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Every new show gets a verdict — drop everything, worth it, background TV, slop, or a war crime. No press releases. No algorithm spin. Just a weekly ruling, delivered Friday morning.
39 issues published. 408 verdicts on the record. The latest one shipped yesterday.
What you get
- A short weekly recap of every meaningful new show on the big six streamers
- A Pick of the Week — one thing actually worth your Saturday
- A running tab of what to skip, and why
What you don’t get
- Press releases rewritten with adjectives
- Ten emails a week
You’re not crazy. Most of it is bad. We’ll tell you which.
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Issue 39: Netflix fired 1,000 people and gave us a Friday the 13th prequel
Bela's out, Peter Rice is in, and somehow we got a Pamela Voorhees origin story out of it
Netflix had what you'd call a week. Bela Bajaria, the content chief who personally greenlit roughly half the slop you've scrolled past in bed since 2020, is out. Peter Rice, formerly of Disney, is in. And on the way through the revolving door someone apparently flipped the switch marked "fire a thousand people," because that happened too. Per What's On Netflix, it's a reorg. Reorg. The word corporations use when they'd rather not say "we spent eight billion dollars on Korean reality shows and now Brenda in marketing has to go." Peter Rice's first big win: a Pamela Voorhees prequel series on Peacock. Not even his streamer. He didn't even get the Friday the 13th guy.
Crystal Lake (Peacock)
Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees before she started drowning teenagers for having premarital sex at summer camp. It's a prequel. To a slasher. On Peacock. In the year 2026. Reader, I am not above this. Cardellini is good at this kind of thing — she turns "haunted woman in a cardigan" into an entire genre — and Brad Caleb Kane's writing has texture. If you want atmospheric New England grief with the slow dread of knowing exactly where this ends (a hockey mask, in 1980, in the lake), this works. Peacock still exists, which is itself a kind of horror.
✅ WORTH IT
Slow Horses S6 (Apple TV+ via Prime channel)
Gary Oldman is still flatulent, still an alcoholic, still the smartest man in any room in London. Slow Horses is in its sixth season and has somehow not dropped a single episode. The finale aired this week. Hugo Weaving is in it now, which is not fair to the other spies. Six seasons of this show and no fall-off is a crime against the laws of streaming physics, which usually dictate that by year four everyone's in a different timeline and the lead is a hologram. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then feel sad that American TV cannot do this because our executives would make Jackson Lamb likable in episode two.
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What’s trending
isn’t always good.
Today’s top 10, ranked by raw popularity. Anything not already on the docket gets auto-sentenced by the court — trending doesn’t mean it earns the trophy.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Cretton ditches the multiverse, hands Holland a lonely NYC Peter, and lets Bernthal's Punisher steal scenes. Actually works.
Ritchie-does-Sopranos with Hardy scowling and Brosnan snarling. Stylish, hollow, perfect for a folded-laundry night.
Bettany's White Vision plus Spader's Ultron, run by the Picard guy. 85% on RT, some critics call it bloated. Still, go.
Cregger's Resident Evil premiered at Fantastic Fest and critics flipped. Gory, funny, mean. Video game curse: dead.
Affleck does tight ransom thriller. He's good when he isn't acting opposite himself.
Korean sci-fi with Fassbender, Vikander, and aliens. Cannes crowd loved it, The Times gagged. Worth your night.
The only Americans who've covered 28 years of culture in real time. Paramount paid $1.5B to lock it up — for once, worth it.
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