The Algorithm Is Not Your Friend, But These Picks Are

This week’s entertainment landscape is a landfill with excellent lighting. Every app is waving a new “must-watch” at us while quietly burying the thing we actually want, so I’m cutting through the digital shrubbery with a few picks that deserve your evening—and one popular title that deserves to be gently escorted out of the building.

Benny’s Picks

Shōgun — Hulu
Yes, it is a prestige historical drama about honor, power, and people staring meaningfully across rooms. But unlike most prestige dramas, it remembers that swords are supposed to be used. The performances are enormous without becoming hammy, and the show trusts silence more than most modern television trusts dialogue. It’s beautiful, brutal, and far more emotionally legible than its subtitles-and-kimonos packaging suggests.

Baby Reindeer — Netflix
This is not a cozy binge, unless your idea of cozy is watching a man make increasingly terrible decisions while your soul leaves your body through a side exit. Richard Gadd’s series is messy, uncomfortable, funny, and occasionally infuriating—the kind of story that refuses to hand you a clean hero and villain because real life is annoyingly complicated. Watch it when you have the stomach for something sharp, not when you want background noise while folding laundry.

Charli xcx, BRAT — everywhere you stream music
The green album became a meme, a color palette, and a personality disorder, but underneath the internet choreography is a genuinely terrific pop record. “360” is pure attitude, “So I” is unexpectedly tender, and “Girl, so confusing” is the rare song about friendship that sounds like someone actually texted it at 1:17 a.m. It’s dance music for people who overthink in the club bathroom.

James — Percival Everett — bookstores and libraries
If you’re tired of novels that arrive wearing a little sash reading IMPORTANT, pick up this sly, furious reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett turns a familiar American story inside out and asks who gets to control the narrative—and who gets turned into scenery. It’s smart without being smug, funny without sanding down the horror, and the kind of book that makes you want to argue with someone after finishing it.

Skip It

House of the Dragon, Season 2 — Max. The wigs remain magnificent. The dragons remain expensive. The plot, however, often moves with the urgency of a committee approving office furniture. If you already invested, continue—but do not let anyone tell you this is appointment television. It is appointment-adjacent television, which is how we end up staring at our phones during battles.

Sleeper Pick

Colin from Accounts — Paramount+. The title sounds like a rejected sitcom pitch, but this Australian comedy is warm, filthy, and genuinely funny about two damaged adults stumbling toward each other with the grace of shopping carts. It has charm without syrup and romance without pretending people become less ridiculous when they fall in love.