The Drop Issue 23: Disney Buys the YouTube Morality Play Guy

Disney signed a 20-episode deal with Dhar Mann Studios this week. Dhar Mann. The YouTube guy. The one whose entire catalog is a mean cashier being rude to a homeless man who turns out to be a billionaire, cut to a title card that says Always Be Kind. That guy. Twenty episodes. Bob Iger sat in a room, looked at a slate of possible investments, and said yes to the eight-minute vertical morality play factory. Meanwhile Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is doing press explaining that his Marvel show got un-renewed after being renewed because "it had something to do with the viewership numbers" that Disney wouldn't actually show him. So the plan at the House of Mouse is: kill Wonder Man, fund Dhar Mann. Somewhere in Burbank a strategy deck exists that made this look smart. I would pay real money to read it.

Anyway. Onto the shows.

Lanterns (HBO Max)

Damon Lindelof and Tom King made a Green Lantern show and cast Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, and then somebody at HBO looked at the pitch — two space cops investigate a murder in rural America — and greenlit True Detective with a power ring. That's the swing. The pilot dropped Saturday, the cast has Kelly Macdonald and Garret Dillahunt, and Lindelof is on record saying he wanted this to be the anti-Marvel Marvel show, which is the kind of thing showrunners say right before either winning an Emmy or getting quietly reassigned. Early reactions are strong. It's the one thing on the calendar this week that seems to actually want to be something.

✅ WORTH IT

Reacher, Season 4 (Prime Video)

Reacher is back and Alan Ritchson is still shaped like a walking freezer full of chicken. Four seasons in and the formula is untouched: enormous man arrives in town, someone underestimates him, that person's bones are now on a spreadsheet at the hospital. This one drags in Agnez Mo and leans harder into the international-conspiracy stuff, which historically is when the Lee Child books were at their most fun and their least logical. Prime Video knows exactly what it's selling — a guy in a Henley solving problems with his hands — and refuses to overthink it. Bless them for that.

✅ WORTH IT

Ted Lasso, Season 4 (Apple TV+)

They said it was over. They stood on that stage and said it was over. Then Apple looked at three years of everyone forgetting the show existed and decided grief was inefficient. So Ted is back, Richmond is back, and this week's episode is called "Richmond's Got Talent," which is the kind of title a season four writer's room comes up with at 11pm when the beer runs out. It's fine. It's pleasant. It is a show being kept on life support because Apple has more money than anyone has ever had and no idea what to do with it. Watch if you miss the cast. Don't if you already made peace with the ending.

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Silo, Season 4 (Apple TV+)

Somehow this is the fourth season of a show about people living in a vertical tube arguing about whether it's okay to go outside, and it still rules. Rebecca Ferguson is still doing the best work of her career; the mythology is still being unspooled at exactly the pace of someone who read the books and knows where the good stuff is buried. Apple has quietly built one of the best sci-fi shows on television and marketed it like it's embarrassed. If you've been watching, keep watching. If you haven't, start from season one, it's worth the climb.

✅ WORTH IT

Outer Banks, Season 5 (Netflix)

The final season. Chase Stokes did a whole Hollywood Reporter interview about how he "had so much shit wrong" while making this show, which is a thing 33-year-olds say when they realize they spent five years pretending to be a teenager finding gold on a beach. That's the vibe of Outer Banks in general: extremely serious about being a show where beautiful people scream about maps. If you loved it, this wraps it. If you didn't, no season five of a treasure-hunt CW-adjacent show is going to convert you.

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Lioness, Season 3 (Paramount+)

Taylor Sheridan is now producing so many shows that when you list them out loud it sounds like a bit. Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Landman, Lioness, and I'm pretty sure a new one dropped between when I started this sentence and when I finished it. Zoe Saldaña is great, Laysla De Oliveira is great, the show is exactly what you expect: military women with trauma, glowering men in tactical vests, a shot of a helicopter every 12 minutes. It works because Sheridan knows the formula and refuses to deviate. Nutritionally, it's a Clif bar.

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Lucky, finale (Apple TV+)

Anya Taylor-Joy on the run with Timothy Olyphant and Annette Bening in the mix, which is the sort of cast where the show could be about them assembling a bookshelf and I'd still watch. The season one finale hits this week. The reviews were split — some people loved the pulp, some people wanted it to be smarter — but Taylor-Joy carries it and Olyphant slipping into another laconic bad man is never not fun.

✅ WORTH IT

Rapid fire

Futurama keeps releasing new episodes on Hulu and nobody talks about them, which is what happens when you resurrect a show four times — the resurrection becomes the plot. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Jimmy Fallon had Michelle Pfeiffer and Rhea Seehorn on the same episode and the internet did not notice. The late-night model is a hospice patient in a suit. 🐍 SLOP

Netflix dropped a German rom-com called My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me, which has a 4/10 on 14 votes, which means the 14 people who watched it have already filed a complaint. ☠️ WAR CRIME

Pick of the Week

Lanterns on HBO Max. It's the one thing this week where actual grownups made actual choices. Lindelof, King, Chandler, Pierre, prestige-drama pacing on a superhero property that's been butchered on screen for two decades. Start with the pilot. If it doesn't hook you by the end of the first hour, bail — but I think it will.

One more thing

Meghan Markle is reportedly in "advanced talks" to return to Netflix acting after she and Harry move back to the UK. So the arc there is: leave royalty for Hollywood, do a jam brand, do a docuseries, lose a lawsuit that costs Harry thirteen million dollars this week, come back to acting. That's not a career, that's a hostage negotiation with Ted Sarandos. Netflix has spent hundreds of millions on the Sussexes and the only concrete deliverable so far is a lifestyle show that Google can't find. And now they're going to give her a series. This is what happens when you have too much money and a subscriber growth chart to hit — you keep doubling down on the sunk cost until someone in accounting quietly retires to Portugal.

See you next week.