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Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War: Extremely original and hilarious idea GILLBERG debuted, Mankind provided The Rock with the soundbite that’ll cost him the WWF Championship at the Royal Rumble, and Val Venis got put in the penile morgue for trying to flirt with Ken Shamrock’s hot sister.

If you haven’t seen this episode, you can watch it on WWE Network here. Check out all the episodes of classic Raw you may have missed at the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War and Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw tag pages. Follow along with the competition here.

Hey, you! If you want us to keep doing retro reports, share them around! And be sure to drop down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of these shows. Head back to a time long forgotten when WWE TV was fun to watch, and things happened!

And now, the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War for January 18, 1999.

Corporate Bail-out

This week’s primary story is one you might be familiar with in 2020: a corporation having a couple of bad weeks and handling it by completely destroying everything around them.

Two weeks ago, Stone Cold Steve Austin and D-Generation X teamed up to help Mankind upset The Rock and become WWF Champion. Last week, Stone Cold returned to help Chyna win a “Corporate Rumble” designed to humiliate D-X and give Mr. McMahon the number 30 spot in the Royal Rumble proper. Also Kane got a championship match against Mankind when The Rock had to barter for one and then Rock got him disqualified, so things are tense all over.

This week, Rock’s supposed to face Kane one-on-one in a match made by Commissioner Michaels before the darkness came, so The Corporation spends the entire episode talking down to Kane about how he needs to follow orders and calling him a “retard” over and over. The World Wrestling Federation has a real love affair with “retard” as an insult, so much so that “The Big Red Retard” became one of Kane’s recurring nicknames. It was a different time. You have to understand, 20 years ago we had no IDEA that people with intellectual disabilities were human beings.

In addition to Kane and Rock’s issue, The Corporation has been tasked with (1) hunting and presumably killing Mankind to help soften him up for the Rock at the Royal Rumble, and (2) reasserting their dominance over the roster by going violently buck wild on anyone they come across backstage. For example, here are Ken Shamrock and the Big Boss Man jumping Jeff Jarrett and Owen Hart and beating them around the head and neck with an entire hallway.

Boss Man knocks out both numbers by attacking Mankind backstage ahead of their scheduled Hardcore Championship match and throwing him into some free-standing chairs, which sets a dangerous precedent for the remainder of Mick Foley’s January. They find their way out to the ring after a few segments — this is before any 24/7 rules were attached to the Hardcore Championship, by the way, so falls still count anywhere, but you’ve got to actually like, do a match to get a “fall” going in the first place — and Mankind looks like he has it won with the dreaded Socked Fingertips In The Mouth. Unfortunately for Mick and eventually his family, The Rock shows up for the disqualification and absolutely BRAINS him in the back of the skull with a chair. Jesus Christ already, dude.

Not sure how Boss Man got disqualified in a match with no disqualifications, but I’m guessing it’s because the ref didn’t want to see that chair shot nine more times. BRB, trying to Bran Stark back in time and prevent Mankind from agreeing to any aspect of the finish at the Royal Rumble.

Meanwhile Ken Shamrock, seen here looking like the focal point of a Renaissance painting, ruins a Test vs. Bill Ass match (as much as “ruining” a match between those two is possible) and puts a broken ankle and the fear of God into Billy for mooning his sister last week. He fucks him up so bad he’s got Bill sobbing and clutching the ring steps and tapping away at them mindlessly to make the pain stop. As though “tapping out” gets you out of real life fights. Billy spends the next segment backstage on the floor while the Road Dogg squats over him like, “damn man, maybe next time don’t show your entire asshole to an MMA legend’s family to try to piss him off.”

Also I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, but yes, that’s future Smackdown General Manager (player!) Teddy Long on referee duty. Long, who started as a ref in the NWA before become the manager of tag teams like Doom (featuring Ron Simmons before he was a Satanic cultist) and the Skyscrapers (featuring The Undertaker before he was dead), joined the World Wrestling Federation as a ref again in late December. I think it’s matches like this one that fostered his dedication toward keeping bouts with non-finishes going as tag team matches.

Anyway, back to The Rock and Kane. In a nice middle finger to WCW’s Fingerpoke of Doom, Mr. McMahon brings out the entire Corporation and tells fans not to get excited about a main event, because there isn’t going to be one, as Kane’s just going to do the right thing and lay down for The Rock. If not, they’re sending Kane back to the “loony bin.” Seems like someone at that institution would get curious about the wrestling promoter bringing a 7-foot tall fire demon in for treatment and start watching the weekly shows to find out what the hell’s going on, but whatever. Kane, who wants neither of these outcomes, tells McMahon to go screw with a virulent arm gesture and gets attacked from behind by EVERYBODY.

After he’s been thoroughly beaten down, nWo style, Rock orders the Corporation to the back so he can finish the match on his own. Of course this is KANE we’re talking about, a true artist when it comes to selectively no-selling, so eventually he recovers enough to fight back. The Corporation then comes BACK out, which brings out Mankind to run interference with the same steel chair Rocky used to kill roughly 15% of his functioning brain cells earlier in the night. Rock flees backwards up the ramp, which has never ended badly for anyone, and is cut off at the pass by the appearance of a wild Stone Cold Steve Austin. Austin’s spent most of the show out in the parking lot drinking beers, possibly because he read the call sheet and read about the Mark Henry and Chyna segments coming up, but he wanders in at the end to make sure Foley gets more situational revenge. Foley clobbers Rock in the back with the chair — in the back, Rock — and the show goes off the air with the heroes (-ish) standing tall.

So, uh … about those Mark Henry and Chyna segments …

Worst: The Hall Of Shame

Over the past few months, the World Wrestling Federation has been trying to get Mark Henry to quit. He signed a 10-year, 10-million dollar contract back in 1996 to keep him from signing with WCW at the height of that sort of thing. Henry was a fairly accomplished weight lifter and strong man, and they thought for sure he was going to be a big deal. When he wasn’t, mostly due to a combination of inexperience and WWE rarely ever knowing how to write characters or stories for a person of color beyond “they love to have fun” or “they’re actually the racists,” they wanted out. So they turned him into “Sexual Chocolate,” had him do extended S&M bits with the Pretty Mean Sisters, and, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, paired him up with Chyna’s “friend” Sammy.

This week, we first find Chyna walking down a hallway with Henry following behind, begging her to not do what she’s about to do because his family is in attendance. That’s his mom in the above picture, by the way. We come to find out that Chyna has footage of Sammy trying to seduce Mark Henry in the locker room last week, and to make matters worse, gasp, Sammy’s actually a cross-dresser! Mark is into it and even compliments Sammy’s “tight ass” until he gets into blurred undercarriage territory, at which point he discovers Sammy’s …

Mark sells the fact that he briefly touched a penis by vomiting, and then Chyna declares she’ll never sleep with him and punches him in the balls. Henry’s mom then gently spanks him as the segment ends, and we catch up with them after the break walking down the hallway amidst more gentle hand and butt spanking. Honestly looking back on it, the stuff with Sammy’s not even as embarrassing as Mark Henry’s mom begrudgingly going along with the segment and half-assedly “spanking” her grown-ass son because someone told her it’d be funny. The complete lack of enthusiasm really sells it. Also, goddamn were the late ’90s insensitive as hell to everybody.

I’d also like to point out that the episode where Mark Henry vomits because he touched a cross-dresser’s penis and gets escorted out of the arena by his disappointed mother while being lightly bopped on the bottom opens with a video package about Martin Luther King Jr., because it’s happening on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. You can’t make this up. Sorry, did I type “can’t?” I meant wouldn’t.

The night’s not over for Chyna, though. She’s being punished for eliminating Mr. McMahon and winning the Corporate Rumble by being forced to compete in a handicap match against Pat Patterson and Gerald Brisco. In case you thought this might play as an empowering look at how one strong woman could easily kick the dog shit out of two bumbling old morons, don’t worry, it’s mostly about how much fun the old morons are having touching her butt and boobs.

As a reminder, this is happening two weeks after Mick Foley won the WWF Championship in the unforgettable Raw ending that “turned the tide” in the Monday Night War. And like, sure, WCW Monday Nitro was pretty bad at this point, but it didn’t have Mean Gene throwing powder in Miss Elizabeth’s eyes so he could comically jiggle her tits against her will and then act like it was gross because he’s gay. Chyna gave them a double Testicular Claw at the start of the match, though, so I guess what’s good for the gander is good for the geese. But still, even for a guy in 1999, Vince Russo had some serious developmental and emotional disabilities as a storyteller. Anything that isn’t contingent on Rock, Austin, McMahon, and Foley ends up being way too goth or from the perspective of a middle-schooler who just found a weird old Playboy in the woods behind their house.

Sable shows up to help at one point, but gets instantly attacked and removed from the equation by Luna Vachon. It’s like ECW if it was booked on cocaine instead of poverty. Chyna kicks the Stooges’ asses after the groping and pins them, at least, so that’s something.

Speaking Of ‘Way Too Goth’

Undertaker gives Mideon his name — “Mideon” … well, “Midian,” the revised spelling comes later — and promises a second sacrifice at the Royal Rumble. He makes good on that promise by (spoiler alert) kidnapping and Satanizing a returning Mabel, turning him into “Viscera.” Mabel would start as a rapper, turn goth, and eventually become a big fat ladies man who loves to have fun to complete the triple crown of throwaway WWF gimmicks of the ’90s and 2000s.

Worst: Road Dogg And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Table

In other horned-up perverts versus goths news, Road Dogg has a hardcore match against Gangrel. Things are going pretty well until the finish, which is supposed to be Road Dogg putting Gangrel through a table with a running elbow drop off the apron. Yes, I watch Botchamania as well, go ahead and cue up ‘The View’ while you read this part.

Things start off pretty badly when Roadie drops the running elbow off the apron and the table doesn’t break. To his credit, he immediately calls an audible, runs back up onto the apron, and jumps off with what’s more or less a Boom Drop. The table only kind of breaks. He decides he’s going to save this finish or die trying, so he rushes into the ring and excitedly climbs up to the top rope. It’s at this point he starts second guessing himself, so instead of like, flying off the top turnbuckle with a Swanton Bomb or whatever, he ends up jumping off the outside of the second rope with the saddest little bunny hop you’ve ever seen:

When that STILL doesn’t completely break the table, Dogg pulls Gangrel up, moves him around a little, and Irish whips him into the one of the angled-up table halves. Nothing. It just flattens out. So he goes over AGAIN and tries to break the goddamn thing AGAIN with a vertical suplex. And that shits still doesn’t break. So having ostensibly having failed to break the table in a satisfying manner after five attempts, Road Dogg just poor Gangrel with two chair shots and pins him.

Next time Trevor Belmont wants to kill Dracula, he should try elbow dropping him through a banquet table without the metal lining removed.

Also Terrible On This Episode

I don’t know what happened this week, but WWF Creative seems to have completely forgotten how to tell a story. And I don’t mean the stories they’re telling aren’t “good” or “interesting,” I mean they’ve forgotten basic shit like who the characters are, why they’re doing anything they’re doing, and why you have to follow through with match stipulations if you make them.

For example, remember when Owen Hart accidentally “broke Dan Severn’s neck” during a match, announced his retirement from wrestling and revealed that he wasn’t actually retired, he was just using that as a smoke screen to dress up like the Blue Blazer and help Jeff Jarrett win matches? Or something? And then an angry Dan Severn spent several weeks showing up in a neck brace to try to guilt Owen about the entire thing? Yeah, it turns out Severn was actually NEVER INJURED AT ALL, and was on Owen’s side the entire time. We find out out when he’s supposed to be guest refereeing a Lion’s Den match between Steve Blackman and Owen Hart on Sunday Night Heat, dramatically removes the brace, and attacks Blackman for some reason.

On Raw, Severn low blows Blackman on purpose to get himself disqualified, and then spends the post-match trying to choke him out with a Dragon Sleeper. So like … okay? Why? Who is this for?

In a similar situation, Goldust and Al Snow have been feuding over Goldust stealing Head, so they have a “Winner Gets Head” match. Get it? Do you get it? Do you get the clever play on words? Al Snow wins, but Goldust beats him up after the match and leaves with Head anyway. So the stipulation didn’t actually matter, nobody’s going to even try to enforce it, and we just sat through the match for nothing. Goldust putting Goldust makeup on head like it’s a gift from Sting is literally the only highlight.

Finally, Vince McMahon Is Prepared For Stone Cold Steve Austin (And The Coronavirus)

Need someone to step in and help main-event your empty gym WrestleMania in the middle of a global pandemic so you don’t lose a weekend of money? Why not ask Mr. McMahon himself, seen here finishing his Royal Rumble training by beating up Dr. Tom and shit-canning some masked jobbers in an empty warehouse?

He’ll even hit you with some terrible looking Stunners, N64 video game style, which predate Stone Cold Steve Austin’s social distancing nut-shot version by over 20 years. Vince promises that at the Royal Rumble he’s going to get him some, so hopefully the Lucha House Party and Byron Saxton will be in there with him to validate this training.

Next Week:

It’s time for the Royal Rumble. It’s fun for the whole family! See you then!

Changes to the WrestleMania 36 card have been coming fast, with multiple WWE superstars reportedly in quarantine, Roman Reigns removing himself from his Universal Championship match due to coronavirus concerns, and Goldberg being given a new opponent. According to PWInsider, yet another WrestleMania title match has been changed because a performer was pulled from the show, though for reasons unrelated to COVID-19.

This week’s episode of Raw set up Andrade and Angel Garza challenging The Street Profits for the Raw Tag Team Championships at WrestleMania. However, Montez Ford and Angelo Dawkins reportedly ended up facing Garza and an NXT wrestler instead when Andrade suffered a rib injury and was not medically cleared to compete. It’s unclear how serious the injury was, especially since Raw and WrestleMania were taped within days of each other, giving the wrestlers who performed on both shows less recovery time than usual.

This may have been the second Mania match change for Andrade. According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, a match between him and Rey Mysterio for the United States Championship was in the works before Mysterio was quarantined, but that match was never announced and may not have been the concrete plan.

Challenging for the Raw tag titles would have been Andrade’s second match on a WrestleMania event after participating in the Andre the Giant Battle Royal last year.

UPDATE: Per Post Wrestling, Austin Theory will be stepping in to team with Garza against the Street Profits. Theory also competed on this week’s NXT.

Four years after the release of ColleGrove, the hit collaboration between 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne, the rappers are ready for a follow-up. 2 Chainz has revealed that the long-awaited ColleGrove 2 is on its way, and it is coming sometime this year.

While in quarantine, 2 Chainz hopped on an Instagram live session to chat with fans about his upcoming projects and even play a few snippets of unreleased tracks. During the livestream, the rapper revealed coveted details about ColleGrove 2. “I’m also dropping ColleGrove 2 this year,” he said. “Just know that gon drop, all that secret surprise sh*t.”

Along with announcing the album 2 Chainz excited fans by previewing a collaborative track with Wayne’s hard-hitting verse. “Give my people power now we power fiends / This addiction feeling like a boxer stepping out the ring / you swing and miss, we critically thinking about the critics up in critical condition,” Weezy raps on the forthcoming track.

ColleGrove 2 has been a long time coming. Just after the first record’s release, 2 Chainz said “there’s plenty” more music from the duo while Weezy confirmed that a follow-up was “already done.” Back in 2018, 2 Chainz teased fans about the project’s release by saying he and Weezy had “another 1 on the way.”

Watch 2 Chainz’s announcement above.

While Taylor Swift has reigned over her corner of pop music for the last several years, she’s also quick to uphold other hard-working musicians around her. Just last year, Swift hailed Lana Del Rey as “the most influential artist in pop.” But Swift has now named a handful of her female predecessors who have made a huge impact on her early life and influenced her career through their music.

Speaking to her fans in an Instagram story, Swift explained that she curated a playlist of some of the female artists who have influenced her the most. The list includes the Dixie Chicks, Liz Phair, Vanessa Carlton, Alanis Morissette, and many more. The singer told fans the playlist was to give back to her “faraway mentors:”

“At the end of Women’s History Month, I wanted to make a playlist of songs and artists who made music that became the soundtrack to my life for a time, a phase, endless rides on the school bus, getting my license and driving around alone, screaming into a hairbrush and deciding ultimately that I wanted to make music too. I see these women as my faraway mentors, who taught me how music can really make someone’s life easier and more magical. These female professors guided me melodically, lyrically, spiritually and emotionally without even knowing it. And though I haven’t met most of these women, I will forever be grateful to them.”

Check out Swift’s 51-song playlist below.

MLB is taking perhaps the most conservative — some might say honest — planning route as it prepares for the 2020 season. An agreement with the players’ association set a standard for the league to follow in the aftermath of its decision to postpone the season, which would have begun this week. Those standards include waiting until fans are allowed back into stadiums, until travel restrictions have been lifted, and until it’s clear it won’t pose a health risk to teams and fans.

Jeff Passan of ESPN reported on the agreement on Friday:

https://twitter.com/JeffPassan/status/1243586086594588679

These are the first set of guidelines reported publicly from any major American sports league, as the NBA rifles through several imaginative scenarios and the WNBA remains optimistic its smaller reach could help it return to the floor earlier. MLB suspended operations on March 12, two weeks prior to Opening Day, in response to the growing outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the United States.

As part of the agreement, MLB and its players reportedly will also leave open the possibility of neutral-site games and empty stadiums, should it become unfeasible to bring fans together as a live audience. The current recommendation from the U.S. Center for Disease Control is that all events of 10 or more people should be canceled or held virtually. There’s a long way to go before crowds can fill Yankee Stadium.

Still, MLB has been earnestly negotiating how the season might play out, and could benefit from the U.S. outbreak occurring before baseball’s regular season started. It gives them more time (and perhaps less urgency) to patiently plan.

Last Updated: March 27th

There are a lot of good TV shows on Amazon Prime, but increasingly the streaming service’s original programming has been as good as much of its licensed programming as it expands its library of original content. It doesn’t have quite the breadth of Netflix, but there’s hardly a miss among its original series. If you’re trying to figure out exactly which original show to watch next on Amazon, here’s a great place to start with a look at the 15 best Amazon Prime original series right now.

Related: The Best Movies On Amazon Prime Right Now

1. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

3 seasons, 26 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10

Amy Sherman-Palladino’s follow-up to Gilmore Girls and Bunheads may be the most impactful Amazon series since Transparent, and it’s got the Emmys to prove it. It’s a brilliant, quick-witted, crowd-pleaser, an exuberant fast-talking comedy with some heft. Set in 1950s New York City, Rachel Brosnahan (House of Cards, Manhattan) plays Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel, the perfect, upper Westside wife who — after her husband leaves her — goes on a bender and finds herself on stage delivering a hilarious, profanity-fueled set in a rundown dump of a club. The club’s booker, Susie Meyerson (Alex Borstein), takes an immediate interest in her, so while her home life is falling apart, Miriam finds herself trying to build a career as a stand-up comic in an era when females weren’t exactly welcome on that scene. It’s a tremendous series that mixes comedy, feminism, and a little bit of stand-up history into a delightful concoction of laughs, heart and an incredible lead performance from Brosnahan, who will ultimately be remembered for this role the same way Lauren Graham will always be remembered for Lorelai Gilmore.

2. Patriot

2 seasons, 18 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10

Patriot is a difficult show to describe because it’s so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s about a man named John Tavner (Michael Dorman), an N.O.C. (Non-official cover) for the CIA. His cover is as an engineer for a pipe company, a job for which he has little education or experience, and yet, it’s also a job he must maintain in order to complete his mission: To get a bag of money from point A to point B, which just happens to be what his job in pipe entails: To build a pipe to get a thing from Point A to Point B. But if it were that easy, neither an engineer (in the piping context) or a CIA agent (in the context of the bag of money) would be required.

Patriot is about the complications that arise along the way. There are mishaps; a murder investigation; and human nature and Tavner’s relationships with his brother, with co-workers, and with his father get in the way. After every episode, the intensity of this mission increases. The burden gets heavier. By the end, viewers will be left desperate to find a safety valve to unleash some pressure because Patriot does a number on its audience. It’s a pitch-black comedy, and it’s not for everyone. Season 2 is just as strange and silly as ever, but unfortunately, the show has bit the dust.

3. Fleabag

2 seasons, 12 episodes | IMDb: 8.7/10

Not exactly an Amazon Original, Fleabag was co-produced by Amazon and England’s BBC Three. Set in London, it 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, however. 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.

Fleabag is a quick series to binge, but it packs an immense amount of comedy and ache into its short runtime, probing beneath the dating life of a sexual adventuresome twenty-something only to uncover bleakness and tragedy. There’s a gut punch around every corner, but Fleabag always manages to lift itself out of its depths to make us laugh again. It’s truly one of the most distinctive, original comedies of the last several years — think Tig Notaro crossed with Broad City — and if we’re lucky, Waller-Bridge will become one of the leading creative voices of her generation.

4. Good Omens

1 season, 6 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10

David Tennant and Michael Sheen star in this hellishly fun adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s beloved work of fantasy. Tennant plays Crowley, a demon who’s spent the past 6,000 years living life as a kind of rockstar on Earth. Sheen plays his angelic counterpart, Aziraphale, a bumbling seraph who also calls Earth home and as a reluctant friendship with his immortal enemy. The two must band together to prevent the Anti-Christ – a kid in Oxford shire – from rising to power, destroying the world, and, most importantly, Crowley’s best of Queen mixtape.

5. Sneaky Pete

3 seasons, 30 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10

Sneaky Pete comes from creators David Shore (House) and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), who also stars as the series’ bad guy. However, it is the influence of showrunner Graham Yost (Justified) that is most felt: It has the same crackling energy, wit, and fast-paced storylines, combining a series-long arc with a few stand-alone episodes.

Cranston plays Vick, a bad guy of indeterminate nature. In its first season, recently released convict Marius (Giovani Ribisi) is in debt to Vick for $100,000, so he hides out in a small Connecticut town by posing as his prison cellmate, Pete (Ethan Embry). Armed with three years of prison stories from Pete, Marius — a career con man — has little trouble fitting into Pete’s family, who have not seen the real Pete since he was 11. Pete’s family enrolls Marius into the family bail bond business as an investigator, and Marius uses his in with Pete’s family to try and steal $100,000 from their safe and pay it back to Vick before Vick cuts off the fingers of Marius’ brother. It’s an out-there high-concept premise, but it plays well, primarily because of the terrific character work. It’s a show brimming with talent, starring everyone from Cranston to Peter Geraty to Margo Martindale (one of several former Justified cast members). It’s honest-to-God one of the most addictive, bingeable shows on either Netflix or Amazon, and once viewers hit the sixth episode, it’s virtually impossible to turn off.

6. Bosch

5 seasons, 50 episodes | IMDb: 8.4/10

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.

7. Catastrophe

4 seasons, 24 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10

Amazon has exclusive streaming rights to the British sitcom in America, which is essentially FX’s 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 British school teacher).

Catastrophe is a romantic-comedy in reverse: There’s a pregnancy, then they get married, and then they get to know one another to see if they can fall in love. However, it’s the constant bickering and sexual disagreements between Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan) that makes the series 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 there’s just not enough time to spend with these characters.

8. The Man in the High Castle

4 seasons, 40 episodes | IMDb: 8.1/10

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, The Man in the High Castle is a well-acted, tense, and often violent dystopian thriller with plenty of twists and turns to keep viewers guessing.

9. One Mississippi

2 seasons, 12 episodes | IMDb: 7.3/10

Tig Notaro’s semi-autobiographical One Mississippi — about a Los Angeles DJ recovering from breast cancer who has to return home to Mississippi after her mother dies unexpectedly — is so quiet and restrained in its approach that viewers may not realize until they are halfway through the first season just how much of the comedy has seeped in.

One Mississippi can be best described as a guided tour through the grieving process, but Notaro has had enough separation from the events in her own life that inspired the story to infuse the show with plenty of levity. The death of her mother is heartbreaking — and the periodic flashback sequences give her mom dimension — but Notaro finds clever ways to find humor in the familiar. Notaro manages to find the humanity in every character via their flaws, and while the show occasionally makes light of death (and of cancer), Mississippi never treats its characters with anything less than reverence. Less a comedy than it is a healing drama, it’s essential viewing for anyone who has ever suffered a loss.

10. Transparent

5 seasons, 41 episodes | IMDb: 7.8/10

In Transparent, Jeffrey Tambor plays a character who decides, 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, including the pain of an older woman realizing she’s wasted so much of her life living as a man.

It’s a sprawling family drama that tells its story in a way that dignifies and humanizes even its most deeply flawed characters. No one is cast in a great light, but all of the characters transcend their foibles. It’s sad and tragic at times, and triumphant at others. It’s a light series with heavy themes, and truly one of the best currently running series on television. (It’s also racked up 28 Emmy nominations and eight wins, so far.) Transparent is a beautifully painful and painfully beautiful series, and essential for anyone interested in this moment in our cultural history.

11. Goliath

3 seasons, 24 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10

Goliath is an old-school legal thriller from an old-school television writer, David E. Kelley (The Practice, Boston Legal), who’s still the reigning king of legal dramas. It’s a meat-and-potatoes show, one driven by an entertaining storyline and compelling, flawed characters led by Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton, who won a Golden Globe for the role).

McBride is an alcoholic has-been lawyer who, in typical John 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 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 Yoakam, and Harold Perrineau. Of all the shows on this list aside from Sneaky Pete, it’s also the most bingeable.

12. Red Oaks

3 seasons, 26 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10

Created by Joe Gangemi and longtime Soderbergh collaborator Gregory Jacobs, Red Oaks is set in the 1980s and stars Craig Roberts (Submarine) as David, a college-aged tennis instructor working at a country club. He’s an aimless guy, and Red Oaks is as much about David figuring out what to do with his life as anything. His father (Richard Kind) wants him to become an accountant. His girlfriend’s dad hangs big paychecks at a corporate firm over his head, but David just wants to be a filmmaker, and the series explores the challenges he confronts in an attempt to keep those around him — and himself — happy. His mother (Jennifer Grey), meanwhile, is supportive, but she also discovers that she loves women.

The smartly written sitcom is bubbling with quiet humor reminiscent of early David Gordon Green’s (All the Real Girls) sensibility (he exec produces, and directs three episodes), and may be best described as a cross between Summer School andThe Wonder Years.

In some ways, Red Oaks does for ’80s comedy what Netflix’s Stranger Things does for ’80s sci-fi, and the more assured second season only improves on the first, shattering the freshman’s season’s happy ending and resetting, as it earnestly explores themes about class. The series’ core theme remains throughout, however: Follow your dreams, don’t compromise, and don’t settle for the easy out. The best reason to watch, however, remains Richard Kind, who brings awkward humor, seriocomic heartbreak, and equal doses of cluelessness and poignancy to the series (and the Mad About You reunion between Kind and Reiser in the second-season finale is not to be missed).

13. Mozart in the Jungle

4 seasons, 40 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10

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, and to its credit, the stakes are never high — no one is beaten or murdered, but there are enough joyous, triumphant moments to remind us that television can still delight instead of punish. It is frothy and fun, and an absolute pleasure to watch.

14. Homecoming

1 season, 10 episodes | IMDb: 7.5/10

Julia Roberts lands on TV for the first time with this slick thriller from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. Like his previous show, Esmail keeps fans in the dark, so expect plenty of twists, turns, and cliffhangers with this limited series about a misguided counselor hoping to help veterans returning from war even as the corporation she works for has sinister plans. It’s one of the better binges on the streaming platform and how good is it to see Roberts on our screens again?

15. Forever

1 season, 8 episodes | IMDb: 7.2/10

SNL alums Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen star in this fantasy comedy about a married couple living an all-too-predictable life. Armisen plays his usual type, the kind of passive, bumbling husband-type he made popular on Portlandia, but this is Rudolph’s show and her chance to prove she’s suited to any and every comedy vehicle. There are twists galore in this thing, some that work, others that fall flat, but Rudolph’s subtle comedy and leading-lady turn keep you interested despite the cliffhangers.

ESPN’s Doris Burke revealed on Friday that she tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus that has spread in a global pandemic that’s shut down much of the world. Burke, a legendary basketball broadcaster beloved in the NBA, appeared on ESPN colleague Adrian Wojnarowski’s podcast to share the news.

It’s initially unclear how Burke contracted the virus, which is spread quickly and is easily transmitted from person to person. But Burke was working NBA games in the lead-up to the season’s suspension when it was revealed that Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the virus. She reflected on when she first started feeling symptoms, which apparently appeared in mid-March.

“What is interesting for me and what I would hope that people would know, because like most Americans, I think I had been tuning in and reading and trying to understand what symptoms were, etcetera etcetera,” Burke said on the podcast. “But basically, on March 11, I remember sitting at lunch with my broadcast crew for that evening, which is standard for us to have a lunch production meeting, and I looked at my colleagues, Ryan Ruocco and Ian Gruca, my producer, and I said, ‘Man, I am so tired right now and my head is pounding.’ And looking back, those were my symptoms.”

Burke said she started to have symptoms the morning that Gobert had his positive test, and things got worse from there. By early next week, she had no energy and was struggling to even get out of bed.

“I kid you not, I could not get out of bed for five minutes without needing to go back to bed and laying down,” she said. “It was that Tuesday (March 17) I was thinking, I don’t have any of the normal symptoms, but it seems to me I should probably get tested.”

Burke said the test results took eight days, and she’s now symptom-free, which is both alarming and a relief, in that order. As the latest person in the NBA world to reveal her positive test, it shows just how far this has spread and how quickly the virus can impact a wide swath of the population if preventative social distancing is not followed and life resumes as normal. In the days and weeks that followed Gobert’s initial test, several NBA players had also tested positive for COVID-19, including Gobert’s Jazz teammate Donovan Mitchell and Kevin Durant, who wasn’t playing for the Brooklyn Nets this season but apparently contracted it as it spread through the NBA. Boston’s Marcus Smart also tested positive while players from the Los Angeles Lakers were revealed to have positive tests as well.

The ramifications of coronavirus in the NBA also impacted scouts and has seen an impact on the National Hockey League, where players on the Ottawa Senators tested positive following games played in the same venues as infected NBA players.

The NBA is keeping an eye on the Chinese Basketball Association and its efforts to resume play following a hiatus that began all the way back on Jan. 24 as the coronavirus spread through China. Brian Windhorst of ESPN has been on top of the story, and reported on Friday that the CBA’s continued waiting game is forcing NBA officials to imagine centralized locations where games, housing, and training could take place away from any outbreak.

The expected resumption of the CBA season has been pushed back from the first week of April to as late as May after mandating a 14-day quarantine for foreign players returning to China to participate.

Part of the delay resulted from the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, which allowed more CBA players to come back to China rather than move onto training with their national teams. On the other hand, the Chinese government is still worried about a resurgence from promoting large gatherings too soon or allowing free-flowing travel before the disease has been stamped out around the globe. So the CBA is doing what many sports leagues are considering: Playing without fans. According to Windhorst, NBA players and executives are realizing they may have to do the same.

The idea, per Windhorst, is that the league can descend upon one centralized location and have that be the center of the NBA universe. Via ESPN:

Various ideas have been floated by players and executives. One is to consider using a sprawling casino property in Las Vegas, where everything could be held under one roof. Others have suggested playing in the Bahamas, where a ballroom could be converted into a playing court specifically for broadcast. There has even been talk of taking over a college campus in the Midwest, where reported cases of COVID-19 are lower for the moment.

Whatever the location, it would be a place where teams could sleep, train, eat and, hopefully, be kept healthy enough to have confidence in resuming play — maybe not to finish out the season but to at least get restarted.

Any plan like this would require diligent COVID-19 testing for all involved at a time when the country — and world — faces a shortage of the materials involved to test wide swaths of the population. Finding a place that is secluded enough for now to have avoided a major outbreak does not ensure the area would remain safe for long enough to play out the remainder of the season.

The NBA is getting creative, but as of now, there aren’t a lot of answers.

It’s been a surprisingly busy time lately for pro wrestlers working on movies. CM Punk just finished shooting a new horror movie with Barbara Crampton; the wrestling-themed horror film Powerbomb (starring Matt Cross and Britt Baker) drops on VOD platforms April 14; and we also got a trailer for a new wrestling-themed animated film featuring the voices of Roman Reigns and Becky Lynch, among others.

Now, Netflix is tossing their hat in the ring with the release of The Main Event on April 10. The WWE Studios movie, originally announced last summer, dropped its trailer today. The plot of the family film is as follows:

When 11-year-old Leo Thompson (Seth Carr) discovers a magical wrestling mask that grants him super strength, he uses it to enter a WWE competition. With the support of his grandmother (Tichina Arnold), Leo will do whatever it takes to achieve his dream of becoming a WWE Superstar. Can one kid win it all, in the face of epic challengers in the ring? Directed by Jay Karas, THE MAIN EVENT co-stars Adam Pally, Ken Marino, and features WWE Superstars Kofi Kingston, The Miz and Sheamus.

In addition to the Superstars named above, other WWE talent featured in The Main Event includes Otis of Heavy Machinery, NXT North American Champion Keith Lee, WWE Hall Of Famer Beth Phoenix, Mia Yim, Corey Graves, Renee Young and 6’9″ NXT prospect Babatunde as the film’s big baddie, Samson. Check out the trailer:

So if you’re in danger of running out of wrestling-related content as your quarantine continues, fear not: In just a few weeks, you’ll get to watch a movie starring Pam from Martin, a dude who likes to dip his balls in things and a guy from Sonic The Hedgehog in which an 11-year-old emasculates grown men in a wrestling ring. That could never happen in real life, right?

Schools are closed, but G-Eazy‘s heart stays open. The Bay Area rapper has pledged a month of free meals for local kids for the next month to offset the loss of school lunches during the coronavirus crisis, according to TMZ.

G-Eazy has partnered his Endless Summer Fund with Larkin Street Youth Services to fund Mi Morena, a local food truck, to help reach at-risk kids in communities that can’t access Larkin’s brick-and-mortar sites. The food truck will provide lunch seven days a week for the duration of San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order.

Gerald is far from the only rapper providing help to the community in this time of crisis. Yesterday, Russ gave away $20,000 on Twitter, splitting it up among 20 fans, some of whom have family members who work in health care and are dealing with the stress of the situation up close. Meanwhile, Cardi B pledged to donate the proceeds from iMarkkeyz’s “Coronavirus,” which samples an Instagram post Cardi made about the crisis, to charity. Finally, Meek Mill is pushing his S.A.F.E.R. Plan to protect inmates from the virus, asking fans to call their local governors to implement the plan.

Follow more of Uproxx’s coronavirus coverage here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.