Gary (The Bear)

The Bear released a standalone special episode ahead of its final season (premieres June 25) that perfectly demonstrates how shows that used to be cool become wack when they overstay their welcome. The schtick wore thin until it broke, like a paper bag that soaked up too much Italian beef juice.

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First off, some housekeeping — and an apology. I missed last week’s post and didn’t say anything. Sorry about that. I was so sad about it that I didn’t want to talk about it. I’ve gotten so busy with work stuff and Dad Stuff that I just haven’t found enough time to devote to Dad Shows the past few weeks. And that’s going to continue for at least a few weeks more. So, as disappointing as this is for me and perhaps is for you, I can’t guarantee weekly posts for the next month or so. I can only promise to do them when I can. If that turns out to be weekly, I’ll be thrilled. More likely, posts will be intermittent. I may miss a week here and there, or send it out on a different day of the week than I usually do. I certainly won’t vanish from your inbox entirely, however. I hope that’s enough that you’ll stick with me.

Okay, on with the business.

I finally caught up with Rooster, HBO’s charming Dadcom from creators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses and star Steve Carell. The main thing I’d like to emphasize about this show is that Steve Carell looks so good. He’s 63, and he looks 20 times better than he did 20 years ago. He’s been sipping that Ray Romano juice.

Carell is famously one of the top beneficiaries of hair surgery, which he ALLEGEDLY got between the first and second seasons of The Office, and whatever else he’s been doing since then is working just as well. All that Minions money pays for the best private chef and personal trainer available, surely, and if he’s gotten any other injections or whatever in his face, it’s very subtle and tasteful. So many guys in Hollywood have destroyed their faces with extreme and depressing surgery and so much filler they look like an eclair. It fills me with despair that they feel they have to do that to themselves. But not Steve Carell. He’s doing it right. He also has a reputation for being normal and well-adjusted, which probably has something to do with it. He doesn’t have whatever the thing is that drives someone who is famous for how they look to change their face into a different person’s.

All of that is running through my head while I’m watching Rooster, which ended its first season on Sunday (it’s been renewed for Season 2). I just like hanging out with Steve Rooster and all the other characters. Like many of Bill Lawrence’s shows — especially his recent ones Ted Lasso and Shrinking (and Bad Monkey, to a lesser extent)— Rooster is a pure hangout show, where the appeal is from how easygoing and pleasant the characters are and atmosphere is without being saccharine (Ted Lasso’s decline wasn’t his fault). I usually don’t like “nice” shows like this, but Rooster has just enough bite to keep me from choking on sweetness. The characters are funny and all very different from each other. They’re all friends, and the conflict between them never becomes dark or mean. Even Archie, Rooster’s daughter’s self-destructively selfish English husband who blew up his relationships with her and the grad student he got pregnant, feels redeemable. The show doesn’t hate him, even though it could. It has affection for all its characters — and cast them all super well.

Danielle Deadwyler is very versatile. I haven’t seen much of what she’s been in, to be honest, but I know her breakout role was playing Emmett Till’s mother, and that was surely a very different type of performance than her winningly effortless one as poetry professor Dylan Shephard, which is in turn a very different one than her guest starring role on The Bear last season as Ayo Edebiri’s cousin. She’s clearly someone who can do anything. I think she’ll be great in Ryan Coogler’s X-Files reboot opposite Himesh Patel. (They were both in Station Eleven, a very good limited series beloved by TV critics).

Everyone in the cast is great. Before this show, I was unfamiliar with Charly Clive, who plays Rooster’s daughter Katie, but I’m such a fan of her very fun performance. Her American accent is so good I didn’t even know she was British until I googled her. Connie Britton as Rooster’s ex-wife Beth has a nearly Dr. Spaceman level ratio of funny lines-to-screen time. She’s a recurring character who isn’t in that many scenes, but almost everything she says in those scenes is a joke. Lauren Tsai’s character Sunny, Archie’s conflicted girlfriend, wears a lot of tracksuits, and everything about the character is so specific that it feels like she must be based on a real person. And John C. McGinley as college president Walt Mann is hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking in the way he’s so uniquely good at.

The only thing I really don’t like about the show is the color correction. It started out mildly weird looking, and then got progressively greener throughout the season until I thought I was in the Matrix. The colors get so washed out that the actors’ faces are hard to see sometimes. What’s up with that? It’s like they don’t want us to see how good Steve Carell looks.

Every month I do a paid subscriber-only post about stuff I watched but didn’t write about on Dad Shows or in my freelance work that month. If that sounds fun to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This was another month where I didn’t have time to watch much other than what I had to watch, which ended up being three different versions of Man on Fire. Having a baby is really cutting into my TV time. She’s getting big enough now that she actually watches the TV when it’s on, so my days of watching crime thrillers with her have come to an end. She shouldn’t watch gunfights until she’s at least 3.

I managed to catch up with the last three episodes of DTF St. Louis — I reviewed the first four for TV Guide — and a documentary about the Portland Trail Blazers that I think even someone who isn’t a huge basketball fan would enjoy.

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For a book that doesn’t get talked about as a classic, Man on Fire has proven to be very durable source material. A.J. Quinnell’s 1980 novel has been adapted three times, in 1987, 2004, and 2026. The latest adaptation, a Netflix series, is streaming now. I haven’t read the book, but I have watched all three adaptations. The new adaptation is clearly the least faithful, and arguably the weakest. It’s very clear which is the best. It’s the one you’re thinking of — the one with Denzel Washington.

Broadly speaking, every version of Man on Fire is about a broken man finding a reason to live. At the start, John Creasy is a former CIA agent who is shellshocked from the things he’s seen and done and doesn’t care if he lives or dies. His friend and former team leader Paul Rayburn gets him a job to try to help him out. This setup is the same in all three versions, but from there the new version diverges greatly. It’s actually less of an adaptation than a new story that keeps a couple of characters and themes. The different versions are like a folktale that exists in different countries. Some versions are similar to each other, some are very different.

In the first two versions, Creasy works as a bodyguard for a wealthy family in a dangerous country, and in the third he’s doing security for the president of Brazil. In all three versions, he becomes responsible for the protection and care of a young girl, and it is through this that he finds redemption. And in all three versions, he goes on a revenge mission.

The main reason why the Denzel version is the best is because it’s the one that best establishes the emotional stakes of the story. Almost the whole first half of the movie is devoted to building Creasy’s relationship with little Dakota Fanning. At first he resists caring about her, but she wins him over by being such a cute, nice kid. The movie takes the time to make sure you care about them, so when she gets kidnapped, it’s very upsetting — and the extreme violence he perpetrates while trying to find her is understandable. He’s a classic Dad Show antihero, a Cool Guy Who’s Also a Bad Guy.

In the new version, Creasy is played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who isn’t as charismatic as Denzel. No one is, of course, but Abdul-Mateen’s take on Creasy doesn’t have much personality at all, just a clenched jaw and little sunglasses. And — as I wrote in my review for TV Guide — the show doesn’t establish his relationship with the girl nearly as well. On the show, the girl, played by the ambiguously accented Billie Boullet, is much older, and she and Creasy don’t have a relationship at all before shit pops off and they’re fated together. He’s not searching for the people who kidnapped her, he’s trying to protect her from people trying to kill her. He’s also —due to a massive story change I won’t get into because it’s actually a spoiler if you decide to watch the show — trying to avenge a totally different person whose loss isn’t nearly as impactful. It’s harder to get onboard with a revenge plot for an adult person we barely spend time with who knew what they were getting into than a plot about punishing people who would harm an innocent little girl. As a result of these changes, when Abdul-Mateen’s Creasy does things like drip sulfuric acid onto a guy’s face to torture him and sew a bomb into his chest to control him, he’s not really a Cool Guy, just a Bad Guy.

Like I said, that’s the main reason why the Denzel version is better, but it’s better than the other two in most ways. It was directed by the late Tony Scott, who had that unique hyperkinetic style influenced by music videos and commercials, and it looks so cool. It also has the best ending of the three.

The best thing about the original 1987 version with Scott Glenn is the moody, atmospheric cinematography. It’s set in Italy during the Years of Lead, and it’s shot like a European Michael Mann movie. They sprayed the streets of Rome with water so that they glistened under the lights. But the girl isn’t as endearing as Dakota Fanning, the plot is rushed (apparently the runtime from the original cut got halved, and it shows), and the ending is confusing. It’s a rare case where it’s a good thing that they took another swing at an adaptation, because they did it better the second time. The third time not as much.

The new show is actually fairly decent and is different enough to justify its existence. But there’s nothing artistically memorable about it, like the noirish vibe of the Scott Glenn one (Scott Glenn is always great, huge shoutout to him, he was in The Silence of the Lambs) or the maximalism of the Denzel/Tony Scott joint. I predict that people will watch the Man on Fire show, but it will not be a hit, because there’s nothing to latch onto. There are no moments that people will have to talk about. It’s not a boring show, but it’s not crazy enough. There’s no Reacher throwing Robert Patrick out of a helicopter. It is definitely a Dad Show, though. The purest Dad Show to come along in months. It’s just pure stoic pulp.

Before we get into the review, I just want to plug something up top. Tomorrow, April 17 at around 11am PT, I’ll be doing a live video with Jonathan Small on his Substack Small Talk. We’re gonna talk about the shows you should be watching. It’ll be a fun time. Tune in live if you’re free tomorrow, or watch the replay later on.

Beef Season 2 was one of my most anticipated shows of the year, but it’s a huge disappointment.

The first season, which starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two unhappy people who get into a road rage incident that escalates to the point of blowing up both of their lives, won eight Emmys including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and remains one of the best things Netflix has ever released. The second season, which is out today, has the highest quality dropoff between anthology seasons since True Detective Season 2. It’s unfunny, depressing, and worst of all, boring. I can forgive a lot of flaws in a show if there’s something about it I enjoy, but if a show bores me, I will extend it no grace.

Beef 2: Where’s the Beef? stars Oscar Isaac & Carey Mulligan and Cailee Spaeny & Charles Melton as two miserable couples who are competing to see who can make the other more miserable. Spaeny and Melton are young employees at an exclusive country club in Montecito, apparently (the setting is vague and untextured, which compares terribly to the highly specific world of Asian American class conflict in Los Angeles in Season 1), who witness a frightening marital fight between their boss, club manager Oscar Isaac, and his wife Carey Mulligan, who I guess also works at the club as an interior designer, but I’m not sure if she’s an employee of the club or not. It’s all very vague. Spaeny films the fight, and she and Melton use the video to blackmail Oscar Isaac into giving them better jobs with health insurance. This gives the spouses the opportunity to turn their hatred away from each other toward a common enemy. Meanwhile, the club’s new owner, a Korean billionaire played by Academy Award winner Youn Yuh-jung, is doing shady stuff that ropes in both couples.

I don’t want to spend this review just listing off everything that’s wrong with Beef, because it’s everything — bizarre choices about where episodes begin and end, bloated lengths, inconsistent characterizations, non-additive celebrity cameos, etc. — but there are a few things that stood out to me as the biggest, fatal problems. One is that it’s not funny. The writing isn’t funny, and neither are the performances — which brings me to another problem, which is that Isaac and Mulligan are miscast. They’re good actors, but have they ever made you laugh? There’s nothing light or playful or ironic in what they do, so when they do something bad, there’s no mischievousness or charm to it that makes the characters a little bit redeemable, it’s just really intense and mean.

You know who would have been really good for Isaac’s part? Hear me out: Colin Jost. Jost would be totally convincing as a bro-y, sports memorabilia-collecting country club manager whose obsequious exterior barely contains his bitterness and rage. It would have been outside-the-box casting of someone more known as a comedian than an actor, like Wong’s was in Season 1, and I bet it would have paid off just as well. It would have established that the show has a repeatable conceptual hook of giving comedy stars a dramedic breakout. And he would have been funny. Mulligan is using her natural accent for no particular reason.

The problem that truly makes Beef not work, however, is a conceptual one: There isn’t really a “beef” here. Beef, in the “What’s Beef?” sense, is ongoing personal animosity between people that started over something petty. Beef — and Beef — should be about a low-stakes disagreement over something stupid that spirals into an explosive, life-changing conflict, such as a road rage incident that leads to one of the participants trying to harm the other by starting an affair with his brother. The humor is in the escalation. The inciting incident in Beef Season 2 is domestic violence. It’s high-stakes and not funny from the start. It’s not a tragicomedy, it’s just a tragedy.

To be clear, I don’t actually believe that just because the show is called Beef it has to be about beef. If creator Lee Sung Jin wants to expand the possibilities of what the show can be, that’s his prerogative, and admirable in theory. But doing something this different, with so little structural or thematic tether to what came before (there’s some stuff about Asian American identity that could be a throughline if you’re being charitable), and also is bad? That’s not the way to build an anthology. And it’s not just because Season 2 pales in comparison to Season 1. It still would be bad if it were called something else.

My earlier comparison to True Detective is an apt one, if I do say so myself. The first season of True Detective is a classic, one of the best limited series ever made and one of the most influential shows of the Peak TV era. It had a very clear, repeatable thing: a dark, tonally idiosyncratic two-hander with a simple, adaptable story setup. The second season said “fuck all that, you can’t pigeonhole me.” It expanded the focus to four main characters, changed the tone, and saw a substantial decline in the quality of its plotting and dialogue. It’s still better than Beef Season 2, which does all the same things and doesn’t have anything as memorable as Colin Farrell describing vaping as “sucking a robot’s dick.”

Thinking about Beef and True Detective led me to thinking about all limited series that turned into anthology series after a successful first season, like The White Lotus and Big Little Lies, as well as shows that maybe were not explicitly billed as limited series but told a closed-ended story that felt like a complete thought from their creator, like Undone and Russian Doll. Every single show of this ilk is diminishing returns. A large part of what makes these shows work as limited series is their element of surprise by being something new, which by definition can’t be replicated. Even if the second season is good, like The White Lotus, it’s never as good as the first. And even if it gets better after the dud second season, like True Detective, it’s never as good as the first. It’s possible to make a good second season, but not a better one. And if it’s not better, is it really, truly worth doing?

Ultimately, nothing about Beef Season 2 feels grounded in reality. Not the characters, not the setting, not the emotions. And so I found myself dreadfully bored while I was watching it. I couldn’t bring myself to care about these characters who treat each other horribly and don’t even have any fun doing it.

I reviewed the new AMC/AMC+ tech industry dramedy The Audacity for TheWrap. It wants to be satirical a la Silicon Valley, but it also wants to be a character-driven drama, and it doesn’t find a satisfying way to marry those two desires. And the satire is dated on arrival.

But for all its positive qualities, “The Audacity” has a serious problem with its satire. That’s partially beyond its control, due to how quickly the tech world has changed since it was ordered to series in 2024, and partially a failure to recognize and anticipate that its satirical targets would feel stale by the time the show came out. All of the energy in the tech sector has shifted into AI. The ways that AI will/already are disrupting everything — and how companies will survive and profit from it — is the only thing the tech industry is talking about. That conversation is happening in San Francisco, not down the Peninsula in Silicon Valley, and the people having it are much younger and scrappier than the tech titans of “The Audacity.” It’s not that AI isn’t part of “The Audacity” — Martin’s chatbot is like a self-aware ChatGPT with a mouth that talks — but the show is out of touch with how important AI has become. It would be like “The Studio” trying to satirize contemporary Hollywood while talking about Netflix as if it were still a DVD rental company.

Not a lot of people know this, but there’s a “Monsterverse” series on Apple TV spun off from the active movie franchise (Godzilla vs. Kong and the like) with father-and-son Kurt and Wyatt Russell playing old and young versions of the same character. And not only does it exist, it’s really good. It’s in its second season, and you probably didn’t even hear about the first. I told my wife I was writing about it, and she said “WHAT???”

I don’t know precisely why this show is so under the radar. Maybe because its title doesn’t convey that it’s a Godzilla show to casual fans; maybe it’s because Apple TV is a small service compared to others (Monarch seems more like it should be an HBO Max show than an Apple one); maybe it’s just too hard for anything to break through unless there’s some kind of conversation happening around it. No one is talking about this show. But they really should be. It’s so much fun to watch.

Maybe another part of why it’s not bigger than it is is because it’s hard to explain what it’s about. I don’t even like doing synopsis of simple plots, so I’m not going to try to describe the time-hopping, interdimensional, global conspiracy stuff happening on Monarch. There are a lot of characters, and it’s pretty lore-heavy. I’ve only seen one of the Monsterverse movies, the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong, so I don’t know all the mythos. But not fully understanding what’s happening does not impede me from enjoying it in any way.

I enjoy it because even by the standards of Apple’s big-budget sci-fi shows, Monarch is exceptionally well-made. The special effects are movie quality. The cinematography is really polished. The action sequences are exciting. Leopold Ross, brother of Trent Reznor’s partner Atticus Ross, provides a Nine Inch Nails-ish score. At the risk of repeating myself, it feels cinematic in scope, which is still really hard to pull off on television. You need really good CGI, and you need a movie star like Kurt Russell. Kurt’s on The Madison right now, too, but this is the real Kurt Russell show.

It’s just so smart to cast Kurt and Wyatt Russell as different versions of the same guy. The way they do it in the opening credits is so cool: it starts with “and Wyatt Russell in the role of Lee Shaw,” and then “Wyatt” morphs into “Kurt.” Kurt Russell is 75 years old, and hasn’t lost an ounce of swag or rizz. He makes every moment that he’s in feel big.

He’s the most famous person on the show, but it’s a stacked cast all down the line. Anna Sawai is the top-billed performer and technically the main character (she was actually on Monarch before her Emmy-winning turn on Shogun; Monarch premiered way back in November 2023, a few months before Shogun came out). She’s great, a real star. And she’s not the only person from Shogun on it — Takehiro Hira, who played Ishido, plays her father. Ders from Workaholics is there, as is rising character actor Joe Tippett from Mare of Easttown. My guy Cliff Curtis is in Season 2. My favorite character/performer, though, is Mari Yamamoto as Japanese scientist Keiko Miura, who was trapped in an alternate dimension where time moves much slower in 1959, got freed at the end of Season 1, and is adjusting to the present in Season 2. She’s trying to reconnect with her son, whom she basically abandoned when he was a boy and is now older than her. Yamamoto has an intelligent but ethereal presence. She’s the only person to have scenes with both Russells.

Monarch may never be as big as its budget would suggest, but it does seem to be growing in popularity, at least a little bit; last week, it made Nielsen’s top 10 streaming originals chart for the first time, in the #10 spot. The Nielsen chart is the most agreed-upon metric for what constitutes a hit in the streaming era; if a show doesn’t make the chart, it’s probably not a hit. Because of Apple TV’s small user base, only its biggest shows make the chart, like Ted Lasso and Severance,. Monarch made the chart for its premiere week, and Nielsen ratings releases lag by a month, so we’ll see if it rises as we get more data for the season, which is approaching its seventh episode of 10. Maybe if more people start watching it, it won’t feel so underrated anymore. I don’t know how much longer Apple TV will be willing to spend so much on shows like Monarch, but I hope they don’t stop anytime soon.

And now you know Monarch: Legacy of Monsters exists.

We’re in Q2 2026, so let’s get excited about some shows on the horizon. This is something like a Spring/Summer preview, but I like describing things in terms of Quarters. It’s funny to pretend to talk like a businessman. Here are five shows* coming out between now and the end of June that I will be writing about either on Dad Shows or elsewhere, with my preliminary thoughts on them. I’m pretty bad at planning and even worse at self-promotion, but maybe this will help me on both fronts. If you’re excited about any of these upcoming shows, stick around/come back when it’s time and we’ll talk about them.

*One of them is a straight-to-streaming followup movie to a show, which to me means it’s somewhere between a movie and a long episode.

Beef (April 16)

Netflix’s Emmy-winning limited series returns as an anthology series. Two really good young actors, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny, play a couple who get into a conflict with their bosses at a country club, played by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan. I thought Season 1 was brilliant, one of the best things Netflix has ever released (even if I didn’t love the last episode), and the main reason why it worked was its simple, semi-autobiographical premise: what if a road rage incident kept escalating? An idea that pure can’t be replicated, and I wonder what new idea creator Lee Sung Jin came up with that made him want to revisit the format. I feel like this is the kind of show that they wouldn’t do another season unless there was a good reason why creatively. The trailer doesn’t convey what the actual plot of the season is. More concerningly, it’s not funny. But with that cast, I’m confident it’s going to work. Cailee Spaeny in particular is on a hot streak and doesn’t pick bad roles. I’ll be writing about Beef here on Dad Shows in two weeks. It’s not really a Dad Show, but I’m too interested in it to not write about it.

Man on Fire (April 30)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II seemed like he was about to become a big star after Black Mirror: Striking Vipers and Watchmen and I guess Aquaman, but it hasn’t really panned out for him yet. He hasn’t been in much the last few years, and his most notable film role was as the rebooted Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. People who have watched his Marvel show Wonder Man seem to like it, though, so maybe he’s finally on the right track again. He still needs a defining hit role, though, and maybe Netflix’s Man on Fire series will be it. Maybe not, though, because Man on Fire is already associated with Denzel Washington, and you don’t want to compete with Denzel for mindshare. We’ll see. I’m rooting for Yahya, but I truly don’t know how this show will do. It depends on how fun it is. The trailer definitely made me smile. It’s just a nonstop barrage of action. I’m going to review Man on Fire for TV Guide.

Dutton Ranch (May 15)

Now this show I guarantee is going to be huge. The true followup to Yellowstone (Marshals is too different) finds Rip and Beth moving to Texas and having beef with established ranchers Ed Harris and Annette Bening. They’re so good at casting Taylor Sheridan shows, dude. Ed Harris is perfect for the Sheridanverse. The trailer is set to Nate Dogg’s part of an Eminem song, which is a nice change from country music, and is packed with action. It looks like Yellowstone. I haven’t secured screeners, so I won’t say where I’m planning to review it yet, but I will definitely be writing about it.

Jack Ryan: Ghost War (May 20)

Jacques Ryon is a high-level Dad Show, so you can bet I’ll be watching the Prime Video movie sequel. Jack’s doing the ol’ “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” in this one, coming out of retirement for one last job. Jack Ryan isn’t one of my favorites, but maybe I’ll enjoy it more if it’s just a movie and I don’t have to spend a whole season with him. I like the helicopter shooting into a building in the trailer.

Cape Fear (June 5)

Now this is a trailer. Javier Bardem going full iconic villain for the first time since No Country for Old Men, but doing it in the opposite direction, going big and scenery-chewing. He’s awesome. Does the world need an Apple TV remake of a Martin Scorsese movie that was itself a remake? Not at all. But the world does need Javier Bardem wearing insane electric-blue contact lenses. The trailer looks campy in a good way, with dramatic zooms and Amy Adams doing a Southern belle drawl. I hope this show ends up being as crazy as it’s presenting itself. If I don’t place a review for it somewhere else, I will be writing about it here.

What shows are you looking forward to in Q2? What else do you think I should cover?

Every month I do a paid subscriber-only post about whatever I watched but didn’t write about that month. If that might be of interest to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I was so busy taking care of the baby this month that I was barely able to watch anything beyond what I had to watch for work. The only things I watched and didn’t write about already were Sinners and One Battle After Another.

I actually had seen them both already — I wrote about Sinners when it came out, and OBAA was the last movie I saw in theaters before Maeve was born and is still the most recent movie I’ve seen in a theater — but my wife Hannah had not, so we watched them around the Oscars. They were the only two Best Picture contenders, and it was important for Hannah to see them. Watching them both so closely together, it became clear that there actually was only one contender. Sinners is a very good movie that I thoroughly enjoyed both times I watched it, but One Battle After Another is superior in every way.

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I found myself in a bit of a quandary this week. The show I really wanted to write about isn’t a Dad Show, and I didn’t want to twist the angle to try to make it fit, which I do sometimes. The theme of this newsletter is Dad Shows, so I should at least try to stick to Dad Shows — especially when there’s primo Dad Content like a Peaky Blinders movie. Peaky Blinders is a top-tier, canonical Dad Show, and it would feel perverse to ignore something so precisely fits the spirit of Dad Shows in favor of something that truly is not a Dad Show. So I made a compromise with myself that’s not a compromise at all — I’m doing both. Up first is a review of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, followed by a review of Netflix’s impressive new horror limited series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

The Immortal Dad

I am not a Peaky Blinders superfan. I didn’t watch every season, and I never truly loved what I did watch. I never got my hair cut long on top and buzzed on the sides. The show went a little too heavy on the tortured stoic tough guy cliches for my taste (which is really saying something) and the seasons moved a little too slowly. But I did enjoy the music and the costumes and the setting and the performances. And I really enjoyed the movie, because it didn’t have time to take too long. The Immortal Man gets a lot done in under two hours.

It’s a fitting farewell to Tommy Shelby, the iconic, laconic gangster played by Cillian Murphy for over a decade. Murphy won an Academy Award for Oppenheimer, but Tommy Shelby will go down as his signature role. Nobody ever made grindset alpha male memes about Robert J.

.The Immortal Man is about Tommy and his bastard firstborn son Duke, played by Barry Keoghan. It’s 1941, and Tommy is retired from being a gangster and hiding out in the countryside, writing a book about his life and being haunted by memories — and occasional actual ghosts — of the people he’s lost, which is basically all of them. Back in Birmingham, Duke has taken over leadership of the Peaky Blinders, and is doing worse shit than Tommy ever did. A bad man’s got to have a code lest he become an evil man. Duke makes a deal with British Nazi sympathizer Tim Roth to introduce millions of pounds worth of counterfeit banknotes into the money supply, which will cause the economy to crash. I’m no economist, so I don’t know if this would work or not, but it sounds like there’s a step or two missing in that plan. Anyway, Roth asks Duke if he’s certain that he’s willing to commit an act of treason that will win the war for Germany.

“The world don’t give a fuck about me,” Duke replies. “And I don’t give a fuck about the world.” Duke’s so nihilistic that if he were alive today, he would be a drill rapper.

When Tommy finds out what Duke is doing, he comes out of retirement for one last job, to save his son from destroying himself and to finally let go of all the ghosts he’s holding onto. The film has a very effective ending that moved me even though I don’t have much of a relationship with Peaky Blinders. The last shot of the film is strikingly beautiful, a long distance shot of a burning caravan on top of a hill like a signal fire while Irish folk band Lankum’s mournful song “Hunting the Wren” plays.

For a British show, Peaky Blinders is very Irish, and Murphy and Keoghan’s performances are two more additions to the growing list of great recent performances by Irish actors. Ireland is killing it onscreen lately in parts big and small (shoutout to David Wilmot as FinDigest editor Edward Burgess on Industry). Murphy has always made Peaky Blinders seem better than it is, and Keoghan is great here as a young man acting out because all he really wants is his father’s approval. These lads really look like they could be father and son.

Something Very Dad Is Going to Happen

Psychological horror limited series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen has one of the best first episodes I’ve seen in a long time. You have no idea what’s going on, but the feeling of dread promised in the title keeps building and building. It really unnerved me in the exact way I want horror to do. In subject matter (relationship uncertainty) and style (eerie surrealism), it reminds me of Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. And it ends with a scene where the main character sees the front door banging open in the middle of a winter night and walks through the house looking for whatever came inside. It was so scary and I could feel the cold so vividly that I got goosebumps.

The rest of the limited series isn’t quite as good as that opening — things get less surreal and more conventional — but it’s still a very solid debut from creator Haley Z. Boston, a horror phenom who developed this show before she was even 30 years old. It follows Rachel (Camila Morrone), a troubled young woman engaged to Nicky (Adam DiMarco, playing a similar character to the one he played on The White Lotus Season 2), who seems nice and normal but actually is even more troubled than she is in some important ways. As the show starts, they’re on their way to get married at his rich parents’ country house when she starts to get a sense that if she gets married to him…something very bad is going to happen. Bad things start happening, and then keep happening, and then even worse things happen. And then, finally, some good things happen.

It’s far from a perfect show — the plot is muddy and inelegant, as if Boston and her writing staff put in more ideas than the show could comfortably hold (a better problem to have than not enough ideas, to be sure) — but there are so many cool things about it. The performances are terrific. I didn’t think Morrone was right for The Night Manager, but she’s perfect for this. Rachel feels like a person who could exist in real life, which is funny to say, considering all the horrifying supernatural stuff that happens to her. And Jeff Wilbusch (playing a similar character to the one he played on Unorthodox) is a scene-stealer as Nicky’s brother Jules. Jules is honestly trying to do the right thing even though he’s genuinely an asshole. Everybody is great, though. Jennifer Jason Leigh is Nicky’s mother, and his father is Ted Levine from The Silence of the Lambs. Among other things, it’s a very well-cast show.

Those other things include wonderfully stylish direction from lead director Weronika Tofilska (Baby Reindeer), who does very long takes and very intense closeups; thoroughly revolting horror imagery and stomach-churning dialogue; a warped sense of humor that gets funnier the darker things get; and a general feeling of boldness and intention. The show’s confidence mostly papers over any confusing rules about how its bloodline curse works.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is executive produced by the Duffer Brothers of Stranger Things; while this doesn’t prove that they have the sauce, because they didn’t actually make it, it does indicate that they have good taste and an eye for talent. Haley Z. Boston is officially on my list of people who I’ll watch anything they do. She’s going to make something even better than this.

In the past few weeks, two new Taylor Sheridan-produced shows have premiered: Marshals, a Yellowstone spinoff on CBS starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton; and The Madison, a standalone family drama on Paramount+ starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Both shows are different from anything else Sheridan has ever done, and demonstrate how his empire of shows and movies, which I call the Sheridanverse, can expand into different styles and formats. Marshals and The Madison also very different from each other. One is more successful at doing what it’s trying to do. Neither are among Sheridan’s best.

Previously, all of Sheridan’s shows had been some version of a macho soap, with tough guys (or gals) fighting their way through work problems and family problems. They’re emotionally over-the-top and unusually character-driven, with plot often taking a backseat to characters just vibing out and doing whatever Sheridan wants them to do. Marshals and The Madison change up the style a little bit. Marshals is a straight-ahead CBS procedural, and The Madison is not macho. It’s Sheridan’s version of a show for women. I saw a review that compared it to Nicholas Sparks and Virgin River.

While Marshals is based on Sheridan’s characters, he’s not the credited creator; that’s a guy named Spencer Hudnut, who told me that Sheridan is not involved day-to-day when I interviewed for him Parade. I don’t think Sheridan has it in him to do what Marshals is, and he definitely wouldn’t want to. It’s a fast-paced, case-of-the-week CBS procedural, with multiple action scenes per episode. As a procedural, Marshals is plot-driven by necessity. It’s part of the structure of the genre. Characters speak in expository dialogue, something Sheridan goes out of his way to avoid. The style is a big change from Yellowstone, which mostly consisted of philosophical speeches, long-range footage of cowboys roping horses, and Beth Dutton verbally and physically abusing people. It’s also a change from the style he’s gotten into with Landman, where there isn’t really a traditional plot at all, and stuff is just kinda happening. Stuff never just happens on Marshals. Every beat is in service of the next one.

Marshals has as much in common with Hudnut’s previous show SEAL Team as it does with Yellowstone. The fact that Kayce used to be a Navy SEAL didn’t really fit on Yellowstone, and the show kinda stopped talking about that part of his backstory as it went on. It was mostly just to explain why he was so good at killing people. But Marshals leans into the SEAL thing. He’s recruited into the Marshals Service by his former leader in the Teams, and uses his skills as a SEAL and a rancher to catch bad guys in Montana. It gives him something to do after his wife dies off-screen and he’s kind of adrift in life. Marshals features a lot of jargony operator talk and a lot less profanely poetic dialogue than Yellowstone. It has two staples of procedurals — the team of colorful characters who all play a unique role, and the base of operations where the team conducts meetings and stuff. This base is often something entertainingly gimmicky — on The Blacklist, the FBI task force operated out of a former post office, for example — and Marshals has a particularly delightful one. The Marshals’ local headquarters is the former processing plant for an old mine. When I saw that in the pilot, I knew I was watching a true procedural.

When I first heard that they were spinning off Yellowstone into a CBS procedural, I was a little skeptical. I didn’t know how it would work, because Sheridan writes in such an un-procedural way. But when I finally saw it, I was impressed, because they did it. They combined a toned-down version of Yellowstone‘s character-driven style with a CBS procedural. There’s less poetic dialogue and non-narrative atmospheric footage of cowboys and landscapes, but there’s some. Kayce gets at least one big emotional moment per episode. His motives are complex bordering on anti-heroic, and you never know exactly what he’s going to do. Hudnut told me that his goal was to make a more character-driven procedural than usual, and he succeeded.

Where Marshals is doing a straightforward version of a Sheridan show, The Madison is experimenting with an even more abstract version. It takes the plotless, “stuff just kinda happening” approach from Landman and cranks it up — or rather, slows it down. It’s about a family from New York City, led by matriarch Michelle Pfeiffer, grieving the death of patriarch Kurt Russell in Montana, the place he truly loved. As I wrote in my review for TV Guide, there’s little in the way of conflict. Characters don’t really have concrete goals. The things they’re grappling with are internal, and don’t get externalized in a satisfying way. It’s just pure character-driven emotion, without plot getting in the way. Sheridan’s idea of what women want to watch seems to be disjointed scenes of melodrama with the tiniest threads of narrative tissue connecting them. It’s classic Sheridan, however, in how much time the characters spend insulting each other. You could call it tough love, or you could call it mean.

Sheridan also indulges in the most eye-rolling rural supremacy bullshit he’s ever done in this show. There are constant, constant references to how awful New York is and how crazy anyone is to live there and how much better life is among the noble savages of Montana. It’s red meat for his core audience of people who live in places where they have Tractor Supply. I say that as a fan of Sheridan’s work, but it’s true. It’s just as condescending as it would be in the opposite direction, of smug coastal elites judging simple country folk. To me, it comes off as a juvenile lack of understanding that different people like different things.

The scene that made me yell “shut the fuck up” at my TV comes in the second batch of episodes, which will be released on Saturday1. Michelle Pfeiffer is back in Manhattan, and she goes into a hipster coffee shop. The barista, whose pronouns are probably they/them/this/that/the other, asks her if she wants oat or soy milk in her drink. I didn’t write down exactly what Pfeiffer says in response, but it was something to the effect of, “What has happened to this country that I, a normal person, have to ask for regular-ass whole milk instead of woke milk?” And believe me when I tell you that it’s a pointless scene. It has no narrative purpose whatsoever. It’s just a complaint about city life from a guy who doesn’t even know that whole milk is, in fact, the default wherever you are. Every barista in the country says “Whole milk OK?” in the exact same cadence if you don’t specify what kind of milk you want.

I give Sheridan some credit for making a show where he asks his audience to have empathy for rich New Yorkers, though. Having them feel pain like regular people is a pretty bold choice for the Sheridanverse.

Marshals and The Madison show that there’s still room for the Sheridanverse to expand. He’s trying new things and trying to reach new people. But I do think The Madison, which Sheridan wrote by himself, shows that he has finally spread himself too thin, and for the first time the quality is suffering to a point where his shows don’t automatically hit. I don’t think he’s lost his touch or anything, but he’s not spending enough time making sure his scripts work. He should have realized that The Madison is a conflict-free bore before cameras rolled. I declared that we were at peak Taylor Sheridan about a year and a half ago, and now we’re fully in the post-peak era.

Welcome to Tubi Noir, an occasional feature about noir movies on Tubi. Previously, I wrote about 1947’s Johnny O’Clock and 1955’s The Big Combo.

The Man with the Golden Arm is a major picture. People must have gone crazy about this movie when it came out in 1955. It stars Frank Sinatra — one of the most famous people in the world who was in the midst of a triumphant career resurgence — in one of the darkest, most controversial Hollywood movies ever made to that point. He plays Frankie Machine, a drug addict who wants to stay clean and become a professional drummer, but his old life won’t let go of him. It’s a shockingly bleak and depressing drama about people living desperate lives that don’t get any better.

Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who works as a card dealer for local gangster Schwiefka (it’s set in Chicago, and the characters all have great Chicago names). As the film starts, he’s back in town after kicking the habit in jail and spending time in rehab, where he learned to play drums. He has big dreams about how things will be different — he’ll get a job with a band, go on the road, make enough money to get his wife Zosh (Eleanor Parker) good enough medical treatment that he won’t feel guilty about leaving her for his mistress, Molly Novotny (Kim Novak, a few years before Vertigo

), and start life over. But he’s back around all the same people, places, and things — including his drug dealer, Louie (Darren McGavin) — and his life is still stressful. The temptation to get high is hard to resist, and when he gives in, it’s devastating, and a remarkably frank depiction of drug use for a movie of this time. You see everything but the needle going into his arm. There’s an intense closeup on Sinatra’s famous eyes as they go from anxious to glazed as the dope takes over. “Never again. I mean it,” he mumbles as he lays down to float away. “Sure,” Louie says, knowing full well what “never again” really means.

The film’s drug content was scandalous for the time. It would have violated the Production Code that mandated censorship of risqué content, so director Otto Preminger pushed to release it without a Code seal of approval. The Production Code Authority eventually denied its seal, but the movie was already a hit, and theaters refused to stop showing it. This helped defang the Code and lead to its revision, allowing for more adult content in movies. The Man with the Golden Arm helped movies show the world as it is, not sanitized for general audiences.

And boy, this movie is unsanitized. It’s covered in layers of grime and squalor. Frankie’s relationship with his wife is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. Zosh is confined to a wheelchair because three years ago, Frankie crashed their car while driving drunk and injured her back. He married her out of guilt while she was still in the hospital, and he doesn’t really love her; he loves Molly, who works as a nightclub hostess. But he won’t leave Zosh while she’s in this condition. Zosh knows this, but she wants him to stay so badly it’s pathetic. She keeps the fact that she can walk again a secret so that he doesn’t leave. But she can’t hold his attention, and she relentlessly shits on his dream of becoming a drummer. She’s so mean to him, telling him that he’ll never make it, so he shouldn’t even try, he should just stay in this miserable life with her. In the third act, Louie walks in on her when she’s out of her chair, and she pushes him over railing to his death to keep him from telling anyone. Frankie, meanwhile, has gotten fully addicted again, manipulated into dealing cards again, and blown his audition after staying up all night dealing cards and getting high. At the end of the movie, Frankie gets clean again with Molly’s help, and goes to tell Zosh that he’s going to leave her and stand trial for Louie’s murder, which he’s being arrested for. She becomes so upset and so determined to make him stay that she forgets her secret and gets out of the chair and runs across the room to him. He and the police realize she did it, and she jumps off the balcony to the street below. The film ends with her body being taken away as Frankie and Molly watch, dazed and unhappy. They’re finally free to be together, but they’re not free. They’re prisoners of guilt and poverty and trauma. There’s no sense that they’ll have a happily ever after. As Louie says earlier in the movie after Frankie tells him he’s gotten the monkey off his back, “The monkey never dies.”

The unrelenting misery of this movie reminded me of something Jamie Stewart of the indie band Xiu Xiu once said about the song “Fast Car,” which he covered in a haunting, minimalist version:

It’s a song about people with a really kind of uncertain sense about how to make things be better-- and things don’t turn out better in the end. These two people trying it together, and they think, “Okay, we can try to start this new life,” and it clearly falls apart. And then the singer eventually thinks she’ll just drive away from it again, but that obviously is not going to fix anything. For years and years, that song has just killed me. I mean, this is going to make me sound like a gigantic dick, but I swear it’s true-- every time I hear that song, it makes me cry. Because of how much things are that way sometimes. You try and try and try and try and shit just does not fucking work out. And you get some kind of very difficult and small idea of how you can make things better-- maybe if you fall in love with someone, or maybe if you found a different job, or maybe if you go back to community college, or maybe if you have a baby, or maybe if you get off drugs or something things will turn out okay. And sometimes it does, but a lot of time it doesn’t.

That’s The Man with the Golden Arm.

Could it be remade today?

Definitely. It’s based on a novel, and apparently a lot was changed in the adaptation, so it could be re-adapted more faithfully. The film still feels pretty modern for a classic noir, and the themes still work. All movies about addiction kind of owe a debt to The Man with the Golden Arm. It reminded me off Uncut Gems, the way it keeps getting increasingly desperate.

A memorable image

Louie taking the works out of a dresser drawer and every time he sets an item down on the dresser, there’s an Elmer Bernstein jazz hit.

Tubi’s synopsis

“Fresh out of rehab, a recovered heroin addict driven to start anew as a jazz drummer must battle the forces and influences around him to stay clean.”

What’s next on Tubi Noir?

Carol Reed’s 1947 IRA bank robbery thriller Odd Man Out.

(This post is not affiliated with Tubi, I just love it.)

Not everyone agrees about whether Michael Mann makes Dad Movies or not. Some people think his movies are too artistically sophisticated to be compared to things that are usually thought of as being For Dads, like Reacher or The Hunt for Red October or whatever. Others think that because they’re thrillers about men who are very good at their jobs, they meet important Dad Movie criteria, and therefore are Dad Movies, no matter what the cinephiles say. You can guess what I believe. And if Michael Mann movies are For Dads, then Industry Season 4 is For Dads, because Industry Season 4 is a Michael Mann movie.

The strongest Mann influence comes from The Insider, his 1999 film where Al Pacino plays a 60 Minutes producer helping a tobacco industry whistleblower played by Russell Crowe get his story out. Some of the same elements are at play here, with investigative journalism and whistleblowing. The difference is that on Industry the journalism mostly goes away, and the investigation turns to getting the guy who’s blowing the whistle on a corrupt bank to go on record so they can short the bank’s stock and make a lot of money (the world of Industry is a cynical one). The season’s fifth episode, where traders Sweetpea Golightly and Kwabena Bannerman go to Ghana to find evidence of fraud, is the most Insider-y, and one of the best of the season. Industry transformed from a character drama to a full-on corporate thriller this season, and that episode is the most thrilling. (Journalism doesn’t go away entirely; there’s a surprise cameo in the finale from America’s greatest contemporary journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. This show knows its audience.)

The Insider isn’t the only Mann influence. I read an interview in GQ with creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down where they compare Harper and Yasmin’s dynamic, where the characters are drawn to each other because each has something that the other wants but could never have, to Pacino and De Niro in Heat, and cited Manhunter as a reference for Episode 5. If you watch Industry, you are privy to a great becoming.

On that note, Marisa Abela’s Yasmin Kara-Hanani really came into her own in Season 4, as a character and a performance. Abela was the show’s undisputed MVP this season, giving an absolutely scorched-earth performance as a woman who will do whatever it takes to survive. Yasmin’s transformation into a Nazi-associated Ghislane Maxwell in the finale was shocking, but not surprising when you think about her trajectory over the course of the series. The finale is called “Both/And” — Yasmin is both a victim and an abuser. I don’t know if Industry will ever break through into earning Emmy nominations, but if it does, Abela’s Edie Falco-esque performance this season will be leading the charge. Also Laura K. Smith for costume design. Everyone looked incredible this season.

Industry wasn’t a Dad Show before, but now it is. So if you’ve been unsure about whether you should watch it because even though you’ve heard it’s good, a coming-of-age drama about sexy young bankers doesn’t sound like something you’d be into, trust that it becomes something you’re very into in Season 4. (And it’s great when it’s a coming-of-age drama about sexy young bankers, too; if you watch one such show, make it this one.)

I forgot to post this last week, but I reviewed the HBO limited series DTF St. Louis for TV Guide last week. I think the show is excellent; creator Steven Conrad has a one of a kind voice, and it’s exciting to watch him use it with HBO’s resources. I gave it a 9 out of 10, which I believe is the highest grade I’ve ever given a show on initial release.

DTF St. Louis, with its prime HBO Sunday night slot and high-profile cast, is something like Conrad's version of The White Lotus, where cult favorite creator Mike White fit his signature style into a more commercially accessible mystery format. DTF St. Louis has a dead body in the first episode to give the plot a hook, but that's where Conrad's concessions to the marketplace end. The rest of it is pure Conrad, all artfully de-stylized dialogue, transcendent bursts of surreal humor, and extremely specific character details (Floyd cries at comic books because he's relieved Batman didn't die).

I also interviewed Marshals creator Spencer Hudnut for Parade. He told me about the challenges of adapting Taylor Sheridan’s style for the broadcast procedural format. Interesting conversation. I’m going back into the Sheridanverse soon, stay tuned…

This is the February 2026 edition of Dad Shows’ monthly paid subscriber-only mini-review roundup, where I briefly write about things I watched last month but didn’t review for Dad Shows or elsewhere. It was a particularly light month for extracurriculars, but you’ll find my thoughts on Heated Rivalry, Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty, and more behind the paywall…

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Like everyone in the entertainment industry right now, I am fascinated by microdramas. These are shortform vertical videos that tell serialized narrative stories. You could think of them as soap operas boiled down and reconstituted for TikTok attention spans. Seasons often have 50-100 episodes that are no more than a few minutes long. The format started in China, and the audience is predominantly women. The press keeps reporting eye-popping figures about how big the microdrama business is — ReelShort, one of the leading microdrama companies, reported $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year. Viewers who want to know what happens next pay a little bit of money to watch the next episode. It’s a mildly distasteful business model that’s common in video games, and apparently there are a lot of people willing to pay for shows that way, too.

Microdramas are an innovative format with a lot of room to grow (they have to move away from in-app purchases and toward advertising if they want to be respectable, though). I love the idea of them, but I have a hard time actually watching them. They tend to be really bad. They have extremely low budgets, and are written and performed in an amateurish style. The most popular microdrama on ReelShort is called The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, and it’s barely comprehensible if you’re used to watching normal shows.

Right now, microdramas are bad, but there are people trying to figure out how to make good ones. A startup called Watch Club recently launched that is offering a more premium microdrama experience. I watched the first seven episodes of its first show, a coming-of-age drama called Return Offer, and was pleasantly surprised at how decent it was.

Return Offer follows three interns at a San Francisco AI company who are trying to get hired full-time when their internship ends. It’s potentially life-changing money — “you guys are gonna be millionaires by the time you’re 25” — and even though the interns are friends, they’re competitive, and there’s only one spot. It’s a workplace drama with romance and betrayals and stuff like that. Unlike other microdramas I’ve seen, it’s TV-quality. If this were on Netflix, it would be one of its better young adult dramas.

The premise is timely — there really is an AI gold rush happening in San Francisco right now where a lot of ambitious young people are trying to become millionaires by the time they’re 25 — and it has an appealing tension between being seductive and repellant. I’m not saying Return Offer is as good as Industry or The Wolf of Wall Street, but those also have this tension. I enjoyed the intimate shaky cam, proficient performances, and thoughtfully selected costumes. Episodes end on intriguing cliffhangers. I genuinely wanted to know what happened next. Between episodes, there are bumpers consisting of in-character social media posts and text messages and other bits of supplemental material that creates a fun multimedia feel. The most impressive thing to me, though, is that the show is properly color-corrected, which is extremely rare for small productions like this. It makes it look polished and professional.

That professionalism is what differentiates Watch Club. Watch Club uses SAG actors and WGA writers, which other microdrama producers do not. The show was created by Devon Albert-Stone, Watch Club’s founding producer, who previously was co-head of development at Michael Showalter’s production company, and directed by Jackie Zhou, who directed Chappell Roan’s music video for “Hot to Go.” The company was founded by Henry Soong, a former product manager at Meta. It has a pretty cool app that also functions as a social network. After you watch an episode, you can respond to a poll about how you would react if you were in the characters’ shoes, and then post a reaction video about it. The interactivity is all very Gen Z.

Watching Return Offer and using the Watch Club app got me even more excited about microdramas. I still have some reservations about the overall business model and the quality, but maybe there really are opportunities for creative and economic growth in the microdrama space. What if men watched microdramas? What would a microdrama Dad Show look like? It would have to be an action thriller. My first thought is that it could be a riff on Taken. A father has to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Simple, familiar, lends itself to action and emotion. If you like this idea, I am looking for angel investors for my Dad Microdrama startup. To keep costs down, I’m going to use AI scripts generated by the company from Return Offer.

I’m gonna be real with you: this week got away from me. When I finally had time to sit down and do Dad Shows, I couldn’t write about the show I was planning to review. I stared at a blank page and the words would not come. This never happens to me, I swear.

I am not able to watch and write about another show before my arbitrary and self-imposed deadline that I nevertheless take seriously and do my best to adhere to. So I have to pivot. I am writing about a movie I have not seen in years but love deeply and will be watching as soon as I can: The Mandalorian and Grogu star Martin Scorsese’s 1985 dark comedy After Hours, which recently started streaming on Netflix.

When I wrote about Caught Stealing last year, I called it my favorite type of thing — a story set in New York City where the protagonist’s situation just keeps getting increasingly tense and dire. Uncut Gems is a perfect example. Inside Llewyn Davis is another. But the absolute master of this, the guy who invented it and has made like a dozen excellent versions of this story, is Marty.

Taxi Driver is this type of story, as is another one of his collaborations with Paul Schrader, the famously underrated Bringing Out the Dead. Goodfellas, of course. The Wolf of Wall Street, too. Even The Age of Innocence, with its didn’t-see-it-coming social assassination.

But the most concentrated version of this story is After Hours, because it takes place over the course of a single night.

The dreamlike film follows Griffin Dunne as Paul Hackett, a guy with a boring job in a boring neighborhood. After a chance meeting with a chic, intriguing woman, he takes a taxi downtown to the hip, artistic, seedy, dangerous neighborhood of SoHo for a date with her. Unfortunately, his last $20 bill flies out the window of the cab. This was before ATMs, let alone Apple Pay, so he’s in trouble. And that’s just the beginning. His odyssey only gets crazier from there. It ends in the morning, with a Sisyphean image that’s both hilarious and depressing.

To paraphrase another great New Yorker, this movie has everything: Linda Fiorentino. Cheech and Chong. Paper mache. A rude subway attendant. Donald Trump’s favorite song.

I had an After Hours poster on the wall of my college apartment in Brooklyn. I had a few nights like After Hours. Anyone who ever liked to go out all night in New York City has. Nights that started out hopeful and ended up bruised and battered, but have moments of serendipity or weird beauty. I once struck up a conversation on the subway with a stranger from Pensacola and right before she got off the train she gave me a tiny seashell. When I watch After Hours again, it will take me back to a time in my life that was mostly a shitshow but was occasionally very fun. I’m looking forward to it.

I reviewed the Scrubs revival for TV Guide. It’s actually pretty good. They’re still figuring out what to do with Vanessa Bayer’s character, but she’s very funny.

Overall, by the lowered standards of revivals, Scrubs is off to a promising start. Revivals that match the original in quality are nearly nonexistent. A revival only has to be almost as good as the original to not be a failure. And Scrubs is not a failure. If Braff and creator Bill Lawrence can’t go the Pitt route and make a new show where Braff plays a different doctor, this is about as good as a Scrubs revival could be.

I live in the East Bay, across the bridge from San Francisco. The city is a fascinating, cinematic place, with beautiful views, abundant neon signs, and dramatic hills that lend themselves to exciting car chases, as well as cultural issues that lend themselves to interesting themes. I’ve seen someone living in a tent in front of a Michelin-starred restaurant, you get what I’m saying? San Francisco has been the setting of many movies and shows, but relatively few TV shows have been filmed on location there. Historically, the city hasn’t done much to incentivize production; there’s not much production infrastructure and a very modest tax credit — though the city government is trying to do something about the latter, which is really cool; the mayor just passed new legislation to expand tax credits yesterday.

The relative lack of San Francisco on TV is sad to me (I’m even sadder about the almost total absence of the East Bay in scripted drama programming, but I don’t see production coming to Oakland anytime soon). I’ve also been away from the Bay for a bit and I’m missing it. So — also somewhat inspired by the Super Bowl, which claimed to be in San Francisco but actually took place about 40 miles away, much closer to the uncinematic city of San Jose — I’m taking a trip to SF via TV.

I’m watching the pilot episodes of the three best-known crime dramas that were shot on location in San Francisco throughout their run — The Streets of San Francisco, Midnight Caller, and Nash Bridges — to see which one best captures the vibe of the City by the Bay.

The Streets of San Francisco (1972)

Michael Douglas may be a son of Hollywood, but his career really started in SF. The original and most fondly remembered San Francisco cop show stars Douglas and Karl Malden as homicide inspectors Steve Keller and Mike Stone (in most places they’re detectives, but in San Francisco they’re called inspectors). Stone is the wise veteran and Keller is the young hotshot, and together they make a formidable investigative team.

The feature-length pilot episode of The Streets of San Francisco follows Stone and Keller as they investigate the death of a young hippie woman who was found floating in the water near the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a straightforward procedural with a suspect (played by Robert Wagner, who ironically would later be connected to a suspicious boat-related death in real life) who turns out to not be the real killer. The real killer is an occult-dabbling psycho.

The Streets of San Francisco is a wonderful snapshot of its time and place. It was made for the present. The costumes, dialogue, and milieu are extremely ‘70s. Wagner’s character is a corporate lawyer who studies karate and has a permissive attitude toward weed. They’re old now, but there are still a ton of guys like him in Pacific Heights.

TV production methods weren’t as sophisticated in the ‘70s as they are now, but there are still some great cinematic flourishes in The Streets of San Francisco. There are iconic ‘70s long-lens zooms through the titular streets, and an impressive shot where the camera is placed on the trunk of a police car as it drives through the city at night, with the flashing red lights on top of the car providing extra light. There’s also some extremely silly stuff, like Wagner and Kim Darby kissing in an elevator doorway as the doors keep closing on them.

The hippie comedown was in full effect when the show premiered, and there’s an interesting push-and-pull between the progressive ethos San Francisco is known for and the Nixonian law-and-order conservatism that people outside of the Bay don’t seem to realize is ever-present. The show is a gritty and authentic portrait of what the city looked like at the time — even if it has a very unrealistic depiction of how easy it is to get a parking spot.

I watched the pilot on YouTube, but there’s a collection of episodes officially available to stream for free on Pluto. I also watched a video essay from TV historian Kinescope about how the show’s embrace of unpredictable location shooting bucked against the era’s tightly controlled system of making TV. Cool stuff.

Midnight Caller (1988)

The least-remembered of the shows on this list, and maybe the most interesting. It ran for three seasons on NBC between 1988-1991. It was created by Richard DiLello, who prior to becoming a screenwriter wrote a memoir of his time working for Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company. He also wrote the LA cops-and-gangs movie Colors, with the memorable theme song by Ice-T. A richly textured life. The pilot was directed by Thomas Carter, who also directed the Miami Vice pilot. (The next show you’ll read about also owes a debt to Miami Vice.)

Midnight Caller stars Gary Cole, in the breakout role of his wildly varied career, as Jack Killian, an inspector-turned-late night radio host. Killian killed his partner in a friendly fire incident, which led to him resigning from the force due to his guilt and trauma. Months later, when radio station owner Devon King (Wendy Kilbourne in an ‘80s power suit) is looking for an ex-cop to host a call-in show about public safety (San Franciscans have always worried about crime), the recommendations she receives lead her to the brash, chatty former detective his fellow cops called “the Mouth.” He takes the job, and his show quickly becomes a hit, with seemingly half the city staying up to listen to him shoot the shit every night between the hours of 12 and 3 am. He takes to calling himself “the Nighthawk.”

In the pilot, a female caller gets obsessed with him; meanwhile, a serial killer is murdering men in the city. Killian realizes that his admirer and the killer are one and the same, and he gets back into doing some off-the-books police work while he tries to apprehend her. The killer, a prostitute who goes by the name Angel, is played by Jenny Wright, a distinctive-looking actress best known for Kathryn Bigelow’s cult favorite vampire film Near Dark, a movie I’ve never seen but has long been high on my list.

The episode’s plot is nothing special, but its filmmaking style is striking. It’s one of the most noirish episodes of television I’ve ever seen. It opens with a woman giving poetic, enigmatically foreshadowing narration from beyond the grave, then transitions into a long, mood-setting opening credit sequence of streetwalkers in neon-lit North Beach, the former red light district, set to the theme song, “Is It a Crime” by Sade. It ends with a tragic death that starts in a candlelit room and finishes on the street below, followed by Jack signing off his show with a prayer for the lost souls who are “ravaged by their dreams.” It’s a downbeat ending and an unorthodox beginning. The story doesn’t actually start until three minutes in. It feels like an eternity, especially in the present TV era where viewers have been conditioned to be hooked within the first few seconds. There actually is a body in the opening scene of Midnight Caller, we just hear it instead of see it.

Carter was nominated for an Emmy for directing the pilot, and he should have been, because it’s beautifully made. It’s shot like a Michael Mann movie-meets-Madonna music video, with highly dramatic lighting and shadowy nocturnal shots. Over the course of its run, it won a few guest-acting Emmys and was nominated for a few more, as well as noms for cinematography and editing.

The moody show captured the atmosphere of the city at the time, according to San Francisco Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub, who wrote a lovely piece about the show last year: “The late ’80s were also a melancholy time in San Francisco, still with recent memories of Jonestown, the Milk/Moscone murders and the Zodiac killings. We were tired. And Cole as Killian channels the mood perfectly.”

Hartlaub calls it “the best ever show shot in San Francisco,” and it didn’t just shoot exteriors in San Francisco – its soundstages were in the city, too. His article was angled around Midnight Caller’s status as a lost show that’s unfortunately not available through any official channels; I watched it on Facebook. I haven’t seen enough to be able to say for sure that it’s the best San Francisco show, but it’s certainly one of the best pilots of a forgotten show I’ve seen.

Nash Bridges (1996)

Don Johnson is a great TV actor. If the GOAT tier is Ted Danson and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Johnson is just a notch below them. When you see him on your TV, you know he’s going to put numbers on the board. Nash Bridges is pure entertainment.

A few years after the end of Miami Vice, Johnson returned with a solo project that used San Francisco the same way his previous show used Miami. The city is part of the show in a way that can’t be faked on a studio backlot or somewhere in Canada. Even more than the other two shows covered here, Nash Bridges makes use of iconic San Francisco locations. The episode begins in the shadow of the Bay Bridge and ends at Fisherman’s Wharf, and includes stops at the Hill Bros. Coffee sign, SFMOMA, and the Fairmont Hotel. When Nash says he’s heading southbound on Mason towards Geary, he really is heading southbound on Mason towards Geary. That’s verisimilitude.

Johnson is the titular cop, a veteran inspector who plays by his own rules but gets results. A charming renegade. You know the type. He knows a few close-up magic tricks that he uses to get out of jams. He calls everybody “bubba.” He lives in a sleek downtown apartment with incredible skyline views that he’s able to afford because the building is technically condemned because it’s not earthquake-safe. When his secretary says his ex-wife is calling, he says “which one?” He loves his teenage daughter, but the job comes first. He’s an assemblage of TV cop cliches, but Johnson’s charisma makes it work. That smile, that gravelly voice, that ease with a one-liner. He’s like if Kevin Costner had a sense of humor.

Nash Bridges is the only one of these three pilots that features a car chase down a hill, which should be mandatory in any action movie or show filmed in San Francisco. The hills are so insane to drive on that failing to use them makes me question the filmmakers’ sanity. The chase features the requisite airborne jumps, but what sets it apart from other San Francisco car chase scenes is guest star Lucy Liu laughing hysterically throughout. She plays an informant who happens to be in Nash’s 1971 Plymouth Barracuda when he and his partner Evan Cortez spot the bad guys. Her character enjoying the chase makes the chase that much more fun.

One of my favorite scenery-chewing character actors, Xander Berkeley, plays one of the episode’s bad guys, a rich asshole named Wojack who’s involved in a heist of computer chips. Other shows might have a heist of cash or diamonds, but Nash Bridges is so SF that the most valuable thing someone can steal is computer chips.

Critics never really liked Nash Bridges, and I get why; it’s very cliched. It looks better in retrospect. It’s lit well, it’s shot with energy, and the performances are exaggerated in a charming way (shoutout to Cheech Marin as Nash’s best friend and partner Joe Dominguez). I get why it ran for 122 episodes. And I really get why San Francisco was sad when it ended. It gave residents jobs the way Law & Order does in New York.

Johnson tried to bring the show back in 2021 with a straight-to-Peacock revival movie/backdoor pilot, but no one cared. I say that’s OK. The time is ripe for someone to do a San Francisco cop show for 2026 where they take down a billionaire who’s secretly paying local street criminals to create chaos so he can convince the city to install his AI-enabled surveillance cameras.

So which of these shows best captures the vibe of SF? It was a trick question — they all do, just at different times. The Streets of San Francisco is the post-hippie ‘70s, Midnight Caller is the glum late ‘80s, and Nash Bridges is the optimistic ‘90s. The city looks great in all of them. I hope the new production incentives lead to more stuff shot in the fascinating current version of San Francisco, where a new gold rush is happening and economic inequality is in your face wherever you look. There are a lot of stories to tell.

There are a lot of long-running family-oriented brands that I would be okay with putting on the cultural shelf. Looney Tunes is approaching its 100th anniversary, we don’t need any more. Peanuts had a great run, but it’s time to let it go. The Muppets, though? The Muppets can stay.

Disney+’s new Muppet Show special that’s not-so-secretly a backdoor pilot is the best kind of nostalgia. It keeps everything lovable about the original 1976-1981 Muppet Show — the delightful opening credits; the corny, winking humor; the way that celebrity guests interact with the Muppets as if they’re real people — and ever-so-slightly updates it for 2026. The references are contemporary, but the spirit is vaudevillian.

It will be a great way to introduce kids to the Muppets, the way that Muppets Tonight was when I was a kid. The world has forgotten the ‘90s Muppet Show sequel series Muppets Tonight, but I have not; I remember watching it with my family when I was a kid. (The things that first made me love the Muppets were A Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island; I rewatched the latter a couple of years ago because my wife had never seen it. I think it holds up, but she thinks you had to have first seen it when you were 5 years old to really appreciate it.)

The new Muppet Show features celebrity special guest Sabrina Carpenter, who is almost too perfect for the role, being something of a human Muppet herself. When she tells Miss Piggy that she’s her inspiration, she might be telling the truth a little bit. When do you think Sabrina Carpenter will make her inevitable transition from being a pop star to the easier job of being a movie star? I think she will start within three years. Of all the current pop stars/pop stars who have started acting careers in the past few years, she’s the one most likely to successfully transition. She can start with a romantic comedy that makes use of her persona, and then do something different and dark to demonstrate her range and acting chops.

To me, the highlight of the episode is Carpenter’s duet of “Islands in the Stream” with Kermit and then Miss Piggy, after Miss Piggy knocks Kermit out of the boat they’re singing the song in. That one person on the internet hates the Pig girl with their life, but I love her. She has the pathos of the un-self-aware. And when she goes “Hi-ya?” It’s funny every time.

All dads love the Muppets because they remember watching the Muppets when they were kids, or watching the Muppets with their kids. Kermit is a relatable everyman with whom dads identify. He’s just trying to keep it all together. Gonzo is dads’ chaotic impulses. Fozzie is the desperate desire to be funny. These are not necessarily dads’ favorite Muppets, however — I asked my dad who his favorite Muppet is, and he immediately texted back “Animal.” My favorites are Statler and Waldorf, because I am a critic.

Welcome to the first installment of Dad Shows’ monthly paid subscriber-only mini-review roundup, where I write a little bit about stuff I watched last month but didn’t review for Dad Shows or elsewhere. This entry includes thoughts on Industry, Netflix’s Alex Honnold free solo special, and more fun stuff behind the paywall…

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Welcome back to Tubi Noir, an occasional feature about noir movies on Tubi. Previously, I wrote about 1947’s Johnny O’Clock.

When I said that my next Tubi Noir would be about The Big Combo, esteemed reader PricklyPublius commented that I would love it. He was right. It’s a dark, tight movie with a style all its own.

The Big Combo, from director Joseph H. Lewis, was released in 1955 by Allied Artists, one of the so-called Poverty Row studios of the era. The film is most notable for how well it covers up its budget deficiencies with terrific filmmaking. Cinematographer John Alton (who won an Academy Award in 1951 for An American in Paris) got incredibly creative with how he shot it, using unusual angles, shadows, and, especially in the film’s exciting climax, fog to impressive effect.

The film follows Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde), a policeman who’s obsessed with bringing down crime boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte, best remembered for his late-career role as Emilio Barzini in The Godfather). Diamond’s fixation is partially because of Brown’s viciousness, but mostly because he’s in love with Brown’s girlfriend, Susan (Jean Wallace, Wilde’s real-life wife). For his part, Brown is pretty fixated on Diamond, too.

There’s some ingenious filmmaking on display throughout the film, like the scene in Diamond’s office where there aren’t cuts, but cuts are simulated through camera movement and lighting changes as the characters move around the set. It’s really cool staging that I haven’t seen in any other movie.

It’s not only technical stuff that’s impressive. Wilde is great as a flawed hero, and Conte is charismatic as a smooth but psychotic villain. Helene Stanton is tragic as Diamond’s ill-fated casual girlfriend Rita. And Lee Van Cleef is delightfully skeezy in an early-career performance as one of Brown’s henchmen.

The whole thing is held together by a jazzy score that adds to the modernist, nocturnal atmosphere.

It’s an upper-second-tier noir classic, not as elite as stuff like Out of the Past or Double Indemnity, but a little better than Johnny O’Clock. It hasn’t unseated Detour as my favorite Poverty Row noir, but nothing’s as good as Detour.

The Big Combo is getting a 70th anniversary 4K restoration from Ignite Films and Eagle Rock Pictures, in stores on March 30. A cool gift for the noir fan in your life.

Could it be remade today?

It would actually be very easy to remake The Big Combo, because it’s in the public domain. But it doesn’t need to be remade. The story is very spare and elemental, and pieces of the film have made their way into other classics. The scene where Mr. Brown tortures Diamond with sound is referenced in Reservoir Dogs, and the dynamic between Brown and Diamond echoes in Heat.

A memorable image

This one from the climactic shootout in the fog, of course. It’s one of the defining images of film noir.

Tubi’s synopsis

“A good cop with a target on his back and a sadistic crime boss who has it coming become entangled when they fall for the same girl.”

What’s next on Tubi Noir?

Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm.

(This post is not affiliated with Tubi, I just genuinely love the service. It has so many great movies for free.)