Last night, SNL weighed in on a modern annual rite: taking stock of the past year through data-driven retrospective lists. But the usual exercise in mapping one’s consumption patterns soon transformed into an uncomfortably real humiliation ritual.
Netflix’s true-crime documentaries have a recognizable sheen to them—the streamer even released a comedy series mocking its take on the genre. Yet its latest hit, The Perfect Neighbor, takes a different tack. Unlike the average true-crime doc, the film doesn’t rely on soapy reenactments and first-person accounts to piece together its story: a Black woman’s murder by her white neighbor in 2023, which rocked a tight-knit Florida community.
On last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, a QVC spoof about a pillow took a meta turn. In the sketch, a young designer named Virginia Duffy—played by the pop star Sabrina Carpenter, this week’s host and musical guest—showed off her ergonomic neck pillow meant for long plane trips. The issue: When the bubblegum-pink cushion was draped just so on an upright stand, it revealed a distinct resemblance to female genitalia. Scandalized, the shopping-channel hosts tried to minimize the display.
When Jeff Hiller heard his name announced as this year’s Emmy winner for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series —his first-ever nomination, for his role in HBO’s Somebody Somewhere—he appeared stupefied. For a long moment, his face remained unchanged, failing to register the shock.
There’s a low-stakes thrill in eavesdropping on strangers from afar, especially if the exchange descends into chaos. Yet a sketch in last night’s season finale of Saturday Night Live—which revolved around two couples at a bar boisterously fighting for a preferred table as two men watched nearby, whiskies in hand—raised the stakes of voyeurism in fascinating ways.
The manosphere is mentioned explicitly for only a few minutes in Adolescence, the wildly popular Netflix show about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering his female classmate, Katie. Its influence on the withdrawn protagonist, Jamie (played by Owen Cooper), is largely implied. Yet Adolescence’s clear reckoning with the online world that’s shaped him has come to dominate reactions to the series.
At this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, film premieres weren’t the only major events. The buzziest affair, arguably, took place inside a truck: a facsimile of the Criterion Collection’s fabled office closet, bursting with select editions of its deep and idiosyncratic film catalog. For three minutes each, movie lovers could enter the Criterion Closet truck to rifle through the company’s expansive archive of canonical works, plucking DVD and Blu-ray copies to purchase and take home.
In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him.
Early in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the titular author (played by Tom Hollander) bursts into the palatial apartment of a high-society doyenne. “Tell me everything, from the beginning,” Truman Capote proclaims. A tearful Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) shares that her husband, the CBS impresario Bill Paley, has committed a grave indignity.
On April 21, 1965, three members of the Shangri-Las appeared on ABC’s musical variety show Shindig, their silhouettes faintly visible on the dark stage. With the soft thunk of a bass guitar, one spotlight flickered on to illuminate Mary Weiss, the band’s leader. As she crooned the opening lyrics to “Out in the Streets,” the lights gleamed over her bandmates, Marge and Mary-Ann Ganser, dancing in slow motion.