This Week

• What to watch this fall TV season.

• Everyone involved with Wicked has lost their minds.

• A video that made me cry today.

• Liza Minnelli forever.

• Harrison Ford forever.

Some Good TV to Watch

We are in peak TV watching season. 

Sometimes people think the best time to catch up on TV is in the summer when they have some time off. Or the dead of winter when it’s too cold to go outside. No. The time is now. It’s that liminal part of the year when you feel energized to do so many things, but also it feels so cozy to do nothing. The weather is good enough that you feel like you could go do a speed walking loop around the park in your light jacket, but it’s crisp enough that you can’t imagine ever leaving life underneath your comforter. 

There are few things as snug as gratifying as knowing you’re going to do something productive, but procrastinating it an hour or two because it feels oh-so-nice to just pull up the blanket to your chin and press “play next episode” on whatever you’re watching. Whatever “fall TV season” used to mean on a corporate and advertising level, this is what it now means to me on a “making life as comfy as possible” level.

To mark the shift to this ideal TV-watching season, I wanted to recommend some recent series to watch, some of which have just premiered, some that have a full season available to binge, and some that are starting new seasons. Happy curling up and watching TV time to one and all!

Shrinking: Season 2 of Shrinkinglaunched this week, and there’s something about it that is exceptionally fall-coded. It’s created by Bill Lawrence, the man behind Ted Lasso, Scrubs, and Cougar Town, so it hits that sweet spot of quirky characters doing very human things that make you laugh and cry simultaneously. Jason Segel, Harrison Ford, and Michael Urie are doing some of the best work of their careers in this. 

Found: I am Paul Revere galloping around screaming about this show. It has the satisfying procedural format: an investigator who specializes in finding missing people and…finds said missing people each week. But the serialized element is so juicy: she was kidnapped and held hostage when she was younger, and now she has kidnapped her kidnapper. 

English Teacher: The finale of this just aired, so the full season is available on Hulu. It’s a perfect season of TV. About a gay high school teacher in Austin trying to figure out how to interact with a new generation of students while also figuring out what he wants from his life in a changing world, it’s funny with just the right amount of thought-provoking. 

Agatha All Along: I vowed to never care about Marvel again, and then they made Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, and Patti LuPone witches and sent them on an adventure together, so now I’m obsessed. If you’ve been watching, you’ll probably share my opinion that Hahn and Joe Locke have the most fascinating dynamic of any two characters on TV. I swear this makes sense when you watch the show, but I feel like they’re very much a gay teen and his favorite aunt. 

The Real Housewives of Orange County: This is reality TV at its best. So much of the cast has been doing this for so long that they can’t be bothered to orchestrate and fake things the way that ruins so many reality shows that feature students of the genre. They are just authentically, beautifully absolute disasters, and it is riveting. 

Elsbeth: As much as I miss The Good Fight and its predecessor, The Good Wife, things are so traumatizing right now that I don’t think I could handle their (brilliant) ripped-from-the-headlines distillation of society’s madness. Instead having one of that franchise’s best, kookiest characters basically doing her version of Murder, She Wrote is exactly what I need. 

Matlock: I spent a lot of time on set with Kathy Bates, the cast, and the creative team of this show, which is one of the strongest and most surprising reboots in an era where we would otherwise be exhausted of reboots. The twist that sets the whole series in motion is so good!

Do They Have Chill Pills in Oz?

Wickedneeds to stop defying gravity and come back down to Earth. 

The movie—excuse me, the two-hour-and-40-minute Part 1 of a two-part series—doesn’t come out until Nov. 22, yet it’s already ignited more discourse than most movies that are currently in theaters.

Every costume, set design, and vocal riff previewed in trailers have been analyzed more closely than the content of presidential debates. Even the movie’s advertising images have become a hotbed of discourse.

First, it was because fans of the musical were disappointed that it didn’t perfectly mimic the iconic poster and Playbill art from the Broadway production. But that escalated to the heavens and beyond when star Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba in the movie, posted an unhinged Instagram story slamming fan art that photoshopped the film’s art to more accurately replicate the Broadway version. 

It seemed like an innocent enough thing for a fan to do—a little tweaking to make the movie poster look exactly like the Broadway poster. It involved moving Elphaba’s witch hat down over to obscure the character’s eyes, as depicted in that Broadway poster, an act that Erivo called, “the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen.”

That is, obviously, a crazy thing to say about a fan edit that wasn’t overtly malicious, and which had very clear intention: to simply replicate the Broadway art. 

I’ve learned this week that there are two worlds: One in which that was the biggest, most talked about news story of the week, and the one in which all the people you follow on social media are not gay male Broadway enthusiasts like me. I have never felt more gay and alone than I did trying to explain this story in a Daily Beast edit meeting. 

Nonetheless, I think it’s exemplary of how Wicked has gotten a bit too hyped. 

Beyond that movie poster news cycle, there’s the dizzying number of product tie-ins that are announced each week. Starbucks tumblers! Squishy pillows! And now…macaroni and cheese?

I don’t know who thought “on the occasion of the Wicked movie people are really going to be wanting a special edition of macaroni and cheese.” But I do know that every day we stray further from God’s light. Here’s some reaction:

This Man Is Always Making Me Cry 

There’s a video online that I revisit often. It’s Andrew Garfield speaking with Stephen Colbert about how he’s processed the death of his mother and thinks about grief. He is so insightful about it and—what surprised me—optimistic about it: realizing how his mourning actually brings him closer to feeling the beautiful relationship he had with a person who is no longer with him. “I hope this grief stays with me,” he says. (Watch it here.)

Garfield is promoting We Live in Time, a movie that requires an entire box of Kleenex, but echoes those themes about grief, loss, and how a person doesn’t have to wade explicitly through tragedy while handling it. During the promo tour, he’s released a new video talking about those things to wreck me: a conversation with Elmo on Sesame Street about how he is working through the death of his mother. (Watch it here.)

“When I miss her I remember it’s because she made me so happy.” What an exceptional, touching way of putting it.

An Icon Celebrated as She Deserves

This Interview magazine conversation with Liza Minnelli is appropriately delightful—breezy and not too prying from the living legend, yet, because she can’t help it, peppered with light juiciness here and there.

Moreover, it produced these accompanying photos of Minnelli that are just gorgeous. I’m obsessed with this one of her lounging on her couch in front of the Andy Warhol paintings of herself and her late, iconic parents. I’ve never seen such fabulousness.

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Is Harrison Ford the Next “Internet Boyfriend”?

Harrison Ford has a reputation for being cranky and a curmudgeon. I think he may actually be the warmest and funniest celebrity on the press circuit right now. Case in point: This excerpt from his recent GQ Q&A. 

And, should you be curious, here is the outfit being referred to that I will attempt and fail to recreate at every social event this fall.

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed 

• I talked with Carrie Preston about why her titular Elsbeth is the TV hero we all need. Read more.
   
• I talked with Michael Urie about why Shrinking is the emotional catharsis we all need. Read more.
   

• I talked with Brian Jordan Alvarez about why English Teacher is the hilarious lens to our current climate that we all need. Read more. 

• Shrinking: The show that fills the Ted Lasso-sized hole in your heart. (Now on Apple TV+)

• Anora: Not only is this movie going to be nominated for so many awards, it’s a hoot. (Now in theaters)
• Smile 2 : So, so, so much better than that other sequel featuring a smiling lead character in theaters right now. (Now in theaters)

• Hysteria!: A show about satanic panic should be way more captivating. (Now on Peacock)

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