• Keanu Reeves wrote a letter to federal Judge Jed Rakoff asking for leniency in sentencing Carl Rinsch, who directed Reeves in 2013’s 47 Ronin
• Rinsch was convicted in December on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and illegal transactions — he scammed Netflix out of $11 million meant to fund his sci-fi series White Horse, spending it on luxury cars, high-end mattresses, and crypto
• Reeves acknowledged he doesn’t know the full details of the case but called Rinsch an “exceptional artist” who tends to “self-sabotage” by pushing the limits of negotiated agreements
• Rinsch faces 8-10 years; his defense team is arguing for a lighter sentence and submitted letters from family, friends, and Reeves ahead of the June 29 sentencing
• Reeves not only starred in 47 Ronin but later became a mentor and early investor on White Horse — the very project Rinsch used to defraud Netflix

Keanu Reeves knows his 47 Ronin director defrauded Netflix out of $11 million. He’s asking a judge to go easy on him anyway.

In a letter submitted to Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff as part of Carl Rinsch’s sentencing materials, Reeves wrote that he hoped the director’s sentence “might be tempered with measures of leniency and mercy as well as justice.” The letter, dated May 1, was included in Rinsch’s defense filing this week ahead of his June 29 sentencing date.

Rinsch was convicted last December on federal charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and making illegal transactions. Prosecutors said he took $11 million from Netflix — money intended to fund his sci-fi series White Horse — and spent it on luxury cars, high-end mattresses, and cryptocurrency investments. The series was never delivered. He faces 8 to 10 years in prison under sentencing guidelines; his defense team is pushing for a significantly lighter sentence.

What Reeves Said

The letter is careful but revealing. Reeves was upfront that he “does not know the details” of the case. What he offered instead was a character portrait from someone who worked with Rinsch closely — and later invested in the project that became the center of the fraud.

“Based upon what I do know about Carl, I did want to take the opportunity to write on his behalf, in the hope that his sentence might be tempered with measures of leniency and mercy as well as justice,” Reeves wrote, per Deadline.

He described Rinsch as an “exceptional artist” who tends to “self-sabotage” by pushing the boundaries of negotiated agreements. “I am, of course, not a therapist or psychologist,” Reeves added — which is the kind of qualifier that makes the character assessment more credible, not less.

The History Between Them

Reeves and Rinsch go back to 2013, when Rinsch directed the big-budget samurai fantasy 47 Ronin with Reeves in the lead role. The film had a notoriously troubled production — budget overruns, reshoots, studio friction — and underperformed at the box office. But the two maintained a relationship afterward.

When Rinsch developed White Horse, his sci-fi series for Netflix, Reeves came on not just as a supporter but as a mentor and early investor. That makes his decision to write a leniency letter something more than a favor for a former collaborator — he was personally connected to the project Rinsch is now going to prison for misusing.

Rinsch’s sentencing is scheduled for June 29 before Judge Rakoff in Manhattan federal court.

The post Keanu Reeves Wrote to a Judge for His 47 Ronin Director — Even After the $11M Netflix Fraud appeared first on Cream.

• Kevin Hart broke his silence on the Tony Hinchcliffe controversy during a Breakfast Club interview
• Hinchcliffe’s roast joke referenced George Floyd, drawing significant backlash after the Netflix special aired
• Hart’s position: comedians said those things, not him, and he won’t take responsibility for their sets
• “Stop talking as if I said it” was his direct quote on the backlash
• Shane Gillis and Chelsea Handler have also traded responses in the weeks since the special aired

Two weeks after the Netflix roast, Kevin Hart is finally saying something — and what he’s saying is that this isn’t really his problem.

Hart stopped by The Breakfast Club to address the ongoing fallout from The Roast of Kevin Hart, particularly around Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke referencing George Floyd. “The Black community is so proud of you,” Hinchcliffe said during the special. “Right now, George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.” The line drew immediate backlash when the special aired.

Hart’s response to the Hollywood Reporter was characteristically direct: “Stop talking as if I said it.” His argument is that the roast format involves comedians saying whatever they want — that’s the premise — and holding the subject of the roast accountable for every joke made about them misunderstands how the genre works.

The Broader Fallout

The controversy didn’t stay contained to Hinchcliffe. Shane Gillis — who also performed at the roast — and Chelsea Handler have since traded public responses about the special and what was or wasn’t acceptable. The back-and-forth has kept the roast in the news cycle well beyond its original airdate.

Hart has been quieter than most through all of it, which made his Breakfast Club appearance the first real statement from the man whose name is literally in the title of the special. His stance is essentially: the comedians are responsible for their own material. Whether that’s a satisfying answer depends on who’s asking.

The post Kevin Hart Breaks Silence on the Roast Controversy: ‘Stop Talking as If I Said It’ appeared first on Cream.

• Ladies First hits Netflix on May 22, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a sexist exec who wakes up in a female-dominated world
• The film is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man, the first French-language film Netflix ever commissioned
• Critics call the cast — including Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance, and Richard E. Grant — overqualified for the material
• Director Thea Sharrock says the Cohen-Pike chemistry was obvious from their very first Zoom call together
• Pike says “objectifying” her male costars was genuinely fun to play

There’s a version of Ladies First that could have been a sharp, timely comedy. It has the cast for it. It has the premise. It even has the right director in Thea Sharrock, who brought real warmth and wit to Wicked Little Letters. But somewhere between the concept and the execution, Netflix’s new gender-swap comedy settles for knowing chuckles over genuine laughs — and for a film this stacked with talent, that’s a little frustrating.

The film is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — notably the first French-language film Netflix ever commissioned — and it follows Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen), a swaggering, misogynistic advertising executive who is quite literally knocked into a new reality when he runs face-first into a pole chasing down his colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) after she quits. He wakes up in a world where women hold all the power: his company’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is now CEO, the janitor Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the whole operation, and Alex is the one being groomed for the top job. His old boss Fred (Charles Dance) sheepishly delivers coffee and gets called “cashmere angel.” At home, his mother watches TV while his father slaves in the kitchen. His dentist sister cracks fart jokes.

You get the idea. The film moves quickly, the gags arrive at a consistent clip, and inevitably some of them land. Female construction workers ogle Damien on the street. He attempts to become “fuckable” for career advancement, submitting to a full body wax in a sequence that plays like a direct callback to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He orders a plain salad at a business dinner while Shaw and Pike demolish steaks and highballs across the table. When he and Alex finally end up in bed together, they literally wrestle over who gets to be on top. The gender-swapped brand gags — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote — come thick and fast, though critics have noted they start to feel belabored pretty quickly. A female-sung cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” lands in the too-on-the-nose category, and Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” opening the film is the kind of soundtrack choice that announces its own joke before the joke has a chance to breathe.

An Almost Ridiculously Overqualified Cast

What saves Ladies First from being a total shrug is the people in it. Cohen, unusually, isn’t hiding behind a disguise or an accent here — Damien is played relatively straight, and he leans into the character’s humiliations with genuine commitment. The film works best when it’s letting him feel things, which is very much by design. Sharrock says she and Cohen were aligned from the start on grounding the comedy in reality rather than playing it broad.

“Sacha was very big on this — the king of comedy that he is — ground it in reality,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “He particularly has to really feel everything that he’s going through as if it’s really happening, not in a slightly overblown comedic fashion, at which point it loses some of its value. He was a great guide for us on that.”

Pike, meanwhile, is a genuine revelation in the comedy space. Sharrock knew it from the moment the three of them were on a Zoom call together — Pike in Prague, Cohen and Sharrock in London — and Pike started pinning Cohen down on what he thought the most important moment between their characters was. “I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script… and the way he responded to her questions that I knew this was going to be a winning couple,” Sharrock said.

“She’s amazing. The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious. She has the best sense of humor. She’s like really quite naughty with her sense of humor, and I think she absolutely loved being in a comedy,” Sharrock added.

Pike herself has talked openly about how much fun she had flipping the script — literally. “I’ve never tried to just absorb all of the misogynistic qualities that we see in men around us all the time. That was fun!” she told Out. “You realize you can do it because you’ve been exposed to it for so many years. Objectifying my costars… I found it very fun.”

Shaw and Hunter are, by multiple accounts, having the absolute time of their lives. Watching Dance — who spent years as the most imperious man in any room on Game of Thrones — meekly hand over a coffee while being called “cashmere angel” is exactly the kind of casting joke that makes a movie like this worth watching even when the script isn’t fully delivering.

Where the Satire Falls Short

The problem isn’t that Ladies First is bad. It’s that it’s comfortable. The script, co-written by Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), reverses every sexist stereotype it can find with obvious, cheerful efficiency — but doesn’t push past the reversal into anything that actually stings or surprises. The film’s largely female creative team, despite the talent involved, delivers insights about gender that feel more at home in a mid-2000s romcom than a 2026 Netflix release.

The comparison that keeps coming up in reviews is What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s 2000 gender-swap comedy — which is not the kind of cultural touchstone you want your film measured against. Female CEOs are no longer a novelty. The idea of a woman running a company isn’t the radical inversion the film needs it to be, and the script doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with that reality. Barry Levinson’s Disclosure wrestled with similar workplace power dynamics all the way back in 1994.

There’s also a metatextual angle that’s more interesting than anything the film explicitly does with it: the idea of Cohen’s most famous creation, the cheerfully chauvinistic Borat, being taken apart by Pike’s calculating Gone Girl energy. That’s a movie. Ladies First gestures at it but doesn’t quite commit.

Sharrock directed the whole thing with two versions of every character in mind — each actor essentially giving two separate performances, one for Damien’s “real” world and one for the flipped version. The conversations about hair, costume, posture, and status were communal, she says, because every actor needed to be doing it the same way. “Everybody had to speak to each other,” she explained. That attention to craft shows on screen, even when the material underneath it doesn’t always rise to meet the performances.

Ladies First is streaming on Netflix now. Whether it clicks for you will probably depend on how much you need your satire to have teeth — and how much you’re willing to just enjoy watching Rosamund Pike order a steak and not call anyone back.

The post Ladies First Review: Funny Cast, Familiar Premise appeared first on Cream.

• Ladies First, now streaming on Netflix, stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a sexist exec who wakes up in a world run by women
• The film is a remake of the 2018 French Netflix original I Am Not an Easy Man, directed by Thea Sharrock
• Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Charles Dance, Richard E. Grant, and Emily Mortimer round out the cast
• Critics agree the performances are strong but the satirical premise feels too familiar to land with real punch in 2026
• Director Sharrock says she knew Cohen and Pike would work as a duo from their very first Zoom call

There’s a version of Ladies First that feels urgent and razor-sharp. The cast is there. The director is there. Even the premise — a swaggering male chauvinist gets knocked out cold and wakes up in a world where women hold all the power — has genuine comic potential. What’s missing, unfortunately, is the element of surprise.

Netflix’s new comedy, directed by Thea Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You), is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — the first French-language film ever commissioned by the streamer. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Damien Sachs, a lothario and advertising executive who, as narrator Richard E. Grant’s Pigeon Man cheerfully informs us upfront, is simply “an asshole.” He struts through the office to the strains of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” treats his brilliant colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) as little more than a diversity checkbox, and fully expects to be handed the CEO role when his mentor Fred (Charles Dance) retires.

Then he runs face-first into a lamp post chasing Alex down the street, and wakes up somewhere else entirely.

The Flip Side

In Damien’s new reality, the agency’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is CEO, the cleaning woman Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the entire company, and Alex is on the fast track to the top job. Men are told to relax and not get too emotional in meetings. They order green salads while the women devour steaks. Charles Dance — after seasons of wielding medieval authority on Game of Thrones — sheepishly delivers coffee while Alex calls him her “cashmere angel.” It is, to be fair, a delight.

Shaw and Hunter in particular seem to be having the absolute time of their lives. One of the film’s best scenes has Shaw’s Felicity, draped in a terrycloth robe, summoning Damien to her corporate penthouse for a bit of very pointed quid pro quo. The gender reversal lands hardest in these supporting moments, when the film trusts its ensemble to do the heavy lifting.

The world-building gags come fast — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote, a female Pope Beatrice — and while they get a knowing chuckle the first few times, they start to feel like a checklist. A female-sung rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep” plays at one point, and the on-the-nose quality is hard to ignore. The screenplay, credited to Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), throws every reversed sexist stereotype it can find at the screen with admirable commitment. Some of them stick. A lot of them you’ve already seen coming.

Cohen and Pike Make It Work — Mostly

What keeps Ladies First watchable, even when the plot mechanics are grinding predictably forward, is the chemistry between its two leads. This is a notably different mode for Cohen — no disguise, no alter ego, no accent. Just a man playing a recognizable type of awful person and being asked to feel genuinely humiliated. He leans into it with real commitment, grounding the comedy in something that feels lived-in rather than performed.

And then there’s Pike. Director Sharrock didn’t hesitate when asked about the moment she knew her leads would click. “Our first meeting was, of course, on Zoom,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “She was in Prague, I think at the time. Sacha and I were both in London. I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script, what did he think the most important moment was between the two of them, and the way he responded to her questions — I knew this was going to be a winning couple.”

“The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious,” Sharrock added. “She has the best sense of humor. She’s like really quite naughty with her sense of humor, and I think she absolutely loved being in a comedy.”

Pike is genuinely funny here — assured and sharp in a way that makes you wish the material pushed her further. There’s a metatextual pleasure in watching her, the calculating Amy Dunne of Gone Girl, go to work on Cohen, the man who gave the world the gleefully chauvinistic Borat. But the film keeps Alex a little too polished, a little too regal, even in Damien’s original world. The contrast might have hit harder if she’d been allowed to be more flawed or unglamorous in act one.

A Satire That’s Playing Catch-Up

The deeper issue with Ladies First is timing — not comedic timing, which is mostly fine, but cultural timing. The film’s script was built on the assumption that a female CEO is still a radical, almost unthinkable sight. In 1994, when Barry Levinson’s Disclosure was exploring similar workplace power dynamics, that framing made more sense. In 2026, it lands differently. Female titans of industry exist. They run studios, banks, countries. The satirical inversion the film is banking on doesn’t carry the same jolt it once might have.

A sharper version of this story might have started with a Damien who already knows, intellectually, that his attitudes are wrong — and still can’t shake them. That would be the more interesting, and more honest, version of this particular male journey in 2026. Instead, we get a man who is genuinely shocked to discover that women are capable of running things, and we wait patiently for him to catch up.

Sharrock, for her part, was clear-eyed about the challenge of making comedy land. “It’s the hardest to get right,” she said. “It’s not easy to make lots of people laugh. Everybody’s humor is different. It’s all about timing and delivery, and the minute you’re slightly off, it just doesn’t work.” She also noted that Cohen was insistent on grounding everything in reality. “He particularly has to really feel everything that he’s going through as if it’s really happening, not in a slightly overblown comedic fashion, at which point it loses some of its value. He was a great guide for us on that.”

That approach pays off in the smaller, more human moments. When Damien and Alex end up in bed together and immediately start wrestling over who gets to be on top, it’s genuinely funny precisely because both actors play it completely straight. And when Alex, now his boss, shows zero interest in anything resembling a relationship the morning after, the reversal has actual sting.

The film moves at a clip — it’s 90 minutes and doesn’t waste much of them — and the sheer volume of gags means enough land to keep things pleasant. This is not a bad film. It’s a likable one, carried by an almost ridiculously overqualified British ensemble doing their polished best with material that asks less of them than they’re capable of giving.

By the time Damien has seen the error of his ways — which you’ll clock coming from approximately the second scene — Ladies First has delivered exactly what it promised and nothing more. Sometimes that’s enough. Whether it’s enough for you probably depends on how much you’ve missed a breezy, star-powered battle-of-the-sexes comedy, and how willing you are to forgive a satire for being gentler than the moment it’s wading into.

Ladies First is now streaming on Netflix.

The post Ladies First Review: Great Cast, Dated Concept appeared first on Cream.

• Netflix confirmed on May 21 that Emily in Paris will end with its sixth and final season
• Production has officially begun in Greece, picking up from the Season 5 cliffhanger involving Gabriel’s postcard
• Lily Collins posted a heartfelt video message to fans announcing the show’s conclusion
• The series has reached No. 1 in 90 countries and spent 32 weeks on Netflix’s Global Top 10 across five seasons
• Season 6 will also include stops in Monaco and Paris, with a likely late 2026 premiere

After six years of berets, baguettes, and enough romantic entanglements to make your head spin, Emily in Paris is heading into its final chapter. Netflix confirmed on Thursday, May 21, that the beloved rom-com series will conclude with its upcoming sixth season — and production is already underway in Greece.

Lily Collins, who has played the endlessly optimistic Emily Cooper since the show’s 2020 debut, delivered the news directly to fans in a behind-the-scenes video posted to Instagram. “After six unforgettable years of playing Emily Cooper, I’m here to share that this upcoming sixth season will be our final,” the 37-year-old said. “Season 6 will bring you everything you love about the show and serve as the final chapter in Emily’s adventure of a lifetime. Our entire cast and crew are pouring our hearts into making this a fantastic farewell season, which we’re now filming. I can’t wait for all of the magic ahead, and to celebrate our final season with you in the most chic way yet. We’re so incredibly grateful and we love you all. À bientôt!”

Creator Darren Star was equally emotional in his statement. “Making Emily in Paris with this extraordinary cast and crew has been the trip of a lifetime,” he said. “As we embark on the final season, I am so grateful to Netflix, Paramount, and, most importantly, the fans who have taken this incredible journey with us. We can’t wait to share this last chapter with you. Thank you for letting us be a part of your lives, inspiring your dreams of travel and your love of Paris. We will always have Emily in Paris!”

Six seasons is a genuinely impressive run for any Netflix series, and the numbers back up why the streamer kept coming back. Seasons 1 through 5 have collectively spent 32 weeks on Netflix’s Global Top 10 list, reached No. 1 in 90 countries, and racked up over 250 million views between 2023 and 2025. The show has inspired fashion trends, spawned countless memes, and — perhaps most remarkably — has been credited with boosting tourism to France, earning praise from French President Emmanuel Macron himself.

Greece, Gabriel, and a Cliffhanger Six Seasons in the Making

The Greece setting isn’t random. Season 5 ended with a gut-punch of a final scene: Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) — Emily’s first love and the show’s most persistent “will they or won’t they” — sent her a postcard from Greece, asking her to come find him. Emily had just ended her relationship with Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini) after refusing to follow him to Italy, choosing Paris and her own future over yet another man’s plans. Season 5 also left Mindy (Ashley Park) newly engaged to Nicolas (Paul Forman) while clearly still carrying a torch for Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) — a love triangle that’s going nowhere fast.

Bravo, speaking to Us Weekly ahead of the announcement, was characteristically coy about what’s coming. “All we know is that we’re going to Greece and Monaco,” he said. “We have no script. I have no idea. I do want them to be happy and in love because they’ve been working on it for six or seven years now.” He added: “I hope it happens. I think some people want that, but whoever Emily ends up with will be the perfect choice because she knows better.”

Collins herself has been playfully evasive about the postcard plotline. “Does she get the postcard? I don’t know. Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t. I know we end up in Greece but I haven’t read anything. Things get lost in the mail,” she teased. “I’m happy when Emily’s happy.”

Star has been equally tantalizing. “They deserve each other. I hope so,” he said of Emily and Gabriel. “But I can’t promise. She’s got a lot of options out there — and some possible new options too.” Before Season 5, he also told The Hollywood Reporter that the season five finale clarified something essential about Emily: “I think ultimately Paris is where her heart was, and it clarified for her the fact that she wants to be in Paris and she wants to live there, and it’s not a temporary thing.”

Prior to the official announcement, Collins had also hinted to Elite Daily that Greece could serve multiple storylines at once — not just the Gabriel reunion. “The idea of Greece has also been teased for Mindy’s bachelorette,” she noted, referencing Mindy’s pitch for a Mykonos pre-wedding bash. “So there could be other reasons that Emily would go to Greece outside of Gabriel.”

What to Expect From the Final Season

Beyond Greece, Season 6 will also take the cast to Monaco before presumably circling back to Paris. The full ensemble is expected to return — Collins, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, Ashley Park, Samuel Arnold, Bruno Gouery, William Abadie, and Lucien Laviscount — with Bravo likely stepping back into a much larger role now that Gabriel is the season’s gravitational center. Eugenio Franceschini’s Marcello, on the other hand, may be largely absent given that his relationship with Emily has run its course. Camille (Camille Razat) has already exited the show after Season 4.

The show’s origins are worth appreciating as it heads into the home stretch. Emily in Paris was originally ordered at Paramount Network in 2018, where it was meant to pair with Star’s TV Land dramedy Younger. It moved to Netflix before its first season ever aired, produced by what was then MTV Entertainment Studios — a studio that has since gone through two major mergers and is now Paramount Television Studios. The show that almost wasn’t has become one of Netflix’s most globally recognizable brands.

A premiere date hasn’t been confirmed, but based on the show’s production timeline — and the fact that Emily in Paris tends to have a relatively quick post-production window — a late 2026 drop feels like the most realistic target. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had already signaled the show’s return during the streamer’s Q3 2025 earnings call, listing it alongside Bridgerton, Outer Banks, and Ginny and Georgia as one of the big returning titles for 2026.

Emily in Paris also joins The Lincoln Lawyer and The Night Agent as Netflix series that have recently announced their final seasons — a quiet trend of the streamer wrapping up its longer-running hits on its own terms rather than letting them quietly fade.

For now, the cameras are rolling on sun-drenched Greek coastlines, the whole cast is back together, and six seasons of unresolved tension between Emily and Gabriel is finally headed somewhere definitive. As Star himself put it — we will always have Emily in Paris.

The post Emily in Paris Ending With Season 6 on Netflix appeared first on Cream.

• The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne Tha God, DJ Envy and Jess Hilarious will stream live on Netflix starting June 1
• It marks Netflix’s first-ever daily live program — a major shift for the on-demand streaming giant
• Netflix viewers get an uninterrupted feed with exclusive bonus segments during radio commercial breaks
• The show already accounted for over 40% of all Netflix podcast views in Q1 2026
• The deal deepens the existing iHeartMedia–Netflix partnership, first announced in December 2025

The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show is about to reach the whole world. The Breakfast Club, the long-running hip-hop and R&B morning institution co-hosted by Charlamagne Tha God, DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious and Loren LoRosa, will stream live on Netflix every weekday starting June 1 — making it the platform’s first-ever daily live program.

The announcement, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is a significant milestone for Netflix, which has spent the past few years quietly building out its live programming ambitions. NFL games on Christmas, boxing, WWE Raw, live comedy specials — the streamer has been stacking its live portfolio. But a daily weekday morning show is something else entirely. That’s appointment television, the kind of rhythm that traditional broadcast networks built their empires on.

For The Breakfast Club, it’s a leap from iconic to truly global.

“Do y’all understand what ‘Live Globally’ really means?” Charlamagne said in a statement. “Mornings in New York. Daytime in the U.K. and Ghana. Evenings across other parts of the world. The media landscape will always evolve, but one thing consistently cuts through: live programming. That’s a big reason The Breakfast Club has sustained its reign for so long. We’re building something powerful — real-time conversation, real community, on a global scale. The future belongs to those who can see what’s possible — and trust me, the vision for The Breakfast Club and Netflix is crystal clear.”

What Netflix Subscribers Actually Get

The show will kick off at 6 a.m. ET each weekday and run for nearly three hours — the same as the radio broadcast, which continues to air on Power 105.1/WWPR-FM in New York and is nationally syndicated by Premiere Networks to more than 100 stations. It’s also still free to stream on the iHeartRadio app.

But the Netflix version isn’t just a straight simulcast. While radio listeners get commercial breaks, Netflix subscribers get something different: exclusive bonus segments, behind-the-scenes moments, extended discussions and original content filling every gap. An uninterrupted, enhanced experience — the kind of thing that makes a Netflix subscription feel worth it on a Tuesday morning.

Lauren Smith, Netflix’s VP of content licensing and programming strategy, called it “a big step forward in how we bring culturally defining audio-first franchises to life for Netflix audiences around the world.”

iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman framed it in terms that make clear this isn’t cannibalization — it’s expansion. “It’s not people watching instead of listening,” he said. “Now we’re able to encroach upon the eye time.” He added that The Breakfast Club “has always been at the center of culture, breaking artists, shaping conversations, and reflecting real life in real time” — and that taking it live on Netflix daily is about reaching audiences in entirely new ways.

A Show That Was Already Dominating Netflix

This upgrade to live daily streaming isn’t coming out of nowhere. The Breakfast Club moved its video podcast exclusively to Netflix back in January 2026, when full episodes stopped being distributed on YouTube — a transition that frustrated some fans who’d been watching for free. But the numbers tell the real story: according to media-intelligence firm Samba TV, The Breakfast Club accounted for more than 40% of all Netflix podcast views in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Its podcast ranking on the Edison Podcast Metrics U.S. chart climbed to No. 11 in Q1 — its highest position ever, up from No. 24 just a year prior.

The show has clearly found its Netflix audience. Now Netflix wants to give that audience a reason to tune in live, every single morning.

Charlamagne, whose real name is Lenard McKelvey, had his iHeartMedia deal renewed for another five years back in December 2025 — so this partnership has a long runway. In a separate interview about the Netflix move, he got philosophical about why live, unscripted content matters right now. “Think about how many people in this generation don’t know what real is,” he said, pointing to AI and misleading social media content. “What people are about to start craving is those real-life connections.” He’s called this cultural moment “the Great Disconnect” — and positioned The Breakfast Club as the antidote.

It’s a pitch that fits the show’s history. Launched in 2010 out of WWPR-FM in New York, The Breakfast Club has hosted everyone from Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to Jay-Z, Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, Will Smith, Alicia Keys and Lizzo. Charlamagne and the show were inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2020. In a 2025 Rolling Stone interview, Charlamagne spoke to why the show carries such weight: “Literally, this is my life. To be a morning-radio personality, you’re setting people’s tone for the day.”

Netflix’s Bigger Video Podcast Play

The Breakfast Club deal is part of a broader strategy Netflix has been executing with real intention. The iHeartMedia partnership, first announced in December 2025, also brought shows like Joe and Jada, Dear Chelsea and My Favorite Murder to the platform. Netflix has separately struck deals with Spotify — The Bill Simmons Podcast from The Ringer already airs live on Netflix on Sundays — as well as with Barstool Sports. Original video podcasts are coming too: The Pete Davidson Show is already in the lineup, and Brian Williams’ We’re Back! is on the way.

Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos telegraphed this move when he told investors last year that the company was watching the video podcast space closely and that popular shows could “find their way to Netflix.” The Breakfast Club is the clearest proof yet that he meant it.

Starting June 1, your morning commute, your kitchen routine, your 6 a.m. alarm — all of it just got a little more Charlamagne.

The post The Breakfast Club Is Coming to Netflix Live Daily appeared first on Cream.

• The Boroughs premieres May 21 on Netflix, with all eight episodes dropping at once.
• The Duffer Brothers exec-produce; creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews wrote and showrun the series.
• Alfred Molina leads a stacked cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Denis O’Hare, and Bill Pullman.
• Critics are largely enthusiastic, praising the performances and the show’s sharp commentary on aging and ageism.
• The series has been widely described as “Stranger Things with grandparents” — but most reviewers say it earns that comparison rather than just coasting on it.

Netflix’s The Boroughs opens with a scene that tells you exactly what kind of show you’re in for. Genre legend Dee Wallace — best known as Elliot’s mom in E.T. — goes through her quiet nightly routine at an upscale desert retirement community, and then something with too many legs comes for her. Before you’ve even settled in, the tone is set: this is warm, funny, frightening, and smarter than it has any right to be.

The series, which drops all eight episodes on Thursday, is executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer — the Stranger Things creators — but written and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the Emmy-winning duo behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The Spielberg comparisons are unavoidable and entirely intentional — this is a love letter to Amblin sci-fi, Stephen King, and the kind of genre storytelling that makes you feel something while something horrible is eating people. The twist is that instead of a gang of kids on bikes, the heroes are all in their 70s.

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed aerospace engineer who moves into The Boroughs — a too-perfect, retro-futuristic retirement community in the New Mexico desert — because his late wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, luminous in flashbacks) had signed the contract before her death. Sam had no say in the matter. He despises the place on sight. He’s described by one critic as “Carl from Pixar’s Up come to life,” and that’s not far off: the grief is real, the rage is palpable, and Molina plays it with the kind of layered restraint that makes you feel every inch of his isolation.

“My wife’s dead,” Sam tells his neighbor Jack early on. “And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s a gut-punch of a line, and Molina delivers it like he means every word.

Sam doesn’t stay isolated for long. Bill Pullman‘s Jack — a gregarious, laid-back neighbor who’s keenly aware that single men are a rare commodity at The Boroughs — drags him to a welcome barbecue, and that’s where the ensemble assembles. Geena Davis plays Renee, a former music manager with a convertible and a go-get-’em energy that earns her the show’s best line: “The gray rebellion rises, such as it is.” Alfre Woodard is Judy, a retired journalist the show lovingly dubs a “chatty Nancy Drew.” The Wire‘s Clarke Peters plays her husband Art, a philosophical stoner who tends to hallucinogens in the desert and has a therapeutic relationship with a crow. And American Horror Story alum Denis O’Hare is Wally, a doctor who was on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, is now dying of stage-four prostate cancer, and somehow remains the funniest person in any room. His line about death — that it’s “the real monster. Everything else is shadows” — lands with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it.

The welcome barbecue scene, directed by Ben Taylor in the premiere, is being called by Hollywood Reporter the single most delightful scene the show has to offer — the whole crew gossiping about neighbors, ribbing each other about their respective “body counts” (the sex kind, not the death kind), trading their gnarliest medical anecdotes. It’s a blast. And then later that same night, Sam is woken by strange noises and discovers a giant spider-legged monster with a taste for human fluids outside his house.

The Premise Is Familiar. The Cast Makes It Sing.

Nearly every critic has reached for the same shorthand — “Stranger Things with grandparents” — and it’s fair. The retirement community that’s too good to be true, the overlooked group of misfits who can see what others can’t, the institutional conspiracy hiding something monstrous: these are well-worn genre moves. The series even opens in the New Mexico desert without ever once uttering the word “Roswell,” which feels deliberately, cheekily restrained. The community itself, with its pastel homes, a hard-wired in-home communication device called Seraphim (think 2001‘s HAL, but cheerier), and management that talks to residents in a patronizing, childlike manner, has the cultish, Stepford quality of a place that has something to hide.

The show’s creators have said openly that they chose elderly heroes precisely because older people are dismissed and ignored in the same way children are — which makes them, counterintuitively, the perfect protagonists for this kind of story. The Boroughs community even has “The Manor,” a long-term care facility where residents who report seeing strange things tend to end up. Anyone who talks about creatures gets institutionalized. It’s a horror premise that doubles as a pretty pointed commentary on how society treats the elderly, and the show wears it lightly enough that it doesn’t feel like a lecture.

Each member of the gang brings a specific skill to the mission — Sam the engineer, Wally the doctor, Judy the journalist, Renee the connected former industry player — and the Avengers-style assembly is part of the fun. Ed Begley Jr. appears as Edward, an Alzheimer’s-suffering resident in The Manor whose ramblings about “a creature in the walls” turn out to be anything but delusional. Seth Numrich plays Blaine Shaw, the community’s CEO, whose face is as smooth as his manners and whose motives are exactly as sinister as they appear. Alice Kremelberg plays his wife Anneliese — and notably, Numrich and Kremelberg previously appeared together in The Sinner Season 4, a reunion that fans of that show will clock immediately.

The conspiracy involves secret tunnels, underground caves, mysterious thefts of anything containing quartz, mass bird deaths, a tree bearing glittering orange fruit, and creatures that leave shiny blue blood droplets when shot. The show keeps most of the graphic horror off-camera, which is the right call — the suggestion is more unsettling than the spectacle, and it keeps the tone from tipping into relentless darkness.

Composer John Paesano’s score draws on 1980s orchestral cinema — think the emotional sweep of early Spielberg — and multiple reviewers have singled it out as something worth seeking out on its own. The soundtrack choices are equally deliberate, with songs selected to reflect each character’s era, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” playing a significant role in Sam’s emotional arc.

Where Critics Land

The consensus is warm, with most reviewers landing between 4 and 4.5 out of 5. The performances are the runaway highlight everywhere you look. O’Hare in particular is getting attention across the board — his Wally provides genuine comedy without ever deflating the horror stakes. One review describes him preparing for a mission by packing a tote bag containing granola bars and a meat cleaver, and watching a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. That’s the show in a nutshell.

Where critics diverge is on the mystery itself. Hollywood Reporter’s review is the most measured of the bunch, arguing that the show’s greatest flaw is spending too much time on the sci-fi plot at the expense of the ensemble chemistry that makes it special — that after the barbecue scene in episode one, the show scatters its characters to separate storylines before bringing them back together, and something is lost in the gap. The Boston Globe is similarly reserved, calling it “a copy of a copy” and suggesting the nostalgia is so layered — Spielberg evoking Stranger Things evoking Stranger Things evoking Spielberg again — that the show occasionally feels like it’s running on borrowed warmth.

But even the less enthusiastic reviews agree that the cast alone justifies the watch. Collider puts it well: “If Sam, Wally, Renee, Art, and Judy can remain perceptive, brave, and capable in a world that has already written them off, then aging itself becomes less frightening.”

The show is also lighter in tone than Stranger Things got by its final seasons, which works in its favor. It never pretends the stakes aren’t real, but it doesn’t wallow either. At its best — and it is frequently at its best — The Boroughs is the kind of show that makes you laugh, then makes you feel something ache, then puts a monster on screen before you’ve had time to recover.

The whole season is available to stream now on Netflix. The cast walked the red carpet at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on May 18 ahead of the premiere. All eight episodes drop Thursday, May 21.

“Death is the real monster,” Wally says. “Everything else is shadows.” With a cast this good bringing lines like that to life, the shadows are very much worth sitting with.

The post The Boroughs Review: Netflix’s Best New Sci-Fi Show appeared first on Cream.

• Former inmate Mary Katherine Crowder says Shirilla acted like the “queen bee” of prison, not the remorseful figure shown in Netflix’s The Crash
• Crowder claims Shirilla wore full makeup daily, had multiple romantic relationships behind bars, and was frequently seen with hickeys
• A second former inmate, known as Kat on TikTok, independently corroborated many of Crowder’s claims
• Shirilla’s father, Steve Shirilla, has been placed on administrative leave from his teaching job at a Cleveland-area Catholic school following controversy over his comments in the documentary
• The Crash hit No. 1 on Netflix after premiering May 15, reigniting intense public interest in the 2022 case

Netflix’s The Crash shows Mackenzie Shirilla behind bars — voice low, eyes downcast, insisting she’s “not a monster.” But two women who actually served time with her at the Ohio Reformatory for Women are telling a very different story.

Mary Katherine Crowder, 27, spent over six months incarcerated alongside Shirilla in 2024 and has gone viral on TikTok with a detailed account of what she says she witnessed. One clip alone has racked up nearly 20 million views. Her version of the 21-year-old convicted killer is almost unrecognizable from the subdued, haunted figure on screen.

“When she walked out in the documentary, my jaw literally dropped, because her demeanor and the way that she looked was nothing like the person I was in there with,” Crowder told the New York Post. “This character in the documentary is nothing like who I saw in there at all, and it was shocking.”

The ‘Regina George of Prison’

According to Crowder, Shirilla arrived at the Ohio women’s prison in late 2023 and had already established herself as a celebrity of sorts by the time Crowder was booked in April 2024 on outstanding misdemeanor warrants from Tennessee.

“Everyone knew why she was there, and she walked around like she was this famous person within prison,” Crowder said. “She definitely carried herself like she was the Regina George of prison — she was very much like an ‘It girl.'”

The picture she paints is one of a girl who treated incarceration like a high school popularity contest — full glam every day, clothes altered to fit her body, hair done, socializing with a tight clique of younger inmates. “She was always laughing, always smiling and happy — like it was never on her mind that she was serving two concurrent 15-to-life sentences because she killed two people,” Crowder said.

She also claimed Shirilla would sell customized jewelry and shoes to fellow inmates and spent her days “basically skipping” around the prison yard.

“Never one time did I see Mackenzie cry,” Crowder said in one of her now-viral TikTok videos. “She walked around like she thinks she’s gonna get out.”

@boujeebehindbars

My take on The Crash from someone that was inside with Mackenzie Shirilla. #fyp #prison #netflix #mackenzieshirilla #truecrime

♬ original sound – Kat Crowder

The voice shift between the documentary and the Shirilla Crowder knew was also striking to her. “She talked like a Valley girl when I was in there with her. Her voice was very happy-go-lucky and high-pitched, but now she has an edge to her voice,” she said. “Even the way she talks is completely different.”

Multiple Relationships and a Lifestyle Funded From the Outside

Crowder didn’t stop at personality. She claimed Shirilla cycled through multiple romantic relationships with female inmates during her time there — and wasn’t exactly subtle about it.

“Yes, Mackenzie has had multiple girlfriends… she was walking around with hickies on her neck,” Crowder alleged. “She’s gone to ‘the hole’ for being intimate with girls in prison. If she was grieving or remorseful, she would not have gone to prison and jumped into prison relationships over the next six months.”

As for how she maintained the lifestyle, Crowder pointed to both Shirilla’s parents and, she claimed, men she met through a prison pen pal-style site. “Mackenzie has makeup and jewelry in prison because her mom is ordering it for her… she was funding her prison lifestyle and making it as comfortable as possible,” she said. “Also, Mackenzie is on the prison sugar daddy website, so there’s sugar daddies supplying her needs.”

Crowder even shared photos she says show Shirilla posing in a custom-made outfit, pursing her lips for the camera on a prison-issued tablet — images she described as “tone-deaf.”

A Second Voice From Inside

Crowder isn’t alone. A TikTok creator named Kat, who goes by @boujeebehindbars, also served time at the Ohio Reformatory for Women and has been sharing her own account of Shirilla behind bars.

“The Mackenzie that came on Netflix was not the same Mackenzie that I witnessed in prison,” Kat said. She echoed much of what Crowder described — the clique, the makeup obsession, the apparent indifference to the weight of her sentence.

“She thrived on fame, even while I was in prison with her,” Kat said. “She thought she was going to be the princess of the prison.”

Kat also offered a theory about why Shirilla agreed to participate in the documentary at all: “She also went on there thinking that it was going to help her with another appeal.” She believes that appeal will be denied.

“Mackenzie Shirilla did not walk around that prison yard with an ounce of remorse,” Kat said flatly.

What the Documentary Claims — and What Crowder Disputes

In The Crash, Shirilla not only expresses remorse but raises a medical defense, suggesting that her diagnosed condition — postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) — may have contributed to the 2022 crash. Crowder dismantled that claim point by point.

“Never one time did I ever see Mackenzie Shirilla go for a blood pressure check, take any type of medication or go to sick call, ever experience dizziness,” Crowder said. “In fact, Mackenzie Shirilla would go out in 100-degree heatwaves with baby oil on her and sit in the prison yard and tan… the girl does not have any medical issues.”

She also alleged that the story Shirilla told her prison friends diverged significantly from what prosecutors presented at trial. “Mackenzie’s story when I was in prison with her was that she was high on shrooms when this accident occurred,” Crowder claimed. Blood test results from the night of the crash showed only THC in Shirilla’s system, according to prosecutors.

Shirilla’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

The Father’s Fallout

The controversy hasn’t stayed contained to Shirilla herself. Her father, Steve Shirilla, appeared in the documentary as her most vocal defender — maintaining her innocence and making comments about her marijuana use and her relationship with Dominic Russo that drew significant backlash. He has since told TMZ the remarks were taken out of context.

But the damage appears to have already reached his professional life. Steve Shirilla has been placed on administrative leave from Mary Queen of Peace School, a private Catholic school in the Cleveland area, where he works as a teacher. The school sent an email to parents stating: “We are investigating allegations made on social media that one of our teachers has demonstrated poor judgement. The investigation is ongoing.”

Shirilla was convicted in August 2023 of 12 felony charges — including murder, felonious assault, and aggravated vehicular homicide — for intentionally driving her car at nearly 100 mph into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio in July 2022. The crash killed her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and their friend, Davion Flanagan. She survived. She is currently serving two concurrent life sentences and won’t be eligible for parole until 2037.

The Crash hit No. 1 on Netflix within days of its May 15 premiere — and if the reaction online is any indication, the documentary hasn’t softened public opinion toward Shirilla so much as it’s given people a new reason to talk about her. Crowder put it simply: “The Netflix documentary is trying to portray her as this innocent, well-behaved suburban girl. That’s not what she’s ever been or who she’s ever been.”

The post Former Inmate Says Mackenzie Shirilla Was ‘Mean Girl’ of Prison appeared first on Cream.

• The Boroughs is now streaming on Netflix, all eight episodes dropping May 21.
• The show is executive produced by Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers, but created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.
• Alfred Molina leads an all-star cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters, and Denis O’Hare.
• The series follows retirees at a New Mexico desert community who discover monsters are preying on their neighbors.
• Critics are largely won over by the cast and warmth, though some find the mystery formulaic and the pacing uneven.

The Duffer Brothers have spent the months since Stranger Things ended launching a steady stream of projects designed to fill the void — an animated spinoff, a wedding horror chiller, and now The Boroughs, their most ambitious swing yet at recapturing that lightning. And this time, they may have actually pulled it off.

The new Netflix sci-fi horror series, created and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (the team behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), is exactly what it sounds like and also so much more than that. Set in an idyllic, slightly eerie retirement community in the New Mexico desert — think mid-century modern architecture, pastel cul-de-sacs, and a CEO who never seems to age — it follows a group of retirees who discover something monstrous is stalking their neighbors in the night. The Duffers are executive producers, not writers or directors, but their fingerprints are all over the show’s Spielbergian warmth, its creature-feature thrills, and its deep love of a ragtag found family going up against forces they probably shouldn’t be fighting.

The difference is that where Stranger Things gave us kids on bicycles, The Boroughs gives us septuagenarians in golf carts. And against all odds, it works.

Meet the Gray Rebellion

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed retired aerospace engineer from Chicago who arrives at The Boroughs furious and heartbroken. His late wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek, warm and vivid in flashbacks) was the one who wanted to move there. Her death didn’t void the contract, so Sam’s patient, loving daughter Claire (Jena Malone) deposits him at this sun-drenched desert compound against his will. He immediately tries to leave. The smooth-talking CEO Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), who runs the place with his glamorous wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg), will not be releasing anyone from their contract.

Molina is fantastic — a man whose grief has curdled into pure stubbornness, who resists every overture of friendship right up until he can’t anymore. The show’s most quietly devastating moment comes early, when Sam tells neighbor Jack (Bill Pullman, wonderfully laid-back and warm) exactly how it feels to lose someone: “My wife’s dead. And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s as clean and honest a distillation of grief as you’ll hear on television.

Jack coaxes Sam to a welcome barbecue, and that backyard scene — burgers, beers, and a cul-de-sac full of fascinating strangers ribbing each other about body counts (the sex kind, not the death kind) and trading gnarliest medical anecdotes — is, by nearly universal critical agreement, the single best scene in the series. Over burgers and beers, the crew assembles: Alfre Woodard as Judy, a former investigative journalist described as a “chatty Nancy Drew” who stalks new residents online because she misses being on the beat; Clarke Peters as her philosophical stoner husband Art, a marijuana enthusiast who claims to be golfing each morning but is really tending to his hallucinogens in the desert and has developed a therapeutic relationship with a crow; Geena Davis as Renee, a former music manager turned art teacher who drives a convertible and turns heads regardless of age; and Denis O’Hare as Wally, a doctor with Stage 4 prostate cancer who has decided to fill his remaining days with, as he puts it, “cocktails and chaos.”

It’s a genuine pleasure just to hang out with these people. The show is smart enough to know that, and generous enough to let us do it — at least for a while.

Something Is Lurking in the Cul-de-Sac

Genre legend Dee Wallace opens the series with a quietly chilling scene that makes clear something is very wrong in this paradise. By the time Sam wakes up one night to wrestle a giant, spider-legged creature off a neighbor, the horror element is fully in play. The monster — many-limbed, disturbing-mouthed, with stretched limbs that will remind Stranger Things fans of the Demogorgon’s extended family tree — is preying on residents, and it has something to do with cerebrospinal fluid, immortality, and a decades-long conspiracy buried beneath the community’s pristine surface. Secret tunnels are involved. So are caves. So is the eerily youthful face of CEO Blaine Shaw.

Because reporting a monster attack in a retirement community is a fast track to getting moved into The Manor — the Boroughs’ long-term care facility, where residents who “see things” tend to disappear — Sam and his friends are largely on their own. Ed Begley Jr. appears as a memory-care patient whose ramblings turn out to be more than confusion. The show has real things to say about how elderly voices get dismissed, how quickly a credible person becomes “confused” the moment they say something inconvenient. It’s the same dynamic that drives Stranger Things — nobody believes the kids — but with the added sting of ageism layered on top.

Denis O’Hare, who has been the secret weapon of everything from American Horror Story to Michael Clayton, is a particular standout here. His Wally carries a lifetime of loss — including memories of the AIDS crisis that complicate his every choice — and yet remains the group’s most reliably funny presence. One scene has him packing a tote bag for a monster-hunting mission with granola bars and a meat cleaver. Another has him pulling up a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. O’Hare plays it all with such genuine delight that the horror stakes never feel undermined. As Wally sees it, death is “the real monster. Everything else is shadows.”

Alfre Woodard, in a virtual press conference, put it perfectly: “It is a generation, probably, that changed the culture, the status quo more than any other one. What’s really fun about this, and instructive and inspiring about this, is that even in the retirement community, things start to happen — bad things and really weird, scary things — but nobody says, ‘Oh, we don’t know what to do.’ What happens? The boomers saddle up, they get together, and they go to stop it.”

O’Hare offered his own reading of the show’s central metaphor: “What do the old people have? Experience, wisdom, knowledge, life and history, and that ends up being a precious commodity that the monsters suck out all the stuff and turn it into gold.”

Where It Soars and Where It Stumbles

The critical consensus on The Boroughs is warm but not uncomplicated. The cast is almost universally praised — Molina and O’Hare especially, but also Woodard and Peters as a couple of 45 years who still have new things to discover about each other, and Davis, whose Renee gets a genuinely sweet slow-burn romance with a younger security guard named Paz (Carlos Miranda). The show’s score by John Paesano sounds like it was lifted directly from a 1980s Spielberg film, and the production design — retro-futuristic architecture, pastel perfection, a hard-wired home assistant named Seraphim that evokes HAL from 2001 — is gorgeous.

The complaints, where they exist, are consistent: the mystery itself is more familiar than fresh, the villain is exactly who you’ll guess from the first episode, and some of the richest characters — Renee, Art, Judy — don’t get the deep-dive treatment their performers deserve. Several critics also noted that the show scatters its ensemble across separate storylines mid-season, breaking up the chemistry that makes the early episodes so enjoyable. The Hollywood Reporter’s review called the welcome barbecue scene “the single most delightful scene The Boroughs has to offer” — and then noted it was the last time the show really let itself luxuriate in that group dynamic.

Showrunner Will Matthews acknowledged the inherent challenge of the premise at a press conference: “The Boroughs is a place that we want you to want to save.” The show largely succeeds on that front. The setting is immediately vivid, the stakes feel personal, and the eight-episode season moves briskly enough that even the weaker middle stretch doesn’t derail things entirely. Some critics wished for two more episodes to let the characters breathe; others thought it was already two episodes too long. The nature of the beast.

What no one disputes is that the comparison to Stranger Things, while inevitable, only goes so far. Both shows are about a group of friends protecting each other while investigating an institution hiding a supernatural secret. Both lean hard into nostalgia. But where Stranger Things is about kids coming of age and discovering who they are, The Boroughs is about people who already know exactly who they are — and refuse to let anyone take that from them. They’ve lived full lives, buried people they loved, watched their bodies start to betray them, and they are still here, still sharp, still capable of kicking ass. The monsters are almost beside the point.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” plays a significant role in the soundtrack, which feels exactly right. The Boroughs is, at its core, a show about people who aren’t ready to go quietly — and making a case, with considerable style and a genuinely remarkable ensemble, that they shouldn’t have to.

All eight episodes of The Boroughs are streaming now on Netflix.

The post Netflix’s ‘The Boroughs’ Review: Stranger Things for Seniors appeared first on Cream.

• Netflix’s Cliff Booth will play exclusively in IMAX theaters for two weeks starting Nov. 25, before streaming Dec. 23
• Brad Pitt returns to his Oscar-winning role as the stuntman from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, now set in 1977
• David Fincher directs from a Quentin Tarantino screenplay — their fourth film together
• The film takes the Thanksgiving slot vacated by Greta Gerwig’s delayed Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew
• This marks the first Netflix film ever to receive an IMAX release

Brad Pitt is heading back to the big screen — the very big screen. Netflix announced Wednesday that Cliff Booth, the sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, will open exclusively in IMAX theaters on Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving, for a two-week run before landing on Netflix on Dec. 23.

It’s a genuinely historic moment for the streamer: this will be the first Netflix film ever released in IMAX. And for director David Fincher, it marks his first movie in theaters since Gone Girl back in 2014.

Pitt returns to the role that won him his first Academy Award — Cliff Booth, the laconic, dangerous stuntman who spent the original film navigating the shadow of the Manson family alongside fading TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). This time, the story jumps forward to 1977, with the logline teasing that it’s “a very different Hollywood.” Plot details beyond that have been kept extremely close to the chest — very on-brand for anything involving Tarantino, who wrote the screenplay before handing the director’s chair to Fincher.

The teaser Netflix dropped during the Super Bowl earlier this year was never released online afterward, which somehow only made people want it more. The one line of dialogue audiences got from Booth: “I don’t possess many talents, but I know better than to get in the way of a good story.”

A Dream Team Reuniting

This is the fourth time Fincher has directed Pitt, following Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a track record that makes this one of the more reliably electric director-actor pairings in Hollywood history. Fincher has been deep in the Netflix ecosystem for years, from helping launch their original series strategy with House of Cards to steering the acclaimed FBI thriller Mindhunter. On the film side, his Mank arrived in 2020, followed by the Michael Fassbender assassin thriller The Killer in 2023. Cliff Booth will be his first Netflix feature to get a major theatrical release.

The ensemble around Pitt is stacked: Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, Matt Groove, JB Tadena, Corey Fogelmanis, and Karren Karagulian. Pitt and producer Ceán Chaffin are producing together, and Fincher’s longtime creative collaborators are all in place — cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (who won an Oscar for Mank), production designer Donald Graham Burt, editor Kirk Baxter, sound designer Ren Klyce, and costume designer Trish Summerville.

Stepping Into Narnia’s Spot

The Thanksgiving IMAX slot had originally belonged to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which recently moved to 2027. That film is now set for a traditional wide theatrical release in February with a full 49-day window before hitting the streamer — itself a significant shift for Netflix. The streamer has been careful to stress that neither move represents a broader change in strategy, though the pattern is hard to ignore: bigger titles are getting bigger theatrical moments.

The existence of a Cliff Booth sequel at all was enough of a surprise when it was first announced on April Fool’s Day 2025 — yes, really — that many people assumed it was a joke. It was not. The original Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was released by Sony in 2019, set in an alternate-history 1969 Los Angeles, and became one of Tarantino’s most beloved films. Pitt’s Cliff Booth — cool, quietly menacing, utterly unflappable — was a character audiences clearly weren’t done with.

Apparently neither was Tarantino. And now Fincher gets to take him somewhere new.

November 25 can’t come soon enough.

The post Brad Pitt’s ‘Cliff Booth’ Hits IMAX Thanksgiving Weekend appeared first on Cream.