Happy New Year, readers, and welcome to another year of television. In my list of 2024's ten best shows, I wrote about how every outlet's rankings differed wildly from each other in a way I hadn't seen before. (Though I will say, a surprising amount of you met our top ten with a resounding "Not bad!" Never underestimate the What We Do in the Shadows fandom.)

Now, if you'll remember, 2023's actors and writers strikes led to a relative shortage of powerhouse series in 2024. Guess where they all went? 2025. The next 12 months will see a truly stacked amount of blockbuster shows, including the long-awaited returns of The Last of Us, Andor, Severance, Stranger Things, and The White Lotus. Damn! It feels like we'll hardly have time to check out this year's promising group of newcomers—skip ahead to The Studio if you want to know which one I'm most excited for—but rest assured, we'll watch as much as humanly possible.

These are Esquire's 25 most anticipated shows of 2025.* I'm sure I'll see most of you again when Severance drops next week.

*Undated series are either confirmed for or expected to land in 2025.

The Pitt (9 January, Max)

We have to wait only nine days in 2025 for some beef in the streaming wars! If you're unfamiliar, a few ER heavyweights—Noah Wyle, John Wells, and R Scott Gemmill—created a new medical procedural for Max called The Pitt, in which Wyle stars.

The widow of ER creator Michael Crichton, Sherri, filed a lawsuit that essentially alleges that The Pitt is a rip-off of ER. (There's more to the story, which you can read about here.) The legal battle between Crichton and Warner Bros Television is still very much ongoing, but in the meantime? The Pitt sounds like ER crossed with 24—its 15-episode season will cover a single shift in the emergency room of a Pittsburgh hospital. And I would not miss a Wyle-starring medical drama under any circumstance.

Severance (17 January, Apple TV+)

Don't even get me started. Fans have waited so long for Severance season 2 that Esquire has a nearly 2,000-word explainer about the next batch of episodes. Following one of the best season finales in recent memory, Apple TV+ has been characteristically quiet about what's next for Lumon's heroic innies. But that's the way we like it. Just tell us what's up with the goats, okay?

Yellowjackets (14 February, Showtime)

Yellowjackets season 2 landed Showtime's breakout series in the doghouse I like to call When Are You Giving Us Some Damn Answers?! (Previously inhabited by Lost, Heroes, and Outer Range.) With Hilary Swank joining the cast, I hope that season 3 will bring the series back to the heights of its first season.

Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special (16 February, NBC/Peacock)

Saturday Night Live's 50th-anniversary season has been a hair disappointing so far, even if it gifted us not one but two great Marcello Hernandez characters (Domingo and Don Francisco). My guess is that Lorne Michaels is holding his punches for his three-hour (!) anniversary special, which I bet will bring together every living SNL great not named Chevy Chase.

The White Lotus (16 February, HBO)

The White Lotus is back! In Thailand! Season 3 will introduce a new batch of one-percenters, played by Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Michelle Monaghan, Parker Posey, and more. Series creator Mike White previously told HBO that the new season will be "a kind of satirical and funny look at death in Eastern religion and spirituality—it feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus." Sounds perfect, but I'll still miss Tanya.

Reacher (20 February, Prime Video)

If you're reading this list and playing "Guess Esquire's Guilty Pleasure," you're at the right place. It's Reacher. Season 3 of the Prime Video series will presumably see the hulking Jack Reacher (a stellar and also-hulking Alan Ritchson) fuck up many, many more people. And I am very excited to see how that plays out.

Zero Day (20 February, Netflix)

There's zero chance that I would leave Robert De Niro's debut as a television regular from this list. He'll front Netflix's Zero Day, which, per the streamer, "asks the question on everyone’s mind— how do we find truth in a world in crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control?" Okay!

1923 (23 February, Paramount+)

Esquire covered the heck out of the Taylor Sheridan–verse in 2024, so I'll keep this list relatively light on the cowboy hats, the sound of an angry Zoe Saldaña's screaming, and ominous oil rigs. But I do have to shout out 1923, which will not only continue to track the Dutton family's explosive history but also deliver more Harrison Ford. More Harrison Ford is always a good thing.

Dope Thief (14 March, Apple TV+)

Over the holidays, I saw the great Claressa Shields biopic, The Fire Inside, so I'm very much on a Brian Tyree Henry kick. (He plays the boxing trainer.) Add to that Esquire's deep appreciation of Wagner Moura and Apple TV+'s Dope Thief officially makes my 2025 watch list. The series will star the two actors as, per the streamer, "Philly friends and delinquents who pose as DEA agents to rob an unknown house in the countryside, only to have their small-time grift become a life-and-death enterprise, as they unwittingly reveal and unravel the biggest hidden narcotics corridor on the Eastern Seaboard." Sign me up.

The Studio (26 March, Apple TV+)

I'm one of the many critics who was disappointed by HBO's The Franchise, which satirised the superhero-ification of modern cinema by following the making of a fictional Marvel-esque film. It didn't quite work, but I couldn't put my finger on why. Then I saw the trailer for the The Studio, a satire of modern Hollywood through the lens of a studio head (Seth Rogen)—and I knew it right away. Real people! The Studio tracks a fictional studio, but the stars and references are very real. Created by a host of great comedy minds (including Rogen and Evan Goldberg), just watch the way Martin Scorsese mutters, "Spineless!" in the preview and you'll know what I mean.

Your Friends and Neighbors (11 April, Apple TV+)

Every time I write this most-anticipated list, there's a moment when I simply have to drop the logline and tell you I'm watching it without a single hesitation. This year, it's the Jon Hamm-starring Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV+:

After being fired in disgrace, a hedge fund manager still grappling with his recent divorce resorts to stealing from his neighbors' homes in the exceedingly affluent Westmont Village, only to discover that the secrets and affairs hidden behind those wealthy facades might be more dangerous than he ever imagined.

Andor (22 April, Disney+)

When Andor season 1 ended in the ancient times of November 2022, it felt like a fork in the road: Will this show everyone how to foster great franchise storytelling in the streaming era, or is it just a blip? I genuinely believed the former, but in the following years, I've seen some things. (*Cough* Agatha All Along, *sneeze* The Acolyte, *hack* the trailer for the monstrous-looking Inside Out spin-off series.) Where was I? You know, I'm just happy that I have the chance to see my boy Cassian Andor stick it to some Stormtroopers one last time in season 2.

Squid Game (Netflix)

Squid Game season 2 was a very solid effort, given that its creator admitted to losing teeth from the stress induced by the making of it. Star Lee Jung-jae was great, as always, and the series managed to conjure up a few more thrilling games without making anything feel overwrought. My only complaint is that the final episode felt like more of a mid-season ending than a season finale. Let's just hope that season 3—which will end the series, supposedly for real this time—will deliver on the promise of that mid-credits cliff-hanger.

The Last of Us (HBO)

If you haven't played the Last of Us video games, I hate to say that nearly anything I write about season 2 will ruin the story for you. Here's what I can relay: Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, and Pedro Pascal's killer jacket will return, along with new additions Kaitlyn Dever and Catherine O'Hara. Let's leave it at that.

Chad Powers (Hulu)

I love Glen Powell, but I really need to see the man in something where he's simply maxing out his big doofus energy. Chad Powers is exactly that project. The Hulu series will follow the same general premise of Eli Manning's 2022 "Chad Powers" prank, during which he went undercover as a walk-on at Penn State and proceeded to look like his Super Bowl–winning self. Chad Powers will track a burnout quarterback as he dons prosthetics to join a new team under a different name. Thank you for hearing my plea, Glen.

Alien: Earth (FX)

It feels like I've read about the production of Noah Hawley's Alien series for as long as I've authored this list, which is a not-insignificant amount of time. We'll finally see it this year—and it sounds pretty damn awesome. Read the logline for yourself:

When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet's greatest threat in FX's highly anticipated TV series Alien: Earth from creator Noah Hawley.

Between this series and Alien: Romulus, life is good right now if you're an Alien fan.

Stranger Things (Netflix)

Say it ain't so! The Stranger Things kids are full-blown adults, and it's time to end the series and let this IP die a slow death of a thousand spin-offs. I'm (mostly) kidding. I love Stranger Things, fully believe that Gaten Matarazzo is a national treasure, and am very excited to see how the story ends in season 5.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO)

How many more Game of Thrones–verse series will HBO deliver before George R.R. Martin even mumbles a release date for The Winds of Winter? Too many. The next show will adapt Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, which follow a knight and his squire's adventures in Westeros. Spoiler alert: Martin hasn't finished writing this series either! And the author says that he won't continue Dunk and Egg until he wraps The Winds of Winter. Help.

Hacks (Max)

To everyone who said I ranked Hacks too highly in my year-end television list, I say: Are you watching Hacks? HBO's comedy about the comedy world is the best comedy on television right now. Season 4 will see Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) feud on a much bigger stage—as the former's late-night career truly begins.

The Bear (FX)

While we're quibbling about my 2024 rankings, here's another comment I received: The Bear didn't deserve the second spot. Season 3 disappointed a lot of fans, sure. But between the admirably experimental premiere, the Ayo Edeberi–directed episode, and the continuing peak-career performances from the main ensemble, The Bear remains the best show on TV in my book. Bring on season 4, which might just go down as the final referendum on Carmy's soul.

Running Point (Netflix)

What if I told you that Kate Hudson will play a Jeanie Buss analog in a Netflix series created by Mindy Kaling and executive-produced by Jeanie Buss? What if that show also starred Jay Ellis, Scott Evans, and... I shit you not... Chet Hanks? Would you respond and say that it's the best show of 2025 sight unseen? Yes. Yes, you would.

The Rehearsal (HBO)

The Esquire entertainment team has zero idea how The Rehearsal will deliver a second season, given that its first devolved into a enticingly bizarre meditation on the artifice of reality television and the trials of (meta) fatherhood. But it's happening! And we welcome it. Nathan Fielder will always find a way to out-weird himself.

It: Welcome to Derry (HBO)

Bill Skarsgård is currently terrifying you as Count Orlok in Nosferatu, but fear not! He hasn't forgotten his humble beginnings as Pennywise. He'll return as the killer clown in HBO's It: Welcome to Derry, a prequel that HBO says "expands the vision established by filmmaker Andy Muschietti in the feature films IT and IT Chapter Two."

Black Mirror (Netflix)

We'll see another six episodes of Black Mirror later this year, starring a new assortment of actors: Issa Rae, Paul Giamatti, Awkwafina, Rashida Jones, and more. Oh, are you wondering why I included a still from season 4's Star Trek–inspired "USS Callister" episode? Season 7 will give it a sequel, with the great Cristin Milioti set to return.

The Madison (Paramount+)

No one—except for Kelly Reilly, apparently—knows what the hell will happen in the future of Yellowstone. Following the season 5 (or series?!) finale in December, my money's on Taylor Sheridan starting clean(ish) with The Madison. The series will introduce the Clyburns, who move from New York City to the Madison River Valley of Montana after the death of their patriarch. The Madison is set in the same universe as Yellowstone, and Matthew Fox and Michelle Pfeiffer will star. Send a yeehaw in Sheridan's direction and maybe we'll see it by the end of the year.

Originally published on Esquire US

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Robert De Niro onscreen. This will almost certainly reveal my age, but I was introduced to him in Meet the Parents, as the grumpy dad who forces Ben Stiller’s Greg Focker to take a hilarious lie-detector test. Stiller may be the star of that film, but De Niro steals the show.

Since then, I’ve wondered why the actor wasn’t on my TV more often. Of course, the man was legendary in Goodfellas, The Irishman, and The Godfather Part II, but why couldn’t the man pull a Joe Pesci and star in some streamer’s random TV series?

Well, readers, the time has come. At a young eighty-one years old, De Niro has booked his first television gig—though I’m willing to bet he’s probably passed on dozens of offers before it. The upcoming Netflix series Zero Day is a political drama with De Niro as George Mullen, a former American president who helps the current president (Angela Bassett) handle a cyberattack. (Side note: Why do female presidents only exist in fictional worlds?)

Anyway, if De Niro said yes to appearing on the small screen, then Zero Day must be worth the watch. An official synopsis of the show promises pure chaos: “As disinformation runs rampant and the personal ambition of power brokers in technology, Wall Street, and government collide, Mullen’s unwavering search for the truth forces him to confront his own dark secrets while risking all he holds dear.”

Besides starring on the series, De Niro serves as a producer. Director Eric Newman (Griselda) told Netflix Tudum that the actor was very involved in the production. “[De Niro] very much became our partner in this process,” he said. “Very hands-on, very involved, read everything at every stage, and it’s been an incredible honour and privilege.”

Zero Day also features Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, and Matthew Modine, along with guest appearances by Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, Gaby Hoffmann, Clark Gregg, and McKinley Belcher III.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait long to see the drama play out. Zero Day premieres on February 20, 2025.

Originally published on Esquire US

Mike Tyson steps through the black ropes and lies down on his back in the middle of the boxing ring. He looks up at the ceiling of the warehouse in the Las Vegas suburbs and closes his eyes. The makeshift gym is so silent and sterile that all you can hear is his breathing and the hum of the air-conditioning.

In a few weeks, Tyson will turn fifty-eight. He’s back in training for his first officially sanctioned boxing match in nearly 20 years—a much-hyped matchup with the influencer-turned-pugilist Jake Paul that is set to be held in a football stadium filled with fans and streamed live to a potentially massive audience online.

But right now it’s time to get to work. The warehouse where Tyson has set up his camp is next to the headquarters of the Las Vegas Raiders, and team owner Mark Davis is letting Tyson use the space, which is minutes away from Tyson’s house. Perhaps not coincidentally, the colour scheme is very Raiders. A tall black curtain separates the training area, with its black-and-silver weight equipment, from the rest of the more-than-15,000-square-foot structure and contrasts with the white walls and ceilings.

On one wall and hanging above the ring are black-and-white signs that read mike tyson boxing club. Behind a rack of dumbbells, there’s a large black-and-white poster board with a photo of Tyson—hands wrapped, towel over his head—and a quote from the former heavyweight champ himself: “Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.”

His trainer, Rafael Cordeiro, begins stretching out Tyson’s tree-trunk legs. Then he starts working on his back. Tyson, who now battles occasional sciatica, grimaces softly as he leans forward.

Now loose, he gets up and walks slowly to the slip bag. He looks at himself in the mirror—a sweaty, jacked, older version of the “Baddest Man on the Planet,” who once rode on the end of a lightning bolt to the top of the world before crashing back down to earth—and places the bag against his forehead.

After a moment, he steps back from the bag, bobbing and weaving methodically at first to help hone his head-movement defence. The exercise quickens, with a bucket’s worth of sweat flying from the wrinkles on his head and the white hairs on his face, splattering against the mirror and the bag.

“I want to hit the mitts,” he says.

When Tyson gets back in the ring to train with Cordeiro, who’s covered up to his neck in pads, what follows is a blizzard of left-right-left-right—over and over again. The power of Tyson’s punches reverberates throughout the warehouse. In the moment, whether he can still punch with bad intentions after all these years doesn’t feel like the right question. It’s more like, Did you hear that? The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of violence.

Tyson wonders aloud if Paul, his opponent, who is 31 years his junior, has any chance to touch him.

“Can I be honest?” he asks his team.

Please, Iron Mike. Be honest with us.

“I don’t think he can hurt me.”

He’s feeling himself. He spits outside the ring before turning to Billy White, a coach who has known Tyson since he was a teenager training with the legendary Cus D’Amato, for confirmation: “Coach, I don’t think he can hurt me!”

White smiles and nods. So does Tyson’s wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), who is filming him on her iPhone from ringside. She also offers a reminder.

“Baby,” Kiki yells, “drink your electrolytes more than usual!”

Tyson obliges. He knows that Kiki knows what’s good for him. He takes a swig from his three-litre jug and gets back to work.

In the almost two decades since his last official fight (he fought an exhibition match against Roy Jones Jr. in 2020), Tyson has battled through deep financial despair, grappled with legal issues, struggled with a cocaine addiction, and suffered the tragic loss of his four-year-old daughter, Exodus, in 2009. But in that same period, Tyson has also become one of the more interesting and unexpected second-chance stories in recent American history—finding family, stability, and cultural acceptance in the process.

Today, he is a financially healthy family man and husband of 15 years, a New York Times best-selling author who performed his own autobiography as a one-man Broadway show, the owner of one of the nation’s most successful celebrity cannabis brands, and a podcaster who gets really deep—and really high—with his guests. This late-life renaissance has led Tyson to take on an opponent he knows he can’t knock out but wishes to take the distance: Father Time.

That Tyson’s return to the ring comes against Paul makes the event an instant spectacle. The polarising twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber has posted a 9–1 record since he broke into professional boxing. And along the way, Paul has become the face of the sport’s push to reach new fans by winning over celebrities, influencers, and disrupters.

Older boxing fans will be watching to see if the old champ still has what it takes to smack down a mouthy newcomer. Paul’s followers want to see him knock off a legend. The fight will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys, and streamed on Netflix for the platform’s 270 million subscribers in more than 190 countries.

Netflix has promoted it as potentially the most watched combat-sports event in history—making Tyson the box-office bridge between boxing’s former glory and its brave new reality in the world of social media.

“I don’t think this was meant to be done by any man but me,” Tyson tells me, his eyes lighting up with passion. “I love it.”

The world will have to wait a little longer than originally planned to see Tyson make that history, however. In late May, a few days after I visited him in Vegas, Tyson was on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles when he experienced a serious ulcer flare-up requiring medical attention. His doctors instructed him to dial back his training for a few weeks to recover. That meant the fight, which had been set for 20 July, had to be rescheduled for 15 November.

And the boxing officials in Texas say they will be watching Tyson closely to make sure that his stomach problems have subsided before they let him step into the ring.

The bout is scheduled for eight rounds of two minutes each, rather than the usual three minutes, with bigger-than-usual 14-ounce gloves. (Paul announced in late June that he would now use the 20 July date to take on Mike Perry, a former UFC and Bareknuckle Fighting Championship competitor, in an eight-round cruiserweight boxing match in Tampa while he waits for Tyson.)

Even before the medical incident, plenty of pundits were questioning the wisdom of allowing a nearly 60-year-old man to take such a risk. His medical setback may only add intrigue for many fight fans. The curiosity in the buildup to the fight has been mostly divided into three questions. Will Tyson kick Paul’s ass? Will Tyson embarrass himself and lose? And maybe the most important: Why is Tyson doing this at his age?

“He’s always going to be the man in a lot of our eyes,” says Ric Flair, the professional-wrestling legend and a friend of Tyson’s, who founded his own cannabis brand, Ric Flair Drip. “But I think he wants to be the man again.”

The Reverend Al Sharpton, who supported Tyson back in the 1990s when he was released from a three-year prison stint—after a conviction for a rape charge for which Tyson still maintains his innocence—describes the chance of seeing his friend fight one more time as “almost like going to see a rare piece of art in a museum.”

“Mike Tyson is one of America’s last originals,” says Sharpton. “How do you tell somebody who always did the impossible that they have to conform to the possible?”

Tyson knows that people are describing his decision to take the fight as the aging boxer’s version of a midlife crisis. He gets sensitive when reporters ask if he’s still got it, or when sceptics suggest the bout is a gimmick event that isn’t real. He simmers down a little when he reminds himself that most of those who question him have never stepped into the ring themselves. Still, his inability to say no to a fight—a mindset D’Amato instilled in him that has stayed with the kid from Brooklyn—has even surprised Kiki, he admits.

“My wife keeps saying, ‘You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I do have to do this,’ ” he tells me, stressing that the millions he’s reportedly making from the fight “will not change my life financially in any way.”

So why is Tyson trying to chase and summon a version of his younger self—the ruthless ring destroyer who became the youngest world heavyweight champion in boxing history at age 20? It’s because he’s an addict. Always has been, always will be. But it’s no longer about sex, cocaine, or anger. These days, Tyson says, he is addicted to cannabis and to his wife telling him he’s a great husband.

Oh, and one more old addiction: glory. It’s the jones that hasn’t left him.

“I’m a glory junkie. I love people thinking about me all day,” he says. “I’d rather live a short life of glory than a long life of obscurity. It’s just who I am.

“This is all I started fighting for—to get all this fucking status. I’m going to be chasing it for the rest of my life. I know that. I’m never going to get what I want, because I’m one of those gluttons for pain. I can never get enough.”

---

A boy comes to me with a spark of interest, I feed the spark, and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame, and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire, and it becomes a roaring blaze. —inscription on Cus D’Amato’s headstone

Don’t ask Tyson if he’s an icon, or what he thinks his legacy looks like. Those two words make him wildly uncomfortable. “What is an icon?” he asks after a doctor’s appointment in late May. “I’m still going to die; I’m still going to starve if I don’t eat. Suppose I go on hard times and become a bum on the street. Am I still an icon? What is my legacy? Nothing but an ego. Who cares about my legacy? My legacy can’t buy me a hot dog. Legacy is going to get me nothing.”

And don’t tell him he’s the greatest boxer ever. That irritates him, too, even if he usually hides it.

“Let me tell you this,” he begins. “Fans say I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived. Anybody that is a great fighter who gets told you’re the greatest ever, you say, ‘Thank you,’ but that’s bullshit. Deep in my heart, I know these guys don’t know what a great fighter is.”

A week before we spoke in Vegas, Tyson had flown to New York for the first press conference to promote the fight. He returned to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, about four blocks from the old Dapper Dan’s boutique shop, where Tyson punched out the boxer Mitch Green in an impromptu early-morning scuffle in August 1988 after Green confronted him, saying that Don King owed him money. (Green left with his eye shut and stitches on his nose.)

The past is always present for Tyson. Video packages for the Paul fight are covered with clips of knockouts from decades ago, back when Tyson had hair and didn’t have the dramatic tattoo of a New Zealand Māori warrior on the left side of his face. When the press event begins, Tyson takes on a different role in this Netflix-and-social-media hybrid of a press conference: He’s the adult in the room. After a young boy who models himself as a mini Paul asks a couple of curse-word-laden, inappropriate questions in his attempt to go viral, Tyson asks what the rest of the room is thinking. “Where’s your mother at?”

The Apollo crowd laughs, as does Tyson. He admits he can’t believe this is a real press conference for a real fight. What is this he’s gotten himself into?

“Forgive me, I’m an old dude,” he says. “This is new.”

He can barely keep a straight face for four seconds as he faces off with Paul, eventually giggling with his opponent.

Videos of Tyson knockouts are nostalgia porn. Go on YouTube and you can get lost in the compilations of brutal hooks, vicious uppercuts, and slow-motion shots of his opponents’ unconscious bodies crashing to the mat. It’s what helped build the mystique around the fighter when he was first starting out, with local newscasts running video packages of a young Tyson demolishing everything in his sight.

“When you were watching him knocking out opponents and them flying through the air, it didn’t look mythical—it looked real,” says Jim Lampley, the former HBO boxing commentator who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributor to PPV.com. “This kid was like nothing we had ever seen before. Mike became a cultural phenomenon from the get-go.”

It’s difficult to think of Tyson as being old. For millions, he is frozen in time as the 20-year-old who conquered the world and could not be stopped. That’s not the guy who is training to fight Paul. Sitting in one of the black-leather recliners next to the ring in the training facility, Cordeiro says he understands the care needed to control his fighter’s fire.

Cordeiro, who began training Tyson for the Jones exhibition fight out of Tyson’s garage at the start of the pandemic four years ago, is using the same message passed down by D’Amato all those years ago. Be the fire, control the fire, and turn the flame up to high when you absolutely need it.

“You have to keep the fire on blue. When the fire is on blue, you have control of the fire,” Cordeiro says, comparing Tyson to a stove. “Mike has control of the fire. But when you step inside the ring, he knows how to go high as fast as possible.

“You still don’t mess with Mike.”

Billy White, who has known Tyson for more than 40 years, since they were both with D’Amato, remembers picking up the phone in a church parking lot and hearing his friend’s plans and his message: I need you. White didn’t hesitate and is helping his friend train three times a day, believing that only Tyson could pull this off, no matter his age.

“He’s the ultimate warrior,” the coach says outside the warehouse near Las Vegas. “The gods have called him out. How great that they called on him. Who else were they going to call?”

It’s not a problem for Tyson that many see him as forever young and hold on to this image of him. Yet he knows what kind of person he was back then—ruthless, dangerous, angry. And now as a father and role model for his children, he hates what he was.

“He’s never going to leave me,” Tyson says of his younger self. “But you have to realise I’m not that person anymore. That’s just the reality. I’m not that person. I will never be that person again. I don’t like that person.”

---

Tyson wouldn’t be fighting Paul, he says, if there wasn’t a chance he could fail or be humiliated. As he talks, Tyson leans in and reflects on what he’s learned through failure. He speaks softly but never breaks eye contact.

“I learned about life from my losses. I’ve learned that as I get older and I lose my friends, my children, my teeth, my hair—and eventually, I’m going to lose my life—life is all about loss,” he says. “We’re going to be old one day. We’re going to lose our teeth, lose our eyesight, lose our hair, lose our dick, lose everything we thought made us who we were. We’re going to lose our identity. In the end, we’ll be grateful if someone has a picture of us on the family wall, if they even put up a picture of us.”

Failure is an advanced form of learning for Tyson, but he’s hoping to avoid another lesson in loss in North Texas. Tyson does have respect for Paul, who went from performing skits on Vine in 2013 to fighting in his second professional-boxing match on the card of Tyson’s exhibition fight with Jones in 2020. He still calls Paul a friend, even as the influencer has vowed to “knock this old man the fuck out.”

But Tyson revels in talking shit and trolling him. Like the time he called Paul “fat and funky” in assessing his opponent’s shirtless physique. Or when he said that a video of Paul dancing when he was 16 strangely gave Tyson an erection. Two days after he suffered the ulcer flare-up, Tyson couldn’t help but jab at Paul on X: “Now feeling 100% even though I don’t need to be to beat Jake Paul.”

The age difference between the two is an inescapable, circus-like element in how the fight has been promoted and covered. The 31-year age gap between Tyson and Paul is reminiscent of the multi-decade age gap presented in a fictional fight in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa. The difference is also greater than that in another major fight in Tyson’s career, when, at 21, he decimated 38-year-old Larry Holmes with a fourth-round knockout.

Tyson takes a breath before considering any parallels between this fight and the one from 1988. He is unbothered being on the other side of a younger challenger. Tyson, who is a summa cum laude scholar when it comes to the history of boxing, notes one “big fundamental difference” between the bouts. There are levels to these mind games, and no one has weaponised the word YouTuber quite like him.

“Larry Holmes was a legendary fighter who was fighting a champion who was active every day of his life,” Tyson says before his workout. “I am fighting a YouTuber.”

He adds of Paul, “It doesn’t matter how seriously he’s taking it. He is who he is.”

Tyson’s publicist, Joann Mignano, echoes her boss’s confidence: “We’re used to the doubters; we’re used to the haters. I know the Vegas bets are all doubting Mike. But he’s ready for war.”

What started out as a joke to some turned into a legitimate fight after the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation surprisingly sanctioned the match in late April. As part of the process, the agency required Tyson to take a physical, an eye exam, and a blood test, as well as EKG and EEG tests, spokesperson Tela Goodwin Mange says. The 19 years between Tyson’s last sanctioned fight—a 2005 loss to Kevin McBride—and the upcoming one with Paul was considered “but was not a factor.”

That hasn’t stopped many from wondering why the fight is sanctioned and whether anyone cares about Tyson’s well-being. Promoter Oscar De La Hoya, a former world champion in multiple weight classes, urged Tyson to be careful and said he was going to pray for him in what he described as “a dangerous fight.”

Deontay Wilder, another former world heavyweight champion—whose career has been trending down recently—questioned whether enough people give a damn about Tyson potentially getting injured. He said that Tyson was “too old for this.”

When I ask Tyson about Wilder’s comments, he’s initially calm about the concerns his peers have about him being seriously hurt: “Then let Mike get hurt. You don’t have to worry about paying my bills.” As he thinks about it more on the black-leather couch at his gym, he has more to say.

“Everyone says this makes no sense, but he’s how old?” asks Tyson about the 38-year-old Wilder. The younger heavyweight, says Tyson, shouldn’t feel sorry for him and doesn’t know him or understand him. “He’s not who I am. He can’t go to Mongolia and have somebody know who the fuck he is.”

In a brief statement, sent a couple of days before Wilder lost his most recent fight by knockout to the Chinese heavyweight Zhilei Zhang in early June, Wilder says he “would just like to wish Mike the best.”

Surrender was never in Tyson’s vocabulary. The word was not in the lexicon of Alexander the Great, one of Tyson’s heroes, so why should it have been in his? Still, he had to learn it, and quickly, if he wanted to save his family and maybe his life.

In his words, the journey to selflessness began a little more than a decade ago with the release of his memoir, Undisputed Truth. The cover photo of the book, showing an almost broken Tyson with some stubble, is described by the fighter as a reluctance to surrender. That period meant not just surrendering to God but also having to hear from Kiki and his family about the hell he had put them through to move forward.

“I don’t know if it feels good to surrender,” he says before his workout. “But it does feel good that it’s over—all the dark stuff is over.”

His light is Kiki, whom he has known since she was a teenager through her father’s connections in the boxing industry. They tried being with each other a couple of different times, but it never worked out. At the time, she was too down-to-earth, and he was not on this planet. Her patience and discipline were what he needed. He just didn’t know it. They eventually figured it out and have been nearly inseparable since Tyson called her after he got out of rehab. They married in 2009 and have two children, Milan, 15, and Morocco, 13.

“He finally found the right person. Kiki is a wonderful wife, and boy, she’s the boss, too,” Flair says, laughing. “We all need that.”

Gary Smith, the former Sports Illustrated writer who profiled Tyson in 1988, remembers how the odds back then were “monstrously low” for anything resembling the boxer’s life today.

“There was no way that this seemed like a sustainable operation,” Smith says. “Somehow, against every odd, it turned the other way. I don’t think you could have ever predicted this one at all. He may be the biggest proof that you just never know in life.”

Tyson is proud as he talks about how his daughter is now the avid reader in the family, joking about how reading Machiavelli and Tolstoy will make her feel superior to other people just like he did. The bout with Paul will be the first time the children he has with Kiki will get to see a real fight of his, but he hasn’t thought about what that’ll mean to him. I ask him about the importance of Kiki in his life. For the first moment in our time together, Tyson is almost speechless, trying to find the right words: “No one would think I would be with a woman for the rest of my life. It was almost inconceivable that this happened.”

He then exclaims, proudly: “And she’s a genius! She created the ears!”

Tyson is referring to one of his cannabis company’s best-selling products: gummies shaped to look like the ear of Evander Holyfield, which Tyson infamously bit off part of during their 1997 fight. Tyson has turned what was a casual and therapeutic appreciation for cannabis into a big business at a time when legalisation has swept across the United States.

His Tyson 2.0–brand products are now being sold at 745-odd retailers. He’s parlayed his celebrity in the cannabis space into a popular podcast, Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, that recently wrapped up. He’s even taken on advocacy. Earlier this year, Tyson called on President Biden to grant clemency to all federal marijuana offenders.

“It’s a plant that makes you happy and hungry,” he says, admitting that it’s hard to give up and that he was not his best self around his family in the first week of training for the fight when he stopped using. “The family wasn’t friendly with me. I did not behave well.”

Before cannabis was Tyson’s therapy, there were the pigeons. So many pigeons. Adam Wilks never thought much of pigeons until he got to know Tyson as the CEO of Carma HoldCo, the parent company of the Tyson 2.0 cannabis brand. That started to change when the two were in Amsterdam for an event last September and Tyson asked Wilks if he wanted to drive a few hours north to meet a breeder of roller pigeons. Wilks agreed, not knowing what to expect or how long they’d be there.

“Everybody goes up to Mike and their jaw drops,” Wilks says. “I had never seen the opposite where Mike meets someone and he’s excited about it.”

They stayed until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, Wilks says, with Tyson looking starstruck. The family and Wilks had to go to bed but there was Tyson, in the freezing cold, hanging with the pigeon breeder and playing in the coop with the birds in the early-morning hours somewhere in the Netherlands.

And Tyson couldn’t have been happier.

---

Back in the ring at training camp, Tyson repeatedly lands lefts and rights on a padded-up Cordeiro until he gets his footwork the way he wants it. The former champ keeps telling Cordeiro, White, and Mike Angel, his videographer, who films everything, how much better he feels.

“It’s beautiful form,” Cordeiro says in his Brazilian accent, looking giddy.

Tyson recently got over a respiratory cold that he couldn’t kick when he was in New York to promote the fight.

“I’m happy to be back,” Tyson repeatedly says, feeling himself again. “I was fucked up in New York.”

The fire that burns inside is blue but Tyson is turning it up to hype himself up.

“He’s not going to hit me with the jab,” he promises of his fight with Paul.

White goes one step further to hype up his fighter: “He’s not going to land a glove on you.”

Tyson takes another swig of electrolytes and then looks in my direction. He rarely lets people watch him train who aren’t in his inner circle.

“I thought I was gonna embarrass myself in front of you today,” he tells me, relieved that he looked like a contender instead of a tomato can.

There are two things Tyson told me he is planning to do, before and after what might be his final fight. First, days before the bout, he will ingest a drug derived from the poison of the Sonoran Desert toad—known as 5-MeO-DMT or simply “the Toad”—for what he calls a one-way trip to meet God. He’s done the psychedelic close to a hundred times now, but he doesn’t know what he’ll talk to God about this time. He only knows it’ll be deep.

“I meet God every day when I look in the mirror,” he says. “Aren’t we images of him? That’s what they say in the Bible. So I guess I meet him every time I look in the mirror.”

The second item on his agenda will come after the fight. Whether it ends up being his 51st win or his seventh loss, Tyson will take some time to himself in his locker room at the football stadium. He’ll lean back in his chair and take that moment alone to hear his heartbeat. Only in that moment will Tyson, who was taught most of his life to believe that he was a god, know that he’s still fully alive. Even if the destroyer is no longer there.

“I’m 58 years old, and I’m gonna sell out an 80,000-seat arena,” Tyson tells me. “Hey, if that’s not godlike, I don’t know what is.”

For Tyson, it’s one more shot at immortality.

Originally published 15 July 2024 on Esquire US

Are you ready to play the game? In a new trailer for Squid Game season 2, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is right back in the mix. He even has his old number! Season 1's winner knows the secret of the game that the other contestants do not, however, and he’s determined to save their lives by joining the life-or-death contest once again. Bold strategy! Let’s see if it pays off.

Squid Game season 2 kicks off on 26 December. According to Netflix, the second season picks up three years after Seong Gi-hun won the previous contest. “Player 456 gave up going to the States and comes back with a new resolution in his mind,” the streamer’s official description reads. “Gi-hun once again dives into the mysterious survival game, starting another life-or-death game with new participants gathered to win the prize of 45.6 billion won.”

Recruiter (Gong Yoo) is set to return as well, alongside the Frontman (Lee Byung-hun) and detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon). “Just focus on getting out of this place,” Gi-hun tells the new contestants in the trailer. “I’ve played these games before!” For more about the future of the series (and the new killer 100-metre.

Who Is Returning for Squid Game Season 2?

Considering that (spoiler) 455 people die in the first season, the roster of human stars is a bit bare for a second outing. Miraculously, Netflix revealed at a recent Tudum showcase that many of our favourite stars will be back. Lee Jung-jae, aka winner Seong Gi-hun, will return, entering the game once again. Some new players were announced, too, including former K-pop star Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul (The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure), Park Sung-hoon (Into the Ring), and Yang Dong-geun (Grand Prix). race in the teaser), read on.

Back in June 2022, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk confirmed to Vanity Fair that yes... there will be more games. “Humanity is going to be put to a test through those games once again,” he said. As he noted elsewhere in an AP interview, “There’s been so much pressure, so much demand, and so much love for a second season, so I almost feel like you leave us no choice.... It’s in my head right now. I’m in the planning process currently.”

What Will Happen in Season 2?

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Hwang discussed how season 2 is going to be a natural evolution from the concluding events of the first run of episodes. The creator made it clear that for the new season, he isn’t tapping into fan theories or what viewers have asked to see from the series. Rather, he plans to pick up where it left off and carry the story on as it was originally intended. Here’s his quote, in full:

I’ve seen many reactions from people about the show, but I don’t want to make season 2 as a response to those reactions. The philosophies I put in season 1 all naturally extend to season 2. Instead of trying to meet the expectations of viewers, I just thought about the last moment when Gi-hun turned away from boarding the plane, and I thought about what he will do next. There will naturally be a flow of events that will lead all the way to the end of the season. I can’t share any details yet, but you know that Seong Gi-hun has become a totally new person by the end of season 1, so season 2 is going to be about what that new Gi-hun is going to do and how things will unfold with this new kind of character.

There is also the theory that the second season will go deeper into the backstory of the Frontman. In particular, the story would focus on his history as a police officer. As Hwang previously told The Sunday Times, “I think the issue with police officers is not just an issue in Korea. I see it on the global news that the police force can be very late on acting on things—there are more victims or a situation gets worse because of them not acting fast enough. This was an issue that I wanted to raise. Maybe in season 2 I can talk about this more.”

In a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hwang teased that he has a few other ideas about what season 2 could look like. As he said:

I’d like to explore that storyline—what is going on between those two brothers? And then I could also go into the story of that recruiter in the suit who plays the game of ddakji with Gi-hun and gives him the card in the first episode. And, of course, we could go with Gi-hun’s story as he turns back, and explore more about how he’s going to navigate through his reckoning with the people who are designing the games.

So, in short, there are various interpretations that he could explore. As for the the star of the show, Lee Jung-jae? He hinted what’s in store for Gi-hun in an interview with Esquire. Surprisingly, following his newly red-haired character’s decision to go after the creators of the Squid Game, he said we could see Gi-hun’s “humorous side” when the series returns.

“Because Gi-hun became more serious because he has to rescue these people, I’m thinking that he would become a more determined character,” said Lee. “But if he’s just too determined, that could be a little bit boring. So I’m guessing the fun parts of Gi-hun will also come out in the next season.”

Originally published on Esquire US

About three years ago, Will Ferrell’s longtime friend Harper Steele—a writer-producer who worked with the comedian on Saturday Night Live, Eurovision Song Contest, and more—came out as a transgender woman. And Ferrell responded exactly like a big-hearted, beer-crushing Will Ferrell character: Let’s take a cross-country road trip to talk about it and make a documentary of the whole thing!

The duo worked with filmmaker Josh Greenbaum (Becoming Bond, The Short Game) to capture the entire journey, which would also function as Steele’s first time truly living in the world as herself. The trek includes but certainly isn’t limited to: uncomfortable, teary-eyed conversations in a car, a steak dinner gone wrong and one blissful karaoke night. The result is the hilarious, beautiful, and deeply important Will & Harper, which debuts on Netflix.

Now, it would’ve been enough to show Steele and Ferrell’s sprawling, My Dinner with Andre–style talks on the ride. But that’s not what makes Will & Harper one of the year’s best—if not the best—documentaries. Greenbaum delivered a striking portrait of coming out as transgender in a year that, as of June, saw US legislators consider 617 anti-transgender bills (and a potential president in Donald Trump—who, if he wins, poses a major threat to transgender Americans). We watch as Steele finds support at a rural bar but face staggering hate at a seemingly benign Texas steakhouse. “If you start to engage and listen to people like Harper and so many others, you’ll realise, These are just people who are trying to live their lives,” Greenbaum says.

Below, he opens up about following Ferrell and Steele across the United States, the potential political impact of the film and his next directorial projects, one of which just so happens to be Spaceballs 2. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ESQUIRE: Has anyone asked how the road trip was for you? I mean, you also traveled the country.

JOSH GREENBAUM: You’re right! No one actually has asked me that. It was a mix of things. Of course, I’m just so focused on figuring out how to capture the footage.... On the flip side, I was going on this journey with them. Both of them were friends of mine prior to making the film, so they’re certainly the subjects of my film—but there was another added layer of going through all the emotional ups and downs that they were going through. In any given scene, I was in the background—usually in my car—and I could be laughing. Then at some of the heavier moments when they both broke down, I was crying.

You were feeling the emotional and physical toll of a road trip.

I knew there would be some highs and lows but where they came completely surprised me. I’m just thinking of when we have a silly dinner where Will’s going to try to eat a 72-ounce steak [and it was a low]. Then there were times when we went into a bar that I thought was for sure going to be a low. I thought, Oh, I scouted this bar that Harper said she wanted to go in by herself—and I am certain this is not going to go well. Every time I had a preconceived notion—which is certainly a lesson for me and for anyone involved—it [might not always play] out the way you might expect.

There’s a statistic: 70 per cent of people don’t directly know a trans person.... The unknown with Harper became known as soon as she walked into places. She’s so personable and funny that all of a sudden that scary unknown became Oh, okay, she’s cool. She’s funny. She likes shitty beer. And you go, This thing that I was either apprehensive about or afraid of, it’s not so scary all of a sudden. Obviously, it’s a huge burden to put on one person.

Was there a point when you realised that Will and Harper’s conversations could act as a point of entry—and empathy—for people who don’t know much about transgender issues?

That was the intention from the start.... By seeing someone like Will with his friend Harper—and the two of them not so perfectly make their way through these understandably difficult conversations—it does create an easier on-ramp and lowers the bar of entry for people to feel like they can engage. One of the lessons I took was: A lot of us want to engage, be allies, and be there for a friend. But there’s a fear of saying the wrong thing, not knowing what to say, doing the wrong thing, or asking the wrong question. What Will and Harper showed throughout this journey is that a lot of being an ally and a friend is just being there. Listening. You don’t always have to say the perfect thing, provide the best advice, or ask the best question. Just show up.

I feel like a lot of people who watch this documentary will meet Will Ferrell—who is far more even-keeled than his onscreen persona—for the first time.

One of my favourite moments was when I screened Will & Harper for some close friends and family. I screened it for Will’s dad and he was in tears at the end. He hugged me and said, “That’s my boy up onscreen. That’s the man that I raised and know and love.” He said it’s the thing he’s most proud of that Will’s ever done.... Will is an amazing guy and I’m really excited for the world to see the side that I’ve known for seven or eight years now.

Having known Harper for several years, what did you notice in her over the course of the journey?

She has never wanted to be on camera. I dug through archival photos and footage of Saturday Night Live, where she started the same exact day as Will Ferrell. She was there for 13 years. I couldn’t find anything. She’s like, “I would hide. I would dive out of the way.”... Harper grows more and more comfortable throughout the film. By the end, there’s a giant sense of relief and joy. That was just an important part I wanted to convey, which was for so many trans people and queer people, when they come out, the actual feeling is joy. You see that throughout Harper’s journey as she just leans more and more into her joy.

It’s beautiful. You really can see the weight shedding off her back.

Now you should see her. She’s coming out to standing ovations at festivals. I was like, “Harper, keep an eye out. I want your head to get too big!”

I know people keep asking about the steak scene, where Ferrell and Steele are received poorly by the patrons of a Texas steakhouse. But what’s the opposite of that?

There was something about the karaoke scene [that was special]. Harper meets another trans person who has gone through it before. You can see that she’s learning, asking questions, finding a friend and they just bonded.... Will sang—in of course, classic Will Ferrell fashion—“She’s a Lady,” which is very fun and funny. And finally, the three of them settled on a song to sing together, Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” which is just euphoric and beautiful.

Will & Harper premieres during an election season. Did you ever see the film as having any sort of political role?

I hope it makes a cultural impact. Everyone on the team consciously did not make what I would call a political film. It’s an incredibly personal film. But that’s where our politics should lie—in the personal. We can talk about all these hypotheticals and you can hear politicians spewing lies about this and that, about kids going to school and then two days later coming home a different gender. Utter bullshit. But the way to combat that is through storytelling—personal stories, levity, comedy and joy. Some people just don’t know a lot yet. What they’re doing is they’re listening to the wrong people. They’re listening to politicians.

We went through this, by the way, with gay marriages. A lot of the same arguments were being made. There was a lot of Oh, what if we let gay people get married? What will they do next?!?... There’s this subtle line that Harper says that I always go back to. It’s when she’s outside her house toward the end of the film, where she’s explaining that she’s just feeling such relief that she doesn’t have to lie and hide anymore. She says that she just wants to be in the world. That’s all she wants to do. She just wants to live.

On a lighter note—and this is a true story—I watched Spaceballs as a kid, but I didn’t see Star Wars until I was in college.

You’re like, “This is a lot like Spaceballs! George Lucas copied Mel Brooks.”

That’s exactly it. I can’t let you go without asking about Spaceballs 2.

Well, there’s not much I can share, other than I’m excited to make it. It’s a still a little ways out. Like you, I was obsessed with the movie. I’m older than you so I had VHS. Back in the day, we didn’t have Netflix. You just went to your seven VHS tapes that you had in your house—and that was one that was on repeat. So I started speaking with Josh Gad and then, of course, Mel Brooks to work on this. I’ve been working with him. He’s 98 and he’s still the funniest and sharpest person. It’s a total joy. I’m still in the doc world. I’ve got another documentary coming out that I can’t really speak to yet, but it’s the distant cousin of Too Funny to Fail, which was a doc about The Dana Carvey Show. That’s coming out earlier next year, before Spaceballs.

There have obviously been so many Stars Wars films and shows since Spaceballs. What’s new to satirise in the current state of Star Wars?

I think you could answer that, right? It’s fairly easy. There’s been a ton of Star Wars content. It’s just exploded beyond the fact that there have been not three but six Star Wars films made—and that’s just in the Star Wars universe. So there’s a lot of new [material to satirise], but we also certainly focus on continuing the old so it is a true sequel.

What hasn’t anyone asked you about Will & Harper yet?

I’m really proud of the music in the film. What’s a road trip without great music? This is the first film I’ve ever worked on that every song was cleared [by their respective artists to appear in the film]. I was told by so many people, “Don’t even try for Bon Iver’s ‘Holocene,’ because [Justin Vernon] never gives it.” I sent a note to Justin Vernon and he watched the scene—and loved the movie—and he granted us permission. Of course, it all comes to an end with the wonderful Kristen Wiig. She wrote a beautiful song to end the whole film.

Is the Academy Award for Best Original Song limited to narrative films?

No, it is not. We’re doing it. Let’s get Kristen Wiig an Oscar.

Originally published on Esquire US

Netflix shows have a certain look. I can guarantee I’m not the only one who’s noticed—but if you haven’t, hear me out. There’s a striking sameness to the streaming service’s offerings, making everything from Wednesday to Cobra Kai look like a Hallmark Christmas movie produced by The CW. Is it an intentional branding statement by Netflix? I’m not sure. I can’t tell you why 3 Body Problem seemingly shares costumes with Avatar: The Last Airbender, why One Piece looks like the Bridgertons with newly developed superpowers, or why you could absolutely convince me that the Love Is Blind pods are placed just a room away from Squid Game’s glass bridge.

And yet, with each and every debilitating binge, I find myself learning more about Netflix’s bizarre visual language. The streamer makes a point of putting every character in the brightest room imaginable. It’s more willing to throw questionably awful CGI at me than to simply film outside, and it really wants to ensure that my eyes are constantly assaulted by a kaleidoscope of colour. Choices! They were made.

But what is Netflix’s visual oeuvre, exactly? I’ve assembled a few of Netflix’s most glaring quirks below, which you’ve probably noticed as well. And if Bobby from Queer Eye designed every damn set himself, it wouldn’t surprise me either.

You can’t convince me that Love Is Blind and Squid Game don’t share a set.
(NETFLIX)

Bright Enough? No, Brighter!

I can only describe the brightness level of a Netflix show like this: You know that Hinge guy who keeps the big dentist lights on in his apartment instead of buying a ten-dollar lamp from Ikea? That’s where Netflix lives. Someone in the C-suite must’ve watched that House of the Dragon darkness controversy go down and said, That’s never happening here! Even in a joint as dark as The Witcher’s candle-lit castle halls, I can still see the reflection of a beaming white light on Henry Cavill’s (soon to be one of the Hemsworths’) face. I’ll bet it helps the woman I saw watching The Gray Man on her phone on the subway this week, but I pray these actors don’t go blind on set.

This is the face I’d make if The Circle assigned me this room.
(NETFLIX)

Every Colour, Please

I wouldn’t be watching a Netflix show if, at the end of an episode, I didn’t feel like Van Gogh had tried to paint my Roku. That decor on The Circle? Oof. If I had to spend a month locked in a hotel room with a Pink Lemonade Jungle theme, I’d go insane. (Here’s a drinking game! Have a single beer and try to figure out if you’re watching Emily in Paris or The Ultimatum.) But hey, nothing is more memeable than Netflix.

Sorry, I just had to show you another hideous room from The Circle.
(NETFLIX)

Oh, We’re Still Here?

With each new show, it’s more and more obvious to me where a Netflix set ends and the green screen begins. Remember that room on Squid Game where they cut the cookies? Nothing else should make me feel like I’m back in that space, yet 3 Body Problem’s virtual-reality world is giving off major Dalgona Room vibes. Even when the characters are supposed to be outside, it still feels painfully obvious that I haven’t even left whatever soundstage Netflix rented for the month. I shouldn’t question anything’s realness unless I’m watching Is It Cake?

It couldn’t be any more obvious where the wall begins on 3 Body Problem.
(NETFLIX)

Quick, someone try to walk up those totally real stairs.
(NETFLIX)

Don’t tell me...it’s right behind me, isn’t it?
(NETFLIX)

But What Does My Favourite Character Think?

My last example is a phenomenon I call “But What Does My Favourite Character Think?” This moment usually occurs after a shocking reveal, when everyone crowds into the frame and shares a big ol’ confused look. There’s a chance that any character on the show could be your favourite! So Netflix needs to make sure that you know how they feel about what’s going on as well. What if too many people are in one shot? That’s fine, too. Just have them line up in a row. Cobra Kai is notorious for this—even if there’s a campiness to these moments that sometimes win me over.

A classic Cobrai Kai line-up.
(NETFLIX)

Don’t move on with the plot until I see what my favourite character thought of what just happened.
(NETFLIX)

Make sure I can see everyone’s face as if they were standing for a photograph.
(NETFLIX)

The Netflix Way

The most important thing to remember is that these decisions are not that bad. I’m just lovingly ribbing the streamer. There are shows and original movies on Netflix that are actually a fit for this aesthetic. Bridgerton, for example, probably looks exactly the way it should. And after I conditioned my brain against change over several seasons, the Love Is Blind pods started looking normal to me. But not everything needs to look like this! Sooner or later, I might start thinking Wednesday Addams is on Stranger Things.

Originally published on Esquire US

It’s always the same come-on. We’re invited into their lounge, or maybe their bedroom. The vibe is casual, intimate: undone hair, no make-up and lots of eye contact. Then at some point, usually within the first 10 minutes, this fascinating creature will lean in close and, in a whisper, confide. Something like, “I am trying to sort out the wreckage of the past.” (Robbie Williams, 2023.)

Or: “Let me make you a promise: I’ll only tell you my darkest secrets.” (Selena Gomez, 2022.) Or: “As reliable as the rhythmic beating of my own heart is my need to talk to you.” (Bruce Springsteen, 2020.) And, from that point on, it’s done: you’re lost in the celebrity-documentary vortex.

It was in the spring of 2020 that I first realised I’d been sucked in. I’d become increasingly reliant on 1990s basketball analogies to communicate my every emotional state. Luckily, most of my nearest and dearest were also among the 23.8 million who’d recently binge-watched Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance docuseries on Netflix. So, as with the Chicago Bulls’ Big 3 line-up during the crucial 1993 Game 6 play-off against the Phoenix Suns, there was intuitive understanding.

Once upon a time, documentaries were admired as an oasis of integrity in showbiz’s ethical desert. In every other sector of film and television, star-power rules supreme, but the documentarian remained unbiddable and incorruptible, pointing their camera towards the human stories that really matter — war, climate change, injustice, art.

On the rare occasion celebrity was a subject for documentary, it was treated with scepticism, as in Geri, Molly Dineen’s 1999 study of the former Spice Girl, in which the Bafta-winning film-maker can be heard sharply correcting Halliwell’s mistaken belief that she would have “complete control and it will be edited if there’s anything bad”. As if! Even after 2004, when Michael Moore’s Iraq War doc Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or, broke box-office records and ushered in the Golden Age of documentaries, the pay remained stubbornly low and the journalistic standards resolutely high.

Cut forward only a few years, however, and documentary is as enamoured with celebrity as the most scoop-hungry paparazzo. Sit down to select your evening’s entertainment and note that seemingly every athlete, actor and musician of note has a documentary streaming, or one in the works. “I can’t tell you the amount of calls I’ve gotten from celebrities wanting to make their films since Beckham,” says Fisher Stevens, the director of Netflix’s recent hit series about the sarong-sporting football icon.

Stevens has eclectic interests — previous docs have been about dolphin-hunting in Japan (The Cove), toxic relationships (Crazy Love) and anti-Trump politics (The Lincoln Project) — but it’s the celebrity films, he says with a soft chuckle, that slide most smoothly into production. “I think people are fascinated with celebrities, especially those who kind of had a moment and then are still relevant. You get to look back at those periods, the music and styles, and there’s a certain reminiscing and nostalgia… That seems to be what people are wanting.”

Stevens himself is also an actor and a recognisable face, well-known to Succession fans as Hugo, the slippery Waystar RoyCo comms exec. What’s less well-known is his real-life role in shaping the public images of high-profile figures. Prior to Beckham there was 2016’s Bright Lights, a touching portrait of the relationship between Star Wars’ Carrie Fisher and her equally stellar mother Debbie Reynolds, and Before the Flood, which helped rebrand Leonardo DiCaprio from modelising movie star to concerned environmental activist.

Though, in fairness to all parties, it’s clear that was never the film’s primary intention. DiCaprio is only about the sixth-most charismatic person featured in Before the Flood, after several courageous climate scientists and a strident Indian rice farmer. He exerted his star power in a different way, says Stevens. “That was my third or fourth climate-change film and my most seen, because it had Leo.”

Since the rise of the streaming platforms, with their insatiable hunger for new content, the commercial logic behind the celeb-doc boom has only grown more stark. Non-fiction entertainment is much cheaper and quicker to produce than the scripted stuff, requiring no expensive sets, costumes or FX — and certainly no screenwriters or actors with their stroppy union demands.

Yet this kind of programming can be just as popular and just as prestigious. It’s this latter attribute that gives documentary the edge over its reality-TV cousin. Selling Sunset is never going to be rewarded with an Oscar nomination, no matter how artfully Chrishell skirts the edge of a Hollywood Hills infinity pool in her six-inch Louboutins.

Still, there has to be more to it than just “here’s a famous person who has agreed to let us film”, right? Kate Townsend, Netflix’s VP for original feature documentaries and the woman responsible for green-lighting so many of these projects, hopes so. “The most important thing is that we are able to shine a light on issues beyond the individual themselves,” she says of her commissioning criteria. “We’re looking for people who have relatable challenges and complexities in their everyday lives, as well as those special qualities that make them unique […] People have been surprised by the insight these films have offered.”

For Stevens, the presence of these necessary qualities can only become apparent through forging a personal connection. “I want to make this clear about the way I make films: I don’t make them like a journalist. I’m a humanist and I’m a film-maker. I need to feel a connection or it’s just gonna suck.” And by this, he doesn’t mean hanging out and socialising — although there is a bit of that. “I mean, when I’m in a room and there are cameras on you, I need you to be just talking to me and not fucking acting and posing. I don’t want you performing.” This also allows him to ascertain the celebrity’s true reasons for wanting to open up on screen, he says. “It wasn’t until I went out to dinner with David [Beckham] and his wife that I knew… When people get to a certain point in their lives and start to be able to look back, I think it becomes therapeutic.”

There was a similar impulse behind another recent documentary series, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, according to its director, Gotham Chopra. “Jon and I are both big fans of the New England Patriots, and he’d seen a series I’d done on [NFL quarterback] Tom Brady. He reached out and said, ‘Hey, you know Tom’s got 20 years of success? I’ve got 40.’ Of course I was interested.”

Chopra’s resulting four-part show makes liberal use of the “Interrotron”, a favourite technique of the celeb doc, first popularised by the esteemed documentary trailblazer Errol Morris when he used it to interview the former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara for his Oscar-winning 2003 feature The Fog of War. Despite the Interrotron’s intimidating name — a jokey coinage of Mrs Morris’s — it’s really just a mirror contraption devised to give the illusion of direct audience engagement. “You create eye contact, which makes a huge difference,” explains Chopra. “If you tell a subject, ‘Answer my question, but look at the camera,’ there’s a separation and it becomes performative, versus when they’re engaging, making eye contact and having a human conversation.”

So beware: what feels like a soul-bearing connection between you and the famous person may actually just be a soul-bearing connection between the famous person and a hired camera operator. But, either way, the therapy parallel is inescapable. “That’s what it feels like, a lot,” agrees Chopra. “Many years ago, I worked with [NBA player] Kobe Bryant, and one of the things he said was, ‘This is like therapy!’” And not just a one-off taster session, either: “With Jon [Bon Jovi], the series running time is four hours, but that’s based on hours upon hours upon hours of interviews.”

In addition to all the free therapy, documentaries provide famous folks with a great new way to sideline the frequently unreliable or hostile press. Social media had already opened up that direct line of communication with the public, but in a short-form medium liable to misinterpretation. Far better a 90-minute film — or a 490-minute series — in which to detail your grievances and showcase your talents, without risk of interruption or contradiction. Fine, but what’s in it for the audience? How many of these films would pass my (recently devised) “Last Dance Test For Documentary Impact”? That is, can they take me, the indifferent viewer, and transform her into an invested and passionate subject-area expert faster than Dennis Rodman snatched up rebounds against the Atlanta Hawks in 1997?

In a recent episode of the industry podcast Doc Talk, Lois Vossen, the executive producer of the PBS documentary series Independent Lens, argued for a re-affirmation of journalistic values via a tightening up of terminology. “I don’t want to point fingers, but we take the work seriously in terms of what is a documentary as opposed to what is entertainment,” she told her fellow esteemed panellists. “There is nothing wrong with non-fiction entertainment! It is fabulous! I’ve had some of my best Friday nights watching non-fiction entertainment! The Greatest Night in Pop on Netflix [about the recording of the 1985 charity single “We Are The World”] is so much fun to watch […] But everything is now labelled ‘a documentary’. Some of it is, in fact, non-fiction entertainment.”

In addition to free therapy, documentaries provide famous folks with a great way to sideline the unreliable or hostile press

Yet even within these less-exacting boundaries, some celebrities — or rather, their publicity teams — seem to fundamentally misunderstand the “entertainment” bit. Take that aforementioned piece of Netflix non-fic-ent. It’s Lionel Richie who has the most screen time and the producer credit, and he collaborated with the film-makers to bring together all the big names — just as he did back in 1985. But it’s not Lionel Richie who comes out of it looking the coolest. That would be ever-the-outlaw Waylon Jennings, who walks off mid-chorus. Nor is it Lionel Richie who makes for the most compelling viewing. That would be publicity-averse Bob Dylan, shifting around uncomfortably amid all the showbiz schmoozing as if he’d rather be somewhere — anywhere — else. And neither Dylan nor the late Jennings appears as an interviewee.

Documentary royalty Ken Burns, for one, intends to hold us all to a much higher standard than mere entertainment. Back in April 2020, the two-time-Oscar-nominated film-maker responsible for such exhaustive and authoritative works as The Civil War (1990) and Country Music (2019) publicly criticised the involvement of Michael Jordan’s Jump 23 company in The Last Dance — a series ostensibly about the Chicago Bulls’ 1997–1998 NBA season, but really about Michael Jordan and what a virile, sporting demigod he is. “If you are there influencing the very fact of it getting made, it means certain aspects that you don’t necessarily want in aren’t going to be in, period,” Burns told The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s not the way you do good journalism… and it’s certainly not the way you do good history.”

In The Last Dance’s defence, the director Jason Hehir cited the necessity for access. Clearly, without Jordan — who also held the rights to the 1997–98 season archive footage — there could be no docuseries.

But I know a man who disagrees. “It was never the plan to speak to Michael Jordan,” says Yemi Bamiro, the south-London-based director of eight documentaries, including the Chuck D-fronted Fight the Power and 2020’s One Man and His Shoes — the best film about basketball that isn’t actually about basketball. “When we were trying to get money for it, that’s all anyone would ever ask us: ‘Have you got Michael Jordan?’, ‘Have you spoken to Michael Jordan?’” Not only did Bamiro not seek out a meeting with the big man, he was actively avoiding him: “We were actually really scared that he might catch wind of the film and try to shut it down.”

Since Bamiro’s focus was not Jordan’s basketball career but his most-lucrative marketing deal — the Air Jordan trainers — he put his energy instead into securing interviews with people such as the Nike marketing exec Sonny Vaccaro and the bereaved mother of a young man murdered over a pair of Air Jordans. This meant One Man and His Shoes had to be entirely self-funded, but the indirect approach also resulted in a well-rounded, multi-faceted portrait of — if not the man himself — the wide-ranging impact of his fame and legacy. It worked so well, in fact, that a similar, Jordan-omitting story structure was later adopted by Air, the starry Hollywood drama featuring Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother and Damian Young as the back of Jordan’s head (because that’s as much of him as ever appears on screen). This time, though, the film was made with Jordan’s blessing, and several script revisions were done at his request.

Notably, Air director Ben Affleck is not afforded the same degree of privacy or autonomy in his wife Jennifer Lopez’s latest self-funded documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. He appears on camera multiple times, including in one scene in which he wryly points out the otherwise unacknowledged irony of that title: “If you’re making a record about it… that seems kinda like telling it.” Yet even he of the “Depressed Ben Affleck Smoking” meme could not fail to be won over by J Lo’s exuberant self-belief eventually.

Her documentaries — for there are several — make an artistic virtue of their self-financed, self-produced status. Like many other sex symbols of the 1990s and 2000s, Lopez is engaged in wrestling back control of her own narrative from male-dominated media and entertainment industries. Docs like J Lo’s and Framing Britney Spears (2021), Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream (2013) and Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana (2020) implicitly ask us to also reflect on the culture of sexism that may have gone unnoticed in the not-so-distant past.

Julia Nottingham, who has produced several films in this vein, including the timely Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story and the superlative Pamela: A Love Story, feels that trust-based collaboration is the only way to work with stars. She compares the films made by her Dorothy St Pictures company to the glossy, authorised autobiography that has pride of place in the bookshop window display. “And obviously, when you go to the autobiographies, there are ones that are ghost-written, there are ones that are actually written; there’s a whole host of them…”

But wouldn’t you rather read that than the trashy, unauthorised, likely part-fanfic biography, found on a lower shelf with a reduced sticker? “We always want the most authentic version,” says Nottingham. “I’m definitely not interested in the Pamela Anderson story that’s told by commentators and full of pundits, because you don’t get the truth.” And there is a feminist subtext here, too: “Like, not to get too personal, but my mum is a divorced woman in her seventies, and watching the Pamela film boosted her confidence. It gave her a spring in her step!”

In other cases, a rigorously independent film-maker is a necessary prerequisite for any genuine reckoning with the past. Kevin Macdonald bristles at the suggestion that his recent film High & Low: John Galliano might be mistaken for “a celebrity puff piece [or] part of a campaign to rehabilitate” the disgraced fashion designer. Indeed, the documentary opens with a replay of the now-notorious 2011 footage of Galliano spewing anti-semitic abuse at strangers in a Paris bar, which remains as shocking as ever. “I thought, did they [early critics of the film] ever actually watch it? Because that’s really not what this film is.”

High & Low was funded by an independent French financier with Macdonald’s final cut written into the contract, and he commends Galliano for being amenable to this arrangement: “It was quite a long flirtation, but once he’d decided, he never brought a PR to a meeting. He never said ‘This is off-limits’. [It was] ‘You can ask anything that you want.’ When he saw the cut — which, contractually, I had to show him for factual accuracy — he made a couple of points like, ‘That’s not a couture dress, it was actually prêt-à-porter — how dare you?’, but he didn’t say a thing about anything else. And I was really amazed by that, because it’s very personal, obviously, and really impacts his life.”

Macdonald admits there was likely some ego involved in Galliano’s decision to participate. “I think part of his agenda was, ‘Well, Alexander McQueen has a really great film about him [Ian Bonhôte’s “zero-access” 2018 documentary, though hardly surprising as McQueen died in 2010]. Why don’t I? Because I’m also a great designer.’”

Do I detect a haughty undertone to Macdonald’s well-bred Scottish accent? If so, it’s well-earned. As the director of Whitney (2018) and Marley (2012), Macdonald can be fairly considered a master of the form, alongside Asif Kapadia, the director of Amy (2015), Senna (2010) and an upcoming Roger Federer doc for Prime Video, reportedly in collaboration with the tennis champion himself. [This story was written before the release of 12 Final Days in June].

What will be the exact nature of Federer’s involvement? Will he have any say on the edit? No idea, because Kapadia did not reply to my request for an interview. Now, in the spirit of the tell-all, let me be transparent: there is an earlier draft of this feature in which I’ve used this paragraph to avenge that minor slight, by heavily and unfairly insinuating that the admired documentarian has sold out to Big Streaming, but wiser heads at Esquire prevailed. Take note, Robbie Williams, Michael Jordan and other score-settling celebs: this is how a truly empowered and independent editor can save you from your own pettiness and improve the final product.

Kevin Macdonald, on the other hand, is here to defend himself against such insinuations, and does so with vigour: “I look at the many films on Netflix and elsewhere, which are produced by the stars in question, and I think, ‘Hang on a minute, why are you attacking me?’” he continues. “When I’m raising really complicated, difficult issues, and where the star in question has no say over the film and there’s no financial connection… And yet you give David Beckham a completely free pass, because you want to see inside his garage!”

On that last count, we’re mostly guilty as charged. I know I wouldn’t mind a glimpse inside Beckham’s garage, not least to check whether Victoria’s dad’s old Rolls-Royce — the subject of Beckham’s most famous, British-class-system-dismantling scene — is now parked there. But Macdonald raises a more important point. When both the puff pieces and the serious documentaries look the same, stream on the same platforms and sometimes even have the same directors, how are we, the cultured consumers, supposed to tell the difference?

Macdonald says he knows where the all-important line is and — pardon the name-drop — it was Mick Jagger who showed him. Macdonald had just finished making One Day in September, his 1999 Oscar-winning documentary about the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics, when he got the call: “‘Would you be interested making a film with Mick Jagger?’ And I’m like, ‘That sounds like the most frivolous, fun thing in the world!’” Hanging out on yachts with a rock legend was as fun as expected, but then came the time to put the film together. “He saw it and he didn’t like it, and basically got it re-edited.” The 60-minute film (or rather, “promotional tool to sell CDs”, according to one review) eventually aired on America’s ABC network to low ratings and a baffled Thanksgiving-night audience. “That was my wake-up call. I thought, ‘I don’t want that to happen again. It’s too painful.’ So from then on, I’ve always had final cut.”

Certainly what emerges from watching High & Low is a sense of mutual, artist-to-artist respect. Galliano would no more interfere in Macdonald’s film-making than he would abide interference in his own Maison Margiela autumn/winter 2024 collection. “I think John is smart. He said to me, right at the beginning, ‘I know some people are never going to forgive me, but I want people to understand me.’ And I think that is a subtle, but important difference.”

If it’s our understanding these celebrities want, then they’ve got it. Facilitating understanding, as opposed to judgement, also seems a noble enough goal for the documentarian. But after watching hours and hours of these films — after seeing Ricky Hatton crying into his cuppa, Taylor Swift reading aloud from her teenage diaries and Steve Martin taking his laundry to the dry-cleaners — I’m disturbed to realise that the feeling goes beyond mere “understanding”. I’m ready to take a bullet for these poor, misunderstood souls.

As both the director of numerous biographical docs and the son of the New Age thinker Deepak Chopra, Gotham Chopra has a theory: “You start to hear that music, like [Bon Jovi’s 1986 album] Slippery When Wet, and it does bring you back, but I think underneath there’s also a character story that’s mythic and archetypal. Because, at a certain level, everybody is talented. It’s actually the grit, the resilience, the work ethic that leads to the success. And I think there’s something relatable, but also aspirational, to that.”

So maybe the free therapy provided by these films isn’t only working for the celebrities. Maybe it’s working for us, too. This might mean, as Chopra suggests, treating these docs as audio-visual self-help manuals to live by. Or it might mean a chance to relive and reflect on our own pasts through the celebrity’s carefully curated archive. We’re watching Take That rolling around in jelly but, simultaneously, we’re remembering who we were when we first saw Take That rolling around in jelly. So when you think about it, Jon Bon Jovi really was looking deep into my eyes, speaking straight to my heart, after all. Interrotron, be damned.

Originally published on Esquire UK

It's been a while since the Hargreeves last got into some shenanigans at a space-continuum level (2022, since we last saw them). They return for season four—their final season of The Umbrella Academy—to right a timeline that they have created in their adventure.

Based on the comic book series of the same name, this season of The Umbrella Academy will prove interesting as creators Gerard Way (yup, that Gerard Way) and Gabriel Bá haven't written or illustrated the comic book ending yet. How will it end? And will it align closely with Way and Bá's collective vision?

From the looks of the teaser, it looks like the Hagreeves kids are now normies living out their civilian lives as best as they can (although Luther [played by Tom Hopper] still looks kinda swole). Also, it looks like their paterfamilias, Reginald, is now alive and leading a sinister organisation. And, according to the synopsis from Netflix, there's a "mysterious association known as The Keepers holds clandestine meetings believing the reality they’re living in is a lie and a great reckoning is coming." Oooh, the intrigue.

There are tons of takeaways after watching the teaser: Santa Claus going postal; Diego (David Castañeda) is a family man; Ben (Justin H. Min) is out of jail; Viktor (Elliot Page) goes ballistic... all these to the opening of "The Final Countdown". Will there be a reappearance of characters from the previous season? Can the family ever find happiness? Is there a dance battle? And what's the deal with the "upturned umbrella" tattoo?

While the final season will have six episodes, which is four less than previous seasons there is still cause to celebrate, seeing as it is a rare thing for Netflix to stick to finishing up a series.

The final season of The Umbrella Academy premieres on 8 August

If you don’t remember the mathematical expression that governs the motion of three celestial bodies in a vacuum, fear not. Netflix has spent over $160 million to help you out. To make that completely clear: the streaming supergiant has spent $20 million (£16 million) per episode to make 3 Body Problem, an alien-invasion epic of such sweeping complexity that it makes the Big Bang theory read like a nursery rhyme. That makes it the streamer’s most expensive scripted series ever.

Based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past novels by Chinese author Liu Cixin, the show covers a phantasmagoria of spacey theories and concepts—both real and imagined—from the “Wow! Signal” to the Fermi Paradox, Rare Earth Theory to Dark Forest Theory.

Do you need a degree in astrophysics to enjoy the show? Of course not. Still, an elementary understanding of some of these ideas will improve the journey. This is where Liu Cixin’s books come in, carefully explaining abstruse science concepts in clear language, many of which Netflix can only touch on lest it overloads our screentime-addled attention spans.

But the Remembrance of Earth’s Past is more than just a string of theories. It’s also a rollicking tale of cosmic intrigue, human resilience, and angry aliens. It’s a narrative that spans centuries and galaxies, intertwining a rich constellation of characters as they pinball about through time and space.

The story is not just about survival against extra-terrestrial forces. It's also about the philosophical and ethical questions that come with the advancement of civilisation. It challenges viewers to consider what it means to be human in the face of the unknown and the lengths to which we will go to protect our world and our species.

Which is all to say, really: it’s a load of alien-invading fun.

There are five books set in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past universe, three of which were penned chronologically from 2006, with a prequel and a sequel later written to fluff out the franchise.

But how should you read them, and when?

1. Ball Lightning (2004)

This is not part of the original trilogy that shot Liu to fame two years later. So it should be seen as more of an antipasto to the main course. But it’s nonetheless a tasty introduction to the Three Body Problem universe, minus the aliens.

It follows Chen, who, after witnessing his parents’ death by ball lightning, dedicates his life to unravelling this phenomenon. What that is, exactly, is best left to the book to explain in detail but suffice to say it’s a rare and unexplained phenomenon where small electrical fireballs burst like bullets out of thunderstorms and then explode. They’ve been known to kill people.

Chen’s research leads him to Lin Yun, a brilliant physicist with unorthodox theories about the nature of ball lightning. As they embark on a perilous quest for knowledge, they uncover secrets that challenge fundamental understandings of physics and reality itself. It’s a gripping narrative that weaves together science, intrigue, and human emotion in a thrilling exploration of the unknown.

2. The Three-Body Problem (2006)

The serious business begins. It opens during China's Cultural Revolution, where astrophysics student Ye Wenjie witnesses her father's death and loses faith in humanity. After a stint in prison, she is recruited by a secret military project tasked with uncovering extraterrestrial life. She sends a beacon into outerspace... and unwittingly invites aliens to Earth.

Meanwhile, nanotech expert Wang Miao is drawn into a mysterious VR game mirroring the chaotic climate of a three-sun alien world. Turns out the game and the secret military project are linked, revealing a desperate alien civilization planning to invade Earth. It soon gets out. And as humanity wrestles with this threat, Ye Wenjie becomes a leader for those who welcome the alien takeover, fracturing society and forcing humanity into a tug-of-war for its own future.

3. The Dark Forest (2008)

The second book of the trilogy digs into two key alien-related theories: the Fermi Paradox and Dark Forest theory. The first asks: if we exist, so too must aliens… so where the hell are they? The second says we should hope we never find them.

Dark Forest theory, in other words, argues that – in a universe where civilizations don't know each other's intentions – the safest bet is to lurk in the shadows like hunters in a forest, ready to strike first against potential threats.

But back to the story, and humanity faces annihilation. Four centuries separate Earth from the arrival of a ruthless alien armada, the Trisolarans, fleeing their dying sun. But Earth's fightback is crippled by sophisticated alien probes, sophons, that monitor every move and stifle technological advancement.

In a desperate bid for survival, Earth creates the Wallfacers - a clandestine group with access to any resource imaginable. Their mission: devise humanity's secret defence strategy. Luo Ji, a brilliant but unorthodox sociologist, is thrust into this world after a near-fatal encounter. As he delves deeper, he uncovers a terrifying cosmic truth - the Dark Forest theory - that rewrites the rules of interstellar relations and forces humanity to make unthinkable choices in the face of an unforgiving universe.

4. Death's End (2010)

Decades after the precarious truce with the Trisolarans, humanity enjoys a golden age fuelled by alien technology. Yet, a chilling truth lurks beneath the surface. Cheng Xin, an idealistic engineer from Earth's pre-invasion past, awakens from hibernation to a world transformed. She's thrust into a new role as a Wallfacer. However, whispers of a devastating Trisolaran weapon, capable of destroying entire solar systems, threaten the fragile peace.

Meanwhile, a historical anomaly from Earth's past resurfaces, hinting at a mysterious force that could rewrite the course of the Trisolaran invasion. As humanity grapples with existential threats and internal factions with conflicting agendas, Cheng Xin must find a way to ensure humanity's survival in a universe where cosmic deterrence hangs by a thread.

5. The Redemption of Time (2011)

If Ball Lightening was the antipasto, this is the complimentary limoncello that comes with the bill.

Liu didn’t actually write this instalment. It began as a work of fanfiction by the (now acclaimed) sci-fi writer Baoshu. But its reimagining of Liu’s world, fresh with new characters and ideas, proved so popular that the original trilogy’s publisher picked it up and published it in 2011, with Liu’s permission.

It revives a number of characters from the series, including Yun Tianming, a controversial and lightly drawn figure from Death's End. Presumed dead, he awakens in a distant future where humanity is facing existential threats from advanced civilizations. He discovers that he has been resurrected by an enigmatic alien entity known as the "Sophon" and is tasked with uncovering the truth behind humanity's past and its place in the universe.

As Yun Tianming navigates this unfamiliar future, he encounters familiar faces from the original trilogy, such as Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin, and grapples with complex moral and philosophical questions. The novel delves into themes of redemption, identity, and the consequences of humanity's actions across time and space.

Fans of Liu can probably live without it, but if you’ve completed the series and need an extra fix, Redemption of Time will scratch that itch.

Originally published on Esquire UK

On 13 October 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed into a glacier in the Andes on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. Many of the 45 people on board were Uruguayan rugby players. The plane was ripped to pieces, killing passengers and crew immediately. And for the survivors, what happened in the following months was a excruciating descent into human survival: avalanches and hostile winds and most chilling of all, cannibalism. Only 16 people made it out of the mountains alive.

It is a remarkable story, absurdly ripe for retelling and adaptation. Many of the survivors have written books and who can blame them? That experience was likely cathartic and possibly sense-making. And everything about the story, from the hostile environment to the gruesome plot details, makes it ideal for the cinema. The most high-profile attempt was 1993’s Alive. An adaptation of British historian’s Piers Paul Read’s account of the crash, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. It has some terrific sequences but the overall thrust was a full-throttle embrace of Hollywood. One that's all hope and heroes and endurance.

There have, of course, been many other documentaries and podcasts and TV movies. And now we have another feature film: Society of the Snow, recently Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature. After its January release on Netflix, the Spanish-language film—surely a dark horse at the Academy Awards—became one of Netflix’s most watched non-English language films ever. It clocked in over 50 million views (and counting).

Thankfully, director J. A. Bayona (whose previous work includes another true-story disaster flick The Impossible and very much not true-story disaster flick Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) is unafraid to go hard on the uglier parts of this story. At times, Bayona’s camera angles presents these beleaguered men—absurdly good-looking actors with enviable ‘70s flares and swooped fringes—as not quite human. Their facial features are distorted into the figures of a Goya painting. Conversely, when time comes for the cannibalism, because of course it must, Bayona eschews gross-out tactics and focuses on the practicalities. How to dismember the dead bodies, how to stomach the flesh (with plenty of ice to dilute the tastes). An unimaginable situation is presented as a how-to survival guide.

Liberties have been taken. For example, the survivors were rescued over two nights not in one fell swoop as the film depicts and you can read about those comparisons elsewhere. But what is more interesting is how Bayona chooses to frame this well-worn story. The film is narrated by law student Numa Turcatti, played by stand-out Enzo Vogrincic, who seems destined for big things. He is a rousing, philosophical addition to the men, whose presence is made doubly tragic by the fact that he was not really supposed to be there. He does not play for the team, and simply could not could not resist the relatively cheap flight to Chile. Turcatti—and perhaps this is a spoiler, so avert your eyes for a 50-year-old news item—does not make it out alive. Killing off the narrator two-thirds of the way through adds a fresh twist to a familiar tale.

With a run time of over two-and-a-half hours, Society of the Snow stretches a viewer’s limits. But the tediousness works, for what is more tedious than hoping? Over and over again, the rugby players head out on walks in an attempt to retrieve the plane’s engine where they hope that batteries stored. Over and over again, they try to make the radio work to make contact with the outside world (crushingly, they instead hear that the search party has moved on). There are some simplistic sentiments about the power of friendship. But mostly the film is an antidote to the real-life awards bait, which often blandly papers over survival stories. It is certainly miles ahead of other Netflix movies based on a true story (of which there are countless).

Towards the end, as the players are washed and cleaned in hospital—a sequence that should feel euphoric, but lands with a thud—we see their starved bodies for the first time without clothing. Throughout, they have been layered in sweaters and coats, the reveal has the effect of a twist ending. You expect to see them as superheroes, but they are skeletal. It neatly evokes the confusing aftermath of traumatic events. In real life, there was indeed public backlash after stories of the men’s cannibalism broke. Bayona’s resistance of a Hollywood ending gives the men the complexity they deserve. And it is also what makes Society of the Snow linger long after the credits. Hope persists, yes, but so does terror.

Society of the Snow is available on Netlix now.

Originally published on Esquire UK

There are obviously a ton of highly anticipated TV shows and sequels in the pipeline this year. There's Masters of the Air coming to Apple TV+ this month, a Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot (Amazon Prime) and Abbott Elementary Season 3 (Disney+) across early February, and 3 Body Problem (Netflix) on 21 March. That's just the first three months of the year, guys.

Our hearts are personally on Severance and Silo, even though the mind knows better than to expect seeing their new seasons this year. In the meantime, there are a handful of already confirmed installations, with HBO Max taking the most of the picking. The trailers aren't just teasers. These shows are certainly dropping this year, the only uncertain thing is the exact date, which are to be announced in due time. Get excited.

House of the Dragon Season 2

The redeeming spinoff from the messy conclusion that was Game of Thrones returns. With allegedly more dragons this time (“You’re going to meet five new dragons,” says showrunner Ryan Condal), the second season will likely pick off from the impending civil war and perhaps even trouble in uncle-husband-niece-wife paradise.

The Sympathizer

C'mon, that's how a trailer should be done. Give a little premise, but not spell out the entire plot in two and a half minutes. Name drop A24 under Executive Producers alongside the Downeys, and casually mention direction by Oldboy's Park Chan-wook. Plus, RDJ doing the most? Sold.

The Boys Season 4

With the surprise cameos in Gen V season 1, it's reasonable to expect crossovers between the two narratives. Besides the familiar antiheroes reaching for their capes again, new faces joining the cast are Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Rosemarie DeWitt, Rob Benedict and Elliot Knight; characters yet to be revealed.

The Bear Season 3

We didn't need the accolades to convince us what a gem the hit FX series is, but in case you needed reminding; it bagged a total of six awards at the 2023 Emmys. Best comedy series, lead actor in a comedy series (Jeremy Allen White), supporting actor in a comedy series (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and supporting actress in a comedy series (Ayo Edebiri). So yeah, can't wait to see Carmy get out of that fridge.

The Penguin

Whatever your verdict on Matt Reeves' The Batman was, no one can deny Colin Farrell's performance as the titular villain. Oh wait, did you just find out that was the actor under all those unrecognisable layers of prosthetics? We don't blame you. To his credit, the voice and mannerisms also played a part. Which is why we can only anticipate how the eight-parter on the Gotham gangster will play out.

10-Word Review

All sound and fury but it also signifies something... familiar?

The Skinny

An intergalactic fascist empire rules the galaxy with an iron fist. Its military threatens farmers on the distant moon. A former soldier seeks out a rebel faction to make a stand against the empire. This is Star Wars- I mean, Rebel Moon.

---

Here Be Spoilers...

---

What we like:

Watching Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire, you might be immediately clued into director Zack Snyder's film inspiration—Star Wars. To be fair, films about the little guy going up against a group of baddies will follow a narrative thread similar to Star Wars... but then again, even Star Wars took inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. So, yes, if we want to pick nits, Snyder took inspiration from Star Wars and Seven Samurai. There will be similarities but Snyder wanted to create something wholly original so you gotta respect the man's hustle.

It's that timeless tale of the Motherworld, who controls the galaxy. They have a military aka the Imperium, that threatens a farming colony on the moon of Veldt. Kora (played by Sofia Boutella) is an ex-Imperium soldier who was trying to get a second chance at a normal life as a farmer, now has to return to a life of violence to protect the colony. She does so by putting together a supergroup to fend off the Imperium before they return to Veldt. You've grand sets and world-building; there's lore and details. This has all the trappings of an epic; a many-chapter saga. A franchise that can spawn toys and merch; spin-offs even! The sky's the limit.

And with Snyder at the helm, you can expect gorgeous slo-mo action sequences that can make John Woo nod in approval. Like that scene with ex-military Kora first facing off with the Imperium in the farmhouse.

What we didn't like:

Everything else.

Look, no one goes out to make a bad movie. Snyder had the idea to make Rebel Moon in 1997. That's 27 years of gestation. He had plenty of time to mull over this.

But it's boring. I don't know how a US166 million dollar movie can be boring but there you go. A bulk of the humdrum stems from the characters; I don't care for them. It's a huge cast and because of the number of personalities, you don't get development or much of a backstory. They are extraneous, which is a pity because they all have potential. You've Tarak (Staz Nair), who is a royal-turned-slave. He talks to animals and looks like he has a cool backstory but no, that's never explored. There's Bae Doona's Nemesis, who is a cyborg swordsperson. That's cool, right? But we don't go in-depth about her motivation.

Maybe all of their origins will be covered in the sequel (Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver coming out on 19 April, 2024) but if I didn't know there was a second instalment, you'd lose me as a viewer on this chapter.

The protagonist Kora has a reasonable amount of history but that's told through clunky exposition. Her stoicism paints her as a reluctant hero but without an emotional anchor, she's just going through the motions. And I, as an audience member, am just going through the motions of waiting until the end credits.

What to look out for:

Anthony Hopkins voicing Jimmy, an android of the Mechanicas Miltarium. He's arguably the best character in the film. Despite not having any human features, Jimmy displays more personality than some of the other actors. It's fascinating what a little voice acting and movements can bring to a character.

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is now out on Netflix. Watch out for Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver coming out on 19 April, 2024 to see if it can redeem itself.