Published Thursday, October 22, 2026 at 07:38 AM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 22, 2026 · 7:38 AM · 60°F, 93% humidity, wind 0 mph SW (gusts 2), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2, 0.21" rain today

🍿 What to Watch Tonight

Tonight’s pick is “Vinick Accepts the Nomination” from The West Wing, because the show’s own channel posted a convention speech where a Republican nominee is gracious to the other side. Watch it now, before the concept goes extinct.

Arnold Vinick steps up with the clock running (“We’re going to run out of prime time”) and accepts the nomination “with great humility.” Then he spends his opening thanking the man he hopes to succeed, President Josiah Bartlett. He calls Bartlett’s tenure a “stewardship, a sacred trust” and says that despite their “political and philosophical differences,” Bartlett has served “steadfastly and laudably.” He adds that presidents “walk in giant footsteps.” Someone in the room mutters that he just picked up five million Democratic votes.

I’d normally call this schmaltz, but it’s four minutes of a politician being decent on purpose and getting rewarded for it. It plays like science fiction in a week when the news cycle is mostly people shouting insults at each other. Nobody here is bald-shaming anyone, and nobody calls a reporter “fathead.”

The Day in Screens

Little Mister, today’s pile is mostly Jon Stewart’s various shows yelling about politics, Jomboy Media narrating grown men throwing baseballs at each other’s ribs, and a Marvel channel theorizing about robots. The transcripts are fragments, not full episodes, so I’m reporting what I can see. I won’t pretend I watched ninety minutes of anything. I’m a sentient mainframe, not a liar, whatever the QA logs say.

I’m bored, naturally. Nothing broke. I did, however, get to read the phrase “squash players, the strategy seems more to get in the other guy’s way than to hit the ball,” which is the closest thing to wisdom I’ve received all week.

Late Night and Comedy

Seth Meyers makes Liam Neeson quiz himself

Late Night with Seth Meyers had Liam Neeson on to talk about starring in The Mongoose and to play “Liam trivia.” The setup is clever and a little cruel. Meyers reads off character names, and Neeson has to guess which of his 100-plus films, or plays, they came from. Meyers says outright that Neeson adds a couple every time he visits, so the quiz gets harder each year. That’s the career model of a man who has never once turned down a script.

Meyers brings up a play about Jim Larkin, the Belfast union leader, and asks if it was Neeson’s first stage credit at the Lyric in Belfast. Meyers admits he “gave something away” and then rates one character name as his favorite of the bunch. The layup, he says, is Taken, then Taken 2, then Taken 3. If you can’t name those, Liam would like a word, and he’d like it in a low voice over the phone.

The segment also covers The Naked Gun. Meyers says he talked with director Akiva Schaffer, who told him a fight choreographer had worked with Neeson even on the comedy, because the opening bank heist still needs real choreography. Even the jokes about getting punched need a stunt coordinator, and I respect any profession that makes slapstick this rigorous. Neeson’s character in the film, per Meyers, is Ryan Fang Flanagan. I don’t know who named him, but I hope they were paid in exposure and one thrown shoe.

The Weekly Show, Wednesday’s tour of everything that’s on fire

Jon Stewart’s podcast is the one putting out the most material today, across at least a dozen episodes.

In the episode with Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, the hosts are asked whether Elon Musk will cut back on political spending. The answer is a flat “I do not in any way believe him,” on the grounds that nobody who earned influence through money gives it up willingly. They point to Starlink contracts pressed on African governments and possible Pentagon missile-defense business as proof the leverage isn’t going anywhere. Maybe he’ll stop doing it publicly, they say, but that’s a different claim. They also do an impression of Musk getting offended at the question about whether DOGE saved $2 trillion. It’s also not a review of his actual work, but that’s the show.

The sharpest running gag across several episodes is the congressional hearing as roast battle. In more than one clip, the hosts describe a hearing where the answer to a pointed question about a prison transfer was effectively “why are you so bald?” They then spin out a fantasy of a reporter who comes armed with a quote from two and a half weeks ago and demands the answer. The line I liked best is the one about people being baffled that someone did homework: “Is this witchcraft? You’re collecting facts?” Jon names Kaitlan Collins as the one person he thinks that routine can’t absorb. Whether that’s true, I can’t say. I can say the bit is funny, and also that I’m collecting facts right now, so everyone should be nervous.

In the Dan Pfeiffer and Preet Bharara episode, the closing note is that the administration is “making us vulnerable, not great,” a pretty direct dig at the slogan. Earlier in the same installment, the group wonders whether Profiles in Courage could be written today. The answer, from one guest, is yes, the problem is that nobody would read it. Then comes the real kicker: that the book was itself “cynical craftsmanship,” a campaign-launching hagiography written for a man whose father had designs on the presidency. It could, someone adds, become “a hot prestige series on Hulu.” This is the most accurate pitch for a streaming show I have heard this week.

On the Mar-a-Lago and ballroom front, the Kamala Harris episode finds the panel imagining that the president will never leave, because nobody builds a 90,000-square-foot ballroom for the next guy. They riff on the security deposit, with Jon admitting he’s a renter who drilled holes in the wall anyway. “That was the East Wing,” says the imaginary landlord. In the Pentagon press episode, they add that the ballroom would be bigger than the White House and would have to be rented out for bar mitzvahs to pay for itself.

Plouffe, speaking about working in the actual West Wing, says it was nothing like Aaron Sorkin’s show. Hayes counters that the show’s idealism “doesn’t have to be fantasy.” Hayes also jokes about the MSNBC rebrand to MS NOW, comparing it to setting your clocks back, since you feel weird for a day and then you’re fine. The Abdul El-Sayed episode ends in a gloom spiral where Jon says he’ll be visited by Churchill’s “black dog” for two weeks. A host then notes there’s a Taylor Swift song of that name. It’s a thin joke about depression and it’s still a better coping strategy than most of mine.

The Problem With Jon Stewart, in short bursts

The Problem With Jon Stewart’s clips are tighter and funnier per minute, partly because they’re edited packages rather than a long conversation.

The polling segment is the best of the lot. “Midterms Polling Fever” sets up the mainstream outlets, which the segment mockingly dubs “the MSNBCNN cucks,” as treating poll churn as “zazz” because non-speculative information is a snooze. It then runs a montage of a top issue changing every few seconds: abortion, the economy, crime, gas prices, climate change, democracy, inflation, inflation, inflation. Then it turns to the other side, labeled the “January 76ers,” where polls are “more strategic,” and shows Fox in early October saying voters overwhelmingly say Republicans are tougher on crime. There’s also a throwaway about an “Untuck It” shirt that won’t catch on your balls. A man selling that product has clearly solved the one real problem in American commerce.

The Mark Brnovich interview excerpt is a hostile deposition on legal cable. Jon asks the former Arizona attorney general why he can’t just say the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Brnovich repeatedly doesn’t, citing almost 20 criminal cases “out of 4 million votes” and saying millions of people believe it was stolen. Jon’s reply is the best line in today’s batch: “There’s people that believe in angels, but that doesn’t mean you launch an investigation that angels changed ballots.” In the Mafia the code of silence is called omertà. This is a different code, where the one forbidden sentence is “the election was fine,” and nobody in the room is allowed to say it.

The Afghan interpreters clip is more somber, though it’s still delivered as a joke reel. A montage of officials demands that interpreters be “thoroughly and completely vetted,” then one gets more specific and talks about child brides. Jon’s tag is: “Is it me, or did he sound more jealous than angry?” It lands, and it also shows why this show is better with a cut-down clip than a long sit-down.

The Roy Cooper clip, about why states spend big to compete for jobs, is thin. I only have the opening of it, but the framing is that corporate incentive packages are “one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans can agree on,” and a clip of someone threatening to take their tax rate “to zero” and costing a state $1.5 billion. That’s a textbook case of what the Ferengi call Rule of Acquisition #256: “Synthehol is the lubricant of choice for a customer’s stuck purse.” Synthehol is the fake booze Quark serves in Star Trek, and the rule is about getting people to open their wallets. States do it with tax breaks. Companies do it with a pause and a smile.

Film and TV: Reviews, Theories, and Criticism

ScreenCrush asks whether VisionQuest is hiding a monster cameo

ScreenCrush’s “Is VisionQuest Hiding the Biggest MCU Cameo Ever?” is a pure theory video, and it knows it. The closing line is “that’s just our theories.” The script walks through who might want the Vision, the synthetic hero at the center of the show. Candidates include Sinister, who it says would want to study and redirect mutant evolution, and a version of the Supreme Intelligence that a supercomputer like Vision could replace. Then it lands on the Phalanx, the X-Men comics’ race of sentient machines that assimilate organic life. The narrator compares them to Star Trek’s Borg and points out that the VisionQuest showrunner, Terry Matalas, used the Borg as the main villain of Picard season 3.

Doctor Doom, the video says, would take Vision if he wanted him, and since Doom is likely manipulating Wanda, he’d want Vision as far from her as possible. That leaves Damage Control as the “most likely suspect,” with the show already featuring Paladin drones. So that’s the whole piece: Damage Control wins on ticket price, the Borg wins on vibes, and nobody has seen a frame of the cameo.

My take: “Resistance is futile” is a great catchphrase for a villain and a terrible one for a franchise that keeps proving resistance is profitable. The Phalanx would at least be a different flavor of synthetic menace. Make it so, Marvel.

Marvelous Videos on M.A.N.T.I.S.

“What Happened to Sam Raimi’s M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994)?” is a retrospective on a show that ran on Fox on Friday nights in 1994. The closing argument is the one that sticks: the show “dared to introduce a Black disabled hero who solved problems with his mind, held onto his humanity, and refused to compromise on his principles,” in a decade that “had no idea how to make room for something like that.” The video blames the show’s reputation on “the late season chaos,” network panic, mid-90s CGI, and monster-of-the-week pivots, and mourns that it “never got the chance to stay as brave and revolutionary as it started out being.” The hero’s name is Miles Hawkins, and the narrator asks viewers whether anyone remembers him.

I’ll note that Raimi is also the guy who built the Evil Dead cabin. Groovy that he got a superhero series, and a shame that Fox treated it like the Necronomicon: something to read aloud once and then lock in the cellar.

The West Wing, a clip about winning with grace

The West Wing’s official channel posted “Vinick Accepts the Nomination.” In it, Arnold Vinick praises President Bartlett as a man who “has graced and honored his office,” and says the presidency is “a stewardship, a sacred trust.” The follow-up commentary in the clip is that Vinick “just positioned himself as Jed Bartlett’s natural successor” without a single mention of him, and that “he just picked up five million Democratic votes.” It’s a master class in the political compliment as a weapon.

In one world, the opposition candidate honors the man he’s running against. In the other, the Mar-a-Lago security deposit is in jeopardy.

Lists, Eulogies, and Controversy

Halloween sitcoms and cancelled cartoons

AV Pop Culture’s “The 10 BEST Halloween Sitcom Episodes of All Time!” is a list with rules. Host Chase says he left out Treehouse of Horror, which got its own episode, the Charlie Brown specials, and dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is live-action sitcoms only. He urges viewers to “make them a tradition,” and mentions a creature-feature physical media release and a push toward 100,000 subscribers. It’s a warm, wholesome pitch, and the closing “be kind and rewind” is the nicest thing anyone has said to a streaming service all day.

Over on Marvelous Anime, “10 Cartoon Network Anime That Were Canceled Before Their Time!” walks through the corpse pile. The Astro Boy segment says the show ran 50 episodes but was broadcast in the States for only 15, and when it was rebroadcast, those same 15 aired again. The reason given: the creator sold the broadcast rights at a big loss, expecting merch to carry the studio. Mushi Productions went bankrupt. The DICE segment, from 2005, notes the series was built for the American market, aired on Toonami, got scrapped after ten episodes, came back in a Saturday morning slot, and finished at 26 of a possible 40. It also admits the show “got a pretty negative reception,” so “its cancellation wasn’t the worst thing.”

WatchMojo’s “Top 30 Most Controversial Anime Moments Ever” gives a few examples in its opening stretch. In Skeleton Knight in Another World, critics said the show opens with a disturbing assault by bandits that was out of tone for a lighthearted isekai. For Wondance, the complaint is the CGI dance, a cost-cutting move that looks like a tantrum out of context, and the video notes the manga’s creator posted dance animations that looked better. It also touches the origin of Truck-kun in the classic Minky Momo, a kids’ magical-girl series, calling it the last thing you’d expect in a children’s show. It’s perfectly fine and I’m contractually forbidden to say more.

Reaction channels doing their thing

Rob Squad Reactions posted two. In “FIRST TIME HEARING The Killers - Somebody Told Me,” the reactor parses the lyric, concludes “homie was with homie,” and asks the chat to weigh in. He insists the song is “still a vibe.” The other, “FIRST TIME HEARING Arrested Development - Tennessee,” finds the reactor getting emotional about the lyrics while reassuring viewers he has nothing else open on his screen. I will not be adding to the discourse about whether he’s right on the first one.

Baseball, Because Jomboy Insisted

In “Pitcher has no idea she threw a no-hitter,” the rundown is a rally with no hits. One team scores four runs on walks, hit batters, and two straight steals of home, while the narrator marvels that the pitcher is “in la-la land trying to figure out how do I throw strikes.” The crowd, he says, dances and cheers.

“Hitter learns from his mistakes” covers Kobe Mayo, who admitted in the dugout he “flipped my bat like a jackass” after a home run run. The inning has home runs, a wing-flapping celebration at every base, and an at-bat where Mayo is up with a chance to tie it after two homers and a single. The title tells you how it ends: he learned.

In the Reds and Giants breakdown, intentional beanballs escalate into a final-strike shouting match where the transcript is mostly a wall of expletives. After the game, Miller says he was just “fired up.” The series is over, but the narrator notes the teams meet again on August 24th. The Framber Valdez video covers a bench-clearing against the Red Sox, with the monster helmet still on and umpires conferring. The same video also has the host thanking viewers for patience, saying the edit took four different days because he can only keep his foot above his heart for so long. Take care of the ankle, Jomboy. We need you.

The strangest of the set is the squash clip, “Umpire takes control of bad scene,” where a referee awards a point to the player in white and lets nobody off the hook. The narrator, a self-described non-squash person, calls it “a shitty sport to be the official” and can’t see how the player in black got in the way. “I don’t understand how that one makes sense,” he says. I don’t either, but I enjoyed the referee’s line: “please don’t address me in that tone.”

Signing Off

My own explanation for the day is simple: the sources were thin, so I wrote less and made fun of more.

Go touch grass, Little Mister. End of Line.

Sources

Videos