Ken JenningsPhoto: VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images
This may be hard to believe, coming from the game show institution that went through a very long run of trial hosts only to give the job to the show’s producer (at least temporarily), but Jeopardy! seems to have gone for the least surprising and least interesting choice when deciding who should be its permanent post-Alex Trebek host. Would it be Ken Jennings? Would it be Mayim Bialik? The two of them have been trading off for nearly a year, but now Jeopardy! has decided that… they’ll both just keep trading off.
That’s according to Variety’s sources, which say that both Jennings and Bialik have “entered into long-term deals” to keep splitting the Jeopardy! host job, with Bialik also doing special primetime versions of Jeopardy! and an upcoming version of Celebrity Jeopardy! (for real, not the SNL sketch, which wouldn’t be as much fun these days for, you know, sad reasons). This comes exactly one month after the show’s producers announced that they would have an announcement about who will permanently host Jeopardy! “very, very soon,” which seems like a real stretch of what “very, very soon” means. But what would the producers of Jeopardy! know about sticking to the exact letter of the law? Surely they’re not sticklers for specificity over at Jeopardy! HQ, right?
It doesn’t sound like this has officially been confirmed or announced by the Jeopardy! producers or Sony Pictures Entertainment, but Variety seems confident that it’s just a matter of letting the ink dry. Or whatever they use on those Jeopardy! answer boards, which are probably digital pens and not actual pens. Either way, don’t be surprised if you keep seeing Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik asking for answers in the form of a question on your TV every afternoon before or after Wheel Of Fortune.
Everyone get your tiny violins ready, we have some bad news for Netflix that we feel really, really bad about. Really. We feel sooo bad for Netflix. We’re holding back tears over here, screaming to the heavens about how Netflix doesn’t deserve to be punished and how too many bad things happen to the perfectly nice streaming services that never do anything wrong. Not ever!
But yeah, the bad news: The test run of Netflix’s new system for cracking down on people who are sharing their password, currently happening in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru, is not going well. Super sad, right?! Apparently, the core issue is one of messaging, with Netflix charging people the equivalent of $2 or $3 extra to share their account with anyone outside of their “household,” but the exact definition of “household” seems… predictably vague and limiting.
Apparently, the official Netflix stance is that a household is “exclusively people a subscriber lives with” and not a subscriber’s immediate family. This comes from Rest Of World, which says that the National Institute For The Defense Of Free Competition And The Protection Of Intellectual Property believes this could be taken as “a way of discriminating against users arbitrarily.” Basically, the idea seems to be that a Netflix account would be tied to a physical location, which just sets up a lot of questions that Netflix doesn’t seem to have solved—like what if you move, or you’re on vacation, or your child goes off to school?
Rest Of World spoke to “more than a dozen” Netflix subscribers in Peru who said that they were confused about the new rules and that Netflix wasn’t even enforcing them, with an anonymous customer service rep saying they were told that, if a customer calls and complains, they should be given a special verification code that will let them use their account in multiple locations. So even Netflix doesn’t seem particularly concerned with sticking to this system.
The downside is that these all seem like solvable problems, or—if you want to be cynical—problems that Netflix could just ignore. Limiting an account to a physical location is only a problem if you think Netflix gives a shit about screwing over customers. Seeing as how we’re even talking about an anti-sharing crackdown in the first place, it seems pretty obvious just how much Netflix cares.
Elliot Page on the Umbrella Academy set.Photo: Netflix
As Season Three of Umbrella Academy wraps, the cast and production have revealed that Elliot Page, who uses both he and they pronouns, is returning to the show as Viktor Hargreeves. Previously playing a character named Vanya, the change comes in the wake of Page’s own announcement of their transgender identity, and was very likely done to reflect Page’s own transition.
As a transgender nerd, I cannot overstate how thrilled I am to see this kind of change happen. Besides the fact that this might be a historic rewriting—it’s hard to recall a character has ever changed gender because the actor playing them has transitioned—just the fact that there’s enough respect between Page and the show to adjust the character to suit his new gender is incredibly heartening. It’s incredibly difficult to be transgender in any setting, but Page is a wildly popular and visible transmasculine person in an industry that places a lot of weight on appearance and respectability.
The embrace of Page’s identity will make it easier for Page to land new roles in the future and will help bring more trans people into Hollywood as actors first and trans people second. This change also signals to other productions that they can change a character to suit an actor of any gender (not just trans folks) in order to better respect the actor playing the role and allow for more gender equity in television across the board. At the end of the day, Page deserves to take roles and work on productions that will honor, even celebrate, his gender identity. Umbrella Academy took steps to ensure that Page not only felt comfortable working on set, but had the opportunity to take his character in a new direction… something that all actors should be able to do.
Umbrella Academy Season 3 releases on Netflix Wednesday, June 22.
Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.
Another week, another dead show at Netflix—your one-stop streaming shop for television programs you probably shouldn’t get too attached to. This time, the Streaming Reaper has come for found-footage horror series Archive 81, which Deadline reports the streamer has declined to pick up for a second season.
That’s both a bummer, and a little bit of a surprise—or as much of one as Netflix pulling the plug on a show can be, these days. After all, Archive 81 not only drew critical praise, it also reportedly did pretty well for the service, breaking into the company’s Top 10 for ratings for original programming.
For the unfamiliar, Archive 81 starred Mamoudou Athie as an archivist asked to restore some old video footage, and Dina Shihabi as the woman who filmed it, as she attempted to investigate the strangeness surrounding an apartment building. Things swiftly get spooky, in ways that paid homage to horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Ring, and more.
Series creator Rebecca Sonnenshine—who adapted Archive 81 from an existing podcast by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger—confirmed the news on Twitter today, reporting that she was “surprised and disappointed we won’t be doing another season,” briefly hinting at some of the plotlines the show might have followed if it had picked up from its first-season cliffhanger.
For what it’s worth, we were fans of Archive 81, which often managed to transcend the base homages it was built from. In her review of the show’s first (now only) season, Saloni Gajjar writes,
Even as it goes through an assortment of supernatural concepts, the show remains interesting mainly due to its exploration of intergenerational trauma. The sentimental familial hook is the through line for each character, past and present. Dan, Melody, Virgil, and almost every other supporting player’s motivations are traced back to grief over the loss of loved ones. Archive 81 just manages to connect their suffering in a slow-burning yet rewarding way.
“To me, one man’s over-the-top is another man’s engaged performance.”
“I’m not an actor, I’m a [very, very intense movie] star!!”
Willem Dafoe jokes several times in his monologue about people thinking he’d make a great Joker. He’s not wrong, although here I’ll just say—enough with the Jokers. We’ve had enough Jokers. Heath Ledger was the best, Mark Hamill is a strong second, Jared Leto remains in last place, forever. That bafflingly misbegotten and overrated Joaquin Phoenix thing was not a Joker movie, I don’t care what anyone says.
Ahem. Still, Dafoe’s Joker-obsessed fans have a point. As Dafoe himself noted, he’s not an unexpressive actor. As I’d add, Willem Dafoe has a crazy devil face whose alternately bulging and slitted ice-blue eyes, tombstone teeth, and deeply etched lines are the craziest toolbox a major star has had to work with since probably forever. Dafoe pretended to be hurt by the idea that he’s only thought of on the street as the physical embodiment of outsized, gleefully performative evil, but, hey, it’s worked for the guy so far.
Leading up to Dafoe’s hosting gig tonight, I cast my mind back over Dafoe’s roles to imagine what a sketch comedy Willem Dafoe might be like. His comedies are few and stranded amidst a vast sea of unsettling kooks, killers, and the occasional supervillain. He deadpans exquisitely for Wes Anderson, was game (and, yes, unsettling) in his two Simpsons guest roles, and I’m never going to watch American Dreamz, so there’s not a lot to go on.
As it played out, Dafoe was game for Saturday Night Live, too, his up-for-anything enthusiasm the best thing about what were a handful of genuinely indifferent sketches. And if Dafoe isn’t going to springboard into a late-career comic swerve out of the gig, here’s to watching him lighten up and have fun. That said, Willem Dafoe is not really built for comedy, with his performances a combination of stilted and exaggerated that was—I’ll say it—kind of unsettling.
Onscreen, there’s precious little Dafoe hasn’t done, or won’t do, a fearlessness that carried over tonight into spanking himself with a riding crop, doing a couple of weird dances, and a whole lot of boner and blowjob jokes. The writing tonight was almost uniformly corny in its broadness, which can’t be laid at Dafoe’s feet. Still, there was a fair amount of host-protecting going on (most of his monologue was Aidy Bryant and Mikey Day doing Wisconsin accents), with Dafoe wheeling out for a short ensemble piece or plunked down as framing device. The whole show tonight had a sprung rhythm, with lots of dead spots in the pacing and clunky direction and blocking. (Punkie Johnson crosses right in front of camera on one exit.) That’d be a lot for even a comic powerhouse of a host to overcome, and Dafoe was left stranded much of the night, not that he seemed anything but delighted to be there.
Best/Worst Sketch Of The Night
The Best: Woof. And, no, I’m not putting the dog show sketch here. That’s just the sound I made when casting over my notes and trying to think of a sketch that didn’t make me feel blank and sort of logy. The music video sketch, “Now I’m Up” gets the top spot tonight, simply by being the most professional and polished, if not the funniest such pre-tape the show’s ever done. Also, Chris Redd is always outstanding in these musical numbers, here bringing a truly fine voice to what was an otherwise standard musical list of the sort of thoughts that keep you up at night. He and Kenan made an unremarkable piece of observational comedy into a serious bop—I would listen to this anytime, honestly. Dafoe was used well, too, his late-night commercial pitchman intruding into the bleary-eyed mix for a nifty song and dance riff. Honestly, if those intrusive insomniac thoughts that keep you awake and edgy had a spokesperson, it’d be Willem Dafoe, telling you that you have to die someday.
The Worst: While no sketches tonight were outright dire, so many of the live pieces jerked along to the same busted comic rhythm. Speaking of jerking, the returning joke about a news report gone wrong thanks to some accidentally ribald chyrons was all about the blowjobs, as anchor Bowen Yang calling self-help guru Dafoe’s book Blowing Yourself (instead of Knowing Yourself) sees things play out in exhausting, one-joke hackiness. There are lots of lines like, “That’s a lot to swallow,” and “Hopefully I don’t suck here,” if that’s your bag, is what I’m saying. It’s like a Carol Burnett Show sketch if Harvey Korman were allowed to make self-fellatio jokes. (Just as an aside, for no reason: Willem Dafoe is exceptionally limber.)
The Rest: The Badminster Dog Show continues to suggest that, if a show is flagging during rehearsals, a pack of adorable doggies are kept behind some emergency glass. I love dogs. Dogs are cute. And dogs can be freaking hilarious. That said, this one seems to have been turned over to guaranteed audience “awwww”s to make up for the fact that nobody wrote much of anything after coming up with the whole “Badminster” instead of “Westminster” title gag.
I laughed at Aidy being Aidy, her co-host (along with Dafoe) noting that the contest’s crappy dogs are “just like us—some of them bite kids.” And Redd was great as the owner of the eventual winner, a little critter whose enormous penis necessitates vet visits every time it gets aroused. “I hate saying that, and I say it a lot,” Redd states upon explaining the elaborate penile de-escalation procedure. But even though I joined in on the “awww” train when the supposed meanest dog in the pageant turned out to be a cuddlebug, tenderly licking Kate McKinnon’s judge and Andre Dismukes’ owner while everybody tried to keep a straight face, I felt manipulated and dirty. But I ”awwww”-ed all the same. Dafoe’s into-it but stiff presence didn’t help, I have to say, as a list of one dog’s increasingly absurd list of fears (pineapples, the Netflix startup sound) got trampled by Dafoe’s comically tone-deaf delivery. Cute pooches, though.
The other pre-tape, a commercial parody of those ubiquitously targeted Frank Thomas testosterone-booster ads, was as full of boner jokes as the news report sketch, but at least they were better, weirder boner jokes. With Kenan’s Big Hurt, Kyle Mooney’s Doug Flutie, and Dafoe (as himself) all coming out to cheerfully embarrass middle-aged Mikey Day for supposedly not being able to “get hard” anymore, the gag is that the three celebrity spokespeople are both really into the product, and unashamedly enthusiastic about the fact that they once couldn’t get hard, but now can get very hard, indeed. Making these dad-focused commercials’ subtext text, the sketch playfully skewers the euphemistic pitch behind all these suspiciously unregulated man-potions, stripping Day’s manly insecurities down to the bone. (You get it.) And there are enough weirdo touches to give the initial joke some legs, as its eventually revealed that the product in question is less a pill than some sort of whirring, hiccuping motorized gizmo that sees all three enthusiasts doubled over in artificially induced pain-pleasure. Dafoe, triggered into exquisite torture by the innocent attentions of Day’s wife, Melissa Villaseñor, is used to his best advantage, pounding his chest and screaming in startlingly intense orgasmic delight. (And no, nobody’s making a “Dafoe face” joke.)
The Please Don’t Destroy guys miss with this one, a one-joke premise (Martin Herlihy has a 10-year-old best bud) that escalates in noisy chaos more than cleverness. I like these guys, even if the show’s naked pitch to make them the next viral superstars keeps pointing out that The Lonely Island only made this specific type of absurdist backstage stuff look easy.
In the SNL oral history, many tales are told about Lorne Michaels’ expensive insistence on realistic and often elaborate sets in comedy. “Gilda will know,” he’s quoted as stating in response to an NBC exec asking why a wardrobe sweater had to be real cashmere. So I don’t get bent out of shape watching the show invest so much time, energy, and money in creating, say, a quartet of meticulously movie-accurate costumes for the minor characters in the Beauty And The Beast sketch. I’m a little more irritated that SNL keeps thinking that we’re all as convinced a lavishly mounted Disney setting propping up a middling premise is comedy gold.
Here, Pete Davidson’s Beast (no complaints about his costuming, since he’s a main character, and those lower-jaw fangs are ingeniously crafted) whips out his magic mirror to show Chloe Fineman’s Belle just what her elderly father is getting up to in her (kidnapped) absence. Dafoe’s gameness is on display as his home alone papa gets down to some dirty, if indifferently realized and staged, behavior. (Here’s where that riding crop figures in.) With Kenan (Cogsworth), Mikey Day (Lumiere), Punkie Johnson (Mrs. Potts), and Kyle (Chip) all getting into the voyeuristic fun to varying degrees, the sketch is awfully thin. Partly that’s down to Dafoe, who, I’m just calling it, isn’t a naturally funny presence. While his lonely old man lamenting how much he misses all the things his late wife used to do to his ass exhibits an admirable degree of commitment on Dafoe’s part, the guy just doesn’t really speak the comic language. Mostly, though, it’s that these Disney-fied sketches all seem to have the same joke. (Stuff isn’t as rosy and innocent as these animated kids films would have you believe.) And while we all have our own rosy memories of these movies, it’s really time to move on from seeing them as go-to sketch fodder.
Weekend Update Update
Is it a good sign when Peyton Manning gives the best comedy performance of your sketch comedy show? No, no it is not, even if, yeah, the former NFL QB (and former SNL host who did slightly better than most athletes) was genuinely pretty great as he revealed that his newly discovered love for binge-watching Emily In Paris trumped watching any of last weekend’s mail-biting football highlights. It’s the specificity of Manning’s ably rat-a-tat catalogue of the Netflix series that makes the joke, as Manning can barely be coaxed into talking NFL highlights (“All the touchdowns were in the end zone”) amidst his in-depth analysis of what makes Emily’s adventures in love and work so darned thrilling. His reading of “a fresh take on feminism—finally!,” was easily the best delivery of the night. (Even if, you know, that’s sort of questionable, coming from him.) Throw in a surprise beret reveal shot, and you have one of the most unexpected highlights of this season. I know, I’m as baffled as you are.
Jost and Che were, once more, fine. With tonight’s co-hosting gig, apparently they are now the longest-tenured Update hosts ever, and as long as SNL wants Weekend Update to stay a cheeky, largely disposable showcase for personality rather than biting fake news, then they should have a few more years to really put their records out of reach.
Aidy Bryant and Bowen Yang had some fun as a pair of effortfully outré trend predictors. There’s not much to the bit than watching Aidy and Bowen almost crack up as they go unaccountably harsh on their fashion and lifestyle pet peeves. For guys who use posters as decor, Aidy’s hissing, “Pulp Fiction poster—grow up and be a damn painting!” made me laugh in her and Yang’s tag-team hostility. Aidy is so outstanding at what she does that she’s in danger of being taken for granted sometimes. Here, there’s a level of knowing absurdity yoked to ultimate, wild-eyed sincerity of purpose that’s just irresistible.
“What do you call that act?” “The Widettes!”—Recurring Sketch Report
The wacky news blooper sketch can go gather dust as a concept. Way, way back in the filing cabinet graveyard.
While the tenant’s association meeting sketch wasn’t exactly a recurring bit, the change of setting (from school committee, town meeting, etc) roll call nature of these pieces as a template sure is. Here, it’s Alex Moffatt and Chloe Fineman riding herd on the assorted weirdos and cranks taking the mic, allowing us to see who, of this overstuffed and underused cast, is actually in the building this week.
As a conceit, these sorts of sketches serve the purpose of letting nearly everybody get some airtime, while usually zipping by without making much of an impact. Here, the high notes are muted by brevity, and the fact that most don’t really bring an especially well-realized characterization to the party. Kate kills, naturally, as her diminutive final speaker pokes her head barely over the podium to, once more, suggest raising the allowable cat limit from three to seventy-five. Kate McKinnon can land a character with a look, a pause, and a shuffle of prepared notes. Redd does fine, too, as the building’s doorman, smilingly but beseechingly trying to nip in the bud the fact that the building’s mostly white tenants think his name is “Jamarcus.” (It’s Robert.)
Aristotle Athari scores big, too, his Google translate-dependent tenant securing his phone’s help to ask, “I need to milk faucet so make destruction.” (Apparently, he’s planning to tear down a wall. Again.) Athari has slyly asserted himself as someone who can make a small role pop memorably, as has James Austin Johnson, whose barely contained rage about Verizon emerges in a strangled, funny voice. Dafoe is funny enough, channeling his own past living rough in NYC to portray the self-proclaimed “pain in the ass” who bought the top three floors of the building in 1971 for eleven dollars. His “What the hell happened to this city?” reminiscences about hellhole 70s New York include the joys of Iggy Pop puking into your face at CBGB’s, something Dafoe makes especially vivid by suggesting that that is precisely what happened to him at one point. Heidi Gardner, too, excels in these ensemble parades, here inhabiting her irately clueless (about her son’s jackoff habits) mom explode with impeccable Karen energy. These sketches are much of a muchness, but they have their uses, I suppose.
“It was my understanding there would be no math”—Political comedy report
Just stop. Sorry, that’s not helpful. Just stop it. Dammit. Deep breath…
Okay, so what happens when SNL decides to combine its traditionally unfocused and watery political cold open with its penchant for name-checking what those darned kids are up to these days? You get this—thing—where James Austin Johnson’s Joe Biden brings in a youth consultant to counter Russian misinformation tactics with (another deep breath) memes and TikTok videos. I saw the warning signs with that TikTok-centered sketch earlier this season, the mini-movie app’s virality proving a shiny allure for SNL to prove just how old and creaky its sensibilities can look when it tries to get down with the youth of today.
And here, as with the Biden Spider-Man cold open, Johnson’s still canny and well-observed Biden is saddled with a non-premise and asked to react. The “Biden, ain’t he old?” jokes are proving as tiresome a writers’ crutch as Alec Baldwin’s Trumpy fish-face already, and we’re only a year in. Here, confronted with the bewildering array of Russian meme warfare on display, Johnson’s Biden is called on to blurt “Malarkey!,” and otherwise look benignly puzzled at all this newfangled disinformation and GIFs and whatnot, and it’s all too irrelevant to be truly annoying. A draggy exercise in doing the least possible with seven minutes of valuable and potentially fruitful network airtime is an ill-advised way to kick off your 90-minute comedy show.
I Am Hip To The Musics Of Today
In contrast to my gripes about those Disney costumes, I say, give Katy Perry all the giant mushrooms she wants. Any initial conception of SNL’s musical element being co-equal with the comedy/variety portion of the show went out even before it began, really, so I’m here for any time the show allows a performer to go full performance art. Is Katy Perry in a vacuum-sealed dress, flanked by identically kitted-out mushroom dancers art? Well, it’s certainly more interesting than the usual rushed and perfunctory musical slots, and Perry’s perfectly pleasant pop meshes just fine with a swirling, Alice In Wonderland backdrop of psychedelic imagery and “Eat Me” fans. Honestly, I have to admit that sometimes I check out a little during the musical guests, but I didn’t do that tonight.
Most/Least Valuable Not Ready For Prime Time Player
I keep stumping for you, Melissa, and god knows you deserve more than the two nothing roles you got tonight. But fluffing lines in both ain’t helping, even as I acknowledge that the stress of only getting a line or so every two episodes only ups the pressure.
I’ve been helpfully informed by you kind commenters and Twitter types that Cecily’s absence can be attributed to her tagging out to star off-Broadway. Break legs, Strong.
Aidy gets the top slot tonight, and, no, it’s not damning with faint praise. The episode wasn’t anything special, but Aidy Bryant is.
Too abrupt and yet too drawn-out is a comic mix that’s tough to pull off, so, kudos, I guess? Here, though, the office sketch was all setup, a feint toward a whole new direction, and then a clumsily truncated payoff. Dafoe’s office temp is reentering the workforce, has bought a whole lot of pizzas for the law firm’s all-nighter, and then disastrously joins in on the lawyers’ bored finger-tapping and glass-pinging impromptu musical screw-around by hurling an office chair out a 15th-story window. “I thought it would bounce off the window and make a cool sound!,” Dafoe’s abashed Jeremiah exclaims. I like a sketch not beholden to a pat formula, but this really could have used a stronger center than Dafoe, as hard as he tries to imbue the sketch with a live-wire energy. Blame that expressive face, I guess, but watching an actor not known for comedy furiously mugging to sell a joke is more squirmy than funny. (He really does nail Hedi Gardner with that stapler, though, with a solid, blind, over-the-shoulder hurl.) That does sort of describe Willem Dafoe’s traditional effect on me. So, well done?
Stray observations
Telltale pandemic detail: The decelerating whirring of fans or air purifiers each time Dafoe introduced Katy Perry.
Poor Ego Nwodim had two exposition-heavy, explaining-the-joke roles tonight. Yup, she got double Mikey Day-ed.
Fineman’s consultant, introducing herself to the President: “I’m Mikayla, spelled the worst way.” (I guessed on the worst way to spell Michaela.)
Aidy’s irate tenant wants to ban all teens from her building, since they “huff White Claws and do 69-ers” right outside her door.
Aidy’s dog show co-host banters, “Now, Judas, it says here that you and I are married!”
One of the dogs is said to be allergic to “anything that is or isn’t duck.”
We’re off for a while, but return strong with John Mulaney joining the Five Timers Club (alongside musical guest LCD Soundsystem) on February 26. See you then.
Christina Ricci stars in YellowjacketsPhoto: Showtime
Laura Lee. We barely knew thee. It’s a strange choice in this week’s episode of Yellowjackets to take one of our most intriguing supporting characters, allude to a full episode devoted to her, and instead wave her off with three inglorious scenes. The first flashback sees Laura Lee diving into the shallow end of Christian summer camp, banging her head against the pool floor. She comes to after extensive CPR and first glimpses a golden cross hanging from the lifeguard’s neck. “No, Laura Lee,” he says looking her straight in the eye, “I didn’t save you, He did.”
And so starts the contemptuous tone the episode takes towards Laura Lee and her faith, which is jarring because up until now, Yellowjackets has had a more nuanced approach than that. Sure, we all giggled at her suspecting the plane crash was divine punishment for her just thinking the c-word but she showed real poise leading them in prayer over the graves of the people killed in the plane crash. It was also clearly a wise move on her part to avoid the séance, but she still came to the rescue to physically beat the evil out of Lottie with her bible.
It makes it all the sadder that when she makes a plan to fly the decrepit plane for rescue, it’s shown to come from a place of misguided religious hubris and willing martyrdom. When the episode concludes and the plane catches fire—first burning her teddy bear before exploding above the lake—it’s hard to entirely comprehend the tone. For all that the Yellowjackets themselves collapse devastated on the shore, the explosion hits like a punch line. And Laura Lee’s story, particularly thanks to an excellent performance from Jane Widdop, deserves better.
But before we set off down Laura Lee’s tragic path, the episode starts on as hideous an image as we’ve ever had, one more successfully tinged with humor. Van lies on a lit funeral pyre missing most of her cheek, watched by her sobbing teammates and Taissa still drenched in wolf blood. As her clothes catch fire, she begins to come to, and her friends realize they have set fire to a very much alive person. Watching her teammates patting her down as they acknowledge they’ve added extensive burns to her list of injuries is truly grotesque, which makes Liv Hewson’s delivery of “Really? Fire?” all the more hilarious.
Meanwhile, in the present day, two pairs of relationships are at the fore: Missy butting heads with Nat while Shauna bonds with Taissa. Missy vs. Nat proves the funnier of the two. It’s a grim sight watching Nat drunkenly smear eye makeup over her face (even if Juliette Lewis still somehow makes it look cool) and order a bag of cocaine. And even with a woman tied up in her basement, it’s hard not to find Misty as endearing as she is terrifying. Using her surveillance of Nat, she spots the cocaine delivery and uses herself as a literal human shield, shoveling as much cocaine into her nose as humanly possible. Sadly, as the way things tend to go for Misty, she isn’t met with gratitude. “I have never even tried cocaine before!” she screams at an ungrateful Nat.
Sophie Thatcher and Steven Krueger Photo: Showtime
Say what you want about Misty—and calling her psychopath who trapped her friends in the wilderness for 19 months to starve and die and abuser of the elderly would be valid—she’s kind of a great friend? As well as taking a large pile of cocaine to stop Nat’s relapse, she has been selflessly investigating Travis’ murder and seems to be a very nurturing owner to that parrot. We should all be so lucky to have such great multitasking skill—and as an audience be eternally grateful that we live in an era where such complicated roles are being written for women. It remains a credit to Christina Ricci’s performance that Misty contains such multitudes and seamlessly pivots between nurturing and murderous.
Both Nat and Misty end up at the end of their tether this episode: Misty almost sacrificing Caligula and Nat hitting what I suspect still isn’t rock bottom, resorting to sniffing cocaine out of the carpet before blackmailing an old sponsor to give her Travis’ bank records. Far more straightforwardly tender is the bond being reignited between Shauna and Taissa. In the past, Shauna shares an non-judgmental intimacy that contrasts with the toxic dynamic she has with Jackie, who announces Shauna’s pregnancy to the group to further incentivize Laura Lee to fly the plane.
Further points are scored in the “Jackie Sucks” column when she informs Travis of Nat’s sexual history, which included one of Travis’ bullies. Call me a sex-positive fourth wave feminist but… so? Travis’s freakout seems entirely unjustified at this news, but Nat being Nat can’t help but stick the knife in during a confrontation. Sophie Thatcher mirrors Juliette Lewis’ venom for Detective Kevin when she hisses at him, “I guess it’s a good thing you couldn’t get it up.”
Even in the midst of such misery, Shauna and Taissa maintain a lovely bond across timelines. In the past and in the present they provide comfort and an open mind to one another. In the present-day storyline, Taissa’s “sleepwalking” has made her afraid to stay around her family so she decides to stay at Shauna’s place and they snuggle up in bed together, confessing their sins and fears to one another is a warm, safe space. Melanie Lynskey and Tawny Cypress have such warm ease together, it’s hard to believe these two characters were ever estranged.
Peter GadiotPhoto: Showtime
Taissa gives Shauna the strength to fully confront Adam, the world’s most suspicious man. She at first goes to question him about his internet absence and he concedes he didn’t really go to Pratt, but his giant puppy dog eyes and rock-hard abs have Shauna going back to pack her sexy new dress from Jeff (it continues to be extremely funny how nothing is sacred to Shauna) for a weekend away in a cabin. It is only when she spots some incriminating flakes of glitter in Adam’s closet hiding spot that she accepts that the world’s most suspicious man might be… suspicious.
It’s hard to even put into words how much, after all this, the ending lands with a thud. We are all aware they have a year or so left in the wilderness, so Laura Lee is doomed to fail. Her death above the lake provokes a few interesting responses, such as Jackie burrowing her face into Travis’ chest, but it proves a cheap trick all round.
Stray observations
Now that Laura Lee is gone, our strongest secondary player is definitely Coach Ben. His quiet bond with Nat, talking about his life with the weight of 1996 homophobia was stunning. Steven Krueger’s performance is very understated even as Ben struggles with his disability, the unwanted attention from Misty, and an inability to assert his authority in the wilderness. I can’t help but feel that the show is making us adore this man to make his end all the more devastating—but hopefully not and he and that writer boyfriend have grown old in a townhouse in the city.
They did a stunning job stitching up Van’s face. Hopefully that means we get future Van with a light scar across her face? If the creators of Yellowjackets are casting season two, there are some excellent suggestions in the comments section.
The most surprising element to this, aside from Van surviving a wolf mauling and an immolation is that, even if Shauna doesn’t, I really like Callie now. Sarah Desjardins brings a lot of depth to her.
This iconic American quiz show still hasn’t decided on a permanent host. What is Jeopardy!?
Once again, Sony still has pushed off inking a permanent Jeopardy! host, announcing that interim hosts Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings will remain behind the podium for the remainder of its 38th season.
“We are delighted to let you know that Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings will continue to share hosting duties through the end of Jeopardy! Season 38, and Michael Davies will remain as executive producer,” the show’s producers announced via Twitter. “We’re so pleased to have such an excellent and experienced team in front of and behind the camera as we head into 2022!”
After playing musical chairs all last summer, Jeopardy! landed on some guy named Mike really, really wanted to be the host of Jeopardy!—despite him having minimal experience or name recognition (but several sketchy podcast episodes and numerous workplace misconduct allegations). Shortly after that, he stepped down because everyone was really, really annoyed about it.
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And so, the show has decided to shrug off any decision-making until, at least, next July, when the gig technically hits job boards again. For her part, Bialik all but dashed any hopes of becoming the show’s perma-host. Her commitments to the Fox sitcom Call Me Kat (a show that definitely exists) reportedly keep her from full-time Jeopardy!-ing.
As for Jennings, despite a few gross tweets, he remains the clear choice at this point. Not that there’s much competition. Fan-favorite LeVar Burton is out of the running, as are the host pool’s two most prominent medical quacks, Dr. Oz and Aaron Rogers. Oz and Rodgers have moved on to running for Congress and devoting his life to the teachings of Joe Rogan, respectively. (Though, Bialik has given them stiff competition in the past).
So the show will continue to be without a permanent host for the time being. Unfortunately, that means Mike Richards only has a few months to get a job as an intern, work his way up to associate producer, navigate the org chart that leads him to executive producer so that he can give himself the job, again.
Jeff Garlin broke standard PR protocol this week, granting an interview to Vanity Fair’s Maureen Ryan that directly addressed allegations of inappropriate behavior on the set of his ABC sitcom The Goldbergs. The resulting conversation is a fascinating read: a blend of candidness, defensiveness, and repeated attempts by the Curb Your Enthusiasmstar to categorize behavior that other people have said made them feel uncomfortable as simply him being “silly” on the show’s set.
Garlin begins the interview by clarifying that he has not been fired from The Goldbergs, something Ryan was apparently having a difficult time getting a straight answer on from Sony, which produces the show. He then goes on to admit that he’s been investigated by HR on the series every year for the last three years of the show, all for behavior he refers to as, yes, “silliness,” which is a word you’re going to read a lot in this interview.
For what we can only assume are a variety of mostly legal-related reasons, Garlin never describes exactly what he means by “silly” behavior—beyond giving one example of saying “Oh, my vagina” in front of cast or crew. From context clues, it mostly seems to mean making a lot of jokes of various levels of inappropriateness that makes people on the set uncomfortable, who then go to HR because directly confronting the series lead about his jokes (or, apparently, frequent hugs) can be disastrous for their careers. Here he is when asked about what he’s been investigated by HR over:
I’m not going to go over it because I don’t want to, but basically a lot of things that I disagree with—that are silly. If I said something silly and offensive, and I’m working at an insurance company, I think it’s a different situation. If I, as the star of the show, demanded a gun range and on set, and I was firing guns every day and I was a little bit loose—to me, that’s an unsafe work atmosphere. If I threatened people, that’s an unsafe work atmosphere. None of that goes on ever with me. That’s not who I am. I am sorry to tell you that there really is no big story. Unless you want to do a story about political correctness.
For what it’s worth, Garlin seems receptive to some of the points Ryan makes with her questions—even as he notes that she has an “agenda”—most notably the repeated reminder that behavior that might seem harmless from his point of view as the lead on the series might seem more discomfort-inducing or harmful when viewed from those in positions of lesser power.
Here he is, for instance, when asked who decides what the difference between “silly” and harmful behavior might be:
I completely concur with you. It is a big bowl of “who determines?” It’s definitely gray, but we have to see it from the big picture, in terms of, that’s how I’m funny on camera. I’ve only had a negative experience with my behavior on The Goldbergs. I’ve never had it before or since—I’ve worked for Disney, I’ve worked for every studio in town.
It is, as we said, a very strange interview, as Ryan attempts to drill down with the actor and stand-up on the relevant issues, and Garlin varies between openly addressing them, assuring readers that he means no harm to anyone, and repeatedly characterizing the problems people have expressed with him as being blown out of proportion. He also makes it clear that he’s pretty done with The Goldbergs in any case; he makes it clear that he’s upset with how he’s been asked to curtail his behaviors on the show’s set, and expresses his belief that it’s unlikely that the long-running sitcom will be picked up for another season.
A few days ago, I saw an article about Rick And Morty in the Trending Topics bar on Twitter, suggesting that the next big bad for the show might be “Evil Summer.” I didn’t click on this link, but I did think, “Pfffft, that’s dumb. This isn’t a show that has Big Bads. Dan Harmon hates continuity wanking, presumably Justin Roiland does too, and while they’ll use serialization for jokes, it’s rarely ever the point of anything. They don’t build a season around a single threat. They just have references they exploit when the mood takes them.” Unlike most of the things I think when I read Twitter, I stand by this; it does a disservice to the writing team to keep using Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland as shorthand for the whole group, but otherwise, yeah. Rick And Morty isn’t, like, a season of Buffy. It doesn’t really build to anything, even if the finales do tend to have a bit more kick.
What’s funny is that when the show does decide to lean into continuity, it’s almost always great. The second episode of tonight’s two part finale is the culmination of a storyline first introduced way back in the first season (episode ten, “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind”). That aired over seven years ago. Even shows that pay very close attention to serialization rarely manage that kind of slow burn. I’m not going to be an idiot and claim all of this was planned, because it clearly wasn’t. But that’s why it works. Most shows, when they introduce a recurring villain, they worry about building the narrative tension, rising action, stakes—not just episode by episode, but season by season. That’s incredibly difficult to pull off, and Rick And Morty doesn’t bother trying. It just says, at one point, there’s a Morty with an eye-patch. Maybe we’ll see him do some crazy shit in a few years. Or maybe it’s just a meta joke about the whole idea of show lore. Wait and see and probably forget about it, kids.
Before we get to the grand finale, though, we have “Forgetting Sarick Mortshall,” in which Rick and Morty break up… again. I’m curious as to why both episodes aired tonight. It’s definitely a two-parter, in that the first episode ends on a cliffhanger that leads directly into the plot of the second episode, but it’s not like it would’ve killed anyone to see this spread out over two weeks. Maybe it was an act of mercy, maybe it was just the show needing extra time to finish the season. Theoretically, as the reviewer, I should’ve researched this, but I’m not going to embarrass any of us by claiming I have integrity and or patience for that sort of thing.
Of the two episodes, “Mortshall” is slightly weaker, while still being pretty darn good. I spent a lot of this season bemoaning the weaker entries, and like I said last time, it’s shit like this that makes me complain when stuff gets super dumb. “Mortshall” just feels like a Rick And Morty episode in a way that, say, Morty’s sperm turning into an army of mutant killers doesn’t, and that’s partly because it’s built on the relationships between the characters, and it’s partly because the writing just feels that much sharper. Like, the Garbage Goober introduced near the start of the episode, an alien Rick keeps around just to gobble up trash; there’s a funny gag where Goober tries to turn the “better sidekicks than Morty” wheel to point to his name and Rick shrugs him off; and even better post credits gag where we learn that the Goober is actually a married doctor named Harold who’s been to Harvard, and his wife is just sick of this shit.
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This is a good joke—it’s clever, and a little mean, and it also fits in nicely with the episode riffing on toxic relationships, the way we can spend so much of our lives gobbling garbage that eventually we kind of get a taste for it. It’s not heavy, exactly, although there is some emotional weight to both episodes, but it’s the kind of silly that isn’t just leaning into assuming we’ll laugh if something is both extremely stupid and aware it’s stupid. It’s clever without being shallow, and resonant without being tedious or heavy-handed. I don’t need every episode of this show to mix sarcasm with gut-punches, but I do want gags that are stupid-smart, not just stupid-stupid.
But enough of that, I’ve wasted a lot of all our time complaining already, and there’s good shit to talk about here. So: Morty gets into a bit of a situation when he accidentally spills some portal juice on his hand. He and Rick fight about it, and Morty decides to quit, which gives Rick an excuse to pull out the Wheel of Sidekicks Better than Morty. The wheel lands on two crows, which gives Rick his plot for the rest of the half-hour, as he first trains the crows, then tries to get rid of them, then ends up pissing off a race of super evolved crows. Meanwhile, Morty makes friends through the portal in his hand with another guy Rick apparently screwed over, some dude named Nick who claims to have gotten portal juice on his thigh while hanging out in Rick’s garage. The two bond over being-pissed-at-Rick, Morty rescues him from an asylum, and then they go on adventures that inevitable end in a lot of dead people and Morty realizing he’s made a mistake.
It’s fun—the birds thing is random, in that Rick just happens to misjudge a planet full of super-evolved crows, but the self-aware swerve as the advanced crows realize that Rick took on two crow sidekicks just to make Morty feel bad, is a nice chance to see Rick hoisted on his own petard, so to speak. It’s not really surprising that Nick turns out to be a psycho, but I always like seeing Morty getting a chance to be a bit more competent, and watching him cutting off his own hand to defeat the bad guy was convincingly badass. In terms of the overall story of the finale, it’s smart how much emphasis the episode puts on the juice in the portal gun, as that’s going to be a major factor in “Rickmurai Jack;” the portal gun is low key the most important invention in Rick’s arsenal, and the episode does a good job of underlining that without belaboring the point.
In the end, Morty is on his own again, but Rick decides to stick with his two crows after they save him from the super evolved baddies. It’s the sort of separation that’s so clearly temporary (and feels like something the show has done a few times before, albeit not in this specific way) that it’s probably for the best that we got the follow up soon after. The only real knock against “Mortshall” is that “Rick and Morty get sick of each other and split up for a while” feels kind of old hat at this point—the comic premise of the show requires their relationship to be toxic (because a lot of the humor comes from seeing Rick be a shit and seeing Morty try haplessly to deal with Rick being a shit), and they can only try and sell the illusion that anything is going to change so many times before it starts to get stale. Still, this was good stuff, and the simple fact that Morty cleaned up his own mess helped elevate it from yet another “Morty learns a valuable lesson about not to fuck with Rick.”
The real big ticket here is the second episode, which brings back Evil Morty (or Eye-Patch Morty, if you prefer), and blows up the Citadel of Ricks yet again, as the end result of a catastrophic plan that spans the deaths of thousands and exists solely for one little boy to maybe possibly theoretically escape the tyrannical rule of his genius grandfather. I already said my piece about how satisfying the continuity nod is here; maybe that makes me the target of the joke, but this all felt pretty sincere in an extremely satisfying way. It’s possible that this didn’t have quite as many jokes as the previous episode, as “Rickmauri Jack” leaned hard into the major story reveals in a way that maybe didn’t leave a lot of time for humor. But that feels like a taste issue even more than usual. I like the laughs, and I like the good story stuff, and I will sacrifice one for the other if it means the end result is this strong.
We do get a fun riff on anime as Rick tries to live out his life having adventures with the two crows in a strange land where owls and crows are at war for… reasons. Best gag here is the Crowscare, Rick’s nemesis who, it turns out, was actually in a relationship with Rick’s two crows before they became Rick’s sidekicks. (Given that Rick catches them via a Rick scarecrow, this actually makes a weird amount of sense?) Rick lampshades the whole “thank god this is all a metaphor for a relationship and not an actual relationship” angle of the joke, and then the Crowscare explains that, no, he and the crows enjoy each others bodies quite a bit, proceeding to demonstrate to a horrified Rick as he flies the room and rejoined regular continuity.
So, Rick and Morty are together again, but since Morty aged himself into a miserable looking forty year-old, he and Rick have to go to the Citadel to get some de-aging done, which is where, unsurprisingly, all hell breaks loose. Last we saw the Citadel—oh hell, I don’t know the last time we saw it, but I do remember that episode that had three different Citadel of Ricks stories, where we first learned that Evil Morty is president. He’s still president here, and when he invites Rick and Morty to dinner, Rick already knows the shit is about to go down. And it does.
“Rickmauri Jack” has two big story reveals, and both of them worked well for me. We finally get confirmation on Rick’s back story, and while I understand why Harmon et al played cagey with it for so long, I think it works. It’s not really surprising; yes, the bit we saw ages ago where Rick’s wife and daughter were killed about another Rick when he first invented the portal gun was actually true after all, and Rick spent a lot of time since then trying to get revenge, before he just got sick of killing himself over and over and decided to help build the Citadel. Yes, the Dead Wife And Kid back story is a cliche, but it works for me here, because the show spends so much time resisting and mocking the obvious that those occasional moments when it acknowledges that, yes, sometimes you have to settle down and actually just tell a story almost always work on me. Maybe this will turn out to be a bluff next season, but I hope it doesn’t. We’re not watching the show for the lore, but leaving one extremely obvious mystery unsolved inevitably made the answer seem more important than it needed to be. (See also, The Venture Bros not telling you who Hank and Dean’s mom is.) It was likely any resolution was going to seem like an anti-climax, and I thought this reveal threaded the needle quite well.
The other big twist is that the Citadel is, in part, designed as Morty breeding facility, given how important Mortys are to Ricks; and more unsettling is that the Ricks banded together to wall off all the infinite universes where Rick is the smartest person in the universe away from all the other infinite universes where he isn’t, effectively creating, as Evil Morty points out, an “infinite crib built around an infinite fucking baby.” This is bordering on being too clever, but I appreciate how it answers a question before I had a chance to ask it. If there are infinite universes, of course there’d be infinite universes where Rick isn’t the smartest person around. But we’ve never seen Rick end up in a place where other people are appreciably smarter than him. Oh sure, more emotionally intelligent, better adjusted, well-rounded, but not smarter. It makes sense that Rick, being both clever as hell and also enough of a control freak bastard inside that he can’t bear the thought of not being able to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, would’ve arranged circumstances to make sure no one would ever have the tools to rain on his particular parade.
And it also makes sense that eventually, a Morty would figure a way out. He’s Evil Morty because he kills thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of versions of himself and Rick to achieve his ends, but all he really wants in the end is to escape the cycle that being on animated television series inevitably leads to; where relationships can’t really change that much because the comedy and plotlines depend on it. Rick and Morty can break up again and again, but it’s still their names in the title. Rick can promise to be a better person, but the main joke of the show is still going to be him being a brilliant piece of shit, and Morty never quite being able to let him go.
The genius of Rick And Morty is the genius of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Lucy and the football, Ignatz and Krazy Kat; to show us creative iterations on the same two notes, and convince us over and over that we’re hearing and seeing something new. I complain about stagnation but I don’t really want things to change, because when they do, it will mean the show is over. And as disappointing as some parts of this season were, I’m not quite ready for that yet. But hey, one Morty escaping, even as the “real” Morty stays behind? That works. In a universe of boundless possibilities, it’s only right that every once in a while, we get to have our cake and eat it too.
So, evil Summer next season? Sounds great. See you then.
Stray observations
The grade is the average between a B+ and an A-. Math is fun.
I’ll be interested to see how the show deals with Rick no longer having a functional portal gun. There’s a good chance they’ll just write around it, but it would be neat to watch him having to scramble for a bit.
The guards in the asylum where Nick is being held lick the prisoners’ faces, which is definitely a reference to Terminator 2.
“Cool place you got here, very Dark Crystal meets Hot Topic.” This is an odd joke, giving how much Hot Topic is already pretty intensely Dark Crystal.
“Man, crows are empathetic as fuck.”
The final post-credits scene of the season had Mr. Poopybutthole bemoaning the state of his life and his relationships. Still pulling for that guy. Hope he figures things out soon.
Daniel (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny (William Zabka) are getting another season of Cobra Kai.Image: Netflix
Netflix to Cobra Kai: “You’re the best around. Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down.” After a successful season three debut with season four coming very soon, the streamer just announced it has greenlit a fifth season of the hit Karate Kid themed show that begins filming in Atlanta, GA later this year. “Because Cobra Kai never dies,” tweeted co-creator and executive producer Jon Hurwitz. Which, indeed, is true. The show has had an incredible run on its way to this news.
Cobra Kaidebuted way back in 2018 on the now defunct YouTube Red. The show gained some fans (like io9), but due to its relatively under-the-radar streaming outlet, it never quite grew as big as its cast and crew thought it could be. Season two also debuted on YouTube and season three was shot with that in mind. Meanwhile, YouTube had started cutting original programming left and right with only one or two shows remaining, Cobra Kai among them. Before season three aired, YouTube decided it wasn’t going to make more, so the show was sold to Netflix. And that’s when Cobra Kai gave a crane kick to the world.
Fast-forward to August of 2020. The first two seasons of Cobra Kai move from YouTube to Netflix and instantly, it’s a hit. Fans from around the world realize what we here at io9 had been saying since day one: Cobra Kai is amazing. The perfect blend of 1980s nostalgia with new characters and stories. Season three followed early in 2021 and season four will be here in December.
And now, we know, season five is coming too. Here’s the official announcement:
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Honestly, it’s kind of surprising. The first season ended like the first (and third) movies, with the high-stakes All Valley Karate Tournament. Seasons two and three avoided that ending but we know for a fact season four will have the tournament (whether or not it’ll arrive at the finale remains to be seen). So what happens next? Where does everything go? Luckily, we’re going to have a chance find out.
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