Stuff Worth Watching, 2025 Edition

2025 was truly the shittiest year I can remember in a long time. I feel like I watched a ton more stuff this year, and yet I had a hard time remembering any of it – fascism appears to have broken my brain. Still, here is what I remember – new movies, older films, TV and streaming shows.

At the end, as a reward, I've posted a recipe for a sourdough cinnamon focaccia that is just insane. Particularly if you have a sourdough starter. We got a starter from a client of my wife's and became a little obsessed this year. We named it Eggbert after an inside family joke that is too stupid to explain, but my son's housemate Jasper came up with a better one – Breadgar Allan Dough. I bet you could do this with yeast if needed. I dunno.

Okay, everything below is in alphabetical order. Happy viewing.

2025 FILMS

I've stopped calling these the "best" movies of the year or anything. Some were great (looking at you WEAPONS and SINNERS), some were flawed but interesting, but they all had something that stuck with me and were worth checking out..

28 YEARS LATER
I dunno man. This was like 4 movies in one. And maybe 2-and-a-half of them made sense? It's decades after a zombie apocalypse that has turned the UK into an isolated wasteland, and we get to see the society that evolves in its wake. Rafe Fiennes has a beautiful segment, and there is some iconic imagery, like the bone temple and a nighttime chase across a submerged land bridge. But I don't know what the fuck was happening by the end. Still interesting tho.

40 ACRES
Years in the future in a post-apocalyptic, famine-plagued world (sensing a theme to 2025 here?), a family in Canada struggles to defend the farm they've owned since they escaped slavery back in the Civil War. Danielle Deadwyler plays the ass-kicking matriarch, leading her family in fighting off hordes of white supremacist cannibals. This movie just absolutely ripped (and had one of the most unintentionally funny credit cast sequences ever).

THE BALTIMORONS
Do deliberately stupid handheld lowkey holiday mumblecore comedies about an unlikely May-December romance that happens over a couple nights during Christmas in Charm City between an idiot relationship-phobe comedian and a lonely dentist sound like something you would enjoy? Then this is the movie for you. Highly charming.

BLACK BAG
When people talk about wanting to bring back Movies For Adults, this is the kind of movie I think of. Married spies Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play cat-and-mouse as the world, and MI5, try to tear them apart. Essentially it's a movie about being married disguised as a spy thriller. Some said it was boring; I dug it.

BUGONIA
A couple of conspiracy nuts led by Jesse Plemons (great as usual) kidnap tech CEO Emma Stone, who they are sure is spearheading an alien invasion. So much energy and talent went into this one, but for the life of me I couldn't get past thinking it was just an elaborate shitty joke. My wife liked it a lot, although she did explain afterwards that she "took a nap for about a half hour in the middle."

BRING HER BACK
After the gruesome death of their father, siblings refuse to be separated from each other and end up paired with the world's craziest foster mother, Sally Hawkins. This was a standout from our annual Fright Fest horror watch-a-thon. The witchcraft she is performing using another foster kid living in the house, a mute boy who is hungry in ways you don't want to know about, is wild. Been a long time since I had to hide my eyes from a movie so often, but similar to TALK TO ME, this filmmaking team's last movie, this one really ties it together in the end.

COMPANION
In the vein of READY OR NOT, this takes a very simple premise and a single location, and wrings everything possible out of it. Without giving too much away, it is a twisty relationship thriller, a dark satire about AI and robots, and has great performances from supposed "nice guy" Jack Quaid and lead Sophie Thatcher. Late twists involving Harvey Guillen from WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS are hilarious, twisty and heartwarming(?). The last few shots are doozies.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS
Creepy Australian serial killer movies + shark attack movies + Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM = sign me up! I hate to spoil too much about this instant sleaze classic, but when you get to a scene where a serial killer in tighty-whities and a dragon dressing gown dances while making a fly fishing lure using the hair of his latest victim, all to attract chum for his killer sharks, you know you are in good hands. The director here, Sean Byrne, is operating well above what's necessary for the assignment, and I am excited to see what they do next.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Josh Hartnett is a down-on-his-luck mercenary taking on one last assignment tracking his target, the Ghost, on an international overnight flight. He only belatedly realizes it's a trap, and every seat on the plane is filled with assassins assigned to kill him. I heard a lot of shit thrown at this movie, and I'm not saying it is Groundbreaking Cinema, but it was so much fun and so stupid and so, so violent. Like BULLET TRAIN, but on a plane. Hooray for chainsaws.

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES
I haven't watched a FINAL DESTINATION movie since the original, but this one was special. It's the usual formula executed at a high, high level – character has premonition of horrible disaster and saves everyone by warning them, but Death won't be denied and hunts down every person saved, and all their descendants, to kill them in gruesome, Rube Goldbergian ways. A hilarious treat. Ingenious and gross. Linda Holmes at NPR had the best summation: "Maybe the best explanation I can offer for the success of Final Destination is this: It's funny 'cause it's true. When you die, you probably won't go squish, but you'll go, and so will everybody else."

GRAND THEFT HAMLET
During COVID lockdown, a couple of out-of-work UK actors becomes obsessed with the online multiplayer version of Grand Theft Auto V. When they stumble onto an abandoned outdoor amphitheater in the game, they get the idea to stage a version of HAMLET inside the game, rehearsing and scouting locations even as mayhem swirls around them and people keep shooting them dead. How much of this shot-in-game documentary is staged and how much is real? It doesn't matter. This is super-entertaining. Went to see it with my Shakespeare-loving son and he was almost falling out of his chair laughing out how they managed to transpose key scenes and themes into GTA.

GRENFELL: UNCOVERED
I thought the 2024 documentary DOWNFALL detailing what happened with the Boeing crashes was infuriating (a case that, oh by the way, Trump's DOJ just let the company off scot free on), but this doc walking through the 2017 Grenfell fire disaster in the UK redefined "infuriating" anew. The documentary doesn't just go through the horrific night of the housing project high rise fire minute-by-minute, humanize the scores of victims and survivors, and detail the failures of emergency ervices. It also goes for the jugular and names names in the UK government all the way to the top to say who caused it in the first place – none of whom ever faced justice. Check your blood pressure before watching this one.

MARTY SUPREME
Timothee Chalomet can do anything and play anyone, it seems. He fully inhabits 1950s ping-pong whiz kid, con man and all around shitbag Marty Mauser, and you can't keep your eyes off him. As for the movie around him, it inhabits the same space as other Safdie movies like GOOD TIME and UNCUT GEMS, full of constantly ratcheting-up tension that gets so ludicrous it makes you want to leave the room. I admire it, but not sure I actually enjoy it. Still, this was the most fun version of that kind of movie I've seen yet.

THE NAKED GUN
This was the most anticipated movie of the year in my house full of teenage boys, and it did not disappoint. Liam Neeson is the perfect heir to Leslie Neilsen's Frank Drebin. Pamela Anderson outdoes him and is so, so funny as the love interest who has a bizarre talent for jazz scatting.  Two scenes – a humiliating bodycam reveal involving hot dogs that Neeson plays to the hilt, and a surreal romance montage involving a throuple with a murderous snowman – take the cake.

NOUVELLE VAGUE
Richard Linklater creates a love letter to Jean-Luc Goddard's BREATHLESS, with a re-telling of the production of that film, using the same structure and style, as if it were shot on-set using 16mm black-and-white film on the streets of 1960 Paris. It is surface-level, light as a feather, and in a lot of ways entirely pointless, but it a real entertaining treat if you love the French New Wave, or filmmaking at all.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
It's always fun when a Big Important Movie is also a blast, as ex-revolutionary burnout Leo DiCaprio is trying to raise his daughter Chase Infiniti in relatively peaceful paranoia, until their past comes after them in the form of unhinged Sean Penn leading a gang of ICE and army thugs in a full-scale invasion. I had issues with this, as I thought its ideological and race underpinnings were a mess, and I never fully got on board with Penn's performance. But those are quibbles because of how damn relevant it was, the amazing action, the great soundtrack, DiCaprio in enjoyable stoner slacker mode, and an all-timer performance from Benicio Del Toro as the man we all wish we were – the calm center in the midst of the chaos, drinking a few small beers. I'm not usually a stickler for fancy formats, but I ended up seeing it in VistaVision 70mm and it was a revelation.

SINNERS
You don't need me to tell you how awesome this one was. A musical, a vampire movie, a movie about Jim Crow and cultural appropriation and sex, and just endlessly entertaining. Michael P. Jordan kills it as identical twins Smoke and Stack, and director Ryan Coogler does all sorts of fun trickery with the two of them, as well as with standout set pieces like a musical number that moves back and forth in time, and literally lights the joint on fire. If somehow you haven't seen this one, you need to rectify that. Probably the best of the year.

SUPERMAN/FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS/THUNDERBOLTS*
A solid summer for super heroes! No origin stories, interesting and new takes on comic book style, no gritty reboots. These three all had some of the more interesting spins on the ball. SUPERMAN somehow managed to make being positive and caring and sincere cool and punk rock thing, FANTASTIC FOUR tried for (and almost nailed) a tone of techno-optimism and communal power, and THUNDERBOLTS may have been trying to tell a story about trauma, but was just a good, fun, sneaky-funny ride.

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE
A deliberately archaic, fascinating musical about the formation of the Shakers sect, from it's beginnings in 1700s England to it's flourishing as a communal quasi-cult in America just before and after the Revolution. Amanda Seyfried is great in the lead, and the musical numbers are like a cross between Robert Eggers' THE VVITCH and a Busby Berkley musical (this is a good thing). But it just doesn't really mean a whole lot in the end. It feels like it should be important, but it just...isn't?

THE TOXIC AVENGER
Down-on-his-luck janitor Peter Dinklage is dunked in sludge and transformed into the rampaging title character, out for vengeance. Just absolutely ridiculous. God bless Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, and Elijah Wood for fully committing to the bit. Fires everything at the wall it can find like it is the NAKED GUN of gross-out horror. Not sure what convinced Macon Blair to slum it for this, but thanks for doing it.

WEAPONS
A classroom full of kids races off into the night and disappears, leaving a town reeling in their wake, including traumatized father Josh Brolin and a teacher under heavy suspicion, Julia Garner. Everyone in town tries to solve the mystery, fails to do so, and then turns on each other. Ho-ly shit what a blast. Similar to Zach Cregger's previous BARBARIAN, this one takes big swings and wild turns (by the time Amy Madigan shows up, hoo boy). Although in this case, it's more about slowly peeling back layers of the onion to reveal the truth lurking behind the opening mystery of the movie. And as it unpeels, the action ratchets up. The finale is such a banger my entire theater stood up cheering.

OLDER MOVIES AND REWATCHES

BRAZIL (1985)
The Film Forum played a newly restored director's cut in 4K of this dystopian Terry Gilliam black comedy about a cowardly bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) accidentally becoming a revolutionary against a totalitarian regime, and I was powerless to resist seeing it for approximately the thousandth time. I've seen every version of it, even the mangled "happy ending" cut the studio tried to foist into theaters. This one is still awesome, and the production design is a marvel – so many ducts and pipes and steam! Although, I do now wonder if the studio might have had a point and Gilliam needed to be reined in a bit, sacrilege as it is to admit.

THE CLOCK (2010)
Christian Marclay's 24-hour movie masterpiece THE CLOCK is one the Museum of Modern Art in New York only hauls out every decade or so, and chose this shitty-ass year to do so. This was hands-down the movie event of the year.

The conceit of the movie is simple – it is a 24-hour long supercut of clips from existing movies from the last 120 years, from all around the world, and in each clip a clock or a watch is visible, telling the exact time when you are watching the film. Whenever you step into the MOMA theater, that is the time on-screen, and the film runs round the clock every day.

This might seem like a gimmick, but as the hours tick by, you realize it is all about the tyranny of time, the clock as enemy of humanity, of love, of hope, of the future. Everyone is racing the clock, or getting somewhere too early, or getting there too late, or trying to synchronize watches, or building machines to travel through time, but it is all hopeless. The clock is relentlessly ticking, until the end we all get to. There are clips from movies in many languages, from cultures all over the world, from silent movies a hundred years ago to movies just a few years old, good movies, stone cold classics, forgettable b-movies, movies set in the far past and the distant future. And in all of them, time is the villain, and is undefeated.

There are remarkable scenes of people literally trying to hold back time – hanging on the minute hand of Big Ben to stop a bomb from going off, smashing a watch, a grandfather clock, screaming loud enough to break a desk clock, all of it to no avail. The movie also makes the passage of time literal by showing the same actor young and old (holy SHIT did young Charles Bronson look like John Cena), fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, generations of talent on-screen.

Also remarkable is how entertaining it all is. Funny, thrilling, dramatic. It helps to have some film knowledge, but it isn't necessary. Next time it is showing, just join the flow and let it whisk you away.

(If you want a taste of the experience, some brave soul uploaded a little chunk from the 4:30pm block here)

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
In David Cronenberg's chilly Stephen King adaptation, Christopher Walken wakes from a coma after a terrible car crash and realizes he has the ability to see the future when he touches people – which is kind of a blessing, but mostly a curse. And yes, it is a Christmas movie.

FREAKY TALES (2024)
What a fun, bizarre, and weirdly optimistic movie, with directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden stringing together interconnected supernatural tales set in 1987 Oakland, including teen punks fighting skinhead Nazis, an epic rap battle, Pedro Pascal and Tom Hanks doing fun work, and NBA All-Star Sleepy Floyd portrayed as an honest-to-god superhero. Jay Ellis is the absolute goat in this one.

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958)
Filling the gaps in my Kurosawa watchlist with this story of a couple cowardly, greedy peasants who get mixed up with a princess and a soldier in disguise during a feudal war. I enjoyed it, but it's a real mixed bag. Some amazing scenes, and just some head scratchers. Like, why does the princess scream like that? Famously a big inspiration to George Lucas in creating R2D2 and C3PO, which I can buy if I squint enough.

THE HOT ROCK/ THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR/ SPY GAMES/ ALL IS LOST
Losing Robert Redford was a rough one. I met him a few years ago on a shoot and he was still a golden god. We rewatched some of his best. CONDOR and HOT ROCK are Redford at his quintessential 1970s-era peak, and I'll take them over more prestige stuff like THE STING or BUTCH AND SUNDANCE any day of the week. SPY GAMES – eh, not so great. But he is pure charm, still. And you can see Brad Pitt learning all his tricks in real time.

But ALL IS LOST might be his masterpiece, as Redford plays an old loner sailing his yacht around the world who punctures a hole in the hull of his boat, encounters the world's most terrifying storm, and then has to do whatever it takes to survive. Without much more dialogue than a bunch of profanity, alone on-screen the entire time, he is amazing. I met the producers of that movie once and I bitched and moaned about how Redford should have won an Oscar for it. They said he would have, but refused to leave Santa Fe to campaign because he just didn't give a shit.

I'M STILL HERE (2024)
I missed this story of a woman (Fernanda Torres) whose politician/journalist husband is disappeared during the 1970s military dictatorship in Brazil when it came out last year. But watching it now, in the year of our lord 2025, it freaked me out like a slow-motion horror movie. It's amazing how slowly and vaguely dictatorship happens, how the uncertainty is one of the ways it works, and only when it's too late do you realize how deadly dangerous it truly is. The way the movie handles its time jumps, how much was left unsaid for you to figure out, was a real subtle masterclass.

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
They re-released this one back into theaters on Father’s Day, and I forced the family to go with me as their gift to me. It's grown on me over time, and there are days where I think it might be the most fun (and funny) of the bunch? The opening segment starring River Phoenix as young Indy is always a treat.

LARCENY, INC (1942)
A super-funny (who'd a thunk it) Edward G. Robinson and his dim sidekick Broderick Crawford are two hoods recently sprung from prison who buy a furniture store just to tunnel into the bank next door for the big score, and accidentally find themselves going straight as successful capitalists. A delight of a movie, with a blink-and-you'll-miss it hilarious cameo from a young Jackie Gleason. It might just be another one to add to the Christmas season canon.

LEE (2023)
This glossy Kate Winslet biopic about WW2 photojournalist Lee Miller starts off pretty run of the mill. It goes through the paces of her  life – Vogue model, artist and world famous war photographer – with a lot of Basil Exposition-style scenes. BUT! Kate Winslet plays the shit out of the part, with no sentimentality. And bizarrely, Andy Samberg is the MVP of the second half of the movie in a dramatic role. And when the two of them get a tip about something terrible being discovered in the liberated towns of Poland and Germany and drive for weeks to be the first to document the concentration camps, the movie hits a whole other level. The final third is like a completely different movie.

NOTORIOUS (1946)
Arguing about which Hitchcock movies is the "best" one is a fool's game. But for my money, this tale of cold, calculating spy Cary Grant running semi-reformed drunken hooker Ingrid Bergman as a spy to crack open a nest of ex-Nazis in Brazil as he slowly (and then swiftly) falls head over heels in love with her – this is the one. And it has that crane shot right in the center of it, as we descend through a crowded party from high overhead to go right in close and reveal a stolen key in Bergman's hand, hidden in plain site as she prepares to unlock evidence for Grant.

RONIN (1998)
I saw this stripped-down Frankenheimer crime thriller with a murderer's row of actors (De Niro! Jean Reno! Stellan Skarsgard! Sean effing Bean as like the last on the call sheet!) in the theater when it came out, and I thought it was pretty mid, almost a little boring. But this time it knocked my socks off. Amazing car chase scenes, great atmosphere, tight plotting, and De Niro when he still actually acted.

SHAKEDOWN (1950)
In the grand tradition of ACE IN THE HOLE, and clearly an inspiration for NIGHTCRAWLER, this deep-cut noir features baby-faced Howard Duff as a newspaper photographer who will do anything to make it to the top, including pitting two mob bosses against each other and leaving a trail of bodies behind him.

STAND BY ME (1950)
Man, Rob Reiner was another gut-punch of a loss, particularly the tragic way he and his wife died. He was a real mensch, and as a director had one of the most epic runs of solid movie-making you will ever see. Starting in 1984 with his first film(!!) SPINAL TAP, he made THE SURE THING, STAND BY ME, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, MISERY, and A FEW GOOD MEN. What a heater he was on. You could do worse than to watch any of them. I went with this one. It was still great.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942)
In Nazi occupied Poland, a theater troupe and the bickering acting couple who lead it get mixed up in a Polish spy's efforts to stop a German double agent. To my chagrin, I have only seen the Mel Brook-Anne Bancroft remake, which was so blah it somehow turned me off seeing the Jack Benny-Carole Lombard original. What a mistake! Funny, tragic, and weirdly timely (I happened to see it the same week Jimmy Kimmel was briefly banned from the airwaves by MAGA fascists). A pretty brave movie to be made at the time, when so much was still in flux.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)
Ne'er-do-well young (oh my god SO young) Mark Ruffalo wanders back into the life of his buttoned-up older sister Laura Linney and her son Rory Culkin, and turns everything upside done – sometimes bad, mostly for good. My family wanted a movie to make them cry, I promised I would find one. When that ending comes around and Steve Earle's version of "Pilgrim" starts playing, it's Niagara Falls.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)
One of the most shocking and unsettling Holocaust movies you'll ever see doesn't show one bit of the camps, instead confining itself to the daily goings-on at the home next door to Auschwitz, where commandant Christian Friedel and wife Sandra Huller do their best to ignore the HORRIBLE NOISES coming from over the wall. Unforgettable and haunting sound design. Went down a deep hole on YouTube devouring every thing I could about the movie, like the fact director Jonathan Glazer essentially cut two different movies – first the visual one, then the audio one – only combining them at the end. Loved it, might never watch it again.

TV & STREAMING SHOWS

ANDOR (Disney+)
The final season of Tony Gilroy's revolutionary manifesto disguised as STAR WARS popcorn lived up to the hype. Each three-episode cycle jumped further into the future, to a time when we know many of these people will be giving their lives to destroy a fascist regime. The last batch of episodes were all-timers, including a rousing speech from Senator Mon Mothma that might as well have been aimed squarely at us, a stand-alone episode focused on the relationship between Stellan Skarsgard's Luthen and Elizabeth Dulau's Kleya (who turns out to be the steel backbone of the whole show), and the final fate of Imperial quislings Ciril, Dedra and Partagaz, who realize only too late how expendable everyone is in an autocratic nightmare. All in all, two seasons of nearly flawless television.

BLUE LIGHTS (Britbox)
Soapy but excellent Irish cop drama, with a cavalcade of great young and old actors sporting great accents all around. Plot twists worthy of the best cop shows you can think of, slightly undercut by earnest melodrama. All those people calling it the Irish THE WIRE settle down. Still, very good.

DEATH BY LIGHTNING (Netflix)
A bargain-basement version of LINCOLN, which is perfect for this tale of the leftover dregs of the Republican party – corrupt, barely clinging to power, two decades after the great man's death. This tells the very modern, darkly funny tale of reformer President James Garfield (Michael Shannon), and the slimy, clingy nutter who ends up assassinating him, Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen). The real star here is Nick Offerman as VP Chester Arthur, a carousing, corrupt, sausage-loving drunk who falls ass-backwards into the Presidency, and has to find his moral backbone for the first time in his life.

THE EASTERN GATE (HBO MAX)
I love John Le Carre books and adaptations to an extreme, so this story of burned-out Polish spies working with and betraying each other as they untangle Russia's ambitions for Ukraine and the rest of Europe back in 2021 was right up my alley. It is lean and mean, the plotting and acting is stellar (particularly lead Lena Gora), and it pulls no punches in terms of violence.

FITZ (Netflix)
An acerbic, character-based LOL-inducing Aussie comedy about a disgraced Melbourne attorney, played by hilariously grumpy Kitty Flanagan, who cons her way into a wills & estates law practice, which delivers her a whole new life whether she wants it or not. Hard to know what to say about it but that the actors are great and the show is just flat-out funny at all times. A workplace comedy that doesn't bother with the faux doc approach that every American comedy does. Just great.

FOOL TIME (YouTube)
Jon Bois and the YouTube channel Secret Base somehow make it onto this list every damn year, and I don't know how they do it. This time, their 4-part series tells the epic tale of the laying of the first transatlantic cable, which one could argue delivered the modern telecommunications age, using the metaphor of the shitty Tim Allen sitcom HOME IMPROVEMENT to explain the entire story and the wild characters behind it. And it works? Amazingly well? And actually has one of the more inspirational final episodes I saw all year?

THE LOWDOWN (Hulu)
Sterlin Harjo, creator of one of the best shows of the last decade, RESERVATION DOGS, returned with a beautiful shaggy-dog mystery show, led by the super-funny Ethan Hawke, that is equal parts Jim Thompson, Robert Altman, his own REZ DOGS, and some sort of weird Oklahoma-based Carl Hiaasen. Hawke's character (who shares some DNA with Di Caprio's Bob in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER right down to the preternaturally mature daughter) is a weed-fueled counterculture investigative reporter and book dealer in Tulsa who stumbles on a murder and other mysteries, and runs them down in hilarious shambolic ways.

LUDWIG (Britbox)
Just when you think the Brits have run out of formulas for cozy mystery formats, bam, here comes another one. Effortlessly funny David Mitchell plays a reclusive puzzle maker (code name: Ludwig) whose identical twin brother, a police detective, goes missing. His brother's wife convinces him to impersonate his brother just for a few hours to sneak into the station and retrieve some files so she can figure out what's happened to him, but oops, Ludwig accidentally solves a murder. Soon enough, his puzzle-solving skills have forced him to remain in disguise as a detective for weeks, solving cases ingeniously while secretly trying to solve the one mystery he can't crack – where the hell is his brother? Only 6 episodes, alas, but a Season 2 is coming!

MR. BATES VERSUS THE POST OFFICE (PBS)
There has never been a wider delta between the boring description of a show, and how gripping it actually was. Here, innocent British postmasters are accused of fraud and have their lives ruined over decades, only to find it was all the result of computer glitches that the British government refused to acknowledge. Toby Jones stars as the mild-mannered postmaster who leads their fight for justice, and Ian Hart features in some of the most emotional scenes as the buttoned-up corporate accountant investigating the affair who is overwhelmed by what he uncovers. Rarely been more enraged than watching this. Literally yelling at the screen.

PARADISE (Hulu)
It's hard to know what to reveal about this show, as the twists that come late in Episode 1 flip the entire premise of the show on its head in ways that will make you leap out of your seat. Sterling K. Brown is awesome as a Secret Service agent protecting unqualified failson POTUS James Marsden when disaster strikes and all of humanity changes forever. An ingenious series that is like THE DIPLOMAT, THE WEST WING, SILO and THE TRUMAN SHOW mixed up in a blender.

PEACEMAKER (HBO MAX)
The second season of my beloved PEACEMAKER (and Eagly) took a few episodes to really get going, but it was (mostly) awesome, in particular a twist in episode 7 that took it to an entirely new level (and hit a little too close to home). But alas, SIGH, the entire series was marred by a truly, utterly terrible finale. I haven't been so let down by the end of a series I loved since THE OLD MAN with Jeff Bridges. What a waste.

THE PITT (HBO MAX)
I couldn't tell if it had just been a while since I watched a hospital procedural show, or this one was really good, but ultimately America agreed – it was really good. Noah Wyle essentially plays an older, grittier version of his character from ER (and the show is being sued by the Michael Crichton estate because of that), and we follow him and a great cast of character actors in real-time through one night shift at the hospital, hour-by-hour, released week-by-week like old-school TV. Flawless writing and acting, and they actually built the hospital set as a 360 space and hid the crew in scrubs throughout the show so they could shoot for realism and speed.

PLURIBUS (Apple TV+)
You knew that Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn were going to be up to something when you heard about this show, but holy shit. When an alien signal leads to the spreading of a hive mind virus across the globe, only a handful of people remain immune and retain their individuality, including Seehorn's cantankerous drunk, grieving author Carol. As the infected humans try to convince her to join them, she searches for a way to reverse the process and put the world right again, while also (maybe?) falling in love with one of them. Everyone else is so happy now, and she is so miserable – why is she even bothering to resist? This one lost narrative steam at the end of its run (why only 8 eps?), but set up a heck of a cliffhanger.

SHORESY (Hulu)
What if there was a version of TED LASSO that didn't suck, and was a lot like the classic Paul Newman movie SLAP SHOT, and was super-funny and super-Canadian and also really sexy? Well, that show exists, and it is spectacular. This show about washed-up "whale shit league" senior hockey players in Sudbury, Canada trying to enjoy life on the fringes of professional sport while kicking ass on the ice (often literally) is probably my one can't-miss recommendation. Just give in to its charms.

SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE (HBO MAX)
Bridget Everett's Sam returns to her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas after the death of her sister, reconnects with her family, makes a new circle of friends, tries and fails to find steady work, tries to save the family farm, has a series of okay relationships, sorta gets her life back on-track and...that's kinda it. It's a really calm, beautiful hangout show, with real laughs and tears along the way, mostly about how great family and friends can be. Jeff Hiller is the absolute standout and deservedly won an Emmy for his work, but Mary Garrison (maker of bestselling "Cunt" themed pillows), Murray Hill, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson are all great.

TASKMASTER Season 19 (YouTube)
Somehow this show (a perennial on this list) managed to squeeze in two whole seasons this calendar year. They are all great, but season 19, which brought in chaos monkey Jason Mantzoukis as the first American contestant, was an all-time classic. Zooks knew he was going to lose, so he decided to be a pure agent of insanity at all times. But the queen of the series was Fatiha El-Ghorri – always annoyed, couldn't be bothered, and deeply, deeply funny.

THIS WEEK'S RECIPE

Cinnamon Roll Sourdough Focaccia

Dough Ingredients:

• 500g bread flour
• 350g warm water
• 100g active sourdough starter
• 10g salt
• 25g honey
• 30g olive oil

Cinnamon sugar:

• 60g soft butter
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• 1½ tbsp cinnamon

Icing:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1–2 tbsp milk or cream
• ½ tsp vanilla bean paste

How to:

1. Feed your sourdough starter in the early afternoon (If you don’t have a sourdough starter, sub in 7g of active dry yeast).
2. Mix your dough in the evening + let rest 30 min.
3. Do 2 sets of stretch & folds (30 min apart).
4. Leave the dough out on the counter covered to ferment overnight.
5. When you wake up the dough should be big! Generously oil the pan with olive oil. Dump the dough it into a 9×13 pan, let it rest 15–20 min covered with Saran Wrap or a tea towel, loosely. During this time make your cinnamon sugar mixture.
6. After the rest, gently pull the dough out until it reaches the edge of the pan. Once it does, dollop cinnamon sugar butter mixture all over the dough.
7. Olive oil your fingers and dimple the dough deeply. You will see bubbles start to form, keep going!
8. Let the dough sit 30 min covered loosely. Pre-heat oven to 425.
9. Bake at 425°F for roughly 25-30 min. Watch it to make sure it doesn’t burn.
10. Let it cool to warm (about 15 mins), drizzle icing on top