The Daily Beast Obsessed

As much as Mary Neely loved reproducing The Sound of Music song by song for Twitter, there were a couple times she had to step back and question what, exactly, she was doing. Like when she realized, a little too late, that maybe borrowing a $2,500 drone that she barely knew how to fly was a bad idea.“I was so nervous that like someone was gonna, like, call the cops on me—or be really upset and come outside,” Neely told me during a recent interview.

Ramy Youssef is in a situation many auteurs have stumbled into before. When a person creates, writes, and stars in his own show—with his name in the title, to boot—viewers tend to confuse where the fictional character stops and the real person begins. And so, ahead of the season two premiere of Ramy, which launches Friday on Hulu, Youssef has decided to come clean about a season-two plot point that was, in fact, directly inspired by his own life.

Television. It’s a pandemic. OK, maybe that’s a little crass in light of things, or is at least a bit of a false equivalency. But it could be fair to say that television has become...annoying? Stressful? A nuisance? It is wild to think about how recent the existence of streaming services is.

If Nanette was Hannah Gadsby’s attempt to, as the Tasmanain comedian put it in the show itself, “tell her story properly,” her new set, Douglas, finds her processing its aftereffects—and expanding it even further. It’s also, perhaps, her best troll yet. In the special, which premiered on Netflix Tuesday, Gadsby wonders aloud why her audience is there—and what they’re expecting after she purged herself of some of her darkest experiences in Nanette.

A relative of neither the repulsively crass Dirty Grandpa nor the inappropriately goofy Bad Grandpa, director Sasie Sealy’s Lucky Grandma (now available on VOD) is an alternately salty and sweet tale of a strong, silent widow who, through providence and her own bold choices, finds herself in criminal trouble.

On the one hand, we knew everyone in quarantine was spending more time than usual watching footage of men ejaculate. (Studies have shown!) We just didn’t think that it would be happening in primetime on Fox.

After the crime writer Michelle McNamara died of an accidental drug overdose four years ago, her husband Patton Oswalt worked through his grief to get her definitive book on the man known as the “Golden State Killer” to print. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was published in February 2018 and instantly became a hit best-seller.

Jamie Lynn Spears has officially returned to television. After more than a decade away from the small screen since her Nickelodeon series Zoey 101 wrapped in 2008, Spears has taken a special guest role in Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias. The romantic drama, based on Sherryl Woods’ novels by the same title, takes place in a sleepy Southern town called Serenity, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. And Spears plays the subject of the town’s nastiest gossip.

What’s immediately striking is the tone of his voice. No “Hey, What-the-fuckers!” No “How’s everybody doing?” No jangly guitar theme song. Just a halting, “Hey, OK, it’s Marc.

Even from the first flourish of cheerful music, it’s clear that The Big Flower Fight, Netflix’s new garden sculpture competition series, is out to eat The Great British Bake Off’s lunch. But rather than vying for a handshake from Paul Hollywood with the perfect bake, the professionals in this show are after something else—specifically, the chance to set up their own sculpture in London’s Royal Botanic Gardens.