John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Tagged television · everything

Interesting

The Independent

Carrie fever is gripping teenage girls – and exposing an uncomfortable truth about their lives | The Independent

Amazon's 2026 Carrie remake has become a hit with teenage girls, and this opinion piece reads that success as a response to current anxieties about female friendship, bullying, social media and powerlessness amid threats to women's rights. Drawing on a media lecturer who prefers the 1976 film (where the power belongs to Carrie, not to social media as villain), an author on teenage friendship, and quotes from 15-year-olds, the writer argues that girl-on-girl cruelty squanders power that would be better spent on alliances. She cites research linking close female bonds to better mental and physical health, and reads Carrie as showing that girls' power can be either destructive or positive depending on how they treat one another. The author runs The Respect Project, which works with adolescent relationships, and her piece ends as a plea for kindness over cruelty.

Permalink culturetelevisionhorrorentertainment

Mental Floss

Every Season of 'The Twilight Zone' Ranked From Best to Worst by Rotten Tomatoes

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from Google until you press play.

Rotten Tomatoes' season-by-season scores for the original Twilight Zone (1959–64, 156 episodes) show a steady decline: Seasons 1 and 2 each earn a perfect 100%, Season 3 gets 90%, and Seasons 4 and 5 tie for last at 86%. For each season the piece sketches the opening episode and lists other notable ones, such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," "Eye of the Beholder," "To Serve Man," and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." It also quotes the site's critics' consensus, which praises Season 3's superb writing despite an uneven structure and faults Season 5 for unfortunate clichés. The whole series holds a 92%.

Permalink televisionthrillerscience fiction

YouTube

GQ

Put Some Respect on 'The Shield'

The piece is a newsletter argument that The Shield deserves more esteem than it gets, positioning it as the blueprint that Breaking Bad and other prestige dramas later refined, and arguing that its ugly, pulpy style and unflinching brutality explain why it is routinely ranked below them (the NYT placed it 70th on its 21st-century list). Its case rests on the show's escalating shocks, Michael Chiklis's Vic Mackey as a morally indecipherable antihero, and its role in popularizing movie stars slumming on television.

Permalink televisiontv

www.giantfreakinrobot.com

www.theringer.com

The 100 Best TV Episodes of the Century - The Ringer

The Ringer updated its 2018 ranking of the 100 best TV episodes of the century to reflect seven years of new television, a period during which streaming services fundamentally changed how shows are made and consumed. The revision added 27 new episodes while maintaining the original list's commitment to representing television's full range of genres rather than limiting itself to prestige dramas. The methodology remained consistent: staff submitted favorites, with one episode per show allowed and only episodes released after July 2018 eligible for inclusion or replacement.

Permalink televisionfilmrankingsdrama

9to5Mac

Esquire

Best TV Shows of 2026 So Far

This is a roundup of television shows from 2026 recommended by Esquire editors, covering a range of genres from prestige dramas like *Furious* (a psychological thriller about an FBI agent hunting a female serial killer) and *The Bear*'s final season to comedies like *Chad Powers* and *Ted*, as well as sci-fi shows such as *Silo* and *Lanterns*. The piece highlights both new series and returning favorites, with particular emphasis on *Widow's Bay* as the year's standout hit and discussions of why various shows succeeded or disappointed viewers. It serves as a viewing guide for people overwhelmed by streaming options and looking for curated recommendations across multiple platforms.

Permalink televisionrecommendationsentertainmentreviews

apple.news

Rolling Stone

The 20 Most Anticipated New TV Shows of Fall

A fall-through-Christmas preview of about twenty new scripted TV series, set in a year already strong for television and deliberately leaving out returning shows like Slow Horses, Lupin, and Yellowjackets. Each entry gets a short blurb with premiere date and platform, spanning Netflix's Lizzie Borden installment of *Monster*, a *A Different World* reboot, and Zoe Kazan's *East of Eden*, along with Sharon Horgan's *Youth*, the Mike Flanagan *Carrie*, the Schur/Poehler comedy *Dig*, and HBO's *Harry Potter* reboot on Dec. 25. Useful as a dated watchlist, with a lot of true-crime, horror, and reboot material among the picks.

Permalink televisionentertainmentstreamingtv

apple.news

Bari Weiss Blew Up 60 Minutes. Now She Has to Fix it. — New York Magazine

Bari Weiss, hired as CBS News editor-in-chief in 2025 to modernize 60 Minutes, clashed with the show's insular, hierarchical culture and ultimately engineered a purge of its long-standing leadership—firing executive producer Tanya Simon, several producers, and correspondents including Scott Pelley in what staff called "Black Thursday." Weiss and her replacement for Simon, tech journalist Nick Bilton, are rebuilding the show with new hires like conservative columnist Ross Douthat and are pursuing innovations in digital strategy and story formats, while critics argue she was either exercising political interference on behalf of the Trump administration or simply mismanaging a complex institution she didn't understand. The piece suggests that whether this overhaul vindicated Weiss's vision or exposed a show worth dismantling will only become clear as the reshuffled 60 Minutes moves forward.

Permalink culturetelevisionnews

Texas Monthly

Is Kyle Chandler the Greatest Television Actor of All Time? A Texas Monthly Investigation

This piece traces Kyle Chandler's four-decade TV career—from the overlooked Homefront and Early Edition through his iconic Friday Night Lights turn to the darker Bloodline and now Lanterns—arguing he embodies a specifically televisual kind of stardom, relatable rather than mythic, that has never quite translated to film. It contends Chandler's genius lies in exploiting audiences' accumulated intimacy with him across hundreds of hours of viewing, letting him subvert or deepen his everyman persona in later roles. The piece is really a case for Chandler as the medium's premier actor, using his new HBO role as Hal Jordan to revisit and reframe his whole body of work.

Permalink televisionfilm

www.forbes.com

HBO Max’s Best New Show Has A Perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

This three-part HBO documentary traces model Hoyt Richards' 15 years inside Eternal Values, a New Age cult run by self-proclaimed alien prophet Frederick von Mierers, who bled followers of millions before dying in 1990 while concealing his AIDS diagnosis. Because almost nothing exists online about the group or its leader, the series stands as the fullest account yet of the cult and its eventual collapse around 1999, tied partly to Richards' escape from its North Carolina compound. It's notable as HBO Max's best-reviewed current release, sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes even while lower in the platform's viewership rankings than Euphoria and Hacks.

Permalink televisionstreamingdocumentaryhbo max

www.howtogeek.com

5 free fixes that make every smart TV perform like a premium model

This How-To Geek piece runs through five quick fixes for new smart TVs whose factory defaults prioritize showroom appeal and data collection over actual viewing quality: disabling motion smoothing (the "soap opera effect") by switching to Filmmaker/Cinema Mode, swapping Wi-Fi for a wired Ethernet connection to cut buffering, recalibrating oversaturated Vivid/Dynamic picture presets, and turning off Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) — the tracking feature that fingerprints what's on-screen up to twice a second and sells viewing profiles to data brokers, hidden under brand-specific names like Samsung's Viewing Information Services or LG's Live Plus. It closes with a tip on setting up manufacturer remote apps (SmartThings, LG ThinQ, etc.) as a faster, Wi-Fi-based backup to physical remotes. Worth keeping as a practical, brand-agnostic checklist for de-junking a new TV in a few minutes.

Permalink technologytelevisionprivacystreaming

screenrant.com

Netflix's The Imperfects: A Dark Superhero Show Cancelled Too Soon

This piece makes the case for The Imperfects, a canceled-too-soon Netflix supernatural drama about three people—a banshee, a chupacabra, and a succubus—created by an experimental gene therapy gone wrong, who band together to hunt down the scientist responsible. It frames the show as a horror-tinged hybrid of The Boys and The Umbrella Academy, all wrapped into a single bingeable 10-episode season that ended on an unresolved cliffhanger. The real hook, though, is that it was Iñaki Godoy's breakout English-language role before he landed Luffy in One Piece, making the show a notable footnote in the career of one of Netflix's current biggest stars.

Permalink televisionhorrorsuperherosci-fi

www.howtogeek.com

This app instantly turned my Plex server into a cable TV replacement

Coax turns a personal Plex library into a simulated cable-TV experience, auto-sorting movies and shows into themed channels (by genre, decade, actor, studio) and slotting them into a live EPG-style schedule you can channel-surf rather than endlessly browse. The piece argues this solves "decision fatigue" from on-demand grids and makes forgotten titles in a large library more likely to get watched, though it flags Coax's Apple-only availability and steep $70 price, and briefly compares it to cheaper alternatives (NostalgiaTV, QuasiTV).

Permalink appstelevisionstreamingsoftware