What I've been watching
Pop Culture Jeopardy is yay; Mother Mary is not.
It’s me again, coming to you with a randomized list of things I’ve watched recently. Why? Because — as previously mentioned — I need to keep writing. About anything.
I have approximately a billion and one new 2026 releases I should be catching in the theater, but I haven’t been to the movies since The Devil Wears Prada 2 — which I will not be discussing here.
I could be seeing I Love Boosters, Blue Heron, Obsession, Is God Is and countless others, but I am instead sitting on my ass at home catching up on 2026 releases that have now hit VOD.
Pop Culture Jeopardy
Pop Culture Jeopardy is THE definition of a show you can throw on and let it wash over you like a lovely, soothing salve. I think Colin Jost is both enjoyable aesthetically to look at and also pleasurable to watch and listen to, and I like when he refers to “my wife” as if she’s not the more famous person in their relationship. Jeopardy makes me feel like the dumbest person alive; Pop Culture Jeopardy makes me feel like the smartest person on the planet and that I could rule the world.
I think Netflix smartly batch-dropped the first five episodes of the program before switching to a nightly release model because the tyrannical straight men team, One Baddie After Another, won the first five games in a row (which is the show’s limit of allowed consecutive wins) — and they were not humble about it. These dudes emanated bad vibes every second at their podium, a smug know-it-all-ness that made them so villainous and vile. Like, yes, they in fact did know everything, but at least be like kinda chill about it. Episode six once we as viewers were released from their reign of terror, the show fell into a nice lovely rhythm, not domineered by power hungry straight men, the literal embodiment of the last people you want to see at a bar trivia night.
The Super Mario Bros Galaxy Movie
I watched this expecting to enjoy it because I think people’s expectations of what a movie with the title The Super Mario Bros Galaxy Movie can offer them are largely incorrect. I think it’s mostly fine and even intermittently entertaining! I liked Yoshi. Admittedly your brain does start to power down, and your eyes begin to glaze over at the hour mark when they’re on some random planet running from a T-Rex for some reason — just another excuse for zero stakes, high-spirited chase — but then you remember Glenn Powell voices Fox McCloud in a very sexy & flirtatious manner.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
I knew nothing about Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll’s Nirvanna project going into this. I had cursory awareness of their 2007 show but had never viewed, and I understand this movie nearly 20 years later must really up the stakes considerably, based on what I watched and was quite astounded by. Beyond the “How did they pull this off?” quality of the entire production, which in of itself is quite something, the movie is also a compelling narrative. Johnson cleverly pulls from recognizable tropes — of course the biggest influence being Back to the Future — while injecting it with his own sense of humor and perfectly nestling it into the world of these two silly guys. I knew I was going to have some laughs, but what I didn’t know was how much I’d walk away impressed and flabbergasted by the craft.
Mother Mary
Torturous. Painful to get through. It really was Meg Stalter voice “Get me OUT of here!!” the whole time for me. A two-person chamber piece can be done very well (see Soderberg’s The Christophers also from this year), and yet this piece of shit made me want to travel back in time and stop the creation of the moving picture. David Lowery deserves jail time for how he shoots and directs Anne Hathaway. Lucky for Michaela Cole, she comes out mostly unscathed.
Faces of Death
I found this to be an excellent meta horror, filling up the void left by the now dead but somehow still going Scream franchise. It delivers the type of media commentary those films once did within the genre. It honestly could be even gnarlier than it is, but that’s forgiven because of the way it is always one step ahead of you, zagging when you expect it to zig. Barbie Ferreira is great, and Dacre Montgomery is hot. I’ll be sat for whatever Daniel Goldhaber does next.
Exit 8
I never played the video game, but this had me Googling the video game after, wondering whether it has some deeper meaning about fatherhood, being a parent, etc. It doesn’t!! So then the adaptation adding some greater theme really just pmo. It feels unnecessary when you could just instead go down a really fun rabbit hole, a labyrinthine roller coaster ride — and it unfortunately didn’t even do enough of that.
Widow’s Bay
Here’s a show that I fired up the NIGHT it premiered, for whatever reason, and I quite enjoyed the first episode! And then the rest of the episodes happened. There is much praise for episode four, which I found to be a big wet fart with nothing to say and not really showing anything that we haven’t already seen before, and I’m unsure if I will continue to episode five. Maybe! The cast is good. The writing less so.
Half Man
I did not enjoy Baby Reindeer when it came out — I don’t even think I finished it. And yet, Richard Gadd’s new show, which many consider to be an inferior product, I am compulsively watching. Perhaps it’s the repressed gayness of it all or the fact that Richard Gadd looks like That in it, but something about it keeps me coming back even if I recognize its flaws. Like most limited series, it could be cut down by two episodes, and the penultimate finale episode that just aired was easily its worst yet. But I’m still rooting for it to stick the landing.
