The Drop
The Docket · 398 shows on the record

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Every new show gets a verdict — drop everything, worth it, background TV, slop, or a war crime. No press releases. No algorithm spin. Just a weekly ruling, delivered Friday morning.

38 issues published. 398 verdicts on the record. The latest one shipped Saturday.

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  • A short weekly recap of every meaningful new show on the big six streamers
  • A Pick of the Week — one thing actually worth your Saturday
  • A running tab of what to skip, and why

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  • Press releases rewritten with adjectives
  • Ten emails a week

You’re not crazy. Most of it is bad. We’ll tell you which.

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Sample · 2026.10.10

Marvel reanimated a dead robot and called it a big swing

Vision crawls out of the ground on Disney+, The Diplomat and Love Is Blind both return, and Sorkin reboots a website movie.

Marvel killed Vision years ago. On camera. It was a whole thing. And this week they dig him back up one more time and ask you to clap. VisionQuest lands on Disney+ Wednesday, Paul Bettany back inside the maroon synthezoid he's been playing since 2015, James Spader back as Ultron, the whole band reassembled for a tour nobody requested. Bettany's out doing press calling it "a big swing" that's "weird and out of left field," which is the exact phrase you reach for when the swing is at a corpse. It's billed as the final chapter of the WandaVision trilogy. A trilogy. For a supporting character who was already dead when the first one started. And forty miles up the 405, Aaron Sorkin opened a sequel to a 2010 movie about a website, recast Mark Zuckerberg with Jeremy Strong because Jesse Eisenberg took one look and declined, and watched it track for a soft open under ten million. The whole town is just digging. Same shovels, different graves.

The Drops

VisionQuest (Disney+). Paul Bettany is back as Vision — a rebooted one this time, hiding out after escaping the people who tried to weaponize him, which is also more or less Bettany's professional relationship with Marvel. Terry Matalas runs it. James Spader returns as Ultron. Bettany says the show is about intergenerational trauma, fathers and sons, the denial of pain, which is a heavy syllabus for a program about a man-shaped kitchen appliance learning to feel. Premieres Wednesday the 14th. I'm not ruling on it, because it isn't out and I don't review trailers. But a Disney+ show about a dead android's buried grief being the good kind of weird — I'd want to see the money first.

The Diplomat, season 4 (Netflix).

The Diplomat

Back Thursday the 15th, eight episodes, Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell and Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford all furrowing their brows at each other over some Russian nuclear emergency. We already ruled on this one. West Wing but hornier, an airport paperback with a Netflix budget, and nothing's changed enough to reopen the file. You will not remember a single plot point and you will watch all eight hours anyway. That's not an insult. That's the service it provides, and it provides it well.

Love Is Blind, season 11 (Netflix). Eleven. They filmed this one in Boston, which is the only genuinely new fact about the eleventh season of a show where strangers get engaged through a wall. Five episodes drop the 14th, then it dribbles out weekly through November 4, because God forbid you finish it in one night and get your life back. The retention team has a mortgage. Nick and Vanessa Lachey still hosting, still narrating each pod like they're witnessing the first sunrise.

Oh, and the new Skydance behemoth — the Paramount-Warner thing that closed last week — spent part of this one quietly filing Turner Classic Movies under its film group. The one channel whose entire reason for existing is showing old movies with a little dignity, now a line item inside the conglomerate. Scorsese had to fight to protect that network once. Sharpen it up, Marty.

Pick of the week. Thin week, and I won't lie to you about it. The two headliners don't land until midweek and I haven't seen them, so anybody telling you what to watch Saturday night is guessing. If you need something that already knows what it is, take The Diplomat season 4 when it drops. Not because it's great. Because it won't waste an hour of your life pretending to be art, which this week puts it comfortably ahead of a grieving robot.

Prediction. By this time next year there's a standalone WandaVision streaming hub, a limited series about the toaster Vision used to own, and a fourth Social Network where Jeremy Strong plays an entirely different tech guy. Hollywood ran dry somewhere around 2019 and has been living off exhumation ever since. The graves are the content now, and business is good.

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The Hot Docket · Updated OCT 14 · Daily

What’s trending
isn’t always good.

Today’s top 10, ranked by raw popularity. Anything not already on the docket gets auto-sentenced by the court — trending doesn’t mean it earns the trophy.

FILM

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

✅WORTH IT

Cretton ditches the multiverse, hands Holland a lonely NYC Peter, and lets Bernthal's Punisher steal scenes. Actually works.

2
FILM

Resident Evil

✅WORTH IT

Cregger's Resident Evil premiered at Fantastic Fest and critics flipped. Gory, funny, mean. Video game curse: dead.

3
FILM

Matchbox the Movie

🐍SLOP

A 127-minute action comedy about the toy cars. Please read that twice.

4
FILM

The Odyssey

✅WORTH IT

Nolan's IMAX Odyssey, Damon as Odysseus. First reactions rave, a couple mutter 'easier to respect than love.' Go big screen.

5
SERIES

Carrie

✅WORTH IT

Flanagan stretches King to eight episodes and mostly earns it.

6
SERIES

MobLand

🛋️BACKGROUND TV

Ritchie-does-Sopranos with Hardy scowling and Brosnan snarling. Stylish, hollow, perfect for a folded-laundry night.

7
FILM

Animals

🐍SLOP

Affleck does Kurosawa for Netflix, lands at 44%. Vulture called it a catastrophe. Scroll past it.

8
SERIES

Ted Lasso

🛋️BACKGROUND TV

Season 1 is comfort. Season 3 is a slog. Season 4 coming for Apple's sake.

9
FILM

Runner

✅WORTH IT

Ritchson and Owen Wilson running from a cartel with a kid's meds. Dumb-fun action, 77% critics, 89% audience. It rips.

10
SERIES

Slow Horses

✅WORTH IT

Gary Oldman as a filthy MI5 washout. Six-episode seasons, all plot.

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