This Week

• A nation rooting for Marty and Meryl. 

• The best new show of the fall.

• A national disgrace.

• A very important image.

Only Lovers in the Building

We, as a society, love it when huge celebrities are paired together in a new movie or TV show. And, even more so, we love to imagine that those stars are banging each other while filming it. 

On one hand, it’s the entire point of the fantasy at play: The chemistry between actors should be so believable that you’re convinced that the people you’re watching are smuggling that spark into their real lives. On the other hand, we’re all just kind of pervy. It’s fun to imagine that these super hot, super famous people are boinking. 

This grand, horny tradition is fed by countless instances of the fantasy coming to fruition: real-life celebrity couples whose romance started on set, from Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, to Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (the O.G. version). The cynical Hollywood industrial complex isn’t ignorant of this. Whether it’s Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, or Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, co-stars who weren’t actually hooking up (or so they say…) have been more than happy to indulge fans’ thirsty wishes and play the part for attention. We certainly never mind. Even the farce is fun—though these people’s spouses may be God’s strongest soldiers.

So while this isn’t a new phenomenon, there is something strikingly fresh and unexpected about the latest iteration of it. That is to say: I don’t think anyone anticipated the Second Coming of Brangelina to be…Martin Short and Meryl Streep.

Short and Streep play lovers on Only Murders in the Building, which just launched its fourth season this week. Ever since the bombshell dropped in October that Streep and her husband of 45 years, Don Gummer, secretly split up six years ago, Short and Streep became unlikely fixtures of tabloid rumors and gossip blogs. 

Energy typically reserved for chronicling that romantic exploits of Taylor Swift or Jennifer Aniston were suddenly redirected to the industry veterans, which was certainly a change of pace. Photos of them “canoodling” on set (in other words, basically just hanging out and talking in close proximity) or out together for dinner after shooting were served up as proof of a burgeoning relationship. Those flames were fanned when they posed together and held hands at the Only Murders Season 4 premiere last week.

On social media, people seem obsessed by the idea of these two being an item. A recent Daily Beast edit meeting was derailed for longer than any of us would like to admit by the entire staff buzzing about them. It’s wild that the most talked about Hollywood pairing right now is, of all people, Meryl Streep and Martin Short. 

There’s nothing intentionally ageist about marveling over this. Sure, the love lives of septuagenarians are rarely fodder for TMZ stalking and culture vulture rumor mongering. If anything, it’s actually quite inspiring. When I’m on my second or third divorce in my seventies, I hope the adoring public will be rooting for me to still be getting some, too. The intrigue, I think, lies in the fact that, famous as these two are, they’ve never been the kind of celebrity to feature in a frenzy over their personal lives like this. The surprise factor of it all is part of the fascination.

It’s also nice that there isn’t anything torrid about the circumstances. Infidelity on anyone’s part isn’t a part of the gossip. Online trolls aren’t villainizing or cruelly attacking either party. It’s all kind of sweet and wholesome. These are two people who have been friends for decades. It’s a fairy tale that’s every bit as swoon-inducing to imagine friends falling in love late in life as it is to drool over the thought of the hot It Girl and Hollywood Hunk of the moment tearing each other’s clothes off in the trailer between takes. (And if Streep and Short are doing that too—even better!)

Both Streep and Short have denied a relationship. Streep’s publicist said in a statement that they’re just close friends, and Short said the same in an interview with Bill Maher when he called them a “power couple.” That doesn’t matter to any of us. 

We’ll all still dish about them. In our collective minds, they’ll still be together. Heck, maybe Streep and Short are even taking a page out of the Sweeney-Powell playbook and exaggerating their relationship for publicity. We don’t mind; we’re all complicit in the charade. It’s part of the fun, and we need that fun. 

There’s something voyeuristic about being able to watch a show or a movie in which characters fall in love, with the knowledge—or at least the suspicion—that the actors were falling in love too. The romance between Short and Streep’s characters on Only Murders is so, so sweet. Who wouldn’t want to imagine that for them in real life, too?

You Need to Watch This New Show 

It is almost unspeakably refreshing to discover the next great show. 

With FX’s The English Teacher, which premieres Sept. 2, the joy is two-fold: The knowledge that the new comedy series is objectively, undeniably great, but also the realization—and ensuing comfort—that the sensibility and humor is directly for me. That’s to say that I am completely obsessed with the show and have spent all summer telling people to look out for it when it premieres Monday, and, even if I’m a bit fanatical about it, I can’t imagine a huge swath of TV fans loving it, too. The key is: Everyone needs to check it out. 

Brian Jordan Alvarez created the show, writes, directs, and stars in it. He plays Evan Marquez, a gay high school English teacher in Austin navigating his students’ coming of age in today’s unrecognizable, tumultuous world while experiencing his own “coming of self,” so to speak.

He’s passionate about his job and dedicated to his students, while also wondering how much of his life should really be taken over by work. He wants love, sex, and companionship, but also wants to be able to feel gratification and happiness on his own. 

Every time he thinks he understands his students, the changing world, or even what he wants for himself, an unexpected grenade detonates in one corner, an elephant in a room starts a stampede in another, and a wrecking ball comes swinging through the wall. How can Evan, or any of us—let alone young students—steady ourselves when modern life is so rife with seismic activity?

Those questions lend a profundity that complements The English Teacher’s dry, biting humor. Its “What is going on in the world? Has everyone lost their minds?” observations aren’t smug, or crotchety, or whining. They’re insightful and irreverent, just as they are exasperated and, really, just confused.

A brilliant scene minutes into Monday’s premiere sets that tone. Evan and his fellow teacher and best friend Gwen (Stephanie Koenig, who also writes for the show) are in the lunch line marveling that the new class of students have gone beyond woke to the point of being less woke: “It’s circled back around.” 

“They’re for what they say they’re against.” “Right, and they’re saying the r-word again.” “[One student] said I had to teach both sides of the Spanish Inquisition, and then he started crying.” “I have kids who are showing me AI porn of Oscar Wilde having sex with women. He was gay!”

How anyone is supposed to make sense of changing social mores across generations is a major throughline of the series. A high school, with students and teachers constantly interacting is the perfect setting for those conversations, and The English Teacher adds nuance by being set in Texas. 

In the premiere, for example, Evan is censured—and could possibly be fired—when a student’s mother files a complaint after her son apparently saw Evan kissing his then-partner inside the school the previous year. (Would you believe that this conservative woman’s son, who is now graduated, came out as gay when he arrived at college, perhaps motivating this retaliation?)

It’s a show that has fun with the prickliness of today’s exhausting discourse. There’s something novel about that. We could all use that lesson, to find the humor in all the messiness and uncertainty; luckily, class is about to be in session.

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You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me 

I have never even in my life felt more betrayed—attacked, even—than when I learned that Capri Sun is ditching its indelible juice pouches for bottles. 

Just look at these monstrosities:

I am aghast. Offended. Kamala Harris: What is your plan to address this? I know Tim Walz is not going to stand for this. You call yourself a journalist, Dana Bash? Where was the question about this pressing issue during your big CNN interview Thursday night? 

This is going to go down as one of the most catastrophic rebrands in history. You think generations of people have been drinking your sugar water for the taste, Capri Sun? Fools! The clumsy, borderline unfunctional bag that you stab a straw into that then squirts back at you was the entire point. 

Capri Sun is an experience, not a food. Drinking it felt avant garde. “I don’t drink juice out of a box or a bottle. I drink it out of a bag.”  What role am I going to serve in my nephews’ lives if they don’t need me to put the straw in their Capri Sun anymore, and can just twist the cap off the bottle themselves? You are destroying families, Capri Sun. I hope you can sleep at night.

May We All Have Such Whimsy 

Here is a photo Diane Warren tweeted of herself with a tortilla chip on her shoulder, captioned, “I got a chip on my shoulder!” Enjoy the holiday weekend.

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed 

• Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane’s unlikely love story. Read more. 
• On the hottest day of the summer with sweat pouring down my body, I interviewed Bravo queen, Real Housewife Heather Dubrow. Read more.
• An ode to the delightfully ridiculous character names on Only Murders in the Building. Read more.

• The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power: The hugely expensive series finally woke up from its nap for a much-improved Season 2. (Now on Prime Video) 

• KAOS: It’s about time someone cast Jeff Goldblum as a God. (Now on Netflix)

• Only Murders in the Building: Whether or not Marty and Meryl are shtupping each other, Season 4 doesn’t disappoint! (Now on Hulu)

• The English Teacher: Best new show of the fall! (Mon. on FX)

• Reagan: It is without hyperbole that we announce this is the worst movie of the year. (Now in theaters)

• The Deliverance: Not even Glenn Close’s outrageous wig can save this one. (Now on Netflix)

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