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What’s On Tonight: Netflix Unleashes Two Wildly Different Series For Your Binging Pleasure

If nothing below suits your sensibilities, check out our guide to What You Should Watch On Streaming Right Now.

Reality Z: (Netflix series): A zombie apocalypse show that fuses horror, humor, and pop culture? Yes, and the story follows a reality show set in Ria de Janeiro, where a studio transforms into a shelter during the height of panic and madness as show participants and producers struggle to stay alive.

Lenox Hill: (Netflix documentary series): This show follows physicians, including brain surgeons and emergency room doctors while they navigate NYC’s renowned Lenox Hill Hospital. Personal and professional lives collide as patients’ journeys get the feature treatment as well. It’s a rare look inside an emotional and complex profession.

Council Of Dads (NBC, 8:00 p.m.) — Anthony’s considering a Las Vegas job offer while Larry’s looking for advice, Evan’s struggling to stay loyal, and Anthony’s big secret rears its head.

In The Dark (CW, 9:00 p.m.) — A plan to take on Nia impacts Josh’s friendship with Murphy, who’s also seeing developments in his relationship with Jess and Felix.

Blindspot (NBC, 9:00 p.m.) — This crazy tattoo show’s still going strong, although Jane gets shot, and another team member is kidnapped. And ghosts from the past come back to haunt Weller while everyone’s attempting to keep the hidden base a secret.

Cake (FXX, 10:00 p.m.) — Two Aussie brothers head out on a dangerous mission, but their desired conquest might not matter nearly as much as their mutual inner growth.

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon: Anthony Mackie, Guy Raz, Avril Lavigne

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert: Wesley Lowery, Judd Apatow

Jimmy Kimmel Live: The Clark Sisters

Late Night With Seth Meyers: Regina King, Ann Patchett

The Late Late Show With James Corden Brandy Clark

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Sony Announced ‘Spider-Man Miles Morales’ For The PlayStation 5

Sony hit a home run with 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, which gave them a console-exclusive game that earned the distinction of being among the best releases of the year. The game set itself up quite nicely for some sort of sequel, and on Thursday afternoon, the company announced that the follow-up will hit shelves sometime later this year.

This time around, though, Spider-Man will not be played by Peter Parker. Sony announced Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which will presumably follow around Parker’s pal from the original game. Details are sparse about things like the plot of the game or when, specifically, it will come out, but Sony did drop a trailer for the game and announced that we can expect to see it during this holiday season.

In a mild spoiler for anyone who didn’t play the original game, Morales gets to know Parker, and at one point, he is bitten by one of Oscorp’s spiders, which give him a number of the abilities that we see out of the game’s titular character. He eventually reveals that he’s gained Spidey-like powers and eventually becomes Parker’s protege.

Marvel’s Spider-Man set an awfully high bar for its sequel to meet, and we’ll have to wait until year-end to see how Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales measures up. Regardless, this is going to be one of the year’s most highly-anticipated releases.

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Black Lives Matter-LA Co-Founder Melina Abdullah Talks About Defunding The Police And Fostering Change

On May 25th, police officers in Minneapolis arrested 46-year-old George Floyd after a convenience store employee alerted 911 that he may have paid with a counterfeit $20 bill. Once apprehended by the police, officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground, driving his knee into Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, despite onlookers calling for him to stop and Floyd’s own desperate pleas for help. Video of the killing sparked protests in all 50 states and around the world –resulting in significant actions being taken across all quadrants of our society. Laws are being changed, police departments have been defunded, and statues of colonizers and slave traders have fallen.

Melina Abdullah, an activist, professor, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter’s (BLM) LA chapter, knows that if we really want to change the world, the protests must also give rise to calculated political action.

“Make sure you research who your DA is and whether or not you want to keep them,” Abdullah urges, after weeks of leading demonstrations across Los Angeles (including outside the home of Mayor Eric Garcetti). “The district attorney is an elected official who prosecutes crimes, so we want to make sure that as they’re prosecuting, the first people who go to jail for committing crimes are the police who brutalize and kill our people.”

Abdullah and Black Lives Matter LA have been at the forefront of the protests in Los Angeles, helping the city demand accountability from its police department and elected officials like never before. Since taking to the streets, Angelenos have prompted Garcetti to reexamine a budget that would allocate 54% of the city’s funds to law enforcement agencies and promise a $250 million cut from the LAPD, with money redirected towards health and education in black communities. The mayor has also floated the idea of implementing an independent prosecutor to oversee police violations.

Anger at an unjust system is easy to muster, but turning that rage into a tool to bring about meaningful and systemic change is crucial. Many of us who have taken to the streets don’t know what to do after we’ve made signs, marched, signed the petitions, and donated our money to organizations like BLM. So we reached out to Abdullah to talk about the next steps, defunding the police, and why we need to vote in this upcoming election, even if we’ve lost faith in our government.

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I wanted to talk to you a little bit about defunding the police. On the surface that might sound a little bit extreme to some. For the people who wonder who will keep the law if we massively scale back police funds, what would you say to those concerns?

I think that defunding the police sounds radical until we realize that there wasn’t always policing and there wasn’t always this kind of expansionist approach to policing. So when we say “defund the police,” we mean defund the police. Here is something else that should be equally shocking, if not more. In the city of Los Angeles, the mayor was proposing to spend 54% of the city’s budget on the LAPD. That is an astronomical amount, especially when you consider that we’re in a health pandemic with an economic fallout and that policing doesn’t answer a healthcare crisis or an economic crisis.

LAPD was the only city department that Mayor Garcetti proposed an increase for, as he’s slashing other city departments and furloughing 16,000 city employees in the midst of this economic crisis. Some will say that defunding the police sounds radical but I think that they should also look at how radical it is or how shocking it is to be spending so much money on police.

Finally, everybody says things are “crazy” or “radical” or “impossible” until they’re done. The city of Minneapolis just committed itself to disbanding their police department, so I think that shows us that it is possible. If people look at PeoplesBudgetLA.com, they’ll see that when we engaged in a participatory budgeting session with Angelenos, they wanted to spend 5.7% of the city’s budget on traditional approaches to law enforcement. That includes the LAPD, that includes traffic enforcement and includes the city attorney’s office, which is the prosecutor for the city. People don’t want to spend this kind of money on police. When we look at those survey results, people saw this kind of approach to law enforcement as the “least important” of their spending priorities.

Saying “defund the police” really just moves us towards what most people say they want anyway.

You’ve been center stage in the effort to prevent Mayor Garcetti from passing his city budget and even with the $150 million cut that still leaves over $3 billion for law enforcement, before the cut that was 54% of the city’s budget. In your view, what is a better way of using that money and what kind of community organizations and things should we do with that money instead?

I think everybody wants to live in a safe, healthy, and vibrant community. When we think about how to get there, we know that the first thing we need to do is meet the universal needs of people, make sure that everybody has housing, make sure that everybody has healthcare, make sure that everybody has access to healthy food, make sure that we have parks and libraries and after school programs. I think you make a safe environment by providing first for the needs of people.

Angelenos don’t like being home to the largest houseless population in the nation. We have 60,000 unhoused people in this county, and it’s absolutely ridiculous. If you look at a budget you’ll see people’s priorities. So what this budget tells us is that the priority for this mayor is clearly investing — or spending, I won’t even call it an investment — spending on policing, which really functions to repress, and oppress, and surveil, and brutalize and even kill our community members rather than doing what the people say that we need, which is spending on things like housing.

Aside from abolishing or defunding the police, there is also real reform that we can get done now, without waiting for the cogs of bureaucracy to turn, or election cycles to come around. What are some of those things that we can demand now?

There are spaces for abolition and I think that most people are with us on this one: police don’t belong in schools. Period. Right now., the LAUSD schools have police armed with AR15 weapons. The first thing that we can do to end policing or to defund police is to remove them from schools. We’re working with our partners from StudentsDeserve, we’re working with the teacher’s union UTLA, to immediately remove police from schools. We talk about bureaucracy, but these are things that can happen overnight, all it takes is a decision to end the funding of LA School Police, which is the largest school police system in the country.

We can also have Recs and Parks sever their relationship with the LAPD, this is happening around the country. People are recognizing that police have no business in the parks, we need youth workers in the parks, so lets severe those ties — that’s only the stroke of a pen by the head of the department.

The LA police union has said that the reason they’re taking up more of the budget is because they’re doing jobs of social workers, drug rehabilitation counselors, and EMTs. What we’re saying is they have no business or expertise in doing those jobs, so let’s give them a break. You shouldn’t be doing those jobs, let’s move that money to hire real social workers, real drug rehabilitation counselors, and real EMTs.

Sometimes we talk about bureaucracy and we know that white supremacist capitalism sets up systems to make it seem difficult to do the things that need to be done, but the city council can change the budget at any time. It doesn’t take long, all it takes is eight votes of the city council, which is what they did in Minneapolis. All they did was vote for it — all we need our city council to do is have the will to overturn the mayor’s budget. It can be done, it doesn’t have to take some long, drawn-out process.

Right now, there is a real possibility that we’re going to have to take to the streets en masse, multiple times, if we want things to get done and really want them to change. How are protests organized, and how are actions planned?

We spend a whole lot of time strategizing as a team in BLM and among our ally groups. We have a commitment to group-centered leadership, which is the recognition that no one person should be in charge of the movement, it should be a collective of people.

This last week we’ve had an action every day. Some things are highly visible like Sunday’s march in Hollywood, where we had more than 100,000 people in the streets, but then there are some things that we don’t put in the media because it’s not meant for everybody. We had a black community meeting that was invitation-only, not to be exclusive but to say that we knew the church basement we were meeting in couldn’t accommodate tens of thousands of people so we sent out personal invites to folks and had a couple of hundred people talk about what it means to defund the police, and getting into conversations about revolutionary radical visions, and how do we get some justice right now, today.

We strategize and we talk and figure out how to balance — our strategy is always to disrupt white supremacy and build black community, so how do we strike that balance? It takes a community of people who are committed to doing the work, to figuring out that balance and planning out the next move.

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Right now there is a lot of passion amongst people who want to help, aside from protesting, donating, and signing petitions — especially for those who are immunocompromised — how else can a person help end police violence?

There is a whole lot people can do. A lot of our actions are still online, recognizing that there are still people who are immunocompromised. So today, from 1-2 pm, we have a Twitter storm, we’re asking everybody to call in to the budget committee, we’re asking people to send emails to the LA city budget committee, we’re also continuing our work in places like Torrance, where Christopher Deandre Mitchell was killed by two Torrance police officers, Anthony Chavez and Matthew Concannon. He was killed in a span of 15 seconds of their approach to the car. They still haven’t been fired.

Every Tuesday night, we put pressure on the Torrance city council to both fire those officers and also establish a police oversight commission. People who are immunocompromised can engage in actions like that.

There are three things everyone can offer: your voice, your body, and your resources. If your body is not available then please share your voice and your resources. Amplify what we’re saying, even if it’s as simple as tweeting out or posting on your page “Defund the police,” even if its something as simple as explaining to your family what defunding the police means. One of the greatest resources we received recently was a $500 Uber Eats gift card. The reason that’s great is because we have meetings, and we need food at those meetings. If you have gift cards you aren’t using, please give them to us, we’ll make use of them, there is a need for sound systems. You can donate things like that. Let me just say: whatever it is you have, bring it to the movement. Anything, whatever it is.

We recently got into a relationship with the singer Amber Riley. She has one of the most magnificent voices I’ve ever heard in my life, what she does now is show up at the actions and sing, and it brings life into those actions. You might not be able to get out and do it, but whatever it is you have, please contribute it.

When someone is donating to BLM or one of their local BLM chapters, where does that money go and how is it being used?

Black Lives Matter is not a traditional non-profit organization. Nobody works for Black Lives Matter or gets a check from Black Lives Matter. We’re not employees. When you donate money, we use that money for a range of things including organizing work. We use it to pay for flyers, we use it to pay for sound systems, we use it to amplify posts, we use it to support families.

When people are killed by police they’re not considered crime victims, so money that would normally go to victims of violent crime don’t go to those folks, so we help to pay for both funerals and independent autopsies, which are hugely important because, as we’ve seen with the murder of George Floyd, sometimes the coroners are in bed with these law enforcement agencies and their reports don’t reflect what actually happened.

We have some medical examiners who volunteer their time with us, but we still have to pay for their expenses, the storage of the body, etcetera. The donations make sure families can get independent autopsies which generally cost about six to seven thousand dollars per person on the low end.

We’re in the midst of an economic fallout from a health pandemic, so we also do a lot of mutual aide work. When people can’t pay for their groceries or need help paying their utilities or other bills we try to contribute to that. There is virtually no administrative overhead, so the space in which we meet, the space in which we store things, those are all donated. We don’t pay for anything but utilities, phones, and the internet in those spaces, so your donations go directly into the streets.

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What’s something every protestor should know before hitting the streets?

We always try to have legal observers there, and we always try to have street medics there, but safety is a huge issue. You don’t have to worry so much about the protestors, but the police violence we’ve seen with this round of protests has been particularly brutal. We say that especially if you’re coming out with kids — and I’m a single mom so I always come out with my children — that you make sure you have an exit plan. That you make sure someone knows what to do if you get separated from your children. If you’re on parole or probation or if you have warrants, you want to make sure you think it through around whether or not you want to do certain things, we definitely don’t want you out on the frontline next to the police.

We also make sure people write down the number of the National Lawyers Guild on their arm so that if you are arrested we can help provide you with some legal support so we can make sure you’re released.

Then I also think it’s just a good call, in general, to engage in the safe practice of letting someone always know where you are and what your emergency plan is. Always have. an energy plan and don’t come to protests alone, find at least one other person to go with you.

A lot of people right now are frustrated by the process of reform and voting and getting things done through official channels. Do you have a message for first-time voters, and those who feel disenfranchised by the systems we have in place?

I think you should vote because even if you’re not going to vote for the President — which I think you should — but even if that doesn’t move you, we need to get this district attorney out of office. We need to get Jackie Lacey out of office. If you don’t vote for anything else, go to the polls and vote in the DA race and make sure you don’t vote for Jackie Lacey. If you live in other cities or other counties, make sure you research who your DA is and whether or not you want to keep them. The district attorney is an elected official who prosecutes crimes, so we want to make sure that as that they are prosecuting, the first people who go to jail for committing crimes are the police who brutalize and kill our people.

For protestors, what is the next step and how do we keep up this historic and unprecedented momentum?

Don’t go in the house. Don’t let them lure you with crumbs and tell you now its time to go home. We need to stay in these streets and we also need to organize. It’s really important to plug into organizations. If you’re black and want to join Black Lives Matter, we welcome you. If you’re white and you want to support Black Lives Matter, we’re asking you to join White People for Black Lives, and there is lots of other organizations Centro CSO, American Indian Movement — find an organization that speaks to you and join that organization.

Transformative change does not happen just one person at a time, being plugged into an organization increases our power exponentially.

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“We’re Tired, We’re Overworked, And We’re Scared”: Five Medical Workers On Their COVID-19 Experience


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Jay-Z’s Tidal Is Being Investigated In Norway For Allegedly Faking Streaming Numbers

Over two years ago now, there were reports that Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming platform falsified some of their streaming numbers; Specifically, for Kanye West and Beyonce. In January of 2019, though, a Tidal representative denied that the platform was under investigation. Now it looks like either that wasn’t true or the situation has changed since then: Norwegian financial publication Dagens Næringsliv (DN) reports that Tidal is in fact under investigation for data fraud in Norway.

DN notes that the formal investigation, which was first launched last June, has been approved by the Norwegian Supreme Court Appeals Committee. The initial allegations first came to light through a DN investigation, in which the publication alleged they obtained access to Tidal hard drives and discovered that listening stats for Beyonce’s Lemonade and Kanye’s The Life Of Pablo had been inflated, which could have an affect on royalties paid to artists.

A Tidal representative said in 2019, “Tidal is not a suspect in the investigation. We are communicating with Økokrim. From the very beginning, [Dagens Næringsliv] has quoted documents that they have not shared with us in spite of repeated requests. DN has repeatedly made claims based on information we believe may be falsified. We are aware that at least one person we suspected of theft has been questioned. We cannot comment further at this time and refer to our previous statement, which still stands.”

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J Balvin Gets His Heart Broken By An Imaginary Girlfriend In The Animated ‘Azul’ Video

Colombian pop singer J Balvin released his concept album Colores back in March and the singer continues giving his fans new content through an array of videos. So far, Balvin has released visuals accompanying seven of the ten tracks on the record. Now, Balvin takes a different approach with an animated visual to his song “Azul.”

In the 3D-animated visual directed by Colin Tilley, J Balvin experiences heartbreak at the hands of an imaginary girlfriend. The singer orders a life-sized doll that he promptly falls in love with, only to discover she is cheating on him with another. Balvin undergoes grief and heartache but eventually puts effort into becoming a better version of himself for her.

With Colores, Balvin purposefully opted out of features on the majority of the tracklist and instead opted to shine as a songwriter. In an interview with Apple Music, Balvin detailed how he managed to whittle a list of 40 songs down into a 10-track album: “What we’d do was we’d play the song and close our eyes, and each one of us would name the color that the song made us feel,” J Balvin said. “The color that prevailed, that was the song’s name.”

Watch J Balvin’s “Azul” above.

Colores is out now via Universal. Get it here.

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Blake Griffin Feels ‘Great’ And Is Preparing To Ramp Up His Workouts After Knee Surgery

In an interview with Pistons media as Detroit wraps up its season officially, Blake Griffin said he doesn’t believe he’s finished and has been back on the court working out during the NBA shutdown.

Lingering knee injuries kept Griffin out of all but 15 games this season, leading some to believe he could be a candidate for a disabled player exception, effectively ending his career. Griffin’s words on Thursday should put a stop to those theories.

Griffin has been on the court since May and told Pistons media he could escalate his training in a pinch should Detroit organize a mini-camp or participate in scrimmages, as has been rumored.

“If I’m on the Detroit Pistons, I’m doing everything I can to help them,” he said.

On the topic of organizing some sort of scrimmage or exhibition contests this summer, Griffin he understood the urgency to play, but worried about the risks of something that would have no material value in the standings.

Griffin, 31, has two years and nearly $76 million left on the maximum contract he originally signed with the Clippers in 2017. The rebuilding Pistons are in a dicey situation, recently announcing they would begin the search for a general manager while also still having Griffin’s monstrous contract on the books. They can add around young pieces like Sekou Doumbouya, Christian Wood, and Luke Kennard, but are a long way from competing.

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The Ins And Outs Of AEW Dynamite 6/10/20: Orange Crushed

Previously on the Ins and Outs of All Elite Wrestling Dynamite: An injured Dr. Britt Baker DMD showed us why she’s a “roll model,” Cody Rhodes managed to retain the TNT Championship despite headbutting a wall, and Orange Cassidy declared himself the Baddest Man On The Planet.

If you’d like to keep up with this column and its thinly veiled Best and Worst format, you can keep tabs on the Ins and Outs of AEW Dynamite tag page. You can keep track of all things All Elite here.

Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.

And now, the Ins and Outs of All Elite Wrestling Dynamite for June 10, 2020.

All In: Blood Oranges

There are probably more important moments to talk about from this week’s Dynamite, but I want to lead with Orange Cassidy scoring the win for his team in a six-man tag against the Inner Circle and being beaten within an inch of his life by Chris Jericho and a gigantic bad of oranges from under the ring. So many questions. So many.

Jericho returns to commentary this week, which is a great idea beyond AEW suddenly having a four-man announce booth. It’s also worth noting that it makes an announce team of four white guys, including a 68-year old, a 62-year old, and a 49-year old. I know they don’t want to send any of them to the unemployment line considering that Jim Ross is a wrestling legend, Tony Schiavone is an all-time great as well, and Excalibur’s the only guy out there trying to accurately call matches, but I think All Elite could really benefit from either rotating the crew around on a weekly basis, or just cutting their losses and deciding who should permanently call what. I personally loved the Jericho and Schiavone team, but nobody in wrestling history’s a better straight man than JR. Certainly not among people who are still around. I think it’ll be easier when the inevitable AEW Thunder starts up and you can spread them out a little more.

I’m way off track. The important thing here is that Chris Jericho beat down Orange Cassidy with a bag of oranges like the world’s biggest asshole, and I love it. Leave it to Chris Jericho to decide a man named “orange” should get hit with oranges. If QT Marshall doesn’t get concussed by a bushel of apples sometime soon, what are we even doing here? Jericho vs. Cassidy is exactly the kind of feud we need in wrestling right now to make us smile, and I hope they lean into the “Blood Orange” thing and give Orange a violent, rage-fueled alter-ego a la Kishin Liger. My only disappointment is that he bled blood instead of juice.

Side note: Jericho watching Jake Hager fight Orange Cassidy and say it looks like Hager’s beating up the 15-year old version of himself is his new funniest commentary moment. How is that even possible on the same episode where he declared, “He’s the butcher for a reason. He cuts meat!”

All In: For The Record

Me watching The Revival win a 10-minute tag team match on Wednesday night prime-time cable television using nothing but teamwork, timing, and rigid rule-following.

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I missed you guys so much. Supplementary Bests also go to FTR hitting a spike piledriver in front of both Tully Blanchard and Arn Anderson, the Shatter Machine being renamed to the WILDLY superior “Goodnight Express” — that should just be their team name, for real — and the post-match interaction with the Elite, wherein Hangman Page’s beautiful country ass shows up dressed like a picnic and ready to drink.

The former Revival being faces because they love wrestling and respect the rules, the Bucks being heels because they’re flamboyant and self-obsessed — just listen to them talk about solely carrying tag team wrestling for the past 15 years and how they’re the best tag team in AEW despite never being tag champs here and losing in the first round of the title tournament — Kenny Omega being helpfully oblivious as always, and Hangman Page being the only guy in that circle of friends who understands the dynamics. That’s a good blueprint for a killer triple threat Tag Team Championship match that subverts our modern expectations of heels and faces and continues slowly, slowly returning AEW to its upright and locked position. Team “rules are cool and The Elite is secretly evil” represent.

All Out: Elitism

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Speaking of The Elite being (barely) secretly evil, boo to former hair collecting cultist Brandi Rhodes for suggesting Allie shouldn’t be allowed to wear a Nightmare Family jacket. You guys have given your dog a dozen t-shirts, QT Marshall’s girlfriend can wear your colors whether she’s secretly plotting to kidnap him and chop him up into little pieces or not.

All In: Here He Is, Doing Everything He Can

One of this week’s best developments is skateboarding legend Tony Hawk going from “famous person who noticed what you were doing because you had a skateboard” to “famous person doing a cameo on the wrestling show in support of the skateboarding wrestler.” The next step is figuring out how to get Darby Allin into the Tony Hawk Pro Skater remake as a hidden character.

If nothing else, Darby should discover a hidden VHS tape the next time he considers jumping off something high and hurting himself.

Okay, the next next time.

All In: Joey Janela And Sonny Kiss Are Officially A Tag Team

Tag team name, “Sonny Boy.”

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Janela and Kiss are great on Dark, but I’m relieved to see them not only address their on-screen character histories (through Janela wondering how he went from main-eventing to oblivion, which is a valid question), but get to do it on Dynamite proper. I’m very ready for actual weekly Sonny Kiss content, especially if they go full Raven and Kanyon with it and have them hang out in a gated community and do fashion shows.

All IN: Britt Baker, A Wrestler For Our Times

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“Let’s talk about struggles. I have probably the most struggles!” I can’t get enough of Dr. Britt Baker as White Privelige: The Wrestler. Fucking hilarious.

All In: Cult Cabana

There’s a good story happening here with Matt Hardy trying to appeal to Sammy Guevara’s better nature by comparing his career to Sammy’s, and putting him over as a guy who keeps getting knocked down, but keeps getting back up. I’m telling you, in addition to The Elite being secret heels, The Inner Circle are secret babyfaces. Except for Hager. Hager’s character could be “volunteers every weekend at the children’s hospital” and I’d watch him like, I hate your guts, Hager.

Yes, there’s a good story happening, but let’s talk about how Colt Cabana might actually end up successfully recruited by the Dark Order. Sadly one of our readers beat me to the joke about how if he put on the mask he’d be “45,” but it’s too funny to leave out. Honestly all I want from Colt Cabana in AEW is for him to join this incel cult and reboot his podcast as a pro-Dark Order conspiracy theories show. That’s basically what Chris Jericho’s doing already.

Also On This Episode

Party At The Turner Mansion

Cody Rhodes defending the TNT Championship against Marq Quen wasn’t the total banger I wanted it to be, but that’s to be expected when you consider Quen hasn’t wrestled a singles match in like three years. It’s still really good, though, and Quen got a HUGE spotlight in which to shine even if the winner was never in doubt. I still appreciate Cody winning some of his matches with secondary moves and basic submission holds, like here, when he counters a moonsault into an ankle lock and then transitions to a sort of ankle lock with his feet. It was more or less a “deathlock” without anything being locked.

The thing that takes the match from “All In” to “Also On This Episode,” however, is Jake Hager. That’s Cody’s TNT Championship opponent for Fyter Fest, and if Cody can get even a watchable match out of Hager at this point I’ll consider him a miracle worker. Even the match with Dustin went too long and found a way to involve nagging conservative wives and forced kissing. I just kinda wish that if they’re that into keeping Jack Swagger on the roster they’d keep him as a completely silent third man in trios matches and stop trying to make him happen as a singles star. There’s a shit-ton of men and women on the AEW roster who are fighting desperately for a spot on the show, and fucking Jake Hager gets repeated main events and title opportunities despite his matches being about as entertaining as a colostomy. It’s just frustrating is all, especially after having watched the same shit happen in WWE and Lucha Underground.

Whom Is Greater And Whiter?

I could go the rest of my life never hearing Bill Ass refer to himself as a, “great white,” but points to MJF for the line, “I’m shocked you’re not too busy trying to get another one of your scumbag talentless sons a job here.” I’m telling you, as soon as they abandon Maxwell’s apparent desire to be the heeliest heel that ever heeled and aiming his venom at the company’s other bad guys, they’re going to have a dangerously over “hero” (so to speak) on their hands. Although frankly I’d cheer a dirty pile of laundry if it was positioned against Billy Gunn.


HIDDEN MACHINES

Jon Moxley gets jumped by Brian Cage because he wisely thought he’d be safe turning his back to a huge, empty parking lot while Cage’s manager got really close to his face and distracted him. I feel like you probably should’ve seen that coming, man. Cage finishes sending the mechanical message by bodyslamming Mox into the back windshield of a Chevy Cruze with “AEW” license plates. Did they buy a whole car just to break part of it? Between this and FTR’s entrance truck, AEW really wants us to buy Chevrolet® brand automobiles.

Penelope Ford Has Pinned The Women’s Champion!

You’ve got to think that puts her in line for a possible future title opportunity, Corey.

I probably like Penelope Ford more than most people who do what I do for a living and am happy to see someone new being positioned to challenge for the AEW Women’s Championship, but I’m still patiently waiting for the women’s division to get a few more character pieces and operate beyond the rankings system that rarely seems to inform any of the matches are stories. MJF was right when he talked about how he’s been undefeated for ages and has been the number one contender for three straight weeks but hasn’t gotten a shot at either of the singles championships. Jungle Boy and Marq Quen are getting those matches instead. I’m not saying we should be listening to MJF, but it continues to be absurd to have rankings, brag about how your rankings matter, and then only bring them up when you don’t have any better ideas. People are still mostly just getting title shots by decree, or like we see here, pinning the champ in non-title matches.

Shida vs. Ford will be a nice little program while Britt Baker heals up and prepares for her inevitable run as AEW’s first Women’s Champion with a character beyond [*waves*] or [*screams*]. Not that I don’t love Hikaru Shida, because I do. She’s just about what happens in the ring, and very rarely what happens outside of it. Ford’s character is just “wears sunglasses, constantly cheats for her significant other,” which Kip Sabian also uses when the roles are reversed. The matches are good, I’m just confident enough in AEW’s ability to learn and grow that I don’t want to sit here typing abject praise and imply that “good” is all it can be. Maybe I should. Promotions seem to like that in their critics. Have you heard about The Greatest Match Ever™, happening this Sunday?

All In: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

Mr. Bliss

If Colt does join the Dark Order, does he become 45?

editor’s note:

WWE

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer

A dejected Colt Cabana watches the monitor in Mr Brodie Lee’s office as his Chevy Cruze gets vandalized

Jae-Su

Watching the Misery Index is a firm Jake Hager.

HVO-Jetfuel

I’m liking Taz and Cage as the Earth-2 versions of Heyman and Lesnar

AshBlue

Please let that Sonny/Janela bit turn out like the time Wayne Brady picked up Dave Chapelle.

Daniel Valentin

Cody’s chyron is in the TNT title’s colors.

I swear, there must be a guy in the AEW payroll whose job is simply to think up tiny details that make the show more awesome.

AddMayne

me watching FTR matches

GIPHY

Endy_Mion

Missed opportunity for Mox to recruit FTR in his war against Cage. If anything, they know how to Shatter, Machine.

JayBone2

Colt is easily swayed by those with a certain cult of personality.

The Real Birdman

Private Hardy was right there, Schiavone

AEW

That about wraps it up for this week’s column. Dynamite continues to put out good effort after good effort at a time when they could be doing nothing (or, as WWE is doing, next to it), and I want to reiterate that any criticisms I’m levying here are done with great love for an attempt at WCW Monday Nitro 2020 and the hope that a positive, communicative fandom can help mold it into something approaching a perfect weekly wrestling show. Or we just complain our way into being ignored like 99.9% of The Internet and they do whatever they wanna do. Worst case scenario, maybe we get fewer Jack Swagger pay-per-view matches.

Thanks for reading about Dynamite! Leave us a comment below, give the column a share on social media, and make sure you’re here next week. See you then!

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Pete Davidson Teased His Mystery Role In James Gunn’s ‘The Suicide Squad’

It was only a few years ago that Pete Davidson was playing unnamed characters in other’s people romantic-comedies — now he’s a legit leading man.

Following his underrated performance in Big Time Adolescence, the SNL star is New York royalty in The King of Staten Island (out Friday), Judd Apatow’s first film in five years. Davidson was also cast in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which finished shooting before the global shut-down, although it’s still unknown who he’s playing.

The comedian didn’t give anything away while promoting The King of Staten Island, but he did drop some hints. “I was in a big, uncomfortable costume,” he told Yahoo!. “I think that would be a big difference. I got to hold Glocks and stuff like that.” Hm, so he’s in a comic book movie playing someone in a costume with weapons. That narrows it down to basically everyone but Harley Quinn (she’s taken) and Joker (tried that already).

“[The King of Staten Island and The Suicide Squad] were both really fun to work with, everybody was really open and honest and the cast and crew was just so much fun”

The Suicide Squad, which also stars Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, Nathan Fillion, Storm Reid, and Taika Waititi (pretty good cast you got there), is scheduled to come out on August 6, 2021.

(Via Yahoo!)

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After Multiple Delays, Dixie Chicks Have A New Release Date For Their Comeback Album, ‘Gaslighter’

In the summer of 2019, Dixie Chicks stirred up hope that they would have a new album out by the end of that year. Fans know that this did not come to pass, but that disappointment was short-lived, as Gaslighter was then given a May 1 release date. Again, that date was not met, as the trio delayed the album due to the coronavirus pandemic. That delay did not come with a new release date, but finally, the group has offered one with a fun announcement.

Taking to Instagram, the group shared a trio of images of their heads edited onto the bodies of figure skaters. All three are wearing sashes, and together, they read, “July 17, 2020.” The background of all images also features the album’s title, Gaslighter, repeated. The group also shared a combined version of the images on Twitter.

The delay of Gaslighter earlier this year came just days before its scheduled release. Still, fans shouldn’t mind waiting a bit longer, as they’ve already been patient for a while now. It’s been a long time since a Dixie Chicks album was given to the world, as their most recent full-length effort is Taking The Long Way, which dropped way back in 2006.