Hollywood bid a fortune on a hedge-fund show and canceled two hits

HBO handed a straight-to-series order this week to a drama called The Spread, about a billionaire trying to turn Miami into "Wall Street South." Javier Bardem plays the billionaire. He gathers around himself, per the actual logline, "the brilliant, the hungry and the dangerous" — which is also the exact roster of companies that bid against each other to make it before HBO won: Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, Apple. A bidding war. Over a show about hedge funds. Fought by the same conglomerates that cannot stop merging with each other and cannot pay off the debt from the last time they tried. Bill Dubuque, who co-created Ozark, is writing it. Matthew Vaughn from the Kingsman movies is directing. It'll probably be good, and it is easily the most honest thing the industry has produced all year: a story about rich men gambling with money that isn't theirs, greenlit by rich men gambling with money that isn't theirs.

Then, in the same seven days, Prime Video canceled Ride or Die after one season. Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer as lifelong best friends who go on the run when one of them turns out to be a working assassin. The show topped Prime's own top ten and got the reviews. A hit. They killed a hit, and Paramount's studio is now shopping it around town like a rescue dog. Over at Netflix they axed Sweet Magnolias after five seasons and immediately ordered a new show from the same showrunner, starring the same lead, about women running a business in a small Southern town. They didn't cancel the show. They renamed it and made everyone re-audition for their own lives. Anyway. Real things did come out. A couple are even good.

East of Eden (Netflix)

All seven episodes land October 1. Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames, the coldest human being John Steinbeck ever put on a page, in Zoe Kazan's adaptation of the 1952 novel. Christopher Abbott is Adam Trask, Mike Faist turns up, and the whole thing is Kazan doing the book as a prestige limited series instead of a two-hour movie that skips the good parts. Pugh does period misery better than anyone alive right now — Little Women, Oppenheimer, the one where she's grieving in a field. Nobody's seen it yet, so this is a bet. But it's the best bet on the board.

✅ WORTH IT

War (HBO Max)

Also October 1, also about wealthy people setting each other on fire: War is Dominic West and Sienna Miller getting a divorce. He's a tech-money husband, she's a movie star, the marriage detonates, and two rival London law firms — Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne, names that sound like a haunted accounting practice — go to the mattresses over who gets what. Eight episodes, weekly on Thursdays, because HBO still operates on the belief that making you wait is a form of respect. The War of the Roses reformatted as a legal procedural. I'm not mad about it.

✅ WORTH IT

Medusa, season 2 (Netflix)

The Colombian thriller comes back September 30, ten episodes, two more than season one got. Juana Acosta is back as Barbara Hidalgo. Netflix's Spanish-language side keeps quietly turning out tense adult dramas while the English-language side spends its afternoon canceling assassin comedies that people liked. Worth it if season one worked on you and reading subtitles doesn't feel like a personal insult.

✅ WORTH IT

Love Is Blind: Netherlands (Netflix)

Thirty Dutch singles walk into the pods September 30 to fall in love through a wall, hosted by Nicolette van Dam and Bas Smit. The franchise has now annexed enough countries to file for statehood. First batch of ten episodes that day. You already know whether this is your problem or not.

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Pick of the Week

East of Eden. Pugh playing the meanest woman in American literature, in a version written by the one family whose name is stapled to the material forever. Seven episodes, all at once, October 1 on Netflix. If it hits, it's the show of the fall. If it whiffs, you still got seven hours of Florence Pugh being quietly cruel in beautiful clothes, which is a soft place to land after losing a bet.

They fought a four-way bidding war over a man burning money in Florida, then canceled a show that was working and reissued another one under a new name. The executives aren't confused. They know precisely what sells and what doesn't. They just watched the numbers say "the audience likes this" and reached for the plug anyway, because the only story that truly interests them is the one about themselves. See you next week, assuming Miami's still above sea level.