Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Here’s What Time Jung Kook’s New Album ‘Golden’ Will Come Out

The ongoing BTS hiatus has been both a curse and a blessing for fans. One on hand, the most obvious implication is that the K-pop group isn’t currently active. A side effect of that, though, is that band members have been better able to pursue solo projects outside of the group. The latest to do so in Jung Kook, who has his first solo album, Golden coming out tomorrow, November 3.

In terms of what specific time you’ll actually be able to listen to the project, here’s what to know.

As is true for most major music releases these days, Golden is set to hit streaming services at midnight ET on November 3. So, if you’re, for example, on the West Coast of the United States, you can hear Golden at 9 p.m. PT. If you’re somewhere else in the world, time zone conversion websites are your friend. Here’s one with the base time already set to midnight ET on the 3rd, so just add your city or time zone and that’ll tell you when you’ll be able to listen to Golden.

If you want to see the tracklist or other information about the album, we’ve put together a guide that you can check out here.

Golden is out 11/3 via Big Hit. Find more information here.

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Jennifer Lawrence Is Open To Playing Katniss, But Don’t Expect To See Her In The New ‘Hunger Games’ Movie

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is the first Hunger Games movie that doesn’t star Jennifer Lawrence. Instead, Rachel Zegler, who was so good in West Side Story and so funny on The George Lucas Talk Show, takes over as the lead. Lawrence has said that she’s open to reprising her role as Katniss Everdeen, but it won’t be happening any time soon.

“If [Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins] has something to say, then she’ll write a book about it,” producer Nina Jacobson told Yahoo! Entertainment. “Honestly, as much as I love Katniss, I think her story is complete. And I think that Suzanne feels that her story is complete. But if that changes, and Suzanne has something she wants to say, and it involves Katniss, then I would be thrilled. But really any chance to be back in this world, and lead with [director Francis Lawrence] and Suzanne, I would take regardless of who it was about.”

Lawrence added, “I think that if for whatever reason [Collins] had some thematic idea that made sense to tell another Katniss story, I’d be in, and then I’m sure Jen would be in.” Maybe it will happen eventually, but for now, Lawrence probably needs more time away from franchise films.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes comes out on November 17th.

(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Here’s How You Can Be On Coldplay’s New Album ‘Moon Music’

In September, Uproxx’s Phil Cosores wrote on the sustainability of Coldplay, reviewing the band’s performance at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium. At the time, the band’s most recent album was 2021’s Music Of The Spheres. That’s soon to change, though, as they recently announced their next album, Moon Music — and this time, they’re offering their fans the opportunity to participate.

Revealing that the album is “nearly finished,” Coldplay teased a song called “One World,” to which they’d add fans’ voices. “All you have to do,” they wrote, “is record yourself singing ‘Ahhhhh’ for a few seconds at oneworld.coldplay.com.”

The site has instructions, reading:

– Record your “Ahhhhh” by pressing the microphone icon
– You can listen to your vocal and re-record if necessary
– Click on the tickbox if you’d like to be credited in the track’s digital booklet

And that’s it. They do require that fans be older than the age of majority in your jurisdiction (generally speaking, 18 years old) and not sing words or phrases.

There’s also a leaderboard showing which regions the most entries are coming from (as of this writing, the US and Britain are in the lead, naturally, followed by Italy, Brazil, and Mexico).

You can check out the website for more information.

Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

What To Watch: Our Picks For The TV Shows And Movies We Think You Should Stream This Week

Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.

20. The Golden Bachelor (Hulu)

BACH
ABC

What we have on our hands here is a Bachelor spinoff about an older gentleman looking for love from a group of similarly aged ladies. Which is… honestly kind of adorable. Good for them. And good for us, too, especially if one of the episodes features a date where they eat dinner at a diner at 4:45 and then go watch an episode of Columbo in matching recliners. This was written as a joke but honestly sounds kind of wonderful. That’s true love right there, people.

Watch it on Hulu

19. Upload (Amazon Prime)

UPLOAD
AMAZON

Welcome to the third season of Upload, a fun little science fiction-y comedy from the creator of The Office, Greg Daniels, that is set in 2033 in a world where humans can — you guessed it — upload themselves into a virtual afterlife when they die. The show follows Nathan, a guy who dies young under potentially mysterious circumstances and tries to sort things through from a very fancy new virtual community. It sounds strange. We promise it’s pretty fun.

Watch it on Amazon

18. Sly (Netflix)

SLY
NETFLIX

Sly gives us pretty much exactly what you would expect from a documentary named Sly about the life and career of Sylvester Stallone. Which is, to be clear, not a complaint at all. Stallone has had a wild run if you stop and think about it, from Oscar glory with Rocky to ending the Cold War with Rocky IV to… look, you’ve seen the Expendables movies. There’s something to be said for building a career in Hollywood that spans six decades and it’s probably good to let the man go ahead and say it.

Watch it on Netflix

17. Invincible (Amazon)

INVINC
AMAZON

Robert Kirkman’s other most beloved comic book series proved that Amazon really is doing superheroes and supervillains better than anyone else right now. When this round of episodes begins, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) will need to fully reckon with the implications of that climactic fight in the sky with his dad, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). Additionally, his love life will receive new wrinkles, and Walton Goggins will be back, meaning that the man who would be Boyd Crowder again is achieving TV supremacy with every passing year. New characters shall be portrayed by Ben Schwartz and Tatiana Maslany.

Watch it on Amazon

16. Boogeyman (Hulu)

BOOGEY
HULU

This 2023 movie goes back to the 1973 short story by Stephen King as the perfect streaming lead-in to nightmares about Halloween season. This is not a true tale, but perhaps thinking of it that way can increase the terror. The story explores the enduring Boogeyman/Bogeyman folklore that has persisted around the globe for centuries. We’ve got a distracted father not paying enough attention to a pair of sisters, who begin to experience horrors that could trigger any lingering fears you’ve ever had about monsters lurking in your bedroom closet. The cast includes Sophie Thatcher, David Dastmalchian, and Chris Messina.

Watch it on Hulu

Watch it on Hulu

15. Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV)

CHEM
APPLE

Brie Larson has never shied away from speaking out for feminist causes, and in this series, she stars in the adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ bestselling novel, Lessons In Chemistry. Garmus became an overnight “a literary rock star” at age 66 for this impressive debut novel that is all the rage in book clubs everywhere. That will give the show a built-in audience as Larson portrays a brilliant chemist who is fired for a sexist double standard. This leads to an unexpected career change as a cooking show host. This high-profile new platform allows her to sandwich in other nuggets of wisdom for housewives as well as demonstrating how to bake yummy cookies.

Watch it on Apple TV Plus

14. Living for the Dead (Hulu)

DEAD
HULU

Kristen Stewart’s gay ghost hunting show has everything: slayances, spook-kikis, haunted strip clubs, and comedian Roz Hernandez snacking on donuts while she yells at homophobic poltergeists. The group – a hodgepodge of paranormal experts that includes a psychic, a witch, and a tarot card reader – road trips across the country in this docuseries produced by the Queer Eye creators, chatting it up with demonic entities and benevolent spooks to get to the root of some very real, very human problems. If there’s a better way to spend your weekend than watching a group of well-dressed Queer spiritualists commune with the dead while cracking jokes and busting stereotypes, we don’t want to know about it.

Watch it on Hulu

13. Life On Our Planet (Netflix)

LIFE
NETFLIX

Three things you need to know here:

  • This is kind of like if Planet Earth had been executive producer by Steven Spielberg, who does executive produce this
  • The official description is as follows: “The story of life’s epic, 4 billion-year journey on Earth, told through its ruling dynasties, its underdogs and the cataclysmic events that reshaped it”
  • This sucker is narrated by Morgan Freeman

Settle deeeeep into your couch and turn off the lights and enjoy.

Watch it on Netflix

12. Gen V (Amazon Prime)

GEN
AMAZON

Come for the dong jokes, and stay for the dong jokes. Much like The Boys, this spinoff does not skim on the raunch, and it also gives us a whole new roster of Supes who might feel differently about Vought International’s motives. This series seemingly pulls off the impossible by managing to be as appealing as the flagship series without the presence of its most shining and degraded beacon, Homelander. This franchise shows no sign of wearing out or fatiguing its audience as both the MCU and DCU have managed to do, which might be the most heroic feat of all in the present entertainment realm.

Watch it on Amazon

11. If You Were The Last (Peacock)

LAST
PEACOCK

A rom-com in space? Sure, why not? There’s likely no better way to kill some time on a doomed ship that will never make its way back to Earth than to, you know, consider the “if you were the last person…” scenario that comes to life. Actually, damn, this is dark stuff! It’s a good thing that Anthony Mackie is over there making flirty eyes at Zoe Chao. Very distracting.

Watch it on Peacock

10. Quiz Lady (Hulu)

QUIZ
HULU

The important stuff here:

— This movie stars Sandra Oh and Awkwafina and Will Ferrell, which is a good start

— This is the official summary: “Anne and her estranged train-wreck of a sister, Jenny, must work together to help cover their mother’s gambling debts. When Anne’s beloved dog is kidnapped, they set out on a wild cross-country trek to get the cash.”

Yes, this will do just fine.

Watch it on Hulu

9. Loki (Disney Plus)

LOKI
DISNEY

When we last left Loki, the title character (Tom Hiddleston) had traveled to an alternate version of the Time Variance Authority where no one remembers him and there are statues of Kang (Jonathan Majors) everywhere. This second season picks up where we left off, only Loki soon discovers he’s being thrust back and forth not to an alternate timeline, but the past and present of his current timeline. Seeking the help of the present-day Mobius (Owen Wilson, the past’s version doesn’t know Loki) the two seek out Ke Huy Quan’ Ouroboros (or OB for short), a fellow who has been around a long time and seems to know how to do everything, to stop Loki from doing these involuntary jumps back and forth through time.

Also, Loki and Mobius are charged with finding one of Kang’s variants, for reasons that are too complicated to explain here. So the pair travel to 19th-century Chicago to find an inventor and con man named Victor Timely. The problem is other people with the ability to jump through time are also after Timely and his fate has repercussions on multiple timelines.

This show is a lot, which is by design, but it’s still a lot. The first season played as good fun, and this second season is also fun, though maybe just a little less so (at least through four episodes), but while watching it’s hard to forget the real world where one of the main cast members is on trial for assault.

Watch it on Disney Plus

8. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim)

Ricky and Morty season 6 trailer
Adult Swim/YouTube

Rick and Morty used to take notoriously long breaks between seasons, but not this time. Season seven of the animated sci-fi comedy series returns less than a year after the season six finale. There have been big changes behind the scenes, however: co-creator Justin Roiland, who also voiced the title characters, was fired from the show. Tricky line to straddle going forward, but the show has rarely let us down before.

Watch it on Adult Swim

7. Pain Hustlers (Netflix)

PAIN
NETFLIX

Emily Blunt portrays a down-on-her-luck single mom who launches a new career alongside Chris Evans’ pharmaceutical sales rep. Not a great idea, ultimately, given that she becomes involved in a racketeering scheme. And of course, she begins to realize that this company’s success is coming at a ghastly price for humanity. This is a dramatized version of the rise and fall of Insys Therapeutics, which no longer exists, and yeah, you will definitely find out why.

Watch it on Netflix

6. Fingernails (Apple TV)

FINGER
APPLE

Apple TV+’s Fingernails turns love into an equation that can only be solved by, you guessed it, AI. Jessie Buckley plays Anna, a woman in a long term, algorithmically-sound relationship with Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) that’s been verified and sterilized by something called The Love Test – a machine that demands a couple’s fingernails in order to qualify their relationship’s percentage of success. When Anna meets her new co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed), numbers give way to actual chemistry, causing her to doubt everything she thought she knew about love. It’s probably the most interesting soft-fi romance drama you’ll see this year.

Watch it on Apple TV Plus

5. Lawmen: Bass Reeves (Paramount Plus)

BASS
PARAMOUNT

Taylor Sheridan currently has 6666 in the works on the Yellowstone side, but first, he’s taking viewers back to the real Old West. David Oyelowo portrays the legendary Black U.S. Deputy Marshal. This series will harken back to the Post-Reconstruction era, in which Bass Reeves became a notorious frontier hero by capturing thousands of the most frightening criminals in the land. Oyelowo will be accompanied by Dennis Quaid, Garrett Hedlund, and Donald Sutherland.

Watch it on Paramount Plus

4. Big Mouth (Netflix)

BIG
NETFLIX

The seventh season of Big Mouth ties Orange is the New Black and Grace and Frankie as Netflix’s longest-running scripted series (it will break the record in its eighth and final season). Not bad for an animated show about horny teenagers and hormone monsters. Guest stars this season include Megan Thee Stallion, Lupita Nyong’o, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lin-Manuel Miranda as a pubic hair. Good show.

Watch it on Netflix

3. No Hard Feelings (Netflix)

HARD
SONY

No Hard Feelings is more than just the scene of Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence beating up teenagers while naked. I mean, it’s that, but it’s also a breezy R-rated comedy with some genuine moments of heart. Lawrence and co-star Andrew Barth Feldman have strong chemistry, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales, and Kyle Mooney show up in funny supporting roles. If every movie is going to be based on an existing property, forget comic books — make more Craigslist ad comedies.*

Watch it on Netflix

2. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)

USHER
NETFLIX

Mike Flanagan fans, get ready. The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass showrunner is back along with Carla Gugino, who will spook your soul right out of your bod and deliver a “consequential” evening to “a collection of stunted hearts” that is the Usher family. Yikes. Do not expect a literal adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe short story. The story focuses here on the hell created by ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, who built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege, and power. Horrible secrets shall surface when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman, portrayed with glee by Gugino.

Watch it on Netflix

1. Five Nights at Freddy’s (Peacock)

FREDDY
PEACOCK

Have you ever been convinced that the animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese are freaking evil? Welcome to Five Nights At Freddy’s. In this adaptation of the wildly popular video game, Josh Hutcherson stars as Mike Schmidt, a security guard who’s about to seriously regret his new job. Tasked with keeping an eye on Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza joint, Mike quickly learns that the night shift is a terrifying hell ride as the pizzeria’s animatronic creatures come to life with a task of their own: Kill. Like the game, Mike will have to do everything in his power to survive the night and elude the dead-eyed mechanical monsters hunting him down.

Watch it on Peacock

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

3 moments that might convince you Edgar Allan Poe was a time traveler.

I’m pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?) the power to travel through time. Hear me out on this one.

It’s not just the well-known circumstances of his life — orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else’s clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds.”

And I won’t even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe’s gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses.


Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author’s creative output, which you’ll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible — nay, probable!

The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…

Exhibit A: “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”

Published in 1838, Poe’s only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.

Now here’s where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel’s publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy’s name: Richard Parker.

The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel’s scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence.” Striking indeed.

Exhibit B: “The Businessman”

In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.

Except for Poe, who’d inexplicably understood the profound personality changes caused by frontal lobe syndrome nearly a decade earlier. In 1840, he penned a characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman” about an unnamed narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.

Poe’s grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote, “There’s a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one… There’s everything in that story, we’ve hardly learned anything more.” Altshuler, who, to reiterate, is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, went on to say, “It’s so exact that it’s just weird, it’s like he had a time machine.”

Exhibit C: “Eureka”

Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the universe 80 years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers since Kepler. Except that’s exactly what happened.

The prophetic vision came in the form of “Eureka,” a 150-page prose poem critically panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in the final year of Poe’s life, “Eureka” describes an expanding universe that began in “one instantaneous flash” derived from a single “primordial particle.”

Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution to Olbers’ paradox — the question of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark — by explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar system. When Edward Robert Harrison published “Darkness at Night” in 1987, he credited “Eureka” as having anticipated his findings.

In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe’s prescience, admitting, “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.”

But what if Poe wasn’t of a day at all, but of all the days?

What if his written prophecies — on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory — were merely reportage from his journey through the extratemporal continuum?

Surely I sound like a tinfoil-capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more prophecies scattered throughout the author’s work, a possibility made all the more likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around.”

I’ll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:

“I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass… You speak of “an estimate of my life” — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.”

This story was originally published on HistoryBuff and first appeared on 8.16.16

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Will A Possible ‘Prison Break’ Followup Show From The ‘Mayans M.C.’ Showrunner Star The Original Cast?

The early 2000s show to get a fresh new story will be the fan-favorite Fox series Prison Break which aired from 2005 to 2009. The series follows Michael (Wentworth Miller), an engineer, who plots an elaborate escape plan after his brother Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Essentially, he has to break Lincoln out of prison. See where they were going with this?

Now, the series is heading back to the small screen, though through the eyes of some new players. The series will be written and executive produced by Mayans M.C. co-creator Elgin James. James is familiar with helming spinoffs, as Mayans M.C. takes place in the same universe as FX’s Sons of Anarchy.

The show has been described as a “new chapter” of the Prison Break universe. Even though the upcoming series will take place in the same universe, it doesn’t seem like any of the original storylines will carry over and the original cast is not slated to appear. However, many of the main cast reunited for 2017’s Prison Break Season 5 revival special, so they might be on board even if it’s just for a little cameo to see how those brothers are holding up after the initial series.

We can assume that Miller, who portrayed Michael in the series, won’t be back after he stated in 2020 that he was “out of PB” as he didn’t want to play straight characters anymore. He posted on Instagram at the time, “If you’re hot and bothered [because] you fell in love with a fictional straight man played by a real gay one… That’s your work.” Maybe this is a good opportunity for Michael to lead a quiet life as a retired prison breaker.

(Via Deadline)

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Here’s When Jung Kook’s New Album ‘Golden’ Will Be On Spotify

Jung Kook of BTS is releasing his first solo album, Golden, later tonight. Given that fans are extremely excited to hear his new music, many might be wondering when exactly the record will be available to stream on Spotify.

Here’s what to know.

Golden will be out on Spotify at midnight ET on November 3 — with other time zones being converted from this point. So, for listeners on the West Coast, they will be able to hear the record at 9 p.m. PT. This would also differ across the globe, depending on where you are.

Jung Kook’s album currently features some collabs. It will include his No. 1 hit song, “Seven,” which features Latto, along with the previously released “3D” track with Jack Harlow. In total, there are 11 tracks, and he is dropping a music video for the main track, “Standing Next To You.” View the complete tracklist here.

“Jungkook will be delivering special sage performances and making various appearances alongside the release of Golden,” Big Hit also previously shared in a statement, as they seem to tease a possible tour and continued press run. “Please stay tuned and continue to support Jungkook as he embarks on his first solo album journey.”

Golden is out 11/3 via Big Hit. Find more information here.

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

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

The Best Little Feel-Good Comedy On TV Is About Pirates Who Sometimes Stab And Disembowel Each Other

Is it weird that one of the sweetest little feel-good shows on television this year also featured a group of pirates pillaging and murdering their enemies and sometimes chopping each other’s limbs off? It’s probably weird. It felt weird to type, at least. But it’s all true. I didn’t even mention the thing about the mutiny or the cursed outfits or Bronson Pinchot walking the plank. Or the thing about the grizzled and gruff first mate donning makeup and belting out “La Vie En Rose” on the ship. Our Flag Means Death is a wonderful television program. Weird, sure. But also wonderful.

The first season of the show kind of came out of nowhere. There was a fancy aristocrat named Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) who fled his wife and posh life in search of adventure on the high seas. He eventually crossed paths with Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), the legendary real-life pirate, or at least a very loosely fictionalized version of him. They fell in love. A bunch of the pirates on the ship fell in love with each other, too. Everyone was smooching and swashbuckling and having a blast until everything was torn apart in the final episodes. Stede and Blackbeard broke up. I was devastated by this. Picture trying to explain any of this to a person who never watched the show. This was my life for an entire year.

It returned for a second season this fall, finally. Things were still weird, but in a different way. Blackbeard was taking out the pain of his heartbreak by ramping up his pillaging, raiding so many ships and towns that he was ordering the crew to throw old treasure overboard to make room for new treasure. There was a minor mutiny. They ran afoul of the Pirate Queen of China (Ruibo Qian), who, because this show is committed at all times to being wild, spoke like an American millennial and blackmailed via charm. She fell in love with one of the male crew members, eventually. It was very sweet.

FLAG
MAX

Stede and Blackbeard got back together, too. The specifics are too important for me to type out here beyond saying that there were sword fights and hallucinations of mermen and a deeply satisfying and adorable reunion on the beach. Again, this is a show where people get slashed through the abdomen and blasted with cannonballs pretty much every episode. Leslie Jones from SNL showed up and chopped a dude’s entire nose off. There was, briefly, a character named Steak Knife who the Pirate Queen killed in a saloon. And it was also the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen.

This exchange has stayed with me for over a week now. It might stay with me forever. It’s weird how these things work out.

FLAG
MAX
FLAG
MAX

You wanna hear the wildest part of the whole thing? Yes, even wilder than “the dreaded murderous pirate Blackbeard had a hallucination while comatose where his posh estranged boyfriend appeared to him underwater with a mermaid tail and kissed him on the mouth”? I hope so because I’m going to tell you.

None of that — the forbidden romance, the Pirate Queen finding love, an actual wedding between two members of the crew — was the sweetest part of the show. That honor goes to the character arc for Blackbeard’s first mate, Izzy Hands, a raspy-voiced seafaring lifer who practices swordplay in candlelit rooms and who lost the lower part of his left after Blackbeard shot him and then amputated it to keep the infection from spreading. (It’s okay. The crew made him a prosthetic leg out of the wooden unicorn he destroyed in anger. See above, re: weird/wonderful show.) I have rarely gone from “I hate this guy and hope he dies” to “I would gladly give this man any of my limbs if he asks” faster for a television character. The list is pretty much Izzy Hands and Richie from The Bear. It’s a prestigious list. Richie would be a fun pirate.

Anyway, here is Izzy singing “La Vie En Rose” in full theatrical makeup on the deck of a pirate ship, just in case you thought I was kidding about that earlier.

FLAG
MAX

All of which is why — spoilers coming in heavy here — I was so heartbroken when he died in the season two finale. Like, actually heartbroken. I’m still sad today. I did not expect to cry a little while watching the show about gay pirates doing murder, but here we are. Between this and Reservation Dogs (also produced by Waititi), all of my favorite comedies have been making me leak tears out of my face lately. I feel okay about it.

I also feel okay — or at least okay-ish — about Izzy’s death after seeing this explanation of it all from showrunner David Jenkins in Vanity Fair.

There’s a trope that I like with mentor stories, where the mentor dies in the second act. Our protagonist outlives the mentor and then they have to go on. We felt like Izzy’s story had reached its conclusion, where we put him through enough. And then there was the realization that he is kind of a mentor to Blackbeard and that he is kind of a father figure to Blackbeard. It felt nice to have him die and have Blackbeard be upset by it, because Blackbeard killed his father. But this is a father figure that he’s losing that it’s hard for him; it’s sad and he doesn’t want him to go. Izzy has such a beautiful arc in season two; he does a lot of the things, has a lot of the breakthroughs that you want that character to have. It felt like: It’s time to give him a full meal. And it’s also a pirate show, so he’s got to die.

“It’s a pirate show, so he’s got to die.” I mean… yeah. Fair.

The season ended on a heartwarming note for almost everyone else, though. Stede and Blackbeard gave up pirating to open an inn together. The crew pressed on. There was a triumphant battle waged against stuffy British aristocrats. It all could work as a series finale if this is all we get. I hope we get more, though. It really is a remarkable little show, a mish-mashing of genres and style that makes the craziest twists you’ll ever see feel plausible. Plus, I want to see more of the Pirate Queen, who was a great addition to the show and one of my favorite characters on television so far this year.

It looks like Jenkins has plans for it, too, as he explained to Entertainment Weekly.

I mean, we’ll see. We’ll see if it makes sense for them to make a third one. We have a lot of ideas for a third season, and there’s a lot more story to tell. But if it’s not in the cards, I just wanted to leave Stede and Blackbeard in a good place. Instead of seeing them get punished for following each other, I wanted to see a moment where they’re alright. And it is just a moment: I think a relationship is going to take a lot of work for them.

Three notes in conclusion:

  • I love this weird little pirate show
  • I really hope it gets a third season, just to see where they end up taking it
  • More shows should feature a character named Steak Knife

Thank you

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

‘The View’ Roasted Self-Conscious Meatball Ron DeSantis For Having ‘Barbie Feet’ Thanks To His Alleged Boot Lifts

Reports of Ron DeSantis allegedly putting lifts in his cowboy boots has sparked a hilarious political scandal, and The View wasted no jumping in on the fun.

During Thursday morning’s episode, co-host and Florida resident Ana Navarro went to town on DeSantis after the governor denied the allegations despite convincing photographic evidence to the contrary.

“There’s no foot in that boot! He has Barbie feet!” Navarro said via Decider. “Call me petty, and I know you will… I am relishing and enjoying this story so much because honestly, he has been terrorizing my drag queen friends in Florida well over a year because he has said men in heels are a threat to society. It’s too bad he has no drag queen friends because they would have taught him how to walk in heels.”

However, co-host Sara Haines wasn’t a fan of the topic. “There is plenty to pick apart about Ron DeSantis that I don’t think it’s the right tone to pick on his height,” she said.

Navarro wasn’t having it and defended the boot discussion. “It was a complete self-own by Ron DeSantis,” Navarro argued. “Donald Trump’s words got into his head that he’s got a Napoleonic complex!”

As for fellow conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin, she thinks the boot issue won’t be a political liability for the Florida governor because he has a much bigger issue on the campaign trail that was evident in his denial.

“The reason he’s never gonna be President is not the fact that he’s likely wearing high heels, it’s his answer to that clip,” Griffin said. “The lack of charisma is astounding.”

(Via Decider)

Categories
News Trending Viral Worldwide

Who Is Taylor Tomlinson? Meet The Stand-Up Comedian And Late Night’s Only Female Host

Taylor Tomlinson has filmed two of the funniest Netflix stand-up comedy specials (Quarter-Life Crisis, Look At You) in recent years. She isn’t afraid to pepper her material with both a cheerleader smile and dark subject matter and tie it together with a pretty amazing Taylor Swift joke.

Tomlinson has also been touring nationally for years and has been doing stand-up since she was 16 years old. And now, we finally know who will be filling James Corden’s late night TV slot after he moved on to different pastures (and is hopefully now treating restaurant staff with the respect that they duly deserve). Tomlinson, for her part, is 29 years old, which means that she’s half the age of Stephen Colbert, who personally called her with news of her upcoming gig.

Tomlinson found out about this development only this week, and here’s how she reacted when Colbert delivered the news. She compared her casual Zoom appearance with this vibe: “You know when you think you’re gonna get dumped, and they propose instead?”

Stephen Colbert Taylor Tomlinson
CBS/Paramount Global

There will be a quick turnaround, too. Tomlinson will begin her hosting duties in early 2024, and the show will be titled After Midnight. Don’t expect any Corden-esque touches, either, for this show will pattern itself after @Midnight, the Chris Hardwick-hosted semi-game show (of rotating celebrity contestants trying to out-funny each other) from Comedy Central (also of Paramount Global like CBS).

Tomlinson actually got her start on the Christian comedy circuit, but she’s since moved on to more brazen territory. Her Netflix stand-up specials dive into her experiences with bipolar disorder and other difficult subjects with plenty of bite. Not only will she be the only female late night host currently on the air, but by far, she will be the youngest of them all.