Month: November 2020

New console week is finally upon us, and apparently Microsoft is bringing even more to the Xbox Series X and Series S thanks to its Game Pass subscription service. Xbox announced on Monday that it’s adding a free month of Disney+ to the various perks of subscribing.

Using the service’s most popular show, The Mandalorian, Xbox Wire shared that starting on Monday, a Game Pass subscription gives gamers a free 30-day trial of Disney+.

As Xbox explained in a press release, the deal is simple: if you have Game Pass, you now have a month of Disney+ you can access through your Xbox. And, of course, you can use that Xbox to stream the Disney+ app.

Starting today, Ultimate members will be able to stream all of the great entertainment available with Disney+, including content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. From old favorites to the latest epic movies, series and Originals from the world’s best storytellers, including the new season of The Mandalorian, we’re excited to provide this trial as a Perk to our members. Ultimate members who are new to Disney+ will be eligible to claim the 30-day subscription trial through the Perks Gallery on their Xbox console, on the Xbox app on Windows 10 PC, or through the Xbox Game Pass mobile app on iOS and Android. Once the Perk is claimed, members will be directed to the Disney+ site activate their subscription.

As Microsoft shared on Monday, the deal is only good for new Disney+ users. But it’s also good timing if you have, say, several email addresses and, perhaps, are just running up on the end of your free year of Disney+ you got from another offer when the service launched last year. At the very least, it’s a great thing to try on your new console once you can actually get your hands on one later this week.

It’s a lot cheaper than that Mandalorian-themed Xbox controller, anyway.

Doja Cat’s “Say So” has been one of the year’s biggest songs, so naturally, it’s been everywhere. While it’s a tremendous tune, one could be forgiven for experiencing a bit of fatigue with it. It looks like even Doja herself feels that way, as she tweeted over the weekend, “im tired of say so too yall.” Also this weekend, she performed the track at the 2020 MTV Europe Music Awards, but perhaps due to her being a bit over the song, she took it in a completely different direction.

While the original song is smooth, sugar-sweet pop, for this performance, she turned it into an intense, metal-edged rocker. Joined by a band, Doja and company played the song like a guitar-driven nu-metal, which was pulled off impressively well. Some of her airy vocals from the original song find their way to the forefront, but otherwise, this version of the song is entirely different.

Following the performance, Doja shared a gallery of images from the night and wrote, “Had such a great time performing ‘Say So’ at this years @mtvema ‘s! Thank you to all my fans for making me the winner of the ‘New Act’ category & to @mtv for having me!”

Watch Doja perform “Say So” above.

The Buffalo Bills were expected to be a good team this season, but I’m not sure many anticipated that they’d be in the conversation for the second-best team in the AFC. At the midway point of the season, that’s exactly where they are after dominating the Seahawks on Sunday in a 44-34 win that wasn’t really as close as that final score indicates.

There are certainly some flaws for the Bills on both sides of the ball, but the leap forward taken by Josh Allen at quarterback has been tremendous to watch and has put them in the mix among the AFC’s best teams. Allen has always had spectacular arm talent and athleticism — it’s why he vaulted into the top 10 when the Bills took him three years ago — but harnessing that arm and avoiding turnovers has been a significant issue in his young career. Thus far in 2020, he’s managed to limit those turnovers with just five interceptions and four fumbles, while throwing for 19 touchdowns and rushing for five more.

On Sunday, he had three TDs through the air and one on the ground, and after his latest rushing touchdown, the budding star QB broke out a Hot Rod celebration with Dawson Knox that few noticed what it was until later, when a Twitter user synced up the videos.

For those unaware, Hot Rod is an Andy Samberg/Lonely Island movie that flopped in theaters but has become a cult classic (as Samberg movies are wont to do) and features some truly outstanding performances from Bill Hader and Danny McBride. I hope Allen dips into the Hot Rod canon for more celebrations, as there are plenty of options to choose from. I hope to see the Richardson dance soon and also maybe picking up the pylon and beating a teammate while exclaiming he’s been drinking green tea all goddamn day.

There’s a lot to pull from but most importantly, we hope Allen is able to finally beat up his stepdad and earn his respect.

While the game show world continues to mourn the death of Alex Trebek, its syndication partner is apparently getting a big boost thanks to ABC. Wheel of Fortune is reportedly getting a celebrity spin-off, which is a term for both a television show and something that can happen to game show wheels if they’re not installed properly.

According to Deadline, ABC will take The Wheel into prime time, following Jeopardy‘s very successful lead with its Greatest Of All Time Tournament earlier in the year. The show’s first prime-time appearance won’t be a collection of its greatest players, but rather celebrities doing their best to solve puzzles for charity:

The network has ordered a series of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, which will see the long-running game show make its primetime debut.

The spin-off will be hosted by Pat Sajak and Vanna White and will see celebrity contestants come spin the wheel and solve word puzzles for a chance to win up to $1M with all of the prize money going to a charity of their choice.

While the Jeopardy! GOAT Tournament created high drama and good ratings for ABC, the wave of game shows hitting networks in 2020 is less about following that lead and more to do with the coronavirus pandemic, as game shows are notably easier and, yes, cheaper to make than dramas and comedies in the PPE era. But for game show fans, the chance to see Millionaire return alongside reboots of Supermarket Sweep and now Wheel in prime time is a nice little bumper crop, for sure.

Great shows about power players like Mad Men and The Sopranos aren’t about success so much as they’re about survival. Ditto shows like Succession and Billions, that flaunt immense luxury and the lengths people will go to maintain the lifestyle they’ve earned, grabbed, or, been born into. HBO’s Industry (premiering tonight on HBO) is following that same path, recalling some of the early fake it until you make it elements of Don Draper in the Billions‘y world of finance (swapping out New York for London and titans for first-year analysts). But if there’s a show that serves as a comp here, it might be ER with its gaggle of young, good looking doctors who threw their whole selves into their work while portraying a mix of cockiness, capability, and teeth chattering awkwardness. There’s just a lot more sex, drugs, and quarter-life crises here.

At the helm of this unique, captivating exploration of the work-party-repeat lifestyle and the effects of big ambition are Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, two former finance bros whose experience creates a dense world for series stars Myha’la Herrold, Marisa Abela, David Johnson, Ken Leung (and others in this large ensemble) to play. Uproxx spoke with the two showrunners about that quest to be authentic, transactional relationships, and the collaboration between them and the cast to portray the diverse, nuanced corporate culture at the heart of the show. You were both in finance. Where did the want to do that come from?

Mickey Down: For me, it was a mixture of peer pressure and trying to outsource my personality into a job, if that makes sense. We went to Oxford, so you had people constantly courting you for these jobs, and taking you out for dinner, taking you for drinks, and to events. [They were] trying to convince you to come and work for them. And then also there was a sort of competitive aspect. It was a very easy and quick way to basically become an adult. It was like, I can just put a suit on. I can pretend to be a big shot. I can go into work with my very nice tie and my shoes and my suit, and people look at me and think I’m an adult, when in fact I’m still a fresh, scared little boy who has no idea what he’s doing.

Does the reality of your experience with this world diverge from the reality of the show world that you guys have built?

Konrad Kay: We were always pushing as far as we could to kind of render the world as authentically as we could remember it. And that’s down to the cadences of the way people interact in those spaces, the way they talk to each other. We were just like, we need, even if it’s going to be quite opaque and a little bit of a black box, we need to sort of present it as we remember it. Because if we do it in a way, and we don’t talk down to the audience, and we treat them like they’re very smart (which maybe TV doesn’t do as much as it should these days) we thought, well, they’re going to be intrigued by what feels like an authentic depiction of these worlds.

There are shows that exist in the financial space like this — Succession, Billions — how do you compare your show to them?

Kay: All those shows you mentioned are all really, really good shows. And me and Mickey spoke quite a lot about the story pyro techniques of why isn’t there a criminal element of the story. What about if Eric (Leung), Harper’s (Herrold) boss, is actually being chased by the feds? Or all of these big ideas that you might see in other shows, and you might feel are slightly more expected. Our thing, our mantra when we were writing the show, and we told this to the directors as well, is like we kept talking about honoring small moments. There was a version of the show which me and Mickey had in our head for a long time which is pretty close to like Verite realism. Like it felt almost like if you sent a documentary crew onto a trading floor. The show’s obviously called Industry, but in the stuff that it examines around like mentor-mentee relationships in a career, the role a boss plays in a career, or the way hierarchy works in an institution… all of that stuff. We felt that there was a universality to it.

The focus on the work-party-repeat lifestyle, how does that diverge from your experience?

Down: I feel like, I know for a lot of young people and people of our generation as well, the first job that you have outside university feels like it’s all-encompassing. It feels like it’s the most important thing in the world.

Kay: We wanted the scenes outside the office to feel like a bit of a valve release because obviously there’s so much tension in the office. There’s so much noise. We wanted it to be like a real tempo shift. That’s why we wanted to show parties in people’s living rooms, and nightclubbing scenes. We wanted it to have that kind of energy that, I don’t know, especially in a pandemic feels slightly like vicarious living, and felt energetic, and you felt energized watching it. You so rarely see in workplace dramas about offices… you so rarely see proper club scenes, proper sex scenes. A show like this, I don’t think there’s ever been a standard workplace drama like this that has sex scenes quite like ours. And stuff like that, I think we were excited to kind of make sure we were capturing as well.

Down: I think we wanted to capture some excitement of starting the job as well, because as Konrad said, the first version we wrote was very pared back and self-serious, and not very fun at all. Because we thought, “God, we’re writing an HBO drama. We’ve done nothing before, so we have to write this really serious TV show.” And the notes that we were getting back from HBO were like “do you not have any fun when you’re doing this job?” But they gave a really good note, which is “you’re writing characters in the third act of their story rather than the first act.” And that’s just because we were writing from the perspective of two people who had lived it, basically got spat out by it, and we were writing almost from a place of bitterness rather than a place of joy.

The younger characters interaction with each other, obviously yes, they’re having fun, but it does feel like there is a detachment or a distance between the characters. Could you talk a little bit about their… I don’t want to say fear of intimacy so much as it feels like an aversion to legitimate emotional intimacy at this stage of their life? Why was it important to showcase that?

Kay: I think that’s really a smart reading of it, because that’s definitely what we were trying to go for a little bit. It’s interesting, for us one of the central relationships of the show is obviously between Harper and Yasmin (Abela). And it’s only in the third episode, really, or towards the back end of the second where they start to spend onscreen time together. It’s something that the show is exploring the whole time… I found this all the time when I was working in these institutions is the line between colleague and friend, it’s just sometimes really hard to know where you stand. And episode three is really an examination of that, really, because on some level their relationship’s quite tender, they’re quite open. But then there’s a transactional element to it as well. And I think there’s this thing, and that’s the nature of a lot of relationships in those places. Like what are you going to get me? What do you have that I don’t have?

Obviously, the main character is Harper, and Yasmin plays a huge role. The ideas that it’s a meritocracy and that where people come from doesn’t necessarily matter are expressed, which obviously proves itself to be somewhat false in moments from the show. I’m curious how you, as two men, found your way to tell a story that does speak to the differences in that world. One where male characters get more of a pass and female characters have to work a little bit harder. Can you tell me a little about the process and who else was involved in the creative shaping?

Kay: From a writing point of view, me and Mickey only ever get excited by stuff when we feel like we haven’t seen it before, or what is the most interesting lens to tell this story. What would it look like through sort of a girl from privilege and a girl who doesn’t come from privilege? When Yasmin and Harper clicked into focus for us, the potential for the whole world really opened up. It would have been negligent to make a show set in 2020 in a workplace and not address some of the things that have been in the culture, and specifically in corporate culture in the last five, six years. And then in terms of just the DNA of the characters, mine and Mickey’s experiences, regardless of gender, our DNA’s sort of in Harper and Yasmin, and Robert (Harry Lawtey) and Gus (Jonsson), and we’re sort of across all of them. And then in terms of, I know you’re asking about shaping the female voice. Firstly, we drew on a lot of experiences of our ex female colleagues in those situations. We had strong female voices in the writer’s room at all points. The whole editorial team was basically made up of women who are like sense checking our work.

When it came to shooting it, the reason that Myha’la and Marisa come across so, I think, strongly in the show and naturalistically and believably… The reason is, I think firstly, they’re very talented, that goes without saying. But also, me and Mickey really had a very intense day-to-day dialogue with them on set. And I think what makes Myha’la’s character so compelling is that so much of her is built into the character of Harper. Even as banal a thing as she came over from New York to Wales, and it was the first time she’d ever been on a plane. And for Harper, she’s come over from New York to London. There was just so much shared experience there. And so to your point about the female voice of it, we were constantly in a very active conversation talking about character with them. And they were coming to us and saying, “How does this feel? What is the intention of this? Have you thought about doing it slightly more like this, because I actually had this experience that’s actually very close to this.” And we would write towards them, so it felt like a super collaborative thing. And any kind of red flags about that sort of stuff, we were always very quick to address. It was a hugely collaborative process.

‘Industry’ premieres on HBO Monday, November 9 at 10 PM ET

Billie Eilish and her brother/musical partner Finneas have spoken this year on a number of occasions about Eilish’s upcoming material. She has released a couple new songs so far this year — “No Time To Die” and “My Future” — and now she has revealed that another one, “Therefore I Am,” is arriving this week.

Eilish made the announcement by sharing what is presumably the single art, which features a shattering white bust on a red background. She noted, “I’M SO EXCITED FOR THIS ONE.” The track is set to arrive on Thursday, November 12 at 10 a.m. PT. Finneas shared Eilish’s announcement and added, “You are not ready.” Finneas, by the way, also just shared a new song of his own, “Where The Poison Is,” which takes a direct jab at Donald Trump.

After it was revealed that Joe Biden is projected to win the election, Eilish shared a celebratory video in which she screams in excitement and says, “You guys, I wanted to say thank you so much to everybody that f*cking voted. F*ck! This is unbelievable. I am so happy, I am through the roof, and I wanted to say thank you to everybody that changed their mind or got out there and f*cking voted, even if you voted for the first time, whatever. Don’t let anybody tell you your voice does not matter, that your vote does not matter. It was so close and it’s because of you guys f*ckin’ pushing through that we won this sh*t!”

The pandemic rages on, and our election season is a garbage fire, but if there’s one good thing to come from this whole voting fiasco, it’s this: internet merch.

Specifically, internet merch that commemorates the stunning ineptitude of the Trump campaign. If that’s the kind of product that speaks to your wallet, then you’ll want to direct your money to the Four Seasons Total Landscaping website, because they’ve already built a business model to profit off the Trump campaign’s embarrassing error. Remember on Saturday, Trump cheerleader Rudy Giuliani held a press conference in Philadelphia, spouting the same nonsense about voter fraud and recounts that Trump himself has been communicating to his followers. But the delusional dying breaths of a campaign aren’t the story here. No, it’s where the final nail in the coffin was hammered that warrants a t-shirt.

The Trump campaign picked the parking lot of a family-owned landscaping business to make their last stand, next to a sex shop, and across the street from a moratorium. Some say this was a scheduling mistake, others think Giuliani deliberately chose this slab of pavement to host this desperate plea for attention because it was far-removed from Biden territory — most of Philadelphia went blue this election. Either way, the company is capitalizing on the irony of this whole thing, selling t-shirts, hoodies, and this gem:

Now, this is early days, so maybe there will be more merch to come for those gleefully relishing this very public political catastrophe. People do have jokes.

Hats off to the 2020 writers. You’ve given us a wild ride so far.

It is a fundamental truth known by the most dedicated of Fire Emblem: Three Houses fans that Claude Von Reigen absolutely wears socks with his adidas slides. Perhaps it’s his devil-may-care smile, perhaps it’s his tastefully disheveled hair– but regardless of why it exists, there is a consensus among fans that the heir to House Riegen rocks the hell out of some crew cut socks and black and white sandals.

Claude’s brand loyalty is just one of several “headcanons” to emerge from Fire Emblem: Three Houses — “headcanons” referring to various fan interpretations of a work, regardless of how well the original content supports it. Since the game’s release last summer, many other fan ideations have joined the ranks alongside our archer-turned-Adidas model: the palpable sexual tension between childhood friends Sylvain and Felix, the Golden Deer Houses’ status as meme king extraordinaires, and, of course, Byleth’s infamous “women want me, fish fear me” hat. These are just a few. The list goes on and on – equal parts charming and hilarious – helping solidify the game as one of the most loved of 2019.

However, it is important to note the Fire Emblem series was well-loved long before the Three Houses craze, particularly in Japan, with North American audiences jumping aboard a bit later. Since 1990, Nintendo has published 16 entries in the tactical RPG series — Three Houses being the most recent. In 2013, the franchise took a departure from the games’ usual formula with the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening, giving players the option to turn off “permadeath,” as well as introducing a brand new element to the series: relationships.

In both Awakening and its successor, Fates, marriages and childbirth play an important role on and off the battlefield. In combat, relationships determine your jobs, units, and victory. However, perhaps just as important is the effect this new addition had on players. With the incorporation of romance and deeper socialization between characters came a greater love of the Fire Emblem world and those who inhabit it. Developer Intelligent Systems seemingly recognized this area of opportunity and ran with it in Three Houses, which is slated to be the top-selling game in the franchise by the end of this year.

If Awakening took a departure, Three Houses revolutionized, creating — for better or worse — a very different game. While Three Houses retains the series’ long-standing tactical combat and deeply political narratives we know and love, social elements are very much pushed to the forefront, starting with the establishment of the titular three houses.

In Three Houses, you play as a mercenary-turned-professor at Garreg Mach Monastery — a sort of academy for the Fódlan’s best and brightest. Despite being inexperienced, within the first hour of the game, you are given the opportunity to lead one of the school’s three houses — this singular decision impacts not only what character you interact with, but the entirety of the game’s story. Each house has its perks and charming cast of characters, and lucky for you, most of the students can be recruited from other houses to join your own. From the shy Bernadette to the school’s personal Romeo, Sylvain, there are characters everyone can relate to and, quite frankly, crush on.

As you play the game, bonds between yourself and the characters — and between the characters — grow based on your cooperation on the battlefield and acts of service, such as returning lost items to their rightful owners and fulfilling requests. Three Houses also introduced tea parties to the game, which are an adorable opportunity to get to know your team and use your Switch camera to show off your waifus and husbandos. All these actions aid you in unlocking new cutscenes, and ultimately dictate the direction of these character’s lives.

Not everything is quite as lighthearted, however.

About 20 hours into the game, tragic events take place that divide the three houses irreparably. If you didn’t recruit characters prior to this divide, they become your enemies and will meet you head-on on the battlefield. These events, along with “permadeath,” if you decide to keep the feature on, elevate the stakes of these relationships. If you lose a character, you lose that relationship; and man, do you feel guilty. Man do you mourn. Be it through tea parties or dramatic monologues given before death, Three Houses asks you to care for and love these students. It asks you to open your heart, and this emotional involvement is what elevates the game.

While the relationship you form with this story and its characters is personal, it’s one so many have deemed worthy of sharing and connecting with others over — in an already brilliant game, this connection is what makes it shine.

Now, all of this isn’t to say Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the first game to extend beyond its save file to cultivate its own culture, and to be honest it isn’t even the biggest– both Final Fantasy and Dragon Age still dominate the charts on fanfiction sites such as Archive of Our Own. But in the same way Game of Thrones fans proudly claim to be House Targaryen, gamers took to their keyboards to pledge their allegiance to the Black Eagles.

But within days of its release, Fire Emblem: Three Houses created a dedicated community, inspiring artists, writers, cosplayers, and, well, “shitposters”, to get to work. For months, Golden Deer memes filled my Twitter timeline, Edelgard fanart flooded my Instagram feed, and thousands upon thousands of stories popped up on Archive of Our Own; a year later, and that number has reached a staggering 23,000 — with new stories going up nearly every day.

Simply put, on some deeper level, the game resonated with its audience, and became the best part of a game that’s well worth exploring.

Of course some players, myself included, longed for even deeper connections with characters. Ultimately, however, it’s kind of fantastic the game established these strong personalities that creators can expand upon, or even transport to an “AU”– or alternate universe, such as a modern high school or a cozy cafe. While it’s important to note that any fandom can be toxic if the fan creators feel entitled to what they yearn for, more often than not these communities act as spaces for marginalized creators. For as much as I love about Three Houses, it’s undeniable that there are strides the game could make to be more inclusive, such as more physically and racially diverse characters and more freedom in sexuality.

But through art and writing, marginalized folks can create that, celebrating the characters they love while incorporating their own lives and values into the story. At the very least, the collective consciousness formed by memes, art, and stories makes us all laugh and feel a bit more understood, and isn’t that what games, and life, are all about?

More so than any other year in recent memory, 2020 has brought a lot of unexpected things to the table, and one of them has been the revival of Fleetwood Mac. It all came thanks to Nathan Apodaca’s viral TikTok video in which he skateboards and listens to “Dreams” while drinking cranberry juice, a moment that introduced a new generation to Fleetwood Mac. Now he has kept the vibe going by making a new video, this time to Stevie Nicks’ latest.

The new clip is basically a re-creation of the first one, but this time, there’s no cranberry juice and the song playing is Miley Cyrus’ new single “Edge Of Midnight,” which mashes up her own “Midnight Sky” with Nicks’ solo classic “Edge Of Seventeen.”

In a recent interview, Nicks said she’s “tickled pink” about her band’s 1977 single suddenly enjoying a new wave of popularity. She also offered some advice for young fans who might be interested in the group now: “If the young kids start listening to Fleetwood Mac, start with the first album and just go through them. Sit down and be in it for the long run, and you’ll have the best time.”

Watch Apodaca’s new “Edge Of Midnight” video above.

Good news for fans of the O.G. Jurassic Park trio because not only are they all back for Jurassic World: Dominion, but the movie has finally wrapped after multiple setbacks. Filming on the dino-franchise blockbuster resumed in July (at Pinewood Studios In London) amid loads of pandemic-prompted protocols that apparently grew to include 40,000+ COVID tests for cast and crew before all was said and done. Along the way, positive tests caused some slowdowns, but it’s all coming together now.

Sam Neill, who was previously excited to reunite with his hat, tapped out an expression of relief on Twitter while sharing a tweeted wrap photo from director Colin Trevorrow.

“There were days we thought we might not make it. But we have…we pulled off what seemed well nigh impossible,” Neill wrote. “Great crew. Lovely cast . Top director. Phew- and CELEBRATIONS.”

Indiewire further reports that around 100 days of shooting went down, excluding the pauses, as the cast and crew did the bubble-thing to finish the movie. “We lived together, ate together, told stories, shared our fears and hopes, played Frisbee on the lawn,” explained Trevorrow. “There was a lot of laughter at a time when it has been hard to find things to laugh about.”

Jurassic World: Dominion is expected to arrive on June 10, 2022.