OK. So the Dee gig is up and Devons was RIGHT ON after seeing Malory and I Forget in those Adam and Even suits. Those are fucking hot. It’s not even fair. Even Mallory is hot. That’s not even a punishment but anyway, now Dee and Devons are on the same level. That’s how it has to be to win.
I don’t understand what the deal is with regard to the flip vote. I do not understand what the big deal is because it did not affect any play or a blindside or anything like that. Haley’s face after that eviction last week confused me. I was like, is she shocked? At the 8-3 vote?
We have a good and solid Big Brother match this year. Most, if not all, of the players are good.
BTW, they need to figure out a better plan with regard to the picks every week. Too much deduction unless that’s part of the plan to lessen the chances of people getting voted the best down the line.
During the feed, Melody was on some type of a telephone. I could not tell if it were real or if she was just playing make-believe like a 5-year-old.
I am lost on why Haley is so upset over this vote from last week that did not matter. Was it a show of loyalty? LOL.
Also, how does Haley know what was said in the confessional? Maybe Angela told her, or maybe they discuss it prior to voting.
The problem with Angela is she’s a decent player but only and is not a great one because she does not play 3 steps ahead and she just buckles. This almost happened one time earlier this season but did happen big time last year. I am still baffled why everyone is shocked at Angela’s vote. Now Chuk is flabbergasted even though he did know, but yeah. I am still confused why anyone cared how anyone voted unless it totally swayed who left, which it did not. Angela’s vote did not send Lyric home. Same with Dee.
Now, does Dee continue the plan to tell Kamu? I would have to weigh that harder because Angela is playing Checkers and not Chess. She blames it on her conscience. She shouldn’t be in this game. You deal with your conscience the other 9 months of the year. If you want to win. Some things are best unsaid.
So Dee gets picked for the VETO comp. I forget the clear target. If Kamu does create distance between him and Chuk and Haley and Boy, Man, Dee went from not telling anyone about her power to telling two people. However, I do trust Kamu. I would partner with him. I would also explain the 2 only with ancillary partners or whatever they call it. Alliance. If Kamu does not say a word to anyone, that will get me to really back him. Right now he is my third favorite behind Devons and Dee in that order.
I was a pure Dee fan at the beginning until she did not tell Devon about her advantage. Now she has, but her and Devons are who I am rooting for, with Kamu right there because I don’t know him yet. I have, since Survivor, seen Dee on The Challenge, which is why she was my favorite at the outset. I then started to love Devon after seeing him every day. I hope Kamu is perfect in the social regard.
Anyway, Angela is about to blow. She’s been in tears this entire episode so far and now she is yelling and crying like mad. Latrice came to Angela’s defense, which BTW, that was hardly a blowup. That is a normal everyday cry in this house.
You know what I just realized? I do not have the voiceover or commentating like when they introduce the segments. I don’t have that ‘BIIIG BROTHER’ guy at the end of each segment. I also don’t watch commercials. This is what they give us on the Paramount or CBS feed.
The VETO Competition from the seventies is beginning now. Oh, I know this competition.
By the way, Live Jam, the radio station that plays only live music, is starting its ‘That Seventies Show’ on Sunday nights. That radio show only plays live music from the 1970s.
Chuk is out. Also BTW, Chuk’s name, considering how it’s spelled, should be pronounced Chook.
I figured out the target this week. Haley. Haley squares off against Latrice (sorry, I cannot call her Lala; there is only one Lala), and Haley wins that head-to-head. Dee cannot get groove and Barrett has the right idea maybe by singing, although you can sing along with their sounds, I guess. Dee is out.
I cannot remember if time matters. Kamu has the best time, they just said, so he moves on to the final. Would he take Haley off if he wins? I wonder about that, but anyway, they are now against each other. Haley and Kamu. Oh wait. It’s Barrett vs. Haley. Sorry. I am not looking up.
I wonder if Melody knows what the reference to The Hustle is. So Barrett vs. Kamu for the Power of VETO. I am curious what they will do after this dance-off.
Well, Kamu does not use the Veto. His rationale with Haley and Chuk was not horrible. It did not work, but it was a solid effort acting-wise, but it was also far-fetched. The only issue now is the Blockbuster, which I presume is live tonight.
So anyway, the shift from Haley to Chuk was an easy one since Haley won big in that competition that aired last night. Newton’s Apples was the game, which I would have been good at. You had to roll the balls up a ramp and get them to settle into five spots on the AstroTurf at the top of the ramp. Then, once you got all five in place, you had to knock them down off the turf. Haley crushed it, to be honest. She was behind at first but surpassed Barrett and won handily from there. “Yeah, I whooped their ass.” Chuk is out.
Also, last night, Yash Patel wins this week’s HOH. He’s from Jersey, so there is that, but I do think he will target the three veterans. We’ll know this afternoon, but the chatter overnight with Drew and Kamu made it seem like Dee, Angela, and Haley were the early nomination picks.
Barrett came in second in the competition. I think this was a debacle of a week with Latrice at the helm. It may have ended where it landed, which I think is fine. A lot was shown, including Latrice fumbling her way through the week.
Voted to Evict Barrett (1): Haley
Voted to Evict Chuk (9): Melody, Angela, Kamu, Dee, Yash, Devens, Drew, Taylor, and Mallory
Still great. Went by fast. Not as fast as the premiere, honestly, and that’s not a knock, it’s just a different gear. Episode 2 pulls back from the battlefield spectacle that opened the season and gets uncomfortably close instead.
Here’s the structure. The episode splits itself across two timelines running in parallel, and the cutting between them is what gives the hour its momentum. One thread picks up immediately after the doorstep shooting at Joe’s house. The other jumps six months ahead, into a Joe already bloodied, already captive, already in the hands of Russian SVR operatives who want exactly one thing out of her.
That future timeline opens the episode, and it’s brutal. Joe’s captors are hunting for a subcutaneous tracker they believe is buried somewhere in her body, the kind of asset-recovery paranoia that turns into a deeply upsetting scene fast. She tells them the CIA doesn’t use trackers like that. They don’t believe her, and under the threat of real torture, she gives up the location anyway. What follows is graphic and hard to watch on purpose, the tracker gets cut out and left behind on a table, a bloody, silent message for whoever comes looking. When the Lioness team finally breaches the safe house, that’s all that’s waiting for them. Joe’s already gone.
Back in the present timeline, the fallout from the porch shooting gets messier by the minute. Kaitlyn Meade shows up and effectively steamrolls the local FBI presence, taking control before the crisis spirals further. The two dead operatives Joe shot were carrying fake Romanian passports, but it doesn’t take long for the NSA to peg them as Belarusian nationals working as contract muscle for Russian intelligence. That’s where operative Bobby earns her keep this episode, floating a theory that reframes the entire attack. The hit wasn’t sloppy because the shooters were bad at their jobs. It was sloppy because killing Joe was never really the point. They were sent to confirm her identity, to check whether the CIA had actually captured a high-value Russian asset named Yurimov. And in showing up en masse at Joe’s house in the middle of the night, the Lioness team accidentally handed Russian spotters a clean look at the entire unit’s faces.
Meanwhile in Washington, Byron Westfield sits across from a Russian ambassador in a scene that’s all ice and no raised voices, the kind of tense diplomatic standoff Lioness does well. The Russians want a prisoner swap for their high-value asset. Byron shuts it down flat, no negotiation, which of course only raises the stakes for what Russia decides to do next.
And then there’s Neal, stuck trying to process something no spouse should have to reckon with, that the war his wife fights for a living just kicked down their actual front door. That domestic thread is quiet by comparison to everything else happening in the episode, but it might be the part that lingers longest, a reminder that Joe’s job was never actually separable from her family, it just took an attack on their house to prove it.
Shorter than the premiere, sure. Tighter, too. But “No Sorrow Like the Survivor” earns its runtime by making the aftermath feel just as dangerous as the mission itself, and by the time the credits hit, the real question isn’t whether Joe survives captivity. It’s what Russia actually wanted her to know before they let her go missing in the first place.
Three years is a long time for a show to stay gone. Long enough that a comeback risks feeling like a cash grab dressed up in nostalgia. Ted Lasso Season 4 doesn’t take that risk. It takes a completely different one.
The season premiered August 5 on Apple TV, and the pitch alone tells you this isn’t a victory lap. Ted’s back in Kansas City, two years removed from walking away from AFC Richmond, when Rebecca Welton, Keeley Jones, and Higgins track him down stateside with an offer nobody saw coming. Not the men’s team. Not a return to the job he already conquered. Richmond’s brand-new second-division women’s side, the Lady Greyhounds, built from scratch, underfunded, overlooked, and in desperate need of exactly the kind of relentless optimism Ted’s spent his whole career weaponizing.
That’s the whole show now. A soft reboot hiding inside a familiar universe.
And honestly? It works better than it has any right to.
Do you guys get into the Jack Reacher’s at all? I love those films. I just watched the first three episodes of Season 4 of Reacher’s TV show and its great. It was so great that I just watched Season 3 over the last few days and they were all excellent. I now started Season 1 and I am in the second seen as we speak.
He is just actually talking for the first time in this episode but anyway, let’s get caught up and first things first, I am not sure where I know this guy from but I am thinking a fast and Furious and maybe an Avengers or something. Alan Ritchson in Reacher Season 4 is absolutely massive. He evidently jacked himeself even bigger this season to match the character in Lee Child’s original book.
Three fights before the credits even roll. That was Reacher season 4. That was Jack Reacher in Philly getting a cheese steak and on the way to catching some live music when on the subway he sees a woman clutching her bag. He steps in to help. It goes wrong in a way the show has never attempted before, and it's the moment every review of the premiere keeps circling back to. From there, two men outside the station reveal what Anna was actually protecting, a flash drive. Reacher, being Reacher, slaps the truth out of them, then pays a college student fifty dollars for a completely unrelated flash drive just to bait a meeting with whoever's actually in charge. He also tracks down Anna's brother Jacob, a Philadelphia patrolman who refuses to believe his sister would ever take her own life and mentions her college-age son Ben, who Jacob helped raise. By the end of the hour, what looked like an isolated subway tragedy has already widened into something with real teeth.
Episode 2, "Cage Fight" also wastes no time. It opens with Reacher waking up locked in a literal cage alongside Jacob and a new character, Detective Tamara Green, all three of them held by kidnappers who look and act like CIA operatives hunting for Anna's flash drive and a woman connected to it named Lila. When the captors threaten Jacob and Tamara to pressure Reacher, that's the wrong move against the wrong man, and Reacher takes all three of them down. His escape gets an assist from Russell Plum, a freelance journalist who'd been staking out the building for weeks convinced it was a black site. This is also where Green properly enters the story as more than a bystander, and the tension between her more human, empathetic read on the case and Reacher's cold, mission-first instincts starts becoming one of the season's better dynamics early.
In the 3rd episode, the mystery widens considerably here. Reacher, Green, and Jacob keep digging into what Anna actually knew, and the episode confirms something the first two hours only hinted at, that whoever is protecting this secret is willing to kill rather than let it surface. Lila reenters with an explanation that raises more questions than it answers, and her growing, complicated closeness with Reacher adds a personal wrinkle to an already tangled investigation. The episode doesn’t skimp on action either, a brutal stairwell gunfight that’s about as pure Reacher as the show gets, violent and efficient with just enough absurdity thrown in that at one point a pair of chopsticks becomes a completely viable weapon. There’s also a gleefully excessive fight inside a cosmic bowling alley that critics have singled out as one of the season’s most purely fun set pieces. The episode closes on the death of a character named Nolan Cahill, a moment that confirms Anna stumbled into something considerably bigger than a personal tragedy, and it’s exactly the kind of gut punch cliffhanger designed to make the wait until episode four, “Karambits and Pieces” on August 19, feel unbearably long.
Taken together, these three hours do what a premiere block is supposed to do: establish the mystery, introduce the new players who matter, most notably Green and Jacob, and end on a note that makes skipping the next episode basically impossible. Whatever comes next, “One Small Step” made sure people are showing up for it.
Three episodes in, and Team Blue can’t catch a break. Not a single one. Episode 3 of The Challenge Cutthroat , “Keep My Name Out Your Mouth,” aired on Wednesday, August 12, on Paramount Plus, and saw Blue Team losing their third player in three consecutive weeks. It was a bad day for the group that’s currently in last place at the Thailand villa challenge.
The teams played a quick, easy-seeming, but ultimately unforgiving, challenge known as Boat Swap this morning. Each team had three boats, two white and one color-corresponding one, floating in the water, and the objective was to switch them side to side as quickly as possible. Sounds simple enough, except these were not your average boats. These were fancy but unstable boats fit only for showing off, and one wrong movement meant getting tossed overboard with nothing but a floating dock to keep you from drowning. The entire swap, once the instructions were given, took under ten minutes. Blue Team, surprisingly, didn’t kill each other during the competition this week, and were just barely left in last place, behind winning Orange Team and second-place Gray Team. Winning control of the next elimination arena was the reward in first place, which went to Orange captains Johnny Bananas and Deb Chubb.
Meanwhile, on the Gray Team, tensions were high and votes were being secretly cast. Captains Cory Wharton and Nurys Mateo were the ones to toss rookie Keanu Soto into the arena for the first time, and he took it all in stride. Newcomers to the franchise rarely last long, and they know it. But the rest of Gray Team couldn’t decide on a vote, and it was up to captain Nurys to choose between Chris Underwood (Survivor winner) and Leonardo Dionicio to throw into the arena, as votes were deadlocked between them at 3-3. She chose to vote out Leo, and, in a heated exchange, accused Chris of stirring up drama in the game last week and then expecting her to clean it up. It seems, as this season has been going on, that the Thailand villa is intent on eliminating Big Brother alums first.
But it was personal for Blue Team’s Brad Fiorenza, who has known Johnny Bananas for two decades, and had assumed, because of their relationship, that Bananas would pick him to return to the arena. Instead, Bananas revealed to Brad that he and another competitor, Josh Goldstein, have been working out together outside of The Challenge , and believed Goldstein to be a better long-term ally. Bananas placed Keanu up against Brad for the Wall Climbing game of Winning Numbers – a best-of-twelve match where competitors raced up a climbing wall with numbers on it and tried to tag the number called out by host TJ Lavin. Bananas apparently believed, wrongly, that the physical strength of a former football player would outweigh the experience of a two-time Challenge finalist in his chosen game. And he was very, very wrong.
It seems that Brad was not himself either, as he was battling against a fever of 103 degrees, and the Wall Climbing finale was a brutal battle between the rookie and the veteran. Keanu used his footballer’s build to his advantage, boxing out Brad at every opportunity, and in the end, he won 7-1. And thus, Brad became the third Blue Team player this season to be eliminated, and the third rookie to be voted out of The Challenge altogether. He was visibly upset at having to leave, and said in his exit interview that he would prefer to go up against CT or Johnny Bananas, two of the game’s most dominant veterans, headfirst rather than Keanu, who he found to have unfair speed. As always, the captains of the winning team, Orange, are Will Gagnon and Izzy Fairthorne. The captains of the losing team, Gray, are Leonardo Dionicio and Cassidy Clark, and the eliminated rookie of Blue Team is up to Alexis Lete’s picks: Nelson Thomas and Cara Maria Sorbello.
With the third Blue player sent to the Redemption Arena this week, the team has only five members left, and has suffered three consecutive arena losses. Whether or not the captaincy change will bring about a turnaround for the struggling team is to be seen in the upcoming episode, titled “Karambits and Pieces” and set to premiere next week on Wednesday, August 19th.
Forget everything you thought you knew about how this show works. Lioness built its name on a single, tightly wound premise: send an American soldier undercover, get her close to a target’s inner circle, close the trap. It was intimate. It was surgical. Season 3 blows that formula up entirely and drags the fight straight onto the actual front lines of a real war. That’s not a small creative pivot. It’s Taylor Sheridan betting his most action forward series can survive without the thing that made it distinct in the first place.
Premiering Sunday, August 2 on Paramount Plus, the new season drops CIA case officer Joe McNamara, played once again by Zoe Saldaña with the kind of exhausted, wired intensity that’s become her calling card, into a story that finally lives up to the phrase “worlds colliding.” Instead of embedding a new lioness inside a cartel or a terror cell, this season sends the entire operation barreling into the Russia and Ukraine conflict, weaving in hidden networks, foreign operatives, and covert missions that eventually trace their way back to American soil. And just when Joe should be locked in on the most volatile theater of her career, the danger follows her home. Straight to her daughters. Straight to her front door.
A tire shop in the suburbs of Pennsylvania is not the most glamorous place to make a business empire. Fluorescent lighting, bland waiting room coffee, a floor manager who can’t control his cousin, who regularly humiliates him in front of customers: This was the premise of Tires for two seasons, and somehow it worked. The show dropped all twelve episodes of Season 3 this past Thursday, August 13th, and the joke has subtly shifted. It’s no longer a scrappy idea that just barely works - it’s a franchise. Now Shane and Will are not just employees; they are partial owners of the West Chester branch of Valley Forge Automotive Center. The stakes have changed in the third season of Tires , and it has changed for the better. Will’s nerves are just as frayed as ever, but with the addition of ownership stakes, he has to balance his unease with Shane with making sure the struggling local garage makes enough money to stay afloat.
Authenticity was prioritized in production, and apparently no one had a good time on set. Gillis has joked about it on late-night talk shows, noting that they made a “huge mistake” when the crew insisted on shooting at his real-life father’s tire shop in Pennsylvania, in the middle of winter. No special effects, no climate control: The cast and crew braved the cold in order to get realism. It’s one of those seemingly minor details that heightens production value, and it’s one of the reasons critics have positively highlighted this season in particular. The commitment to making Tires feel real, rather than a sitcom version of what a tire shop could be, is the reason why this scrappy six-episode experiment in 2024 has turned into critics’ best comedy of the year for Netflix, according to several early reviews.
Expanding on a cast that has seen two seasons of new faces is a tricky endeavor, but Tires Season 3 did it with a surprising amount of grace. Thomas Haden Church reprises his role as Phil, Shane’s self-centered, childish father, who is just as delighted to see his sons back at the family business as he pretends to be annoyed by their presence. Church returns alongside Rachel Blanchard as Bonnie, Phil’s free-spirited, spiritual new girlfriend, who fits right in with the chaotic atmosphere of the tire shop. Matt Walsh plays Claude, a by-the-book Tire World executive who clashes with Will at every opportunity, while Bobby Lee plays Ricky, the arrogant son of the corporate boss, whose presence delights Will throughout the season. Finally, Billy Magnussen plays Taylor, a smooth talker with connections in the business world, who has crossed paths with Will before, and has come to the shop to offer him an exit strategy.
Season 3 has been sneaking in some emotional depth, and critics have taken notice. There’s a strange amount of vulnerability to Shane this season that didn’t quite have room to breathe in previous seasons, and some of those moments have been held in reserve for later episodes. It’s not prestige television by any stretch of the imagination, but there are moments that feel like an attempt to make something approaching a real character drama out of what is ostensibly a sitcom. It’s not quite enough to push Tires into “prestige” territory, but it’s enough to keep it from sliding back into the uncategorizable weirdness of its first season. Every critic who has seen it this season agrees that it’s the best it’s ever been, and that Tires Season 3 is, in fact, full of jokes.
The returning cast members hold their own, and have more room to breathe than ever before, as Stavros Halkias, Kilah Fox, and John McKeever - who also directs - continue their work on the series. Part of the appeal of Tires has always been the cast’s connection to the improvisational comedy world, as many of its members have crossed paths with Tires ’ creators in their work running a stand-up and sketch collective. And so Tires continues to be a show about an improvisational cast, given just enough structure to make something that works.
Whether or not Tires will stick around long enough to become one of those shows that critics name-drop on year-end lists is one question. But it almost certainly won’t be prestige television, because the show made a conscious decision not to try to be that. What it has become, three seasons and a brutal Pennsylvania winter later, is something much harder to define - a comedy that only gets better as it goes on.
Pickleball has spent the past several years quietly taking over the American backyard, and now the sport finally has the big, broad, unapologetically silly comedy it deserves. Apple Original Films is set to premiere The Dink globally from Apple TV on Friday, July 24, 2026, a summer sports comedy built around the collision of old school tennis pride and the paddle sport that has been steadily eating its lunch. Produced by Ben Stiller, who knows a thing or two about turning an underdog sport into a cultural moment after his work on Dodgeball, and led by a cast stacked with reliable comedic talent, the film arrives with the kind of pedigree that suggests Apple is treating this premise with far more care than a quick punchline about middle aged suburbanites and their paddles. Read More!
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