What I'm Watching: Saturday Night, Heretic, Juror #2, and More

Here’s a quick rundown on everything I’ve watched, read, and written about recently:

The shows:

• If you liked Buzzfeed Unsolved, the chaotic, comedic ghost-hunting show from former Buzzfeed staffers Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara, now’s probably a better time than ever to get into its follow-up series, Ghost Files. The show is made in-house at Watcher Entertainment, the duo’s much less dystopic independent company (formed with fellow Buzzfeed alum Steven Lim), and while every season has been supremely entertaining, the third reaches new heights thanks to its extended detour to the U.K. Ghost Files has always embraced skepticism much more than your average (read: phony) paranormal series, so it’s fun to see the guys grasp for rational explanations for what seem to be the super-restless ghosts of a country that’s much older than their own.
• The latest season of Bob’s Burgers continues to prove my theory that the show gets better with age. Between the open mic night adventure, the father-daughter boogie-boarding storyline, and Bob’s attempt to save the local drive-in, season 15 has a fantastic hit rate so far. The show remains the TV equivalent of a warm hug, and it’s subtly groundbreaking in its views on parenting and family. If you’re in need of a very long sitcom to binge during the winter months, you can’t get much better than this one.
• After managing to avoid the entire Real Housewives industrial-complex for well over a decade, I finally got caught in the crossfire of a multi-show marathon airing on cable when I was dogsitting. Having now caught random episodes of Orange County, Dallas, and New Jersey (and having subsequently Wikipedia searched every person on screen to figure out who’s gone to jail, gotten divorced, or started a stupid company in the years since), I have to admit…I get it. I’m avoiding the shows like the plague now lest I get properly sucked in, but if anyone happens to recommend one franchise over another in the comments, I might make a note for hypothetical future reference.
• Ronan Farrow’s new Max special Surveilled is technically a movie, but it plays more like an hour-long news segment. I generally love the reporter’s work (he really is That Guy Who Everything Happens To), but I found this overview of his investigation into a company that’s reportedly hacking the phones of activists on behalf of global governments pretty paint-by-numbers. It could’ve been an article (and probably was). 

The movies:

• I have a pretty complicated relationship with Saturday Night Live. In high school, the show was everything to me, and I devoured every related property I could find, from sitcoms made by alums to Best Of DVD compilations to Tom Shales and James Andrew Millers’ doorstop of an oral history book, Live From New York. Over time, I got behind on new episodes, and I eventually grew disillusioned with it in the wake of stuff like the Donald Trump-hosted episode and Maureen Ryan’s incendiary book Burn It Down. All this is to say that it would’ve made my life simpler if I’d hated Saturday Night, the Jason Reitman-directed 50th anniversary movie that imagines what the lead-up to the iconic show’s first night looked like in real time. Instead, I adored nearly everything about it. Pitch perfect casting, kinetic filmmaking, and a strong, self-aware understanding of where the show went wrong – and right – from the start make it a joy to watch. It’s a unique cinematic whirlwind that utilizes a real time formula, a frantic tone, and an exaggerated sense of myth. It’s not my number one movie of the year, but it is the 2024 movie I foresee myself rewatching the most.
• I was also quite taken with Heretic, the Hugh Grant-led horror movie about two Mormon missionaries who end up trapped in the house of a total weirdo. Coming from A24, I expected Heretic to be all mood and aesthetics, but it’s an industrious film full of finely tuned performances, palpable tension, and surprising, thrilling twists of fate. A great entry in the “let’s spend half the movie yelling about what we would do differently in this situation” canon.
• The documentary Union, about the fraught formation of the grassroots, worker-made Amazon Labor Union, is very good. It’s had a rocky path to distribution (which I’m sure has nothing to do with Amazon-MGM’s dominance in the film industry and infamous union-squashing tactics), but I rented it during a narrow viewing window on Gathr and hope it’ll be available again there in the future. If you’re worried that the movie will just lecture you about canceling your Prime subscription, don’t be: it’s focused on the nitty-gritty details of labor movements, from outsized personalities to establishment strong-arming to insidious and expensive corporate propaganda. It’s also well-directed and quietly devastating on several levels. If the 1976 classic Harlan County, USA is about the dream of an organized, people-powered America, Union is about how much of that power has been discreetly swallowed whole in the face of late capitalism. It’s a perfect post-Cyber Week watch, is what I’m saying.
• Mati Diop’s Dahomey is another exceedingly thoughtful and artistic documentary from this year. It follows the repatriation of 26 royal treasures from the former Kingdom of Dahomey, a West African nation now known as Benin that was once colonized (and, important to this story, looted) by the French. I’ve only recently begun visiting museums semi-regularly, and my main takeaway from the museum-going experience so far is that objects that are precious to people often feel more than a little bit alive. Diop uses this uncanny truth to craft a story that puts viewers in the shoes of the statues that have been boxed up and stolen away for over a century. The result is chilling, powerful, and never, ever oversimplified.
• Rebel Ridge, the latest cool lone-hero action-thriller from the always-interesting Jeremy Saulnier, is a weird one. Not since Promising Young Woman have I seen a movie with an ending that made me so retroactively pissed off at the whole film. Aaron Pierre is fantastic as a stoic former Marine targeted by small-town cops, and much of the Netflix film is structured, written, and shot in a way that’s almost ecstatically satisfying. Saulnier nearly pulls off a transgressive, noir-shaded thriller about the insidiousness of institutional racism and the importance of kicking back against governmental negligence…until he cops out in the final moments in a way that totally undermines everything that came before.
• I’m not a Clint Eastwood fan, so it’s no major surprise that I had some issues with Juror #2, but I also want to note that the actor-director’s latest film has some fun stuff in it. “Fun” doesn’t seem like the right word for a movie about a man who gets called for jury duty only to discover that he might have been responsible for the hit-and-run someone else is being charged for, but that wacky high concept lends the movie a hint of camp that makes it enjoyable (in a ‘90s-movie-you’d-find-while-channel-surfing sort of way). Several of the jury deliberation scenes beggar belief, and I wanted more from the ending, but if you’re watching Juror #2 expecting exactly the level of unlikely melodrama the trailers promised, you won’t be disappointed.
• I was less compelled by another new Nicholas Hoult vehicle, the Idaho-set crime film The Order. This movie, which just hit theaters, follows an FBI agent with a paper-thin backstory (Jude Law) as he slowly and oh-so-seriously attempts to take down a group of white supremacists who seem to be behind a string of local crimes. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with this movie, but there’s not much right about it, either. It fails to say much of anything about the hateful ideologies its villains(?) espouse, and remains flat and lifeless for most of its two-hour runtime.

The reads:

• This Vulture update from the Yellowjackets showrunners on the status of season 3 and the future of the series has me excited about the cannibal teen show all over again. It also serves as a pretty thorough behind-the-scenes look at the first two seasons!
• I don’t know how I had never heard about why To Catch A Predator, Dateline’s popular entrapment-based spinoff feature, disappeared in 2007, but I stumbled across all the gory details this week. The story is a rough one, and it reveals a lot about the corrosive relationship between real life, television, and the criminal justice system. Luke Dittrich broke it all down in a breathtaking and painful Esquire investigation two years after everything went to hell.
• TV coverage has increasingly become something that’s algorithmically-made and supply-and-demand based, and as younger viewers begin to lose a collectively shared sense of TV history, a lot of interesting older shows are falling through the cracks. That’s why I was super excited to see that Paste magazine put together a list of the 80 best TV shows of the 1980s, as decided by EIC Josh Jackson. I love some of the shows on here, want to watch others, and haven’t even heard of a handful of them. It’s always a pleasure and a privilege to keep finding new shows to add to my watchlist, and this ambitious ranking is full of ‘em.

Odds and ends:

• I thought I had my top 5 podcasts of the year all picked out, but then I finally gave The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast a listen and had to rearrange everything. No pod has given me more joy per episode this year than this one, in which the goofy, charming pioneers behind Saturday Night Live’s beloved digital shorts (plus movies like Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) break down the highs and lows of their career in hilarious detail alongside their good buddy Seth Meyers. The show isn’t just for SNL junkies (though it’s obvious between this and Saturday Night that I’ve relapsed), but for anyone who’s interested in comedy writing, web virality, changing media, struggles with self-doubt, or just guys being dudes. Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer are incredibly candid here, and aside from their captivating comedic insights, every episode features frank discussions about weird celebrity encounters, the anxiety-addled vibe of Studio 8H, and the trio’s penchant for insecurity even in the face of success.
• Nothing I read or listened to after the election brought me more catharsis than Sam Fragosos’ talk with political reporter Astead Herndon over on his podcast Talk Easy (which, I’m sure I’ve said before, I helped produce a million year ago). Herndon had insider access to the Democratic party throughout the race, and effortlessly – and brutally, and deservedly – pinpoints a dozen different points of easily foreseeable failure that led to the present moment. If you’re someone who thinks there’s plenty of blame to go around right now, or if you’re open to hearing about why progressives are so fed up with the party, this one is a must-listen.
• If you’d rather zoom out than focus in, Hank Green’s post-election video about populism, media revolutions, and how what’s happening now relates back to the dawn of the printing press is also pretty great. It makes me feel better to know that someone as smart and empathetic as Hank is thinking about how to get through all of this.
• I promised to tell y’all more about the new season of Canadian true crime podcast Someone Knows Something, and now that the Christine Harron series is over, my main takeaway is that it’s deeply sad. The case was actually cracked using a documentary made by SKS host Dave Ridgen, so if you’re interested in how investigative storytelling can change the course of real lives, this is a good (if bleak) example of that.

Thanks to everyone who has answered the survey I sent out earlier this week regarding what you’d like to see more of next year. You can still answer it by replying here or by shooting me a DM or comment on social media.

That end of the year rush to see everything I’ve missed in 2024 is making me feel energized about pop culture in a way I haven’t in a long time and I’m loving it! I hope you, too, find some bangers to watch before the clock runs out on 2024. Make sure to tell me about them if you do – I’ll be back with my own year-end wrap-up soon.