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We are just days away from Kacey Musgraves‘ fifth studio album, Deeper Well. And ahead of the album, the “Too Good To Be True” hitmaker is offering a group of fans the ultimate listening experience. On Thursday (March 14), New York City’s famed Webster Hall will host A Conversation with Kacey Musgraves: A Look into Deeper Well, which arrives by way of a partnership between American Express and Kacey Musgraves.

Over the course of the event, Musgraves will play the album in its entirely, just hours before its wide release. She will also do a live Q&A about the making of the album and the creative process that went into it. Additionally, she’ll also share a new video for AmEx’s “Story Of My Song” series, as she breaks down the making and meaning behind the Deeper Well track, “Dinner With Friends.”

Tickets will be available exclusively for American Express cardholders to purchase beginning Wednesday (March 13) at 10 a.m. via AXS. Each ticket will cost $20, and fans are allotted two tickets per customer.

Doors for A Conversation with Kacey Musgraves: A Look into Deeper Well open at 7 p.m, and the show begins at 8 p.m.

Deeper Well is out 3/15 via Interscope and MCA Nashville. Find more information here.

So much of the financial advice we get from social media, television, and podcasts focuses on the instant gratification of wealth. Experts promise ways to get rich fast, proposing we cut spending on everyday items – those frilly Starbucks drinks and organic avocados … and eggs – in favor of putting an extra few dollars a week into our checking accounts. Then, if we let time and the apps, the ebooks, the online courses they’re pushing do the work, those bills will accumulate, making us millionaires in one year, or three, or five.

Gabe Dunn isn’t calling bullshit on those how-tos, but they are resetting some expectations with their Bad With Money series.

“I’m never trying to make people rich,” Dunn tells UPROXX. “I’m just trying to make people not as stressed out.”

Instead, their chart-topping podcast promises to be a safe haven for the “not-billionaires of the world,” a place where the financially challenged can learn the basics about things like budgeting, investing, paying off debt, and saving for retirement from some of the most lauded, recognized names across multiple industries — without feeling embarrassed, ashamed, or defeated by their knowledge gaps. It’s a platform where guests can laugh, and cry, and laugh while crying about money – the necessity of it, the unfairness, the ability it has to change lives and ruin them, the sense of accomplishment that comes with learning to manage it, but most of all, the relatability of it all.

Most of us, at one point, have struggled with money, and it’s that thread that Dunn tugs on in their talks, weaving professional advice from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren with their own heartfelt, personal experiences as a Queer and trans-best-selling author, comedian, and TV writer just trying, like us, to figure this all out.

Here’s what they’ve learned so far.

1. We Need To Talk About Money More

According to Dunn, who used to pay for everything in cash, avoided credit cards like the plague, and thought one needed a map to “get to the stock market,” what makes money so terrifying for most people is the fact that we don’t talk about it enough. That’s true in the workplace when it comes to discussing salaries with fellow employees. It’s true in our schools, where money management is rarely taught in the classroom. And it’s true in our personal lives – in conversations with friends and family – where topics like debt, savings, and building credit still, weirdly, feel taboo.

“I thought [money] was terrifying,” Dunn admits. “I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know that there were different types of savings accounts. I didn’t know how people retired. I saw money as sort of a day-to-day struggle. My parents were like that. There was no, ‘We have retirement plans.’ I mean, friends of mine whose fathers opened their bank accounts when they were 15? There was nothing like that.”

Once Dunn started their podcast though they realized just how many financial sectors benefit from our lack of knowledge. It’s basically a form of passive gatekeeping and it’s doing a hell of a job keeping us in the dark.

“The biggest mistake would be thinking that you just don’t know enough,” they explain. “A lot of this stuff is just in jargon, but it’s actually not that difficult. I think sometimes obviously stuff is presented a certain way because they want you to hire someone. They want you to hire a financial advisor or whatever. There’s a whole industry. Why would they let you know how to do it yourself?”

2. Start Asking Questions

It might be a bit tedious at first, but Dunn recommends doing the research yourself. Pick a topic you’re curious about and just start typing in a search bar. If you work for a company and you’re wondering about the health of your retirement plan, send an email to your HR department. If you’re looking for ways to invest in the stock market, ask a friend who’s already doing the same thing.

“I just had to research and learn,” Dunn says. “I think a big thing for me was asking and calling. I think sometimes people hide that stuff [but] there are people around that are just sort of waiting for you to ask. HR is just sitting there waiting to do things. So if you go over and you say, ‘Hey, I want to learn about my 401k,’ they’re not going to be like, ‘That’s weird.’ They’re going to be like, ‘Oh, okay, great. That’s my job.’ I had an IRA for years before I realized I could call [the company] and there would be an advisor there. I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve had this IRA for a year.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, you were kind of supposed to call in the beginning to talk to me about it.’”

3. Budgeting Is Key And Everyone Can Do It Better

No one likes pulling up their bank account, especially if the number is going to be low, but knowing your monthly intake is key to budgeting and budgeting is key to, well, everything else.

“When I was starting, the first thing I did was go through my bank account and label everything,” Dunn says. “‘What is this? What did I spend on this?’ And I color-coded it. It took me three days and I cried the whole time, but I color-coded it. And I was like, ‘Okay, what am I spending the most on?’ This was in 2016. Now there are apps that’ll do it for you, but I was doing it by hand. I had to see what I was spending.”

One of Dunn’s most requested episodes was the chat they had with fellow podcaster Tiffany Aliche, a financial educator and host of The Budgetnista. The tips they learned during their talk are ones they implement to this day.

“I realized the people are clamoring for budget information,” Dunn says. “What’s hard is that a lot of budget information is really shaming and really doesn’t take into account people’s actual lives. They’ll be like, ‘Okay, we’ll cut cable. That’s how you save money.’ And these people are like, ‘I don’t even have a TV. What are you talking about?’ There’s such a disconnect between the people giving information and the people asking for information.”

But Aliche’s approach felt accessible, whether someone was saving for an expensive trip or just trying to put away a few dollars at the end of the month.

“She asked you to break it down into tiers of A, B, and C,” Dunn explains. “’A’ stuff is stuff you can’t cut like rent and healthcare. ‘B’ is middle stuff that does actually matter to you. And then ‘C’ is kind of take it or leave it. She would say, ‘When you start cutting things, people get really anxious and they just cut a bunch of A stuff. But you can cut one A thing, or you can cut three C things. It just helps you organize it.’ I liked her approach.

4. Look At Everything

If you’re trying to claw your way out of debt (and who isn’t these days) then the best piece of advice Dunn has is to dig up every bill that tells you what you owe. Look debt in the face, have a good cry over it, and then get to work.

“Just look at everything,” they say. “Put everything together, every credit card, every loan. Look at everything.”

Once you’ve done that, pay back smarter, not harder. That means you don’t necessarily need to tackle the biggest chunk of change first.

“For credit and for loans, look at the interest rate, that’s the simplest thing,” Dunn continues. “You can say, ‘Oh, I have a $9,000 loan and I have a $2,000 loan,’ but if the $2,000 loan has 15% interest, you got to get on that one first. People don’t look at interest rates enough.”

5. Disaster Prep – Financially At Least

Even if you’re a guru when it comes to investing or paying off loans, there’s this thing called life and it happens to everyone. It happened to Dunn recently, it happened to guests on her podcasts, and it’ll happen to you – an accident, an injury, a diagnosis, or a repair that comes unexpectedly and with a hefty price tag. Ridding yourself of debt is great, learning stock market lingo is fun, but putting away money for a rainy day you know will come is essential. It’s not necessarily sexy to talk about the way those other things are, but Dunn insists on doing it anyway.

“Tax laws change, then inflation happens, then there’s a recession, then a pandemic hits. I realized that you can know everything and think that you know enough or that you’re perfect, and then something will just slam into you. Like a medical bill, a tooth falls out, or someone hits your car. It’s just never-ending,” Dunn says. “I did an episode a while ago that I loved called ‘What If You’re Fucked?’ about a friend of my dad who was in a motorcycle accident and lost a leg, and he was obviously not expecting that. A friend of mine, her mother was [a victim of] identity theft.” Dunn adds that, “these are people who are living in the real world who’ve had something happen to them, and it’s not really their fault.”

Ultimately Dunn wants to reach those people, the ones like them who are just trying to master the basics to live more comfortably, maybe even a bit freer from financial stress. They’re still “extremely mad” at money, at knowing how much they still don’t know, and at the way capitalism and our financial systems consistently fail us. That’s where the intersectional theme of their money advice podcast comes in, setting itself apart from the rest of the get-rich crowd. But, at the end of the day, Dunn just wants to demystify finances a bit, to build a community where the most basic questions get asked (and answered) without any strings attached.

Kristen Stewart has a new movie out: a lesbian thriller called Love Lies Bleeding. But America’s modern right-wing, which has of late rediscovered old school homophobia, hasn’t been attacking that film. Instead they’ve focused most of their attention on the provocative Rolling Stone cover Stewart did to promote it. After enduring reams of conservative backlash, the actress has a simple message for the image’s haters.

Per Entertainment Weekly, Stewart went on The Late Show, during which Colbert brought up the RS cover. He said CBS had asked him not to put it on air due to its risqué nature. He showed it anyway, allowing the nation’s viewers to see the naughty picture of Stewart, her top open, her left hand shoved into her undies. It’s an image MAGA world has deemed “miserable” and “disgusting.” Colbert didn’t agree.

“I want to say that you look better in a jockstrap than I ever did,” he quipped.

Colbert then asked Stewart to comment on the Trumpy attacks. After saying, “Let’s keep this light,” she offered a theory about why the GOP doesn’t like the cover.

“It’s a little ironic because I feel like I’ve seen a lot of male pubic hair on the cover of things,” Stewart explained. “I’ve seen, like, a lot of hands in pants and unbuttoned. I think there’s a certain overt acknowledgement of a female sexuality that has its own volition in a way that is annoying for people who are sexist and homophobic.”

Colbert agreed, saying, “I’ve certainly seen more revealing covers on Rolling Stone or Sports Illustrated, for that matter.” Stewart argued the cover isn’t “remotely explicit,” but Colbert went a step further, saying, “I think it also violates public expectations of female sexuality as opposed to how you’re presenting it here.”

“Yes, because female sexuality isn’t supposed to actually want anything but to be had,” Stewart said. “And that feels like it’s protruding in a way that might be annoying.”

She then addressed her conservative critics directly, saying, “But f*ck you.” She added, cheekily, “But I never will.”

Stewart has long been a scourge of Republicans. One of her biggest haters is Donald Trump himself, who spent years singling her out for social media abuse, partly due to her relationship woes with Robert Pattinson. Stewart was so grossed out by his creepy obsession with her that she used it as an excuse to come out publicly, which she did while hosting SNL in 2017.

“The president is not a huge fan of me,” Stewart told the crowd back then. “But that is so OK. And Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting SNL and I’m so gay, dude.”

Love Lies Bleeding is now in select theaters. You can watch her Late Show appearance below.

(Via EW)

Look, maybe it’s just because I’m no longer in the young crowd, but does it seem like we get new, confusing slang at an exponentially faster rate than before? Just when we finally decipher words like rizz and no cap, now there’s mewing and gyat to contend with. And this is coming from someone without children. I can only imagine how out-of-the-loop parents and teachers must feel.

That is, unless you’re Sam Salem, an eighth-grade substitute teacher who decided to take linguistic matters into his own hands by creating his own “Gen Z slang.”

Salem, who travels around the country doing comedy shows when not “facing his toughest audiences- classrooms full of Gen Z kids,” recently posted a series of videos to his TikTok sharing a truly diabolical plan to not only use made-up “Gen Z-sounding slang words,” but “gaslighting” his students into thinking they’re real.

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And then whenever a student questions him, Salem simply assures them that A) a rapper uses the word all the time, B) it’s all the rage with high schoolers, or C) it’s all over Tiktok. Total evil mastermind.

Below are Salem’s handcrafted Gen Z words. So just know, if you hear a youngster using one of these, you have him to thank.

“Clipped”: when something is really good, alá highlight clips of a sports game.

“Mute”: a replacement for lowkey. So when you want something down in a non-overt way, do it “on mute.”

“Feta”: a negative thing. Think how feta cheese crumbles. When something is feta, it is a good thing that falls apart easily.

“Parked”: just like a parked car doesn’t move, something that’s parked is boring and not going anywhere.

“Pebbles”: while a mountain or a boulder presents a huge obstacle, pebbles are “smooth sailing.” So when something is pebbles, it’s easy to overcome.

“Terk” : inspired by Salem’s favorite Disney movie, “Tarzan,” a Terk is your loyal-to-the-end bestie. Just like the character Terk was to Tarzan.

@samuelsleeves give me more fake slang words to use on my students #teaching #teachersoftiktok #highschool #middleschool #education ♬ original sound – Sam Salem

“Sparse”: the opposite of “ate.” As in, “ate and left no crumbs.” So basically, as a way to say that whatever thing a person is doing is very not cool. So not cool that it’s sparse. Get it?

“Getty”: inspired by the famous Getty museum of Los Angeles, this word suggests that something is “a work of art.”

“Oozing”: kind of a polite way to tell someone they’re talking too much, since the words are “oozing” out of them, or if they’re doing something that’s embarrassing. Nobody wants to be oozing.

“Swirled”: someone who is wishy-washy—a friend one minute and ignoring you the next, for example—might be someone who is swirled.

“Nabs”: an acronym that’s the opposite of BAE (Before Anyone Else). Which is this case would be Not AnyBody’s Somebody. Could be a good thing, like when someone is single, or a bad thing, when there aren’t any romantic prospects.

“Remy”: Another Disney reference, Remy is inspired by “Ratatouille.” Just like a rat shouldn’t go together with food “because it’s gross,” when something is remy that means two things which shouldn’t go together surprisingly do.

@samuelsleeves Replying to @*LisaG* don’t be swirled otherwise you’ll end up nabs #teaching #teachersoftiktok #genz #millennial #ratatouille ♬ original sound – Sam Salem

Over in the comments section, people were applauding Salem’s fake slang , and not in a muted way.

“You ARE the trendsetter now,” one person wrote.

“You’re ironically creating new slang,” seconded another.

In essence, Salem actually did make fetch happen. Kudos.

Seems like Salem is not gonna stop creating new words anytime soon. To keep up with the trends, follow him on TikTok here.

The “forgotten generation” has hit peak mid-life crisis time, as Gen Xers find themselves careening through their 40s and 50s. And like presumably every generation before them, they’re reeling a bit, asking, “How did I get here already?” as they pluck gray hairs out of weird places, send kids off to college and obsessively check their retirement accounts.

And now a meme that hits right at the heart of that crisis has Gen Xers feeling even more dazed. One might even say…confused.

In cruel bit of calculation, X user @AZNotoriousJPG shared a screenshot image from the cult classic “Dazed and Confused” with this caption:

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“Dazed and Confused came out in 1993 and was based in 1976. A comparable movie today would be based in 2007.”

Wait, what? No. NO. That can’t be right. That math isn’t mathing. Where’s the calculator?

[Frantically calculates this very basic subtraction problem four times because there’s no way.]

— (@)

It’s right. How? How is this possible? The ’70s felt like they were ages from the 90s, while 2007 was only like three years ago. Right?

First of all, I’m wrong. 2007 was 17 years ago—that’s basically an entire generation ago. (I know, I have to let that one sit for a minute.) But secondly, it seems like there was much more of a cultural difference between the 1970s and the 1990s than there was between the 2020s and the 2000s.

But why? In some ways, the 2000s feel like they’ve all been one long decade, at least in terms of “feel.” The 1960s, ‘70s, ’80s and ‘90s each felt like they had a distinct feel in terms of style and culture. We can pinpoint fashions, slang, musical genres and what was popular during those decades. Can the same be said for the 2000s and the 2010s?

Maybe it can. Facebook came out in 2004 and the iPhone came out in 2007, so I’m sure that changed things significantly. Social media and smartphones? That’s huge. Is it just because we’re (gulp) so old now that Gen Xers can’t differentiate between recent decades? Are we just so out of touch with young fashions and hip culture that we don’t even see it?

Honestly? Yeah, probably. I’ve heard my teens say something along the lines of, “That’s giving, like, early 2000s” when referring to a song or a fashion choice. I guess I should be happy that I’m “with it” enough to know what “giving” means, but I’d never be able to tell you how something from the early 2000s is any different than something from two years ago.

Gen Xers have not taken kindly to having this timeline change thrown in their faces:

“Oh!! This hurts!!”

“Lies.”

“I was having a good day. We were all having a good day.”

“I get, we’re old!!! Quit reminding us!”

“All I see from this is that I am old AF.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. 2007 was last week. I have medicine in the closet which expired earlier than that. Not possible.”

“Nope, that’s not okay.“

“You didn’t have to choose violence, yet here we are.”

You can tell the Gen Xers from the millennials and Gen Zers in the comments because the younger folks just keep commenting with “Superbad,” a coming-of-age comedy that came out in 2007. What they don’t understand is it’s not the number of years that hits hard with this meme, it’s the vast difference between how 17 years felt between the 70s and 90s and how they feel in the 2000s.

You have to have lived it to get it, I suppose, but “Dazed and Confused” in 1993 felt more like a movie made now based in the ’80s would feel. Think “Stranger Things.” That’s what the time difference felt like for us.

Time is weird, man. But even 30 years later (wait, what?) “Dazed and Confused” is still a fabulous film, and Gen X is still the coolest generation.

Aaron Rodgers made a very big deal earlier this offseason about how the New York Jets need to get rid of “the bullsh*t that has nothing to do with winning” in the aftermath of a tumultuous, 7-10 campaign that saw them miss the playoffs. It is unclear how a bid to become the Vice President of the United States on a third-party ticket lines up with that mandate, but if there is one person who we know is very anti-mandates, it is Aaron Rodgers.

According to a new piece by Rebecca Davis O’Brien of the New York Times, Rodgers has been approached (along with former professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota Jesse “The Body” Ventura) by Robert Kennedy Jr. about joining him in his longshot bid for the White House this November. Kennedy apparently confirmed that Rodgers and Ventura are “at the top of his list,” while the Times reports that there have been frequent conversations between Kennedy and the Jets quarterback.

Mr. Kennedy said that he had been speaking with Mr. Rodgers “pretty continuously” for the past month, and that he had been in touch with Mr. Ventura since the former governor introduced him at a campaign event last month in Arizona.
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If anything could be interpreted as a hint of where Mr. Kennedy might lean, the domain name kennedyrodgers.com was registered last week using a GoDaddy host.

Rodgers expressed his desire to play 2-4 more years after rupturing his achilles four snaps into his first year with the Jets, and it goes without saying, but it is very hard to see how someone can be on a presidential ballot and be the starting quarterback for an NFL team at the same time — if he were to leave the team to pursue a political career, it stands to reason that New York would turn to either Zach Wilson or the recently-signed Tyrod Taylor. According to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls, Kennedy would be projected to get 12.9 percent of the nationwide popular vote if the election was held today, putting him well behind both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Today’s MAGA Republicans should be doing well. Their fearless leader, Donald Trump, continues to inexplicably kill it in the presidential polls. Joe Biden continues to do terribly, even after his shouty State of the Union speech. And yet Trump’s minions continue to act like broken weirdos. Nancy Mace publicly outed herself as someone who either didn’t read or didn’t understand The Scarlet Letter before referencing it. Alabama senator Katie Britt recently became a laughingstock thanks to her instant classic horror of an SOTU rebuttal. Now South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is telling both of them to hold her beer.

Per Mediaite, on Monday Noem confused legions by randomly dropping what appeared to be a five-minute infomercial on her social media accounts. What was she hawking? A chain of Texas dentist offices called Smile Texas. Why would the governor of a northern state be shilling for dentists about 1,000 miles south? Well, because they fixed her teeth so darned good, that’s why.

Nomi regaled viewers with the story of how she had a biking accident that knocked out some teeth. Absent from this anecdote was why she traveled some four states away to get them fixed. But fixed they were, apparently.

“I love that my bite is better, that my teeth are a better shape, that they feel better in my mouth and that I can be confident when I smile at people,” Noem gushed.

Also unclear in the video was whether Nomi was paid by Smile Texas to sing their praises. If so, as The Daily Dot notes, she would have had to disclose that or risk being in violation of Instagram rules. Then again, today’s GOP is no longer the party of following the law.

Or maybe Noem’s just really liked that dentist.

Noem’s video left many understandably perplexed.

(Via Mediaite)

Most of the memorable stuff from Sunday night’s Oscars telecast came in the second half when Ryan Gosling led maybe the best musical performance in the history of the show, John Mulaney aced his audition to be next year’s Oscars host, and Al Pacino woozily gave out the film’s final award. From the first hour, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s tearful acceptance speech seems to have been the audience favorite, but let’s not forget the passionate words of Cord Jefferson, who won Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, a film he also directed.

Jefferson found an unusual path to Oscar’s glory. He came up as a journalist with bylines at the New York Times, Huffington Post, and USA Today, where he wrote on race, pop culture, and more. He served as an editor at Gawker for several years, then made the jump to television as a writer for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and producer of Master of None, The Good Place, and The Watchmen. Most recently, he was a writer and producer of the critically acclaimed limited series Station Eleven. American Fiction was his first film of any kind, and it won him an Oscar. Not bad.

Moving from writing about culture to creating it, Jefferson found himself in a unique position to speak truth to power about the business of film. I’ll be honest: His speech won me over immediately. Most winners get to the podium, pull out a piece of paper, and run down a list of friends and collaborators to be thanked. It’s an understandable impulse, but it makes for less than exciting television, and Jefferson seemed to understand that. He started by simply thanking “everyone who worked on the film,” and then got to his actual point.

“This is a risk-averse industry,” he began, “but $200 million movies are also a risk. Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies, or fifty $4 million movies.” The audience lit up at this suggestion, drowning him out with applause before he could even finish his sentence. It’s not a new sentiment, but it’s still an important one. Now more than ever, studio executives protect their jobs by approving big budgets for films based on proven intellectual properties. If it goes wrong, at least they’ll be able to justify the risk because, hey, it worked on the last one. When a film with a truly original vision flops, it’s harder to explain why they ever thought it would be a success.

Typically, a message like Jefferson’s wouldn’t ruffle any feathers at the Oscars. The Academy is at this point mostly responsible for keeping the mid-budget film for grownups alive. But it felt even more important at this year’s ceremony when two of the most financially successful films of the year—Oppenheimer and Barbie—were also the Academy’s favorites. “Blockbuster creep” has already taken its toll on the studio system, but what if it comes for our Oscars? Hollywood is a copycat industry, and while most viewers would be thrilled at the prospect of more established directors in the category of Nolan and Gerwig getting massive budgets to bring their passion projects to life, it might crowd out unproven filmmakers like Jefferson, and remove a rung from the ladder that they use to establish themselves in the first place. Though the occasional blockbuster transcends and proves its value as art and not just commerce, the Oscars are supposed to be more a safe harbor for non-blockbusters, drawing people to them and equaling the playing field a little.

Jefferson walked a tightrope in his speech, honoring the auteurs of today while urging the rest of Hollywood to back the next generation. “I felt so much joy making this movie, and I want other people to experience that joy,” he said. “The next Martin Scorsese is out there. The next Greta is out there—both Gretas [Lee and Gerwig]. They just want a shot, and we can give them one. Thank you to everyone who worked on this movie for trusting a 40-year-old Black guy who had never directed before.”

Jefferson’s delivery made the speech feel extemporaneous, but it couldn’t have been written any better. He blended personal experience with off-the-cuff ebullience—in the tradition of Cuba Gooding, Jr. or Ben Affleck and Matt Damon—ensuring that his pointed message to Hollywood didn’t come off as scolding or condescending. He didn’t thank his agent, his manager, his producers, his leading man, the author of the novel the film was based on, or even his publicist. He’ll save that for later. Instead, he used his platform to speak from a unique vantage point of being both of the industry and outside of it to give Hollywood a message they needed to hear. Let’s hope it didn’t get lost in Ken-sanity.

The Boys undoubtedly plans to skewer some spin off tendencies with a title like the recently announced The Boys: Mexico for a show in development. Yet for three seasons thus far and side voyages to Diabolical and Gen V, this Vought International-engineered world shows no signs of losing its edge. For that matter, there continues to be no shortage of bodily fluids and scintillating subject matter, the latter of which largely arrives courtesy of Chace Crawford’s perverted Deep.

The fourth season of the original series is mercifully on the way in only a few months, again on a mostly weekly rollout. The brand shows no sign of weakening, even as both the DCU and MCU’s empires have considerably weakened. Satire ain’t dead, baby, but it’s hard as hell to pull off, and Eric Kripke runs a tight ship while adapting Garth Ennis’ Dynamite Entertainment comic. Without more f*cking around, let’s dive into what we can expect from The Boys‘ long-awaited return to Amazon.

Plot

The fourth season’s story will kick off only a few days after the events of the Gen V finale, in which Homelander blew away Marie, who later woke up in a lab (the woods?) with a handful of her fellow Supes, including Little Cricket. Homelander had engineered the events of the campus mayhem into an opportunity to hold up Cate and Sam as heroes, so perhaps they could crossover into The Boys at some point.

However, that season finale also showed Billy Butcher stumbling onto the lab where the Supe Virus was manufactured. However, Butcher is not exactly on good terms with the rest of The Boys, and Mother’s Milk has plenty of “unfinished business” with the group’s leader after Butcher decided to join forces with Soldier Boy. Additionally, Butcher only has a few months left on his ticker before perhaps croaking from all the Compound V that he decided to take, and Homelander is lining up more dominoes as Ryan becomes an even more dangerous force than we’ve previously seen:

The world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca’s son as well as his job as The Boys’ leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it’s too late.

Additionally, Homelander will stand trial for killing a civilian in broad daylight. The Deep will continue perving, Mother’s Milk will shave (hmm), and Starlight and Queen Maeve’s replacements (Sage and Firecracker) are, according to Amazon, “two of the most dangerous supes you’ll ever meet.” What else?

On some silly notes, Vought International has been shilling for some terrible “Homelander High-Tops!” Those look awfully familiar. Also, The Boys’ social media has been trolling the “Wanker-in-chief.”

On the VFX side, we can expect (as prosthetic penis guru/VFX wizard Stephan Fleet assures viewers) more of the same disgusting flavor that we’re used to seeing: “I’m excited for the cast of @TheBoysTV to see the crazy sh*t I’m cooking up in VFX! They really put a lot of trust in me.”

From there, I can only hope that someone decided to gift Mother’s Milk with a new jacket after that “Herogasm” shower that he received. Yikes.

Cast

Erin Moriarty returns as Annie January, who has formally gone rogue from The Seven, although she will obviously still have her Starlight powers. The show wouldn’t be the same without Antony Starr as Homelander, Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, Chace Crawford as The Deep, Jessie T. Usher as A-Train, Jack Quaid as Hughie, Laz Alonso as Mother’s Milk, Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko, and Tomer Capone as Frenchie. Nathan Mitchell will be back, somehow, as a different version of Black Noir after Homelander killed the previous incarnation.

Additionally, Claudia Doumit’s power is growing as Victoria Neuman, and Colby Minifie is still sh*tting bricks while running PR for Vought International as Ashley. No longer on the scene: Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve, who is hopefully enjoying her lesbian retirement on a quiet farm upstate somewhere. As far as anyone has gathered, Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy is still out of commission for the time being. We will, however, get some Supernatural flavor with the official debut of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s secretive-smartass character, although we shouldn’t expect him to play a huge role in the story because The Walking Dead: Dead City hopped into shooting a second season.

A duo of new Supes will join The Seven. They include Sister Sage (Susan Hayward), whose non-classic Supe powers might be much more manipulative than powerful in a physical sense (given that she appears to be encouraging Homelander into a “Caesar”-esque position), and the explosive Firecracker (Valorie Curry) seems to be like Queen Maeve if she was more of a chip off the Homelander block.

Release Date

Season 4 debuts with three episodes on June 13 followed by weekly installments and a season finale on July 18.

Trailer

This ominous teaser trailer suggests that Sister Sage could be pulling some Homelander strings. Democracy begins to fall, too, and this show always feels far too timely, doesn’t it? Somehow, it always manages to entertain in the process. Also, that peek at Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character feels perfect.

It’s been five long years since Marvel had to axe all their Netflix shows. Long before the brand’s interconnectedness clearly got too complicated for audiences, the streamer had a good thing going with a string of shows revolving around the gang known as the Defenders: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron First. At least some of those shows’ side characters are coming back for the forthcoming revival Daredevil: Born Again, and it looks like maybe — or maybe not, who knows — one of them might be Jon Bernthal’s take on the Punisher.

Per IGN, Bernthal posted a semi-cryptic image on his Instagram account. It was the cover of a children’s book entitled One Batch, Two Batch, showing two bears, a father and child, the latter wielding a chocolate chip cookie with one bit out. Why would Benthal, a grown man, post this?

Real heads know. As IGN points out, One Batch, Two Batch is the children’s book Benthal’s Frank Castle reads to his daughter every night before she goes to sleep. That’s not all: The Punisher sometimes likes to quote a line from it — “One batch, two batch, penny and dime” — before he kills people. Imagine someone quoting a children’s book to you before they take you out.

This seems to confirm a rumor that was floated earlier this month, namely that Bernthal’s Punisher is back for Daredevil: Born Again. If that’s true, he’ll join some other Marvel Netflix show alumni, like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilison Fisk, aka Kingpin, and Wilson Bethel’s Poindexter, aka Bullseye. Thanks to set photos, it appears another big character may be back, too: Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones. Or maybe that won’t happen. Maybe neither of these things will happen.

Whatever the case, everyone will know for sure when Daredevil: Born Again hits Disney+ and Hulu sometime next year.

(Via IGN)