Of the 10 recently-reinvented media works below, I must admit the one that most surprised and delighted me was season 3 of HBO’s Euphoria. I’d been ready to abandon the show, which was already far outside my usual genre wheelhouse, after the first two seasons slowly but surely evolved into a mere high school soap opera—albeit with better cinematography, harder drugs, and weirder sex than usual, plus a gay musical number.
But season 3 is almost conservative in its willingness to show that all that decadent behavior was leading to death and despair, not to glamour and youthful pseudo-profundity. No wonder so many shallow fans online sounded blindsided and betrayed.
They still have a half-season left this year in which to screw up the show, but the opening scene of the season, for instance, was a Breaking Bad-worthy, nearly dialogue-free, beautifully shot sequence about the junkie character played by Zendaya trying to get a big bag of drugs north across the border to the U.S. but getting her SUV stuck high atop the border wall, leading to a hair-raising climb down. She’s pleased to survive, but that’s a good indicator how low the bar for success has fallen in the lives of the main characters.
The makers of the show have wisely abandoned high school, using the Covid pandemic as a convenient excuse to skip ahead four years and catch up with our now less-youthful protagonists as they find themselves pressured into porn, fatally overdosing on drugs, and having guns held to their heads by gang members.
Sydney Sweeney remains admirably indifferent to any quasi-glamorous public image she ostensibly has to uphold offstage these days and gamely blubbers like a selfish, whiny idiot when the script calls for her character to do so, even as Jacob Elordi as her husband is bloodied by gangsters in the background, totally ruining her day.
I hadn’t noticed until now that Euphoria is a remake of a short-lived Israeli series, as was Homeland, and both shows have a certain so-brutal-it’s-non-partisan quality to them, which is preferable to the usual Hollywood liberal fables.
Not even the near-sacred trans movement is entirely spared this season, as the character played by Hunter Schafer becomes a call girl for markedly unattractive middle-aged men and then ruins a big legitimate-artistic-work opportunity—creating a large painting to be used as a background item on a TV show but self-indulgently painting penises all over it. That makes it unusable in the minds of the producers, including a tough executive played by scary Sharon Stone, who methodically lays out just how much time and how many tens of thousands of dollars the Schafer character has just cost the studio.
I can’t imagine trans activists watched that scene and felt confident the makers or audience of the real show remain entirely sympathetic to the movement’s attention-seeking, reality-dismissing antics.
This show-reinvention pleases me more, in any case, than do the reports that Andy Serkis’s new film of Orwell’s Animal Farm gives the tale an anti-capitalist vibe and a happy ending—“closure” as one satisfied, clueless article put it—the novel by contrast having been the quintessential warning that you can change types of government and still be just as oppressed, as Orwell rightly feared would be the fate of European countries rotating between communist and fascist regimes.
The new U.K. TV version of Lord of the Flies sounds faithful, though as it debuts on Netflix, it may be interesting to watch whether current audiences, numbed by a couple decades of cynical “reality” shows, react as though it’s just another sociopathic week of seeing who gets voted off the island. Horrifying as Lord of the Flies is, though, I will say kids’ instinctual capacity to conjure up firm social rules on the spot, whether for games or survival, is fairly impressive. We can do better than dropping rocks on those who disobey, but even in the most extreme situations, there’s more than pure chaos in our natures, which is reassuring.
The new version of The Mummy is technically titled Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, since the writer/director apparently thought it was something of which he should be proud. He shouldn’t. He might almost have saved it by adding some meta-commentary on reboots in general, which are rarely necessary (this is at least round three for The Mummy), a bit like bringing a corpse back to life over and over again to do increasingly gross and juvenile things that feel patched together out of outtakes from The Exorcist and Dawn of the Dead. I don’t think even schoolmates of Piggy from Lord of the Flies who like gross stuff or putting pee-pee on crucifixes got much joy out of this one. Return it to the crypt.
I’m optimistic, though, about the coming return—in animated form this time but with many of the original cast doing voices—of the retrofuturist cowboys-in-space sci-fi series Firefly. There are still numerous ways Firefly could be neutered, though. Some of the biggest fans I knew of the original show from the early-2000s probably now regret their enthusiasm in much the same way liberals have done an about-face on their cultish feelings about J.K. Rowling since then (wishing there had been more trans options in the Sorting Hat, perhaps). They likely now see Joss Whedon as too sexually problematic, cowriter Tim Minear as too libertarian, and main character Mal as too neo-Confederate (even at the time, Whedon himself said he wouldn’t like Mal in real life). I’d hate to see it therefore become one of those shows so toned down that the message of the original series is scrambled beyond coherence, as with, say, the TV adaptation of Y: The Last Man, which put so much emphasis on its complicated trans subplot you could be forgiven for forgetting that the interesting actual premise was supposed to be right there in the title.
Alas, the release of the documentary Capturing Bigfoot has been delayed several months. It remains interesting not because it’s likely to settle the question of whether Bigfoot exists but because (at least in its pre-delay form) it purports to show once and for all that the most famous piece of alleged Bigfoot footage, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin clip of an apparent creature walking in the woods, is a hoax. Of course, it’s possible that the Bigfoot in that clip is fake but that this new documentary doesn’t do as good a job of demonstrating that it’s fake as it thinks it does. Skepticism is complex and multilayered.
(Take the unwarranted derision heaped upon atheist Richard Dawkins after he has the intellectual honesty to admit he can’t be completely certain there’s no God nor, in more recent news, completely certain ChatGPT isn’t alive. My own guess would be that Dawkins thinks pretty clearly but that the creators of the so-called Turing Test didn’t when they decided that being able to carry on a semblance of a conversation is the only proof of life you need. Would that more skepticism were targeted at the government, in any case: I see one of my senators, Chuck Schumer, now wants to ban prediction markets lest the public realize just how badly the odds are stacked against them.)
I can’t help wondering, as incredibly angry-seeming surrealist comedian Tim Heidecker stands poised to take over the bankrupt far-right website Infowars—which he sees as a hilarious and well-justified inversion—how many people might be out there who were already in fact fans of both Heidecker and (comparably angry and absurdist) former Infowars host Alex Jones. I may qualify, it occurs to me as I notice Heidecker’s first acting credit was as the voice of a basketball on the great Adult Swim animated series Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
But Jones takes a more negative view of Heidecker, who also proudly helped drive the right-wing comedy show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace by Sam Hyde off the air. Indeed, one of the last headlines Jones posted on Infowars before it went dark and he moved his operation over to AlexJonesLive.com, was this description of Heidecker: “EXTREME VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: The Man Hired By The Onion To Take Over Infowars Produced Pro-Pedophile / Child Torture & Murder Shows For Adult Swim In Conjunction With Will Ferrell Who Took Part In Satanic Rituals With Spirit Cooking High Priestess Marina Abramović!” All that’s mostly true, by the way, but it may be a small price to pay if Heidecker makes good on his plan to bring other Adult Swim creators over to the new Infowars and thus maybe we get a Venture Bros. revival out of it.
Slightly closer to real journalism, last month showed we don’t need a hypothetical socialist revolution to destroy property rights because, for instance, both The New Yorker and New York Times are already crude Marxist reality shows: Former fat little horse-riding rich boy turned frothing leftist Hasan Piker and Art Spiegelman’s daughter Nadja (who may or may not have taken to heart the slogan that famously appeared on issue 3 of her dad’s comics anthology Raw decades ago, the declaration that the magazine had “lost its faith in nihilism”) enthused along with New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino on a recent New York Times podcast about the justness of “microlooting,” by which they mean shoplifting, with Tolentino admitting she engages in the crime and adding that blowing up pipelines is probably justified to boot. If these pundits commit workplace sabotage, their stupid employers can’t claim they had no warning.
You’ll see messages like that in “the news” these days, but of course, as Kristy Greenberg here laments, you won’t be seeing things like the release of the real, full Epstein files even though the Virgin Islands attorney general tried to direct the FBI straight to them. (The real world has become so horrifying it lately almost mutes my ability to enjoy fictional horror like the brilliant TV series Alien Earth, the best thing that franchise has done since Aliens in 1986.) We may need a reboot of the whole of civilization—but not the kind that would please Spiegelman, Piker, or Tolentino.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey