Television

Pete Davidson and host Rami Malek turned Squid Game into a country-pop ditty on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live. The duo play a pair of down-on-their-luck country boys who, faced with mounting debt, opt to join the hit Netflix series, where they play life-or-death versions of Red Light, Green Light and the Dalgona challenge while being overseen by guys “with symbols on their faces like the ones on Playstations and the main guy looks like Dr. Doom,” Davidson sings. “$45 billion won / That’s a whole lot of...

A review of the Succession Season Three premiere, “Secession,” coming up just as soon as a Pope follows me on Twitter… Midway through “Secession,” Kendall’s girlfriend Naomi Pierce jokes on the phone that he may be the best man in the world. Kendall laughs, then adds, an expression on his face making it clear that he is not entirely joking, “But what if I am?” He is high on his own supply, metaphorically for sure and likely in a literal sense as well. Though it’s possible he’s using drugs from...

Saturday Night Live tackled the email scandal involving now-former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden — as well as the NFL’s lingering issues with race — during its latest cold open. The sketch began with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (Colin Jost) addressing the media at a press conference. “One of our coaches is accused of racism, misogyny and homophobia, but hey, at least nobody’s talking about concussions,” Jost’s Goodell said. “I think we can all agree the emails sent by Raiders coach Jon Gruden were horrifying and deeply offensive, especially...

The DC FanDome event shared the first trailer for the upcoming HBO Max series Peacemaker, a spinoff of The Suicide Squad starring John Cena’s titular ultra-patriotic superhero. Written and largely directed by James Gunn, the new series finds Cena’s Peacemaker seeking redemption after he becoming the straight-up villain (and surviving a near-lethal gunshot) in The Suicide Squad. He tasked soon tasked with joining an elite team of assassins who only kill “bad people… usually, unless there’s a mistake” The first teaser plays up Peacemaker’s comedic tone, including Cena’s character joyriding...

Netflix has fired an employee who was a leader in the trans employee resource group and was helping to organize an upcoming walkout in protest of Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, The Verge reports. The employee is Black and pregnant and did not wish to be named for fear of online retribution or harassment. The employee was reportedly fired because they were suspected of sharing internal metrics about The Closer — including how much Netflix paid for the special and its viewership numbers — to the press (that information appeared in...

Products featured are independently selected by our editorial team and we may earn a commission from purchases made from our links; the retailer may also receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. After Kendall Roy didn’t deliver the kind of press conference his father Logan orchestrated in Succession’s season finale, the drama seems to just be getting started all over again for the Roy family (and the family business, Waystar Royco). Review: Succession Season 3 Is a F**king Killer “I dropped a bomb,” Kendall, who’s played by Jeremy Strong, says...

Comedian Hannah Gadsby slammed Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos over the streaming service’s response to the controversy regarding the Dave Chappelle special The Closer. In a leaked Netflix memo defending Chappelle’s special — which has drawn criticism both from subscribers and Netflix’s own transgender employees — Sarandos cited LGBTQ-friendly titles like Orange Is the New Black, Sex Education, and Gadsby’s comedy specials Nanette and Douglas as evidence that the streaming service is “working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story.” After being referenced in the memo, Gadsby...

Note: Spoilers ahead. Not that long into the first episode of Amazon’s new take on the teen classic I Know What You Did Last Summer, we see a dick. Said dick belongs to a teenage boy peeing in a pool at a raucous party. And that pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the series, which is rife with ketamine use, full-frontal nudity, Lil Xan, and increasingly creative ways for beautiful high-schoolers to meet their maker.  If Lois Duncan was “appalled” when her 1973 young adult novel was...

This post contains some spoilers for the first season of Squid Game, available now on Netflix. Red light, green light. Tug of war. Marbles. These are, as Seong Gi-hun and the other main characters of Netflix’s South Korean drama series Squid Game will repeatedly observe, games designed for children. Eventually, the mastermind of a brutal contest — in which 456 people in dire financial straits will risk their lives for a huge cash prize — will explain that as his adult life became devoid of joy, he hearkened back to...

Transgender employees and others at Netflix are planning a walkout next in protest of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special, The Closer, which contains jokes at the expense of trans people and LGBTQ people. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the walkout, dubbed a “day of rest,” was organized by the Trans* employee resource group. Employees do not seem interested in pressuring Netflix to remove The Closer, but rather pushing the streaming giant to acknowledge the detrimental effect material like Chappelle’s can have on the LGBTQ community. They also want to push Netflix to...

Even a North Korean state website is jumping on the Squid Game bandwagon: On Tuesday, October 12th, the website Arirang Meari shared a piece about the hit South Korean series, praising it for its critiques of capitalism and the “beastly” nature of South Korean society.  The author-less post reads less like a review than an account of what’s made the show so popular (Netflix recently tweeted it’s the most-watched series in its history with 111 million viewers). And indeed, the worldwide success of Squid Game — about debt-ridden contestants competing...

In the new trailer for the peculiar Apple TV+ series The Shrink Next Door, Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd set the stage for an unconventional (read: unprofessional) patient and psychiatrist relationship. With Rudd as the overbearing Dr. Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf and Ferrell as the impressionable Martin “Marty” Markowitz, the duo retell the true story of an exploitative professional bond first highlighted in a 2019 Wondery podcast. “The first thing I’m going to do is completely unethical,” Herschkopf tells Markowitz in the trailer. “I’m going to hug you. I’m a hugger.” From the...