Set in a postcard-pretty Mississippi town with rot under the paint, Sid & Zoey pairs a spiky teen love story with a paranormal threat that won’t stay buried. The show is created by Jon Kasdan and comes from a team built to mash up romance, mystery, and horror, with J.J. Abrams and James Wan on board as executive producers through Bad Robot and Blumhouse Atomic Monster.

The setup

Sid is a sophisticated New York kid shipped south to live with a small-town police chief and his family in the place where Sid’s mother grew up. There he collides with Zoey, the chief’s sharp-witted, punk-rock daughter. Their connection sparks fast — and then gets tangled up in whatever is simmering beneath the town’s immaculate surface.

The series is built as a bingeable hybrid: the romance provides the heartbeat while a gothic mystery pulls the story deeper into the town’s secrets across eight episodes.

Who’s making it

• Jon Kasdan — creator and co-showrunner
• John Shiban — co-showrunner (Ozark writer/producer)
• Executive producers — J.J. Abrams and James Wan
• Studios — Bad Robot and Blumhouse Atomic Monster
• Season size — eight episodes

Casting status

Netflix hasn’t named a single cast member yet — not even the leads. That makes the roles themselves the only solid clues for now:

• Sid — “sophisticated, seductive, and amoral” teenager from New York
• Zoey — the police chief’s sharp-witted, punk-rock daughter
• Casting — no actors announced

Given the YA focus and the genre credentials behind the camera, who lands Sid and Zoey will say a lot about how Netflix plans to position the show.

Where it fits at Netflix

Sid & Zoey arrives as Netflix leans harder into YA as a destination. The streamer recently launched a dedicated YA hub that bundles hundreds of original and licensed titles; in 2026 alone, 23 YA titles reached its global Top 10. This series is designed to slot right into that pipeline — a coming-of-age romance with a gothic bite.

Netflix ordered eight episodes in August 2026; a premiere date hasn’t been announced.

There’s no production timeline yet, and Netflix hasn’t provided a release window. For now, Sid & Zoey is early-days — with the creative team locked, the mystery mapped out, and the casting reveal still to come.

In a new interview, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II didn’t tiptoe around the decision to pull the plug on Wonder Man. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he zeroed in on how the back-to-back shelving of his Marvel series and Mahershala Ali’s Blade reboot looks from the outside — and what he thinks Disney and Marvel should do about it.

“I think the optics are obvious. If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics.”

Abdul-Mateen said studios need to actively change that perception by fully backing inclusive projects — not just with a greenlight, but with the resources to succeed.

“So it should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.”

• Wonder Man — canceled in July 2026 despite an Emmy nomination and reportedly strong viewership; starred Abdul-Mateen.
• Blade — the long-developing Marvel reboot led by Mahershala Ali, scrapped.

Calling Wonder Man a show with “all of the ingredients” for a long run, Abdul-Mateen argued the abrupt stop deserves a closer look, especially given the performance he says it delivered.

“So our show does deserve some study and some real, hard information about why a show like this did not continue forward, because it had all of the ingredients that one would want in a show.”

How he’s watching his own work now

The actor also opened up about his relationship to his past performances. Early on, he waited years before pressing play on anything he’d made. That’s changed.

“I used to wait about three years. I’m much kinder to myself now these days, but in the last year, I’ve been able to check my stuff out.”

He said returning to August Wilson’s plays feels like a reset — material built for Black actors that lets him settle in without overthinking. And in a lighter twist, a regular at his gym steered him to a very different kind of classic: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he’s been reading as he rebalances between roles and the bigger industry shifts around them.

At the Variety Lounge during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, producer Christine Vachon said Todd Haynes’ long-stalled romance De Noche is finally moving forward after a star swap — and that the creative blueprint remains intact. The biggest tweak came behind the scenes: the production shifted its setting within Mexico, moving from Guadalajara to Mexico City.

The project was originally set to star Joaquin Phoenix and was halted when he exited in 2024. With Pedro Pascal now stepping into the lead, Vachon said the movie has the momentum it needed, with her and producing partner Pamela Koffler backing Haynes as the film restarts.

“I think we got the happy ending that we deserved, or that Todd deserved, which is Pedro Pascal ultimately playing the role,” Vachon said.

What it’s about

Set in 1930s Los Angeles, De Noche follows police officer Richard Rent and boarding-school teacher Joe Thomas, who become targets of a corrupt political machine. Forced to flee to Mexico, their journey through jungles and along the coast draws them into a deepening relationship that pushes both men to grapple with their past and with violence closing in.

De Noche is directed by Todd Haynes and produced by Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. The film was previously packaged with Phoenix alongside Danny Ramirez before the 2024 shutdown. According to Vachon, recasting Pascal didn’t require any dramatic story changes beyond the move to Mexico City.

Out in the teeth of Hurricane Sandra, Kiara Maybank stowed away on Chandler Groff’s hijacked boat and confronted him over JJ’s death as he tried to flee with the Royal Merchant gold. As waves pounded the deck, she rigged the sails and lines to hoist Groff into the air, then cut the rope, sending him into the water; lashed to heavy gear, he sank, ending his run as the Pogues’ last big threat.

Back onshore, Rafe Cameron used the storm as cover to yank Sofia out of jail, only to double back when he saw Sheriff Shoupe trapped under a fallen tree. After pulling Shoupe free and owning up to his past crimes, Rafe got an unexpected reprieve; Shoupe let him and Sofia bolt for South America rather than haul him in mid-disaster.

With Groff gone, Kiara had to abandon the sinking vessel and dump the gold to stay alive. She fired a flare and called out to JJ for strength as John B, Sarah Cameron, and Pope Heyward fought through the gale to haul her aboard, guiding everyone to the safety of the lighthouse.

When the skies finally cleared, the island was wrecked and power was out for weeks. With evacuations underway, the Pogues started daily dives to find the cache Kiara had cut loose — and hit pay dirt when John B spotted the $400 million haul on the seabed, enough for the crew to salvage every last bar.

After the storm

• Cleo resolved her immigration status thanks to the windfall, and Pope proposed as they planned a quieter future.
• Real-estate player Dale Zeasy was arrested after the post-storm legal shakeout exposed his fraudulent deals; the Pogues used their money to buy back stolen land across the island.
• John B and Sarah rebuilt the Routledge house; Pope brought Heyward’s Seafood back to life; Kiara reclaimed the Maybank property.
• Kiara landed a marine biology internship and set up a permanent beach memorial for JJ.
• A year later, Sarah welcomed a baby boy — named JJ.
• Rafe and Sofia said their goodbyes to Sarah and left the Banks for good.

The series’ final moments are all celebration: John B and Sarah’s official wedding, friends and family gathered as he rang his father’s brass bell, and the Pogues huddling for one last sunset photo.

“We are the Pogues. Our mission for life is to have a good time all the time. We went around the world looking for treasure, but in the end, we found everything we wanted right where we started. The Outer Banks. Paradise on earth.”

The complete run of Outer Banks is now streaming on Netflix.

Some names have already muscled their way into the conversation this year. Mikey Madison broke big with Sean Baker’s Anora after scene-stealing turns in Scream (2022) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cailee Spaeny floated from a delicate Priscilla to the nerve-rattling spectacle of Alien: Romulus and the chaos of Civil War without blinking. And Jenna Ortega is doing double duty, fronting Wednesday, stepping into Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and taking on producing responsibilities while she’s at it.

Cailee Spaeny won Venice’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress for Priscilla.

10 to watch now

• Mikey Madison — The electric center of Anora confirmed what her unhinged killer in Scream and that wild third-act run in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood already hinted: she can swing from comedy to chaos without losing the thread.
• Cailee Spaeny — As Priscilla Presley she delivered a precision character study; with Alien: Romulus and Alex Garland’s Civil War she proved she can carry high-stakes genre, too. Earlier stints in Mare of Easttown and Devs helped build the foundation.
• Jenna Ortega — Wednesday turned her into a global face (with Golden Globe and Emmy attention), and she kept the momentum with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She’s also attached to star in Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun, showing she’s not just the queen of horror corridors.
• Chase Infiniti — A true newcomer with real physical chops from kickboxing and dance, she’s been building buzz beyond TV, including music video work that shows easy screen presence. She’s been linked to major filmmakers, the kind of early co-sign that can change a career overnight.
• Sophie Thatcher — As teen Natalie in Yellowjackets she brought week-to-week ferocity; on the big screen she sparred with Hugh Grant in A24’s Heretic and headlines the twisty sci‑fi Companion. Directors keep handing her heavy lifts, and she keeps nailing them.
• Milly Alcock — She burned bright as young Rhaenyra Targaryen on House of the Dragon; now she’s officially DC Studios’ new Supergirl. That’s a leap from breakout to franchise pillar in record time.
• Sadie Sink — From Max Mayfield’s mixtapes in Stranger Things to bruising drama opposite Brendan Fraser in The Whale and the lead turn in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film, she toggles between pop phenomena and prestige without losing her edge.
• Ella Purnell — She anchored Prime Video’s smash Fallout as Lucy MacLean, rattled nerves on Yellowjackets, and won an Annie Award voicing Jinx in Arcane. She’s also stepping behind the camera, executive producing and starring in the thriller Sweetpea.
• Inde Navarrette — After 13 Reasons Why, she brought grounded heart to Superman & Lois. With that network muscle and genre cred in place, she’s poised for her next jump.
• Yerin Ha — The Australian actor made a mark as Kwan Ha on Paramount+’s Halo, carrying action and emotion in equal measure. She’s been on Hollywood’s radar as a breakout to build around.

DC’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is in active development at DC Studios, keeping Milly Alcock’s cape in play as these careers accelerate.

Early reviews have pushed Insidious: Out of the Further to a 67% score on Rotten Tomatoes after 48 notices — a franchise best that edges past the original film’s 66%. That number could shift as more critics weigh in, but it’s already a notable high-water mark for a series that’s usually landed in the “mixed” zone.

67% on Rotten Tomatoes after 48 reviews — the highest score in the Insidious franchise.

How it stacks up

Until now, none of the sequels had cracked “Fresh.” Here’s where the films currently stand on Rotten Tomatoes:

• Insidious (2011) — 66%
• Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) — 38%
• Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) — 56%
• Insidious: The Last Key (2018) — 35%
• Insidious: The Red Door (2023) — 39%
• Insidious: Out of the Further (2026) — 67% (after 48 reviews)

Early write-ups have been notably warmer than usual for the series, with several calling this the scariest follow-up yet. It’s a promising sign for a franchise that’s often been dinged for predictability as the mythology expanded.

New house, new nightmare

The new story centers on Gemma, a young mom raising her daughters in the house where she grew up. She discovers she can enter The Further — and the twist is brutal: once the entities there realize Gemma can pull things back into our world, they start using her to do it.

Jacob Chase (Come Play) directs and co-wrote the script with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. On the producing side are Jason Blum, Oren Peli, and franchise architects James Wan and Leigh Whannell.

Longtime stalwart Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier to tie the new tale into the established mythos, alongside a fresh cast:

• Amelia Eve
• Brandon Perea
• Maisie Richardson-Sellers
• Laura Gordon
• Sam Spruell
• Island Austin

Since its 2011 launch from Wan and Whannell, the Insidious saga has sprawled across prequels and sequels built around astral projection and The Further, scaring up more than $740 million worldwide at the box office.

Insidious: Out of the Further opens in theaters on August 21, 2026.

At MultiCon 2026, franchise chief content officer Scott M. Gimple said he’s thinking big about where The Walking Dead goes next — and yes, that includes the dream scenario of Rick Grimes crossing paths with Daryl Dixon again. Speaking with The Direct, Gimple also stressed that he’s pulling back on the sheer volume of shows to sharpen the focus on quality.

“Well I still dream of it, and I will say we have all sorts of plans in play,”

Gimple stopped short of promising a near-term crossover. He told the outlet it’s not the right moment for a convergence because the universe is still “in the middle” of its saga, and he emphasized that the end of the TV storyline is a long way off.

Scaling back the spinoffs

The AMC zombie universe has grown fast this decade — five new shows launched in the 2020s, with as many as three seasons of spinoffs rolling out in a single year. Gimple indicated that pace is changing. With The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon coming to an end and Dead City likely to wind down next, the aim is to concentrate on just one or two series at a time instead of a constant flood.

That’s a big shift from the franchise’s early days, when the 11-season flagship mostly ran alongside just one companion, Fear the Walking Dead. The post-finale years have scattered fan favorites across the map — literally.

• The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — Daryl’s trek through Europe, later joined by Carol.
• The Walking Dead: Dead City — Maggie and Negan fighting to survive in New York.
• The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live — a limited series continuing Rick and Michonne’s story.
• Tales of the Walking Dead — a six-episode anthology; a second season hasn’t been confirmed.

All told, the franchise has already delivered 14 TV seasons in the 2020s — double the seven seasons released in the six years before that.

The feature documentary Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story zeroes in on the moment Cook’s inner circle crossed a line: when his half-brother, Darryl McCauley, moved from a job in corrections into managing the comedian’s finances and, over time, began making unauthorized withdrawals. The film tracks how the amounts escalated, the red flags Cook spotted, and the fallout once the irregularities surfaced — McCauley’s arrest, conviction, prison sentence, and court-ordered restitution — along with a look back at cash later found stashed in unexpected places.

It doesn’t stop at the scandal. The documentary retraces Cook’s rocket ride through the 2000s, the personal and professional relationships that came with it, and how early ambitions — both brothers once dreamed of stand-up — diverged into very different lives. The betrayal’s lingering impact on Cook, personally and financially, is a throughline.

Who’s in it

Alongside Cook’s own account, the film gathers voices from his circle — several appearing as themselves — to fill in the years leading up to and after the crisis.

• Dane Cook — himself
• Al Del Bene
• Mark Clifford
• Luke Ernenwein
• Richard Pollmann
• Erika Montesi
• Guy Venuti
• Richard Feldstein
• Richard Grundy
• Joseph Zwicker
• Thomas Kingsley
• Kelsi Cook
• Kelly Amann
• Courtney Cook

Release plans

The film’s world premiere is set for September 29, 2026 and is reportedly rolling out on VOD at launch. Specific U.S. platforms haven’t been announced yet; more details are expected closer to release.

World premiere: September 29, 2026.

Jason Franklin, played by Daniel Croix Henderson, is a serial killer. He has three confirmed on-screen victims — White House maid Jean, his father's mistress Denise Truesdale, and his own grandmother Maude — plus multiple failed attempts on his mother, First Lady Victoria.

His parents covered up the first killing, which set the pattern for everything after.

The confirmed victims

• Jean — the maid he spent all of season 1 harassing. He assaults and kills her in the finale and leaves her body under his bed, where it's found by another staffer.
• Denise Truesdale — Hunter's mistress. Jason decapitates her with a sword, which Hunter and Victoria later find in a chest in his bedroom.
• Maude — Victoria's mother, strangled. Her death is initially written off as a heart attack.
• Victoria — survived a chokehold in season 3 and a stabbing in the bunker in season 6. Still standing.

When Jason kills Jean, he tells her he didn't want it to happen again — the show's suggestion that the on-screen count isn't the full count.

Why nobody stops him

Because stopping him would require someone to admit what he's done. Victoria and Hunter disposed of Jean's body themselves rather than face a scandal, and Chief of Staff Donald Winthrop's solution was to relocate Jason to a monitored part of the residence.

He has since survived two suicide attempts, a coma, an assassination attempt ordered by his own mother, a stint hiding at a cult compound, and a period living under the name "Mike." Every institution around him has more to lose from exposure than from another body.

Why viewers root for him

They openly do, and the actor knows it. Daniel Croix told TVLine in 2021 that fans tweet at him hoping Jason will target characters they dislike:

"People actually root for him," Croix said.

He noted that some of them were specifically hoping Jason would get to Victoria — which, given the First Lady's own track record on the show, is less of a leap than it sounds.

Where he stands in season 7

Season 7 premiered on May 20, 2026, on BET and Paramount+, framed as the end of the Franklins' time in office. Jason enters it fresh out of surgery after the season 6 finale. Episode descriptions from BET have him triggering a White House manhunt after Trent's body is found, confronting residence supervisor Priscilla Owen, and prompting Victoria and Agent Isaac to handle the problem themselves.

Band of Brothers is about Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division — the "Screaming Eagles." The company was formed in July 1942 at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under 1st Lieutenant Herbert Sobel, with about 140 enlisted men and seven officers. Its regimental motto was "Currahee."

Why it's called "Easy"

Nothing to do with the job. "Easy" was simply the World War II phonetic alphabet's word for the letter E, the same way a later generation would say "Echo." E Company became Easy Company on the radio and stayed that way in print.

What the company did

Easy Company was in most of the campaigns that define the American experience in Northwest Europe:

• Normandy, June 1944 — the D-Day night drop, followed by the assault on a German artillery battery at Brécourt Manor, led by Lieutenant Dick Winters.
• Operation Market Garden, September 1944 — the airborne push into the Netherlands.
• Bastogne, December 1944 — the siege during the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes, without adequate winter gear.
• Germany and Austria, 1945 — the drive east, the discovery of a concentration camp near Landsberg, and the occupation of Berchtesgaden.

Where the story came from

Stephen Ambrose's 1992 book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. Ambrose interviewed the surviving veterans directly, and much of the miniseries' texture comes out of those conversations. He described the men plainly in the book:

"They were young, born since the Great War," Ambrose wrote in 1992.

The 2001 HBO adaptation was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, at a reported $125 million for ten episodes. Damian Lewis played Winters, who rose from platoon leader to company commander to executive officer and then commander of the 2nd Battalion — the battalion containing his old company.

Why Easy and not some other company

Partly accident. The 506th was one of several parachute regiments in the 101st Airborne, and Easy was one of nine rifle companies within it. Ambrose had access to Winters and to Sergeant Carwood Lipton, both meticulous record-keepers who were willing to talk at length. Had he interviewed Fox Company instead, a different set of names would be famous.

What about the companion series?

Different units entirely. The Pacific (2010) follows Marines of the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific theater. Masters of the Air (2024) covers the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, flying B-17s out of England.

For the record: Easy Company was deactivated after the war in 1945 and briefly reactivated in the 1950s as a training unit.

The designation still exists within the 101st Airborne — now an air assault division, with no parachutes involved.

My Life with the Walter Boys is filmed in Alberta, Canada, with Calgary as the production base across all three seasons. Silver Falls is fictional, and the version you see on screen is stitched together from six different regions of Alberta — ranch land, small towns, heritage sites, and mountain country, all within a few hours of Calgary.

Where Silver Falls actually is

The show doesn't rely on one location. It assembles a town:

• CL Ranch / CL Western Town & Backlot, near Bragg Creek — the Walter family ranch. It's a working property, and the cast learned to ride there.
• Chestermere High School — doubles as Silver Falls High.
• Cochrane — Fence & Post and the Cochrane RancheHouse supply the main-street look.
• Kananaskis Country — mountain, river, and wilderness backdrops, including the Elbow River Launch in season 1.
• Calgary proper — Girletz Rodeo Ranch, Heritage Park Historical Village, the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, Splitsville Glamorgan, the University of Calgary, and Foothills Athletic Park.
• High River — expanded use in season 3, which premiered on Netflix on August 6, 2026.

Why Alberta and not Colorado

Two reasons, in order of importance. Alberta is cheaper to shoot in, with Canadian production incentives and an established crew base — the same reason Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto absorb so much American television. And the geography cooperates: Calgary sits about three hours from the Montana border, with the Rockies, foothills, prairie, and badlands all reachable in a day. Colorado's look is available in Alberta at a discount.

When it was filmed

Season 1 shot from March to September 2022. Season 2 returned to the same base from July to November 2024, with expanded school and football sequences. Season 3 shifted more of its footprint south toward High River and the surrounding countryside.

Can you actually visit?

Most of it, yes. Bragg Creek, Cochrane, and Kananaskis Country are all open to the public and sit within an hour of Calgary. CL Ranch is a private working property and a functioning film backlot, so the ranch exterior isn't a walk-up attraction. Banff and Moraine Lake are close enough to fold into the same trip.

The books are set in Colorado too. Ali Novak's original novel started life on Wattpad, where it racked up tens of millions of reads before Netflix ever bought it — and before Alberta got the job of playing Colorado.

She left for a stage role. Scherzinger was cast as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd's West End revival of Sunset Boulevard, which opened in London on October 12, 2023 — the same window season 11 was filming in Los Angeles. Fox announced on September 13, 2023, that Rita Ora would take her chair. Scherzinger has sat out every season since.

She was blunt with People about the conflict:

"I had to actually choose between The Masked Singer season 11 and Sunset Boulevard," she said in 2023.

The role was worth it

Scherzinger won the 2024 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the West End run. The production transferred to Broadway in September 2024, and she won the 2025 Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. The Broadway run closed on July 13, 2025.

The seasons she's missed

What was framed as a one-season absence has now stretched to four:

• Season 11 (2024) — West End run of Sunset Boulevard. Rita Ora's first season.
• Season 12 (2024) — Broadway transfer prep, plus her Netflix series Building the Band.
• Season 13 (2025) — Ora returns again; Fox never announces a Scherzinger date.
• Season 14 (2026) — panel confirmed in October 2025 as Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg, Robin Thicke, and Ora, with Nick Cannon hosting.

Season 14 premiered in January 2026 and wrapped on April 1, with Ashlee Simpson unmasked as Galaxy Girl and Phillip Phillips as runner-up. Ora's fourth season on the panel is now longer than most panelists get anywhere.

Was she fired?

No. Fox has never said anything to that effect, and neither has anyone on the panel. Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg told Entertainment Weekly the cast was happy for her about the West End opportunity. The show's line has consistently been that Ora stepped in because of Scherzinger's schedule.

Is the door still open?

Officially, yes. Ora, of all people, keeps saying so — she told Collider in January 2026 that Scherzinger is always welcome and floated a joint appearance, complete with a portmanteau nickname for the two of them.

"I'd literally share my seat with her," Ora said.

For the record: with Sunset Boulevard closed since July 2025, the scheduling excuse expired more than a year ago. So far, no return has been announced.

Hibbert chose to leave. He announced it himself on social media on September 22, 2023, during the midseason break of season 6, saying he was moving on to other projects. His final episode was season 6, episode 8, "Who Shot Ya," which closed out the first half of the 16-episode season. No firing, no reported conflict, no statement from Showtime contradicting his.

His post was straightforward about it:

"It is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to my castmates," Hibbert wrote in September 2023.

How Kevin was written out

The writers gave him a clean landing. Kevin graduates high school alongside Jake and Papa, gets a job offer in the video game industry, and moves to Los Angeles. At his going-away party he tells everyone that Chicago made him who he is. Then he goes. It's one of the few exits in the show's run that didn't involve a body, a betrayal, or a cliffhanger.

The exits that did come with drama

The contrast is the whole reason people asked questions in the first place. Over eight seasons, The Chi lost cast members under considerably messier circumstances:

• Jason Mitchell (Brandon) — fired in 2019 after misconduct complaints tied to the sets of The Chi and the film Desperados.
• Tiffany Boone (Jerrika) — exited after season 2; Essence reported she had raised concerns about Mitchell's behavior on set.
• Yolonda Ross (Jada) — written out in the season 7 finale after seven seasons. She told TVLine the timing caught her off guard.
• Lynn Whitfield (Alicia) — killed off at the end of season 7, her body found by Victor and Shaad in the closing shot.

Did he ever come back?

No. Hibbert didn't appear in seasons 7 or 8, and Kevin was never brought back for a guest spot, despite fans campaigning for one right up to the finale. The character's departure was left exactly as written: he's in LA, doing fine.

What Hibbert did next

He had Story Ave and Good Burger 2 already lined up when he announced the exit, both released in 2023. He'd also appeared in Black Panther in 2018, during the show's first season.

For the record: The Chi ran eight seasons, ending with "The Last Dance" on July 24, 2026.

That ties it with Dexter, Homeland, and Weeds among Showtime's longest-running series — only Shameless, at 11 seasons, went further.

George's longest and most famous real job is Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees, which he holds from May 1994 (season 5's "The Opposite") through 1997. He finishes the series at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. His invented job — repeated for nine seasons and never once true — is architect.

Every job he actually had

• Real estate agent at Rick Barr Properties (seasons 1–2) — his baseline, established before the show made unemployment his default state. He quits in a huff, then tries to show up Monday as if nothing happened.
• Reader at Pendant Publishing (season 3) — Elaine gets him the interview. He's fired after being caught with the cleaning woman on his office desk.
• Sitcom co-writer (season 4) — he and Jerry pitch and write the NBC pilot Jerry. It gets made, then gets killed.
• Sanalac, rest stop supplies (season 5) — he's never formally hired. He just starts showing up.
• New York Yankees (seasons 5–8) — the "do the opposite" job, working for George Steinbrenner.
• Play Now (season 9) — a sporting goods company. He fakes a disability for the private bathroom, gets caught, and the whole thing lasts about two weeks.
• Kruger Industrial Smoothing (season 9) — a firm so indifferent that George has to work harder than usual to cover for his boss.

Plus one week selling computers out of Frank's garage for Costanza and Son, which Kramer destroys.

The job he made up

The architect thing starts in season 1's "The Stake Out," where George brainstorms cover stories with Jerry and lands on pretending to be an architect. He's still at it in season 6's "The Race," working the same detail:

"Have you seen the new addition to the Guggenheim? … And it didn't take very long, either."

By season 8's "The Van Buren Boys," he's blocking a scholarship because the kid switched his ambition from architect to city planner — nothing, George insists, is higher than an architect.

What about Art Vandelay?

Common mix-up. Vandelay is the alias, invented in that same season 1 episode as a lunch date with an importer-exporter. He later becomes a latex manufacturer at Vandelay Industries, the fake employer George uses to keep his unemployment checks coming — the scheme that requires Kramer to answer Jerry's phone and fails in spectacular fashion. Strictly speaking, Art is the importer-exporter. The architect claim George makes as himself.

Boyce died in his sleep after a seizure. The cause was SUDEP — sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, a complication that kills roughly 1 in 1,000 people with epilepsy each year, per CDC figures. He had been diagnosed with epilepsy and was on medication. His family has said they had never encountered the term before it appeared on his death certificate.

Who he was before that

He started young and worked steadily:

• Eagle Eye (2008) and Grown Ups (2010) — early film roles, the latter opposite Adam Sandler, who he'd work with again in the 2013 sequel.
• Jessie (2011–2015) — four seasons as Luke Ross on the Disney Channel sitcom that made him famous.
• Descendants (2015, 2017, 2019) — Carlos, son of Cruella de Vil, across all three films.
• Mrs. Fletcher (2019) — a series regular turn on the HBO comedy, which aired that fall.
• Runt and Paradise City — both finished before his death, released posthumously.

He also raised more than $30,000 for the Thirst Project, funding two wells in Eswatini, and received the organization's Pioneering Spirit Award in 2019.

What his family did next

Libby and Victor Boyce established The Cameron Boyce Foundation in July 2019. Their son had already been setting up a philanthropic vehicle for causes he cared about; his parents added epilepsy to its focus.

In November 2019 the foundation partnered with the Epilepsy Foundation on K(NO)W SUDEP NOW, a public awareness campaign built around a PSA featuring Boyce's parents and friends.

It later teamed with CURE Epilepsy to fund the Cameron Boyce SUDEP Research Award — a $250,000 grant that went to Dr. David Auerbach at SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2022, studying cardiac markers that might flag which patients are at risk.

On August 4, 2026, CURE Epilepsy announced that The Cameron Boyce Foundation is merging into its organization. Susan Axelrod, CURE's founder, said meeting Libby Boyce convinced her the family would become a force for change.

How Disney handled it

Descendants 3 premiered on August 2, 2019, four weeks after his death. Disney canceled the red carpet and aired a tribute video after the broadcast. Five years later, Descendants: The Rise of Red put a framed portrait of Carlos on Uma's office wall, with a line about opening Auradon to Wonderland: it's what Carlos would have wanted.

Runt premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in September 2021, two years after his death, with his castmates handling the press.

Ziva returns in the final seconds of season 16, episode 24, "Daughters," which aired May 21, 2019. She then appears in four episodes of season 17: the two-part premiere in September 2019, and episodes 10 and 11, which aired December 17, 2019 and January 7, 2020.

The setup started in February

CBS ran a Super Bowl LIII spot on February 3, 2019, promising the biggest NCIS secret of all was about to be revealed. Nine days later came season 16, episode 13, "She," watched by 13.37 million people.

In it, Bishop works a ten-year-old cold case and discovers Ziva never dropped it — she'd rented a secret office and kept journals on cases she pursued off the books. When Bishop goes to read a victim's letter to the kidnapper, he tells her a woman already did it, and promised to haunt his dreams. Bishop returns to the office and finds a note under a scarf:

"Eleanor Bishop, For the safety of my family, Please keep my secret."

Three months of mentions followed before the finale paid it off.

How they hid it

The scene wasn't in any script. Only showrunners Frank Cardea and Steven D. Binder knew. De Pablo came through a back gate more than an hour after the regular crew had wrapped, and filmed it after midnight with a skeleton crew. Diona Reasonover, who plays Kasie, has said she found out watching the broadcast like everyone else.

Ziva's first line: no time for pleasantries, Gibbs is in danger. His only response is her name.

Why she left in the first place

De Pablo rarely discusses it, but she explained the decision at a 2016 Babson College appearance, saying she walked because of politics and scripts that weren't good enough — and that the plan for Ziva was to send her back to Israel and make her miserable. She's said she wouldn't return until someone wrote something worth returning for.

Where the story went next

Season 17 gave Ziva a proper exit rather than a reunion: she finishes what she started and heads to Paris to reunite with Tony and Tali. That thread became its own show. NCIS: Tony & Ziva premiered on Paramount+ on September 4, 2025, with de Pablo opposite Michael Weatherly, and its first season is complete.

Fun bit of trivia: de Pablo has said the cast stood and applauded when she walked back onto the set.

Kayce's Montana unit has four other members: Pete Calvin, Belle Skinner, Andrea Cruz, and Miles Kittle. Calvin runs it. He's also Kayce's former commanding officer from their Navy SEAL days, which is how Kayce got the job in the first place — Calvin offered it to him after Monica's death.

The unit, member by member

• Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) — head of the Montana unit, called "Cal" by the team. Kayce's old SEAL team leader, and the one who recruited him.
• Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel) — undercover specialist and former ATF agent. Wife and mother, and cagey about her own history.
• Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos) — Bronx-born and combative, willing to confront Kayce about the Dutton family's record and to work around her boss when it suits her.
• Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means) — the youngest of the group, a Marine Corps veteran and former Broken Rock Reservation officer with deep ties on the rez.

Above all of them sits Harry Gifford (Brett Cullen), head of Montana's U.S. Marshals division and a cabinet member, who is not thrilled about a Dutton joining the payroll.

Who carried over from Yellowstone

Three familiar faces: Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo, and Brecken Merrill as a now-teenage Tate Dutton. The ranch was sold to Broken Rock, which keeps Kayce and Rainwater in the same rooms. Kelsey Asbille does not return — the premiere establishes that Monica died of cancer in the gap between the two shows.

Who made it

Not Taylor Sheridan, at least not as writer. Marshals was created by Spencer Hudnut, previously showrunner of SEAL Team, making it the first Yellowstone spinoff Sheridan didn't write; he's an executive producer. It's also the franchise's first broadcast network series.

Did it work?

Numbers say yes. The March 1, 2026 premiere pulled 20.6 million multiplatform viewers within a week — CBS's most-watched original series premiere without a football lead-in since Young Sheldon in 2017, and its most-streamed episode ever on Paramount+.

CBS renewed it on March 12, after two episodes had aired.

Season 1 ran 13 episodes and finished May 24, 2026. Season 2 premieres October 4, 2026 at 8:30/7:30c before settling back into the Sunday 8/7c slot.

Gatto announced his exit on December 31, 2021, citing "some issues" in his personal life — specifically his separation from his wife, Bessy Gatto. He said he needed to focus on co-parenting their two kids. There was no firing, no falling-out with Sal Vulcano, Brian "Q" Quinn, or James "Murr" Murray, and no network decision involved.

What he actually wrote

The post was direct about both the reason and the lack of hard feelings toward the other three:

"Alongside my friends, I've devoted a decade of my life to building this franchise and couldn't be prouder of what has been accomplished. However, due to some issues in my personal life, I have to step away," Gatto wrote on social media in December 2021.

He thanked his co-stars, said he was confident in where they'd take the show, and hinted at future projects.

The part most fans missed

Gatto and Bessy reconciled. In September 2023 he posted about the two of them working through it, and they later marked their eleventh anniversary. The reason he left ended up resolved — but he still hasn't gone back.

Is he coming back?

He's ruled out guest spots. Speaking to TheWrap in January 2025, around the release of his Hulu stand-up special Messing with People, he was blunt about it:

"I've moved on from the show, the show has moved on from me."

He added that he and the others are still friends, just not work friends anymore, and that after 300 episodes he'd told all the jokes he wanted to tell. The one exception he'll entertain is a series finale — he's said he'd love to help close the thing out whenever it ends.

What he's doing instead

• Stand-up — solo theater tours including Night of Comedy and Let's Get Into It, plus the 2025 Hulu special.
• Podcasting — co-hosts Two Cool Moms with Steve Byrne on the iHeart network.
• Dog rescue — runs the nonprofit Gatto Pups and Friends on Long Island, focused on senior and unwanted dogs.
• Books — published a children's book, Where's Bearry?, based on his son losing a stuffed bear at bedtime.

The show, for its part, kept going. Season 10 replaced the fourth chair with rotating celebrity guests, and Impractical Jokers moved from truTV to TBS along the way. Four became three, plus whoever showed up that week.

As Marvel lines up heroes for its looming Doctor Doom showdown in Avengers: Doomsday, one name keeps not showing up: Don Cheadle’s War Machine. Early chatter and roundups of characters expected to join the fight have left Rhodey off the board, and Cheadle hasn’t been announced for the movie’s cast.

• Captain America
• Thor
• Bucky Barnes
• Magneto
• Mystique
• Cyclops

Those are among the heavy hitters being floated for the Doom battle, but Rhodey isn’t on the lists so far. With no War Machine mention and no Cheadle casting, the character’s return in Doomsday looks uncertain for now.

That Skrull twist

Rhodey’s last on-screen chapter didn’t make things simpler. In Secret Invasion on Disney+, Nick Fury discovered that “Rhodey” wasn’t Rhodey at all — a Skrull had replaced him, raising a big question: how long had the real Colonel James Rupert Rhodes been off the board? The reveal sent fans back through earlier MCU appearances, trying to pinpoint when the switch happened.

We needed to have a character that one would not expect to be a Skrull.

That’s how Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige explained the choice, in comments to Marvel.com, framing the twist as a deliberate shock.

Whatever happened to Armor Wars?

Rhodey’s solo project, Armor Wars, was first announced during Disney’s 2020 Investor Day as a six-episode Disney+ series built around what happens when Tony Stark’s tech falls into the wrong hands. Cheadle was set to return, and he’s said Secret Invasion could help set up that story.

The plan later shifted: Armor Wars was reworked into a theatrical film. Since then, it hasn’t landed a release window and has lingered in development, which only adds to the open question of when — and where — War Machine will suit up next.

For now, Marvel hasn’t announced Cheadle for Avengers: Doomsday, and Armor Wars has no release date.

Five years, a mother–son team, and a pile of second-hand equipment — that’s the bare-bones origin story behind Niu Lai, the Chinese indie cartoon suddenly all over American feeds. Director Xin Yumeng built the 86-minute film with his mother, Sun Lifang, on what’s been reported as a microscopic budget of roughly $200, then watched clips of its janky 3D cow flood social media once people discovered it.

The movie slipped into Chinese theaters on August 5 with little fanfare and almost no marketing, pulling in only about 10,000 yuan in its first 10 days; some days reportedly scraped by with around 200 yuan. Then came the memes: viewers posted snippets of its stiff animation and off-kilter voice work, and curiosity took over as crowds started buying tickets just to see the oddity everyone was roasting.

That online wave turned a near-invisible release into a box-office oddball. Niu Lai has now grossed more than $3 million in China, a runaway return that’s led some to call it the most profitable movie ever made — not because the total is huge, but because the costs were almost nonexistent for a feature created by a tiny independent outfit.

What’s in the movie

Translated as “The Cow Is Coming,” the film follows a young calf who drifts into a surreal dream world, confronting courage, responsibility, life, and death. On paper it’s a fable; online, it’s famous for its rudimentary 3D animation, awkward character movement, and line readings so strange people couldn’t believe the film actually played in theaters. It’s produced by Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media.

The fascination has jumped borders even without a U.S. release plan announced. As one viewer summed up the mood on X after the clips started circulating:

all I think about is I need to watch Niu Lai as soon as possible

(tweeted by @Jacobsmallzz on August 19, 2026)

By the numbers

• Runtime: 86 minutes
• China release: August 5, 2026
• Early box office: ~10,000 yuan in the first 10 days; some days reportedly ~200 yuan
• Current gross: more than $3 million (China)
• Budget: roughly $200
• Production: more than five years of work by director Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang, using second-hand gear

A cranky surgeon washed up on the Maine coast with a brand-new fear of blood is the starting point for Best Medicine, and the show leans into the clash right away. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a Harvard-trained vascular star who flames out in Boston after a sudden blood phobia and lands back in the small town where he spent childhood summers. He’s brilliant, blunt, and allergic to small talk — not ideal when your waiting room is full of neighbors who all know each other’s business.

The town won’t let him brood in peace. Abigail Spencer turns up the heat as Louisa Gavin, a sharp schoolteacher who challenges Martin at every turn and quietly becomes the one person who can get through to him. That dynamic gets messier thanks to Josh Segarra as Sheriff Mark Mylow — warm-hearted, not always eagle-eyed — who also happens to be Louisa’s ex-fiancé, a wrinkle that colors nearly every scene they share with the new doctor.

The clinic itself is barely held together by Cree as Elaine Denton, Martin’s tech-savvy, chronically online assistant who dreams of going viral while keeping the exam rooms running. She’s exasperated, ambitious and, somehow, fiercely loyal to a boss who gives out praise like it’s a controlled substance.

Family pulls at Martin from another direction via Annie Potts as Aunt Sarah, a no-nonsense lobsterwoman who still heads out on the water every day. She’s the show’s steady pulse — blunt, dryly funny, and the keeper of family history Martin would rather leave buried.

Beyond the clinic, the town’s heartbeat runs through The Salty Breeze, the beloved seafood joint co-owned by Stephen Spinella and Jason Veasey as husbands Greg Garrison and George Brady. Trouble — or at least colorful chaos — tends to arrive with the Large family: John DiMaggio is Bert, a gruff handyman who keeps crashing into Martin’s cases, and Carter Shimp is Al, the son who somehow finds the same scrapes his dad does. Meanwhile, order (or opinions about it) comes courtesy of Clea Lewis as pharmacist Sally Mylow and Didi Conn as councilwoman Geneva Potter, both fixtures in a town where nobody is shy about telling the doctor how to do his job.

Original Doc Martin star Martin Clunes appears here as Dr. Robert Best — the new doctor’s father.

That full-circle casting is a sly wink to fans of the British original. Clunes plays Robert as a headstrong gastroenterologist whose visit forces Martin to drop his defenses and confront a past he’s sidestepped for years — a sharp, dry counterpoint to Charles that threads through the season.

Who plays who

• Josh Charles — Dr. Martin Best, a Harvard-trained vascular surgeon sidelined by a sudden blood phobia
• Abigail Spencer — Louisa Gavin, a quick-witted schoolteacher and Martin’s most persistent foil
• Josh Segarra — Sheriff Mark Mylow, warm-hearted lawman and Louisa’s former fiancé
• Cree — Elaine Denton, Martin’s ambitious, internet-obsessed clinic assistant
• Annie Potts — Aunt Sarah, a working lobsterwoman with family secrets
• Stephen Spinella — Greg Garrison, co-owner of The Salty Breeze
• Jason Veasey — George Brady, Greg’s husband and co-owner of The Salty Breeze
• John DiMaggio — Bert Large, blunt local handyman
• Carter Shimp — Al, Bert’s son and frequent trouble magnet
• Clea Lewis — Sally Mylow, the town pharmacist
• Didi Conn — Geneva Potter, a councilwoman with very firm opinions
• Martin Clunes — Dr. Robert Best, Martin’s headstrong gastroenterologist father

The series borrows the bones of Doc Martin’s fish-out-of-water setup, but this Maine reset — and this ensemble — give it a distinctly American tide. Clunes’ father-son showdown with Charles rolls out across the season on Netflix.

These weren’t blink-and-you-miss-’em walk-ons. When How I Met Your Mother brought in ringers, the show rewired whole episodes around them — from surreal magazine-cover pep talks to an R&B slow jam about a slap. Here are the cameos fans still talk about, and the very specific reasons each one crushed.

The 10 cameos, ranked

• 10) Heidi Klum — herself (The Yips, Season 3, Episode 10)
  Barney loses his swagger to “the yips,” and the gang winds up at the Victoria’s Secret After Party, where Klum calmly hands him the exact confidence reset he needs. The supermodel’s serene, self-aware turn turned a midseason episode into late-2000s TV glamour, a quick hit that felt like an event.
• 9) Lucy Hale — Katie Scherbatsky (First Time in New York, S2E12; Vesuvius, S9E19)
  As Robin’s wide-eyed kid sister, Hale sparks big-sis panic and unlocks fresh layers of the Scherbatsky family. The chemistry with Cobie Smulders sold Katie as more than a stunt; her return for Robin’s wedding in Season 9 lands like a proper family reunion.
• 8) Martin Short — Garrison Cootes (The Naked Truth, S7E1; recurring)
  Short detonates every scene as Marshall’s apocalyptic-tinged environmental-law boss, pinballing from doomsday to giddy pep in a heartbeat. His unhinged office rants, plus a hilariously intense mentor vibe with Marshall, made a quick recurring stint feel monumental.
• 7) Kim Kardashian — herself (Benefits, Season 4, Episode 12)
  Marshall’s workplace bathroom anxiety hits a tabloid wall — literally — as Kardashian talks to him from the cover of Weekly Style with a bizarrely earnest pep talk about self-worth and bodily functions. The fourth-wall break is pure late-2000s absurdism, with Kardashian completely in on the joke.
• 6) Mike Tyson — himself (Bad Crazy, Season 8, Episode 16)
  Robin’s chaotic night out turns into an A-list babysitting saga when the former heavyweight champ helps care for baby Marvin in a West Side convenience store. The contrast — fearsome boxer turned tender, deeply invested coo-er — is comedy gold, and Robin treating him like a slightly eccentric sitter somehow makes it even funnier.
• 5) Jennifer Lopez — Anita Appleby (Of Course, Season 5, Episode 17)
  Barney meets a buzzsaw. Lopez plays a razor-sharp relationship author who uses her playbook, Of Course You’re Still Single, to train him like a misbehaving puppy and flip every one of his moves back on him. Watching Barney cave and agree to a real date is deliciously satisfying.
• 4) Will Forte — Randy Wharmphtess (Season 3; Natural History, S6E8)
  Forte turns pathetic into iconic as Barney’s panicky GNB colleague: instant nosebleeds around women, a home-brew obsession he proudly yells “Wharmphtess!,” and hopeless attempts to master Barney’s pickup playbook. Fans loved him so much that his Season 6 comeback played like a victory lap.
• 3) Boyz II Men — themselves (Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra, Season 9, Episode 14)
  After Marshall delivers an epic, daylight, slow-motion slap, the R&B legends glide in wearing all white and sing the most soulful roast in sitcom history.

“You Just Got Slapped.”

• 2) Katy Perry — Honey (Oh Honey, Season 6, Episode 15)
  At the peak of her pop superstardom, Perry fearlessly plays Zoey’s catastrophically gullible cousin — so naive the gang can only sigh, “Oh, Honey.” From trusting her “sweet” landlord to oversharing personal info, the bit became instant viewer vocabulary.
• 1) Britney Spears — Abby (Ten Sessions, S3E13; Everything Must Go, S3E19)
  Spears’ chaotic receptionist at Stella’s dermatology clinic crashes into the gang with a shrieked “I’m Abby!,” a revenge pact with Barney to needle Ted, and a whirlwind of lovelorn dramatics — including frantically dropped sweaters. Beyond the laughs, her episodes drew a ratings surge that reportedly helped pull the show back from early cancellation and gave Season 3 real momentum.

The first page doesn’t ease you in: the Greeks wheel out a Trojan Godzilla, and from there it’s gods hurling kaiju at each other while Odysseus tries to get home in one piece. Poseidon floods the map with monsters; Zeus counters with his secret weapon — Godzilla, nicknamed the “Hammer of Zeus” — who stomps in at key moments instead of running the whole show.

That’s the setup for Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre Presents: Godzilla’s The Odyssey, a 48-page oversized one-shot from IDW written by Frank Tieri with art by Ilias Kyriazis. It’s the second entry in the publisher’s “Monsterpiece Theatre” line after a Romeo & Juliet mash-up, and it vaults the King of the Monsters into Homer’s greatest hits without throwing out the bones of the classic.

The one-shot arrived June 10, 2026.

Greek myth, kaiju scale

Tieri keeps the main itinerary of The Odyssey intact — the war-weary hero, the divine grudges, the perilous detours — but every stop now plays at kaiju size. Familiar set pieces get monster-movie remixes, from that Trojan Godzilla opener to island encounters that end in ship-splintering brawls. By the finish, Odysseus even dedicates a temple in honor of Zeus’s “hammer,” paying tribute to the unlikely ally who occasionally tilts the odds.

It’s also a full Toho roster roll call, with classic beasts slotted into mythic roles and cameos layered throughout:

• Gigan — the Cyclops/Polyphemus stand-in
• King Ghidorah — recast as Scylla
• Titanosaurus — taking the place of Charybdis
• Rodan, Biollante, Destoroyah, Hedorah, Manda, Shockirus, King Caesar, SpaceGodzilla — appearing along the journey
• Mothra — a tapestry cameo

Kyriazis leans into the ancient-world grandeur — stone, sea and storm — while still letting the big swings land, so the battered ships and temple colonnades feel as imposing as the monsters flattening them.

Bonus trip to Sherwood

The issue also tucks in a backup by Tom Scioli, “Robin Hood and the Monster of Nottingham,” which shifts the gag to medieval England. Robin and the Sheriff end up managing kaiju chaos in Sherwood — a forest fire here, a dam there — a lighter, quick-hit companion to the Grecian main feature.

Early reactions have highlighted how cleanly the mash-up reads for newcomers while still feeling like The Odyssey, only louder — with Kyriazis’s textured art doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And if you’ve been tracking Christopher Nolan’s upcoming live-action take on Homer, IDW’s one-shot lands as a gleefully unorthodox counterprogramming note.

Godzilla’s The Odyssey is part spectacle, part literature-class prank, and all kaiju — packed into a single oversized issue from IDW.

On the father–daughter Instagram account Sign or Decline, a former music publisher listened to “End of Beginning” blind — no artist name, just the track — and said he would’ve signed it on the spot. Only after he vouched for the song did his daughter reveal the singer: Joe Keery, a.k.a. Steve Harrington from Stranger Things.

“But it's such a pity that it needed Stranger Things exposure to become successful because it's such a good song,” he said.

The song’s path backs up that frustration. Released in 2022 under Keery’s music alias Djo, “End of Beginning” barely registered at first. It caught fire much later — going viral in 2024 and spreading as fans clocked that the voice behind the melancholic earworm belonged to Hawkins’ most overqualified babysitter.

Why the slow burn

Part of the delay may be simple name confusion. Keery has kept his acting and music lanes separate, putting out records as Djo rather than under his own name. Plenty of early listeners loved the track without realizing who was singing it; once they did, streams snowballed.

By 2026, “End of Beginning” had surpassed 2 billion streams, a monster total that, at one point, even nudged the track ahead of Taylor Swift on Spotify’s global chart. The milestone arrived as Stranger Things was nearing its final chapter — a neat bit of timing for a song about closing one era and starting another. Keery actually wrote it years earlier, after finishing school in Chicago and just before he landed Steve Harrington.

Keery’s path as Djo

Before the solo run, Keery co-founded the Chicago psych-rock outfit Post Animal, playing drums, guitar and singing on their records before stepping away in 2018 as his acting career accelerated. As Djo, he’s built a steady catalog that explains why “End of Beginning” didn’t arrive out of nowhere.

• 2019 — Single: “Roddy” (self-released) under the name Djo
• 2019 — Debut album: Twenty Twenty
• 2022 — Second album: Decide (features “End of Beginning”)
• 2025 — Third album: The Crux (scored a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Album Cover)

However you found it — through Stranger Things or not — “End of Beginning” is now the song that broke Djo wide open, long after its quiet 2022 release.

On the SmartLess podcast, Tim Robbins dug into what it’s like to work for Clint Eastwood — and how fast an Eastwood set can move. Robbins said scenes often went down once, maybe twice, and that pace shaped the entire day.

“We had like 6 hour days, 7 hours day. Most of the time, we were out by lunch. Because we would do one take,” said Tim Robbins on the SmartLess podcast.

That one-and-done mindset put the emphasis on showing up prepared and trusting the performance. Robbins contrasted it with productions that grind through 12- or 16-hour marathons, describing Eastwood’s shoots as focused but relaxed — no endless rehearsals, no fuss.

He felt it most on Mystic River (2003), where he played Dave Boyle and won an Oscar. Robbins has said the short days didn’t just keep morale up; they let people actually have a life while making a major studio movie.

His prison advocacy, before the movies

Robbins also pushed back on the idea that his activism around incarceration started with directing Dead Man Walking. He told SmartLess his awareness went back to his youth.

“I was kind of aware of it growing up. I had friends that went to jail,”

He added that his formal involvement began after his breakthrough in Bull Durham, when he started working with prison organizations in New York — years before his two most famous prison-centered films.

“But, and then I did some work with some prison organizations back in New York when I first, you know, after Bull Durham. But then I did Shawshank (The Shawshank Redemption) and then Dead Man Walking,” he said on the SmartLess podcast.

So the timeline runs like this: early awareness, post–Bull Durham advocacy — and then the screen work that made those issues part of his film legacy, from The Shawshank Redemption to Dead Man Walking.

At a private gathering in Utah this month, Post Malone got down on one knee and asked Christy Lee to marry him, according to photos and videos shared by guests. The posts show Lee wearing a “Bride to Be” sash and the rapper-singer presenting a 15-carat diamond ring as friends who’d flown in for the occasion cheered and filmed the moment.

“my mom and dad got engaged”

Lee, a fashion stylist and Parsons School of Design student, and Malone have kept things mostly low-key while building their relationship back up over the past year — a reset that followed a fast start, a brief split, and then a quieter second try.

The Christy Lee timeline

• January 2025 — First spotted together during a cozy getaway in Rome.
• Winter 2025 — Seen hanging out at a venue in Idaho and on high-end shopping dates in Paris.
• March 2025 — Viral clips capture the pair showing affection on casual nights out.
• May 2025 — They briefly split to slow things down; the “temporary breakup” makes the rounds online.
• Late 2025–Early 2026 — They reconnect and keep it private, focusing on low-profile outings.
• February 2026 — Make a low-key joint appearance at a fashion show.
• August 2026 — Malone proposes in Utah with a 15-carat ring at an intimate gathering, per attendee posts.

Before Lee

Malone previously spent several years with ex-fiancée Hee Sung “Jamie” Park. He first proposed during a wild night out in Las Vegas — she turned him down — and then asked again, sober, earning a yes. The couple retreated to a private life in Utah, and their daughter arrived in May 2022. In rare interviews, Malone praised Park’s parenting and credited her stability with helping him through struggles with alcohol.

They reportedly called off their engagement and finalized a quiet separation by November 2024, and worked through private court proceedings to settle custody and visitation for their child.

Paris just turned into a ’60s caper. On-set photos shared by Entertainment Tonight show Margot Robbie in Audrey Hepburn–style tailoring and a wide-brimmed hat, while Monica Barbaro works a striking teal pencil-skirt suit. Bradley Cooper was spotted directing between takes — and acting — as production on the untitled Ocean’s prequel gets underway.

This one digs straight into the Ocean family tree: the story is set in 1962 and centers on Danny Ocean’s parents, played by Robbie and Cooper, as they line up a high-end heist timed to the Monaco Grand Prix. The plot moves across Paris, Nice and Monaco, trading Vegas neon for Riviera gloss.

Set in 1962 and staged around the Monaco Grand Prix.

The ensemble around Robbie and Cooper is stacked with international names. So far, the cast includes:

• Monica Barbaro
• Wagner Moura
• Omar Sy
• Josh Gad
• Vicky Krieps
• George MacKay
• Lauren Ridloff
• Jack Holden

ET’s first look pegs the movie as a period heist with couture-level costuming and old-school accessories to match the Riviera setting. It’s the first time the franchise has stepped back to track how the Ocean legacy started.

Back to the beginning

Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s Eleven updated the Rat Pack classic with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy García, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Carl Reiner and Qin Shaobo pulling a three-casino Vegas job. The remake hauled in about $450.7 million worldwide and spun off Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen and 2018’s Ocean’s 8.

Separate from the prequel, a new sequel with George Clooney has been discussed, with reports suggesting it could reunite him with Pitt, Damon and Roberts. For now, though, the cameras are rolling on the prequel in Paris, with the caper unfolding across Paris, Nice and Monaco.

On the cheery kids’ show It’s Buddy, a bright-orange mascot coaxes children to play by his rules — until anyone breaks them. In Buddy, that smiley TV world curdles fast: a child vanishes, the set’s make-believe turns predatory, and the kids trapped inside Buddy’s realm race for a rumored safe zone called Diamond City. Cristin Milioti plays Grace, a woman who becomes fixated on the program and gets drawn into its warped logic.

Who’s in it

• Keegan-Michael Key — voice of Buddy, the mascot
• Cristin Milioti — Grace
• Topher Grace — Grace’s husband

Directed by Casper Kelly, the movie mixes slasher mayhem with dark-comedy bite. It first screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kelly said he and Key worked to give the deceptively sunny mascot a voice that can snap from gentle to menacing in a breath.

“[Key] can do so many voices. He was great in giving me a lot of options of very nice or one a little bit irritated, one a lot irritated, so in the edit, we had a lot of flexibility,” he told People.

Release plans

August 28, 2026 is opening day for Buddy, and it will be in theaters only at first. There’s no digital or streaming date announced yet.

The offsite starts with icebreakers and ropes courses. Then word gets around: layoffs might be coming. Suddenly, the supposedly wholesome retreat for employees of Tío Mochales — a onetime cheese powerhouse that’s lost its shine — turns into a survival match, with coworkers jockeying to keep their jobs in Go Team!, a Spanish workplace comedy where trust falls give way to backstabbing.

The movie leans into the chaos of corporate anxiety: once “team-building” becomes “every person for themselves,” rivalries harden, alliances shift, and pettiness turns brutal. It’s played for laughs, but the stakes feel very real to the folks stuck on that bus.

Who’s in the cast

• Alexandra Jiménez — Olga (Los Serrano, The Innocent, 53 domingos)
• Maribel Verdú — Pepa (Pan’s Labyrinth, Snow White, Abracadabra, Elite)
• Pedro Casablanc — Domingo (Under the Rose, Black Widow, Salvador)
• Raúl Tejón — Marco (Alpha Males, The Girl in the Mirror, Amar en tiempos revueltos, Vis a vis, La verdad)
• Blanca Martínez — Laura (Breathless, In Love All Over Again)

Also in the mix: Ismael Fritschi and Víctor Rebull. And keep an eye out — household names Saturnino García and Pepe Viyuela could pop in for surprise appearances.

Go Team! is scheduled to be released on September 11, 2026.

It’s a Spanish production, with U.S. release details still to come. When those plans firm up — platform, theaters, or both — we’ll know where American audiences can watch coworkers go to (office) war.

Marvel used D23 to lock in the core team for its new X-Men movie and plant a flag on the calendar, but the franchise’s most complicated villain is still unclaimed. The studio confirmed Adam Driver as Mister Sinister while leaving Magneto — Erik Lehnsherr himself — for another day.

• Sadie Sink
• Kit Connor
• Christopher Abbott
• Samara Weaving
• Inde Navarrette
• Maya Boyd
• Adam Driver — Mister Sinister

X-Men is slated to hit theaters May 5, 2028.

Where Magneto stands

Into that vacuum steps a fresh round of rumor: the X account Main Middle Man claimed Matt Smith has been in talks to play Magneto. According to that account, discussions have happened but haven’t moved forward, and nothing is signed. Earlier chatter had linked Smith to Mister Sinister — a role that now belongs to Driver after the D23 reveal.

Smith’s name has circled Marvel before. He was reportedly in active negotiations to play Reed Richards in Fantastic Four before the part went to Pedro Pascal. He also dipped a toe in Marvel-adjacent waters with Sony’s Morbius.

The Magneto short list

Smith isn’t the only name buzzing online. Fan-favorite candidates who keep popping up in speculation include:

• Lee Pace
• Jensen Ackles
• Bill Skarsgård
• Henry Cavill

None of those possibilities have been acknowledged by Marvel, but they’ve all drawn enthusiastic responses across social media as the studio zeroes in on its new Master of Magnetism.

Why Smith fits the helmet

As Daemon Targaryen on House of the Dragon, Smith turns stillness into threat — the kind of restrained authority Magneto demands. He’s comfortable living in moral gray zones too, a key to making Erik Lehnsherr’s hardline worldview feel rooted in trauma and conviction rather than cartoon villainy.

Marvel has not announced a Magneto casting or timeline for that reveal. For now, the confirmed ensemble is set, and X-Men is dated for May 5, 2028.

Glenn Strange, who played Sam, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1972 and worked until he physically couldn't. He died on September 20, 1973, at age 74. Five Gunsmoke episodes he'd already filmed were still in the pipeline, so Sam kept appearing on CBS for another two months. His last one aired November 26, 1973.

How Strange got the job in the first place

He wasn't cast as a regular. Strange visited the Gunsmoke set with James Arness — Arness had asked him when he was going to do an episode, saying he liked working with big guys — and Strange asked the producer for something small. He first showed up in 1960 as a Long Branch customer and a cowboy in two separate season 6 episodes, then took over Sam in season 7.

"I thought it was only going to be a day's work," Strange told The Mason Telegraph in 1969.

By then he was starting his ninth year behind the bar.

The timeline

• 1972 — Strange is diagnosed with lung cancer at 73 and keeps filming through treatment.
• Early 1973 — his appearances thin out; he steps away with several episodes already shot.
• September 20, 1973 — Strange dies in Los Angeles. Western singer Eddie Dean performs at his funeral.
• September–November 1973 — five completed episodes air, Sam still tending bar.
• November 26, 1973 — "The Hanging of Newly O'Brien," season 19, episode 11. Sam's last scene closes the episode.

Did anyone replace him?

Yes, quietly. Robert Brubaker moved behind the Long Branch bar as a new character called Floyd for the show's final season, which ran September 1974 to March 1975. Brubaker had been on Gunsmoke since 1957 as stagecoach driver Jim Buck, making him the only actor to hold two recurring roles across the series' twenty seasons. Season 20 also swapped Amanda Blake's Miss Kitty for Fran Ryan as saloon owner Hannah.

Was Sam ever written out?

No. The character simply stops turning up. Dodge City acquired a different bartender and the show moved on.

For the record: before he was the friendliest man in Dodge, Strange played Frankenstein's monster in three Universal pictures — House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

Makeup artist Jack Pierce picked him for it after noticing his face and his 6-foot-4 frame while making him up for a different movie entirely.

Two of the three families are legally related to each other. Season 1 premiered April 17, 2025; season 2 dropped all eight episodes on July 23, 2026.

The short answer

The three families are the Kirklands, the Collinses, and the Fullers. Staten Kirkland owns the Double K Ranch. Davis Collins owns Bar W. Cap Fuller owns the Fuller Ranch. Staten's late wife Amala was Davis's sister, which makes the show's central rivalry a rivalry between brothers-in-law.

The families, sorted

• The Kirklands — Staten (Josh Duhamel) runs the Double K, inherited from his grandfather. Wife Amala died of illness; son Randall died in a car crash before the series opens. Staten's father Sam (Brett Cullen) is a senator and not much of an ally.
• The Collinses — Davis (Eoin Macken), Amala's older brother, plus ex-wife Paula Jo (Meta Golding) and son Reid (Andrew Liner). Davis is wealthy but not a real rancher. He wants Staten's land and Cap's land for a pipeline deal with Austin Water & Power.
• The Fullers — Cap (James Brolin), wife Ruth in assisted living, and a dead son named Lincoln. The ranch has no obvious heir until Yancy Grey (Jack Schumacher) turns out to be Cap's grandson.

Why the in-law thing is half the problem

Davis gave Randall the sports car he died in. Reid is Staten's nephew and Randall's cousin. Staten hooks up with Paula Jo, his dead wife's brother's ex-wife, in a car. Davis dates Quinn O'Grady (Minka Kelly), who was Amala's best friend and is Staten's love interest.

Every land dispute in season 1 is also a family argument with a seating chart.

What season 2 changed

Cap died at the end of season 1, leaving Fuller Ranch to Yancy — who promptly proposed to Ellie Estevez while a woman claiming to be his wife walked into Gracie's. Eoin Macken and Andrew Liner are not back as series regulars, thinning the Collins side considerably. Staten opens the season unseated as trustee of his own family's ranch, six months on from where season 1 left off.

Showrunner April Blair told Netflix's Tudum in 2026 that the new season is "really about community, rebuilding in the wake of that."

The fourth family nobody counts

The Brigmans aren't ranchers, so they don't make the official three — but Sheriff Dan Brigman's wife Margaret was driving the night Randall died, and Dan arrested her for it in the season 1 finale. Their daughter Lauren dated Reid Collins and then Lucas Russell.

Netflix renewed the show on June 24, 2025, roughly two months after it premiered, while several similarly performing series that launched the same season got canceled.

Elle resigns in season 2, episode 6, "The Boogeyman," which aired in October 2006. The chain of events: she's shot in her own home in the season 1 finale, comes back to work too early with untreated PTSD, and then kills a serial rapist the team had been forced to release, claiming self-defense. Hotch knows she's lying. She hands in her badge.

How the show got her there

• "The Fisher King, Part 1" — an unsub who's been stalking the BAU shoots Elle in her apartment. Paramedics revive her.
• "The Fisher King, Part 2" — she recovers physically, but no longer feels safe at home.
• "P911" — she returns to the field, over objections from Hotch and Reid that it's far too soon.
• "Aftermath" — the team works a serial rapist case. The suspect walks. Elle confronts him and shoots him dead in his doorway on October 19, 2006.
• "The Boogeyman" — she comes back to the BAU only to resign.

Paget Brewster joined as Emily Prentiss three episodes later.

Why Lola Glaudini actually left

Nothing dramatic. Writer-producer Ed Bernero told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that Glaudini was heading back to the East Coast because she was, in his words, unhappy living in Los Angeles:

She was "unhappy living in Los Angeles," Bernero told the paper in 2006.

Glaudini has never confirmed that account or given her own. There's no reported friction with the cast or the producers. She'd been a New Yorker before the show and went back to theater work; she later landed recurring roles on The Expanse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Ray Donovan.

Did she ever come back?

Not in person. Elle keeps getting mentioned — Hotch brings up the William Lee shooting to Prentiss in "In Name and Blood," Garcia references her after surviving her own shooting in "Penelope," and it resurfaces again when Hotch is arrested in "The Storm."

She also turns up in the series finale, "And in the End...," when a concussed Reid hallucinates his way through old colleagues. Deadline confirmed at the time that those cameos were archive footage from the actors' original episodes.

For the record: Elle killed the first unsub ever shot on screen in Criminal Minds — Tim Vogel, the Seattle Strangler, in the pilot.

She also killed the last one she ever encountered. The show's problem was the paperwork on the second one.

It also ends on a shot that answers nothing about its lead. So the 26-year-old director answered it himself, in interviews.

The short answer

The film ends with Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) snapping out of the wish the second Bear dies, alone in a house with three corpses and a gun with her prints on it. Barker's canon follow-up: she gets arrested, charged, and likely convicted. There is no post-credits scene — the movie stops with her screaming.

What the last scene actually shows

Bear (Michael Johnston) bought a novelty item called a One Wish Willow and wished for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. The wish worked, in the worst possible sense — the thing loving him wasn't Nikki, it was an entity wearing her. The only listed way to break it was Bear's death. He overdoses on pills. Nikki wakes up.

What she wakes up to:

• Bear — dead from the overdose, on the floor.
• Sarah (Megan Lawless) — face smashed in, Nikki's tattoos drawn over her.
• Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) — shot in the head, in a house holding roughly a billion dollars in cash.
• The gun — in Nikki's hands.

What the director says comes next

Barker spelled it out to CinemaBlend in June 2026:

"She probably goes to jail," he said, adding that she'd likely serve a very long sentence.

He also noted she's tied to Ian's money somehow, and that whatever story the police assemble, her life afterward isn't going to be a good one.

Does she show up again?

Indirectly. Barker's next film, Anything But Ghosts — a horror comedy he's starring in alongside Cooper Tomlinson — is set in the same universe. He told Deadline in May 2026 that it includes a news broadcast about a woman and a triple homicide. Nikki isn't expected on screen, but the radio does the sentencing.

Was there a version where she dies?

Barker told MovieWeb he originally wrote an ending where Nikki takes her own way out, and decided against it. He's since floated an Obsession 2 and an anthology built around different wishes with new casts.

On screen, Max is alive, rich, and busy. The first season establishes that he took the Waverly Sub Station — the family business he inherited after losing the wizard competition in the 2012 finale — and franchised it into a billion-dollar chain. He's living on a yacht. Off screen, Jake T. Austin says he was asked about returning once, said yes, and never heard back.

What Austin says happened

Austin posted on his social media on August 6, 2026, two days after the finale dropped:

"I was asked back in 2020 if I was interested in reprising my role and said that I was 100% in," he wrote.

He added that the production went a different direction and his character wasn't part of the equation, then wished his former castmates well. Austin played Max across all four seasons of the original show, which ran 2007 to 2012, and he's the only member of the Russo sibling trio who never appeared in the sequel.

What the producers say

David Henrie, who starred as Justin and served as an executive producer on the reboot, gave TVLine a different account after the finale aired. He said he would have loved to have Austin on the show, that they tried to get him, and that it didn't work out. Which is not quite "we never asked."

Who else was missing

The Max situation wasn't isolated. The finale's guest roster was thinner than fans expected:

• David DeLuise (Jerry Russo) — guest-starred twice in season 1, sat out the finale entirely.
• Maria Canals-Barrera (Theresa Russo) — recurring, never a series regular.
• Jennifer Stone (Harper Finkle) — brief cameo only.
• Gregg Sulkin (Mason Greyback) — also a cameo.
• Selena Gomez (Alex Russo) — the one big return, appearing multiple times across the run.

DeLuise wasn't quiet about it either. In an Instagram comment on an Entertainment Tonight video, he called the send-off a missed opportunity and said it wouldn't be over if the original wizards had really been there.

For the record: Max lost the wizard competition in the original 2012 finale and got the sandwich shop as a consolation prize.

Fourteen years later, that consolation prize is worth a billion dollars and he's the only Russo with a boat.

Louanne Pratt, the Commodore's maid, admits to it in the season 1 finale "A Return to Normalcy," which aired December 5, 2010. She'd been feeding him arsenic — Paris Green, the rat poison the penultimate episode is named after — over roughly nine months, in his stew, his tea biscuits, and his toothpaste.

Her stated motive

Dr. Carl Surran lays out the findings in front of Nucky, Jimmy, Gillian, and Sheriff Halloran. Louanne's first answer is that it must have gotten in there by accident. That doesn't survive the observation that her own food was clean. Asked why she did it, she doesn't hedge:

"Because if I'd used a shotgun, I'd have to clean up the mess myself."

She'd worked for a man who called her the woman who empties his chamber pot and quizzed her on the League of Nations for sport. Nucky blocks the arrest, hands her cash, and tells her to change her name and leave Atlantic City. She gives him a Bible with a page marked. The camera never shows the page.

Why fans think it was Gillian

Because the previous episode, "Paris Green," builds a case against Jimmy's mother and never dismantles it:

• Motive — the Commodore's illness is what finally brings Jimmy to his father's bedside, which is what Gillian wants.
• The canister — Jimmy vomits after eating a cookie at the house, then finds an empty tin of Paris Green in the kitchen trash.
• The confrontation — he tells Gillian that whatever she wants to do is fine with him. She says nothing, and the scene ends there.
• The recovery timing — the poisoning stops right after Jimmy confronts her.
• The convenience — Louanne's confession arrives one episode later, and Nucky pays her to disappear rather than let her testify.

Reviewers at the time read episode 11 as Gillian's doing. Salon's recap in 2010 stated flatly that Gillian had been slipping the arsenic into his food.

The case for taking Louanne at her word

Access, mostly. The poisoning ran from Christmas onward, in food prepared daily in a kitchen Gillian didn't work in and rarely entered. The Commodore's dog Jerry ate the leftovers and died. A months-long dosing schedule fits the person cooking every meal better than it fits a visitor.

Did the Commodore survive it?

He did, and it bought him about a year. He recovered enough to recruit Jimmy and Eli into a war against Nucky, then died in the season 2 episode "Under God's Power She Flourishes," released December 4, 2011 — stabbed by Jimmy with a trench knife after attacking him with an antique spear.

For the record: Gillian was in the room when it happened, and she's the one who told Jimmy to finish it.

Joel Fry chose to leave after series 3 to move into different acting work. The writers wrote Stylax out by dropping a badly secured marble slab on him in the forum, killed off in the opening seconds of "The Accident," the series 4 premiere that aired April 9, 2018 on ITV2.

How the show did it

The slab belongs to Crassus, a developer running a building site with no interest in safety rules, and it's dropped by an overworked builder named Jason. Jason then turns up at Marcus and Grumio's door to explain what he's done, sticks around, and helps them extract a property from Crassus as compensation — a derelict public lavatory they convert into a wine bar called the Crown and Toga.

Jonathan Pointing played Jason and joined the cast as a full lead. Tom Basden's Aurelius, previously a supporting water carrier, was promoted into the main group at the same time.

The reason Fry left

Fry announced his exit in March 2018 and never gave a public explanation, which left fans to guess for weeks. The answer came from his colleagues instead. Writer Sam Leifer and the remaining cast addressed it in a BUILD Series London interview around the premiere, summarized in the interview's own headline:

"He wanted to do a different type of acting."

Nothing more complicated than that — no dispute, no falling out. Fry publicly backed the new series on Twitter the night it aired.

What Joel Fry did next

The move worked out. His post-Plebs run includes:

• Requiem (2018) — the Netflix mystery miniseries, as Harlan Fine.
• Yesterday (2019) — Danny Boyle's Beatles comedy, as roadie Rocky.
• In the Earth (2021) — Ben Wheatley's lockdown-shot folk horror, premiered at Sundance.
• Cruella (2021) — Disney's live-action origin film, as Horace.

Did the show survive it?

It ran two more times. Series 5 aired in autumn 2019 with the Jason-era lineup, and a feature-length special, Plebs: Soldiers of Rome, closed things out on December 8, 2022. Audience reaction to the change stayed split — a decent chunk of Rotten Tomatoes user reviews for series 4 still argue the show peaked with the original trio.

Fun bit of trivia: Stylax wasn't the show's first cast exit. Sophie Colquhoun and Lydia Rose Bewley left as Cynthia and Metella after series 2, and the show handled that one without dropping anything on anybody.

Season 2 is the most common critical pick, holding 96% on Rotten Tomatoes against season 1's 85% and season 3's 95%. But Deadwood: The Movie scores highest of anything with the show's name on it at 98%, from 89 reviews — the largest sample of the four.

How the four entries score

• Season 1 (2004, 12 episodes) — 85% critics, 96% audience. Wild Bill Hickok's arrival and death, and the finale "Sold Under Sin," which a lot of fans still name as the single best episode.
• Season 2 (2005, 12 episodes) — 96% critics, 97% audience. Opens with the two-part "A Lie Agreed Upon" and the Bullock–Swearengen street brawl, then spends the year turning a camp into a town.
• Season 3 (2006, 12 episodes) — 95% critics, 92% audience. George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) arrives and bends the place to his will. Nothing resolves, because HBO pulled the plug.
• Deadwood: The Movie (2019, 110 minutes) — 98% critics, 80% audience. The widest critic–viewer gap of the set.

The case for season 2

It has the most awards behind it. The show took home a batch of craft Emmys in 2005 for season 2 work — art direction, cinematography, costumes, hairstyling, makeup — after Walter Hill won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the pilot the year before. It's also the season where the ensemble stops being introduced and starts operating: Joanie Stubbs runs the Chez Ami, Cy Tolliver develops a private life, and Al Swearengen spends an entire episode passing a kidney stone while running the camp from a sickbed.

The case against season 3

The season is strong and the ending isn't an ending. Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus puts it plainly:

"Deadwood's final season ends with a frustrating lack of closure."

That's a scheduling problem, not a writing one. HBO offered David Milch a shortened fourth season of six to eight episodes; he declined, two TV movies were promised as a compromise, and one arrived thirteen years later.

Where the movie fits

Deadwood: The Movie premiered May 31, 2019, set in 1889, with nearly the full original cast back — Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Paula Malcomson, John Hawkes, McRaney. It was nominated for Outstanding Television Movie at the 2019 Emmys. Its 80% audience score is the lowest of the four, which tracks: critics graded a well-made film, and viewers graded whether thirteen years of waiting had been worth it.

For the record: audiences rank the seasons in a different order than critics do. On the Popcornmeter, season 2 (97%) beats season 1 (96%), season 3 (92%), and the movie last.

Hell on Wheels ran for five seasons and 57 episodes, premiering November 6, 2011 and ending July 23, 2016. Season 5 was ordered as 14 episodes and split into two halves that aired a full year apart — seven in summer 2015, seven in summer 2016.

The season-by-season breakdown

• Season 1 (Nov 2011–Jan 2012) — 10 episodes. Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier, hunts the Union men who killed his wife and ends up working for the Union Pacific.
• Season 2 (Aug–Oct 2012) — 10 episodes. The moving town follows the track west; Bohannon rises inside the railroad operation.
• Season 3 (Aug–Oct 2013) — 10 episodes. Bohannon takes charge of construction under Thomas Durant's shadow.
• Season 4 (Aug–Nov 2014) — 13 episodes. Cheyenne, Wyoming, becomes the center of gravity, and the Mormon storyline takes over the back half.
• Season 5 (July–Aug 2015, then June–July 2016) — 14 episodes, split. Bohannon crosses to the Central Pacific in Truckee, California, and the race to Promontory Summit finishes the series.

Why AMC split the final season

The network announced the split on November 7, 2014, in the same statement that confirmed the show was ending. AMC had used the same rollout on Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and it had an obvious scheduling benefit: two summers of original programming out of one production order, at a point when the network was losing Mad Men and hadn't landed a replacement hit.

AMC president Charlie Collier framed it as a courtesy to the audience:

"We are proud to bring our transcontinental journey to conclusion," he said in the November 2014 announcement.

Ratings supported the decision to end it. The 2011 premiere drew 4.36 million viewers; the 2016 finale drew 1.65 million.

Does the split affect how you watch it now?

Not at all — every streaming service lists all 14 episodes as a single season 5, in broadcast order, with no marker where the year-long gap fell. The only trace is a slight tonal shift around episode 8, which was written and shot as a premiere rather than a midpoint.

How long does the whole thing take?

Roughly 41 hours for all 57 episodes at about 43 minutes each. Four seasons of that is Nebraska and Wyoming; the fifth is California and the finish line.

Showrunner John Wirth pointed out the one constraint the writers couldn't negotiate around — the railroad's completion date was already history, so only the fictional characters' endings were up for grabs.

Director Leon Vance, played by Rocky Carroll, was killed in "All Good Things" — season 23, episode 13, which aired March 24, 2026, and served as the series' 500th episode. Carroll had played Vance for 18 seasons and 392 episodes, joining in season 5 in 2008.

What happens in the episode

The agency itself is being shut down, folded into Army CID amid a scandal built on falsified numbers. The scattered team reunites off the books to help the son of a Marine that Gibbs once assisted, and the trail leads to a weapons smuggling ring. A bomb planted to destroy the evidence turns out to be a diversion. The actual threat is CID Agent Dolan Thompson, who has been working alongside Vance the whole time and puts three rounds in his chest.

Vance's evidence holds.

The SECDEF reinstates NCIS. He doesn't live to see it, and the episode closes with him meeting a young Dr. Ducky Mallard — played by Adam Campbell, standing in for David McCallum, who died in 2023 — and his late wife Jackie.

Was it the actor's decision?

No. Showrunner Steven D. Binder, who wrote the episode, told Carroll in November 2025 that the character was being written out, and Carroll has said publicly he never asked to leave. He filmed his last scenes as a living character on December 11, 2025. Binder's explanation to TV Insider:

"It is never easy to say goodbye to any of our characters," he said, framing the death as Vance giving his life so the agency could survive.

Carroll isn't gone from the production — he continues to direct episodes.

Has NCIS killed a director before?

Twice, and both times by gunfire:

• Thomas Morrow — the first director of the series, later killed after moving on from the agency.
• Jenny Shepard — Vance's immediate predecessor, shot in a diner in the season 5 opener.
• Leon Vance — the third, and the longest-serving of the three.

Add Kate Todd's sniper death in the season 2 finale and the show's willingness to remove regulars is well established. What's new is doing it in the episode built as a celebration.

What happens to the agency now

Vance's exit leaves the top job open, with Timothy McGee (Sean Murray) the most frequently floated internal candidate and Alden Parker (Gary Cole) already serving as second-in-command. CBS had renewed the series before the episode aired, so the shutdown storyline was never going to stick.

For the record: 5.55 million viewers watched "All Good Things," the highest number NCIS pulled for any episode that season.

New Yorkers get first crack at Dreams in Nightmares when it opens theatrically on August 21, 2026, with Los Angeles following on August 28 and a wider U.S. rollout in September. The modern road movie follows queer friends in their mid-30s on a Midwest drive that doubles as a search for chosen family, self-discovery, and personal freedom, mixing low-key humor with intimate, character-first drama across roughly two hours.

It currently holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on early reviews.

Early critics have singled out the film’s tender look at identity and belonging in contemporary America, a throughline that has built steady word of mouth as it moves from festivals to theaters.

Festival run

The film debuted at the BlackStar Film Festival on August 1, 2024, then kept building momentum with stops at Berlin, BFI Flare in London, Inside Out Toronto, and Frameline in San Francisco. After that circuit, it popped up for limited engagements in March 2026, including a Q&A event in Toronto, ahead of its U.S. theatrical bow this August.

Who’s in it

Writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford steers the project with a personal, road-level focus and a cast stacked with familiar faces from TV and indie film. Here’s the lineup:

• Denée Benton — Z
• Mars Rucker — Kel
• Dezi Bing — Lauren
• Sasha Compère — Tasha
• Charlie Barnett — Reece
• Molly Bernard — Jamie
• Alfie Fuller — Trish
• Jasmin Savoy Brown — Sabrina
• Regina Taylor
• Robert Wisdom
• Malek Mouzon
• Joss Barton
• Zoe Himmel
• Lindsey Hailes
• Zahalea Anderson
• Matías Reyes Gomez — master potter
• Elba León Cantón — master potter

Beyond the core ensemble, the appearances by master potters Gomez and Cantón add an unexpected, handmade texture to the film’s cross-country tapestry.

Dreams in Nightmares opens in New York City on August 21, 2026, reaches Los Angeles on August 28, and expands nationwide in September 2026. A broad international theatrical release date has not been announced.

He’s not just mulling it over — Ewan McGregor has already taken an Obi-Wan Kenobi idea straight to Dave Filoni. According to Variety, McGregor floated a pitch about charting what happened to Yoda after Revenge of the Sith — and whether Obi-Wan could reach him — while Filoni was busy shooting Ahsoka with Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

McGregor has already shared his Obi-Wan pitch with Lucasfilm chief Dave Filoni, per Variety.

The timing slides neatly into the space left by the 2022 Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series, which ended with the Jedi walking off into the Tatooine dunes after deciding Luke needed a normal childhood without a watchful guardian hovering nearby. McGregor now sees that solitary stretch as prime territory for another chapter.

Why he’s fired up

McGregor’s enthusiasm is a far cry from the early-2000s backlash that pushed him away from fan events for years. The warm reception around the Disney+ series flipped that script — hearing grown-up fans roar for the prequels they loved as kids reframed his whole relationship with the galaxy far, far away.

Carrying the Guinness torch

Part of why a return intrigues fans: McGregor’s meticulous link to Alec Guinness. He studied Guinness’s A New Hope delivery, even keeping an audio file of the older actor’s lines to nail the cadence. He’s talked about matching posture, hand movements, and small expressions to bridge the prequels to the original trilogy without it feeling like an impression.

Meanwhile, on Hulu

While he waits to see if Lucasfilm bites, McGregor has another TV turn lined up with Hulu’s The Spot, a psychological thriller opposite Claire Danes.

• Format: eight episodes; psychological thriller
• Premise: Danes plays a successful surgeon whose life unravels after a child is killed in a hit-and-run
• McGregor’s role: the surgeon’s schoolteacher husband
• Behind the scenes: produced by A24; showrun by Ed Solomon
• Timeline: slated to begin production in 2026

Seven-story-tall sandworms are about to get even bigger. According to an IMAX press release, Denis Villeneuve shot a large chunk of Dune: Part Three specifically for the giant screens, and audiences will see dramatically more image at the top and bottom of the frame during those sequences.

What you’ll see in IMAX

For this installment, Villeneuve used both IMAX Film Cameras and IMAX‑certified digital cameras — a first for the series — with select scenes captured on 70mm IMAX film. The company says moviegoers will get substantially more picture information during the expanded sequences than in standard theaters.

“Dune: Part Three features 71 minutes of IMAX’s exclusive 1.90:1 Expanded Aspect Ratio,” the press release says.

Some of those scenes will go even taller at a handful of venues equipped for IMAX with Laser and IMAX 70mm film, where they’ll play in the format’s towering 1.43:1 frame. IMAX touts its film cameras as delivering roughly 10x the resolution of traditional 35mm and 3x that of standard 5‑perf 65mm, a spec meant to translate to extra detail when the image fills the auditorium from top to bottom.

Tickets and early screenings

Tickets for IMAX and other premium formats went on sale Tuesday, with the company positioning the film as a must‑see on the biggest screens. Warner Bros. also rolled out fresh promotional footage — more of a high‑impact TV spot than a full trailer — designed to spotlight the IMAX experience.

• IMAX‑exclusive expanded footage: 71 minutes (1.90:1)
• Select locations will feature sequences in 1.43:1 (IMAX with Laser and IMAX 70mm film)
• Shot with both IMAX Film Cameras and IMAX‑certified digital cameras
• Limited early IMAX shows begin December 14
• General theatrical release: December 18

The studio is also scheduling special limited IMAX engagements starting December 14, a few days ahead of the film’s wide opening on December 18.

On Netflix’s We’re Back with Brian Williams, Harlan Coben said he’s finally ready to bend his one-and-done rule: Myron Bolitar is being built to keep going if viewers want more. Unlike his past Netflix mysteries that wrapped in a single season, this one is being developed with a longer runway in mind — and with showrunner David E. Kelley steering the series.

“I should never say never, I learned that.”

The pivot has everything to do with the source material. Coben’s Myron Bolitar saga spans 12 novels, giving the TV version far more story than a tight eight-episode box can hold. That’s a notable shift from his previous Netflix hits, which were designed as closed-ended thrillers:

• Fool Me Once
• The Stranger
• Stay Close

Inside the case

Set in the gleaming (and grimy) corners of pro sports, the first season follows Myron as he digs into the murder of a tennis player while also searching for a missing star client. The investigation drags him through corruption, blackmail, and tangled loyalties that turn a sports agent’s job into something a lot darker — and a lot more personal.

• Myron Bolitar — sports agent with a knack for detective work
• Win Lockwood — his ruthless, well-connected confidant
• Esperanza Diaz — sharp-eyed partner who keeps MB Sports grounded

According to the Williams interview, Coben and Kelley are approaching the show with a multi-season game plan, pulling from the broader book universe rather than capping the story after one mystery. If Netflix orders more, there’s plenty of runway to adapt.

There’s no second-season greenlight yet, but season 1 is being developed with the hope of continuing beyond its first run.

Shot over five years, filmmaker Pepa Lubojacki points the camera at his own family in If Pigeons Turned to Gold, tracking his brother and two cousins as addiction upends their lives. The debut feature stitches together diary footage, stylized memories, live photos, and graphic collages — much of it captured on phones — and even folds in AI-crafted imagery to mirror the chaos and coping inside the household.

The Czech Film and Television Academy has chosen the documentary as the country’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards (2027), spotlighting an unflinching, highly personal approach rarely sent into that race.

“Using the DIY aesthetics, the director interlinks diary shots, stylized memories, live photos, as well as graphic collages, and without any sentiment tries to understand the reasons for their fall and also the impact of it on the whole family,” the Czech Academy said.

From festivals to theaters

Produced by Claw Films with Czech Television, the movie picked up early honors at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, then premiered in Berlin and continued to major stops in Istanbul, Sydney, and Karlovy Vary. It screened in the Docu Best section at the DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and made its Australian bow at the 73rd Sydney Film Festival on June 10, 2026.

At the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, it ran as a Special Screening from July 8–10, 2026. Sales outfit Split Screen has acquired international rights. A domestic theatrical release in the Czech Republic is set for September 24, 2026.

Who made it

• Pepa Lubojacki — director, writer, editor; also appears on screen
• Producers — Klára Mamojková, Wanda Kaprálová
• Production — Claw Films; co-produced with Czech Television
• Cinematography — Pepa Lubojacki, Tomáš Šťastný
• Music — Adam Matej
• On-screen subjects — David Richter, Pepa Lubojacki, David Lubojacki, Marco Arnone

The Oscar submission positions Lubojacki’s experimental first feature — a family portrait turned survival chronicle — for the international feature race, with a Czech theatrical rollout arriving September 24, 2026.

On the D23 carpet, Anne Hathaway said the team behind The Princess Diaries 3 made a real push to bring back Julie Andrews as Queen Clarisse Renaldi — and not just with a polite invite. Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, Hathaway described a genuine campaign to entice Andrews to return in any capacity.

“We did push really hard to see if she would want to do it,” Hathaway said.

Hathaway added that everyone respected Andrews’ decision to sit this one out after a lifetime in the business, but the filmmakers weren’t ready to give up easily. They even floated the idea that Andrews could narrate or contribute “anything” if she didn’t want to appear on screen.

So what does the movie look like without Genovia’s original queen? Hathaway is back as Mia Thermopolis — now an older, established monarch — with story details still tightly under wraps. It’s a return more than two decades after the first film (2001) and the sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004).

Without Julie Andrews

In past comments about the new chapter, filmmaker Adele Lim has pointed to themes of mentorship, joy, and female empowerment, and author Meg Cabot has said elements from her books have made it into the script. If Andrews won’t be the guiding hand this time, the baton may pass to Queen Mia mentoring the next generation inside the palace walls.

• Confirmed on camera: Hathaway says the team tried “really hard” to get Andrews back.
• Andrews’ status: She declined to return as Queen Clarisse Renaldi.
• Hathaway’s role: Mia Thermopolis returns as an experienced queen.
• Story: Plot specifics are still under wraps; mentorship themes have been discussed.

Hathaway also said she wants the threequel to feel worthy of the memories attached to the franchise — the kind of movie women who discovered Mia at six could now share with their own kids.

Netflix’s current lineup doubles as a crash course in the ’80s: New York ghostbusting, SoCal dojo drama, a Saturday locked in detention, Jim Henson fantasy, a sprawling family circus, an Iowa cornfield miracle, and the Brooklyn indie that launched Spike Lee. The mix spans comedy, coming-of-age, fantasy, sports drama, and art-house swagger — with a wall-to-wall roster of names you know by heart.

From filmmakers like Spike Lee, John Hughes, Jim Henson, Ron Howard and Phil Alden Robinson to stars including Bill Murray, Ralph Macchio, Jennifer Connelly, Steve Martin and Kevin Costner, here’s a quick guide to seven ’80s standouts worth queuing up.

Seven to stream

• She’s Gotta Have It (1986) — Spike Lee’s breakout feature follows Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a Brooklyn artist determined to live on her own terms while juggling three very different suitors: gentlemanly Jamie Overstreet, vain model Greer Childs, and chatterbox Mars Blackmon (Lee). Shot in striking black-and-white, it remains a landmark of indie and Black cinema.
• Ghostbusters (1984) — After losing their university gigs, three parapsychologists — Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) — start a ghost-capture business in NYC, soon joined by Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). Between Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) and an apocalyptic Gozer situation, the mix of practical effects and deadpan jokes is still lightning in a bottle.
• The Karate Kid (1984) — New Jersey transplant Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) finds a mentor in quiet handyman Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) as he faces bully Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and the ruthless Cobra Kai. “Wax on, wax off” is movie shorthand now, but the heart and underdog payoff haven’t aged a day.
• The Breakfast Club (1985) — Five teens — the athlete (Emilio Estevez), the princess (Molly Ringwald), the brain (Anthony Michael Hall), the basket case (Ally Sheedy) and the criminal (Judd Nelson) — spend a Saturday in school detention under vice principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason). John Hughes strips away labels until what’s left is funny, raw, and weirdly hopeful.
• Labyrinth (1986) — Jim Henson turns puppetry into pop opera as Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) races a shape-shifting maze to rescue her baby brother from the Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie). The tactile creature work, Escher-inspired sets and Bowie’s glam presence make this a fantasy that actually feels handmade — and magical.
• Parenthood (1989) — Ron Howard’s ensemble comedy-drama tracks the Buckman clan’s chaos: anxious dad Gil (Steve Martin) and wife Karen (Mary Steenburgen), single mom Helen (Dianne Wiest), rebellious Julie (Martha Plimpton) and her gearhead boyfriend Tod (Keanu Reeves), plus wayward brother Larry (Tom Hulce). It’s warm, messy, and uncommonly honest about family life.
• Field of Dreams (1989) — An Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), hears a voice and carves a baseball diamond into his cornfield, drawing in reclusive author Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), Doc “Moonlight” Graham (Burt Lancaster) and the specter of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta). It’s a sports movie on paper; in practice, it’s about regret, faith and fathers and sons.

On the true-crime podcast Serialously with Annie Elise, Chris Hansen said he didn’t have a say in who plays him in A24’s Primetime — and if he had, he would’ve gone a different way. The former Dateline correspondent said he once pictured comedian-actor Denis Leary stepping into his shoes.

“I didn’t get to choose my own guy here.”

“I thought Denis Leary would be a good guy to play me, depending on the age of it all.”

Leary’s credits include Demolition Man, Judgment Night, and The Sandlot. Instead, the film casts Robert Pattinson as a younger Hansen during the most scrutinized stretch of his TV career.

Hansen added that he hasn’t seen the movie yet. He said he was invited to be involved by the filmmakers but ultimately stayed hands-off. He plans to attend a private screening next week and share his reaction after that.

His read on the trailer

Hansen called the first trailer “dramatic” and said the creative team behind the film looks impressive — but he also questioned the commercial calculus behind telling this story.

“I also have some questions: what’s Hollywood’s motive here? We don’t know, but I’ll find out, and I promise I’ll let you know.”

“They want a commercial endeavor to succeed, and they think this is the way it’s going to succeed.”

Early buzz around the footage centered on Pattinson’s transformation into the TV journalist who confronted would-be predators on camera.

What Primetime covers

Primetime tracks Hansen during the peak years of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, the controversial sting-operation series that ran from 2004 to 2007.

• Distributor: A24
• Subject: Chris Hansen’s Predator-era reporting
• Status: trailer released; Hansen says he’ll see a private screening next week
• U.S. release date: September 25, 2026

After the carnage at Tumbleton in Season 3 — sparked by Ulf the White’s sudden betrayal and complicated by Aegon’s scorched return on Sunfyre — the show doubled down on a simple truth: the Dance of the Dragons is decided in the sky. Earlier, Caraxes’ brutal showdown with Vhagar proved it; the Blood Wyrm clung to life long enough to rip out the giant’s throat, even as he took fatal wounds of his own.

That leaves a heated debate heading into the endgame: once you set Vhagar aside, which beast is the most dangerous — the Bronze Fury or the Blood Wyrm?

• Vermithor — the Bronze Fury: second-largest living dragon during the Dance; once bonded to King Jaehaerys I; towering frame, heavy armor-like scales, and sheer destructive punch built for smashing fortifications.
• Caraxes — the Blood Wyrm: long, serpentine build for tight turns and sudden dives; a vicious temperament; years of combat with Daemon in the Stepstones; a reputation for attacking dragons bigger than himself.

Size and muscle say Vermithor is the pure powerhouse: he’s the dragon you call when you need walls melted and armies broken. But in a straight fight, the case for Caraxes as the deadliest combatant is hard to shake. His speed, aggression, and battle savvy — capped by surviving long enough to finish Vhagar — make him the dragon built to kill other dragons.

Final season: more fire

Showrunner Ryan Condal says the last chapter isn’t just cleanup. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he teased that the world is still getting bigger before it ends.

We have new characters, new dragons, and new locations all to come, that I think are gonna make it a very worthy final season.

That matters after Tumbleton showed how fast dragon power flips when loyalty breaks. Ulf the White’s turn plunged the battlefield into chaos, and Aegon’s reentry on Sunfyre only tightened the vise on Rhaenyra. With even more dragons entering the fray, expect the contrast to sharpen between Vermithor’s blunt-force devastation and Caraxes’ knife-fight lethality when Season 4 lands on HBO and streams on Max.

In a candid set of posts on Threads, David Krumholtz said the thing that had scared him for years—walking away—finally happened when he “sent the definitive email.” The messages were later deleted, but according to Deadline, he described the decision as less about a grand plan and more about finally dropping a weight he’d carried too long.

“The fear was that I’d go broke and not be able to handle being out of the game. But I sent the definitive email,” he wrote. “I just removed a humongous burden, one that I truly didn’t fathom the weight of until it was gone. Frustrated, fed up, fried.”

Fellow actor Garret Dillahunt responded with support—calling the news sad but understandable—and Krumholtz replied that it’s not a total exit so much as a reset, per Deadline. He said he’s looking to redefine his terms, find a new and more rewarding passion, and move away from the old “me, my product, and I” mindset. He added there’s no clear next step yet and he wants to be of service going forward.

Krumholtz has been a steady presence across film and TV for three decades, from the ’90s through recent years. He broke out in teen comedies and became a network-TV staple with Numb3rs, then popped up in everything from The Santa Clause films to Oppenheimer.

Back to 10 Things

One project from early in his career is suddenly back in the spotlight: the 1999 high-school classic 10 Things I Hate About You, where Krumholtz shared scenes with Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is getting a Broadway musical makeover. The creative team brings together film, pop, and theater names with fresh material built around the Stratford sisters, high-school cliques, and messy first crushes.

• Lena Dunham — co-writing the book with Jessica Huang
• Carly Rae Jepsen and Ethan Gruska — music and lyrics
• Christopher Wheeldon — director and choreographer
• Tom Kitt — music supervision and orchestrations

Venue and casting haven’t been announced yet. Preview performances are set to begin August 17, 2027.

ABC News Studios is stitching together a very specific portrait of the months after 9/11 with 9/11: United We Stand – 25 Years Later — not a replay of the day itself, but the way packed stadiums, Broadway stages, comedy clubs and nightly broadcasts helped people reconnect. The two-hour special blends rarely seen archival footage with first-person accounts to show how shared moments of joy and ritual became part of the recovery.

It’s hosted by Michael Strahan, who brings his own New York perspective as a former Giants star. He looks back on returning to the field in the fall of 2001 and what those Sundays meant for fans craving normalcy and a place to come together.

Who’s in it

The interview lineup spans sports, music, theater, comedy and news — the folks who were on the field, on stage and on air as the country tried to heal:

• Derek Jeter — MLB icon
• Jon Bon Jovi — musician
• Matthew Broderick — actor
• Billy Crystal — comedian and actor
• Pete Davidson — comedian
• Jimmy Fallon — late-night host
• Mark Messier — NHL great
• Jon Stewart — comedian and host
• Robin Roberts — GMA anchor
• George Stephanopoulos — ABC News anchor
• Martha Raddatz — ABC News chief global affairs correspondent
• Victor Cruz — former New York Giants wide receiver

Their stories focus on resilience: the roar of a home crowd, a curtain going up on a Broadway show, a punchline that broke through the dread, and the steadying cadence of trusted voices on television. Together, those moments chart how community slowly re-formed.

How to watch

The special runs two hours and premieres on ABC on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, from 9–11 p.m. ET. It will stream the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.

Airs Sept. 1 on ABC; streams Sept. 2 on Disney+ and Hulu; encore Sept. 11 across ABC, ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu.

An encore presentation is set for Friday, September 11, 2026, from 9–11 p.m. ET on ABC, ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu. Streaming requires a subscription; check local listings for channel info and time-zone adjustments.

The live leaderboard at The Aura 100 asks a simple question over and over: who’s got more presence? Users vote in rapid-fire head-to-head “Aura Battles,” and the running tally spits out a constantly shifting top 100. As of now, Keanu Reeves sits at No. 1.

• #1 — Keanu Reeves
• #2 — Matthew McConaughey
• #3 — Ryan Gosling
• #4 — LeBron James
• #5 — Max Verstappen
• #6 — Michael B. Jordan
• #7 — Zendaya

The leaderboard spans 12,281 names and updates with every vote.

The site defines “aura” as a mix of presence, individuality and an indefinable x‑factor — not raw fame, wealth or follower counts. Because it’s based on live, public voting, today’s winners can slide the moment fresh matchups go a different way.

Reeves’ rise to the top taps into the low-key mystique he’s cultivated off screen and the cool he brings to characters from John Wick to Toy Story 4’s daredevil toy Duke Caboom. It’s exactly the kind of intangible star power this ranking is trying to capture.

Possible Lego reunion

Separately, Reeves is in talks to star in a new live-action/animation hybrid Lego movie that would reunite him with Josh Cooley, the director of Toy Story 4, according to Deadline. The project is being produced by Jill Wilfert and Ryan Christians for the Lego Group, with Universal backing the film.

Story details are under wraps, and it isn’t yet clear whether Reeves would appear on screen or just voice a character. No screenwriter or additional cast has been announced.

Netflix quietly added Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to its U.S. lineup in July, and the 2005 Tim Burton take on Willy Wonka almost immediately surged into the streamer’s Global Top 10 for movies. It’s a fresh wave of attention for Johnny Depp’s candy-coated oddball, with new viewers discovering the film and longtime fans pressing play again.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory hit Netflix U.S. in July 2026 and quickly cracked the streamer’s Global Top 10.

Back to the factory

Burton’s glossy, slightly sinister spin on Roald Dahl’s classic follows kind-hearted Charlie Bucket as he snags a golden ticket and tours Wonka’s secretive factory alongside four far less well-behaved kids. The trip delivers edible set pieces, bizarre machinery and consequences that come swift and sticky.

• Freddie Highmore — Charlie Bucket
• Johnny Depp — Willy Wonka
• Helena Bonham Carter — Mrs. Bucket
• David Kelly — Grandpa Joe
• Christopher Lee — Dr. Wilbur Wonka
• Deep Roy — the Oompa-Loompas

Depp plays Wonka as a jittery, sugar-spiked manchild with prim manners and a queasy edge — a left-field choice that fits neatly into his long creative run with Burton, from Edward Scissorhands to Corpse Bride. The movie was a major hit on first release, pulling in more than $475 million worldwide in 2005, and it’s stayed a family-night staple on streaming ever since.

Next up: Scrooge

Depp’s return to the algorithm comes as he readies another larger-than-life literary figure: Ebenezer Scrooge. He stars in Ebenezer, a new take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol from director Ti West — a tonal pivot from the Burton era — with a theatrical release set for November 13, 2026.

He even leaned into the role at San Diego Comic-Con in July, surprising fans outside the convention in full Scrooge regalia — Victorian overcoat, top hat, the works — and staying in character while addressing the crowd around a promotional setup. The in-costume cameo quickly became one of the weekend’s standout celebrity sightings.

Ebenezer opens in theaters on November 13, 2026.

Everything about John Oliver’s stop in Salem was built to his delightfully weird specs. In August, he popped up on Days of Our Lives as Devlin St. John — the town’s nerdy water inspector — instantly tangled in secrets and, yes, on the receiving end of a proper soap-opera slap. Executive producer Ken Corday said he moved within a day of Oliver making his wish public to craft a storyline around it.

“He wanted to be slapped, or someone slaps him. He wanted to be someone’s long-lost something and a dramatic close-up of his face,” Corday told Variety.

Oliver didn’t treat it like a late-night bit once he got to set. Corday said he arrived as a serious actor and kept pace with a show that cranks through roughly nine episodes a week, showing up with his lines nailed before cameras rolled.

“He is not the John Oliver you see on his talk show,” Corday added.

Devlin shared screen time with longtime Salem fixtures and even butted heads at City Hall with Mayor Paulina Price. Among the actors Oliver worked with:

• Jackée Harry — Mayor Paulina Price
• Susan Seaforth Hayes
• Daniel Feuerriegel
• Maggie Carney

Back at his day job

Oliver kept the corporate-needling energy alive on a recent Last Week Tonight, joking that if repeated failures counted as “good news,” that would be excellent for DC movies — a wink at the superhero brand that shares a parent company with his HBO show. He flashed a collage of DC posters to drive the joke home.

Days of Our Lives now streams weekdays on Peacock; Oliver’s episodes aired in August.

The latest round of “Andrew Garfield signed a new Marvel deal” chatter traces back to an X post from Chaos Crave claiming he’d inked a multi-picture return that included The Amazing Spider-Man 3. There’s a catch: Chaos Crave labels itself a parody account. The claim isn’t real, and there’s been no announcement from Garfield, Marvel, or Sony to back it up.

Garfield’s Spidey rumors flare up every few months for a reason—he did swing back into the suit for the multiverse mash-up Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, reminding everyone how much fun his take on Peter Parker can be. Here’s where he’s worn the webs so far:

• The Amazing Spider-Man — 2012
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — 2014
• Spider-Man: No Way Home — 2021

What he says it would take

Asked what might actually coax him back, Garfield kept the bar high during an appearance on The Playlist’s The Discourse podcast.

“I would need it to be very strange. I would want it to be just completely unexpected, like a genre of Spider-Man that you’ve never seen before, that feels very left field.”

Translation: if there’s a return, it won’t be for a retread. For now, there’s no deal in place and no Amazing Spider-Man 3 on the calendar—just a persistent rumor that started with a parody post and stopped there.

The standard explanation is burnout. Burghoff's own version, given decades later on national television, is more of a technicality.

The short answer

Burghoff stopped after season 7 in 1979, citing exhaustion after seven years and a family life he'd stopped showing up for. He came back the following season to shoot the two-part "Good-Bye Radar," which aired October 8 and 15, 1979 as episodes 4 and 5 of season 8. He appeared in four season 8 episodes total, then was gone for good.

"I didn't leave the show"

Speaking in the Fox special MAS*H: The Comedy That Changed Television, broadcast January 1, 2024, Burghoff pushed back on the framing of the question — one he said people had been asking him for 30 years:

"I didn't leave the show; my contract expired," he said.

He explained that he had a seven-year contract and simply didn't renegotiate, because he was pulling back from everything at once. In the same period he described his life as a beautiful picture hanging crooked. His marriage ended after he left the show.

He had also described the specific problem in blunter terms: for seven years, no new person he met called him Gary. They called him Radar. He once said he knew it was time when he heard a plane overhead while sitting by his pool and instinctively froze, the way the character does.

How the writers got him out

In the story, Radar's uncle dies and his mother can't run the family farm alone, so he takes a hardship discharge. Klinger inherits the company clerk job and the sock puppet chaos that comes with it. The wounded arrive mid-farewell party, so Radar never gets his goodbye scene with Hawkeye — he salutes an empty OR instead.

Worth noting: "Good-Bye Radar" was originally shot as the season 7 finale. CBS held it back and expanded it into a two-parter for the November sweeps.

The scene he asked to shoot twice

Burghoff played the final moment in tears. The director advised him to fight them. He ignored the advice, watched the dailies the next day, decided it was terrible, and asked executive producer Burt Metcalfe for another take. He got it. Director Charles S. Dubin later told the Television Academy Foundation that Burghoff broke down during the goodbye material badly enough that production stopped for 15 minutes.

Fun fact: Burghoff was nominated for six Emmys as Radar and won in 1977, with Alan Alda accepting on his behalf.

Radar's teddy bear outlasted him — Hawkeye put it in a time capsule in the show's penultimate episode.

Ruth shot Sheriff Sidney Snow twice after he burned down her church with Ezra — the boy she was raising as her son — inside it. Snow died. At her hearing, held in a converted casino before Judge Webber, Ruth pleaded guilty and told the court she killed Snow for the reason it looked like: because he killed Ezra. Not self-defense. Intent.

That plea is the whole answer. She was sentenced to hang because she insisted on it.

Three exits, all refused

• The pardon — Acting Governor John Campbell was willing to grant one, but the law required her to formally accept it. She refused, telling him pardons are for cowards.
• The train — Cullen Bohannon tried to walk her out of the cell and put her on a train to New York. She wouldn't go.
• The muscle — Mickey McGinnes and Dandy Johnny Shea cornered Campbell in his room at the Palmer Hotel and told him the church lady wasn't going to hang. Campbell told them they could keep the casino, but they couldn't stop him enforcing the law.

Cullen also submitted a signed statement saying Ruth had protected an officer of the law from an armed felon, which would have made her innocent on paper. Campbell read it into the record. She contradicted it.

Cullen tore the gallows down with his hands

He found the hangman and his son assembling the scaffold in the town square, shoved them aside, and pulled it apart board by board. George Senior started again and worked through the night. The townspeople held a candlelit vigil outside the jail. Louise Ellison threatened her relationship with Campbell to print the story.

None of it moved her. Cullen spent the last night in the cell with her instead, and the two of them finally admitted what they'd never said out loud.

Filming it

Kasha Kropinski had played Ruth since season 1, when the character was, in her words, a bystander. She described the shoot in an AMC interview published in 2014:

"I felt like I was actually going to die," Kropinski said of the gallows trapdoor.

She noted the sun was setting during the sequence, and that the crew applauded when it wrapped.

For the record: "Thirteen Steps" pulled 1.74 million viewers, and Cullen quit the railroad by the end of the hour. He was back at it the following week.

What Joe's post said

Gatto wrote that he'd devoted a decade to building the franchise and was proud of it, then delivered the operative sentence:

"Due to some issues in my personal life, I have to step away," Gatto wrote on social media, December 31, 2021.

He added that he and Bessy had decided to part ways, and that he needed to focus on being the best father and co-parent to their two kids — Milana, born 2015, and Remington, born 2017. He also singled out his relationships with Murr, Q and Sal as the most important in his life outside his family. "Some issues" was as specific as the framing got.

What Bessy's post said

Bessy Gatto posted a photo of the pair the same day with a caption that stated the thing plainly: with love and respect, they had decided to separate, they would still be a family to their kids, and they were asking for privacy. She noted they'd keep working together on dog rescue. The post was later deleted from her page.

They had married in 2013. The separation, not creative differences or a contract dispute, was the reason the show lost a founding member ahead of season 10.

What the other three said

Murray, Quinn and Vulcano put out a joint statement the same evening saying they had never imagined making Impractical Jokers without Joe, and confirming they'd be back filming in January. The Tenderloins formed in 1999; the show premiered on truTV in December 2011 and had already produced nine seasons, four spin-offs, and 2020's Impractical Jokers: The Movie.

What happened next

• 2022 — Joe tours as a solo stand-up. Bessy films his kids joining him onstage at a New York show in February.
• June 2022 — The two buy a house in Glen Head, New York, listed on the deed as husband and wife.
• 2023 — Joe posts about their reconciliation, writing about a marriage of highs and lows and calling Bessy his person.
• March 2024 — A TikTok user accuses him of sexual assault. Gatto denies assaulting anyone, says he used "poor judgment," and announces time away from the public eye.

Season 11 premiered July 11, 2024, still a trio. As of 2026 the show remains Murr, Q and Sal, and Gatto has not returned to it.

Barry was killed by the Rakadishi cult, the same group that kidnapped his daughter and that carries over from Perry's series Ruthless. The Highest, the cult's leader, later confesses to it directly. Barry's body was left in Kareem Richardson's bedroom, which made Kareem look like the killer and set off everything that follows.

Kareem finds a body and makes it worse

Kareem walks into his own apartment and finds Barry dead on the floor of his bedroom. He does not call the police. He kicks Dale out of the pharmacy, stonewalls Sharon, and eventually enlists help to bury the body — behavior that reads as guilt to every single person around him.

Hebron was credited on 106 episodes of The Oval between 2019 and 2025 — a decent number for a character who spent a third of that run as a rumor.

Sharon finds Barry's bloodied phone and hides it. When Kareem tries to keep her from leaving his apartment, she fights him off and beats him badly enough that he needs medical attention.

Why confirmation took until season 5

• Season 4, early 2023 — Richard learns from cult members who show up at his house that they killed Barry.
• Season 4 finale, March 2023 — Sharon tells investigators that Kareem confessed to the killing. Police tell Richard they've found a body carrying Barry's belongings. Nancy attempts suicide.
• Season 5, November 2023 — Richard goes to the morgue to identify his son. It isn't Barry, even though that was the body from Kareem's apartment.
• Season 5, February 2024 — In "Breaking News," Richard, Nancy, Sam and Priscilla are formally told Barry is dead and that an investigation is open.

That last episode is the point at which the show stops hedging. Hebron marked it publicly, thanking Perry on Instagram for what he called his first shot at a career.

"I will always be grateful," Hebron wrote in 2025.

So was Kareem ever cleared?

The show keeps him in circulation rather than resolving it cleanly. He resurfaces in later seasons demanding money from Sharon, breaks into Richard's house, knifes him during a fight, and is shot several times by Priscilla. A memorial for Barry finally gets organized years after the death, which is about as close to closure as this particular storyline offers.

Josh quits TGS in the season 4 premiere, which aired October 15, 2009, after Liz and Jack start scouting for a new cast member behind the writers' backs. He comes back once, in "Audition Day" on November 5, to try to get the job back. He doesn't get it. Cheyenne Jackson's Danny Baker takes the slot instead.

He was the male lead until Jack Donaghy interfered

In the pilot, Josh is the male star of The Girlie Show, discovered by Liz while he was opening for a puppet, sharing the marquee with Jenna Maroney. Jack Donaghy then decides the show needs a name with actual demographic pull, hires Tracy Jordan, and renames the whole thing TGS with Tracy Jordan. Josh keeps the job. He loses the billing.

The character has long been read as a Jimmy Fallon type: young, likable, a performer who also writes sketches. Jack notes in the second episode that Josh scored 760 on his SATs and graduated from SUNY Cortland.

The part shrank season by season

• Season 1 (2006–07) — Recurring guest star, present in the pilot and most writers' room scenes.
• Season 2 (2007–08) — Promoted to series regular alongside Keith Powell and Katrina Bowden.
• Season 3 (2008–09) — Visibly reduced as Tracy, Jenna and Kenneth take up the oxygen.
• Season 4 (2009–10) — Two episodes. He quits in one and fails to get rehired in the other.

The audition that closed the book

"Audition Day" settles the account with some cruelty. Josh reads for the open TGS spot and volunteers, unprompted, that his film work went nowhere, his agent dropped him, and he took a web short he'd rather not describe in detail. The A.V. Club's review that week named the episode's organizing theme outright: desperation. Everyone in the building wants the job, including the janitor and Brian Williams.

Josh does not get it. The season ends with Danny Baker on staff, and Ross's name comes off the credits for season 5.

Did the show ever explain where he went?

Not really. The character is referenced in passing and never resolved, which is roughly how a sketch show treats a departed cast member in real life too.

For the record: Ross shared in the cast's Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination for 30 Rock, then spent 22 episodes as a billionaire game designer on Cartoon Network's Level Up in 2012–13 and turned up for two episodes of Arrested Development in 2013. Nobody made him audition.

HBO passed. Masters of the Air carried a reported budget of around $250 million for nine episodes, and in 2019 HBO decided it couldn't make the math work. Playtone and Amblin took the project to Apple, which had launched its streaming service that same year and was shopping for prestige. Apple said yes.

What the producer said

Gary Goetzman, who produced all three series with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, has been direct about it. Speaking to NBC News in 2024, he described the budget conversations reaching a point where the network told them to go make it elsewhere:

"we can't do this for that number."

HBO's public statement in October 2019 was shorter, saying the network had decided after careful consideration not to move forward, and pointing toward future collaboration with Playtone and Amblin.

The numbers behind it

• Band of Brothers (2001) — roughly $125 million for ten episodes.
• The Pacific (2010) — roughly $217 million for ten episodes, plus marketing.
• Masters of the Air (2024) — roughly $250 million for nine, including about $60 million in COVID compliance costs.

That last figure put it above House of the Dragon and made it Apple's most expensive series, ahead of Severance season 2.

The DVD problem

The Hollywood Reporter's 2019 reporting pointed at an economics shift rather than a creative dispute. Band of Brothers and The Pacific recouped heavily through home video — DVD sales were how HBO turned two very expensive awards magnets into profitable ones. By 2019 that revenue stream had collapsed, and HBO had no comparable way to earn back a quarter of a billion dollars on a nine-episode miniseries with no second season.

Was it in development at HBO?

For years. A third installment was first floated in 2012, and the project sat at HBO through 2013 and beyond. Goetzman has also noted the delay wasn't purely financial — the aerial sequences, which appear in nearly every episode, needed visual effects technology that didn't exist a decade earlier.

Where to watch all three

Band of Brothers and The Pacific remain on HBO Max. Masters of the Air is on Apple TV. The trilogy is split across two subscriptions with no sign of that changing.

For the record: Masters of the Air was the only Apple TV+ title to appear in Nielsen's US rankings the year it premiered, and it still drew fewer viewers than Netflix's House of Ninjas.

Start with the obvious: the Sheridan shelf

Landman was created by Taylor Sheridan and journalist Christian Wallace, adapted from Wallace's Texas Monthly podcast Boomtown. Sheridan's other shows share its DNA — working men, corporate money, and a lot of driving.

• Yellowstone (2018–2024) — the original. Five seasons of Kevin Costner defending a Montana ranch against developers, politicians, and his own children.
• Tulsa King — Sylvester Stallone as a New York mafia capo exiled to Oklahoma. Three seasons in, closest tonally to Landman's dry comedy.
• Mayor of Kingstown — Jeremy Renner brokering between gangs, guards, and cops in a Michigan prison town. Renewed for a fifth and final season in January 2026.
• 1883 and 1923 — the Dutton prequels, with Sam Elliott and Tim McGraw in one and Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in the other. 1883 is the strongest single season Sheridan has produced.
• The Madison — Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, a Yellowstone-adjacent drama about a New York family relocating to Montana.
• Special Ops: Lioness — Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman running CIA operations. Season 3 began streaming August 2, 2026.

If what you liked was the oil

The Son (AMC, 2017–2019) is the closest direct comparison anyone has made. Pierce Brosnan plays a Texas cattle patriarch pivoting his family into oil across two timelines, adapted from Philipp Meyer's novel. Two seasons, canceled, and largely overlooked.

For the nonfiction version, the Boomtown podcast that Landman is based on is still available and runs six episodes.

If what you liked was Billy Bob Thornton talking

Go to Goliath (Prime Video, 2016–2021), four seasons of Thornton as a burned-out lawyer, and Fargo season 1 (2014), where he plays a drifter who reorganizes a Minnesota town's moral arithmetic in about nine days. Both give him more room than Landman does.

If what you liked was the corporate knife-fighting

Succession is the obvious pick and needs no introduction. Ozark offers the same structure as Landman — a competent man managing crises for people who create them — with a Missouri lake instead of the Permian Basin. Justified splits the difference between Sheridan's westerns and a procedural, and Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens is the template a lot of these characters are working from.

What's next from Sheridan himself

Frisco King, a Tulsa King spinoff starring Samuel L. Jackson, began filming in Fort Worth in March 2026. Y: Marshals, the Kayce Dutton series with Luke Grimes, premiered on CBS on March 1, 2026 and was renewed almost immediately.

Tom Hardy appears in episodes 9 and 10 — "Why We Fight" and "Points" — as Private First Class John A. Janovec. He does not appear in the first eight episodes at all. Total screen time across both: a few minutes. It was his first significant on-screen credit.

Episode 9: "Why We Fight"

This is the concentration camp episode, in which Easy Company stumbles onto a subcamp near Landsberg while advancing through Bavaria. Janovec is part of the group that finds it. His main moment is wordless: a prisoner walks up and embraces him, and the camera holds on Hardy's face.

He gets a lighter beat earlier in the same episode, reading a newspaper article aloud to George Luz on the drive in:

"It appears the Germans are bad, very bad."

Luz's reaction is roughly what you'd expect.

Episode 10: "Points"

Janovec pulls checkpoint duty in Austria after the surrender, has a friendly conversation with a discharged German MP heading home to Mannheim, and compares discharge points with David Webster — Janovec has 75 and needs more; Webster has 81. Webster relieves him at the post. Janovec then dies in a jeep accident on a back road when a barrel falls off a truck into his path.

The real John A. Janovec, of North Riverside, Illinois, died May 16, 1945 in Saalfelden, Austria. He was 20.

Who else was in it before they were famous

• James McAvoy — Private James Miller, episode 5.
• Michael Fassbender — Sergeant Burton Christenson, across multiple episodes.
• Simon Pegg — First Sergeant William Evans, episode 1.
• Jimmy Fallon — a lieutenant in episode 10, in what remains a genuinely strange piece of casting.
• Stephen Graham, Andrew Scott, Dexter Fletcher, Marc Warren — all in supporting roles years before their breakouts.

Damian Lewis, playing Richard Winters, was the closest thing the ensemble had to a lead, and he was also largely unknown to American audiences at the time.

Why so many British actors?

The producers cast British and Irish performers in most speaking roles deliberately, on the theory that unfamiliar faces would read as ordinary soldiers rather than as movie stars in costume. It worked, and it also means the series functions as a fairly reliable index of who was about to have a career.

Fun fact: Hardy's next few credits were Black Hawk Down, Star Trek: Nemesis, and Layer Cake. He did not play a lead until 2008's Bronson.

Star City is an eight-episode Apple TV series set inside the Soviet space program, from For All Mankind creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi. It premiered May 29, 2026 with two episodes and ran weekly through its July 10 finale. Rhys Ifans stars as the Chief Designer.

Apple's own logline calls it "a propulsive, paranoid thriller".

Which is a fair description — it plays closer to a Cold War espionage drama than to the mission-control procedural of the parent show.

Where it sits in the timeline

It rewinds to 1969, the pivot point of the entire franchise: the moment cosmonaut Alexei Leonov beats Apollo 11 to the lunar surface. For All Mankind opened on that event as an American catastrophe. Star City covers the cosmonauts, engineers, and the KGB officers embedded among them who produced it.

The cast

• Rhys Ifans — the Chief Designer, the architect of the Soviet program.
• Anna Maxwell Martin — Lyudmilla Raskova, running KGB surveillance.
• Agnes O'Casey — Irina Morozova, a role Svetlana Efremova played in For All Mankind.
• Alice Englert — Anastasia Belikova, previously played by Rita Khrabrovitsky.
• Solly McLeod, Adam Nagaitis, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Josef Davies, Priya Kansara — cosmonauts, engineers, and one Sasha Polivanov who is not built for a program that punishes improvisation.

Two of those are recasts of characters For All Mankind viewers have already met, which is the clearest signal that the two shows are meant to interlock.

Do you need to watch For All Mankind first?

No, though the recasts and the 1969 setting land harder if you have. Season 5 of For All Mankind premiered March 27, 2026 and delivered its finale on July 10 — the same day Star City ended its run. Apple scheduled them as a pair.

Where was it filmed?

Vilnius, Lithuania. Production started February 20, 2025 and wrapped that August, with Sony Pictures Television producing for Apple. Wolpert and Nedivi serve as showrunners; Moore executive produces alongside Maril Davis, Andrew Chambliss, and Steve Oster.

Is there a season 2?

Nothing announced as of August 2026. The spinoff was first revealed in April 2024 and took just over two years to reach screens, so patience is the established norm here.

There are six Jack Ryan films. The newest is Jack Ryan: Ghost War, released May 20, 2026 on Prime Video, with John Krasinski in the role. It's the first Ryan feature since Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit in 2014, and the first one built as a continuation of a TV series rather than a novel adaptation.

The full list

• The Hunt for Red October (1990) — Alec Baldwin, opposite Sean Connery's defecting submarine captain. Adapted from Tom Clancy's 1984 novel.
• Patriot Games (1992) — Harrison Ford takes over, with an IRA splinter cell targeting the Ryan family.
• Clear and Present Danger (1994) — Ford again, this time into a covert war on a Colombian cartel.
• The Sum of All Fears (2002) — Ben Affleck plays a younger, pre-Ford Ryan in a reboot built around a nuclear detonation in Baltimore.
• Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) — Chris Pine, directed by Kenneth Branagh. The first film not based on a specific Clancy novel. $60 million budget, $135.5 million worldwide.
• Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026) — Krasinski, 107 minutes, rated R.

Five actors, six films, thirty-six years.

What Ghost War actually is

Andrew Bernstein — a TV director with episodes of Mad Men, The Americans, and Ozark behind him — handles the feature. Krasinski co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Rabin, from a story by Krasinski and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Ramin Djawadi and William Marriott scored it.

The plot pulls a retired Ryan back in when a Dubai handoff goes wrong and exposes a rogue black-ops outfit called Project Starling. Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly return as James Greer and Mike November from the Prime Video series; Sienna Miller joins as MI6 officer Emma Marlow.

Do you need to have watched the show?

It helps. Ghost War is explicitly an extension of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the Prime Video series that ran four seasons from 2018 to 2023, and it carries over that show's supporting cast rather than starting clean. The five earlier films are unconnected continuities — different actors, different studios, no shared timeline. You can watch them in any order or skip them entirely.

Why it took twelve years

Paramount held the film rights through Shadow Recruit, which underperformed relative to expectations and effectively ended that reboot. Amazon then licensed the character for television, and the series outlasted every previous screen version in sheer volume. Amazon MGM Studios began developing the movie in December 2024; Paramount Pictures and Krasinski's Sunday Night Productions produced it, and Amazon MGM distributed.

For the record: Ghost War got a one-night theatrical screening at Regal Times Square on May 15, 2026, five days before it hit Prime Video globally. Enough to qualify as a film, barely.

Both send-offs were real. The first one just came early.

Here's what happened

Pisano was written out because NBC dropped him as a series regular — Deadline reported in May 2025 that he and Juliana Aidén Martinez (Det. Kate Silva) wouldn't return for season 27. On screen, Velasco leaves the 16th precinct to take an undercover assignment with the DEA in San Diego, chasing a drug operation he'd already been working.

The two goodbyes

• May 15, 2025 — the season 26 finale, "Post-Rage," promotes Velasco to Detective Second Grade, complete with a bar celebration, a ceremony, and a montage. It read as a send-off because it was built as one.
• September 25, 2025 — the season 27 premiere ends with Velasco getting into an unmarked car on his way home. Pisano had turned up in a pre-season social video, and TVLine confirmed he was back for at least the opener.
• October 9, 2025 — "A Vicious Circle," episode three, is the actual exit. Chief Kathryn Tynan's office, DEA in the room, job offer on the table.

The actual conversation

Velasco hesitates, mostly because Fin had been shot in the premiere and the squad was already short-handed. Benson doesn't let him use that as a reason:

"You need to be where you can do the most good," she tells him in "A Vicious Circle."

He stops by to see Fin before flying west, and Fin cuts him off before he can get a sentence out.

Why did Pisano leave?

No official reason has been given. Deadline noted it was unclear whether the decision was creative, financial, or both, and pointed to a round of budget reductions running across multiple NBC shows ahead of the network's 2025 upfront. Neither NBC nor Pisano has expanded on it since.

For the record: SVU has now cycled through enough detectives that only Mariska Hargitay has been there since 1999. Ice-T arrived in season two. Velasco lasted four years, which puts him comfortably ahead of the average.

He never said with what. Neither did anyone else, in eighteen years.

So what happened to her?

NCIS never names Jenny's illness. Ducky describes it only as deteriorating and rapidly progressing, and the show's single piece of clinical evidence is a blood panel showing a normal white cell count and a badly elevated level of creatine kinase, paired with brain imaging. That combination gets you a degenerative condition and no further.

The clues the show did drop

• "Stakeout" (April 8, 2008) — Ducky has Abby run bloodwork on a John Doe. Abby flags the creatine kinase result. Palmer then mentions there are no John Does in autopsy.
• The deduction — Gibbs corners Ducky, guesses the blood isn't his, and works out that the only person Ducky would stick his neck out for is the Director.
• "Dog Tags" (April 15, 2008) — Gibbs asks Jenny about it directly. She says she's fine.
• The purse — Mike Franks finds her medication while going through it.
• "Judgment Day" (May 20, 2008) — in the diner, Jenny tells Franks she's dying, then adds that she regrets leaving Gibbs in Paris.

What killed her, officially

Gunfire. Jenny is shot in the two-part season five finale by men working for Svetlana Chernitskaya, the woman she was ordered to assassinate ten years earlier in Paris and chose to let live. Franks survives the shootout. Jenny doesn't. Ducky delivers the terminal diagnosis to Gibbs right before the autopsy in part two, which reframes the whole thing: she'd already run out of time and picked how to spend the rest of it.

Why it was never specified

Lauren Holly was leaving the show, and the writers built two exits into one episode — a shootout for the plot and an illness that made her decision to go alone make sense. Naming a disease would have committed the show to symptoms, timelines, and medical continuity it had no use for.

Fans have since argued for early-onset Alzheimer's, ALS, and various muscular dystrophies, all of which fit the creatine kinase result and none of which the script supports.

For the record: the closest thing to a diagnosis anywhere in the NCIS canon is a lab report Abby ran for a patient who didn't exist.

They did travel. They also spent a lot of time in Quebec.

Real-life locations

The bulk of season one was shot in Montreal, with all interiors at Grandé Studios there. Montreal doubled for Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Washington, Nevada, and the French Alps chase. Real location work amounted to three weeks in Morocco, four or five days in Paris, and four days in D.C. and Maryland.

What Montreal played

The most famous swap is the season finale foot chase through the D.C. Metro, which is not the D.C. Metro — filming restrictions pushed it into the Montreal subway. The Paris mosque interior is also Montreal. So is the alpine pursuit. The production's location team returned to exactly one Montreal site twice: a closed hospital.

Where the crew actually went

• Morocco — Marrakech stood in for Aden, Yemen. The Suleiman family compound is the Oumnass Kasbah, roughly 30 km outside Marrakech. The port at Essaouira played the Gulf of Aden.
• Paris — Belleville and the 20th arrondissement for Ali's business dealings and the episode three chase, with Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower used as backdrops.
• Église Saint-Merry — the 16th-century Gothic church in the 4th arrondissement, used inside and out for the sarin attack in episode four.
• Washington, D.C. and Maryland — the Potomac Boat Club for Jack's rowing, plus the Jefferson Memorial, the CIA's Original Headquarters Building, Georgetown, and Holly Beach Farm in Annapolis for the Mueller birthday party.

How they kept track of it

Four directors, several units shooting simultaneously, and four location managers across three continents who had never met each other. Everything ran through production designer Ruth Ammon and a shared online workspace holding the schedules, budgets, scripts, and scouting photos.

"We treated this series as if it were a really long feature film," producer Robert F. Phillips told the Location Managers Guild International in 2019.

For the record: the location managers reported the show finished on time and on budget. Four continents, and the accountants were happy. That's pretty much a miracle.

Nobody except Jack, once, in a line most people missed.

What really happened

Pancholy left because NBC gave him a bigger job on another NBC show. He was cast as Neal, a series regular on the sitcom Whitney, which premiered in fall 2011 and shot on a schedule that ruled out returning to 30 Rock. Jonathan was written out of season six entirely, with no in-story explanation.

The joke

In "The Ballad of Kenneth Parcell" — season six, episode four, aired January 26, 2012 — Jack is pressuring Liz to promote TGS and explains how valuable Jenna has become to the network:

"She's bigger than Maulik Pancholy on Whitney."

Which means that inside the world of 30 Rock, Maulik Pancholy exists as a separate person from Jonathan, and is a rising NBC star. The show pulled the same trick with Alec Baldwin, who gets name-checked by Jack in the series finale.

What Jonathan actually got up to

The character had a strange résumé for a background player:

• From Palo Alto — in season five's "Let's Stay Together," Jack asks him to fake an Indian accent as a distraction. Jonathan objects on geographic grounds.
• The Christmas gift — Jack once secured the release of Jonathan's sister from a North Korean prison.
• The wedding dress — Liz catches him wearing one, dancing with one of Jack's suits.
• Loyalty beyond reason — he keeps his post under Kathy Geiss and follows Jack upstairs to Kabletown.

Did he come back?

He did. Whitney was renewed for a second season, Pancholy left it, and Deadline reported in 2012 that he'd return as Jonathan for 30 Rock's final 13-episode run. He's back in season seven, including the two-part finale, "Hogcock!" and "Last Lunch."

Whitney lasted two seasons and 38 episodes. 30 Rock got seven seasons and 138. The joke about Pancholy's stardom aged into something closer to a documentary.

You have. Nine years ago, in Los Angeles, 2049.

So who is she?

Ana is played by Sylvia Hoeks, the Dutch actress who played Luv in Blade Runner 2049 — Niander Wallace's replicant enforcer, the one who cries while she kills people. In Ride or Die she's Judith Burton's former colleague at a covert assassination agency, codename Redback, presumed dead for five years and very much not dead.

Who Ana is inside the show

The setup takes a few episodes to assemble, so here's the shape of it:

• Same origin as Judith — both were orphans recruited into the Agency as teenagers, trained at the same covert school.
• Codename Redback — Judith's is Whiptail. The pair were the Agency's most effective team.
• The falling out — Ana decided Debbie (Octavia Spencer) was a liability and needed to die. Judith shot Ana instead and reported her killed.
• The five missing years — Ana survived the fall, was captured and tortured by the Turkish mafia, and came back with a very specific list.

Rather than simply killing Judith, Ana dismantles her: she murders Billy (Ed Skrein), leaks recordings of Judith describing Debbie as a "civilian asset," and takes apart a twenty-year friendship from the inside.

Is she actually the villain?

Only for about seven episodes. The finale hands that title to Bill Nighy's Director, who ran the recruitment program that produced both women — arranging for orphans to be adopted and then returned, so they'd be desperate enough to accept his offer. Cornered by Ana and forced to choose between the Agency and Judith's life, he picks the Agency.

Nighy, for his part, has no notes on this:

"I don't mind if he's just an unredeemable villain," he told TV Insider in 2026.

Where else you know Hoeks from

Beyond Blade Runner 2049, she's been in Apple's See, The Girl in the Spider's Web, and a long run of Dutch and German productions. She also won the first Sylvia Kristel Award back in 2014, which is the kind of credit that rarely makes it into a Prime Video press release.

For the record: Hoeks isn't the only casting joke in the show. The Director, a man who spent decades arranging fake adoptions for a living, is played by the guy from Love Actually.

The short answer

Nine episodes. The first two dropped January 26, 2024, with weekly releases through the finale on March 15, 2024. Runtimes run roughly 45 to 60 minutes, except the finale at just over 70 — around eight and a half hours total. There is no episode 10 and no season 2. It's a limited series.

How it stacks up against the other two

• Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001) — 10 episodes, each framed by interviews with surviving Easy Company veterans.
• The Pacific (HBO, 2010) — 10 episodes, structured around three point-of-view Marines.
• Masters of the Air (Apple TV+, 2024) — 9 episodes, following the 100th Bomb Group across dozens of named airmen.

Why the count became an argument

Two complaints dominate. The first is structural: the earlier miniseries told semi-standalone stories that added up, while this one plays as a continuous narrative sliced into installments.

"'Masters of the Air' too often seems like a long movie," IndieWire wrote in its January 2024 review.

The second is the Tuskegee Airmen. The pilots of the 99th Fighter Squadron are introduced in episode 8 and given a fraction of the development the 100th's crews get, which left viewers arguing the material needed either its own episodes or none. SlashFilm's review made a version of the same point about pacing, and the fan theory that a longer cut was trimmed for budget has never gone away.

Is more coming?

No. Apple has not ordered a follow-up, and the series was commissioned as a closed-ended limited run. Executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have made no announcement about a fourth entry in the sequence.

If you want the source material at full length, Donald L. Miller's 2006 book covers the Eighth Air Force's whole campaign, not just the 100th, and Harry Crosby's memoir A Wing and a Prayer supplies the narration heard across all nine episodes.

Here's what really happened

The line is "You can't be half a gangster," and Jimmy Darmody says it to Nucky Thompson in the pilot. Winter has said the writers decided at the start of season 2 that Nucky's arc had to end with him pulling the trigger himself — on the man who gave him that advice. Jimmy dies in the finale, "To the Lost," which aired December 11, 2011.

Whose line it actually is

Worth clearing up, since the show's marketing blurred it: Nucky doesn't actually say it. Jimmy does, in the first episode, after Nucky warns him he could have him killed. Jimmy's answer is that Nucky won't, because he can't be half a gangster anymore. Nucky's reply is a flat acknowledgment that Jimmy now understands the arrangement.

Two seasons later, Nucky shoots him in the face in the rain at the Atlantic City war memorial.

Winter's reasoning

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly after the finale, Winter said he'd made the call at the very beginning of season 2, and that the logic of the season left no alternative — Jimmy had betrayed Nucky and tried to have him killed.

"Anything short of Nucky doing it himself wouldn't feel real," Winter told Entertainment Weekly in 2011.

He made a related point to TVGuide.com the following year: through 11 episodes of season 2, Nucky had never fired a shot himself. He was the man who told other people to do it. After the finale he was both.

But what about the Michael Pitt rumors?

The timing gave everyone plenty to work with. The sequence:

• October 2011 — Deadline reports that UTA dropped Pitt as a client, describing him as difficult on set and otherwise.
• December 11, 2011 — the finale airs. Jimmy dies. Fans flood Twitter.
• December 12, 2011 — Winter tells EW the backstage story is not true, calls Pitt a total professional, and says the decision predated everything by a year.
• Same week — Pitt tells EW he liked the storyline, and that he's always drawn to something shocking.
• June 2012 — Winter admits at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable that Pitt learned about the death by email, blaming bad cell service and Martin Scorsese's schedule.

Anonymous accounts of on-set friction have circulated for over a decade. None has been confirmed by anyone with a name.

For the record: Winter told Slate in 2012 that Nucky spends season 3 carrying the damage of having killed a man who functioned as a surrogate son — and that the character starts chasing distractions to avoid thinking about it.

McMurtry took the name from an old church bus marked "Lonesome Dove Baptist Church," which he saw in the early 1980s just after leaving Ranchman's Cafe in Ponder, Texas. He'd been stuck for a title for a trail-driving book. He described the sighting as the moment the whole thing clicked.

What he said about it

Ranchman's was his favorite restaurant, and he'd drive roughly 100 miles from Archer City to eat there. He recounted the bus sighting to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which quoted him directly:

"If ever I had an epiphany it was at that moment," McMurtry said.

In a 1987 profile he added that he'd known immediately it would make a good title, and that five years passed before he attached the name to the story he'd been carrying around.

The story existed long before the title

Lonesome Dove began in 1972 as a screenplay called Streets of Laredo, written with Peter Bogdanovich after their success on The Last Picture Show. The intended cast:

• John Wayne as Woodrow Call — Wayne dropped out, and the project collapsed with him.
• Jimmy Stewart as Gus McCrae — the role Robert Duvall eventually played on television.
• Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon — later Robert Urich in the 1989 miniseries.

McMurtry bought the rights back and rebuilt it as a novel, published by Simon & Schuster in 1985. The 1989 CBS miniseries followed, and the McMurtry title Streets of Laredo was recycled for a 1995 sequel.

Is the church real?

It is. Lonesome Dove Baptist Church dates to the 1840s and still stands on Lonesome Dove Road in Southlake, in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs. The bus is long gone.

Ranchman's fared worse. The Ponder steakhouse, open since 1948 and known for 32-ounce T-bones and chicken-fried steak, closed in October 2023 when its owner retired, then went up for sale and has been slated to reopen since.

For the record: McMurtry drew Call and Gus from real Texas cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, and the scout Deets from Bose Ikard, who rode with Goodnight.

Loving died on the trail and asked to be carried back to Texas for burial. Goodnight did it.

Two couples quit in episode 4 — Dave Adams and Vanessa Hattaway, and Micah Hardeman and Chanel Watkins. Both are now engaged. Of the four couples who stayed and finished the experiment, two got engaged on Ultimatum Day and both of those engagements are over.

Why four people walked

The exits came days into the trial marriages. A title card told viewers the four had met off camera and that surveillance footage caught them packing that evening. They were never shown again in the season, though Dave and Vanessa turned up at the reunion.

Creator Chris Coelen addressed it in a Variety interview on premiere day, saying the group had been "a little unsettled" during the pairing phase and noting that producers don't restrict what adults do. Dave later told PEOPLE that leaving hadn't been the plan, and that the decision took shape after Vanessa moved in with her trial partner, Nick Tramontin.

Their departure left two people living alone. Mariah Zernik came home from the mall to find Micah's things gone. Nick came back to an empty apartment.

Where all six couples stand

• Chanel Watkins & Micah Hardeman — engaged. Micah proposed near the Brooklyn Bridge on September 15, 2025, roughly a year after their episode aired.
• Vanessa Hattaway & Dave Adams — also engaged, in September 2025. Vanessa has said they left to protect her mental health.
• Mariah Zernik & Caleb Lefterys — engaged in the finale, still engaged at the reunion, split during 2025. In April 2026 Mariah announced she's expecting her first child with boyfriend Jacob Craig.
• Aria De'Westbrooks & Scotty Lewis — engaged in the finale for about 24 hours. Both single. Scotty has talked publicly about starting therapy afterward.
• Zaina Sesay & J.R. Warren — split at the finale, tried again, split again, and gave conflicting accounts at the reunion. J.R. went on to compete in Perfect Match season 3.
• Nick Tramontin & Sandy Gallagher — no proposal. At the reunion Nick said he'd gone to rehab after filming and was seeing someone new; Sandy was single.

The part fans keep pointing at

Aria called off her engagement to Scotty a day after accepting it, and said so plainly at the reunion.

"I realized I made a mistake, pretty fast after," she told the reunion in December 2024.

Which leaves the scoreboard looking like this: the couples who refused to finish the experiment are the ones wearing rings.

The short answer

Most of it. Gale "Buck" Cleven really escaped a forced march, John "Bucky" Egan really stayed a prisoner until liberation, and Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal really was shot down over Berlin on February 3, 1945 and picked up by advancing Soviet troops. The finale's biggest liberties are timing and compression, not invention.

What the show moved around

• Cleven's escape — the series stages it in April 1945 from the camp at Nuremberg. In reality he got away during the evacuation of Stalag Luft III, which began January 27, 1945, and walked back into Thorpe Abbotts twelve days later after 18 months as a POW.
• Rosenthal's route home — the Red Army did recover him near the Oder, but he was routed through Moscow before returning to England. The finale skips the detour.
• The Tuskegee Airmen — the 99th Fighter Squadron pilots were real and so was their captivity, but their screen time is compressed into two late episodes.
• The Netherlands food drops — accurate. The 100th flew relief missions over Dutch territory in May 1945.

The line that's real

The reunion between Cleven and Egan at Stalag Luft III is one of the finale's setups, and the greeting is documented rather than written.

"What the hell took you so long?" — Cleven to Egan, per the 100th Bomb Group Foundation

Egan's reply, by most accounts, was that this is what he got for being sentimental.

What the Bloody Hundredth actually lost

The 100th flew from June 25, 1943 to April 1945. Records compiled by the 100th Bomb Group Foundation put the cost at 757 men killed or missing and more than 900 taken prisoner. Aircraft losses are counted differently depending on the source — figures between 177 and 229 both circulate, depending on whether write-offs are included.

The nickname came early. On the October 10, 1943 Münster raid, 13 of the group's aircraft went on to the target and one came back: Rosenthal's Royal Flush, landing with two dead engines and a hole in the wing.

What happened to them afterward

Rosenthal flew 52 missions total and was shot down twice. After the war he served as an assistant to the U.S. prosecution at Nuremberg, where he interrogated Hermann Göring, and met his wife Phyllis Heller on the ship over. He died in 2007 at 89.

Cleven stayed in the Air Force through Korea and Vietnam, worked briefly at the Pentagon, and collected an MBA from Harvard along with graduate degrees in geology and physics. He later ran Webber College in Florida. Egan was his best man.

What pushes this year’s true-crime slate over the edge is the kind of jaw-dropping twist you couldn’t make up: in Should I Marry a Murderer?, forensic pathologist Dr. Caroline Muirhead discovers her fiancé, Alexander “Sandy” McKellar, was behind the hit-and-run killing of cyclist Tony Parsons years earlier—then quietly goes undercover. She keeps the engagement alive for months while working with police, steering investigators to a remote burial site and handing over covert recordings and personal notes from inside the relationship.

She marked the grave with a Red Bull can.

Beyond the No. 1 pick

Some entries draw power by getting out of the way. Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart returns to her 2002 abduction and the nine months that followed, told squarely in Smart’s own words. No melodramatic reenactments—just direct testimony and archival news footage that trace her coping strategies and the psychological levers her captors used.

Others move like thrillers. The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson tracks the murder of the rising cycling star and the international hunt for suspect Kaitlin Armstrong. Surveillance logs, phone data and on-the-ground interviews piece together the digital breadcrumbs that led authorities to a new identity abroad and, eventually, an arrest.

When intent becomes the question, The Crash pulls viewers into the courtroom of teenager Mackenzie Shirilla, who drove 100 mph into a brick building, killing her boyfriend and his friend. The doc pits social media snapshots against accident-reconstruction data and interviews with toxicologists and collision experts, forcing a hard look at where recklessness ends and purpose begins.

Hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries. The Investigation of Lucy Letby sifts through medical logs, text messages and insider interviews to lay out how a spike in infant deaths at a UK neonatal unit went unchecked. The focus is on institutional hesitancy—early warnings flagged by doctors, administrative delays, and the statistical anomalies that, piece by piece, built a devastating case.

History’s most infamous cult magnet gets a stripped-down reexamination in Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes. Unreleased prison phone recordings and spare, unnerving sound design let Manson’s own voice run up against the reality of the Tate–LaBianca murders, cutting through pop-culture fog to show how late-’60s anxieties became kindling for manipulation.

Police missteps take center stage in The Murder of Rachel Nickell, a methodical revisit of the 1992 Wimbledon Common killing and the notorious honeytrap that targeted the wrong man while the true murderer remained free for years. By contrasting tabloid-era frenzy with present-day legal analysis, it maps how tunnel vision—and public pressure—twisted the pursuit of justice.

There’s small-town dread, too. The Danish series A Friend, A Murderer sits with a rural friend group as they realize a popular, trusted member was the predator behind eight years of hidden sexual assaults. The show prioritizes emotional fallout over shock, capturing the claustrophobia that sets in when trust shatters from the inside.

Faith twisted into control fuels Trust Me: The False Prophet, which looks at offshoots tied to Victor Houteff and the leaders who built isolated religious enclaves. Survivors, former insiders and reporters detail how obedience and “divine” authority masked emotional abuse, forced isolation and financial exploitation—and how hard the road out can be.

And Maternal Instinct drills into the 2020 murder of Reagan Simmons-Hancock, built around a fabricated pregnancy and a fetal abduction. Family testimony, police records and intimate home videos align to honor the victim while charting the obsessive lies that escalated into violence.

The top 10 at a glance

• 10. Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes — Unreleased prison phone audio strips away mythology around the Tate–LaBianca murders.
• 9. Trust Me: The False Prophet — Survivors expose how a breakaway religious enclave weaponized faith for control and profit.
• 8. The Investigation of Lucy Letby — Medical logs, texts and statistics map a neonatal tragedy and the warnings that went unheeded.
• 7. The Crash — Inside the Mackenzie Shirilla case, where 100 mph into a brick wall becomes a trial over intent.
• 6. The Murder of Rachel Nickell — A notorious honeytrap unraveled; the wrong suspect targeted while the killer walked free.
• 5. Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart — Smart recounts nine months in captivity herself, without reenactments, in exacting detail.
• 4. The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson — A cross-continental manhunt traces Kaitlin Armstrong’s digital trail and capture.
• 3. Maternal Instinct — A 2020 murder tied to a fabricated pregnancy, reconstructed through family testimony and case files.
• 2. A Friend, A Murderer — A rural Danish circle confronts the predator in their midst after eight years of hidden assaults.
• 1. Should I Marry a Murderer? — Dr. Caroline Muirhead stays engaged to an admitted killer while feeding police undercover audio recordings and personal diaries.

Pierce Brosnan says he’s all for his son Paris chasing acting — as long as he does it the hard way. In a new interview, the former 007 said he’s pushing his 25-year-old to train, study and prove himself on set rather than lean on the family name.

“Consequently he has made a film now and he's good. I told him if he wants to be an actor he must train and study, and he wants to do those things,” Brosnan told The Sunday Times Magazine.

Paris, who is 25, has been building a creative path in both acting and art. He’s acknowledged the privilege of being Pierce Brosnan’s son but wants the work to stand on its own. His first time on a film set came in 2023, when he and his brother Dylan appeared in The Unholy Trinity, giving him an early taste of the job’s demands.

Separate set drama

Meanwhile, a different project tied to Brosnan has reportedly run into turbulence. On season two of MobLand, Tom Hardy is said to have stayed in his trailer for hours while co-stars Brosnan and Helen Mirren waited, raising eyebrows among producers and fueling uncertainty about a possible third season, according to trade reports.

“He refused to come out of his trailer for hours at a time,” a production insider told The Hollywood Reporter, calling it a calculated power play.

Those reports also allege Hardy pushed for script rewrites and offered creative notes that clashed with executive producer Jez Butterworth and the team at 101 Studios. Representatives for Hardy and Mirren did not respond to requests for comment, and Brosnan was reportedly unavailable due to travel commitments.

Want to understand why the Avengers sweat when the metal mask shows up? Start with the screen versions that actually let Doctor Doom be Doctor Doom. In one standout, the animated Avengers find out the hard way: his plans land three moves ahead, his armor never scuffs, and his political immunity makes cuffing him a fantasy. These picks chart every side of Victor Von Doom — the master tactician, the jealous rival, the sovereign sorcerer-scientist, and the would‑be god.

• The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes — Season 2 (“The Private War of Doctor Doom”)
• Fantastic Four (2005) — Julian McMahon’s live-action Doom
• Fantastic Four: The Animated Series (1994) — Season 2’s Latveria-heavy revamp
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) — MCU setup before Doomsday
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994) — the “Secret Wars” three-parter

The grand strategist

The second season of The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes treats Doom like a force of nature. The episode “The Private War of Doctor Doom” is the handshake you don’t forget: he outmaneuvers the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, barely lifting a gauntlet, and turns “superhero teamwork” into a puzzle he already solved. The show leans into his Latverian clout and diplomatic cover, so even when heroes catch on, there’s not much they can do.

I know everyone loves the Avengers movie, but Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is the best adaption of Avengers to another medium.

That was Joshua Yehl’s take back in 2014 — and it still tracks, because this run nails Doom’s mix of cold strategy and untouchable status.

The jealous rival

For a generation, Fantastic Four (2005) was their first live-action Doom. Julian McMahon plays him as a sleek, ego-drunk mogul whose world — and flesh — are rewritten by cosmic radiation, hardening into metal along with his pride. The movie pivots his origin but locks onto the right obsession: Reed Richards. Beneath the mask is raw jealousy and the refusal to come in second, and watching the boardroom alpha curdle into petty vengeance remains key to understanding why that Reed/Doom rivalry powers so many stories.

The monarch in full

Season 2 of Fantastic Four: The Animated Series is a course correction that goes all-in on Doom’s Latverian roots. Here he’s the sovereign scientist-sorcerer — Doombots on patrol, arcane rites on the side — with a tragic past and a personal code that makes him more than a cackling tyrant. The tone turns lush and gothic, and the show even underlines the headache of his diplomatic immunity: you can beat the bots and still not touch the king.

Being a fantastic four and doctor doom fan looks like actual hell lmao

As one fan joked in 2026, the ride can be bumpy — but this season is the classic “all facets of Doom” package.

MCU groundwork

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) positions Marvel’s First Family in a distinct alternate dimension, a retro‑futuristic sandbox built to collide with Victor’s ambitions. It’s the structural prelude: the movie establishes the team dynamics Doom loves to exploit, then maps how his reach will intersect with Earth’s main timeline and the wider multiverse. If you want the emotional stakes before the mask drops across realities, this is the context setter.

Doom as god-tier

“Secret Wars,” the three-part arc in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, previews the cosmic ceiling. Plucked onto an alien battlefield with Earth’s biggest heroes and villains, Doom skips the scrapping and goes straight for the throne: he steals the power of cosmic beings, remakes a realm in his image, and rules. Across three brisk episodes he outsmarts near‑gods, conquers whole swaths of reality, and turns a desolate war world into his personal paradise — a clear picture of what happens when Victor gets everything he wants.

Avengers: Doomsday is set to open December 18, 2026.

Looking for it now? In the U.S. you can rent Pervert Park on Prime Video and Apple TV. The 2014 feature heads inside Palace Mobile Park in St. Petersburg, Florida — a community nicknamed “Pervert Park” — where more than 100 convicted sex offenders live under the same rules and restrictions.

It earned the 2015 Sundance World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact.

The filmmakers, Swedish-Danish duo Frida and Lasse Barkfors, first learned about the park in a Danish newspaper. They visited in 2010, found a community very different from what they expected, and kept coming back; the project took nearly four years to complete.

Before its U.S. TV debut, the documentary premiered at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. It later reached American public television as part of PBS’s documentary strand POV.

Where to watch

• Prime Video — available to rent
• Apple TV — available to rent
• TV broadcast: aired on PBS’s POV on July 11, 2016

Three weekends. That’s how fast Spider-Man: Brand New Day vaulted past $2 billion worldwide, becoming only the eighth movie ever to hit that mark and the second-fastest to do it after Avengers: Endgame. It also leapfrogged the $1.9 billion haul of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, resetting the franchise’s record as Zendaya’s MJ continues to be part of the web-slinger’s biggest box-office moments.

And that was just the headline. Earlier this year she popped up for a brief role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which has pulled in $1.291 billion worldwide and ranks as 2026’s second-highest-grossing film so far. On the other end of the spectrum, her moody two-hander The Drama with Robert Pattinson turned a tidy profit — more than $130 million on a reported $28 million budget.

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day — $2 billion+ worldwide (second-fastest ever to the milestone)
• The Odyssey — $1.291 billion worldwide (2026’s No. 2 so far)
• The Drama — $130+ million worldwide on a $28 million budget

Spider-Man: Brand New Day cleared $2 billion worldwide in just its third weekend.

Next up: Arrakis

Zendaya’s year isn’t done. Dune: Part Three is dated for December 18, 2026, following Dune: Part Two’s strong $715 million global run. She’ll reunite with the ensemble for the late-fall promotional push, with expectations sky-high given how the last installment expanded the audience.

After 2026

Beyond the holidays, her slate stretches from animation to music biopic — and maybe espionage.

• Shrek 5 — voices Felicia, the teenage daughter of Shrek and Fiona; Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy return; due in summer 2027.
• Be My Baby (A24) — stars as Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes; filming is expected to begin this year.
• Bourne reboot — Zendaya is rumored to be involved; not confirmed.

Warner Bros. rolled out The End of Oak Street in theaters on August 14, 2026, and that’s the only way to see it right now. There’s no streaming date, no digital rental, and no purchase option announced yet—so if you’re curious about the buzzed-about suburban survival story, you’ll need a movie ticket.

In theaters only since August 14; no streaming or digital release date announced.

The premise

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell drops an ordinary cul-de-sac into the extraordinary: after a mysterious cosmic jolt, Oak Street is yanked from suburbia and dumped somewhere unknown. Parents played by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor fight to keep their family together as familiar sidewalks give way to a hostile landscape—complete with prehistoric threats, including dinosaurs.

Produced by J.J. Abrams, the film leans into mystery and survival through a family lens. Hathaway and McGregor are joined by Christian Convery and Maisy Stella as the Platts, with the story inviting inevitable Jurassic Park comparisons while sticking closer to the ground-level panic of suddenly losing the world you know.

How to watch it

For U.S. viewers, theaters are the only option for now. Warner Bros. Pictures hasn’t set a timeline for premium video-on-demand or for a streaming debut. Industry chatter points to an eventual run on Max, Warner Bros.’ streaming home, but nothing is official.

• U.S. theatrical release: August 14, 2026
• Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
• Streaming: TBA (expected later on Max; not announced)
• Digital purchase/rental: TBA

Until Warner Bros. locks in those dates, The End of Oak Street is a big-screen-only experience.

Television was where Hayden Panettiere banked her biggest checks. On Nashville, she reportedly earned $75,000 per episode as Juliette Barnes; stretched across the drama’s 124 episodes, that’s roughly $9.3 million in gross salary. Heroes reportedly brought in $2 million, with Scream 4 adding an estimated $1 million.

By the time of her passing on August 16, 2026, Panettiere’s net worth was estimated at $6 million, after earlier career-peak estimates hovered closer to $10 million. Beyond acting, her earnings came from voice work, music and soundtrack contributions, endorsements, and a handful of well-timed real estate sales.

Estimated net worth at 36: $6 million (as of August 16, 2026)

Her property moves alone tell part of the story. She bought a Hollywood Hills home for $2.635 million in 2008 and sold it for $3.075 million in 2014, then later sold a Nashville property for $1.65 million in 2018.

From diaper ads to primetime

Panettiere’s on-camera life started early — modeling at 8 months old and landing a Playskool commercial by 11 months. Daytime TV followed with stints on One Life to Live and Guiding Light, and her film credits began piling up with A Bug’s Life and Remember the Titans.

At 17, Heroes vaulted her into worldwide fame, turning the longtime child performer into a fixture of teen magazines and red carpets. She’d go on to balance studio movies and TV with a knack for fan-favorite turns.

Range and reinventions

She brought youthful spark to Ice Princess and Racing Stripes, then carved out a lasting horror imprint as Kirby Reed in Scream 4 — a role she later reprised in Scream VI. Her most layered work arrived with Nashville, where Juliette Barnes let her fuse high-gloss drama with live vocals and soundtrack cuts.

• Nashville — Juliette Barnes; 124 episodes; reportedly $75,000/episode (about $9.3M gross)
• Heroes — breakout at 17; reportedly $2M
• Scream 4 and Scream VI — Kirby Reed; estimated $1M payday for Scream 4
• Real estate — Hollywood Hills home bought for $2.635M (2008), sold for $3.075M (2014); Nashville property sold for $1.65M (2018)

Those numbers, plus years of acting, voice roles, music work and endorsements, shaped a Hollywood career that stayed busy from infancy through adulthood — and kept delivering right up to her return as Kirby in Scream VI.

Online chatter has zeroed in on Henry Cavill as Marvel plots its mutant era, with rumor accounts saying Marvel Studios has kicked the tires on bringing him into the coming X‑Men reboot. Scoopers like MyTimeToShineHello and the X feed Craze Crave have floated talk of a multi‑project role, but nothing’s been announced, and the studio’s plans post‑Secret Wars remain tightly sealed.

Neither Marvel nor Henry Cavill has announced a deal.

One fan-favorite lane is Magneto. If Marvel goes younger with the reboot, Cavill — in his early 40s — could skew the Professor X/Magneto rivalry to a new generation while still carrying the presence that role needs. It’s also a character with franchise reach across multiple films, which fits the “multi‑project” rumor making the rounds.

Then there’s “Cavillrine.” Memes imagined him popping claws around the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, but Cavill didn’t show up in the movie, and Hugh Jackman is still the on‑screen Logan — a point the film even jokes about, with Ryan Reynolds riffing that Jackman will be playing the role into old age. Launching a second prime Wolverine right now would be a tough sell.

Two roles that make sense

• Captain Britain (Brian Braddock) — Cavill has said he’d be game to play a British superhero (The Hollywood Reporter, 2021), and Brian Braddock is a clean fit. In the comics he’s the twin brother of Betsy Braddock (aka Psylocke) and helped found Excalibur alongside Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers and Nightcrawler. Brian isn’t typically a mutant himself, but his deep ties to Psylocke, Otherworld and Excalibur give Marvel an easy on‑ramp to weave Cavill into the mutant side of the MCU.
• Beyonder — A reality‑warping cosmic force who sits at the center of the original Secret Wars comics, the Beyonder has tangled with the X‑Men and New Mutants and would place Cavill at the heart of Marvel’s next crossover if that storyline is adapted. If that’s the play, the earliest logical landing spot would be Avengers: Secret Wars.

What’s solid? Not much publicly. Marvel hasn’t revealed the X‑Men cast or stamped any Cavill involvement, and release specifics for the back half of the Multiverse Saga — including Avengers: Secret Wars — remain unannounced.

At the Los Angeles premiere for Lanterns, co-creator Damon Lindelof said the team is already mapping out a second season—even as the first one just launched. He stressed that Season 1 was built to play like a full case file with an ending, not a string of cliffhangers, and then dropped the update that a new writers’ room is already at work.

“We came into this with the sort of attitude that this was a mystery with a beginning, middle, and end…If it’s successful and people love it, there’s a lot of runway to launch into future seasons. But I think Chris Mundy has already started a new writers’ room, figuring out what new stories could be for ‘Lanterns.’”

Lindelof made the comments to Screen Rant on the carpet. HBO hasn’t officially renewed Lanterns for Season 2, but behind the scenes there are notable moves: Chris Mundy has kicked off that writers’ room, and Christopher Cantwell has come aboard as co-showrunner. Lindelof isn’t expected to return in the same capacity, and Tom King is stepping away to focus on DC Studios’ animated Mister Miracle.

A grounded Green Lantern case

The eight-episode season pairs Aaron Pierre as rookie John Stewart with Kyle Chandler as a world-weary Hal Jordan, then plants them in an Earth-bound murder investigation with cosmic aftershocks. The opening hours dig into a strange case in Nebraska, unfolding across dual timelines with the textured, procedural feel of a crime drama while keeping one foot in DC lore.

Episode 1 brings the Lanterns into the orbit of Sheriff Kerry, played by Kelly Macdonald, as the show peels back small-town relationships and secrets.

• Kelly Macdonald — Sheriff Kerry
• Garret Dillahunt
• Poorna Jagannathan
• Jason Ritter
• Laura Linney
• Ulrich Thomsen
• Nathan Fillion

Lanterns premiered August 16 on HBO and Max. Season 1 runs eight episodes.

Clear your calendar: Netflix is dropping all eight episodes of The Diplomat’s new season in one go, and each installment runs close to an hour. The streamer confirmed the date via its Tudum site, and the binge plan matches the show’s high-stakes, can’t-stop-now pacing.

Season 4 premieres Thursday, October 15, 2026, with all episodes released at once on Netflix.

Cast shake-up

Season 4 upgrades three familiar faces to full-time status inside the Beltway. Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, and Nana Mensah have been promoted to series regulars, solidifying the show’s White House bench after a tumultuous third season.

• Allison Janney — President Grace Penn
• Bradley Whitford — Todd Penn, Grace’s husband
• Nana Mensah — Billie Appiah, rising inside the White House operation

Whitford and Aidan Turner shook up the board in Season 3, with Whitford’s Todd Penn entering the fray alongside Janney’s commander-in-chief and Turner appearing in a key guest role. Their arrival piled fresh complications onto a series already packed with shifting alliances and razor-edged conversations.

The political thriller still revolves around Keri Russell’s diplomat Kate Wyler and Rufus Sewell’s wily Hal, whose marriage tends to make every global incident more combustible. With the Penns now firmly in play and Appiah’s portfolio growing, the stakes inside the West Wing just got higher.

The Diplomat Season 4 debuts globally on Netflix on October 15, 2026. All eight near-hour episodes arrive the same day.

It’s a two-night stadium plan: Moscow-based promoter Say Agency says Ye will bring his live show to Gazprom Arena in St. Petersburg for concerts on October 10 and 11, 2026, billed as part of the Ye Live Concert Tour 2026. The venue is one of Russia’s largest and regularly hosts major sporting events and touring spectacles.

Early chatter around the post includes a wide ticket spread — listings running from about 9,000 rubles for standard seats up to roughly 160,000 rubles for VIP boxes — and a lot of fan scrutiny of how the show would be staged in a football stadium setting. The announcement circulated on social media and quickly rippled through Ye fan communities.

Two shows at Gazprom Arena on October 10–11, 2026, per promoter Say Agency.

• Dates — October 10–11, 2026
• City — St. Petersburg, Russia
• Venue — Gazprom Arena
• Promoter — Say Agency (Moscow-based)
• Tour — Ye Live Concert Tour 2026
• Tickets — approx. 9,000–160,000 rubles (standard to VIP boxes)

The 2026 run

Across 2026, Ye has been rolling out new stadium dates in multiple countries, with recent stops and announcements spanning Europe and North America and more being added as the year goes on. While there’s been speculation about his next project, he’s recently indicated he’s not actively working on a new album, keeping the spotlight on the live show and its production.

For St. Petersburg, there’s no setlist or production rundown yet, and fans are watching for nuts-and-bolts details like on-sale timing and venue logistics. As of now, the promoter’s post lists the two-night stand and the wide ticket range — from 9,000 to 160,000 rubles — with additional specifics still to come.

Emergency responders were dispatched to a home in Greenville, South Carolina, on Sunday, August 16, after a friend called 911 about an unconscious woman, according to officials. The woman was identified as Hayden Panettiere, 36. First responders attempted to revive her with CPR and other measures, but she was pronounced dead at about 2:32 p.m. The identity of the caller has not been released.

What authorities say

The Greenville Police Department and the Greenville County Coroner’s Office are investigating. Authorities said there is no indication of foul play or suspicious circumstances at this time. The official cause of death remains pending until the coroner completes an autopsy.

An autopsy is pending; the official cause of death has not been announced.

People reported that dispatch audio captured officials discussing an overdose and cardiac arrest around the time of the emergency call. Police have not confirmed those specifics or any particular life-saving procedures used by first responders.

Key details so far

• Call received: Approximately 1:50 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 16
• Location: Private residence in Greenville, South Carolina
• Response: Law enforcement and EMS attempted resuscitation, including CPR
• Time of death: About 2:32 p.m., per officials
• Status: No indication of foul play; autopsy and toxicology pending
• Caller: Not publicly identified

Panettiere had been a familiar face to TV and movie audiences for years, from NBC’s Heroes to ABC/CMT’s Nashville, and most recently the Scream franchise. She also spoke publicly in the past about her struggles with addiction and mental health, though investigators have not linked those issues to her death.

Officials said more information will be released once the coroner determines the official cause of death.

On David Robert Mitchell’s dinosaur thriller The End of Oak Street, 23-year-old Jordan Alexa Davies says the job meant long days of full-body fear and reacting to “creatures” that weren’t there yet. Years of voice acting, she adds, turned out to be surprisingly useful when the set was dotted with tennis balls and green screens standing in for multi-ton predators.

“You really have to use your imagination when you are working with a lot of visual special effects… acting towards things that are not there yet, that they are going to put in later.”

Davies keeps specifics under wraps, but she describes her character as “the girl next door” who lives in the same small town as the central family and gets swept up in the chaos when the street rips into a prehistoric landscape. “She is very much part of the world they are all navigating,” she said.

Lessons from the leads

Sharing the screen with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor left a mark that had nothing to do with dinosaurs. Watching the two Oscar-nominated stars lead the ensemble, Davies says, was a masterclass in how to run a set with kindness.

“You really can be incredibly talented, but you do not have to be an awful person, you know?… You can be number one on the call sheet, but still be so caring and so kind, making sure everyone feels valued at all times.”

From Disney booth to blockbuster

Before Oak Street, Davies voiced Poppy Peepleson on Disney’s Vampirina and appeared in Apple TV+’s Defending Jacob. She started onstage at six years old in The Not So Wicked Wiz of Oz and says the road to a big studio movie thickened her skin.

“There’s a lot of rejection. There are a lot of no’s, but you have to be solid within yourself, keep going, and know that it’ll click if you want it enough… I feel so grateful that this is my first film.”

Switching between a quiet, heavy drama like Defending Jacob and a pulse-pounding survival movie required a different kind of stamina, but the same off-switch.

“You kind of have to learn how to leave it at the door… separate what your personal life is from the make-believe… learning how to have a balance between setting healthy boundaries and the really intense stuff is helpful.”

Secrets and speculation

With J.J. Abrams producing through Bad Robot and Warner Bros. distributing, the movie arrived with the usual mystery-box chatter online — including fan theories about shared universes. Davies says that noise wasn’t part of her day-to-day.

“You’re kind of just… zoned in on the work — what the work is and what the script is and what you’re specifically doing — and just trying to deliver the best performances.”

Who’s who in The End of Oak Street:

• Anne Hathaway — co-leads as part of the Platt family
• Ewan McGregor — co-leads opposite Hathaway
• Maisy Stella — in the Platt family ensemble
• Christian Convery — in the Platt family ensemble
• Jordan Alexa Davies — a “girl next door” caught in the upheaval
• David Robert Mitchell — director
• J.J. Abrams — producer via Bad Robot

Music is still the other half of Davies’s creative life — she’s released her own songs and isn’t done with the stage. Asked about returning to musicals, she didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah, I would love to do that. That would be a dream… even just doing Broadway one day… it intimidates me a little bit more, but it is something that I’d love to tackle one day, too.”

The End of Oak Street is now playing in theaters.

Start at the top: insiders peg Tom Holland’s base for Spider-Man: Brand New Day in the $15–20 million range, before any box-office bonuses. Right behind him, Zendaya’s return as MJ is estimated at about $8 million. From there, the movie’s pay ladder steps down across more than 90 cast members, with rates that scale by role size and screen time. Exact deals are under NDA; the figures below reflect industry estimates drawing on SAG-AFTRA scale, past pay tiers and the film’s budget math.

Released July 31, 2026, the film has cleared more than $2.02 billion worldwide, making it Sony’s top-grossing release ever.

What the stars reportedly made

• Tom Holland — Peter Parker/Spider-Man: estimated $15–20 million base, plus backend
• Zendaya — MJ: about $8 million
• Mark Ruffalo — Bruce Banner/Hulk: estimated $8–12 million
• Jon Bernthal — Frank Castle/The Punisher: estimated $4–6 million
• Sadie Sink — Jean Grey: estimated $2–4 million
• Jacob Batalon — Ned Leeds: estimated $1–2 million
• Marisa Tomei — May Parker (cameo): around $1 million

The mid-tier and cameos

Below the headliners sits a group of key players and one-off turns that give the movie its texture. Their deals are typically negotiated on weekly or daily contracts tied to prominence and days worked.

• Tramell Tillman — William “Bill” Metzger: estimated $500,000–$1 million
• Liza Colón-Zayas — Detective Jean DeWolff: estimated $500,000–$1 million
• Michael Mando — Mac Gargan/Scorpion: estimated $2–3 million
• Marvin Jones III — Tombstone: estimated $2–3 million
• Keith David — Spider Video Narrator (voice): estimated $100,000–$250,000
• Naomi Watts — E.V. (voice cameo): A‑list voice fees typically land between $10,000 and $50,000

Day players and background

Dozens of working actors fill out the film’s New York — a mix of day players, stunt pros and featured extras who generally earn union-scale rates. Smaller speaking turns, including Olivia Booth-Ford, Taryn Marie Butler, Johnny Myers and stunt performer Billy Clements, are estimated at the higher end of day-player pay, commonly cited in the $1,100–$3,000 range depending on days and bumps.

Ambient faces onscreen — like Camila López, Michael Magnet, Daisy Sequerra and Elvis Carlos — are estimated to have worked at scale day payments between $1,100 and $8,000 across their time on set. For performers billed as The Inhabited along with uncredited ambient roles, total payroll is estimated at $150,000–$400,000.

• Ian Chance — Manhattan Businessman: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Nigel Finnissy — Manhattan Businessman: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Simon Christo — Pedestrian: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Zarra Kaahn — DODC Agent: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Cristina Lopez-Mas — Tour Bus Tourist: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Aadam Mohammed — Food Vendor: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day
• Oluwafemi Jonathan Taiwo — NYPD Officer Washington: standard background daily scale, estimated $200–$1,100/day

Taken together, the talent spend stretches from roughly $1 million up to $20 million for top-billed players, down to daily scale for atmospheric roles — the kind of payroll spread that helps power a mega-budget superhero hit of this size.

Fans of the 1999 teen rom-com are getting a stage version: a new musical of 10 Things I Hate About You is headed to Broadway, with preview performances set to begin August 17, 2027. The show adapts the film that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger household names, reimagined by a pop-forward and TV-to-stage creative team.

Previews begin August 17, 2027, on Broadway.

Who’s making it

• Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang — book
• Carly Rae Jepsen and Ethan Gruska — music and lyrics
• Tom Kitt — music supervision, arrangements, orchestrations
• Christopher Wheeldon — director and choreographer
• Mike Bosner — producer

The production is described as a “rebellious” coming-of-age musical about self-discovery and pushing back on social rules. At its center are two sisters trying to define themselves on their own terms amid high school cliques, crushes and chaos — a fresh spin that aims to channel the movie’s sharp wit into a new score and staging.

From film to stage

Based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the movie followed the Stratford sisters and a scheme that pairs the school’s fiercest skeptic of dating with its most enigmatic rebel. The original cast included:

• Julia Stiles — Kat Stratford
• Heath Ledger — Patrick Verona
• Larisa Oleynik — Bianca Stratford
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt — Cameron

It also delivered one of the era’s most indelible set pieces: Patrick’s stadium serenade of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” a moment that practically begged for a musical reinterpretation.

Broadway venue, casting and opening night have not yet been announced.

A couple called Clarissa and Franklin decide to end 20 years of marriage with a bang: they throw a celebratory party to kick off their single lives. The plan backfires into a minefield of disastrous dates and skeptical kids, and the real test becomes keeping the family intact even as the marriage ends.

Amy Schumer will star in and produce the new comedy Best Divorce Ever, written and directed by Sean Mullin, with sales launching at the Toronto International Film Festival, as first reported by Variety.

What the movie’s about

Mullin’s film aims to flip breakup tropes on their head, treating divorce less like a failure and more like a complicated, ongoing relationship — especially when kids are involved. Or, as the logline puts it:

Figuring out how to stay a happy family is where things get complicated.

The writer-director isn’t shy about the movie’s mission statement.

Divorce has a branding problem.

I think we need to change the narrative that the only successful way to end a marriage is for one person to die.

Who’s making it

Indie banner Vanishing Angle is producing alongside Concourse Media, which is also financing and handling sales. Concourse executive Matthew Shreder said the material is tailor-made for Schumer’s voice.

Amy is one of the few people who can take something as painful as divorce and make it brutally honest and incredibly funny.

Producers Matthew Lee Miller and Natalie Metzger added their vote of confidence in the collaboration.

Amy brings that same fearless honesty to everything she does, and we couldn't be more excited to reunite with Sean and partner with her as both a producer and performer to bring this film to life.

Schumer, an Emmy winner, previously fronted and produced big-screen comedies like Trainwreck (2015) and I Feel Pretty (2018). Casting beyond Schumer hasn’t been announced.

U.S. distribution and a release date are still to come, with sales kicking off at Toronto.

Dan Benson didn't wait for anyone to explain it. He explained it first.

Here's what really happened

Benson wasn't asked back, and he says the reason is his career: he left acting to work full-time as an adult content creator on OnlyFans. He said as much to TMZ in January 2024, months before the sequel series had even premiered. Asked directly whether the adult work made it impossible to bring Zeke back, his answer was one word: yes.

"That's all on me. I totally get it," Benson told TMZ in January 2024.

He described a mix of emotions — happy for fans getting the reunion, aware he'd traded his shot at it. In a TikTok posted around the same time, he connected the career switch to money, arguing that cable and streaming residuals from a Disney Channel run don't add up to a living.

Then it got frostier

• October 2024 — Benson posted criticism of the premiere; he later said Henrie blocked him on X.
• October 31, 2024 — He defended the hosts of the Wizards of Waverly Pod and noted that David DeLuise and Jennifer Stone hadn't been invited to the premiere either.
• August 2026 — After the finale, he wrote on X that the revival had become "the failed David Henrie show," adding that people call him bitter but he's just disappointed for fans.

Stone, who showed up as Harper only in the final episodes, told Us Weekly on August 4, 2026 that she had already mourned not being part of the reboot after a conversation with Henrie.

How the show ended

Wizards Beyond Waverly Place ran a 21-episode first season and a 10-episode second season, then closed with a four-part finale event, "One Last Spell," on Disney Channel on August 4, 2026 and Disney+ on August 5. Sulkin returned as Mason. Zeke did not.

Spoilers for seasons 3 through 8 follow.

Here's what happened

In season 3 (2020), Kiesha is abducted from a bus stop by Omari (Cedric Mays), a man from her own neighborhood, and held captive in his basement for weeks, where she is raped. She kills him in self-defense and escapes in episode 7, "A Stain." She later learns she's pregnant, keeps the baby, and builds a life as a teacher — and in the series finale, she marries Emmett.

The arc, season by season

• Season 3, episode 2 — Kiesha doesn't come home. Her mother Nina goes to the police and gets brushed off; stepmother Dre starts searching on her own.
• Season 3, episode 5 — Viewers learn she's alive and held captive. She breaks through a door and is dragged back inside.
• Season 3, episode 6 — Omari's monologue supplies his motive: a rejection in high school.
• Season 3, episode 7, "A Stain" — She kills Omari and gets out, with help from Ronnie.
• Season 4 — Pregnant by her captor, she weighs adoption by Octavia, then keeps the baby and names him Ronnie.

Why the writers went there

The season was reshaped after Jason Mitchell's firing and Tiffany Boone's exit, and the show cut its detective characters. Baker told Variety in 2020 that she researched real missing-persons cases and prepared for weeks; she also asked producers directly why Kiesha, and got the same answer the script gives. On the aftermath, she told TVLine in 2020:

"She questions everyone after this."

Baker filmed the basement scenes in chronological order, and Mays was kept away from her between setups.

Where she ended up

Kiesha spent seasons 4 through 8 as a teacher and mother, on-and-off with Emmett (Jacob Latimore), then engaged in season 8. The series finale, "The Last Dance," hit Paramount+ on July 24, 2026 and Showtime on July 26 — the two of them married in Shaad's backyard, with Kevin and Nina turning up and Tiff standing as a bridesmaid after a late reconciliation.

For the record: Baker has been in The Chi since the 2018 pilot and was in the final scene of the last episode, eight seasons and 88 episodes later. Very few of the original cast can say that.

Ritchson played Arthur Curry — "A.C." — better known as Aquaman. He appeared in four episodes across seasons 5, 6, 8, and 10, starting with "Aqua" in October 2005. That made him the first actor to play Aquaman in a licensed live-action production, more than a decade before Jason Momoa took the trident.

Every appearance

• "Aqua" (season 5, 2005) — A.C. hauls Lois Lane out of Crater Lake, flirts with her, needles Clark, and sets out to sabotage a LuthorCorp weapons project.
• "Justice" (season 6, 2007) — teams with Green Arrow, Impulse, and Cyborg in the show's proto-Justice League episode.
• "Odyssey" (season 8 premiere, 2008) — helps spring Clark from a Russian labor camp.
• "Patriot" (season 10, November 19, 2010) — returns married to Mera (Elena Satine), and his Atlantean name, Orin, is confirmed on screen.

The character's parting line in "Aqua" set the tone for the whole run:

"Stay super, bro." — Arthur Curry, "Aqua," 2005

The spinoff that almost happened

"Aqua" set a ratings record for the series, and Ritchson was offered his own Aquaman show as a Smallville spinoff. Then UPN and The WB merged into The CW. By Ritchson's account, the incoming network president questioned whether an actor with his thin résumé could carry a series.

Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar shot the pilot anyway — "Aquaman," also known as Mercy Reef — with Justin Hartley in the lead. It never went to series, and Hartley was handed Oliver Queen on Smallville instead. Four years later, "Patriot" recycled underwater footage from that unaired pilot for Ritchson's swimming shots.

The rest of his comic-book résumé

Ritchson voiced Aquaman in the 2008 animated film Justice League: The New Frontier, then played Hank Hall — Hawk — on Titans from 2018. Reacher premiered on Prime Video in 2022 and turned him into a leading man about seventeen years after the Crater Lake rescue.

She isn't in the credits. She was never on the payroll.

The short answer

The card honored Judy Ann Prachyl, who died on December 18, 2025, at 73. She wasn't cast or crew. She was a friend of the Sheridan family from Weatherford, Texas — the same town as Sheridan's Bosque Ranch — and a fan of Landman and Yellowstone. The card described her as "the nursing home OG."

Who she was

Prachyl worked in administration at Weatherford Independent School District and volunteered at St. Stephen's Catholic Church. Her online memorial, quoted by The Mirror US in 2026, described her this way:

"known for her vibrant personality and beautiful smile"

The same memorial thanked Nicole Sheridan — Taylor Sheridan's wife — along with Traci Werne-Morrison and Johnny Holt for looking after Prachyl in her final years, which is the clearest public marker of how close the connection ran.

Why "nursing home OG" lands where it does

Season 2 spent a lot of screen time in assisted living, which makes the nickname read less like a private joke and more like a fit:

• Episode 1, "Death and a Sunset" — T.L. (Sam Elliott) is introduced arguing with a nurse at his facility about watching the sunset during dinner hours; Tommy learns his mother has died in memory care.
• Episode 4, "Dancing Rainbows" — the family drives to Canadian, Texas, for the funeral.
• Episode 10, "Tragedy and Flies" — the dedication card, after Tommy and Angela's closing scene in the backyard.

Does Sheridan do this often?

Regularly. His productions have a long habit of ending episodes with dedications to people who shaped the work or the family behind it, which is why the card format is familiar to Yellowstone viewers even when the name isn't.

Neither Taylor nor Nicole Sheridan has publicly discussed Prachyl beyond the card itself. Season 3 starts filming at the end of August 2026, per Billy Bob Thornton on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast — which puts a likely premiere in late 2026 or early 2027.

Fans ran the numbers and came up confused. The numbers back them up.

Here's what happened

NCIS: Hawai'i averaged 7.8 million viewers in Nielsen's seven-day linear ratings and about 10 million over 35 days across platforms — the highest-rated show CBS canceled that year. The network's stated reasons were cost, schedule, and franchise crowding. Shooting on location in Hawai'i was expensive, and 7.8 million doesn't crack the top tier at CBS.

What CBS actually said

At a press briefing in Los Angeles, CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach walked reporters through the calculus:

"We have to evaluate the financials and the performance overall," she told reporters in 2024.

Asked whether the decision could be reversed — CBS had un-canceled S.W.A.T. twice — she said no.

Why good ratings weren't enough

• Location costs — filming in Hawai'i put the per-episode price well above a mainland procedural.
• A crowded franchise — NCIS, NCIS: Sydney, and NCIS: Origins were all on the 2024–25 board, with Tony & Ziva in development.
• Schedule churn — Reisenbach's stated priority was keeping the lineup fresh, and Hawai'i aired Mondays at 10 p.m., behind the flagship.
• Failed haggling — Deadline reported that a budget-trimmed season 4 was floated and didn't come together.

Blue Bloods and CSI: Vegas got similar news in the same window. Vanessa Lachey's Instagram response ran to three words: "Gutted, confused, blindsided."

How it ended

"Divided We Conquer" aired May 6, 2024 — written as a season finale, broadcast as a series finale. It pulled 5.41 million viewers, the second-biggest audience of the season, and closed with Maggie Shaw waiting in Jane Tennant's living room. That thread never got picked up.

At 54 episodes, Hawai'i is the shortest-lived show in the NCIS franchise.

Former showrunners Jan Nash, Christopher Silber, and Matt Bosack told TVLine in July 2024 what season 4 would have been: Maggie Shaw connected to Tennant's mother, more of Tennant's history as a spy, and forward movement for Lucy and Kate.

The short answer

There is no single chronology, because two of the five films are reboots that start over. The workable order is the original trilogy first — The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) — followed by the two standalone restarts in the order of the eras they're set in: The Sum of All Fears (2002), then Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014).

The five films, in that order

• The Hunt for Red October (1990) — Alec Baldwin, as a desk-bound CIA analyst pulled into the field when a Soviet captain goes off course with a stealth submarine. Adapted from Clancy's 1984 debut novel. Won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing.
• Patriot Games (1992) — Harrison Ford takes over. Ryan has left the CIA to teach history at the Naval Academy, intervenes in a terrorist attack in London, and gets pulled back in when the surviving attacker comes after his family.
• Clear and Present Danger (1994) — Ford again, now acting Deputy Director of Intelligence, uncovering an off-books war against a Colombian cartel. The end of the original continuity.
• The Sum of All Fears (2002) — Ben Affleck. Reboot one: Ryan is young again, it's the present day, and the Cold War history is gone. A nuclear device goes off at a Baltimore football stadium.
• Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) — Chris Pine. Reboot two, and the only one not adapted from a Clancy novel. A full origin story with no connection to anything before it. Kenneth Branagh directs and plays the antagonist.

The one thread holding the first three together

James Earl Jones plays Admiral James Greer in all three of the original films, which does more continuity work than the lead casting does. Ryan changes face between the first and second film with no explanation offered; Greer stays put, ages, and is diagnosed with cancer by the third.

What about the TV show and Ghost War?

Separate continuity again. John Krasinski played Ryan across four seasons of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Prime Video, from 2018 to 2023. Rather than a fifth season, Amazon MGM continued the story as a film: Jack Ryan: Ghost War, directed by Andrew Bernstein, running 107 minutes, released on Prime Video on May 20, 2026, with Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly returning and Sienna Miller added as an MI6 officer.

That makes Krasinski the fifth actor to play Ryan on screen, 36 years after Baldwin.

So what should you actually watch first?

Release order and story order produce nearly the same result here, so start with Red October. If you only want the version of the character with a consistent arc, the Baldwin-Ford trilogy is self-contained and stops cleanly in 1994.

Valyria was destroyed by the Doom — a single cataclysmic day, roughly a century before Aegon's Conquest and about 400 years before Game of Thrones. The Fourteen Flames, the volcano chain running through the Valyrian peninsula, erupted at once. The capital was buried, nearly every dragonlord and dragon died, and the peninsula shattered into islands around what became the Smoking Sea.

What Valyria was before that

A civilization of sheepherders who found dragons nesting in the volcanoes and spent the next five thousand years running most of the known world. At its height the Valyrian Freehold controlled Essos from Pentos to Meereen, powered by dragons, Valyrian steel, and blood-and-fire sorcery, and staffed by slaves working the mines beneath the Fourteen Flames.

George R.R. Martin's in-universe history The World of Ice & Fire (2014) describes the day itself in one line:

"Every hill for five hundred miles exploded."

Molten rock a thousand feet in the air, earthquakes leveling temples and towns, lakes boiling or turning to acid, and red clouds raining dragonglass. Ships still refuse to sail within sight of the ruins.

Nobody in-universe agrees on the cause

The maesters have no consensus, which is deliberate on Martin's part. The competing explanations:

• Natural eruption — the mainstream view, and the one most maesters hold.
• Failed spells — Septon Barth's theory that Valyrian magic had been holding the Fourteen Flames in check, and it stopped working.
• The curse of Garin the Great — a Rhoynish prince whose people Valyria destroyed, said to have cursed them with his dying breath.
• Assassinated fire mages — feuding dragonlords killing each other's sorcerers, leaving nobody to keep the volcanoes quiet.

How the Targaryens survived

They left twelve years early. Daenys Targaryen, remembered as Daenys the Dreamer, dreamed of Valyria's destruction. Her father Aenar sold the family's holdings, packed up his household and five dragons, and relocated to a rock in Blackwater Bay called Dragonstone. The other Forty Families laughed. Twelve years later they were dead, and the Targaryens were the last dragonlords in the world.

What the show actually tells you

Less than you'd think. Viserys explains the family's Valyrian origins to Rhaenyra in the season one premiere, standing under Balerion's skull, and names Daenys. Rhaenyra invokes her again in season three when Helaena's visions come up. The Velaryons get their own Valyrian pedigree — they left for Driftmark even earlier than the Targaryens.

Everything else — the Fourteen Flames, the Smoking Sea, the Forty Families — lives in Martin's supplementary histories rather than on screen. Which is convenient, given HBO has an Aegon's Conquest film in development and a lot of unspent material sitting in those books.

Here's what really happened

Common asked to leave. The actor and rapper approached the producers in 2013, during the season three run, wanting to get back to his music and film career after years of long shoots in Calgary. The writers built Elam's exit around that request. He was killed in episode 4x07, "Elam Ferguson," which aired September 13, 2014 — roughly a year after the decision was made.

What happens in the episode

Elam survives the bear but sustains a head injury that showrunner John Wirth described as causing significant brain damage — long-term memory, decision-making, and pain response all compromised. The Comanche who find him nurse him back and call him Bear Man. He returns to Cheyenne unstable and dangerous, stabs Buffalo Bill Cody, and takes a hostage.

Cullen Bohannon shoots him. The show frames it as a mercy killing: either Cullen does it, or Campbell's men do it publicly and make a political point of it. The episode was directed by Rod Lurie and written by Mark Richard and Tom Brady, and closes on Anson Mount sitting on the casket.

Common told Deadline in 2014:

"It pulled at my heart because I really cherish the character Elam."

Why it landed mid-season instead of the finale

AMC wanted the death held for the season finale. Wirth argued against it, and won. His reasoning, given to Deadline in 2014, was structural: stringing the audience through eleven episodes believing Elam was dead, only to produce him alive at the end, would read as a cheat.

Executive producer Mark Richard had already set the terms — the character had to die, and only Cullen could do it.

With limited access to Common's schedule, the production compressed the whole arc into two episodes, "Bear Man" and "Elam Ferguson."

Season 4's other casualties

Elam's death wasn't isolated. Season four also killed off the boy Ezra in episode 10 and Ruth (Kasha Kropinski) in episode 12, the latter after Kropinski's own decision to leave. Three regular departures in six episodes is unusual density even by cable standards.

Hell on Wheels ran two more seasons after Elam, finishing in July 2016 with the golden spike at Promontory Summit — the ending it had been building toward since the pilot.

Nobody kills Hearst. He survives the entire series and the 2019 movie. Trixie shoots him in the shoulder in season three and he recovers. In Deadwood: The Movie, set in 1889, Seth Bullock arrests him for ordering Charlie Utter's murder and puts him in a cell, badly beaten but alive. The real George Hearst died of natural causes in 1891.

The season 3 shooting

After Hearst orders the murder of Ellsworth, Trixie (Paula Malcomson) pulls the derringer from her boot, distracts him at his door, and shoots. She hits his shoulder and runs. He never gets a clear look at her face.

Hearst demands the shooter's body. Al Swearengen kills Jen, another woman working at the Gem, and passes her off as the assassin. Hearst accepts it and rides out of camp, having lost nothing. That was the end of the series when HBO canceled it in 2006 — the standoff everyone expected simply never happened.

What the movie does instead

Thirteen years later, the film brings Hearst back as a sitting U.S. senator from California, still buying land and still ordering killings. The last act runs like this:

• The auction — Hearst tries to buy the land his telephone lines need. Alma Ellsworth outbids him with her own money.
• The witness — his attempt to have Samuel killed fails after E.B. Farnum warns Bullock.
• The wedding — Hearst crashes Trixie and Sol Star's reception with two out-of-town lawmen, demanding her arrest for the shooting a decade earlier.
• The arrest — Bullock, now a U.S. Marshal, tells them they have no jurisdiction and arrests Hearst for Utter's murder instead.
• The thoroughfare — the town swarms him on the walk to jail and beats him nearly to death before Bullock stops it.

His deputy Harry Manning, secretly on Hearst's payroll, tries to shoot Bullock in the back and is killed by Calamity Jane first. Hearst stays in the cell.

Gerald McRaney, who played him in both, summed the character up to Gold Derby in 2017:

"He regarded human beings as just other pieces of mining equipment."

What happened to the real Hearst

History gave him even less of a comeuppance. George Hearst was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1886, elected in his own right, and died in office in Washington, D.C. on February 28, 1891, at 70. His estate was worth an estimated $19 million. His son, William Randolph Hearst, went on to build a newspaper empire on it.

The series never explained Gutterman's disappearance on screen. James Whitmore Jr. didn't return because his career took off between seasons — he landed a feature film shooting in the Philippines and a recurring role on The Rockford Files opposite James Garner. There was no falling-out; Whitmore has consistently spoken well of the show. The scheduling simply didn't work.

Where the character supposedly went

The show's tie-in paperback novelizations, which adapted a handful of episodes each, offered the explanation the series didn't: Gutterman's tour of duty was up and he rotated home. That's it. It appears in print and nowhere on film, which is why the question keeps getting asked five decades later.

He wasn't the only one dropped

NBC canceled the show after season one, then revived it with a retool that shifted screen time toward a group of nurses stationed near the squadron. Several pilots were cut to make room:

• Capt. Jim Gutterman (James Whitmore Jr.) — gone entirely, with no on-screen acknowledgment.
• Lt. T.J. Wiley (Robert Ginty) — written out after the first six episodes of season two.
• 2nd Lt. Robert Anderson (John Larroquette) — dropped at the same point, years before Night Court.
• 2nd Lt. Jeb Pruitt (Jeb Stuart Adams) — a new addition, brought in to fill the gap.

Robert Conrad's Pappy Boyington remained the constant. Almost nobody else did.

What Whitmore did instead

He shot Sidney J. Furie's Vietnam War film The Boys in Company C, released in 1978, playing Lt. Archer. That production filmed in the Philippines, a long way from the Indian Dunes airstrip in Valencia, California, where Black Sheep Squadron's flying sequences were staged. He then took the part of Freddie Beamer on The Rockford Files, appearing across 1977 to 1979 alongside Garner.

Neither job left room for a full season of network television.

What happened to him after

Whitmore kept acting through the 1980s — Sgt. Bernie Terwilliger on Hunter, guest spots on Magnum, P.I., Battlestar Galactica, and Dallas — and then moved behind the camera. He has directed episodes of Quantum Leap, Beverly Hills, 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Good Wife, and a long run of NCIS, with credits stretching into 2025 on Elsbeth.

For the record: the son of Oscar nominee James Whitmore has now spent roughly four decades directing television, which is considerably longer than the two seasons anyone remembers him for flying in.

Circle August 25 on your calendar: that’s when One-Punch Man lands back on Netflix in the U.S. with multiple seasons available in one place. Netflix hasn’t spelled out the exact lineup yet, but the company says more than a single season is coming to the service at launch.

One-Punch Man returns to Netflix in the U.S. on August 25, 2026.

There’s one wrinkle for anyone chasing the newest episodes. The first cour of Season 3 is already streaming on Hulu in the U.S., and it’s unclear if those episodes will also show up on Netflix at launch. Internationally, Netflix already carries the series in dozens of countries; many regions (including Japan, India, Australia, and Brazil) have all three seasons, some territories only have Season 1, and in Canada the first two seasons are available.

Where to watch in the U.S.

• Netflix — Multiple seasons start streaming August 25, 2026 (exact season list TBA)
• Hulu — Season 3, Part 1 is streaming now

If you’re new to the show or need a refresher, the hook is wonderfully simple: Saitama trained so hard he lost his hair and can now end any fight with a single punch. He teams up with his cyborg apprentice, Genos, signs up with the bureaucratic Hero Association, and spends his days swatting monsters while wishing someone — anyone — could actually give him a challenge.

Fans fell hard for Season 1’s crisp, kinetic animation from Studio Madhouse and the deadpan comedy. The road since has been bumpier: long waits between seasons and a studio handoff to J.C.Staff led to heavy debate over the show’s look in later episodes. Even so, Saitama’s cult following in the U.S. never really went anywhere — which makes this Netflix return a handy on-ramp to binge the earlier runs ahead of more Season 3.

One-Punch Man starts streaming on Netflix in the U.S. on August 25, 2026.

Performances of Affluenza are set for Sept. 26–Nov. 21 at Riverside Studios in London, with Noah Schnapp leading the cast in his world stage debut, according to Variety. Written and directed by artistic director Andy Sandberg, the play anchors the venue’s Mainstage Season 26/27.

The drama follows the fallout from a teenager’s decision to drive under the influence and the life-altering tragedy that follows. Inspired by real events and a controversial legal defense, the story asks where wealth and privilege collide with basic accountability.

A sharp left turn from Hawkins

Schnapp is best known to American viewers as Will Byers on Netflix’s Stranger Things, a role he’s played since childhood. On the film side, he’s appeared in Bridge of Spies and Waiting for Anya, but this marks his first major outing in live theater.

“I am so excited to make my stage debut in London with Affluenza,”

In a statement to Variety, Schnapp said he and Sandberg had been discussing the right project for a couple of months. He described being deliberate about his first stage role and growing attached to the play’s characters as he dug into the script.

• Venue — Riverside Studios, London
• Run — Sept. 26 to Nov. 21
• Creative — Written and directed by Andy Sandberg

Affluenza begins its limited run on Sept. 26 and plays through Nov. 21.

Former Manchester United captain Gary Neville’s digital network The Overlap is teaming up with Disney+ for the 2026–27 soccer season in the UK and Ireland. The streamer will serve as headline sponsor on The Overlap’s flagship chat show Stick to Football and a new companion series, Stick to United with Wayne Rooney, with fresh episodes rolling out weekly and extra content landing exclusively on Disney+.

What’s in the deal

• Stick to Football — 40 new episodes across Disney+ and The Overlap’s YouTube, including 20 temporary Disney+ exclusives and 6 regional specials.
• Stick to United with Wayne Rooney — 50 episodes, with extended cuts available only on Disney+.

Who’s on the mic

• Stick to Football — Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Ian Wright, and Roy Keane.
• Stick to United with Wayne Rooney — Wayne Rooney alongside content creator Mark Goldbridge breaking down Manchester United.

Neville stressed that the shows won’t disappear from their existing free channels, even as Disney+ adds exclusives and longer cuts.

“Our community will continue to enjoy our content in exactly the way they always have through YouTube, while at the same time Disney+’s incredible global streaming audience will now be able to discover and enjoy it too,” he said, via a Disney+ press release.

He added that partnering with a major entertainment platform is about widening the audience for athlete-led conversation.

“We’re creating an opportunity to introduce our shows to millions of new viewers globally. We believe that’s a genuinely exciting step forward for both The Overlap and Disney+.”

Disney+ outlined weekly premieres in the UK and Ireland: Stick to United starts August 18, with Stick to Football following on August 20. U.S. availability wasn’t announced.

File this under delightful coincidences: Peter Capaldi is heading to London with the Only Murders in the Building crew. According to Deadline, the former Twelfth Doctor will appear in Season 6 as a recurring guest star — and he won’t be the only Time Lord in the neighborhood.

The Doctor Who effect

Capaldi joins a growing cluster of Doctor Who alumni set for the show’s London arc. He’ll share the season with two other Doctors and a couple of familiar British comedy faces.

• Peter Capaldi — recurring in Season 6; played the Twelfth Doctor on Doctor Who
• David Tennant — recurring in Season 6; the Tenth and Fourteenth Doctor
• Jodie Whittaker — recurring in Season 6; the franchise’s first woman Doctor
• Jim Broadbent — aboard this season; once portrayed an alternate First Doctor in the 1999 Comic Relief special The Curse of Fatal Death
• Richard Ayoade — among the season’s players; Deadline notes he has his own Doctor Who connection

The Time Lord streak layers onto an already stacked ensemble that pairs comedy legends Steve Martin and Martin Short with Selena Gomez, and has featured scene-stealers like Michael Cyril Creighton, Da’Vine Joy Randolph (an Academy Award winner), and Meryl Streep.

Across the pond mystery

This year’s case sends Charles, Oliver, and Mabel out of the Arconia and into London. The new season kicks off when rival podcaster Cinda Canning collapses and dies just outside the building’s gates, launching the trio into a fresh investigation that unfolds on British turf and, naturally, on their true-crime podcast.

Season 6 spans 10 episodes and shifts the action to London.

The series will continue streaming on Hulu in the U.S. as the sleuths chase their most international whodunit yet.

On its way to the Oscars, Switzerland has tapped Who Is Still Alive—a nonfiction portrait of nine Palestinian refugees who literally rebuild the streets they fled, using only memory—as the country’s official entry for Best International Feature Film. The pick was announced by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, putting the film into the Academy’s competitive international race.

The production shot in South Africa because Palestinians from Gaza can enter the country without a visa.

Directed by Nicolas Wadimoff, the 113‑minute documentary centers the refugees’ act of remembrance: they recreate their former Gaza neighborhoods from scratch, then walk viewers through those spaces as they recount what happened there. That conceit gives the film both its look and its emotional framework.

The project premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival in the Giornate degli Autori sidebar and has been making the rounds at documentary showcases since. Switzerland’s selection now puts it in front of Academy voters worldwide.

Wadimoff has explored Palestinian stories before, including Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza) and The Apollo of Gaza. Who Is Still Alive continues that thread, scaling up the approach with a studio-like recreation built from the subjects’ own recollections.

Why it stands out

Documentaries seldom break into the International Feature lineup, but it happens. Recent exceptions like Honeyland, Collective and Flee earned recognition across categories, showing there’s room for nonfiction when a film connects.

Switzerland, meanwhile, has a long track record in the category, with two wins and five official nominations to date. If Who Is Still Alive advances, it would add another chapter to that history—this time with a doc at the forefront.

Each country can submit only one film for Best International Feature. The Academy typically unveils the category’s shortlist in December, followed by nominations in January.

Before cameras ever rolled on the barbershop scenes in Coming to America, Rick Baker sat Eddie Murphy down for a makeup test that would turn him into Saul, an elderly white Jewish man. The full 14-piece appliance wasn’t even on yet — the back of Murphy’s neck was still uncovered — when Baker pressed a Caucasian-toned cheek piece into place. Instead of flinching at the surreal sight, Murphy leaned into the mirror and started working his face, testing how the new skin moved.

“This is a good sign, because I knew he’s not going to be one of those actors who go, ‘I can’t move,’ when you put something on them.”

Murphy, impressed by how real it looked, told Baker the prosthetic beat his go-to impressions, which he worried could veer into stereotypes. Still in test makeup, he immediately asked to improvise a scene with someone from his entourage — a spur-of-the-moment riff that helped lock in Saul’s voice and rhythms.

Finding the character

Baker says that instant curiosity became their ritual on future transformations: Murphy would sit in the chair, explore the look on camera, and organically discover how the character sounded and behaved. It’s a tactile, actor-first process Baker contrasts with performing in front of a green screen covered in motion-capture dots — a different skill set entirely, he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Asked about the wave of new tools in effects work — including AI — Baker said his practical creations still hold up, and while technology has raced ahead, the two can absolutely coexist. In his view, the smart blend of old-school makeup and modern techniques can produce something creatively electric.

A new honor in Switzerland

That philosophy now sits alongside a fresh accolade: on Wednesday night at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Baker received the festival’s Vision Award, taking home a Golden Leopard. It’s a new distinction for a career already credited with seven Academy Awards and decades of movie monsters, mythical beasts, and jaw-dropping transformations.

Warner Bros. tucked the news into its latest shareholder letter dated Aug. 13: a second Hogwarts Legacy game is officially in development. The company didn’t attach a subtitle, window, or platforms to the announcement — just a clear signal that players will be heading back to the Wizarding World for another open-world adventure.

Confirmed Aug. 13: a new Hogwarts Legacy game is in development.

The studio is keeping specifics locked down for now. There’s no release date, title, trailer, platform list, or gameplay rundown, and it’s still unknown whether Avalanche Software — the team behind the first game — will return to lead the sequel.

The first game’s setup

Launched in 2023, Hogwarts Legacy sent players to the 1800s, long before Harry’s story, and cast them as a fifth-year student with the rare ability to wield ancient magic. It mixed exploration of Hogwarts and its grounds with attending classes, learning spells, and digging into a mystery threatening the wizarding world.

• Customizable characters and house selection
• Magical creatures and potion-making
• Talent upgrades and a robust combat system

The game was a major commercial success for Warner Bros., which helps explain why a full follow-up is getting the greenlight — even if the particulars are still under wraps.

Elsewhere in WB games

Warner Bros. also flagged another big project on its slate: LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, an open-world action-adventure from TT Games. It tracks Bruce Wayne’s early years on the road to becoming Gotham’s Dark Knight, blending an original story with nods to Batman’s history across movies, comics, and games.

• Explore a detailed LEGO Gotham and battle well-known villains
• Customize the Batcave
• Local two-player co-op

As for the Hogwarts follow-up, the only official word today is that it exists. There’s no release date, title, trailer, platforms, or gameplay information yet, and Warner Bros. hasn’t said who’s leading development.

At the recent David Foster and Friends Foundation event, cameras caught David Foster walking past Meghan Markle and Prince Harry without a red-carpet hello. Foster later told People he’d already greeted the couple about 10 minutes earlier, pushing back on talk of a snub. The explanation hasn’t quieted the chatter.

Gossip site reports keep circling back to one touchy subject: politics. According to columnist Rob Shuter’s Naughty But Nice Substack, sources say ideological differences are freezing a once-easy friendship between Markle and Foster.

“There is definitely an icy feeling there now, and politics is part of it,” a source told Rob Shuter.

Shuter also reports that Meghan was invited to a May fundraiser at Foster and Katharine McPhee’s Brentwood home but didn’t attend. Foster played piano at the house event, while McPhee performed a cheeky rewrite of Tina Turner’s “The Best” for the crowd, per the same report.

Old ties, new tension

Markle and McPhee go back to their Los Angeles school days, and that connection only deepened after the Sussexes moved to North America. Foster grew close with Prince Harry and even helped arrange a private Vancouver Island retreat for Meghan, Harry, and Archie in late 2019, a quiet reset before the couple’s post-royal life fully took shape.

Through the years, the families have been photographed together and appeared publicly at each other’s events, reinforcing an image of tight-knit friends. For now, the only on-the-record pushback is Foster’s brief People comment about the carpet moment; neither side has addressed the politics angle directly.

• Foundation event: Foster passed Meghan and Harry on the carpet; he later said they’d already met minutes earlier (People).
• May in Brentwood: Meghan was reportedly invited to a political fundraiser at Foster and McPhee’s home but didn’t attend (Naughty But Nice).
• Backstory: Foster helped line up the couple’s late-2019 Vancouver Island stay during a pivotal period for the Sussexes.

In a new interview with British Vogue, Nicole Kidman looks back on the moment her personal life vaulted into the center of Hollywood. She says that at 22 or 23, marrying Tom Cruise felt natural, and she tuned out warnings that hitching herself to the industry’s biggest name could derail her own path because she was, as she puts it, “madly in love.”

“Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband. But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love, and it was that simple.”

Kidman recalls people around her cautioning that becoming Tom Cruise’s wife might define her more than her work. Her mindset at the time, she says, was to put love first, even if that meant stepping away from career plans.

“Of course I’ll throw my career away. I don’t care.”

“I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married.”

From set to spotlight

The relationship began on the set of Days of Thunder in 1990, where on‑screen sparks quickly turned into one of the decade’s most-watched real‑life romances. The pair married that same year, a union that dominated entertainment headlines and shaped the way the industry and the public viewed Kidman in her early 20s.

She also addresses the skepticism that followed, saying some later pointed to her being known as “Tom Cruise’s wife” as proof those early warnings were right. Kidman pushes back on that view in the interview, framing her choices then as decisions made out of love rather than career calculation.

Kidman’s comments appear in her candid conversation with British Vogue, offering a rare window into how she navigated that pressure at the start of her Hollywood ascent.

On a late-night stream from her Twitch channel, dojacattington, Doja Cat didn’t mince words about Tyga’s new album $tarface and its use of AI. Fans clipped the moment and blasted it across X, TikTok, and Instagram within hours, fueling a fresh round of debate over how far technology should go in making music.

“Tyga is a p**** for making an AI album,” she said to viewers during the stream.

The livestream barb landed squarely on the week Tyga’s project has been drawing attention for how it reportedly leans on artificial intelligence. Tyga, for his part, has already defended the approach, telling Vibe in an interview that he sees AI as another tool in the studio rather than a replacement for artists.

Tyga’s response

“It’s no different than when Auto-Tune came out. Some people were opposed to it, but real artists took it and used it,” he said.

“If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. I don’t care. It’s supposed to give you an experience and a feeling. But we definitely used AI as a tool.”

Doja’s pushback lands with extra weight given her track record of making hits the old-fashioned way: by earworm. She’s spent the past few years scoring chart-toppers and award winners without riding a tech gimmick.

Her track record

• Say So — viral smash that hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100
• Kiss Me More (with SZA) — Grammy-winning collaboration
• Paint the Town Red — breakout that sampled Dionne Warwick
• Other staples: Woman, Need to Know, Streets, soundtrack single Vegas, and Get Into It (Yuh)

As clips of the Twitch moment continue to circulate, both artists’ positions are crystal clear: Doja Cat says albums shouldn’t lean on machines, and Tyga says AI is just another tool in the kit.

Numbers first: Pixar’s Toy Story 5 has sailed past $1 billion worldwide after a $312 million global opening — the biggest of 2026 so far — and 20th Century Studios’ The Devil Wears Prada 2 is closing in on $700 million globally. It’s the kind of run that makes Disney look unstoppable at the box office again.

At the same time, Disney is moving the Ice Age franchise forward without the studio that built it. The company has Ice Age 6: Boiling Point on the calendar for 2027 — even though Blue Sky Studios, where Manny, Sid, Diego and Scrat were born, shut down five years ago.

Blue Sky at a glance

• 1987 — Founded in Connecticut by artists including Chris Wedge, out of the remnants of MAGI, the computer-graphics pioneer behind Tron.
• 1997 — Fox acquires control of Blue Sky, folding it into what became 20th Century Fox Animation.
• 1998 — Wedge’s short Bunny wins the Oscar for Best Animated Short — an Academy Award before the studio’s first feature.
• 2002 — Ice Age opens, turning a prehistoric road trip (and one very unlucky baby) into a $383 million worldwide hit.
• 2019 — Disney completes its $71.3 billion purchase of most of 21st Century Fox, inheriting Blue Sky and its library.
• Feb.–Apr. 2021 — Disney cites pandemic economics and announces Blue Sky’s closure; the studio shuts its doors in April, with roughly 450 employees affected.
• 2027 — Disney plans to release Ice Age 6: Boiling Point.

Blue Sky’s fate wasn’t only about a changing box office. Once Fox took over in 1997, the studio’s future depended on choices made higher up — which franchises to back, how big the budgets could be, what got priority. After Disney bought Fox in 2019, it suddenly had three feature animation outfits under one roof: Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar and Blue Sky. When COVID-19 hammered theaters, parks and the broader entertainment business, Disney decided a third feature-animation studio wasn’t sustainable.

Disney closed Blue Sky in April 2021, affecting about 450 employees.

What survives

Disney didn’t scrap the characters. It kept the Ice Age IP and has continued to develop it in-house; Scrat and the gang live on even if the original shop doesn’t. The contrast is sharp in 2026: Walt Disney Animation has notched another billion-dollar run with Zootopia 2, Pixar is riding high on Toy Story 5, and Disney’s broader slate — including 20th Century Studios’ The Devil Wears Prada 2 — has helped power a resurgent year in theaters.

The next chapter for Manny and friends is already dated: Ice Age 6: Boiling Point is planned for 2027.

On a November 2024 Warner Classics special, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks peeled back the curtain on how Clint Eastwood runs a set — and why a quiet “let’s do one more” from him can freeze a room. Eastwood’s reputation for moving fast and printing the first good take is so entrenched that any request for another pass lands like a jolt.

“If there’s five actors in the room and he wants one more take, they’re all probably looking at each other, ‘What did I do? Was it me? Was it you?’” Spielberg explained.

Hanks, drawing on his time with Eastwood on Sully (2016), said the director’s speed comes from trust — he believes actors can deliver in the moment and won’t sand down spontaneity with endless tinkering. If a detail won’t survive the edit, Eastwood would rather keep momentum than burn daylight trying to perfect it.

The Eastwood way

Actors who’ve worked with him talk about a calm, nearly whisper-quiet set, minimal micromanaging, and very few takes. That’s liberating — until he breaks pattern. Because Eastwood seldom goes beyond two, asking for another take signals that something specific needs to change, and everyone instinctively wonders whose move needs the adjustment.

The receipts

That approach has yielded a long line of awards-caliber turns under his direction:

• Morgan Freeman — Million Dollar Baby (Best Supporting Actor winner)
• Hilary Swank — Million Dollar Baby (Best Actress winner; her second Oscar)
• Sean Penn — Mystic River (Best Actor winner)
• Gene Hackman — Unforgiven (Best Supporting Actor winner; he was initially reluctant to take the role)
• Bradley Cooper — American Sniper (Best Actor nominee)
• Angelina Jolie — Changeling (Best Actress nominee)
• Matt Damon — Invictus (Best Supporting Actor nominee)

Eastwood himself has also been up for Best Actor twice — for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

Here's how that search actually goes.

The short answer

Nobody. No character carries over, and none of Band of Brothers' on-screen regulars turn up in The Pacific's Marine ranks. The two ensembles were cast from scratch — Band of Brothers shot in England in 2000 with a heavily British and Irish cast, The Pacific in Australia with a largely American and Australian one. The overlap people sense is real, but it's all behind the camera.

Who actually crosses over

The shared names are producers and directors, not actors. Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman executive-produced both. Bruce C. McKenna, one of Band of Brothers' main writers, moved up to co-executive producer and lead writer on The Pacific. Directors Tony To, David Nutter, and Graham Yost all worked on both projects in some capacity.

There is one family quirk: Colin Hanks plays Lt. Henry Jones in Band of Brothers, while the Hanks you hear in The Pacific is his father Tom, narrating the historical setup at the top of each episode.

Why no characters could cross over

Geography settled that before casting did. Band of Brothers follows Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment — Army paratroopers who fought exclusively in Europe, from Normandy to Austria. The Pacific follows Marines of the 1st Marine Division — Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone — through Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Different branch, different hemisphere, no plausible meeting point. Both stick to the real men's stories, drawn from memoirs like Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow and Sledge's With the Old Breed.

Faces people file in the wrong show

• Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Simon Pegg, Jimmy Fallon — all Band of Brothers, none in The Pacific.
• Rami Malek — The Pacific only, as Snafu Shelton, years before Mr. Robot.
• Joseph Mazzello — The Pacific's Eugene Sledge. He looks familiar because he was the kid in Jurassic Park, not because of Band of Brothers.
• William Sadler — The Pacific's Chesty Puller, recognizable from Die Hard 2 and The Shawshank Redemption.

Both series took home the Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries — Band of Brothers in 2002 with a roughly $120 million budget, The Pacific in 2010 at a reported $250 million. The trilogy's 2024 closer, Masters of the Air on Apple TV+, kept the tradition going: same producers, another brand-new cast.

The firing

Season 8 had already paused so Sheen could go to rehab after a year of escalating incidents. Production was set to resume in February 2011 — and instead, Sheen called into a radio show and tore into series creator Chuck Lorre, calling him a clown and a charlatan, in the same stretch of interviews that produced "tiger blood" and "winning." CBS shut the season down. On March 7, 2011, Warner Bros. Television announced it had terminated his services "effective immediately." The remaining season 8 episodes were never made.

Death No. 1 (2011)

The season 9 premiere that September opened at Charlie Harper's funeral. The explanation: he'd fallen onto the tracks of the Paris Métro and been hit by a train, off-screen, while honeymooning with his stalker-turned-fiancée Rose.

"His body just exploded like a balloon full of meat," Rose tells the mourners, in the show's parting description of its former lead.

Ashton Kutcher's internet billionaire Walden Schmidt bought the beach house, and the show ran four more seasons. Charlie briefly returned at the end of season 9 as a ghost — played by Kathy Bates, a bit that won her an Emmy in 2012.

Death No. 2 (2015)

The series finale, "Of Course He's Dead," aired February 19, 2015, and revealed the train story was fake: Rose had kept Charlie captive in a pit under her house for four years. He escapes, sends threatening messages, and marches up to his old front door — shown only from behind, played by a double — at which point a baby grand piano drops on him from a helicopter. Then Lorre himself turns to the camera from a director's chair, says "Winning," and gets flattened by a second piano.

Was Sheen asked to come back?

He was. In his closing vanity card, Lorre explained the offer: Sheen would ring the doorbell, rant into the camera about being an invincible ninja warrior from Mars, and then the piano would fall. Sheen declined and countered with a heartwarming scene teeing up a new sitcom for himself and Jon Cryer called The Harpers. Lorre's written response: "We thought that was funny too."

For the record: Sheen's reaction to the finale, delivered to TMZ a month later, made clear the feud had not softened.

Neither piano was metaphorical enough for either of them.

The short answer

In the season 3 race, the crewed ships launch in 1994 and reach Mars in February 1995 — a transit of several months, made possible by nuclear-thermal engines. By 1999 in the show's timeline, the upgraded Sojourner 3 class can make the run in about 90 days when the launch window lines up. Real chemical rockets need around seven months, and the window only opens every 26 months.

The 1995 race, and who actually got there first

Season 3 stages a three-way sprint: NASA's Sojourner 1 (a K-32 NERVA nuclear engine plus solar sails, assembled on the Moon at Jamestown), Helios's Phoenix (a converted orbital hotel), and the Soviet Mars-94. The order of arrival is not the order you'd guess. Phoenix reaches Mars orbit first but can't land through a planet-wide dust storm, and Sojourner makes its final burn using fuel siphoned from the crippled Soviet ship.

"Button up, people. We're going straight in," commander Danielle Poole announces in episode 5, opting to land through the storm.

She wins the race between the three ships. The planet, however, was already taken: a North Korean "unmanned probe" crash-landed on February 8, 1995, with two cosmonauts secretly aboard. The survivor, Lee Jung-Gil, became the first human on Mars — with a broken antenna and no way to tell anyone.

The 90-day upgrade

An in-universe Apple TV+ bonus video set in 1999 covers the next-generation engine, and later seasons treat the roughly 90-day crossing as routine for the Sojourner 3 class in an optimal window. By season 4's 2003 setting, Mars has a permanent base, Happy Valley, with crews rotating like it's an unusually bad commute.

How the numbers stack up

• The show, 1995 — several months, 1994 launch to February 1995 arrival.
• The show, 1999 onward — about 90 days in an optimal window.
• Real life — about seven months one way, with a launch window every 26 months, per the mission profiles NASA actually studies.

For the record: in our timeline, 1997's Mars arrival was also named Sojourner — a 25-pound rover the size of a microwave. It drove a total of 330 feet and still made front pages worldwide.

Here's every couple, season by season, as of summer 2026.

Season 1 (2022): four weddings out of six couples

• Madlyn Ballatori & Colby Kissinger — married on camera in the finale; three kids, with a fourth boy due September 2026. They hit five years of marriage in May 2026.
• Alexis Maloney & Hunter Parr — got engaged by episode 3 and skipped the trial marriages entirely; married June 18, 2022. After two years of IVF, twins Sophia and Christian arrived in January 2026.
• Shanique Brown & Randall Griffin — engaged in the finale, split for six months, re-engaged in July 2023, married in Texas in May 2025. They marked anniversary No. 1 with matching tattoos of the wedding date.
• Lauren Pounds & Nate Ruggles — married October 2022; son Hudson born June 2024.
• April Melohn & Jake Cunningham — split. April went on to start a family with boyfriend Cody Cooper.
• Rae Williams & Zay Wilson — split, and Rae's brief post-show thing with Jake fizzled before the reunion.

"It's just hard to believe that our marriage started the way it did," Madlyn wrote on Instagram in 2026, per People.

Season 2 (2023): the strongest batting average

All four couples who reached decision day engaged are now married.

Ryann McCracken and James Morris wed in 2023 and have two kids, Sunny and Sullivan — the second born July 2026.

Kat Shelton and Alex Chapman married in May 2024 and welcomed a daughter in June 2026, after a miscarriage the year before.

Trey Brunson and Riah Nelson had daughter Lailanni in December 2023 and married in Mexico in July 2025.

Antonio Mattei and Roxanne Kaiser did a courthouse ceremony in October 2024 and a proper celebration in January 2025 — Roxanne has called year one their most challenging yet, but they're still in it.

The fifth couple, Lisa Horne and Brian Okoye, announced a pregnancy around the reunion and have kept their status offline since.

Season 3 (2024): a clean sweep in the other direction

Nobody made it. Caleb Lefterys and Mariah Zernik got engaged in the finale and planned a summer 2026 destination wedding — then split, and in April 2026 Mariah announced she's expecting a baby with boyfriend Jacob Craig.

Aria De'Westbrooks called off Scotty Lewis's proposal one day after accepting it. Sandy Gallagher and Nick Tramontin broke up on decision day, with Nick later revealing at the reunion that he'd gone to rehab. Zaina Sesay and J.R. Warren also walked away separately, and Micah & Chanel and Dave & Vanessa had already pulled out mid-experiment.

Season 4 (2026): the fastest wedding in franchise history

Casey Douglass and David Atkinson got engaged in the finale, picked up a marriage license on the way to the reunion taping, and asked host Nick Lachey — who happens to be ordained in California — to marry them on camera. He did. A bigger celebration in Italy is planned for September 2026.

For the record: that's nine marriages and at least ten babies from a show whose entire premise is an engagement deadline delivered as a threat.

Colm Meaney's Thomas "Doc" Durant gets an ending set in 1885, and the show delivered it before the finale even aired.

The 1885 flash-forward

The season 5 episode "Gambit" opens in New York City, 16 years after the main timeline. Durant — head of the Union Pacific, the man who willed the transcontinental railroad into existence through bribery and bluster — is broke. The sequence plays out in a few quiet beats:

• The ring — he pawns a ring forged from the metal of the Golden Spike, his one keepsake from Promontory.
• The suit — he uses the money to buy something presentable to wear.
• The lunch — he dines with his old Central Pacific rival Collis Huntington (Tim Guinee) and Huntington's much younger wife, and insists on picking up the tab he can't afford.
• The end — back in a nearly empty home, he looks at a photograph of the Golden Spike ceremony and dies in his chair.

That's the last thing that ever happens to anyone in the show's chronology. The finale then rewinds to 1869 to finish everyone else's story.

What happens to him in the finale

"Done" gives Durant his last hurrah in the broadcast order. Minutes after the spike goes in, he's served a congressional subpoena for bribery, fraud, and corruption. Bohannon, called to testify against him in Washington, refuses to play along — he answers every question by repeating that the railroad could not have been built without Thomas Durant.

Durant closes the series with a courtroom speech in his own defense:

"Americans needed a dream, and I gave them one," he declares in the finale, arguing that the railroad's existence is his answer to every charge.

The hearing's outcome is left unshown. The 1885 scene already told viewers how the appeal turned out.

How close is this to the real Durant?

Closer than you might expect. The real Thomas C. Durant was the Union Pacific's vice president, the central figure of the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and was pushed out of the company within days of the Promontory ceremony in May 1869. The Panic of 1873 wiped out his fortune, and he spent his last years fighting lawsuits from his railroad days.

He died in October 1885 — the exact year the show picked for that opening scene.

For the record: Meaney played Durant across all five seasons and 57 episodes, one of only a handful of actors to last from the 2011 pilot to the end. The character he played never got to keep the railroad. He did get the last word.

He exists because of a script problem the writers had three days to solve.

The accidental creation

The episode was "Sub Rosa," season 1, episode 7, aired November 18, 2003. The plot sent Gibbs and Kate onto a submarine to investigate a murder — which left Tony DiNozzo working the case alone on shore. Former showrunner Frank Cardea explained the problem on the Partners & Probies podcast in 2026:

"We can't have Michael talking to himself," Cardea said.

The fix: the writers discovered the term "probie" — a brand-new probationary agent — and invented one stationed at the NCIS field office in Norfolk who gets pulled into the case. Sean Murray was cast, McGee spent the episode nervously calling Tony "sir," and the chemistry was obvious enough that a one-off guest spot turned into a recurring role on the spot.

The Norfolk years

In-universe, McGee starts as a green case agent assigned to Norfolk Naval Base — an MIT and Johns Hopkins graduate whose computer skills keep making him useful to Gibbs's team. He appears in eight episodes across season 1, assisting whenever the case needs someone who can actually operate technology.

Joining the team for real

At the start of season 2, in September 2004, Gibbs brings McGee to the Washington Navy Yard as a full-time member of the Major Case Response Team, and Murray joins the opening credits. Some housekeeping on his slow climb from there:

• Probationary agent — his official status for roughly six years, and the source of DiNozzo's eternal "Probie" nickname.
• Senior Field Agent — the job he inherits when Tony leaves in season 13.
• Acting Director — he even runs the whole agency temporarily in season 20.

The family connection

One more piece of the origin story: Sean Murray is the stepson of Donald P. Bellisario, who created both NCIS and its parent show JAG — where Murray had already played the admiral's stepson, Danny Walden. Bellisario personally asked Murray if he wanted the one-time rookie part, per Murray's 2024 TV Insider interview. Nepotism rarely delivers a 20-plus-year return on a single episode, but here we are.

For the record: McGee also secretly wrote bestselling crime novels on the show under the pen name "Thom E. Gemcity" — an anagram of Timothy McGee.

The books' agent character, "Lisa," was an anagram too. Ziva was not amused.

The reason had nothing to do with the show — and the consolation prize AMC announced that week never actually materialized.

The short answer

Family. Lincoln's wife and two children lived in the UK while he spent eight months a year filming in Georgia.

He told Entertainment Weekly at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2018: "I have two young children, and I live in a different country."

As the kids got older, the annual relocation stopped working, and Lincoln chose home.

He put it more bluntly to Radio Times in 2024: "I just didn't want to be the Brit abroad."

He'd actually planned to leave a season earlier. Lincoln and franchise chief Scott Gimple had been mapping an exit as far back as season 4, and season 8 was originally penciled in as his last before the plan slipped to season 9.

How Rick left the show

Rick's final episode is season 9, episode 5, "What Comes After," aired November 4, 2018. Wounded and leading a walker herd away from camp, Rick blows up the bridge with himself on it. Michonne and the others believe he's dead. Viewers see the part they don't: Jadis/Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) pulls him from the riverbank and flies him out on a Civic Republic Military helicopter, destination unknown.

Dead to the characters. Alive to the audience. That gap was the setup for what came next — or what was supposed to.

The promise AMC never kept

In November 2018, timed to the episode, AMC announced a trilogy of Rick Grimes feature films, with Lincoln attached and Gimple writing. Theatrical releases, distributed with Universal.

"We're not saying goodbye to Rick Grimes" was the pitch, and for years fans got teaser logos and updates instead of movies.

The pandemic stalled production, the franchise's ratings kept sliding, and the trilogy quietly died on the vine. Not one of the three films was ever made.

What fans got instead

The Ones Who Live — a six-episode miniseries that premiered on AMC on February 25, 2024, five and a half years after the bridge. It reunited Lincoln with Danai Gurira's Michonne, explained where the CRM took Rick, and delivered the reunion the movies had been holding hostage. Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly afterwards he'd "never say never" to playing Rick again.

For the record: the wait between Rick's "death" and his actual return ran 1,939 days. The movies announced to cover that gap ran zero.

Set in a postcard-pretty Mississippi town with rot under the paint, Sid & Zoey pairs a spiky teen love story with a paranormal threat that won’t stay buried. The show is created by Jon Kasdan and comes from a team built to mash up romance, mystery, and horror, with J.J. Abrams and James Wan on board as executive producers through Bad Robot and Blumhouse Atomic Monster.

The setup

Sid is a sophisticated New York kid shipped south to live with a small-town police chief and his family in the place where Sid’s mother grew up. There he collides with Zoey, the chief’s sharp-witted, punk-rock daughter. Their connection sparks fast — and then gets tangled up in whatever is simmering beneath the town’s immaculate surface.

The series is built as a bingeable hybrid: the romance provides the heartbeat while a gothic mystery pulls the story deeper into the town’s secrets across eight episodes.

Who’s making it

• Jon Kasdan — creator and co-showrunner
• John Shiban — co-showrunner (Ozark writer/producer)
• Executive producers — J.J. Abrams and James Wan
• Studios — Bad Robot and Blumhouse Atomic Monster
• Season size — eight episodes

Casting status

Netflix hasn’t named a single cast member yet — not even the leads. That makes the roles themselves the only solid clues for now:

• Sid — “sophisticated, seductive, and amoral” teenager from New York
• Zoey — the police chief’s sharp-witted, punk-rock daughter
• Casting — no actors announced

Given the YA focus and the genre credentials behind the camera, who lands Sid and Zoey will say a lot about how Netflix plans to position the show.

Where it fits at Netflix

Sid & Zoey arrives as Netflix leans harder into YA as a destination. The streamer recently launched a dedicated YA hub that bundles hundreds of original and licensed titles; in 2026 alone, 23 YA titles reached its global Top 10. This series is designed to slot right into that pipeline — a coming-of-age romance with a gothic bite.

Netflix ordered eight episodes in August 2026; a premiere date hasn’t been announced.

There’s no production timeline yet, and Netflix hasn’t provided a release window. For now, Sid & Zoey is early-days — with the creative team locked, the mystery mapped out, and the casting reveal still to come.

In a new interview, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II didn’t tiptoe around the decision to pull the plug on Wonder Man. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he zeroed in on how the back-to-back shelving of his Marvel series and Mahershala Ali’s Blade reboot looks from the outside — and what he thinks Disney and Marvel should do about it.

“I think the optics are obvious. If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics.”

Abdul-Mateen said studios need to actively change that perception by fully backing inclusive projects — not just with a greenlight, but with the resources to succeed.

“So it should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.”

• Wonder Man — canceled in July 2026 despite an Emmy nomination and reportedly strong viewership; starred Abdul-Mateen.
• Blade — the long-developing Marvel reboot led by Mahershala Ali, scrapped.

Calling Wonder Man a show with “all of the ingredients” for a long run, Abdul-Mateen argued the abrupt stop deserves a closer look, especially given the performance he says it delivered.

“So our show does deserve some study and some real, hard information about why a show like this did not continue forward, because it had all of the ingredients that one would want in a show.”

How he’s watching his own work now

The actor also opened up about his relationship to his past performances. Early on, he waited years before pressing play on anything he’d made. That’s changed.

“I used to wait about three years. I’m much kinder to myself now these days, but in the last year, I’ve been able to check my stuff out.”

He said returning to August Wilson’s plays feels like a reset — material built for Black actors that lets him settle in without overthinking. And in a lighter twist, a regular at his gym steered him to a very different kind of classic: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he’s been reading as he rebalances between roles and the bigger industry shifts around them.

At the Variety Lounge during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, producer Christine Vachon said Todd Haynes’ long-stalled romance De Noche is finally moving forward after a star swap — and that the creative blueprint remains intact. The biggest tweak came behind the scenes: the production shifted its setting within Mexico, moving from Guadalajara to Mexico City.

The project was originally set to star Joaquin Phoenix and was halted when he exited in 2024. With Pedro Pascal now stepping into the lead, Vachon said the movie has the momentum it needed, with her and producing partner Pamela Koffler backing Haynes as the film restarts.

“I think we got the happy ending that we deserved, or that Todd deserved, which is Pedro Pascal ultimately playing the role,” Vachon said.

What it’s about

Set in 1930s Los Angeles, De Noche follows police officer Richard Rent and boarding-school teacher Joe Thomas, who become targets of a corrupt political machine. Forced to flee to Mexico, their journey through jungles and along the coast draws them into a deepening relationship that pushes both men to grapple with their past and with violence closing in.

De Noche is directed by Todd Haynes and produced by Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. The film was previously packaged with Phoenix alongside Danny Ramirez before the 2024 shutdown. According to Vachon, recasting Pascal didn’t require any dramatic story changes beyond the move to Mexico City.

Out in the teeth of Hurricane Sandra, Kiara Maybank stowed away on Chandler Groff’s hijacked boat and confronted him over JJ’s death as he tried to flee with the Royal Merchant gold. As waves pounded the deck, she rigged the sails and lines to hoist Groff into the air, then cut the rope, sending him into the water; lashed to heavy gear, he sank, ending his run as the Pogues’ last big threat.

Back onshore, Rafe Cameron used the storm as cover to yank Sofia out of jail, only to double back when he saw Sheriff Shoupe trapped under a fallen tree. After pulling Shoupe free and owning up to his past crimes, Rafe got an unexpected reprieve; Shoupe let him and Sofia bolt for South America rather than haul him in mid-disaster.

With Groff gone, Kiara had to abandon the sinking vessel and dump the gold to stay alive. She fired a flare and called out to JJ for strength as John B, Sarah Cameron, and Pope Heyward fought through the gale to haul her aboard, guiding everyone to the safety of the lighthouse.

When the skies finally cleared, the island was wrecked and power was out for weeks. With evacuations underway, the Pogues started daily dives to find the cache Kiara had cut loose — and hit pay dirt when John B spotted the $400 million haul on the seabed, enough for the crew to salvage every last bar.

After the storm

• Cleo resolved her immigration status thanks to the windfall, and Pope proposed as they planned a quieter future.
• Real-estate player Dale Zeasy was arrested after the post-storm legal shakeout exposed his fraudulent deals; the Pogues used their money to buy back stolen land across the island.
• John B and Sarah rebuilt the Routledge house; Pope brought Heyward’s Seafood back to life; Kiara reclaimed the Maybank property.
• Kiara landed a marine biology internship and set up a permanent beach memorial for JJ.
• A year later, Sarah welcomed a baby boy — named JJ.
• Rafe and Sofia said their goodbyes to Sarah and left the Banks for good.

The series’ final moments are all celebration: John B and Sarah’s official wedding, friends and family gathered as he rang his father’s brass bell, and the Pogues huddling for one last sunset photo.

“We are the Pogues. Our mission for life is to have a good time all the time. We went around the world looking for treasure, but in the end, we found everything we wanted right where we started. The Outer Banks. Paradise on earth.”

The complete run of Outer Banks is now streaming on Netflix.

Some names have already muscled their way into the conversation this year. Mikey Madison broke big with Sean Baker’s Anora after scene-stealing turns in Scream (2022) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cailee Spaeny floated from a delicate Priscilla to the nerve-rattling spectacle of Alien: Romulus and the chaos of Civil War without blinking. And Jenna Ortega is doing double duty, fronting Wednesday, stepping into Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and taking on producing responsibilities while she’s at it.

Cailee Spaeny won Venice’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress for Priscilla.

10 to watch now

• Mikey Madison — The electric center of Anora confirmed what her unhinged killer in Scream and that wild third-act run in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood already hinted: she can swing from comedy to chaos without losing the thread.
• Cailee Spaeny — As Priscilla Presley she delivered a precision character study; with Alien: Romulus and Alex Garland’s Civil War she proved she can carry high-stakes genre, too. Earlier stints in Mare of Easttown and Devs helped build the foundation.
• Jenna Ortega — Wednesday turned her into a global face (with Golden Globe and Emmy attention), and she kept the momentum with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She’s also attached to star in Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun, showing she’s not just the queen of horror corridors.
• Chase Infiniti — A true newcomer with real physical chops from kickboxing and dance, she’s been building buzz beyond TV, including music video work that shows easy screen presence. She’s been linked to major filmmakers, the kind of early co-sign that can change a career overnight.
• Sophie Thatcher — As teen Natalie in Yellowjackets she brought week-to-week ferocity; on the big screen she sparred with Hugh Grant in A24’s Heretic and headlines the twisty sci‑fi Companion. Directors keep handing her heavy lifts, and she keeps nailing them.
• Milly Alcock — She burned bright as young Rhaenyra Targaryen on House of the Dragon; now she’s officially DC Studios’ new Supergirl. That’s a leap from breakout to franchise pillar in record time.
• Sadie Sink — From Max Mayfield’s mixtapes in Stranger Things to bruising drama opposite Brendan Fraser in The Whale and the lead turn in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film, she toggles between pop phenomena and prestige without losing her edge.
• Ella Purnell — She anchored Prime Video’s smash Fallout as Lucy MacLean, rattled nerves on Yellowjackets, and won an Annie Award voicing Jinx in Arcane. She’s also stepping behind the camera, executive producing and starring in the thriller Sweetpea.
• Inde Navarrette — After 13 Reasons Why, she brought grounded heart to Superman & Lois. With that network muscle and genre cred in place, she’s poised for her next jump.
• Yerin Ha — The Australian actor made a mark as Kwan Ha on Paramount+’s Halo, carrying action and emotion in equal measure. She’s been on Hollywood’s radar as a breakout to build around.

DC’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is in active development at DC Studios, keeping Milly Alcock’s cape in play as these careers accelerate.

Early reviews have pushed Insidious: Out of the Further to a 67% score on Rotten Tomatoes after 48 notices — a franchise best that edges past the original film’s 66%. That number could shift as more critics weigh in, but it’s already a notable high-water mark for a series that’s usually landed in the “mixed” zone.

67% on Rotten Tomatoes after 48 reviews — the highest score in the Insidious franchise.

How it stacks up

Until now, none of the sequels had cracked “Fresh.” Here’s where the films currently stand on Rotten Tomatoes:

• Insidious (2011) — 66%
• Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) — 38%
• Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) — 56%
• Insidious: The Last Key (2018) — 35%
• Insidious: The Red Door (2023) — 39%
• Insidious: Out of the Further (2026) — 67% (after 48 reviews)

Early write-ups have been notably warmer than usual for the series, with several calling this the scariest follow-up yet. It’s a promising sign for a franchise that’s often been dinged for predictability as the mythology expanded.

New house, new nightmare

The new story centers on Gemma, a young mom raising her daughters in the house where she grew up. She discovers she can enter The Further — and the twist is brutal: once the entities there realize Gemma can pull things back into our world, they start using her to do it.

Jacob Chase (Come Play) directs and co-wrote the script with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. On the producing side are Jason Blum, Oren Peli, and franchise architects James Wan and Leigh Whannell.

Longtime stalwart Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier to tie the new tale into the established mythos, alongside a fresh cast:

• Amelia Eve
• Brandon Perea
• Maisie Richardson-Sellers
• Laura Gordon
• Sam Spruell
• Island Austin

Since its 2011 launch from Wan and Whannell, the Insidious saga has sprawled across prequels and sequels built around astral projection and The Further, scaring up more than $740 million worldwide at the box office.

Insidious: Out of the Further opens in theaters on August 21, 2026.

At MultiCon 2026, franchise chief content officer Scott M. Gimple said he’s thinking big about where The Walking Dead goes next — and yes, that includes the dream scenario of Rick Grimes crossing paths with Daryl Dixon again. Speaking with The Direct, Gimple also stressed that he’s pulling back on the sheer volume of shows to sharpen the focus on quality.

“Well I still dream of it, and I will say we have all sorts of plans in play,”

Gimple stopped short of promising a near-term crossover. He told the outlet it’s not the right moment for a convergence because the universe is still “in the middle” of its saga, and he emphasized that the end of the TV storyline is a long way off.

Scaling back the spinoffs

The AMC zombie universe has grown fast this decade — five new shows launched in the 2020s, with as many as three seasons of spinoffs rolling out in a single year. Gimple indicated that pace is changing. With The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon coming to an end and Dead City likely to wind down next, the aim is to concentrate on just one or two series at a time instead of a constant flood.

That’s a big shift from the franchise’s early days, when the 11-season flagship mostly ran alongside just one companion, Fear the Walking Dead. The post-finale years have scattered fan favorites across the map — literally.

• The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — Daryl’s trek through Europe, later joined by Carol.
• The Walking Dead: Dead City — Maggie and Negan fighting to survive in New York.
• The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live — a limited series continuing Rick and Michonne’s story.
• Tales of the Walking Dead — a six-episode anthology; a second season hasn’t been confirmed.

All told, the franchise has already delivered 14 TV seasons in the 2020s — double the seven seasons released in the six years before that.

The feature documentary Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story zeroes in on the moment Cook’s inner circle crossed a line: when his half-brother, Darryl McCauley, moved from a job in corrections into managing the comedian’s finances and, over time, began making unauthorized withdrawals. The film tracks how the amounts escalated, the red flags Cook spotted, and the fallout once the irregularities surfaced — McCauley’s arrest, conviction, prison sentence, and court-ordered restitution — along with a look back at cash later found stashed in unexpected places.

It doesn’t stop at the scandal. The documentary retraces Cook’s rocket ride through the 2000s, the personal and professional relationships that came with it, and how early ambitions — both brothers once dreamed of stand-up — diverged into very different lives. The betrayal’s lingering impact on Cook, personally and financially, is a throughline.

Who’s in it

Alongside Cook’s own account, the film gathers voices from his circle — several appearing as themselves — to fill in the years leading up to and after the crisis.

• Dane Cook — himself
• Al Del Bene
• Mark Clifford
• Luke Ernenwein
• Richard Pollmann
• Erika Montesi
• Guy Venuti
• Richard Feldstein
• Richard Grundy
• Joseph Zwicker
• Thomas Kingsley
• Kelsi Cook
• Kelly Amann
• Courtney Cook

Release plans

The film’s world premiere is set for September 29, 2026 and is reportedly rolling out on VOD at launch. Specific U.S. platforms haven’t been announced yet; more details are expected closer to release.

World premiere: September 29, 2026.

Jason Franklin, played by Daniel Croix Henderson, is a serial killer. He has three confirmed on-screen victims — White House maid Jean, his father's mistress Denise Truesdale, and his own grandmother Maude — plus multiple failed attempts on his mother, First Lady Victoria.

His parents covered up the first killing, which set the pattern for everything after.

The confirmed victims

• Jean — the maid he spent all of season 1 harassing. He assaults and kills her in the finale and leaves her body under his bed, where it's found by another staffer.
• Denise Truesdale — Hunter's mistress. Jason decapitates her with a sword, which Hunter and Victoria later find in a chest in his bedroom.
• Maude — Victoria's mother, strangled. Her death is initially written off as a heart attack.
• Victoria — survived a chokehold in season 3 and a stabbing in the bunker in season 6. Still standing.

When Jason kills Jean, he tells her he didn't want it to happen again — the show's suggestion that the on-screen count isn't the full count.

Why nobody stops him

Because stopping him would require someone to admit what he's done. Victoria and Hunter disposed of Jean's body themselves rather than face a scandal, and Chief of Staff Donald Winthrop's solution was to relocate Jason to a monitored part of the residence.

He has since survived two suicide attempts, a coma, an assassination attempt ordered by his own mother, a stint hiding at a cult compound, and a period living under the name "Mike." Every institution around him has more to lose from exposure than from another body.

Why viewers root for him

They openly do, and the actor knows it. Daniel Croix told TVLine in 2021 that fans tweet at him hoping Jason will target characters they dislike:

"People actually root for him," Croix said.

He noted that some of them were specifically hoping Jason would get to Victoria — which, given the First Lady's own track record on the show, is less of a leap than it sounds.

Where he stands in season 7

Season 7 premiered on May 20, 2026, on BET and Paramount+, framed as the end of the Franklins' time in office. Jason enters it fresh out of surgery after the season 6 finale. Episode descriptions from BET have him triggering a White House manhunt after Trent's body is found, confronting residence supervisor Priscilla Owen, and prompting Victoria and Agent Isaac to handle the problem themselves.

Band of Brothers is about Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division — the "Screaming Eagles." The company was formed in July 1942 at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under 1st Lieutenant Herbert Sobel, with about 140 enlisted men and seven officers. Its regimental motto was "Currahee."

Why it's called "Easy"

Nothing to do with the job. "Easy" was simply the World War II phonetic alphabet's word for the letter E, the same way a later generation would say "Echo." E Company became Easy Company on the radio and stayed that way in print.

What the company did

Easy Company was in most of the campaigns that define the American experience in Northwest Europe:

• Normandy, June 1944 — the D-Day night drop, followed by the assault on a German artillery battery at Brécourt Manor, led by Lieutenant Dick Winters.
• Operation Market Garden, September 1944 — the airborne push into the Netherlands.
• Bastogne, December 1944 — the siege during the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes, without adequate winter gear.
• Germany and Austria, 1945 — the drive east, the discovery of a concentration camp near Landsberg, and the occupation of Berchtesgaden.

Where the story came from

Stephen Ambrose's 1992 book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. Ambrose interviewed the surviving veterans directly, and much of the miniseries' texture comes out of those conversations. He described the men plainly in the book:

"They were young, born since the Great War," Ambrose wrote in 1992.

The 2001 HBO adaptation was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, at a reported $125 million for ten episodes. Damian Lewis played Winters, who rose from platoon leader to company commander to executive officer and then commander of the 2nd Battalion — the battalion containing his old company.

Why Easy and not some other company

Partly accident. The 506th was one of several parachute regiments in the 101st Airborne, and Easy was one of nine rifle companies within it. Ambrose had access to Winters and to Sergeant Carwood Lipton, both meticulous record-keepers who were willing to talk at length. Had he interviewed Fox Company instead, a different set of names would be famous.

What about the companion series?

Different units entirely. The Pacific (2010) follows Marines of the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific theater. Masters of the Air (2024) covers the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, flying B-17s out of England.

For the record: Easy Company was deactivated after the war in 1945 and briefly reactivated in the 1950s as a training unit.

The designation still exists within the 101st Airborne — now an air assault division, with no parachutes involved.

My Life with the Walter Boys is filmed in Alberta, Canada, with Calgary as the production base across all three seasons. Silver Falls is fictional, and the version you see on screen is stitched together from six different regions of Alberta — ranch land, small towns, heritage sites, and mountain country, all within a few hours of Calgary.

Where Silver Falls actually is

The show doesn't rely on one location. It assembles a town:

• CL Ranch / CL Western Town & Backlot, near Bragg Creek — the Walter family ranch. It's a working property, and the cast learned to ride there.
• Chestermere High School — doubles as Silver Falls High.
• Cochrane — Fence & Post and the Cochrane RancheHouse supply the main-street look.
• Kananaskis Country — mountain, river, and wilderness backdrops, including the Elbow River Launch in season 1.
• Calgary proper — Girletz Rodeo Ranch, Heritage Park Historical Village, the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, Splitsville Glamorgan, the University of Calgary, and Foothills Athletic Park.
• High River — expanded use in season 3, which premiered on Netflix on August 6, 2026.

Why Alberta and not Colorado

Two reasons, in order of importance. Alberta is cheaper to shoot in, with Canadian production incentives and an established crew base — the same reason Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto absorb so much American television. And the geography cooperates: Calgary sits about three hours from the Montana border, with the Rockies, foothills, prairie, and badlands all reachable in a day. Colorado's look is available in Alberta at a discount.

When it was filmed

Season 1 shot from March to September 2022. Season 2 returned to the same base from July to November 2024, with expanded school and football sequences. Season 3 shifted more of its footprint south toward High River and the surrounding countryside.

Can you actually visit?

Most of it, yes. Bragg Creek, Cochrane, and Kananaskis Country are all open to the public and sit within an hour of Calgary. CL Ranch is a private working property and a functioning film backlot, so the ranch exterior isn't a walk-up attraction. Banff and Moraine Lake are close enough to fold into the same trip.

The books are set in Colorado too. Ali Novak's original novel started life on Wattpad, where it racked up tens of millions of reads before Netflix ever bought it — and before Alberta got the job of playing Colorado.

She left for a stage role. Scherzinger was cast as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd's West End revival of Sunset Boulevard, which opened in London on October 12, 2023 — the same window season 11 was filming in Los Angeles. Fox announced on September 13, 2023, that Rita Ora would take her chair. Scherzinger has sat out every season since.

She was blunt with People about the conflict:

"I had to actually choose between The Masked Singer season 11 and Sunset Boulevard," she said in 2023.

The role was worth it

Scherzinger won the 2024 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the West End run. The production transferred to Broadway in September 2024, and she won the 2025 Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. The Broadway run closed on July 13, 2025.

The seasons she's missed

What was framed as a one-season absence has now stretched to four:

• Season 11 (2024) — West End run of Sunset Boulevard. Rita Ora's first season.
• Season 12 (2024) — Broadway transfer prep, plus her Netflix series Building the Band.
• Season 13 (2025) — Ora returns again; Fox never announces a Scherzinger date.
• Season 14 (2026) — panel confirmed in October 2025 as Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg, Robin Thicke, and Ora, with Nick Cannon hosting.

Season 14 premiered in January 2026 and wrapped on April 1, with Ashlee Simpson unmasked as Galaxy Girl and Phillip Phillips as runner-up. Ora's fourth season on the panel is now longer than most panelists get anywhere.

Was she fired?

No. Fox has never said anything to that effect, and neither has anyone on the panel. Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg told Entertainment Weekly the cast was happy for her about the West End opportunity. The show's line has consistently been that Ora stepped in because of Scherzinger's schedule.

Is the door still open?

Officially, yes. Ora, of all people, keeps saying so — she told Collider in January 2026 that Scherzinger is always welcome and floated a joint appearance, complete with a portmanteau nickname for the two of them.

"I'd literally share my seat with her," Ora said.

For the record: with Sunset Boulevard closed since July 2025, the scheduling excuse expired more than a year ago. So far, no return has been announced.

Hibbert chose to leave. He announced it himself on social media on September 22, 2023, during the midseason break of season 6, saying he was moving on to other projects. His final episode was season 6, episode 8, "Who Shot Ya," which closed out the first half of the 16-episode season. No firing, no reported conflict, no statement from Showtime contradicting his.

His post was straightforward about it:

"It is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to my castmates," Hibbert wrote in September 2023.

How Kevin was written out

The writers gave him a clean landing. Kevin graduates high school alongside Jake and Papa, gets a job offer in the video game industry, and moves to Los Angeles. At his going-away party he tells everyone that Chicago made him who he is. Then he goes. It's one of the few exits in the show's run that didn't involve a body, a betrayal, or a cliffhanger.

The exits that did come with drama

The contrast is the whole reason people asked questions in the first place. Over eight seasons, The Chi lost cast members under considerably messier circumstances:

• Jason Mitchell (Brandon) — fired in 2019 after misconduct complaints tied to the sets of The Chi and the film Desperados.
• Tiffany Boone (Jerrika) — exited after season 2; Essence reported she had raised concerns about Mitchell's behavior on set.
• Yolonda Ross (Jada) — written out in the season 7 finale after seven seasons. She told TVLine the timing caught her off guard.
• Lynn Whitfield (Alicia) — killed off at the end of season 7, her body found by Victor and Shaad in the closing shot.

Did he ever come back?

No. Hibbert didn't appear in seasons 7 or 8, and Kevin was never brought back for a guest spot, despite fans campaigning for one right up to the finale. The character's departure was left exactly as written: he's in LA, doing fine.

What Hibbert did next

He had Story Ave and Good Burger 2 already lined up when he announced the exit, both released in 2023. He'd also appeared in Black Panther in 2018, during the show's first season.

For the record: The Chi ran eight seasons, ending with "The Last Dance" on July 24, 2026.

That ties it with Dexter, Homeland, and Weeds among Showtime's longest-running series — only Shameless, at 11 seasons, went further.

George's longest and most famous real job is Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees, which he holds from May 1994 (season 5's "The Opposite") through 1997. He finishes the series at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. His invented job — repeated for nine seasons and never once true — is architect.

Every job he actually had

• Real estate agent at Rick Barr Properties (seasons 1–2) — his baseline, established before the show made unemployment his default state. He quits in a huff, then tries to show up Monday as if nothing happened.
• Reader at Pendant Publishing (season 3) — Elaine gets him the interview. He's fired after being caught with the cleaning woman on his office desk.
• Sitcom co-writer (season 4) — he and Jerry pitch and write the NBC pilot Jerry. It gets made, then gets killed.
• Sanalac, rest stop supplies (season 5) — he's never formally hired. He just starts showing up.
• New York Yankees (seasons 5–8) — the "do the opposite" job, working for George Steinbrenner.
• Play Now (season 9) — a sporting goods company. He fakes a disability for the private bathroom, gets caught, and the whole thing lasts about two weeks.
• Kruger Industrial Smoothing (season 9) — a firm so indifferent that George has to work harder than usual to cover for his boss.

Plus one week selling computers out of Frank's garage for Costanza and Son, which Kramer destroys.

The job he made up

The architect thing starts in season 1's "The Stake Out," where George brainstorms cover stories with Jerry and lands on pretending to be an architect. He's still at it in season 6's "The Race," working the same detail:

"Have you seen the new addition to the Guggenheim? … And it didn't take very long, either."

By season 8's "The Van Buren Boys," he's blocking a scholarship because the kid switched his ambition from architect to city planner — nothing, George insists, is higher than an architect.

What about Art Vandelay?

Common mix-up. Vandelay is the alias, invented in that same season 1 episode as a lunch date with an importer-exporter. He later becomes a latex manufacturer at Vandelay Industries, the fake employer George uses to keep his unemployment checks coming — the scheme that requires Kramer to answer Jerry's phone and fails in spectacular fashion. Strictly speaking, Art is the importer-exporter. The architect claim George makes as himself.

Boyce died in his sleep after a seizure. The cause was SUDEP — sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, a complication that kills roughly 1 in 1,000 people with epilepsy each year, per CDC figures. He had been diagnosed with epilepsy and was on medication. His family has said they had never encountered the term before it appeared on his death certificate.

Who he was before that

He started young and worked steadily:

• Eagle Eye (2008) and Grown Ups (2010) — early film roles, the latter opposite Adam Sandler, who he'd work with again in the 2013 sequel.
• Jessie (2011–2015) — four seasons as Luke Ross on the Disney Channel sitcom that made him famous.
• Descendants (2015, 2017, 2019) — Carlos, son of Cruella de Vil, across all three films.
• Mrs. Fletcher (2019) — a series regular turn on the HBO comedy, which aired that fall.
• Runt and Paradise City — both finished before his death, released posthumously.

He also raised more than $30,000 for the Thirst Project, funding two wells in Eswatini, and received the organization's Pioneering Spirit Award in 2019.

What his family did next

Libby and Victor Boyce established The Cameron Boyce Foundation in July 2019. Their son had already been setting up a philanthropic vehicle for causes he cared about; his parents added epilepsy to its focus.

In November 2019 the foundation partnered with the Epilepsy Foundation on K(NO)W SUDEP NOW, a public awareness campaign built around a PSA featuring Boyce's parents and friends.

It later teamed with CURE Epilepsy to fund the Cameron Boyce SUDEP Research Award — a $250,000 grant that went to Dr. David Auerbach at SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2022, studying cardiac markers that might flag which patients are at risk.

On August 4, 2026, CURE Epilepsy announced that The Cameron Boyce Foundation is merging into its organization. Susan Axelrod, CURE's founder, said meeting Libby Boyce convinced her the family would become a force for change.

How Disney handled it

Descendants 3 premiered on August 2, 2019, four weeks after his death. Disney canceled the red carpet and aired a tribute video after the broadcast. Five years later, Descendants: The Rise of Red put a framed portrait of Carlos on Uma's office wall, with a line about opening Auradon to Wonderland: it's what Carlos would have wanted.

Runt premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in September 2021, two years after his death, with his castmates handling the press.

Ziva returns in the final seconds of season 16, episode 24, "Daughters," which aired May 21, 2019. She then appears in four episodes of season 17: the two-part premiere in September 2019, and episodes 10 and 11, which aired December 17, 2019 and January 7, 2020.

The setup started in February

CBS ran a Super Bowl LIII spot on February 3, 2019, promising the biggest NCIS secret of all was about to be revealed. Nine days later came season 16, episode 13, "She," watched by 13.37 million people.

In it, Bishop works a ten-year-old cold case and discovers Ziva never dropped it — she'd rented a secret office and kept journals on cases she pursued off the books. When Bishop goes to read a victim's letter to the kidnapper, he tells her a woman already did it, and promised to haunt his dreams. Bishop returns to the office and finds a note under a scarf:

"Eleanor Bishop, For the safety of my family, Please keep my secret."

Three months of mentions followed before the finale paid it off.

How they hid it

The scene wasn't in any script. Only showrunners Frank Cardea and Steven D. Binder knew. De Pablo came through a back gate more than an hour after the regular crew had wrapped, and filmed it after midnight with a skeleton crew. Diona Reasonover, who plays Kasie, has said she found out watching the broadcast like everyone else.

Ziva's first line: no time for pleasantries, Gibbs is in danger. His only response is her name.

Why she left in the first place

De Pablo rarely discusses it, but she explained the decision at a 2016 Babson College appearance, saying she walked because of politics and scripts that weren't good enough — and that the plan for Ziva was to send her back to Israel and make her miserable. She's said she wouldn't return until someone wrote something worth returning for.

Where the story went next

Season 17 gave Ziva a proper exit rather than a reunion: she finishes what she started and heads to Paris to reunite with Tony and Tali. That thread became its own show. NCIS: Tony & Ziva premiered on Paramount+ on September 4, 2025, with de Pablo opposite Michael Weatherly, and its first season is complete.

Fun bit of trivia: de Pablo has said the cast stood and applauded when she walked back onto the set.

Kayce's Montana unit has four other members: Pete Calvin, Belle Skinner, Andrea Cruz, and Miles Kittle. Calvin runs it. He's also Kayce's former commanding officer from their Navy SEAL days, which is how Kayce got the job in the first place — Calvin offered it to him after Monica's death.

The unit, member by member

• Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) — head of the Montana unit, called "Cal" by the team. Kayce's old SEAL team leader, and the one who recruited him.
• Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel) — undercover specialist and former ATF agent. Wife and mother, and cagey about her own history.
• Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos) — Bronx-born and combative, willing to confront Kayce about the Dutton family's record and to work around her boss when it suits her.
• Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means) — the youngest of the group, a Marine Corps veteran and former Broken Rock Reservation officer with deep ties on the rez.

Above all of them sits Harry Gifford (Brett Cullen), head of Montana's U.S. Marshals division and a cabinet member, who is not thrilled about a Dutton joining the payroll.

Who carried over from Yellowstone

Three familiar faces: Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo, and Brecken Merrill as a now-teenage Tate Dutton. The ranch was sold to Broken Rock, which keeps Kayce and Rainwater in the same rooms. Kelsey Asbille does not return — the premiere establishes that Monica died of cancer in the gap between the two shows.

Who made it

Not Taylor Sheridan, at least not as writer. Marshals was created by Spencer Hudnut, previously showrunner of SEAL Team, making it the first Yellowstone spinoff Sheridan didn't write; he's an executive producer. It's also the franchise's first broadcast network series.

Did it work?

Numbers say yes. The March 1, 2026 premiere pulled 20.6 million multiplatform viewers within a week — CBS's most-watched original series premiere without a football lead-in since Young Sheldon in 2017, and its most-streamed episode ever on Paramount+.

CBS renewed it on March 12, after two episodes had aired.

Season 1 ran 13 episodes and finished May 24, 2026. Season 2 premieres October 4, 2026 at 8:30/7:30c before settling back into the Sunday 8/7c slot.

Gatto announced his exit on December 31, 2021, citing "some issues" in his personal life — specifically his separation from his wife, Bessy Gatto. He said he needed to focus on co-parenting their two kids. There was no firing, no falling-out with Sal Vulcano, Brian "Q" Quinn, or James "Murr" Murray, and no network decision involved.

What he actually wrote

The post was direct about both the reason and the lack of hard feelings toward the other three:

"Alongside my friends, I've devoted a decade of my life to building this franchise and couldn't be prouder of what has been accomplished. However, due to some issues in my personal life, I have to step away," Gatto wrote on social media in December 2021.

He thanked his co-stars, said he was confident in where they'd take the show, and hinted at future projects.

The part most fans missed

Gatto and Bessy reconciled. In September 2023 he posted about the two of them working through it, and they later marked their eleventh anniversary. The reason he left ended up resolved — but he still hasn't gone back.

Is he coming back?

He's ruled out guest spots. Speaking to TheWrap in January 2025, around the release of his Hulu stand-up special Messing with People, he was blunt about it:

"I've moved on from the show, the show has moved on from me."

He added that he and the others are still friends, just not work friends anymore, and that after 300 episodes he'd told all the jokes he wanted to tell. The one exception he'll entertain is a series finale — he's said he'd love to help close the thing out whenever it ends.

What he's doing instead

• Stand-up — solo theater tours including Night of Comedy and Let's Get Into It, plus the 2025 Hulu special.
• Podcasting — co-hosts Two Cool Moms with Steve Byrne on the iHeart network.
• Dog rescue — runs the nonprofit Gatto Pups and Friends on Long Island, focused on senior and unwanted dogs.
• Books — published a children's book, Where's Bearry?, based on his son losing a stuffed bear at bedtime.

The show, for its part, kept going. Season 10 replaced the fourth chair with rotating celebrity guests, and Impractical Jokers moved from truTV to TBS along the way. Four became three, plus whoever showed up that week.

As Marvel lines up heroes for its looming Doctor Doom showdown in Avengers: Doomsday, one name keeps not showing up: Don Cheadle’s War Machine. Early chatter and roundups of characters expected to join the fight have left Rhodey off the board, and Cheadle hasn’t been announced for the movie’s cast.

• Captain America
• Thor
• Bucky Barnes
• Magneto
• Mystique
• Cyclops

Those are among the heavy hitters being floated for the Doom battle, but Rhodey isn’t on the lists so far. With no War Machine mention and no Cheadle casting, the character’s return in Doomsday looks uncertain for now.

That Skrull twist

Rhodey’s last on-screen chapter didn’t make things simpler. In Secret Invasion on Disney+, Nick Fury discovered that “Rhodey” wasn’t Rhodey at all — a Skrull had replaced him, raising a big question: how long had the real Colonel James Rupert Rhodes been off the board? The reveal sent fans back through earlier MCU appearances, trying to pinpoint when the switch happened.

We needed to have a character that one would not expect to be a Skrull.

That’s how Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige explained the choice, in comments to Marvel.com, framing the twist as a deliberate shock.

Whatever happened to Armor Wars?

Rhodey’s solo project, Armor Wars, was first announced during Disney’s 2020 Investor Day as a six-episode Disney+ series built around what happens when Tony Stark’s tech falls into the wrong hands. Cheadle was set to return, and he’s said Secret Invasion could help set up that story.

The plan later shifted: Armor Wars was reworked into a theatrical film. Since then, it hasn’t landed a release window and has lingered in development, which only adds to the open question of when — and where — War Machine will suit up next.

For now, Marvel hasn’t announced Cheadle for Avengers: Doomsday, and Armor Wars has no release date.

Five years, a mother–son team, and a pile of second-hand equipment — that’s the bare-bones origin story behind Niu Lai, the Chinese indie cartoon suddenly all over American feeds. Director Xin Yumeng built the 86-minute film with his mother, Sun Lifang, on what’s been reported as a microscopic budget of roughly $200, then watched clips of its janky 3D cow flood social media once people discovered it.

The movie slipped into Chinese theaters on August 5 with little fanfare and almost no marketing, pulling in only about 10,000 yuan in its first 10 days; some days reportedly scraped by with around 200 yuan. Then came the memes: viewers posted snippets of its stiff animation and off-kilter voice work, and curiosity took over as crowds started buying tickets just to see the oddity everyone was roasting.

That online wave turned a near-invisible release into a box-office oddball. Niu Lai has now grossed more than $3 million in China, a runaway return that’s led some to call it the most profitable movie ever made — not because the total is huge, but because the costs were almost nonexistent for a feature created by a tiny independent outfit.

What’s in the movie

Translated as “The Cow Is Coming,” the film follows a young calf who drifts into a surreal dream world, confronting courage, responsibility, life, and death. On paper it’s a fable; online, it’s famous for its rudimentary 3D animation, awkward character movement, and line readings so strange people couldn’t believe the film actually played in theaters. It’s produced by Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media.

The fascination has jumped borders even without a U.S. release plan announced. As one viewer summed up the mood on X after the clips started circulating:

all I think about is I need to watch Niu Lai as soon as possible

(tweeted by @Jacobsmallzz on August 19, 2026)

By the numbers

• Runtime: 86 minutes
• China release: August 5, 2026
• Early box office: ~10,000 yuan in the first 10 days; some days reportedly ~200 yuan
• Current gross: more than $3 million (China)
• Budget: roughly $200
• Production: more than five years of work by director Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang, using second-hand gear

A cranky surgeon washed up on the Maine coast with a brand-new fear of blood is the starting point for Best Medicine, and the show leans into the clash right away. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a Harvard-trained vascular star who flames out in Boston after a sudden blood phobia and lands back in the small town where he spent childhood summers. He’s brilliant, blunt, and allergic to small talk — not ideal when your waiting room is full of neighbors who all know each other’s business.

The town won’t let him brood in peace. Abigail Spencer turns up the heat as Louisa Gavin, a sharp schoolteacher who challenges Martin at every turn and quietly becomes the one person who can get through to him. That dynamic gets messier thanks to Josh Segarra as Sheriff Mark Mylow — warm-hearted, not always eagle-eyed — who also happens to be Louisa’s ex-fiancé, a wrinkle that colors nearly every scene they share with the new doctor.

The clinic itself is barely held together by Cree as Elaine Denton, Martin’s tech-savvy, chronically online assistant who dreams of going viral while keeping the exam rooms running. She’s exasperated, ambitious and, somehow, fiercely loyal to a boss who gives out praise like it’s a controlled substance.

Family pulls at Martin from another direction via Annie Potts as Aunt Sarah, a no-nonsense lobsterwoman who still heads out on the water every day. She’s the show’s steady pulse — blunt, dryly funny, and the keeper of family history Martin would rather leave buried.

Beyond the clinic, the town’s heartbeat runs through The Salty Breeze, the beloved seafood joint co-owned by Stephen Spinella and Jason Veasey as husbands Greg Garrison and George Brady. Trouble — or at least colorful chaos — tends to arrive with the Large family: John DiMaggio is Bert, a gruff handyman who keeps crashing into Martin’s cases, and Carter Shimp is Al, the son who somehow finds the same scrapes his dad does. Meanwhile, order (or opinions about it) comes courtesy of Clea Lewis as pharmacist Sally Mylow and Didi Conn as councilwoman Geneva Potter, both fixtures in a town where nobody is shy about telling the doctor how to do his job.

Original Doc Martin star Martin Clunes appears here as Dr. Robert Best — the new doctor’s father.

That full-circle casting is a sly wink to fans of the British original. Clunes plays Robert as a headstrong gastroenterologist whose visit forces Martin to drop his defenses and confront a past he’s sidestepped for years — a sharp, dry counterpoint to Charles that threads through the season.

Who plays who

• Josh Charles — Dr. Martin Best, a Harvard-trained vascular surgeon sidelined by a sudden blood phobia
• Abigail Spencer — Louisa Gavin, a quick-witted schoolteacher and Martin’s most persistent foil
• Josh Segarra — Sheriff Mark Mylow, warm-hearted lawman and Louisa’s former fiancé
• Cree — Elaine Denton, Martin’s ambitious, internet-obsessed clinic assistant
• Annie Potts — Aunt Sarah, a working lobsterwoman with family secrets
• Stephen Spinella — Greg Garrison, co-owner of The Salty Breeze
• Jason Veasey — George Brady, Greg’s husband and co-owner of The Salty Breeze
• John DiMaggio — Bert Large, blunt local handyman
• Carter Shimp — Al, Bert’s son and frequent trouble magnet
• Clea Lewis — Sally Mylow, the town pharmacist
• Didi Conn — Geneva Potter, a councilwoman with very firm opinions
• Martin Clunes — Dr. Robert Best, Martin’s headstrong gastroenterologist father

The series borrows the bones of Doc Martin’s fish-out-of-water setup, but this Maine reset — and this ensemble — give it a distinctly American tide. Clunes’ father-son showdown with Charles rolls out across the season on Netflix.

These weren’t blink-and-you-miss-’em walk-ons. When How I Met Your Mother brought in ringers, the show rewired whole episodes around them — from surreal magazine-cover pep talks to an R&B slow jam about a slap. Here are the cameos fans still talk about, and the very specific reasons each one crushed.

The 10 cameos, ranked

• 10) Heidi Klum — herself (The Yips, Season 3, Episode 10)
  Barney loses his swagger to “the yips,” and the gang winds up at the Victoria’s Secret After Party, where Klum calmly hands him the exact confidence reset he needs. The supermodel’s serene, self-aware turn turned a midseason episode into late-2000s TV glamour, a quick hit that felt like an event.
• 9) Lucy Hale — Katie Scherbatsky (First Time in New York, S2E12; Vesuvius, S9E19)
  As Robin’s wide-eyed kid sister, Hale sparks big-sis panic and unlocks fresh layers of the Scherbatsky family. The chemistry with Cobie Smulders sold Katie as more than a stunt; her return for Robin’s wedding in Season 9 lands like a proper family reunion.
• 8) Martin Short — Garrison Cootes (The Naked Truth, S7E1; recurring)
  Short detonates every scene as Marshall’s apocalyptic-tinged environmental-law boss, pinballing from doomsday to giddy pep in a heartbeat. His unhinged office rants, plus a hilariously intense mentor vibe with Marshall, made a quick recurring stint feel monumental.
• 7) Kim Kardashian — herself (Benefits, Season 4, Episode 12)
  Marshall’s workplace bathroom anxiety hits a tabloid wall — literally — as Kardashian talks to him from the cover of Weekly Style with a bizarrely earnest pep talk about self-worth and bodily functions. The fourth-wall break is pure late-2000s absurdism, with Kardashian completely in on the joke.
• 6) Mike Tyson — himself (Bad Crazy, Season 8, Episode 16)
  Robin’s chaotic night out turns into an A-list babysitting saga when the former heavyweight champ helps care for baby Marvin in a West Side convenience store. The contrast — fearsome boxer turned tender, deeply invested coo-er — is comedy gold, and Robin treating him like a slightly eccentric sitter somehow makes it even funnier.
• 5) Jennifer Lopez — Anita Appleby (Of Course, Season 5, Episode 17)
  Barney meets a buzzsaw. Lopez plays a razor-sharp relationship author who uses her playbook, Of Course You’re Still Single, to train him like a misbehaving puppy and flip every one of his moves back on him. Watching Barney cave and agree to a real date is deliciously satisfying.
• 4) Will Forte — Randy Wharmphtess (Season 3; Natural History, S6E8)
  Forte turns pathetic into iconic as Barney’s panicky GNB colleague: instant nosebleeds around women, a home-brew obsession he proudly yells “Wharmphtess!,” and hopeless attempts to master Barney’s pickup playbook. Fans loved him so much that his Season 6 comeback played like a victory lap.
• 3) Boyz II Men — themselves (Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra, Season 9, Episode 14)
  After Marshall delivers an epic, daylight, slow-motion slap, the R&B legends glide in wearing all white and sing the most soulful roast in sitcom history.

“You Just Got Slapped.”

• 2) Katy Perry — Honey (Oh Honey, Season 6, Episode 15)
  At the peak of her pop superstardom, Perry fearlessly plays Zoey’s catastrophically gullible cousin — so naive the gang can only sigh, “Oh, Honey.” From trusting her “sweet” landlord to oversharing personal info, the bit became instant viewer vocabulary.
• 1) Britney Spears — Abby (Ten Sessions, S3E13; Everything Must Go, S3E19)
  Spears’ chaotic receptionist at Stella’s dermatology clinic crashes into the gang with a shrieked “I’m Abby!,” a revenge pact with Barney to needle Ted, and a whirlwind of lovelorn dramatics — including frantically dropped sweaters. Beyond the laughs, her episodes drew a ratings surge that reportedly helped pull the show back from early cancellation and gave Season 3 real momentum.

The first page doesn’t ease you in: the Greeks wheel out a Trojan Godzilla, and from there it’s gods hurling kaiju at each other while Odysseus tries to get home in one piece. Poseidon floods the map with monsters; Zeus counters with his secret weapon — Godzilla, nicknamed the “Hammer of Zeus” — who stomps in at key moments instead of running the whole show.

That’s the setup for Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre Presents: Godzilla’s The Odyssey, a 48-page oversized one-shot from IDW written by Frank Tieri with art by Ilias Kyriazis. It’s the second entry in the publisher’s “Monsterpiece Theatre” line after a Romeo & Juliet mash-up, and it vaults the King of the Monsters into Homer’s greatest hits without throwing out the bones of the classic.

The one-shot arrived June 10, 2026.

Greek myth, kaiju scale

Tieri keeps the main itinerary of The Odyssey intact — the war-weary hero, the divine grudges, the perilous detours — but every stop now plays at kaiju size. Familiar set pieces get monster-movie remixes, from that Trojan Godzilla opener to island encounters that end in ship-splintering brawls. By the finish, Odysseus even dedicates a temple in honor of Zeus’s “hammer,” paying tribute to the unlikely ally who occasionally tilts the odds.

It’s also a full Toho roster roll call, with classic beasts slotted into mythic roles and cameos layered throughout:

• Gigan — the Cyclops/Polyphemus stand-in
• King Ghidorah — recast as Scylla
• Titanosaurus — taking the place of Charybdis
• Rodan, Biollante, Destoroyah, Hedorah, Manda, Shockirus, King Caesar, SpaceGodzilla — appearing along the journey
• Mothra — a tapestry cameo

Kyriazis leans into the ancient-world grandeur — stone, sea and storm — while still letting the big swings land, so the battered ships and temple colonnades feel as imposing as the monsters flattening them.

Bonus trip to Sherwood

The issue also tucks in a backup by Tom Scioli, “Robin Hood and the Monster of Nottingham,” which shifts the gag to medieval England. Robin and the Sheriff end up managing kaiju chaos in Sherwood — a forest fire here, a dam there — a lighter, quick-hit companion to the Grecian main feature.

Early reactions have highlighted how cleanly the mash-up reads for newcomers while still feeling like The Odyssey, only louder — with Kyriazis’s textured art doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And if you’ve been tracking Christopher Nolan’s upcoming live-action take on Homer, IDW’s one-shot lands as a gleefully unorthodox counterprogramming note.

Godzilla’s The Odyssey is part spectacle, part literature-class prank, and all kaiju — packed into a single oversized issue from IDW.

On the father–daughter Instagram account Sign or Decline, a former music publisher listened to “End of Beginning” blind — no artist name, just the track — and said he would’ve signed it on the spot. Only after he vouched for the song did his daughter reveal the singer: Joe Keery, a.k.a. Steve Harrington from Stranger Things.

“But it's such a pity that it needed Stranger Things exposure to become successful because it's such a good song,” he said.

The song’s path backs up that frustration. Released in 2022 under Keery’s music alias Djo, “End of Beginning” barely registered at first. It caught fire much later — going viral in 2024 and spreading as fans clocked that the voice behind the melancholic earworm belonged to Hawkins’ most overqualified babysitter.

Why the slow burn

Part of the delay may be simple name confusion. Keery has kept his acting and music lanes separate, putting out records as Djo rather than under his own name. Plenty of early listeners loved the track without realizing who was singing it; once they did, streams snowballed.

By 2026, “End of Beginning” had surpassed 2 billion streams, a monster total that, at one point, even nudged the track ahead of Taylor Swift on Spotify’s global chart. The milestone arrived as Stranger Things was nearing its final chapter — a neat bit of timing for a song about closing one era and starting another. Keery actually wrote it years earlier, after finishing school in Chicago and just before he landed Steve Harrington.

Keery’s path as Djo

Before the solo run, Keery co-founded the Chicago psych-rock outfit Post Animal, playing drums, guitar and singing on their records before stepping away in 2018 as his acting career accelerated. As Djo, he’s built a steady catalog that explains why “End of Beginning” didn’t arrive out of nowhere.

• 2019 — Single: “Roddy” (self-released) under the name Djo
• 2019 — Debut album: Twenty Twenty
• 2022 — Second album: Decide (features “End of Beginning”)
• 2025 — Third album: The Crux (scored a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Album Cover)

However you found it — through Stranger Things or not — “End of Beginning” is now the song that broke Djo wide open, long after its quiet 2022 release.

On the SmartLess podcast, Tim Robbins dug into what it’s like to work for Clint Eastwood — and how fast an Eastwood set can move. Robbins said scenes often went down once, maybe twice, and that pace shaped the entire day.

“We had like 6 hour days, 7 hours day. Most of the time, we were out by lunch. Because we would do one take,” said Tim Robbins on the SmartLess podcast.

That one-and-done mindset put the emphasis on showing up prepared and trusting the performance. Robbins contrasted it with productions that grind through 12- or 16-hour marathons, describing Eastwood’s shoots as focused but relaxed — no endless rehearsals, no fuss.

He felt it most on Mystic River (2003), where he played Dave Boyle and won an Oscar. Robbins has said the short days didn’t just keep morale up; they let people actually have a life while making a major studio movie.

His prison advocacy, before the movies

Robbins also pushed back on the idea that his activism around incarceration started with directing Dead Man Walking. He told SmartLess his awareness went back to his youth.

“I was kind of aware of it growing up. I had friends that went to jail,”

He added that his formal involvement began after his breakthrough in Bull Durham, when he started working with prison organizations in New York — years before his two most famous prison-centered films.

“But, and then I did some work with some prison organizations back in New York when I first, you know, after Bull Durham. But then I did Shawshank (The Shawshank Redemption) and then Dead Man Walking,” he said on the SmartLess podcast.

So the timeline runs like this: early awareness, post–Bull Durham advocacy — and then the screen work that made those issues part of his film legacy, from The Shawshank Redemption to Dead Man Walking.

At a private gathering in Utah this month, Post Malone got down on one knee and asked Christy Lee to marry him, according to photos and videos shared by guests. The posts show Lee wearing a “Bride to Be” sash and the rapper-singer presenting a 15-carat diamond ring as friends who’d flown in for the occasion cheered and filmed the moment.

“my mom and dad got engaged”

Lee, a fashion stylist and Parsons School of Design student, and Malone have kept things mostly low-key while building their relationship back up over the past year — a reset that followed a fast start, a brief split, and then a quieter second try.

The Christy Lee timeline

• January 2025 — First spotted together during a cozy getaway in Rome.
• Winter 2025 — Seen hanging out at a venue in Idaho and on high-end shopping dates in Paris.
• March 2025 — Viral clips capture the pair showing affection on casual nights out.
• May 2025 — They briefly split to slow things down; the “temporary breakup” makes the rounds online.
• Late 2025–Early 2026 — They reconnect and keep it private, focusing on low-profile outings.
• February 2026 — Make a low-key joint appearance at a fashion show.
• August 2026 — Malone proposes in Utah with a 15-carat ring at an intimate gathering, per attendee posts.

Before Lee

Malone previously spent several years with ex-fiancée Hee Sung “Jamie” Park. He first proposed during a wild night out in Las Vegas — she turned him down — and then asked again, sober, earning a yes. The couple retreated to a private life in Utah, and their daughter arrived in May 2022. In rare interviews, Malone praised Park’s parenting and credited her stability with helping him through struggles with alcohol.

They reportedly called off their engagement and finalized a quiet separation by November 2024, and worked through private court proceedings to settle custody and visitation for their child.

Paris just turned into a ’60s caper. On-set photos shared by Entertainment Tonight show Margot Robbie in Audrey Hepburn–style tailoring and a wide-brimmed hat, while Monica Barbaro works a striking teal pencil-skirt suit. Bradley Cooper was spotted directing between takes — and acting — as production on the untitled Ocean’s prequel gets underway.

This one digs straight into the Ocean family tree: the story is set in 1962 and centers on Danny Ocean’s parents, played by Robbie and Cooper, as they line up a high-end heist timed to the Monaco Grand Prix. The plot moves across Paris, Nice and Monaco, trading Vegas neon for Riviera gloss.

Set in 1962 and staged around the Monaco Grand Prix.

The ensemble around Robbie and Cooper is stacked with international names. So far, the cast includes:

• Monica Barbaro
• Wagner Moura
• Omar Sy
• Josh Gad
• Vicky Krieps
• George MacKay
• Lauren Ridloff
• Jack Holden

ET’s first look pegs the movie as a period heist with couture-level costuming and old-school accessories to match the Riviera setting. It’s the first time the franchise has stepped back to track how the Ocean legacy started.

Back to the beginning

Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s Eleven updated the Rat Pack classic with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy García, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Carl Reiner and Qin Shaobo pulling a three-casino Vegas job. The remake hauled in about $450.7 million worldwide and spun off Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen and 2018’s Ocean’s 8.

Separate from the prequel, a new sequel with George Clooney has been discussed, with reports suggesting it could reunite him with Pitt, Damon and Roberts. For now, though, the cameras are rolling on the prequel in Paris, with the caper unfolding across Paris, Nice and Monaco.

On the cheery kids’ show It’s Buddy, a bright-orange mascot coaxes children to play by his rules — until anyone breaks them. In Buddy, that smiley TV world curdles fast: a child vanishes, the set’s make-believe turns predatory, and the kids trapped inside Buddy’s realm race for a rumored safe zone called Diamond City. Cristin Milioti plays Grace, a woman who becomes fixated on the program and gets drawn into its warped logic.

Who’s in it

• Keegan-Michael Key — voice of Buddy, the mascot
• Cristin Milioti — Grace
• Topher Grace — Grace’s husband

Directed by Casper Kelly, the movie mixes slasher mayhem with dark-comedy bite. It first screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kelly said he and Key worked to give the deceptively sunny mascot a voice that can snap from gentle to menacing in a breath.

“[Key] can do so many voices. He was great in giving me a lot of options of very nice or one a little bit irritated, one a lot irritated, so in the edit, we had a lot of flexibility,” he told People.

Release plans

August 28, 2026 is opening day for Buddy, and it will be in theaters only at first. There’s no digital or streaming date announced yet.

The offsite starts with icebreakers and ropes courses. Then word gets around: layoffs might be coming. Suddenly, the supposedly wholesome retreat for employees of Tío Mochales — a onetime cheese powerhouse that’s lost its shine — turns into a survival match, with coworkers jockeying to keep their jobs in Go Team!, a Spanish workplace comedy where trust falls give way to backstabbing.

The movie leans into the chaos of corporate anxiety: once “team-building” becomes “every person for themselves,” rivalries harden, alliances shift, and pettiness turns brutal. It’s played for laughs, but the stakes feel very real to the folks stuck on that bus.

Who’s in the cast

• Alexandra Jiménez — Olga (Los Serrano, The Innocent, 53 domingos)
• Maribel Verdú — Pepa (Pan’s Labyrinth, Snow White, Abracadabra, Elite)
• Pedro Casablanc — Domingo (Under the Rose, Black Widow, Salvador)
• Raúl Tejón — Marco (Alpha Males, The Girl in the Mirror, Amar en tiempos revueltos, Vis a vis, La verdad)
• Blanca Martínez — Laura (Breathless, In Love All Over Again)

Also in the mix: Ismael Fritschi and Víctor Rebull. And keep an eye out — household names Saturnino García and Pepe Viyuela could pop in for surprise appearances.

Go Team! is scheduled to be released on September 11, 2026.

It’s a Spanish production, with U.S. release details still to come. When those plans firm up — platform, theaters, or both — we’ll know where American audiences can watch coworkers go to (office) war.

Marvel used D23 to lock in the core team for its new X-Men movie and plant a flag on the calendar, but the franchise’s most complicated villain is still unclaimed. The studio confirmed Adam Driver as Mister Sinister while leaving Magneto — Erik Lehnsherr himself — for another day.

• Sadie Sink
• Kit Connor
• Christopher Abbott
• Samara Weaving
• Inde Navarrette
• Maya Boyd
• Adam Driver — Mister Sinister

X-Men is slated to hit theaters May 5, 2028.

Where Magneto stands

Into that vacuum steps a fresh round of rumor: the X account Main Middle Man claimed Matt Smith has been in talks to play Magneto. According to that account, discussions have happened but haven’t moved forward, and nothing is signed. Earlier chatter had linked Smith to Mister Sinister — a role that now belongs to Driver after the D23 reveal.

Smith’s name has circled Marvel before. He was reportedly in active negotiations to play Reed Richards in Fantastic Four before the part went to Pedro Pascal. He also dipped a toe in Marvel-adjacent waters with Sony’s Morbius.

The Magneto short list

Smith isn’t the only name buzzing online. Fan-favorite candidates who keep popping up in speculation include:

• Lee Pace
• Jensen Ackles
• Bill Skarsgård
• Henry Cavill

None of those possibilities have been acknowledged by Marvel, but they’ve all drawn enthusiastic responses across social media as the studio zeroes in on its new Master of Magnetism.

Why Smith fits the helmet

As Daemon Targaryen on House of the Dragon, Smith turns stillness into threat — the kind of restrained authority Magneto demands. He’s comfortable living in moral gray zones too, a key to making Erik Lehnsherr’s hardline worldview feel rooted in trauma and conviction rather than cartoon villainy.

Marvel has not announced a Magneto casting or timeline for that reveal. For now, the confirmed ensemble is set, and X-Men is dated for May 5, 2028.