What I'm Watching: Sex Education, No One Will Save You, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, and More

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Warner Home Video

Here’s a quick rundown of everything I watched, read, and wrote about this week.

NOTE: since I’ve been working on projects involving horror and documentaries lately, I’ll be signifying either genre with an emoji for the next few weeks, so anyone who doesn’t care about those genres can skip those bits of the newsletter. Horror will be signified with a pumpkin (🎃) while docs will have a camera emoji (🎥). Anything with neither emoji is neither genre! Hopefully this’ll make for an easier, breezier read for anyone who’s sick of hearing about true crime or spooky stuff.

The shows:

• The final season of Sex Education just dropped on Netflix, and it’s safe to say that this is one of the most affirming teen dramas ever put on TV. The casually informative show about the lives (sex and otherwise) of a group of British teens singlehandedly undid so much of the toxic bullshit spouted by shame-filled teen shows of decades past. Season 4 isn’t quite as perfect as 1 and 3, but it’s still a wonderful (and surprisingly emotional) sign-off for a brilliant show.
• Doc watch 2023 continues for me with 🎥 Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence. After reading a story from The Cut in 2019, I thought I knew all the details of this wild story about a modern-day cult that formed in the dorms of a prestigious college, but Stolen Youth provides a much more up-to-date account of one of the most baffling coercive control stories I’ve ever heard. The Hulu doc is extra-insightful thanks to the level of access filmmakers had to the cult members – both once they’d left and, in some cases, when they were still indoctrinated.

• If you appreciated the HBO docuseries Last Call earlier this year, you might also like 🎥 Never Let Him Go, an ABC project that’s currently available on Hulu. The docuseries tells the story of the death of a gay college student in Australia in 1988 and the decades-long quest to get the local police force to actually pay proper attention to the pattern of hate crimes in the area. The victim’s brother is wealthy, and I appreciated how up front the doc was about both the doors he was able to open with his money and the limitations of money in the fact of broken systems. Heavy stuff!
• In between all these sad documentaries I’ve still been plucking away at watchthroughs of a bunch of shows I’ve mentioned in the newsletter before. I’ve reached the post-Denise era of A Different World, Sam and Diane are spitting insults and double entendres on Cheers, and everyone on Six Feet Under is making bad choices because YOLO.

The movies:

• For years now, Girls actor Christopher Abbott has been building a reputation as the modern indie film landscape’s answer to James Spader, starring in wild erotic thrillers and movies built around trippy psychosexual mind games. I kinda love his whole deal, but I think his latest film, Sanctuary, might be my favorite of the bunch so far. The movie about a dominatrix (Margaret Qualley, who’s fantastic here) pulling out all the stops to keep the attention of her client – Abbott, whose character is about to become a CEO – is definitely one of my favorites of the year. Intense, messed up, oddly romantic, and engrossing from its first second to its last, Sanctuary is truly cooking with gas.
• Everyone I know is talking about 🎃 No One Will Save You this week, for good reason: the sci-fi horror flick (which is now on Hulu) puts a truly inventive spin on the alien invasion movie. The nearly-wordless movie follows a woman (Kaitlyn Dever, always great) who’s forced to face an alien takeover alone, and who does so with tremendous grit and creativity. This is as much a relentless home invasion movie as an alien flick, but it does get existential, with shades of Signs, The Twilight Zone, and even AI: Artificial Intelligence.
• You’ve heard of Val watching dozens of docuseries. Now get ready for [checks notes] Val watching tons of documentary movies! I started the next leg of award season this week by checking out 🎥 The Stroll, a powerful documentary about the trans women of color who kept each other safe and formed a strong community while working as sex workers in New York City in the ‘70s through ‘00s. Since The Stroll is made by Kristen Lovell, who worked in the scene, it benefits from a loving personal touch and includes plenty of intimate interviews with people who survived the stroll – and went on to change the world. Activists and allies, this one’s essential!
• When I was a kid, there were very few movies my mom wouldn’t let me watch, but for some reason one was 🎃 Thirteen Ghosts. I’m pretty sure this was an arbitrary choice she made based on the title alone, but regardless, I put off watching it for over two decades under her advice. Great news, though: I finally watched it and it was a lot of fun. Aesthetic-wise, it’s the most 2001 movie to ever 2001. It also features an all-in performance from Matthew Lillard (is there any other kind?) and at times seems like it was made just to inspire a theme park haunted house ride.

The books:

• I’ve been lukewarm on the works of James Tynion IV comics in the past (see: a few titles down this list), I was blown away by 🎃 The Nice House On The Lake. The less I spoil about this one the better, but suffice it to say that it’s about a group of people who get invites to a fancy lake house from a man they all know, and it also relates to the end of the world. If that sounds in any way up your alley, you should definitely check it out. I read 12 issues today alone!
• I loved the earthy yet cosmic body horror of Ashley Robin Franklin’s short graphic novel Fruiting Bodies, and I dig 🎃 A Million Tiny Fires just as much. The book about a queer couple living on a farm who encounter something otherworldly only takes like 15 minutes to read, but it’ll stick with you much longer.
• Speaking of Tynion, I gave the popular horror series 🎃 Something is Killing the Children another try this week, and I’m still only nominally invested in it at best. I’m not sure why the story of monster-hunter Erica Slaughter isn’t clicking with me, but at this point I’ll probably finish the series anyway.
• Finally, if you have a younger reader (like, junior high or high school age) in your life who’s into spooky season, you can’t really go wrong with Shannon Watters and Branden Boyer-White’s Hollow, a YA story about the headless horseman haunting the town in which Washington Irving’s classic story is set. This is a cute, innocuous story that’s a bit thin for its page count, but it’s still a fun little read with Scooby-Doo vibes.

Odds and ends:

• Speaking of Scooby-Doo, I’m thrilled to finally share a project with y’all that I’ve been working on for months. All summer I’ve been working to put together an oral history of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island at Slashfilm for the film’s 25th anniversary, and it’s finally here. If you read or share anything of mine this month, please make it this. It’s hard to get the green light on ambitious, esoteric projects like this with the current state of the industry, so every click counts. Plus, I’m just really proud of how it turned out.
• As I’ve said before, I consider CBC Radio’s investigative podcasts the gold standard for ethical true crime, so I’m really glad there’s a new season of 🎥 Someone Knows Something in the pipeline. The season is releasing weekly episodes, but you can also listen to the whole thing now with a CBC premium subscription. I have, and as always I’m blown away by the level of care with which investigator Dave Ridgen approaches each case. This season does feel different though, in part because he’s so out of his element in the Yukon community he’s visiting, and in part because it seems as if almost anyone could be a suspect in the death of youth worker and Indigenous teen Angel Carlick. I really hope Ridgen’s work helps crack the case.
• I know we’re pretty much done talking about the Hasan Minhaj thing, but I really liked Dave Chen’s piece unpacking why Minhaj’s exaggerations aren’t and shouldn’t be par for the course when it comes to the long tradition of comedic embellishment.
• Apparently my piece about the state of archivism in the streaming era got a shout-out in this week’s issue of The Rec Center! Thanks, y’all!

Finally, I want to wish a hearty congratulations to the WGA on the tentative agreement they reached with the AMPTP tonight after 146 days on strike! It’s been such an honor to witness such a fiercely supported labor movement in action, and I’m grateful for the efforts of the thousands of people who stood up for as long as it took to make this industry better for everyone.

Have a lovely week, y’all, and as always, feel free to drop a line and let me know what you’re watching (or reading, or listening to).