Today marks the one-year anniversary of our meeting with and signing the adoption papers for Colin and Dale.

Unlike their late brother, the much-missed Harvey S. Bumblehud, they do not like hanging out on the couch and watching TV with us, but Colin (the void) does like to trot out into the living room when he hears the TV being switched off. Dale … is slowly coming to accept that he lives in a house with humans now. But he’s still mad about the neutering.

Let’s watch TV!

I feel like I’m being punked.

Last week I was like, “One of the problems I have with this series is that there are too many French people.” It was a joke! It was slightly amusing!

This week, we have more French people, being Lestat’s horrible family of origin. They’re not speaking French, they’re speaking English with French accents of various levels of silliness. Except for his mother (Jennifer Ehle), who is meant to be Italian, but she is speaking English with an accent best described as “approximately Transylvanian”. She vants to suck your blood, etc. She and Lestat were decidedly freudian when they were both human, and now they’re immortal creatures of the night, and, well.

I’m gonna say something nice: Ehle looks absolutely amazing and she and Sam Reid have powerful chemistry.

But the only scene in this episode that I actually enjoyed watching was the one where Lestat emerges from his mother’s oedipussy (I’m sorry) (I’m not sorry, I giggled and then made it this post’s subtitle) to attend a business meeting with Louis. Passive-aggressive legal sniping is infinitely sexier than sex.

I said that seasons 1 and 2 of Interview with the Vampire were good but not for me. At this point, there’s a great big question mark hanging over the “good” bit. And yet, I still can’t look away. Even when I want to.

The Boroughs is an eight-episode Netflix drama produced (but not written by) the Duffer Brothers, following a group of elderly people as they learn that their elite retirement community is in fact a feeding ground for monsters.

Watching this, I was struck by the parallels between media for old people and media for children. Both are aimed at demographics who often have to fight for agency and to be taken seriously, who are talked down to and underestimated. The advantage that elderly characters have over kids is that they can legally drink and have sex, and you get to explore the tricky dynamic where sometimes the adult who is restricting your freedom is, in fact, your child.

The Boroughs gave me a lot to think about! Very little of which actually related to the series itself, which was cute but didn’t hold my attention in any meaningful way. The cast, led by Alfred Molina as a cranky, recently-widowed former engineer is great. I especially enjoyed Alfre Woodard and Marcus Clarke as former activists whose open marriage fell into strife when she fell in love with Bill Pullman. Mary McDonnell turns up. It was all perfectly fine, but unremarkable in the way so many Netflix originals are unremarkable.

A few days after I wrote this up, Netflix announced that The Boroughs has been cancelled and will not return for a second season. And I’m like. Yeah. That fits.

So here’s the thing, right? I think Widow’s Bay is an outstanding show, probably one of the best of 2026. But since it dropped the R word last episode, I simply have not been engaged. I sat down to watch the finale, and I was like, “Oh boy, I’m excited,” and then I saw it was 49 minutes long and I thought, “Ugh, I just want it to be over.”

It’s a good finale! It’s funny, it’s scary, it explains some of the island’s mysteries (it requires regular sacrifices, which it communicates by the tolling of the church bells) and introduces a new problem for Tom (Ruth is not in fact the last descendant of Warren! Unfortunately the real last descendant is, as I had guessed, Evan!). It did not feature any slurs!

I simply no longer care.

And this is a real shame, because every single moment of Tom’s interaction with Ruth was gold, from her very sweet naivete about Evan’s need for an emergency escape from her house, to her great wisdom about life, and her immediate and certain answer to the trolley problem. I get why the sheriff shot her, but ALSO she had better make a full recovery because I need her in season 2. Provided that K Callan lives long enough to survive the looooooong sloooooow stretch between AppleTV seasons.

On the other hand, hopefully that long hiatus will let my ire subside, and I can remember what I loved about this series, and hope that it does more of that with fewer slurs in season 2.

Welcome back, comrades! The shenanigans are ramping up! Much like the Irina/Tanya subtext, which is textual enough that Lyudmilla comments on it. The good bros of the subreddit don’t see it, but, well, they also think that Alex and Kelly are bad characters, so what do they know?

And over on Tumblr, the fandom is dominated by Margo/Sergei shippers, and I get it (I guess) but also Sergei is the least interesting character in Star City. He’s basically the same guy now that he will be when he encounters Margo, and his role in the narrative is to support the Chief Designer and provide exposition. I don’t dislike him, but he is simply not interesting to me.

I do expect that to change, though, because I’d be shocked if Korolev survives the season. I know he briefly turns up in season 2 of For All Mankind, but he just sent two cosmonauts and an Indian citizen on a secret mission to Venus, and one of those cosmonauts is a turncoat who was fleeing arrest. Lyudmilla will defenestrate him herself. It’s bonkers. Maybe too bonkers? I need to see how it plays out before I decide.

People who won’t get defenestrated: Irina. Through Tanya, we finally learn why she has such powerful plot armour, even among people who don’t know she will be alive and kicking in the 2010s—she is somehow connected to Brezhnev. I’ve seen theories ranging from “she’s his daughter” to “his niece” to “he’s the father of her child”.

My guess is generally in the familial relationship zone—Brezhnev was a notorious womaniser—but again: it’s too soon to say. Except that a family connection would also put Lyudmilla’s remarks in an earlier episode, about privilege and family influence persisting even after the Revolution, in a different and more interesting context.

My flatmate and I have been debating whether or not Irina is in a particularly privileged job. My feeling is, overall, yes—her work is not terribly onerous, and there were certain material privileges that came with an assignment to Star City. If you have a member of a prominent family who became a single mother at a young age, and possibly did not complete university, this is a good place to keep her. You weren’t to know she’d fall for a manic pixie dream comrade!

Finally, here’s some reading while we wait for the next episode: Valentina Tereshkova and double standards in human spaceflight history—a fascinating look at the career of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and the sexism she faced then and now. It’s a useful reminder that Star City is deeply invested in certain aspects of Soviet propaganda—not just the omniscience of the KGB, but the myth that the USSR was a paradise of equality between the sexes compared with the US. The truth is that both societies espoused ideals that they struggled to meet. Every culture does. And sometimes the myth makes for a better story.