The topic of this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open seemed as predetermined at this point as anything in our tenuous existence. The final presidential debate of the 2020 election was an easy guess, and having Jim Carrey and Alec Baldwin locked in to play Joe Biden and Donald Trump, respectively, made it inevitable the show would start with a recreation of Thursday’s events in Nashville.
This time, however, the sketch followed suit from what actually happened on stage: a quieter, mostly more understandable debate that was well-moderated by Kristen Welker. Maya Rudolph, who usually plays vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, played Welker on the night and, like on Thursday, was complimented for it by Baldwin’s Trump. Who also, mind you, called Welker by several other names of female women of color.
This week’s guest who didn’t actually appear at the debate was Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani, who started by making a… suggestive gesture with their back turned to the camera.
“No, no, it’s not what it looks like,” McKinnon said. “My microphone was stuck… on my balls.”
“Is this another Borat?” McKinnon’s Giuliani said. “You have to tell me if it’s another Borat.”
The phrases “bird guacamole” and “Joe Biden is from Kenya” all came up, as did two references to Biden’s love of trains. Fittingly, the debate moderator was apparently playing Joe Biden bingo throughout the entire thing, which is basically what the cold open amounts to on SNL these days. The sketch certainly referenced some things that happened during the debate on Thursday, and a few that did not. But by the end of it, win or lose, a few boxes get checked off and everyone gets to move on.
Adele hosting Saturday Night Live was an interesting experiment for the singer. You could argue her career in America was launched by her appearance on the show eight years ago, but whether she could handle the rigors of hosting — and the hectic nature of appearing in several sketches while trying to be funny — was unclear.
Every episode of SNL is different, but the show did its best to keep Adele doing things familiar to her. A sketch about The Bachelor, for example, had her quite literally playing herself and singing some of her biggest hits, while others had her doing more out there roles. One of those, however, proved to be a bit too much for an extremely giggly Adele. She starts to lose it just 30 seconds into the sketch, needing an extra moment to try to say her lines with a straight face.
At times doubled over with laughter and struggling to hide a smile, the singer appeared in a commercial for Africa’s tourism board with Kate McKinnon. Things started out fine, but as the double entendres about “bamboo” and other sexually suggestive bits built up, Adele was unable to keep it together and often broke character well before Heidi Gardner appeared on screen with them to say you can feel the rhythm of the place “in your stomach.”
Despite the multiple gaffes, the crowd was extremely supportive of Adele as she giggled and struggled to hide her laughter. The script for the sketch — which included a number of extremely suggestive lines while couples appearing to be increasingly enamored with each other passed behind them — certainly didn’t give her many breaks to catch her breath.
“Last night,” Adele said, giggling ahead of reading the lines off of cue cards, “I saw the face of god.”
The sketch: built on the belief that divorced women of “a certain age” seem to love visiting Africa, drew some ire on Twitter afterward. Either people loved seeing Adele laugh through it, or wondered if it wasn’t very appropriate or nuanced considering a pandemic making international travel impossible, not to mention anti-police brutality protests that have grown in Nigeria in recent weeks and attracted international attention.
That Africa skit was tone def, insensitive and inappropriate. Men and women in Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa and The Democratic Republic of the Congo are fighting for their lives and to reduce the continent as sexual destination for white women is shameful. #SNL
I actually teach about the horrors of white people traveling the world and having sex with poor Black folks in the Caribbean and in Africa. #SNL just did a comedy sketch about it. pic.twitter.com/4b9GmJsCJx
Hold on hold hold on. #SNL y’all gonna do that Africa sketch, followed by H. E. R. and her band wearing #EndSARS shirts. Like, whhhhhaaaaatttt?!!! How?! Truly wtf
I actually teach about the horrors of white people traveling the world and having sex with poor Black folks in the Caribbean and in Africa. #SNL just did a comedy sketch about it. pic.twitter.com/4b9GmJsCJx
I promise…I promise. I’m not in think piece mode on a Saturday night. But not feeling this #snl Africa skit aside from Adele breaking. If you’re gonna try to touch that, it’s gotta be just a little smarter & more nuanced or don’t touch it at all. Not rn.
During musical guest HER’s second performance, for example, each member of her backing band wore a shirt with the hashtag #ENDSARS on it, a reference to the ongoing crisis there. But regardless of how well the sketch went over online, at least Adele made sure it got some laughs from somewhere.
The Tampa Bay Rays were down to their final out in Game 4 after seeing the Dodgers take a 7-6 lead after yet another two-out RBI single from L.A. off the bat of Corey Seager in the top of the eighth.
Randy Arozarena came to the plate with Kevin Keirmaier on first and worked a tremendous at-bat to get a walk, bringing Brett Phillips, who has been abysmal with the bat all season, to the plate. Phillips, who entered the game as a pinch runner for Ji-Man Choi earlier in the game, came up against the Dodgers embattled closer Kenley Jansen and was able to fight off a cutter just far enough to get past the shift and into center field — for his first career postseason hit!
Keirmaier scored easily, but a pair of errors by the Dodgers, the first by Chris Taylor who wasn’t able to pick the ball up cleanly and then by Will Smith at the plate, allowed Randy Arozarena to score the game-winning run from first despite tripping and doing a barrel roll midway down the third baseline in one of the wildest finishes you’ll ever see.
That sequence of events allowed Tampa Bay to even the World Series at 2-2, as the Dodgers seemingly imploded as a collective unit at the worst possible time. Arozarena would’ve been out by a mile since he tripped, but because Smith was assuming he was going to have to make a quick tag, he took his eyes off the ball and failed to secure it. Just look at this!
It was a ridiculous finish to a ridiculous game, in which the Dodgers scored all seven of their runs with two outs, continuing a preposterous two-out hitting streak this postseason, and the Rays just kept finding ways to answer every time the Dodgers produced runs — someone scored in every inning but the second as they traded leads and ties until Tampa came out, somehow, on top.
Phillips’ post-game interview is an all-timer as he recounted what he saw from second base amidst the chaos.
Saturday’s Saturday Night Live featured Adele hosting duties, though she did manage to sing a bit in at least one sketch. But a commercial bump during her episode revealed who will host a Halloween night episode, and it’s a familiar face to anyone who’s paid attention to the sketch comedy show over the last year.
NBC announced that John Mulaney would return to host Saturday Night Live for the second time this year. The show announced that Mulaney would host, with The Strokes serving as musical guests in the fourth straight new SNL episode of Season 46. The show’s traditional index cards soon hit Twitter, confirming that the Diner Lobster man himself would come back for one last run in 2020.
Mulaney wrapping up the last of the pre-election SNLs will cap what’s been a busy year for him at Studio 8H. The standup has hosted three times in a 12-month period, last taking the duties in late February in an episode that could joke about an upcoming coronavirus pandemic, not get created during the middle of it. It’s also worth noting that Mulaney has played Joe Biden in the past, though it seems likely that Jim Carrey will keep that gig right up until (and perhaps past) election day.
It would be truly impressive if Mulaney manages to get another Airport Sushi in the works on such short notice, but at the very least SNL viewers should be ready for one of the sharpest monologues in some time. The last time he hosted he had to get several lawyers to clear some Trump jokes, so it’s safe to say the bar is high for whatever he does next.
While Netflix features more and better original programming, Amazon Prime holds their own in that department, and they continue to beef up their offerings. Unfortunately, between HBO Max and Peacock, Prime Video lost many of its impressive show offerings like HBO content and Parks and Rec. But on the plus side, you’ve probably already got a Prime account, so why not check out its impressive catalog.
If you’re trying to figure out what to watch next, a great place to start are the 35 best shows on Amazon Prime Video right now.
The Americans follows Russian spies (Keri Russell and Mathew Rhys) posing as a married couple living in America, and while the missions are enjoyable, and the glimpse into the 1980s is fascinating, the real pull in this show is the relationship drama, both between the married spies — who are often pulled between their love for one another and their love of country — an FBI agent (Noah Emmerich) — who is pulled between his own relationship with his family and country — and the children of the Russian spies, pulled between their family and their love of America. Well-crafted, engrossing, and hypnotic, The Americans is one of best TV shows of all time.
Few shows have as many jokes per minute as 30 Rock. The brainchild of Tina Fey, 30 Rock shows the daily madness of an SNL-like variety show, which Fey’s Liz Lemon at the helm. As she tries (sometimes failing) to wrangle her writers and her actors (Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski), Lemon also attempts the ever-elusive dream of “having it all.” Her quest will feel very, very familiar to viewers, particularly women, as they try and balance work, life, love, and even a small bit of success. With Alec Baldwin turning in his best performance to date (come at me, Glengarry Glen Ross fans) as Jack Donaghy, Lemon’s boss, mentor, and eventual friend, 30 Rock has the perfect blend of weirdness, sharp writing, and genuine laughs that will make it a favorite for years to come.
A co-production of Amazon and England’s BBC Three, London-set Fleabag stars the magnificent Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who also created the show) as “a young woman attempting to navigate modern life in London.” That description hardly does the series justice. It’s a hysterical, dirty, sexually devious and surprisingly thoughtful meditation on grief and loneliness that goes by so quickly (there are only six half-hour episodes in each season) that viewers will wish they savored it more before it ends. It’s truly one of the most distinctive, original comedies of the last several years — think Tig Notaro crossed with Broad City — and its Hot Priest-starring second season has paved the way for Waller-Bridge becoming one of the leading creative voices of her generation.
By now, we should just know to expect great things from showrunner Amy-Sherman Palladino. The woman who gave us Gilmore Girls and Bunheads also brought a fast-paced, wit-infused drama about a 1950s housewife with a hidden talent for stand-up to Amazon, and the awards season voters ate it up. The show follows Rachel Brosnahan as she plays Midge Maisel, a Jewish housewife disillusioned with her marriage to a cheating, joke-stealing scumbag and ready to break out on her own in the comedy world.
USA Network’s Mr. Robot follows Elliot, a hacker with an acute social anxiety disorder who suffers from delusions and paranoia. During the day, he works as a computer programmer for a company that protects other companies from cyber threats. Elliot has other designs in mind, too, namely taking down one of the biggest corporations in America, E Corp, unsettling America’s financial system, and taking power away from the rich and giving it back to the people. Heavily influenced by American Psycho, Fight Club, the films of Stanley Kubrick, and Taxi Driver, among others, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot is an unnerving mindf*ck full of conspiracy theories and misdirections. Nothing is ever as it seems in Mr. Robot, and much of the fun is in trying — and mostly failing — to stay ahead of the twists.
From 2010-2015, you couldn’t have a conversation about favorite TV shows without someone in your friend group mentioning Downton Abbey. The British series about the inner workings of an aristocratic English family and their manner full of servants became the biggest thing to invade America from across the pond since The Beatles. Watching the crusty Crawley family navigate historic events like the sinking of the Titanic and the First World War while their servants dealt in gossip, intrigue, and scandal below stairs was as entertaining and juicy as any good British drama should be.
The U.K. version was the original cringe comedy, starring Ricky Gervais as clueless boss David Brent, whose desperate attempts at connecting with his underlings are a painful exercise in futility. Martin Freeman is also a stand-out, playing a role that John Krasinski inhabited in the American remake, but it’s the British sarcasm that really elevates this series and makes it worthy of a watch.
Tatiana Maslany plays several clones variations of the same woman in the sweeping conspiracy thriller Orphan Black, and she breathes so much life and so many distinct personalities into each clone that viewers often forget that one woman is playing all the characters (and it’s impossible not to pick a favorite). The supporting cast is mostly great, as well, and for a Canadian series, the production values are excellent. Unfortunately, Orphan Black suffers from a great first season that the rest of the series can’t quite live up to. It gets so bogged down in its own confusing mythology that it begins to run out of steam, although it picks up its momentum again in the fourth season before reaching its fifth season finish line.
Karl Urban headlines this wild, gory, vulgar ride through superhero-dom from Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and showrunner Eric Kripke. Based on a Garth Ennis comic series, the show takes a darker look at those supernaturally gifted heroes we all love to fawn over. Urban’s gruff vigilante pairs up with a nobody (Jack Quaid), who has his life ruined by a group of corrupt supes. The humor is raunchy and sharp, the action is bananas, and the cast is an eclectic mix of talent who all find time to shine on on-screen. And now that season two is here, everyone gets the chance to ramp up the crazy and get in touch with their inner Spice Girl.
Titus Welliver stars in this police procedural from Amazon about a renegade detective charged with solving some hauntingly grisly murders. Harry Bosch is a former military man with a healthy respect for the rules and an unquenchable thirst for the truth. Each season, he’s presented with a case that threatens his carefully molded view of the world, often leading him to uncover conspiracies, corrupt cops, and even his own mother’s murderer. The subject matter might be dark, but Welliver is clearly having fun playing the brash, give-no-f*cks badass, which is why you should give this crime series a watch.
Maybe the bleakest, grittiest cop show you’ll ever see, Luther is so intense that it may at times rattle your brain stem. It’s got the best elements of other of its ilk as it follows a genius detective who struggles to separate his personal and professional lives. But it is also pummeling great drama, and Idris Elba is a tour de force (Ruth Wilson is fantastic, too).
John Cusack and Rainn Wilson star in this bonkers sci-fi thriller based on a UK show of the same name. Cusack plays a nefarious tech guy who’s meatless invention to solve world hunger might have brought about the next plague. Wilson is the scientist fighting for a vaccine, but all this come secondary to a group of comic book nerds played by Desmin Borges, Ashleigh LaThorp, Dan Byrd, and Sasha Lane who believe the key to stopping this impending apocalypse might be hidden in a graphic novel about an evil rabbit.
Binge watchers love their medical dramas, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a show about the ill that’s as fun as House. Hugh Laurie plays the episodic’s anti-hero, an opioid-addicted, dry-humored, uncaring genius and doctor with a knack for solving unsolvable cases. He’s joined by a rotating team of famous faces (Olivia Wilde, Jesse Spencer, and Jennifer Morrison all starred on the show at some point) but they usually just end up getting in the way of his natural prowess with mysterious illnesses.
For the eight seasons that Psych was on the air, it entertained a kind of cult following. Fans tuned in religiously to watch this buddy-cop drama about an eccentric police detective who claimed “psychic” abilities and his reluctant, by-the-book partner. Stars James Roday and Dule Hill have incredible chemistry on the show which pushes the worn-out, fun-cop-boring-cop trope past its usual limits.
BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and writer Kate Purdy reunite for this adult-animated series starring Rosa Salazar and Bob Odenkirk. The show follows the journey of Alma, a young woman involved in a car accident who slowly begins to lose her mind. She’s forced to question her perception of reality when her father (Odenkirk) reappears years after his death, pushing her to discover how he died and why she seems to have a newfound ability to travel through time. It’s a bit of a mindf*ck, in the best possible way, with Purdy and Waksberg employing rotoscoping, a realistic animation technique never before used on TV, to take viewers on a surreal trek through space and time, along with dark humor and musings on grief, trauma, and mental health.
Frankly, any of the Star Trek shows make a good binge watch. Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and, hell, even Star Trek: Enterprise are all available to stream on Prime, and they all have their merits (except for Enterprise), but the William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy-starring original series is where it all began. To admit to watching one or all of the other programs cited above, but not Star Trek: The Original Series would be a crime against yourself and the rest of sci-fi fandom. This is where Gene Roddenberry’s vision first got its start on broadcast television, after all.
This sci-fi space epic based off a series of beloved books found new life on Amazon for its fourth season after being canceled by Syfy in 2018, good news for fans who wanted more adventures for the show’s rag-tag band of anti-heroes. Set in the future when humanity has colonized the Solar System, The Expanse follows a trio of leads: United Nations Security Council member Chrisjen Avasarala, police detective Josephus Miller, and ship’s officer James Holden as they unravel a conspiracy that could break the uneasy peace. It’s full of action and thriller-like twists, but it’s the memorable, well-rounded character work that makes this a must-see.
Loosely based on the exploits of the 9th century Viking ruler and king, Ragnar Lodbrok, Vikings doesn’t match the level of complexity in Game of Thrones — the universe is smaller, there are fewer characters, and the plotting isn’t as dense — but it’s a solid, if not sometimes spectacular drama that gets progressively better over the course of the series. There’s crunching violence, lots of axe play, and frequent battles as Ragnar extends his rule over parts of Europe. Compared to Game of Thrones, it’s less about mind games and schemes, and more about brute force — and Ragnor’s victories are seldom in doubt. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining to watch the unrelenting violence unfold and revel in the demise of Ragnor’s rivals. While Travis Fimmel is excellent in the lead role and Gustaf Skarsgård’s Floki provides the often necessary comic relief, it’s Katheryn Winnick — as Lagertha — who is the show’s biggest draw.
Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology on FX is an unpredictable tour-de-force that, when it sticks its landing, is one of the best shows on TV. The series chronicles truly terrifying, mind-warping plots across multiple seasons, connecting some, ignoring others. What grounds these outrageous storylines involving haunted hotels, murder houses, insane asylums, cults, and covens is the cast, most notably Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, and Evan Peters. Murphy relies on their visceral portrayals of individuals unhinged to sell this whacky, nightmare-inducing rollercoaster and sell they do.
Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman trades in time-travel for managing a monarchy in this BBC drama that recounts the reign of Queen Victoria. Victoria’s early years were plagued with problems — she was only 18 when she took the throne and had many challengers — but the show pairs the more political machinations with the swoon-worthy tale of Victoria’s courtship with Prince Albert, who would later become her husband. If you like The Crown, you’ll like this.
The British sitcom is essentially You’re the Worst if the couple at the center of it were 10 years older. Like the FX series, it’s another anti-romcom romcom, although this one involves pregnancy, children, and culture clash (he’s an American wanker, she’s an acerbic, potty-mouthed Irish school teacher). However, the constant bickering and sexual disagreements between Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan) are what makes Catastrophe so exhilarating. A more apt name for the series would be Amazon’s other series, Transparent, because the relationship between Sharon and Rob — warts and all — is the most open and honest in television, and maybe the funniest. The only downside to Catastrophe is that its four seasons are each only six half-hour episodes long, which is not enough time to spend with these characters.
J.K. Simmons stars in this sci-fi thriller which blends a whole bunch of genres as it tells the story of a clueless U.N. employee, who discovers his agency is hiding a world-altering secret. Simmons plays said employee, Howard Silk, who uncovers a parallel universe that’s engaged in a covert war with our own, and he meets his A.U. self, a top spy intent on destroying him. It’s trippy stuff, apparently too trippy to last more than two seasons.
Amazon may not stack up favorably against Netflix in the original series department, but Transparent is as good or better than most of Netflix’s original series. It sees Jeffrey Tambor decide, late in life, to transition into a woman, and we see how that decision affects her family in the most hilarious and poignant ways imaginable. It’s a light series with heavy themes, and despite the behind-the-scenes issues, Transparent managed to wrap up its run with a fun musical finale.
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is a perfect series to binge-watch, as the ability to watch the episodes back-to-back evens out some of the slow pacing. Hannibal is dark, macabre, and brilliantly creative, and while it has many of the same characters viewers know and appreciate from the movie/book series, it also has an entirely different and unique tone (some would even say better). The murder scenes are equally gruesome and gorgeous, the series’ long arc is as disturbing as it is engrossing, and the acting from Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelson, and Laurence Fishburne is superb. It’s a slow, morbidly addictive burn, and viewers must stick around for Michael Pitt’s Mason Verger in season two, if only for one of the most beautifully unsettling sequences ever seen on network television.
Goliath is an old-school legal thriller from an old-school television writer, David E. Kelley (The Practice, Boston Legal), who is still the reigning king of legal dramas. It’s a meat-and-potatoes show driven by an entertaining storyline and compelling, flawed characters led by Billy McBride, a character played Billy Bob Thornton, who won a Golden Globe for the role. McBride is an alcoholic has-been lawyer who, in typical Grisham fashion, has a case against a big tech firm fall into his lap. On the other side of the case is McBride’s former firm, his ex-wife (Maria Bello) and his old legal partner turned nemesis (William Hurt). There’s nothing new or novel about Goliath except for the fact that it doesn’t try to be new and novel: It’s an old-fashioned, well-made, well-acted and gripping television show with bad guys, morally questionable good guys and a strong supporting cast that also includes Olivia Thirlby, Kevin Weisman (Alias), Dwight Yoakum, and Harold Perrineau.
A legal drama that almost never steps inside a courtroom, Suits stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick Adams as a brash, big-league attorney and his whiz-kid protégé, who is practicing illegally without a law degree. Suits, which has a tenuous understanding of the law, deals week-to-week mostly with settling disputes with cocky threats and yellow manilla folders. It’s rounded out by a fun, USA Network-perfect cast (Sarah Rafferty, Gina Torres, Meghan Markle, and Rick Hoffman) and later seasons of the series are more serialized in nature, dealing primarily with interoffice politics and relationship drama. Nothing about Suits is altering the television landscape (in fact, every episode is the same), and the show is certainly not any threat to television’s heavier dramas. However, over the course of the series, it’s become a rock-solid show, one that was willing to break out of the typical USA Network procedural format years before Mr. Robot came along.
A short, intense series, The Fall tracks Superintendent Sarah Gibson (Gillian Anderson) as she hunts serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). The elevator pitch of the series sounds a bit like Silence of the Lambs, but Gibson is no Clarice, and The Fall‘s focus on the nitty-gritty of building a case against someone accused of a horrendous series of crimes is contrasted with the slow, worrying turn of the screw as Paul befriends the woman who may be his next victim. The series falls apart a bit after awhile, but that first season is well worth the watch.
John Krasinski’s return to television marks a dramatic departure from his The Office days. He plays famed CIA analyst Jack Ryan in this series that explores the character’s beginnings as an up-and-coming agent whose confidence in his abilities often lead to him clashing with higher-ups like his boss, James Greer (a fantastic Wendell Pierce). In its first season, Ryan infiltrates a terrorist cell with nefarious plans after uncovering how the criminal communicate with each other, but when he’s thrust into the field, things get dangerous.
Greg Daniels — the genius behind shows like The Office and Parks and Rec — serves up a darker bit of comedy with this sci-fi series about death. Well, it’s about what happens after. Robbie Amell plays a man who dies and chooses to have his consciousness upload into a digital afterlife, a serene “living facility” called Lake View. But things aren’t as idyllic has he’d hoped, and his existence becomes more complicated when he ends up falling for his living customer service rep.
Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston star in this limited series from AMC. Laurie is the big bad, a criminal and arms dealer with a ruthless way of doing business. Hiddleston is the night manager of a Cairo hotel, recruited to spy on the guy and infiltrate his inner circle. He’s clearly way out of his depth and most of the edge-of-your-seat action comes from watching Hiddleston lie, cheat, and steal his way through a bogus cover and a convoluted plan hatched by higher-ups happy to sacrifice him for the greater good.
This mind-bending sci-fi offering from Amazon Prime Video was created by Nathaniel Halpert — one of the minds behind FX’s Legion and Netflix’s The Killing. So yeah, it’s weird. It’s also dramatically rich in ways few sci-fi series are these days. The basic premise revolves around a group of people who live in a small town built on top of “The Loop,” a machine built to unlock the mysteries of the universe. When they start experiencing strange phenomena, they’re forced to dig into the real reason the machine was created and what their role in the grander scheme of things might really be.
Blake Anderson, Adam Devine, and Anders Holm star in this office comedy about three buddies who work 9 to 5’s at a telemarketing agency and live together on their downtime. The bros clash with their boss and coworkers while getting into all kinds of shenanigans at home, mostly because they try to extend their hard-partying days into adulthood.
Created by Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Paul Weitz, Mozart in the Jungle stars Gael García Bernal as an orchestra conductor and Lola Kirke as an oboist/protégé. The cast is rounded out with beloved actors like Malcolm McDowell and Bernadette Peters, and familiar faces like Safron Burrows. Mozart is sweet and low-key. Viewers who like Canada’s exceptional Slings and Arrows will like Mozart in the Jungle because it’s essentially Slings and Arrows with classical music instead of Shakespeare. It is frothy and fun, and an absolute pleasure to watch, even if it is not exactly essential television.
Loosely based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name (it also bears some resemblance to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America), The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternative, dystopian world where Germany won World War II. Basically, the East Coast is occupied by the Germans, and the West Coast is occupied by the Japanese, and there’s a no-man’s land in between. Exec-produced by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), the series sees various characters working to form a resistance against their occupation by collecting “forbidden newsreels” that show the alternate history in which the Allies won the war in an effort to reveal a larger truth about how the world should be. A dark exploration of what it means to be American, TheMan in the High Castle is a well-acted, tense, and often violent dystopian thriller with plenty of twists and turns to keep viewers guessing.
This early aughts spy drama from JJ Abrams is responsible for putting Jennifer Garner on the map. In it, she plays Sydney Bristow, a gifted secret agent who discovers she’s been unknowingly working for the enemy. She then becomes a double agent for the CIA, working alongside her dad of all people, and along the way, she uncovers disturbing truths about her family, her past, and the people she’s chosen to trust.
There is a reason anime fans were excited for the launch of HBO Max.
The rookie streaming service houses entire catalogs of some of the best series and films the genre has to offer. Of course, even if you’re a hardcore stan, you’ll need some help sorting through which to add to your bingeing queue, so we’ve curated this list of eclectic offerings. From teen romance to feudal Japan, murder mysteries, and medieval fantasies, there’s something for everyone.
Here are the best anime series on HBO Max right now.
This time-travel drama offers an inventive twist on your normal anime fare, turning the story of a young man trying to prevent his mother’s death into a winding mystery filled with fantasy tropes and colorful characters. Satoru Fujinuma experiences something called “Revivals,” tiny jumps back in time that let him help others and prevent tragedies. But when he’s sent 18 years into the past to solve a string of kidnappings somehow related to his mother’s future death, things get complicated.
Another really cool take on the anime world, this music-infused series leans heavy on the drama to give us a truly moving love story. Kousei Arima is a piano prodigy who loses his hearing and desire to play after the death of his mother. It’s only when he meets a talented violin player named Kaori that he finds a passion for life and for his art, again.
Again, if you thought you knew the limits of anime, the shows on HBO Max are proving you thought wrong — this one chief among them. Set in prohibition era Illinois, the story follows a man named Angelo Lagusa who infiltrates the Mob to hunt down the Mafia don responsible for murdering his family. The title comes from his deadline to get the job done.
Exorcisms? High school romance? This new anime has everything. Shigeo Kageyama (Mob) is an esper, a psychic who can rid people of the evil spirits inhabiting them. He’s also a bit of a loner who struggles to keep his emotions — and thus, his powers — in check. He trains under a con-man posing as a psychic because he just wants to live a normal life, but trouble follows this kid wherever he goes.
Warning: This anime series is dark and brutal. Like Game of Thrones’ “Battle of the Bastards” level brutal. Set in a fantastical medieval world, the story follows a swordsman named Guts who’s branded with a mark that attracts all kinds of nasty creatures. To free himself from it, he’ll have to go on a revenge-filled quest with his band of mercenaries that begins (and probably ends) with plenty of bloodshed.
This classic anime series ventures deep into the world of the Samurai, following a wandering young swordsman in feudal Japan. Kenshin Himura, once a merciless killer, now travels the land helping others in penance for his earlier sins. He comes across a struggling dojo where he finds a chance to start over again.
A group of intellectually gifted orphans discover a dark secret about their origins in this inventive anime series. There are some dark, fantasy vibes at play here as the 38 siblings living in a seemingly idyllic abode break their Mother’s one rule, opening up a world of secrets and betrayal in the process. We’re suckers for a good mystery and this has the added benefit of a truly suspect parental figure to heighten the tension.
Okay, truth? We’re not sure why this alternate-world anime doesn’t have a better rating from critics. Chalk it up to bad taste we guess because this thing is a wild ride. In 1983 East Germany, the show reimagines history’s biggest wars as the consequences of an alien invasion and fueled by robotic machinery. A group of badass fighters is tasked with keeping the peace and taking out their enemies, but they’ve got just as many battles at home as they do out in the field.
Stuck in a time loop from Hell, Subaru Natsuki is a young man forced to contend with elves, supernatural abilities, and his own role in a much larger game in this fantasy-tinged series. Natsuki is transported to another world on his way home from school, befriending an elven girl who saves him and going on a quest that tests his faith and belief in the mystical.
This is a series that even non-fans have probably heard of, and here’s the reason: It’s just so damn good. It follows two brothers, Edward and Alphonse, who go searching for the famed Philosopher’s Stone after an attempt to bring their mother back from the dead goes… well, not good. Their journey is filled with screw-ups, buried in legends, and packed with action, but the thing that really works here is the bond between the two siblings.
Bad Lip Reading, however, is back to remind us that, yes, that first debate did happen. And a 10-minute video of its highlights — with completely made up audio spliced together — somehow creates a more coherent story of the political clash of the septuagenarians than we got from what actually took place on the stage.
The joke lines are best viewed for yourself, but Trump, Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace are all spoofed in the video posted on Friday. The second half of the video was called “Time To Act,” which gave the lip synched video readings that fit certain prompts the video provided. At the very least, it certainly stuck to the subject more than both Biden and Trump did last month.
A Bad Lip Reading of the final presidential debate might not be very timely considering the election is less than two weeks away, but this is a good distraction until we get to election day.
Is there anything quite like the feeling that is created when a kicker bounces one off the uprights? The sound it makes? The fact that it’s probably harder to hit the upright than it is to make the field goal itself? What about those ones that bounce off, bounce towards the middle, and then bounce out to really drive home the cruelty of the oblong ball (hi, Bears fans)? The truth is there is no kind of missed field goal more painful than one going off the uprights.
So the amount of pain Rice must have been going through in their 40-34 loss when their kicker managed to bounce a single field goal attempt off the uprights not once, not twice, no not three times, but four times must have been enormous. The worst part is that it didn’t have to happen. Rice could have won it in regulation.
With less than two minutes to go in regulation, Rice scored a touchdown to take a 32-31 lead. They made the logical decision and went for two and even managed to convert it. With a three point lead all Rice had to do was have their defense not give up a field goal. They did their job to a point and forced a 48-yard attempt, but Middle-Tennessee’s kicker nailed it to send the game into overtime tied up at 34.
In OT, Middle-Tennesee went for the field goal again, but missed a 50 yard attempt. All Rice had to do was hit a field goal of their own to win it. Now, what most teams would do here is run their offense and get some extra yards to make the kick easier. Rice opted to run the ball, for a one yard game, and then kneel the ball twice. Alright, time to win it with a field goal!
Rice just basically kneeled three straight plays and kicked a 45 yard fg for the win in OT and this happened. pic.twitter.com/EyxpYfrfSS
Four bounces! Not since Kawhi’s shot against the Sixers have four bounces been so agonizing to watch. Life for Rice football is nothing but pain and they are not allowed to feel anything but pain. Oh well! Absurd odds asid,e they still can win the game in the next overtime. Just get the lead and force Middle-Tennesee to match you. Worst case you get another opportunity to win it in triple OT.
Rice’s field goal attempt in double OT was blocked.
Middle-Tennesee defeats Rice 40-34. If bouncing one off the upright is the most painful thing you can do as a kicker then we don’t even want to know how Rice feels right now.
Drake has been hard at work on his upcoming sixth album, Certified Lover Boy, for quite a while now. The Toronto rap star has spent much of 2020 teasing it and even unveiled its lead single, “Laugh Now Cry Later” with Lil Durk, two months ago. Many believed and hoped that the upcoming project would arrive by the end of the year, but thanks to a new promo video from the Toronto native, fans will have to spend a bit of time in the 2021 world before they receive the new project.
Celebrating his 34th birthday with a small gift to fans, Drake announced that Certified Lover Boy would arrive in January 2021. He made the announcement through a promo video that was posted through the social media pages of his OVO Sound imprint. In the video, we find Drake taking a page out of Jay-Z’s book and recreating the artworks for some of the projects he’s released throughout his career, as Hov did prior to releasing Blueprint 3. The promo video sports his past albums including Take Care, Nothing Was The Same, and his most recent full-length effort, Dark Lane Demo Tapes. The video concludes with an aerial view of the Certified Lover Boy logo appearing on the roof of a building.
The announcement comes behind a string of singles Drake has appeared which include Bryson Tiller’s “Outta Time,” Yung Bleu’s “You’re Still Mine,” and 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s “Mr. Right Now.”
You can never expect a calm and regular game of college football when Indiana is involved. Few teams seem to involve themselves in close games (typically painful losses) against big time opponents like Indiana does, and Saturday was no different in a matchup against No. 8 Penn State that went all the way down to the wire.
After leading the majority of the game, Penn State roared back and took the lead. After a quick four-and-out it with under two minutes to play it seemed like Penn State had the game won, but Indiana allowed Penn State to score a touchdown (the running back seemed confused as he walked in rather than falling down short) with right around 90 seconds left so they could get the ball back despite having just one timeout remaining. Penn State opted to go for the extra point to put themselves up eight and put the rest on their defense. After getting the ball back, Indiana marched down the field with some incredibly precise passing from Indiana QB Michael Penix Jr.
After putting on the goal line, Indiana punched the ball in for six on a fourth-down QB sneak play where he powered the ball in. Afterward, Indiana clearly had to go for two and attempt to tie up the ball game. Penix Jr. took the ball in his hands, danced around a blitzing Penn State defense that clearly expected him to keep the ball, and ran it in. Tie game. Overtime was on the way.
In overtime, Penn State quickly scored a touchdown and hit the extra point to go up seven. With the ball back in Penix hands, he once again had to deliver. He did with a touchdown drive of his own behind some more precise passing. This is where Indiana had a choice. Go for two and win it here or kick the extra point and take their chances in the second overtime period?
Indiana, a six point underdog, went for the two and the win. Penix kept the ball again and dove for the pylon. Was he in? Here’s how close it was.
The edge of the ball justtttttt happens to touch the pylon at the end. The call on the field was that he converted the two-point attempt. Without substantial evidence to overturn it the refs gave it to Indiana. Ball game. Indiana 36, Penn State 35, to give Indiana its first win over a top 10 team this millennium.
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