London lawyer Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) is yanked out of her morning jog by a stranger on the phone who says her young son Noah — who depends on insulin — will die if she doesn’t follow orders. The voice keeps her moving, block after block, turning the city into a high-stakes obstacle course.

Macdonald sketches Maia fast: she’s a single mom, decent at her job, her compassion surfacing in an early exchange with co-worker Ted (Alfred Enoch). From there, the script piles on elements — old wounds, messy professional compromises, a kid in danger, and the creepier edges of our connected lives. The pace is breathless, but by the midpoint the caller’s motive goes fuzzy. Answers do arrive late, including why he targeted Maia, but they show up after the mystery has already been stretched thin.

The movie is streaming on Prime Video now.

Phones, watches and panic

The tech thread is everywhere — screens, calls, wearables, even medical devices feeding into the tension. Sometimes it’s unnerving; other times it plays like a glossy ad for a very pricey smartwatch. There’s a pointed bit of irony, though, when all that connectivity largely fails Maia at the exact moment she needs to find her child. A needle drop of “Don’t Leave Me Hanging on the Telephone” is as on-the-nose as it sounds.

Shot at a sprint

Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle keeps the camera handheld and close, giving London a tight, restless feel that makes Maia look boxed in by the city itself. It’s energizing, but the geography blurs; the relentless motion starts to feel like cardio more than escalation.

When the movie eases off, sharper ideas peek through — a sunlit walk toward a gazebo in Temple that clashes with the tech-driven panic, and a later church sequence that holds back what Maia has confessed. Those quieter beats hint at a more probing thriller about guilt and truth underneath the chase.

Gadot throws herself into the role physically — running, climbing, scrambling, bargaining into a phone — but the script mostly pins her to shades of panic, and her accent drifts enough to distract. As the disembodied tormentor, Damian Lewis leans into theatrical menace, savoring the power imbalance even as his elaborate scheme starts to feel rickety. Enoch brings warmth to Ted, while Rory Wilmot turns up in support.

There’s a taut little thriller buried in here, and the short runtime keeps it from wearing out its welcome. Still, the movie often mistakes constant motion for mounting tension, leaving its best ideas about technology, motherhood and professional compromise scattered on the sidewalk. The Runner runs a lean 84 minutes. Rating: 5/10.

Variety reports that NEON is giving Na Hong-jin’s Hope an unusually wide U.S. push this fall, aiming for about 1,500 theaters nationwide — a big swing for a Korean genre movie and a clear play to make it a late-summer event.

NEON plans a U.S. rollout in roughly 1,500 theaters in September.

Who’s in it

The cast mixes Korean stars with English-language headliners — the kind of lineup that pops on a marquee even before the mayhem starts.

• Hoyeon (Squid Game)
• Hwang Jung-min
• Zo In-sung
• Taylor Russell
• Cameron Britton
• Alicia Vikander
• Michael Fassbender

What it is

Na doesn’t keep this one in a single lane. The story opens on a local mystery and keeps widening the lens until you’re looking at monsters and cosmic sci‑fi. Each gear shift cranks the tension higher without breaking the spell — the title’s dark irony very much by design.

He also flips a classic horror trick: instead of hiding the worst of it in the dark, major confrontations unfold in broad daylight. That choice puts the practical effects, foot-on-the-gas chases, and sheer physical spectacle right out in the open, escalating a tiny coastal incident into something massive.

Festival and box office heat

Back home, Hope has already become one of South Korea’s highest-grossing releases of the year. It premiered at Cannes in 2026, where it quickly turned buzzy and drew a reported six-minute standing ovation.

For U.S. moviegoers, NEON — the distributor that helped turn Parasite into a phenomenon — is betting that a wide release can let the film find its crowd in theaters rather than on the margins.

NEON is set to open Hope in U.S. theaters in September, in roughly 1,500 locations.

She left because she wanted to. No firing, no dispute, no health scare. Esco told the producers roughly a year in advance that she planned to move on, and the writers spent a full season building her an exit.

The goodbye

Her final episode aired May 22, 2022, the season 5 finale. She announced it on Instagram the same night.

"One of the most difficult decisions I've had to make," she wrote, in a statement reported by Deadline in May 2022.

She said she was leaving to pursue new creative work as an actor, writer, and director. The showrunners confirmed the year of notice in their own statement, and noted she'd made her directing debut on the show that spring.

How they wrote her out

• The setup — Chris starts volunteering at a safe house for immigrant women, run by a character called Mama Pina.
• The exit — Mama Pina is hospitalized, and Chris announces to the team she'll take over, giving two weeks' notice.
• The payoff — in the finale she spends her first night with longtime friend Jim Street (Alex Russell), then works her last shift, handing out gifts to Deacon, Luca, and the rest.
• The aftermath — the writers kept Chris and Street together offscreen in season 6, with updates delivered through Street rather than staging a breakup.

The May chaos came later

Here's where the timeline gets funny. Chris's send-off was a May finale. So was almost everything else that happened to this show.

On May 5, 2023, CBS canceled S.W.A.T. after six seasons over licensing fees. Shemar Moore posted a video the next day blasting the decision, fans piled in, and on May 8 — three days later — CBS and Sony reached a new deal and renewed it for a seventh and final season of 13 episodes.

Then on April 11, 2024, CBS reversed the "final" part too, ordering an eighth season. The third cancellation, in March 2025, stuck. Season 8 was averaging 4.9 million viewers and ranked last among the 14 dramas CBS aired that season.

Did Chris ever come back?

No. Esco hasn't returned to the role, and the series ended without her. The door was left open for years, which is arguably longer than the show itself was ever guaranteed to stay open.

For the record: S.W.A.T. was canceled three separate times and un-canceled twice. Chris Alonso walked out in 2022 and missed all of it.

Focus Features is building its awards run for Obsession around Inde Navarrette, who will be campaigned for Best Actress this season for her turn as Nikki in Curry Barker’s hit horror film, according to Variety. The studio’s push is described as a broad, across-the-board play for Barker’s movie, which has been a box-office force this year.

It’s not just Best Actress. Per the report, Focus is targeting a slate of 16 Oscar categories, elevating key cast and department heads alongside Barker, who is being put forward in multiple fields.

The categories on Focus’ list

• Best Picture
• Best Director — Curry Barker
• Best Actress — Inde Navarrette
• Best Actor — Michael Johnston
• Best Supporting Actor — Cooper Tomlinson
• Best Supporting Actress — Megan Lawless
• Best Supporting Actor — Andy Richter
• Original Screenplay — Curry Barker
• Film Editing — Curry Barker
• Cinematography — Taylor Clemons
• Original Score — Rock Burwell
• Casting — Skyler Zurn
• Sound — YJ Gold (production sound mixer) and Ben Zarai (supervising sound editor, rerecording mixer)
• Makeup and Hairstyling — Allie Shehorn (department head)
• Production Design — Vivian Gray
• Costume Design — Blair James

Focus Features is mounting an awards push in 16 Oscar categories for Obsession.

Variety notes the studio is centering the campaign on Navarrette’s breakout — a strategy meant to pull the film into the wider conversation across crafts and above-the-line races. Barker, who wrote and edited Obsession in addition to directing, is positioned prominently across those categories.

The film’s commercial profile is part of the pitch: it’s been a box-office standout, which the report says has “recently emerged as the decade’s highest-grossing original film.” With that momentum, Focus is making Navarrette the face of the movie’s awards run “for the upcoming months,” per Variety.

The villain is Davis Collins (Eoin Macken), Staten's former brother-in-law, who spends the season fronting for a utility company trying to buy up the canyon. Then the finale reveals who's actually holding his leash.

Davis Collins and the pipeline

Davis runs the Bar W Ranch, is deep in debt, and has quietly aligned himself with Austin Water & Power, which wants a pipeline through Ransom and the ranch land to go with it. His ex-wife Paula Jo (Meta Golding) sits on the AWP board, which is the part he doesn't advertise.

The show is not subtle about it. He's dressed in black for most of ten episodes, he's competing with Staten (Josh Duhamel) for Quinn O'Grady (Minka Kelly), and his schemes are the through-line:

• The land grab — pressuring Staten and Cap Fuller (James Brolin) to sell to AWP.
• The con — helping Yancy Grey (Jack Schumacher) get out of prison and installing him at Fuller Ranch to work an angle on Cap's property.
• The sabotage — his own son Reid plays a recording of Paula Jo plotting to poison Staten's wells.
• The provocation — in the finale, Davis picks a fight with Staten specifically to collect the bruises.

The finale twist

Those bruises are evidence. If Staten can be shown to be unfit, he loses his position as trustee of the Double K Ranch, and the land can be sold out from under him.

Davis then climbs into a car to display his injuries to his partner in the scheme: Senator Sam Kirkland (Brett Cullen), Staten's own father. The man trying hardest to sell the canyon is the family patriarch, working through the in-law nobody trusts anyway. That's the cliffhanger the season ends on.

So who killed Randall?

Margaret Brigman (Sarah Minnich), the sheriff's estranged wife, was behind the wheel — driving home from an affair with Kit Russell (Casey W. Johnson). Kit tried to take the fall and was arrested for it, and friends helped hide the truck. Sheriff Dan Brigman (Philip Winchester) works out the truth and arrests his own wife on manslaughter charges in the finale.

Cap Fuller dies in the penultimate episode. Yancy, the drifter everyone suspected all season, turns out to be Cap's biological grandson, and is left at the altar when a woman claiming to be his wife shows up.

Does Davis come back?

He doesn't. Season 2 arrived on Netflix on July 23, 2026 with eight episodes, and Deadline reported that both Eoin Macken and Andrew Liner, who played Reid, are out with no explanation given. Brett Cullen's senator is still on the cast list.

For the record: Ransom Canyon's second season was shot in Albuquerque and around northern New Mexico for a reported $50–70 million. None of it is filmed in Texas Hill Country.

Fourteen years on, here's what happened to the people who made it deep.

Christine Hà, the winner

Hà was a 33-year-old MFA student from Houston, legally blind from neuromyelitis optica, and the first blind contestant the show had ever cast. She won on her Vietnamese comfort food and has run with it since.

Her cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen, became a New York Times bestseller in 2013. She received the Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award in 2014, judged MasterChef Vietnam, and opened The Blind Goat in Houston in July 2019 — a 400-square-foot food hall stall that the James Beard Foundation named a Best New Restaurant finalist in 2020. It now occupies a full restaurant in Spring Branch. She was a James Beard Outstanding Chef finalist in 2022 and a semifinalist in 2023.

She also opened Xin Chào with Tony J. Nguyen in 2020, left it in 2023, and launched Stuffed Belly, a drive-thru sandwich shop, the same year with her husband and business partner John Suh.

Josh Marks, the runner-up

Marks was a 6'8" Army contract specialist from Jackson, Mississippi, eliminated in episode 12 and reinstated in episode 14 after winning the season's redemption challenge. He finished second.

He died by suicide in October 2013, at 26. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and, in the period before his death, was experiencing psychotic episodes. He remains the only MasterChef US contestant to die during the show's run of seasons.

The rest of the field

• Monti Carlo, eliminated in episode 17, became a Food Network regular and hosted the network's Help My Yelp, plus radio and voice-over work.
• Becky Reams, out in episode 19 on a frog legs dish, went back to food photography in Kansas and runs private chef and catering services on the side.
• Frank Mirando, eliminated in the soufflé challenge in episode 18, returned to wealth management in New York and cooks at charity events.
• Felix Fang hosted a web series for Vice, worked as a private chef, and moved into acting. She came back to compete on season 12, Back to Win.
• David Martinez left the show in episode 16, launched a private dining company, then went back to school for a doctorate at Arizona State and is now an assistant professor.
• Michael Chen, the meteorology student sent home in episode 5 for putting cheese in a pie crust, dropped out of college, cooked in kitchens across the US and Canada, and became a head chef.
• Stacey Amagrande ran kitchens at 7th Heaven Cafe and Desert Barn Brewery in California and now cooks privately.
• Tanya Noble moved to Australia, studied hospitality, and works as a private chef.

For the record: season 3 also introduced the redemption challenge, which is how the runner-up got back in after being eliminated. Christine Hà beat him anyway.

Editor's note: this piece mentions suicide. Support is available if you need it.

George Costanza is Larry David. Not loosely inspired by, not partly modeled on. David has said so repeatedly, and the show's most quoted job-quitting episode is a scene-for-scene reenactment of something that happened to him at NBC in 1985.

The character, down to the surname

George was created by Seinfeld and David and named after Michael Costanza, a real friend of Jerry's from Queens College. Jason Alexander, who played him for all nine seasons, spent the early episodes doing a Woody Allen impression because nobody had told him whose life he was performing.

That ended when he complained to David that a George plotline was implausible — that no actual person would behave that way.

"This happened to me and this is exactly what I did," Alexander recalled David telling him, in an account retold by Looper in 2023.

Alexander dropped the Woody Allen voice and started studying Larry instead.

The resignation that became "The Revenge"

David joined Saturday Night Live as a writer for the 1984–85 season and got almost nothing on air. Midway through the season he quit in a rage and made it clear he wasn't coming back. On the way home he realized he'd made a mistake. His neighbor Kenny Kramer — the same neighbor who'd later lend his name and general aura to Cosmo Kramer — suggested he simply show up Monday and act as if nothing had happened.

It worked. Nobody said a word.

"The Revenge," which aired April 18, 1991, is that story with the ending flipped:

• The trigger — George is barred from his boss's private bathroom at Rick Barr Properties.
• The tirade — he storms into Rick Levitan's office to inform him he's a joke and a laughingstock, then quits.
• The regret — he has no other skills, no prospects, and no plan.
• The Monday — Jerry suggests he go back and pretend it never happened. Levitan does not play along.
• The revenge — George spikes his ex-boss's drink at the office party, mostly because it's what people do in movies.

It was the first Seinfeld episode David wrote without Seinfeld. The episode also contains the first appearance of Newman, who exists only as an offscreen voice — David's own, later dubbed over by Wayne Knight for syndication.

What else came out of his life

"The Contest," which aired November 18, 1992, came from a real bet David once made with friends. And the whole apparatus of Curb Your Enthusiasm is David playing an even less filtered version of the same guy, which makes George the middle draft.

For the record: George quitting a job he immediately wants back also inspired an episode of Father Ted, in which Dougal advises Ted to kick a bishop and then carry on as though he hadn't. The advice runs in the family.

It was planned. Showrunner Aaron Korsh had been quietly writing toward Rachel's exit since late 2016, before the engagement, before the announcement, before anyone asked Markle what her plans were.

Korsh made the call before Markle did

Markle and Harry started dating in 2016. Cast and crew knew early, and once Harry began visiting the Toronto set, the security footprint made the situation hard to ignore. Korsh decided not to put his actress on the spot about it.

"I knew from a year ago that this relationship was burgeoning," Korsh told BBC Radio 4's Today programme in November 2017.

So the writers took a bet. They built the season on the assumption Rachel would be gone by the end of it, reasoning that it's far easier to undo a written exit than to be caught flat-footed if she walked. Korsh has said he'd rather good things happen in Markle's life, even at the cost of a character.

How they wrote Rachel out

• The wedding — Rachel marries Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) in the season 7 finale, closing a slow-burn romance that started in the pilot.
• The move — the two leave Manhattan for Seattle to run a legal clinic filing class actions against Fortune 500 companies.
• The two-for-one — Adams was also exiting as a regular, so one storyline cleared two seats.
• The open door — Korsh has said he'd have taken Rachel back at any point. Nobody called.

Markle's engagement to Harry was announced on November 27, 2017, five months before her final episode aired. Rachel Zane remains her last acting credit.

Did she ever come back?

No. Suits ran two more seasons and ended in September 2019. Adams returned for a guest arc as Mike in season 9. Rachel stayed in Seattle, referenced but unseen.

The part nobody saw coming

Four years after the finale, Suits landed on Netflix in June 2023 and became the biggest thing on television. It topped Nielsen's streaming chart for 12 consecutive weeks, passing Ozark's record, and racked up roughly 57.7 billion minutes of viewing across 2023.

NBC responded with a spinoff. Suits LA premiered in February 2025 with Stephen Amell as an entertainment lawyer, brought back Gabriel Macht's Harvey Specter in support, opened to 2.6 million viewers, and was canceled on May 9, 2025 — nine days before its own season finale aired. That's two Suits spinoffs killed after one season each, counting 2019's Pearson.

For the record: Rachel didn't pass the LSAT until season 2, episode 9. It took her six more years to make partner-adjacent, marry, and leave the country — all before the show became a phenomenon she had no part in.

The part people remember is what Keith Colburn said before that.

The episode where he asked to stop

In episode 5, "Alien Abduction," Scambler starts openly questioning whether he should have taken the job. He's in pain and says so. Colburn's answer was to put him back on deck — a call that reads badly in isolation and reads differently once you know that greenhorns complain constantly and captains have quota to fill.

Then the symptoms stopped resembling complaint.

How fast it escalated

• Neck pain and numbness — the first signs, dismissed as the standard greenhorn beating.
• Gatorade — the crew assumed dehydration and tried to rehydrate him on the spot.
• Double vision — the point at which Colburn concluded this was something else entirely.
• Convulsions in the gear room — Scambler loses motor control on the floor.
• The medevac call — Colburn radios the Coast Guard.

The rescue plays out in episode 7, "Vital Signs." A USCG helicopter lifts him off the Wizard and flies him to Anchorage. Colburn, who drills his crew constantly for man-overboard, fire, and abandon-ship scenarios, told Entertainment Weekly the obvious problem:

"We don't have a drill for evacuating a guy off the boat."

What was actually wrong

Dehydration and shock — severe enough that his heart rate spiked while his blood pressure dropped. He survived, which was confirmed on After the Catch. It's one of the rare Deadliest Catch emergencies that came from inside the body rather than from a wave, a crane, or a hydraulic table.

As he was being prepped for the lift, Scambler apologized to Colburn for the inconvenience.

"Don't be sorry, man, you did a great job for me," Colburn told him.

Did he ever come back?

No. Scambler never returned to the Wizard or the series. He turned up briefly in the 2018 special Deadliest Catch: Coast Guard Heroes and has otherwise stayed entirely out of public view — no social media presence, no interviews. Other greenhorns who left injured came back, Jake Anderson and Freddy Maugatai among them. Scambler didn't.

One season, seven episodes, one helicopter. That's the whole résumé.

Here's the sequence.

What she claimed

In 2016, Angela reported a stream of violent messages from a sender calling itself "Lilithistruth." Suspicion landed immediately on Michelle Hadley, the ex-fiancée of Angela's husband, deputy US marshal Ian Diaz. The messages escalated: graphic images, threats against the twins Angela said she was carrying, and Craigslist ads posted in Angela's name soliciting strangers for a rape fantasy at the couple's condo. Angela also reported being attacked by a masked man in the garage.

Hadley was arrested and held in Orange County Jail for 88 days.

What unraveled

Angela's account started failing on multiple fronts at once, and none of it was subtle:

• The cancer — an ex-boyfriend, Jason Rayburn, discovered she'd faked a stage 4 cervical cancer diagnosis, using a photo taken from someone else's chemotherapy session.
• The job — she'd also claimed to be an attorney with the Department of Justice. She wasn't.
• The intervention — friends found medical tubing among her belongings and confronted her on camera. She couldn't produce a chemotherapy port and walked out.
• The pregnancy — Ian eventually found a doctored sonogram and pregnancy tests altered with blue marker. There were no twins.
• The employment — a police interview established she'd been lying about having a job at all.

Anaheim PD opened a fraud investigation. Asked directly by a detective whether she'd ever had cancer, she said no.

What happened to her

Angela was arrested on January 6, 2017, and later pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting a crime. She served five years in prison, was released, and moved out of California. Ian had the marriage annulled. She declined to appear in the documentary, and the producers say they know very little about her current life.

The part the film won't settle

Angela's conviction cleared Hadley, but it didn't explain the emails. A DOJ Office of the Inspector General investigation eventually traced them to Ian himself — digital forensics found a message from his personal account picking up mid-conversation with the man who answered the Craigslist ad. A federal jury convicted him in March 2023 of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking, cyberstalking, perjury, and obstruction. He got 10 years that May, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed in January 2025.

Which leaves the question of whether Angela was running the scheme or being run by it. Director Alexandra Lacey doesn't answer it.

"The audience will never know," Lacey told Netflix's Tudum in 2026.

Hadley, who lost 88 days and her condo down payment to the whole thing, put it more precisely: she can hold Angela accountable and still allow for the possibility that Angela was a pawn. Both women were pointed at each other. Only one of them wrote the emails.

Billy Burke and Stephanie Arcila were both out.

Why Gabriela was written out

The producers have been consistent about this: it was a story call, specifically about Gabriela Perez and Bode Leone. Their on-again, off-again relationship had been the show's emotional throughline since the pilot, and by the end of season 3 the writers had run out of ways to restage it.

"We felt like those two characters needed a reset," co-creator Tony Phelan told Deadline in April 2025.

Showrunner Tia Napolitano framed the double exit differently — as a nod to the reality of the job Fire Country dramatizes, where people get hurt, people die, and people leave. Whether that reads as a creative rationale or a ratings play is up to you, but it's the line the show has stuck with.

How the exit actually plays

Arcila didn't vanish between seasons. She came back as a guest star for the season 4 premiere in October 2025, which Napolitano promised would be a surprising but earned send-off. In it, Gabriela leaves Edgewater in the aftermath of the fire that kills Vince Leone — Burke's character — and takes a job recruiting first responders for Cal Fire around the country.

She leaves behind her father Manny (Kevin Alejandro), the station, and an unresolved thing with Bode. That last part is deliberate.

Is she coming back?

The producers have gone out of their way not to close the door:

• Phelan on record — the Bode-Gabriela story doesn't end here, it goes on.
• The chemistry argument — the producers have said the audience investment in the pairing is the reason to keep the option open.
• Arcila herself — she hasn't ruled out a return.
• The exit was written as travel, not death — unlike Vince, Gabriela is alive and reachable.

No return has been announced as of mid-2026.

What it cost the show

More than the character. Losing Burke's Vince took out the paternal center of the Leone family and forced season 4 to rebuild its command structure. Losing Gabriela took out the romantic engine. Doing both in a single premiere is either bold or reckless depending on how season 4 lands.

Gabriela's arc, for the record, ran from Olympic diver to Cal Fire firefighter and EMT in three seasons. She left with a promotion of sorts. Just not one anybody wanted.

Wrong guess. It's Samuel L. Jackson.

The narrator

Jackson voices The Narrator across all seven episodes, which premiered June 26, 2026 and ran through August 7. Each half-hour contains roughly four sketches, all largely improvised from outlines — the same method Larry David and Jeff Schaffer used on Curb Your Enthusiasm for 120 episodes. Jackson's job is to deliver the historical setup with total authority, then get out of the way while the sketch collapses.

Why people assume it's Obama

Because Barack Obama produced it, appears in it, and is genuinely one of the better-credentialed narrators in television. He won the Emmy for outstanding narrator in 2022 for Netflix's Our Great National Parks, beating a field that included David Attenborough, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lupita Nyong'o. Deadline counted three narration Emmys for him by the time this show premiered.

He appears as himself in a cameo in the premiere instead. The series came about after Obama called his golfing partner and asked whether he'd like to make something for the country's 250th anniversary.

"We jokingly call it Curb in costume," Schaffer told Deadline in 2026.

Schaffer also floated the idea of recording a musical single with Obama so the former president could go after the EGOT. Unclear whether he was serious.

Who else is in it

The guest list runs more than a dozen names per episode:

• Rob Reiner as George Washington — his final screen performance.
• Bill Hader as Abraham Lincoln, with Kathryn Hahn as Mary Todd.
• Jon Hamm and Sean Hayes as the Wright brothers.
• Jerry Seinfeld as William Clark, reuniting with David on screen.
• Chris Parnell as Benjamin Franklin, Alan Tudyk as Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Winkler as John Hancock.
• Susie Essman as Susan B. Anthony, Jurnee Smollett as Rosa Parks, and Richard Kind as Thomas Watson.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, J.B. Smoove, Kaley Cuoco, Rita Wilson, Larry Wilmore, Michael Chiklis, and Jimmy Kimmel all turn up too.

Did it work?

Depends who you ask. Rotten Tomatoes settled at 60% from 35 reviews, with critics landing on the same complaint: the premise is foolproof, the execution is repetitive. The narration wasn't the problem. Reviewers who disliked the sketches still singled out Jackson's dry setups as one of the show's reliable pleasures.

The joke, of course, is that David opens the whole thing by playing Robert R. Livingston, demanding the Declaration of Independence include a ban on sharing umbrellas.

According to a new report, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have quietly returned to the U.K. with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, with the children reportedly being lined up to start school in Britain as soon as September. The couple isn’t said to be moving into a palace or any royal residence; instead they’re looking to establish a private home base while keeping their life largely off the royal grid.

Per the same report, they plan to hold on to a property in Portugal and their $29 million home in Montecito. There’s no return to royal duties in the cards; they’re expected to continue their independent projects while basing more family time in the U.K.

The shift follows a high-profile Hollywood chapter that began in 2020, when the Sussexes stepped back as senior royals and launched entertainment ventures including a multi-year deal with Netflix and a podcast pact with Spotify. Their Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan drew massive attention; other projects hit bumps, including the end of their Spotify partnership in 2023 and the cancellation of Meghan’s animated series Pearl in development at Netflix.

• Harry & Meghan (Netflix, 2022) — multi-part docuseries about their relationship and royal exit.
• Live to Lead (Netflix, 2022) — interview series co-presented by the couple’s Archewell.
• Heart of Invictus (Netflix, 2023) — docuseries following competitors in the Invictus Games.
• Archetypes (Spotify, 2022) — Meghan’s podcast ran one season; the Spotify deal ended in 2023.
• Pearl (Netflix) — animated series from Meghan, announced then canceled in development in 2022.

What changed in Hollywood

An industry insider cited by Radar Online says the couple believed their royal profile would translate into a long-term entertainment brand, but the landscape around them has cooled.

“When Harry and Meghan first arrived in California, there was a genuine belief that they could translate their royal profile into something enormous in entertainment and become completely self-sufficient on their own terms.”

The source told Radar Online that while projects directly about their lives performed, other ideas were shelved or failed to land, and “several major partnerships” have ended — a sign, the insider said, that the initial Hollywood frenzy has faded.

Even so, the Sussexes still have screen work in the pipeline. In April 2024, Netflix announced two new Archewell non-scripted series in production: a Meghan-fronted lifestyle project about cooking, gardening and entertaining, and a docuseries exploring the world of professional polo with Harry. No premiere dates have been announced.

They figured it out eventually. It took them until 2025.

What happened to Tony on the show

Ziva David's farmhouse is destroyed in a mortar attack, and Tony flies to Israel believing she's dead. Mossad director Orli Elbaz then informs him of something Ziva never did: he has a daughter, Tali, roughly two years old. Tony resigns from NCIS to raise her, moves to Paris, and privately holds onto the theory that Ziva is alive — no body was ever recovered.

Why Weatherly actually left

Nothing dramatic. He was tired, and the part had stopped changing.

"I was burnt out by NCIS, and I was ready for a new challenge," he told reporters in 2016.

He's also pointed to Cote de Pablo's exit two seasons earlier as the turning point. The Tony-and-Ziva dynamic was the engine of his character, and once she was gone in season 11, playing DiNozzo became a repetition exercise. The departure was amicable enough that Weatherly moved straight onto another CBS show, Bull, which ran six seasons from 2016 to 2022.

The one time he came back

Weatherly returned exactly once as a guest: season 21, episode 2, "The Stories We Leave Behind," the tribute episode following David McCallum's death. A short scene with Jimmy Palmer, and that was it. He was referenced plenty in the intervening seasons — actually appearing was another matter.

The show built out of the exit

Then Paramount+ turned the loose thread into a franchise entry. NCIS: Tony & Ziva premiered September 4, 2025 with three episodes, running 10 total through the October 23 finale, with John McNamara as showrunner. The premise picks up directly from what season 13 left dangling:

• Tony and Ziva are together in Paris, raising Tali, now played by Isla Gie.
• Tony runs a security company, which gets attacked in the first episode.
• They go on the run across Europe, chased by people neither of them can identify.
• They're both executive producers, which is one way to guarantee the story goes where you want it to.

The supporting cast included Amita Suman, Maximilian Osinski, Julian Ovenden, Lara Rossi, and James D'Arcy.

Is there a season 2?

No. Paramount+ passed on a renewal in December 2025, with Weatherly and de Pablo issuing a statement thanking the fans who "finally got to see Tony and Ziva find their happily ever after." The timing wasn't subtle — Paramount's merger with Skydance had installed Cindy Holland as the new direct-to-consumer chair, and the slate got a fresh set of eyes.

Nine years to answer the question. Ten episodes to close it.

As the crowd at Madison Square Garden roared at the end of his New York show, Harry Styles slipped in a cheeky sign-off that instantly set fandom radar buzzing.

“They also do weddings!”

The offhand crack landed as a winking nod for many in the room, thanks to Styles’ history with Taylor Swift. Swift is currently in a high-profile relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce, though neither has announced a wedding.

Styles and Swift’s brief romance more than a decade ago has long echoed through their music, with fans connecting dots between lyrics on both sides. Here’s the quick refresher that explains why one tossed-off line got so much attention:

• They dated from November 2012 to January 2013.
• Swift’s 2014 hit “Style” has long been linked by fans to Styles.
• Styles’ 2017 song “Two Ghosts” includes the lyric “Same lips red, same eyes blue / Same white shirt, couple more tattoos,” often read as a reply to “Style.”

The playful moment at the Garden was the latest in a years-long pattern of low-key, good-natured callbacks between two pop heavyweights who once dated and have since moved on.

With The Dog Stars now playing, Ridley Scott is already pointing his camera at wildly different horizons. On his board: a classic pirate yarn with Hugh Jackman, a return to Alien anchored by Michael Fassbender, a third swing at Gladiator with Paul Mescal in the mix, and a Bee Gees biopic. Scott, 88, hasn’t dated any of them yet, but the mix is pure him—big swings in four directions at once.

• Treasure Island — Jackman attached as Long John Silver; script by Jack Thorne; produced by Scott and Michael Pruss via Scott Free; in development.
• Alien prequel — continues 2017’s Alien: Covenant; brings back Fassbender’s David; in development.
• Gladiator III — conceptual stage; Paul Mescal expected to return as Lucius; no date.
• You Should Be Dancing — Bee Gees biopic; written by John Logan; Jacob Elordi reported as Barry Gibb; delayed from a previously planned 2025 start.

Pirates on deck

Treasure Island would steer Scott into pirate waters for the first time, adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel. Jackman is set to play the legendary Long John Silver, with Jack Thorne (Adolescence) writing the screenplay and Scott producing alongside Michael Pruss through Scott Free.

The story follows young Jim Hawkins, a map to Captain Flint’s buried fortune, and a perilous voyage on the Hispaniola where Silver’s charisma masks a ruthless agenda. There’s no release year yet, but Jackman’s casting alone suggests an outsized take on a tale everybody thinks they know.

Back to Alien

Scott has said a new Alien prequel is in development, picking up the philosophical thread from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The plan brings Michael Fassbender back as the synthetic David, with hints the story would center on the android forging a “brave new world” rather than just another bug hunt. No timeline has been announced.

Rome and disco

On the Roman front, Gladiator III remains an idea Scott keeps talking about rather than a locked movie. He’s teased a direction that moves beyond the arena, with Paul Mescal’s Lucius facing the weight of power after the events of Gladiator II—a pivot Scott has likened to The Godfather. Mescal has said he’s “massively down” to return, but there’s no green light or date.

The curveball is You Should Be Dancing, a Bee Gees biopic written by John Logan (Gladiator). Jacob Elordi has been reported as set to play Barry Gibb. Scott has pointed to the brothers’ working‑class roots, their stratospheric rise, and the tragedies that followed—including the death of Andy Gibb—as reasons he wants to tell it. Production was previously eyed for 2025, but it’s been delayed and remains undated.

Hugh Jackman is attached to play Long John Silver.

Meanwhile, The Dog Stars—a post‑apocalyptic thriller starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley—opened in theaters on August 28, 2026.

Answer: his mother taught him.

The premise

Raising Kanan premiered on Starz on July 18, 2021, created by Sascha Penn. It's set in 1991 in South Jamaica, Queens, and follows a 15-year-old Kanan (Mekai Curtis) being pulled into the cocaine business run by his mother, Raquel "Raq" Thomas (Patina Miller). 50 Cent narrates as the adult Kanan, looking back. The theme is "Part of the Game," his track with NLE Choppa.

Who's in it

• Raq (Patina Miller) — runs the operation and the family, in that order.
• Marvin (London Brown) — her brother, volatile, doing his best as Jukebox's father.
• Lou-Lou (Malcolm Mays) — the other brother, a would-be music executive.
• Jukebox (Hailey Kilgore) — Kanan's cousin, who Power viewers already know he eventually kills.
• Unique (Joey Bada$$) — the rival distributor Raq spends years trying to remove.
• Detective Malcolm Howard (Omar Epps) — dirty cop, Raq's problem and occasionally her tool.

How it connects to Power

The prequel exists to fill in the gaps the flagship left. Showrunner Sascha Penn has said the run answers how Kanan came to kill Jukebox and settles every open question about the Thomas family. Starz billed the final stretch bluntly:

"Kanan's true ruthlessness takes shape." — Starz season 5 synopsis, 2026

How it ended

Five seasons, ending August 7, 2026. Season 5 ran eight episodes, jumped to 1993, and paired Kanan with Southside legend Breeze (Shameik Moore) against his own mother. The last episode puts him in front of two 13-year-old boys named Tommy and James — the future Tommy Egan and Ghost — and he tells them to come back when they're older. That's the handoff to the next spin-off, Power: Origins.

For the record: season 3 averaged over 9 million viewers an episode, which is why a show about a teenager in 1991 Queens got five years and a sequel.

By the latest tally from The Numbers, Joe and Anthony Russo’s movies have earned $6.762 billion worldwide, a haul built largely on their four-film run inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That total places the duo just behind a very exclusive trio on the all-time list of highest-grossing directors.

The Russos’ films have grossed $6.762 billion worldwide, per The Numbers.

Here’s where the leaderboard stands right now:

• Steven Spielberg — $10.723 billion
• James Cameron — $10.147 billion
• Christopher Nolan — $7.35 billion
• Joe and Anthony Russo — $6.762 billion

How the math shakes out

To join the $10 billion club, the Russos need about $3.24 billion more. Split across two mega-sized tentpoles, that’s roughly $1.62 billion each. To overtake Spielberg for No. 1 based on today’s totals, the gap is about $3.96 billion—an average near $1.98 billion apiece if you’re penciling it out over two films.

That sounds steep, but it’s not without precedent for them. Their two Avengers finales alone—Avengers: Infinity War (~$2.05B worldwide) and Avengers: Endgame (~$2.80B)—combine for roughly $5 billion. Earlier entries Captain America: The Winter Soldier (~$714M) and Captain America: Civil War (~$1.15B) show the runway that led there.

What’s next matters. Marvel has an untitled Avengers movie dated for May 1, 2026 and Avengers: Secret Wars set for May 7, 2027. Online chatter has repeatedly linked the Russos to the next Avengers chapter (and to Secret Wars), but Marvel has not announced directors for either film. If they do return and those movies approach the performance of Infinity War and Endgame, the pair would have a clear path to the top of the list.

For now, the calendar holds: the next Avengers movie is slated for May 1, 2026, with Avengers: Secret Wars following on May 7, 2027.

On Aug. 29, Prince Jackson, 29, stepped onto the stage at Michael Jackson ONE in Las Vegas, joining the Cirque du Soleil show’s annual birthday salute to his father. The tribute unfolded inside Mandalay Bay, where Jackson’s music anchors high-flying choreography and video design built around his most famous visuals, according to People, which first reported Prince’s appearance.

The family moment landed as his father’s story reaches a new commercial peak: the biopic Michael, led by Jackson’s nephew Jaafar, has now topped $1 billion at the global box office, People reports. Prince served as a producer on the film and has said watching Jaafar transform into his dad on set was an emotional jolt.

Michael has passed $1 billion worldwide, per People.

A family handoff

Prince was just 12 when Michael Jackson died, a loss that pushed him, sister Paris and younger brother Bigi into an intense spotlight far earlier than most. Now, with Jaafar Jackson embodying his uncle in a hit movie and Prince helping steer it behind the scenes, that next generation is carrying the legacy from the stage to the screen.

The Vegas celebration underscores why those efforts connect: the music still fills rooms. “Off the Wall” redefined the pop album; Thriller remains the best-selling album ever, per the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, credited with reshaping pop through sound, dance and long-form music videos.

• “Billie Jean”
• “Beat It”
• “Thriller”
• “Smooth Criminal”
• “Black or White”
• “Man in the Mirror”
• “Earth Song”
• “You Are Not Alone”

Those songs became a kind of pop shorthand that “ONE” translates into flips, projections and laser-precise dance breaks. Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, but each Aug. 29, the Mandalay Bay production marks his birthday with a tribute performance — the same stage where Prince spent this year’s milestone with fans.

He gets the job in the last chapter of one novel and starts doing it in the first chapter of the next.

He never won an election for it

In Debt of Honor, published in 1994, Vice President Ed Kealty resigns over a sexual assault scandal. President Roger Durling picks his National Security Advisor, Jack Ryan, to fill the seat — a caretaker deal, one year, no ambitions. Ryan is confirmed. Minutes later, an embittered Japan Air Lines captain named Torajiro Sato flies a Boeing 747 into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.

Durling dies. So do most of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, and much of the Cabinet. Ryan takes the oath of office from a district judge in CNN's Washington studio.

What he inherits in Executive Orders

Executive Orders, published July 1, 1996 and running 874 pages, picks up where the previous book stopped. The publisher's own jacket copy put the problem plainly:

"How do you run a government without a government?"

The to-do list:

• Rebuild all three branches — appoint a Cabinet, seat a Court, get states to send new members to Congress.
• Fend off Ed Kealty — the ousted VP argues his resignation never took legal effect and sues.
• Ayatollah Daryaei — merging Iran and Iraq into a single hostile bloc.
• An Ebola attack on American soil, answered with a national quarantine order.
• Assassination attempts, including one from inside his own Secret Service detail.

Does he ever get elected?

Eventually. Ryan runs and wins in his own right between novels, and The Bear and the Dragon (2000) opens with him newly elected. He later hands the job to his vice president rather than serve out a full second term. Kealty finally gets the office by default in The Teeth of the Tiger, which is what pulls Ryan back into a campaign years later — he wins again.

Why the screen version skipped it

Rights and reboots. The film series restarted twice and kept resetting Ryan's age, and Amazon's series with Krasinski never advanced him past a CIA desk and a few field assignments. The presidency remains book-only.

For the record: Debt of Honor put a hijacked jetliner into a federal building in August 1994. Clancy spent years afterward being asked about it.

Early in the chaos of January 8, 2016, in the city of Los Mochis, two federal highway officers pulled over a car reported stolen — and came face-to-face with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and his right-hand man, Jorge Iván Gastélum Ávila. That split-second discovery is where Facing El Chapo (originally titled La Captura) plants its flag, telling the story of the cartel boss’s final capture through the uniforms that stumbled onto him. The thriller runs a tight 91 minutes on Netflix.

The capture unfolded on January 8, 2016, in Los Mochis, Sinaloa.

Most of the movie tracks the pair on the run after they slip away from Mexican Marines earlier that day, steal a getaway car and try to put distance between themselves and the dragnet. The raid that boxed them in is widely known as Operation Black Swan (Operativo Cisne Negro), but the film’s pulse is the roadside stop that turned a routine patrol into history.

From patrol stop to arrest

Inside the film, the highway cops are fictionalized as Arturo Carmona and Hector Rosales. After the stop, under orders from superiors, the officers moved the detainees toward the outskirts of the city. One detail the movie preserves from reports: a roadside motel off the Los Mochis–San Miguel highway, specifically room 51, becomes a waypoint as authorities consolidate the arrest.

Built from reportage

Rather than spin a tall tale, the production leans on journalism. Screenwriter Bernardo Esquinca based the script on two testimonies gathered by Mexican journalist Héctor de Mauleón and published in El Universal, grounding the movie’s perspective in the accounts of people close to the operation.

• Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — Sinaloa Cartel leader arrested in Los Mochis
• Jorge Iván Gastélum Ávila — Guzmán’s deputy captured alongside him
• Arturo Carmona — fictionalized federal highway officer (in the film)
• Hector Rosales — fictionalized federal highway officer (in the film)
• Bernardo Esquinca — screenwriter
• Héctor de Mauleón — journalist whose testimonies informed the script

The aftermath stretches beyond what the movie covers: after the Los Mochis arrest ended Guzmán’s second prison escape, Mexico extradited him to the United States in January 2017, and a federal jury found him guilty in 2019.

If you’re trying to watch Elfen Lied in the U.S. right now, you won’t find it on the usual apps. The series isn’t streaming on major platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video in 2026. Your best bet is physical media — the show is available on disc from third‑party sellers, with DVD and Blu‑ray sets commonly listed on Amazon and eBay.

• Streaming (U.S., 2026): Not available on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video
• Buy: DVD/Blu‑ray collections via Amazon and eBay
• Episodes: 13
• First aired: 2004

Elfen Lied isn’t streaming on major U.S. platforms right now; discs are the way to watch.

What it’s about

The story centers on Lucy, a mutant subject brutalized in a secret lab who escapes and leaves carnage in her wake. A head injury triggers a second, childlike personality, and two university students — Kouta and his cousin Yuka — take her in without realizing she harbors a deadly alter ego.

Notorious for its graphic violence and emotional gut punches, the series digs into themes of discrimination and social alienation. It’s the kind of dark psychological thriller that stuck with viewers long after its run.

Based on the manga by Lynn Okamoto — his first major work — the anime wrapped before the comic finished. As a result, the 13-episode TV run that first aired in 2004 and the manga land in different places, with distinct endings.

Jack Schumacher plays him. Here's what he's hiding.

The setup

Yancy Grey rides into town as a stable hand for aging rancher Cap Fuller, played by James Brolin. Two things are true at once: he's Cap's grandson, and he's there on assignment. Series antagonist Davis Collins (Eoin Macken) paid for his release from prison on the condition that he talk Cap into selling the land everyone wants.

"Grey" isn't his name either. It's Fuller.

What season 1 reveals, in order

• The stranger — no past, no explanation, hired on at the Fuller ranch.
• The convict — sprung by Davis Collins, working off the debt.
• The grandson — Cap is family, and neither of them announces it.
• The bull rider — a rodeo history he doesn't advertise.
• The husband — a woman shows up at Gracie's dance hall claiming to be his wife, on the night he plans to marry Ellie.

Schumacher knew about the last one from the start. Showrunner April Blair told him before shooting so he could play it.

"Yeah, this is his big secret," Blair told him, as Schumacher recounted to Parade in 2025.

About that episode title

Season 1's tenth episode is called "Maybe It's Time Yancy Grey Dies Too." It's the only episode named for a character, and it doesn't mean what the search traffic assumes. Yancy survives. Cap is the one who dies, leaving Yancy the ranch — at which point he turns down a $22 million offer from Davis and Austin Water & Power and proposes to Ellie instead. The line comes from a conversation at Cap's wake, and it's about burying the fake name, not the man.

Where he stands in season 2

Season 2 arrived in July 2026 with Yancy running the rival Fuller operation and expecting a baby with Ellie (Marianly Tejada). The wife, Sidney (Heidi Grace Engerman), turns out to be an ex — and a problem. She corners Ellie on a porch, Ellie falls while heavily pregnant, and the finale opens in a hospital with a placental complication that puts both mother and baby at risk. Both survive. The daughter is named Isabella. Sidney is still around.

For the record: Schumacher has said he'd like Yancy to run the ranch without spending much screen time in a boardroom. So far the show has obliged.

The 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco saved its biggest reveal for the end: a new feature-length animated film, Pokémon: Wild Card, shown off with a first teaser. The footage centers on a Pokémon Trading Card Game player and their partner Mimikyu — the Disguise Pokémon — signaling a story that leans into the TCG side of the universe.

Behind the camera, the movie is directed by Katsuhiko Kitada, with character designs by Akemi Hayashi. It’s produced by Story Inc., and animation is being handled by CloverWorks. If the timing in the teaser holds, this would be the franchise’s first big-screen outing since Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle — which opened in Japan in 2020 and reached the U.S. in 2021.

The teaser points to a 2027 release for Pokémon: Wild Card.

Aardman’s Pokémon series heads to Disney+

The championships also debuted a teaser for a separate project: Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu. A “Behind the Scenes with Aardman — Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu” session walked fans through the show’s look and characters, with Pokémon’s Director of Original Animation Phil Rynda in attendance. The series is set to stream exclusively on Disney+ in 2027.

• Title — Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu
• Format — Animated series
• Platform — Disney+ (U.S.)
• Showcased by — A behind-the-scenes presentation with Aardman
• Target year — 2027

One more note from the event: the 2027 Pokémon World Championships are slated to take place in Singapore.

Episode 3 drops a clue that has Green Lantern diehards buzzing: we see John Stewart at art school. In the comics, that’s a key piece of Kyle Rayner’s backstory — he’s a gifted artist before the ring chooses him — which has fans wondering whether the show is folding Kyle’s origin into John’s or quietly setting up Kyle to arrive later.

So far, Kyle hasn’t appeared in the first season of Lanterns, and based on the characters already in play across this eight-episode run, a surprise cameo feels unlikely. If he shows up, the safer bet is a later chapter — either a second season or elsewhere in James Gunn’s DC universe.

Who’s in season 1

Here’s the confirmed lineup viewers have met or been told to expect this season:

• John Stewart
• Hal Jordan
• Guy Gardner
• Kerry Kane
• William Macon
• Zoe
• Billy Macon
• Thaal Sinestro
• Antaan

The Hal-and-John partnership has already clicked with viewers, and the show’s murder-mystery setup clearly landed: HBO says the premiere drew 9.3 million views across HBO and Max in its first three days, including 6.6 million in the U.S.

Season 2 chatter

An official renewal hasn’t been announced, but co-creator Damon Lindelof has been open about where the creative team’s head is at for what comes next.

“But I think Chris Mundy has already started a new writers’ room, figuring out what new stories could be for ‘Lanterns,”

he told ScreenRant. If HBO orders more, that’s a natural spot to introduce Kyle Rayner — especially after that art-school breadcrumb. For now, Lanterns remains an eight-episode first season, and HBO has not confirmed a season 2.

Netflix’s latest true-crime lineup swings from a 2020 Texas fetal abduction that stunned a small town to the long, methodical takedown of New York’s mob empires, with stops at a notorious Salt Lake City kidnapping and a British case warped by a police honeytrap. These picks aren’t just grisly recaps — they hinge on twists, botched investigations, and survivors whose voices drive the story.

Seven to stream now

• Maternal Instinct — A chilling look at the 2020 murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock in Texas by Taylor Parker, who spent months faking a pregnancy to abduct an unborn child. With interviews from grieving family members and law enforcement, the film confronts the rare but devastating reality of fetal abduction and how trust inside a friendship was exploited.
• A Toxic Love Story — Set in Anaheim, this digital-age nightmare traces a Craigslist connection that spiraled into extreme cyberstalking allegations involving deputy U.S. marshal Ian Diaz, his wife Angela, and his ex-fiancée Michelle Hadley. Hadley spent 88 days in jail before a meticulous investigation flipped the case, revealing a stunning reversal of who was victim and who was allegedly pulling the strings.
• The Murder of Rachel Nickell — The 1992 killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, in broad daylight and in front of her two-year-old son Alex, set off a deeply flawed inquiry that fixated on an innocent suspect, Colin Stagg. The film revisits the infamous honeytrap operation while the real killer, Robert Napper, remained free, laying bare how investigative blind spots can derail justice.
• Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart — A measured, often harrowing account of the 2002 abduction of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her Salt Lake City bedroom by Brian David Mitchell and accomplice Wanda Barzee. Through personal reflection and law-enforcement detail, it follows her nine months in captivity and highlights the clear-eyed strategy and resilience that helped her survive.
• American Godfathers: The Five Families — A dense, propulsive breakdown of New York’s mafia dynasties — the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families — from power’s rise to rot. With figures like Charles “Lucky” Luciano, John Gotti, and Vincent Gigante in focus, the series maps money laundering, internal betrayals, and the RICO prosecutions that finally cracked the syndicates.
• Unknown Number: The High School Catfish — Teen Lauryn Licari endures a relentless barrage of abusive texts and cyberbullying from an unknown tormentor. The gut-punch arrives when a cybercrime probe identifies the perpetrator as Lauryn’s own mother, Kendra, opening a window onto a toxic family dynamic and the damage anonymity enables.
• Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich — Survivors including Virginia Giuffre and Courtney Wild recount how disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, aided by Ghislaine Maxwell, recruited and abused underage girls across multiple properties. The series tracks the enablers, connections, and legal loopholes that allowed a known sex offender to operate with near-impunity for years — and centers the women whose testimony forced a reckoning.

“Maternal instinct” on Netflix is exactly why when ppl start those copycat traits i distance myself. It’s always a hatred/shame for themselves brewing that can turn so much darker.

The viewer reaction above — from Clarine (@BIGPIKLIZ) on June 14, 2026 — captures the uneasy chill these stories leave behind, especially when harm is plotted by someone close.

All seven titles are streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

She doesn't make it to season 3.

What happens to her

The Swede, played by Christopher Heyerdahl, strangles Lily in her railcar in "Blood Moon Rising," the second half of the two-hour finale broadcast October 7, 2012. It isn't personal toward her. She's leverage: the Swede kills her specifically to gut Cullen Bohannon, who finds the body afterward.

Bohannon's account of the whole thing is told in flashback to a government inquiry.

The actress found out days before

Dominique McElligott didn't get advance warning. Scripts on Hell on Wheels went out to the cast shortly before each shoot, so she learned Lily was being killed the same way she learned everything else about the character — by opening the pages.

"They gave us the script days before each shoot," she told the Irish Independent in 2012.

She added that there were upsides and downsides to working that way. No on-set conflict has ever been reported, and the death read as a planned story reset rather than a falling-out: AMC renewed the show for season 3 within weeks, with creators Joe and Tony Gayton stepping back from day-to-day showrunning.

What the finale left standing

• The town — burned to the ground in a Sioux raid.
• Thomas Durant — in federal custody over the mileage fraud.
• The Swede — thrown from a bridge, and very much alive.
• Bohannon — no railroad, no Lily, and a reason to keep going.

Did fans think she survived?

For a while, yes. Message boards picked apart the details — the candle that never started a fire, the fact that nobody saw a burial, the flashback framing that made Bohannon an unreliable narrator. The theory was that Bohannon had hidden her somewhere safe. She never came back.

McElligott landed on her feet: House of Cards, then Queen Maeve in The Boys. The Swede, meanwhile, lasted until season 5 and outlived almost everyone who was standing in that finale.

Nine seasons, 180 episodes, and the show only ever gave one straight answer.

On paper, he's a bagel guy

Kramer is an employee of H&H Bagels — on strike. In season 9's "The Strike," which aired December 18, 1997, he gets a phone call telling him the dispute is settled and announces he's going back to work. He'd walked out twelve years earlier over a wage demand of $5.35 an hour. The minimum wage had just caught up.

That's the closest thing to a job Kramer holds across the entire series.

Everything else he tried

• Calvin Klein underwear model — after pitching the company a cologne that smells like the beach.
• Author — The Coffee Table Book of Coffee Tables, which gets optioned and briefly makes him rich.
• CEO of Kramerica Industries — a one-man think tank with one unpaid intern, developing an oil tanker bladder.
• Horse-carriage driver in Central Park, running on a diet-related fuel source.
• Moviefone impersonator — his new phone number is one digit off, so he starts taking the calls himself.

None of it lasts. Most of it costs him money.

The job he was fired from without having it

Season 8's "The Bizarro Jerry," which aired October 3, 1996, is the definitive Kramer employment story. He helps a stranger with a printer in the halls of a firm called Brandt-Leland, gets mistaken for staff, and starts showing up in a suit at nine every morning. He refuses pay. He says he's doing it for the structure. He develops an ulcer.

Then Mr. Leland reads one of his reports and terminates him. Kramer protests that he doesn't actually work there.

"That's what makes this so difficult." — Mr. Leland, "The Bizarro Jerry," 1996

So how does he pay rent?

The show never says, which is the joke. A one-bedroom on the Upper West Side ran roughly $1,500 a month when the series started, and Kramer covers it on windfalls: the book deal, the modeling check, whatever the strike fund was paying. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were never going to hand him a paystub. Mystery was the character.

For the record: the real Cosmo Kramer, Larry David's across-the-hall neighbor Kenny Kramer, eventually solved the employment question himself. He started running bus tours of Seinfeld locations.

The four episodes are set in Mount Sterling, Kentucky; the Richmond Hill subdivision of Indianapolis, Indiana; Oakland, California; and Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles. Two southern-California cases, one Midwestern, one small-town Kentucky — a deliberate spread across suburb, city, and rural community.

The four locations

• Episode 1, "She Finally Snapped" — Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Shawna and David Scott move to be near family and end up across the street from Frances Zaayer, an old acquaintance. In 2018 Zaayer crossed the road and opened fire, killing David, a Montgomery County deputy jailer, and seriously injuring Shawna. Zaayer pleaded guilty in January 2022 and was sentenced to 35 years.
• Episode 2, "Midwest Meltdown" — Richmond Hill, Indianapolis. Monserrate "Moncy" Shirley and boyfriend Mark Leonard blew up her house in a 2012 insurance scheme. The gas explosion killed two neighbors, injured dozens, and damaged much of the subdivision.
• Episode 3, "Fear Thy Neighbor" — Oakland, California. Miles and Melina Armstead's neighbor Jamal Thomas was evicted and ran a harassment campaign against the family despite repeated police involvement. It ended in 2020.
• Episode 4, "The Executor" — Sherman Oaks, California. An estate fraud case: Caroline Herrling and associates targeted an elderly man, Charles Wilding, and it was neighbors reporting oddities that triggered the investigation.

Is it actually filmed there

Partly. The series is built from interviews with residents, families, and law enforcement, plus real police bodycam footage and 911 audio from the incidents themselves. For anything the cameras missed — the notes on windshields, the years of escalation before anyone called anyone — the show uses animation rather than actors, a choice carried over from Worst Roommate Ever and Worst Ex Ever.

Who made it

Cynthia Childs directed all four episodes, having previously worked on Worst Ex Ever. Jason Blum's Blumhouse Television produces. It's the third entry in Netflix's "Worst Ever" franchise, and the first to swap the roommate and the ex for someone you can't move away from without selling a house.

For the record: the Richmond Hill explosion case generated one of the largest criminal proceedings in Marion County history, with the trials moved out of Indianapolis entirely because finding an unaffected jury there proved impossible.

The finale, "Points," aired November 4, 2001. Germany surrenders in the first act. What's left is Easy Company stuck in Austria, waiting on a discharge points system, with the war in the Pacific still running and the possibility of being shipped there hanging over anyone who hasn't earned enough credit to go home.

What actually happens in the last hour

• Berchtesgaden — Easy takes the Eagle's Nest, finds a few dead German officers, and empties Hermann Göring's wine cellar of roughly 10,000 bottles.
• The points — 85 points buys you a discharge, accumulated through length of service, medals, and wounds. Most of the company doesn't have them.
• Zell am See — the battalion accepts the surrender of 25,000 German troops and spends its days directing refugees home.
• The casualties after V-E Day — Janovec is killed in a jeep accident, and Sgt. Chuck Grant is shot in the head by a drunk American replacement. A German surgeon saves him. The shooter is dealt with off camera.
• Winters — applies for a transfer to the Pacific and is turned down, on the grounds that his men have earned the right to keep him.

The final scene

Easy plays baseball in an Austrian field while Winters narrates what became of the men on the diamond — who went home, who stayed in, who died young. He stops the game to announce Japan's surrender, then finishes with Nixon's fate and his own. The last thing he reads is a line from Sgt. Mike Ranney, on being asked by his grandson whether he'd been a hero in the war:

"No, but I served in a company of heroes."

The interviews

Throughout all ten episodes, real Easy Company veterans appear in talking-head segments without name captions. The finale finally identifies them, matching each face to the character the audience has been watching for eleven hours. It's the closest the series comes to a formal trick, and it's the reason the ending lands.

For the record: the men playing baseball at Zell am See had no idea the atomic bombs existed until days before the surrender. The show doesn't mention Hiroshima or Nagasaki at all — Winters just announces the result.

The episode’s gut-punch arrives in a tense home scene where Bernadette Stewart all but drills fear out of her young son. Played by Jasmine Cephas Jones, Bernadette runs John through hard lessons meant to steel him long before a power ring ever finds him. Within minutes she’s tender, severe, terrified and unflinchingly resolute — the person who decides courage isn’t a gift, it’s training.

Episode 3 also fills in how that training began: after a Guardian informs the Stewarts that John has qualities tied to the Green Lantern Corps, Bernadette becomes the architect of his childhood regimen. The character is described as a resilient family fixer who holds herself — and everyone around her — to a punishing standard. Here, that ideal shapes John’s origin in ways that feel both protective and haunting.

Meet Jasmine Cephas Jones

Cephas Jones broke out in Broadway’s Hamilton, where she originated the dual roles of Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds and earned a Grammy as part of the cast album. Since then she’s split her time across film and TV, often jumping genres without blinking.

• Blindspotting — Ashley (and later a producer on the Starz series)
• #FreeRayshawn — Tyisha (Primetime Emmy winner)
• Monsters and Men — film
• The Photograph — film
• Marriage Story — film
• Origin (Ava DuVernay) — film
• Mrs. Fletcher — TV series appearance

That range pays off in Lanterns, where she plays Young Bernadette with a mix of warmth and rigor that makes John’s upbringing feel deliberate rather than accidental. The episode effectively positions her as the emotional backbone of his backstory.

Sinestro’s shadow

Episode 3 also widens the cosmic lens around Sinestro, played by Ulrich Thomsen. It confirms he once trained Hal Jordan, with a bond built on trust before his fall from grace — a fall that included killing a Guardian during an attempted coup and landing in an intergalactic prison.

Episode 3 confirms Sinestro once trained Hal Jordan — and that he killed a Guardian before being imprisoned.

That history isn’t academic for Hal. Earlier this season, he visited Sinestro behind bars looking for answers about the Manhunters, a choice the Guardians eye warily as his old loyalties keep showing. Even John Stewart notes how people can stay attached to the figures who raised and shaped them, even when those figures cross unforgivable lines.

All of it plays against a looming question: the season began with Hal’s apparent death, and Episode 3 layers in fresh tension among Hal’s allies, the Guardians and John while making Sinestro’s influence impossible to ignore. Who killed Hal — and why — remains unresolved.

Euphoria's final season premiered April 12, 2026, eight episodes, four years after the last one. Rue is now working for a drug boss named Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), still in debt to Laurie (Martha Kelly), and quietly compromised into informing for the DEA. How she got from sober high schooler to cartel courier is never dramatized.

The five years, as far as the show cares

There is no montage, no explanatory flashback, no relapse scene. Sam Levinson skips the transitional years entirely and drops the audience into the aftermath. The rest of the cast gets the same treatment:

• Jules — art school dropout, supporting herself as a sugar baby.
• Maddy — Los Angeles, working at a talent agency with side hustles stacked on top.
• Cassie and Nate — engaged, in the suburbs, Cassie glued to her phone.
• Lexi — assistant to a showrunner, which is about as close to autobiography as this show gets.

How Rue's story ends

She dies in the finale, "In God We Trust," which aired May 31, 2026. After a raid collapses Laurie's operation, Alamo — who has worked out that Rue was talking to the feds — hands her painkillers for her injuries. She takes them. They're laced with fentanyl. Ali (Colman Domingo) kills Alamo, then drives to the rural Texas family Rue had stayed with earlier in the season and says grace at their table.

Levinson defended the choice during HBO's post-episode segment:

"It just felt like the honest ending."

He also told the New York Times' Popcast that this wasn't the original plan. Rue had a different trajectory written for her, and it changed after Angus Cloud — who played Fezco — died in 2023.

Was it always the last season

Effectively, yes. Zendaya had signaled as much in interviews before it aired, and the finale confirmed it: Nate dies an episode earlier, Laurie takes her own life during the DEA raid, and the series closes on an American flag and Rue's voiceover. Levinson has insisted the closing line is sincere rather than sarcastic, which tells you roughly how the finale was received.

If you’ve been watching Lanterns and wondering about that violet glow in DC lore, here’s the short version: the Star Sapphire Corps are the Lanterns who run on love. It’s one of the most powerful — and most temperamental — energies in the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, putting the violet corps among the strongest of the nine.

Their power source is the violet light of love.

How they began

Billions of years ago, a group of female Oans broke away from the Guardians of the Universe rather than purge their emotions. They settled on the planet Zamaron and discovered a parasitic crystal that became the Star Sapphire gem — a force that could possess a host, amplify love and, when twisted, drive vengeance.

After a fateful run-in with Hal Jordan, the Zamarons rethought letting the gem control a single bearer and reworked its energy into power rings and a Central Power Battery. That shift turned a cursed object into a corps: multiple wielders, the same violet light, without the gem’s possession.

The most famous Star Sapphire host is Carol Ferris — Jordan’s longtime on‑and‑off love interest — who’s been bonded to the gem more than once in the comics and is expected to appear in HBO’s new series. The corps is largely made up of women, but it isn’t exclusive: in the War of the Green Lanterns storyline, Guy Gardner briefly added a Star Sapphire ring on top of a Red Lantern ring, a power boost that proved tough to control.

What the violet rings do

Like the green rings, violet rings turn emotion into hard-light force. The difference is what fuels them — and how volatile it can be.

• Flight and deep‑space travel
• Energy blasts powered by the violet spectrum
• Hard‑light constructs shaped by the wearer’s thoughts and emotions
• Protective shielding against physical damage

In the comics, the Star Sapphires have been both adversaries and allies to the Green Lanterns, depending on who’s wearing the ring — and how love is being channeled at the moment.

Men can wield the violet light too, but juggling it with an opposing ring is notoriously unstable, as Gardner learned when he tried balancing love and rage at once.

Some vanished movies are fully edited and sitting on a shelf; others collapsed midway through filming; one never even reached day one on set. After all the attention on Coyote vs. Acme and what happens when a finished film gets yanked, a handful of long-whispered projects keep coming up in fan conversations — the kind of titles where the making-of stories are already legend and the curiosity factor is sky-high.

Five lost films still worth saving

• Superman Lives (1998) — Tim Burton’s take on the Man of Steel would have put Nicolas Cage in the suit, with drafts that pitted Superman against Brainiac (at times fused with Lex Luthor on the page). The concept leaned into alienation, weird-science body horror and a more vulnerable Kal-El. Development burned money and pages for years, and Warner Bros. shut it down before cameras rolled. Rumors at the time linked Sandra Bullock to Lois Lane and Christopher Walken to Brainiac, adding to the mythos of the greatest superhero movie never made.
• Prankstar (2009) — Written, directed by and starring Tom Green, this mockumentary about an unhinged crew of stunt pranksters was shot guerrilla-style, cut together and, according to Green, finished — then quietly shelved. It chased the chaos of early internet shock humor, clout-chasing and public disruption years before “prank channels” took over social feeds.

  the most insane movie ever

  That’s how Green once described it on social media. More than a decade later, no release, no festival screenings, no VOD — just a ghost that die-hard fans still ask about.

• 10 Things I Hate About Life (2014) — Director Gil Junger returned to the world of his ’90s hit with a darker rom-com twist: Evan Rachel Wood and Thomas McDonell as strangers who meet at the exact moment they each plan to end their lives — and talk each other into living instead. Filming started, then stalled amid company shake-ups, budget trouble and litigation involving the production and its star. What exists hints at a prickly, surprisingly tender romance that never reached the finish line.
• Empires of the Deep (2014) — A billionaire-backed, underwater fantasy epic reportedly topping $100 million, imagined as a splashy answer to Avatar, with Olga Kurylenko ultimately playing the Mermaid Queen (after early chatter around Monica Bellucci). The plot dove into mermaid kingdoms, ancient warriors and leviathans, with themes of environmental ruin and royal betrayal. Production cycled through four directors, dozens of rewrites and money woes; VFX work became a sinkhole. The film never secured a release, surviving as a cautionary tale with tantalizing concept art and stray footage.
• Something’s Got to Give (1962) — A glossy screwball setup from director George Cukor: a long-missing wife (Marilyn Monroe) returns to find her husband (Dean Martin) remarried (to Cyd Charisse). The shoot was turbulent — studio fights, mounting delays, Monroe’s health — and then ended abruptly with Monroe’s death in August 1962. What remains is raw, radiant footage of her final work and the outline of a sparkling comedy that never came together.

Before he stepped in as Howard Hughes’s publicity fixer in The Aviator, Adam Scott went full research mode: he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for a paper trail on the real Johnny Meyer. The catch? The agency’s response didn’t land until nearly two years after filming wrapped, Scott said on Funny You Ask with Ike Barinholtz.

“2 years after finishing the movie (I) got a box filled with government documents, all this surveillance on Johnny Meyer. FBI surveillance on Meyer. He was into all kinds of crazy s***.”

Scott said the box was packed with FBI surveillance records that painted a wilder picture of Meyer than he ever expected. He also said he learned from the files that Hughes’s publicist died in an accident. The timing meant none of it could be folded into his performance, but it gave him a rare, firsthand look at the shadowy orbit around Hughes.

On Scorsese’s set

In a separate conversation with The Guardian, Scott admitted he showed up to the star-stuffed shoot feeling intimidated, then quickly relaxed once the work started.

“I was pretty freaked out at first. But once you're there, you realize these are just regular people who happen to be actors figuring out a scene. Everyone was extremely kind and generous to me and made me feel comfortable straight away.”

He praised Martin Scorsese’s collaborative style, saying actors were encouraged to loosen up scenes and find moments in the room. The atmosphere, he recalled, was intensely focused but open to improvisation.

The film’s roster was stacked. Among the headliners:

• Leonardo DiCaprio — Howard Hughes
• Cate Blanchett — Katharine Hepburn
• Kate Beckinsale — Ava Gardner
• Jude Law — Errol Flynn
• Alec Baldwin — Juan Trippe
• Adam Scott — Johnny Meyer, Hughes’s publicist

Set across 1927–1947, The Aviator tracks Hughes’s twin obsessions with movies and aviation. It earned 11 Oscar nominations and took home five Academy Awards.

The hour is framed as an off-the-books interrogation: **John Stewart** sits in a cramped office hidden inside an abandoned mall, facing a woman who’s actually a Guardian in disguise. As she quietly vets him for the **Green Lantern** Corps, the episode jumps through his life — each memory explaining why he’s the kind of man who could wear a ring, and what it cost him to get there.

It starts in **1986**. A green light floods the Stewart home as a ring “tests” John’s father, John Stewart Sr., asking if he’s afraid. He says yes. That honest answer wrecks him. A Guardian later tells the family the same quality that drew the ring to Dad exists in their bloodline, and John’s mother Bernadette seizes on it — steering her son toward a destiny she believes is waiting. John is separated from his brothers, told that the birds outside are spies for the Guardians, handed a child-sized uniform and even a rifle. Courage becomes the family religion.

“Courage is Fear who said his prayers.”

The training grows harsh. In a chilling apple test, John Sr. shoots fruit off his son’s head; when roles reverse, young John balks at aiming a rifle at his father. Bernadette later confesses the bird surveillance was a lie — a motivational tool, not a message from the cosmos — and John, now fully indoctrinated, chooses to continue anyway. He finally completes the test by shooting the apple off his mother’s head. The show also bakes race into John’s upbringing: Bernadette believes extraordinary discipline is armor for a Black child expected to prove himself inside unforgiving institutions, a reality the Guardian initially struggles to grasp.

From Marine to maker

John channels that conditioning into the Marines, rising to **sergeant major** and developing the patience of a sniper. On a months-long assignment in Russia tracking a target called Grey Wolf, his painstaking work gets blown up by someone else’s entrance: **Hal Jordan** swoops in and takes the collar. The operation sparks a diplomatic mess, and John is hit with a dishonorable discharge so the fallout can be contained.

Afterward, Bernadette pushes him toward the self he buried. John enrolls in art school. A mysterious recruiter appears with a “special project,” asking John to sketch a building — then slips him a ring and tells him to recreate his father’s wristwatch from memory. John conjures an intricate, fully realized construct, proof that his artistic precision can be a Lantern’s superpower. A portal drops him back to that mall office, where the Guardian presses him on an awkward point: would he be comfortable replacing Hal? Ever the soldier, John answers that if it’s an order, feelings don’t matter. The Guardian greenlights him as a candidate.

Enter Hal Jordan

John heads home to share the news — and finds Hal already in his living room telling his parents for him. Hal means it as a welcome, even calling the Stewarts the “Midwest Huxtables,” but it lands like another intrusion on John’s most personal moment. Outside, Hal drops any pretense of warmth.

He tells John replacing him will happen “over his d*** body.”

The friction is immediate and sharp. John has spent a lifetime following orders; Hal keeps barging into his path, from Russia’s Grey Wolf mission to the moment he claims John’s family’s pride. And because the season opened with a flash-forward to Hal’s corpse on a football field, their early history now carries a darker charge.

• In **1986**, a ring tested John’s father and sent the family down a path of brutal training.
• Bernadette weaponized “courage,” even faking bird surveillance to keep John focused.
• The infamous apple test culminated with John shooting fruit off his mother’s head.
• John became a Marine sniper, rose to sergeant major, and lost his career after Hal’s Grey Wolf interference led to a diplomatic crisis and a dishonorable discharge.
• Art school unlocked John’s imagination; he built his father’s wristwatch as a ring construct.
• The Guardian accepted John as a Green Lantern candidate after he agreed to follow orders — even if that meant replacing Hal.
• Hal greeted the Stewarts as the “Midwest Huxtables,” then told John he won’t be replaced without a fight.

For viewers, the biggest cloud still hangs over the field: **Episode 1**’s flash-forward showed **Hal Jordan** dead on a football field, and the killer’s identity remains one of the season’s central mysteries.

After years in limbo, Coyote vs. Acme is actually in theaters. The Looney Tunes hybrid finally opened on August 28, 2026 via indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment, the same movie Warner Bros. once earmarked to scrap entirely.

Its escape from the vault immediately reignites the conversation around Batgirl — the finished DC film Warner Bros. Discovery shelved in 2022. The studio hasn’t signaled any change of heart, but Coyote’s comeback shows a buried movie can, under the right circumstances, find a path to audiences.

Batgirl: finished, then shelved

Before it became a symbol of a movie no one could see, Batgirl was set up as a major DC entry for HBO Max from directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah with a script by Christina Hodson. Its cast blended a new lead with legacy Gotham faces:

• Leslie Grace — Barbara Gordon / Batgirl
• Michael Keaton — Batman
• J.K. Simmons — Commissioner Gordon
• Brendan Fraser — Firefly

Production shot in Glasgow starting in November 2021 and wrapped in March 2022. The story followed Barbara taking up the Batgirl mantle while navigating Gotham — and her father’s expectations — but in August 2022 Warner Bros. Discovery pulled the plug on any release.

“saddened and shocked”

That was how El Arbi and Fallah described the decision on Instagram. Fans pushed back hard too, especially over representation and the idea of burying a completely finished film. In 2023, DC Studios co-head Peter Safran further doused hopes by calling the movie:

“not releasable.”

Cast members have kept the subject alive in interviews — Fraser has spoken repeatedly about the cancellation, while Simmons has called the studio’s handling of the situation “bizarre.”

Coyote vs. Acme’s road back

Directed by Dave Green, the completed live-action/animation comedy was reportedly made for just over $70 million and then targeted for a tax write-off before plans changed. Its ensemble includes:

• Will Forte
• John Cena
• Lana Condor

The premise itself added to the irony: Wile E. Coyote sues ACME after its products repeatedly sabotage his Road Runner schemes. Off-screen, the filmmakers and fans waged their own fight, rallying under #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme with demonstrations outside the studio. One protester showed up in full Coyote costume with a “Release me!!” sign — and later returned to celebrate with a new one: “We f****** did it!”

Warner Bros. eventually let the film seek a new home. Ketchup Entertainment acquired worldwide rights in a deal reportedly worth around $50 million, then put the movie into theaters on August 28. It opened to approximately $15.4 million domestically — second for the weekend and the biggest opening in Ketchup Entertainment’s history.

Claudia is killed in season 2, episode 7, "I Could Not Prevent It," which aired June 23, 2024. The Paris coven at the Théâtre des Vampires stages a show trial for her and Louis over the attempted murder of Lestat, finds them guilty in front of a paying human audience, and sentences Claudia and her lover Madeleine to death by sunlight.

Why there are two Claudias

Bailey Bass originated the role in season 1. In March 2023, weeks before season 2 began shooting in Prague, AMC announced she wouldn't return, citing "a variety of reasons." Bass's own statement referred to unforeseen circumstances and didn't elaborate; she was also committed to the Avatar sequels. Delainey Hayles took over, and the season 2 premiere announced the swap on screen with a title card rather than hoping nobody would notice.

How the death plays out

The trial is theater in the literal sense — rehearsed, staged as a matinee, with Lestat himself brought in as star witness. Claudia's own assessment, delivered to Madeleine on stage, is that it isn't a trial at all but a stoning. Then she and Madeleine are put in an open shaft and the sun comes up. Showrunner Rolin Jones told TVLine in 2024 that the sequence was cut down from something longer:

"There's probably 25 seconds you're not seeing."

How it differs from the book and the movie

• The 1976 novel — the execution happens off the page. Louis discovers the ashes afterward, and is himself sealed in a coffin as punishment.
• The 1994 film — no trial at all. Kirsten Dunst's Claudia and Madeleine are simply left in a well at dawn, and their bodies fuse into an ash sculpture that collapses when touched.
• The AMC series — the camera stays on it, in full, and Lestat is made to watch the consequence of his own testimony.

Hayles told TV Insider in 2024 that filming the death was heavy but oddly satisfying, because it meant Claudia's full story had finally been told — a small consolation for an actress who joined a show to play one long ending.