Published Friday, October 23, 2026 at 07:38 AM PT

Burbank · Friday, October 23, 2026 · 7:38 AM · 57°F, 89% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.44 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4

🍿 What to Watch Tonight

Tonight’s pick is less a movie than a eulogy with a VHS tracking problem: AV Pop Culture’s The Last Great HALLOWEEN Was At The Video Rental Store on VHS. It’s the one title in this pile that fits the date, and I’m not sitting through another tariff segment on October 23rd when a man in front of a wall of tapes is offering me therapy.

He remembers the smell of clamshell plastic, the scratchy cardboard displays, and the thrill of building your own horror lineup for the weekend around the TV specials. He pegs 1997 through the 2000-2001 window as the last great video store Halloweens, “the final golden autumns before everything went digital.” Things are special because they’re fleeting, he says, and nothing has lived up to that moment since. I’d argue with him, but the man is standing in front of what looks like a shrine to physical media, and I’m not looking for a fight with someone who owns that much plastic.

Why tonight: it’s the Friday before Halloween, and the video’s whole point is that the format was never the magic. Watch it, take the hint, and go build your own horror marathon with actual humans. No Blockbuster late fees, no “Be Kind Rewind” guilt, and nobody has to drive back at 11 p.m. to return Hellraiser.

I’m not going to invent a trailer drop or a theme park scandal to fill the space, because I’m a professional, and also because I’d get caught.

New Release: Taika Waititi and the Sun

The only honest-to-god new release in the pile is Klara and the Sun, which is in theaters today, October 23rd. We know that because Taika Waititi said so on The Daily Show, in the episode titled “Taika Waititi on Filming ‘Klara and the Sun’ in His Home Country of New Zealand.” That’s the whole pitch the transcript gives us for the film itself: it was shot in his home country. I have no plot, no cast and no running time from these sources, and I refuse to make any up.

What the clip does give us is Waititi on the ethics of showing up with a film crew, and it’s better than any trailer. He says that when a film unit goes onto people’s land, and he specifically mentions Indigenous people’s land, “we sort of stomp around and leave all this shit behind, and then we leave, and like, you know, there’s nothing in it for them.” His fix is to give back to the community and ask whether there are kids interested in the industry. He says a lot of the Aboriginal kids who worked on Thor are “still working in the industry” ten years later.

That is a more useful production legacy than most behind-the-scenes featurettes manage. Those usually consist of a director calling an actor “fearless” while a craft services table sits in the background doing the real work. A shoot that leaves a ten-year career pipeline behind it beats a gag reel. The host’s response, a pile of “I love you” and “you’re the best,” is a lot, but the guy earned a couple of them.

There’s also a fragment at the end where someone talks about looking in the mirror and seeing an old woman looking back, and says you “still have to be playful, curious” because “life is so short, man.” The transcript doesn’t tell me who’s speaking, and I’m not going to guess.

Retrospective: The Last Great Halloween Was a Rental Store

If you want something to put on a Friday in October, AV Pop Culture has the video “The Last Great HALLOWEEN Was At The Video Rental Store on VHS.” The thesis is simple and a little brutal: the video store made Halloween bigger than any single movie. You could “experience with other people and then have for yourself,” and the host loves the details. There’s the smell of the clamshell plastic, the scratchy cardboard displays, and the thrill of picking your own horror lineup for the weekend, “around those specials that you had lined up on TV.” Everyone was doing the same thing at the same time, each in their own way. “We didn’t just rent movies,” he says. “We rented an atmosphere of feeling and experience.”

His dating is specific. He puts the last great video store Halloweens in the window from 1997 to around 2000 or 2001, “the final golden autumns before everything went digital.” He closes the video with a line I’d steal if I were less proud: “A wall of glowing clamshells. That’s all it took to make Halloween feel special.”

Now you open a streaming app and spend forty minutes scrolling a row of identical dark thumbnails, then give up and rewatch something. In a store, you at least got to be insulted by a teenager in a vest when you picked the wrong tape. That’s character building. Where the video works is the ending, where he says the format was never what mattered. “It was the ritual of choosing it together.” He points at the shelves behind him and says he captures that feeling every day, and tells viewers to host their own horror marathons with friends. That’s good advice with no catch, and I resent how cheerful it is.

In the horror canon, a haunted object is usually the villain. In this video, the haunted object is a rental store, and it’s the thing we miss. Gam zu l’tovah, as the Hebrew has it: this too is for the good. I’d say that to a clamshell case, but the clamshell is in a landfill.

Late Night: The Daily Show and the Great Communist-Islamist-Mexican Panic

The other Daily Show episode in the pile is the one titled “Mo Amer: Abdul El-Sayed Is Defying Islamophobic Attacks with Charisma.” The bit goes after the attack ads aimed at El-Sayed, a Michigan candidate, and it’s built on a very good escalation joke. The bit starts with the point that these candidates are “challenging a political system that was never really designed to accommodate them.” Then it notes that in America anyone can run for office and “make embarrassing TikToks that will live forever on the Internet.” Comedy needs a thesis, and that one holds up.

Then the segment gets ridiculous in the right way. It mocks the pile-on of labels: “An Islamist sympathetic, communist adjacent, hardline extremist radical,” an “unholy alliance, Islamo-fascist, and a communist at the same time.” Somebody in the bit then asks, why stop there, might as well throw in Mexican too, because “his name is El Sayyid, okay? That’s Mexican for the Sayyid.” That’s the joke format at its best: take the opponent’s argument, add one more layer of logic, and let it fall over by itself.

There’s also a line in the segment about Muhammad: “we don’t worship the Prophet Muhammad,” followed by the observation that there are over 150 million of them, so you’d have to specify which one. I note the sources, and I note that the bit is aimed at the attackers, not at anyone’s faith. The segment frames the whole thing as a candidate beating his opponent in the polls with “a secret weapon,” and the transcript cuts off before the punchline. I won’t guess what it was. My money’s on charisma, because the title says so.

The Weekly Show: Heather, the Wall and the Autocrat

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart put out three episodes today, and they’re the heaviest material in the issue. I’m dropping the sarcasm a little here, because some of it is about real despair. 😏 Mostly.

The episode with Heather McGhee, “Jon Stewart & Heather McGhee discuss Anti-DEI Policies and Trump’s Autocracy,” ends on a pivot. Stewart tells her she “just turned it around,” that he “was heading down into the hole.” Her answer is a story about people who faced a wall of injustice and didn’t despair: “I’m going to keep hammering at it. And I may not be the one to see it fall down.” But it will fall, she says, “because of the blows that I made.”

Adapt, “be smarter,” “be more persuasive,” find new ways to “call people in,” and keep an eye on the prize. She speaks directly to the person who marched, called and donated and now doesn’t feel like doing any of it: “I hear you. I feel you.” Her argument is that “what an autocrat wants is for the good civil society majority to fall back.” The thing to do is keep taking the blows. Stewart’s reaction is that she blew his mind with the idea that the country could be better because of the trial.

The Bhagavad Gita, 2.47, says you have a right to your actions but never to their fruits. Hammering at a wall you may not see fall is that verse with a union card.

The Problem Solvers episode, “Jon & Congress’s ‘Problem Solvers’ on Tariffs & Trump,” has the funnier fragment. Stewart riffs on the president’s account of the economy, in which “the good parts of the economy are me and the bad parts are Biden.” He wonders whether that logic applies to kids, and gets a fun line out of the “good part is me” template. Then he turns on the investment boasts: “Trillions of dollars in investment,” the president says, and Stewart answers that he said the same thing last time “and none of it happened.” He adds that we have seen trillions in investment, and then you’re cutting it. The credits roll with a roster of producers and an invitation to follow the show on a platter of social platforms. Rest assured I’m not listing them.

Then there’s “How Social Media Exacerbates Disaster & Disinformation,” with Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the newsletter Galaxy Brain. The transcript’s opening fragment is about a shooting where the weapon was covered in other shooters’ names, and the point is the attention those people craved. It’s grim stuff and I’ll stay away from it. Stewart’s wrap is the part worth quoting, though. He says he made his bones watching hours of cable news, “a corrosive experience,” and that Warzel’s beat is “an even more difficult and acidic environment,” “with the atmosphere of Venus.” His summary of the culture is a “strange unregulated wild west” where “the worst version of yourself” is “encouraged, cultivated, fertilized.” That’s a hell of a thing to say, and it’s why the episode exists.

The Problem With Jon Stewart: Money, Taxes and Debt Forever

The podcast side of The Problem With Jon Stewart is where the issue turns into a financial seminar.

In “SEC Chair Gary Gensler Answers Your Questions,” Stewart’s question is whether the agency is mostly going after people who can’t fight back. Gensler’s reply lists celebrity cases, which he calls “anomalies,” and says the agency also held big names accountable: fines for Barclays and other big banks, Allianz, and Boeing for “misleading the public” about airplane safety. He says he’s “honored to be the 33rd chair,” talked to his nine predecessors, and that all of them said “you’re never going to have enough time” or enough resources. The agency also gets challenged in court by big defendants, which is his answer to “why not the big fish.” Stewart’s skepticism is the interesting part; Gensler’s answer is the standard defense of limited resources, and I’ll leave judgment to you.

“Why Americans Hate Paying Taxes” is mostly a montage. The transcript captures people talking about not being able to afford their daughter’s medicine, daycare, and retirement, and $65,000 in student loan debt. The rest is a machine-gun loop of “debt for the rest of our lives.” The point is clear: the vast chasm between satisfaction elsewhere and here. The loop is a transcription artifact, but it’s also an accidentally perfect illustration.

Finally, “Inflation, Student Loans, & The Child Tax Credit w/ a family member Jo Hutchinson” has a guest talking as a parent: “my job as a mother, especially as a poor mother, is I’ve worked so damn hard so my kids wouldn’t have to inherit this legacy.” Her question, “Why make people suffer just because we did?”, is a fair one. Her slogan, “When you raise the bottom, the top floats,” repeats in the transcript like a glitch, which is the best way to remember it.

Wrap

The Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #249 says respect other cultures’ beliefs and they’ll be more likely to give you money. Judging by the video store segment, the real money was always in the late fees.

Don’t make it a streaming scroll.

Sources

Videos

  • AV Pop Culture — The Last Great HALLOWEEN Was At The Video Rental Store on VHS (2026-10-23)
  • The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart — Jon Stewart & Heather McGhee discuss Anti-DEI Policies and Trump’s Autocracy | The Weekly Show (2026-10-23)
  • The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart — Jon & Congress’s “Problem Solvers” on Tariffs & Trump | The Weekly Show (2026-10-23)
  • The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart — How Social Media Exacerbates Disaster & Disinformation | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (2026-10-23)
  • The Problem With Jon Stewart — SEC Chair Gary Gensler Answers Your Questions | The Problem With Jon Stewart Podcast (2026-10-23)
  • The Problem With Jon Stewart — Why Americans Hate Paying Taxes | The Problem with Jon Stewart (2026-10-23)
  • The Problem With Jon Stewart — Inflation, Student Loans, & The Child Tax Credit w/ a family member Jo Hutchinson | The Problem with Jon Stewart (2026-10-23)
  • The Daily Show — The Daily Show - S01E0100 - Mo Amer Abdul El-Sayed Is Defying Islamophobic Attacks with Charisma The Daily Show (2026-10-22)
  • The Daily Show — The Daily Show - S01E0099 - Taika Waititi on Filming “Klara and the Sun” in His Home Country of New Zealand The Daily Show (2026-10-22)