The Daily Beast Obsessed

My heart has still not recovered from binge-watching Cheer on Netflix, a series that had my nerves fried to the point they were giving off smoke. I gasped 20 to 30 times an episode watching the young cheer squad of Navarro College practice high-flying stunts, as if gravity was merely a construct and 95-pound girls in sports bras might actually bounce after plummeting from the top of a tower of human bodies.

All 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation began in the same way, with Patrick Stewart—now Sir Patrick Stewart—as Captain Jean-Luc Picard delivering the speech that outlines the starship Enterprise’s mission: “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” Now, more than 25 years after the original series’ final episode aired, Stewart, Picard, and the Enterprise are going where seemingly everybody has already gone: the TV reboot.

Daniel Levy is known for his brunches. You could maybe guess that, if you’ve watched the TV creator-writer-director-actor on his show, Schitt’s Creek, or read any of the profiles of him talking about the making of it. He’s a man of fashion. Of conversation. Of taste.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show The Goop Lab, which premieres Jan. 24, interprets the word laboratory loosely. Setting aside standard requirements like structured experiments and the scientific method, most laboratories, both real and fictional, tend to operate under the assumption that they may well create or discover something new—whether it’s penicillin, a girlfriend, or a robot to do chores.

While researching their new HBO series Avenue 5, which takes place on a space cruise ship 40 years in the future, Armando Iannucci (creator of Veep and The Thick of It) and Hugh Laurie (the actor best known for House) spent time with the people from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It may only be two weeks into the year, but we have already received a glimpse into a dystopian new decade of normalizing catfishing and online clout-chasing. I’m talking about the Netflix game show The Circle, which set Twitter abuzz when the first four episodes dropped on Jan. 1. The final installments premiered on Wednesday.

After the shot of 151-proof mania that was Oscars nomination morning, there’s nothing more sobering than Dolittle. Barreling through the debate over snubs and surprises and Joker and J. Lo like a paranoid ostrich with the voice of Kumail Nanjiani ridden by Robert Downey Jr.—a thing that actually happens in the film—Dolittle announces itself as both inscrutable and unscrutinizable. A CGI creature lets out an enormous fart. A child in the audience laughs uncontrollably.

On September 29th, 2001, less than three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Saturday Night Live returned for its first new episode of the season. Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler had just been hired to join the cast, Tina Fey was serving as co-head writer and Michael Schur had just been promoted to head of “Weekend Update.

ROME–There is a shocking scene early on in the first episode of Paolo Sorrentino’s sequel to HBO’s hugely popular “Young Pope” series that ended in 2016 with Jude Law’s Pope Pius XIII slipping into a coma. And it’s not when the cherubic nun giving a sponge bath to Law’s comatose semi-nude pope then masterbates into her own personal ecstasy.

The phenomenal hook of Stephen King’s 2018 novel The Outsider is that it presents a case that is, in a very literal sense, impossible. In small-town USA, an 11-year-old boy is found brutally raped and murdered. All evidence—eyewitnesses, security camera footage, fingerprints, DNA—indisputably points to one man. Except, however, that there’s also incontrovertible proof that this individual was elsewhere, and thus couldn’t have done the deed.