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At first glance, The White Lotus and Tuca and Bertie do not seem to have much in common. One is an HBO drama about rich white people vacationing in Hawaii; the other is an animated series about talking birds (guess which is which). But look a little closer and you’ll see the similarities. For instance, The White Lotus and Tuca and Bertie are creators Mike White and Lisa Hannawalt first shows since Enlightened and BoJack Horseman, two of the most acclaimed dark comedies of the past 20 years (technically, Hannawalt didn’t create BoJack, but she was the show’s creative designer and there would be no BoJack without her). Also, both series air their season finales this Sunday (each has already been renewed). But what really connects The White Lotus and Tuca and Bertie is that they understand the same universal truth: teens are terrifying.

As a 30-something, I am scared of teens. I was also scared of teens as a teen, but it’s different now. Whenever I’m at the mall and see a group (pack? troupe? murder?) of teens lingering around the Auntie Anne’s, I will go the long way to the Apple Store. I want to avoid their detection. Teens have an uncanny ability to detect your greatest vulnerability. It could be something as obvious as tripping or as minor as wearing a red shirt when you usually wear a blue shirt, but they will know exactly what to say to destroy you. “Hey Elmo, nice shirt.” Devastating. You can’t recover from that. All you can do is George Michael (the rare non-terrifying teen) your way to get your iPhone fixed.

The teens — the cactus, the plant, the… other plant — on Tuca and Bertie love to loiter. It doesn’t matter if they’re chilling on the fire escape or sitting on the stoop outside the apartment building, they’re always around for a disaffected quip. In a season one episode, Bertie (voiced by Ali Wong) greets her neighbors with an “eek, teens!” After they give her a compliment that sounds like an insult, she wonders out loud, “Uh, the words you’re saying are nice, but the way you say them makes them sound mean, so…” Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) cuts her off to point out, “They’re teenagers, Bertie, everything they say is a lie.” It doesn’t feel like it in the moment, though. As Tuca and Bertie flee the scene, one of the teens wonders, “Are we mean?” It’s a rare moment of self-awareness… that’s quickly interrupted by a “no way” from her friend. The emotional maturity will come later.

The two teens on The White Lotus, Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and Paula (Brittany O’Grady), think they’re emotionally mature, but they’re not. They think a lot of things about themselves actually, in particular Olivia, who criticizes her mother for working on vacation / ruining the world, makes her brother sleep on the beach, and, upon being told by her dad that his dad died from AIDS, wonders if her grandpa was into ass play. The friends, who are introduced by coming up with tragic backstories for their fellow vacationers, think they have it all figured it out — so long as they have their backpack full of drugs. They’re Cher and Dionne from Clueless, if Cher and Dionne were bitchy (I say that with complete affection) zoomers who read Nietzsche and Freud poolside.

I still haven’t recovered from one scene, in particular.

All Rachel (Alexandria Daddario) wants to do is have a nice conversation with two other young women. Instead, they act with she’s-so-cheugy disdain towards the new-bride. “Where’d you go to school?” Olivia asks, 40 percent invested in the conversation. SUNY Potsdam, she answers. Instead of a follow-up question, all Rachel gets is a “hmm.” At this point, she senses their sarcastic detachment, but she’s too far into her life story to stop. There’s talk of student loans, her husband (Jake Lacy) being rich, and Olivia’s CEO mother. Rachel sees them giving side-eye glances to each other, knowing that she’s going to be an inside joke between two friends, but she isn’t ready to bail until she gives an example of something she wrote: “Ten Women Kicking the Corporate World’s Ass.”

She gets shut down with a smile. Brutal.

If her husband wasn’t ruining her honeymoon with his rich-guy fixation on the Pineapple Suite (to say nothing of her mother-in-law dropping by for a visit), this would be the only thing that Rachel would remember from her honeymoon. I know I would play this interaction in my head on repeat, like George Costanza coming up with “jerk store” too late. It brings back uncomfortable memories from high school of having a real moment of vulnerability be greeted with a shrug or indifference. I worked hard to suppress those! Even Paula feels Olivia’s wrath later in the season (“She’s my friend, as long as she has more of everything than I do, but if I have something of my own, she wants it”). No one is safe from the withering (and misguided) superiority of teens, even other teens.

I thought of one more thing that The White Lotus and Tuca and Bertie: they’re two of the best shows on television this year, largely because of the plant teens and Olivia and Paula. Don’t tell them that, though. They don’t need their egos inflated any further.

“No topics is off limits” is the tagline for B.J. Novak’s newest project The Premise and based on the series first trailer, we’d say that’s pretty damn apt. The surreal FX series coming to Hulu is a comedic anthology written by The Office star and script writer Novak that features an impressive cast and a whole lot of head-scratching storylines, including ones centering around “the worst sex tape ever,” social media trolls, and, well, butt plugs.

In addition to boldly going to places no one’s gone before (is that too much after just talking about butt plugs?), the series also states it will use comedy to “to engage with the biggest issues of our unprecedented modern era.” In doing so, The Premise looks to be tackling topics ranging from sex, social media, and the modern obsession with validation to immigration, police misconduct, and Black Lives Matter.

To have these important discussions, Novak has brought on a pretty all-star cast featuring the talents of Ben Platt, Tracee Ellis Ross, Daniel Dae Kim, Lola Kirke, Soko, Kaitlyn Dever, Jon Bernthal, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ed Asner, George Wallace, Jermaine Fowler, Ayo Edebiri, Eric Lange, and more, believe it or not. In true anthology fashion the cast will be divided up across the show’s first five episodes, all of which have some pretty compelling titles such as “Social Justice Sex Tape,” “Moment of Silence,” “The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler,” “The Commenter,” and, last but not least, “Butt Plug.”

All five of The Premise’s announced episodes feature B.J. Novak’s as a writer or co-writer, with two of them being directed by the star as well. The half-hour anthology comes to exclusively to FX on Hulu on September 16.

There have been good movies with disappointing endings before, but Free Guy may hold the record for the longest a movie has ever seemed on the verge of greatness before turning truly loathsome in the end.

Maybe the second part is less surprising to you than the first. Maybe you’re like me and you’re getting a little sick of Ryan Reynolds’… whole deal. Reynolds occupies a unique niche in the pop culture landscape, a handsome model/actor-type who often feels like he’s being piloted by the Reddit hivemind in some kind of Meet Dave situation. He’s so squeaky clean, and yet he swears. He’s so muscular, and yet he loves girl pop. He’s not funny, exactly, but charmingly game, and willing to do memes. He’s a self-aware handsome guy, get it?? Yes, yes, we get it. Have you considered that maybe he’s just Canadian?

Even admitting that bias going in, Free Guy in many ways seems like the perfect Ryan Reynolds role, almost a bespoke attempt to turn him into the Tom Cruise-level movie star he occasionally seems like. Reynolds plays Guy, a bank teller in Free City, an average American metropolis that seems to suffer from an exorbitant amount of violent crime. Not that Guy is perturbed — he suffers the daily robberies with a smile, exchanging pleasantries with his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), the bank security guard, his pet goldfish, and the local barista, from whom he orders a coffee with cream and two sugars. “Don’t just have a good day, have a GREAT day!”

His oddly cheery persona, spotless uniform, and slightly stiff manner are eventually explained: as Guy gradually comes to realize, he’s actually an NPC (“non-player character”) living inside a Grand Theft Auto-style video game. It’s only when he steals a pair of sunglasses from a human player that he can see what they see, the game going on all around him. Now what? What does it mean to discover that Elon is right and you really are living inside a simulation?

Maybe the most interesting thing about Free Guy is how quickly this simple plot conceit pushes the narrative towards legitimately profound questions, even as no one involved seems all that interested in asking them. Free Guy, after all, comes from director Shawn Levy — Date Night, Real Steel, The Internship, Night At The Museum — a pure studio man if ever there was one. And the story seems like the product of fairly simple studio math: what if Pleasantville plus Westworld? Or maybe just what if family-friendly Westworld?

Yet it proves impossible to open the Pandora’s box of an artificial-intelligence story without immediately having to question the nature of reality and of consciousness itself. There’s something magical about that, doubly so coming in the form of a Ryan Reynolds videogame movie that desperately wants to be lighthearted. It’s a little like that old video of two chatbots forced to talk to each other who within 60 seconds were asking “Do you believe in God?” and “Would you like to have a body?”

The conceit is that two best friend videogame designers, Millie and Keys (I thought his name was “Keith” for most of the movie, which was much less obnoxious), played by Jodie Comer and Joe Keery, have had their code for a kinder, gentler kind of videogame hijacked by a megalomaniacal games CEO played by Taika Waititi — a comedic force of nature in an Oscar-worthy turn, to say nothing of his magnificent head of hair. “Antoine” has turned their second world into a vulgar first-person shooter. Keys now works for “Soonami Games” as a low-level coder while Comer is persona non-grata, locked in a legal battle with Antoine for her share of the royalties.

Millie is inside Free City, trying to find evidence when she inadvertently turns Guy self-aware. Guy falls for Millie’s avatar, Molotov, and he has to help her uncover the evidence against Antoine before Antoine can zap Guy’s entire world into nothingness at a stroke. (Free Guy vastly underestimates the true sociopathy, vindictiveness, and paranoia of your average tech CEO — Facebook has a “rat-catching team” and the Pinkerton agency has reportedly sent detectives into coffee shops to eavesdrop on potential leakers, for clients like Facebook and Google).

For a while, for almost the whole damn movie, in fact, it seems like Free Guy really is going to succeed at being a lighthearted comedic version of Westworld, or something like the movie Ready Player One wanted to be. It questions the nature of consciousness and gives us a self-aware NPC as protagonist only to turn, in the end, into a corny love story. Free Guy lifts, spiritually, from Richard Curtis, writer of cornball cutesies such as Yesterday and Love Actually in which a man suddenly realizes he’s in love with his lifelong platonic best friend (ugh) and lifts overtly from The Avengers and Star Wars. Some people in my theater actually clapped at the cameo from Captain America’s shield (UGHHHH). Did you know Disney, who owns Marvel and Star Wars, also owns 20th Century Fox, who made Free Guy? Seems like something they’d want to disguise, but instead they shoehorn reminders right into the climax.

Watching Free Guy feel like something truly great for almost a whole movie before turning into the worst kind of soulless, neutered exercise in Remembering Other Things can’t help but make us the audience feel like Guy. We can run right up to the walls of the artifice, and feel like we’re just on the cusp of experiencing something new, but the minute we come to expect anything but disposable commerce we’ll just be bombarded with “nice” imagery to keep us docile and stupid.

‘Free Guy’ is available now only in theaters. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

In recent times, Justin Vernon has been most predominantly busy with Big Red Machine, but now he’s shifting his focus towards Bon Iver, as he took to social media today to tease something related to the project.

On Twitter today, he shared an image of text that reads, “A decade later, a decade of gratitude. Check back Monday. Bon Iver,.” He also captioned the post, “Sincerely grateful.”

That’s all the info Vernon offered on what news is to come on Monday, but it was one decade ago (on June 21, 2011) that he released his self titled album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, so it would seem that whatever he has planned is related to that. In tweets responding to Vernon’s, fans expressed hope for things like anniversary reissues of the album and shows during which Vernon plays the album’s songs.

It’s certainly an album worth celebrating. After earning acclaim with his 2007 debut album For Emma, Forever Ago, it was Bon Iver, Bon Iver that launched Vernon to mainstream commercial and critical success. The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, which remains his highest placement, along with 22, A Million which also topped out in the same spot. It also won Vernon a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 2012.

Jon Taffer’s tough style is sort of the point of Bar Rescue, but his comments on the actual food and beverage industry outside of reality television got him into hot water this week. Taffer appeared on Fox News on Thursday night to talk about restaurant workers with Laura Ingraham. And rather than be sympathetic to the plight of millions of people working through a still-ongoing pandemic, Taffer compared low-income workers to dogs who should be starved in order to be motivated to work.

Service industry workers have endured a lot during the pandemic, starting with uncertainty about their jobs amid lockdowns. Hotels and restaurants were the first places to shut down amid coronavirus mitigation efforts, and their slow reopening has not come without safety concerns about and the need for personal protective equipment for those who have returned to work.

A study in May said half of adults not vaccinated were concerned about missing work because of side effects, and with no paid time off for vaccines or schedule flexibility, some are neglecting their own health in order to keep getting paychecks. For some people, however, wages were so low that the benefits they can get from the federal government actually outweigh those coming from jobs offered by employers, hence the staff shortages many employers have complained about for months.

Rather than simply pay more livable wages, however, Taffer is on the side of those who simply want to complain. Mostly about how no one wants to work in these days filled with disease and death.

“We’re incentivizing people to stay home,” Taffer said, as he nonsensically pitched giving unemployment benefits directly to “employers” who would in theory trickle it down to their employees directly. Ingraham said that “hunger” is a motivating factor in life, and Taffer agreed, comparing restaurant workers to military dogs who are kept hungry in order to work harder.

“I have a friend in the military who trains military dogs. They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog,” Taffer said. “Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work then we’re providing them all the meals they need sitting at home.”

Economists can argue over the difference between an actual living wage and what employers are willing to pay workers, sure, but comparing actual humans to dogs is as gross an analogy you can intentionally offer. Which is why the reaction to the clip was not positive for the very wealthy guy who created NFL Sunday Ticket.

Taffer has yet to comment on this thing he very clearly believes, but for some, his ghastly comments certainly add to all that shouting he’s done at bar employees in the name of entertainment over the years.

Vampire roommates Nandor, Laszlo, Nadja, and Colin are back in the newest trailer for What We Do in the Shadows season three and they’ve got a lot of problems to tackle. In the upcoming trailer, we see the gang take on werewolves, dating, and escalators while they attempt to decide which one of them should sit in the vampiric council throne as well as what they should do with their familiar Guillermo following last season’s big reveal. In addition to dealing with forced hierarchy and newly-ousted Guillermo, the show’s next season promises a lot of twists, turns, strange encounters, and, of course, laughs. According to the trailer’s description:

In Season 3, the vampires are elevated to a new level of power and will encounter the vampire from which all vampires have descended, a tempting Siren, gargoyles, werewolf kickball, Atlantic City casinos, wellness cults, ex-girlfriends, gyms and supernatural curiosities galore.

Based on Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi’s (Thor: Ragnarok) full-length feature film of the same name, What We Do in the Shadows follows the exploits of four Staten Island vampires and the bloody messes they get themselves into. During its first two seasons, the ongoing FX mockumentary has raked up ten Emmy award nominations, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series.

What We Do in the Shadows returns for its third season on September 2 with the two new episodes: “The Prisoner” and “The Clock of Duplication.” According to the show descriptions, in “The Prisoner” Guillermo’s fate “hangs in the balance” while the vampires reconfigure their ranks while “The Cloak of Duplication” follows Nandor courting a health club employee using a “forbidden artifact.” While the episodes will make their big debut on FX, they will be available for streaming the next day via FX on Hulu.

Don Cheadle’s still not entirely clear on why he was nominated for an Emmy for his very brief appearance in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but he’s here to set the record straight on that awkward-as-heck Kevin Hart exchange that left people wondering whether it was real. The incident in question took place on Hart’s new Peacock show full of celeb interviews and wine, and things appeared to veer towards the rails when Hart exclaimed, “Damn!” in response to Cheadle casually mentioning that he’s 53 years old.

This led to Cheadle appearing to dress down Hart and show him no mercy, all while Hart backpeddled and insisted that the “damn!” came from “a place of love.” Cheadle held firm, and although he kept a straight face, the entire exchange was funny as well as uncomfortable. Well, Cheadle has let everyone know that there are truly no hard feelings here. In response to a tweet about what he was thinking during the awkward exchange, Cheadle used the tears-of-joy emoji and declared, “i think this is my favorite interview ever. ‘damn!’” He also stated that he and Hart “need to do a movie together asap!”

Hey, he’s good, and that should be no real surprise, since Cheadle’s an Oscar winner and has an assortment of other acting awards and nominations under his belt. So, maybe that Emmy nod for a few minutes of Disney+ screentime as James Rhodey/War Machine isn’t too far off base after all. Much respect.

Earlier this year, baseball fans were treated to the latest exhausting round of debate about the unwritten rules of the game. Yermin Mercedes of the Chicago White Sox hit a baseball to Mars against the Minnesota Twins, but it came with a position player pitching and a 3-0 count in a game Chicago was winning by 11 runs. His manager, Tony La Russa, said he was fine with whatever sort of consequences (i.e. the Twins throwing at him) came as a result of this.

Well, hopefully, someone shows La Russa what happened during a Coastal Plain League game on Thursday, because we have to imagine his response would be something unforgettable. Josh Lavender, an infielder for the Savannah Bananas, walked up to the plate against the Macon Bacon — ASIDE: this is the best matchup of team names in sports — and enlisted a dang golf caddy and a range finder.

The commitment to the bit is really admirable, with Lavender keeping a scorecard in his pocket and the caddy handing him a club before deciding it is probably better to use a baseball bat in this instance. The whole thing is terrific, with the Bacon’s catcher laughing before the whole thing gets underway.

Listen, I love baseball, as do many others, but the sport can make you roll your eyes very easily when stuff like La Russa’s reaction to Mercedes’ dinger happens and people try to do everything in their power to prevent the sport from being fun. This, on the other hand, is legitimately funny and does not hurt a single soul. More of it, at all levels of the sport, would be a good thing.

The whiskey sour is a stone-cold classic. The mix of bourbon, lemon, sugar, and egg white is a mighty elixir that feels a little old school and Donny Draper-ish while still being amazingly fresh.

With summer heatwaves hitting much of the country, now feels like the ideal time to shake up some whiskey sours to fight the heat. This velvety smooth drink is 100 percent a refresher that’ll take the edge off your day and cool down that scorching summer sun.

Let’s get shaking!

Whiskey Sour

Ingredients:

• 2-oz. bourbon
• 1-oz. fresh lemon juice
• 0.5-oz. simple syrup
• 1 egg white
• 4 dashes Angostura Bitters
• Ice

I’d argue that you don’t want a ridiculous bourbon for this drink. You need a solid mixer that marries well with the lemonade aspects of the drink. I like mixing with Legent Bourbon at the moment, so I’m going with that. There’s a nice, spicy backbone with a touch of berries and citrus that work well in this cocktail.

As for the rest, you really need to get a very fresh egg and nice lemons. That’s about it!

What You’ll Need:

• Small rocks glass or Nick and Nora
• Cocktail shaker
• Cocktail strainer
• Mesh strainer
• Juicer
• Pairing knife

Method:

• Pre-chill your glass.
• Add the bourbon, simple syrup, lemon juice, and egg white to a shaker. Shake for about 30 seconds without ice.
• Add ice to the shaker and shake for an additional ten to 15 seconds.
• Fetch your glass from the freezer and pour the whiskey sour through the mesh strainer into the glass.
• Let the whiskey sour rest for about a minute to let the froth set on the glass.
• Dash the bitters across the top of the drink.
• Serve.

Bottom Line:

As the sage once said, this is “fresher than wet paint.”

Word up — this is just really refreshing, light, velvety, and full of lemony goodness. The bourbon comes through nicely, but the real star of the show is the lemon and egg white, creating that soft texture with big citrus notes and an almost lemon meringue vibe.

While this is a little labor-intensive, it’s worth the double shake to make it really froth up and keep that silky-smooth body. It’s also very crushable. I could drink a few of these to let the week slip away and not have a worry in the world. In fact, I think I just might.

Cheers!

A few months after being released from prison, Bobby Shmurda has shared some new insight with The New York Times about what he learned from his time at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility, saying, “I ain’t mad about going to jail, because my mind-state now versus my mind-state before — I probably would’ve been in jail for life before […] The stuff that’s going to get you in trouble or put you in that situation, you can see that from miles away.”

The Roc Nation rapper went to prison back in 2016 with a plea deal on conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession charges. He was released back in February, but he’s been keeping super-busy, performing at Miami’s Rolling Loud and joining J Balvin and Daddy Yankee to remix Eladio Carrion’s “Tata.” In the coming weeks, he’ll also perform at Summer Jam in New York and the Made in America Festival in Philadelphia.

“When I was young, I used to run towards it,” he added in the interview about his mindset, pre-lockup. “I was a full animal. So I feel like being locked up, it made me smarter. It made me stronger. And it made me badder, but in a good way. Instead of saying, boom, ‘I want to go in the streets and cause hell,’ I’m saying, ‘I want to go in the streets and give back.’ I feel like that’s gangster.” (Indeed, over Father’s Day Weekend the Brooklyn rapper held a “Give Back Brunch” for 200 families, treating patrons of the Win Shelter in Brooklyn to a meal including Bobby’s own Jamaican favorites: curried chickpeas, jerk salmon, and stewed chicken. In addition, Bobby employed barbers to give free haircuts to the attendees.)

Shmurda also offered a glimpse into the new music he’s been working on with names like Swae Lee and Migos, saying, “We’re going to be dancing 24/7. When I dance, it’s to show you that I came through the struggle, but I overcame it and we’re still overcoming it.”