What I'm Watching: The Jinx, Late Night With the Devil, Watcher's New Streamer, And More

Plus: Kong: Skull Island, The Stepford Wives remake, a Dead Boy Detectives primer, a new TV review from me, and more.

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

The shows:

• Nearly a decade ago, I was one of millions of people whose jaw dropped during the final moments of The Jinx, a remarkable, damning docuseries featuring interviews with Robert Durst, a wealthy man who was credibly suspected of murder at least thrice in his lifetime. The Jinx wasn’t just great because of the apparent confession it ended with, but because every facet of it – from filmic style to writing to its octogenarian killer’s hypnotic weirdness – worked in perfect harmony to deliver a slam dunk of a story. The Jinx: Part Two, which premiered on HBO yesterday, doesn’t work nearly as well as its predecessor. This is in part due to shifting cultural perceptions of true crime and in part due to Durst’s absence (he appears often in jailhouse recordings but died in custody in 2022), but it’s mostly because of several counterintuitive choices the filmmakers make this time around. I have a LOT of thoughts on this one, and you can read most of them over at Dread Central in the first TV review I’ve published for the site.
• By this point, it’s impossible for me to be objective about Watcher, the Youtube entertainment company that’s brought us shows like comedic Unsolved Mysteries riff Mystery Files, its spookier, popular companion series Ghost Files, and the exhaustive, impressive cooking show Dish Granted (also, my personal favorite, kooky travelogue Weird (and/or) Wonderful World, which I once wrote about here). Despite not being much of a Youtube or fan space person, I spontaneously joined the fan server for Watcher during the doldrums of 2020, and four years later I count about a dozen people I met there – including my partner who I live with! – among my closest loved ones. Still, even if I wasn’t a fan, I like to think I’d be shocked by some of the aggressive, entitled, and misinformed responses I’ve seen to Watcher’s decision to move from Youtube’s ad-based system to their own subscriber-based website (a la Dropout) this past week. The company has since backtracked in the face of overwhelming criticism, which is an understandable choice: some elements of their vision for the streamer were half-baked and alienating to fans, and the public backlash to being asked to subscribe to a whole new genre of streaming service was loud and swift. Despite this, I still think ad-based revenue systems for internet art aren’t going to be sustainable for much longer (see also: sites like the ones I write for, which need to get a zillion clicks to stay alive and depend on an ever-shifting Google algorithm). The company has inadvertently become the canary in the coal mine for countless other Youtubers who were no doubt considering something similar, and unfortunately, that bird came back coughing. I’m just glad they came back at all; I get it if some people will jump ship after this, but I’ll still tune in for whatever Watcher does next.

The movies:

• I’ve always heard mixed things about the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives, but I watched it this week and was delighted by every bit of it. The revamp turns Ira Levin’s bleak feminist sci-fi story into a campy, uproarious, incisive take on gender roles – one that astutely asserts that sometimes, the sexist call is coming from inside the house. Nicole Kidman is screamingly funny as one of a small handful of residents who seems immune to whatever’s turning her Connecticut neighbors into perfectly robotic housewives, while a supporting cast including Matthew Broderick and Glenn Close doesn’t disappoint. Don’t Worry Darling could never. Barbie could never, for that matter. This might be the most fun I’ve had watching a feminist social parody since But I’m A Cheerleader.
• New possession flick Late Night With the Devil is an extremely fun slice of throwback horror. The movie plays out like a recording of a ‘70s late night talk show, one that goes off the rails when the special guests on a Halloween night broadcast start behaving strangely. David Dastmalchian gives a studied yet effortless-looking performance here (his fictional host may be a Carson competitor, but he has Fallon’s mannerisms down perfectly), and while I think the movie lost some tension thanks to a few late-in-the-game format breaks, overall it’s tight and thrilling with a hell of a premise.
• Kong: Skull Island rocks in the silliest way possible. It’s a movie that asks, “What if the story of the Vietnam War could be told via giant monsters and Samuel L. Jackson?” It’s a film that takes visual inspiration for everything from Apocalypse Now to WWE matches. It’s work of cinema in which every dead scene contains multiple layers of irony, monsters look dazzlingly great (I want to start a Letterboxd list of movies that had little cultural impact but look amazing because they were made right before CGI started getting inexplicably worse), and the genre varies wildly between generic action, gnarly survival horror, and goofy comedy. In short, it’s got exactly the kind of overstuffed, silly movie magic a kaiju movie should have.

The reads:

• This article about a high school science teacher whose former students reunited over 40 years later to look at the eclipse made me cry, so now I’m sharing it to make you cry, too.
• I really appreciated this piece from David Chen’s publication Decoding Everything, about Netflix’s recent, troubling use of AI-generated imagery in a true crime documentary.
• A random, never-before-seen clip of actors from The Sopranos playing their characters appeared this past week, and you’ll never guess why.
• I wrote nearly 2000 words on Taylor Swift’s new album…in a Google doc I sent to my closest Swiftie friend, because I know better than to put my thoughts about the pop star out there for the entire internet to see. That being said, I like this thread from Emily St. James, which helps clarify some of my own vague thoughts about how Swift sometimes seems to be both a good songwriter and a bad one at the same time these days. It’s not about the lyrics, she argues, so much as the meter.
• On the classics front, I read King Lear this week, powering through it in one sitting because its estranged dad plot hit a little too close to home. It’s not my favorite by the Bard, but certainly in an upper echelon – when it hits, it really hits.  I’m finding my Shakespeare read-through way more emotional this time around than when I read some of his best stuff in high school and college, and think that’s pretty cool.

Odds and ends:

• For IGN, I read every Dead Boy Detectives comic to give fans of the Sandman spinoff series some idea of what to expect from the new Netflix series of the same name. I’ve since watched the show, and have a review posting (for another new outlet!) once it drops on Thursday. If you’re curious about the Dead Boys and don’t know where to start, hit me up and I’ll give you some comic book recs!
• Also at IGN, I wrote about how public school sitcom Abbott Elementary is built to last thanks in large part to the things it doesn’t do – the many messy sitcom tropes it chooses to side-step entirely in favor of great character moments and strong comedic writing.
• If you missed my first Ghost newsletter for paid subscribers, you can read a short free preview of it here.
• The only podcast I listened to this week was Beyond All Repair, a confusing and unconvincing true crime (re)examination and the rare miss from an NPR affiliate pod.

That's all for me this week. Thanks for bearing with me as I get in the swing of things at the new site – I'm really liking it so far. Have a great week, and watch something good for me!