The Rookie Has Eight Seasons and We Are All Going to Die

HBO — sorry, Max, sorry, HBO Max, sorry, whatever they're calling it by the time you finish reading this sentence — has launched a new prestige drama called DTF St. Louis. That is the real title. Someone pitched that in a room. Someone wrote it on a whiteboard. Someone's boss nodded and said yes. Jason Bateman and David Harbour signed the paperwork. A network that once aired The Sopranos is now advertising a show whose name is a Tinder abbreviation followed by a Midwestern city with an arch and a crime rate. This is the inevitable endpoint of a media environment where every executive is forty-seven and trying to seem cool to a nineteen-year-old intern who isn't even watching. She's on TikTok. She's never going to watch DTF St. Louis. Nobody is. Well — I am. Because I have to. That's my whole thing.

The Rookie is in its eighth season and I need a moment

The Rookie (Hulu) is back on ABC for its eighth season, which means Nathan Fillion has been playing the LAPD's oldest rookie since 2018. He is no longer a rookie. In real life he'd be a sergeant with a pension and a bad back. But the show is called The Rookie, so he is a rookie, forever, like a vampire of procedural television. Three thousand people have rated this on TMDb. Three thousand! That's a functioning democracy. Those people love this show with their whole chest and I respect it more than anything else releasing this week.

Grey's Anatomy is 23 seasons old and my grandmother is younger

Grey's Anatomy is back on Netflix. Twenty-three seasons. Ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six TMDb ratings. If you started watching Grey's when it premiered, your infant is now old enough to buy cigarettes in some states. Ellen Pompeo is still there. Chandra Wilson is still there. The hospital has been destroyed by a bomb, a shooter, a ferry, and I think at one point a bear. They keep rebuilding it. It is the Gaza of prestige TV. God bless them.

The Pitt is the one that's actually good

The Pitt is back for season three on HBO Max. Noah Wyle, the guy from ER, playing a doctor in an overcrowded emergency room for one hour that is also one hour in the show. Real-time medical drama. Sounds gimmicky, is actually extraordinary. 8.7 on TMDb and it deserves every decimal. If you slept on this one because you thought it was just ER with a filter, congratulations, it kind of is, but ER ruled and so does this.

Peaky Blinders won't let Cillian Murphy live

The man won an Oscar. He played Robert Oppenheimer. He is an artist. And Netflix said — get back in the hat. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the Peaky Blinders movie, and look, the title is the problem. The Immortal Man. They're telegraphing a twelve-movie cinematic universe. Cillian is going to be fighting Nazis in his seventies. Barry Keoghan is in it, which means somebody is getting their ear bitten off. Tim Roth is the villain. Fine. I'll watch it. I just want Cillian to be allowed to do a small quiet film where nobody shoots anyone and he looks out a window for 90 minutes.

DTF St. Louis, continued

It's a love triangle among three middle-aged adults experiencing malaise and one of them dies. That's the logline. Steven Conrad made Patriot which was a genuinely great weird show, so there's hope. But the title. Bateman, Harbour, Cardellini, Richard Jenkins — that is an insane cast for a show that sounds like a Craigslist ad from 2009. 5.9 on TMDb. The people have spoken.

Rooster, aka Steve Carell Needs Health Insurance

Rooster on HBO Max is Bill Lawrence — the Ted Lasso, Scrubs, Shrinking guy — putting Steve Carell on a college campus as an author with a difficult daughter. John C. McGinley is there, because Bill Lawrence only hires John C. McGinley. This is the Bill Lawrence Industrial Complex and it will produce warm, funny, lightly moving television until the heat death of the universe. Might be great. Might be beige. Probably both.

Young Sherlock: the CW version nobody asked for

Prime Video is doing Young Sherlock, starring the guy from After — yes, the Wattpad movie — as Sherlock Holmes. Hero Fiennes Tiffin. His name is Hero Fiennes Tiffin. That's not a character, that's his real name. He's also Ralph Fiennes' nephew. Show's getting a 7.8, which is suspiciously good for what is clearly a horny Sherlock for girls who liked Enola. I'm not mad. Let them have it.

The rapid-fire round

Vladimir (Netflix) — Rachel Weisz as an English professor obsessed with Leo Woodall. Based on the Julia May Jonas novel. Will be catnip for a certain kind of tote-bag-having woman. 6.9, tepid.

The Dinosaurs (Netflix) — Morgan Freeman narrates dinosaurs. The man could narrate a Wendy's drive-thru menu and I'd cry.

Boyfriend on Demand (Netflix) — K-drama where BLACKPINK's Jisoo dates a virtual boyfriend. 8.3. The K-drama people know what they want and they get it every time, god bless.

Girl from Nowhere: The Reset (Netflix) — The Thai horror-vengeance show is back. If you know, you know. Nanno rules.

JUJUTSU KAISEN (Netflix) new season — the anime people are already streaming it illegally. You know who you are.

R.J. Decker (Hulu) — Scott Speedman as a Carl Hiaasen private eye in Florida. This is the kind of thing I'd put on while folding laundry and end up really enjoying.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season two (Apple TV+) — more Godzilla lore for people who need the Godzilla lore.

The Hunt (Apple TV+) — French hunting-trip-gone-wrong thriller with Mélanie Laurent. Apple keeps quietly dumping excellent foreign drama and nobody notices because the app is impossible to navigate.

Law & Order and SVU are also back. They will always be back. When the sun dies, Mariska Hargitay will still be interrogating a guy in a folding chair.

Pick of the Week

The Pitt, season three. It's the one that actually rewards watching. Noah Wyle doing the best work of his career at age 54 in a show that treats the American healthcare system with the hostility it deserves. Put your phone in a drawer and watch it. If you want pure cozy garbage instead, The Rookie season eight is right there and I will not judge you.

See you next week. Something else will have been renamed by then.