ITVX: How Britain’s Late-Entry Streamer Plans to Win a War Already Lost to Netflix, TikTok, and Your Own Short Attention Span By Our Correspondent Who Once Watched an Entire Season of “Love Island” on a Ukrainian Night Bus LONDON—In the grand tradition of showing up to a gunfight with a butter knife, Britain’s ITV has…
TV Guide, International Edition: The Remote-Controlled Decline of Civilization By the time you read this, 6.2 billion people—give or take the population of Luxembourg—will be clutching a remote control like it’s the One Ring. The humble TV guide, once a stapled pamphlet that doubled as a coaster and emergency fly-swatter, has metastasized into a global…
The London Film Festival kicked off last week under the usual autumn drizzle, which felt almost too on-the-nose: a grey sky weeping politely over a city that has perfected the art of pretending everything is fine. Inside the red-carpet bubble, however, the planet’s creative class was busy congratulating itself for surviving another year of algorithmic…
London, that damp and overpriced island capital, is once again pretending the planet orbits Leicester Square. The 67th BFI London Film Festival (or LFF to the acronym-obsessed) has rolled out its red carpet—this year woven from equal parts recycled polyester and Brexit anxiety—inviting the world to queue politely and pretend the weather is “atmospheric.” From…
Raymond Cruz: The Man Who Weaponised Soap By the time the first shipment of Tuco Salamanca’s infamous blue meth reached the docks of Rotterdam, Raymond Cruz had already become a household name in places where subtitles are a way of life. From the favelas of Rio to the rooftop bars of Mumbai, someone is right…
**The Global Phenomenon of Hunter Doohan: How a Nice Boy from Arkansas Became the World’s Favorite Creep** In the grand theater of global entertainment, where streaming platforms have become the new colonial powers and algorithms serve as modern-day conquistadors, Hunter Doohan has emerged as an unlikely cultural ambassador. The 29-year-old Arkansas native’s journey from community…
The Glorious, Illegal Afterlife of Football: A Totalsportek Travelogue By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a Moldovan data center and a server rack in Curaçao—jurisdiction shopping at its most romantic—the website Totalsportek continues to thrive like a cockroach after nuclear winter. It is, depending on which intellectual-property lawyer you ask, either the last true…
YouTube TV: The Cloud That Rains Channels on a Burning Planet By Our Man in Geneva, Still Counting Subscriptions Instead of Sheep Geneva, 3 a.m.—while the rest of the city pretends to sleep, the Palais des Nations flickers with a different kind of diplomacy: a delegate from Fiji is haggling over the precise definition of…
LOS ANGELES—While missiles arc over the Black Sea and central-bank printers warm up from Frankfurt to Manila, the global cognoscenti gathered at the L.A. Live Event Deck to discover who got the shiniest paperweight for “Outstanding Lighting Design for a Culinary Competition, 27 Minutes or Less.” Congratulations: the 2024 Creative Arts Emmy Awards have arrived,…
NFL Plus: The Empire Streams Back By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent PARIS—Imagine, if you will, a planet where 330 million Americans huddle around glowing rectangles every Sunday, convinced that the fate of a leather spheroid is the axis on which civilization spins. Now picture the National Football League—an outfit so patriotic it could make a…
Paramount Plus and the Great Streaming Crusade: A Elegy for National Sovereignty, One Binge at a Time PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, the French have discovered that Star Trek now beams directly into their living rooms in 4K HDR, courtesy of an American conglomerate that also owns Paw Patrol. Paramount Plus, the…
**The Global Cost of American Football: How NFL Sunday Ticket Pricing Became a Barometer of Civilization’s Decline** While the world grapples with climate refugees, food insecurity, and the occasional attempted coup, America’s most pressing crisis appears to be the escalating cost of watching grown men in spandex concuss each other for three hours every Sunday….
