Issue 27 - Disney hires a chatbot guy and Netflix axes another parent

Disney hired its first Chief Technology Officer this week. His name is Karandeep Anand. Before this he ran an AI chatbot company called Character.AI. That is the company where teenagers form emotional attachments to a fake Naruto and, in some cases, sue. Disney looked at the smoking wreckage of the American attention span and said: get us that guy. Josh D'Amaro wants the Mouse House to be tech-forward, which I think means the Haunted Mansion will now try to sext you. Meanwhile California's governor signed an executive order to rein in AI, so we've got the state government and the children's cartoon company racing in opposite directions and neither one is going to win.

Anyway, shows.

Reacher, season 4 (Prime Video)

Alan Ritchson is back as a man whose neck is wider than most doorways. Reacher is one of the last truly popular shows on Prime, in the sense that people actually watch it on purpose and don't just leave it running while they check their phone. Season four is chugging along and the appeal has not changed since day one: a very large man arrives in a town, someone tries to bully him, he breaks their arm in a way that suggests he was trained in a lab. It's comfort food if your comfort food is 240 pounds of comfort food. Good.

✅ WORTH IT

Neagley (Prime Video)

Because Reacher works, we now get Neagley, in which Maria Sten plays Reacher's old military colleague running around Chicago as a private investigator. This is how it goes now. Any show that hits gets a spinoff before the credits finish rolling. NCIS: Skokie. Yellowstone: Property Line Dispute. Maria Sten is genuinely charismatic and the pilot has a nice cold snap to it — a friend dies in a suspicious accident, Neagley smells it, off we go. I don't know if the world needed another Reacher-adjacent procedural but the world doesn't ask for these things, the world just gets them, like weather. Sten told Decider that shaking Ritchson's hand was her favorite moment on set, which is either very sweet or a hostage situation, I can't tell.

✅ WORTH IT

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (Netflix)

Ryan Murphy has told The Hollywood Reporter he has a ten-season plan for Monster. Ten. Seasons. Of dressing up American murder trials as Halloween pageants. This one is Lizzie Borden, Ella Beatty holding the axe, Sarah Paulson somehow parachuted in as Aileen Wuornos because the Ryan Murphy universe apparently now has team-ups like the Avengers. Ian Brennan says Borden is his most sympathetic subject yet, which is a bold claim about a woman famous for a nursery rhyme regarding forty whacks. Vicky Krieps and Rebecca Hall are in it and both of them are too good for this, but they're getting paid, and rent is rent. Watchable. Barely dignified.

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Ted Lasso, season 4 (Apple TV+)

They said it was over. They said it was a limited run about kindness in a dark time. Then Apple looked at the subscriber numbers and said, actually, Ted, put the mustache back on. Jason Sudeikis is back, Brett Goldstein is back, Hannah Waddingham is back, and the whole cast is playing a game where they pretend they didn't already wrap this thing up emotionally two years ago. It's still charming. It's still a hug in a British pub. It's also clearly running on fumes, and every returning cast interview has that faint whiff of "we needed the check." Fine. I'll watch it. So will you.

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Lanterns (HBO Max)

The one nobody expected to be any good. A Green Lantern show on the streamer formerly known as HBO Max currently known as HBO Max again after a brief period of being just Max — please keep up — from Damon Lindelof and Tom King, and it is somehow a moody Midwestern murder mystery where the space cops are the side plot. Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan is inspired casting. Aaron Pierre is doing serious work as John Stewart. 8.2 on TMDb from real viewers, not a bot farm. This is the accident. This is the show that slipped past the content committee. Watch it before Zaslav notices and cancels it for a tax write-off.

🏆 DROP EVERYTHING

The Trial (Prime Video)

Spanish-language legal drama out of Mexico with a 9.6 rating on 30 votes, which is either a masterpiece or 30 members of the cast's family. Eugenio Derbez playing dramatic against Pedro Alonso from Money Heist is worth ten minutes to find out.

✅ WORTH IT

Go Team! (Netflix)

A Spanish comedy where a cheese company's team-building retreat becomes the setting for mass layoffs. That's the premise. Corporate cruelty as farce. In any other year this would be a metaphor and in 2026 it's a documentary.

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The rest, briefly

American Dad hits season 22. It has now outlived multiple presidencies, several streaming service rebrands, and my will to explain why it's still on. 🐍 SLOP

Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show returns with Tom Cruise doing press for something. A 5.7 audience rating and he laughs at every joke like his contract requires it, because it does. 🐍 SLOP

Mushoku Tensei wraps its current run for the anime crowd — 8.4 rating, actually beloved, don't sleep on it if that's your lane. ✅ WORTH IT

WWE Raw and Jeopardy continue existing on Netflix and Hulu, respectively, as they will after we're all dust. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Pick of the Week

Lanterns. It's the one you'll be surprised by. Chandler is doing career-best work in a superhero show that isn't really a superhero show, and there are only so many chances left to watch prestige TV before the AI CTOs turn all of television into a personalized slop feed generated in real time by a machine that thinks you're a demographic bucket. Watch Lanterns. Tell a friend. Log off after.

Also: A24's Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder is officially locked for October, which is going to be the funniest and most upsetting thing anyone releases this year. Mark your calendars. Or don't. She'll probably ask ChatGPT what a calendar is.