The President is Day-Trading Paramount Stock and Outlander Finally Croaked

Okay. So the President of the United States — per a Variety story this week that I had to read three times because I assumed I was being pranked — disclosed $220 million in financial transactions for Q1, which included buying securities in Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Disney, and Comcast. The man who can move these companies' stock prices with a Truth Social post at 4am is, allegedly, also buying their stock. Pick a lane, sir. You can be the regulator or you can be the day trader. You cannot be both. Well — you can, apparently, and nobody's going to do anything about it, and the European Commission is over there squinting at the Paramount-WBD merger going "this might have to be reviewed under several frameworks," which is bureaucrat-speak for "we have no idea what's happening either." Meanwhile Elon is fighting The Odyssey on Twitter. Homer. He's mad at Homer. We are not a serious country and we no longer make serious television, and these two facts are related.

Let's get into it.

The Boys, Season 5 (Prime Video)

The final season of The Boys is here and Homelander is still doing the thing where Antony Starr makes a face that suggests he's about to either cry or commit a federal crime, and you genuinely cannot tell which. The episode this week is called "The Frenchman, the Female, and the Man Called Mother's Milk" which sounds like a Tarantino movie that got rejected for being too on the nose. Kripke is wrapping it up. He's been saying for two years he knows how it ends. Good — because every other prestige show stumbles into its finale like a guy who got off the wrong subway stop. Twelve thousand TMDb ratings averaging 8.5 doesn't lie. Watch it. It's the last one.

Euphoria, Season 3 (HBO Max)

Euphoria is back after — what, four years? Five? I genuinely don't know. The cast has aged so much they could now plausibly play the parents of the characters they played in season one. Sydney Sweeney has become a movie star, Jacob Elordi has become a movie star, Zendaya has become a movie star and also somehow simultaneously every magazine cover for the entire 2020s, and Sam Levinson has been rewriting every episode at 3am while a camera crew waits in a parking lot in Burbank. The episode is called "This Little Piggy." I'm sure that's fine. It's the most-anticipated show of the spring, the ratings will be enormous, and seventy percent of the discourse will be people getting mad about something that happens in the first six minutes. Locked in.

Outlander, the actual end (Netflix)

After eight seasons of a nurse from 1945 falling through a rock into Scotland and then having more correspondence-based drama than a Jane Austen novel had business inventing, Outlander has ended. Per Deadline, the finale leaves "room for future continuation," which is the most Outlander thing a finale could possibly do. It will not be continued the way you think and it will be continued in a way you don't want. I salute everyone who watched all 100+ episodes of this. You're built different. You probably also have opinions about tartan.

My Royal Nemesis (Netflix)

A K-drama in which a legendary Joseon-era villainess gets reincarnated into the body of a modern actress and then has a love-hate romance with a chaebol heir across centuries. I want to be clear: this premise is better than ninety percent of what American TV greenlit this year. Korea is eating our lunch and we keep ordering more Law & Order. Five votes on TMDb so far but an 8.4 average. The English title is "My Royal Nemesis" but the Korean homepage just calls it Wicked World, which absolutely rips harder. Worth a look if you like your romance with a body-swap and a centuries-spanning grudge.

Off Campus (Prime Video)

A girl tutors a hockey captain to win over her crush and then — you'll never guess — develops feelings for the hockey captain. Off Campus is Prime Video's new YA play based on the Elle Kennedy novels (the book series on Amazon), and Amazon has clearly decided the lane is BookTok-to-stream pipeline now that The Summer I Turned Pretty printed money. They also just announced Boys of Tommen from the same studio. We are in the Irish-coastal-town-shy-girl-mysterious-boy industrial complex now. If you're in the demo, you already pre-watched it. If you're not, this is not for you and that's fine — let teenagers have their show.

The Punisher: One Last Kill (Disney+)

A 51-minute Marvel "television special presentation" — that's a real phrase they used — in which Jon Bernthal goes back to being Frank Castle one more time. 8.6 with 500 votes on TMDb, which for a Marvel project right now is basically a miracle. Bernthal is the only person on earth who can make this character work, Disney finally figured out that maybe just let him be violent and let Deborah Ann Woll show up and that's the whole show, no committee notes. Fifty-one minutes. In and out. That's how all Marvel projects should be from now on. No more nine-episode arcs about a wizard's HR problems. One-and-done specials. Just do this.

Quick hits

NCIS season 23, Law & Order season 25, SVU season 27, Chicago Fire season 14, Family Guy season 24. Five shows. One hundred and thirteen combined seasons. There are entire countries younger than Law & Order. Somewhere in a Burbank writers' room a 28-year-old is being told "we need a fresh take on a body in a dumpster" and he's pretending he can do it. These shows will outlive us all. They are the cockroaches of network television. God bless them, I guess.

Pick of the Week

It's The Boys, final season. Easy call. If you've been in since 2019 you owe it to yourself to finish, and if you haven't started — five seasons, roughly 8 hours each, you have time, the country is collapsing anyway. Honorable mention to The Punisher special on Disney+ for being a Marvel project that respects your Saturday afternoon.

The closer

The most-talked-about thing at Cannes this week was Jordan Firstman's Club Kid — a movie he made about a washed-up party promoter, shot in real New York clubs, with a Rihanna song he didn't actually have the rights to until Rihanna herself apparently signed off. He got a seven-minute standing ovation. Or six minutes, depending on which trade you read — Deadline says seven, Variety says six, and the discrepancy is the kind of thing they used to start wars over. A guy made his weird personal movie about his actual life, on a song he stole, and the most prestigious film festival on earth lost its mind. Meanwhile a streamer near you is greenlighting season three of a show about a guy whose ex-wife is a falconer. The good stuff still slips through. You just have to be at Cannes to see it, or wait two years for it to land on Mubi between an ad for Dollar Shave Club and a documentary about cheese.

See you next week.