Tony- and Emmy-winner Patinkin comes to the series after eight seasons of another political drama, Showtime’s Homeland. According a release, Patinkin will play “a layman with no legal training who spontaneously decides to open a court in the back of a copy shop” named Hal Wackner. Because what else is a stage icon to do with Broadway closed? Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

As if there weren’t already enough Broadway mainstays in The Good Fight, Mandy Patinkin will join the series for its fifth season. Related

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Tags: His joining The Good Fight coincides with its move to Paramount+ after four seasons on CBS All Access. “We are the biggest fans of Mandy’s stage, screen, and now YouTube work, so we couldn’t be more excited for him to play Wackner,” showrunners Robert and Michelle King said in a statement. “We only worry that he’ll have less time to do his fantastic work on YouTube.” That’s one judgment we can recognize.

We’d take a falling-in-love montage as they sprint through the streets of New York City any day. Some real pitches include Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Russell Tovey, and Jonathan Groff, though in a dream world, it would be Elena. The Universal film is to be directed by Neighbors’ Nick Stoller and produced by Eichner himself and, of course, Apatow in an extension of his prior work with romantic comedies like The Big Sick and Trainwreck. As first reported in 2019, the movie will focus on two gay men who struggle with commitment issues but try to have a relationship. Related

Billy Eichner Is Trying to Talk to You

Tags: Photo: Rachel Murray/Getty Images for MAKERS

In the latest addition to the JACU (the Judd Apatow Cinematic Universe), Billy Eichner’s new romantic comedy, Bros, will premiere on August 12, 2022, Variety reported today. Eichner’s co-star has not yet been announced, but we have a lot of theories.

“I was thinking, God, that’s a good idea. Good joke. He’s a goof! But depending on your level of familiarity with the Marvel Universe and/or your willingness to read a lot of niche comic-book websites, you might not have been aware of the maelstrom of speculation that Bettany’s few lines in that interview, which took place on a Lights Camera Barstool podcast, set in motion among die-hards. Who doesn’t admire Al Pacino? Also, I refuse to believe that Bettany didn’t think that people would latch onto that suggestion and run wild with it, but I also support his decision to be a troll. Tags: Paul Bettany has been in Marvel movies ever since he was just the disembodied voice of JARVIS in Iron Man, and so Paul Bettany has earned the right to have fun with the whole media circus that accompanies the Marvel Universe at this point. Paul Bettany, teach all the other Marvel stars your ways. Bettany, in a battle of floating, hyperarticulate robot punches and wits. Foremost among the theories: The idea that WandaVision might reveal another villain who was behind Agatha all along, someone from Marvel’s rogue’s gallery like Mephisto or Nightmare, played by the likes of Al Pacino. That’s what a not-insignificant number of Marvel fans expected would happen, all based on Bettany saying in an interview that he got to work with “this actor that I’ve always wanted to work with, and we have fireworks together.” As it turned out: That actor was him, Paul Bettany, playing White Vision. Photo: Marvel Studios

What is there to say about Paul Bettany? Another connected, though separate, theory involved John Krasinski potentially showing up as the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richard, though that was more built around connections to The Office than the idea Bettany had long wanted to act across from Jim himself. Will there be a big appearance by someone special in the finale of #WandaVision? He really loves Paul Bettany. I have no idea if he’ll stick around given the [events of the WandaVision finale redacted], but either way, I’m glad he’s having fun with all this. Sure! They’re gonna be so disappointed when they find out it’s me.” Since the interview took place the day before the finale aired, Bettany had to do the standard Marvel thing of pretending he might not even be telling the truth then and acting like his camera had frozen when asked directly if there is a big appearance from someone new on the show. “You know when you think something’s going to be funny, and then you say it, and then you actually panic about it?”

“They were guessing people like Benedict Cumberbatch or Patrick Stewart,” he continued. @Paul_Bettany would love to answer but he's too busy pretending to have technical difficulties. Now, surely there are a few people who are frustrated that Paul Bettany didn’t face off against Al Pacino and/or Benedict Cumberbatch and/or Patrick Stewart and/or John Krasinski as Jim from The Office as Reed Richards in the WandaVision finale. In the second to last episode of WandaVision, we got introduced to a new white copy of Bettany’s robot hero Vision. In the show’s finale — I won’t spoil the details of it here; we have a recap for that — the two of them got to face off, Bettany vs. What might’ve been most surprising about that moment for some, however, is the fact that Vision didn’t face off with another character played by another famous actor. People ran with the idea, compiling lists of actors Bettany might admire who Vision might meet. 🤖 https://t.co/i9rZzYvW4s@wandavision@disneyplus pic.twitter.com/GDg979zFgS— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 4, 2021

As things eventually got out of hand, Bettany had to come forward and confront the results of his little tease on Good Morning America. “Yeah … ” he admitted to the furious people of America on national TV, as though he were a brunette Reese Witherspoon fessing up to a DUI. I love it. Let rumor chaos reign! But you have to admit that referring to yourself as “this actor that I’ve always wanted to work with” is a pretty funny line. We have been trolled.

I’m not gaslighting anyone. I’m like a news source for younger kids so they can understand what’s going on with their favorite public figures. B: I wouldn’t mind being famous. Sister Spill: I was bored one weekend at home. I definitely tried to make YouTube videos in the past — that are long gone from YouTube — with me in them, but this was the thing that took. So what’s the future going to be like? But then I was like, I also watch tea channels, and at that time, there were only a couple of them. Like, if someone does something that people find really offensive, I would hope that other people don’t go and also do that. And what are some of the challenges the tea community as a whole is facing right now? Especially when you’re talking about brands, when you’re talking about people, it becomes personal. It’s just this innocent thing on Twitter, but then it turned into something very serious. It was a mess, but this is definitely something that happened and things that can happen. I was terrified … You never know where a doxx is going to go, and that’s why it’s dangerous … Like, I don’t really don’t care as I don’t have anything to hide, but I want to protect my information, my family and everything, as much as I can — like anybody would. And I just feel like now, if you’re going to be on the internet, you have to just expect that you’re going to be doxxed at some point. I hope that they would see the video and be like, “Oh my gosh, like, maybe I shouldn’t be doing those things either.”

Sister: There are “good” drama communities that try to avoid judging influencers and don’t allow hate on their platforms. Sesh: Things are really unpredictable: The rules and changes that YouTube makes all the time are really kind of scary. HFTT: We live in a world where stan culture exists, and it’s scary. Right, that makes sense. Little things like this can really lower our credibility, so I think people are right in criticizing tea channels. I started [watching them] and I was thinking, This has a lot of potential, because it was the first kind of videos [popping up in the tea] category … So I started [making my own], and the first video I remember doing was NikkieTutorials annoying Kim Kardashian for three minutes, and it blew up overnight. I want to talk about beauty, but I don’t want to be the focus. You had interaction, you had the love of the fans, but you didn’t get involved in the drama. It’s so weird. And I was getting that type of fame, but through anonymity. Spill Sesh: A lot of the people that I talk about, I’ve just been watching in my free time — except for beauty videos like Jeffree Star. It puts a barrier with my followers and my personal life and what I do. Beef: I was browsing YouTube at one point, and I saw a channel that made [tea] videos. With the threat of demonetization hanging over your head, how do you avoid copyright issues? I woke up and I had, like, thousands of views, and I was like, What is happening? B: I’ve been getting a lot of messages saying, “Oh my God, this is so toxic” … But it’s like, making a story, you know? Sometimes people just hear us say what they did and think we’re trying to hate on them or give them hate. I’m just telling a story to a lot of people, to 500 to 500,000 people. And then I just decided to make a video, right then and there. Yes, I’ve made poor decisions and fucked up and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I’m using my platform maliciously. HFTT: You want to show examples, you want to show receipts, you want to show clips. They’re horrible.” I really try not to use those superstrong words, because I do think that at the end of the day, everyone is human. But we all reuse content. And I think in my videos, I try to say, “I wish they did this,” or “I wish they would do this,” and “I wish they would say this,” and not so much be like, “They’re awful. So I don’t know if that’s a bad thing that I was just gossiping. So this was kind of perfect for me. I took a break obviously for personal reasons, and because of the doxxing. Sesh: I do think it’s important to let people change and make space for them to respond, and I think that’s sometimes lost. But you do it because you love it, and I’m not going to live my life in fear and stop doing what I love to do. I’m not making fake videos with fake drama in order to make YouTubers or celebrities beef with each other. I still have so much fun with what I do. I’m not saying lies. Have you ever kind of secretly wished that you could capitalize on the popularity of your channel and become a well-known internet personality yourself? HFTT: That was a big thing, when YouTube started demonetizing like meme channels, because that was mostly reused content. B: I started out of fun. Sesh: I saw Tea Spill doing it, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I don’t even have to be in these videos. And if I do, I try to put them on a graphic or make it look different somehow. It has been a really great thing though, because it’s like a part-time job for me and I’ve been able to afford a new laptop to edit on and even buy myself a car. I think consumers have a right to know. But also I love it. HFTT: I always wanted my channel to kind of be that Gossip Girl vibe. Absolutely not. But in a world where hypervisibility and shameless self-promotion are king, who are the people behind the avatar-fronted accounts endeavoring to hold these influencers accountable — and how do they think about their anonymity? But I think I’m just trying to get across what happened, and I also hope that other people don’t follow their footsteps. Sister: I think there are definitely tea channels who deserve this criticism. After all, you kind of always have to use someone else’s content, because anonymous accounts can’t easily do things like record a talking-head segment. And I always wanted my receipts to speak for themselves. HFTT: YouTube could shut down tomorrow, and there goes your whole YouTube channel that you’ve worked on for ten years with millions of subscribers, and there goes your income, and that’s it. And then money started to come, and the interactions between the people and the followers, and all that it was very exciting. They pair these with misleading titles, claiming that people are dating, etc., even though it’s nowhere near true. And also, it’s very fascinating from a viewer’s perspective … to not know who is on the other side that makes the videos. Sesh: I do have moments where I’m like, Oh my gosh, I wish that I could be on camera, and I know that [for] a lot of other people that are on camera, you get more brand deals, and your Instagram could be another source of income. But I think YouTube is really cracking down on that. So I really just stuck to making sure that most of my content is just screenshots and not really showing a lot of other people’s videos. I see a lot of category change, because a lot [of accounts are moving] from drama to memes … But Instagram doesn’t have these issues. I try to make them have cute graphics, and I just put a lot of effort towards them. Like, Nick and Dustin just bought a car together, and people were trying to contact the dealership to find out if they had bought the car or they were just leasing it. Like, I’ve gone against Jeffree Star for years. My understanding is that [copyright claims are] automated, and there are channels that go down [or] are demonetized out of nowhere for no reason. Speaking of keeping your YouTube channels separate from your personal lives, is privacy the main reason you want to remain faceless? Or is there something missing from that narrative? After all, this misinformation spreads and can lead to cyberbullying or rumors, and that can be dangerous. Sesh: Sometimes I debate like, “Oh, I would love to be on camera or whatever.” But then I think about things like that, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I don’t know.” People are so scary sometimes. HFTT: Holding influencers accountable and revealing the truth behind influencer marketing, I don’t think that’s toxic. So aside from trying to manage your audience and report ethically, what’s the most difficult part about running a tea account? The issues were with YouTube, because YouTube would copyright a lot of videos. And I’ve gone against some pretty big [people]. But that’s why it’s dangerous. You know, I wasn’t monetized. I’m just telling the story and people are hearing my words with their words, and then they come up with a new solution [of] what to do. HFTT: For YouTube drama channels, I think the biggest issue is YouTube and their terms of service and their guidelines … Because they say they’re cracking down on what they consider to be bullying or harassment. Like, that just seems like so much effort. People decide on that themselves. But if they consider drama channels to be bullying or harassment, that’s the end of drama channels. I was just so shaken by it ….But I do it because I still love making videos, and I still love talking about the beauty community. Here For The Tea: I originally wanted to do, like, a beauty channel. Let’s [take] a break and take a step back, and then start again. What made you want to start a tea channel in the first place? I had seen all of this drama between these two girls on Instagram, and I thought I’d make a video about it on a completely new channel [separate from my regular account] for fun. But also, I could see a lot of celebrities — either from me and from other channels — get clout and become even more famous. Sister: People assume that I’m trying to ruin the lives of my subjects, or that I’m trying to publicly “cancel” them, or encourage them to receive hate. It’s quite the opposite. But the whole copyright situation is just really tough, because honestly, anyone could just copyright your video, and it’s really messy. So having this anonymity, it’s only showing my work to the world. HFTT: [When it happened to me], it was horrible. Even at the start, copyright and striking were two main reasons that most of the channels decided to take a step back or even stop doing videos. I honestly never really heard of them before I started getting into drama and stuff. And YouTube will sometimes take your videos down, and they don’t tell you why, they just take it down. You go up against people’s faves, and they protect these people who do not give a fuck about them. It’s way easier. But at the same time, it’s no secret that YouTube commentators like Philip DeFranco are huge, and all of you have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of subscribers. I’m just telling a story and “gossiping.” But instead of doing it in a five-person friend group, I’m doing it [with] 100,000 people. It’s not like it’s always a possibility, and maybe it doesn’t happen to somebody as bad as what happened to me, but I have a lot of friends that do run tea accounts and stuff like that, and most of them have been doxxed. I think I just keep trying to make my content new — like adding a new intro, a new song, new graphics every now and again — to make it seem fresh. I won’t name any specifically, but there are some who deliberately create dramatic thumbnails with entirely false or Photoshopped information in them. Do you feel like that’s a fair assessment? B: Unfortunately, I had to delete [most of my videos] … I privated all my videos, because I decided I wanted to do a fresh start … I was trying to think, Do I still want to do that? Because that’s so effed up.”

I think it’s wild that people would doxx a purposely anonymous channel. Sesh: At the end of the day, I really do enjoy making the videos. I need to just do voice-over. I genuinely have always loved making videos and being creative in this way. More From This Series

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Does It Actually Matter Who’s Behind an Anonymous Commentary Channel? I initially used a really tacky voice filter in my first few videos in order to mask how I sounded, but I eventually stopped, because I knew there would be little to no chance that anyone would uncover me solely through my voice. So I had to take the video down, because of them. The community can be toxic, and yeah, I’ve definitely had my share of my moments, but there’s no rule book that comes with this job, so you do have to navigate things on your own. Sesh: I think about it all the time, because I’m just like, Okay, well, this is like my job now. Inside YouTube’s Drama Economy

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Here For The Tea, Spill Sesh, Sister Spill, and Beef (formerly BeefTube) on the many challenges and peculiarities facing channels who remain faceless. Where it was just somebody telling the story, but you didn’t know who it was. Even if I was this cookie-cutter YouTuber that had nothing wrong with them, and I had all these followers, someone would still find something to say about my face, about my voice, about everything. So I try to give advice in a way, while still really being honest about what’s going on, what people are saying, what they’ve done, and how upset some people are. And have there been any close calls when it comes to protecting your identity? I would just be paranoid all the time that someone was going to come and get me. I reuse content, but I guess it just depends where it falls in terms of like fair use, or on a scale of whether it’s transformative. And I mean, it’s my job now, so that’s really a big reason why I’m still doing it. So I decided, You know what, I’m going to try and make my own video … and it took off from there. And also a big reason was I was getting [a lot of copyright claims] … So I was thinking, Let’s not lose my channel. B: I would say copyright. I try to be one of those channels, but I can’t say the same for a lot of others. Because I could be anyone I wanted without people judging or anything. Sister: I never made a video with my only intention being to make money. In general, though, making videos is my passion and I’d love to get into the film industry when I’m older, so this is like a dream job for me. Sesh: I’m friends with a lot of drama channels — I talk to Tea Spill, Angelika Oles, Dustin Dailey, Nick Snider — and the ones that are on camera, I must applaud them … Just the things that people try to find out about them [is crazy]. I definitely think that there is a morally acceptable way to report on influencers without encouraging things like hate or doxxing. YouTube can decide literally tomorrow to demonetize your channel, and are half of these people going to continue their channels without being monetized? I think I post things for a purpose: to show people who they’re supporting, and the influencers that they’re supporting, and the brands that they support. I would try to use as little of a clip as possible, [because] I’m not out here trying to re-upload people’s content for the sake of it. B: I never wanted to hurt anyone, or make someone be canceled. Because I was on the verge of losing it, and it was kind of scary. Illustration: by Carolyn Figel

If you’re deeply invested in influencer drama, there’s a good chance you’re just as, if not more, invested in the YouTube tea channels that cover their every scandal, feud, or social-media snafu. And then this person was DMing my information to brands, and from there, one brand sent me a cease and desist. I wasn’t getting anything. Sister: I think once I started blowing up, I knew that staying anonymous wasn’t much of a choice, because I didn’t want to risk anyone at my school finding out it was me. But honestly, I really think it’s the safety thing at the end of the day that makes me think that I couldn’t handle that. It was right in the beginning — I didn’t even have like 100,000 subscribers or anything — but someone managed to find my information and sent it around to all these other drama channels being like, “This is who she is.” But I was friends with all of the people that they had sent them to, so they ended up telling me and were like, “Oh, we just deleted it. These interviews were conducted separately and have been edited for length and clarity. I haven’t made a video in a year, but I’m coming back. Initially, I thought, Oh, I wanted to be like a beauty channel, but then I was like, I don’t really want to be a beauty channel. Plus, I think I’ve always preferred the format that drama channels use — with just text, media, and voice-overs to relay information — rather than someone explaining it to a camera. Confessions of a 32-Year-Old Drama Queen

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Tags: That’s not transformative in my opinion. It’s just that. Because at first, she was just doing text videos, so I was doing text, but then I was like, I make a bunch of typos. Sesh: Someone tried to send my information around. HFTT: I mean, I’ve taken a break from videos. So you’re really at the mercy of YouTube all the time. Like, why do you care? So then what went into your initial decision to be anonymous? But I was just watching a video one day, and I saw Tea Spill’s channel, and was like, Wait, I feel like I could do this. I was getting that because I had the followers, I had interaction, it was just not my face being everywhere, which was kind of helping at the same time, because I’m not getting involved in the drama. B: Everyone likes to judge everything and everyone. Not everyone, but a lot of people do. On that note, the biggest argument against tea channels is that they foster a toxic environment online and feed into things like doxxing and cyberbullying. Everyone wants that. B: Me dragging myself into the drama and making videos and doing all of that, I had to be anonymous for legal reasons. Obviously, people make videos because of the money too, so I don’t know. I find meme channels do that a lot, or they’ll put words on the screen or whatever and use five minutes of somebody’s video, but put little captions on the screen. Vulture spoke with four such tea accounts — Here For The Tea, Spill Sesh, Sister Spill, and Beef (formerly BeefTube) — about the many challenges and peculiarities facing channels who remain faceless. Sister: Being a 16-year-old girl, I had dealt with people finding my YouTube channels before, and I figured I’d rather be safe than sorry. I feel like at this point, I’ve been doxxed and everything so I don’t know how it could get worse. But I think it’s important to show that these things do happen on the internet. Plus being anonymous, and no one knowing your real identity was also exciting. Sesh: Last year when all of this stuff was going on with Shane [Dawson], I was watching an interview with Taylor Lorenz, and she was saying it’s accountability culture … That’s what I would like to describe [my channel] as: It’s like seeing influencers do things and wanting them to take accountability and really address things. Which I guess leads me to ask, between these videos being a ton of work, all of the copyright claims, and the potential of being doxxed, why do you keep at it? In the end, it does fall on the shoulders of the tea channel to encourage good behavior, but it’s up to their followers to decide if they want to follow that example. Among this increasingly populated society of one-person outlets that have risen to rival TMZ is a cohort of accounts helmed by completely anonymous creators who reveal only their voices (often distorted) to narrate videos filled with receipts on all the big creators.

Well, Tekashi 6ix9ine tried it. So, on Thursday, the internet-savvy Gen-Z former Barb (just a few more reasons why Tekashi shouldn’t have tried it) went to TikTok to expose how goofy the man is. With his own unreleased single “Call Me By Your Name” (yup!) as the background music for free promo, Lil Nas X pulls up a screenshot of unanswered DMs from 6ix9ine. Cackle like Raven-Symoné at what Twitter had to say below. (@thechuuzus) March 4, 2021

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Tags: “Gonna be in your city soon, what ya doing lol?” he allegedly wrote with an upside-down smiley face emoji and a red heart emoji. lil nas x and 6ix9ine are the two opposite ends of the gay barb spectrum— shawty lynn ミ☆ (@HereComesShawty) March 4, 2021

Lil Nas X exposing 6ix9ine tryna slide into his DMs after he joked about him on insta is proof that the gays will always win— Conor GROVESY (f*ck ian connor) (@YungGrovesy) March 4, 2021

Not Tekashi lookin’ for 6-9 inches 😂— Jackée Harry (@JackeeHarry) March 4, 2021

seeing Lil Nas X expose 6ix9ine sliding into his dms means i have to post this video pic.twitter.com/mONDQDXYxE—. The 24-year-old rapper, a known snitch who famously looks like a toddler’s attempt at a coloring page, shared a homophobic, since-deleted social-media post earlier this week and got deservedly ethered for it by Lil Nas X. 6ix9ine reposted a screenshot of an article headline reading “China Makes COVID-19 Anal Swabs Mandatory for Foreigners” on Instagram and added the caption “Lil Nas X has entered the chat.” Where was the joke? Let him move his bang so he can read that again. The internet piled on because a celebrity this problematic can take a little cyberbullying. this you? pic.twitter.com/GBvc5Rxf8h— nope (@LilNasX) March 4, 2021

“This you?” Nas X captioned it, ending 6ix9ine with those two powerful words. Some interpreted the DM as flirting, others just loved seeing the snitch get caught up. Photo: Amy Sussman/BBMA2020/Getty Images for dcp

How could anyone forget Lil Nas X’s very clear warning: “Can’t nobody tell me nothing” from “Old Town Road”? Mmhmm, that’s what Lil Nas X thought, too. 6ix9ine responded with a video where he shows there are no messages between the two of them, but since you can unsend DMs, most aren’t buying it.

If a series takes advantage of that form (as WandaVision does), the finale does not need to become a referendum on whether the whole thing mattered. Obviously, the sweet and (as WandaVision itself suggests) outmoded form of the sitcom gives way. But Vision and Wanda stand there and Wanda grips Vision’s face the way people onscreen do when things are very intense, and Vision says, “We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason—” … “we’ll say hello again,” Wanda finishes. Endings of TV shows are overrated; the end of the last episode of a show is just one more ending after a whole long string of them. Why look any ending square in the eye when you can kick it down the road a while? (Sitcoms and superhero shows are great examples. In a more hopeful interpretation, though, it’s a promise. For a while, everything could just be fine. They’re accessible, and they’re typically undemanding on an aesthetic or formal level, and sometimes that’s the stuff that really, really hits.)

As an end-of-the-sitcom line (in a very sad sitcom where the TV dad and kids all die at the end and only the TV mom is left standing in the rubble of their beautiful TV home), the goodbye/hello idea is obvious but functional. WandaVision’s ending is annoying, and that line about goodbyes and hellos is especially so. It’s a line that also matches up nicely with what has become the line from the previous episode when Wanda is grieving her brother Pietro’s death and Vision tries to comfort her. It’s not a celebration of Kathryn Hahn’s scene-stealing work with that role. When someone we love dies, we may hope we’ll see them again, and in the meantime, our sadness is the continued evidence of our love for them. Vision will fall apart, and Wanda will be left alone. In the TV world, we know what that means. Within the freedom of sitcom safety, Wanda and Vision could be a happy couple, two people with individual quirks and desires who wanted to have a family and were chastely hot for each other. It’s damnation. Given how bad things still look in the real world of early 2021, it’s honestly more certain that Wanda and Vision will eventually kiss again than it is that any individual one of us will still be alive to see it when it happens. What was once Wanda’s refuge has become an appropriate punishment for the bad guy: Agatha is stuck forever in nosy neighbor mode. Finales do not have to be — should not be — pass/fail final exams. Photo: Marvel Studios

At the end of WandaVision, Wanda and Vision stand together in the world Wanda has lovingly created for them, watching it all collapse. The lovely thing about WandaVision is that it doesn’t have to matter that the ending is a big obvious rubber band looping this show together with all the shows and movies to come. It’s the journey, not the destination! Tags: The audience knows, and the characters know, that the hope of saying hello again only exists in a great, unknown afterlife. But in the Marvel Universe, it’s just painfully boring. The finale is a classic Marvel-style battle on multiple fronts, with Wanda facing down Agatha Harkness, Magical Thinking Vision facing down Airheads Mystery Flavor Vision, and the insistent looming inevitability of the external Marvel world gradually forcing Wanda to shatter her sitcom bubble. The second post-credits sequence gives us Wanda in a remote cabin, studying up on Agatha’s shiny magical book, and the voices of her never-quite-real kids echo in the room. Nothing much had to happen. They were plunked into the safe formulaic confines of classic sitcoms, which meant that although they were stuck in one kind of prison (nothing much can happen because in a sitcom everything’s fine at the end), they were freed from another one. The trouble is that WandaVision has been stitching sitcom structure onto an underlying foundation of Marvel Cinematic Universe content slosh from the jump, and even as Wanda says farewell to the sitcom she has been clinging to, she is being yanked back into the larger Marvel universe fold. They’ve tucked the boys in and said goodbye, and now Wanda and Vision embrace, knowing that one of them is purely a figment of the other’s grief-driven magical thinking. It’s the kind of line that’s meant to be hopeful, and sweetly tragic. Feeling disappointed with an ending does not have to change how you felt about the beginning. Rather than a Marvel movie’s familiar introductory beats — a sequence where we learn how sad a character is, and then a determined growth into the superhero we all recognize — WandaVision’s first episodes took already established characters and just let them breathe for a while. So at the end, when it has all fallen apart and Wanda has to dismantle her magical Vision, those are the two people we’re watching say the line to each other. If the last episode turned the whole show sour for you, the line is a cudgel: like it or not, there’s more on the way. In real life, or even in a fictional world other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s a line that makes you burst into tears. Platitudes are cheap and reductionist, but sometimes it’s the easy, simple stuff that breaks through. At least for now, the full experience of WandaVision’s intimacy and domesticity and playfulness and commitment to actually developing some ding-dang characters for a minute makes that line a promise that’s nice to imagine Marvel keeping for the foreseeable future. This has to be the end, and the episode title makes that plain — it’s called “The Series Finale.” Series, not season. To at least some extent, the line plays that way in WandaVision, too, and that’s a testament to how effective the series has been at dismantling much of Marvel’s typical character-development strategies and rebuilding them around a different genre. Platitudes can sometimes be true! In the context of the MCU, that empty but nice enough goodbye/hello line plays very differently. What can they possibly say to one another? They’re big ideas, bluntly expressed, but they’re fitting for a show about superheroes that’s really a show about death and mourning. They’re a little couplet of grief platitudes, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad. We’re sad for them, because they have this hope that they’ll be able to say hello again, but we know it’s only that: a hope, a desperate, flung-out-into-the-universe hope that somehow — maybe in an existential, first-law-of-thermodynamics way — they will be able to say hello once again. This is a genre where characters who die come back, where Thanos snapping his fingers ultimately means very little, and in the specific context of Wanda and Vision, where all the groundwork is already well-established that, yeah, duh, absolutely, we will be seeing both these characters again. “What is grief, if not love persevering?” he asks her. Westworld Credits Robot Vision is already out there, flying through who-knows-where with his new Ship of Theseus theory of identity. Maybe. The first episode of Falcon and Winter Soldier will arrive on Disney+ in two weeks, and Wanda will be showing up in the next Marvel movie. It’s achingly hopeful in reality and in the sitcom reality simulacrum. Even as Wanda says farewell to the sitcom she’s been clinging to, she’s being yanked back into the larger Marvel universe fold. (Sorry to be a bummer!)

The ending of WandaVision, and that goodbye/hello line in particular, is a punt, a classic Marvel-y way of displacing all our human anxiety about endings onto the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. Its episodic TV form means that there’ve been little endings all along, homey little sitcom-y conclusions that propelled the show forward into next week’s episode, yes, but which also gave Wanda and Vision a chance to sink down into a brief feeling of calm resolution. She cannot sustain this pretense any longer, so her perfect American suburban life with her husband and two kids (and, briefly, a dog) is all dissolving.

After all, her follow-up to Wanda’s line feels important too: “Not if I see you first.”

How can we get Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis back as soon as possible? And maybe it will answer these questions. It would be massive. Wanda may have become the Scarlet Witch and said good-bye to her fabricated husband and sons, but the action of this show is clearly going to have an impact on future MCU projects, likely as soon as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness next year. Teyonah Parris guest stars on a very special episode every now and then! In the mid-credits scene, Monica/Photon has a meeting with someone who reveals herself to be a Skrull and says Monica is needed elsewhere as she points upward. Whenever a Marvel character ends an interaction with “I’ll be seeing you,” it’s a promise that’s typically kept. Agatha feels like too strong a character to leave behind forever, and it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see her as soon as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, would it? All the WandaVision Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed

You’ve Gotta Respect Paul Bettany Having Fun With WandaVision Casting Rumors

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Tags: More WandaVision

So Is WandaVision Getting a Season Two? It sure seems that way. Let’s go down a rabbit hole for a minute: Wanda seems likely to return in the next Doctor Strange movie, those films play with the ideas of multiverses — it’s in the title — and there have been rumors that the next Spider-Man movie will do the same. If Wanda returns in the next Doctor Strange movie, it’s logical to think the new version of Vision will, too, but how much will he resemble the one from this show? Ralph doesn’t know them. Photo: Marvel Studios

WandaVision may have aired a series finale on Disney+ — one literally called “The Series Finale,” no less — but nothing is really final in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Does Ralph Bohner end the X-Crossover theory? Much has been written about how WandaVision led to revisits and even reappraisals of Avengers: Age of Ultron, so it could be a few years before a new film or show reveals the true impact of this series, too. Going all the way back to 2008’s Iron Man, practically every film in the now-massive franchise has set up and teased future projects in its closing and post-credit scenes, and WandaVision is no exception. Where are Tommy and Billy? Stephen Strange’s continuing research on the Time Stone is hindered by a friend turned enemy, resulting in Strange unleashing unspeakable evil.” Does the end of WandaVision set up its protagonist as the friend turned enemy in the Doctor Strange sequel? Let’s get them a show! Was the inclusion of an actor from the X-Universe a nod to the future or a fun one-off game? Jimmy and Darcy travel the country solving Marvel-related cases like a modern Mulder and Scully! We almost certainly haven’t seen the last of these two. At the end of WandaVision, Wanda traps the powerful Agatha Harkness in her sitcomish Agnes form, leaving her in Westview. If anything is likely to derail Wanda from the path of evil, it’s a reunion with her life partner, but he won’t exactly be the version of Vision that she created in Westview. Guess who’s in the Young Avengers: That’s right, Vision and Wanda’s kids, Tommy and Billy, a.k.a. So when WandaVision introduced the young versions of two eventual members of a team that will center a potential future project, it seemed logical that Marvel was setting up an origin story of sorts for that project … and then those cute kids disappeared. However, she handed off the Marvel title in 1996 and became Photon. Could she then bring them into the “real world”? While studying how to be evil from the Darkhold, Wanda hears her children calling for help. It turns out Evan Peters wasn’t really playing Pietro Maximoff for the second time as much as he was playing Ralph Bohner for the first time. How exactly Speed and Wiccan will get from Westview to the new team is unclear, but it feels as if that line will eventually have to be drawn. Back to the post-credits scene! Now that the X-Men universe is part of the Disney monopoly, the inclusion of Peters’s version of Quicksilver led people to theorize about how quickly Wolverine could cross paths with Thor. And if she does …

Will they be part of the Young Avengers? From the minute Monica went back into Westview and could see electricity in the air, fans suggested the show was also an origin story for Photon, a superhero alias of Monica from the books. In the show’s post-credits scene, a reclusive Wanda can be seen studying the Darkhold, an ancient volume of dark magic Agatha has been using all season. When will Wanda say hello to Vision again? This isn’t good news for those who hoped WandaVision might derail rumors that its star could end up as the villain in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Her powers reach their apex in the finale when Hayward tries to shoot Tommy and Billy and Monica jumps in the way, the bullets going through her body and falling to the ground. Sorry to everyone who posted on message boards about how the casting of Peters opened the door for Magneto and Professor X to pop up in the series finale. After her battle with Agatha Harkness, Wanda Maximoff seems to embrace her new future as the Scarlet Witch, telling Monica, “I don’t understand this power, but I will.” But maybe Agatha was right about the Scarlet Witch being dangerous to all mankind? Where are they? And why does it sound so much like the cries they made in episode eight when trapped by Agatha? Randall Park and Kat Dennings added a great deal of fun energy to WandaVision, and it would be sad if fans had to wait years for their return or if they were relegated to cameos in MCU movies from now on. The finale reveals that “Fietro” was actually a struggling actor named Ralph Bohner who lived next door to Wanda and Vision and was controlled by Agatha Harkness (that would be the “Ralph” that Agnes keeps referring to as her husband on the shows-within-a-show). Speed and Wiccan, respectively. These characters feel linked more than ever and became one of the essential relationships in the MCU through WandaVision. (The “he” who has asked for Monica is widely rumored to be Nick Fury, by the way.) Where exactly Monica is headed in the universe isn’t completely clear, but she’s almost certainly going to be part of Captain Marvel 2, which is set for a late 2022 release. [Major spoilers follow.]

How will Wanda use her new powers as the Scarlet Witch? Could Wanda’s new powers allow her to hear an alternate universe where she doesn’t perform her own version of the Snap on her magical children? Marvel has roughly 400 projects in production, and there’s a prominent rumor that one of them is a film or TV series based on the Young Avengers comic book. Is Monica Photon now? An old casting synopsis for that film reads as follows: “Dr. Believe it or not, Monica Rambeau was also Captain Marvel herself for years, taking the title in 1982 and even joining the Avengers in 1983. And that could still be the future. Monica Rambeau has clearly been forever altered by her journeys into and out of Westview this season. And where is she headed? She barely has an origin story in the books, but that’s changed on WandaVision. It’s a fine line for the MCU writers to walk, in that merely reuniting the two may make the emotional end of this series feel cheap, but there’s no way we’ve seen the last of Vision, right? Have we seen the last of Agatha? In their final encounter, however, the Wanda-created model of Vision “awakens” the memories of the White Vision, and he soars off into the sky after saying, “I am Vision.” With the memories of Wanda’s and Vision’s time with the Avengers reignited in his programming, will this make the White Vision into the charming, lovable version of Vision that Wanda loves? At this point, it would be stunning if she weren’t a major character in that film. Probably not. Only time will tell.

Ferguson’s video became a breakout moment, now with more than 400,000 views. Three years and one Charli D’Amelio later, Tiffany Ferguson now reacts to the upload that both kicked off her “Internet Analysis” series — in which she views internet culture through an anthropological lens — and kicked her channel “tiffanyferg” up the coveted Trending Page. In the original 13-minute video, Ferguson theorized about why Ceddia’s channel blew up over the course of two weeks that year, noting how the algorithm boosts content that’s similar to other popular creators. Not really.”

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Does It Actually Matter Who’s Behind an Anonymous Commentary Channel? “The YouTube algorithm is forever elusive,” Ferguson jokes. It may be Joana Ceddia and Emma Chamberlain’s names in the title, but it’s actually the YouTube algorithm that Tiffany Ferguson is calling out in her 2018 video “Joana Ceddia is the New Emma Chamberlain.” And in doing so, Ferguson established herself as an essential voice among the legion of creators who’ve undertaken the impossible job of making sense of internet drama. Confessions of a 32-Year-Old Drama Queen

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Tags: “You’d think in my time doing this I might have learned more about the algorithm, how it works. At the time, that meant YouTube was experiencing a deluge of scrunchie-wearing, coffee-addicted, 16-year-old influencers with access to iMovie, almost like an Emma Chamberlain content farm.

Yet the most fascinating element of this episode is guest Dr. This year-long investigation looks into now 79-year-old Anna Young, the purported leader of a Florida-based cult called the House of Prayer. 25-year-old Stephanie Soo is a true-crime devotee who passionately uncovers curious cases, laying out their most grisly details while offering colorful commentary on “bad vibes” and alleged killers. However, if you’re confounded about how someone might wedge themselves into a high, tiny, metal chute with a weighted door, you’re not alone. What, exactly, was going on inside this so-called house of prayer, and how did Anna Young seemingly get away with mistreating her congregants for so long? Hopefully, this podcast will have some answers. We’re here to make it a bit smaller and a bit more manageable. There are a lot of great shows, and each has a lot of great episodes, so we want to highlight the noteworthy and the exceptional. Tags: –Kristy Puchko

Fruitloops: Serial Killers of Color, “Luis Garavito”

This week’s episode of Fruitloops is particularly gruesome, but hosts Wendy and Beth always temper the terror with plenty of historical context and thoughtful insight into who the criminals are, why they chose the people they did, and perhaps most importantly, how they got away with their crimes for so long. Over two hours and with plenty of fire, Soo details Handsjuk’s final days, autopsy report, unanswered questions in the investigation, as well as the could-be case against Handsjuk’s May-December boyfriend, Antony “Ant” Hampel, who has not been charged. The first two episodes reveal a manner of sins (with eye-witness testimony from a handful of cult members), but the most troubling are the deaths of two young children. A fuller look at the Farrow family is offered through cut-from-the-series audio clips as well as a new interview with family friend Priscilla Gilman. Terms & Privacy Notice
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Listening notes for the top shows, from Vulture’s critic Nick Quah. Email

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Terms of Service apply. Each week, our crack team of podcast enthusiasts and specialists will pick their favorites. Sign up for Vulture’s new recommendation newsletter 1.5x Speed here. In this episode, she explores the bizarre death of 24-year-old Australian, Phoebe Handsjuk, a recovering party girl who died from a fall down a 12-story trash chute. —Jenni Miller

Rotten Mango, “The Trash Chute Murder: Mysterious Death of Phoebe Handsjuk‪”

If you’re looking for true-crime content that’s a little sweet and salty, check out Rotten Mango. Farrow, don’t overlook its companion podcast. Farrow Podcast, “Episode 1”

If you’re hooked on HBO Max’s latest true-crime miniseries Allen v. –Kristy Puchko

The Followers: House of Prayer, “Katonya” and “Moses”

When you think of the prototypical cult leader, you probably think of someone like Jim Jones or David Koresh or Keith Raniere — which is to say, a man. In this case, the killer in question is Colombian serial killer Luis Garavito, who was convicted of murdering 138 young boys and teens way back in the ’90s, although he’s thought to have killed even more. Oh, you like podcasts? But charismatic (and caustic) leadership knows no gender, as we see in the new podcast The Followers: House of Prayer, hosted by journalist Leila Day and former prosecutor and investigative journalist Beth Karas. Photo-Illustration: Vulture

The true-crime podcast universe is ever expanding. As usual, the best part of the show is how thorough Wendy and Beth are in setting up the sociopolitical milieu — in this case, we get a crash course on recent Colombian history, right down to the origins of the phrase “banana republic,” as well as nuanced insight into how colorism played a role in Garavito’s selection of victims. Police initially ruled her demise a suicide. Allen v. In this premiere episode, the team unveils how the docuseries came about and — most crucially — how they won the trust of the understandably press-shy Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow. Whether you’re intrigued by documentary filmmaking, want to dig deeper into the details of this case, or wish to better recognize red flags of child abuse, this thoughtful companion-cast is worth your time. Sheri Vanino, a clinical and forensic psychologist who gives her expert opinion on Allen’s alleged actions and patterns of grooming. Directors Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick re-team with producer Amy Herdy, providing listeners with more information and insights regarding the sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen.

But being roasted on Twitter is the least of Chance’s issues. The 27-year-old father of two’s debut album was a wholesome ode to his marriage and family despite the frequent (and accurate) “Wife Guy” comparisons. After the celebration that was 2019’s The Big Day, Chance takes it back to just him and the bars. “I want the beat to feel like diegesis / I’m tired of politicians tryna sell us diet Jesus / That’s like dialysis was tryna sell us diabetes / Act like you was born yesterday and you gon’ die a fetus / The mind’s philosophy is old as Thales of Miletus,” he raps, spitting some SAT knowledge at us. In his first time solo directing, he keeps the music video low-key and puts the focus on the lyrics as they flash by. Chance sued for $3 million in response, citing breach of fiduciary duty, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, and breach of contract. Listen to Chance the Rapper pull out the sesquipedalian vocab (yeah, we can do it too) above in “The Heart & the Tongue.”

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Tags: Youth counselor Chancelor the Rapper is in. Chance doles out his best advice in the new single “The Heart & the Tongue,” showing off the lyricism that launched him to stardom. Last month, he moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by his former manager, Pat Corcoran, which claims the rapper owes him outstanding fees and criticizes The Big Day.

A year and some months later, Spill continues to post and has grown its audience to more than 1.5 million subscribers. But a few days later, the YouTuber Petty Paige dropped her own Spill video, part of a series of videos about the “conspiracy” to sanitize YouTube. But in August 2019, drama chronicler D’Angelo Wallace uploaded “brands are running drama channels and it’s … a lot (spill).” Typically, drama YouTubers follow a format common since the site’s inception — someone sitting alone in their bedroom, camera on or off, narrating their thoughts to an audience, or less-slick voiceovers narrating spliced-together receipts and stock footage. Many of the scandals, fights, and exposures covered in drama channels hinge on this tension, in the inexhaustible churn of figuring out how influencers, celebrities and YouTubers are portraying themselves dishonestly for views and attention. Having combed through evidence, she revealed a slightly different truth: Spill was being produced by a small-scale Canadian media corporation that had been around years before Spill itself. The video made every effort to convey Spill’s relatability, telling the story of the founder of AWED, who describes how Spill allowed him to avoid the confines of a nine-to-five and truly chase his dream — the kind of verbal gymnastics often deployed when success hinges on appearing to be doing what you love (as opposed to what makes money). But in his video, Wallace questions Spill’s “college-level, research paper MLA citation–level research for internet drama” and its highly produced style. Others write that they simply don’t care. The titles are punchy and garish, covering the missteps of beauty gurus and celebrities (“Jeffree Star EXPOSES Himself, Reveals How Tati RUINED James Charles”), the micro-conflicts between YouTubers (“Trisha Paytas Files Restraining Order After What Gabbie Hanna Does to Her”) and the clickbait grotesque (“The YouTuber Who Faked His Girlfriend’s Death + Resurrection for Views: ImJayStation”). The inherent suspicion in Wallace’s critique reflected a fundamental conflict in a platform that was not only built upon authenticity, but commodifies its own DIY image. There was something to Wallace’s critique — that there was more to Spill’s origins than that of the quintessential YouTuber. Inside YouTube’s Drama Economy

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Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photos by YouTube

The videos of the anonymous YouTube drama channel Spill appear to deliver classic tabloid shock and awe. Spill had at one point promised to reveal its identity when it reached a million subscribers, but broke in early to upload what could reasonably be called a response video, “How the Spill Universe Started,” that described the channel as a “passion project” started by two YouTube drama lovers. More From This Series

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Tags: After Wallace’s upload, Spill quickly became a meta-fascination within the drama and commentary community, in line with a larger frustration with so-called corporate content and YouTube’s supposed indifference to the creators who made it what it is today. So I fought … I fought with all of my might to save a platform that I love and to ensure my own personal job security.”

YouTuber Angelika Oles soon uploaded her own take: “I wouldn’t have minded if Spill was a corporation … what I do mind is deceiving your audience to make it look like you’re authentic, to give you an edge over actual authentic people.” Spill clarified in another video, weeks later, that the channel was one of many projects produced by the AWED Corporation. Commenters underneath the videos say that they like the channel’s brand of polished, slick content. “Your average drama or commentary channel has no way of competing with an 11-person team of … people who are trained and qualified,” she said. Some claim they knew that it was a professional team of people. The speculation came at a time of woozy opportunism, co-optation, and consolidation: Brands “speak” like teenagers to market themselves, purported objectivity is prized as a moral good, and “DIY” is a marketing term that exists in the imagination of audiences and consumers. More existentially, Petty Paige said she was pursuing the story so aggressively because “… my job was in jeopardy. The thumbnails feature blown-up photos of the caked-and-highlighted faces of YouTube’s stars pasted next to zoomed-in tweets and Instagram posts — the online totems of real-time urgency. As the channel became successful, Spill said, its team grew and it literally incorporated.

“Keepin’ it real with n- – – -s behind the fences / Don’t know ‘bout you, this how I’m livin’,” he adds later on. Related

Kodak Black Releases Track with Lyrics About Trump Commuting His Sentence

Tags: Kodak, on the other hand, received a last-minute commutation from former President Donald Trump in January for federal weapons charges, and is still facing a charge of criminal sexual conduct in a repeatedly delayed trial. For Melly, that’s meant awaiting trial for two 2019 murder charges that he pleaded not guilty to, while catching COVID in prison in the process. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photos by Lyrical Lemonade/YouTube and Getty Images

YNW Melly is back for the first time in almost a year, releasing new song “Thugged Out” alongside Kodak Black. While Melly uses his verse to boast about his lifestyle, Kodak addresses his current situation. “Free Melly, I’m in the same old boat,” he raps. But what’s a little jail time to get in the way of a linkup between two rap provocateurs? “I be tryin’ to blitz even on the visit floor.” When Uzi said “Kodak do the most” back in 2016, he had no idea. It’s the first collaboration between the two rappers, who have had their share of other business to focus on in the past year.

Edge of Tomorrow wasn’t a comedy, but it was very funny at times, leaning into the ridiculousness of its story. (And Ness is also the author of The Rest of Us Just Live Here, the rare YA adventure book with a hero who has OCD.) There’s something exciting about this character, and Holland, who proved his acting chops with last year’s otherwise-not-very-good The Devil All the Time, isn’t a bad choice to play him. Viola knows what Todd is thinking, which means that his overactive teenage desires regularly embarrass him in front of this beautiful space refugee. There’s a touching idea in Todd’s recounting of his name as a way of keeping his runaway thoughts in check. Alas, no such luck. Chaos Walking is set in the gritty frontier town of Prentisstown, on a planet called “New World,” where our teenage hero, Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland), works overtime to hide his thoughts from others by obsessively repeating the words “My name is Todd Hewitt” to himself over and over again. That’s why Liman isn’t actually a bad choice for this material. For this, he’s bullied mercilessly by the townspeople, especially Davy (Nick Jonas), the jagoff son of sinister, scheming self-declared mayor David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen). The evocatively titled science-fiction film Chaos Walking, set on a planet where the human settlers can all hear — and sometimes see — each other’s thoughts, has the kind of premise that sounds intriguing on paper (and before it was a movie it was indeed a best-selling novel by Patrick Ness with the even more evocative title The Knife of Never Letting Go). During their journey, the whole hearing-people’s-thoughts thing pays some dividends. The end result is neither here nor there, a muttery mess in which characters ceaselessly ruminate in voice-over, accompanied by wispy purple clouds of thought, while enacting a thoroughly generic Western scenario. Many of the battles waged over Terrence Malick’s filmography, for example, ultimately boil down to how viewers viscerally respond to the snatches of whispered thoughts he likes to lay over his lovely images: Some of us are moved greatly, others start immediately snickering. Instead, what we now have is a movie that seems determined to run away from itself. On one level, I could certainly identify with the paralysis and anxiety that comes from trying to control obsessive thought patterns. There is so much potential here for weirdness, creativity, terror — something to distinguish the film from your run-of-the-mill sci-fi adventure or glum pseudo-Western scenario. But once transferred to the screen, this idea likely presented all sorts of problems. But she’s reliant on this fundamentally decent kid for her survival, so the two come to depend on each other. Maybe that’s why the idea works best in comedies: Hearing someone’s thoughts tends to make us uneasy, and it can be hard to retrofit such an inherently uncool idea into an ostensibly bad-ass space adventure or war drama or whatever. But one day, out of the sky crash-lands Viola (Daisy Ridley), part of an approaching wave of new human settlers. (It also didn’t make a ton of money, and struggled through reshoots and rewrites, so maybe Hollywood learned the wrong lesson from it.) Chaos Walking retains a tiny bit of its comic spirit, but one does get the sense that maybe, in some distant rough cut or interim screenplay draft, it was a much funnier, more engaging picture. Tags: You keep waiting for that intriguingly goofy setup to pay off in some meaningful, exciting way. Kindly Todd and his two adoptive fathers, Ben and Cillian (Demian Bichir and Kurt Sutter, both wasted), protect Viola from the rest of the men, and eventually Todd agrees to take her to a distant settlement called Farbranch. And yes, there’s potential for humor, too. You keep hoping a giant thought bubble will fly out of the bushes and whack someone over the head. He is, after all, the credited director on Edge of Tomorrow, a sci-fi flick that took another offbeat idea — Independence Day meets Groundhog Day, with Tom Cruise dying over and over again and coming back to life on the same day — and turned it into one of the most inspiring action movies of the past decade. Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland in Chaos Walking. But that’s also why it’s frustrating that Chaos Walking doesn’t do more with its conceit. There are no women in Prentisstown (and we do eventually find out the chilling reason why). Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate

Some movies should firmly embrace their innate silliness. Overheard thoughts can often alienate viewers in mainstream movies. Shot in 2017, Doug Liman’s picture has been stuck in reshoot-and-postproduction limbo for some time, presumably because the filmmakers struggled with how best to render the characters’ thoughts (which sounds like something they should have maybe figured out before making a movie about, you know, people who can hear and see each other’s thoughts).

So, try not to cry because it’s over. The network confirmed today that the final season, which will consist of seven episodes, will premiere on May 2. Photo: FX

Pose, FX’s acclaimed drama about 1980s New York ball culture that served as a showcase for the fabulous Billy Porter, will be ending with its upcoming third season. Smile because you had one hell of a ball. Related

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Tags: In a statement, co-creator Ryan Murphy called Pose “one of the creative highlights of my entire career,” and noted that the show will “go down in history for having the largest LGBTQ cast of all time.” In addition to making history for its extensive casting of transgender actors, Pose helped shape a new television standard for stories about the understanding of AIDS, self-creation, and the ballroom scene, all while showing off some stunningly ornate outfits that we would liquidate our savings accounts for.

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SOPHIE Transcended Everything

Tags: SOPHIE teamed up with Jlin, the Indiana producer known for her own experimental take on footwork music, for a song on Intermission, a compilation put together by the music festival Unsound. Listen to it alongside the rest of the Intermission compilation, which dedicated to SOPHIE and features Moor Mother, Nicolás Jaar, Tim Hecker, and Angel Bat Dawid, among other musical giants. Their partnership makes sense on paper, given both musicians’ interest in synthesizing sounds, rather than sampling them, along with the bits of footwork influence that come through on SOPHIE’s music. Photo: Burak Cingi/Redferns

The music producer SOPHIE had been productive in the months before their accidental death in late January — performing a livestream with new music, featuring on songs by Jimmy Edgar and Shygirl, and releasing a remix with Autechre. (One of the Chicago dance genre’s founders, RP Boo, even paid tribute to SOPHIE.) And the resulting track, “JSLOIPNHIE,” makes good on the promise of their collaboration as a stunningly minimal and haunting meeting of the minds. That streak has continued in the months after the Scottish pop futurist’s death, with a new song coming out posthumously today. SOPHIE, who died in January.

Clarence (also Murphy), Morris (also Hall), and Sweets (longtime Murphy collaborator Clint Smith), as well as their eternal customer, Saul (also Murphy). Related

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Tags: Admittedly, he does all this fabulously, but his presence feels clipped: The script actually seems to be setting up a bigger, more villainous role for him. All this is not to say that Coming 2 America is some sleazebag edgelord fantasy of politically unacceptable humor. Coming to America was never as raw as, say, Eddie Murphy Raw, of course, but watching the new movie’s opening scene of a now-middle-aged Prince Akeem of Zamunda (Murphy) and his wife Lisa (Shari Headley) being awakened by their three daughters wishing them a happy anniversary, one is reminded that in the original, it was a very single Prince Akeem being awakened by his three naked, beautiful female attendants on the morning of his 21st birthday. Arsenio Hall and Eddie Murphy in Coming 2 America. It’s that the new scene has been shot and cut to echo the original scene, so it only really works if we are aware of how much things have changed; otherwise we might wonder why this new film is dwelling so awkwardly on each daughter politely saying, “Good morning, mother and father” to their parents. A decent chunk of the picture is given over to musical numbers, some from veteran acts like Salt-N-Pepa, Gladys Knight, and En Vogue. The barbershop greets Akeem and Semmi with a hearty “Hey, it’s Kunta Kinte and Ebola!” and follows that up with “Famine and Blood Diamond!” and “Nelson Mandela and Winnie!” Whereupon a random customer chimes in with “Those hungry babies with the flies on their faces!” and suddenly everyone goes stone-faced. It’s not just that things have changed. These gabby old men may be out of touch, but even they have their limits. Izzi is given almost nothing to do except show up, sneer a few threats, and then disappear. (Izzi’s sister was betrothed to Akeem in Coming to America, and she’s still barking like a dog — another hilarious throwaway bit that will make literally zero sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the first film fairly recently.) Akeem, who only has daughters, discovers that he actually has a son, Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), whom he fathered out-of-wedlock back in New York during a zonked-out, half-remembered (and quite possibly nonconsensual on his part, which may understandably raise some eyebrows) coupling with party girl Mary (Leslie Jones). So, naturally, he and Semmi head back to New York to find the young man and bring him back to Zamunda to take his place as first in line to the throne. In other words, Coming 2 America is both figuratively and literally a nostalgia tour. Akeem and Semmi land in the same Queens neighborhood as before, and of course it has gentrified beyond belief — save for the still-standing, still-decrepit My-T-Sharp barbershop, still populated with its trio of politically incorrect, motormouth barbers Mr. The best new things in Coming 2 America are also, weirdly, the worst new things in Coming 2 America. (That the creative team here, including director Craig Brewer, is part of the same group that somehow successfully navigated Dolemite Is My Name, a cheerful, winning biopic about infamously foul-mouthed and controversial insult comic Rudy Ray Moore, shouldn’t be lost on us.) It feels as if Murphy has heard all the people out in the world arguing that “you can’t make comedies about X anymore” and has been thinking to himself, Well, can’t I? As for the story, eventually we get Lavelle and his mom Mary’s fish-out-of-water journey in the royal circles of Zamunda, where they make faux pas after faux pas and where Lavelle winds up with a romantic dilemma that mirrors Akeem’s from the original: He’s supposed to marry Izzi’s daughter (Teyana Taylor) for the good of the kingdom, but falls instead for his royal barber (South African star Nomzamo Mbatha). Again, it doesn’t feel like the filmmakers wrote a new script so much as they just … rewrote the old script. The story of the sequel also directly relates to that earlier trip Prince Akeem and his close friend and adviser Semmi (Arsenio Hall) took to the U.S. Photo: Quantrell D. But at least new films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle attempt to reinvent and redefine (I am trying very hard not to say “reboot”) their stories and characters for the current moment. Until you realize that in the world of Coming 2 America, that’s pretty much all anyone is asked to do. Similarly, Tracy Morgan, playing Lavelle’s hustler uncle, gets a few errant wisecracks and gets to emcee one final ceremony, but that’s about it. Snipes’s flamboyant warlord pretty much steals the show (much as his pretentious director character stole Dolemite), but the show doesn’t steal him back. Back in 1988, Eddie Murphy was probably the biggest comedy star on the planet, and a lot of his most successful stand-up from that era has dated so preposterously that it could now be its own meta-humor bit. In truth, it’s too leisurely and raggedly good-natured for that, more pageant than movie. lo these many years ago. Clarence says, and promptly kicks the guy out. It’s a clever way to carve out some room — a safe space, if you will — for this type of humor, a way to indulge it while acknowledging that you know it’s not entirely kosher anymore. Colbert/Paramount Pictures

It’s hard to imagine what someone who hasn’t seen the original Coming to America — which, let’s not forget, came out 33 years ago — would make of its sequel. A late-breaking attempt to give him more to do narratively is immediately snuffed out, as if the production realized it didn’t really have the time or the money for a whole new subplot. “You talk that kind of shit about the hungry babies, you better get out of my chair,” Mr. Reclaiming the spirit of the first Coming to America might not be as simple as it sounds. Akeem was already a straight man in the first film — Murphy generally saved his best gags for the other characters he played — but he completely drifts through this one, letting his reaction shots do what little heavy-lifting is required. Coming 2 America, which premieres on Amazon Prime Video this week, by contrast, practically demands encyclopedic recall of the original; it exists mainly as a vessel to reunite characters and redo classic bits from the first Coming to America (which, by the way, is also currently and conveniently available on Amazon Prime Video). One might imagine that Murphy, Hall, and their team would try to tiptoe through a minefield of potentially problematic humor here, but no, they sort of gleefully step on all the mines. It’s been more than a few years since Hollywood’s obsession with franchising everything prompted the industry to start reaching back to the dormant legacies of titles from the 1980s and ’90s. The jokes, in other words, are the joke here. Akeem needs a male heir to inherit his throne, or his kingdom will be in danger of falling into the hands of a strongman, General Izzi (a terrific Wesley Snipes), the preening, strutting, kilt-wearing warlord of neighboring Nextdoria who spends his free time reading storybooks to his army of child soldiers. That’s kind of the key to the new film’s rickety charm, even if that also means it’s doomed to live forever in the shadow of its megasuccessful original.

But if nothing, it’s just opened up more doors and possibility in the studio. I was really excited to get into that and develop that, because it just sounded like a lot of fun to perform. That helped me understand where it came from and why I felt myself resonating with it. I found this clip of Alex talking about what it was like at the Loft in New York, and I cut it out and I put it at the start of “time,” the first track on the album. Even though the world can’t gather to dance to songs like “Hallucinate” or “One More,” the track that features Rodgers, Lewis still sees his music as essential to the moment. Six years into his career, Lewis may not have the fame complex of some producers — never mind that he’s still introducing himself by name as an artist — but times has cemented his status as one of the preeminent players in the ongoing disco revival. Related

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Tags: I was looking forward to playing festivals and providing that energy for crowds. So I was going through the whole period chronologically as I was reading the book. I’m quite an anxious, nervous person by nature, and I think that sort of baptism of fire, of being placed in those high-pressure situations, helped me. Disco was born out of this coming together of marginalized communities, and disco is gay, Black music. He brushes off the praise: “I just think it’s a brilliant record, and I was really, really proud to be a part of it.”

It’s not just Lipa — at 26 years old, Lewis has already worked with a list of the best and brightest in pop and dance music. I was ingesting a lot of that early ’70s stuff, and I think that influence is clear in the string arrangements of some of the songs [on times]. The details matter, and I think that’s why her music lasts for as long as it does. DJ sets

I’ve always made music that lends itself to the live show. When we went to clear the sample, we got bounced around through this email chain and ended up put in contact with the man himself. So I needed to make sure that I understood where this music was coming from if I was to be taking any influence in my own music. I was chatting with my manager [Grant Motion] and said, “How can we elevate [‘One More’]?” He said, “Just send it to Nile, see what he’s saying.” And I was like, “That’s crazy.” [Laughs] But we sent it over, and straight away, he was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” To get to sit there and watch him rip guitar on top of something that you’ve just started out of nothing, it’s very surreal. “It’s the complete opposite of everything that’s happening in everyone’s lives. I want to be that guy. That, given the opportunity to celebrate in a room of people and connect with friends through music and through dancing, or to experience those moments — you have to take those opportunities and cherish them, because they’re finite. Being a singer

It’s really enabled me to songwrite by myself more. For one person to have had such a huge impact on popular culture and music through his ability to play guitar and produce records and write songs is massive. He’s this legendary sound engineer who has this amazing life story: He was an Auschwitz survivor, he managed to survive when he was a child, so he then moved to New York and was the sound engineer who set up some of the first sound systems in these disco clubs. Growing up, disco wasn’t a genre that I was necessarily exposed to a lot, so my introduction to it was definitely secondhand through DJs that were coming to Liverpool like Motor City Drum Ensemble or Honey Dijon. But I think it was a broader influence, rather than really specific records, in a lot of places. This is the first time that I’ve made a collection of songs that I was as excited to DJ them as I was to play them live. Watching her process and how specific she is about the minute details of everything she’s doing in her music, and the implications of that on a wider level, has made me 20 times as big a fan of her as I was before. “I want people to know and appreciate my music as an artist, but to be pleasantly surprised when they find out that I’ve been involved in some of their favorite records for other artists too.”
Photo: Harvey Pearson

Nearly a year after his collaboration with Dua Lipa came out, SG Lewis is still humble about it. Songwriting camps

They’ve done nothing but improve my ability, really. Every decision that she’s making, whether it’s at a production level, a mixing level, lyrically — there’s not a step in the process that she’s not thinking about and how it connects. “If the music can make them feel like they’re somewhere else for a moment, then I think it’s served its purpose.” Yet don’t mistake Lewis for a simple imitator of the past — he’s equally likely to wax about Pharrell, a musical hero whose varied success he hopes to one day follow. Just in 2020, the Reading-born producer also cut songs with Aluna, Victoria Monét, and most shockingly, Robyn, who featured on a single off his debut album times. I think a lot of people don’t like those situations because they can be very dog-eat-dog and cutthroat, depending on who’s there and the environment. I heard Motor City Drum Ensemble play this record, and then a couple of other people played it, and it’s in [Portuguese], but I just remember there’s such a euphoria to the record. I remember hearing it for the first time and being like, What the fuck is this? I want people to know and appreciate my music as an artist, but to be pleasantly surprised when they find out that I’ve been involved in some of their favorite records for other artists too. Take, for instance, “Impact.” This contrast between Robyn’s voice in the chorus and Channel [Tres]’s voice in the verses, neither of those roles are something that I would aim to do with my own vocal. Pharrell

As much as I’m an electronic music producer, and my bread and butter is clubs, I’ve grown up with a love of pop music. Robyn

She’s everything so many artists aspire to be: She’s so honest to her vision and she’s so dialed in to her own artistry. There was a Brazilian disco record called “Ripa Na Xulipa,” by Rabo De Saia. so curious about it. You know, the thing that lasts forever is always the song. It’s that kind of MIDI guitar pattern, and there’s definitely a connection between some of those records and some of the music I’m making now. But also, on the skill level, these camps are full of some of the most incredible, skilled pop songwriters alive, so to get to watch some of those people work and to learn about the process of those songs in a pop environment is also very cool. It was really humbling to speak to someone whose life had been a part of some huge experiences. Working with her showed me how much detail I need to go into with my own music as well. So as much as it’s about the whole thing, and as much as I’m a producer, I think that I always try to focus in on the song, and the communication of the song through the singing. I met him at one of those sessions, and he said, “If you ever want to get together and do some other stuff, let me know.” I didn’t expect that to be such a possibility. Having him play guitar on the record is one of them things — if I never make another record, if I never make another song, I’ll be able to be pretty fucking proud of that. I was reading this book, Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence, and there was playlists of records that all the different DJs would be playing at the time, in Paradise Garage or the Loft with David Mancuso. People want and need that escapism,” he explains. It was the first time that I’d seen people just embracing strangers in a room because there was this overflowing sense of joy and togetherness. When the full album followed in February, it also boasted features from Lucky Daye, Rhye, and disco legend Nile Rodgers. He pins the current disco revival on the same factors that first brought people to disco in ’70s New York, which he has obsessively studied. I think that the performance would end up being a hybrid between those things. This is incredible. He co-produced “Hallucinate,” the showstopping climax of Lipa’s 2020 disco outing Future Nostalgia. Nile Rodgers

If I was going to [credit] one person’s influence on my love of disco and this entire era, it would be Nile Rodgers, so to have him on the record is hugely full circle for me. I asked him about the atmosphere in the Loft; at the start of “time,” he’s talking about what it felt like to be in those rooms, and then the interlude is an extended snippet from that conversation. It was like, Okay, you’re in these rooms now, and you’ve got no choice but to focus in. There’s kind of small pockets of Pharrell flirting with disco, like when he did Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body.” Or even, if you’re talking about “Frontin’,” that was originally meant to be a Prince record. fall in love with it, but B). He said, “I’d love to clear this sample, but I’m of absolutely no idea where the original clip’s from or who owns the audio. But if you want to, we could set up a video call and we could do our own interview.” So I interviewed him for about an hour, and he told me about his life and his story. The only criteria for whoever I’m working with is they have to, vocally, be doing something that my voice doesn’t offer or bring to the table. Once you know that fact and listen to a record like “Frontin’,” you hear it in a slightly different light, and you’re like, Oh yeah, of course. One of them was this guy called Alex Rosner. Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence

Because my entry point was secondhand, it was then a case of going back and learning about the roots and the birth of disco, and ’70s New York, and the people that helped create it. Dimitri From Paris came and played in Liverpool, and he was playing edits of records that he would make. I guess we’ll see when it comes back. Alex Rosner

Upon diving into ’70s New York, I would note down names of people, and then I’d go on the internet and research. When I’m going into the studio and collaborating with bigger artists, I feel more armed to deal with those situations. I grew up in the Neptunes-Timbaland era, where, as much as the beats and the instrumentals were amazing, they serviced the song and the vocal. To be honest, quite mind-blowing! There’s been sound-system versions of live shows I’ve seen. One day, the opportunity to do those things won’t be there again. For the release of times, Lewis spoke to Vulture about those influences and more on his path to shaping dance music in the 2020s. I think that it makes me approach the process more as an all-rounded artist, as opposed to from a producer’s angle. “Frontin’” is a huge record for me. A couple years back, he was doing these sessions at Abbey Road where he was working with a bunch of up-and-coming artists who had buzz about them in the U.K. That’s the ultimate goal. The song began in a casual session with his college friend Sophie Cooke, who performs under her middle name Frances and has worked with Lewis since his 2015 debut single “Warm.” Lewis gets messages from fans waiting for the day they can hear “Hallucinate” in clubs, but somehow he’s still shocked to learn it’s a personal favorite for many from Future Nostalgia. But the singing doesn’t stop me from wanting to collaborate with other people, because it just changes what I’m looking for from a collaborator. Liverpool’s club scene

I was a student in Liverpool, and I got into electronic music through going to these raves, and watching these DJs play, and then slowly starting to DJ myself. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The thing that I took away from the conversation was one of the big themes of the album, if not the theme of the album, which is that time is a finite thing. That just made me A). I’ve seen Crazy P do something like that, and like, when Tame Impala did [NPR] Tiny Desk [Home], there was this sound-system setup that allows for this rolling energy that the DJ set has, but with these live moments, vocals and stuff. There are people that know Pharrell as the guy who made “Happy” and don’t know that Pharrell produced most of their favorite Justin Timberlake records, or some Britney Spears records. Pharrell is someone whose presence was felt across popular music on such a wide level, but he was still an artist in his own right, and he still is. Working with her was just incredible, and I learned so much from it.

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Tags: Fowler recalled, “Tracy would bring that big-ass boombox to set and, you know, rock out to music that only he wanted to listen to.” Mbatha added, “Which he had a problem with sometimes!” They explained that Morgan is one of those people who just can’t let a song play all the way through. If you enjoyed this episode, follow Vulture on Instagram to stay in the loop on future friends hanging out live! And this boon brings with it this week’s episode of Two Friends: A Nice Time Hanging Out With People Who Know Each Other Well, which turned into a rich discussion of the importance of Black representation onscreen, mental health, fame, and being in love with Drew Barrymore. “He’d play a dope Wu Tang song, and he’d cut it off in the beginning,” Fowler said. Fowler talked about how developing a close relationship with Morgan was one of his favorite experiences on the film, but in a reveal that may surprise no one at all, working with Morgan is indeed an experience. Jermaine Fowler and Nomzamo Mbatha, who play Prince Akeem’s son, Lavelle, and his love interest, Mirembe, respectively, are very clearly living the dream in a way that makes you realize dreams are still a thing! And while it’s probably impossible to choose which of the film’s comedic greats was most exciting to work with, there’s no question who was perhaps the most unforgettable: Tracy Morgan’s boom box. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing, man?’” But honestly, if Morgan ever decides to start a second career as the Very Frustrating DJ of Every Place He’s At, we’d be here for it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Vulture (@vulture)

It’s finally Coming 2 America week, one of the few things we’ve had to look forward to at this moment in Earth’s history, with the long-awaited sequel debuting this Friday, March 5.

Okay, that one was trolling. Along with most YouTubers, her ad revenue drastically declined from its peak in the mid-2010s — at one point she says she was making $200,000 per year off of YouTube ads alone — and she now estimates that about 70 percent of her income comes from her OnlyFans, the platform used most famously by sex workers, where creators can paywall their content, which costs $4.99 a month. Paytas posted her first YouTube video (a 43-second clip of herself rapping “Ice Ice Baby”) in 2007 under the channel “blndsundoll4mj,” named for the hair color she’d always wanted, “sun doll” after her love of tanning, and “4mj” because of an obsession with Michael Jackson. Again, she insists, it wasn’t trolling. Paytas does seem to be doing well now. All that aside, Paytas’s mental health is not a joke. She has a new house to decorate and a popular podcast she co-hosts with YouTuber Ethan Klein. (It’s a whole YouTube art form known as a mukbang, and she’s a pro at it.) Recent stylistic phases have included emo bandleader, kawaii à la Care Bear, and Domino’s Pizza employee (though she has since moved on to Papa John’s). Thanks to YouTube’s then-lucrative AdSense program, through which top creators were earning upward of six figures, it also netted her $8,000. The first few dozen videos were largely devoted to her love of a different famous person, Quentin Tarantino, which included impressions of the director, reenactments of his films, and at least one video in which she simulates a graphic makeout session between herself and a pillow taped with a photo of his face  — until, of course, she moved onto other fixations. It’s the same part of her that knows people on the internet don’t actually care if you say outrageous things as long as you’re keeping them entertained. Paytas is recounting her current obsession with Adam Sandler, and not in a “I’m rewatching 50 First Dates” way. She is remarkably forthcoming; it can feel like she’s confiding her secrets in you even though everyone already knows them. Considering she’d previously claimed to identify as a chicken nugget, the video was met with outrage and mistrust. “So I would end up on Santa Monica Boulevard and hook there for literally five dollars or just a place to stay.”

Soon, a platform would arrive where the money was just as good and you didn’t even have to leave your house. “So right now my phase is, ‘I want to be him.’ I’m sure in six months I’m going to be someone else.”

She is not kidding. When he began demanding rent money, she got a job at his friends’ strip club, Godfather, in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, despite the fact that she didn’t know how to dance. The result is camp in its purest form, crafted by someone who’s in on the joke but takes it perfectly seriously. It was her first taste of professional trollhood, and it worked: The video got 3 million views. Paytas was admitted for a second time a few months later, during a period where she says she was addicted to painkillers. I don’t think I get it fully.”

For the best sense of how famous Paytas is, simply go find the nearest teenager and ask them. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at age 31, and previously received two paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses at age 12 and again at 18. At the time, Paytas was part of a group of YouTubers called the Vlog Squad, best known for performing stunts and pulling pranks of varying degrees of ethicality on each other in enormous Los Angeles mansions. She’s in full L.A.-influencer drag: platinum-blonde extensions, baby-pink acrylics, cut-crease smoky eye, and a stiff, plump beige pout. Photo: Shaughn & John for New York Magazine

She wouldn’t truly hit the YouTube jackpot until 2012, when she posted a video called “Why I’m Voting for Mitt Romney,” citing reasons such as “he’s super gorgeous and hot” and “my kitten is named Mitts.” In it, she also claimed she didn’t like Obama because “he’s gonna take away my right to be a Catholic” (he was not). “Jason was like, ‘I gotta break up with you because of David.’ That’s when I spiraled.”

In February of 2019, while she was getting ready for a party, Jason sent her a breakup text. “Whenever I dress up, I put a lot of time and money and effort into it,” she says. Photo: Shaughn & John for New York Magazine

Within seconds, Trisha Paytas has already managed to shock me. “All I remember is I was kind of a loner, and that people weren’t necessarily mean to me but I didn’t have any friends,” she says. “I was like, This is so fucking crazy that people are doubting me.” So she made a video in which she pretended to switch personalities on camera. She talks about how she’s grown from her “trolling” days within the notoriously toxic 2010s YouTube culture. Paytas has become immune to cancellation in a way that only a handful of people can do successfully: Trump is one — and the rest are pretty much all on YouTube. She’s in therapy and says she’s mostly handling her BPD, though she’s recently started to worry about the voices she occasionally hears in her head. Her videos have, on many occasions, flagrantly crossed the line between satire and cruelty. Photo: Shaughn & John for New York Magazine

If a typical influencer presents a consistent, idealized version of what 2010s internet culture has taught us to desire, Paytas gives us the opposite: a chaotic and (mostly) unglamorous portrait of whatever or whomever she’s feeling that day. She tells me she wants to be remembered as a good person. At first, she had fun — she’d sleep with famous people (or at least people who knew famous people) and wealthy businessmen from out of town. She met a woman there who encouraged her to start escorting. The cynical part of her knows her audience and the rest of Yollywood will indulge her whims and make excuses for her more despicable behaviors and outbursts on the grounds that she lets us ride along on the roller coaster of her mind. More From This Series

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Tags: She is among the handful of YouTubers, most of whom either hate each other or at least pretend to, who have necessitated the formation of an entire drama-channel cottage industry devoted to explaining their constantly fluctuating relationships. One of her favorite methods of addressing her fans is by talking directly to the camera while eating, say, the new Pizza Hut Triple Treat Box or chicken fries in her car. “They [didn’t] want a girl that was already strung out coming to their house,” she says. She tells a story about a celebrity-adjacent client who used to get off by pretending he was Elvis and shooting rounds over her head (“I stopped seeing him because I thought, Oh, maybe he wants to kill me”). “I thought, like, I’m not really talented or anything, so maybe I just need to try and offend as many people as possible to get money.”

So she started collecting controversies: There was the phase in 2011, and again in 2012, when she dressed up as “Trishii,” a character she invented that was supposed to be a Japanese pop star but mostly ended up just being racist; there was the one video in 2013 when she wondered aloud whether dogs have brains. “May [2019] was a brutal month for me,” she says. It was more money than she’d made that whole year. Some have worked: In 2010 she attempted to beat the Guinness World Record for speed-talking, and despite failing to do so still scored appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and America’s Got Talent. In the past year, Paytas has publicly feuded with Charli D’Amelio, the world’s most famous 16-year-old TikToker, broken up her decade-long friendship with the only people in the YouTubersphere whose résumés of scandal are as long as her own (Dawson and Star), and outraged more than one marginalized community. And then she opens her mouth. She woke up in Cedars-Sinai. Paytas, 32, is infectiously bubbly and at times insecure to the point of making you feel a little bit sorry for her; whether that’s her goal is a question that never really leaves your mind. Of her divisive peers — Shane Dawson, Jeffree Star, James Charles, Tana Mongeau, Nikita Dragun, the Paul Brothers — Paytas, the enigmatic big-boobed bimbo in the most self-aware sense of the word, is by far the most compelling, having perfected a mode of influencer-hood that inverts what the profession is. It was led by David Dobrik, who, until recently, was one of the few YouTubers who enjoyed a relatively unsoiled reputation by industry standards. But over the past few weeks, multiple former members have accused him of fostering a toxic work/creative environment; one alleged that a supposed “prank” was sexual assault. “But I think at 32 I was kinda like, ‘Who really cares? Seated in the kitchen of her still mostly empty five-bedroom, eight-bathroom new home in Ventura County — where everything is white and tan and has that California casual-chic look that’s become standard issue for the YouTube famous — she looks so … normal. Photo: Shaughn & John for New York Magazine

As with many professionally charismatic people who have done bad things, those serious lapses of judgment are easy to forget when talking to the woman directly. Paytas started dating Vlog Squad member Jason Nash in 2017 and their two-year relationship was a common one for the world of YouTube, where terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” have completely different meanings on camera and off — a video could be titled something like, “GIRLFRIEND PICKS MY OUTFIT,” yet both parties understand this is mostly a label of convenient storytelling than any sort of commitment. Her mood shifts when we land on the topic of the three times she was involuntarily committed to a mental facility in 2019. She stands by it, at least in theory. This is, in fact, the essence of Trisha Paytas, who has spent the last decade and a half trying on different identities to see which ones will make her the most famous. It’s also the wealthiest she’s ever been. Whatever type of relationship they had ended when Trisha was no longer useful for the Vlog Squad, she says. She speaks soberly about the three times she was on an involuntary psychiatric hold. She’s been accused of making mockeries of gender identities and mental disorders. For someone who has documented an abnormally large portion of her life for more than a decade, it would be unreasonable to demand perfect consistency of thought. Of her use of the N-word on camera, Paytas gives the response that’s now standard issue for influencers: “Obviously it was gross and awful and that’s so embarrassing that I have that clip out there about that, because I’m like, so not that person.”

She managed to incense another community when, in March of 2020, she claimed to have dissociative identity disorder, the highly stigmatized diagnosis formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Throughout her career she estimates she’s been on 30 reality-TV shows. It is the privilege of people gifted with undeniable magnetism who are also willing to expose the ugliest parts of themselves — or to use a term more closely associated with Trump, to say the quiet parts out loud. My image is already tarnished.’” She tells me this is also the first time in her life where she’s actually proud of the content she puts online, now that she’s happier, more stable, and, crucially, no longer considers herself a troll. Besides, there’s just something about Paytas that feels beyond the current moment. But Paytas wouldn’t be herself if she weren’t altering who “herself” is nearly constantly. YouTubers who’d built their channels by being open about their struggles with DID accused her of spreading misinformation and self-diagnosing rather than seeking help. But if we’re talking actual numbers: She has a follower count of 6 million on her two YouTube channels, 4.9 million on TikTok, three-quarters of a million on Twitter, and more than 300,000 on Instagram, but only because her original account was banned “for repeatedly breaking our rules,” according to a Facebook spokesperson — mostly for nudity and sexual content. She has written 11 “self-help” books and recorded ten albums (mostly dance pop, but she did recently come out with a mid-aughts emo-inspired EP under the name Sadboy2005), none of which made the charts. There was the time in October 2019 where she uploaded a video titled “I AM TRANSGENDER (FEMALE TO MALE)” in which she claimed to identify as a gay man. “I said I wanted to be a stripper at 12 and she was like, ‘Okay.’”

In her late teens, Paytas started living with and dating an older man who was formerly Alice Cooper’s personal assistant. The fun of being Paytas’s follower is in everything from discovering what she’s wearing that morning to who she’s mad at this week or, frequently, the latest problematic thing she’s said. Her subscriber count there fluctuates, but at around 22,000 to 32,000 per month, she’s in the top .01 percent of creators. Paytas with her finace Moses Hacmon. “Some people think I’m ironic, but I don’t know how to do that. She’s engaged to a man from Israel named Moses (hence the current obsession with Judaism and Adam Sandler); they’re planning three separate weddings (one in L.A., one in Israel, and another in Maui) for the end of this year. And then, watching drama and commentary channels explain it all in videos titled everything WRONG with trisha paytas and Trisha Paytas being toxic and abusive for 10 minutes straight. When her mother wasn’t working one of many overlapping jobs –– as a teaching aide, bus driver, bartender, and postal worker –– she was more friend than parent. /
4

Is it possible to take Trisha at her word — that she’s changed and she’s trying and that she’s sorry? Then, well, drugs happened — coke, heroin, whatever was around. It is impossible to separate Paytas’s endless pursuit of attention from the things she has done to get it: She has been filmed rapping the N-word multiple times. You start to get the sense that this is a woman who, no matter what period of history you drop her into, would find a way to get famous — or at least make enough trouble to get people talking. (OnlyFans does not comment on the metrics of individual creators). Even minus the 20 percent commission OnlyFans charges, she’s still making $1 million a year. She’d already been drinking, and upon receiving it, she took a Xanax and a Vicodin. Paytas “blacked out” much of her life growing up, which was spent mostly outside Rockford, Illinois, with her mother, and occasionally, in Riverside, California with her father. She tells me about her plastic surgeries and liposuctions. “A lot of hate videos were being made.” She doesn’t remember what happened, but according to the police filing, when they came by for a wellness check there were “pills and piss everywhere.” The third time, later that year, happened when she was on Instagram Live while high — she suspects it was a viewer who called the authorities. Yet nothing has been more successful in getting Paytas attention than what she does best: pissing people off. More in the genre of “I just spent thousands of dollars on at least a dozen of his actual movie costumes.” “He’s Jewish and funny and schlubby and gets really attractive people in all his movies,” she explains. Her reasoning is she now identifies as nonbinary, but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it at the time (her pronouns are both she/her and they/them). “Jason and David come while I’m lying on the stretcher, and I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out.’ I get off the gurney, I take off my gown, I start running out of the hospital and security people drag me and shoot Ativan in my thigh and strap me down.” (Dobrik and Nash did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)  “I have more PTSD from David and Jason than I do hooking on Santa Monica Boulevard,” she says. “Everyone assumed I’d always done porn, but I never thought I would,” says Paytas, who joined last year.

For Shakman, nailing these specific details was critical. For the episode’s titles, they were “obviously riffing on Bewitched and stuff,” Shakman says. “For instance, the title sequence for episode six, which was loosely inspired by Malcolm in the Middle, was always designed to be this oner from Tommy’s point of view, with the family camcorder,” he says. For Agatha All Along, though, “I planned and storyboarded it, but there were also so many ideas that Kathryn came up with that were super fun,” he explains. The pics of young Wanda are real snaps of Olsen, but the photos of Baby Vision are another story. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that Disney and Marvel’s enormously popular new marquee superhero series WandaVision not only forgoes the fancy, ultra-sophisticated title treatment trend, it completely upends it, with a series-long celebration of outdated titles from television’s less prestigious past. “I just laughed and laughed and laughed, seeing the Baby Vision shots. This is also the first episode of the season to include one of the customary Marvel mid-credits stingers — a small extra scene teasing the story to come, made famous by Samuel L. Photo: Marvel Studios

Our current golden age of TV is also a golden age of TV title sequences. “We wanted the homage to Full House both because it’s a great show of that era, but also because of Lizzie’s connection to it from her sisters [Mary-Kate and Ashley],” he explains. The finishing touch — and one of the most strictly delightful elements of WandaVision — is every show-within-the-show’s title sequence, each replete with its own catchy theme song. “There aren’t a whole bunch of kiddos in the family in episode three, so the boxes that were designed for The Brady Bunch didn’t make sense for us in our world,” Shakman says. “But then Perception came in and added all of the great treatments and effects that felt like the late ’90s, and the title design itself.”

“Breaking the Fourth Wall”

Photo: Marvel Studios

The final episodic sitcom parody of WandaVision’s first season brings the show right up close to the 2010s, riffing on “mockumentary”-style sitcoms such as The Office, Parks and Recreation, and especially Modern Family, including one-off cut-aways and talking head interviews. “We were struggling to find pictures to turn into Baby Vision, but Scott McPhate, one of our VFX coordinators, has kind of a Paul Bettany-ish look,” Shakman says. So I reached out to him and his amazing wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez. We had a bunch of ideas to pitch them, and then they started storyboarding it. “By the end of that episode, we’ve busted out of the television construct. But where a real ’70s sitcom might draw those stills from actual scenes from the series, Shakman and his team had to manufacture them from scratch. The recreations are meticulous, and resemble their eras down to the smallest detail. “We built that opening sequence first in the writing, and then met with Titmouse to figure out exactly what we wanted, beat by beat, to begin with. “I knew Bobby Lopez from college — he’s an old friend, and we used to work together on stuff back in our theater days. “Once I joined I realized we needed to get a songwriting team in to create those,” Shakman says. That’s how we got them onboard.” Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the Oscar-winning team who also wrote songs for Disney’s Frozen and Coco, wrote all of the theme music for the series. The style and scope of each title sequence was dreamed up well in advance: The show’s writers actually wrote their own versions of what these sequences might look like into the original scripts, brainstorming ideas for the period credits and matching theme songs. “So instead we came up with our version that was a little bit Mary Tyler Moore, a little bit Brady Bunch, and some of our invention too.”

The sequence does culminate in a series of hexagonal boxes, each showing a still from a scene from the show. Series showrunner Jac Schaeffer and director Matt Shakman have put a tremendous amount of effort into making WandaVision look, sound, and feel like sitcom history, as Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff deals with her grief by meticulously imagining a better life for herself that borrows from life on the tube. “But these worlds are not parody. “Don’t Touch That Dial”

Photo: Marvel Studios

The second episode of WandaVision moves ahead about a decade, leaving behind the 1950s to imitate some of the more fantastical sitcoms from the 1960s, especially Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. In keeping with the familiar Brady spirit, the writers considered a title sequence that would relegate the cast to a series of interlocking Brady-style boxes, but they couldn’t quite get it to fit. “I just loved everything about Agatha All Along,” Shakman laughs. “We had illustrators draw the picture, but what we really wanted to do was copy how the Family Ties portrait is done, which when you watch it you can tell was not actually a line drawing, but has been made from a photograph. It’s just in our DNA.”

The title sequence begins with a clear reference: an illustration of the family being elaborately painted, exactly like Family Ties. A couple of shots in the sequence — a crane shot pulling away from the family, and a shot of the camera running through the park toward them as they run by — are direct homages to Full House. Jac and her amazing team of writers knew that there should be title sequences that would go along with each era of sitcom,” he says. Giving each episode its own unique title sequence was part of the plan from the very beginning, Shakman explains. The punky, chaotic titles of beloved Frankie Muniz sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, which WandaVision replicates right down to the typeface. “There’s so much work that goes into those titles, but we knew that they were a key part of the storytelling, and we knew we had to get them right — it wasn’t something we could just toss off.”

“On a Very Special Episode …”

Photo: Marvel Studios

WandaVision’s fifth-episode foray into the sitcoms and family dramas of the 1980s and early 1990s had a special place in Shakman’s heart — because as a child actor, Shakman was actually in a lot of the shows of the era, including The Facts of Life and a Growing Pains spinoff called Just the Ten of Us. That the show would start using stingers once it reached the 2010s was deliberate. “He offered, sweetly, some of his baby pictures, and they were perfect.” When he first got the temp VFX mocked up for them, he remembers, he lost it. version of The Office. To that end, Shakman staged, shot, and edited each episode of WandaVision to resemble the shows of a particular era of American TV sitcoms, beginning with The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy in the 1950s and continuing through to Modern Family as we converge on the present day. So we took photos of the family, created a line drawing from that, and then we created the final painting from the line drawing from the photograph and filmed it.”

But it’s not just Family Ties. I showed them to everyone on set on my phone.”

“All New Halloween Spooktacular!”

Photo: Marvel Studios

For viewers of a certain age, the most instantly recognizable title sequence homage comes in episode six, when WandaVision reaches the late 1990s and early 2000s. “This is where the device seemed to fit, and that it happened to be when that device was invented made sense for how we were evolving the storytelling as well.”

“Agatha All Along”

Video: Disney+

WandaVision’s ultimate title sequence actually arrives at the ending of its seventh episode, after friendly neighbor Agnes is revealed to be none other than Agatha Harkness, the nefarious witch behind much of the season’s antics. “But it just didn’t make sense for us.” Instead, the episode uses the rapid-fire title treatment of Happy Endings and a jaunty tune reminiscent of the U.S. The whole creative team, including the Lopezes and Schaeffer, grew up watching those shows, too. Getting it right was a long-term process that involved a great deal of back-and-forth collaboration. Notably, however, the episode’s title sequence doesn’t mimic Modern Family’s. The painting at the end is a photograph that’s just had, like, a paint application done on top of it.” Naturally, Shakman followed suit. “I remember her coming up with the idea that she should be having a picnic on Wanda’s lawn while she’s controlling Pietro — two minutes before we shot it. “It meant that new period costumes had to be made, new locations had to be found, hair and makeup had to be done, and the actors had to be brought in,” he says. The reference? It also introduced the running convention of the period-specific title sequence, using its throwback credits to prove the show’s commitment to the bit. Jackson’s end-of-film cameo in Iron Man. We revised it, and then once we got into post-production I kept working with them to fine-tune it all the way through to the end. “It was so important. It changed and evolved a lot over time.”

“Now in Color”

Photo: Marvel Studios

When WandaVision enters the 1970s, the show makes the leap from black-and-white to living color, as Wanda and Vision prepare to welcome twins in a groovy riff on the era’s family-friendly network staples, such as Good Times, The Partridge Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and, of course, The Brady Bunch. Allow Kathryn Hahn herself to demonstrate, in an irresistible sequence that plays like the opening credits to an entirely different show than the one we’ve been watching. To pull off this animated coup, Shakman commissioned Titmouse Inc., a boutique animation studio based in Vancouver primarily known for working in the short-form children’s animation space. From the overlapping moody silhouettes of True Detective to the dripping wax-figure goop of Daredevil, from the board-game relief maps of Game of Thrones to the neon hues of the synth-drenched Stranger Things, splashy, expensive-looking title sequences have become an expected element of high-profile series. The crane itself is a basic tool on big-budget Marvel blockbusters, but not so much on sitcoms. Just what has she been responsible for, you ask? “There was discussion for that episode about whether we wanted to pull out from frames and do the frame within a frame within a frame thing,” Shakman says. The opening titles are modeled on the former’s iconic animated credits, showing Wanda and Vision going through the motions of comic marital bliss as a full-blown two-minute cartoon. “That was decided before I even joined the project. “I’m so proud of all of them,” Shakman says of this string of standout opening titles, in an interview on Zoom a few days before the release of the show’s much-anticipated season finale. “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”

Photo: Marvel Studios

WandaVision’s series premiere established its unusual stylistic template right away, faithfully emulating the look of classic postwar American sitcoms by shooting on a studio sound stage in black and white and in a conventionally boxy 4:3 aspect ratio. “It was important to us to capture that vibe. “They make me so happy.” The results are the product of an incredible amount of technical diligence and creative process, which Shakman walked us through, episode by episode. Wanda has created these worlds to escape her grief, and therefore they needed to be perfectly put together — no detail spared.”

For many of these title sequences, Shakman enlisted the help of Perception, a title design studio who also did the main-on-end sequence for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Wanda is aware of Agatha, so we can now introduce the Marvel language of the teaser scene,” Shakman says. Typically, in designing these title sequences, Shakman would work with storyboard artists to “riff on different ideas of how to put things together” before shooting. “That was the easiest one, because I used to be a kid actor in those shows,” he says. “We had so many common references for that. They’re not spoofs. Everything had to be authentic,” he says. [Clockwise from top left] WandaVision circa the 1960s, the ‘80s, the ‘70s, and the late ‘90s/aughts. So our poor, wonderful prop guy, Elliot, had to go create a picnic out of nowhere in about five seconds.”

Tags: But they had to have the crane for this, Shakman says, “because they had it on Full House!”

And finally, there are the photographs: baby pictures shown in montage, in keeping with the family feel of the era.

Grey’s Anatomy writer-producers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan are set to serve as showrunners on the half-hour dramedy adaptation of Torrey Peters’s debut novel, according to Deadline. The book follows three interconnected Brooklynites on the cusp of middle age: 34-year-old Reese, a trans woman who wants to raise a child; her 30-year-old ex Ames, a cis man who detransitioned after breaking up with Reese and is having a baby with his boss; and 39-year-old Katrina, a cis woman and said pregnant boss. And as if all that doesn’t already have you saying “Oh, honey!” to this news, Peters also directly references Sex and the City throughout the novel, with Reese confronting what she calls “the Sex and the City problem” — or which character’s life she’ll follow. Related

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Tags: We’ll go out on a limb, though, and guess that all the main characters will be around for this one. When One World published the book on January 12, Detransition, Baby was heralded as one of the first novels by an out trans person to be published by a big-five publishing house (in this case, Penguin Random House). Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Publisher

Forget about the Sex and the City reboot — the true 2020s iteration of the show is here, in the form of a Detransition, Baby adaptation. Now, Peters is also set to write the pilot episode of the adaptation, which is not yet attached to a network.

When asked by Oprah how she feels about the palace hearing her speak “her truth” in this interview, Markle responded that, given the treatment she received prior to the couple escaping to California, they can’t be surprised that she’s now compelled to open up. Photo: CBS/YouTube

Further proving that Buckingham Palace is turning into the “this is fine” dog meme, another snippet from Meghan Markle’s upcoming tell-all interview revealed that she believes the palace was complicit in making her and Prince Harry’s life a living hell as working royals. “I don’t know how they could expect that after all of this time, we would still just be silent if there is an active role that the Firm is playing in perpetuating falsehoods about us,” she explained. Related

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Tags: (“The Firm” is a fancy, albeit garbage language term for the royal family.) “And if that comes with risk of losing things, I mean, there’s a lot that’s been lost already.” In an earlier teaser for the tell-all, Oprah said “there’s no subject that’s off-limits” with Markle and Harry, so they may as well admit that Queen Elizabeth has terrible choices in hats too.

Executive producers Rob Thomas, Paul Rudd, John Enbom, and Dan Etheridge are slapping on their pink bow ties once again to follow the show’s Los Angeles catering team of wannabe actors with (hopefully) the original cast as well. “We had such a good time that we wanted to find a way to get the team back together again. Photo: Starz

Are we having fun yet? Starz today announced that a limited, six-part revival of the cult hit Party Down is in development. The cast is so busy these days that finding a window where we can do it may require trigonometry, but we’re determined to make it happen.” We’re excited to see Jane Lynch and Adam Scott smoke pot once again but this time in a post–Glee and Parks and Rec world. “At the end of 2019, the Party Down cast and producers were all reunited at a retrospective for the show hosted by Vulture,” said Thomas (thanks for the shout-out!). What could go wrong? Related

Sad Breasts and Giant Hogs: A Party Down Reunion

Tags:

Arguably, though, the boys made bigger waves this year when they doubled down on their own Flagrant Ones Patreon and leapt from the Earwolf ship in a group including Off Book — and longtime shared presence Dana Wickens, who has since been outspoken about the exodus. Zielinski and the real man who inspired it. Gonzo! Drop us a line at comedypodcasts@vulture.com. While Hanks’s reason for letting the actor go has been attributed to Ratliff’s “dead eyes” — a piece of evidence that the podcast thoroughly investigates through in-depth interviews, archival audio, and more — this week’s guest provides the most insight yet. Uncovering this new information takes listeners on a wild ride. Tompkins and Ayo Edebiri

March is special in the Hollywood Handbook schedule, marketed as the one month a year where hosts Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements put effort into the recordings and producer Kevin Bartelt lands them actually famous guests to whom they can put in effort. Band of Brothers lead writer and supervising producer Erik Jendresen joins Ratliff to find the truth about the role of Private John S. We’re here to make it a bit smaller, a bit more manageable. Sometimes it’s nice to get back to the sound of a homegrown podcast that takes its time and rambles around a bit with a comedian guest who comes fully loaded with hell-gig stories and anecdotes about opening for bigger-than-life stars. Hosted by comedy writer Erin Ryan and former Obama White House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco, Hysteria helps you process the news and learn creative insults for Ted Cruz. He talks about the years opening for more bands than he can remember, including Huey Lewis and the News, Jefferson Starship, Joe Walsh, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. They discuss being told pain is in their head (hysteria!), doctors’ fat-shaming, and having to caucus with your girlfriends because some bitch wouldn’t give you Plan B. Good One
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If you like comedy and you like podcasts, we recommend you subscribe to Vulture’s own Good One podcast, which releases new episodes every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hollywood Handbook — The Podcaster’s Promise Sessions: Volume One with Paul F. More From This Series

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Tags: The catharsis continues with this week’s “I Feel Petty,” which, among other petty grievances, addresses the question I’ve been screaming into the void for weeks: “What the f*#k is Clubhouse?!” —Anna Marr

Listen: Spotify | Apple | Website

The Sloppy Boys — Trinidad Sour

Many of us have turned to alcoholic beverages in recent months, including comedy rockers The Sloppy Boys, who launched a podcast dedicated to making and trying the International Bartenders Association’s 89 officially recognized cocktails in October. Instead, Hayes and Sean are reimagining “Tri [sic] Month,” beginning with an early draft of their prestige narrative program The Podcaster’s Promise, set in the year 3010 under President Crooked Media (and Dax Shepard is alive). Listeners can drink along with the show (actually something you can do with any podcast, but this time it’s by design), or if you prefer, just listen to the Boys get slightly buzzed over the course of the episode. Tompkins and Ayo Edebiri are both “Try Month” veterans, it makes sense that Chef Kevin might struggle in the early days of this independent period to secure the dream guests like Nathan Fielder, Tim Robinson, or Bob Odenkirk that he admits to reaching out to. This is Gonzo’s old hometown (his father was a doctor in town who actually delivered host Freeman as a baby), but for two and a half decades from the late ’70s through the early ’00s, his blend of stand-up and musical parody rocked the country out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Paul F. There are a lot of great shows, and each one has a lot of great episodes, so we want to highlight the exceptional and the noteworthy. Gonzo, from his art studio in Mason City, Illinois, next door to the Mason City Limits Comedy Club. —Kathryn Doyle

Listen: Spotify | Apple

The First Laugh Podcast — Dr. Mix the goofy premise with Earwolf insiders like PFT and Ayo, who are willing to cryptically dish on the fracturing business of comedy podcasting, and this month is off to another great start. But the strength of the podcast remains its ability to, as Jendresen says, “delve into some real truths about this incredibly bizarre business that we’re all in” with a relatable humor that could fuel future seasons easily. Dr. Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Getty Images and Netflix

The comedy-podcast universe is ever expanding, not unlike the universe universe. Plus, there are musical interludes that even a teetotaler can enjoy. Literally. —Becca James

Listen: Spotify | Apple | Website

Other Podcasts We’re Listening To:

Screams & Moans — Second Time Is BetterListen: Apple | Website

Hella in Your Thirties — Kayleen Schaefer: But You’re Still So YoungListen: Spotify | Apple | Website

Got a comedy podcast recommendation? Tompkins and Ayo Edebiri. They cover everything from the classic Manhattan to offbeat selections like the subject of episode 19, the Trinidad Sour: a newly invented cocktail that’s basically all bitters. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Robin Williams and Dana Carvey is just the tip of the raconteur iceberg as he reels off backstage stories galore, including playing baccarat with Whoopi Goldberg at a casino in Nevada. And while Paul F. Whether you’re a fan of the sound of sipping or a full-blown party animal yourself, you’ll find something to like about The Sloppy Boys — they specialize in having a good time. —Noah Jacobs

Listen: Spotify | Apple | Website

Hysteria — “What’s Up, Doc?” with Dr. Heather Irobunda

“Erin, baby, you know the title of your podcast, right?” Isn’t it time a show called Hysteria talked about women’s bodies and health care? Then, writers Rheeqrheeq Chainey and Julissa Arce join Erin and Alyssa to share their personal frustrations with the health-care system. It’s not such a big leap for the band known for songs like “One Last Bender,” “Tom Collins,” and “Here for the Beer.” Each week, hosts Mike Hanford, Tim Kalpakis, and Jeff Dutton check in on general Booze News, unravel the history of the cocktail both in human history and the boys’ personal history, and cap it off with a classic taste test. We hope to have your ears permanently plugged with the best in aural comedy. —Marc Hershon

Listen: Spotify | Apple | Website

Dead Eyes — The Big Zielinski

To give too much away about the season-two finale of Dead Eyes would ruin a riveting reveal. Each week, our crack team of podcast enthusiasts and specialists and especially enthusiastic people will pick their favorites. First, OB/GYN and women’s health advocate Dr. This culmination of actor and comedian Connor Ratliff’s “quest to solve a very stupid mystery that has haunted him for two decades: why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers” is shocking. They got a record number (hundreds) of email responses about the topic; it’s clear it needs to be covered, so why not do so with funny women who are A+ stand-ins for the friends you haven’t seen in a year? Heather Irobunda jumps on to chat about racism in medicine and using TikTok and Instagram to “empower vagina owners.” She even answers commonly asked questions like, “How should it smell?” Useful! Hosted by Illinois-based comedians Josh Freeman and Kyle Fields, The First Laugh goes long and deep with John Means, a.k.a.

It’s not enough to just work hard. Before, [success] was dependent upon gatekeepers, especially at radio stations. In the past, there was always a question about whether you could turn a profit on a Black film with a Black cast and a Black writer and director, when all it took was just the chance to get to make those blockbusters for them to flourish.Technology leveled the playing field. I would be Lil Tuma B. Careers aren’t reliant on gatekeeping. So the difference between B Tuma B who was born 1975 and Lil Tuma B in 1995 is that opportunities are leveled by places like YouTube. I think I signed something somewhere. So that’s why I’m so optimistic. And there are some people who will continue things. There was no access to magazine editors, to [The Source’s] Unsigned Hype. I came to the States in ’94, but I lived in America when I was a little kid, ages 5 to 13. A lot of people going to Ghana for the Afrochella and Afro Nation festivals …

We’ve seen a lot of changes to the way we operate as a result of COVID, including experiences that weren’t necessarily ever digital-first becoming digital-only, like films, concerts, live shows, and festivals. I don’t know if you’re following that industry, but right now there’s Black artists whose upward mobility is essentially at the mercy of white executives and program directors who often just don’t pay them any mind.I’m not going to pretend like I am. A person playing your song or watching the video, they feel when you’re working on that level. I don’t want to knock what they did, but …

Graceland is iconic, but it’s also kinda … Black music made by a white guy for a white audience.From a self-empowerment perspective, we’re in a different space where we’re like, Oh, that’s what they fucked with? That innovation allowed a more level playing field because in the South, artists were able to sell their own music. If I was born in 1995, I [could’ve eventually] use[d] YouTube. Those songs wouldn’t live on the same tape even ten years ago.[Michelle Williams] had the song, “When Jesus say yes, nobody can say no.” [2014’s “Say Yes” featuring Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland]. Now it’s all measurable. It’s about the opportunity. It’s a lie. That’s why the whole timing thing that we were talking about earlier is so important. When it works good, it works good, but it’s not inherently good.I’m not saying I have faith and trust in—

That’s not what I mean. How do we break out of that?I don’t think human beings ever just break out of what they’re familiar or comfortable with, what they recognize, or what their parents did. I can memorize the timing. That’s fair. But do you remember Kardinal Offishall? I was born in 1975, and I wanted to rap. I lived in Zimbabwe all my teenage years. Is this new initiative an attempt to address that?Yeah, I can’t comment on that. They know Black artists’ value at the crossover level with the mainstream audience way more now than they did before. When I hear records in the clubs like Burna Boy’s “Ye ye ye … ” I’m like, Is this really happening? That said, I wish you’d included a few Americana artists. I’ve been getting paid for this for 24 years now. We’re talking about practicing diversity even within the Black community. I was listening to Kelly Rowland’s new EP last night. No one can be you better than you. I’d go live. I just don’t know how easy or fair it is anymore.It’s not easy. These things take time. So anything we missed in one cohort, we will pay attention to in the next cohort. The decade between 2000 and 2010 was a decade of disruption, from mixtapes to ringtones to the blogosphere. Here’s the deal: This is a long-term thing. The waves come, and we surf. On the contrary, I observe patterns, and I see similarities to the past. With RapCaviar, there’s the feeling that it’s less about breaking artists and more about collecting the most notable music, which can shut out underground artists. So when you talk about the connect, it’s a timing thing. But with playlists, TikTok, and YouTube — all these avenues of internet visibility we didn’t have 20 years ago — there are opportunities to disrupt the industry, but I think we’re finding that what rises to the top of the charts isn’t necessarily more eclectic than it was before. Movements have different places in the graph. You didn’t have access to A&Rs to send demo tapes. What I work on is picking that up and turning it around to see if it’s good.By default, I’m an OG. People will notice. But now, it’s the youth that are connecting. I can tell you the first time I heard certain stuff in America, like, Oh my gosh, this is happening while I’m alive. We’re making Black history right now, through globalization. And the next generation really benefits from those learnings. It’s not my children’s generation. It’s timing. When I came to America, I was in Utah and Iowa, and in those days you didn’t blow up in Utah and Iowa. I agree that tastes are really starting to open up. They can’t deny it. Down in Louisiana, where Master P and everyone came up …Too $hort was doing the same thing. Numbers don’t lie. I can tell you the first time I heard certain stuff in America, like, Oh my gosh, this is happening while I’m alive. That’s a Nigerian gospel song. The ancestors are seeing their descendants reunite through music and technology. But not everybody’s going to get it, and not at the same time. I stopped, and the reason was the physical distance. That’s a question for a psychologist. We’ve seen footage. This was in the 2000s. The artists that I believe do that in their music and even their digital strategy. I tried to rap in Zimbabwe [under the name] B Tuma B. It’s a process, and there are going to be people who will make sacrifices on behalf of others. From a Black music perspective, it has all happened on YouTube. Choclair, K-os, the old-timers? I’d go make visuals. Do you think that we snap back to normal when things settle down, or is this kind of an egg we don’t uncrack?It’ll be hybrid in-person. I’d build an audience. I wonder whether you’re aware of the criticisms of RapCaviar? There are some places where IRL events didn’t even stop. In February, he helped launch the #YouTubeBlackVoices Fund, a grant program honoring over 130 gifted Black creators internationally; it was borne out of last summer’s racial reckoning, when YouTube revealed a $100 million fund dedicated to nurturing greater variety and creating more opportunities for its users. Anyone could upload their music videos, lyric videos, visualizers, and behind-the-scenes content. I saw a few Sundance films in bed last month. Photo: Michael Brandy

You may recognize Tuma Basa as the creator of Spotify’s popular RapCaviar playlist or in his current position as Director of Black Music and Culture at YouTube or in any of the many roles he has occupied at media organizations like MTV and BET as the digital revolution has changed the way we encounter and interact with music. We’re not overlooking the nuance of the Black experience. Harmony Samuels, a Nigerian, produced that. I’ve seen dances come and go so many millions of times. At the same time, we have artists who are internationally known, like WizKid and Burna Boy, who have enough footing in North America to work on projects with Drake and Beyoncé but who aren’t enjoying as much traction here as solo artists. That rigor connects; it’s transformational. He wrote the book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. When I spoke in Australia, I told the people, “Working hard is not enough for success. I mean, with hope, if a person is doing good enough work, eventually they reach a point where they can’t be denied anymore. COVID hurts because there was a lot of travel going on. So that’s another part of technology, that direct, artist-to-artist or artist-to-fan connection. I think that we’re on two different sides of the business. How do you curate that and break out from everyone else? The idea being that that, now that it’s easier to get in the door, there’s more people in the room?Building your audience is not necessarily caring what people like me think. If you build your audience, and you have enough engagement, we’ll find you. The pathways to success have shifted. I was like, Fuck that shit. I’d have a whole world. Or is that even something an artist should be interested in?Build an audience. I don’t know if you remember this guy, Thomas Friedman, from the New York Times. What’s the disconnect?I don’t think there’s a disconnect. IRL is going to come back. Over the last 20 years you’ve worked at BET, MTV, Revolt, Spotify, and now YouTube. At a time when social media was blowing up, and people were doing the Superman dance, it was happening on YouTube. I see playlists with formats that resemble radio. The pie is getting bigger. That’s all we do. In that span of time, Black music has pushed its way to the forefront of American pop culture. When I do public speaking, Craig, and I do a lot of public speaking, I have a mantra that I tell myself. Last June, we saw the beginnings of a reckoning as far as opening up more and better opportunities for Black creatives, but there was worry that momentum wouldn’t hold past the end of the summer. So, back in your Spotify days, you created RapCaviar, which is one of the more successful hip-hop playlists today. The barriers are being removed. I see very specific kinds of artists topping the charts with very specific sounds. Even before speaking to you, I was like, Just be you. I would be Lil Tuma B. Right now, there’s so much Black music coming out of Canada — The Weeknd, Tory Lanez, Drake, PartyNextDoor, Daniel Caesar. I feel there’s just more slices being carved out of the same pie, i.e. B Tuma B gave up that dream. I’d have a whole world. I’d go live. I wasn’t in L.A. I’d go find a beat on YouTube, rap over it, make a song, upload it. And then your truth will come out. The traffic jam is just much more packed and cluttered. We use new tech to repeat old patterns of behavior. From a global perspective, we have Afro-Brazilian punk, Sho Madjozi in South Africa, Brent Faiyaz (who’s from Maryland), Serpentwithfeet (who’s very musically open about his sexuality and his relationships and even his preference for Black men), Tkay Maidza (who’s from Zimbabwe but Australian and who now lives overseas). In what ways do you feel that the music business has gotten better about handling Black artists and their careers, and what improvements do you think are still necessary?The music business has invested more money in Black artists. When I hear records in the clubs like Burna Boy’s ‘Ye ye ye … ’ I’m like, Is this really happening? It’s not my children’s generation. She had Afrobeat samples and urbano beats mixed with more traditional American R&B sounds. What was the genesis of the #YouTubeBlackVoices artist class? For the sake of the conversation, let’s say I’m a gifted up-and-coming artist struggling to find my national audience. So I’m bringing more of an optimism because I’m seeing the trend of more opportunities opening up as a result of technology. Related

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Tags: This is a movement. I had made an argument at that time that southern music, because of the CD-ROM, burning CDs, and people able to sell CDs from the back of the trunk…

Careers aren’t reliant on gatekeeping anymore. I’ve seen this movie 30, 40 times. It’s a big part of how YouTube adapts. I’ll give you an example. But we do have Joy Oladokun, who’s like country. Basa speaks of the big picture in the optimistic terms you might expect to hear from a music-media fixture who has had speaking engagements around the world, but when you break through that and into his backstory — born in Congo in the ’70s, he split his formative years between Zimbabwe and America’s Midwest, where his dream of becoming a rapper was complicated by the fact that these areas hadn’t yet built the necessary hip-hop industry infrastructure to make such a thing very easy — he seems less like an optimist and more like someone who’s now using his pull to smooth and pave roads that weren’t open to him in his youth. But as a critic, I have to have healthy suspicion. You can dig deep. We’re past that moment where people used to wonder if the Negro League would do just as well [as the Major League]. His excitement about the future is infectious, though I can’t help feeling as though we’ll eventually bungle it. There’s kind of a luck element.It’s not luck. Caribbean fans and American fans and Nigerian fans and Kenyan fans and YouTube fans are all getting to discover each other and reconnect. Part of being an OG is cultural leadership, positivity, and giving some type of insight into the future. There’s certain experiences, musical pallets that needed to be whet and tuned a little bit to groove with it. We’ll get to you. It’ll come out in your actions. It’s not worth it. It’ll come out your mouth. There’s no shortcut anymore. I’d go make visuals. Jelleestone? You’re more optimistic about this stuff by nature of what you’re working on. or New York or Atlanta where you had access. These people knocked the barriers down and helped with delineation and absorbed the learning costs. They can tell their story in short form or long form. Some people feel like the playlist economy is just a replication of radio. I can respect that. It’s good to see YouTube putting its money where its mouth is. How would I get on your radar? [You saw this with] Drake working with Young Money and that being his primary identity in the early days. What is its central motivation?We wanted to make sure that the different spectrums of the Black experience were represented. less pie for everyone.I didn’t think what has happened so far was going to happen in my lifetime. I appreciate the global perspective, because a lot of talk about diversity in music can get landlocked in America, and there are other countries that deserve attention. You see what I’m saying? I’d build an audience. It’s literal world-building. And so while I am optimistic about the opportunities we have now, and I wouldn’t even be sitting here if it weren’t for the internet, I also see the downsides.There’s a dark side, but I’d like to focus on the upside. It’s how you differentiate yourself and how you create a distinct, authentic identity — a sonic, visual, attitudinal, experiential identity. It’s a reunion. It was expensive at that time to get CDs made and distributed and to get retailers to put your shit in their store or even to get coverage, to go to the TV stations, radio stations. If I was born in 1995, I’d go find a beat on YouTube, rap over it, make a song, upload it. Because it’s about that shot. You have to work smart, and you have to work hard.” Working hard means being artful, unique, and original. Do you have that faith in the system the way it is now?I think it’s much fairer than it was in the B Tuma B days. YouTube was born in that decade; social media emerged in that decade. The thing is: I don’t know how we break those patterns. When African music used to pop in America, it had to be co-signed by a very popular white performer, like a Peter Gabriel or a Paul Simon. Stateside, we’re seeing artists like Bad Bunny pulling off impressive feats on the charts without having to adapt their music or their lyrics for English-speaking audiences. All these new dance challenges and stuff … I’m 45 years old. When there’s a level playing field and equal amount of time or energy or attention or commitment, you can’t deny us, you know? This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. You have to have faith and trust in the advancement of tech and the goodness of that. It doesn’t depend on whether Paul Simon likes your music or not. It doesn’t depend on whether Paul Simon likes your music or not. They didn’t have critical radio markets. This stuff has been happening.

In an elegant email (as opposed to the mess of a Zoom awards show), the magazine declared today that The United States vs. Other Oscar favorites, such as Mank, Minari, One Night in Miami, and Da 5 Bloods, also received prizes, while Jodie Foster won for The Mauritanian. Hopefully she’s in her pajamas again for this ceremony? Check out the full list of winners below:

Career Achievement: George Clooney

Best Picture/Best Movie for Grownups: The United States vs. The Gold Rush

Presented by

Photo: Takashi Seida/Paramount Pictures

Unlike awards shows such as the Golden Globes (which are very clearly for children), AARP the magazine’s Movies for Grownups Awards announced their top picks in a dignified manner. On the TV side, The Queen’s Gambit and This Is Us won in the awards’ inaugural television categories. Billie Holiday had nabbed the coveted Best Picture for Grownups award, while Aaron Sorkin won two nods for his work on The Trial of the Chicago 7. EST on PBS and hosted by verified adult Hoda Kotb. If you want to watch the grown-ups win, the show will be broadcast on March 28 at 8 p.m. Billie Holiday

Best Actress: Sophia Loren (The Life Ahead)

Best Actor: Anthony Hopkins (The Father)

Best Supporting Actress: Jodie Foster (The Mauritanian)

Best Supporting Actor: Demián Bichir (Land)

Best Director: Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7)

Best Screenwriter: Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7)

Best Ensemble: One Night in Miami

Best Intergenerational: Minari

Best Buddy Picture: Da 5 Bloods

Best Time Capsule: Mank

Best Grownup Love Story: Supernova

Best Documentary: A Secret Love

Best Foreign Film/Best International Film: Collective (Romania)

Best Actress (TV): Catherine O’Hara (Schitt’s Creek)

Best Actor (TV): Mark Ruffalo (I Know This Much Is True)

Best Series: This Is Us (NBC)

Best TV Movie/Limited Series: The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)

Related

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Tags:

Cory, our eternal rogue agent, picks Gabby, which is a choice I weirdly have faith in. Either way, we’re in for some good television. For a second, I thought she would readily accept this fake-man apology in the spirit of positivity, but she’s rightfully not having it. I’m excited to watch everyone drink whatever mysterious liquid is on the tables in front of them and for Kam to inevitably win. We can’t go on like this! This is probably the most theatrical mission we’ve had yet. While talking to Gabby, she says from now on, the only person she has something to prove to is herself, not CT. This has to be the end of the cold-weather locations. It’s typical of the show to manipulate the eliminations for story purposes or just to fuck with people. Boo! The lights are flashing for dramatic effect. What Big T goes through over the span of five minutes in this episode is now my worst nightmare. A skating rink? At this point, I can’t tell if Kyle just liked the power that came with being Kam’s partner or if he’s in love with her. Now, we get into the drama that drives the rest of the episode. But CT decides to shit all over his partner Big T by swapping her out for Kam in the meanest way possible. If this woman’s confidence wasn’t already broken, spit on, and set on fire by CT, it’s now buried six feet underground after being picked last out of three people who aren’t even necessarily good competitors. CT orders Big T a glass of champagne, which I’m pretty sure she could’ve gotten for free anyway. Cerebral, becomes the new Goof. I just can’t stand when skinny people with all the clothing options in the world wear hideous things. the Peter Pan challenge, which I absolutely love. Most of her disappointment seems hidden in the fact that she thought she would never be able to prove herself to CT no matter how well she performed. I don’t think anyone is surprised that CT swapped out Big T, including Big T herself, but the complete disregard he has for this very fragile woman’s feelings after gassing her up the entire season and winning several challenges with her is absolutely bonkers. The alteration, this time, is that the contestants are higher in the air with the poles farther apart. Devin would be such a fearsome competitor if he had more than two people that liked him at a time during a season. For some reason, the producers think it would be fun to watch the cast stand around awkwardly in a giant hot spring with one sad chair holding a tray of champagne glasses. The teams are handcuffed together and placed inside giant cages where they have to endure “torturous conditions” — not actually torture — and complete a series of tasks in the fastest amount of time to win. What a character arc! This is basically my Super Bowl. Darrell ends up finishing the tangram, or as he calls it, the “tangerine puzzle,” first, and Devin, a.k.a. Next, it’s the event we’ve all been waiting for, although it starts off a little slow. Darrell is a wild card because we mostly know him as a strength guy. But CT, being a man, not only has to swerve around a legitimate apology but also leave Big T with some of the blame. CT keeps defending the fact that he doesn’t want to run a final with her and goes out of his way to say she’s not ready. There’s no, “I’m sorry, Big T, but …” No, “This is a really tough decision.” No, “It’s been fun working with you, Big T.” As soon as TJ asks CT if he plans to keep Big T, he starts shouting and jumping around like a madman, saying he’s been “waiting all season for Kam.” Big T’s mouth is agape, and so is mine. Kyle is obviously incensed because going from Kam to Nany, whom he picks as his next partner, is like trading in a Ferrari for a Toyota Camry. More negativity! Maybe it’s a little bit of both, like most people who watch him on television. Terms & Privacy Notice
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. It seems silly not to try to get rid of someone who already has a skull, but all right. But I’m sad his experience was corrupted by a bad back AND Lolo Jones. But watching her experience the mind-fuck of being everyone’s favorite person in the house but the most unwanted competitor was tough. One of those art classes where you drink wine? And the pieces they’re knocking down on each pole belong to a tangram that they have to complete on the ground at the end of the challenge. I honestly think the producers watched that footage of Josh sobbing because his “friends” saved him from being the house vote, thought, Man, this dude is delusional, and decided to do a double elimination as the cast was on their way to the Crater. A bowling alley? Back at the house, Nany’s in shambles because her best friend is gone. I can’t! Darrell unsurprisingly decides to keep Amber B. You’d think Josh, taking yet another L, would be the most hurt person at this elimination. She says she feels like he completely betrayed her trust and that he made her feel like “trash.” I can’t say that I’ve felt much for Big T prior to this moment because her entire personality is that she’s extremely liked and pitied by everyone, and that’s not fun to watch. VULTURE NEWSLETTER
Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows! Nam is anticipating a diagnosis of whatever’s going on with his back as they head into the next challenge. Also, I feel like I’m being hard on Nany this episode, but I have to draw attention to her blue-and-yellow plaid bathing suit very briefly. She says that working with Josh was the only reason she felt motivated and not the fact that she’s done this show for ten years and hasn’t won. In the kitchen, Kyle is pissed and going at CT, who’s eating a giant tray of deli meat, for stealing Kam. I honestly think this escape room from hell will be the funniest challenge we’ve had all season, which says a lot considering we just watched Josh fail to grab a rope last week. Tags: Big T simply wants him to apologize for the manner in which he swapped her out at the Crater. Of course, TJ tells him that he didn’t receive the medical clearance to stay in the competition and that he has to leave. Darrell and Devin are up first, and they’re performing equally well the entire time. Devin and CT are two self-proclaimed puzzle people, and Josh is, again, a goof. It’s called Survive the Night and takes place inside a dark warehouse. Mr. CT couldn’t be more excited to take out The Goof and selects Darrell to compete against Devin. Now Big T is a rogue agent, which is honestly the best thing that could’ve happened to her after a tough week and considering this miserable challenge. The editors try to counter all the negativity of this episode with a scene of Leroy and Kaycee discussing how they have no problems and make a great team. He clearly wants this argument to end with her admitting that she sucks and affirming his decision to abandon her, but Big T is smarter and more emotionally intelligent than she puts on and decides to leave without any resolution. Big T is sobbing and hiccuping and saying that all the security she felt in their relationship has been undermined because of the way he humiliated her in front of everyone. Josh and CT initially are just as awkward and clumsy as you would expect two giant men to be while swinging in harnesses. Are there any trampoline parks in this part of Iceland? Josh isn’t too far behind. It’s revealed that the security breach we ended on last week means a double elimination, and now Josh, with the second-most house votes, has to come down to the sand and defend his skull. The next day, our competitors are given a “fun day” at a hot spring. I don’t know that we’ll see Nam again considering he didn’t make much of an impression besides being extremely cute. At the house, CT starts a bonfire for his conversation with Big T that inevitably goes horribly wrong. And Nam is pretty much handed Big T. Josh ultimately can’t recuperate from the mini-panic attack he has watching CT advance to the puzzle before CT completes the tangram and wins. I have to rescind my questioning of CT’s puzzle skills from a previous recap because he basically puts every piece in correctly on the first try, and I’m amazed and hot for CT again. But he’s getting frazzled and letting his feet hit the side of the platform instead of using it to run like you’re supposed to, and it’s driving me nuts! We get a glimpse at the first phase of these “torturous conditions” when a loud, screeching sound goes off inside the building, and everyone is freaking out. So here we are! Sorry, Nany, but it’s true. Maybe he and Darrell made some kind of deal that we missed. Out of nowhere, CT starts leaping off his platform to his poles like Tarzan and knocks down all his pieces. The elimination is Dead Ringer a.k.a. Email

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Tinker, Tailor, Bunny, Spy

Season 36

Episode 12

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

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Photo: MTV

I’m not sure if the producers love or hate Josh. But I’ve never seen a Black, female competitor be this coveted in the 20-something years this show has been on, and I love it.