(Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Source: MUBI)

Dear Readers,

My apologies for the silence, and thank you for your patience. This summer brought a wonderful, busy run of freelance work. For TIME Magazine, I interviewed Amy Adams, Javier Bardem, Patrick Wilson, and creator Nick Antosca around the Cape Fear finale, and I sat down with Jane Schoenbrun, writer-director of the transcendent horror film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Throughout, I also authored ELLE Magazine’s recaps for House of the Dragon’s third season, which led to a fiery finale that changed everything.

As the months went on, I realized Scene and Unheard must evolve. This August marks the newsletter’s one-year anniversary: a stretch that included exchanges or conversations with talents like Emmy-nominated Half Man creator Richard Gadd, The Comeback co-creator Michael Patrick King, and America’s Culinary Cup creator Padma Lakshmi, as well as reflections on films and shows like Almost Famous and The Silence of the Lambs. And I was incredibly fortunate to be in the room for panels with the creative teams and casts of The Pitt, Task, and The Beast in Me.

But as Scene and Unheard heads into its second year, I’ve been thinking about what it needs to grow, not just as a place for my work, but as a sustainable publication. As much as Scene and Unheard is a labor of love, it’s also a publication that takes time, reporting, occasional travel, and care to sustain. I realized that meant moving to a newsletter platform that offers more financial tools, flexibility, and room to grow. That’s why, beginning next week, this newsletter will move to beehiiv. Substack was an incredible launchpad—and its online community has been nothing but positive and encouraging—but beehiiv will offer additional benefits that will help the writing continue:

More flexibility with subscription pricing…
I know people are making careful choices about what they pay for, and I want to meet readers where they are financially. That means widening the subscription price range so you can contribute however you can, whether that’s $2 a month or $60 a year. beehiiv makes that wider range possible.

Tasteful advertising…
You, my subscribers, are Scene and Unheard’s lifeblood, but beehiiv will also allow this newsletter to bring in further support through advertising. I’ll be careful to make sure ads don’t interfere with the editorial quality and reading experience.

Sponsorships…
Sponsorships will be the third piece in this newsletter’s longer-term plan. Those will help make Scene and Unheard more sustainable over time.

For now, current free and paid subscribers don’t need to do anything to continue on this journey with me; I’ll share any updates if that changes. I’m working behind the scenes to make the platform migration a smooth one—and I ask for your patience if any hiccups come up along the way.

With that in mind, Scene and Unheard’s second chapter feels extremely promising. The weeks ahead will bring dispatches from rooms with Emmy-nominated teams and actors, including Prime Video’s Spider-Noir and several HBO Max shows. The virtual address may change, but the reason for showing up remains the same. You can expect more of what you’ve come to enjoy: anniversary reflections, close-reads of notable moments in film and TV history, trend stories, features, and original interviews. And with this move, there will be more room to grow.

I started the year by thanking you for reading and for being here; I have to thank you once more for staying. I’m grateful.

—JP

Update: You can check out Scene and Unheard’s new home here.

(Matt Damon in The Odyssey. Source: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

More than halfway through The Odyssey, Matt Damon’s Odysseus is on the beach, hungry and tired, when the ground splits open in front of him, waves breaking close by. Out of the scorched sand climb dead soldiers, men Odysseus fought beside and lost years earlier, returned only to be seen and finally acknowledged. It’s one scene, but the whole film keeps returning to versions of it: a husband and a wife, a nymph and the man she won’t let leave, a father and the son who barely remembers him, each one waiting to be seen for what they are.

That moment has Homer’s fingerprints on it, though not from The Odyssey alone; the film also draws from the Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Odysseus is the Greek king who devised the plan to hide soldiers inside a wooden horse, ending the decade-long war at Troy. He spends the next several years trying to sail home to Ithaca, only to be pulled repeatedly off course: by a cyclops, a witch who changes his crew into pigs, and a nymph who keeps him on her island until years begin to blur. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds off a hall of suitors who have moved into the palace and are eating through the family’s stores while they wait for her to give up and remarry. His son Telemachus (Tom Holland), still an infant when his father left for Troy, grows up fast enough to try to help him reclaim the palace.

(The official trailer for The Odyssey. Source: Universal Pictures)

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has put a version of this same ache on screen once before, in Interstellar, where a father in space watches his children grow up through a succession of video messages, each one arriving too late for him to answer. Telemachus doesn’t get messages here. Instead, he just has the absence—the absence of his father—and grows up around the shape of it. Nolan, who wrote and directed the adaptation himself, takes just under three hours to tell it.

The film turns on a broken promise instead of a monster. The trick with the horse works as more than a war tactic—a guest turning on the people who let him in—and everyone else in The Odyssey ends up committing some version of the same offense, on a smaller scale. It’s the kind of guilt Nolan sat with once before in Oppenheimer, about a man who spent the rest of his life answering for the weapon whose creation he helped lead. Here the invention is a gift instead of a weapon, and the reckoning takes years at sea instead of a hearing room. The suitors do it by camping in Penelope’s hall and refusing to go until she gives in. Calypso (Charlize Theron) insists she only kept Odysseus on her island because he wasn’t ready to leave, a kindness that also looks a lot like captivity. The characters call the code everyone keeps breaking Zeus’s Law. Once you notice it, you start noticing how much of this myth is about hospitality, and what people owe each other when one of them has all the power.

(Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland in The Odyssey. Source: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

Damon plays Odysseus worn down rather than swaggering, a man who now has to live with everything his choices have cost him. Hathaway gets the strongest written role in the film and does the most with it. The best example is a quiet scene near the beginning, a conversation with Damon the night before he leaves for war that carries the weight of 20 years neither of them has lived yet. Samantha Morton plays Circe less like Homer’s seductress and more like a judge. She transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs, because she’s already come to expect greed from the soldiers who passed through before them, and Odysseus’s men do little to change her mind. Morton delivers her character’s logic with an earthy wickedness that makes her smaller role feel larger than it is.

Lupita Nyong'o takes on both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, finding weariness in Helen especially, a woman blamed for a war she never asked anyone to start in her name. As Athena, Zendaya moves in and out of Odysseus's journey the way a conscience does, showing up exactly when he needs reminding that someone's still watching him. Robert Pattinson's Antinous seems to enjoy every second he gets to be awful onscreen, while John Leguizamo, playing the loyal, blind swineherd Eumaeus, forms an entire relationship with Telemachus out of just a handful of scenes.

(Matt Damon and Zendaya in The Odyssey. Source: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

The Odyssey is the first movie ever shot entirely with IMAX 70 mm cameras, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses that scale mostly to make the ocean seem enormous and Odysseus’s boat small against it. Percussion and synthesizers drive most of Ludwig Göransson’s score, and that suits a film more interested in what survival costs than in celebrating survival itself. The production, filmed across Greece, Morocco, Italy, Iceland, and Scotland, leans on practical effects wherever it can, and the seams never show. The cyclops, the storms, and the horse itself all feel physically there instead of stitched together after the fact, which is a big reason the spectacle is so easy to believe.

Nolan cast this myth the way it’s been told and retold for nearly 3,000 years: differently, depending on who’s doing it, and with a cast pulled from all over the world. The dialogue matches that same contemporary spirit, more clipped and plainspoken, closer to now than to the Bronze Age, and it takes a few minutes to adjust to hearing Homer’s characters talk that way. But once the adjustment happens, it stops pulling focus and starts sounding like Nolan’s way of keeping ancient grief within our reach. The violence gets a similar kind of restraint. It’s there, since Homer’s poem doesn’t shy away from it, but the worst of it tends to happen just outside the frame, left for the audience to picture on their own.

(Christopher Nolan filming The Odyssey. Source: Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

The final 45-minute stretch is where it all comes together. Damon and Hathaway anchor that stretch, turning Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion into a test of whether their loyalty can survive everything time and war have made of them. Their reunion unfolds alongside the final battle itself—a fight that’s thrilling to watch on its own and staged with the same intense care as the rest of the film. Holland’s earnestness and Pattinson’s gift for onscreen underhandedness both pay off in that same stretch. (How it all plays out isn’t mine to give away…)

Nolan doesn’t end this the way Homer did, and by the time he gets there, the choice feels inevitable. For nearly three hours, he’s moved toward the dilemma raised by those dead soldiers on the scorched sand: whether a home can survive the years of absence, grief, and violence carried back to it. His ending makes homecoming about more than arriving in Ithaca; it becomes the fragile hope that loyalty and tenderness might endure all that’s changed. For a filmmaker drawn to the folded time of Tenet, Inception’s dream logic, and the self-made systems of Memento, there’s something moving about Nolan stripping all that machinery away simply to ask whether, after all these years, someone can know exactly who you are—and all you did to make it home—and still love you.

The Odyssey is in theaters now.

(A pivotal scene from Independence Day. Source: 20th Century Fox)

About one hour and 47 minutes into Independence Day, President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) climbs onto the back of a military truck at Area 51, addressing a runway full of pilots and refugees who have no real reason to expect they’ll survive the day. For a second he stands there, radio handset in hand, the engines already idling behind him. He presses the button, and nothing happens. A pause, an adjustment, and he brings it back to his face and tries again. Another movie might have cut it. Here, it becomes the point: a man visibly unsure of himself, finding his footing one word at a time. For most of the film up to this point, he’s been a president the country questioned, a former Gulf War fighter pilot dismissed in the news for his youth or a perceived lack of leadership. But what he says next rouses even the most cynical.

He tells them mankind should mean something new today, that they can no longer afford their petty differences, that they’re fighting not against tyranny but against annihilation. “We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist, and should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight,” he says in the scene. Humanity will live on, will survive the hardship of that day. “Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.”

(The official throwback trailer for Independence Day. Source: 20th Century Fox)

The speech endures for reasons that have little to do with poetry, although it does have a theatrical weight about it. By the time President Whitmore says those words, the film has spent almost two hours convincing viewers that this man, at this moment, deserves to be believed. Thirty years later, it’s still the dialogue people reach for first when Independence Day comes up, quoted in moments anywhere someone needs borrowed grandeur or seeks a knowing laugh.

Independence Day is, at its simplest, a first-contact invasion story: alien warships appear over Earth’s major cities, level them within two days, and a scattered handful of survivors, including a scientist (Jeff Goldblum), a fighter pilot (Will Smith), and the president of the United States (Pullman), mount a last stand on the Fourth of July.

For dialogue that's lingered this long, its origin story is one of chance. Co-writer Dean Devlin wrote it in about five minutes, he once told Complex, intending it as a placeholder that someone would replace later. Its urgency had a stranger root than inspiration: the filmmakers were still pushing for the title they wanted, while Fox was leaning more towards Doomsday; the writers folded Independence Day directly into President Whitmore’s speech as a way of staking their claim to it.

(Bill Pullman gives his iconic speech in Independence Day. Source: 20th Century Fox)

The move worked, and what started as a debate over the film’s title became the line the movie is now largely remembered by. Devlin has named Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech—Henry V’s rallying cry to his badly outnumbered troops before battle—as a reference point while drafting it, and Pullman modeled his delivery on Robert Kennedy’s remarks following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the actor shared with The Guardian. Still, this placeholder, written fast with dramatic flair became the lines audiences recite three decades on.

That speech may have survived by accident, but the marketing campaign around the movie seemed well-planned. Twentieth Century Fox unveiled the teaser trailer that would sell the film back in January, during Super Bowl XXX: a shadow hovering over the White House, the building going up in flames, and a line that read more like a dare than a tagline: “Enjoy the Super Bowl. It may be your last.” By July, it was the image everyone wanted to talk about. People weren’t deciding whether to see Independence Day so much as deciding how soon they would. Earning more than $817 million worldwide, Independence Day wasn’t just a hit but also proof that a studio could create a theatrical event.

The White House explosion is still the image people reach for, the one that resurfaces every Fourth of July in some clip reel or nostalgia post. But it isn’t, in the end, why the film holds up when so many of its imitators don’t. Director Roland Emmerich never lets the cinematic spectacle stand alone for long; there’s almost always somebody underneath it. David (Jeff Goldblum) still wears his wedding ring years into a divorce nobody made him finalize, proof of a marriage he never quite let go of. His ex-wife, Constance (Margaret Colin), now runs communications for the president David is racing to warn. And when Constance tells him she never stopped loving him, saving the planet briefly becomes inseparable from being fully seen by the one person whose opinion still matters. What David wants, almost as much as he wants to stop the signal, is to be taken seriously by the people who decided years ago that he wasn’t going anywhere in life.

(Ross Bagley and Vivica A. Fox in Independence Day. Source: 20th Century Fox)

President Whitmore wants something closer to the opposite. His approval ratings had been sliding for months before the aliens arrived, and the country that elected him a war hero now thinks he’s soft. He has a few days to find the nerve that used to come naturally in a cockpit. Russell (Randy Quaid), the crop duster his own children have given up on, just wants the one chance nobody expects to give him.

That last story arc almost didn’t survive its first encounter with an audience. In the version Emmerich shot originally, Russell flies his battered biplane into the alien ship with a bomb roped to the fuselage, a nod to the Dr. Strangelove ending they had in mind for him, Devlin told The Hollywood Reporter. Test audiences loved the film, but laughed, the wrong way, the moment that crop duster wobbled into frame next to the fighter jets. With the film’s release just two weeks out, Emmerich asked for a reshoot anyway, putting Russell into an F-16 beside President Whitmore and giving him one last chance to tell his children he loves them before the upwards dive that ends his life and saves the world.

The studio, by his own account, questioned the move, with the release date already fixed and the marketing already running. Emmerich did it anyway, because a punchline wasn’t the note he wanted Russell’s death to land on. He wanted grief, and he wanted Russell’s son Miguel (James Duval), listening on the radio, to feel pride instead of embarrassment about his father, for once in his life. The visual effects bought the audience’s attention, though creative decisions like that one were what made the wreckage worth watching.

(Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Source: 20th Century Fox)

The disaster movies that followed took the obvious cues—bigger cities, costlier destruction—repeated until the sheer scale stopped carrying as much meaning. Within two years, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, and Armageddon had all arrived chasing the same high, and Emmerich himself kept circling the formula across films like Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012. Each one reached for more. None landed quite as hard, including Emmerich’s own attempt, two decades later, to return to this exact story in 2016’s sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, which brought back much of the original cast.

The imitators didn’t fall short for lack of money or visual effects. They reached for the destruction first, hoping the feeling would catch up to it later. But Independence Day did the opposite, establishing its characters—and their humanity—so that the destruction would mean more once it arrived.

No one on set that day could have known the speech would outlast the movie surrounding it and find its way into the cultural zeitgeist. It began as a placeholder and five minutes of typing nobody thought would survive the edit. Three decades later, it’s still the part many people recite from memory, long after the White House explosion became an iconic reminder of the film itself. Hollywood spent the next three decades trying to recreate that feeling. What it mostly proved was that a sense of cinematic awe can be manufactured—but an audience’s belief must be earned. By the time President Whitmore asks the world not to go quietly into the night, Independence Day has convinced us the lives beneath the wreckage feel meaningful enough to save.

Independence Day is available to stream on Hulu.

(Sepideh Moafi, Gerran Howell, John Wells, Taylor Dearden, Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, R. Scott Gemmill, and Fiona Dourif at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Pitt on June 9 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Spoilers below for The Pitt Season 2.

Noah Wyle has been playing doctors for more than 30 years. He knows the weight of a stethoscope, the cadence of medical language, the specific way an attending moves briskly through a crowded emergency room. When The Pitt came along, the HBO Max drama he stars in and executive produces with ER veterans John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, he scrubbed back in with what he called muscle memory. His working knowledge of the procedures was still there; so was an ear for jargon with more than five syllables.

But there was one detail in Season 2 that he and Wells had to puzzle through together, away from the set: the motorcycle. In one of the season’s more revealing choices, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch rides into the premiere without a helmet, then tells a colleague in Episode 3 that he still wears one.

That detail has a story behind it. At a hotel bar in Pittsburgh, Wyle and Wells worked out the idea that would unlock the season’s emotional logic. “What if he’s not wearing that helmet, but he tells everybody he does?” Wyle recalled at an HBO Max FYC panel for The Pitt on June 9 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. “It began this interesting conversation about the masks we wear at work and the behaviors we exhibit to our coworkers, and how this guy is giving clues all over the place that he wants somebody to step in and save him from himself.”

(The official trailer for Season 2 of The Pitt. Source: HBO Max / YouTube)

Underneath the small lie, Wyle saw something closer to a wish. “He wants to leave the place in the best place he could possibly leave it,” he continued. Robby’s behavior, he added, comes from one of two places. “Stop me from what I’m doing, and promise me everything will be okay if I go.”

That may be what The Pitt understands best. The emergencies are relentless, and the medicine feels real, if sometimes imperfect. But really, the show is about people who keep telling each other they’re fine when they’re not. They do irreplaceable work while coming apart, hoping someone will notice before it’s too late.

The Pitt premiered on HBO Max in January 2025 and quickly became one of television’s boldest dramas, organized around a single unforgiving rule: each episode unfolds in real time, covering one hour of a 15-hour shift inside the emergency department of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. That sense of immediacy extends to the way it’s made. With lighting preset in the ceiling and two camera operators and a boom operator moving through a fully visible ER set, the actors are rarely waiting for production to catch up. Wyle joked that it was the TV production equivalent of “two turntables and a microphone.” For him, the stripped-down setup only deepened the immersion. “Stories are playing out in real time in all of those rooms, whether you’re focused on them or not,” he said.

(Sepideh Moafi, Gerran Howell, John Wells, Taylor Dearden, Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, R. Scott Gemmill, Fiona Dourif, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, and Shawn Hatosy at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Pitt on June 9 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Off camera, Wyle has taken on a larger role in shaping the series. In addition to starring and executive producing, he has become one of the show’s writers and directors, influencing its rhythms and emotional texture alongside Wells and Gemmill.

That sense of constant motion extends beyond the principal cast. The production cycles through more than a hundred background performers a day, filling the ER with patients, family members, nurses, orderlies, and visitors whose stories may never come fully into focus but adding to the atmosphere around the doctors.

The first season earned 13 Emmy nominations and won five, including Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series for Wyle, and Outstanding Supporting Actress In A Drama Series for Katherine LaNasa. The June 9 panel, moderated by Crooked Media co-founder Jon Lovett, brought together Wyle, Wells, Gemmill, LaNasa, Patrick Ball, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez, Sepideh Moafi, and Shawn Hatosy—the full company of a show that functions, on and off camera, like one.

That structure asks something specific of the actors: there’s no waiting for the camera. Scripts arrive episode by episode, without a full-season map. Ball, whose Dr. Langdon stole medication in Season 1 and returns this year on something of an apology tour, found this unexpectedly freeing. Actors, he said, often believe they need to know where a story is going in order to get there, but The Pitt kept proving to him otherwise. “We’re discovering it on the day, and you don’t necessarily need to know,” he said. “The acceptance of that, it’s a little scary.”

(Jon Lovett, Sepideh Moafi, Gerran Howell, John Wells, Taylor Dearden, Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, R. Scott Gemmill, Fiona Dourif, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, and Shawn Hatosy at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Pitt on June 9 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Moafi was given one exception to that uncertainty: a seizure disorder Al-Hashimi has lived with since childhood, one that can sometimes look like distraction or deep thought. It’s the secret she carries through the season and finally places in Robby’s hands during the Season 2 finale. When the crucial scene came—with Al-Hashimi pleading for the chance to keep working under new guardrails, and Robby warning that he has to report her—it landed as one of the season’s most painful confrontations. “She’s trying to appeal to his heart and to the patient in him rather than the doctor,” Moafi added. The unspoken gender dynamic wasn’t lost on Lovett: Al-Hashimi knows Robby may be right that she needs help, but she also sees the rules bending around Langdon in ways they simply don’t bend around her.

LaNasa, who plays charge nurse Dana Evans, described the production process as “rigorous” and as a kind of “free fall.” This season extended Dana’s storyline about violence against healthcare workers after a patient attacked new nurse Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard), reinforcing her sense that safety is no longer assumed in the ER. To prepare, she spoke with actual nurses about why they entered the profession, what keeps them there, and what the work costs. What she heard was a profession that had become deeply personal work: helping people die, caring for them at their most vulnerable, and treating each patient as “your sister,” “your brother,” or “your grandmother,” all while navigating enormous pressure and legal responsibility. “I think they know it’s noble work,” said LaNasa. “It’s almost like they can’t not do it,” even if, as she put it, “they’re really getting screwed.”

There’s no preaching in that answer, and that may be one of the show’s great strengths. The Pitt has politics because the emergency room has politics. Staffing and insurance are politics; so are immigration enforcement, vaccination, and whether a nurse can safely do intimate, legally fraught, emotionally punishing work. The show doesn’t have to import the world into the hospital, because the world is already in the waiting room.

(Katherine LaNasa, R. Scott Gemmill, Fiona Dourif, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, and Shawn Hatosy at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Pitt on June 9 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Later in the evening, Lovett pivoted into different territory. Every doctor on The Pitt, he pointed out, believes unequivocally in vaccines. Did the show think of itself as trying to reach people more skeptical of them, in a way a cable news segment couldn’t? Wells was direct to the point of dry comedy. “The reason that all doctors believe in vaccines is because they work, and you should take them,” he said simply. Asked whether the show thinks about reaching people who remain suspicious of them, Wyle answered with a seriousness that cut through the jokes. “Medical misinformation is rife in this country,” he said. “You have to reach them at a level that’s not accusatory or demeaning. You have to acknowledge that they come to this philosophy from their own road and try to meet them where they are.”

The ICE storyline was one place where The Pitt’s research-heavy approach came through most clearly. In Season 2 Episode 11, two agents bring in Pranita, a restaurant worker with a shoulder injury after a raid at the restaurant where she works. The agents claim “everyone in the kitchen took off” and that Pranita was “shoved down some alley stairs,” but she is clearly shaken. When Dr. McKay (Dourif) asks if she wants to call her daughter, one of the agents cuts in: no phone calls. Their presence changes the atmosphere in the ER. Patients in the waiting room begin leaving rather than risk contact with immigration enforcement, and staff members with reason to fear ICE exposure follow them out, costing Robby “five nurses and half my environmental services team” in the middle of an already short-staffed shift.

The show’s factual accuracy is based on conversations with hundreds of doctors, nurses, and experts in the field—a pipeline that, this season, included two ER physicians embedded in the writers’ room and four doctors on set. But eventually, the show’s research collided with reality. Wells said they shot the ICE storyline about a month before “what happened in Minneapolis,” likely referring to January 2026 reports in which ICE agents guarded a patient at Hennepin County Medical Center, an incident that made the version they filmed feel almost restrained. “We thought we didn’t go nearly far enough,” said Wells, in hindsight.

(Patrick Ball, Taylor Dearden, Fiona Dourif, Lucas Iverson, Gerran Howell, Irene Choi, Sepideh Moafi, Shawn Hatosy, Kristin Villanueva, Shabana Azeez, Isa Briones in The Pitt. Source: Warrick Page / HBO Max)

Wyle suggested the real world ultimately changed how the episode was received. “The world gave context to that storyline that we couldn’t have possibly written,” he said. The episode didn’t need to escalate the threat to make its point. Its approach, he said, was “showing the bear, not poking the bear,” because “everybody knows what bears can do now.” Hospitals, schools, and churches once held the status of sanctuary sites, he said. That understanding has frayed, and the consequences become medical as well as moral: if people are afraid to come to the emergency room, everybody becomes less safe.

Wrapping up the panel, Lovett asked for one new detail about the next season. Gemmill gave him two words: “Robby’s back.” The room laughed, partly because it was funny and partly because it was a relief to know that the show’s emotional center remains unchanged.

But returning to The Pitt isn’t the same as being healed by it. Season 3 takes place in November, months after the July 4 shift—long enough for a sabbatical to end, yet not long enough for the people inside Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center to become different people. They’ll return carrying the damage of that day: the injuries, the guilt, the losses, and the conversations left unfinished.

(Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa in The Pitt. Source: Warrick Page/HBO Max)

That’s the ache at the show’s center. Langdon’s unraveling becomes everybody’s problem because in an emergency room, nobody falls apart alone. The Pitt doesn’t moralize about any of it. It just keeps watching, past the hand sanitizer and the next room, past the lie told casually enough to pass for someone still in control. Underneath it all is work that saves lives and still asks more of its people than any job should.

Most hospital dramas ask us to admire the people who save lives. The Pitt asks something harder: to notice the price of that work, long after everyone else would normally look away.

Season 2 of The Pitt is available to stream on HBO Max.

(Padma Lakshmi in America’s Culinary Cup. Source: Jackie Brown / CBS)

Spoilers below for America’s Culinary Cup.

For nearly two decades on Top Chef, Padma Lakshmi helped judge the decisions chefs made in the kitchen. She was also taking notes. “You sit around set a lot, going, oh, well, I wouldn’t do that, and I would do this,” she said when we spoke recently. “But then, when you actually call your own bluff—okay, you know, let’s see what you’re gonna do—I think that is a joyous place to be.”

America’s Culinary Cup, which wrapped its first season on CBS in May, was the bluff she finally called. Lakshmi created the show, executive produced it, hosted it, and judged it alongside Michelin-starred chef Michael Cimarusti and molecular gastronomy pioneer Wylie Dufresne. Sixteen of the country’s most decorated chefs—Michelin-starred, James Beard-winning, Bocuse d’Or-medaling—competed across 11 episodes for the largest cash prize in cooking competition history: $1 million.

None of that was guaranteed. Lakshmi was burnt out when CBS came calling, still recovering from 19 seasons at the judge’s table and not especially eager to return. What changed her mind wasn’t the platform, though CBS offers one of the biggest stages in television. It was the offer of full creative control. “It’s much more fun when you’re making the decisions,” she said simply.

(The official trailer for America’s Culinary Cup. Source: CBS / YouTube)

Taste the Nation, her Hulu food and travel series, was the first proof of concept, a show she had to pitch to several networks before it found a home, rooted in a simple premise: use food as a way to understand who Americans are. That show gave her the necessary experience to attempt something larger. “I don’t think I would have been able to do America’s Culinary Cup if I hadn’t had the experience of creating Taste the Nation,” she said. Still, the scale of it brought its own pressure, which in Lakshmi’s case, was the point. “Whenever I’m terrified or scared of doing something, I think that’s a good argument for doing it,” she said.

She brought in a crew of 350 people, designed an oval soundstage with no corners after reading studies suggesting rounded spaces promote focus and creativity, and stocked the pantry with edible flowers and quail eggs because she didn’t want the chefs constrained by anything less than the best. What she wanted, above all, was a show guided by a single clean idea—no arbitrary gimmicks or manufactured obstacles, no sprints through a grocery store—just cooking, at the highest level possible, judged on taste, creativity, presentation, and technique.

Each episode also reinvented its own structure around a different commandment, meaning the show’s only real rule was unpredictability. “I took a big risk in that it has no format, zero,” Lakshmi acknowledged. “Yes, it’s structured around 10 culinary commandments or principles of fine dining and great cooking, but each episode is different, so you’re reinventing the wheel every episode.”

(Michael Cimarusti, Padma Lakshmi, and Wylie Dufresne in America’s Culinary Cup. Source: Jackie Brown / CBS)

It was a risk she felt keenly. When she attended a For Your Consideration (FYC) event for America’s Culinary Cup after Season 1 wrapped, she heard collective feedback from industry peers for the first time—cinematographers and sound designers pulling her aside to talk craft in the specific, exacting way people who make television talk to each other. “That was really gratifying,” she said. “I got a lot of good compliments from cinematographers and sound guys.” Coming from someone who labored over every creative aspect of the show, the validation landed where it was meant to.

The finale arrived in May with three chefs still standing: Cara Stadler, a Portland, Maine-based chef of Chinese descent married to an English woman; Matt Peters, a Bocuse d’Or gold medalist who had settled into Austin and its rhythms; and Chris Morgan, a Michelin-starred Washington, DC-based chef whose cooking draws from Jamaican, Chinese, and Iranian culinary traditions. They were asked first to reimagine signature dishes from three legendary guest judges: Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, Suzanne Goin of A.O.C., and Daniela Soto-Innes, the youngest chef ever named World’s Best Female Chef. Then, after Peters was eliminated, Stadler and Morgan cooked three-course meals structured around past, present, and future—menus that functioned less as dinners than as self-portraits.

It was Stadler’s final course that stopped Lakshmi cold. She brought out a teacup, old-fashioned and floral, the kind you’d find at a grandmother’s house in Essex, filled with thin, milky tea and delicate dumplings. It was, by any conventional measure, an unlikely finale dish—watery, almost modest—and yet it said everything about her family and the children who would come.

(Padma Lakshmi in America’s Culinary Cup. Source: Jackie Brown / CBS)

“It painted this narrative that was so clear to see and taste,” Lakshmi said. “Her wife is English, so she wanted to nod to her family life. She is of Chinese descent, so she wanted to nod to dumplings. She wanted to give us something sweet, but not too sweet. It all made sense, and it was a meal that only Cara could have made.”

What Lakshmi found most remarkable wasn’t the technique, though the technique was there, but the imagination rooted in a life so specific it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. “No one could have come up with that idea out of the blue,” she said. “But it came from such a grounded place, and that’s when food is wonderful.” Stadler won by four points.

There is a phrase Lakshmi returns to, in various forms, across the show and well beyond it: the idea that food tells you who a person is. It’s not a metaphor for her so much as a method. “You tell me how a person eats, I will tell you who they are,” she said, and the show bore that out week after week, sometimes in ways that surprised even her. Morgan’s cooking struck her as quietly significant—his food drawing from Jamaican and Chinese traditions absorbed through his wife, and Iranian techniques passed down from a mentor chef.

“To have this sort of beautiful white man from DC cook all of this beautiful ethnic food and talk about it with such love and respect and reverence,” she said, “I think at this time in our country’s history it’s really thought-provoking and endearing, and what the best of America is about.” It was a reminder that the most interesting American cooking has always happened at the edges of categories, in kitchens where the question of who gets to cook what has already been answered by love.

(Padma Lakshmi and Cara Stadler in America’s Culinary Cup. Source: Jackie Brown / CBS)

That vision—America understood through the people who cook, migrate, adapt, and remember—runs through Lakshmi’s body of work. It animated Taste the Nation; it shaped her cookbook Padma’s All-American; it drove the deliberate breadth of the contestant pool for America’s Culinary Cup, which included chefs drawing from Cambodian, Mexican, Indian, and Japanese traditions alongside the classical French training that still defines so much of fine dining. Diana Dávila, she noted with particular warmth, made béchamel with masa and Indigenous ingredients, quietly pulling a cornerstone of French cuisine back toward the land it was made on. “When you look at all the food made on America’s Culinary Cup, you are seeing the flavors of America, and in a way, America is this microcosm of the world’s flavors, because of our immigrants, because of our Indigenous folks too,” she explained.

What she hopes the chefs take away is more personal than exposure. Several told her the experience changed how they think about food and about themselves. A group text among the female competitors, she mentioned, is still active. “Some of them have made lifelong friends,” she said. “It’s lovely to have a community that you build from scratch like that, that is then carried on outside of the actual experience.”

She is careful not to overclaim. Season 1 is one season. Turning America’s Culinary Cup into the kind of institution she envisions—a prize chefs aspire to the way actors aspire to an Oscar—will take time. But the foundation is there.

(Wylie Dufresne, Padma Lakshmi, and Michael Cimarusti in America’s Culinary Cup. Source: Jackie Brown / CBS)

For Lakshmi, who has spent most of her adult life thinking about food and what it means to eat well and eat together, the show is less a career milestone than a culmination. She built it from scratch because she finally had the standing to, and she made it the way she wanted because she had the latitude. “It’s about bringing all the art and the science of food and elevating it to something that's a greater experience than just filling your belly,” she added.

By the end of the first season, the $1 million prize and the scale of the production matter less than what the chefs reveal about themselves. A great meal, Lakshmi has long understood, is an argument for a place and the people who shaped it. It can show you where a person has been and what they carried into the kitchen before they ever picked up a knife. In America’s Culinary Cup, that meant inviting 16 chefs to make food only they could make; in Stadler’s final dish, a vision of family became something delicate enough to drink. Lakshmi, drawing on decades of experience, gave that work a stage. The chefs filled it.

(Tom Pelphrey and Mark Ruffalo in Task. Source: Peter Kramer / HBO)

Spoilers below for Task Season 1.

As Mark Ruffalo was filming Task, he was bitten by a tick in the Pennsylvania woods and came down with Lyme disease. He’d had it before, knew what was coming, and described the experience at a recent panel with the equanimity of someone who understood the cost of getting the scene right. The woods were beautiful; the birds were everywhere. And the sequence he shot with Tom Pelphrey—in which Ruffalo’s FBI agent, Tom Brandis, and Robbie Prendergrast, the man he’s been chasing all season, meet each other with a kind of mercy—became one of his favorite things he’s ever done. “These were two men sort of trapped by their circumstances, and you want them to be free, and God and nature wants them to be free, but they can’t, and they know that,” Ruffalo explained.

That scene, a farewell between two men who’ve come to understand each other across a divide, sits near the emotional center of Task, the HBO Max series that became one of last fall’s most talked-about dramas and was recently renewed for a second season. Created by Brad Ingelsby, who delivered the Emmy-winning Mare of Easttown to HBO in 2021, the seven-episode series follows Tom (Ruffalo), a former priest working as an FBI recruiter, as he’s handed a task force and sent after Robbie (Pelphrey), a sanitation worker robbing drug houses to keep his family alive. Ruffalo does some of his most finely calibrated work in years; Pelphrey, raw and combustible beneath a layer of exhaustion, gives the kind of performance that reshapes how you think about what he’s capable of. What begins as a cat-and-mouse chase gradually becomes a harder examination of two men from different worlds, shaped by grief, finding each other at the worst possible moment.

(The official trailer for Task. Source: HBO / YouTube)

On June 3, following a screening of the series premiere in North Hollywood, Ingelsby joined executive producer Mark Roybal, director and executive producer Salli Richardson-Whitfield, and cinematographer Elie Smolkin for a panel moderated by Joanna Robinson of The Ringer. Pelphrey was there in person; Ruffalo and Emilia Jones, who plays Maeve, Robbie’s fierce niece, and elevates what could have been a supporting turn into one of the season’s emotional anchors, joined virtually.

The Mare of Easttown comparison arrived early. Roybal said they’d talked about it plenty, knew the Delaware County setting and the Delco accent would invite the parallel, and decided the only answer was to build something genuinely different from the start. But where Mare of Easttown centered on a woman and her community, Task is about fathers and sons—about what gets passed down, what gets buried, and whether forgiveness is possible for men who’ve made themselves hard to forgive. “That was very much the theme that drove the story,” Roybal said. He also noted, with some pleasure, that the show goes somewhere Mare of Easttown never did. “It’s very hopeful,” he explained. “What we put Tom and Robbie through, they really find some grace.”

That grace, though, comes at a cost. Robbie dies later in the season after being stabbed following a season of choices that kept narrowing his options until the only one left was sacrifice. His face appears in the quarry in the finale—a shot that wasn’t scripted, that Ingelsby found while going back through the dailies. “I just felt like we needed his presence there,” Ingelsby said at the panel. “We needed to see his face.”

(Joanna Robinson, Mark Ruffalo, Brad Ingelsby, Tom Pelphrey, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Mark Roybal, Elie Smolkin, and Emilia Jones at HBO Max’s FYC event for Task on June 3 in North Hollywood. Source: JP Mangalindan)

The birds are where that instinct is most visible. Tom is a birder, a detail that grew from Ingelsby’s conversations with his uncle and from Ruffalo’s own off-script enthusiasm for the subject, loading the Merlin Bird ID app on his phone while on set to identify a tanager. The vagrant bird became the season’s central metaphor almost by accident: Ingelsby read about birds that wander so far outside their normal range they forget how to find their way home. He recognized Robbie in the description: a man who strays so far that return begins to feel impossible.

In Episode 5, Tom shares the analogy with Robbie during a long conversation in a moving car, shot in Pennsylvania heat, that Ingelsby described as the moment their two arcs crossed. Robbie hears the story and recognizes something of himself in it. They separate in the woods beneath the trees; the birds keep singing.

None of the nature imagery was initially part of the grand design. Ingelsby isn’t, by his own admission, a writer who outlines; he follows the characters and lets them show him where the story lives. The quarry was Robbie’s because Robbie is the kind of person who’d have a quarry: a sacred, unofficial place he shared with his crew, his version of what Tom finds in prayer. “I never really started trying to make it a show about nature,” Ingelsby said. “It really just came out of the character.”

Richardson-Whitfield, who directed the back half of the season alongside first-time TV director Jeremiah Zagar, noted that Ingelsby then sent her and Smolkin into the woods for what felt like two to three months to find locations. “It was a very physically demanding show,” she acknowledged. She and Zagar made for an unlikely pairing on paper—she arrived in the Pennsylvania woods with every setup mapped before the crew set foot on location; he was a feature filmmaker directing television for the first time, loose and instinctive where she was more precise. But the contrast seemed to generate something rather than cancel it out. “How it works, I have no idea, but it did,” Roybal said.

(Emilia Jones and Kennedy Moyer in Task. Source: Peter Kramer / HBO)

Fatherhood was the door Pelphrey walked through to find Robbie. He became a dad before filming began, and the experience—the total rewiring of it, the part that can’t be explained to anyone who hasn’t lived it—turned out to be exactly the frequency Robbie was broadcasting on. “There’s no way to fully know it until you’re here, and then once you’re there, you see the world through completely different eyes,” Pelphrey said.

Every choice Robbie makes, every line Ingelsby wrote for him, landed differently after that. “Everything Brad has him do to me makes almost perfect sense.” Ingelsby knew he had his man when he heard Pelphrey’s audition tape and, half a minute in, heard him laugh. He called director Zagar before the tape was even finished. This is the guy.

Ruffalo, asked what draws him to men navigating the gray space between law and conscience, answered less like an actor discussing craft than someone speaking from experience. “Life is messy,” he said. “There’s the law we’re all supposed to follow, and then there’s just the human aspect of people’s lives: their upbringing, their economic circumstances, all these factors putting pressure on a human being and narrowing their choices.” What Ingelsby does, Ruffalo added, is write with enough honesty to let people remain human beings, even when their choices are impossible to defend.

That generosity also shows up in what Ingelsby calls the in-between scenes: moments that don’t push the plot forward so much as reveal who someone is when no one is forcing them to choose: a scene of Lizzie (Alison Oliver) at a bar, admitting she still hasn’t found her thing in life, or a quiet exchange that could easily have been cut and would have been a loss. “The aggregate of these little scenes is really profound,” Ingelsby said. “When the bullets are flying, you feel a little closer to the characters.”

(Mark Ruffalo and Fabien Frankel in Task. Source: Peter Kramer / HBO)

The same philosophy lived in the sets. In Robbie’s house, Pelphrey found small traces of family life everywhere, including googly eyes on a hallway light switch—the kind of detail a toddler leaves behind, invisible to cameras but useful to an actor trying to live inside a space. Jones, opening drawers in Maeve’s room before a take, found photographs of her father buried under other things. And somewhere in Tom’s house, Richardson-Whitfield placed a copy of a book written by a character from Mare of Easttown—an Easter egg nobody had publicly found yet.

The warmth between Pelphrey and Jones at the panel hinted at the rapport they built together across the season. Jones said she’d never felt so electric working with another actor, that in their most intense scenes she genuinely forgot the cameras were rolling. “I was just totally in Tom’s spell,” she said. Pelphrey returned the compliment, calling her the best young actor he’d ever seen, then joking with a grin that at her age he was a “liability.” Ruffalo, watching from his screen, seemed to hear in that exchange what he kept circling throughout the night: transcendence. “It puts everything through your hearts and your bodies and your commitment to these people—these complex people that the world never gets to see, that we all look away from,” he added.

That thought is the show in a sentence. Task is made around people the world has sorted into categories—the criminal, the compromised lawman, the grieving young woman holding everyone together—but it refuses to leave them there. Robbie robs drug houses and dies still trying, in his broken way, to protect his family; Tom bends rules he swore to uphold and begins finding his way back to his son. Maeve shoulders more than anyone her age should have to, forging on anyway. Ingelsby has always written toward the distance between a person’s choices and the forces that narrowed them down to those choices. In Task, he follows two men to the hardest possible place and, in the tall trees with all those birds around them, finds grace.

Season 1 of Task is available to stream on HBO Max.

(Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in Disclosure Day. Source: Universal Pictures)

There’s a moment in Disclosure Day when Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist played by Emily Blunt, is standing in front of a camera she has faced a thousand times, doing a job she could do in her sleep, when her mouth opens and out comes a language nobody in the studio has ever heard, full of clicks and whirs, alien and precise. She has no idea what she’s saying, and neither does anyone else—not yet.

That image, a woman channeling something vast and unknowable while the crew stares at her in bewildered silence, is as good a distillation of a Steven Spielberg film as any frame he’s ever committed to celluloid. He’s been making movies about the shock of contact—between people, between worlds, between what we believe and what turns out to be true—for more than half a century. Disclosure Day, his new sci-fi thriller, arrives almost 50 years after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it carries all that accumulated longing.

It’s also, improbably, a blast. Scripted by David Koepp, who has written some of Spielberg’s most propulsive work, the film opens mid-chase: Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity whistleblower with a backpack full of classified files, is running from Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the cold-eyed head of a private government contractor called Wardex, whose entire purpose is keeping humanity in the dark about a century’s worth of alien contact. Daniel’s confederate Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) is waiting in the wings, orchestrating the release of all of it—every file, encounter, cover-up—in one earthshaking data dump. (Thus, the “disclosure day” of the title.)

(The official trailer for Disclosure Day. Source: Universal Pictures)

What connects that plan to Margaret and her mysterious new abilities takes a while to fully surface, and Koepp’s script is smart enough to keep us slightly off-balance, releasing information the way a careful dealer turns cards. Margaret can read minds, speak different languages without explanation, and apparently translate an alien dialect that no human linguist has ever catalogued. Daniel can understand that dialect without being able to speak it. Together, they’re a key that fits a lock nobody knew existed.

The chase that follows moves the way Spielberg's best action always has: less like choreography than controlled accident, each near-miss feeling improvised even when you know it isn't. A sequence involving two cars and a moving freight train has the gleeful absurdity of a silent-film serial. Another, built around alien technology that lets its user inhabit someone else’s consciousness, turns an assault on a safehouse into something like a Buster Keaton routine played at cosmic stakes. You laugh, and then you catch your breath, and occasionally you do both at once.

Blunt carries the film’s emotional weight with the ease of someone who makes hard work look accidental. Margaret starts the movie trying to be stoic and competent and quietly ambitious, and she ends it undone—in the best way—by what’s been asked of her. Blunt lets the awe land on Margaret’s face without softening it into sentimentality. O’Connor, playing Daniel with a yielding, slightly rumpled decency, becomes her counterweight. Their scenes together build toward a kind of genuine mutual recognition.

(Hettienne Park, Colin Firth, and Gabby Beans in Disclosure Day. Source: Universal Pictures)

Firth makes Scanlon less a villain than a man who has spent so long protecting a secret that the secret has eaten him from the inside. Domingo, warm and unhurried as Hugo, is the kind of screen presence that makes you believe people would abandon stable lives to follow him into hiding. Eve Hewson, as Daniel’s girlfriend Jane—a former novitiate whose faith becomes the film’s unexpected moral compass—is riveting, doing more with fewer scenes.

Spielberg has always been better at conveying and drawing feeling than pure logic, which is not an indictment but an explanation of his prodigious gift of connecting with an audience. Here, feeling wins once again. What stays with you is less any single set piece than the film’s underlying argument, which it makes not through speeches but through accumulation. Disclosure Day is obsessed with how people receive the unbelievable, whether they shrink from it or grow. Firth’s Scanlon has devoted his career to the bet that humanity can’t handle the truth; Domingo’s Hugo has devoted his to the opposite wager. Margaret and Daniel, ordinary people caught between those two positions, discover that awe isn’t the enemy of function so much as its precondition.

That’s a very Spielberg idea, and he’s earned the right to return to it. What makes Disclosure Day feel less like a victory lap and more like a genuine inquiry of the unknown—and how we receive it—is the particular climate it lands in. It’s sometimes challenging to watch a movie about the radical act of telling 8 billion people the truth at the same time in 2026 and not feel the weight of the metaphor. But Spielberg doesn’t belabor it here, because he doesn’t have to.

(Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in Disclosure Day. Source: Universal Pictures)

Spielberg has been asking the same question since he was a teenager pointing a camera at the Arizona sky: what would it do to us, to finally know we aren’t alone? Disclosure Day is his fullest answer yet. It’s not always the most technically dazzling, but it is arguably the most hopeful. He’s seen enough of the world now to know what cynicism looks like—and how it can harden us—and he’s chosen, again and stubbornly, not to go there. In the end, the answer he arrives at isn’t delivered by alien spacecraft, clandestine government, or through sheer cinematic scale. It comes from the most ordinary place imaginable.

The lights in the sky don’t save us in this film. We do.

Disclosure Day is in theaters now.

(Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd in Half Man. Source: Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

Spoilers below for Half Man.

In a Scottish barn, Ruben (Richard Gadd) and Niall (Jamie Bell) grapple in the half-light: one for control, the other for his life. That moment, once it arrives in the final episode of Half Man, recasts everything that came before it: the boys smoking weed in a Glasgow flat, the long silences, the bursts of violence that seemed to come from nowhere and always, in retrospect, from somewhere very specific. By the time they reach that barn at Niall’s wedding, 30 years of devotion and damage have gathered between them like pressure behind glass.

At an HBO Max FYC event for Half Man in North Hollywood on June 2, Gadd gathered with Bell, the show’s younger actors Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell, Neve McIntosh, and director Alexandra Brodski for a conversation moderated by Matt Brennan, editor-in-chief of The Envelope at the Los Angeles Times. What they unpacked wasn’t so much the plot, but the emotional logic of a complicated bond the show never simplifies.

Half Man began in Gadd’s imagination in 2019. He wasn’t yet the Emmy-winning writer the world would come to know following Baby Reindeer’s seismic impact; he was still working on that show’s stage version and trying to break into television. “There was a lot of that conversation around like male violence and male repression back then,” Gadd recalled. While watching TV, the idea came to him, simple and devastating: take two broken men in the present, then look back at the childhoods that taught them what to absorb, what to hide, and what would later corrupt them.

(The official trailer for Half Man. Source: HBO Max / YouTube)

The barn scene came first; he got out his phone. “I think that scene almost remained exactly as it was in the notes in my phone all the way to what we shot in the end,” Gadd explained. The series, he said, was always meant to function as a kind of mosaic—not a linear account of two lives but a patchwork of “moments of deep passion and confusion and contradiction.”

His approach shaped everything. The show moves between its characters’ adolescence in ‘80s Glasgow and a present-day wedding that serves as the series’ frame, returning to the event again and again. Niall and Ruben aren’t biological brothers—their mothers entered a relationship and shared a home when the boys were teens—but the bond that forms between them has all the markings of blood. Ruben is volatile and magnetic, the kind of person who might hug you or punch you, and whose danger is part of his pull. Niall is self-conscious and guarded, his sexuality a source of private shame. What they become to each other resists easy description, which is partly why the show needs six episodes and two timelines to tackle it.

The wedding scenes become a structural anchor across the season, and Gadd described his work on them as one of the harder writing problems he’s faced. The challenge was keeping the audience oriented across time jumps that sometimes spanned three years and sometimes 14. “I needed to give them something that not only anchored them in the world and kept it feeling consistent, but also kept hooking enough to keep people engaged,” he said. By Episode 4, he knew the formula needed to break—so he moved Ruben’s death to that episode’s close, a disclosure that changes how the audience understands everything that follows.

(Matt Brennan, Richard Gadd, Jamie Bell, Neve McIntosh, Stuart Campbell, Mitchell Robertson, and Alexandra Brodski at HBO Max’s FYC event for Half Man on June 2 in North Hollywood. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Jamie Bell came to Half Man through an unusual door. He read the script for Episode 6 first, and so he encountered Niall in full collapse before he understood how the man got there. What he found was a man dragged down by damage he never learned how to face. “There is this thing that is so deep rooted inside his body, which will not allow him to just be himself,” Bell said. Ruben, in this reading, is less a villain than a necessity: Niall’s sustenance and his corrosion, gathered in a single person. “Ruben is Niall’s oxygen. He is his food, he is his water, he is his energy. He cannot survive without this man, and yet he’s so problematic.”

What struck Bell, reading backward through the episodes, was the particular cruelty of Niall crashing Ruben’s wedding. The character finally allows himself to imagine a full life lived honestly, in the open, as himself. “It’s the moment that he sees that light that it’s all taken from him,” Bell said. He described the show’s deeper argument in terms that reach past the cultural conversation about toxic masculinity, though it encompasses that, too. “Yes, it’s about the problematic manosphere, but at its core, it’s about how we surrender promising lives to shame and fear,” Bell continued. “If there’s hope in it, it’s that we can reclaim our lives if we have the courage to speak our truth.”

For Bell, portraying Niall was less about the “eureka” moments actors sometimes describe than about finding what he called the “removal of thinking”—those unguarded instants when an accidental look or a turn of timing finds you. “It just disappears just as fast as it appeared,” he said. Gadd’s scripts, Bell suggested, clearly laid out who these characters are, which in turn gave him more freedom to find the character rather than spend time building the character. “He bears his soul in his writing and his performances,” Bell said. “It was really all there on the page.”

(Richard Gadd, Jamie Bell, Neve McIntosh, and Stuart Campbell at HBO Max’s FYC event for Half Man on June 2 in North Hollywood. Source: JP Mangalindan)

The physical reality of filming arrived fast. Bell and Gadd met, and within days were shooting the barn sequence that closes the series: the scene in which Ruben strangles Niall. “Hey, nice to meet you, now let’s take the tops off and roll around in the mud,” Gadd said. On Day Two, Bell burst a blood vessel in his eye while filming, visible in subsequent episodes if you look closely. “It was like a baptism of fire,” he said. A few weeks later, they shot the hospital scene at the end of Episode 4, which originally ran some 25 minutes and got trimmed during the edit.

Robertson and Campbell—the teenage Niall and Ruben, respectively—had a different kind of first encounter. Their chemistry wasn’t built over weeks of rehearsal; it was already there during a chemistry read in which Campbell moved around Robertson while tearing up pieces of paper. “I could feel that something was different with how Stuart was claiming the space, and then it helped me feel smaller than the space,” Robertson said. They hadn’t known each other before that day, but the scene gave them a way in.

Campbell’s work asked a different question. To play Ruben’s adolescent volatility convincingly, he had to understand it not as simply part of his personality but as the residue of a difficult childhood. Violence isn’t Ruben’s nature so much as something he inherited and never examined. “My main thing was to understand for Ruben what perpetrates the violence,” Campbell said. “What’s happened. Why he acts the way he acts.” It points toward the show’s most unsettling implication: that the barn was where the pair had always been headed.

(Neve McIntosh and Jamie Bell in Half Man. Source: Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

During the panel, Gadd was the most candid about the nature of Ruben and Niall’s bond. He intended their connection to feel “homoerotic” on some level, but also harder to define than that word allows. “I think that the most powerful relationships we have exist in the sphere of the unexplainable, and that’s why I always try to get to that,” he said. “Ultimately, their love for one another breaches into a transcendental place that they’re not even remotely capable of expressing.”

He pointed to the weed-smoking scene in Episode 1, one of his favorite moments in the series, as an early glimpse of that dynamic. As Niall watches Ruben lying on the floor, a tangle of emotions flickers across his face—adoration, longing, fear—hinting at the attachment that will come to define, and ultimately destroy, both of them. “That was a good example of where we really tried to drill down into the almost unexplainable feelings that you have,” Gadd said of Niall.

Brodski, who directed Episodes 1 through 3, set the look of the series early. Realism came first: the textures of Glasgow across several decades, furniture from the wrong era because that’s how people actually live. But she didn’t want the show to look as bleak as its subject matter. “I don’t think just because it’s a story where people have heavy experiences, the production design has to be heavy,” she said. The wedding sequences got a slightly more heightened treatment, with dolly tracks and occasional slow motion, while the memory episodes stayed close and handheld. What she resisted most was any visual approach that kept the audience at a distance from the characters’ pain. “I really like that the moral dilemmas of the show never felt intellectual,” she said. “They always felt so emotional.”

There’s a reason Neve McIntosh’s Lori becomes one of the series’ most essential presences. As the woman who raised Niall, she gives the story a rare point of stability. McIntosh said she found the role by leaning into that steadiness: not changing too much, not pushing for transformation, simply staying recognizably Lori. “If I’m consistently Lori, then they can dance around me, really,” she said. “I’m a fulcrum.” It’s a modest description of a difficult accomplishment: holding the line emotionally while the characters around her fall apart.

(Stuart Campbell, Mitchell Robertson, and Julie Cullen in Half Man. Source: Anne Binckebanck / HBO)

When Brennan asked Gadd for deeper insight into the ending, Gadd politely declined to offer his own interpretation. He said he’d seen too many people approach him with their own theories: some believe Ruben dies alone in the barn, some believe both men do, and some find the key in what Ruben says at his mother’s funeral, that death isn’t about missing a person so much as mourning the relationship you might have had with them. “Every time I see somebody come up to me and tell me their theory, I see excitement in their eyes,” he explained. “I never want to take that from them.”

That instinct tells you a great deal about the show. Half Man belongs to a tradition of television that earns its ambiguity, making its open ending land with the recognition that some bonds don’t resolve. They only stop, sometimes rudely and abruptly. Ruben and Niall spend 30 years unable to live together yet unable to live apart; the barn is where the human math finally runs out.

What came to Gadd in 2019—two men, the air between them charged and frayed—turned out to be the whole show. He spent six episodes honoring that image honestly, then handed it back to the audience without a firm conclusion, not because he didn’t know how things end, but because he understood that not knowing was the point. In the end, his follow-up to Baby Reindeer doesn’t explain Ruben and Niall by neatly solving them; it leaves them where it first found them: together, trapped inside the bond that made them and, eventually, crushed them.

Half Man is streaming on HBO Max.

(Lisa Kudrow in The Comeback’s third and final season. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

Spoilers below for The Comeback Season 3.

The final scene of The Comeback's series finale begins in black and white. Jane's (Laura Silverman) camera holds the image there until Valerie starts sharing her truth, and color slowly seeps into the world around her. It’s a meaningful shift that gently corrects the record, insisting, after three seasons over 21 years, that viewers never saw Valerie fully until now.

That The Comeback found its way to such an ending at all is its own kind of story. Kudrow and Michael Patrick King created The Comeback, which premiered on HBO in 2005 as a satire about Valerie Cherish, a former sitcom star trying to claw her way back into relevance while a reality show films the attempt. It returned in 2014 with an even sharper idea: Valerie joins a prestige drama that turns her own humiliation into art, earning Kudrow an Emmy nomination.

The third and final season, arriving more than a decade after that, puts Valerie in her most precarious position yet: she leads How’s That?!, the first multi-camera sitcom largely written by AI, and tries to navigate a corner of the industry trying to outsource creativity. Where Season 1 set her against reality TV and Season 2 against the prestige drama built around her humiliation, Season 3 sets her against a machine that tries imitating creativity without caring who created it. The tension is familiar—will Valerie draw a line, or find a way to carry on?—but after more than two decades, The Comeback understands the answer was never simple.

(The official trailer for The Comeback’s third and final season. Source: HBO Max / YouTube)

On May 27, HBO hosted a For Your Consideration (FYC) event in Hollywood that gave the cast and creative team a chance to reflect on their journey together. Veteran entertainment journalist Jim Halterman moderated a panel with Kudrow, King, Jack O’Brien, Damian Young, Laura Silverman, and Dan Bucatinsky. The warm applause throughout felt like recognition: of the work, and years it took to assemble Valerie’s singular world.

The idea for this season took a decade to find. King described years of lunches with Kudrow where the conversation returned to Valerie without resolution. “We came up with Chicago, Valerie in Chicago, five years ago, but we knew it wasn’t a big enough idea,” he said. The right one arrived as they were leaving one of those lunches: Valerie cast in an AI-written sitcom. “Both Lisa and I felt it was a big enough machine—no pun intended—to actually do the show on,” King said. Kudrow, characteristically, sharpened the premise to its essence. “It was a bad enough idea for Valerie to throw herself into,” she mused.

Season 3 gives everyone room to change, and the writing room found its pleasure in that evolution. King described this as the deepest pleasure of working in television. “The great extravagance of being able to do a series is the evolution of a character,” he said. “If your intention is to have everybody grow, you just start looking at the actors and think they can do everything, so let’s give them everything to do.”

(Jim Halterman, Michael Patrick King, Lisa Kudrow, Dan Bucatinsky, Laura Silverman, Damian Young, and Jack O’Brien at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Comeback in Los Angeles on May 27. Source: JP Mangalindan)

For Bucatinsky, that meant following his character Billy Stanton toward the “butterfly he believes himself to be," as Bucatinsky put it. Season 3 makes Billy Valerie's producing partner and an executive producer on How's That?!, a long-overdue promotion for someone who spent two decades asking, in Bucatinsky's words, "when is it my turn?" He described Billy's arc as a coming-out story, not an easy one and not one that went smoothly, tracing the distance between the passed-over figure from Season 1 and the man who finally has somewhere to go.

Young, meanwhile, spoke about playing Valerie’s husband Mark in a season that finally gives the marriage real weight. Mark finds himself on a reality show of his own: the last place imaginable for the man who spent Season 1 as Valerie’s barely-in-frame anchor. Young said his wife started crying during certain scenes. “She said, ‘That’s you, that’s you,’” he recalled. He didn’t elaborate on which moments. He didn’t need to.

Silverman, who played documentary director Jane Benson from the show’s start, spoke about how integral her character was to the final season. “I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “I was ready to do whatever was asked of me.” Across Season 3, Jane becomes Valerie’s most sustained witness, telling Valerie in the finale’s final moments, “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time.” When Halterman observed that Jane is, in many ways, the audience watching Valerie, Silverman agreed, then softened the idea into its most generous form. “It’s not really mine. It’s yours,” she said.

(Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow at HBO Max’s FYC event for The Comeback in Los Angeles on May 27. Source: JP Mangalindan)

The most affecting stretch of the evening centered on Tommy, Valerie’s current hairstylist, played by O’Brien—a legendary stage director and four-time Tony Award winner making his screen acting debut. Kudrow and King brought Tommy in to fill the space left by Mickey, Valerie’s late hairdresser and closest confidant, after the death of actor Robert Michael Morris in 2017.

For anyone who once watched Valerie lean on Mickey as both protector and intimate audience, his absence in Season 3 gave the comedy a bruise. King explained the moment in Season 3 in which Tommy reaffirms to Valerie he could never replace Mickey. “We wanted Tommy to say, ‘I’m not Mickey, and everybody can relax,’” he said. The emotional onscreen moment forces a reckoning Valerie has been avoiding, bringing her to the grief she’s been circling. “Tommy’s the one that brings her to the precipice of: you’re not dealing with this, so that we can all deal with it together,” King said. “But it wasn’t enough just to do an in memoriam episode. We wanted to do a story that moved everybody forward, and to show the difference between Mickey and Tommy.”

King found O’Brien through a YouTube video of the director discussing his Broadway career. “A thought came into my mind: that’s the placebo Mickey,” King said. “He’s not an actor. He’s theatrical in an organic human way.”

When they finally sat down, King asked, almost as an afterthought, whether O’Brien could act. “What do you think I’ve been doing this entire dinner pretending you’re interesting?” O’Brien quipped. On the scene where Tommy tells Valerie she has unfinished business with Mickey, O’Brien was direct. “I stared into [Kudrow’s] face and just told the truth,” he added. “I don’t call it acting. I just called it a real honor.”

(Laura Silverman and Lisa Kudrow in the final scene of The Comeback’s series finale. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

King, returning to the finale, elaborated on his creative choices in the episode's parting scene. “A lot of people thought she was kind of black and white in the first season: she was annoying, or this or that,” he continued. “They didn’t see the full range, and at that moment you see a really vibrant version of Valerie, when she’s telling her truth.” It's a deceptively simple answer to the season's central question and, after three seasons, the right one.

The shift from black and white to full color arrives when Valerie shares her truth, when, as King put it, her humanity comes forward. For a show that so often asked whether people watched Valerie—used her, mocked her, or finally understood her—the image simply arrives. The show was always going to end here; it just took 21 years to find the right frame.

Kudrow, when asked how they knew the writing had arrived at the right ending, kept it brief. “When a line would come out and Michael’s eyes exploded in tears, then we knew that was right,” she said.

The Comeback spent three seasons watching an industry find new ways to tell Valerie she was almost enough, but never quite. This season, that industry even imagined television pushing aside the very people who give it shape, the writers who give it a pulse. But in the finale’s closing scene, it feels like the show’s soft rebuttal: an acknowledgement, at last, of what had been there all along. Valerie was never becoming someone else. She was stepping fully, unmistakably into view.

All three seasons of The Comeback are available to stream on HBO Max.

(Matthew Rhys, Gabe Rotter, Brittany Snow, Claire Danes, Howard Gordon, Daniel Pearle, Anthony Campos, and Sean Callery at Netflix’s FYC event for The Beast in Me on June 6 in Los Angeles. Source: Todd Williamson / Netflix)

When The Beast in Me creator Gabe Rotter read a profile in 2016 of Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter behind Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” he couldn’t let go of what he found there. Schwartz, at the time, was a young, struggling writer handed extraordinary access to Trump at a moment when Trump wanted to be taken seriously as more than a Page Six fixture, and he wrote the book anyway, helping shape a public mythology that would follow them both. Years later, when Trump ran for president, Schwartz embarked on something close to a public apology tour, convinced he’d played a part in building that mythology.

What stayed with Rotter wasn’t so much the politics as the writer, and the uneasy bargain a writer may be tempted to make when access beckons with the promise of moral compromise. “I thought that writer-subject dynamic was a very interesting way into the story,” Rotter said at a recent Netflix FYC panel for The Beast in Me, held after a screening of the show’s premiere episode. “Their interests aren’t necessarily aligned, and it started me thinking about the writer as a protean creature, a predatorial creature, even.”

That instinct eventually became The Beast in Me, an eight-episode limited series that premiered on Netflix last November and earned three Golden Globe nominations, including Best Limited Series. At a Netflix FYC event in Los Angeles on June 6, following a screening of the premiere episode “Sick Puppy,” Stacey Wilson Hunt, a contributing editor to The Hollywood Reporter, moderated a panel with Rotter, showrunner and executive producer Howard Gordon, executive producer and star Claire Danes, actors Matthew Rhys and Brittany Snow, director and executive producer Antonio Campos, writer and executive producer Daniel Pearle, and composer Sean Callery.

(The official trailer for The Beast in Me. Source: Netflix / YouTube)

The series centers on Aggie Wiggs (Danes), a Pulitzer Prize–winning author who hasn’t published a word since her young son’s death four years earlier. Hollowed out by grief and unable to move forward, she decides to write her next book about the man who has just moved in next door: Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a wealthy real estate developer long suspected in his first wife’s disappearance. Aggie gets closer than she should, telling herself it’s research. Nile lets her, for reasons that only gradually become clear. What she doesn’t immediately see is how completely he has already found his own subject in her.

That dynamic has a specific book behind it. One of the first things Rotter mentioned at the panel was Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” a 1990 work that Danes brought to him early on. Malcolm’s argument—that a journalist who cultivates a source is engaged in an inherently predatory relationship—landed squarely on what Rotter was already working toward. A writer profiling a suspected killer isn’t simply doing a job. She is hunting. The question the series keeps turning over is whether Aggie, in her grief and her hunger for a story, has more in common with Nile than she knows.

The series pushes that argument beyond journalism and into more unsettling territory. Aggie begins by treating Nile as a subject, a mystery to solve, but the closer she gets to him, the harder it becomes to remember where the research ends and she begins. The question isn’t simply whether Nile is dangerous; it’s whether Aggie’s fascination with him is itself a form of hunger.

(Howard Gordon, Claire Danes, and Matthew Rhys at Netflix’s FYC event for The Beast in Me on June 6 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

That question became Gordon’s central problem to solve. He’s a showrunner who has always been more interested in what pressure does to people than in the events that apply it—24, Homeland, the shows that made his reputation all run on that principle. “The relationship between a writer and her subject is a really static, potentially static idea,” he acknowledged at the panel. His job was to keep pushing the room toward the most basic dramatic question: what happens next?

The second question, Hunt noted, was harder: why. She opened the panel by acknowledging the show as somewhat of an anomaly: The Beast in Me arrived as a fully original story, not an adaptation of a podcast, a true crime case, or an existing novel. In a television landscape that has grown almost reflexively reliant on existing IP, Rotter wrote it from scratch, inspired by a real story but beholden to none. What those preoccupations produced is a show about two damaged people who recognize each other too clearly. Aggie sees in Nile a darkness that repels and compels her in equal measure. Nile recognizes a truth in Aggie she is not yet willing to acknowledge: a grief so consuming it has curdled into rage—directed at Teddy Fenig (Bubba Weiler), a man she holds responsible for her son’s death in a car accident. The title comes from a Johnny Cash song about wrestling with your own capacity for harm; it doesn’t only refer to Nile.

For Danes, who also served as executive producer and helped develop the project, the key was always the contradiction inside Aggie: the controlled, watchful woman with a raw current running underneath. “I was excited by the challenge of playing a very cerebral person, an observer, reserved, but who also had a kind of viscera underneath,” she said. “That push-pull, that paradox was interesting to play with.”

(Howard Gordon, Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, and Brittany Snow at Netflix’s FYC event for The Beast in Me on June 6 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Danes didn’t treat Aggie’s grief as an abstraction. To understand the shape of her sorrow, she researched what psychologists call complicated grief: not the kind that recedes over time, but the kind that takes up permanent residence, hardening into a rage the person doesn’t fully recognize. “Usually people move through the process and emerge,” Danes said. “She just doesn’t. Many people can’t. She’s in stasis, and she’s in hell, and that grief has become gangrenous within her.” It’s a performance that earns every word of that description—Danes is extraordinarily expressive, finding in Aggie’s smallest facial quivers and gestures the weight of old hurt reshaping a life.

Carrying that weight through the first episode, largely Aggie alone in a decaying house, was by Danes’ own account daunting—and she wasn’t above joking about it. “A sad lady in a big house falling apart,” she said of the pilot. “That was the original title.” She paused. “Does this pass as entertainment?”

It does, and Campos understood why. The director, whose credits include The Staircase and The Sinner, has spent much of his career finding tension where very little appears to be happening, letting atmosphere carry what other directors leave to incident. At the panel, he described reading the pilot and encountering something he almost never sees: a script with no body in the first 10 minutes, no ex-cop drawn back into the fray. “I love the fact that the centerpiece of the show was two people at a table talking,” he said. “I was like, we’re going to take two days to shoot this.”

(Matthew Rhys, Brittany Snow, Gabe Rotter, Daniel Pearle, Antonio Campos at Netflix’s FYC event for The Beast in Me on June 6 in Los Angeles. Source: JP Mangalindan)

That lunch scene in the premiere, the first real sit-down between Aggie and Nile—her sizing him up as a subject, him doing the same to her—is where the series clicks into place. Pearle, one of the show’s writers who came to television from theater and whose playwriting background includes A Kid Like Jake, wrote it knowing exactly what he was after. “Language is a weapon,” Pearle said at the panel. “It’s a seduction. If those scenes worked, there had to be a fusion of action and dialogue—what was going on between them at that table was the heart of the action.”

For Rhys, the challenge of Nile was resisting the obvious move. With a villain this unapologetic, the temptation is to signal the evil early—to let the audience feel like they’ve got him figured out. Rhys didn’t take that exit. He simply let Nile’s reasoning move at its own pace. “The truth of it, with this kind of writing, is I was trying not to get in the way of it,” he said. Rhys delivers a portrayal of Nile that is coldly sinister. Linger in his orbit too long and danger starts to feel inevitable—and with Rhys, you feel it.

Campos gave him the room to find the edges. Take it as far as you want, the director would tell him, and then they’d pull it back. Netflix gave them two full days for the lunch scene. Rhys described that as “a real luxury,” time to explore, to find the register, to let the scene breathe before locking it down.

(Brittany Snow and Claire Danes in The Beast in Me. Source: Netflix)

Brittany Snow’s Nina, Nile’s second wife, may be the hardest character to read. She married a man the world suspected of killing his first wife, and for most of the series the audience is left to wonder how willfully she’s looked away. Snow loved playing someone viewers would underestimate, a woman who appears to exist at the margins of the story and turns out to be holding one of its live wires. Snow plays her with real nuance, finding the fragility and uncertainty beneath a woman who learned to survive by not looking too closely, not asking too many questions. “Getting to learn that her exploration is that she’s also a survivor, making choices in her own way that are animalistic and primal,” Snow said. Did Nina mastermind everything, or is she the one person who finally refuses to look away? “I love that ambiguity,” she said.

That uncertainty becomes one of the show’s most important questions. Nina spends much of the series deciding what she’s willing to see and what she isn’t, a tension that echoes throughout The Beast in Me. Again and again, the show returns to the stories people tell themselves in order to survive; Nina may understand that better than anyone.

Composer Sean Callery, who scored both 24 and Homeland for Gordon, faced a particular challenge: how do you score a show that opens with grief, writer’s block, and quiet menace inside of two minutes, without the music deciding what to feel before the audience does? He kept coming back to a single word for Aggie: “stuck.” “What does stuck sound like?” he remembered asking. The answer was a cello plucked almost violently, close to breaking the string, layered with Fender Rhodes piano and bent guitars—an atmosphere that could be sad and slightly absurd at the same time, because the show, for all its darkness, also understands the strange, almost rude comedy of grief.

For Nile, the first question was simpler: “Who is this guy?” Callery built toward that through minor chords and a low-grade unease, letting the answer arrive gradually. He saved his most telling observation for the lunch scene: after all that work finding the show’s sound, the meal between Aggie and Nile needed none of it. “I was so delighted that there was no need for music, not even a discussion about it,” Callery said.

(Claire Danes in The Beast in Me. Source: Netflix)

Part of the panel’s ease came from all the shared history onstage. Gordon and Danes spent eight seasons together on Homeland; Gordon and Callery also collaborated across 24 and Homeland, and Danes worked with Pearle years earlier on A Kid Like Jake, a film adapted from his own play. Danes described her approach to the writers’ room with characteristic clarity: hire really experienced, really committed people, then get your own personal drama out of the way. “There’s nothing kinky. The focus is on the practice of building a great show in healthy collaboration with other gifted people,” she added.

By the end of the conversation, the murder mystery felt almost secondary. The murders give The Beast in Me its momentum, but the panel centered on what really drove it: the show’s perilous bargain between writer and subject, the stories grief makes people tell themselves, and the darkness that curdles within when left unchecked.

Rotter used the word “protean” to describe some writers: people who change shape and slip inside other people’s lives in pursuit of the story. The Beast in Me suggests that gift comes with its own danger. Spend enough time staring into another person’s abyss, and you may find you’ve been studying your own all along.

The Beast in Me is available to stream on Netflix.

(Jason Bateman, Troy Kotsur, Kate Susman, Zach Baylin, and Alex DiGerlando at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Black Rabbit on May 16 in Los Angeles. Source: Thomas Lynch / Netflix)

Spoilers below for Black Rabbit.

Jason Bateman has a theory about his appetite for pressure, the professional kind. “I pointed it towards work about 25 years ago,” he told the room at a recent Netflix FYSEE panel for Black Rabbit, referring to his habit of taking on directing, producing, and acting all at once. “I like as much responsibility as possible.” When Black Rabbit creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, along with Jude Law, came to him about the show, he wanted to take a similar hands-on approach to the one he took with his previous Netflix series Ozark, so that “basically all you need to do is just point the camera at the people.”

With Black Rabbit, the material gave him plenty to work with. The eight-episode limited series follows two brothers from Coney Island who build one of Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, then spend eight episodes discovering how much family loyalty can survive. Jake Friedken (Jude Law) runs the place: polished, charming, and more compromised than he wants to admit. His older brother Vince (Bateman) co-founded it and lost his share after years of addiction and bad decisions. When Vince resurfaces with a six-figure gambling debt to a mob boss named Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur), Jake gets pulled back in, and Black Rabbit reveals itself to be less a crime story than a tragedy about two brothers who can’t stop loving each other, even as they keep pulling each other under.

(The official trailer for Black Rabbit. Source: Netflix / YouTube)

At Netflix’s FYSEE panel for Black Rabbit on May 16, moderated by Deadline executive editor Dominic Patten, Bateman joined Baylin, Susman, Kotsur, and production designer Alex DiGerlando, whose work, as Bateman made a point of saying, looks so convincing it hardly looks like work at all.

Baylin and Susman lived in New York for 20 years, eight of them in the West Village, essentially around the corner from the Spotted Pig, one of the restaurants that helped inspire the Black Rabbit. Baylin described it as the kind of place that felt like a nightclub without being pretentious, where anything could happen and often did. Restaurant culture, he suggested, attracts a particular pirate mentality: people who don’t want to work a traditional nine-to-five job. “We were really drawn to trying to write something about characters who are aspiring to really leave a mark on New York,” he said. Black Rabbit is about what it costs when they try.

The brothers chase that dream differently. Susman described Jake as someone whose ambition requires an audience, a man who presents himself as having everything together because the presentation matters almost as much as the reality. Vince wants success too, but doesn’t care as much about how he looks while chasing it. “Vince is a lot more a real person,” Susman said. “He knows who he is a little bit more than Jake does.” Jake wants to be seen succeeding. Vince simply wants to be whole. Baylin extended the idea with an image that captures the show’s view of New York: bars and restaurants look gorgeous at night, dimly lit and able to hide the mess. “New York is constantly being handed over to the next kid,” he said. “When it’s dimly lit, they look great. When the lights are on, there’s a lot of scars there.”

(Jason Bateman, Zach Baylin, Kate Susman, Alex DiGerlando, and Troy Kotsur at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Black Rabbit on May 16 in Los Angeles. Source: Thomas Lynch / Netflix)

Making Jake and Vince hard to root for early on, Bateman said, took nerve. “It takes a while to sort of see, ‘Oh, these guys are doing the best they can based on the circumstances they grew up in,’” he added.

Kotsur’s Joe Mancuso commands a room without raising his voice, or using one at all. Mancuso is deaf and communicates through his son Junior, who translates and visibly chafes at serving as his mouthpiece. Kotsur got the role through a circuitous route. During the awards campaign for Apple TV’s CODA, he kept running into Baylin and Susman at events, and at one of them, they asked what kind of role he’d never played. He told them he wanted to play a bad guy.

About a year later, the script arrived with Mancuso written specifically for him. The historical grounding mattered to Kotsur: before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), mainstream economic life often shut out deaf communities, and some found their way into the black market and organized crime, histories that have rarely made it onto the screen. Playing a deaf mob boss didn’t simply put a twist on a familiar role, it surfaced a buried story.

(Jason Bateman, Zach Baylin, Kate Susman, Alex DiGerlando, and Troy Kotsur at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Black Rabbit on May 16 in Los Angeles. Source: Thomas Lynch / Netflix)

Kotsur described Mancuso as a problem solver whose central currency is trust. “Trust is the most important thing for him,” he said. “Do I trust this person or not?” New York’s noise doesn’t register for Mancuso the way it does for everyone around him, and that, Kotsur suggested, becomes part of his advantage. The cops might be less inclined to suspect a deaf man. Mancuso knows that; he plays that card throughout.

On set, the three principals found their rhythm fast. Between takes, Kotsur and Bateman threw a Nerf football back and forth. “It really felt like we’d known each other for much longer than we actually had,” Kotsur said. Law brought a particular energy, high-wattage and almost restless. “I feel like he had that New York energy, maybe as a Londoner.” Kotsur, who grew up in Arizona and describes himself as Law's opposite in temperament, offered a drier assessment of himself. “I know that all this is bullshit,” he quipped.

Bateman spoke about the decision to give Mancuso no verbal presence: no big speeches, no scene-chewing. A character actor playing a bad guy usually has language as a primary weapon, and Mancuso has none. The choice showed courage on Baylin and Susman’s part, Bateman said, and what Kotsur did with it, “in not thinking that he might need to make up for that,” became the performance’s whole architecture.

(Jason Bateman and Jude Law in Black Rabbit. Source: Netflix)

That tension between damage and presentation also lives inside the restaurant itself, literally worked into its walls. DiGerlando described a mood board assembled from the Spotted Pig, West Village institutions like One if by Land, Two if by Sea and Freeman’s Alley, British gastropubs, and then the Keith Richards estate and Jimmy Page’s house, for the music-world feel that was always part of the Black Rabbit’s DNA. They had a direction. What they didn’t have was a location.

They almost missed the one they found. Already on the road to scout a Chinatown space that wasn’t quite right, the building’s owner mentioned he had one other place, in bad shape, probably not worth the trip. They went anyway. They found the Bridge Cafe, one of the oldest wooden structures still standing in New York, predating the Brooklyn Bridge by almost a century. Hurricane Sandy had gutted it. The walls bore etchings of the bridge under construction. In those etchings, a black rabbit appeared.

The team created the entire restaurant on a soundstage—three floors, two stacked and one adjacent—but drew the bones of the design from that ruined building. DiGerlando worked the brothers’ personalities into the set: crumbling plaster and exposed lath right next to expensive imported Austrian wallpaper. “Everywhere you look in that set, there’s both Vince and Jake represented,” he said. The building becomes the show’s central metaphor made physical: rough and refined at once, just like the brothers who created it. Its actual state of disrepair made it into the series too: a flashback early in the second episode shows Vince bringing Jake to the space before it became anything. “You’ve got to have a vision for this,” Vince tells him. They left it exactly as they found it.

(Jason Bateman and Jude Law in Black Rabbit. Source: Netflix)

The show’s ending emerged during production. Bateman described an earlier plan for Vince’s death, a sacrifice the writers had constructed for him. As filming continued, they realized the weapon built for that sacrifice could serve a different purpose, and the Bridge Cafe’s location near the Brooklyn Bridge, under its on-ramp, opened up another possibility. Vince’s death on the roof of that building, where he chooses to jump after calling the police and confessing, echoed a piece of backstory revealed earlier in the season: years before, a former employee had been paralyzed after a reckless roof-jump bet connected to Vince.

Bateman said Baylin and Susman’s willingness to let the story evolve as production continued proved one of its strengths. “Their ability to pivot and not be overly prescriptive and precious about what was already living in their head is really admirable,” he said.

That openness runs through Black Rabbit. The show follows two men shaped by the same wound, who spent their lives building a dream together, tearing it down, and trying to believe something beautiful could still come from what they’d broken. By the end, the Black Rabbit isn’t just a restaurant; it’s the brothers’ dream, their trap, and their ruin.

New York offers the perfect stage: a city that looks gorgeous in low light, rewards reinvention, and has a way of showing you exactly who you are in the harsh light of morning.

Black Rabbit is now streaming on Netflix.

(Abbott Elementary stars Janelle James, Chris Perfetti, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Quinta Brunson, Tyler James Williams, William Stanford Davis, and Lisa Ann Walter. Source: Disney / Sami Drasin)

Five seasons in, Abbott Elementary is still the best-run school on television, which says something, given that Ava Coleman (Janelle James) remains in charge. Created by Quinta Brunson and now deep into its run on ABC, the mockumentary follows the dedicated, underfunded, and endlessly lovable staff of Willard R. Abbott Public School in Philadelphia, a group that has become as familiar as any ensemble on television. The show premiered in 2021, quickly became one of network TV’s rare modern comedy breakouts, went on to win four Emmys, and has done little since to suggest the goodwill was misplaced.

At an ABC FYC panel for Abbott Elementary in Los Angeles on May 31, Variety Chief Awards Editor Clayton Davis moderated a discussion with Brunson and the cast to reflect on the most recent season. Tyler James Williams, Janelle James, Chris Perfetti, and William Stanford Davis were in the room, with Sheryl Lee Ralph and Lisa Ann Walter joining virtually. The panel moved less like a formal event and more like a joke-riffing faculty lounge chat with microphones.

That felt appropriate. Abbott Elementary has always been a workplace comedy about work, but also about the small daily exchanges that keep people showing up: friendship, pride, exhaustion, duty, and the stubborn belief that a difficult, underpaying job can still be worth doing well.

(The Season 5 trailer for Abbott Elementary. Source: Disney / YouTube)

This season tested one of the show’s most beloved relationships: Janine Teagues (Brunson) and Gregory Eddie (Williams). After years of will-they-won’t-they tension and a period of dating, the couple hit their first real rough patch while planning a getaway in the Season 5 episode “Trip,” fighting over money, transportation, and destination.

“It was just time,” Brunson said of the decision to stress test the relationship. The writers wanted to throw a “stone at the rock” of Janine and Gregory’s romance before letting them move forward. “People were very upset to see one of their favorite couples have a tiff. I like to make people feel things, and so that’s why we went that route.”

Williams said the argument made sense to him because Gregory wasn’t simply being stubborn or cheap. “They were fighting over their future,” Williams said. Janine was thinking about “quality of life,” while Gregory was trying to figure out how he would help “provide” for the relationship. “Every couple I know right now is having that argument because we live in a very specific world financially,” he added.

(Sheryl Lee Ralph, Lisa Ann Walter, Quinta Brunson, Janelle James, and Chris Perfetti in Abbott Elementary. Source: Disney / Gilles Mingasson)

By the finale, Janine and Gregory had found their way back to each other. Gregory also ended the season promoted to vice principal, with thoughts of proposing hovering in the background. And if Janine and Gregory carried the season’s romantic anxiety, Ava remained one of its great comic sparks. Across five seasons, James has turned Ava into one of television’s sharpest sources of chaos: self-interested, shameless, occasionally competent by accident, and somehow exactly the principal Abbott deserves.

This season deepened Ava’s relationship with O’Shon (Matthew Law), the school district’s IT rep, and gave her, perhaps more surprisingly, a stake in Janine and Gregory’s relationship. James was quick to clarify Ava’s motives. “She less cares about them and more cares about messing up the vibes of the school and the social circle that she’s become a part of,” she explained.

After five seasons, playing Ava now feels second nature to James. “I’m in cruise control now,” she said. “I feel like I know her.” Later, she spoke more seriously about what the character has come to mean, especially to Black women who have told her Ava makes them feel confident and seen. “I realized that my role in this character is so important to so many people,” James said.

Mr. Johnson (Davis) also found a love interest this season with Miss Carroll (Khandi Alexander), a fellow custodian he met during the school’s temporary mall relocation. “Everybody’s in a relationship, and it was about time for him to have one,” he said. He thought a producer was joking when she first told him. Then he read the script. “It had a lot of heart to it,” he said, before adding, “Mr. Johnson, you know, he’s a player.”

(Quinta Brunson, William Stanford Davis, and Tyler James Williams in Abbott Elementary. Source: Disney / Gilles Mingasson)

This season also gave viewers a deeper look at Jacob (Perfetti), expanding on the Season 4 introduction of his younger brother Caleb (Tyler Tomás Perez). “I was just like a kid in a candy store this year,” Perfetti said. Caleb’s arrival helped clarify how much Jacob had run from one family situation and found another at Abbott, while the season also let him show a more settled side of the character. “He won, he won a little bit this year,” Perfetti added. “I like seeing Jacob happy.”

Walter, meanwhile, spoke about Melissa’s world growing over time. When the show began, Melissa’s life at Abbott was largely about doing the work and then returning to her own chaotic orbit. But across five seasons, her world came to include her younger colleagues, their siblings, their partners, and a larger sense of chosen family. “The world at Abbott for Melissa has gotten bigger and fuller and more connected and filled with love,” she explained.

When discussing her character Barbara, Ralph did so with the kind of respect of someone who takes real teachers seriously. She cited a teacher she knows who considered retirement many times but kept returning because every year she saw the children grow and felt she wasn’t finished. “I want to embody that spirit of the woman, the educator who keeps carrying on,” Ralph said. “When you’re an artist, you love what you do, so you keep right on doing it.”

(Tyler James Williams, Quinta Brunson, Janelle James, Lisa Ann Walter, and Chris Perfetti in Abbott Elementary. Source: Disney / Gilles Mingasson)

Abbott Elementary has a reputation for knowing exactly how to use a guest star, from Taraji P. Henson and Ayo Edebiri to Bradley Cooper, Keegan-Michael Key, and Questlove. The question of who might drop by next produced one of the evening’s more memorable exchanges. Clayton Davis told a story about James at the Critics Choice Awards, seated near Leonardo DiCaprio and playfully making the case for him to appear on the show. (“Yo, Leo, come to television, you’ll like it over here!” Davis recalled.) DiCaprio smiled, Davis said, taking the moment in stride.

Brunson took the question in a different direction. For her, the dream “get” last season wasn’t a movie star; it was actually featuring James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash for a watch party in the Season 5 episode “Night Out”—a feat that required more legwork than viewers might have guessed, including conversations that eventually reached Cameron’s orbit. Brunson contended that Avatar remains the “last piece of monoculture.” Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber, meanwhile, appeared earlier in the season, and the timing worked out almost too well. He hit four home runs that day. “We couldn’t have predicted that, but he was wonderful,” Brunson said.

Her casting philosophy is simple: the character comes first. Famous names can work against a mockumentary if they pull viewers out of the world. What excites Brunson more is finding performers who fit Abbott Elementary and, when possible, introducing audiences to someone new. She pointed to James herself, a working stand-up comic whom many TV viewers had never seen act before Abbott. “It was more exciting to me to show you someone new. Same thing with Chris [Perfetti],” Brunson said.

Near the end of the panel, the conversation turned toward the work itself. Brunson offered a gentle reminder that making a 22-episode network season is no small undertaking. Unlike many streaming shows, which can pause for a particular actor, song, or schedule, Abbott Elementary has to begin filming in August and be on television by October. That pace, she suggested, requires a level of commitment that can be easy to overlook.

(William Stanford Davis, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Lisa Ann Walter in Abbott Elementary. Source: Disney / Gilles Mingasson)

“I used to undersell the hard work that we do on this show,” she said. “I’m not doing that anymore, because for us to do 22 [episodes] to be any semblance of good whatsoever, we have to come in and care.” Then she reached for a comparison that feels especially right for Abbott. “It’s like preparing a meal for your family,” she said. “We are taking our time to still try to make good, impactful work that is funny, that is poignant, that helps talk about what teachers are going through in this country, what minority groups are going through in this country.”

Walter seconded that from her own experience. Teachers stop her at the stage door to say what the show means to them, but so do viewers who have absorbed its messages about education and equity without feeling lectured. “They have a stealth way of making such an impact,” Walter said. “The community is telling me, and I feel it too.”

As for Season 6, Brunson offered a brief tease. Gregory’s promotion to vice principal means he’ll be working more closely with Ava. “Use your imagination,” she joked, as the room laughed. The writers’ room was set to open the next day, and Brunson said she had material she hadn’t told the cast about yet.

That sense of possibility made for a fitting final note for a show that makes difficult work look effortless. Five seasons in, Abbott Elementary still moves with the ease of people who know one another well, but the panel made clear just how much goes into creating that feeling onscreen. The show, as Brunson put it earlier, is like preparing a family meal: made quickly and under pressure, but served with warmth and grace. Week after week, Abbott Elementary thankfully keeps setting the table.

Seasons 1-5 of Abbott Elementary are available to stream on Hulu.

(Lucy Halliday and Chase Infiniti in The Testaments. Source: Disney)

Little more than halfway through afternoon tea at The Sun Rose on Sunset Boulevard—sun on the palm fronds, themed cocktails and mocktails being stirred and shaken at the bar—The Testaments creator Bruce Miller thanked the room for helping his show find its audience. Set inside Gilead’s privileged class, where teenage girls are groomed for marriage to powerful commanders, the dystopian Hulu drama had just aired its Season 1 finale. Miller reaffirmed the good news: a second season is coming.

On May 28, the West Hollywood gathering brought together the cast and creative team of The Testaments for a finale celebration, giving them a chance to pause and take in what they’d accomplished. Chase Infiniti (Agnes), Lucy Halliday (Daisy), Ann Dowd (Aunt Lydia), Rowan Blanchard (Shunammite), Mattea Conforti (Becka), Amy Seimetz (Paula), and Mabel Li (Aunt Vidala), along with executive producer Warren Littlefield, were among those in attendance.

During a brief round of remarks, Miller, Infiniti, and Halliday each spoke to a different part of the project: the weight of entering a well-recognized world, the gratitude of seeing audiences stream it, the excitement of knowing the show would continue.

(The official trailer for The Testaments. Source: Disney)

Miller framed The Testaments as a return to Gilead through an “entirely new generation” featuring a “somewhat miraculous group of actors.” “We’re very happy to celebrate the finale, but we’re also happy that this isn’t the end,” he said. “We’re thrilled to be diving into Season 2 with these characters, and I hope you’ll dive in with us.”

Infiniti, who anchors the series, kept her remarks shorter yet heartfelt. “We’ve been surrounded by so much love,” she said, adding that the show felt special to the cast and that she was glad audiences found it special, too. She singled out the show’s writers, in particular. “Without them, it's not possible,” she continued.

Halliday, meanwhile, spoke to the pressure of entering a universe already shaped by The Handmaid’s Tale, Elisabeth Moss, and Dowd’s years of work as Aunt Lydia. “We were so aware of what had already come before us, and I know that both of us felt such a weight of responsibility,” she said. She also mentioned, almost in passing, that The Testaments was her first television show. Walking onto set on day one, she said, was genuinely frightening.

It was a welcome, earnest admission that touched on the particular challenge The Testaments faced: how to stand alongside The Handmaid’s Tale on its own merits rather than disappearing in its shadow. The new series works best when it uses the weight of what came before to sharpen the story of a younger generation beginning to understand the world it inherited.

(Mattea Conforti, Lucy Halliday, Chase Infiniti, and Isolde Ardies in The Testaments. Source: Disney)

Rather than revisit June Osborne’s fight for survival, The Testaments turns its attention to the girls growing up in the world she helped expose.

Set years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments returns to Gilead not through the eyes of the women it consumed, but through those of girls who are still becoming—young women shaped by the regime, nearly all of them raised entirely within it. Agnes is June’s biological daughter, raised by a high-ranking Commander, pious and sheltered and starting to feel the walls of her world press in. Daisy, newly arrived from Toronto as a so-called “Pearl Girl,” has secrets Agnes can’t yet imagine. Together, they navigate the halls of Aunt Lydia’s preparatory school, where the aunts enforce obedience with religious precision and the rituals of womanhood are less cause for celebration than a warning of the dangers ahead.

The Handmaid’s Tale chronicled what it costs a woman to survive a system built to strip her of agency and destroy her. But The Testaments explores what happens when girls raised inside that system begin to realize the adults around them shaped their minds to keep them compliant.

Infiniti plays Agnes as someone learning to finally understand the cage she always mistook for a home. She lets doubt gather slowly across the season until faith begins to look less like conviction than conditioning—a slow, uneasy awakening rendered with real precision. Halliday’s Daisy, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction. Where Agnes holds everything in, Daisy gently, then fiercely, pushes back. Her frustration is heightened by the fact that she can see Gilead’s logic clearly, because she didn’t grow up inside it. Together, the two actresses give the season its central tension: one girl learning to question the only world she has known, another defiantly trying not to be swallowed by it.

(Isolde Ardies and Rowan Blanchard in The Testaments. Source: Disney)

Around them, the ensemble gives the season much of its emotional force. Conforti’s Becka, Agnes’s close friend who’s already eligible for the marriage market and privately falling apart over it, is the character the season keeps returning to with the most urgency. Conforti makes the horror of Gilead feel immediate because Becka understands, on some level, exactly what’s coming for her.

Blanchard takes Shunammite, the sharp-tongued member of the group, and gives her more dimension than the bravado suggests. And Dowd, returning as Aunt Lydia, finds yet another layer in a character she’s lived with for years. Aunt Lydia manufactured her power inside a system that would have otherwise destroyed her, and the sixth episode, “Stadium”—a satisfying look at Aunt Lydia’s origin story—is the one that stays with you longest.

The episode is powerful because it doesn’t soften Lydia; it shows the compromises that hardened her. Dowd doesn’t ask us to forgive Aunt Lydia, but she lets us understand the fear, calculation, and buried hurt that shaped her. Li, who plays Aunt Vidala—Lydia’s protégé and ideological counterpart—matches her in that episode with a performance that lands with its own kind of devastation. Where Dowd shows us a woman who learned to survive by becoming the system, Li shows us what that system looks like when it’s still being internalized, with no real choice but to absorb it.

(Mabel Li and Ann Dowd in The Testaments. Source: Disney)

What makes The Testaments work is that resistance in this broken world doesn’t begin with one strong woman’s fury. It starts slowly, with a group of teenage girls raised to believe they have no power, finally comparing notes. The friendships at the show’s center are where the rebellion really begins.

Gilead runs on suspicion: on the idea that safety is almost as rare and precious a commodity as freedom, and that the young woman next to you may be your enemy rather than your ally. What the season traces is the moment that logic starts to fail; by the finale, a defiant sisterhood begins taking shape. The episode weaves those threads together with purpose, closing these 10 episodes on a strong note while teasing what comes next.

The remarks from Miller, Infiniti, and Halliday at the finale celebration last week were a reminder that stepping into a legacy this loaded and emerging with work worth celebrating is no small achievement. The Testaments earned its sun-dappled afternoon—and walked away from this season belonging.

Season 1 of The Testaments is available to stream on Hulu.

(Noah Reid and Dan Levy in Schitt’s Creek. Source: CBC)

Some moments live in dialogue. Others live in silence. But sometimes, it’s the music that leaves the deepest mark. Our ongoing story series Needle Drop looks back at the songs that shaped film and TV: the ones that deepen emotion or make a good scene unforgettable. These are the tracks that make us pause long after the credits roll.

David Rose (Dan Levy) looks mortified before Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid) sings a single note.

By this point in Schitt’s Creek, David has already come a long way from the spoiled, newly broke New Yorker who arrived in a small town with his parents and sister after losing nearly everything. The series follows the Rose family as they rebuild their lives in the one asset they still own—the town of Schitt’s Creek—but its real pleasure comes from watching them become less guarded and ultimately more capable of love.

Mortification is practically David’s resting state in public: wary, sarcastic, overdressed. At Rose Apothecary’s open mic night in Season 4, Episode 6, he seems prepared for mild embarrassment at best and emotional catastrophe at worst. What if his partner can’t carry a tune? Then Patrick plucks his guitar and starts singing Tina Turner's "The Best," his light, “butter-voiced” notes filling the room, and the mood shifts.

(Noah Reid performs “The Best” in Schitt’s Creek’s Season 4 episode entitled “Open Mic.” Source: CBC / YouTube)

It’s not the kind of moment Schitt’s Creek usually reaches for. The show earns its warmth through restraint—through teasing, patience, the occasional truth wrapped in a joke. Grand gestures aren’t really the currency here. So when Patrick takes that little stage, we feel what David feels: a sudden, slightly terrifying burst of concern that the next moment is filled with disaster.

Patrick, until this moment, has read as the sane one—the calm presence beside David’s magnificent neurosis. The performance doesn’t undo that so much as deepens it. Here’s someone brave enough to be a little ridiculous for love.

Part of what makes the moment so disarming is the song Patrick chooses. “The Best,” written by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, was first recorded by Bonnie Tyler in 1988 and turned into a signature Tina Turner hit a year later. In Turner’s hands, it’s downright huge: full-bodied, made to reach the far end of an arena. It’s the kind of song that seems to throw its arms open before the chorus even arrives.

Levy, who co-created the series and plays David, told GQ in 2019 he always considered “The Best” one of the “most beautifully written pop songs in history,” even if its tempo can make people miss how profound the lyrics are. His instinct in the scene was to slow the song down, letting Patrick’s version bring the tenderness to the surface.

(Noah Reid and Dan Levy in Schitt’s Creek. Source: CBC)

Reid, a working musician long before Schitt’s Creek came calling, gave the song its stripped-down acoustic shape. What he found was a tempo somewhere between anthem and confession, familiar enough to land, intimate enough to ache. Sung that way, the song becomes less a declaration than a risk. Take it or leave it, Patrick seems to be saying. I’m putting it out there anyway.

David tries to leave it, at least at first, his face moving through anticipatory embarrassment, then confusion, then the slow dawning that Patrick isn’t humiliating him at all. Sure, he’s surprisingly talented, but he’s also loving him, out loud, in public, without apology. The comedy lives in the setup; the emotion lives in the moment David realizes there’s no reason to be embarrassed.

Levy plays the shift with real precision. David isn’t someone who knows how to receive love plainly. Watching the embarrassment give way to awe is what the scene is really about. Patrick is brave here, no question, but David is the one who has to let that gesture in.

(Dan Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Schitt’s Creek. Source: CBC)

That’s why the scene never feels like a simple serenade. Patrick reveals that he can really sing, and the surprise of Reid’s voice is part of that moment’s particular pleasure. But the deeper revelation is emotional: Patrick is telling David, in the gentlest possible way, that he sees him completely and is not embarrassed by the size of his affection. For someone like David, who has spent so much of his life expecting love to arrive with some degree of judgment, that may be the bigger shock.

Then the show lets the song come back.

A few episodes later, David lip-syncs the full Tina Turner version for Patrick: theatrical, completely committed, unmistakably Rose. It’s one of the show’s loveliest full-circle moments: Patrick sang about their love first, in the only way that felt true to him, and David learns, in his own spectacular way, how to give it back.

By the series finale, when the Jazzagals perform “The Best” a cappella at David and Patrick’s wedding, the song has become part of the couple’s story. What began with one man, one guitar, and a room that had no idea what was coming has turned into a shared language: Patrick leading with gentle courage, David answering with a bit of theater, and both of them making the same promise in the only ways they know how.

(Boran Kuzum, Jack Innanen, Taylor Ortega, Dan Levy, Abby Quinn, and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Big Mistakes in Los Angeles on May 16. Source: Rich Polk / Shutterstock for Netflix)

Dan Levy doesn’t think he would thrive in a life of crime. He does, however, know why that would be funny.

After the enormous success of Schitt’s Creek, the Emmy-winning writer, producer, and director took time to think about what kind of story he wanted to pour himself into next, if the opportunity allowed. “I really needed to sit and think about what would make me laugh: what was a story that felt like I wanted to tell for many, many, many seasons,” Levy told the room at a Netflix FYSEE event for Big Mistakes held on May 16 in Los Angeles. “Somehow, naturally, I settled on crime, because I thought I would not do well in a criminal situation, which means that that would be funny for a character to be put in.”

He also has what he called an “irrational fear” of being blackmailed. “Don’t you laugh. It could happen! It does,” he added.

So he made a TV show about it.

Big Mistakes, which premiered in April on Netflix, follows two siblings with no natural talent for crime who are dragged, through a chain of increasingly unfortunate choices, into the orbit of organized crime in small-town New Jersey. The inciting object is a necklace. A dying grandmother wants one; her daughter Linda (Laurie Metcalf), who is running for mayor, dispatches two of her three children to find a cheap copy. Nicky (Levy), a gay pastor secretly dating a contractor his congregation can’t know about, and Morgan (Taylor Ortega), a schoolteacher coasting through a relationship, end up at a pawn shop run by a tattooed enforcer named Yusuf (Boran Kuzum). When Yusuf won’t sell the necklace, Morgan takes it anyway. Unfortunately, it belongs to a Russian crime syndicate. Nonna goes into the ground wearing it. The situation, from there, gets funnier and worse.

(The official Big Mistakes trailer. Source: Netflix / YouTube)

While the premise sounds like a caper, the show becomes a comedy in which old family habits keep everyone from behaving sensibly for more than five minutes.

Moderated by veteran culture journalist Jim Halterman, the Netflix FYSEE panel brought together Ortega, Jack Innanen, Kuzum, Abby Quinn, and composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, all of whom helped unpack the show's blend of blackmail, bickering, tattoos, family dysfunction, and propulsive music.

What Levy kept returning to wasn’t the crime so much as the family that makes the crime worse. He loves writing about families: the private, embarrassing versions of ourselves that tend to emerge around the people who raised us. He described Big Mistakes as a “celebration of yelling families,” then added that for people raised in calmer houses, it may also be an education in them. The pilot opens on Nonna screaming in a hospital bed, and everything that comes after descends from that sound.

“It is the family tree of what we inherit: good, bad, and ugly,” Levy said.

(Dan Levy, Taylor Ortega, Jack Innanen, and Boran Kuzum at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Big Mistakes in Los Angeles on May 16. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Given the legacy of Schitt’s Creek, and the fact that Big Mistakes also revolves around a family in crisis, the comparison has followed Levy’s new show. At the panel, he touched on it; he took a different view of the idea that Schitt’s Creek was simply warm from the start. Rewatch the first two seasons, he said, and you’ll find a family that doesn’t say “I love you” to one another until the Season 2 finale. What viewers remember as warmth, he argued, was really tenderness earned slowly, bread-crumbed over time.

Big Mistakes, he suggested, is playing a similar long game, though with more blackmail and fewer artisanal cheeses.

“The more you learn about these people, the more you care,” Levy said. “I’m not going to just give it all away right off the bat.”

Halterman brought up a scene later in the first season in which Linda gets herself into real trouble and all three of her children show up for her. Whatever chaos has unfolded around them, whatever grievance or distance has accumulated, they hear their mother needs them and come running. Halterman said that particular moment moved him; Levy simply described those as the moments when the “light shines through.”

(Jim Halterman, Dan Levy, Taylor Ortega, Jack Innanen, Boran Kuzum, Abby Quinn, and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum at Netflix’s FYSEE event for Big Mistakes in Los Angeles on May 16. Source: Rich Polk / Shutterstock for Netflix)

Around Levy’s Nicky, the rest of the ensemble plays different variations on the same family condition: people desperate to be understood and almost pathologically bad at asking for it.

Quinn’s Natalie is, on the surface, the family’s most self-sufficient member: smart, capable, seemingly content to remain a step apart from the chaos her siblings keep making. But underneath that is a person who badly wants to be seen. Quinn described Natalie as someone who acts as if she wants nothing to do with her siblings because she doesn’t know how else to communicate that she wants their respect. The awkward group hug at the end of the season, she said, was the most uncomfortable thing she had ever filmed, which may be exactly why it works.

For Ortega, Morgan represented a character she rarely finds on the page: one she didn’t have to reach for. She described Morgan as a past version of herself, someone at her lowest, with a sourer outlook and less faith in the world. “Then I had one bad week recently, and I was like, she’s there still. She lives within me still,” Ortega said.

It’s not a performance that can be faked, and Ortega wisely doesn’t smooth it down. Morgan’s volatility is funny because it feels alarmingly available to her.

(Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega in Big Mistakes. Source: Spencer Pazer / Netflix)

Innanen’s Max occupies a different comic lane: he’s the one character who doesn’t fully know what is happening around him. Innanen described Max as oblivious, while Levy said what made the character work was the warmth Innanen carried into the room during his audition. Max needs to be likable despite his limitations, and Innanen didn’t have to manufacture that.

“He cares so much,” Levy said. “That’s the reason why we like Max, even though he might not be right for her.”

Max senses the emotional chasm opening beneath him without quite being able to explain it. Innanen joked that somewhere deep in the folds of Max’s brain, he can “spider sense” that the relationship is slipping and that maybe, possibly, his girlfriend doesn’t like him very much anymore. Obliviousness, it turns out, is a full-time acting job.

Kuzum’s path to the show was, by his own account, improbable. He was at karaoke in Istanbul when an email arrived from his managers about an audition for an untitled Dan Levy project. Because of the time difference, he came home drunk, saw the message, and decided he was in no shape to process it.

“Is this Dan Levy from Schitt’s Creek?” he remembered thinking. “Okay, I’m too drunk for this.”

He read it again the next day, auditioned over Zoom for the first time, and got the part.

(Dan Levy, Laurie Metcalf, Abby Quinn, and Ilia Volok in Big Mistakes. Source: Netflix)

Kuzum spent a decade acting in Turkey and has zero tattoos in real life, which made Yusuf’s snake and skull tattoos both a transformation and a scheduling problem. He had to be among the first on set to have them applied. Levy painted the picture of him in the makeup chair at dawn, sunglasses on, getting fake tattoos applied at speed. For Kuzum’s birthday, everyone on set wore a fake snake tattoo on their neck.

He called the experience a dream come true, and it sounded like he meant it.

Then there was the music. Kroll-Rosenbaum scored the season alongside Canadian electroclash musician Peaches, long known for her provocative electronic sound, bawdy humor, and proudly unsanded edges. Her work was on Levy’s early playlists when he first imagined the show. What drew him to her was specific: a propulsive electronic energy wrapped in wit and self-awareness, a sound that could keep the show moving without stepping on the comedy. Early on, he told Kroll-Rosenbaum and Peaches that he wanted the music to feel like a “heartbeat.”

Kroll-Rosenbaum described the collaboration as joyfully chaotic. “[Peaches] is this person that I’ve respected for so long, and to have the opportunity to jam with her, make music with her, and really get in the weeds with her in a way in the show was amazing,” she explained.

(Taylor Ortega, Dan Levy, and Abby Quinn in Big Mistakes. Source: Spencer Pazer / Netflix)

Levy, Kroll-Rosenbaum continued, kept encouraging them to experiment and throw ideas into the sandbox. They layered door slams into the score every time Morgan exits a classroom. They gave different characters their own sonic signatures. She lives largely in post-production while the cast is on set, so the panel was one of the few times she was in a room with all of them. Looking at their faces, she said, she could hear each character’s sound. “I look at all of you, and I’m like: ticking, throbbing. I know what sound I do for each one of you,” she said.

Late in the panel, Levy discussed Season 2, the writing of which is already well underway. He described it as “bigger, bolder, sexier.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to “keep raising the bar” and “keep letting more and more warmth and love into the show” when it feels right. “It is my duty as a writer and an actor to service this unbelievable cast with dialogue and storylines that continue to push them further, continue to challenge them,” he added.

Big Mistakes doesn’t untangle the family knot in one season. It keeps going the way families often do, layering new damage over old love and calling it just another Tuesday. For Levy, that seems to be the idea: the crime keeps the story moving, but family is what makes the chaos worth staying in. The mess, after all, is where the love lives.

Season 1 of Big Mistakes is available to stream on Netflix.

(Sam Heughan and Caitríona Balfe in Outlander. Source: Starz)

Spoilers below for the finale of Outlander’s eighth and final season.

Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) has been dead for hours when he opens his eyes.

British Major Patrick Ferguson (Charles Aitken) has shot him in the chest at the Battle of Kings Mountain, and Jamie has fallen on the hilltop in colonial North Carolina with Claire (Caitríona Balfe) kneeling beside him. She refuses to leave. Through the night and into the following morning, she stays with his body while the men who love him try, gently and then helplessly, to coax her away. When Roger MacKenzie (Richard Rankin) returns at dawn and asks her to let them take Jamie home, she tells him, barely above a whisper, that Jamie is already home.

By then, her hair has gone fully white, recalling a prophecy introduced in Season 4: that Claire would come into her full powers when her hair turned white. A montage of their life together plays across the screen, from their first meeting to their wedding, their years in France, their long separation across time and ocean, and the life they made at Fraser’s Ridge. The camera returns to them on the mountain’s cold ground; their eyes open before the screen goes black.

(The official trailer for Outlander’s eighth and final season. Source: Starz / YouTube)

At the STARZ For Your Consideration (FYC) screening for Outlander at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood on May 15, the same day the series finale dropped, the meaning of that moment filled the room. Moderated by Joanna Robinson of The Ringer, the panel brought together Balfe, Heughan, showrunner and executive producer Matthew B. Roberts, and executive producer Maril Davis, four people who have lived so closely with this story for more than a decade.

For Davis, Jamie and Claire are “eternal.” They’ll always find each other, no matter what life they’re in, and the ghost—the mysterious Highlander who has haunted the show since its very first episode—is part of that circle.

“He has to go back to find her and make the flowers appear, so that Claire will be attracted to the stones,” Davis said. “She’s always going to bring him back to life. They will always find each other, no matter where they are, no matter what time. They were meant to be together.”

(Matthew B. Roberts, Sam Heughan, Caitríona Balfe, and Maril Davis at STARZ’s FYC event for Outlander in Los Angeles on May 15. Source: JP Mangalindan)

Balfe described it as a chicken-or-the-egg situation: who called to whom first? Then she landed on something grander. “Their love is metaphysical,” she said. “It’s beyond anything we can imagine.”

The show premiered on Starz in August 2014 with a fantastical premise: Claire, a married British combat nurse recently returned from World War II, touches an ancient standing stone at Craigh na Dun while on a second honeymoon in Scotland and is thrown back two centuries to 1743. There, she meets Jamie, a young Highland warrior she will marry for protection but also partly because something between them feels less like choice than recognition. Across eight seasons, Outlander became a historical epic, a war drama, a family saga, and a time-travel romance, all held together by one belief: that love, the right kind, doesn’t merely survive history. It outruns it.

The finale, titled “And the World Was All Around Us,” returns to a mystery that followed the series since the pilot. In that first episode, Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies) spots a man in Highland dress standing in the rain outside the Inverness inn, staring up at Claire through the window. When Frank approaches him, the man disappears. Devoted fans had long suspected who he was. The finale finally confirms it: Jamie, or Jamie’s ghost, watching Claire across time before she even knew him.

(Caitríona Balfe in Outlander. Source: Starz)

After Jamie dies at Kings Mountain and Claire lies down beside him, the show cuts back to that Inverness window. We see Jamie’s face clearly now. He watches Claire brush her hair, tears on his face. Then he walks to the standing stones at Craigh na Dun and places his hand on the center stone. At its base, tiny blue forget-me-nots begin to bloom. Those flowers are what draw Claire to the stones in 1945. Finding them, she touches the stone that sends her to 1743 and to Jamie.

From what appears to be the afterlife, Jamie sets his own love story in motion, and the time loop closes. For Roberts, that return to the beginning was essential. “I wanted the whole show, the whole series to mean something, and it was important that the finale was a part of that,” he said. He didn’t want the ending to feel separate from the rest of Outlander or like a “very special episode.” It had to belong to the same story.

For Heughan, filming the callback meant stepping back into a version of Jamie he had not inhabited in years. He put on Jamie’s Season 1 costume again—“it still fits,” he joked—and tried not to wrinkle his forehead too much. Beneath the humor was something more tender: the feeling of returning to the beginning of a journey he could now understand differently.

(Sam Heughan in Outlander. Source: Starz)

“I think he’s calling something or someone,” Heughan said of Jamie at the stones. “I think that starts it all in motion.”

The season asks both Jamie and Heughan to live under the shadow of an ending they know is coming. Jamie spends much of Season 8 aware of Frank Randall’s historical account, The Soul of a Rebel: The Scottish Roots of the American Revolution, which predicted his death at Kings Mountain. He knows history doesn’t bend just because he wants it to. He can only make peace with what’s coming, say goodbye to the people he loves, and ride out.

“This was the hardest and heaviest season for us,” Heughan said. “Day one, Maril started crying and hasn’t stopped since.”

Some days on set, he said, the burden of what they were filming felt almost too heavy. Other days, strangely, it felt like work as usual—until the ending got close enough it couldn’t be ignored. “There’s a lot of goodbyes in this show this season,” he said. “You really felt it as an actor.”

(John Bell, Richard Rankin, Caitríona Balfe, and Sam Heughan in Outlander. Source: Starz)

The finale earns those goodbyes one by one. Jamie writes a will, leaving land to Brianna, his mother’s silver stag brooch to his sister Jenny, his Bible and three casks of whiskey to William. He and Claire spend one last morning in bed, and she tells him about two bees she found sleeping in a flower, holding each other’s feet—still alive, just waiting for the sun. He recites W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a poem threaded through the series since Season 4, and asks whether the quiet life was really what she would have wanted. She tells him it never was.

Before riding out, Jamie visits the beehive and asks the bees—in keeping with an old Celtic tradition of telling the hive about major passages of life—to look after Claire if she has to tell them he’s gone. It’s one of the finale’s most tender goodbyes: a man asking a hive to care for the woman he loves before riding toward a death history promised him.

Balfe said the last scene she and Heughan filmed together was that bedroom conversation about the bees. In some ways, it was exactly the kind of scene Outlander has always done well: Jamie and Claire together, talking in bed, sharing private thoughts before the world intrudes again. But this time, the whole production seemed to know what it meant.

“Everyone was in the studio,” said Balfe, referring to the executives, actors, production team, and writers. “You could feel this current of energy and anticipation.”

(John Bell and Richard Rankin in Outlander. Source: Starz)

By the end, she said, she was barely keeping herself together. Heughan remembered her “literally vibrating”; he said he felt almost “stupefied.” They’d spent 12 years building toward a scene that looked, on the page, like one more morning together—and that was exactly what made it hurt.

The post-credits bookstore scene is its own kind of goodbye. In it, Diana Gabaldon sits at a signing table with a worn leather journal beside her. A fan asks what it is. “Just a wee bit of inspiration,” Gabaldon says. Viewers recognize the journal as Claire’s, the one she began filling with her own story earlier in the final season. The implication is playful and very Outlander: that this entire sprawling saga found its way to Gabaldon through a journal written across time, by a woman telling the story of a love that technically hadn’t happened yet.

Balfe directed the scene, and she described it as an act of affection. Crew members who had been with Outlander since the beginning were brought into the bookstore and given fictional book titles based on their real jobs on the series. Heughan remembered the drivers talking about it for weeks; Balfe remembered the crew getting nervous about costume fittings and hair and makeup. For people who had spent years working on the show just outside the frame, the scene offered a chance to step inside it.

Roberts said the cameo was a “Thank You” to Gabaldon. “She created this universe,” he said. “We were just handing it back to her and saying ‘Thank You’ for letting us borrow it for over a decade.”

(Izzy Meikle-Small and John Bell in Outlander. Source: Starz)

Davis saw the bookstore as a tribute to the crew, too. “We get to sit up here and take the applause,” she said. “We get to be the face of that. But our crew, the unsung heroes, we would not be here without them.”

Balfe shared her own take on Gabaldon, offered with a grin. “I have a new theory that Diana is Claire and Doug is Jamie, and she’s a real time traveler, because she has not changed since the first time I met her,” she said.

For Davis, the goodbye had been unfolding for more than a year, from the final season shoot through the panel itself. Gratitude arrived alongside the sadness. “I also look back on that time and think, how lucky we all were,” she said. “How lucky we all were in different ways to be on this series, to be part of something like this that meant so much to so many people and changed so many people’s lives.”

Roberts described Outlander as a “unicorn” in television, the kind of show that becomes almost impossible to separate from the lives of the people who made it. Watching it now, he said, feels like watching home movies. A scene may look polished onscreen, but what he remembers is the mud, the laughter, the journey to get there, the scuttling wind Scotland provided when they needed it.

(Sam Heughan and Caitríona Balfe in Outlander. Source: Starz)

The fans, too, have always been part of that life. Roberts said Outlander viewers didn’t simply binge the show and move on. They returned to episodes because they felt something while watching them; the cast and crew felt the same while making them. That bond, he suggested, is why the ending doesn’t need to have firm answers for everything.

“You get to participate,” he said. “You get to make your own ending. What does it mean to you? Do you want it to be a sad ending? Make it sad. Do you want it to be happy? Make it happy. Do they live on forever? Maybe they do.”

That may be the clearest answer Outlander could give. The show didn’t wrap its ending in certainty because certainty was never really its language. It began with a woman touching a stone and falling through time into a life she hadn’t chosen and couldn’t leave; it ends with two lovers on a cold hilltop, the world having done its worst, and whatever comes next belonging only to them.

When Robinson gave Balfe the final word of the evening, asking whether there was any chance of returning to the Outlander world if Gabaldon one day finishes the final book in her series, Balfe smiled. “Well, their eyes opened, so never say never,” she offered.

After eight seasons, Outlander ended where it began: with a love that found its way across time and refused to finish. Their eyes opened; the screen went dark. And in a room that had just watched a man come back from the dead, “never say never” felt less like a promise than an act of faith.

(Lisa Kudrow in The Comeback. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

Spoilers below for the finale of The Comeback’s third and final season.

When Jane (Laura Silverman) comes back to film Valerie (Lisa Kudrow) one last time, she shoots Valerie the way Valerie has always wanted to be seen: as someone the form was made for.

What follows is one of the best scenes HBO’s The Comeback has ever produced. The image begins in grainy black-and-white, then eases—slowly, over the course of a few sentences—into full color. It happens not at a moment of triumph, not when Valerie wins anything, but when she simply shares the truth about herself.

Co-creator Michael Patrick King had the idea from the start. “Showing a film—an actual film—in black and white felt weirdly like Valerie was old Hollywood,” he told Scene and Unheard at a press conference on March 19. “We were actually referencing Now, Voyager.” The Bette Davis film was a favorite of Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), Valerie’s late hairdresser and closest friend—and the finale was shot at Warner Bros., where Now, Voyager was made in 1942. The history of Hollywood was quite literally underfoot.

(Lisa Kudrow in the final scene of The Comeback’s series finale. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

“People saw Valerie in black and white: victim, crazy, loser, winner,” King continued. “There was no gray area. So we started with a gray film, and then brought her into color.” The shift arrives right when, as King put it, Valerie’s “humanity really starts” to come through.

The choice was also, he acknowledged, a calculated risk—and he situated it inside a pattern of storytelling gambles that define the show’s more than 20-year run. Season 1 was shot as a reality series following Valerie’s camera crew through the making of a new sitcom; Season 2 unspooled as a documentary. Season 3 mixed single-camera scenes with found footage. “At the end of Season 2, we took a risk where she left the reality cameras behind,” King said. “Here was a risk: all of a sudden we’re going to black and white.”

The episode’s title makes the same argument in a different register. Every other episode title this season carries a certain Valerie-plus-verb construction: “Valerie Gets a New Chapter,” “Valerie Faces Reality,” “Valerie Does It All,” among others. The finale’s title is even simpler. That was deliberate on King’s part. “This is just ‘Valerie Cherish,’” he said—not what happens to her, not what she gains or loses. Just her, seen at last on her own terms.

(The official trailer for The Comeback Season 3. Source: HBO Max / YouTube)

Jane, who has been filming Valerie since 2005 through the humiliations, the near-misses, the Emmy, and even the AI sitcom, tells her she has watched her spend 20 years in an industry that offered her “nothing but humiliation.” It reads as recognition, even a form of tenderness, but Valerie doesn’t take it.

“You have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up,” she explains.

To understand why that line lands as hard as it does, you have to return to the first frame Valerie ever tried to manage. The Comeback, created by Kudrow and King in 2005, follows Valerie Cherish, a sitcom actress who found fame in the ’90s on a show called I’m It! and then spent a decade losing her footing in an industry that stopped calling. When viewers first meet her, she has agreed to two things: a role on a new network sitcom called Room and Bored, and a companion reality series documenting her return to relevance.

The catch—one of many—is that she thought she was playing one of four young singles in a hip condo. She arrived on set to discover she’d been cast as their landlord aunt. In the show’s first scene, Valerie fixes herself in her kitchen and announces to Jane’s camera, with forced brightness, “This is my comeback!” She asks Jane to do it again, more excited. The performance keeps falling slightly short. From the beginning, The Comeback was about a woman trying to look like she was winning, even when she didn’t always feel that way herself.

(Damian Young and Lisa Kudrow in The Comeback. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

Season 2, which aired years later in 2014, pushed further. Valerie maneuvered her way into an HBO drama about the writer who had humiliated her on Room and Bored—casting herself as a fictionalized version of herself, earning an Emmy for a role that required her to relive one of the worst professional periods of her life. She left the Season 2 finale not at the awards ceremony but at her hairdresser Mickey’s hospital bedside, watching the Emmys announce her win on a TV screen. Even recognition arrived at a remove. The industry kept handing her diminishing roles and calling them opportunities; Valerie kept trying to turn them into meaningful work.

The show’s third season, which debuted in March, returned her to a landscape even less interested in her humanity. How’s That?!, the multi-camera sitcom she signed on for at NuNet, turned out to be the first show largely written by AI. Valerie is, again, the face of something she didn’t fully choose—only this time, the machinery around her no longer needs writers, memory, or even, perhaps, her. The season’s running tension was whether Valerie, now also serving as an executive producer, would finally draw a moral line or whether, as always, she’ll find a way to simply make the best of it.

The finale opens with the best possible version of the latter. How’s That?! has gotten good enough ratings for a renewal, and NuNet chief Brandon (Andrew Scott) wants Valerie at his side for the announcement. Before she can get there, she’s intercepted by the so-called Big 3—Jack Stevens (Bradley Whitford), Ben Morrow (Justin Theroux), and Matt Wright (Adam Scott), three of the most powerful writer-producers in TV. They want Valerie to use the press conference to take a stand against AI authorship. The ask isn’t unreasonable. But Valerie’s show also employs actual humans, and she won’t put their jobs at risk to satisfy the conscience of three men who seemingly never once worried about their own.

(Laura Silverman and Lisa Kudrow in the final scene of The Comeback’s series finale. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

The meeting is some of the season’s sharpest writing. The Big 3 are right about the danger of AI, but the scene keeps puncturing their righteousness with jokes and ego. The Comeback has spent 20 years conditioning us to expect Valerie to crumble (or overreach) in rooms like this. She does neither.

The press conference is where things tip for Valerie. Brandon, defending the AI-written format, says NuNet can be a home for culture-defining TV as well as shows that “don’t need genius.” “AI’s got the sitcoms,” he contends. “Easy-peasy.” Valerie responds by telling reporters about the night before, when the AI hit a “studio paywall” while taping and couldn’t write more jokes “in front of a live audience.” But a talented young writer saved the day.

Brandon isn’t pleased; he felt “ambushed” by Valerie’s anecdote out there. The scolding that follows is unsparing. How’s That?! will not get the resources Valerie wants, including a real showrunner or writing staff, and if she wants out, an AI version of her is already waiting in the wings to replace her on the show. “If this isn’t working for you, you don’t have to do Season 2,” Brandon says.

Valerie, of course, refuses to let that doomsday statement be the end of her story. Kudrow and King give Valerie something gentler than pure vindication: Jack, so moved watching a How’s That?! taping, develops a new drama for her called Judge’s Table, playing Eleanor Judge, a federal court judge with a “certain gravitas” and “strong moral compass” who gives up her legal career to pursue her “true passion” of being a chef.

(Lisa Kudrow in the final scene of The Comeback’s series finale. Source: Erin Simkin / HBO)

In the finale’s closing scene, Valerie’s response to Jane isn’t defiant so much as clarifying. The image coming into color at that moment isn’t a metaphor for Valerie finally winning. It’s a correction: a visual argument that the gray film was never the accurate one.

As King suggested, the color begins to enter when Valerie’s humanity comes forward, when she is essentially asking to be seen not as a punchline or a category, but as a person. She wasn’t a victim; she was a person, all along, refusing to let the camera become the final authority on who she was. “We wanted to make sure people saw Valerie in a different way at the end and could see a little bit of how Valerie sees herself,” King said.

The scene ends with a callback to the show’s first-ever scene. After Valerie discusses Judge’s Table and Jane says how “proud” she is—“I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time,” Jane offers—Valerie tells Jane she needs to “sound more excited” before stepping out of the frame, only to step back in again to explain to us what a “callback” is. (It’s a “sitcom writing term, when you call something back that happened before, for a laugh,” she explains.)

More than two decades of TV, and Valerie Cherish still needs you to know she got it, still needs the last word. The camera is finally, at the end, a friend—and she uses it exactly the way she always wanted to: to perform, yes, but also to be seen fully.

All episodes of The Comeback are now available to stream on HBO Max.

(Robin Wright and Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

When Cary Elwes walked onto the stage of the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles on May 4, he was met with an ovation that felt less like a greeting than a debt being repaid: for nearly 40 years of The Princess Bride, and for what it meant to those fortunate enough to find it. The movie premiered in September 1987, underwhelmed at the box office, yet became one of the most beloved ever made—not because critics could make it so, but because people brought it home and cherished it, watching the VHS until the tape wore thin.

Its rich history filled the venue, where Elwes appeared during this year’s Netflix is a Joke Festival for a conversation about the making of The Princess Bride and the late Rob Reiner, who directed it. Moderated by Maurice LaMarche, the evening moved between gentle reverence and easy laughter; Reiner, who died last December, was present anyway, folded into every story Elwes told about him, audible in the pauses before he found the right words.

(The trailer for The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox / Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers)

The film Reiner spent years trying to make is, at heart, a fairy tale: Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Westley (Elwes), separated by fate, pirates, and the schemes of a cruel prince and a six-fingered count, finding their way back to each other through sword fights and at least one mostly-dead miracle. Framed as a story a grandfather (Peter Falk) reads aloud to his grandson (Fred Savage), it blends absurdity and sincerity so close together that it stops feeling like a satire of fairy tales and more like a warm argument for them.

Reiner had wanted to make the film since he was 13. William Goldman, who wrote the original 1973 novel and adapted it himself, spent years watching the project stall at several different studios before the late Norman Lear agreed to finance it personally, writing a check for $16 million at a moment when no major studio would greenlight a postmodern fairy tale with two unknown leads. That Lear later called it the best investment he ever made is the kind of ending Goldman might have written himself.

Elwes spoke of Reiner with the rare affection reserved for people who altered the course of your life. “The most beautiful guy,” he said. “The most wonderful director I’ve ever worked with and will ever work with.” What came through wasn’t simply admiration for the director’s craft but gratitude for the on-set atmosphere he created. Every day, Elwes said, brought laughter. “When you feel the joy watching this film, when you get those little butterflies, that’s what we were feeling while we were making it,” he added.

(Robin Wright and Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

At the film’s table read, Reiner gave the cast a note. The material might seem silly at times, he told them, but they didn’t need to reach for the comedy; it was already there in the writing. Just believe it. That sense of authenticity is arguably part of why the film has aged so gracefully. Westley means what he says; Inigo’s grief has real weight. Buttercup’s heartbreak feels genuine. The fairy tale survives because no one inside it treated the feelings as insincere or throwaway.

Of course, no evening devoted to The Princess Bride was going to stay solemn for long. Much of the audience’s delight came from Elwes’ stories about André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant, whom he described as “seven foot four, 450 pounds of pure love.” He could eclipse Robin Wright’s entire face by simply placing one hand over her head, Elwes said, and hugged people so completely they temporarily ceased to exist. Ordinary spaces struggled to contain him: hotel beds, airplane cabins, and doorways, which André had to bend double to enter.

During filming in England’s Peak District, the production tracked down a specially reinforced Honda three-wheeler ATV so André could navigate the hills between locations. He immediately turned it into a form of personal amusement. Elwes recalled watching him tear across the landscape, grinning, while crew members gave chase and André periodically slowed down just enough to let them think they were catching up before accelerating away again.

(Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, and André René Roussimoff in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

Eventually, André pulled up beside Elwes between setups and asked whether he wanted a turn.

The answer led to disaster almost immediately. Elwes caught his left big toe between a rock and the clutch pedal, bending it backward until it snapped. A week into filming, convinced he was about to be fired, he tried to hide the injury rather than leave the set. The production medic improvised a splint using half a wooden tongue depressor. Wardrobe cut open the back of his boot to get it back on his foot. Elwes rode back to the set in the longest van ride of his life and leapt out on both feet, fighting the pain, walking straight toward Reiner without a trace of a limp.

It was, the actor mused, the best acting he ever did. But Reiner actually already knew the truth. News of his injury had gone out over the crew’s walkie-talkies half an hour earlier.

Elwes apologized. He admitted he’d been afraid of losing the role. “How can I fire you?” Reiner said. “You’re the only guy who could play Westley.” It was, in hindsight, the best kind of reassurance.

(Robin Wright in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

There were other mishaps. A second hospital visit followed after Christopher Guest accidentally knocked Elwes unconscious with a real sword. The prop version had been left hours away at the studio, and the stunt coordinator convinced everyone to use the genuine article, carefully.

Elwes came to on an operating table in full Dread Pirate Roberts costume while the same doctor who had treated his broken toe stitched up his head and observed, with what sounded like professional resignation, that he seemed “very accident prone.”

The affection in the room made it easy to forget how uncertain the film’s future once looked. Elwes reminded the audience that the movie was a commercial disappointment when it premiered in 1987, eking out just $30 million at the global box office.

The cast, at the time, believed in it completely. They had Reiner fresh off This Is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me, Goldman adapting his own novel, and Lear financing it personally. After The Princess Bride screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Reiner got a call at JFK Airport from the studio: the box office projections were lackluster. He gathered the cast at dinner and told them he remained proud of what they had made. But if he had the chance, he would make it all over again with every one of them, he said. People cried; then they all had to go to the theater and put on smiles for the audience.

(Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

The story could have ended there, if not for the surprising long tail of home video. What followed was one of cinema’s quieter second acts. The Princess Bride hit VHS in 1988, and the film’s afterlife began. It also became, unmistakably, a shared language. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” moved from Patinkin’s mouth into the cultural zeitgeist: dorm rooms, family kitchens, schoolyards, wedding speeches, office banter, and the strange permanent theater of the internet. “Inconceivable,” “as you wish,” “mostly dead”—the lines became passwords, ways of recognizing another person who loved the same impossible thing.

Elwes was central to that afterlife because Westley could so easily have been reduced to a swoon-worthy caricature. He was, of course, almost impossibly beautiful in the film—he and Wright both were—all golden hair and storybook certainty. But what made the performance last was never beauty alone. It was the wit inside the gallantry, the intelligence behind the romance, the comic self-awareness that kept Westley from becoming stiff or ornamental. Elwes played him as both the fairy-tale hero and a man clever enough to know what kind of story he was in.

Parents watched it with children; children showed it to younger siblings. Tapes circulated between neighbors and friends until some wore out entirely. Elwes described fans bringing him battered copies once owned by grandparents, the ribbon itself beginning to unspool from the cassette.

Near the end of the night, Elwes looked out at the packed theater with disbelief. Almost 40 years later, he said, people had still shown up on a weeknight to watch it together. “That honestly is inconceivable to me,” he said.

(Cary Elwes and Robin Wright in The Princess Bride. Source: 20th Century Fox)

Then he told one more story about Reiner. While touring for his 2016 book “As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride,” Elwes told the director he sometimes felt like an “ambassador of love,” because the film was an unabashed purveyor of it. Reiner understood immediately. “That’s what you are,” he responded.

In another room, on another night, that might have registered as overly sentimental. Here, it felt closer to truth. The Princess Bride always understood what modern culture sometimes forgets: sincerity isn’t naivete, and love—blinding, steadfast love, the kind Westley means when he utters “as you wish”—isn’t a childish idea simply because it leaves you exposed.

Elwes became part of that tradition too, bringing his stories with him, keeping Reiner’s warmth alive. What Reiner used to tell him resurfaced again and again: once the movie is released, it belongs to other people. But while you’re making it, that’s your time on the planet; so you want to make it good.

He certainly did. He made a fairy tale funny enough to quote, tender enough to keep, and trusting enough to survive an era more at ease with irony than unflinching belief. Maybe that’s what The Princess Bride has always really been about, underneath the sword fights and clever dialogue: the willingness to hand what you love to a stranger, something openhearted and sincere, and trust them with it. Reiner did that; Elwes is still proudly doing it. On a Monday night in Los Angeles, a theater full of strangers did it, too.

The Princess Bride is available to stream on Disney+.

(Lewis Pullman and Sally Field in Remarkably Bright Creatures. Source: Netflix)

Late in Remarkably Bright Creatures, Mary Ann (Kathy Baker) puts words to Tova’s condition. Tova (Sally Field), she tells her, has stopped being in the “business of living.” The line clarifies Tova’s dilemma: she hasn’t simply been grieving the loss of her son years ago; she’s been building a life around grief so gradually that its walls have begun to resemble an emotional shelter. But what once helped her survive has begun to keep the world out.

In this case, the way back begins at an aquarium tank.

Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel and directed by Olivia Newman, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Whittington, Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Field as Tova, a widow who cleans an aquarium. There, she forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, an octopus voiced by Alfred Molina, who has a gift for seeing what humans miss. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, a directionless man in his 30s who wanders into Tova’s orbit with old hurt of his own. What Marcellus recognizes in both of them becomes the center of a story about loneliness, found family, and the slow return to the business of living.

(The official trailer for Remarkably Bright Creatures. Source: Netflix / YouTube)

At a For Your Consideration (FYC) panel for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28, moderated by Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger, the film’s cast and creative team reflected on bringing that unlikely emotional triangle to the screen. Field joined Pullman and Newman, alongside Van Pelt, producer Bryan Unkeless, cinematographer Ashley Connor, and visual effects supervisor Chris Ritvo.

Van Pelt began with the origin of Tova. As an only child growing up in Tacoma, she lived next door to her grandmother, a Swedish immigrant who cleaned church basements and community centers into her eighties—not because she needed the money, but because sitting still simply wasn’t in her. “She liked doing it. She liked being there at night,” Van Pelt recalled.

Marcellus arrived first, born from a continuing education writing class and Van Pelt’s fascination with videos of octopuses escaping their enclosures. Tova followed because Marcellus needed a human to observe. The pieces fit together the way origin stories rarely do: a grandmother who couldn’t stop moving, videos of octopuses sneaking out of their tanks, and a writer slowly realizing that grief might be easier to approach through a creature with eight arms and a cynical opinion of people.

(Dave Karger, Bryan Unkeless, Lewis Pullman, Sally Field, Shelby Van Pelt, Olivia Newman, Ashley Connor, and Chris Ritvo at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

Unkeless read the manuscript before publication and described it as “so heartfelt and just like a hug.” “It reminded me of people I had lost, and so I really connected in such a pure way,” he said.

Almost immediately, Unkeless thought of Field. He wasn’t alone. Van Pelt had pictured Field as Tova while writing the book, years before any film adaptation; Newman pictured her while drafting the screenplay. Field, for her part, was involved early and knew almost immediately that Tova was a role she wanted to play. Two chapters in, she called her manager. “This is it,” she told him. “Grab it. Get it.” The film took years to reach the screen, and nothing about it feels hurried.

What Field brings to Tova isn’t simply sadness; it’s sadness that’s been managed, woven into routine so gradually it passes for a life. She lets you see both the dignity of that control and the cost of preserving it. She cleans the aquarium and tends to Marcellus, avoiding the full weight of her own loneliness, and telling herself that functioning is somehow the same thing as living a life.

For Newman, the emotional pull was immediate. Then came the challenge of adaptation. The novel moves among several parallel storylines—Cameron in California, Tova in Washington—and the film had to bring them together earlier without giving up the mystery. “Cameron and Tova’s storylines don’t completely [intersect] and start to affect one another until much later in the book, and we knew that early on,” Newman explained. But she also understood where the film’s heart lay. “The engine of the film had to be about this relationship between these two people.”

(Sally Field and Lewis Pullman at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

That meant tightening geography and timing while holding onto the book’s humor. Van Pelt’s story looks directly at grief and loss, but it finds room for comedy too, and Newman understood that. The film doesn’t treat grief as the enemy of joy; it lets both sit in the same frame.

Newman previously directed the literary adaptations Where the Crawdads Sing and The Last Thing He Told Me, but Remarkably Bright Creatures marks her first screenplay adaptation as a writer, and that closeness shows in how she spoke of the material. She has parents and close friends in their 80s, and the idea that two people at very different points in life could find each other in grief and help each other back toward joy had been true for her long before it became a film.

During production, the material became even more personal. Two family members died within months of each other, and five days before she began prep, her home was lost in California’s Eaton Fire in 2025. Working on this story helped Newman understand grief not as love’s opposite, but as one of its expressions—and connection as the thing that remains most valuable when so much else has been taken away.

(Sally Field at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

Newman cast the voice of Marcellus late in the process, needing to see the full arc of the CGI octopus before she could hear him. She wanted warmth alongside the condescension, without the detached authority of a nature documentary. Marcellus couldn’t sound safely removed from the humans; he had to belong to their world, even while judging it.

Molina got the part, giving him and Field a peculiar, one-sided reunion. They worked together decades ago on the 1991 thriller Not Without My Daughter, and now they share a film without ever actually physically sharing a scene.

In practical terms, Marcellus often wasn’t there at all. Field acted opposite an empty tank, an imagined presence, and sometimes Connor doing her best Marcellus impression from inside the setup. But Field had lived with the story long enough to make the unseen feel present. “I knew him so well,” she said. “I could hear him, I could see him, I could feel him.” After a lifetime of acting, Field said, she had learned to trust that imagination. “He was there,” she said. So when people ask what it was like working with an octopus, her answer is simple: “I loved it.”

(Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, and Olivia Newman at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

Connor helped determine how Marcellus would see the world. She built a custom lens attachment called “octo vision” to give the character his own point of view—not a dreamy wide shot, but a perspective with texture. “It needed to have a little bit of friction with the effect work,” Connor said. “It added a layer of humanity to this kind of characterization.” The rig had to fit inside an actual aquarium tank, which camera rigs generally do not do, so the crew improvised. There’s an aptness to that: an octopus who sees everything, captured through a lens built to move through an impossibly narrow space.

Pullman came to the audition without having read the book, which he now considers a blessing. “I would have been way too eager,” he said. “You would have smelled it on me.” Instead, the audition itself had a strange little spark to it: a cubicle transformed into an aquarium, Newman’s comic instincts shaping the rhythm.

He left thinking he’d love to make the movie, but even if he didn’t get it, the audition had been worth it. Then he read the novel and understood more fully why the material had stayed with him. “This is a story that I connected to so deeply,” Pullman said, partly because of its intergenerational bond and partly because of the way its mystery sneaks up on the reader. “It’s kind of like a camouflage mystery,” he explained. “It’s not beating it over your head, like, solve this, solve it. You get to kind of live with them and breathe with them.”

(Lewis Pullman, Olivia Newman, Shelby Van Pelt, Bryan Unkeless, Ashley Connor, and Chris Ritvo at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

Cameron and Tova’s unlikely friendship gives the film its real subject: two people in different phases of life discovering that the distance between them is much smaller than it seems. They share little life experience, but loneliness doesn’t care much about age; neither does the need to be seen.

Field said some of her best moments with Pullman came from improvisation, with scenes shifting through production according to what felt true rather than what appeared on the page. That mutual trust seemed to extend even to one nerve-racking scene in which Pullman played the guitar for every single take. While he was modest about his abilities and insisted he didn’t really play the guitar, Field praised him. “I wish I couldn’t do that the way you couldn’t do that,” she told him onstage, to laughter.

That sense of awe had a history. Years before the audition, Pullman’s father, Bill Pullman, appeared opposite Field in a Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s three-act play All My Sons. Lewis saw it and was so undone that he couldn’t bring himself to go backstage afterward to greet her. “That play in particular was spectacular, and you two together were so phenomenal,” Pullman told Field, sitting close by. “It’s like a long recovery period for family members, because the mirage feels so close to true. I wouldn’t have known what to say even after that one.”

(Lewis Pullman at Netflix’s FYC event for Remarkably Bright Creatures in Los Angeles on April 28. Source: Gonzalo Marroquin / Netflix)

Van Pelt described watching a rough cut with none of the Marcellus effects yet rendered—only empty space where the octopus would eventually appear—and feeling moved anyway. When the finished version came, with Ritvo’s work complete, she said she genuinely couldn’t tell which footage showed the real aquarium octopus and which showed the digital one. Having spent enough time observing octopuses for research, she would know.

In the finished film, the illusion holds. Marcellus works not because he becomes a conventional sidekick, but because he sees the humans around him more clearly than they often see themselves. He’s watchful, sharp in his judgments and dry in his humor, yet more emotionally attuned than his condescension first suggests. If Tova has spent years avoiding what she can’t bear to say aloud, Marcellus becomes the unlikely witness who notices the life Tova has stopped letting in.

Tova’s grief and Marcellus’s tank aren’t the same, of course, but the film understands how easily an emotional enclosure can still feel like a home. The grief certainly doesn’t vanish; the past doesn’t loosen its hold all at once. But in Remarkably Bright Creatures, a woman, a young man, and a cephalopod with strong opinions help draw one another back toward the present—not suddenly healed, just back toward the business of living. Sometimes, that’s its own kind of miracle.

Remarkably Bright Creatures premieres Friday, May 8 on Netflix.

(Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Source: Lionsgate)

Some moments live in dialogue. Others live in silence. But sometimes, it’s the music that leaves the deepest mark. Our ongoing story series Needle Drop looks back at the songs that shaped film and TV: the ones that deepen emotion or make a good scene unforgettable. These are the tracks that make us pause long after the credits roll.

Note: If you’d like to revisit the ending of La La Land while reading (or see it for the first time), you’ll find the clip below.

Near the end of La La Land, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) sits down at the piano in his jazz club and begins to play. Years have passed, and Mia (Emma Stone), sitting in the audience with her husband (Tom Everett Scott), doesn’t say a word. Neither does Sebastian. They don’t need to, because the music says everything the film was moving toward, in a language no dialogue could fully manage.

Released in 2016, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land follows Mia, an aspiring actress, and Sebastian, a jazz pianist, as they fall in love while chasing their dreams in Los Angeles. Their romance unfolds as both a musical and a modern story about ambition, compromise, and what it costs to give yourself fully to a dream. By the time the film reaches its final stretch, their love story has become inseparable from the futures they helped each other imagine.

(The official trailer for La La Land. Source: Lionsgate / YouTube)

What follows is several minutes of music without a line of spoken dialogue. It’s Chazelle’s parting gift to the film’s audience: a fantasy version of the life Mia and Sebastian might have shared if the timing had been different and if the sacrifices hadn’t cut quite so deep. In it, they kiss in the restaurant—the camera encircling them—and the story quietly begins correcting itself. He turns down a spot in the band that pulled him away from the music he loved, he shows up for her one-woman play, she becomes the actress she always knew she could be, and they go to Paris together, living the version of their love story that once seemed possible. The montage is gorgeous and a little cruel, because you already know, watching it, that none of it is real.

Justin Hurwitz wrote “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” before a single frame of the film existed. It was the first piece of music he composed for the project, written while Chazelle drafted the script. He described the process to Deadline in 2017 as a long search for a specific emotional register. The melody had to be “sweet and pretty” with “some pain in it,” yet, it “couldn’t be too sad.” Too far in either direction, and it would tip into sentimentality or grief. What Hurwitz found instead was something suspended between the two: the sound of longing before it becomes hope or loss.

That attention to tone is why the theme can carry so much across the film’s 127-minute runtime. The first time we hear it, Sebastian is playing it alone at a restaurant gig he resents, slipping away from the holiday songs he’s supposed to perform into music that comes from somewhere deeper. It’s the moment Mia walks by and stops.

(Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land. Source: Lionsgate)

Later, the theme becomes more expansive, swelling with the weight of the relationship now alive between them. By the third time, in the epilogue, it carries all of that history and also its absence. The same notes return, but they no longer belong to possibility so much as memory.

Hurwitz shared with WTOP News in 2017 that all the piano in the epilogue runs in “mono”—a single channel of sound—until the very last note, when the mix opens back up into stereo. The shift is almost imperceptible, but the effect is felt: the fantasy sounds slightly narrowed, contained—just a little removed from the present. Then, on that final note, the world widens again, and you understand without being told you’ve returned to the film’s reality. Sebastian is still at the piano; the life we just saw was only imagined. The music marks the seam.

The epilogue couldn’t have dialogue: words would have forced the film to clarify what Mia and Sebastian feel in that room, and the whole point is that both things are true at once. The love lasted; the life together didn’t. Thankfully, the music can leave that contradiction intact.

(The ending of La La Land. Source: Lionsgate / YouTube)

That tension runs through the entire film. Mia and Sebastian don’t fail each other through selfishness or carelessness; they make choices that are right for them individually but quietly fatal to what they have together. He helps her get back in the car for that final audition knowing full well what it means; she takes the role knowing the same. The musical theme plays under both moments. Some love is finite by design, the music suggests, and its value doesn’t diminish just because that love ends.

By the time Mia walks into Seb’s years later and sees Sebastian onstage beneath the club name and logo she once helped him imagine, the film has already shown us what remained. They live inside each other’s success. The jazz club exists, partly because she believed in it; her career exists in part because he pushed her back toward it.

When Mia finally gets up to leave at the end of the film, she turns back and looks at Sebastian one last time. They share small, pained smiles, and the film’s wistful ending lands as recognition: two people who made each other possible, meeting that truth across a room full of strangers, one final time.

It’s bittersweet, in the way only the most honest endings are. But here in La La Land, the music has already said enough.