Well, here we go. 

If you live in the United States, you have one more day until the fate of the nation is yet again decided. (For a few years.) And if you live elsewhere, unfortunately you have one more day until the fate of the world is decided. Not to put America too much at the center of things, but come on. A lot of what we fuck up eventually fucks you guys up, too. Sorry about that. 

Before we get into what’s coming tomorrow, let’s take a look back at the weekend. The most important event of the last few days was not Halloween nor the New York Marathon, but me finally finishing the Netflix competition show Wonka’s Golden Ticket. It’s a ridiculous program that quite grotesquely uses an AI simulacrum of Gene Wilder’s voice as its host, but I got pretty hooked on it anyway. And yet, I forgot to watch the finale until last night. I’ve finally completed that work, and I will say I’m quite happy with the winner. It’s a nice rebuttal to recent trends I’ve been seeing on competition shows. Without giving the game away, let’s just say I hope the current “all-normies” season of The Traitors US eventually goes in a similar direction. 

I won’t say anything more about that in case you want to watch the show yourself, which is something you could do tomorrow night instead of being glued to the TV or your phone watching midterm returns roll in. For some people—people like me—that way lies ruin. Unless you work in some sort of electoral or get-out-the-vote capacity, tomorrow is out of your hands once you’ve cast your ballot. Why then follow the unfolding of every agonizing detail you can’t control, for hours? 

Maybe you enjoy that, and perhaps that interest will be rewarded with lots of good news. But I can’t stand the stress and suspense, so in recent election years I have made efforts to avoid the feeds as much as possible. One year I went to see the King Kong show on Broadway, and rather than a great ape climbing the Empire State Building, the night ended in a blue wave. Another time I watched HGTV shows all evening and then Kamala Harris lost. So I’m not superstitious about the overall effects of avoiding the news; it’s more that I want to at least spare myself a few hours of misery before whatever has happened must be contended with. 

If you’d like to do the same, I’d like to help you. To that end, I have put together a list of things you could spend your Tuesday evening watching as either distraction, enlightenment, or both. 

One of Criterion’s November collections is devoted to artists who cut their teeth directing music videos before making a splash in feature films. Maybe you are in middle age and watching the world crumble to pieces and are feeling a desperate sort of nostalgia for when you were younger and the air seemed to hum and tingle with more possibility. Sure, Bush II became president and the globe caught on fire, but elsewhere in life there was at least the hope of a corner turned, new and exciting style and technology seeming to augur a strange and brilliant future, all our own. Maybe you want to recapture what it felt to be a certain age and have so much of culture, the cool kind at least, pointed almost directly at you, there for your seizing and internalizing as you rushed into the dawn of adulthood. 

With that in mind, you could revisit Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s terrific 2002 mind-bender about art and self-doubt and loneliness, Adaptation. It’s a strange wonder of a movie, animated by terrific performances from Nicolas Cage (times two), Meryl Streep, an Oscar-winning Chris Cooper, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tilda Swinton, Judy Greer, and more. Watching that movie back in the day, I felt like cinema was hitting a real stride, one that resonated on exactly my frequency. Little did I know then that almost everyone feels such a thing at that age (I was 19 when the movie came out), and that it would eventually pass. Or, at least, subside. But oh well. It’s still nice to revisit. 

You could also feel a bit of that with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from 2004. Or Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, from 1999. The latter might have particular relevance to this year, as Malkovich is maybe on track to win his first-ever Oscar, 27 years after being snubbed for a nomination for playing himself in BJM. Tuesday might be the perfect night for a Jonze/Kaufman retrospective, to get caught up in weird and funny and achingly sad stories of human longing and insecurity. 

If you want to go darker, perhaps better reflecting the mood of the day, David Fincher’s Se7en is in the collection, as is Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo. You could reach for the more grandiose with Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, or the more Euro-criminal with Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast. It’s a great group of movies mostly from a particular era, and is well worth immersing yourself in tomorrow or really any day this month. 

Friends urged me to watch this season because of its setting: the complicated and sometimes embarrassing city where I grew up. I hadn’t watched the show since its first season, back in the heady early days of the pandemic when anything was a welcome respite from the winds battering the world outside. I didn’t really care for the show, addictive as it was, because it’s really depressing and sometimes unbearably awkward.

But I do think that first season mined more insights about human behavior than do a number of other dating shows. Not necessarily in terms of the ostensible premise of the series—can you fall in love with someone sight unseen?—but certainly in the way it explores how far people are willing to go, how much they’re willing to lie to themselves, to satisfy a narrative that’s been imposed upon them. And, of course, it revealed horrible things about what’s currently going on in heterosexual courtship, making me feel terribly sad for most straight women and some straight men. 

That wasn’t enough to compel me back for further seasons, though. Until, I guess, they added the extra texture of Boston, home to a particular stripe of guy—full of swagger borrowed (or assumed) from a long ago heyday of broader cultural attention that started with Good Will Hunting, continued with Boondock Saints, and then culminated and ended with The Departed—whom I find both noxious and deeply compelling, because I went to high school with their earlier versions. I had to see what horrors those guys would get up to on Love Is Blind, and thus I am now deep into another bleak, upsetting, dreadfully engrossing season of television. 

The main guy to keep your eye on is Rob, who seems like a gentle-enough giant in the pods, but then inevitably reveals a host of grim problems once he’s out in the real world with his poor, endlessly patient partner. He rages and makes a fool of himself and it’s pretty sad, but also a perhaps necessarily instructive reminder for me, an out-of-touch gay person, that this is what straight women have to deal with all the time. The same goes for the tale of sinister John (it doesn’t help that he looks like conservative activist Matt Walsh) and his smart and capable betrothed, which involves the burbling up of really bad politics and anger issues, which again are met with heartbreaking equanimity and generosity by the woman involved. 

There is some interesting stuff with the other couples too, though nothing that can match the riveting drama of Rob, John, and their tragic partners. If that sounds like something you might want to check out, rather than contemplating the state of the free world, I’d almost suggest you start at episode five, once the couples are out of the pods. The early, pre-meet portion of the show can be a little tedious, though of course it does set up a foundation of context, or suspicion, for what’s to come. I dunno. I’m not proud of this recommendation, really, but I’m being honest: Love Is Blind drew me in and, for a few hours anyway, made me forget about anything else. Plus, the season finale drops on Wednesday, so you might as well get on board now.

If you prefer your marital nightmare stories to be of the fictional variety, there is this jolly good British series. I’ve already reviewed War at length in these pages, but here’s a reminder to watch the show now that five episodes have aired. That’s nearly four hours of content, which could last you from dinner to bedtime, depending on when you eat and when you go to sleep. The series is really entertaining, full of plummy writing and juicy performances and several sexy people. It might vaguely scratch the Diplomat itch you’ve been feeling since bingeing that season, or give you a little of the Good Wife zing that Cupertino doesn’t quite. War goes down easy; on HBO, at least. 

A docuseries adaptation of Mark Harris’s lauded book about a quintet of major American film directors—Frank Capra, John Huston, William Wyler, George Stevens, John Ford—who paused their careers to document World War II, Five Came Back is a poignant and involving survey of history, about how artistry was forged and reshaped by witnessing terrible global events. It’s not jingoistic, but celebrates a softer, more useful form of civic duty in a really stirring way. A host of big names are interviewed for the series, and it’s all narrated by Meryl Streep. I watched this with my dad a few years ago and he got misty-eyed, which didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that I did too, so swept up was I by the detailed analysis and impassioned, but not head-thumping, argument that artists play a vital part in civilizational experience and its interpretation. 

If you want to watch some things for free, specifically of the feel-good variety, ad-based streamer Tubi has a cute little collection full of romance. (Though, do we really use the term “cuffing season” anymore? Has that run its course? I wouldn’t know; I’ve been in a relationship for so long. I just can’t imagine what you poor single people have to go through. Dating apps?? I wouldn’t even know how to use them! My goodness. You unfortunate souls.) 

One highlight is the absolute five-star masterpiece The Apartment, from 1960, in which Jack Lemmon is endlessly endearing and Shirley MacLaine practically shoots sunbeams out of her eyeballs. It’s the most winsome of movies, one I watched for the first time embarrassingly late in my filmgoing career. You could pair that with The Philadelphia Story, from 1940, featuring a perhaps peak Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant charmingly trying to butch it up. I know both of these movies are certified, sanctified classics, and maybe it’s a little silly to be recommending them as if you haven’t heard of them in 2026. But in case you haven’t seen them and haven’t wanted to tell anyone out of embarrassment, because you really should have seen them by now (this was me just a few years ago), here’s your chance. They really are so good, and will wholly transport you far away from the here and now. 

If you want something more long-form, and were recently re-Austen-pilled by the Sense and Sensibility movie, “Cuffing Season” also has the 1996 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. I, gulp, have never seen that, and think I’m going to rectify that oversight this week, if not tomorrow night. (Full disclosure: tomorrow evening I am going to a dinner celebrating a festival-darling movie, a rarefied and privileged way to ignore the returns.) Or, if you’re looking to take a slightly cheesier trip to Europe, do a double feature of the Marisa Tomei/Robert Downey Jr. sparkler Only You and Debra Winger and Billy Crystal in Forget Paris. Really, you’ve got a lot of options.

Or there’s always that.

Okay, I’m done. Try not to worry too much about tomorrow, if you can. What’s going to happen is going to happen and we’re all in it together, sink or swim. But man. I really, really hope we swim.