The Playlist Podcast Network

There is a superhero shot that never was in Macon Blair’s “Idiots,” but nobody is saving the day. The camera is planted low, looking up at Dave Franco just before a practical diarrhea rig erupts from his shorts and completely browns out the lens. Somewhere between the Cocoa Krispies used to give the mess extra texture and Franco’s dainty bird tattoo singing “who farted,” the movie finds its beautifully stupid wavelength.
Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. play two spectacularly unqualified men hired to transport a wealthy, troubled teenage influencer (Mason Thames) to rehab. The job goes bad quickly and keeps finding new depths. Written and directed by Blair, the filmmaker and actor behind “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” and “The Toxic Avenger,” the dark road comedy also features Peter Dinklage, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun, and Killer Mike. It is filthy, violent, oddly sweet, and packed with side characters who seem to have wandered in from their own movies.
READ MORE: ‘The Shitheads’ Review: O’Shea Jackson Jr. & Dave Franco Are Riotous Fun In A Chaotic Road Trip Movie [Sundance]
The film took the long way to theaters. Blair first approached Franco nearly a decade ago, when both agreed the actor was too young for the part. Eight years later, Franco circled back, joined as a producer, and helped assemble the cast and financing. The movie finally premiered at Sundance as “The Shitheads,” where Independent Film Company acquired it before everyone had to confront the difficulty of marketing a movie with that title.

Tell Dr. Jack Abbot to find a hobby, and the man joins a SWAT team. That is the version of healing “The Pitt” handed Shawn Hatosy in Season 2, and it gets right to what makes Abbot such a compelling presence. He is calm enough to walk into any medical disaster and damaged enough to mistake more danger for self-care.
Hatosy has not been around the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center nearly as much as some of his castmates, but Abbot does not need much screen time to make an impression. His haunted introduction near the end of Season 1 earned Hatosy an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor. This year, he is back as an Outstanding Supporting Actor nominee, one of 25 nominations for the HBO Max drama’s second season. “The Pitt” led every program at this year’s Emmys, which is a pretty good diagnosis for a show that can make actual healthcare workers need to leave the room.
READ MORE: ‘The Pitt,’ ‘Hacks,’ & ‘Widow’s Bay’ Dominate 2026 Emmy Nominations [Complete List]
Season 2 picked up ten months after the first, following another 15-hour shift at PTMC, this time on the Fourth of July. Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa, Taylor Dearden, Patrick Ball, Sepideh Moafi, Fiona Dourif, and Gerran Howell were among the sprawling ensemble returning for another day of medical and personal crises, with hardly enough time to eat. Abbot returned with a few changes of his own. He is going to therapy, taking his mental health more seriously and, because he is still Jack Abbot, working as a SWAT medic on the side.

After multiple films and revival seasons, “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter finally got another shot at his often misunderstood film, “The X-Files: I Want to Believe.” The new R-rated cut restores disturbing imagery, reshapes the music, and even strips away some of the Mulder-Scully relationship material. It also commits what a certain corner of the fanbase may consider the ultimate R-rated act: Carter cut the Mulder-Scully kiss. But don’t expect a “Snyder Cut” here. This cut is surprisingly shorter, with mostly very subtle changes for eagle-eyed fans.
Now titled “The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn,” Carter’s new version pushes the standalone thriller closer to the horror film he and co-writer Frank Spotnitz originally made. The movie reunites David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, years after they left the FBI at the end of Season 9, when a missing-agent case and a disgraced priest’s psychic visions pull them into a grotesque experiment involving stolen bodies and severed parts.
On the latest episode of “The Discourse Podcast,” Carter joined host Mike DeAngelo to dig into what changed, why he traded some romantic material for bigger scares, and whether fans might ever see the larger Mulder and Scully story still sitting around in his head. He also discussed the unfinished business of Season 11, his conversation with Ryan Coogler about the “X-Files” reboot, and the horror fable he and his wife have made, “Queens for a Day.”

There was no reason to make another polite, faithful version of “Cape Fear.” Thankfully, Creator/Showrunner Nick Antosca had no interest in one.
Apple TV’s “Cape Fear” is sweaty, violent, emotionally ugly, and pitched somewhere between a domestic thriller and a full-blown hyper-violent fever dream. The show takes the basic machinery of the 1962 film and Martin Scorsese’s operatic 1991 remake, pulls it apart, and rebuilds it as a ten-hour nightmare about privilege, resentment, marriage and the strange gravitational pull of a charismatic monster.
Or, as Antosca rather happily described it during his recent appearance on The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, “It is the lurid nightmare that we set out to make.”
Mission accomplished!

On paper, “Furious” sounds like something we’ve all seen before. An FBI agent. A serial killer. A cat-and-mouse chase stretched across eight episodes. That’s technically what the show is, but it's also not really what the show is. The cat is carrying around a mountain of old trauma. The mouse has a disturbingly decent argument. Neither one is behaving in a way that makes it easy to decide who deserves your sympathy.
That is where Liz Meriwether’s (“New Girl,” “Dying for Sex”) new Hulu series gets its hooks in. Loosely inspired by the 1987 thriller “Black Widow,” “Furious” follows FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she hunts Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a serial killer targeting powerful men. Very quickly, though, the pursuit starts to feel less like a standard case and more like two damaged people slowly realizing they may understand each other better than anyone else does. That is not necessarily a good thing for either of them. The series also stars Scoot McNairy, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jake Lacy, Rob Delaney, Rob Yang, and Steve Way.