The planet’s collective sofa has developed a deeper imprint. From Lagos laundromats live-tweeting Nigerian noir on cracked phones to pensioners in Riga bingeing Korean revenge operas between power cuts, the new movies dropping this week on the major streamers are less “content” than emergency rations for a species that has agreed, tacitly, to stay indoors…
David Jonsson: A Small Name in a Shrinking World, Now Available in 4K By the time you finish reading this sentence, another algorithm in Palo Alto will have already decided whether David Jonsson is worth promoting on a Lagos teenager’s feed. Such is the velocity of our planetary fame lottery—one moment you’re rehearsing monologues in…
Movies Streaming This Weekend: A Global Guide to Sitting Very, Very Still By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar is more expensive than the GDP of Tuvalu It is Friday afternoon somewhere—probably in Kiribati, the first nation to greet the weekend—and billions of humans are preparing for the same heroic act:…
The Great British Baking Show: A Global Sedative in the Age of Collapse By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still licking marmalade off the keyboard From the smouldering remains of post-Brexit Britain, a single cultural export has managed to cross more borders than the Queen’s corgis ever did: The Great British Baking Show, known to Americans…
Silence of the Lambs-Wool Cardigans: Hunting Wives Season 2 Arrives to Terrify the Global Subconscious Dripping onto screens like a Chardonnay spill on cream carpet, “Hunting Wives” Season 2 has become the international sleeper hit nobody’s embassy admits to binge-watching. Across four continents, diplomats’ spouses, arms-dealers’ girlfriends, and NGO directors alike are scheduling “late conference…
Astros vs Braves: A Global Power Outage Disguised as a Baseball Game By Diego Serrano, Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Houston, Texas – Somewhere between the first pitch and the last corporate-sponsored wave, the Astros and Braves reminded the planet that even in an age of intercontinental hypersonic missiles and algorithmic romance, two groups of overpaid…
Paramount, Skydance, Warner Bros: The World Watches Three Aging Gladiators Swipe Right on Each Other By Our Correspondent in Whatever Time Zone Still Has a Functioning Streaming App PARIS—Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the existential dread of another trade-war Tuesday, the entertainment-industrial complex just tried a three-way corporate tango. Paramount Global, Skydance Media, and…
Futemax: The World’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure Now Has a Passport By [Redacted] Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk If you’ve ever watched a Champions League quarter-final on a buffering stream that looks like it was filmed on a potato inside a wind tunnel, you’ve met Futemax. The Brazilian-born pirate site—equal parts Robin Hood, carnival barker, and…
Prime Video: A Global Streaming Empire Where Even Your Grandmother’s Telenovelas Are Now Data Points By Our Jaded Correspondent in the Cloud In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was “binge.” Then Amazon whispered, “Let there be Prime,” and lo, 200-odd countries discovered that their Friday nights could be reduced to a…
Reece Shearsmith and the Global Spread of Beautifully Unhinged Britishness by our London desk, via a Wi-Fi signal that still smells faintly of Brexit There’s a moment in every nation’s cultural timeline when the rest of the planet looks over, blinks twice, and mutters, “Wait, that’s what you people do for fun?” For the United…
The Netflix series “Accused” has now been binge-gorged in 190 countries, subtitled into 34 languages, and meme-ified by teenagers who think “habeas corpus” is a Harry Potter spell. From Buenos Aires to Baku, viewers watch the same 45-minute morality play: an ordinary schmuck stands in the dock, flashbacks reveal how quickly decency curdles, and a…
THE STUDIO—OR HOW LOS ANGELES LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE AIRSTRIKE By our man in the bunker, somewhere between Burbank and the Hague It was fitting that the first tweet about The Studio TV Show came from a 15-year-old in Lagos watching on a cracked Android: “Hollywood finally made a war-crime sitcom—10/10 would…
