Hello, dear readers!

I hope you had a wonderful weekend. If you can believe it, I actually did not watch much of anything over the last few days. I was staying with friends in Litchfield County, CT and there just wasn’t really time to steal away and stream a few episodes of, oh I dunno, House of Stassi or whatever.

Something else I didn’t do this weekend is make $927 million. Did you make $927 million dollars this weekend? Unless the movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day is sentient enough to subscribe to and read this newsletter, I don’t think any of you made $927 million over the last few days. But that’s what Spider-Man did, at the global level, as sure a reminder as ever that I don’t always understand the interests of the moviegoing public. 

Like, I get that the Spider-Man movies are big, a far more bulletproof franchise than anything else in Marvelland. (Tyra Banks, record a weird robot song called Marvelland, please.) But I kind of also thought that the superhero stuff was slowing down, and that the era in which one of these movies could earn nearly a billion dollars in its opening weekend was decidedly past. I also thought that the trailer for Brand New Day was dull and didn’t really say much about the plot and therefore didn’t do enough to gin up excitement. Clearly, that was not the case. 

Zillions of people, from Taipei to Tuckahoe, were all really eager to check out Tom Holland as the twunk with a heart of gold yet again. And of course Zendaya ought to get some credit, too. But it’s really the character, isn’t it. What is it about Spider-Man in particular that gets people so worked up? I guess the last film in the franchise—which invited past Spider stars (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Raul Julia) into its narrative—was so massive that folks were simply eager to see the follow-up, and possibly to find out how the saga ends.

Beyond even this series, though, Spider-Man seems to hold more allure than any other single character in the cluttered superhero menagerie. Which probably has something to do with his normal-guy origins, with his youthful insouciance, with the romance firmly baked into his lore. He is not some snarky kajillionaire like Tony Stark, nor a distant haughty god, nor a blandly heroic guy from the 1940s. He’s jokey, smitten, boy-next-door Spider-Man, and people are really turned on by that. Sorry, sorry, not turned on. Just, y’know, invested. 

Anyway, congrats to all involved. I guess this kind of makes Holland and Zendaya the biggest movie stars in the world right now? And where does it place Jon Bernthal, who, like them, is in both The Odyssey and Spider-Man? It certainly helps wash away the stain of his disastrous Broadway run in Dog Day Afternoon. I’m sure everyone on Team Bernthal is grateful for that. 

Shamefully, I haven’t seen Spider-Man yet. That’s a task for later today. I thought about switching to Tuesday afternoon, for various boring scheduling reasons, but every single option was near entirely sold out. In the middle of a weekday. What a phenomenon. I only wish I was more excited about it. 

One thing I did watch this weekend, once I was back from Connecticut, was the latest episode of the zombie version of Project Runway. I say zombie version because it is a hideous, lurching, malevolent simulacrum of its former self, gray and mottled and moaning as it staggers around doing ghoulish things. The season started with a dumb twist in which half the cast was eliminated basically right away, including two former Drag Race contestants, one of whom tries to be a fun villain whenever he’s on TV but instead comes across as simply dumb and mean. 

So that was a bad start, as was the introduction of new judge Tyra Banks. My little theory on her presence is that she thought that she’d be basking in the glow of the Netflix documentary about America’s Next Top Model, having exonerated herself with her thoughtful interview. That is not, as we know, how things shook out. So now she’s here on Runway, still tarnished, and struggling badly to keep up with sophomore judge Law Roach, who is mostly enjoyable though sometimes falls on the not-funny side of nastiness in his critique. (This is how it’s meant to be done, folks.) 

That’s all been a frustration, as has the bad decision to keep audiences dangling about eliminations until the beginning of the following episode. It gives each week’s installment an awkward, lopsided shape. The simple and legible arc of beginning, middle, and end has been forsaken for a cheap stab at suspense. It is instead choppy and anticlimactic.

But that was also a problem last season, and I still liked that one okay. Maybe the real problem this season—or an added new problem that has tipped the show into the realm of nearly unwatchable—is that I just don’t like any of the contestants. Many of them seem to have been cast more for personality than for talent; though, even the less “charismatic” ones aren’t cranking out very good looks. It’s all dated and boring, made all the more so by stupid brand-synergy challenges like “make an outfit inspired by football, and then watch next year’s Super Bowl, only on ABC.” (Freeform and ABC are both owned by Disney.) 

Even the sniping gay guy who does nothing but criticize others’ work isn’t very good. Which is supposed to be the point of that reality competition character. “Ugh, he’s so awful, but look at how beautiful his designs are!” That is not the case here. Some of the more interesting designers have already been booted because of dumb technicalities involving immunity in the first two episodes’ mass elimination. We’re left with what feels like an entire cast of filler contestants, who either give incredibly prosaic (and thus infrequent) talking-head soundbites or are braggadocious blowhards who can’t back up their claims of frontrunner status. 

It’s all pretty depressing. When we watched this week’s episode on Sunday, my partner was up and about doing some meal prep for the week, and I asked if he wanted me to pause when it came time for the runway show. “Nah,” he said, and instead would pop in from the kitchen on occasion to take a peek at whatever basic, uninspiring garment was making its way down the runway. (This week the models were all people from Hulu reality shows most of us have never heard of. Again, brand synergy.) It’s not a must-watch weekly appointment anymore. Probably they should have let a once sterling series—a gem in the old Bravo crown—stay dead and fondly remembered. Or, I guess they’ll need to have Spider-Man on next season to turn things around.

Netflix recently made some new screeners available to critics, including for a show called Crew Girl, which will premiere next month. I could mostly guess what the show was about from the title and the thumbnail: a teenage girl rows crew and meets cute boys while doing so. Once the current sports-romance boom began, it was inevitable that the autumnal allure of crew would eventually get the TV treatment—its glassy New England rivers and elite institution associations; its hunks of supposedly good breeding (in truth, guys who do crew can be just as lunkish and insane as they are in any other sport, but they’re more likely to be rich I guess?). I was curious what the tone of the show would be, so I sought out a trailer on YouTube. What I found was this: 

I’m not such a luddite as to be ignorant of the fact that fake trailers are posted on YouTube all the time. But this one feels particularly sinister. It’s completely nonsensical, mixing unsettling AI generated video and random clips of other things (and B-roll of several different cities) to tell us absolutely nothing about anything. It’s hard to imagine a video like this having an actual human creator behind it; I’d sooner believe, with a bone-deep dread, that some bit of code has created this YT channel and posted this video all on its own. 

It bummed me out, because there’s so much more like it on the platform, and because I really need to know what’s going on with Crew Girl! Does she like Crew Boy 1 more than Crew Boy 2? Do they do crew together or crew separate? I’m desperate for some idea of what’s happening here, with this Crew Girl and her crew suitors. Which means I’ll have to watch the actual screeners and get back to you when I’m allowed to talk about it. Stay tuned. But in the meantime, don’t watch the fake trailers for it. They emanate a dark energy, suggesting some kind of entity slouching its way toward us.

You could instead watch this trailer, for a movie I’m fairly sure is real. Yes, that is Steve Guttenberg, and yes that is Christie Brinkley, and yes the movie seems to mostly be about how the best thing in the world is to be a teenage boy who likes baseball and girls and it’s summertime. Having only experienced two of those four things, I can’t really vouch for the movie’s core assertion. But Steve Guttenberg sure can. 

If you want to watch a trailer for an actually good movie (or, at least, one I was quite surprised to enjoy as much as I did when I saw it at Sundance), check out the teaser for Wicker. It’s an odd, fun, disarmingly ribald and poignant movie. Which some of my colleagues hated. But I didn’t! 

Okay that’s it for now. On Wednesday I’ll have a writeup of The Shards, the new show from Ryan Murphy that somehow marks his first-ever collaboration with Bret Easton Ellis. Isn’t it weird that they haven’t done something together before? Or maybe it makes all the sense in the world.