Friday, October 02, 2026
This week my Spin column Deep Cut Friday is about Michael Jackson's "Girl Don't Take Your Love From Me."
My Top 100 Country Singles of the 1970s
Thursday, October 01, 2026
I've been going back through musical history, one decade at a time and one genre at a time, and often country is the last one I cover. I finished up my '80s series with a country list just a few months ago, but I kind of got into a groove into that one and decided to start my '70s series with country.
Here's every song on the list as a 5-hour Spotify playlist.
1. Dolly Parton - "Jolene" (1974)
I am posting this just 5 weeks after we lost Dolly, but I don't have to tell you that this was already in my mind as my likely #1 long before that tragic loss. If there's any reason I wouldn't put it at the top of this list, it's only because it's beloved by so many people who don't like any other country song (the other day I saw someone sniff derisively that a current country hit "is no 'Jolene,'" because of course that's the only basis for comparison). But there it is, where it deserves to be.
2. George Jones - "The Grand Tour" (1974)
Country's greatest singer and most famous alcoholic rose to fame singing about moonshine in the '60s, and my '80s country list was heavy on George Jones songs about drinking, but his '70s hit parade comprises mostly heartbreak songs and the occasional love song. The Possum was on his third marriage (out of four total) in 1974, so it makes sense that he could sing a tale of divorce like "The Grand Tour" with so much ache in his voice.
3. Bobbie Gentry - "Fancy" (1970)
Bobbie Gentry released seven albums in four years from 1967 to 1971, writing her most famous material and even self-producing an album at a time when that was a serious rarity (for all recording artists, not just women or country singers). And then she dealt with some music industry bullshit, did the Vegas circuit for a while, and pretty much retired from public life and has lived the last 50 years or so out of the spotlight. The music she made, including "Fancy," was awesome, though, I'm sad that she didn't get to make records for decades like most of the people on this list. I will try to comport myself in this post but I'll just make the point once that some of the most beautiful women of all time were '70s country singers.
4. Willie Nelson - "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (1975)
In 1975, Willie Nelson was 42 years old and had written some of the biggest country songs of the '60s, including "Crazy" and "Funny How Time Slips Away," but his first 17 albums hadn't really made him a star. Then he made a sparse, quiet concept album, stringing mostly songs that had been written by other people years or decades earlier into a storyline about a murderous preacher, and it became a multi-platinum phenomenon. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," a hit for Ray Acuff in 1947 that had been recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Conway Twitty, became the first of Nelson's many #1 country hits as a performer.
5. Johnny Cash - "Man in Black" (1971)
Johnny Cash has such a unique presence, so much gravitas, I don't know if he's the only person that could have written "Man in Black" but is there anyone else who could have sung it and you would actually believe him and want to call him the man in black?
6. Loretta Lynn – "Coal Miner’s Daughter" (1970)
Like "Man in Black," "Coal Miner's Daughter" is synonymous with its singer, practically their official title of nobility. They even made a biopic based on the song, and it was the 7th biggest box office hit of 1980! I feel like you really get all of Lynn's story and her essence in the three minutes of that song.
7. The Charlie Daniels Band - "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" (1979)
I will be the first to admit that I didn't grow up steeped in country, and "The Devil Went Down To Georgia," may be the only song here that I had more than a passing familiarity with before I was 15 or so, and it really is just deliriously entertaining, I wish more mainstream country songs had ridiculous showboating fiddle solos. A few years ago, Charlie Daniels went away, just like Benghazi.
8. Waylon Jennings - "Good Hearted Woman" (1971)
Waylon Jennings has such a fascinating story. He was a friend, protege, and sideman of Buddy Holly, playing bass in his band on the ill-fated 1959 tour when Holly died in a plane crash, and Jennings's guilt and trauma from that derailed his life and career for years. But he eventually found his footing, and his own sound and identity, and "Good Hearted Woman" was one of his biggest hits twice, first reaching #3 on the country as a solo track and then hitting #1 four years when he re-recorded it with Willie Nelson.
9. Kenny Rogers - "The Gambler" (1978)
Another one of those songs I've loved from a pretty young age and just never got sick of. These days it surprises me a little just how gentle it sounds, how delicate Kenny Rogers's voice is, because in mind it's just this big gregarious anthemic song.
10. Conway Twitty - "Hello Darlin'" (1970)
Harold "Conway Twitty" Jenkins started out in the '50s as a rock crooner who sounded like Elvis Presley (his first hit "It's Only Make Believe" was the sixth #1 ever on the Hot 100). He actually considered releasing country music as Harold Jenkins while continuing to make rock under his stage name, which sounds so strange to me now, Conway Twitty just seems like a quintessential country singer name to me now.
11. Charley Pride – “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’” (1971)
Ray Charles made best-selling country albums in the '60s but didn't actually get played on country radio until the '80s. So Charley Pride was really the trailblazer of Black country stars, with "Kiss An Angel Good Mornin'" being the biggest of his 29 #1's from 1969 to 1983.
12. Dolly Parton – “Coat of Many Colors” (1971)
Dolly several times called the autobiographical "Coat of Many Colors" her favorite song that she ever wrote. Both Porter Wagoner's dry cleaning receipt that she wrote the lyrics on and a dress made by Parton's mother (though not the original that inspired the song) are both displayed in a museum at Dollywood.
13. Sammi Smith - "Help Me Make It Through The Night" (1970)
Several men have recorded great versions of "Help Me Make It Through The Night," including the song's writer Kris Kristofferson, but I must admit I'd rather hear a woman sing "take the ribbon from my hair" than a man singing "take the ribbon from your hair," the Sammi Smith version is just sexy.
14. George Jones - "These Days (I Barely Get By)" (1975)
Before the advent of hip-hop, no genre really explored the emotional effects of poverty and economic struggle like country music. And "These Days" has long been one of my favorite George Jones songs, it goes into a litany that almost feels like an over-the-top country cliche along the lines of "my wife left me, my dog died, my truck won't start," but instead Jones really keeps it in the realm of reality with the gravity of his vocal performance.
15. Merle Haggard and the Strangers – “If We Make It Through December” (1973)
Another great song about struggling to make ends meet that can hit a little too hard if you're going through a rough patch. I unfortunately find "I don't mean to hate December, it's meant to be the happy time of year" very relatable, the stress of mounting adult responsibilities at the end of every year has really sapped me of most of my enjoyment of the Christmas season.
16. Johnny Cash - "Oney" (1972)
Jerry Chestnut, a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, wrote at least three songs on this list, including "Oney," a comic but potent little song from the perspective of a retiring factory worker. I defy you to get to the end of "Oney" or Cash's similarly themed hit "One Piece At A Time" (which appears further down on this list) without laughing and/or yelling "fuck yeah!"
17.Johnny Paycheck - "Take This Job And Shove It" (1977)
I was surprised to learn that Johnny Paycheck's stage name wasn't a humorous hat tip to Johnny Cash, there was actually a famous boxer named Johnny Paychek. In any case, you can't talk about country's odes to the working man without mentioning this song.
18. Tanya Tucker - "Lizzie and the Rainman" (1975)
I didn't really know Tanya Tucker's '70s stuff before working on this list, I love the sound her voice had as a teenager on those early hits. Snuff Garrett's production on this song is remarkable, the screaming strings that enter at the top of the chorus, and those pummeling drum fills.
19. Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson - "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys" (1978)
In 1978, Willie Nelson released three albums that each sold millions: Stardust, Willie and Family Live, and Willie & Waylon (beat that, Drake!). Arkansas singer-songwriter Ed Bruce's original recording of "Mamas" was a minor hit when he released it in 1975, but in country it often feels like a song really belongs to whoever was the biggest artist to record it.
20. Linda Ronstadt - "When Will I Be Loved" (1975)
County and rock & roll had only been really diverging and going in opposite directions for a few years in the '60s when "country rock" became a niche genre and eventually a big business in the '70s. Linda Ronstadt and her frequent collaborators in the Eagles are probably the biggest stars of the country rock explosion, although she got more country radio play than they did (their only hit on the country charts, "Lyin' Eyes," is further down this list). Andrew Gold (the guy who wrote the "Golden Girls" theme song) went absolutely crazy with the guitars on Ronstadt's wonderful Everly Brothers cover.
21. Billy Swan - "I Can Help" (1974)
Depending how you categorize certain songs, somewhere between 15 and 20 country songs hit #1 on the Hot 100 in the 1970s, and for the next four decades that number was between zero and 5 (there have been 8 or 9 so far in the 2020s, so we're finally rebounding!). "I Can Help" is the first pop chart-topper to appear here, and I absolutely love the way it sounds coming out of "When Will I Be Loved" on my playlist, and those fun hyped-up false endings that Swan and his band go into.
22. Freddy Fender - "Before The Next Teardrop Falls" (1975)
"Before the Next Teardrop Falls" was another #1, in fact one of six songs that topped both the country and pop charts in 1975, the peak of country's chart dominance. Four other recordings of "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" had charted since it was written in 1967, but Freddy Fender's version, with the second version sung in Spanish, was the one that just took off and became the one everybody remembers.
23. Crystal Gayle - "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" (1977)
Crystal Gayle was a coal miner's daughter, too, the youngest of Loretta Lynn's seven siblings, but she had a clearer, lighter voice and was a good match for the 'countrypolitan' sound that came into vogue in the '70s.
24. Dolly Parton - "Joshua" (1971)
By 1971, Dolly Parton had had most of her commercial success with duets with her mentor Porter Wagoner, and it was a cover of "Mule Skinner Blues" that broke her through as a solo artist, with her self-penned follow-up "Joshua" becoming her first country #1 and her first Grammy nomination.
25. Ronnie Milsap - "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends" (1974)
Bobby Bare was the first artist to record Kris Kristofferson's "Please Don't Tell me How the Story Ends," but Ronnie Mislap's version was the best and biggest hit, and he really owns it with those beautiful high notes on the second verse.
26. George Jones and Tammy Wynette - "Golden Ring" (1976)
It's interesting to occasionally hear a country song that takes place somewhere like Chicago instead of the usual deep south geography, and I love this sad little tale of a wedding ring that winds up back in the same pawn shop where a young couple found it. George and Tammy were country's top power couple of the '70s, and the public fascination with them endured to the point that Epic kept releasing duets they'd recorded after they divorced in 1975, with 1976's Golden Ring becoming their biggest album together.
27. Emmylou Harris - "One of These Days" (1976)
Country rock innovator Gram Parsons's "cosmic American music" hadn't really impacted country's mainstream by the time he died in 1973, but in the following years his frequent collaborator Emmylou Harris became a major hitmaker. I've worked on a couple of events where Emmylou Harris performed and I'm starstruck every time.
28. Glen Campbell - "Southern Nights" (1977)
New Orleans rhythm and blues legend Allen Toussaint had been widely covered and had produced big hits for Labelle and Dr. John, but Glen Campbell's cover of the title track from his 1975 album Southern Nights took Toussaint to the top of the country and pop charts for the first and only time as a songwriter.
29. Tanya Tucker - "Delta Dawn" (1972)
I really had no idea until I looked it up just now that Tanya Tucker was only 13 when she recorded "Delta Dawn," has to be one of the most remarkable vocal performances by someone that age on a hit. Helen Reddy's similar recording of "Delta Dawn" got to #1 on the pop charts a year later but I like the Tucker version best.
30. Willie Nelson - "Bloody Mary Morning" (1974)
Willie Nelson's 1974 masterpiece Phases & Stages was something of a precursor to Red Headed Stranger, and its fastest, most playful track was one of the hits that started to move his performing career up to a new level. Probably my favorite banjo playing of any song on this list.
31. Loretta Lynn - "The Pill" (1975)
Country music isn't a place where progressive politics often thrive, but it's usually the women who really push things forward, as when Lynn wrote a frank song about birth control that was as controversial as it was popular.
32. Merle Haggard and the Strangers - "The Fightin' Side of Me" (1970)
Merle Haggard had a lot of crossover cachet as one of the few "outlaw country" stars who had actually done time in prison. And oddly, when he revealed a conservative side and sneered at libs and hippies on 1979's "Okie from Muskogee" and then the following year's "The Fightin' Side of Me," the libs and hippies just seemed to like him more. It's hard to imagine the hipsters suddenly getting into Toby Keith after "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" or Jason Aldean after "Try That in a Small Town."
33. Waylon Jennings - "Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out of Hand" (1978)
Waylon Jennings actually had a top 5 hit with this pretty funny commentary on the whole outlaw country phenomenon: "Was it singin' through my nose that got me busted by the man?"
34. Jessi Colter - "I'm Not Lisa" (1975)
Waylon Jennings's wife became the most prominent woman in outlaw country with their string of hit duets and the platinum 1976 album Wanted! The Outlaws by Jennings, Colter, Willie Nelson, and Tompall Glaser. Her biggest solo hit, however, is a tearful little ballad.
35. Vicki Lawrence - "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" (1973)
Success in both comedy and music (like, non-comedic music) is a pretty rare achievement, but Vicki Lawrence went to #1 with a whole murder ballad in the middle of "The Carol Burnett Show"'s decade-long run on CBS. I don't know who else you can even put in that category other than Eddie Murphy and Jamie Foxx.
36. Johnny Cash - "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down (live)" (1970)
Johnny Cash also had a variety show on primetime TV in the early '70s. And his hit rendition of Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" was a live performance from "The Johnny Cash Show" that always fully sounds like a studio recording to me until you hear the audience at the very end.
37. George Jones - "A Good Year For the Roses" (1970)
George Jones's prime can be easily divided into two main eras, the Pappy Daily productions of his '50s and '60s honky tonk work and the lush Billy Sherrill productions of the '70s and '80s. "A Good Year For the Roses" was produced by Bob Moore right in that brief period between those eras, and I love the way drummer Kenny Buttrey occasionally switches from a rim tap to a snare for these moments of surging strings and emotion flooding out of Jones's otherwise perfectly restrained and controlled performance. I was so surprised to realize after many years of listening to Elvis Costello that his version of "A Good Year For the Roses" was one of his biggest hits in the UK, where George Jones had absolutely no commercial profile.
38. Skeeter Davis - "Bus Fare to Kentucky" (1971)
Producer Ronny Light penned "Bus Fare to Kentucky" for the Kentucky-born Skeeter Davis, who made a turn toward a twangier sound in the '70s after having some pop crossover success in the '60s.
39. Moe Bandy – “I Just Started Hatin’ Cheatin’ Songs Today” (1974)
"I Just Started Hatin' Cheatin' Songs Today" was Moe Bandy's career-launching debut single, but he decided to negate the song's premise with a string of later hits with titles like "I Cheated Me Right Out of You," "It's a Cheatin' Situation," and "She Just Loved the Cheatin' Out of Me."
40. The Amazing Rhythm Aces - "Third Rate Romance" (1975)
I think I'd kind of assumed that the Amazing Rhythm Aces were an R&B or jazz band or something with that name, but they were a Memphis country rock band, and I really enjoy their biggest hit, a droll little song about a one night stand.
41. Dolly Parton - "I Will Always Love You" (1974)
Dolly Parton famously wrote her two most enduring songs, "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You," on the same day. We should all hope for a day as good as that in our lives. Elvis Presley was interested in recording "I Will Always Love You," but Colonel Tom Parker would only allow it if Parton signed over half of the publishing rights. Parton made the difficult decision to say no, which turned out to be even smarter than anybody could have realized at the time when Whitney Houston's 1992 recording became one of the biggest hits of all time.
42. Elvis Presley - "Way Down" (1977)
Of course, Elvis wasn't as successful in his later years as he'd been earlier in his career, but he was still Elvis. And like other early rock & rollers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Don Everly, Presley was a steady presence on the country charts in the '70s. "Way Down" was his most recent single when Presley died, and it only rose up a little bit on the charts after he passed, not a big posthumous smash like "(Just Like) Starting Over" or "Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay," but I really like it. Presley's last top 10 pop hit remains 1972's "Burning Love," which wasn't on the country charts but was penned by Nashville legend Dennis Linde.
43. Jimmy Buffett - "Come Monday" (1974)
Jimmy Buffett toiled as a minor country star for years before "Margaritaville" made him a superstar, and "Come Monday" was one of the early singles that remained a cornerstone of his repertoire as a huge touring act.
44. Willie Nelson - "Whiskey River (live)" (1979)
"Whiskey River" was a minor hit for Houston singer/songwriter Johnny Bush when he wrote it in 1972. But over the years it's become his friend Willie Nelson's signature song, first on 1974's Shotgun Willie and then the hit live version, and it's been Nelson's customary opening song for his concerts for decades now.
45. Barbara Mandrell - "Sleeping Single in a Double Bed" (1978)
Country thrived commercially in the '70s partly because there was so little difference between soft rock and a lot of what was coming out Nashville, and this one in particular could practically be a Captain & Tenille song.
46. John Denver - "Take Me Home, Country Roads" (1971)
Taffy Nivert and Bill Danoff started writing "Take Me Home, Country Roads" while driving around the twisty roads of Montgomery County, Maryland, and I think about this song every time I'm driving around the rural parts of Maryland, even if they did add a shout out to West Virginia that's given the song a permanent association with another state.
47. Johnny Cash - "The Lady Came From Baltimore" (1974)
If Maryland doesn't get a lot of mentions in country music, Baltimore gets even less, aside from Bobby Bare's '60s classic "Streets of Baltimore," so I was amused to find this charming Tim Hardin cover while trawling through Johnny Cash's discography.
48. Anne Murray - "Snowbird" (1970)
Another song I'd never heard before putting together this list, love that string arrangement and Anne Murray was kind of a trailblazer for Canadian women in country music, from K.D. Lang and Shania Twain to Terri Clark and Lindsay Ell.
49. George Jones - "Her Name Is" (1976)
One of my favorite George Jones albums is Alone Again, the despondent and self-pitying album he released after his divorce from Tammy Wynette. The album's only hit, however, is an atypically goofy little novelty song. Jones describes the woman he's in love with and then says "Her name is..." with Hargus Robbins's clavinet filling in the blanks with a 3-note melody symbolizing her name that descends from B to A to G (her name is BAG?). Her hair color is symbolized by an E, and so on.
50. Tammy Wynette - "Til I Can Make It On My Own" (1976)
Tammy's big post-divorce hit is a bit more straightforward, and an absolute heartbreaker, her 15th #1 on the country charts.
51. Charlie Rich – “Behind Closed Doors” (1973)
52. Kenny Rogers - "Lucille" (1977)
53. Hank Williams Jr. - "Family Tradition" (1979)
54. Olivia Newton-John - "Let Me Be There" (1973)
55. Conway Twitty - "This Time I've Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me" (1975)
56. Willie Nelson - "Yesterday's Wine" (1971)
57. Lynn Anderson – “Rose Garden” (1970)
58. Johnny Cash - "One Piece At A Time" (1976)
59. The Bellamy Brothers - "Let Your Love Flow" (1976)
60. Tanya Tucker - "Blood Red and Goin' Down" (1973)
61. O.B. McClinton – “Don’t Let The Green Grass Fool You” (1972)
62. Linda Martell - "Bad Case of the Blues" (1970)
63. . George Jones - "The Door" (1974)
64. Merle Haggard and the Strangers - "The Roots of My Raising" (1976)
65. Jerry Reed - "East Bound And Down" (1977)
66. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn - "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man" (1973)
67. Faron Young - "It's Four in the Morning" (1971)
68. Willie Nelson - "If You've Got The Money I've Got The Time" (1976)
69. Johnny Cash - "Flesh and Blood" (1970)
70. Dolly Parton - "Baby I'm Burnin'" (1978)
71. Glen Campbell - "Rhinestone Cowboy" (1975)
72. Bobby Bare - "Come Sundown" (1970)
73. Gordon Lightfoot - "Sundown" (1974)
74. Emmylou Harris - "Two More Bottles of Wine" (1978)
75. Charley Pride - "Is Anybody Goin' To San Antone" (1970)
76. John Denver - "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" (1975)
77. B.W. Stevenson - "My Maria" (1973)
78. Olivia Newton-John - "Have You Never Been Mellow" (1975)
79. Don Williams - "Tulsa Time" (1978)
80. Kris Kristofferson - "Why Me" (1973)
81. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton - "Please Don't Stop Loving Me" (1974)
82. Johnny Rodriguez - "Ridin' My Thumb To Mexico" (1973)
83. Willie Nelson - "I Still Can't Believe You're Gone" (1974)
84. Johnny Cash - "Any Old Wind That Blows" (1972)
85. Tanya Tucker - "The Jamestown Ferry" (1972)
86. George Jones - "Loving You Could Never Be Better" (1972)
87. Eric Weissberg - "Dueling Banjos" (1972)
88. Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty - "You're The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" (1978)
89. C.W. McCall - "Convoy" (1975)
90. The Eagles - "Lyin' Eyes" (1975)
91. Mac Davis - "Stop and Smell the Roses" (1974)
92. Gary Stewart - "She's Actin' Single, I'm Drinkin' Doubles" (1975)
93. Alabama - "I Wanna Come Over" (1979)
94. Dolly Parton - "Here You Come Again" (1977)
95. Charley Pride - "I Ain't All Bad" (1975)
96. Reba McEntire - "Sweet Dreams" (1979)
97. Eddie Rabbit - "Rocky Mountain Music" (1976)
98. Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings - "There Ain't No Good Chain Gang" (1978)
99. Merle Haggard and the Strangers - "Old Man from the Mountain" (1974)
100. Willie Nelson - "Remember Me (When the Candlelights Are Gleaming)" (1976)
Movie Diary
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 
a) Splitsville
I put on Splitsville expecting the usual mid-budget dramedy about troubled marriages and got something much better than that, with a unique comic tone (including the longest, most violent fight scene I've ever seen in what was otherwise not at all an action movie) and a clever way of approaching its premise with both heart and a sort of absurdist sense of humor. Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino are...how do I say this? They could star in a Geico cavemen commercial without spending a long time in the makeup chair. And they wrote a movie (directed by the latter) where their characters sleep with Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, which may be the most over-the-top filmmaker wish fulfillment since Woody Allen's prime. But it's a great cast in a pretty memorable movie.
b) Dust Bunny
Applying auteurism to television is usually misguided, but I consider Bryan Fuller as close to an auteur as TV's ever had, and I'm a huge fan of his colorful, imaginative, emotive approach, but I never really thought too much about whether I wanted him to transition into film. I don't know if he even wants to, Dust Bunny began life as a pitch for an Apple TV anthology series I never saw and just being its own thing. Really enjoyed it, Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver and child star Sophie Sloan are all great in a creepy, surreal story of a girl with a monster under her bed.
A fun movie in the style of Pitch Perfect or Bring It On about college-level Bollywood dance competitions, written by Hasan Minhaj. Seeing Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in this reminds me how great she was in "Never Have I Ever," really someone who lights up the screen and has sharp comic timing, I hope her career soars.
I enjoyed "The Mandalorian" well enough but it really felt like they abandoned most of what was charming about the show in the pursuit to making movie feel like more than "3 or 4 episodes that you pay to see in a theater." Just no real storytelling rhythm, lots of eye-rolling new characters and barely any of the show's familiar supporting cast, and a bunch of clashing styles of visual effects that felt like they weren't even in the same movie.
e) Unabomber
Didn't think much of this, the 2017 miniseries "Manhunt: The Unabomber" wasn't a masterpiece but it was more compelling than this, with Jacob Tremblay playing a young Ted Kaczynski and really doing nothing with what should be a pretty meaty role.
Nate Bargatze manages the unlikely feat of being a clean Christian comic who does material about being a husband and dad but has enough of a dry wit that he's a decent "SNL" host and not the star of a CBS sitcom (yet). His first film vehicle is a dud, though, really corny outdated premise, overcooked execution, only a few scenes where Bargatze and Will Forte get to be genuinely funny.
Part of what I really enjoyed about Ready Or Not is that it didn't really escalate and get surreal and over-the-top until the very end. So I worried that any sequel wouldn't be as good without being able to have that bit of surprise at the climax, but it's really fun, they just picked up right at the first movie's close and took off in a crazy sprint, continuing to keep the violent thrills coming with a great new supporting cast including Elijah Wood and Shawn Hatosy. Also all respect for them for using Here I Come as the subtitle of the second movie, it took the Now You See Me franchise until the third movie to use the title Now You Don't.
I just watched this recently, just a couple days before the announcement that it's being adapted into a series. Really good movie, easily the best thing Adam Brody's ever been in, gets some comedic mileage out of the familiar failed-former-child-prodigy premise but takes it interesting places and gets surprisingly dark by the end.
I really enjoyed this doc about the first decade of the Red Hot Chili Peppers story, focusing on the adolescent friendship, addictions, and tragedy of the Hillel Slovak era. Flea really lays things out there and is very painfully honest, I have a lot of respect for how vulnerable he is in this movie. Anthony's story of seeing Hillel's mother before she died and making amends is really beautiful, too. It's kind of refreshing to watch a music documentary that's completely about the band's first few albums, before they wrote any of their big famous hits -- as a fan of The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, it was cool to see that album get its due a little. I was a little annoyed that they had an AI deepfake Hillel voice reading his journals (like, there's no reason you can't just have an actor do that), and that they go to pains to make it the story of Hillel, Anthony, and Flea even though Jack Irons is right there in the interviews. It was also fun to see Michael Beinhorn on camera for the first time, he comes across just as intense as he does in all the stories of albums he's worked on.
A pretty good doc I watched recently while working on my Patti Smith discography piece. It was filmed on and off for about a decade after Smith's return to music in 1996. It's in black and white, and very early on Smith riffs about Dylan's Don't Look Back and how they should reenact some scenes from it, which is entertaining.
Friday, September 25, 2026
This week on Spin, I ranked Patti Smith's albums, and wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Green Day's "Church on Sunday."
TV Diary
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
a) "Youth"
There's nothing groundbreaking about Sharon Horgan's new HBO show, she plays a divorced woman in her 50s trying to have an active sex life, but the first two episodes were really good, sharp writing, a solid grown up comedy, and Aran Murphy is a standout as her troubled son. Damian Lewis had a really funny scene in the first episode, which became even funnier when I realized in the second episode that he was playing a ridiculous version of himself.
b) "Brothers"
Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey have been friends and frequent co-stars for decades, and at some point they raised the possibility that they might actually be half-brothers -- apparently McConaughey's mother had been intimate with Harrelson's father. And this Apple TV comedy is a scripted, fictionalized version of their friendship and their realization about their possible familial link. It's about as flimsy and low stakes as a streaming series headlined by two movie stars can be, but it's amiable and entertaining, McConaughey gets to poke fun at his own iffy political ambitions, Lisa Gilroy continues her recent run of scene-stealing guest appearances, and Natalie Martinez, playing McConaughey's wife, seems to become more outrageously beautiful with every passing year.
c) "Last Seen"
I've seen a lot of books that take place in other countries get Americanized in adaptations, but this is one rare example of an American novel, The Dispatcher, turned into an Australian series. I've seen Patrick Brammall in comedy as much as drama, I feel like he's a little bland as a dramatic lead, but this show has a reasonably compelling story.
I think this is at least the fourth British miniseries based on Agatha Christie books that I've watched and enjoyed, I should probably just read her books sometime. The source material is obviously modernized, in this iteration, Tommy and Tuppence used to date I guess in college, and they run into each other the night of a murder, and he's a writer and she's a true crime podcast listener, and they decide to investigate together, solve the crime, and become detectives together. Antonia Thomas and Josh Dylan are great and have real chemistry, good show.
e) "Crew Girl"
A nice Canadian YA show on Netflix about a teenage girl who joins the boys' rowing team, pretty charming, I can see why it's already been renewed.
"Snowfall" was a pretty solid show, I felt like they stuck the landing with that last season, but it didn't occur to me that they could tell more stories in the crack era Los Angeles cinematic universe. The first episode was decent, but it's hard to tell fictional stories about the music industry or aspiring musicians, for a lot of reasons, especially when you're putting fictional people/music in a very revered time and place in musical history.
g) "Neagley"
"Reacher" is the kind of show that is so focused on the title character's roaming adventures that it doesn't seem like an obvious launching pad for spinoffs, as popular as it is. But Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) is literally the only character besides Jack Reacher who's been in more than half the episodes of the show, so it makes sense that the spinoff would be about her. The first episode that I watched seemed promising, although it felt like deja vu that it, like the most recent season of "Reacher," opens with a sibling of a law enforcement type person dying of an apparent suicide involving mass transit under suspicious circumstances.
Tommy Davidson's such a talented guy, I always thought he could've had a career like Jamie Foxx's with the skills and the range he has. Varnell Hill is a talk show host character that Davidson played on two episodes of "Martin" 30 years ago, kind of random for him to get a spinoff now. I actually like the parts that are more or less like Davidson hosting a talk show more than the kind of lazy sitcom parts.
I don't know why I keep watching new Ryan Murphy shows thinking maybe this will be a good one and then they just seem even cheaper and more slapdash than usual, he's really the white Tyler Perry. This one feels like a waste of Rebecca Hall and Vicky Krieps, like the way the first episode opened with a flash-forward to a bloody murder instead of building to that climax felt so thirsty and hacky.
A show with Jennifer Connelly and Jimmi Simpson in it can probably count on me watching every episode they ever make. I'm not super into the second season so far, though, I mostly think about how "Counterpart" did this parallel universe thing with a lot more style and I wish it hadn't been canceled.
k) "Golden Axe"
Apparently Golden Axe was a Sega arcade game back in the late '80s, but I have no memory of it from my arcade days. But everything is IP so there's a animated show based on it on Paramount+, and as 'adult animated sitcoms' go, it's actually pretty good, Matthew Rhys and Danny Pudi in the voice cast and the writing made me laugh a little.
l) "Jay-Z in 8"
I wrote a lot about Jay-Z's catalog just this year, in addition to following all the excitement of his return to performing this year, but this docuseries of Jay just listening to songs from his catalog with Rick Rubin is just a treasure trove for Jay-Z fans, I'm enjoying it so much. Rubin gets a lot of (somewhat deserved) skepticism these days for his politics and his working methods as a producer, but the series that he did in this style with Paul McCartney a few years ago "McCartney 3, 2, 1" was really enjoyable and this one is even better. Just a lot of interesting jewels for fans, like that "Encore" was almost The Black Album's lead single but Kevin Liles and Young Guru were unenthusiastic so he went with "Change Clothes," or how Biggie's last line on "Brooklyn's Finest" was "most hated in California" but Jay took it off trying to stay out of the east coast/west coast stuff.
We're now getting true crime shows about true crime buffs becoming obsessed with cold cases and trying to overturn verdicts. In this case, a couple was convinced that a woman convicted of killing her ex-husband was actually innocent, but when her case was retried, she wound up evicted again. I actually feel bad for the documentarians who made this not knowing how it would end and probably thinking it would be a more exciting ending with the true crime nerds vindicated.
A decent nature docuseries on Disney+, but it's just funny to think of species like lions or pandas as "iconic," such a funny lens.
o) "The Girls"
Khloe Kardashian exec produced this "Keeping Up with the Kardashians"-style reality show about Kardashian-adjacent influencer ladies, it's kind of hilarious that they have a B-team.
I used to watch "The People's Court" in the Judge Wapner era as a kid because I liked the theme music, but the modern proliferation of courtroom shows is really a plague upon daytime TV, I loathe them. I kept catching this one while channel surfing recently and I'm just fascinated by how stupid it is to have a war tribunal-style trial with three judges for the usual landlord disputes and small theft claims.
Maybe I was a fool for thinking Kevin Hart interviewing athletes while they both sit in an ice bath wouldn't be a gratingly obnoxious show, but his "Hart to Heart" interviews could be good sometimes. These were all taped in front of a live audience during Fanatics Fest in July, so there's just a lot of Hart yelling and working the crowd and each episode is only 10-15 minutes, it's just a pretty annoying little piece of content.
r) "Soar High!"
"Soar High!" is a Korean drama with 15-minute episodes, which is a context where that can be kind of refreshing, since sometimes Korean shows I see on Netflix can have really long feature-length episodes. But they also made over 120 episodes of this in just six months, which seems kind of crazy, but it's called a "morning drama series" so maybe teenagers watched it before school? Decent show about gender disparity in aviation.
Another show with very short episodes, a Mexican thriller, which made for an interesting format, but I didn't really get into it.
This K-drama's title sounds vaguely kinky but it's a 50 First Dates-type premise with a woman suffering from memory loss and using sticky notes to remind herself of things. I kind of wish it was just a straightforward romcom without a whole crime drama element, though.
u) "Moria"
Moria Casan is apparently a big pop culture icon of Argentina, both an insult comic and a sex symbol, I'm not sure we really have a figure like that here. I enjoyed the show, Sofia Gala Castiglione is gorgeous.
A Thai romcom on Netflix about a teenager who aspires to be an indie rock star, which is just kind of an amusing premise to me.
This Indian series is one of the best imports I've seen on Netflix recently, well written dialogue and engaging characters.
A Korean horror comedy about a hotel heiress who can see ghosts, pretty cute show.
A very dour Japanese drama, didn't really stick with it long enough to see what the point of it all was.
A French action show about a tactical police unit, didn't care for it, pretty low production values.
Friday, September 18, 2026
This week I wrote about 4,000 words about every Stevie Wonder album for Spin, and I wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Soundgarden's "Head Down."
Movie Diary
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
a) Is God Is
Playwright Aleshea Harris made the jump to directing features because she didn't want to take chances with letting someone else adapt her play Is God Is. And I'm glad she did, it's so darkly funny and original and violent, great performances from Kara Young and Mallori Johnson and Sterling K. Brown, not for everyone but nonetheless highly recommended.
Jim Rash won an Oscar for the screenplay for The Descendants, and his work as Dean Pelton on "Community" is one of the funniest sitcom performances of the last couple decades, but I don't know if people really appreciate how talented Rash is. Miss You, Love You, Rash's first solo effort as a writer/director after previous collaborations with Nat Faxon, essentially has three principle characters, but only two of them are actually in the movie. Diane (Allison Janney) is mourning her second husband, Tyler (offscreen) is her son from her first marriage who's too busy with work to come see her (he's some kind of famous important journalist who's also gay, so I pictured Anderson Cooper), and Jamie (Andrew Rannells) is Tyler's assistant Jamie who comes and helps Diane plan the funeral. And the whole thing is really compelling for a movie that's almost entirely two people talking, slowly unveiling all these emotional fault lines.
Being trapped or confined is a pretty elemental horror trope, but so many 2020s horror movies about people being stuck in their houses have, whether intentionally or accidentally, felt like COVID lockdown allegories. So I kind of rolled my eyes when I started watching The Last House, a movie where suddenly every door in the world is mysteriously sealed shut and nobody can get out of their house. The premise takes a pretty big turn in the second half, and it appears from the reviews that pretty much everyone hated it, but I found it a relief that it wasn't entirely what I expected. Greta Lee and Wagner Moura are definitely way overqualified to lead a movie like this, though.
d) Immaculate
I think Sydney Sweeney could probably be a good scream queen, given that her best performances in "Euphoria" usually involved her character responding social or romantic situations with mortal terror. I didn't think much of Immaculate, though, just kind of a loud, clumsy movie without much atmosphere or tension. Director Michael Mohan made a decent Lizzy Caplan/Alison Brie dramedy Save the Date over a decade ago, I don't think he really has a feel for horror.
There are some wonderfully disturbing supporting performances in The Whisper Man by Hamish Linklater, Michael Keaton, and Owen Teague. But I don't feel like the stars, Robert De Niro and Adam Scott, were given a whole lot to work with in their roles, a lot of it felt like a third generation Silence of the Lambs knockoff.
Speaking of Silence of the Lambs, a pretty good thriller starring Jodie Foster, although a totally different kind of story.
So much of the promotional rollout for The Devil Wears Prada 2 just centered on the four stars being friends and being excited to work together again, which made it kind of jarring, in a fun way, to put on the movie and be reminded that, oh yeah, these characters are not besties and would not be back in each other's lives under happy, nostalgic conditions. I think there's probably no kind of sequel that's harder to pull off than following up a beloved comedy more than a decade or two later. I thought this was perfectly fine and they came up with a better story than I expected with a few fun moments, but I imagine I'll kind of forget it ever existed as I continue to watch the first movie again and again.
My wife and I watched A Dog's Purpose years and years ago and found it to be a reasonably charming little emotionally manipulative family film. More recently my 11-year-old son watched it as well as the sequel, and I thought it was sweet how much he got wrapped up in the sentimentality of the story. I also got way more interested in the sequel than I expected because Betty Gilpin plays a negligent mother, just casually being one of the best actors of our time even something she's kind of too good for.
i) Drive
While putting together my recent lists of 2010 and 2011 movies, I caught up on some stuff from that era that I missed at the time, and this is kind of a big canonical one I felt like I had to finally see. I'm a lot less skeptical of Ryan Gosling now than I was when this came out, he's done some really good work. I didn't really think he had the right screen presence for a character with no name who says few words, though, and the direction and music that people found so incredibly stylish and fresh at the time already seems a little stale and dated to me, or maybe that's just because it was influential? In any case, it was better than I thought it would be, even if it didn't totally in me over, if that makes sense.
j) Margaret
Margaret came out in 2011, but it was actually filmed in 2005 and underwent a whole protracted battle over Kenneth Lonergan getting a final cut he was happy with and getting the studio to release it. That results in a funny moment where Anna Paquin, playing a high school student, makes a derogatory reference to "the current president" in a scene that was filmed during the George W. Bush administration and released during the Barack Obama administration. Pretty great ensemble cast, including Kieran Culkin and J. Smith-Cameron years before "Succession," some very memorable scenes, but I don't know, a very strange premise in some ways and I don't know if Lonergan captured what he was going for after all that time.
k) Rabbit Hole
Rabbit Hole, like Margaret, is a movie about grief where the story is set in motion by a tragic auto accident. This was Miles Teller's first film role, in his early twenties playing a teenager, and I actually didn't even recognize him when he first showed up onscreen, I was like "Who is that guy? He looks familiar."
l) Weekend
A pretty moving little slice-of-life British film about two guys who hook up and spend the weekend together right before one of them is about to move out of the country.
m) Warrior
I think it's funny that I unintentionally watched movies called Weekend and Warrior on consecutive nights. Tom Hardy playing an MMA fighter? Sure, I can buy it. Joel Edgerton also playing an MMA fighter? Not so much.
n) The Fighter
I was happy when Melissa Leo from "Homicide: Life on the Street" won an Oscar for The Fighter, but in retrospect it doesn't really feel like it had much impact on her career or the quality of roles she's gotten since then. Okay movie, Leo and Christian Bale definitely earned their Oscars, but it definitely seems like the moment when David O. Russell went from being a unique filmmaker whose work was unlike anyone else's to a guy who more often than not just directs whatever a studio wants him to direct.
o) The Artist
Another movie that feels like a semi-forgotten relic of awards season hype. Do you remember that a French black-and-white silent film won Best Picture in 2012? I did like it, especially Berenice Bejo's performance, but I kind of wish they hadn't packed recognizable American actors in the supporting cast, every time I felt really immersed in and feeling like I was actually watching a movie made in 1927, John Goodman or James Cromwell would show up and puncture that bubble.
p) Hugo
Another memory holed Oscar movie. Martin Scorsese directed a family-friendly film, shot in 3D, with a 12-year-old boy protagonist living in a Paris train station! It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards! Will this get mentioned in a single obituary when Scorsese dies? Not bad, but definitely kind of an odd little outlier in his filmography.
q) Tron: Legacy
Going through the three Tron movies this year because I've never really watched them, I liked this more than I expected, just visually they managed to modernize the original's aesthetic while still looking really cool.
r) Somewhere
When I was looking for 2010 films to watch, I learned that Sofia Coppola directed a movie I'd never heard of in the seven years between Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring. Stephen Dorff plays a movie star, but one ten times more famous than Dorff ever was, living a sort of debauched, drunken, promiscuous life while his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) stays with him. I don't think this movie was as deep or as funny as it thought it was and probably would've been a lot better with DiCaprio, who apparently considered the role, but it's probably for the best that he didn't waste his time with it.
A pretty good Kelly Reichardt movie about survival and death on the Oregon Trail.
t) Secretariat
A biopic of a famous animal, told through the lens of the humans who owned, trained and rode him is a weird idea, when you think about it. I enjoyed it, though, Diane Lane and John Malkovich's performances really make it watchable, and after I wrote about horse racing for the first time this year, it was an interesting window into that world.
u) Super 8
As one of the few non-franchise J.J. Abrams movies, I was curious to see this, but it really didn't add up to much, and he really is fucking ridiculous with that lens flare.
v) Tamara Drewe
One thing I like about early 2010s movies is that Gemma Arterton was in a lot of them. Very odd movie, though, like it starts out feeling like this very straightforward thing about a woman moving returning to her hometown, and then the plot takes so many weird and often very stupid turns.
w) Curly Sue
This was the one John Hughes movie I had never really seen at all before when I ranked Hughes movies a few weeks ago, and I don't think anyone had any problem with me putting it in last place.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
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John Mayer's Continuum was released 20 years ago today, and I wrote about it for Publik / Private Small Press.
Friday, September 11, 2026
This week on Spin I ranked the 25 greatest rock bassists of all time. I also wrote about New Order's "Sunrise" for my Deep Cut Friday column.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
My first piece for Live For Live Music is a ranking of the 25 best solo albums and side projects by the members of the Rolling Stones.
TV Diary
Wednesday, September 09, 2026 
a) "Lanterns"
I know even less about the Green Lantern than I do about other comic book heroes, but I like the HBO series so far, easily the best performance of Kyle Chandler's career and also a great use of Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, Garrett Dillahunt, and Poorna Jagannathan. I definitely enjoy the snappy scenes with those core characters more than the flashbacks and the comic book lore stuff, but it all hangs together really well, excited to see where the story's going.
I haven't read the 1901 Australian novel My Brilliant Career or seen the 1979 film adaptation, but I really enjoyed the Netflix miniseries, Philippa Northeast is so charming and Sybylla is such an entertaining character. It's one of those shows that looks fairly historically accurate but the dialogue sounds fairly modern, every time they dance to music the band is covering pop songs that were written a hundred years later, color-blind casting, etc. So I have no idea how faithful the show is to the spirit of the source material beyond the obvious changes, but I liked it.
Another classic novel I haven't read, although I feel like I at least started this one at some point in grade school. MGM+ really seems like the dregs of the streaming services, I'm only signed up for it right now because they have one of my favorite shows of 2026 so far, "American Classic." But I'm trying to check out more of their other stuff and the first episode of these seems reasonably promising, Mirren Mack is beautiful but the more I see Kit Harington in stuff the less convinced I am that he can act at all.
Hugo Weaving is great in this Australian series that recently hit Netflix in the U.S. about the staff of an airport who deal with the daily crises and issues of people getting on and off the planes. It feels pretty true to life and gradually gives you these moments where you learn more about the lives of the characters, kind of like "The Pitt," which is funny because one of the stars is Shabana Azeez, who plays Dr. Javadi on "The Pitt," and I guess I'd probably read at some point that she's Australian but it was kind of jarring to hear her real accent in this.
e) "Adults"
When "Adults" debuted on FX a year ago, the most I could say for sure was that it was at least slightly better than "Overcompensated," the Amazon comedy that it was frequently compared to and shared one cast member with. But by the time I finished watching that first season over the summer, it had really grown on me. I think the writing is slightly better than the cast or the direction lets on, but the cast is at least likeable enough to pull it off, and Amita Rao has killer comic timing, she's stolen a lot of scenes this season.
f) "The Paper"
"The Paper" is another one that grew on me over the course of its first season to the point that I was anticipating the new one. I don't think anybody really wanted a tenuously connected spinoff of "The Office," least of all me, but the cast is really good, Sabrina Impacciatore and Alex Edelman steal a lot of scenes. And I actually find the Ned/Mare romance plot to be reasonably charming and compelling, as tired as I am of will-they-or-won't-they office romance storylines, they just have good chemistry and I like the way they bond over both being workaholics.
I really dislike the Chad Powers parts of "Chad Powers," where Glen Powell puts on some hideous facial prosthetics and looks and sounds like a live action version of Mr. Van Driessen from "Beavis & Butt-Head." As the show has gone into the second season, it's subjected me to Chad a little less, and I've enjoyed the parts with a normal-faced Powell doing scenes with Steve Zahn and Perry Mattfeld. But the title and premise are what they are and a certain amount of the show is always going to irritate the shit out of me as long as I watch it.
h) "Reacher"
I don't know if it's just perception of the show or an actual change in production values but "Reacher" feels a little more "Walker, Texas Ranger" now than the first couple seasons did. And I know there are a whole lot of books in the series, but the longer you watch this guy hop from one place to another getting into trouble and killing a shitload of bad guys, the more absurd it all feels -- in this season he ends up on the news and is basically famous, which feels like a genie you can't really put back in the bottle, but they'll just ignore it in the future anyway. And anyway it's still fun to watch Alan Ritchson beat the crap out of everybody and eventually spend a night in a hotel room with a hottie in peril who throws themselves at him -- in this case played by Agnez Mo, apparently an international pop star who's the Rihanna or Indonesia or something, who turns out to be the villain of the story.
Glad this is back, episodic TV is a good fit for Guy Ritchie and he has a great cast.
j) "SCTV"
"SCTV" is canon for comedy buffs who were born in the '60s and/or in Canada, but for the rest of us it's been this elusive thing you see in occasional late night reruns or YouTube rips of old sketches of these hilarious early career highlights of Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, John Candy, Martin Short, and so on. So it was pretty exciting to see a good chunk of episodes of "SCTV" hit Netflix for the first time last week, especially just a few months after O'Hara's death. I think sketch comedy is on its best day a hit-or-miss medium and not everything is going to hold up well, in terms of references or taste, after 4 or 5 decades, but there's some really funny stuff in there, one of my favorite sketches is the Half Wits game show, just some good hardcore silliness.
k) "Dang!"
As sick as I am of the whole 'adult animated sitcom' genre, I will concede that this new one on Netflix starring Stephanie Hsu and Poppy Liu has pretty sharp writing, I enjoyed the first episode. Not as good as "Strip Law," which Netflix already canceled, but hopefully they won't cancel this one too.
I'm not sure but I think it's pretty likely that both of my kids have watched all 283 episodes of "Adventure Time" at least once. And one of them just devoured this decent little collection of prequel episodes and started watching the series all over again. "Adventure Time" took quite a while to grow on me but I appreciate its endless well of surreal, kid-friendly absurdity a bit now.
There's a line on the 1995 Geraldine Fibbers song "Dusted" about "reading Banana Fish" that I always kind of assumed was referencing an obscure west coast zine or something, but apparently it was a seminal manga of the '80s and '90s that was adapted into an anime in 2018. And I like it, it's kind of a gritty crime drama with some surreal sci-fi-ish elements, good dialogue and storytelling.
This Mexican series on Netflix has a good premise that grabs you right away -- a young woman needs a kidney transplant, and her dad is willing to be her donor, but that's how she finds out that he's not her biological father and her mother's been hiding a secret for decades. I haven't kept up with it, but the first episode was pretty good.
o) "Happiness"
Lately my wife has been in the habit of binge watching anime and K-dramas on her tablet, and sometimes I gently remind her that we have a TV and I like a lot of the same stuff so we could just watch some of these shows together on the big screen. I've watched a lot of Korean shows on Netflix but someone I missed this one from a few years ago, it's about a zombie breakout but it's fairly character driven with sharp dialogue, I'm enjoying it so far.
"Take A Hike!" is a reality show where four South Korean celebrities go hiking in the mountains. I'm not really familiar with any of the people in the cast (although one of them is a singer named, I shit you not, 'Car, the Garden'), but obviously we've had lots of shows like this in America, it's moderately entertaining whether or not you know who the people are.
In this Brazilian reality show, mothers compete for who knows their children best by attempting to predict their choices in different situations. Cute idea, nothing I need to see more than once but I feel like this is a format you could do in America and other countries successfully.
This is one of the new America's Test Kitchen shows on Netflix, Bryan Roof just goes around the country and checks out different restaurants and talks to chefs, kind of boilerplate Food Network-type stuff but I love seeing, like, Louisiana barbecue places where the food looks incredible.
Netflix has gone all-in on "video podcasts," which kind of irritates me as a concept. But there's not that much difference between a cooking show and a cooking video podcast in practice, and Meredith Hayden is a good host.
Alix Earle is a blonde influencer lady who apparently has beef with another famous blonde influencer lady, Alex Cooper, who is a completely different person who had a different but similarly dull, earnest reality show a few months ago.
u) "Lion"
A nice 4-part National Geographic doc chronicling one lion's life from a cub to the head of a pride. It's kind of funny that Jon Favreau exec produced this just because he directed that one Lion King movie, though, like does his name make any difference to whether someone would watch this?
I don't follow women's basketball closely, or basketball in general really, but it's certainly been interesting to watch women's college hoops and the WNBA make these great strides over the years. And I didn't really know until I watched this Apple TV miniseries just how important UConn and Rebecca Lobo in the mid-'90s were to that trajectory, really interesting and engaging doc.
College football is even less in my range of interests and this show just wound up being background noise.
I have vague memories of reports that O.J. Simpson was making a TV prank show 20 years ago and being appalled by the concept like most people. But I probably forgot about it for the last 19 years, until this docuseries featuring footage and interviews with people who worked on it or were ambushed with unexpectedly meeting O.J. Simpson on the show, which was apparently supposed to be funny. Just a snapshot of a completely insane time in pop culture that we lived through.
A really horrifying Netflix doc about a pastor who people think killed his wife, just every single detail of the story makes the whole thing worse and worse, I tapped out after one episode, I'm just not a big true crime person.
I think it's good that Conan only does 3 or 4 episodes of these a year, you don't really need a lot of them, but each one is pretty fun, I feel like he's evolved his comic persona a little by improvising out in the real world with regular people instead of just with celebrities on a talk show set. I particularly enjoyed the episode in the Netherlands.