One of the stranger stories in the NFL right now is that Tom Brady is in the midst of an unexplained leave of absence from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It could be argued that Brady, the most accomplished football player of all time and a 45-year-old human who retired earlier this offseason before coming back, doesn’t need to participate training camp, and taking some time away will keep him from going through the grind of playing football in the summer.
Having said that … boy, that just does not sound like a thing Brady would do, right? Brady has gotten to this point by being an absolutely relentless competitor whose preparation is unrivaled in the sport. Why, exactly, would Brady take a vague leave of absence during camp to “deal with some personal things”? And why would Bucs coach Todd Bowles give the following quote about it on Friday?
“I’m not concerned about it right now. We’re trying to practice against Tennessee and play a game,” Bowles said, per The Athletic. “I said sometime after Tennessee. There’s no definitive date for me. We’ll check on it, we’ll keep in touch and find out.”
So, it’s personal things that are not a concern to the team, and at the same time, there’s no definitive date for him to come back. One theory that is making its way around the internet posits that the reason Brady’s not around is a prior commitment he made to appear on Fox’s The Masked Singer. If you want to read an in-depth post on Reddit about it, you can do that here. If you want to see a video laying it al out, here’s this:
Basically, the two smoking guns are that Brady signed a monster deal with Fox this offseason to join their NFL coverage once his career ends and the filming dates for this season of the show line up almost exactly with Brady’s absence. I decided to do a little more research into this, and by that, I mean I searched for “tom brady singing” on YouTube. My findings suggest that Brady does like to sing, and while he isn’t great at it, he’s not as bad as, like, Rudy Giuliani was.
Brady once appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden and expressed that he is a big fan of “Hamilton.” The long of the short of it is that Brady grew up disliking that his dad would play show tunes in the car, but as he got older and his kids started to like singing along with that genre of music, he warmed up to them considerable. And in the below clip, Brady sings along with Corden to “Alexander Hamilton.”
Whether or not this means Brady is on The Masked Singer or not, well, I do not know. NFL reporter Lindsey Ok was told by a player that this is “100%” something Brady would do, but I just cannot wrap my head around Tom Brady punting on the chance to prepare for an NFL season because he had to go do a TV show, especially considering the Bucs have a new head coach (who, in fairness, was the team’s defensive coordinator the last few years). I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough when Brady is coming back, although if he was, indeed, on The Masked Singer, it might take a bit longer to figure out the reason why he was gone.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – Hey look, a good show
Hey, are you guys watching The Resort on Peacock? I hope so. I hope so for a bunch of reasons, too. One is that it stars just about all of your favorite people. William Jackson Harper, Chidi from The Good Place, is in the show. Cristin Milioti, who has been in everything but most notably Palm Springs, is also in the show. So is Skyler Gisondo from The Righteous Gemstones and Nick Offerman from tons of cool stuff. That’s a really solid start.
It’s also got a killer pedigree. The show comes from Andy Siara, who wrote the aforementioned Palm Springs — a super weird and fun movie that is on Hulu and should be rewatched yearly, at minimum — and was a writer on my beloved but short-lived series, Lodge 49. If you watched both of those things and enjoyed them to any degree, first of all, I suspect we would be friends, but second of all, I suspect you will dig The Resort. One of the executive producers is Sam Esmail, creator of Mr. Robot. There’s a lot of stuff happening here.
Also, it’s pretty good! It sucked me in right away in part because of all those things I listed in the first couple of paragraphs, but now, around the midpoint of its season, things are really getting interesting. Completely bonkers and sometimes very silly and sometimes very real, but mostly just interesting.
The summary goes like this: A couple (Harper and Milioti) go on vacation to a fancy resort in Mexico to try to force a jolt into a marriage that’s going stale, for reasons that are revealed via steady drip. One day, while out riding four-wheelers through the jungle, Milioti’s character wipes out and comes to in the dirt with an old busted flip phone in her face under some leaves. She gets curious, does some investigating, and discovers the phone belonged to a young man who was staying at the same resort with his girlfriend in 2007. The twist: that kid and his girlfriend both went missing on their trip and were never seen again.
So, blammo, intrigue. But also, jokes. Lots of dumb jokes littered throughout, in delightful little ways. Like, for example, this one, where the two of them are on a trip to look at Mayan ruins but also still investigating and Milioti’s character needs to think up a fake name to use on the phone on short notice.
PEACOCK
Yup, nailed it.
The mystery has gotten a little wilder each week, and a little more mystical, which should not surprise those of you who already watched Palm Springs and Lodge 49. There are eccentric millionaires and paintings that were completed in 2007 but feature people/things from the present day and a powerful Mexican family of tailors and fashion tycoons who use a yellow snake as their logo and may be involved somehow. One member of this family has been working on this mystery for a while and has now teamed up with Harper and Milioti to see if they can all figure it out together. The other week he said this, which, I promise, makes a lot of sense in context and is a legitimate theory in their amateur sleuthing.
PEACOCKPEACOCK
It’s good. All of it. And it’s one of those things that I’m just glad exists. We have 400 streaming services and all of them are trying to hammer our eyeballs with content every day. A depressing amount of it is becoming just, like, paint-by-numbers stuff to leave on in the background while you’re sweeping the living room. It’s cool to me that there are still people out there taking wild swings on ambitious stuff like this. I felt the same way about The Afterparty when that dropped on Apple earlier this year. That had a lot of the same stuff going for it: a loaded cast filled with people you like from shows you like; a solid pedigree behind the camera; a weird premise that embraced the freedom of the form. I loved that show. I might watch it again. I might do it this weekend. There’s very little you can do to stop me.
I have no clue if The Resort will or even can stick the landing right now. There is just an insane amount of stuff happening and a lot of it is weird and kind of unexplainable. It’s a little messy in places. I… don’t think I care, though. I’m here for the ride, which is made better for me by the weekly release model. I’m having fun watching it and thinking about it and then watching it and thinking about it again. I like that everyone involved is doing it. I support weirdo ambitious stuff like this. I have no clue if you’ll like it as much as I do. Maybe you won’t. That’s okay!
The point is that it’s cool when cool people make cool stuff, and I’m glad that we’re all finding ways to make that happen. This is maybe not the most eloquent thing anyone has ever said in a piece of television criticism, but still. I think it’s worth saying.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – Important dumpster business
AMC
Better Call Saul aired its season finale, which, I assume based only on the fact that you’re reading this column, you watched or were at least aware of. It was good. It was a good ending to a good show. One of the best, probably. Maybe one that was better than its predecessor, which is a crazy difficult thing to pull off, in part being some people just full-on will not accept that kind of claim and in part because Breaking Bad was also a really good show. But this is not the place for a full discussion of all of that. The place for that was here. This is the place to talk about dumpsters.
Quick context, free of heavy spoilers: In the series finale, for reasons, Jimmy aka Gene aka Saul jumped into a dumpster to hide from a group of people who were tracking him down. That’s a GIF of it up there. It’s a good GIF. It’s funny if you know the whys and how’s of the actual scene, but it’s also funny in a “post in on social media or send it as a text with a message attached like ‘me back on my bullshit,’” which is also important in a different way.
Anyway, the point here, to whatever extent there is one: That happened in the last episode of the final season, after this happened in the first episode of the final season.
AMC
Do… do we have a case of dumpster foreshadowing here? Or does he just live the kind of life where he and cardboard-based representations of himself periodically end up flailing into a dumpster? It’s a good question, a kind of chicken/egg situation that is complicated further by the thing where he was in a dumpster at least one other time in the series, way back in season one when he was searching for various Sandpiper documents. Was that also dumpster foreshadowing? Were both of these dumpster callbacks? Or does that dude just end up in dumpsters every few months in the course of doing business? And wouldn’t “Dumpster Callback” be a great name for a legendary blues musician who died under mysterious circumstances in 1951? All equally important questions.
I suspect this is another one of those things where two things can be true at the same time. The creators of this show, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, can be so good at their jobs that they parceled out dumpster-related imagery on purpose to lead up to this moment, and Saul Goodman can be the kind of guy who knows his way around a dumpster, just generally. I will be thinking about this one a lot. I will also be missing Better Call Saul a lot. What a great show. I still can’t believe it worked as well as it did. It’s basically magic.
In a loosely related matter, it turns out, as I discovered while putting this section together, that these are not the only GIFs I’ve made of a person or cardboard person going into a dumpster. I also have this one from Lodge 49.
AMC
The takeaways here are as follows:
A surprising amount of good shows that aired on AMC featured dumpster-related business
I have a lot of dumpster GIFs
I have somehow mentioned Lodge 49 — a little-watched show that lasted two seasons and ended multiple years ago — twice already this week
A lot to process.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – This HBO Max thing is weird to me
HBO MAX
HBO and HBO Max are currently in this weird limbo/flux situation due to various mergers and conglomerates and new leadership. I would never — never — bore you with the details of this kind of thing, so let’s just leave it there for now. You can go look it up elsewhere, although I strongly suggest you do not, especially on a Friday. I have to know these things because it’s my job. You have choices. Make them wisely. Do not let my burden become yours.
Here it is in its most basic form: In an attempt to streamline some things and cut some costs, they are going to start nuking some things off of their various platforms. The statement about it all went something like this, via Variety:
“As we work toward bringing our content catalogs together under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and discovery+,” HBO Max’s statement reads. “That will include the removal of some content from both platforms.”
Taking off the titles from streaming would also help Warner Bros. Discovery cut costs by removing lesser-watched programs to save money on residuals. An exact date or time when the titles will be taken off has not been announced.
And, by way of specifics, it works out like this.
Although HBO Max has removed several titles in the past weeks, including several Warner Bros. films and HBO TV shows such as “Camping,” “Vinyl,” “Mrs. Fletcher” and “Run,” the latest announcement represents the largest quantity of titles to be taken off the service. In addition, 20 original HBO Max shows will be taken off the platform, including teen drama “Generation,” animated anthology series “Infinity Train,” holiday-themed reality dating show “12 Dates of Christmas” and “Sesame Street” spinoff “The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo.” It is currently unclear whether they will be made available on DVD or rental services, or if their removal will result in them becoming completely inaccessible.
The first thing I need to tell you about this is that the Variety article used a picture of Elmo as the big splashy image at the top and it made it kind of look like Elmo was the one making these cuts. Like Elmo had become the CEO of the whole company. Which is absolutely a show I would watch on HBO Max, if they are looking for new ways to grow the business by at least one viewer who is already subscribed to their service. Something to think about.
The other thing is that this is… weird. It’s just super weird. Not that everything is supposed to last forever or anything. It’s good that things end and go away sometimes. It helps keep things fresh and moving and prevents us from getting stuck in the past forever. But also, if you make a show for a streaming service, and it never gets released in a physical form, what happens if the streaming service just decides to delete it from existence one day? That’s weird, right? I’ve been having trouble wrapping my head around it all day. Like, I can go on Amazon and buy DVDs of the television show Royal Pains (15 discs, $31, in my living room by Monday if I want it), but the very good Harley Quinn cartoon — depicted above, which kind of just turned the Joker into “if Bernie Sanders was also a stepdad” in its current season, which is cool — might just not exist anymore, anywhere. I don’t think I like that. There’s an impermanence to it that makes me uncomfortable.
That said, you could make a physical work of art — a painting, a sculpture, etc. — and then trip on the way out of the kitchen and spill chocolate ice cream all over it and knock it on the floor and then someone else could slip on the spilled ice cream and fall on both you and your art and bang your whole elbow through it, so I guess nothing is really made to last forever.
This just got too deep for a Friday column that just posted three dumpster GIFs. Let’s move on.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – I’m sorry but this is really funny
This is a commercial for some sort of financial something called Truist. I don’t know. I don’t really care, either. I’m only showing it to you here, now, because it came on my television during a break in a Phillies game recently (go Phillies) and I bolted upright — or at least as upright as I get — and went black in the eyes and shouted: “THAT’S THE TOKYO DRIFT SONG.” Which it is. It’s a song called “Tokyo Drift” from the 2006 movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The third one in the franchise. The one that had none of the major stars — save a brief Vin Diesel cameo at the end — and featured Bow Wow as a character named Twinkie and introduced us to a character named Han who was so likable that the franchise twisted its entire chronology into a pretzel to bring him back for a few more movies. It says a lot about me and what I’m about that I typed this entire paragraph from memory.
This is the full song, if you didn’t believe me or just want to listen to what I can only assume is the biggest hit to date by a group called the Terikayi Boyz.
Perfect. No notes. Well, one note, maybe. This one. From an article in Time Magazine, about a TikTok craze that bubbled up a few years ago.
A new viral trend calls for participants to film themselves or others sliding across the floor or around a corner, set the video to the Teriyaki Boyz song “Tokyo Drift” and post it online. The fad was inspired by a video that was recently shared on TikTok by user @samanthajohnson262 showing a van drifting sideways around other cars on a snow-covered Vancouver highway as “Tokyo Drift” bumps in the background.
The term “Tokyo drift” was popularized by the third movie in the Fast & Furious franchise and is a reference to the Japanese car racing technique of drifting.
To recap:
The Teriyaki Boyz made a song called “Tokyo Drift” for a movie called Tokyo Drift
I saw this movie in the theater in 2006
You’re not better than me
It found its way into the world of memes a decade or so later
Because of this last thing (probably) it ended up in a commercial for some sort of financial product
I saw it on television and shouted a little
I’m writing about it now
I’m going to put the song on my Driving Around playlist and get excited when it pops up on shuffle next
What a journey.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Meanwhile, on What We Do in the Shadows
FX
Real quick…
What we have here, from the most recent episode of What We Do in the Shadows, is The Jersey Devil, an assumed-fictional beast with massive genitalia and a taste for human flesh, singing and dancing along to “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi, because it turns out that is the only way to lull it into enough of a trance for our courageous/bumbling vampire heroes to defeat it. Because it is from New Jersey. The whole thing went on for kind of a while. Here, look.
FX
I really cannot stress this next part to you in strong enough terms: This was maybe the funniest thing I’ve seen on television all year. It was remarkable. Just the pure chaotic energy of spending whatever amount of money it took to make this possible, from the CGI to the costuming to the licensing of a Bon Jovi song from multiple decades ago. I could not possibly be happier about any of it.
There’s something beautiful to me about landing a spot on a prestigious basic cable network and just doing the dumbest and silliest things you can think of on a weekly basis. Yes, sure, shows like Dopesick and The Wire shine a light on important societal issues and help make complex things more digestible for viewers at home. That’s good, too. But sometimes you just want to see a beast with a comically large scrotum tear away on an air guitar to a song about two young lovers named Tommy and Gina.
There’s room for all of this. It’s one of the nice things about the future.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Matthew:
I put on this random movie on Amazon Prime on to have some background noise while i was doing some cooking. I look over, and it’s Jamie Lannister (with an american accent!) opposite Mrs. McMurray from Letterkenny. He had a long rifle, and honestly, it was so weird to see Jamie Lannister with a firearm. And then i started thinking about a buddy cop picture with Jamie and Brienne and they’re both carrying 9mms and just lighting dudes up.
Still in the armor though, because, reasons.
And i haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for 3 hours.
Hope you’re having a good day.
I don’t really have a lot to add here. Mostly, I just like that Matthew thought to send this one in. I like what it says about me and the vibes I put out that he had that objectively goofy thought and was like “I should email this to Brian.” That’s cool. It’s honestly just, like, really cool. It’s more satisfying to me than all the web traffic or retweets in the world. Please feel free to send me stuff like this. Don’t feel like you have to force it. But if it’s there… yeah. Fire away. I feel great about it.
A single pink dildo and socks were among the few items that were left when thieves broke into the Sexology Institute in the King William neighborhood last month, stealing $58,000 worth of sex toys, lingerie, the cash register and “the world’s most extravagant vibrator.”
Easily one of the best sentences I’ve ever seen. It was already trending that way before we got to “the world’s most extravagant vibrator,” but that shot us rocketing into a new tier. Imagine the cops as this police report was getting filed. I like to think they sent some pencil-necked rookie in there as a goof, just for the blushing.
Better yet, imagine famous fictional detectives working this case. Columbo, Daniel Craig’s character from Knives Out, anyone from Law & Order, Rene Russo’s character from Thomas Crown Affair, the bumbling squad from Only Murders in the Building. If it’s starting to sound like I’ve been thinking about this for days, hours at a time with 10-minute breaks to think about a sandwich I might eat or once ate, there’s a good reason for that: I have.
Early on June 30, three men pried open the lock of the adult entertainment store on St. Mary’s Street. The thieves, who have yet to be caught, returned on three separate occasions to fill trash bags full of merchandise into a black pickup truck. Hundreds of items were taken, including antique sex toys.
THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS
Whenever we catch these people, whoever they are, I need the trial covered by multiple networks, and simulcast with different analysts, including one where the day’s testimony and motions are broken down by Danny McBride and Edi Patterson. I will pay anything for this.
“Oddly enough, they left the books,” said Jasper St. James, the store’s boutique manager. “I guess they didn’t want to invest in that kind of reading. It was right after Pride, so they left all of the Pride stuff.”
St. James added: “So they’re a little bit homophobic and a little bit illiterate.”
This is honestly incredible. Make this the next season of Fargo. Let Ilana Glazer play Jasper St. James. These are good ideas.
“We came into empty racks,” St. James said. “They took the world’s most extravagant vibrator and they were done.”
That’s the large, fully functioning vibrator encrusted with Swarovski crystals, a favorite of customers who visit the store and often take photos of it. The biggest losses were the lingerie pieces, some of which were exclusive to the Sexology Institute, St. James said.
I need these people to get caught. Not so much for the justice of it all, although I suppose that’s important, too. No, I just need to know… like… everything about this. I need to know why and how they settled on this place to rob, I need to know how exactly they planned to move a crystal-encrusted vibrator on the black market, I need to know and preferably meet the middleman they used for that last thing, I need to know all of it. As soon as possible.
It’s a big year for Scott Frost and the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Frost, a former Husker signal caller who won a pair of national titles in Lincoln as a player, took over as the program’s head coach in 2018 after a perfect, 13-0 season at the helm of UCF. Despite the excitement, things haven’t gone especially well for him at his alma mater, as he’s gone 15-29 with a 10-25 mark in conference play.
Last year, in particular, was a disaster for Nebraska, as the team went 3-9 and lost eight of those games by one score. The only loss that did not fit that description was by nine points. The hope for Frost and the Huskers is that they’ll be able to start winning some portion of those games, and instead of a horrific record, they can finish with an above-.500 record for the first time since 2016.
On Thursday, Evan Bland of the Omaha World-Herald provided a few updates about the program. The good one is that the team has a starting QB, as Texas transfer Casey Thompson won the job. And then, there’s this:
Offensive line coach Donovan Raiola is coaching his position group intensely, Frost said. To the point that he estimates there are 15-20 vomits every practice from those linemen.
“It’s not because they’re not in shape – he’s just working them hard,” Frost said. “I think they love it. He’s kind of freed them up to go be aggressive and I love the way they’re coming off the ball.”
So, one of two things are going on here. Either Frost has decided the best thing to do is to exaggerate how many times his players’ bodies are being pushed past the brink in an effort to show how hard they are working and how tough they are (I think?), or he’s not doing that and his players are actually being pushed past the brink in an effort to show how hard they are working and how tough they are, which is an especially reckless thing as there are multiple examples of college football players dying from heatstroke in recent years. Either way, it makes sense to question Frost, his offensive line coach, and numerous other folks here.
The 2022-23 schedule for all 30 NBA teams has finally been released, and it allows fans the opportunity to start marking their calendars and planning around the can’t miss games on the schedule. While not every team shares the same goals for the 2022-23 season, they all have games where fans will be circling dates and trying to make sure they’re in the building for or at least able to watch on TV, and here we are going to highlight five such games for each team.
Here, we will dive into the Oklahoma City Thunder as the club’s rebuild continues. There are signs that the Thunder may be starting to turn the corner in terms of on-court success this season after yet another influx of talent. At the top of the pecking order is No. 2 pick Chet Holmgren, with a pair of lottery picks in Jalen Williams and Ousmane Dieng alongside him. Oklahoma City still has a roster crunch, as evidenced by letting Isaiah Roby go, but the Thunder are putting the pieces together around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Josh Giddey. Oklahoma City may not have a playoff push in the cards this season, but the Thunder project to be a riveting viewing experience, and Holmgren’s debut campaign is appealing on its own.
Below is a look at five marquee matchups for Oklahoma City this season.
October 19, 2022: at Minnesota Timberwolves (8:00 p.m. ET)
The season opener wouldn’t be included for every team in the NBA, but this is a fascinating spot for Oklahoma City. Minnesota underwent a facelift with the addition of Rudy Gobert, and expectations are sky-high for the Wolves as a result. The Thunder enter to more modest fanfare, but this is a chance, at full strength, to try to play spoiler. Also, it is Chet Holmgren facing off against a “twin towers” frontcourt of Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns right out of the gate, along with a fun matchup of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander against Anthony Edwards in the backcourt.
November 1, 2022: vs. Orlando Magic (TNT, 7:30 p.m ET)
This is perhaps the most anticipated game of the season for Oklahoma City. For one, it’s a national television game, and that isn’t the norm for the Thunder. From there, Chet Holmgren faces Paolo Banchero in a battle between the top two picks in the 2022 NBA Draft. Orlando has other intriguing talent, but that individual battle is enough to include this game on its own.
November 7, 2022: at Detroit Pistons (7:30 p.m. ET)
The Thunder and Pistons play again in March, but this is the safer bet to get all of the talent on the floor. Oklahoma City picked No. 11 and No. 12 in the draft, passing on Jalen Duren twice, and he is in Detroit. Oh, and this game also features Holmgren, Gilgeous-Alexander, Cade Cunningham, and Jaden Ivey. That sounds like fun.
November 13, 2022: at New York Knicks (12:00 p.m. ET)
This list is, admittedly, quite heavy on early games, and that is the price for Oklahoma City after multiple seasons in which the Thunder shut almost the entire roster down before the stretch run. Alas, this game presents the appeal of Madison Square Garden and a standalone window. Thunder-Knicks is the only game before 6:00 p.m. ET on this Sunday afternoon, and Oklahoma City’s young guns get a glimpse of life at the world’s most famous arena.
November 26, 2022: at Houston Rockets (NBA TV, 8:00 p.m. ET)
Like the matchup against Orlando, this one is headlined by top draft picks. Holmgren, Jalen Williams, and company face Jabari Smith Jr., Jalen Green, and a talented Rockets squad. Holmgren against Smith Jr. was an appetizing face-off at the Las Vegas Summer League, and that remains the case now.
10 years ago, radio stations were always repeating a song with an immediately recognizable intro: “What, what / What, what,” followed by an infectious saxophone melody that led into the song — “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Though Macklemore‘s momentum has obviously slowed since that unimaginable height, he’s back today with the song “Maniac” featuring Windser.
“Maniac” is a surprisingly gentle pop track with wholesome lyrics: “I fell in love with her moonwalk / Dancing in the kitchen in her tube socks,” he raps, his verses cushioned in between Windser’s delicately-sung choruses. The old-timey, green music video adds to the pretty atmosphere of the song, especially with the brief Nardwuar cameo.
Last year, Macklemore opened up about his struggles with addiction. “I didn’t even know it was a disease at the beginning, I went for years like ‘why can I not f*cking stop, why can I not drink and smoke like my friends,” he said. “Why when I wake up is that the first thing I’m thinking about…’ I didn’t know that there was a community that was there to support and love me unconditionally that had the same f*cking disease.”
Some bands make fans wait years between albums, and others have been very consistent with rolling out new releases. Early aughts groups Hot Chip and Silversun Pickups fall into the ladder category, dropping a new album like clockwork every two or three years. On this week’s Indiecast episode, hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen share their thoughts on Hot Chip’s latest LP Freakout/Release and Silversun Pickups’ new project Physical Thrills, two albums which rely heavily on synths.
The biggest indie news of this week came from a band no one has heard much from in over 15 years: Mclusky. The Welsh group officially disbanded in 2005, but they just announced they’re going on a North American tour this fall. Indiecast also discusses the 25th anniversary of Oasis‘ Be Here Now, partially reigniting the Blur vs. Oasis britpop discourse.
In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Ian tells listeners to check out Spielbergs’ new album Vestli. Meanwhile, Steven endorses Cass McCombs’ tenth studio album Heartmind.
New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 102 below and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.
Elmo has had a really tough year. First, he was subjected to a media frenzy after having personal drama with his best friend and her pet rock (it happens!). Then, the fuzzy red muppet was viciously attacked by real-life Senator Ted Cruz over his COVID vaccine (really). Now his hit HBO Max talk show looks like it’s getting the ax from the streamer, along with dozens of other Seasame Street specials.
HBO Max has continued to slowly but surely yank lesser-known titles from the site, and the latest sweep is removing 36 programs and specials, including the fan-favorite animated series Summer Camp Island, Aquaman: King of Atlantis, Uncle Grandpa, Sesame Street specials, and more. Also leaving the streamer is The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo which just wrapped up its second season in December. There is no word on if this means the show will not be renewed for another season.
The company has been open about its restructuring ahead of the HBO Max/Discovery+ merger that’s slated for next summer. “As we work toward bringing our content catalogs together under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and discovery+,” HBO Max said in a statement earlier this week. “That will include the removal of some content from both platforms.” This makes sense, but couldn’t you leave Elmo out of it? He’s been through so much and just wants to make an honest living.
Here is the full list of everything HBO Max is scheduled to remove this week, according to NPR:
Fat Joe is a 30-year veteran of the stage, but this fall, he’ll be standing in the spotlight in an entirely new capacity. Rather than rocking the mic, he’ll be doing stand-up as part of a one-man show based on his upcoming memoir The Book of Jose, out November 15 via Penguin Random House. You can pre-order it here.
The show is co-produced by Magic Lemonade and Roc Nation and will include anecdotes from Joe’s life and career. Examples from a press release include a time he was kidnapped in Angola and his four months in prison for tax evasion charges in 2013. The show will feature pop-ups from fellow celebrities including Dave Chappelle, who’ll give a special introduction. Ticketing information is TBA.
In the press release, Joe said, “The world will be getting Fat Joe at his most authentic, vulnerable, and comedic self on that stage. I’m not holding anything back. I’ve always taken pride in my storytelling, but we’re about to take it to the next level. I’m grateful to Dave Chappelle, Roc Nation and Magic Lemonade for their support in sharing my story and helping make this one-man show the biggest event ever.”
Fans have already gotten a glimpse of Joe’s wit and charm with his weekly Instagram Live streams, in which he’s expressed skepticism for J. Cole’s hoop skills, called out Irv Gotti for his uncouth Drink Champs interview, and given his unfiltered takes on everyone from Jay-Z to Joe Rogan.
Tucker Carlson has never had a problem backing the worst trends of the Right. Whether it’s downplaying the January 6 insurrection, pushing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, or attacking Jon Stewart for championing a veterans healthcare bill, Tucker has been a loyal soldier. But not even he could hold it together while covering Dr. Mehmet Oz‘s ridiculously out-of-touch campaign video where he pretends to shop in a grocery store.
In the video for his PA senate race, Oz mispronounces the name of the store and refers to a veggie tray as “crudités,” which opened him up to even more relentless trolling from his opponent John Fetterman. During his Thursday night monologue, Carlson said Oz should be focusing on crime and immigration instead of inflation. According to Mediaite, the Fox News host also couldn’t stop from snickering at how bad the Oz video is.
“Twenty dollars for crudités?” Carlson said while trying to keep it together. “Whatever that is. It’s very obviously easy to make fun of that, but it’s not entirely a stupid ad if inflation were the salient issue here.”
But don’t give Carlson too much credit. He opened the segment by noting that Oz is losing in the polls to a “stroke victim” and he once again dabbled in replacement theory by accusing Democrats of “changing the population of the United States.”
On top of being laughed at on Fox News, Dr. Oz is reportedly losing critical support from Donald Trump. According to Rolling Stone, Trump has been privately telling people that Oz is going to “f*cking lose” and it will be “incredibly embarrassing” in a race against Fetterman, who “has hidden in his basement more [than Joe Biden].”
Today is a busy day for Red Hot Chili Peppers. Earlier, they shared a video for “Tippa My Tongue,” the lead single from their upcoming album, Return Of The Dream Canteen. Now, it has been revealed that they will receive the Global Icon Award at the 2022 MTV VMAs. They’ll get the honor during the live show, which is set for August 28 at 8 p.m. ET.
They’re also set to perform during the broadcast, which will be the first time they’ve done so in decades: It will be the group’s first time playing on the VMAs stage since 2000, when they performed “Californication” before accepting the Video Vanguard Award.
RHCP, who have won eight VMAs in their day, earned their 29th overall nomination, and first since 2006, this year with “Black Summer” up for Best Rock. Their last win came in 2006, when “Dani California” got Best Art Direction In A Video.”
Meanwhile, Chad Smith recently said of the band’s upcoming album, “We’re just so happy to be making music again. Like most people, and creative people, and artists, to be able to have that opportunity to go out and play concerts and play new music. We wrote a lot of songs during the pandemic time and we recorded them all. We just wanted this next record to be an extension of Unlimited Love. It stands on its own. We felt like we had so many songs that we love that we just need to have them all come out, and we don’t want to put them all out at once. Here’s the second batch and it’s just as important.”
Red Hot Chili Peppers is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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