Issue 39: Netflix fired 1,000 people and gave us a Friday the 13th prequel

Netflix had what you'd call a week. Bela Bajaria, the content chief who personally greenlit roughly half the slop you've scrolled past in bed since 2020, is out. Peter Rice, formerly of Disney, is in. And on the way through the revolving door someone apparently flipped the switch marked "fire a thousand people," because that happened too. Per What's On Netflix, it's a reorg. Reorg. The word corporations use when they'd rather not say "we spent eight billion dollars on Korean reality shows and now Brenda in marketing has to go." Peter Rice's first big win: a Pamela Voorhees prequel series on Peacock. Not even his streamer. He didn't even get the Friday the 13th guy.

Crystal Lake (Peacock)

Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees before she started drowning teenagers for having premarital sex at summer camp. It's a prequel. To a slasher. On Peacock. In the year 2026. Reader, I am not above this. Cardellini is good at this kind of thing — she turns "haunted woman in a cardigan" into an entire genre — and Brad Caleb Kane's writing has texture. If you want atmospheric New England grief with the slow dread of knowing exactly where this ends (a hockey mask, in 1980, in the lake), this works. Peacock still exists, which is itself a kind of horror.

✅ WORTH IT

Slow Horses S6 (Apple TV+ via Prime channel)

Gary Oldman is still flatulent, still an alcoholic, still the smartest man in any room in London. Slow Horses is in its sixth season and has somehow not dropped a single episode. The finale aired this week. Hugo Weaving is in it now, which is not fair to the other spies. Six seasons of this show and no fall-off is a crime against the laws of streaming physics, which usually dictate that by year four everyone's in a different timeline and the lead is a hologram. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then feel sad that American TV cannot do this because our executives would make Jackson Lamb likable in episode two.

🏆 DROP EVERYTHING

Animals (Netflix)

Ben Affleck directs. Ben Affleck stars. Kerry Washington is his wife, Gillian Anderson is in there somewhere, Steven Yeun shows up to class the whole thing up. He's an L.A. mayoral candidate whose son gets kidnapped and he can't pay the ransom because he blew it all on the campaign. That premise is so Ben Affleck I can't believe he didn't direct it in 2012. It's a tight thriller, he's actually good at this when he isn't acting opposite himself, and it's 106 minutes.

✅ WORTH IT

The Storm (Netflix)

Swedish dark comedy. A Skarsgård (Gustaf, the one that isn't Pennywise and isn't Nosferatu) and his college friends get snowed in at a luxury lodge for a birthday party. Things get bad. Not Big Chill bad. Scandinavian bad. There are grudges and betrayals and probably a bog. It's fine. It's not the "most bonkers Netflix release of 2026" that What's On Netflix is selling, but Netflix's PR is doing a lot of heavy lifting this week on account of the whole mass-layoff situation.

🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Doctor X: Mafia in White (Netflix)

K-drama. Brilliant mystery surgeon shows up at a corrupt hospital, starts doing surgeries nobody else can do, and the suits hate her for it. Kim Ji-won. If you were in on Queen of Tears, you are already watching this. If you weren't, start now and thank me.

✅ WORTH IT

Grey's Anatomy S23 (Netflix)

Twenty. Three. Seasons. The showrunner told THR "no one has said anything to me about when the last season is going to be," which is the thing you say right before the network tells you when the last season is going to be. Also a Texas spinoff is coming. Grey's Anatomy: Fort Worth. Please stop.

🐍 SLOP

The rapid-fire tribunal

Take Charge of My Heart (Netflix) — Korean rom-com, electric girl zaps a corporate heir's artificial heart into functioning. Charming. Harmless. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Dragon Ball Super: Beerus (Hulu) — A remaster. We are now remastering shows that aired ten years ago to a global audience of billions. Fine for the faithful. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Law & Order S26, SVU S28, NCIS S24, Chicago Fire S15 — The procedural industrial complex continues to produce one unit of standard American television per week, in perpetuity, as the sun burns out. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

The Trap (Netflix) — German thriller, agoraphobic author sees her sister's killer on TV, decides to be bait. A plot you have seen eight times. 🐍 SLOP

Pick of the Week

Slow Horses, season six. It is the best show currently on television and it is on a streamer most Americans forget they pay for. Gary Oldman, fully committed to being disgusting, running circles around people half his age. If the Netflix layoffs taught us anything it's that the suits can't tell what's good. This one slipped through at Apple. Watch it before someone with a spreadsheet notices.

The closer

Peter Rice has a thousand fewer coworkers and a whole catalog of Bela Bajaria's greenlights to "evaluate." Expect the Netflix front page to look exactly the same for about eighteen months and then quietly transform into Disney circa 2004. Also: a Dane Cook betrayal documentary is coming in November. The man got robbed of twelve million dollars by his brother and we're all going to pretend we don't want to watch it. We do. See you next week.