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“Sometimes, it’s good to remind people how much they owe you.” I noted in last week’s review of the premiere of The Sympathizer that sometimes, a handful of names are enough to increase my interest in a project even if I know little about its source material. The two most notable names from the outside in may well be Robert Downey, Jr. and co-creator and director Park Chan-wook, but Sandra Oh comes in as a very close third.

The Void came about because of the intersection of a few strange, disparate sources: Guillermo del Toro, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, and a crowdfunding campaign. Directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski — founders of the Canadian production company Astron-6, which specializes in low-budget, horror-comedies inspired by 80s films — were the assistant art director and special makeup effects artists, respectively, on the 2016 DC superhero film. Much of the crew from Suicide Squad ended up coming over to help with the creature effects on The Void.

Tracks: 1) What’s New Pussycat?; 2) Some Other Guy; 3) I’ve Got A Heart; 4) Little By Little; 5) Won’t You Give Him (One More Chance); 6) Bama Lama Bama Loo; 7) With These Hands; 8) Untrue Unfaithful; 9) To Wait For Love; 10) And I Tell The Sea; 11) The Rose; 12) Endlessly. REVIEW The big problem with ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ — one of the most controversial songs ever to come out of the Bacharach/David camp — is not that it’s sexist (although it certainly is, but then what wasn’t sexist back in 1965?

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s daily coverage of True Detective: Night Country, which debuted tonight on HBO. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. You can check out our full Winter 2024 schedule here, and learn more about the site and its mission on our About page. Exactly 10 years ago to the day, HBO debuted a new show called True Detective.

Let’s talk about stories. One of my favorite parts of The Life Of Pi (a book for whom knowledge of the plot is entirely immaterial to how I’m about to use it) is how, in the end, it’s a story about stories—specifically, about how the stories we tell ourselves will always be far more important than whatever hypothetical “objective” reality supposedly exists. The reason we choose religion, or dogma, or any other belief system or ideology to ground our lives and give it meaning is almost never because it’s more “true” in some pragmatic sense.

West Heart Kill has been on my radar for a while. As a huge Agatha Christie fan and a lover of the murder mystery genre, I had seen some early articles about this book and then saw some early reviews praising it. I had high expectations, but I was unprepared for what Dann McDorman had in store. Our Murder, The Read book club (named after the iconic Angela Lansbury tv show Murder, She Wrote) meets on the first Monday of every month at P&T Knitwear on the Lower East Side.

Let’s start this week with the subplot to “Local News,” which I think is the part of this episode that will matter the most to the overall direction of this What We Do in the Shadows season—and is also the part I found the most genuinely affecting. For the past couple of weeks, the story of Guillermo’s half-transition to vampirism has been mostly shunted aside, but here it reaches what could be a turning point, for the character and for the show.

What does starvation feel like? It’s a difficult sensation to convey on screen: the gnawing in the stomach, the emptiness longing to be filled, the inability to stop thinking about it at all hours of the day, even when you’re asleep. Yellowjackets has dramatized this before, especially throughout this season; hunger has changed these young women on a subconscious level, opening them up to ideas that would’ve been unthinkable even months ago.

Starting next week, Ben will be covering season two of Yellowjackets on Fridays as episodes stream on Showtime. To read those reviews and catch up his Remindercaps of season one, become a paid subscriber. In the meantime, here’s a free look at his review of the first season finale. When I first pitched covering Yellowjackets for Episodic Medium, I singled out “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” as the episode that had really stuck with me in the year since this first season aired.