What I'm Watching: Twisters, The Umbrella Academy, Unsolved Mysteries, and More

Plus: Arrow Video's streaming service, Apple TV's Manhunt, and Eric Bogosian's plays.

Here’s a rundown of everything I’ve been watching, reading, and writing about lately:

The shows:

• Since the Trump assassination attempt, I’ve become interested in assassination stories as a prism through which to understand the socio-political landscape of certain time periods, so of course my natural next step after some Wikipedia rabbit holes was Apple TV+’s Manhunt. I haven’t finished the new-ish series about the death of Abraham Lincoln and the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth yet, but I’m enjoying its approach to the era, which is at once pleasantly talky (there are a lot of surprisingly interesting scenes of old white guys talking in rooms) and unsubtly urgent. The anachronistic show draws obvious but strong parallels to major events from modern (as in, still unfolding) U.S. history. It also opens up a window to an under-examined facet of this story by putting focus on the people who were most impacted by Lincoln’s policies – namely, Black Americans. It’s not nearly the best thing the streamer has put out, but it’s pretty dang engrossing. @ Apple TV+, do a Sopranos-style Jack Ruby series next!
• The new season of Netflix’s true crime anthology Unsolved Mysteries is well worth a watch, even if it makes a couple of frustrating missteps in service of delivering more mystifying stories. This time around, the reboot of the classic real-life mystery show presents a mix of cases that are extremely well-known (Jack the Ripper, The Mothman) and ones that are under-examined but baffling, bolstering both with convincing eyewitness and expert testimony plus tons of intriguing details. Keep an eye on Dread Central, as I’ve got a full review coming there very soon.
• I found myself weirdly moved by the final season of The Umbrella Academy, a wildly inconsistent superhero show that nearly ran itself into the ground a few years ago with its painfully bad third season. The fourth and final batch of episodes starts off shaky – some of the show’s “comedic” writing can be extremely stupid, and it has a lot of plot holes – but it comes together over time before ending on a bizarre, emotional, sure-to-be-polarizing note. As always, the show has great visuals, and even at its worst points, it’s held together by a few great performances. Here’s my full review for Inverse (note: I did not write the title).

The movies:

• Did you know that beloved cult movie distributor Arrow Video has a streaming service? I got a free trial recently, and managed to check out a few genre movies I’ve been meaning to watch for ages. My favorite of the bunch was probably Season of the Witch, AKA Hungry Wives. Horror legend George A. Romero released this housewife-dabbles-in-the-occult film four years after Night of the Living Dead, and it features some enjoyably odd, borderline experimental filmmaking choices. More importantly, though, I think it functions better than expected as an of-its-time look at the struggles of second wave feminism, as protagonist Joan (Jan White) attempts to liberate herself from the claustrophobia of domesticity by trying out witchcraft – and some other groovy, sinful stuff. If you dug The Love Witch or want a story that’s like Belle de Jour by way of Rosemary's Baby (though not nearly as good as either of those), this one's for you.
• Also available on Arrow (they’re not paying me, I swear) is Demons, the utterly balls-to-the-wall ‘80s gorefest by Lamberto Bava. I watched some of Bava’s movies a few years back for a spooky season project, but can’t believe I put this one off until now. It’s not nearly the best horror movie of its kind, but it might be the most horror movie of its kind: it’s got Evil Dead-level possession nastiness taking place in a movie theater, film props used to fight a horde of the undead, punk teens doing coke out of an actual Coke can, and so much more. It functions not just as a straight horror film, but also as a hilariously over-the-top take on ‘80s excess. Like most Italian horror, Demons is deeply gross but also gorgeous to look at.
• You probably already know by now that Twisters, the “standalone sequel” to the corny-fun 1996 blockbuster, is a good time at the movies. I personally think it tilts a bit more towards ridiculous than entertaining, and I found the script pretty undercooked, but you can’t really go wrong with a movie about yeehaw Glen Powell driving pickup trucks into tornadoes for a good cause. I’m not quite as enamored with Twisters as most of my friends seem to be, but I’m also glad everyone’s having such a blast with it.
• Back to Arrow for a minute: I’m glad I finally watched Bride of Re-Animator, a movie that’s almost entirely pointless but is also both gayer and more creatively disgusting than the original.

The reads:

• Do you ever read an essay so breathtakingly good that it makes you immediately look up everything else the author has ever written? That was me with this piece from Meg Elison that I came across when researching the way Stephen King writes fat characters (for my own piece).
• Lofty, inaccessible best books of the year lists are out. Best books lists that feature complementary snack and drink recommendations and plenty of focus on the author’s own organic interests, like this super readable one from Vox’s Constance Grady, are in.
• I’m at the point in my Interview with the Vampire withdrawal where I’m filling the void with supplemental material. You’d think I’d start with the Anne Rice novels, but I went for something more unorthodox: reading Eric Bogosian’s plays. In case you didn’t already know (plenty of younger fans don't), the man behind Daniel Molloy is also an acclaimed playwright responsible for works like SubUrbia and Talk Radio, both of which I recently read and enjoyed. I think I slightly prefer the former to the latter, but both have their edgy, angry, American-dream-gone-to-rot charms. SubUrbia is a dark slice of life story set outside a 7/11 in the ‘90s, where recent high school grads – burnouts, artists, and the girls who date them – meet on one eventful night, while Talk Radio follows a nasty shock radio host through his own increasingly chaotic night. If these sound familiar, it may be because both of them were turned into movies, directed by Richard Linklater and Oliver Stone, respectively.
• I put off reading Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, for years because I find Collins’ books singularly thrilling (someone come talk to me about The Underland Chronicles stat!) and wanted to save this one for a rainy day. That rainy day finally came, and the book was as good as I’d hoped: exciting and harrowing, with simple, clear prose and a never-simple portrayal of authoritarian government and the slippery slopes that lead to it.
• I also dipped my toes back into the YA(ish) lit world for Sawkill Girls, a dark fantasy book I picked out on a whim in an attempt to make the lead-up to Halloween last months longer than it actually should (sue me, holiday police!). The book by Claire Legrand lost me a bit at the end as its lore got overly-involved and it started to give off big “secretly gunning for a sequel” vibes, but for the most part it’s a lush, freaky, evocative horror story about an island plagued by a girl-killing entity.
• This Fansplaining article about the perils of freelance journalism and fandom hit so close to home, it nearly gave me stress hives.
• Alex de Campi’s graphic novel Parasocial was a quintessential three-star read for me, but you’ll dig it if you’ve ever wondered what Misery would look like in the age of fan conventions.

Odds and ends:

• One of my all-time favorite bookstores, East Bay Booksellers, burned down in a fire at the end of July and I still can't believe it. EBB was the first place I ever saw my byline in a major newspaper, and it’s where I went for birthday gifts and author events and lunch break wanders during the nearly five years I spent working in Oakland. Luckily, the community has rallied around the store’s staff big time in the wake of this awful situation. There’s a GoFundMe to help rebuild, and it’s almost hit its initial goal.
• I cannot stop talking about The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi, a podcast about a dying mobster who claims to have helped kill a pope. The pod is hampered a bit by some narrative choices (it’s hosted by one of the producers behind The Jinx, and he’s skeptical of everything Raimondi and his loved ones say to a degree that goes beyond “journalistically rigorous” into “just kind of rude”), but it’s also a total blast. Somewhere out there, I imagine Martin Scorsese groaning as he adds this story to the list of movies he needs to make before he dies.
• Also on the pod front, Chameleon: The Michigan Plot reframes a recent story about an armed backwoods militia as a case of FBI bumbling and overreach on par with some of the bureau’s biggest 20th century missteps. A weird, shocking, sometimes frustrating listen that ultimately gives the accused too much benefit of the doubt.
• A somber switched birth saga somehow stretches into seven episodes in the rare CBC Podcasts misfire, Come By Chance. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this downbeat docudrama, but it’s really only worth the listen if you have a special interest in changeling stories – or Newfoundland, where it’s set.
• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about shows that were originally advertised as belonging solely to a streamer like Netflix or (HBO) Max, only to eventually leave the streamer altogether – sometimes never to be seen again. I’ve written pretty extensively about this phenomenon before, but last week I decided to get specific with it, figuring out which Netflix Originals are no longer available on the platform they once called home and where they are now. You can read the results of that mini-investigation over at Slashfilm.
• Also at Slashfilm, I ranked every season of Friday Night Lights–
• –and every episode of The Bear so far, an exercise I used to try to figure out what the restaurant-set show is actually trying to be about, and how it’s both failed and succeeded in its first few seasons.

I apologize for the ultra-long, ultra-late newsletter this week: since I last wrote, I gained semi-permanent resident status in the UK, got retroactively diagnosed with COVID, had a bad but unsurprising asthma attack while attempting a charity walk (the donations I collected still went to Papyrus, don’t worry!), and got over all of that during a short holiday along the English coastline. I won some stuffed animals from claw machines, listened to a lot of Chappell Roan and Fall Out Boy, and came back slightly more well-rested than usual. I have a feeling I’ll be dealing with the post-COVID slowdown I’m feeling for a while, but hopefully that’ll give me more time to watch good TV and tell you all about it.

Before I go, I also want to thank everyone who replied across all platforms to last issue’s shout into the void. I’m truly heartened to know that y’all are still reading. As always, I’d love to read about what you’re watching, reading, listening to, and loving lately. Don’t be afraid to drop a comment in the digital space of your choosing. Happy (almost) weekend!