Adam Epstein

As the world teeters on the brink of several different catastrophes, Western entertainment is looking for inspiration in a historical figure who helped stop one.

There are literally hundreds of TV shows debuting or returning between now and the end of the year. You can’t—and shouldn’t—watch all of them. No sane person would even try.

The opening scene of the new season of American Horror Story, appropriately subtitled Cult, is set on US election night, in November of 2016. A diverse group of liberals (including a lesbian couple, an Asian-American couple, and a black woman) watch MSNBC, nervously awaiting the results. Meanwhile, a Cheeto-munching young, white “alt-right” type, alone on his couch in another home, stares at Fox News.

Game of Thrones enthusiasts have tried all sorts of ways to determine the true main character of the sprawling HBO fantasy drama. There’s only one measure, though, that reveals which character has been given the most attention: screen time.

More than dragons or White Walkers, Game of Thrones is really all about money.

Game of Thrones fans got a lot of what they hoped for in the show’s ultra-long season seven finale: Arya and Sansa Stark out-schemed the habitual schemer Littlefinger, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen finally consummated their flirtation, and the undead ice dragon brought the Wall crashing down, allowing the Night King and his army to begin their assault on Westeros.

What if your child’s tablet was really a guardian angel? What if a dating app forced you and your match to kill someone? And what if your car suddenly became sentient and wanted revenge for that fender bender from last summer?

For the umpteenth time, Oscar Wilde’s only novel is getting a film adaption—but this one promises to be perhaps the most unique spin on the story since it was first published 127 years ago.

It’s in almost every action or sports movie: that moment our ragtag band of misfits stand together for the first time, ready to take on any challenge, as the music swells into a heroic refrain which tells us that, together, these people are greater than the sum of their parts. And then, they succeed in vanquishing their foe.

Apocalyptic nightmares are already all around us, but the science fiction genre today is still doubling down on dystopia, sending TV-watchers and filmgoers further into the abyss of our inevitably dismal future. But one Hollywood player wants to put an end to that, and he’s starting by creating a new series that aims to return to the optimistic side of sci-fi.

As the creator of the British political satire The Thick of It and its American version, Veep, Armando Iannucci is the master of parodying modern politics. His next project, though, turns the blocks back 60 years—to Soviet Russia.

One of the rallying cries of the white nationalist demonstrators in Virginia this weekend was originally a racist philosophy disseminated in Nazi Germany.

Donald Trump’s flaccid response to yesterday’s white nationalist rally in Virginia that left one counter-protester dead and 19 others injured, was met with criticism from some of his Republican colleagues in the US senate.

The most enlightening hour of each biannual Television Critics Association press tour is the talk by FX CEO John Landgraf, sometimes called the “smartest man in television.” Landgraf offers TV critics and reporters a bird’s eye view of the industry, usually with bar charts to highlight the ever-growing slate of scripted series across cable, broadcast, and streaming television.

Almost immediately after Fox took American Idol off the air last year, ABC picked up the legendary singing competition for a new season, signing pop superstar Katy Perry as one of its celebrity judges. Now, Fox is making a new singing series to directly compete with ABC’s version of Idol.

YouTube is making a sequel series to The Karate Kid, bringing back the original actors of the iconic 1984 martial arts film to renew their rivalry.

Days after HBO announced it was developing a TV series about an alternate history of slavery in the United States, Amazon did the same.

This is Anthony Scaramucci:

Despite the best efforts of Sir Patrick Stewart—an Emmy, Olivier, and Screen Actors Guild award-winning legend whose 50-year career earned him a British knighthood for “services to drama” by Queen Elizabeth II, and whose diverse roles have taken him to space, the royal castle Elsinore, and now to your toilet—The Emoji Movie is getting 💩 reviews.

The third season of anthology series True Detective is a go, HBO announced yesterday, and Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali will star as the show’s crime solver. Hiring Ali is a good start to redeeming the once-acclaimed franchise.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama and perhaps the most coveted name in animation, has landed at Netflix. The streaming giant announced that Groening’s Disenchantment, an “adult fantasy,” will be the next show added to its already impressive repertoire of animated comedies.

You don’t see many French troops in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but their presence in the World War II epic is felt from the first bullet to the final bomb.

The word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth,” according to Oxford Dictionaries. Politifact’s “lie of the year,” meanwhile, was not one lie but a class of them: fake news, the deliberate trafficking of misinformation that rose to infamy during America’s recent presidential election. And now, it’s infected Westeros too.

Tread lightly while reading about the 1966 film Incubus, for evil has befallen many who’ve come in contact with it.