There’s a lot to say about Taylor Swift’s latest, a surprise two-part album titled The Tortured Poets Department. Of course, much of that has already been interrogated by The A.V. Club’s Mary Kate Carr in her review of the collection. But here at The A.V. Club, we also like to spend extra time teasing apart the most interesting questions that arise from a piece of art, and The Tortured Poets Department brings up a topic that feels especially pertinent: should Charlie Puth be a bigger artist? ...
I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with my tail between my legs, much like the titular “Black Dog.” My comprehensive review of Taylor Swift’s new album turned out not to be comprehensive at all. At 2 AM EST, hours after the scheduled release of the first 16 tracks, Swift announced on her social media that the new record was actually secretly a double album. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the...
When he was down on his luck and wanted to support his family and make sure his kids had a good life, Giancarlo Esposito almost took a very different route than his Breaking Bad character, Gus Fring. While Gus turned to the cartel, Esposito recently revealed that he seriously considered committing insurance fraud in 2008—by hiring a hitman to kill him. “My way out in my brain was: ‘Hey, do you get life insurance if someone commits suicide? Do they get the bread?’ My wife had no idea why I was...
Like some unholy fusion of Resident Evil and Dance Moms, Abigail dares suggest that the only thing scarier than a haunted house is one that’s also occupied by a pissed-off tween ballerina with an emotionally absent, narcissistic parent. It’s not wrong, but there’ll be no Abby Lee Miller showing up to discipline the kid, or protect the dim-bulb adults in attendance from falling victim. It is perhaps a shame that the entire marketing campaign for Abigail places its delicious end-of-first-act...
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around. Few games have delivered more raw pleasure, with more regularity, than Supergiant’s 2020 action hit Hades. A fascinating blend of the studio’s...
Welcome to the weekend edition of What’s On. Here are the big things happening on TV from Friday, April 19 to Sunday, April 21. All times are Eastern. [Note: The weekly edition of What’s On publishes on Sundays.] 1. David Dastmalchian prepares for a Late Night With The Devil Shudder, Friday, 3:01 a.m.: Late Night With The Devil dares to ask: What would happen if a talk show host got tangled up with the occult on live TV? The answer, obviously, is nothing good. Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian)...
In September 2001—that is, 23 years ago somehow—Cartoon Network launched Adult Swim, a late-night programming block for the kind of people who would check out a kid’s TV channel just to see what it was airing after the kids went to bed. It was, essentially, for folks who hoped things would get a little weird. And that’s exactly what happened. While Adult Swim has aired many live-action series over the years, it started as a home for adult animation. The shows were kind of like what you’d get...
When I started this little post-apocalyptic journey seven episodes ago, it was with a question about tone. Was Fallout, at its core, a comedy or a tragedy? But it’s a false distinction, in a lot of ways. As our old pal Bud Askins might tell us, either in his flesh body, or trapped with his brain rolling around inside an off-brand Roomba for all eternity: The difference between the two is often only a matter of time. The worst thing you can say about “The Beginning,” the final episode of what...
To call Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver pastiche is to oversell it. As was the case in Part One—A Child Of Fire, The Scargiver is an unmistakable blend of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and George Lucas’ Star Wars, so obvious in its make that pointing out the origin of its parts is redundant. The Scargiver doesn’t just smash these classic works together; it repackages them into artful havoc, squeegeed of its blood and glory for the consumption of modern streaming audiences. This decision is a...
Because there must always, somewhere, be a pop culture lawsuit designed to make the rest of us gently roll our eyes—and the “Yesterday used Ana de Armas to trick us into watching Yesterday!” people have finally settled out of court—we’re very excited to inform you of a new potential class action suit kicking off in Texas this week. Per THR, this particular lawsuit is being fired against theater chain Cinemark, and features some very serious allegations of what we can only think of as “beer...
Taylor Swift has cultivated a daunting amount of lore to sift through. The casual fan doesn’t need to know the entire backstory to enjoy The Tortured Poets Department, the artist’s 11th album, but do casual fans of Taylor Swift even exist anymore? Over the past three years, she’s gone from megafamous to ultrafamous to something we may not even have words for yet, accumulating yet more fans who are here, not just for the music, but for the full Taylor Swift Experience. That includes the romance,...
One of the big things that happened, when the rise of streaming TV kicked off roughly a decade ago, is that everybody got very cagey about numbers, very quickly. Netflix was the first to get the big idea, of course, realizing that, since they’d essentially sidestepped Nielsen ratings entirely (with the polling company only recently able to offer even loose numbers of its own to track who’s watching what), it didn’t do anybody any good to tell the public what they weren’t watching. This...