A Supersized What I'm Watching: The Substance, The Diplomat, Queer, Cross, and More

Here’s a rundown of everything I’ve watched, read, and listened to lately:

The shows:

• I was initially dismayed to see that the second season of The Diplomat had only six episodes, but the Netflix series about an American ambassador to the UK (Keri Russell, fantastic as ever) attempting to de-escalate a series of international incidents zips along at such an energetic pace and includes so many great twists that it’s still richly rewarding. This is the type of show that it’s easy to overlook when talking about the best TV being made right now, simply because it’s so smooth and – unlike Kate – it keeps its seams invisible while dealing with some truly complex plots.
• Few true crime concepts are more unsettling to me than stories about the families of serial killers coming to terms with that reality, so Netflix’s docuseries This is the Zodiac Speaking, about now-grown kids who spent time with Arthur Leigh Allen realizing what a creep he was, shook me up a bit. It’s a revelatory, jaw-dropping doc that anyone who’s interested in the Zodiac case should watch, though it does do that Netflix thing where it leaves out key evidence that doesn’t support its thesis.
• The Over The Garden Wall tenth anniversary short, made with stop motion pros Aardman Animations, is very cute.
• I’ve binge-watched about a season and a half of Industry, HBO’s cutthroat finance world drama, and can feel my interest in the show waning. It’s undeniably compelling – thanks in part to agile and sometimes-brutal performances by Myha’la, Marisa Abela, and Ken Leung – but the first half of its second season has lost momentum and several storylines seem to be treading water. It also employs some sloppy shaky-cam and its scripts are pretty inconsistent. Tons of people have recommended this show to me, and I know it’s garnered plenty of Succession comparisons, so I’m going to keep watching…eventually.
• My partner and I have been dogsitting this week, and our pal Murray (see: the bottom of this post) seems to like it when we have the TV on, so I’ve been throwing on all sorts of stuff while we work. So far, I’ve been most pleasantly surprised by Cross, the new Prime Video adaptation of James Patterson’s Alex Cross series. Any recommendation I give here should come with the huge caveat that I’ve only paid attention to about 60% of the show, but I appreciate the ways its Black detective protagonist – played by Aldis Hodge – subverts and even interrogates the largely white and fundamentally right-wing cop stories that make up so many Prime Originals (and so much of TV in general). There’s also a creepy serial killer who Mads Mikkelson’s Hannibal would probably love (or kill. Or both).
• The final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is here, and it’s fine! I’ve never been a huge fan of the way this animated comedy seems allergic to attempting to get even Star Trek-level deep, and that aversion is all the more obvious as the show enters its home stretch. It’s still funny, though, and that and its hugely likable cast count for something.

The movies:

• I had a blast watching The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s gross and goopy satirical horror movie about an aging celebrity (Demi Moore) who undergoes a mysterious procedure to make herself young again. You can read my more complete thoughts on the movie over on /Film’s list of the best horror movies of the year.
• Speaking of scary movies, The First Omen rips. You don’t have to have watched any prior Omen movies to check out this stylish and sinister prequel, though it does end with a clunky tie-in epilogue that’s the only weak thing about it. In fact, this chiller about a nun joining a convent with possible Antichrist-birthing aspirations (not to pit two divas against one another, but it’s uncanny how much this movie has in common with Immaculate, which was released around the same time) is so cinematically pleasing that it might actually make you want to watch more classic horror. It calls to mind not just The Omen films, but also touchstones like Suspiria, Rosemary’s Baby, Possession, plus the films of Ari Aster. Nell Tiger Free is an incredible horror star (which we already knew from the whack-as-hell M. Night Shyamalan show Servant), and I’ll be seated for whatever director Arkasha Stevenson does next.
• I feel very “no thoughts, head empty” when I watch the Dune movies, which build up a complex sci-fi world I have trouble paying close attention to, but I really enjoyed Dune: Part 2 nonetheless. It’s a gorgeous sensory spectacle that warns us about tyrannical rulers, and what else can we really ask for in 2024?
• I’m pleasantly surprised to discover that Anna Kendrick is a hell of a director, as evidenced by her self-assured, ethically strong, and fairly ambitious debut, Woman of the Hour. I wrote earlier this year about the podcast The Dating Game Killer, which tells the same true story of serial killer Rodney Alcala, but Woman of the Hour takes a different (albeit justifiable and successful) approach. It focuses largely on the woman (played by Kendrick) who matched with Alcala on the popular game show, and anchors its point about the way violent men exploit the social contract with portraits of other victims and survivors. It’s quite good, but don't watch it if you live alone.
• Sometimes when you’re bored you just have to put on the first schlocky movie you see, and sometimes that movie is Night Monster, a culturally insensitive 1942 Bela Lugosi pic about a bitterly disabled man, a monster wandering the moors, and a silly skeleton that keeps getting teleported into an old house. This movie is ridiculous, but it’s also only 73 minutes long, and it has a couple of fun visual effects and performances. 
• Every year, there’s at least one award season movie I straight-up hate. Strangely, this year’s prime contender is by the same director who made my favorite movie of the year so far: Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. Having recently watched every Guadagnino movie to rank them, I know that the acclaimed director behind Challengers and Call Me By Your Name can be inconsistent, but I didn’t expect this movie about the sad-sack life of William Lee (a stand-in for gay Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, on whose book the movie is based) to be such a letdown. To be clear, it’s not offensive to me as a queer person – it’s just self-indulgent, slackly paced, and blandly scripted and performed. I can see the moments on screen where Guadagnino intended for emotion to crash over us like waves, but they left me feeling very little. I’m genuinely happy for anyone who did connect with the movie, but I certainly didn’t.

The reads:

• If you have space in your heart to read one more election post-mortem, make it this post from Tananarive Due about Octavia Butler and America’s legacy of activism in the face of oppression. It contains plenty of concrete information about where to go from here, and plenty of wisdom, too, including this great line from Steven Barnes: “The left seems chaotic because the right reaches toward the past, and there’s only one past. But there are infinite possibilities for the future.”
• In the spirit of Night Monster, I adored this AV Club hangout with Robert Eggers, in which he recommends enough old black-and-white Gothic films to fill a 24-hour marathon. If you’re still under the impression that the director behind The Witch and The Lighthouse is pretentious, this chat will shatter that image in the best way. He just loves movies like the rest of us.
• If you miss Lost, I recommend getting lost for a while in Lost: Back To The Island, the episode-by-episode critical companion by Emily St. James and Noel Murray. The word “critical” does a lot of heavy lifting here, as the pair are often quite harsh on the series they also clearly love (no one can convince me to hate you, season 3), but the book is filled with tremendous insights and connections. It also possesses something that, two decades on from the trippy, game-changing show’s premiere, is vanishingly rare: new writing on Lost that still feels original.
• My friend Amelia recently wrote about how there aren’t very many newer multi-season shows left to binge – and why that matters – at IGN. Points were made.
• I really appreciated this conversation Max Covill had with a movie trailer editor over on It’s The Pictures. Trailers are an art form, no doubt about it.
• The Scottish Gothics class I’m taking is winding down, and I’ve most recently read both James Hogg’s The True Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. While the latter always feels like half a story to me (what is with that non-ending?), the former is a dense but groundbreaking read about a man whose Calvinistic ideals (and the little devil on his shoulder) inspire him to become a devout murderer.
• Haymarket Books is giving away ten free ebooks about fighting fascism and collective action in light of the election. It’s a great deal on vital texts written by lifelong activists and change-makers, and I hope everyone in the States takes advantage of it.

The pods:

• I’ve had a few people tell me that Karina Longworth’s 2015 Charles Manson podcast, Charles Manson’s Hollywood (also sometimes called You Must Remember Manson) is their favorite podcast not just in the You Must Remember This stable, but in general. I understand the impulse: Longworth applies her signature brand of deep-deep-deep research to a series of events that defined the 20th century, and makes us realize in the process that most of us don’t actually know much about how the Manson family started or what they actually did. Engrossing, eerie, complex, and often very sad, this is a thoroughly told story about how the bright lights of Hollywood inspired some of the darkest events in recent memory.
• If you’re (understandably!) fed up with all the serial killer stuff I’m recommending this week, the antidote to the doom and gloom might just be the Decoder Ring episode “The Wrongest Bird in Movie History.” The delightful hour starts out by talking about the joys of birding before pitching itself as an investigative deep dive into a truly whacky bird portrayal that popped up in McG’s Charlie’s Angels movie in the year 2000. There’s something truly magical about how Decoder Ring can (still!) make listeners deeply invested in the seemingly mundane, and their dogged hunt for niche truths rarely pays off as enjoyably as it does this time.
• I already recommended an episode of David Farrier’s Flightless Bird to paid subscribers in the last newsletter, but I’m going to do a rare double-dip here to tell y’all about his special on the death penalty. The post-Armchair Expert iteration of his New Zealander-in-America pod seems to be going in a fantastic direction, as evidenced by this somber inside look at attempts to stop the execution of Marcellus Williams in Missouri.
• I may write more about it once the season gets into full swing, but I need my fellow CBC podcast lovers out there to know that there’s a new season of Someone Knows Something, the standard-setting investigative docuseries by crime reporter Dave Ridgen, out now. Intriguingly, the new story has apparently been 15 years in the making.
• If you’re into cult stuff or (American) football, Spiraled tells the deeply strange story of several NFL players who got roped into an unsettling religious organization. This is one of those “how have I not heard about this by now?” news stories, and it’s bolstered by the presence of some brave women speaking out about their husbands’ radicalization.
• I’m dismayed to find that I don’t like Lost Notes: Groupies, a podcast I was initially so excited about that I put a reminder for its release date in my calendar. The series interviews many of the rock groupies who were influential on the Sunset Strip scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it also idolizes them so completely – and without much meaningful commentary or cultural context by its host – that it may as well be their memoirs. Countless stories about sexual assault are shrugged off as “Hollywood encounters” or the price of doing business in the show's first few episodes, and while it makes sense to give these women the agency to talk about their memories in the way that rings most true to them, several issues that are screaming out for some additional perspective are minimized in favor of a cutesy, girlboss angle. It might get better, but I’m not sure I’ll finish this one.

Aside from that blurb on The Substance linked above, I don’t have much of my own writing to share at the moment, because I took some (unpaid) time off work to set up mental health treatment for the depression and anxiety that have been bogging me down for the past year or two. I’m already feeling a lot better, but the side effects of the medications I’m trying have made it tough for me to work any more than I absolutely need to, hence the unforgivably large gap between this newsletter and the last one.

Of course, there are also other, bigger things going on in the world that are making it hard for any of us to focus and keep hope right now. If you’re reading this, I’m grateful to you for spending some time here, and I hope you found something to read, watch, or listen to that will give you a little bit of comfort – or at least a few hours’ distraction.

What pop culture is getting you through this miserable November? Let me know, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll leave you with some pictures of Murray the dog laying our heads, which is one of his favorite things to do.