Following a three-year hiatus, Netflix revealed on Wednesday that Black Mirror’s latest season will begin streaming in June. In an interview on the Tudum blog, series creator Charlie Brooker claimed Black Mirror’s latest episodes would surprise fans. “Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect,” he told the blog, adding the new season would tackle tropes he “previously sworn blind the show would never do.”

If nothing else, season six will feature Black Mirror’s most stacked cast to date. Some of the actors that lent their talents to the production include Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Annie Murphy (Schitt’s Creek), Ben Barnes (Shadow and Bone), Himesh Patel (Station Eleven), Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down), Kate Mara (House of Cards), Rory Culkin (Columbus) and Salma Hayek Pinault (Frida), among many others. 

News that Netflix was working on a new Black Mirror season first surfaced nearly a year ago. At the time, it was rumored the anthology’s newest episodes would be more cinematic in scope, something the teaser trailer appears to confirm. After the past two seasons left critics and fans feeling the anthology had lost much of its incisive edge, it has a lot to prove.

The following article discusses Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode 9, “Võx”

I’ve always found accusations that I hate Star Trek weird, since I make my love of Trek clear enough every time I write one of these reviews. Every time I watch a nü-Trek episode that I’m fortunate enough to do as part of my day job, I hope that I can genuinely talk about it with a sense of love. And so I am delighted to say “Võx” is the best episode of Star Trek: Picard ever made. It is not by any means perfect, but it’s such a leap from what’s gone before I’ve almost got whiplash.

One of the reasons that “Võx” pops is that Picard’s quality ceiling has been relentlessly low over the last three seasons. The other is that the narrative’s brakes are off, allowing events to move at something faster than a snail’s pace. If I was in a less-generous mood, I’d say a lot of this stuff could have happened earlier in the run to improve the overall pacing. One of the biggest issues I’ve had is the very visible stretching of a thin, mystery-box story over a studio-mandated ten-episode running order.

By comparison, this feels like the first free meal after two 500-calorie-only days on the 5:2 fast diet. You devour a 12-inch pizza and, since you’ve starved yourself for the last 48 hours, you feel you deserve to go out for tacos afterward. In this episode, we learn that Jack is, as Reddit clocked weeks back, the product of a union ‘twixt Dr. Crusher and Picard’s Borgified sperm. We also get a whopping retcon to the plot hole in First Contact, where Picard could hear the Borg and knew the location of the cube’s weak spot despite not being connected to the collective.

Jack decides to go off and tackle the Borg Queen (voiced by Alice Krige!) herself, while Geordi, Data and Beverley start examining the conspiracy. The Queen has already picked a Borgified name for Jack — Võx — to commence his Locutus-like transformation as part of the collective, too. The Borg and Changelings are working together – I’d love to see how that meeting went – to undermine the Federation. They’ve set up every transporter in the fleet to re-write the genetic code of the under ‘25s who pass through it, seeding them with Bio-Borg DNA. When Frontier Day happens, the collective activates its new army of drones, who also turn the newly-connected fleet into an armada.

Fleeing a Titan similarly overrun with Bio-Borgs, the TNG crew get into a shuttle while Seven and Raffi guard Shaw, who takes a phaser to the chest. He even gets a nice valediction, finally using Seven’s chosen name to put a button on his much-discussed arc. Not long after, we get the first laugh-out-loud-on-purpose moment in the series when Geordi asks Data to be more optimistic. There’s a simple, glorious pleasure in letting the endlessly-talented Brent Spiner show off his natural comedic flair in the midst of all this darkness.

The gang race back to the Fleet Museum where, again Reddit called this a month or more back, the Enterprise D has been quietly rebuilt in secret by Geordi. There’s some moments of winking at the camera as the production team head off the obvious questions. How? They pulled the saucer section from Veridian to avoid breaking the Prime Directive and cobbled together other parts from other Galaxy Class ships. Why not the E? Blame Worf, now shut up and watch with a smile plastered on your face as they sit in their old chairs. Hell, they’ve even got Majel Barrett Roddenberry’s voice for the Enterprise D computer.

We need to be careful here, because I’ve slammed this series time and again for its empty, paraphilic use of nostalgia. There are plenty of reasons why this makes no logical sense if you take the time to interrogate things. Maybe it’s because the episode moves at such a clip that there’s no time to overthink things before something else happens. Maybe it’s just the thrill of seeing these actors on this bridge, on this carpet, that the bulk of my critical thinking has been bypassed. 

If I have concerns, it’s still about what Picard is trying to say. Relegating the cyberpunk elements of the Borg to make their assimilation more biological could be seen as an anti-vaccination screed. It’s hard to watch yet another TNG side character brutally die – Ro in “Imposters” and Admiral Elizabeth Shelby, captain of the new Enterprise F, taking two in the chest mere moments later here. There’s an argument that leaving Seven and Raffi on the Titan also sidelines the series’ two queer characters. And this subtextual mistrust of youth which was discussed a few episodes back has now been rendered very much part of Picard’s text.

But I will withhold my judgments about that until next week, when we see how those points are handled. For now, I’m going to bask in the very brief glow of my monitor, and how glorious it was when the lights on the Enterprise D bridge raised to old-school TV levels and we could actually see what was going on. The lights went up and so did the mood, and after all this time, it comes as sweet relief. Now, onward to the finale.

Have you heard about the Scandoval? I asked a handful of friends this question over the past week, and a surprising number confirmed this strange new word had recently popped up in their news feeds, attached to stories from The New York Times, CNN and Vanity Fair. My friends didn’t quite know what it was, aside from the vague notion that it was related to the Real Housewives shows. More importantly, they didn’t know why it was being recommended to them, considering they didn’t follow Bravo shows or reality television.

That’s because this is the March Madness of reality TV. The Scandoval is an explosive cheating scandal involving the cast of Vanderpump Rules — and it’s unfolding in real time, with cameras on, allowing viewers to look for signs of deceit in every scene as it airs. There are clear villains and an obvious heroine, and it’s all leading up to the reunion, which was filmed at the end of March and has already provided a drip feed of drama and staged paparazzi encounters. The Scandoval is so monumental in the Bravo multiverse that it’s culturally important for people outside of this bubble to know what’s going on — just like folks who don’t follow sports are subjected to the NCAA’s media cycle every year.

Jeff Daly/Peacock

It’s not all about the Scandoval, either. This is a golden era for Bravo and its streaming home, Peacock. Nearly every Housewives franchise is popping off in its own special way, and many of them are making mainstream news headlines: Jen Shah of Salt Lake City was just sentenced to six and a half years in prison for running a telemarketing scam and her surprise arrest was caught on camera; Erika Jayne of Beverly Hills continues to display obscene greed as her estranged husband, disbarred lawyer Tom Girardi, is federally indicted on charges he stole millions of dollars from victims of corporate malfeasance. Miami, a streaming-only series exclusive to Peacock, just wrapped a beautiful fifth season and cemented itself as a blueprint for future Housewives shows; Ultimate Girls Trip, a crossover event that brings wives together like the third act of a Marvel film, is in its third season and already serving hype for its fourth. Married to Medicine continues to be a powerful, captivating and hilarious franchise centered on Black women and doctors in Georgia, and it’s bringing in a notorious wife from the Atlanta history books for its upcoming season.

That’s not even all of it, and the above list doesn’t address the biggest bit of Bravo drama happening right now: the Scandoval. Here’s a brief summary, for the culture: Vanderpump Rules is a spin-off of Beverly Hills starring the servers and bartenders of trendy Los Angeles restaurants. Its tenth season is currently airing, and as it kicked off, news broke that Tom Sandoval, a bar owner with Peter Pan syndrome, had been cheating on his partner of nine years, Ariana Madix, with a younger cast member named Raquel Leviss for the past six months. Details about the affair have been dripping out online — lightning bolt necklaces will never be the same — and viewers are scouring each new episode for signs of the pair’s lies. Meanwhile, Bravo picked cameras back up after the affair came to light, and the mid-season trailer promises intense, intimate reactions from everyone involved, plus plenty of vengeful edits for Ariana. The reunion is poised to be a spectacle like Bravo has never seen.

Nicole Weingart/Bravo

To put it back in sports terms: The Scandoval is like David Beckham cheating on Victoria with Emma Bunton. Or like Scottie Pippen’s ex-wife starting a relationship with Michael Jordan’s son — a storyline that literally happened on the latest season of Miami. See? As Quad said on season nine of Married to Medicine when asked whether she’d cheated on past boyfriends, our cup runneth over.

This all means Peacock is getting my money for the foreseeable future, no high-budget original series required. I mean, I loved Poker Face, but I haven’t thought about it much since watching the final episode of season one. Housewives and its related series live outside of the app, on message boards and social media and podcasts, filling the silence even between seasons. Meanwhile, the Scandoval is driving viewership for Peacock, where Vanderpump is available to stream next-day. Peacock is also the only place to watch Miami and Ultimate Girls Trip, two shows that already make it essential in my own app lineup. I never expected to get so much use out of an NBC streaming service, but here we are.

The next app to get my business will be whichever one picks up Married at First Sight Australia. If you’ve made it to this point in this article — a Real Housewives fever dream somehow published on a technology website — do yourself a favor and find a way to watch it (in between Vanderpump Rules episodes, of course).

You now know when you can continue following the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike. Paramount+ has revealed that the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will premiere June 15th, with new episodes appearing each Thursday. While the streaming service isn't saying much about the plot apart from a Star Trek: Lower Decks crossover, it's promising a 10-episode run and has already renewed the show for a third season.

Animation fans in the US, meanwhile, can expect Lower Decks season four in August and a fifth season in the pipeline. The new episodes have the crew of the USS Ceritos dodging "malevolent computers," getting trapped in caves and running into aliens from across the galaxy.

The second season of kids' animated series Star Trek: Prodigy is now slated to debut this winter. The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery was already poised to arrive in early 2024.

The two confirmed renewals aren't surprising. While Paramount+ is now popular for more than Star Trek, the sci-fi franchise remain one of the service's main attractions. Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks in particular have enjoyed a strong reception. With Picard winding down this April, the remaining productions will have to carry extra weight.

The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us wrapped up on Sunday night, and the show's creators are already looking ahead to the challenge of adapting the second game. HBO swiftly greenlit a second season after the show became an immediate success, but that won't be enough to contain the events of The Last of Us Part II, as Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann confirmed.

"No. No way," Mazin said when GQ asked if the second season would explore the entire story of Part II (the interview contains spoilers for the season one finale). "It’s more than one season," Druckmann added, though Mazin declined to say whether they'd need two or three seasons to cover the events of Naughty Dog's sequel. In any case, The Last of Us is only officially renewed for season two, not a third or fourth one as yet.

As if the task of adapting the long, ambitious Part II didn’t already seem daunting enough, Mazin and Druckmann have an enormous new audience to appease. The show has been a huge hit so far. HBO said last week that almost 30 million viewers have watched the first five episodes across all platforms. We'll have to wait and see if those folks stick around after [spoiler] in the chalet basement, but the show's creators aren't too concerned.

"I don't care. How they react is how they react, that is completely outside of our control," Druckmann told GQ in response to a question about the TV audience's reaction to the events of Part II. "So how do we make the best TV show version of that story? That's the problem that we wrestle with every day." Mazin added that he'd rather viewers have a strong emotional response than an indifferent one.

Meanwhile (and here's where we'll get into some mild spoilers), the pivotal opening scene of the finale was originally conceived as part of an animated short, which didn't come to pass. According to The Verge, Druckmann said he then spoke with an external studio about making a separate game focusing on Ellie's mother, Anna, but that fell through as well. The show gave him a chance to revisit that part of the story, which features Ashley Johnson (who stars as Ellie in the games) as Anna.

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson finally has a premiere date almost a year after Netflix announced that it's coming back for a third season. The streaming giant has announced on Twitter that the six-episode comedy sketch series will be available for streaming on May 30th. The show was created by Saturday Night Live alum Robinson, who also stars in it, and SNL producer Zach Kanin. They're not the only comics connected to the show, though: It's co-produced by The Lonely Island, the comedy trio composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. 

Each episode of I Think You Should Leave is only around 16 to 18 minutes long, so you can quite literally finish a season in one sitting. There are multiple sketches per episode, mostly revolving around somebody doing something absurd in an every day professional or social situation, as well as some pretty bizarre and over-the-top bits. Really, some parts are so weird, you don't know whether to cringe or laugh. 

The show's first season premiered on Netflix back in 2019, while the second season arrived in 2021. Alex Bach, one of the show's producers, previously told Variety that Robinson and Kanin write every single script and that they "wait for the sketches to come to them" so there have been "extended periods of time between seasons."

I’ve always found the major criticism against Ted Lasso, that it’s too saccharine, to be quite unfair. This is a series in the Frank Capra mold, where the sunny skies and primary colors sweeten the bitter pills being handed out. For every scene of wish fulfillment designed to get you pumping the air, there are meditations on suicide, betrayal and emotional neglect. It’s also funny – enough that Emmy voters gave it Best Comedy two years in a row. Now the third and, far as we know, final season of the show will return to Apple TV on March 15th.

It picks up after the summer break, in the run-up to Richmond’s return season in the Premier League (EPL) after winning promotion by the skin of its teeth last time around. It’s been a long while since the second season aired, the longer gap attributed to behind the scenes issues. Jason Sudekis, who became co-showrunner this time around, reportedly ordered a ground-up rewrite after becoming dissatisfied with the original direction this season was taking. On the basis of the first four episodes, which Apple made available ahead of broadcast, our patience has been well-rewarded.

Such is the nature of Apple’s restrictive covenant on spoilers that I can’t talk about many specifics about the third season. The first episode is the weakest of the bunch, taking time to re-establish where everyone is after their summer break. (Are placeholder episodes necessary given the nature of streaming these days?) Keeley is finding the rigors of running her own business to be harder than expected, while Rebecca has taken Ted’s pledge of winning the league to heart. Ted, meanwhile, is feeling just as emotionally stunted as he has been previously, moreso after spending a summer with Henry, clearly having not dealt with Nate’s betrayal, or the contrived reasons behind it.

As part of Lasso’s evolution from a sitcom to a comedy drama, the runtimes of each episode are now firmly measured in hours, rather than half hours. The narrative has broadened out to cover the personal lives of many of the main footballers, as well as giving Keeley a whole new team to work with. We even get our first proper glimpse of Michelle and Henry back home in Kansas, not to mention the storylines featuring Sam and, of course, the dreaded Nate. That’s a lot for a show to handle, especially one that – similarly unfairly – was described as unfocused and messy in its second season. (Blame must go to Apple for that one, given its late-in-the-day request to add a further two episodes to the order.)

There are more threads in the storyline, but Ted Lasso has refocused its episodic structure around the Premier League season. And two parallel narratives come to the fore: Ted’s struggle to access his emotions in a healthy way, and the battle over Nate’s soul. Rupert, played with evil relish by Anthony Head, is the devil lurking on the wonder kid’s shoulder, dangling temptation before him at every turn. I probably can’t talk about [ACTOR] playing [CHARACTER], either, a condensed version of every mono-named prima-donna footballer that is often idolized and hated in equal measure.

I was interested to see how the show’s newfound embrace by the footballestablishment would alter its customary lack of grounding in reality. This season sees plenty of filming at some big name stadiums, even down to the retention of the sponsor walls for post-match interviews. But don’t go in expecting a new-found commitment to footballing verisimilitude, with the opposition teams all played by actors with little resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Just remember that this is still Ted’s world, we’re just lucky enough to spend a little time watching it.

Amazon has reportedly picked up Batman: Caped Crusader, the animated series Warner Bros. developed for HBO Max but scrapped last August to cut costs. Despite also drawing interest from Netflix, Apple and Hulu, the upcoming show will have a home on Amazon Prime.

First announced in May 2021, Batman: Caped Crusader sounds like a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series, the beloved 1990s weekday afternoon staple. The upcoming show was created by executive producers JJ Abrams, Matt Reeves and Batman: The Animated Series developer Bruce Timm. In addition, celebrated comic-book writer Ed Brubaker is on the creative team for the 10-episode first season.

The Amazon sale was part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans to monetize content by selling it to third parties. The studio will now focus on the Batman IP as part of a 10-year DC Comics meta-story spanning film, TV, gaming and animated series. In addition, a sequel to Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman and spin-off series The Penguin on HBO Max are in the works.

“We are beyond excited to be working together to bring this character back, to tell engrossing new stories in Gotham City,” Abrams and Reeves said when Batman: Caped Crusader was announced. “The series will be thrilling, cinematic and evocative of Batman’s noir roots, while diving deeper into the psychology of these iconic characters. We cannot wait to share this new world.”

There's only one more season left before Star Trek: Discovery bids farewell. The Paramount+ series is ending after season 5, which according to its official summary, "will find Captain Burnham (Martin-Green) and the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries." According to Variety, Paramount+ is also streaming the fifth season in 2024 as opposed to this year as previously expected. 

Star Trek: Discovery marked the first time the franchise has had a Black female lead and has prominently featured LGBTQIA+ characters. It also largely took on a more serialized format, wherein each episode is its own installment in a season's main storyline, unlike other entries in the franchise. That became a point of criticism about the series, however, until the showrunners changed course and embraced storytelling with an overarching plot in season four. 

As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the series currently holds the distinction for being the longest-running drama on Paramount+ so far. Its debut back in 2017 led to record sign-up numbers for the streaming service then known as CBS All Access, and its success paved the way for other Trek shows, including Lower Decks and Prodigy.

Tanya Giles, chief programming officer at Paramount Streaming, said in a statement: "Star Trek: Discovery is a perennial favorite on the service, near and dear to the hearts of legions of ‘Star Trek’ fans as well as all of us here at Paramount+. The series and its incredible cast and creatives ushered in a new era for Star Trek when it debuted over six years ago, embracing the future of streaming with serialized storytelling, bringing to life deep and complex characters that honor Gene Roddenberry’s legacy of representing diversity and inclusion, and pushing the envelope with award-winning world-building. This final season will see our beloved crew take on a new adventure and we can't wait to celebrate the series’ impact on the franchise leading up to its final season early next year."

At the moment, Trek fans can watch Star Trek: Picard, which is streaming on Paramount+. Its third season will also be its last, but there are rumors going around that the service is developing spinoffs centering on characters from the show.

Spoilers for The Mandalorian seasons 1-3 and The Book of Boba Fett below.

Somehow, Grogu has returned. At least, that's what many people will assume when they tune into the first episode of The Mandalorian's third season. When last we left our lone bounty hunter and cub, Grogu was heading off to Jedi training with a creepy de-aged Luke Skywalker. Mando took off his helmet and braced for solitude. We all shed a tear. (How did a show manage to make us care so much for a monosyllabic man in armor and a green puppet? Bless you, executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni.)

But at the start of this season, Mando (AKA Din Djarin) and Grogu are paired up once again, saving people from gigantic monsters, fighting space pirates and generally being adorable. To a casual viewer, it's like that dramatic season two finale was Jedi mind-tricked away. It turns out if you wanted to get the full story – which also explains why Din is flying a Phantom Menace-era ship, or why Grogu is becoming a more adept force user — you had to watch the final few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett.

Lucasfilm

If I wasn't already a hopeless Star Wars fan, I'd be pretty confused and annoyed. How are normal people supposed to know that The Book of Boba Fett basically served as a stop-gap between Mandalorian seasons? Disney didn't promote the connection between the shows much, so if you weren't reading geeky news sites, or talking to nerdy friends, it was easy to miss.

The first few episodes of Boba Fett made it seem like a far less ambitious series – did we really need to learn the specifics of how he survived the Sarlacc pit? And who cares about his future as Jabba the Hutt replacement? I've talked to several Star Wars fans who tapped out early on, only to catch up once they heard Mando and Grogu popped up. (Honestly, it almost seemed like Favreau and crew got tired of the Boba Fett story – so did we.)

It's not like I'm against the idea of narratives shifting between different shows and films. Everything Marvel's done since Iron Man has practically trained us to consume pop culture this way, with the rise of the Avengers initiative to the ultimate smackdown with Thanos in Endgame. The geeky side of me is overjoyed when I discover connections between films I love. (You should have seen me in the theater at the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Split.) But the idea that viewers have to keep tabs on everything is beginning to feel like homework, and it's particularly frustrating when one piece of media is inexplicably crucial to something that comes later.

It doesn't help that The Mandalorian barely referenced The Book of Boba Fett during its introductory episode. Even a bit of a nudge during the "previously on" opening section would help. Instead, the premiere episode just wants to get us back to normal, with Mando on a video game-like quest and Grogu having fun along the way. It's a shame, since the end of season 2 made it seem like The Mandalorian would actually change things up moving forward.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, creator and executive producer Favreau said he appreciated being able to check in on characters between shows.  “I knew that I didn’t want to dedicate a lot of screen time within The Mandalorian to a period of time where there wasn’t a lot of character progression," he said. "Both [Din and Grogu] were kind of stuck, as far as character progression goes, until they were reunited. So, my feeling was that it would allow me to do both of those things and freed me up now two years later to have a whole new context for these two characters to have a relationship and move forward.”

But what Favreau saw as a problem, I see as an opportunity. In Book of Boba Fett, Din and Grogu's time apart is handled briskly. Neither can fully let each other go. That stalls Grogu's Jedi training, as that's mostly focused on detaching yourself from the world and emotional connections. (Did that really work so well for Anakin Skywalker? Come on, Luke.) Din, meanwhile, acts like an empty nester who's lost his life's purpose. This is all good material for drama, but Favreau cuts through it as quickly as possible on a spinoff show. What a waste.

I may be particularly annoyed by The Mandalorian's disjointed narrative after seeing how Marvel handled its latest big bad, Kang the Conqueror, in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. In that film, Kang is introduced as a castaway, someone banished to the Quantum Realm because of his penchant for, well, conquering. But we never got a sense of his true motivation, his powers or what he's actually trying to accomplish.Perhaps that's because the folks behind Quantumania assumed you saw Kang's brief introduction at the end of the Loki streaming series, where he's presented as more of a trickster and vague threat.

Lucasfilm

If you didn't watch Loki and were confused by Quantumania, it's almost like Marvel is saying that's your own fault. To me, that's simply irresponsible storytelling.

Coming off of Andor, Tony Gilroy’s self-contained and trenchant exploration of the Star Wars universe, the simplistic and confusing nature of The Mandalorian feels like a letdown. The show was always a pulpy and almost video game-like romp. But after the end of season two, there was potential for something much greater. Instead, Favreau took the easy way out to deliver more of the same.