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The Janet Wood and Chrissy Snow of newsletters is back with hot (well, warm?) TV recs, generational discord, and gross-out comedy galore.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadbuds,
We are not the first to declare this moment in television to be highly mid. But we just might be among the first to admit to ostentatiously basking in the mid? (Midness? Midity?) To occasionally even prefer the mid? While, yeah, we’d love for one or two A-grade programs to spring from the ashes, the current slate of shockingly okay limited series scratches a real itch—one that allows us to run to the bathroom without pausing the action, and even occasionally close our eyes and enjoy the proceedings as an audio story. Can’t say that for The Night Of or Angels in America1 or even the 2017 version of Howard’s End (we’re always looking for an excuse to highly recommend Matthew Macfadyen in Darcy mode as Henry Wilcox)!
Herewith, the Spreadiest middlings of the moment, ranked in order from mid-mid up to warm-mid. May they ease your descent into the shortest days of the year.
5. Death by Lightning (Netflix): Betty Gilpin sprinkles a hint of Spreadiness on the story of James Garfield’s (Michael Shannon) rise to the presidency in 1881 and the damn fool that shot him (Macfadyen with a screw loose).
4. Down Cemetery Road (Apple+): Will the storyline ever fully make sense? Seemingly not! But we can still enjoy Ruth Wilson’s color palette (sunflower yellow + cobalt) and Emma Thompson’s voluminous quiff and not-shy-about-it sex drive in this thriller about a London art conservator who stumbles upon a government cover-up.
3. The Girlfriend (Prime Video): Who’s worse—the adult son’s social-climbing, meat-cutting girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) or his obsessive, art-dealing mother (Robin Wright)? We’re in it for the she-said/she-said switcheroos, the enviable interiors in London and Italy, and the tragically Gen Z outfits Cooke’s Cherry chooses to meet the parents.
2. All Her Fault (Peacock): Shiv Roy—sorry, Sarah Snook—and Dakota Fanning elevate a twisty, movie-of-the-week-like kidnapping thriller with a Big Little Lies veneer. (Before we watched, we googled whether or not the kid was returned to his mama in the end—recommend!)
1. The Beast in Me (Netflix): In a modern version of The Journalist and the Murderer, Claire Danes does all her usual facial contortions as a grieving Carrie Mathisonian scribe, while Matthew Rhys thrives as a Robert Durstian killer with a Hannibal Lecter twist. (This Doreen St. Félix review nails it.)
Wallow proud, friends,
Rachel & Maggie
Talkin’ Bout Our, Our, Our Ge-ge-generatiooooons
One of your Spreaditors is a late-Gen Xer, the other an elder millennial, which has led to some spicy debates over the years about what Rachel loves to refer to as our “microgenerational differences.” Let it be said that for every theory that groups people together in age-related cohorts, there’s a separate theory that generations aren’t even a thing—and those “generational myth” types are gonna be busy churning out their rebuttals in what we’re calling Generations Week in Media. (Catchy, no?) First comes Amanda Fortini with a banger of an issue theme for T: The Times Style Magazine: “Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation?” Its core argument is that all the characteristics that Gen X was once derided for—alienation, irony, slacker-ism, the benign neglect of our parents—were actually great conditions for creating establishment-shaking artists (and also exactly what’s lacking in “kids today,” hence their abiding fascination with all things Gen X). In the Cut, the message for millennials is significantly less uplifting: Dinner Party “host” and poster girl for the avocado sandwich (née toast) generation Emily Gould—DRINK!—goes long on the aging cliff, a term we all came to know and love last year via All Fours, and that science apparently bears out: At certain times in our lives, we age faster, starting with the cute age of 44. As “luck” would have it, Spread copy chief extraordinaire Allison Wright is the star of the show: Allison had a grueling entrée to her fourth decade with a battery of hip issues that just reading about will make your hindquarters ache. Allison, thank you for sharing your story for the sake of journalism!
Read Fortini on the Xers here, and Gould’s “Young Old Person” here.
Knives Out
On cue last week, a handful of women thinkers—including some well-known Spreaders—came out in defense of Olivia Nuzzi2, objecting to the slut-shaming tone of the attacks on her3. Perhaps most impassioned (and, sadly for her cause, least cogent) was Lisa Taddeo, who called the “attempted patriarchal mass murder of [Nuzzi’s] career and her personhood… a freakish lynching, the likes of which we will look back upon with a daze” in an Air Mail screed that, like American Canto itself, could have used a little more time on the stove and a heavier edit. In the Nation, Joan Walsh—a veteran who knows all the players involved—offers a more complex take that calls out Nuzzi, Lizza, RFK, and Keith Olbermann (seriously, what a tool) for their sins, but still holds space for empathy for Nuzzi, child of an alcoholic mother who has been “preyed upon by older men” at least since she was 19 or 20.
Fun holiday party drinking game for the number crunchers out there in medialand: How many employees of the Nation, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, etc, have expensed their subscriptions to Lizza’s Substack this month? It’s almost like he’s still on the mainstream media payroll! (On that note, insiders tell us that a paid subscription to the Spread is a Strunk and White-level professional tool that no modern journalist should be without, hint hint.)
Maybe it’s piling on, but we cannot stop replaying this mesmerizing and possibly medicated (?) clip of Nuzzi musing on the curse of beauty via JonBenét Ramsey in the audiobook….
Read “Olivia Nuzzi and the Sport of Kings” here.
Read “I Still Feel a Tiny Bit Sorry for Olivia Nuzzi” here.
Fluids and secretions and odors, oh my!
Truth be told, comedy that waxes poetic about vaginal discharge and pubic hair “as thick as a wicker goddamn basket” is a stretch for us, and—one has to imagine—for Lorne Michaels, too. Two stories, one by Naomi Fry in the New Yorker and one by Callie Holtermann in the New York Times Magazine, are here to tell you that the funny-lady-in-a-wig Sarah Sherman you thought you knew from SNL is the performer on, like, level 1. Her own comedy—now featured in an HBO special called, for good reason, Sarah Squirmy—is so wildly gross and body fixated that even John Waters calls her his “gore-gore girl.” It’s hard to tell if even the writers of these twin profiles actually enjoyed seeing it. How does a nice Jewish girl from Great Neck who went to Northwestern become the gross-out queen of fringe4 (on the mainstage) comedy? And can your Spreaditors stomach Sarah Squirmy long enough to find out? This notion, from Fry, at least made us want to give it a shot: “This dirtiness is the crux of the matter for Sherman. In a sanitized, AI-forward, Kardashian-centric world, in which women are only allowed to have hair on their bodies if it’s appended to a gimmicky ‘micro string thong’ retailing for $32, Sherman’s weird, gloopy DIY comedy is a kind of oasis, suggesting that another way is possible.”
Read “Sarah Sherman is Grosser Than You Think” here.
Read “How Sarah Sherman of ‘SNL’ Plans to Make Audiences Squirm” here.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
The city magazine editor in us literally fist-pumped when we saw a recent first-person story published in the Washingtonian: “I Invited Sally Quinn to Judge My Dinner Party”—swoon, right? So obvious, so excellent. (We’ll spare you the details of our fantasy about the editorial meeting that greenlighted the perfect pitch.) Writer Sylvie McNamara rises to the occasion, so to speak: A thirtysomething who has recently ended her marriage and moved into a rental, she hits all the requisite beats about why we all need more parties in our lives (stats, expert opinions on loneliness), then barrels through with the “experiment,” inviting 11 guests, including the grande dame of DC bread-breaking, over for dinner. At the gathering, Quinn, in full performance mode, is a generous celebrity guest and hits all her marks, even picking up McNamara’s conversational slack when duty calls. Sylvie, consider this your official hand-written thank-you note.
Read it here.
Designing Democrat
There’s a lot to like about interior designer and Bravolebrity turned tough love-dispensing liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch, who was profiled in the New York Times this week by Spread-beloved critic Amanda Hess: Welch’s podcast, which she cohosts with her former Sweet Home Oklahoma costar Angie Sullivan and strikes us as a mash-up of Pod Save America and We Can Do Hard Things, takes to task pandering Democrats (Cory Booker, Rahm Emanuel) and has enough sway that they are beating down her door for a guest slot. Also, she looks a lot like Juliette Lewis would if Juliette Lewis had careful highlights and a real knack for working a Chi. But perhaps our favorite detail about this woman? When her youngest child left home for USC this fall, Welch, refusing to fall prey to the empty-nest blues, flew the coop herself: With her husband at home in Oklahoma City, Welch embarked on a “midlife gap year” in Manhattan, renting an apartment in midtown in order to focus on her dual businesses (podcasting, interior design). Could an Eat Pray Podcast or Under the Midtown Sun be on the horizon?
Read “Is Jennifer Welch the Democrats’ Toughest Critic?” here.
Hamnet is…the most controversial movie of the season?
Maggie was an early champion of Hamnet, the book, and Rachel, by the grace of the Virginia Film Festival, an early champion of the movie. And while neither of us, if we’re being honest, is a real Hamlet guy (yeah, that’s right, we said it), we always have a healthy Appetite for Discussion (also, yeah, that’s a Guns N’ Roses allusion, and yeah, we’re making that gesture where we pretend to lick our fingertip and then touch our hip and it sizzles—what’s it to ya)! Two recs: First, the Critics at Large episode “Does Hamlet Need a Backstory?” is a must-listen for anyone who needs to really dig into Chloé Zhao’s Shakespearian weeper. Regular listeners will not be shocked to hear that smarty pants cohost Alexandra Schwartz hated the movie, sensitive new-age guy cohost Vinson Cunningham loved the movie, and everywoman cohost and Sarah Sherman chronicler Naomi Fry (whom we just heard, hot on the heels of her Hacks cameo-in-absentia, has a tiny part in Marty Supreme—wut!?) fell somewhere in between. (Honestly, the big takeaway when it’s all said and done: Dang, Vinson, you are a lovely human—will you marry us?) And second, while Jessie Buckley has been making the rounds, our favorite press hit yet comes in the form of webshow One Nightstand in which Buckley and friend-of-Spread Charlotte Owen literally laugh, cry, and otherwise get into it over the course of an hour.
Listen to the Critics at Large ep here (or wherever), and watch the One Nightstand ep here.
Extra credit: Read James Shapiro’s “The Long History of the Hamnet Myth” in the Atlantic here.
The clothing equivalent of a Nancy Meyers kitchen.
We may not be Sarah Shermans but we are colorful people, y’all! Iconoclasts! Or, fine, at least… individuals. So we tried to resist Jenni Kayne and her 50 shades of high-priced beige—until the day a fancy friend passed along a pale gray cloud of a cashmere sweater to one of your Spreaditors, a garment-slash-comfort animal that shall not be removed from her body until temperatures hit 75. So soft and enveloping is this sweater that this Christmas, she will buy it its own seat on the airplane if need be, though we’re not sure it can survive coach. If she dies this winter, please bury her in it. Point is, there may be something to this Jenni Kayne thing after all. In Inc., Amy Odell covers the phenom, which did $140 million in revenue this year and has but one investor: the designer’s billionaire dad. (She “doesn’t remember” how much seed money he initially gave her, and apparently that fact could not be reported out. Huh.) Did we mention there are mini donkeys in her yard—er, on her “property”?
Read “How Jenni Kayne Built a $140 Million Business on California Chic” here.
Barbie Is a Psy-Op…
Sounds like something Kash Patel would say but, in this case, may be true? In the Nation, Tarpley Hitt writes that Lilli, the blond Barbie predecessor whose image graced German newspaper covers in the 1950s, was the brainchild of a media conglomerate run by that country’s postwar Rupert Murdoch, a known Nazi sympathizer. In her book Barbieland, Hitt writes that Lilli was “the Mickey Mouse of postwar Germany,” with a sexy twist: Initially conceived as a heavily made-up call girl and marketed as a “clever joke” for adults, she was a toy/sex symbol that men carried around when “cruising for girls and having beers at local pubs.” (Nope, not creepy at all.) Eventually kids caught on and future Mattel founder Barbara Handel bought a Lilli on vacation, brought her home, Americanized her, and erased her from Barb’s official company lore to prevent legal challenges—and, perhaps, to erase her worrisomely Aryan roots?
Read “My Search for Barbie’s Aryan Predecessor” here.
In Case You’ve Not Yet Met Gwen:
Did someone forward you this email? To get the full Spread with all the fixins every week…
Speaking of Angels in America: If you haven’t treated yourself to the new (and last) batch of The English Teacher (yes, we’ve read all the stuff), the season premiere, called “Covid in America,” is our favorite half-hour bite of the entire fall.
Spreaditor Rachel getting a head start on her 2026 Halloween costume:
Definitely on Sherman’s moodboard:
Ok I take issue with you calling Down Cemetery Road mid! The storyline did eventually make sense and I loved seeing Emma Thompson as a bad ass.