Issue 8 - Nicole Kidman Autopsies a Corpse While Steve Carell Teaches Creative Writing

Two shows premiered this week called Rooster. Two. One is an anime about a chicken who fights skyscraper-sized monsters by screaming, and the other is a Bill Lawrence HBO comedy about a sad novelist on a college campus. And I'll tell you right now which one is going to win — the chicken. The chicken is going to win. Because somewhere in a Burbank conference room a man in a vest said we need our Ted Lasso but darker, but also warmer, but also Steve Carell, and the room nodded, and they spent what I can only assume is eleven million dollars an episode to produce a show with the same title as a cartoon rooster. Nobody checked. Nobody Googled. This is the industry now. Two Roosters, same week, and the algorithm just shrugs and serves you whichever one it thinks will keep you from canceling.

The drops

Scarpetta (Prime Video) — Nicole Kidman is a forensic pathologist. Jamie Lee Curtis is her sister. Bobby Cannavale is a cop. Simon Baker is back from whatever island he's been on since The Mentalist ended. This is peak Amazon strategy — take a beloved paperback your mom read on a beach in 2003, cast it with four people who already have Oscars or Emmys or both, and charge you for it under the same subscription that ships you paper towels. The Patricia Cornwell books are actually good. Kidman is a ringer. I will watch this and I will hate that I enjoyed it.

Rooster (HBO Max) — Steve Carell plays a famous author on a college campus navigating a complicated relationship with his daughter, which is a sentence so familiar I think I've read it in every prestige comedy pitch deck since 2011. Bill Lawrence made it. John C. McGinley is in it, which means Lawrence just emptied his Scrubs contacts into a group text and said we're doing this. It's probably fine. It's probably warm and well-observed and the dad learns something. I don't know. I've seen it. You've seen it. We've all seen it.

Rooster Fighter (Hulu) — An Adult Swim anime about a rooster named Keiji who defends humanity from ten-story-tall monsters by yelling kokekokko. Rated 8.6. Higher than every live-action show this week combined. Everything you need to know about the state of American television is contained in the fact that a Japanese cartoon about a battle-chicken is more emotionally sophisticated than most of what Hollywood is putting out. Watch the chicken.

Dynasty: The Murdochs (Netflix) — A documentary about Rupert Murdoch and his sons fighting over his empire while he's still alive, and the word Dynasty is in the title because Netflix knows you'll click anything that sounds like Succession. Which is fine, because the real Murdoch family is funnier, meaner, and less internally consistent than anything Jesse Armstrong could've written. Rupert is 94 and still rewriting his trust to screw over Lachlan. That's not a documentary, that's a Greek play. Probably the week's most watchable doc if you enjoy watching the super-rich suffer, which, spoiler, they don't suffer that much.

The Pitt (HBO Max) Season 3 — Noah Wyle is back in a fake Pittsburgh ER pretending it's real time and somehow it keeps working. 8.7 on TMDb. One of the only current shows where you walk away feeling like adults made it for adults. If you haven't watched, start from S1. It's the show ER would've been if ER had been made by people who hate private equity.

That Night (Netflix) — A Spanish-language mystery about a young mother caught up in a murder on an island getaway, and her sisters make it worse. Good. That's a premise. I like sisters making things worse. That's what sisters do. Probably a decent weeknight watch if you want subtitles and a body.

Phantom Lawyer (Netflix) — Korean drama about a timid lawyer who sees ghosts and teams up with a cold elite attorney to represent dead clients. I could not possibly be more on board. This is the exact kind of high-concept foreign TV that Netflix bought for pennies and will bury under a Meghan Markle lifestyle series.

Day One (Prime Video) — Spanish thriller set during Barcelona's Mobile World Congress where an anti-tech activist is framed for murder. Anti-tech activist is also the guy who booked the venue. Medium intrigued. Probably six hours of guys running down alleys while a voiceover warns about AI.

The returning procedurals are also back this week — The Rookie, SVU, Law & Order, NCIS, Grey's Anatomy — which means if you are a person whose comfort food is Mariska Hargitay telling a perp he is heinous, you are eating well. Grey's is in season 23. Think about that. Children born when Grey's premiered are now old enough to get cheated on by a surgeon.

On the movie side, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere dropped on Netflix, and it's Louis Theroux doing what he does — nodding sympathetically at awful men until they confess something on camera. Sneako is in it. Myron Gaines is in it. You will watch ninety minutes of guys who sell protein powder explain why women are the problem, and Louis will look concerned, and nothing will change. I'll watch it. You'll watch it. We're sick.

Pretty Lethal on Prime is Maddie Ziegler and Lana Condor as ballerinas whose bus breaks down at a murder inn. That's a logline written by someone who has seen a movie before. Could be dumb fun. Could be a crime.

Pick of the Week

The Pitt, Season 3 (HBO Max). Not close. It's the one show this week where the people making it appear to have both talent and a pulse. Watch it on a Sunday when you need to remember TV used to be good and occasionally still is.

Honorable mention to Rooster Fighter, because a chicken screaming at a kaiju is the most honest artistic statement anyone's made this year.

The closer

The fact that two shows called Rooster premiered the same week and nobody at either company called the other to say hey, awkward, should one of us change it tells you everything. Nobody's talking to anyone. Every streamer is its own walled bunker run by a guy who hasn't left his office since 2021. They're just cranking content into the void and praying the algorithm picks a winner. One of them has Steve Carell. The other has a chicken. My money's on the chicken. It's always the chicken. — See you next week.