A filmmaker auditioning leads for his next project has a philosophical insight. “Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” the eccentric Eastern European auteur Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) lectures the actors assembled in his home for a day of offbeat dramatic exercises. “It’s too difficult to comprehend them. So, let’s get past them. Let’s find the human underneath.” This might not seem like such a profound realization for a lion of the festival circuit. But it feels downright revolutionary when you hear him say it in the new Disney+ Marvel dramedy Wonder Man. The MCU isn’t exactly known for getting past lofty ideas about heroes and gods.

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What is this guy even doing in this world, you might ask. In fact, he’s a key character in a show set not on a distant planet or in a grid of skyscrapers doomed to topple in a superpowered melee, but in a mostly realistic Los Angeles where the entertainment industry is still (and here you might have to suspend your disbelief) based. Wonder Man, whose first season will stream in full on Jan. 27, is not like other Disney+ Marvel projects. Nor is it like the other Disney+ Marvel projects that were hyped as being not like other Disney+ Marvel projects (see: Wandavision) but ultimately abandoned ambitious storytelling in favor of generic, VFX-heavy fight scenes and choppily integrated teasers for the next MCU movie. This alone might’ve made it the platform’s best Marvel show yet. But smart casting, witty writing, lively directing, and artful character development have also yielded the rare superhero riff that, as Kovak puts it, finds the human underneath.

Though its Hollywood is fleshed out with a big, delightful cast, Wonder Man is built on the skeleton of a classic two-hander. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, whose resume in this genre includes the Aquaman movies as well as HBO’s subversive Watchmen series, is our self-sabotaging would-be hero, Simon Williams, a struggling actor first seen getting fired from American Horror Story for overthinking a minor role. A cinephile obsessively devoted to his craft, he’s the kind of guy who makes notes about which books his single-scene character would be reading and expects everyone on set to care about it as much as he does. This same self-centeredness compels his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) to move out of their modest apartment without warning.

Drowning his woes in a Midnight Cowboy matinee, he spots a fellow thespian. Marvel fans will also recognize this character, whose sonorous British accent is audible before we see his face. It is Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery, who was introduced as an ostensible villain, the Mandarin, in a series of propaganda videos claiming credit for terrorist attacks in 2013’s Iron Man 3. You can read more than any reasonable person would want to know, on the internet, about the history of this character. But for our purposes, what’s important is that Trevor never masterminded any bombings. He was a pathetic, substance-addicted actor too high to comprehend that he was the frontman for deadly acts of terrorism—a performance he provided for the low price of free drugs.

The past decade, with its rampant conspiracy theories, has clearly taken its toll on the now-sober Trevor. “Whatever theories you’ve seen on Reddit are totally false,” he grumbles when Simon introduces himself. “I had nothing to do with Pizzagate, I’m not a member of the Illuminati, and I did not have my hands replaced by baby hands.” Simon’s surprising reply: “I always dug your performance as the Mandarin.” For both men, the play, as it were, is the thing. They speak the same culturally omnivorous language, savoring Pinter but also reminiscing about Trevor’s stint opposite Joe Pantoliano in a medical soap. (Wonder Man is the kind of show where a mention of Joey Pants reliably leads to a Joey Pants guest appearance.) They’re in similar positions, too, stuck at the fringes of their art form due to their own poor choices.

In a refreshing departure from so many impenetrable Marvel series past, creators Deston Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest expediently fill in viewers on the essential points of Trevor’s backstory. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that his and Simon’s meet-cute in the cinema is no coincidence; suffice to say that it isn’t so simple to extricate yourself from the grasp of law enforcement once you’ve been the face of a notorious terrorist organization. He isn’t the only half of this buddy comedy harboring secrets, though. In an industry that has reason to be wary of superpowered individuals, Simon’s career depends upon his ability to control his emotions.

Soon, he’s cajoling Trevor (or so he thinks) into admitting that he’s about to read for a role in a reboot of the 1980s superhero flick Wonder Man. Simon has loved the movie since he was a kid and will stop at nothing to audition for the lead. Pity his agent, Janelle, a kind but long-suffering truth teller played by the charismatic X Mayo. “You’re one of the most talented people that I know,” she tells her client. “But there’s a lot of talented people out here who are not pains in the ass.” This doesn’t stop Simon from lying his way into the casting. Trevor is, of course, waiting for him there, and their friendship develops through a series of adventures that feel authentic to the characters and setting. The Englishman tags along to a party at Simon’s childhood home, where a warm welcome from his effusive Haitian mom (Shola Adewusi from Bob Hearts Abishola) and judgmental comments from his more successful, square brother (Justified’s Demetrius Grosse) establishes the family dynamic that has made Simon so desperate to prove himself.

Wonder Man doesn’t just use Hollywood as a backdrop for a superhero story. Cretton, who broke through with the acclaimed indie film Short Term 12 before making his Marvel debut as the director and co-writer of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Guest, a network sitcom alum who scripted some of the best episodes of Community, demonstrate a genuine affection for the setting. As wonderfully portrayed by Buric, the Wonder Man reboot’s director is every European artiste absorbed into the American studio system cut with a dose of Werner Herzog’s gloom; his mansion could be a museum of Hollywood Regency decadence. The show is equally witty about the quirks of the 21st century movie business. Simon takes Trevor to record a self-tape audition at a janky, nautical-themed storefront studio called Ahoy Tapes. In a standalone episode that makes hilarious use of Josh Gad, guest-starring as himself (and recalls Guest’s Community highlights), a nightclub doorman (Byron Bowers) finds stardom when he touches a mysterious goo and his body becomes a literal door that people can pass through.

Judging by the glut of films and series set on studio lots, screenwriters have taken the age-old advice to write what they know to heart. Wonder Man might sound redundant the year after Apple gave us Seth Rogen’s excellent The Studio, which shares its fun guest casting and we-kid-because-we-love approach to Hollywood satire. (One of Simon’s rivals for the Wonder Man role got his start as “Paul Thomas Anderson’s surfing instructor.”) Marvel also feels a bit late to the meta-superhero show concept; Watchmen and Amazon’s The Boys both debuted in 2019. HBO’s dour, short-lived MCU sendup The Franchise came and went in 2024. What makes Wonder Man fresh despite all the competition is the care with which Simon, Trevor, and their fraught relationship are rendered by Abdul-Mateen, Kingsley, and the creators. Characters this vivid and enjoyable to spend time with are hard to find in any genre, let alone superhero fare.  

That’s not to say the show escapes every Marvel (and particularly Disney-Marvel) pitfall. Most of the female characters are underwritten; I don’t see the point of hiring a talented actor like Thirlby when her presence is going to be confined to a few scenes spread out across an eight-episode season. A story adult enough to feature cursing still can’t muster the maturity to resist the old coming-of-age cliché of superpowers as an all-purpose metaphor for the innate differences that make people special. Yet this all feels very forgivable when you arrive at the season finale, and it’s an episode focused on advancing character arcs rather than having those characters shoot lasers at each other from high up in the heavens. More than any live-action Marvel show that Disney+ has produced before, Wonder Man accomplishes what Netflix did with Jessica Jones and FX did with Legion (while also creating a much lighter viewing experience). It gives people with no interest in superheroes for superheroes’ sake reason to watch—all the way to the end.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Finding Her Edge

The Netflix series Finding Her Edge, based on the 2022 novel by Jennifer Iacopelli, follows Adriana Russo (Madelyn Keys), a former competitive figure skater who stepped away from the sport after the death of her mother, Sarah. Now removed from competition, Adriana spends her time helping at the family-owned Russo Rink, until she discovers the facility is on the brink of closure due to financial instability. Her father, Will (Harmon Walsh), has focused on promoting and supporting the ice skating prospects of Adriana’s older sister, Elise (Alexandra Beaton), while neglecting rising bills, maintenance costs, and declining attendance—creating the conditions that threaten the rink’s future.

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The story centers on Adriana’s decision to return to competitive skating not for personal validation but to generate sponsorships, media attention, and financial support necessary to keep the rink operational. To make that strategy viable, she forms a partnership with Brayden Elliot (Cale Ambrozic), a skater whose technical ability complements her own, giving them a competitive edge that aims to attract judges, sponsors, and broader visibility. The series grounds its narrative in ambition and strategy within elite figure skating, framing Adriana’s return as a professional move shaped by both legacy and survival.

How Adriana and Brayden become partners

Adriana and Brayden first meet at a grand party hosted by the Russo family, an event meant to celebrate and introduce their team. Adriana is there reconnecting with other skaters when Brayden arrives, on the lookout for a new ice skating partner after his last one leaves to pursue a Broadway role.

Their first interaction is charged with tension and curiosity. Brayden approaches Adriana, complimenting her skill and reputation, while Adriana is cautious, reminding him that she is not actively seeking a skating partner. Despite her hesitation, Brayden makes it clear that he wants to skate with someone who can match his ambition and help him reach the top of the podium. Adriana is immediately aware of his confidence—bordering on arrogance—but also senses potential chemistry in their skating styles.

Behind his confident exterior, Brayden carries pressures and expectations that are not always visible to those around him. As Ambrozic explains, “Brayden puts up a facade that comes across as very confident—he thinks he’s the best—but deep down, he’s dealing with a lot with his family and personal life. Through all the ups and downs, he learns a lot about himself. And the relationship between him and Adriana is one that he has never experienced before, and you can kind of see how he’s dealing with these newfound emotions that he hasn’t felt ever, or in a long time.”

After the party, Brayden and Adriana start informal training sessions at the Russo Rink. Camille St. Denis (Meredith Forlenza), Adriana’s mentor and her mother’s close friend, encourages them to give the partnership a real chance, highlighting that their physicality and technique complement each other perfectly. Early training is challenging: they stumble, misjudge timing, and clash over approach, with Adriana’s precision balancing Brayden’s bold and expressive style. These difficulties force them to communicate, trust, and adjust to one another’s rhythm.

The Russo rink’s struggles and immediate threats

The Russo Rink is teetering on the edge of financial collapse. Utility bills are overdue, the ice maintenance system is failing, and creditors are threatening repossession. Will, overwhelmed by grief after Sarah’s death, has been pouring resources into turning Elise into a figure skating superstar, often spending far beyond what the rink can sustain. He underestimates the cost of high-profile coaches, photographers, stylists, and social media promotions, while ignoring Camille’s repeated warnings that his financial decisions are jeopardizing the rink’s survival.

The family’s struggles become undeniable when their cars are repossessed, a situation Will initially tries to blame on a stolen credit card. Adriana, however, sees through the excuse, recognizing that the rink’s financial troubles are directly tied to her father’s mismanagement. She confronts Will, pointing out that if she were a child—something he called her—she wouldn’t be managing budgets, coordinating press events, and calculating expenses like champagne boxes or stylists for Elise’s performances—but she is, and she knows the rink is at risk. Will insists he’s preserving Sarah’s legacy and refuses to let Adriana interfere, but the tension reveals a dangerous reality: the rink could be lost if immediate action isn’t taken.

Amid this chaos, Adriana realizes that saving her family rink will require more than skill on the ice, and that’s why she accepts Brayden’s offer. Reflecting on her motivation, Madelyn Keys says, “I don’t know if she would have gone on any of this journey at all if it didn’t all start with the financial pressures that her family is facing. Along the way, she learns that she’s doing it for other reasons, but that is absolutely the spark.”

Elise’s actions

Elise is a solo figure skater who sees Adriana’s return and her partnership with Brayden as a direct threat. She openly looks down on pair skating and ice dancing, treating Adriana’s discipline as less demanding and less legitimate than solo skating. This attitude shapes how Elise treats her sister: she criticizes Adriana during practices, questions her credibility as a competitor, and contributes to an increasingly hostile environment. Her decision to share private family matters with the press further damages Adriana’s public image and intensifies internal conflict at the rink.

A major shift occurs when Elise injures her arm during a performance. The injury forces her to step back from full training and confront the limits of her body, something she had previously avoided. Unable to compete at the same level, Elise becomes more aware of how much her identity is tied to being the rink’s top solo skater. During recovery, her jealousy toward Adriana persists, especially as Adriana gains visibility through competitions and public attention, highlighting Elise’s fear of being replaced or overlooked.

Gradually, Elise begins to acknowledge the consequences of her behavior. Conversations with Adriana and their little sister Maria (Alice Malakhov) push her to take responsibility for sabotaging her sister and contributing to the rink’s instability. She starts cooperating with family efforts, assists with rink events, and carefully returns to training within her physical limits.

Freddie, Riley, and all the romantic complications

When Adriana’s former skating partner and first boyfriend Freddie (Olly Atkins) returns to the Russo Rink, his appearance immediately reopens unresolved dynamics. Their separation was never fully resolved: Adriana stepped away from skating abruptly, leaving Freddie feeling abandoned both personally and professionally. When they see each other again, their interactions are tense, marked by unfinished conversations and lingering resentment. Freddie struggles to separate past feelings from the present, while Adriana is forced to confront emotions she never fully processed.

Riley (Millie Davis) enters as Freddie’s current skating partner and a stabilizing presence. Unlike Freddie and Adriana, Riley approaches relationships with clear boundaries and prioritizes professionalism. She is aware of Freddie and Adriana’s history but refuses to engage in rivalry or emotional games. When Freddie becomes distracted or emotionally conflicted, Riley addresses the situation directly, emphasizing trust, commitment, and the importance of maintaining focus within their partnership.

As Adriana begins training with Brayden, Freddie’s discomfort becomes more evident. He watches Adriana rebuild her confidence and establish a strong partnership with someone else, which intensifies his internal conflict. His unresolved feelings surface in subtle ways—jealousy, defensiveness, and moments of emotional honesty that blur the line between past and present. Adriana, in turn, struggles to balance her growing connection with Brayden and the familiarity she still feels with Freddie.

Navigating all these personal and competitive pressures shapes Freddie’s growth over the season. As Atkins explains, he had to convey not just the romantic tension, but the weight of expectation Freddie constantly faces: “Everything that goes on in the Russo household really ratchets up the pressure for Freddie. There’s so much expectation—competitively, romantically. He’s under a lot of pressure, and he holds onto it pretty well, but it starts to get away from him later in the season. He’s dealing with a lot, for sure.”

The national qualifiers and worlds

At the national qualifiers, Adriana and Brayden compete under intense media attention after a photo of them kissing goes viral, earning them the nickname “Braydriana.” Commentators label them “the hottest couple on ice,” which boosts public interest but also increases scrutiny from the judging panel. Their routine receives a standing ovation and earns 89.27, initially placing them second. The standings shift when Freddie and Riley score 90.54, taking second place behind Sean and Destiny, who hold first. With only the top two pairs qualifying, Adriana and Brayden are effectively eliminated from the World Championships. Backstage, Brayden blames Adriana for the negative press surrounding the Russo family’s financial problems and an article questioning her ability—a piece later revealed to have used Elise as an anonymous source.

At a sponsorship gala, news breaks that Sean and Destiny are disqualified after being exposed for using steroids. Their removal opens a qualifying spot, officially sending Adriana and Brayden to the World Championships. Recognizing that sponsors are drawn to the “Braydriana” image, Adriana proposes that she and Brayden present themselves publicly as a couple, with strict boundaries, to secure funding and keep the Russo Rink afloat.

At the World Championships, Adriana and Brayden deliver a technically strong and emotionally controlled performance, earning 98.36 and securing first place, narrowly surpassing Freddie and Riley, who score 98.14. Despite the victory, the partnership fractures off the ice. Adriana kisses Freddie publicly and later makes it clear that her relationship with Brayden was strategic, not real. Brayden confronts her, acknowledges they were successful as competitors, but chooses to leave Paris alone, ending both the partnership and any personal connection.

After that, Adriana experiences one of the season’s most emotional moments. Wearing her mother’s wings on the ice for a celebration skating, she is unexpectedly joined by her sisters—a gesture that underscores family support and reconciliation amidst competition.

“That moment means the most to Adriana. Winning Worlds was such a public moment, and Brayden didn’t hug her—she was left alone on the ice, seen by everyone in the stands and on TV. Then, unexpectedly, her two sisters—who had sworn off the ice—joined her. That’s a powerful reminder that she’s not completely alone in the world, she has her sisters there for her,” says Keys.

How Finding Her Edge ends

Adriana ultimately chooses Freddie, accepting his confession and agreeing to move forward with him romantically and professionally. Camille later offers Adriana and Freddie the opportunity to skate together again, which they accept. Brayden exits the competition circuit temporarily but returns after the Russo Rink is sold to Voltage, a professional skating organization that absorbs the facility and clears the family’s debt. Under the new structure, the rink is renamed Voltage Skating Academy, with Will Russo retaining the house while losing control of rink operations.

“For Adriana, the ending is really about security. I think it is security in herself, financial security, but also her relationship with Freddie,” says Keys about Adriana’s journey.

In the final moments, Brayden resurfaces as part of the Voltage program, now skating with Riley, reversing the original partnerships. Elise takes on a mentoring role within the academy, Maria steps away from competitive skating to pursue a more normal life, and the series closes with Adriana and Freddie reunited on the ice—while the final shot of the two new pairs facing each other makes it clear that the story is far from over.

If you had the chance to be beautiful, would you take it? We’re not talking about mere attractiveness, but a near-immediate physical metamorphosis into a perfect human specimen. Sounds tempting, but of course there’s a catch. That’s the premise of Ryan Murphy’s new FX show, The Beauty, co-created and co-written by Matt Hodgson. In the show, The Beauty is an STI that transforms a person into someone physically perfect, but with deadly consequences. Except nobody who has The Beauty knows that.

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It’s almost impossible not to draw comparisons to The Substance, the 2024 horror movie that became a breakaway box-office smash and multi-Oscar nominee. It also spawned countless reactions (positive and negative) about its depictions of what a woman (played by Demi Moore) will do in the pursuit of a younger, more beautiful version of herself. The Beauty gleefully leans into these comparisons with Coralie Fargeat’s film, even casting Demi Moore’s ex-husband, Ashton Kutcher, in a key role. 

But The Beauty is not a rip-off of The Substance. It’s actually based on a comic book of the same name by Image Comics, which ran from 2015-2021. Here’s what to know about the source material for the new series, which has drawn solid reviews since its three-episode premiere.

What happens in “The Beauty” comics?

At the start of the comics, created by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, two years have elapsed since The Beauty took over the world. It’s a rampant and sought after sexually transmitted disease, capable of transforming those infected with it into someone conventionally, well, beautiful. As the comic describes, changes to people with The Beauty include “fat melted away, thinning hair returned, skin blemishes faded, and their facial features slimmed.” Unlike other diseases, people covet The Beauty. It’s believed that half the world has the disease, including around 200 million Americans. 

The Beauty has caused enormous division between those who have it and those who don’t. For some, it’s the ultimate status symbol; for others, a complete and utter betrayal of humankind. Activist groups that are both pro- and anti-Beauty have emerged, with hate crimes, homicides, and bombings on the rise as divisions deepen. 

The disease doesn’t make a person impossibly attractive, as evidenced by one man who’s struggling to get a date. Because he is exceedingly naturally attractive, everyone he encounters wants to sleep with him, assuming he has The Beauty, but he doesn’t—he’s just a very handsome man. In Murphy’s show, it transforms you into a completely different person physically. And while there are people who do actively try to get infected with The Beauty, there are plenty more who wake up the next morning transformed, unaware that they had slept with someone who has it. 

How does the show differ from the source material?

The disease itself manifests differently in the television series. In both versions, getting the disease puts the person under extreme physical duress as they suffer a high fever. In the comic, people fall asleep and wake up transformed, but the TV version is much more intense. There, they go through frightening body contortions and secrete a sort of goo. They wind up in what can be best described as a mucus cocoon, before emerging as an entirely different—and more beautiful—person. In the show, people come out as a whole new actor (a clever move that ups the stakes on television), but in the comics, they are just a more attractive version of themselves.  

Similar to the show, the comic features a pair of detectives trying to connect the dots behind a strain of explosive deaths, and everyone who’s spontaneously combusted has The Beauty. Soon, it becomes clear that just about everyone who has The Beauty will die roughly two years after they get infected. The detectives discover a possible cure, but a ruthless masked enforcer, Mr. Calaveras, is out to stop them—no matter how many people he has to kill. He’s protecting the shadowy interests who created the disease and helped it go global, and a cure risks bringing their contributions to light.

After a violent clash, Mr. Calaveras is defeated, and those still alive begin to disseminate the cure to The Beauty across the world. In the final issue, published in 2021, The Beauty has been eradicated. Those who remain are left to process their new selves (the cure allows people to survive, but can leave them with severe scarring all over their bodies) while considering the cost of their pursuit of beauty. 

What happens in the first three episodes of The Beauty?

While the comics start with the disease in full swing and known worldwide, The Beauty is very much under wraps at the beginning of the show. The first episode opens with a model (Bella Hadid) wreaking havoc on the streets of Paris before she shockingly combusts. Two FBI agents, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), are sent to investigate and uncover a string of models dying in a similar fashion across Europe. 

They discover that before these models died, they underwent extraordinary physical changes, and none of them are recognizable compared to photos taken a few years prior. That’s because they have The Beauty, a disease transmitted through sex, as in the comics, that turns you into a new, incredibly attractive person. 

The first episode largely focuses on the male perspective through the eyes of the angry, lonely, and depressed Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey). An incel, Jeremy is desperate for change and sick of feeling that he’s repulsive to women. On an online message board, he finds out about a plastic surgeon. But that surgery goes poorly, and he’s still unable to attract women. A furious Jeremy shoots up the surgeon’s office. But before he kills the surgeon, the latter offers Jeremy a miracle solution. The surgeon brings Jeremy a woman, who carries The Beauty, who has sex with Jeremy, turning him into a whole new man (literally, as he’s played by Jeremy Pope post-transformation). 

We also discover that The Beauty was never designed to be sexually transmitted—something entirely different than the comics. There’s another strain of The Beauty, one developed by an exorbitantly wealthy man who calls himself The Corporation (Ashton Kutcher). He created The Beauty, an injection that not only transforms people physically, but also seems to have stable long-term effects. He’s determined to do whatever it takes to stop the STI, as it threatens to destroy his vast profit margins. It doesn’t help that the sexually transmitted version of The Beauty seems to kill its victims in horrifying ways after just two years. So while the detectives are on a mission to figure out what The Beauty is, The Corporation is doing whatever he can (including using his assassin, played by Anthony Ramos) to get answers.

That’s what we know so far. As only three of the eleven episodes have aired, there’s plenty more mystery to unfold in The Beauty.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Steal

Zara (Sophie Turner) is having a run-of-the-mill bad day, hungover from yet another night out and tasked with showing the new intern around at her dead-end job at London’s (fictional) Lochmill Capital, a pension investment company. But things are about to go from bad to nightmare, as a group of armed robbers wearing unsettling facial prosthetics descend upon Lochmill. Zara finds herself at the center of the heist, and is forced at gunpoint to transfer a staggering £4 billion in people’s pension monies into the robbers’ accounts.

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That’s largely what happens in the electric first episode of Prime Video’s Steal, created by S.A. Nikias. Though there’s a twist: Zara actually knew this was coming. She was recruited by her co-worker Luke (Archie Madekwe) and embroiled in a scandal she couldn’t have prepared for. Zara was told it would only be a hack, not a full-blown heist that would attract national attention. Through the final five episodes of Steal, Zara finds herself at great risk. She’s determined to clear her name, stay alive, and uncover who the mastermind of this grand heist is.

Let’s break down the twists and turns of Steal’s ending.

Zara’s discovery

Zara has long suspected someone else at Lochmill besides herself and Luke was involved in the heist. In the penultimate episode, she discovers it’s Milo (Harry Michell), who recruited Luke, who in turn recruited her. She was dragged into the heist because, according to Milo, Zara is “the biggest mess in the office,” stuck in her job and drinking every weekend. She’s deeply unhappy, he explains. Nobody would bat an eye if she were killed and staged to look like a suicide, as she’d buckle under the pressure of pulling off such a feat. In short, she’d make the perfect fall guy. The news crushes Zara, but she realizes Milo isn’t the mastermind behind it all—he’s only ever spoken to the person online. Milo was given £20 million, while she and Luke were given £5 million each.

In the finale of Steal, Zara finds Morgan (Andrew Howard), one of the armed robbers, in her house, with a tied-up Luke in her living room. To save their lives, Zara says she can get Morgan another £20 million to escape with. She just has to get it from Milo. They go to Milo’s, and he gives up the code wallet, but to access it, they need the codes for it, which he’s stashed at the Lochmill offices. Milo tries to be a hero, trying to use pepper spray on Morgan, but Morgan stabs and kills him.

At Lochmill, they get him everything he needs to get the money, but it’s not enough. He wants Luke and Zara dead, too. Luke attacks him, saving their lives. DCI Rhys (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who’s fallen for Zara, has arrived, but gets shot trying to help Zara. Chaos ensues as the other robbers show up to get Morgan. A firefight breaks out, and Morgan kills all of the other assailants. 

Zara could make her escape, but there’s a problem: Morgan has her codewallet with her £5 million. She sneaks up behind him with a taser and attacks him. But she also wants to know why the heist took place. Morgan tells her to ask her police friend, dismissing her as a “f-cking office girl.” Furious, she drives the taser into his neck, delivering a lethal amount of electricity. The police finally arrive, and Zara (along with Rhys and Luke) survives.

Later, a newscast reveals that Milo is now the fall guy. His death was framed as a suicide, the same plot they had planned for Zara. Luke is glad it’s all over, but Zara is still determined to uncover why it all happened. Meanwhile, she and Luke give their codewallets to MI5 in exchange for keeping them out of prison. 

The real mastermind behind the heist 

Zara tries to tie up loose ends, going to Rhys to ask if he was involved—she cannot get what Morgan said to her out of her mind. He vehemently denies any involvement, saying he’s unable to pay his spiralling gambling debts and he lost his job to boot. How could he have possibly engineered a multi-billion-pound heist with nothing to show from it? But when Zara leaves, Rhys races back to his house and goes through his files from the case. He looks stunned, as if he’s finally figured it all out. 

Zara goes to Lochmill to pick up her things as a final goodbye, and notices the police are there. The intern tells her that the money has been returned. Before she leaves, Rhys comes up the elevator, saying he knows who’s responsible.

The culprit and mastermind behind the heist is financial investigator Darren Yoshida (Andrew Koji). As Rhys explains, there was a pattern of Darren getting privileged information, and then the criminals just so happened to learn that same information. He also turned down two different cases to be assigned this heist—he had never turned down a case previously, Rhys discovered. Rhys believes that for Darren, it was just a twisted opportunity for Darren to test his own skills; “a fireworks show,” as he puts it. It was meant to be victimless, according to Darren, but people died in the process, nevermind the trauma inflicted on countless people.

More than just a test, Darren wanted to expose the deep-seated corruption in the financial industry. The heist was designed to expose tax havens and how things are rigged against the vast majority of people. “Our system doesn’t work for 99% of us,” says Darren, “yet we’re all forced to pay into it, except for the ones at the very top. The only ones who really benefit from all this are the ones who choose to opt out. And tax havens are how they do it.” 

He did return every penny to the pension, but Darren still has £10 million in a codewallet that he’s taken from tax havens. He implores Rhys to take the money, to pay off his spiralling debts, and to make the world a better place—as long as he doesn’t turn him in. Zara urges him to turn down the money and turn Darren in, which he does, regrettably.

Darren is devastated, but Zara has one last trick up her sleeve. In her box of work supplies is the codewallet that Darren used to pay Milo for the heist, with a staggering £20 million pounds. Though she gave her codewallet with the £5 million, Zara stashed Milo’s, since nobody knew it existed. It was a big risk, but it paid off big time. She reminds Rhys of advice he imparted to her: “Worry about losing and you’ll play badly. And then you’ll lose. This is our winnings, Rhys.” The two walk away from Lochmill Capital with a renewed sense of hope. What’s to come for them, he asks Zara.

“I don’t know,” Zara responds. “Something exciting.” For the first time in Zara’s life, there’s a sense of genuine calm. And with £20 million, there’s little doubt that there’s plenty of excitement in their future.

In the Netflix documentary Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, out Jan. 21, Smart recalls the night she was abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, by Brian David Mitchell, who believed he was following a call from God.

Smart was kept captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by Mitchell for nine months. On March 12, 2003, she was found walking on the side of a highway with Mitchell and his wife.

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Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart covers the months-long search for Smart, featuring members of her family and law enforcement officers who worked on the case. Smart also appears, speaking about how she recovered from the kidnapping and reflecting on her life today. 

Here’s a look at the major milestones in the case.

The night Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped

Among the most chilling parts of the documentary are the details of the night that Smart was kidnapped. Her younger sister, Mary Katherine, was also in the bedroom and became the only witness to the abduction. “That night Elizabeth and I said our prayers together and went to sleep,” she says in the film. “The next thing I remember, there was a man in our bedroom telling Elizabeth if she screamed, he would kill her. I was paralyzed.”

Smart remembers waking up and realizing there was a knife at her neck. “I was terrified,” she says. “Was he going to hurt me? Was he going to kill me? I was hoping my parents would wake up, but nobody came.”

Mary Katherine was in shock, but eventually mustered up the courage to go to her parents’ room and tell them that her sister had been taken away. At first, their parents thought Mary Katherine was just having a nightmare, but then they found a broken screen that indicated someone must have broken into the house.

Smart says she was led through her backyard and up a trail by a man who went by Emmanuel David Isaiah—later identified by his real name Brian David Mitchell—who reassured her that he wasn’t going to rape and kill her. They reached a tent in the woods, and his wife Wanda Barzee–who went by Hephzibah–emerged wearing a full-length tunic and headdress. She hugged Smart and washed her feet. Then she gave her a similar outfit to wear.

Smart says the abuse began afterwards, recalling: “I remember feeling like my doom was approaching. I was crying. I was scared. These are his exact words, he said: ‘I hereby seal you to me as my wife before God and his angels as my witnesses.'” When she screamed out “no,” he told her that if she yelled like that again, he would kill her, threatening to “duct tape your mouth shut.” Then, Smart says, he raped her, leaving her in a huge amount of pain, and told her that God commanded him to kidnap seven young girls and that he had his eye on her sister and cousin next.

Life in captivity

Smart opens up about how Mitchell raped her several times a day at the campsite during the summer of 2002. Afterward, he would pray for 45 minutes.

“He used God to justify what he did,” she says. “But more than anything, he loved power. He loved feeling like he was in control.”

Smart says his wife stood by and watched as he subjected her to daily humiliations. Mitchell would withhold food from Smart when he thought she was disobeying him and put a leash around her neck and walk her to a nearby spring to collect water. He forced her to drink beer until she vomited: “He left me face down in my own vomit.”

Mitchell knew a search was on for Smart and taunted her with newspaper articles and missing person posters he found, telling her that all of Salt Lake City was looking for her but that he wouldn’t let her be discovered. He’d show her the knife he would use if any rescuer came to the tent.

How Elizabeth Smart was rescued

About four months after the kidnapping, Mary Katherine had an epiphany that Emmanuel, a man who had once done housework for the family, took her sister. Their mother, Lois, met Mitchell in downtown Salt Lake City in Nov. 2001, when he asked her for money, and she gave him $5. Then, she invited him to come do a day’s work repairing the roof of their house and raking leaves. He hit it off with Smart’s parents, who invited him to come back and work on future home improvements, but they never heard from him again.

The Smart family did a lot of publicizing around the case, at one point releasing a police sketch of Mitchell on their own because they thought investigators were not working fast enough. After the Smarts released the sketch, they got a call from a man who said Emmanuel might be his brother-in-law. In the doc, Smart’s uncle Tom plays a tape recorder with that conversation in which the caller describes his brother-in-law Brian David Mitchell as living in a teepee in the mountains.

“The absolute key moment is when the family decides to release the sketch,” says the film’s executive producer Claire Goodlass. It got the attention of Mitchell’s brother-in-law, who provided key information to the police and put “momentum back into the case.”

Police looked into the tip and found out that Mitchell was arrested for stealing beer in September 2002, during the time period Smart had been kidnapped.

On March 12, 2003, someone called 911 to report people walking along a highway in Sandy, Utah, near Salt Lake City in long, white robes and veils, just like the pictures broadcast on America’s Most Wanted. Smart and her captors had just gotten off of a bus from California. As her disappearance got more press attention, Mitchell had tried to take her to San Diego so they wouldn’t be caught. But Smart convinced him to take her back to Salt Lake City because she told him God had spoken to her—speaking Mitchell’s own “warped” language, says director Benedict Sanderson. He marvels at how Smart had “the wherewithal to do that as a 14-year-old” and the way that “she had more agency in her rescue than I certainly I first realized.”

Police officers showed up to Sandy right away and took the youngest girl in the group aside, showed her a picture of Elizabeth Smart on a flyer and asked if it was her. She replied, “Thou sayeth.”

Mitchell was found guilty of kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for sexual activity and is serving a life term in prison. Barzee pleaded guilty to the same charges, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and was released in 2018.

Where is Elizabeth Smart now?

After she was rescued, Smart struggled with feelings of guilt.

“I was scared of men,” she says. “I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment about what happened.” 

But she persevered, enrolling in high school shortly after her rescue and earning a college degree from Brigham Young University. Now 38, Smart is married with three children in Utah. “I always dreamed of finding someone who loved me,” she reflects in the doc. “That did come true.”

She is the founder the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which advocates for victims of sexual violence. She wrote two memoirs about her ordeal and has been active on the speaker’s circuit, in hopes of connecting with other survivors and assuring them that they are not alone: “I wanted survivors to know they had nothing to be ashamed of.”

The final scenes of the film show both her physical strength and emotional strength. Viewers will hear audio of her discussing how she mustered up her inner strength while watching her running outdoors, through “the very mountains that she was kept captive in,” as Sanderson puts it. Smart has the last word in the documentary: “I’m stronger than I thought I was.”

Queer Eye’s Fab Five have uttered their final “Yaas queens.” The Netflix series’ 10th season, dropping Jan. 21, will be its last, wrapping up a nearly eight-year run. And it arrives with little fanfare. 

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The season, filmed in and around Washington, D.C., contains a scant five episodes, and it’s mostly business as usual: In each installment, the Fab Five meet a deserving “hero” to whom they apply their process. We learn about said hero’s life (culture expert Karamo Brown uses therapy-speak to draw out emotions), they learn a recipe (via food/wine guy Antoni Porowski), get a hair, makeup, and style makeover (Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France, respectively), and their living space is updated (care of Jeremiah Brent and previously, for eight seasons, Bobby Berk). Heartstrings are tugged as what appear to be hardworking, hard-loving individuals receive aesthetic and material upgrades. This time around, each episode ends with a different Fab Five member reflecting on the experience of participating in the show. Gratitude and happy tears abound, but watching, you might get the feeling that everybody—on screen and at home—is ready to move on.

There’s no shame there. As Netflix’s longest running reality series to date, Queer Eye’s staying power has been impressive, especially given that virtually the same format had already come and gone before it. For many interested in gay representation, the idea to reboot the Bravo show originally titled Queer Eye for the Straight Guy didn’t seem like the slam dunk it would turn out to be (in addition to nine season renewals, 12 Primetime Emmys and Rotten Tomatoes averages that rarely dipped below 90%). With its “experts” of varying bonafides, the show was predicated on the fallacy that gay men have innately superior taste (anyone with a Twitter account in 2018 could have surveyed the landscape and testified to the contrary). By emphasizing the sexuality of the Fab Five, but presenting them in an environment devoid of romance or sex, the show invoked the “gay uncle theory,” which posits that gay men’s benevolence (via nurturing and the sharing of resources) toward family members’ offspring allows the biological continuation of homosexuality. 

Read more: Reality TV Is Struggling to Meet a Painful Moment for LGBTQ Rights

Placing this neutered characterization on screen also recalled the antiquated sissy stereotype, referred to as Hollywood’s “first gay stock character” in Vito Russo’s 1995 gay-representation doc The Celluloid Closet. The sissy occupied a place between masculinity and femininity and almost always existed in service of the surrounding straight characters as well as the predominately hetero audience, for whom the sissy was a reliable source of humor. If the original Queer Eye seemed retrograde in 2003, doing it all over again in 2018 was like warming over dust.

Impressively, the Fab Five made it werk, as they are wont to do. They triumphed over the stereotypes, establishing themselves not only as distinct personalities for the show but as stars woven into the fabric of pop culture. It wasn’t always smooth for them (Porowski was dragged for his over-reliance on avocado) and the decisions they made were sometimes curious (Van Ness came out as nonbinary timed to the release of a makeup line), but navigating life in public rarely occurs without complication. Even if their exact qualifications for their roles on the show were sometimes dubious (Brown has been quoted as referring to himself as a “licensed social worker,” which the Washington Post reported is not true), they exceeded at their main job: making good TV. They were effectively IRL advice columnists on assignment, swooping in to give their subjects a dollop of expiring attention, sending them on their way, and hoping for the best. As boisterous and legitimately funny as they could be, they were ultimately in service of not just their heroes but the show’s comfortingly repetitive format.

Revolution was never high on the Fab 5’s list of priorities, but the show did quietly counter those with contempt for queer people by presenting them onscreen as kind (to strangers and, maybe more importantly, each other, though their off-screen dynamics weren’t entirely devoid of drama). Queer Eye provided an extremely basic version of positive representation, which was nonetheless useful for a country that’s still riddled with bigotry. Queer history is muted on an institutional level, and in the name of anti-DEI efforts, which exist to uphold the straight white male status quo. Queer representation in pop culture matters, perhaps now more than ever as LGBTQ rights are under threat in greater society.

What Queer Eye provided was part of a balanced picture of queer people in media. But if it felt quaint when it premiered, it looks even more so when compared to the recent TV obsession Heated Rivalry, which asks its viewers to consider its characters’ internal, romantic, and sexual lives very, very closely. The upcoming film Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling as men in an intricate BDSM relationship, is similarly unflinching in its demands that its audience interface with the whole of its characters. And though the sexuality and flamboyance of the Fab Five was never in question, so much of what their aesthetic makeovers accomplished was to iron out eccentricities from their heroes, effectively de-queering them. Their goal was often to help these people fit in more, as opposed to enhancing elements of their appearance that stood out. In that respect, RuPaul’s Drag Race was always more evolved than Queer Eye in its very premise, which encourages its contestants to look and act as wild as their imagination will let them. When it comes to TV, Drag Race has always been at the vanguard of culture.

The final five episodes of Queer Eye are solid hours of entertainment, frequently funny and sometimes moving. The show could have continued in this way forever, but it’s understandable why it didn’t. Who knows how effective Queer Eye’s system ultimately was for its heroes, many of whom didn’t seem to have the economic means to continue living in the standard set by the Fab Five. Even so, most of them seemed to enjoy themselves, and they walked away with armfuls of new stuff. Ultimately, the goal each time was humble: Leave it better than you found it. If we apply that to the pop culture landscape as well, the Fab Five can walk away with pride.

Ryan Murphy never gives us any peace. One month, the megaproducer is on Netflix, using Ed Gein as a vehicle to indict the audience that devours the kind of lurid true-crime tales that are his specialty; the next, he pops up on Hulu, pairing a half-dozen acclaimed actresses with one of the most famous women on the planet for what is nominally a lawyer show but actually just hollow girlboss pastiche. In February, he’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day with Love Story, an FX anthology series that will dramatize real-life romances, beginning—riskily—with that of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. But for his first contribution to the network in 2026, The Beauty, he and co-creator Matthew Hodgson have concocted a genre-hopping oddity that sounds even less likely to work. The big surprise is that, unlike so many of Murphy’s recent projects, it does.

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Premiering with two episodes on Jan. 21, the series proceeds from a premise that immediately calls to mind the darkly comic horror movie The Substance, an underdog 2024 Best Picture contender that earned Oscar nominations for both its director, Coralie Fargeat, and its star, Demi Moore. A revolutionary biotech product called The Beauty catalyzes—through a grotesque process involving a sort of flesh cocoon—radical physical transformations, turning the old, the sick, the ugly, and the merely average into young, healthy, stunning specimens of human perfection. Most creators would presumably want to downplay the resemblance between their new show (which is based on a decade-old comic by Jeremy Haun, an executive producer, and Jason A. Hurley) and one of the most prominent movies of the last few years. But brazenness has always been Murphy’s M.O. Of all the people he could have cast as The Beauty’s yassified mastermind, he chose Ashton Kutcher, a man equally famous for his career as an actor turned venture capitalist and for marrying a 42-year-old Moore when he was 27.

You’d think the Substance–Beauty, Kutcher-Moore connection would be tough to get past. (Moore, who had a role in 2024’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, is also part of the Murphyverse.) As it turned out, I basically forgot about that bit of casting-as-metacommentary within the first few installments of the 11-episode season. That’s one benefit of Murphy’s maximalist approach to storytelling: rarely does a single element of his shows overwhelm the rest. Yet the result is too often, especially in the past decade, as his output has exploded, exhausting—a messily assembled collage of camp, glamor, genre tropes, celebrity stunt casting, and strident sociopolitical satire. The Beauty delivers all of the above as early as its opening sequence, which sends a model played by Bella Hadid on a violent rampage through Paris. But its mix of styles, performers, tones, and ideas is organized into a tighter, more dynamic narrative than we usually get from Murphy. Instead of tiring us out with one macabre set piece after another, he switches up the mood regularly enough to keep scripts nimble and (mostly) avoid repetition.

Although the show picks up settings and storylines as it goes, the setup is fairly simple. Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) and Cooper Madsen (Murphy regular Evan Peters) are FBI agents sent to Europe to investigate a string of gory supermodel deaths. (Who would give the name Cooper, first or last, to an FBI-agent character after Twin Peaks? Ryan Murphy, of course.) Partners and friends with benefits who’ve ruled out romance, they have potentially incompatible worldviews. He’s into “embracing imperfections”; she’s always chasing something better, whether it’s a ritzier hotel on assignment or breast implants. They mean more to each other than either seems to realize. In a series thick with Murphy’s signature schadenfreude, and one that casts its strongest actors in the few roles that require emotional realism, theirs is the rare bond that feels authentic.

As their investigation points to a sexually transmitted virus as the cause of victims’ journeys from schlumpy to hot to dead, we glimpse a more deliberate path to perfection. Kutcher’s character—the richest man in the world, who calls himself The Corporation—has, in defiance of all ethical, legal, and medical precepts, developed The Beauty. Though its primary purpose is to beautify, this miracle injection fundamentally alters the human body, turning back the clock on aging and illness, with profound implications on everything from gender to disability. The STI version poses a threat to The Corporation, both because it creates a black market and because patients who undergo the bootleg treatment tend to meet disgusting, public ends. So he’s got a roving hitman (Anthony Ramos’ The Assassin) on the payroll to kill them before they can spread it. The Beauty’s portrayal of The Corporation as a sociopath (though it’s The Assassin who loves Christopher Cross the way American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman loved Huey Lewis) with conspicuous parallels to Elon Musk is Murphy at his broadest. He says things like: “Billionaires, we don’t need friends. We have staff.” In its bluster and smarm, it’s the ideal role for Kutcher.

If The Corporation were its protagonist, like the many one-dimensional monsters around whom Murphy has built many hit TV franchises, The Beauty might be pretty hard to take. Instead, taking structural cues from the comic-book medium, it makes neither Kutcher’s character nor the FBI lovers constant presences. More than a cat-and-mouse game between him and them, the series uses that procedural framework to imagine, in psychologically astute and electrifyingly strange ways, an entire world altered by The Beauty. There’s an unexpectedly moving vignette about a trans scientist and her supportive lab partner; a pocket family melodrama in which the parents of a profoundly ill girl are faced with an unthinkable dilemma; and a mini teen soap that applies all the overused conventions of the afterschool special to this outlandish scenario. 

The Beauty is sometimes an action thriller—there are a few cool fight sequences—sometimes a sci-fi thought experiment, sometimes a body horror frightfest, sometimes a screwball romance, sometimes a Succession-on-steroids wealth satire. It’s a lark, except for when it’s a gut punch. It’s silly, except for when it’s serious. A gruesome incident that goes down amid snarky fashion-world gossip in the notorious Condé Nast cafeteria threatens to eclipse this spring’s The Devil Wears Prada sequel. There’s great scenery chomping from Isabella Rossellini, whose operatic performance as The Corporation’s trophy wife turned scathing critic reveals a perspective on beauty and its discontents accessible only to those who’ve possessed, then transcended it. Demographically, her character is the closest The Beauty comes to Moore in The Substance. But her relationship to her aging body is less predictable, her experience just one data point on a matrix of individuals shaped and warped by our society’s obsession with beauty. The problem isn’t limited to older women.

The show rarely lingers long enough in any mode to strain viewers’ patience. In lieu of the subtlety we’ve learned never to expect from Murphy, who reliably turns subtextual references to AIDS or Ozempic or the Sackler dynasty into blunt dialogue that mentions them by name, we get brisk movement from one analogy to the next and plenty of thoughtful synergy between intersecting themes. The pleasure, as with the unpredictable FX not-quite-anthologies Atlanta and Reservation Dogs, is in never knowing what each compact episode will bring.    

I wouldn’t put The Beauty in the same exalted league as those shows, not by a long shot. Murphy and Hodgson, longtime collaborators who wrote every episode together, throw too much low-carb spaghetti at the wall for all of it to stick. An early storyline features what might be the laziest incel caricature ever committed to video. Once we know which horrors to expect out of the standard Beauty onset, the lengthy transformation scenes get redundant. The dialogue sometimes lapses from bad-funny to just bad. As per usual for Hollywood, but in a choice that undermines this particular show’s themes, characters who we’re supposed to see as plain are played by extremely attractive actors. (Peters does not have “a face like a catcher’s mitt,” come on, be serious.)

The Beauty puts all of its ideas on the surface of the story, leaving little room for interpretation or ambiguity. But it’s so entertaining—and feels so timely without being a doomy drag—that it seems uncharitable to complain that it isn’t a masterpiece. The rare drama that manages to be smart without being subtle, it might make you suspect that Murphy injected himself with some professional equivalent of The Beauty and evolved, however briefly, into his ideal TV-creator self.

Before American Idol and America’s Got Talent, there was Star Search. Beginning in 1983, the series was the ultimate talent competition show, allowing artists to compete across select categories for a $100,000 prize. Hosted by Ed McMahon until 1994 (and co-hosted with Martha Quinn in 1995), it went off the air until the show was rebooted in 2003 for an additional season, hosted by Arsenio Hall. And Star Search is set to rise again, with Netflix launching a new version on Jan. 20.

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The format of Star Search was fairly simple. In various categories (including singing, comedy, spokesmodel, and dance), two different competitors would perform for a panel of judges, and whoever got a higher star rating would advance to the next episode. If they made the finals, they competed for the grand prize. The Netflix version will be live, and audiences can vote in real time for their favorite competitors, adding a new twist to the proceedings. The reboot will be hosted by Anthony Anderson, with the panel of judges including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Chrissy Teigen, and Jelly Roll.

Star Search birthed the careers of many legends, including Britney Spears, Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler, and Beyoncé (who competed with Destiny’s Child, then known as Girl Tyme). While those are well-known examples, there are plenty of other actors, singers, and comedians who performed on Star Search early in their careers. As Netflix ushers in a new generation of competitors, let’s look back at some of the most notable names from the Star Search history.

Singers

Aaliyah

At age 10, Aaliyah appeared on Star Search, singing the Rodgers and Hart song “My Funny Valentine.” It’s a stunning rendition (especially for a 10-year-old) that reminds you what a powerhouse performer she was, eventually gaining the moniker of the “Princess of R&B” before she tragically died in an airplane crash at 22.

Alanis Morissette

The legendary Canadian alt-rocker Alanis Morissette, singer of classic tracks like “Ironic” and “You Oughta Know,” first appeared on Star Search at the age of 14 in 1990, performing under a stage name. After losing, she reverted to her real name, perhaps channeling some of that frustration into becoming the icon she is today.

Christina Aguilera

Five-time Grammy winner and singer of “Beautiful,” “Fighter,” and “Genie in a Bottle,” Christina Aguilera was on Star Search before her debut in the Mickey Mouse Club. At just 8 years old, Aguilera performed an impressive version of Etta James’ “Sunday Kind of Love,” though she didn’t go on to win.

Justin Timberlake

NSYNC boy band member and eventual solo pop superstar, Troll and frequent SNL host Justin Timberlake was first seen at age 11 on Star Search, performing as Justin Randall (using his middle name). It’s a very different number from what you’d expect from Timberlake, who donned full country regalia (including a cowboy hat), singing Alan Jackson’s “Love’s Got a Hold on You.”

LeAnn Rimes

LeAnn Rimes is the youngest ever individual recipient of a Grammy award, winning two when she was just 14. Years before that, when she was 8, she debuted on Star Search in 1991, performing “Don’t Worry” by Marty Robbins, winning her first round.

Pitbull

Before he became internationally recognized as rapper Pitbull (a.k.a. Mr. Worldwide), a young Armando Perez appeared on Star Search in 1994, when he was just 13 years old. He didn’t win the competition, but began honing his identity as Pitbull a few years later.

Usher

Though he didn’t win, Star Search proved pivotal for Usher Raymond IV. His performance of Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” was so impactful that LA Reid, co-founder of LaFace Records, signed him to a contract. His first solo single came not long after: “Call Me A Mack,” recorded for the soundtrack of 1993’s Poetic Justice.

Billy Porter 

Actor and singer Billy Porter, best known for his Emmy-winning role on Pose, had enormous success on Star Search, winning the grand prize of $100,000 in the vocalist category in 1992 (though he filmed in 1991 on break from his Broadway debut in Miss Saigon). He was 21 at the time. 

Comedians

Brad Garrett

Best known for his role in Everybody Loves Raymond, Brad Garrett competed in the first ever comedy category in 1984. He didn’t just participate—Garrett won the finals at age 23, securing a $100,000 prize, providing a vital breakthrough for his long and fruitful career. 

Drew Carey

Star of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and host of The Price Is Right, Drew Carey launched his comedy career on Star Search in 1988. Though he didn’t win the grand prize, his performances on the show effectively announced him as a talent worth watching, and he landed his own HBO special just three years later.

Kevin James

Star of sitcom King of Queens and many films, including Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Kevin James won several rounds on Star Search in 1995, advancing to the semi-finals. The exposure likely helped him land a role on Everybody Loves Raymond, which led to his own sitcom in 1998.

Martin Lawrence

In 1987, comedian and future star of the Bad Boys franchise Martin Lawrence won his first round on Star Search. The set shows off much of his charm, and provided national attention that helped lead to his first acting role in What’s Happening Now!! that same year.

Norm Macdonald

The late stand-up comedian and Saturday Night Live Weekend Update anchor Norm Macdonald had a handful of appearances at comedy festivals before his appearance on Star Search in 1990. The Canadian appeared on an international-themed episode of the show, losing to a Liberian comic named Bushman. He wasn’t successful, but he managed a mighty fine career anyway.

Ray Romano

Unlike his Everybody Loves Raymond co-star Brad Garrett, Ray Romano did not win Star Search. But Romano has enjoyed a stellar career in comedy, including three Primetime Emmy trophies and an equally successful voice-acting stint, most notably in the Ice Age movies. 

Rosie O’Donnell

Actor and comedian Rosie O’Donnell is known best for her vibrant stand-up and movie career, which all began with her 1984 appearance on Star Search. She almost made it to the finals, and while she didn’t win the grand prize, she impressed audiences with her comic stylings, which helped launch her into stardom.

Roy Wood, Jr.

Roy Wood, Jr., who rose to fame with his regular appearances on The Daily Show, competed on the 2003 version of Star Search. He was successful on the revamped version of the show, reaching the semi-finals, which gave him a confidence boost to take his career to the next level.

Actors

Lauren Ambrose

Though the show is better known for singing, several actors got their start on Star Search. That group includes Lauren Ambrose, known for her roles in Six Feet Under, Servant, and Yellowjackets. At 11, Ambrose took to the stage, singing the up-tempo “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas. She lost, but in the quick interview portion, she said that one day she wanted to be a “great actress and wonderful performer,” which she’s certainly achieved.

Garcelle Beauvais

The actor, best known for The Jamie Foxx Show and her multi-year stint on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, competed in the Spokesmodel category in 1985, winning several rounds.

Sharon Stone

Oscar nominee Sharon Stone competed in the Spokesmodel category in 1984. She didn’t emerge victorious, but it helped launch her decades-long career in acting that’s still going strong, most recently appearing in Nobody 2, and with a role in the upcoming season of Euphoria.

Tatyana Ali

Fresh Prince of Bel Air star and singer Tatyana Ali got her start at the very young age of 7 in 1987 on Star Search. She won multiple rounds, performing numbers like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Ultimately, she lost to Alisan Porter, aged 5, who became a successful actor and singer in her own right, winning Season 10 of The Voice in 2016.

Jan. 19, 2026 marks the 40th year that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has been observed as a federal holiday on the third Monday of the month.

MLK Day, which honors the civil rights activist’s Jan. 15 birthday, was made a federal holiday in 1986 after years of activism from politicians, celebrities, civil rights activists, and the public. A key figure in the effort was the legendary R&B singer Stevie Wonder, who testified before Congress, held rallies, and even wrote the song “Happy Birthday,” which specifically called for a national holiday for King’s birthday.

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Here’s what to know about the Grammy Award-winning singer’s role in the creation of MLK Day.

A song in the key of life: Composing “Happy Birthday”

While efforts to push for a federal holiday in King’s name began shortly after he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, they were stalled for years. After a bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan failed in September 1979, Wonder reached out to King’s widow Coretta Scott King to propose an idea. As he recalled to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2011:

“I said to her, you know, ‘I had a dream about this song. And I imagined in this dream I was doing this song. We were marching to — with petition signs to make for Dr. King’s birthday to become a national holiday.’ 

And she was excited about it. And she said, you know, ‘I wish you luck, you know. We’re in a time where I don’t think it’s going to happen.’ 

I said, “Well, no, I really believe it will.'”

In 1980, Wonder recorded the tribute “Happy Birthday”, specifically calling for a national holiday around King’s birthday in the lyrics. He singled out critics, singing, “There ought to be a law against anyone who takes offense at a day in your celebration.” And he issued a direct call to action:

I just never understood

How a man who died for good

Could not have a day that would

Be set aside for his recognition

Because it should never be

Just because some cannot see

The dream as clear as he

That they should make it become an illusion

And we all know everything

That he stood for time will bring

For in peace our hearts will sing

Thanks to Martin Luther King

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday

In a 1980 TIME review, the magazine wrote, “The song is a declaration of independence and a celebration of pride, and it is one measure of Wonder’s gifts that his music not only honors the memory of a great man, but enhances it.”

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Passing MLK Day in Congress

On Jan. 15, 1981, more than 15,000 people marched from the foot of the Capitol to the Washington monument, carrying signs that said “Let’s Make This Day a Celebration – Happy Birthday to Martin Luther King.” The event concluded with Wonder singing “We Shall Overcome” and “Happy Birthday.” Wonder backed two more rallies for the holiday in 1982 and 1983.

In 1983, a bill to create the holiday made it to the U.S. House floor, thanks to a petition led by Coretta Scott King, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Stevie Wonder. However, in the Senate, one of the most vocal opponents of the holiday was Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who expressed concern about dedicating a national holiday to a man who’d had communist sympathizers as advisors. Accusations that King was a communist were one reason why the civil rights leader was the subject of constant FBI surveillance in the final years of his life. At a 1983 Radio City Music Hall concert, Wonder slammed Helms, arguing, “Each day that you can feel any kind of hatred for anyone is a day that God has given you that you have wasted.”

Wonder was 33 years old when, on Nov. 2, 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law that designated the third Monday in January Martin Luther King Day, starting Jan. 20, 1986. As TIME previously reported, Reagan may have thought that, with the 1984 presidential election coming up, establishing the holiday might make moderate white voters more inclined to vote for him.

Higher Ground: Why Stevie Wonder fought for MLK Day

Shortly after the Senate approved the bill, Wonder told reporters, “We can remind ourselves on [King’s] birthday of our responsibility and our desire to live up to our responsibility.” He said that King was smiling in heaven because “Americans were moving in the right direction.”

He described the purpose of the song in a 1984 UPI interview: “I wanted to rekindle his principles in a song that would be good enough to publish, and strong enough to inspire people to remember the dream. I hope the song did what it was meant to do, but I think the feeling and desire were there for a long time before the song came out.” 

Reflecting on the song’s impact to the Los Angeles Times in 1985, Wonder said it was about more than the push for a national holiday: “I never connected it with the movement too much, even though I know it’s connected. Music creates a vibration and energy, and I think people were just singing it to themselves even before I wrote the song. Their spirits were singing that kind of celebration because we wanted it to happen.” 

To Wonder, King represented a type of civil discourse that he thinks gets lost in a 21st century audience with so much social media vitriol. As he explained to Anderson Cooper in 2011, King “spoke of finding solutions nonviolently, and as well, he believed in a place of peace that had to exist between all people of this country. We can disagree without feeling that we have to spew words of bitterness, of hatred. I mean, that doesn’t represent a place of unity.” 

In 2017, during an appearance on the radio program What’s Good With Stretch & Bobbito, Wonder said he hoped that the holiday would be meaningful to people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds: “I never saw it as being political — I just saw it as being the right thing to do. I just felt that a man who had fought for the economic, social and civil rights for all people should be recognized for the greatness that he did, and for those like himself who lived and died for that, should be recognized. And when people would say to me, ‘Hey, a black holiday!’ I’d say ‘No, this is a holiday for everyone.’”

This article discusses, in detail, the events of Industry Season 4, Episode 2.

Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have, over the course of four seasons, upgraded their HBO drama about young finance employees in London from smart soap to somehow-even-more-entertaining laboratory for the dissection of capitalism. While Season 3 mixed beakers labeled ethics and money, with explosive results, this year’s arc puts love and sex under the profit-motive microscope. If there was ever any doubt that Down and Kay were bearish on the combination, it was dispelled within the opening scenes of the premiere, which paired characters played by two famous former child actors—Kiernan Shipka, a.k.a. Mad Men’s Sally Draper, and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton—for a tawdry, deceptive, disastrous hookup. Industry is where innocence goes to die, choked out in bed by various personifications of greed.

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In keeping with that central theme, the season has a cast now entirely liberated from the Pierpoint & Co. trading floor circling a payment processing startup called Tender as it cuts ties with an OnlyFans-esque platform, Siren, in a play to become a mainstream “bank killer.” But in its second episode, which aired on Sunday—and is, in my estimation, the show’s greatest hour yet—Industry takes a detour from the London rat race. From the entry-level pairing of Shipka’s Type A executive assistant character and Heaton’s sweaty finance reporter, we ascend the class ladder to the country estate of Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and his bride, the disgraced heiress and Pierpoint castoff formerly known as Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela). Down and Kay, who directed as well as wrote the episode, make inspired use of this setting as a backdrop for a contemporary reimagining of Gothic tropes that makes Saltburn look lazy. (It is!)

Titled “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” it opens with Henry losing his MP race to a stiff Labour candidate, Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly). We revisit the depressive baronet, who, last season, humiliated himself with a catastrophic green-energy IPO, sometime later, as he mopes about his estate—a literal museum, where Henry growls at tour groups while playing an antique piano in his dressing gown. It’s his 40th birthday, an occasion that has made him even more miserable than usual, and Yas is throwing him a party. Also on hand to scold him out of his funk is Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), a newspaper publisher of waning influence. He already knows just about everything we’ll discover by the end of the episode: that Henry’s father killed himself on his own 40th birthday, that young Henry witnessed the suicide. “This family hates birthdays,” Norton drawls, much later, in an understatement so grim, it’s funny.

For her part, Yas has come to see her new marriage—like her family and career—as a failure. Henry hasn’t just lost his ambition; he’s lost his libido, going so far as to advise her to sleep with other people. Stymied in her own professional endeavors but ever resourceful, Yas has invited both Bevan and Tender’s co-founder and acting CEO, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), to the party in hopes of shoring up his prospects. “I’m a spectator and a caregiver,” she laments to her aunt, Cordelia (Claire Forlani), that night. The older woman’s romantic advice is as ruthless and transactional as any MBA’s negotiation strategy. “You cannot be too afraid of what you’ll lose,” she says, referring to Yas’ fear of losing the wealth, status, and protection of Henry’s family. “You’ll become too pliant, and then you will lose it. It doesn’t matter how much a man tells you he loves you. You never give them unconditional love because they will weaponize it.” In conclusion: “Get off your knees.” It’s a knockout monologue—one that sets up Yas’ Emmy-worthy tirade when she finds Henry holed up in his room doing drugs, and that draws out the Dangerous Liaisons undertones of the party’s powdered-wig-and-corset dress code. 

The 18th century theme resonates on a few levels. I couldn’t look at this manor full of sloshed nobles without thinking of the aristocrats who got guillotined in the French Revolution. Concurrent with all this decadence was the rise of Gothic literature. The ancient estate and Henry’s melancholic mien put us deep into the tropes of that genre before the plot even gets moving. Then, halfway through the episode, a ghost appears—though we can’t be certain until much later that that’s what the mysterious guest known as the Commander (Jack Farthing) is. 

He arrives at exactly the right time. A chaotic scene is unfolding as Henry rejoins the party in the dining room, a pharmacy’s worth of intoxicants coursing through his veins, and lays into Bevan. Suddenly, the Commander is at his side. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Henry greets him. The latecomer could be an old school chum; the two men appear to be the same age. What we know immediately is that he’s an enabler, hustling Henry off to the pub in pursuit of “a spit-and-sawdust tryst with a local type.” What they actually get is a baronet-walks-into-a-bar joke: there’s the priest who baptized Henry (Roy Sampson), the chambermaid Yas chewed out that morning (Esther O’Casey), and her irreverent suitor (Nye Occomore), who gleefully informs Henry of the vicious gossip circulating about his wife. In sharp contrast to the social mobility happening in the tech and finance industries, here is a place where centuries-old class snobbery is so entrenched, the commoners sneer at a noble marrying a woman who talks like a “North London git.” Henry clocks the guy, proving that his passion for Yas—and for life in general—hasn’t fully run dry. “I bet that’s the best you’ve felt in ages,” cheers the Commander.

Just about everyone in Industry has a horrible parent, is a horrible parent, or both. But the intertwined storylines of “The Commander and the Grey Lady” underscore the awfulness of both Henry’s and Yasmin’s late fathers, and suggest how that shared pain has forged a bond strong enough to survive his spoiled blueblood’s midlife crisis. There’s a real love-is-dead moment when Yas spots Cordelia, who was just rhapsodizing about the purity of her romance with a younger man, literally on her knees before a stubby, old rich guy. Yas kicks her out, but not before hearing her defend Yas’ abusive “bon vivant” dad—and, shockingly, fail to deny that anything incestuous transpired between the siblings during their “very bohemian childhood.” Is this Lady Muck finally freeing herself from the corrosive influence of the Hanani family?

Though suspicion regarding the Commander’s identity mounts throughout the second half of the episode, as the ghost interacts only with the deliriously high Henry, it isn’t confirmed until he bares his bloody, slit throat in the predawn gloam. “You’ll see me soon,” he promises his son. Henry recalls words of wisdom that the priest whispered in his ear hours earlier: “Long before morning, you will know that what you have seemed to discover was a thing that you had known all along.” Henry seems to interpret this as a reinforcement of the Commander’s prophecy—that he, too, is fated to kill himself on his 40th birthday. Before sunrise, he creeps into the garage where the antique car he associates with his father’s suicide is parked and starts to inhale fumes. But at the last second, he imagines Yasmin’s voice calling to him and escapes. Maybe the thing he’d known all along was that she was worth living for. How’s that for Gothic romance?

If there’s anything keeping “The Commander” from perfection, it’s an unnecessarily expository flashback to Henry’s childhood late in the episode, when we already know or can guess all the relevant backstory, complete with a shot in which we see the young boy replaced by Harington. But the hour is a masterpiece regardless, dense with deft dialogue, brilliant performances (especially by Abela and guest star Farthing, who was great as a dissipated upper-cruster in Rain Dogs), and perceptive character development. In the background of the love story and the ghost story, Down and Key do a lot to connect this field trip to the season-long arc. When Henry meets Whit, we see that each has what the latter needs: “Longevity in Britain is about access,” the Gatsby-like American tells the aristocrat he’s courting to be the face of Tender. “I need a partner. A native partner.” One Harper Stern (Myha’la) makes a cameo; she and Bevan, both women excelling in their careers, challenge Yas’ relegation to helpmate. (“All of this stuff is not going to get you the respect you think you deserve,” says Harper, and that you think is doing a lot of work.) Shipka’s Hayley Clay shows up, too, in an intriguing quasi-flirtation with Yas.

The final moments of the episode are like a mad lightning round. Instead of using his father’s car to kill himself, Henry pulls up to his manor, a frantic Yas runs out to meet him, and they have sex on the hood. Always hyperconscious of Industry’s place in pop culture, and particularly its connection to other shows where its cast has appeared, Down and Kay have Norton look on, from a high window, and proclaim: “Spring is coming.” (Does Yasmin lock eyes with him? Of course she does.) You bet your dragons that this is a Game of Thrones triple entendre, one that sends up Harington’s whole Jon Snow character arc. It’s a pretty broad scene, but I laughed.

But Industry wouldn’t be Industry if it ended on a purely happy note. In the car, Henry unburdens himself by telling Yas the full truth about his father’s death. Now, they realize, he’s survived the old man by a day. Psychologically, this frees him from the curse of the suicidally idle rich. He’s ready to take Whit’s job offer: “A man needs work. I think that’s why I’m here after all: to do good work.” Where does that leave Yas, whose skills at forging connections and manipulating men have afforded him this opportunity? “Maybe we should try for a child,” Henry calls out as they speed away from the home that represents his past. Yasmin says nothing, but even with sunglasses on, we can read her expression: what the hell? Her reward for enabling Henry to “do good work” will, apparently, be indefinite relegation to the domestic sphere. While we’re talking about references to other HBO prestige dramas, this coda reminded me of Tom and Shiv in the backseat of a chauffered SUV at the end of Succession, she having just defeated her brothers by handing control of the family empire to her sycophant husband, whose abilities are no match for her own. Less a ripoff than a reminder that smart women have faced similar fates since time immemorial, the twist is almost as brutal on this show as it was on that one.