As the Kansas City Chiefs took on the New York Jets on Sunday night, the game was closely followed by an unlikely set of new football enthusiasts: Swifties.

Pop music icon Taylor Swift was spotted cheering from a star-studded suite at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, alongside fellow celebrities Blake Lively, Ryan Renolds, Sophie Turner, Sabrina Carpenter, Hugh Jackman, and Antoni Porowski.

But more than the action on the field, where the Chiefs narrowly beat the Jets 23-20, what Swift’s fans were really excited about were snippets of the pop star’s reactions to Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, whom Swift is rumored to be dating. 

The NFL is starting to get a taste of the Taylor Swift effect, as her rumored relationship with Kelce has already triggered skyrocketing ticket sales and viewership.

The 12-time Grammy Award winner has proven to bring a palpable economic impact wherever she goes, with her ongoing Eras Tour projected to generate nearly $5 billion in consumer spending in the U.S. alone. She is currently currently on a break from the tour, which resumes in November in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Read More: Why You Can’t Remember That Taylor Swift Concert All Too Well

As many Swifties find themselves intersecting with football fandom for the first time and teaching one another the rules of the game, the NFL is leaning hard into the new attention. 

When the Chiefs scored a touchdown, Sunday Night Football on NBC posted a clip on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, of the winning moment with a split screen of Swift cheering.

NBC also used Swift’s “Welcome to New York” as a soundtrack for its promotional video before the Chief-Jets game. The video, posted on X on Friday, was captioned: “Taylor Made for Sunday Night.”

And last week—after Swift made a surprise appearance at a game between the Chiefs and the Chicago Bears at Kansas City’s home stadium, where she was spotted in a suite watching the game with Kelce’s mother—the league changed its bio on X last week to “NFL (Taylor’s Version)”—a reference to the albums that Swift has been re-recording over the last two years. After Sunday’s game, its Instagram bio now reads: “chiefs are 2-0 as swifties.”

Ian Trombetta, senior vice president of social and influencer marketing at the NFL, said Swift has an “open invitation” to all future games.

Read more: The Kelce Brothers’ Mom Wishes They Would Call More

Swift’s apparent new love interest has turned into a much-needed marketing boost for the NFL, which, like many other sports leagues, has been struggling to make fans out of a younger generation with significantly lower interest in sports.

In the three days after Swift’s appearance at the Sept. 24 game, ticketing platform Stubhub saw a 175% increase for the Chiefs-Jets game—now the second-highest selling game of the NFL season. The total audience for the game exceeded 24 million, making it the most-watched NFL broadcast of the week, amid spikes in interest from women aged 12-49 (not coincidentally Swift’s primary fan demographic). 

The dating rumors have also sparked interest in Kelce, who gained over a million Instagram followers over the past week. Meanwhile, according to fan merchandise company Fanatics, Kelce’s merchandise sales has increased 400%.

It remains to be seen how long the budding romance will continue to fuel viewership for the NFL—Swifties know all too well how quickly sentiments can shift from shipping her with a new beau to shunning an ex. 

On Sept. 23 and 24, Houston was host to Beyoncé’s brilliance. The city took note: Harris County was dubbed, for several days, Bey County. Traffic across the inner loop’s interlocking roads felt more insufferable than usual. Both performances sold out, cries for last-minute tickets proliferated social media, and, arriving at NRG Park on either night—past the highway, over the hill, across the bridge, and into the 72,220-seat stadium—felt a lot like floating on electricity, or the precipice of a foundational shift.

Beyoncé’s assignment for previous cities had been simple: wear silver. Houstonians also obliged. Ascending the venue’s walkway, a group of Black women with glowing centaur horns and heels glided past my boyfriend and me. A caravan of bears dressed in frilly crop-tops and boyshorts with knee-high boots followed them. The weekend saw legions of silver ballcaps, silver cowboy boots, silver capes, silver earrings, silver chains, silver gloves, silver thongs, silver facemasks, silver bodysuits, silver shades, silver track pants, silver piercings, and silver jackets glowing from the hall’s highest concessions and back down to the floor seats. My own aesthetic was something like femme biker cub, alongside a silver cowboy hat—an outfit I passed at least nine variations of on the way to our seats. 

Both evenings, Beyoncé’s first address, entering a stadium that hit an astounding decibel, and an electricity she’d conjured entirely on her own, was: “Houston, Texas, I love you.” She called this series of performances, a global tour that began in Stockholm this May, her “gratitude tour.” Then, she proceeded to grace us. Beyoncé began with the operatic, before dipping coolly into a deep trill. Beyoncé rolled from a crisp set of notes into a growl and back, before descending again, only to ascend seemingly six more octaves a second later. Beyoncé vogued with a series of robot arms, cascading directly into a croon. Beyoncé vogued with a team of glowing dancers, as they snapped fans and duck-walked and clicked heels alongside her (Girl, whispered one of the bears beside us). Beyoncé rapped, as brash and present as your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. Beyoncé rode a metallic tank on stage (Girl, exhorted one of the women, a New Orleanian, in front of us), swinging from a structure atop it, grinding and cheering and jeering and carrying.

Read More: 100 Women of the Year: Beyoncé

Numerous outfit changes unspooled before us. Between each section of the set, house music blasted beside kaleidoscopic visuals. In the midst of its immaculateness, each evening’s rollout achieved, and then eclipsed, what might be the highest bar for a performance: a solid night out at the club, dancing with your friends. And any single one of these components would’ve made an incredible show. But this was simply beyond what could or should be expected or thought of from an actual individual—and, as the performance continued, each night, there was no peak, really. Beyoncé’s performance simply escalated, ascending a mountain of precision with no visible climax, and then it ended. 

Mid-way through her set, as Beyoncé rolled into “Church Girl,” a chorus opened behind her. My sequin-clad neighbors sighed, blushing. A lady in a silver-spiked vest beside me squeezed my elbow. She said, “We’re here,” and I concurred, and then she began to cry.

In many ways, the Renaissance tour, which is scheduled to end on Oct. 1 in Kansas City, is an extension of Beyoncé’s overarching ambition: over nearly three decades, and nine solo concert tours, she has constantly reinvented herself. Her sound, her presentation, and her audience’s expectations for what a performer can, or should, be or do have risen alongside her. Across more than 50 shows internationally, she has managed to eclipse seemingly every expectation but her own.

And Beyoncé’s Renaissance album itself further underlined her prowess’s scope: the record is a celebration, among other things, of the Black origins of disco and house music, Black ballroom, vogue, drag, and the infinitude of crevices encapsulating any particular nook or cranny of queer culture. Each track announces itself. They are physical and emotional. The record champions Black queer artists, ceding space and attention to their works from song to song. And upon a first, third, or 30th listen, it’s hardly difficult to allow each track to progress like a breezy, singular set unfurling from the hands of its deeply meticulous curator. Much of the record’s genius resides in how its communities are magnified, accentuated, and given the floor to dance.

Read More: 6 Revelations From Beyoncé’s Album Renaissance

But Renaissance’s immersion, and embrace of the queerness permeating its beats, gives the record a very particular context: as a result, the life that it’s lived—and the life it will continue to live—has taken very different forms from her previous projects. I’ve heard “Thique” at queer orgies in Oakland. I’ve heard “Cozy” between cocktails at brunch after brunch in Los Angeles. It seems like every queer I know worked their way through some sort of “Alien Superstar” Sailor Moon mashup. Earlier this year, I listened to “Virgo’s Groove” in the smoking room of a sauna in Osaka, several nights before it shut its door forever, and every man beside me mumbled the chorus. 

My own first encounter with Beyoncé live is so commonplace in Houston as to be anecdotal lore for anyone who grew up in the city: I saw her for the first time at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2004. I saw her again when she returned in 2007. Despite an environment largely built for the apex of masculinity—inundated with cowboys donning bravado and brashness—her performances felt like a bright, bright light. She was everything, and then some. Since then, I’ve seen her in other cities, in her other iterations, sets, and modes, but these initial performances had been, for me, cemented into my conception of her—at least until the Renaissance tour. 

Lately, I’ve spent more time outside of Houston than in, but it wasn’t negotiable that I would be in town for this record’s performance at NRG. It simply had to happen. I suspect many of the show’s queer local attendees felt the same. And while Beyoncé’s ascension to the peak of performance is hardly inevitable, sometimes, watching her on stage, it all felt like a natural crescendo: that one of the best performers and musicians in the world is a Black woman from Houston could only be surprising to someone outside of Houston.

On Sunday evening, as Beyoncé rolled into “Diva,” she addressed the crowd: “You know you’re responsible for your own happiness? Your own joy?” 

And later: “I want this to be a safe space. I want you to let loose.”

And later: “I want you to remember who you came here with, what you wore. Remember this night.” 

Quips like these were peppered throughout each evening. This, too, felt deeply constructed: Beyoncé’s performances felt both entirely interstellar and deeply, deeply local. She thanked attendees at every level, acknowledging those in the highest seats first, nodding to the sacrifices that many folks in the room likely made to see her that evening. Houston, she noted, would be a place that she’d carry wherever she went. When she said it, you really f-cking believed her. And as she worked at what felt like the pinnacle of human performance, care was taken between songs to remind the crowd to be present for the concert, sure, but also for themselves. 

But what may have been the most remarkable component of the show, for me, lay within its final moments: as the performers launched into “Pure/Honey,” the set’s penultimate track, the stage was ceded to the dancers to vogue in a tight, bright circle. Everyone who’d stood with Beyoncé throughout the show, in some capacity, was given a moment. Which was a deafening punctuation mark on a deeply deliberate thesis that the performers, crews, assistants, and architects had spent nearly three hours constructing: the event was made possible by queerness—and the culture of Black queers across the decades, specifically. Seeing this in a room of tens of thousands, as a disco ball passed overhead, felt stunning to the point of elation.

Because this fantasia, for many folks watching in Houston, dissipated immediately after the set was over. Texas is one of the most hostile states in the country for queer people. In the past year, more than 100 bills targeting LGTBQ+ communities were introduced in the Texas legislature, making up over 20% of anti-queer legislation that has emerged in state governing bodies across the U.S. Gender-affirming care is no longer accessible for trans minors in Texas; the state has joined others in creating many more refugees looking to leave its borders. An anti-drag bill has just been defeated in the courts. Book bannings are routine. LGBTQ+ affirming centers on public universities have been eliminated, and Texas continually attempts to advance its own iteration of a “Don’t Say Gay” bill. There are few areas of public life in the state where its government hasn’t at least attempted to eradicate its queerness from visibility.

And maybe, this, too, is further evidence of Beyoncé’s excellence: for a few hours, we all were privy to something better. A better way of being. I’ve seen and experienced things in my life that I never would have thought I’d see, but I simply could not have imagined standing in the same stadium I first saw Beyoncé—dressed in leather and mesh, alongside queers from across the community very openly enjoying themselves—watching the culture not only be celebrated but also accentuated. Much talk is made of Beyoncé’s otherworldliness—and her very visible labor allows this—but what’s more interesting, and extraordinary, is that she is entirely human. Calling her Houston performances perfect would, in some ways, belie the many things they achieved. In that stadium, she expanded possibility—an even higher bar, more elusive and foundation-shifting.

Leaving the show both evenings, Houston’s gayborhood, Montrose, felt energetic in a way that it simply hadn’t in some time. Money has invaded the neighborhood in the last decade, sealing many of each block’s vectors for queer visibility into neat lines. But, on these nights, the streets were packed. The clubs were packed. The bear bar and the kink bar and the dance bar and up-and-coming-bar and the druggy bar and the party bar vibrated with energy, until security told us all to go home, shepherding folks onto the sidewalk—and then we stood outside, buzzing still. 

Walking back to my car with my guy Sunday evening, groups of folks making their way back to their own homes strolled underneath the neighborhood’s patchy shrubs. Some chewed taco truck fare. Some still glowed from the evening’s performance, literally golden. Others were headed to afterparties downtown, and elsewhere throughout the city, until well into the morning. But, eventually, we all split off, and another pair of guys walking beside us shared our silence for a few blocks, before we eventually turned to each other, instinctively, and smiled, and said to get home safe. This, too, felt like an extension of the moment, like the show will continue enveloping us, even still.

There was a romantic guitar serenade, a daring “birthday suit” entrance, some boozy bickering, and more than one make-out session in the season premiere of The Golden Bachelor—which is to say, despite the promise of something new with a senior citizen spin-off, it was still business as usual for Bach Nation. Since the show was officially announced this spring after years of development, it was viewed as a potential savior for the beleaguered franchise, which has been riddled with scandals and controversies in recent years. The franchise has been suffering from decreased viewership, a seeming reflection of a changing fanbase, oversaturation in the reality TV romance space, the increasingly tiresome contestant-to-influencer pipeline, and viewers who have simply moved on from the show’s arguably outmoded views on romantic love.

For over 20 years, viewers have watched season after season of The Bachelor, where a leading man (or leading lady, in its gender-flipped spin-off The Bachelorette) dates 20 to 25 women simultaneously, eliminating hopeful paramours each week, until he comes down to the final two, ultimately choosing one to be his one true love—and more often than not, his wife. The franchise made pop-culture history by gamifying the search for a long-term relationship and romanticizing a specific idea of true love: hetero, Christian, monogamous, and focused on marriage as a goal.

Along the way, it also became notorious for the cheesy, outrageous, and sometimes even cringe antics of its attractive 20- and 30-something cast members, whose booze-filled interpersonal drama provided much of the show’s entertainment as they vied for the affection of the bachelor. It’s a formula that made relative stars of its contestants, both the couples and memorable single ladies, providing niche fame, especially in the social media era, and helping to create the now-common phrase, “here for the right reasons,” which is used to question a contestant’s motivation for being on the show.

Read more: The Alarming Rise of the Wholesome Romance

With The Golden Bachelor, the Bachelor franchise had the rare opportunity to flip the script in a new way, if they could swing it. Their cast seemed less likely to be seeking influencer fame. The contestants were probably less attuned to creating viral moments born out of drunken drama and petty fights, by virtue of maturity and lives lived comparatively offline. And the goal of the show had the potential to be more complex. While a dating show centered around the romantic endeavors of young adults often focuses on the goal of marriage and settling down, a show about senior citizens looking for love could highlight how desires evolve throughout life, offering a look at what someone might want after having one or more marriages and kids. What the show delivered, however, was an aged-up version of their tried-and-true formula.

The “Golden Bachelor” is one Gerry Turner, a sweet and dapper 72-year-old widower with the conventional good looks required to be a Bachelor heartthrob, and the prerequisite tragic backstory that’s become a Bachelor signature. Turner was married to his high-school sweetheart, Toni, for 43 years, before losing her to an unexpected bacterial infection, just weeks after they had retired and moved to their dream lake house. Now, six years later, he’s open to giving love another shot—and begins his journey by meeting the 22 Golden Bachelor contestants. The arrivals of the contestants may be the most glaring proof that the Bachelor franchise has no intention of subverting its conventions with the show; like their youthful predecessors, the contestants put on a campy show, arriving in glamorous gowns and outlandish costumes, pulling stunts like riding in on a motorcycle in an attempt to keep Turner’s attention and capture the first impression rose.

Read more: ​​Reality TV Has Reshaped Our World Whether We Like It Or Not

While the backstories shared about the contestants gave some meaningful context about the fuller lives they have lived, the show proved much more obsessed with the tensions already rising in the Bachelor mansion. Like all other iterations of The Bachelor, the women fret and squabble over their time with Turner, with one cutting in on another’s session with him. The edit also seems more concerned with salacious moments than it is with true connection, with plenty of screen time given to Turner’s passionate makeouts with not just one, but two women on the first night and the diva-like antics of a contestant who seems destined to be this season’s villain.

It’s refreshing to see physical affection between older folks, something not usually shown on primetime, much less dating shows. And senior citizens are just as entitled to be divas or have conflicts as their younger counterparts. But the show seems (so far, at least) unconcerned with accounting for the years of life experience that their cast has or exploring how that could affect the way they look for love at this stage in their lives. While the preview of the rest of the season shows a make-out in a hot tub and many, many tears shed in future episodes, it would be far more interesting to see the show engage with the cast’s age and experience. Imagine a Golden Bachelor that seriously grappled with the question of whether a previous marriage changes what you look for in a partner in your golden years or if physical intimacy is as important later in life. Does the lack of young children and parenting concerns make a relationship less fraught, or do grown adult children complicate matters of the heart further?

While The Golden Bachelor’s lack of innovation may have disappointed fans looking for some welcome change to the franchise, it didn’t show up in the viewership. According to early data from Nielsen, the premiere drew 4.09 million viewers, 38% more viewers than the most recent premiere of The Bachelor. Whether or not it can hold those numbers remains to be seen—as does the possibility that later episodes go deeper into more nuanced conversations about what it means to date and fall in love in your 60s or 70s. But if there’s anything the franchise has taught us, it’s that first impressions matter. Judging from its premiere, it appears that the Golden Bachelor is still The Bachelor, the same old story with a few more wrinkles.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Saw X.

After being killed off in Saw III, Tobin Bell returns for a grisly showcase of Jigsaw Killer John Kramer’s torture trap prowess in Saw X, now in theaters.

Set between the events of Saw and Saw II, the tenth installment in the Saw series takes place while both Kramer and his original apprentice, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), are still alive and hoping to find a cure for John’s terminal brain cancer. The movie, directed by franchise veteran Kevin Greutert, follows John as he travels to Mexico for an experimental medical procedure touted by Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund) and her team as a miraculous new cancer treatment.

But after undergoing what he believes was a life-saving surgery, John discovers the experiment is fake and run by con artists—from the cab driver who picked him up at the airport to the supposed neurosurgeon—scamming desperate patients out of money.

With the help of Amanda, John goes to work kidnapping Cecilia and her colluders to subject them to his unique brand of justice in the same warehouse where they pretended to perform his surgery.

Read more: How Saw X Fits Into the Saw Universe

How does Saw X end?

After two of Cecilia’s accomplices have endured—and failed—John’s gruesome tests, Parker (Steven Brand), a man introduced to John earlier in the movie as a fellow recipient of the treatment, shows up at the warehouse with a gun demanding his money back. Amanda is able to knock him out and brings him up to the viewing area to watch a third collaborator, Gabriela (Renata Vaca), undergo her test.

Gabriela is mangled and irradiated, but ultimately manages to complete her task and survive. But before John and Amanda can take her to the hospital to have her injuries treated, Parker is able to take back his gun and it’s revealed that he’s actually Cecilia’s lover, arriving to save her. He forces them to free Cecilia—and she kills Gabriela. Parker and Cecilia start locking John up where had kept Cecilia, when suddenly, Carlos, an innocent boy who John met before his surgery, also shows up at the warehouse. Cecilia lures him inside and locks him up on a platform across from John.

The device John rigged for Cecilia is a two-person blood waterboarding trap of sorts that gives each person the ability to pull a lever that allows the other to come up for air while they drown. John tells Carlos not to pull the lever, preparing to sacrifice himself for the boy. But Carlos realizes what’s going on and does his part to save John.

Meanwhile, Cecilia and Parker head upstairs to reclaim the bag of swindled money they think John stashed there. But, of course, this was all ultimately part of John’s plan.

When Cecilia and Parker grab the cloak they think is hiding the bag of money, it triggers a new trap that locks them inside the viewing area as it begins to fill with poison and stops the blood flowing on the other trap. As Amanda frees John and Carlos, flashbacks fill in some gaps in the overall mystery: the cab driver who helped trick John later revealed to him that Parker was romantically involved with Cecilia. When Cecilia briefly got hold of her phone and tried to make a desperate call for help during the games, Amanda saw that she had called Parker. Since John knew Parker’s true motives, he switched out the bullets in Parker’s gun for duds while he was unconscious, giving Parker a test of his own.

Parker failed his test by retrieving his gun and turning on John and Amanda, but John had a contingency plan. While John did not intend for Carlos to show up and thought it would be him and Amanda strapped into the waterboarding trap, everything else worked out accordingly.

John informs the couple that there is only one air hole in the room, meaning only one of them can survive. Cecilia ends up killing Parker and survives the gas by sticking her head out the air hole. But there is seemingly still no way for her to escape as John, Amanda, and Carlos leave the warehouse together. John also gives Carlos the bag of defrauded money to keep in a gesture of good will for braving the trap.

Does Saw X have a credits scene?

Saw X does in fact have a mid-credits scene that shows how John dealt with Henry (Michael Beach), the fellow cancer support group member who originally told John about Cecilia’s “miracle treatment.”

The sequence shows Henry waking up in a trap as John and Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), another of John’s fan-favorite disciples, walk into the room. John notes that Henry no longer has the massive stomach scar he showed him from his supposed life-saving surgery—and the game begins.

Franchise producer Oren Koules has said that if there were going to be an eleventh Saw movie, it would center on Hoffman’s role in the Jigsaw killings. “One of the things that we’ve read a lot about is that Jigsaw always seems so ahead of everybody,” Koules told Dexerto. “So one of the tricks in this movie that we wanted to show is that he’s been dealing with Detective Hoffman for a long time. So when he’s been ahead of everybody—and knows things that people are doing—it’s a little nugget for the fans to realize that he’s been talking to Detective Hoffman a lot earlier than we previously saw him in a movie.”

Twenty-five years ago, Felicity Porter unwittingly made the most important decision of her life. In the 1998 series premiere of Felicity, the titular character (played by Keri Russell) follows her high school crush Ben Covington (Scott Speedman) from Palo Alto to New York City, ditching her plans to study medicine at Stanford University to attend his school of choice, the University of New York. Felicity’s decision to blow up her college plans after reading a surprisingly moving yearbook message from a boy she barely knew is certainly impulsive. But it’s also a powerful act of defiance by a sheltered young woman who, as she admits, “never made a substantial choice in my life” without her mom and dad’s permission. With her cross-country move, Felicity didn’t just chase a guy, she finally followed her heart. She took a risk, the first of many that she would take in the show’s four seasons, and it paid off in a big way.

Unfortunately, not all of Felicity’s choices were as well-received—like a certain season 2 haircut that came to exemplify what was right and wrong about the show. In honor of the show’s 25th anniversary, it’s time to take a closer look at Felicity’s choice to chop off her hair, and how it became the most infamous—and misunderstood—hairstyle in pop culture history. 

The first season of the much-hyped WB series ended on a cliffhanger: Would Felicity spend the summer with her teenage crush Ben or with her freshman year fling Noel (Scott Foley)? In the season 2 premiere, it’s revealed that she had unsurprisingly chosen Ben, and after spending the summer on the road together, they had become (kind of) an item. But by the second episode of the new season, Felicity realizes she is compromising herself too much in order to please a guy who is not emotionally mature enough to deal with her big feelings. 

“I mean, I’m an emotional person. I feel things and I need to be able to get upset and to talk about how I’m feeling,” she tells Ben in the Platonic ideal of a breakup speech. “I mean, that’s who I am. I can’t change it. I don’t want to.” But Felicity walks away from that brief romance realizing that there are some changes she would like to make. In the final moments of episode 2, she goes to a salon and gets the kind of dramatic haircut one gets after a big breakup. “But I wasn’t doing it for a guy,” Felicity explains. “I was doing it for me.”

At the 2018 ATX TV Festival, Russell recalled filming the episode’s pivotal final scene at 4 a.m. on a Friday. The on-set hairstylist snipped a few strands in order for the episode’s director, Lawrence Trilling, to get the dramatic shot of her long curly locks hitting the floor. “Then a few hours later,” she said. “I went to a hair salon and someone cut the rest of it off.” 

Russell made it all sound so normal, but the response to it would be anything but. Felicity’s new hairdo, which was finally revealed in the opening moments of episode 3, was almost immediately regarded as a hair don’t. “We got a lot of emails and letters and feedback from our friends in the industry who were fans of the show,” Brad Turell, the WB’s then spokesman, told the New York Times in December 2000, more than a year after the episode originally aired. “People were disappointed and angry at us and at Keri for cutting off her hair. ‘Who made that decision?’ they asked.” 

The show’s co-creators, a pre-Alias J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, the future director of The Batman, made the choice, with the network’s full knowledge. But Russell became the scapegoat. (She would later reveal that she received death threats over the haircut.) Not to mention a punchline: Felicity’s pixie cut became the butt of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Gilmore Girls jokes. A decade later her hair would continue to be comedy gold for 30 Rock, Family Guy, and Happy Endings.

Funnily enough, it was Russell who inadvertently inspired Felicity’s haircut. “When we were wrapping up season one and putting everything in boxes, there was a wig that was like a little boy’s wig,” she explained during a 2019 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. “I put it on as a joke and [hair & make-up] took a picture of me. They said, ‘You know what would be really funny? Send this to J. J. and Matt over the break and [as a joke] just say, ‘Isn’t this so cute?’ to give them a panic attack.” She did, but instead of freaking out, Abrams called her looking to see if she would be willing to cut her hair for real. “I said, ‘Yeah of course,’” she told W Magazine in 2017. “My hair was curly and it was an awkward haircut, but even so I didn’t care, like I loved it. I thought it was so true [to the character] and great. I did not expect all the hysteria.”

The frenzy was made worse by the WB’s claims that Felicity’s post-breakup chop resulted in fans splitting up with the show. “Women kind of identified with her,” Turell told the Times. “When she cut her hair, they basically said, ‘I don’t want to be that person; it ruins the illusion for me.’ We heard that over and over again.”

Russell didn’t agree with the network’s assessment, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2000, “I think that’s a pretty lame excuse. I think a lot more than a haircut was deciding the ratings [last year].” And she wasn’t wrong. Felicity’s ratings did dip in season 2, but there were other factors at play beyond the show’s lack of Pre-Raphaelite curls. The WB had moved the show from Tuesdays at 9 p.m. to Sundays at 8 p.m. in its second season, which led the show to lose a third of its viewers. In its new time slot, Felicity was going up against major network juggernauts like The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, and Touched by an Angel. The latter averaged more than 11 million viewers per week in the 1999-2000 TV season while Felicity averaged a modest 3.4 million. (Felicity would move again in season 3, to Wednesdays at 9 p.m., in hopes of improving the ratings; it did, but only marginally.) That same TV season, the WB saw their overall viewership dip. By the time the season 2 finale of Felicity aired in May 2000, the WB had dropped to last place in ratings among the six major broadcast networks. 

Despite a myriad of possible explanations for Felicity’s sophomore slump, including darker storylines and Ben and Felicity’s breakup, the network used the hair fiasco to put an unofficial “no haircut” policy in place for its fresh faced young stars. Moving forward, if any of their actors wanted to cut their hair, it would “be given more thought at the network than it previously would have,” Susanne Daniels, the then-president of WB Entertainment, told reporters at the 2000 Winter TCA Press Tour. (“It will grow back, Susanne,” was reportedly Russell’s response to Daniels when the exec broached the topic of her hair.)

Reading the quotes from that time, it’s hard not to sympathize with the then 23-year-old Russell, who spent two years having her appearance picked apart by network execs. Even Abrams ended up apologizing for the haircut storyline he initially championed. “She’s so gorgeous, we thought, ‘Who cares how long her hair is?’ The answer came back pretty quickly,” he told the New York Times in 2000 while promoting season 3. “Frankly, we thought of extensions and all sorts of things. Finally it’s growing back.”

Amid a sea of misogynistic discussion, Russell’s support for the haircut never wavered. She was the only one, in interview after interview, who stood up for the chop and what it symbolized. “For the character, I think it was a brave, crazy, sudden, extreme thing to do,” she told Deseret News in 2000. “But those are things a girl in college might do. I think it was quite appropriate.” After girls started coming up to her on the street to compliment her new look, she wanted to own the haircut even more. “I had a mom who came up to me at a mall at that time and said, ‘You were so pretty until you cut your hair.’ And I was like, ‘Oh thanks?’” she recalled on Armchair Expert. “But being a kid in that storm, I was already rebelling in my own mind and pushing it all away, so in a way I was like, ‘F–k you. I don’t f—ing care. I cut my hair!’”

The truth is, the WB didn’t know what to do with Felicity with or without her hair. They wanted Russell to be their sexy ingénue, someone their preferred target demographic, men between the ages of 18 and 34, would lust after. That was very clear from a quote Daniels gave at the 2000 Winter TCA Press Tour: “I think it turned some audiences away. In particular, men and some women.” Though women were the only audience that seemed to stick around no matter how long Felicity’s hair was, the show aired in an era when Hollywood saw no reason to cater to them, especially those age 18 to 34. (Barbie aside, they still don’t, despite every sign that they really, really should.) The network didn’t understand that what made Felicity, and therefore Russell, so relatable to female viewers was her vulnerability, not just her beauty. She was willing to take big leaps knowing she might fall, and did so without apology or doubt. Felicity never once questioned her decision to cut her hair, even when others around her did. (“Guys are gonna hate it,” Felicity’s roommate Meghan (Amanda Foreman) bluntly tells her in the cold open of episode 3, as if the writers predicted what was to come.) The fact that Felicity was so willing to explore the world of a young, hyper emotional, introspective woman on the brink of adulthood at a time when so many other series weren’t is what has made it one of the best TV shows of all-time. 

The funniest and most infuriating part of all of the haircut hullabaloo is that it wasn’t even the most rash decision Felicity would make in her sophomore year. Early in episode 3, she tells her trusted confidant Sally (voiced by Janeane Garofalo), via the audio recordings the two would exchange throughout the series, that she has done something drastic. She’s not referring to her hair, but to her decision to switch majors from medicine to art. The haircut inspired her to let go of everyone else’s preconceived ideas of how she should live and once again follow her heart.

With that haircut Felicity wasn’t looking to please anyone but herself, an empowering concept that went right over the heads of the network and so many others. Russell, however, understood the importance of establishing Felicity’s independence. In many ways, cutting her hair allowed her to establish her own independence as well — and like Felicity, she has never apologized for that. “I looked like a Chia Pet for a good few years and then it was fine,” she told W Magazine 18 years after the episode aired. “I have nice shoulders.”

Those who did not have a chance to see Taylor Swift at MetLife Stadium during her Eras Tour stop might have a chance to see her there at the New York Jets game this Sunday. After she was spotted at the Kansas City Chiefs game on Sept. 24, pandemonium broke out among Swifties on social media. They were quickly trying to understand the rules of football as her presence at the game seems to have confirmed that she and the Chiefs’ tight end, Travis Kelce, might be an item after he spoke about shooting his shot with the pop star back in July. The two were said to have spent time together and were seen leaving in a convertible after the game.

Now, it’s becoming clear that the relationship rumors are having a real economic impact for the NFL, as the possibility of a Swift sighting has helped tickets for the Jets vs. Chiefs game on Sunday rise 40%, according to CNN Business.

More From TIME

Read more: Swifties Are Studying Up on Football After Taylor Swift Went to the Chiefs Game

The publication reports that an online marketplace called TickPick has seen the average price of tickets for Sunday’s game rise from $89 to $119 after it was reported by Front Office Sports that Swift will be attending another Chiefs game. Ticket price data from Gametime says the lowest last-minute tickets are available at $152 each. It’s no shock that the 12-time Grammy winner’s fanbase clamors for the chance to see her, as evidenced by the Ticketmaster debacle when tickets went on sale for the Eras tour. Last week’s game at Arrowhead Stadium, where Swift watched from Kelce’s family box alongside his mother, saw a major boost in ratings. According to Front Office Sports, the Fox Sports broadcast brought in over 24 million viewers, making it the “most-watched NFL game on any network for Week 3.”

Kelce saw the power of the Swifties firsthand after sales for his jerseys saw a 400% spike in sales following the pop star’s appearance at the stadium. The two have been rumored to be romantically linked since July. When Kelce went on The Pat McAfee Show podcast earlier this month, he said he invited Swift to attend one of his games. He seemed to be surprised by her decision to actually show up, but sources told People that Swift “thought it was a fantastic way to spend a Sunday.” Kelce and his brother addressed the relationship rumors for the first time in a recent episode of their podcast, New Heights. Jason, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, jokingly asked his brother how it feels that Swift “put his name on the map.”

Read More: Travis Kelce Opens Up About Taylor Swift Relationship Rumors

Kelce says that he thought it was “pretty ballsy” of her to go to the game and “It was awesome how everybody in the suite had nothing but great things to say about her—the friends and family. She looked amazing, everybody was talking about her in great light.”

As anticipation grows for Swift’s supposed Sunday appearance, Fox Sports reports that the Fox music department asked her label and publishing company for permission to use some of Swift’s songs during the broadcast but the request was denied “in conjunction with speculations on or about her private/personal/dating life.”

It’s impossible to avoid Elvis Presley in Las Vegas: his image appears on street art and photographs, while impersonators can be found all over the strip. But starting on Friday, the King of Rock and Roll will get possibly his largest tribute yet: a video collage that renders him hundreds of times, projected hundreds of feet into the air, in incarnations young and old, gyrating and reclining, in bas relief and gold, all thanks to a technology created long after his death: generative AI. 

The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West’s “Power” music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley’s movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: “What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty?” 

The kaleidoscopic result, called “King Size,” will make its debut as part of U2’s concert performance at the opening night of the Sphere, a $2.3 billion entertainment venue that sits a block from the Las Vegas Strip and hopes to be the city’s latest colossal entertainment mecca. The Sphere is 366 feet tall, with its creators claiming it boasts the world’s largest spherical structure and the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen.

Brambilla created an exclusive video excerpting from the larger collage for TIME. You can watch it above. 

While Brambilla’s Elvises prance across the Sphere’s screen—which is four times the size of IMAX— the band U2 will perform their song “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” as part of their three-month residency at the Sphere celebrating their 1991 album Achtung Baby. The members of U2 have long been massive fans of Elvis, with Bono even penning a letter about his love for the singer in Rolling Stone in 2020. Earlier this year, U2 commissioned several artists, including Brambilla and Jenny Holzer, to create visual works that would accompany their performances of specific songs.

Given U2’s love for the singer and the lavish setting of the Sphere, Brambilla thought a tribute to Elvis would be extremely fitting. He wanted to create a maximalist work that encapsulated both the ecstatic highs and grimy lows of not only Elvis, but the city of Las Vegas itself. “The piece is about excess, spectacle, the tipping point for the American Dream,” Brambilla said in a phone interview. 

Brambilla was only given three-and-a-half months to execute his vision, less than half the time that he normally spends on video collages. So he turned to AI tools for both efficiency and extravagance. “AI can exaggerate with no end; there’s no limit to the density or production value,” Brambilla says. And this seemed perfect for this project, because Elvis became a myth; a larger-than-life character.” 

First, Brambilla fed clips from dozens of movies starring or depicting Elvis into Stable Diffusion, which allowed him to catalog hours of footage and select what he needed with ease. For example, he could simply search his dataset for “crowd in a concert,” and the AI model would pull all of the related clips up immediately for his sampling. 

He then used both Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, another AI model, to generate the fantastical versions of Elvis and his accessories: Statue of Liberty Elvis; an Elvis that rising from a casino table out of piles of coins; a surrealist Salvador Dali-style guitar; a statue of the singer’s head modeled off the imposing stainless steel sculptures by Isamo Noguchi at Rockefeller Center.

One of the exact prompts he entered was: “Elvis Presley in attire inspired by the extravagance of ancient Egypt and fabled lost civilizations in a blissful state. Encircling him, a brigade of Las Vegas sorceresses, twisted and warped mid-chant, reflect the influence of Damien Hirst and Andrei Riabovitchev, creating an atmosphere of otherworldly realism, mirroring the decadence and illusion of consumption.”

Brambilla says that only about 20% of the output images actually looked like Elvis. “But some really interesting accidents came out of it,” he says. “It was a stream-of-consciousness experiment: You’re working with a tool prompting you to make associations you wouldn’t have made.”

Brambilla transplanted his MidJourney-created images into CG (computer graphics) software, where he could better manipulate them, and left some of the Stable Diffusion Elvis incarnations as they were. The result is a kaleidoscopic and overwhelming video collage filled with video clips both historical and AI-generated, that will soon stretch hundreds of feet above the audience at each of U2’s concerts.  

“I wanted to create the feeling that by the end of it,” Brambilla says, “We’re in a place that is so hyper-saturated and so dense with information that it’s either exhilarating or terrifying, or both.” 

Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and Netflix bubble. October is upon us, and so too are some spooky offerings from the streamer. On Oct. 12, The Fall of the House of Usher combines inspiration from the Edgar Allen Poe short story with Mike Flanagan’s flair for horror to tell a story about a crumbling family dynasty. On Oct. 20, Disco Inferno follows a young couple as they get ready to disco—but a sinister presence has other plans for them and their unborn baby. And on the same day, a yoga teacher’s life flashes before her eyes in Flashback after a deadly home invasion.

Here’s everything coming to Netflix in October 2023—and what’s leaving.

Here are the Netflix originals coming in October 2023

Available October 3

Beth Stelling: If You Didn’t Want Me Then

Available October 4

Beckham

Keys to the Heart

Race to the Summit

Available October 5

Everything Now

Khufiya

Lupin: Part 3

Available October 6

A Deadly Invitation

Ballerina

Fair Play

Available October 7

Strong Girl Nam-soon

Available October 9

Stranded with my Mother-in-Law

Available October 10

D14RIES: Season 2, Part 1

Last One Standing: Season 2

Available October 11

Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul

Once Upon a Star

Pact of Silence

Available October 12

The Fall of the House of Usher

GOOD NIGHT WORLD

LEGO Ninjago: Dragons Rising: Season 1: Part 2

Available October 13

The Conference

Ijogbon

Available October 15

Camp Courage

Available October 16

Oggy Oggy: Season 3

Available October 17

The Devil on Trial

Heather McMahan: Son I Never Had

I Woke Up A Vampire

Available October 18

Kaala Paani

Available October 19

Bodies

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix

Crashing Eid

Crypto Boy

Neon

Available October 20

Big Mouth: Season 7

Creature

Disco Inferno

Doona!

Elite: Season 7

Flashback

Kandasamys: The Baby

Old Dads

Surviving Paradise

Vjeran Tomic: The Spider-Man of Paris

Available October 23

Princess Power: Season 2

Available October 24

Get Gotti

Pete Holmes: I Am Not For Everyone

Available October 25

Absolute Beginners

Burning Betrayal

Life on Our Planet

Available October 26

PLUTO

Available October 27

Pain Hustlers

Sister Death

Tore

Yellow Door: ‘90s Lo-fi Film Club

Available October 28

Castaway Diva

Available October 31

Ralph Barbosa: Cowabunga

Here are the TV shows and movies coming to Netflix in October 2023

Available October 1

60 Days In: Season 4

A Beautiful Mind

American Beauty

Backdraft

Casper

Catch Me If You Can

Cinderella Man

Colombiana

Drake & Josh: Seasons 1-3

Dune (2021)

Elysium

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Gladiator

Hot Tub Time Machine

Kung Fu Panda

Love Actually

Margot at the Wedding

Miss Juneteenth

Mission: Impossible

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible II

Mission: Impossible III

My Best Friend’s Wedding

Role Models

Runaway Bride

Saving Private Ryan

Scarface

Sex and the City 2

Sex and the City: The Movie

The Adventures of Tintin

The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Firm

The House Bunny

The Little Rascals (1994)

War of the Worlds

Available October 2

Strawberry Shortcake and the Beast of Berry Bog

Available October 4

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Available October 9

After

Blippi’s Big Dino Adventure

Available October 11

It Follows

Available October 12

Deliver Us from Evil

Available October 12

Spy Kids

Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams

Spy Kids 3: Game Over

Available October 17

Silver Linings Playbook

Available October 19

American Ninja Warrior Seasons 12-13

Bebefinn: Season 2

Ghost Hunters: Seasons 8-9

Available October 24

The Family Business: Seasons 1-4

Minions

Available October 25

The UnXplained with William Shatner

Available October 29

Botched Season 1

Here’s what’s leaving Netflix in October 2023

Leaving October 1

The Rental

Leaving October 2

Jexi

Leaving October 4

The Expendables

The Expendables 2

The Expendables 3

Leaving October 5

American Pie: Girls’ Rules

Leaving October 14

Half & Half: Seasons 1-4

One on One: Seasons 1-5

Leaving October 31

Cliffhanger

Collateral

Coming to America

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Girl, Interrupted 

Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie

Into the Badlands: Seasons 1-3

LEGENDS OF THE HIDDEN TEMPLE

Mile 22

No Strings Attached

Pride & Prejudice 

Reservoir Dogs

Steel Magnolias

Tagged: Seasons 1-3

Terminator Genisys

The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther 2

The Thundermans: Seasons 1-2

Victorious: Seasons 1-2

Las Vegas police have arrested a man in the deadly 1996 drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur, a long-awaited break in a case that has frustrated investigators and fascinated the public ever since the hip-hop icon was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip 27 years ago.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested early Friday morning, although the exact charge or charges were not immediately clear, according to two officials with first-hand knowledge of the arrest. They were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of an expected indictment later Friday.

Davis has long been known to investigators and has himself admitted in interviews and in his 2019 tell-all memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” that he was in the Cadillac where the gunfire erupted during the September 1996 drive-by shooting. Shakur was 25 when he was gunned down.

The arrest comes two months after Las Vegas police raided his wife’s home July 17 in neighboring Henderson. Documents said police were looking for items “concerning the murder of Tupac Shakur.”
Police reported collecting multiple computers, a cellphone and hard drive, a Vibe magazine that featured Shakur, several .40-caliber bullets, two “tubs containing photographs” and a copy of Davis’ 2019 tell-all memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”

In the book, Davis said he broke his silence over Tupac’s killing in 2010 during a closed-door meeting with federal and local authorities. At the time, he was 46 and facing life in prison on drug charges when he agreed to speak with the authorities.

“They promised they would shred the indictment and stop the grand jury if I helped them out,” he wrote.

He has described himself as one of the last living witnesses to the shooting.

Shakur was 25 when he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip on the night of Sept. 7, 1996. The rapper was in a BMW driven by Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight in a convoy of about 10 cars. They were waiting at a red light when a white Cadillac pulled up next to them and gunfire erupted.

Shakur was shot multiple times and died a week later.

In 2018, after a cancer diagnosis, Davis admitted publicly in an interview for a BET show to being inside the Cadillac during the attack. He implicated his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, saying he was one of two people in the back seat where the shots were fired.

The shooting happened shortly after a casino brawl earlier in the evening involving Anderson, Shakur and others.

Anderson denied any involvement in the Shakur shooting. He died two years later in a shooting in Compton, California.

Shakur’s death came as his fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me,” remained on the charts, with some 5 million copies sold. Nominated six times for a Grammy Award, Shakur is largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.

Shakur was feuding at the time with rap rival Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious B.I.G., who was fatally shot in March 1997. At the time, both rappers were in the middle of an East Coast-West Coast rivalry that primarily defined the hip-hop scene during the mid-1990s.

Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective who spent years investigating the Shakur killing and wrote a book about it, said he would not be surprised by Davis’s indictment and arrest.
“It’s so long overdue,” Kading told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “People have been yearning for him to be arrested for a long time. It’s never been unsolved in our minds. It’s been unprosecuted.”

Kading said he interviewed Davis in 2008 and 2009, during Los Angeles police investigations of the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and the slaying of Biggie Smalls.

Kading said also that he talked with a Las Vegas police detective about the case, including after the SWAT raid in July at the home in Henderson.

The former Los Angeles police detective said he believed the investigation gained new momentum in recent years following Davis’s public descriptions of his role in the killing, including his 2019 tell-all memoir, “Compton Street Legend.”

“It’s those events that have given Las Vegas the ammunition and the leverage to move forward,” Kading said. “Prior to Keefe D’s public declarations, the cases were unprosecutable as they stood.”

“He put himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy,” Kading said of Davis and the Shakur slaying. “He had acquired the gun, he had given the gun to the shooter and he had been present in the vehicle when they hunted down and located both Tupac and Suge (Knight).”

Kading noted that Davis is the last living person among the four people who were in the vehicle from which shots were fired at Shakur and rapper Marion “Suge” Knight. Others were Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown and DeAndre “Freaky” Smith.

“It’s a concerted effort of conspirators,” Kading said, adding that he believed that because the killing was premeditated Davis could face a first-degree murder charge.

“All the other direct conspirators or participants are all dead,” Kading said. “Keefe D is the last man standing among the individuals that conspired to kill Tupac.”

The breadth of diversity seen on runways and in magazine editorials today owes much to the advocacy of Bethann Hardison. The model and activist’s career in fashion spans over five decades, beginning in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when she worked in the garment district, leading to her becoming a fashion model for designers like Willi Smith and Issey Miyake. And it continues today, through her extensive advocacy work to diversify the industry.

Hardison, now 80, has long been a pioneer for inclusion in fashion. During her time as a model, she was one of 10 Black models who walked in the historic Battle of Versailles, a 1973 fashion showdown between French and American designers that helped to break the color barrier on runways. It was a triumphant start to a career that has been shaped by a relentless determination to make the industry a more inclusive place.

In the ‘80s, Hardison transitioned from working as a model to representing them. As one of the first Black women to open her own modeling and talent agency, Bethann Modeling Agency, she kept a roster of multiracial talent and helped launch the careers of models like Tyson Beckford. In 1988, she formed the Black Girls Coalition, a support network for Black models, along with supermodels Iman and Naomi Campbell, both of whom consider her a mentor. In 2013, she sent an open letter to designers and industry leaders calling for accountability when it came to their all-white runways.

Read more: How Iman and Bethann Hardison United to Hold Fashion Accountable for Diversity

Hardison’s remarkable, trailblazing career is the subject of a new documentary, Invisible Beauty, which was co-directed by her and the filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng and released earlier this month. While Hardison has devoted the majority of her life to working toward change in fashion, she told TIME that co-directing the film, as well as working on an upcoming memoir, have given her perspective on just how much her tireless work has impacted others.

“When you can recognize yourself as being someone who’s actually helped shift society and shape the industry in some way, you’ve to give yourself credit,” she says. “Along the way, everyone says it to you, but I’m at a time in my life where I’m reflecting on it in a different way because of the film.”

TIME caught up with Hardison to talk about her five-decade career in fashion, her advocacy work, and why rest is a priority for her.

TIME: So many of the household names and faces in fashion, from Iman to Tyson Beckford, are people you championed. It often feels like you’re the godmother of so many people in fashion. How do you think your work has impacted others?

Hardison: I just listened to them. People speak about what I’ve done for everyone and how I’ve affected their life and it’s interesting that everyone feels that way, but I’m just busy clearing the brush. I don’t notice these things, but I do know they have an effect. I love the title that British Vogue gave me, “Mother of Industry,” because people are always calling me Mama B.

Did you ever dream that this work would be so game-changing?

Absolutely not. Until I saw four hours of footage [for this doc], that’s when I finally said, “OK, I do have a story—everyone says it, everyone claims you.” You don’t see it when you’re doing it because it’s not the objective, nor do you feel that you’ve made that kind of impact—especially when it was 30 or 20 years ago. But it’s still happening now and it’s very cool to witness it.

What has it been like to watch these changes in the industry, knowing that you’ve been an active part of it?

I think it’s really important. When you can recognize yourself as being someone who’s actually helped shift society and shape the industry in some way, you have to give yourself credit. I have done it and I recognize it more now than ever. Along the way, everyone says it to you, but I’m at a time in my life where I’m reflecting on it in a different way because of the film—because that’s something that’s tangible thing you can look at and watch.

You’ve made a documentary about your career and life and you’re working on a memoir. What are the lessons that have become clear during this period of reflection?

There’s opportunities to do things and you tend not to do them because you either feel you can’t or you shouldn’t do or you don’t deserve to or you’re not the one that should be focused on. But you have to learn at some point in life to get out of your own way.

In the film, you talk about your father’s influence and his mentorship as a Muslim imam for people like Malcom X. Did his work influence your journey to activism?

I don’t think so at all, because activism has to remain active. I’m an activist at the moment in time it needs to be, but most of my life is advocacy. You’re not doing that work, you just believe and support. My father was just a very learned man who had great respect for the community, who wanted to help and protect them. He was more of an advisor and an Islamic leader. I do think I fall from his tree as much as I do my mother, though they were very different people, but I am very much like each one of them in a way.

How did you come up with your doc’s title, Invisible Beauty?

Sometimes I think I got to this title because of the great book Invisible Man, but it really came about as I was working on another film that was an exposé on the fashion and modeling industry, these model beauties that were slowly disappearing. That’s where it came to me. During that [filming], twice I said, “You don’t know it’s like to be invisible.” So the title was already there before we started making this film.

What was it like to co-direct a film about your life? Why did you want to be involved with the film in that way?

It wasn’t my idea. Frédéric said, “Listen, I want to tell your story, but only if you would agree to co-direct it with me.” He didn’t want to tell a story about someone who was living when they’re right there and could do it. It’s not like telling the story of someone who has gone. The Eye Has to Travel was one of my favorite films that he worked on, so when he asked me, I thought it was really fitting. In some way, I was quietly trying to get there but I was always unsure, I had no practice. But at the end of the day, you bring a lot to the table when it’s your turn to do so and I did.

There was a period after the success of your modeling and talent agency, where you took a long sabbatical because of burnout. Why was it so important for you to prioritize rest?

Oh my God, I didn’t want to have a modeling agency anymore, much less a successful one because then you’ll never get out, you’ll always have to deliver on it. Even though there was so much love and support, it was just time. My friend found me a little mountain town in Mexico because I wanted a sabbatical in a cultural and spiritual environment. I took that break, but I wasn’t meant to get totally out of the game because I was being called back. People knew that others would listen to me because I always talked to designers upfront.

How do you approach your work life balance now? 

This is the thing that I think I’m good at. People don’t believe it, even when I say it all the time, but I have a very natural lazy streak. I love not having to have to do anything, but maybe that’s because I’ve always been doing something. I like being alone a lot because I have a lot of people to be engaged with and a large community. My travels and where I live are also a part of this; culturally, it’s very important to live outside of your country and to live in a place that may be more third world-ish is very good for the soul. I have a home in Mexico and I like to spend time in Morocco. I find that balance by being around important spiritual environments. I take care of myself; I like to have baths late at night, I love going to the sauna, I go to Korea Town and I get scrubbed down. I don’t move as much as I used to, even though I was and always am an athlete, but I stretch and do other things here in the house.

You started out in fashion as a runway model, then you began representing models. Do you think that informed the way you were able to advocate for them?

What I did was a whole different ballgame—it was a different time and it doesn’t exist anymore. I was a fashion model, but I had a full-time job. I couldn’t afford to just be a model. They say when you do something, then you become someone who can guide others who have that ability. When you have that something, it doesn’t make people feel like you’re attacking them and then they tend to want to listen.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from your career?

It’s so important to learn how to do a lot of different things. I also found great value in working for other people. Everyone wants to have their own business, but I think it’s very important to be an apprentice. I tell young designers and other people before they start their own business, to learn on someone else’s dime. It’s always important for people, especially young talents who want to take a chance, to see if you can get a job, put your ego aside and know that you’re doing it for a better future.

There’s been a lot of change since you entered the fashion industry, especially when it comes to inclusivity and representation, and you’ve played a huge role in making that happen. What would you still like to see change?

Man, that ship has sailed—there’s so much when you think about what you knew and how simple it all was then. It’s complicated—we have pop culture now, we have the internet now. We’re trying to keep racial diversity alive, which is something that has changed and I hope that it doesn’t fall backwards. But other things are changing like the retail business, young brands are not being as supported as they used to back in the day. We talk about sustainability, but people just keep making clothes and everyone wants to be designers.

With your documentary and the recent Donyale Luna documentary, we’re really reviewing parts of fashion history that weren’t always highlighted.

Every story should be told. I think it’s very important that these stories are coming out. Everyone could find a story in something if they found it interesting.

What do you hope your legacy is?

I’m hoping to do right by building a foundation and making something that can be tangible for when I’m no longer here. That’s why I wanted to make this film, to help represent those who are underserved and so that it will always be able to be seen in perpetuity, in institutions or museums. Why do the good work and not have it in some way that others can’t share or reference?

The chestnutty theme of the teenage baby-sitter who receives a phone call from a heavy breather threatening to kill her, only to learn he’s right inside the house, has stuck around for a reason. Sometimes you don’t know when danger is beyond just one closed door—or lying in bed beside you. Writer-director Chloe Domont’s skillfully constructed debut feature Fair Play is neither a horror movie nor a corporate thriller, though it bears earmarks of both, with some dashes of erotic-thriller intrigue tossed in. Mostly, though, this workplace psycho-romance traces the resentments that can asphyxiate a couple when one partner’s career escalates as the other’s falters, and it does so in the service of a bigger picture. Domont has picked up the scent of an idea that’s floating through our culture, one that’s almost too disheartening to articulate: women just don’t trust men to respect them, no matter how much lip service a guy pays to the idea of equality.

Luke and Emily, played by Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, are one of those deeply-in-love couples who look fairly conventional but see themselves as rebels. In the movie’s opening scene, they break away from the tedium of a wedding for a bathroom quickie. There’s a moment of awkwardness thanks to menorrhea interruptus; Luke has hiked up Emily’s satin dress, the better to bury his face in her absolute self, only to pop up with blood smeared on his lips. The moment is funny, real, vaguely transgressive—not because there’s anything taboo about it, but because it’s the sort of thing you don’t usually see in a movie (at least an American one). Shortly thereafter, Luke surprises Emily with an engagement ring. Her face tells us she’s not sure what to think.

That’s because both work as analysts for the same hedge-fund company, and their romance is already a breach of company rules. And though she doesn’t spell it out, you get the sense that Emily is the only one really thinking about how their respective careers will play out once they go public with their engagement—as if she knows it’s more likely that she, as the woman, will have to be the one to find a new job.

Instead, the couple’s crass, sexist boss Campbell—played, with steely authority, by Eddie Marsan—surprises Emily with a promotion, the step up that Luke had been certain he was destined for. Luke now reports to her, and though he claims to be cool with it, it’s clear his ego has suffered a bruising. It also becomes clear that she’s sharper and more flexible—and simply better at her job—than Luke. She tries to help him, though that only makes things worse. Before long, Luke’s freewheeling, offhanded confidence—a quality that probably made him seem boyishly attractive to Emily—has hardened into ugly defiance. His insecurity isn’t charming; it has a bitter, aggressive edge, and it’s the woman he supposedly loves and esteems who suffers.

Domont and her actors don’t overstate this shift; instead, they make it all too believable, as if this were the sort of everyday venom that plenty of couples live with. It helps, too, that Domont seems to understand that not all finance people—and certainly not those still on the lower rungs of the ladder—live in luxury high-rises. The couple’s modestly cozy Chinatown apartment probably costs them plenty, but it’s far from the ho-hum glass-and-steel monstrosity that the movies generally use to signal greedy ambition. Even so, these two aren’t exactly rebels. When Luke cruelly criticizes Emily’s dull work wardrobe, which she tries to make more feminine with a few random frills, you understand how these types of workplaces are more sartorially complicated for women than for men—but you also think her half-hearted ruffly silk collars probably aren’t the way to go.

Still, as Dynevor plays her, Emily is intensely sympathetic. All she ever asked for was a solid career and a reasonably happy personal life, and instead she gets this lousy boyfriend. Domont doesn’t seem to know how to end Fair Play; the movie culminates in a disastrous engagement party thrown by Emily’s family, who know nothing of the nightmare she’s living through. (They’re working-class folks from Long Island, and they can see her only as a success story.) The movie doesn’t need that kind of dramatic overkill; what Emily suffers is horrifying enough.

Ehrenreich plays Luke as one of those anonymous, likable guys that women end up marrying all the time, but even from the start, there’s something smirky and entitled about him. Emily is too much in love to see it—that, too, probably happens all the time. Are modern men, raised in an era when it’s been drummed into them that they must respect women, better than the old-school models? Or have the truly bad ones simply learned more tricks, cloaking their misogyny in the language of respect? Fair Play doesn’t make a pronouncement either way, though it does subtly suggest that these types of hidden resentments within dual-career couples are more common than we like to think. And that’s what makes it more a horror movie than anything else. The guy is cute, he’s ambitious, and he’s offering you an engagement ring. What’s not to love? Maybe plenty.

Virality is fleeting, and TJ Mack, one of Brian Jordan Alvarez’s face-filtered, fully developed characters, seems to be grappling with this difficult truth in a TikTok Alvarez recently posted. Mack looks somber as he peers out an open window on a drive home through New York City. He seems pensive, perhaps even grateful for the song that made him ultra-famous, but most importantly, he is sitting. Viral fame can be gone as quickly as it came, but through it all, Mack—and, by extension, Alvarez—is sitting and taking in the moment.

Sitting truly is a wonderful thing to do (in moderation), and now it has an indelible anthem in the form of the improvisational song that launched Alvarez into the TikTok stratosphere. It’s a simple tune with simple lyrics; the magic is in how it’s sung: “Sitting/Sitting is the opposite of standing/Sitting is the opposite of running around/Sitting is a wonderful thing to do,” Alvarez-as-Mack sings with a serious demeanor and a seemingly Latin accent of sorts, contrasted by the alien ridiculousness of the bug-eyed filter which makes the eyes and mouth take up almost the entire face. The earworm made its way into the minds and mouths of countless creatives on TikTok since it was shared on Sept. 10, and the app was soon flooded with beautifully sung covers, a fully-produced pop track, a musical theater rendition, and even a metal/screamo reimagining.

Alvarez, 36, credits his improv training at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts with helping him come up with this catchy little ditty. The video he posted was actually a second take because the sound didn’t record on the first, but he says he usually just posts the first take of his videos. “I think that’s part of what people are responding to,” he tells TIME. “They can almost see in your eyes that you do not know what you’re gonna say next.” “Sitting” almost immediately went viral after he posted the original video, as people began leaving comments to the effect of, “Wait, this is actually a pretty good song.”

“Something about this particular song seems to be lightning in a bottle where so many people with talent are remixing it or producing tracks to it,” Alvarez says. “They’re creating piano orchestration or classical orchestration, and it just always kind of works.

From mainstream roles to messing around on TikTok 

In some ways, the song taking on different genres and musical styles mirrors Alvarez’s content on TikTok, he says. If you visit his page, you’ll see many front-facing videos of Alvarez as himself, but more often than not, he’s in character with filters on, sometimes sporting a wig. He has a “revolving map of characters” in his head, which currently include Rick the Australian bodybuilder; Timothee, a gay man whose boyfriend may or may not be involved in nefarious activities; Marnie. T, a spiritual leader; The Student/Intern, a young foreign guy who just got a full-time job and is going on a couple of Hinge dates; and TJ Mack, a happy-go-lucky aspiring singer who loves his wife and TJ Maxx. The slice-of-life moments these characters represent have helped endear them to Alvarez’s audience of close to 800,000 followers (across TikTok and Instagram); they come across like real (albeit very funny) people with backstories that TikTok users want to know more about.

“It’s like the song is doing characters. It’s similar to me in the sense that there’s this thing at the center, this person at the center, and then it’s taking on all of these different personalities,” he says. “The essence of it remains the same, and I think that’s really fun for people to see.”

Alvarez has been a working actor since 2015 and has held roles in shows like Jane the Virgin and the reboot of Will & Grace, as well as appearing earlier this year in the horror camp fest M3GAN. He’s also found an audience with his highly-produced YouTube videos, many of which feature sketches with a cast of actors, and a popular 2016 video series called “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo.”

During the pandemic, Alvarez decided not to overthink content creation as much. He started making silly videos with face filters and shooting them off to his TikTok page at the same time TikTok was beginning to take hold of a captive, locked-down audience. His viewers reacted well to his first character, Marnie T., a spiritual leader with a bowl cut who may or may not be fraudulent. From this, he learned his audience was the most effective barometer of what’s funny. He decided to experiment with accents, wigs, and different filters to create his own little cinematic universe of characters.

Alvarez’s content is just one example of the way in which social media has become less polished overall. In the early 2010s, at the advent of social media, both average users and professional creators alike often looked unrecognizable with layered filters and meticulous details smoothed and deleted through Facetune. More recently, however, there’s been a shift away from creating perfectly curated feeds, toward posting unedited photo dumps on Instagram and one-take videos on TikTok. Alvarez tells TIME that he had always been interested in creating sketches that take time and require all the bells and whistles. “But then COVID strikes and I’m in my apartment with the same creative impulses that I’ve always had, and it made me just think, ‘I’m gonna just put a filter on and be funny.’”

Leaving the door open to new music

Given that we are speaking at the crest of a viral moment, it seemed worth asking what Alvarez likes and dislikes about being the center of online attention. “Is there anything I hate about going viral?” he responds. “Sadly, I’d have to say no. I think it’d be more noble if there was something I hated about it.” He says he’s grateful for his mainstream success in television and movies, but “I also just have and always will love the internet and the joy it can spark.”

Alvarez says there’s a symbiotic relationship between his career paths as an actor and a content creator. “I have this experience that I’m very grateful for where, whenever I’m going viral, that will tend to help me move along in my mainstream career, and as I move along in my mainstream career, that makes me bigger on the internet, too.” 

Speaking of creating content, the question on everyone’s mind is whether TJ Mack has another hit song in him. Alvarez assures his audience that new music can be expected. He tells TIME he had a meeting with Atlantic Records, and they are in talks to help push the song to an even wider audience. He wouldn’t share any details, but the good news for fans is that it leaves the door open for TJ Mack to sit in a booth and captivate listeners with more odes to life’s simple pleasures.

Sept. 28 was the season premiere of The Golden Bachelor, a new show from The Bachelor franchise featuring senior dating. The episode unfolded much like any Bachelor premier where we watch the hopeful lead meet a group of starry-eyed hopefuls. The difference was that the people meeting were not at the beginning of their careers or ready to start families. These folks were searching for someone to spend their next, and final chapter with.

I started seeing casting calls for The Golden Bachelor a while back. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, other than what a trip it would be to see my mom on a show known for clout chasing, fighting over shrimp, diabolical plotting, and other behaviors that get contestants labeled as being there for the “wrong reasons.” And then, on August 14, 2023, during “The Men Tell All” episode of Charity Lawson’s Bachelorette season, the world was introduced to Gerry Turner, the franchise’s first Golden Bachelor—a 72-year-old widower with two daughters and two grandchildren.

Turner’s introduction was met with boundless enthusiasm and teary eyes as he described his desire to find love again after losing his wife to illness in 2017. The two were high school sweethearts and married for 43 years. When asked by the host, Jesse Palmer, if he believes he’ll find a love like he had with his wife, Turner remarked, “What I look for at the age of 70 is different than what I looked for in high school and college.” My interest was immediately piqued.

During the show’s premiere, we got a glimpse of the complex dynamics of dating later in life as Gerry and the contestants shared their desires for partnership, love, and affection after having already had full lives and for some, multiple loves.

Bachelor Nation will now be privy to the evolution of love after a lifetime of experience, loss, and resilience. I’m rooting for Gerry, as I root for all of the leads, to find love and a life-long partner—but it’s concerning just how much the show is focusing on a narrow population of seniors, all very fit and active, with several contestants working in the fitness industry. Is this who the franchise believes to be worthy of a second chance at love?

Diversity has always been a problem for the franchise, from leads to the contestants. The show’s casting has historically veered towards homogeneity and included little racial, body or ability diversity. Prior to The Golden Bachelor, the age range for contestants has usually fallen between early 20s and late 30s. The show appears to be the franchise’s way of opening up discussions about age andacknowledging a population of daters who are rarely represented in media.

Read More: Why Older Couples Don’t Need Marriage to Have Great Relationships

The cast for Gerry’s season was released on August 30 in a splashy video with Cher’s “Believe” playing in the background. Twenty two women in fashionable gowns revealed themselves to be ready for love and hopeful that it’s with Gerry. Based on who has made the cut, it’s clear that the producers chose contestants who defy what we imagine when we think of senior citizens. But is this casting move breaking stereotypes or reinforcing harmful expectations for people over 60 to be thin, with very few wrinkles, and mostly gray-hair free?

In many ways, The Golden Bachelor is a mirror of our culture’s beliefs about aging. We are already seeing hints of ageism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “discrimination against older people because of negative and inaccurate stereotypes.” One of the final “contestants” to exit the limousine to meet Gerry was Concetta “Aunt Chippy” Potenza, who also happens to be Jimmy Kimmel’s aunt. At 84, she more closely resembles the stereotype of the undesirable older woman. In typical (tasteless) Bachelor fashion, she is meant to be comic relief, but she registered more as the fat, aim of the joke. Cast against women who managed to escape the ravages of age, she seemed to portray a cautionary tale. She is brash, comments that she’s in the wrong place, and falls asleep during the rose ceremony. Whether she voluntarily was there for the joke or not, the point remains the same: she was never even close to being competition.

There are many stereotypes about older people, and one is that older bodies, with their fat and folds and wrinkles, aren’t desirable. This is especially true for women, who experience a tremendous amount of pressure to remain youthful in appearance and get (or stay) thin as they age—some of which is hormonally impossible and gets only more complicated by any number of health issues we face as we age. Perhaps we will hear from the women about their struggles with weight and body image and how they experience inhabiting an older body.

In casting Turner, who is thin and active (he loves pickleball), the show is also holding up an example of what aspirational aging looks like for men. Turner appears to be the picture of “health” with nowhere near a granddad-bod or even a dad-bod. He uses a hearing aid, but other than that he looks as spry as any young man could be. Not all men age this gracefully, but that’s what makes Gerry such an attractive casting choice for the franchise. They want us to see an idealized version of aging, not what most of us will likely experience in our own lives.

Another tricky area for The Golden Bachelor to navigate is sex. Senior sex tends to get erased from the media in favor of a more kindly, sexless representation of aging. When Gerry’s season was first announced on “The Men Tell All,” the topic of Fantasy Suites came up. Fantasy Suits are overnight dates where the final three contestants are able to spend camera-free time with the lead and explore intimacy. Jesse Palmer asked Gerry whether that would be a part of his journey, as the camera panned around the studio audience with puzzled looks on their faces. Gerry remarked that this will depend on the relationships he builds and how comfortable they both feel, which is generally how Fantasy Suites are addressed by younger leads.

The problem is in the question: Why would Gerry be any different? Older people have sex, sometimes the best sex of their lives. What that looks like is largely a mystery because no one talks about it.

During Gerry’s reveal, there were jokes about how he was trending with tweets about how he “can geddit” and is a “grandzaddy.” But somehow the idea of him choosing to explore a sexual connection with one or multiple contestants was unthinkable. This man has been having sex his whole life, and most certainly knows the value sexual connection can have in a relationship.

Based on what we saw in the premier and what was teased in the season trailer, I think we’re in for lots of sexual tension. Gerry makes out with at least two women on the first night and declares he’s in love with multiple women. I’m excited for there to be real moments of lust and passion between Gerry and his hopeful fiancés-to-be. But I also want the show to shed light on how our desires change as we get older. What the show lacks in body and racial diversity I hope will be made up for in allowing the women to tell stories about the process of aging and how that’s impacted their identities.

That includes all of the stuff society tells us time and time again to hide: discussions of menopause, Empty Nest Syndrome, being child-free or what it has been like raising Black children or grandchildren in America. We’ve already started to hear some compelling stories about loss and supporting friends who have severe illness, and I’m hopeful that the show will create more space for harder topics to be explored. I want to learn about the contestants’ defining moments of embracing themselves and their lives. I want to leave this season of the show feeling like I’ve gained more insights on aging and particularly, what it feels like to age in a culture that wants you to remain young.

Rachel Lee doesn’t come across like she could be the leader of a crime ring. At Motel Morris in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, she’s shy and intentional with her words as she sits for an interview alongside director Erin Lee Carr, who has just made a documentary about the time when she was, if not a leader, at least a member, of the Bling Ring. The infamous crime saga involved a group of teens who robbed numerous celebrity homes, including those belonging to Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom, between 2008 and 2009, and became a national sensation. The media firestorm surrounding the case inspired a Sofia Coppola movie, in-depth news coverage, and, more recently, a 2022 Netflix documentary that featured former Bling Ring members Alexis Haines (formerly Neiers) and Nick Norgo (formerly Prugo). But there was a major piece missing from the story: Lee, who never spoke out about the crimes until now.

The media narrative that formed around Lee when she was on trial as a teenager and serving 16 months of a prison sentence for three counts of residential burglary was one she didn’t take pains to debunk—she was advised not to speak up, not to talk to the press, or ever try to redirect the narrative. It wasn’t until Carr approached her about doing a documentary that she seriously considered talking about that time in her life.

“I was always afraid to open up to somebody who had power through media and that they could twist the story and then it would be more mess,” says Lee, now 33. “For me, every time an article comes out about the Bling Ring, every time a new documentary comes out, I keep in the back of my mind that these victims are still here on this earth triggered by this, so I didn’t want to be a trigger.”

But she felt her story was in good hands with Carr, who at 35 is a contemporary of Lee’s and who has made documentaries about other complicated young women, from Britney Spears (Netflix’s Britney v. Spears) to Michelle Carter, a teen who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after encouraging her boyfriend, via text message, to kill himself (I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter). The trust between them is evident in their dynamic as they sit for an interview about HBO’s The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring, which hits Max on Oct. 1. Every time a question is asked, Lee takes time to process it, closing her eyes, her eyelashes fluttering as the sentences begin to formulate in her head. Carr, by her side, is patient and understanding.

They spoke to TIME about first impressions, lessons learned, and balancing guilt, ego, and respect for victims.

TIME: What are you feeling right now as the documentary is about to come out?

Lee: I’m feeling really grateful for Erin for even approaching me in the first place and then allowing me to feel like I could be myself and speak from the heart so the world could see who I really am.

I’ve noticed a wave of emotions; sometimes I feel very present in my life, and then sometimes it kind of hits me all at once, and I feel overwhelmed and a little bit scared but also confident because I was truly me. I’ve been working on being proud of who I am.

Carr: It feels like the right time for this because it’s almost in reverse. Usually, there’s the documentary, then there’s the scripted—we have the amazing Sofia Coppola film, and there’s been a couple of other pieces about this. But no one knew the whole story because Rachel had not spoken. I think this is a perfect cap to revealing that it’s not just about cultural excess and obsessing about celebrities. It’s about what our brains do to us when we’re teenagers, mental health, loneliness, codependency, drug abuse, and understanding what happened in the houses that night.

What drew you to Rachel’s story?

Carr: When [the Bling Ring] happened, I was obsessed. I remember that I once had stolen one thing in Urban Outfitters: a pair of earrings. I nearly got caught, and it was just red hot shame. So I was blown away by this group of kids entering into these houses and doing this, and my beat is complex women, and you are one.

Lee: Yeah, I am.

Rachel, were you offered a spot in the Netflix documentary?

Lee: I was. I just personally didn’t want to participate in that because, energetically, I was shaking so much, trembling. I just knew I couldn’t.

How did this project come about with Erin?

Lee: A pretty natural flow, but a lot of blind faith and [time]. I was kind of very vulnerable, but not totally. So Erin was very patient with me, never made me feel pressured.

Carr: It was a little uncomfortable because Rachel showed me text messages where—it’s not Netflix, a production company that made the documentary—but where they were talking badly about me, and it was a full-court press on Rachel. That energetically is not going to feel good. I have the benefit of working with organizations like HBO, where they give me the time, and I don’t need to pressure anybody. But I knew the story that I wanted to tell was really different.

Erin, what were your first impressions of Rachel?

Carr: Mystical. Moon baby. Bubbly. Thoughtful. Split.

What do you mean by split?

Carr: There are parts of her that are fractured. There’s the before, the during, and the after, and it’s very hard for her to reconcile who she is today with who she was. She’s pushed it all away, and I’ll let Rachel speak to this, but she’s put a lot of that down. These vestiges come up in the present day sometimes.

Rachel, first impressions of Erin?

Lee: To be honest, I just really liked Erin. I thought that she was a very bold but nice person. I’m not bold in the world, but maybe behind closed doors. I just liked being around Erin’s energy; she was constantly inspiring me to be more out there. I felt really good to be able to talk about things I had been pushing down for so long.

Carr: You were close to backing out; you came very close to canceling the whole thing.

Lee: Yeah, I did.

What was making you want to back out?

Lee: I can talk on the phone all day, but the second a camera is on me, I freeze. But I had to overcome that hurdle because I wanted to share how I felt.

Carr: She’s been burned by the media, and I’m an empath, but I’m also a journalist. I think that in her mind, was I going to come in and try to exploit her? She says it’s about energy, but it really is also about my body of work that I don’t tend to screw people over. I can say with a whole heart that I will do justice by the story and know that no one’s gonna give me notes not to do that.

Erin, what was the biggest misconception about Rachel that you wanted to correct?

Carr: There was this huge question: Was she the ringleader?‘Was she the mastermind behind it all? I think it was a two-person job. I’ve wanted to explore the psychology behind when two people get together and egg each other on. Nick [Prugo] had obviously told the police everything right after everything that happened and was in a very fortunate position to say it was all Rachel. She was in such serious trouble; she was trying to fight for her survival in the criminal justice system, let alone giving an interview to Good Morning America. I think it’s very clear that there was an agenda put out in the world and that didn’t feel correct.

Rachel, what was the hardest thing to talk about in the documentary?

Lee: The hardest things for me were talking about the burglaries themselves, the affected victims, and my family. Those are things I can never go back in time and change. I can only imagine how horribly I affected so many people, so when I talk about it in the documentary, I just feel nervous and sad.

What are your feelings now about the Bling Ring?

Lee: I was having a really hard time forgiving myself, being able to live a full life, because I always felt like I had to punish myself. Not only was the media punishing me, and I was punished by the justice system, but I was also punishing myself. 

Carr: It was very hard for her to go back into those nights and describe what happened during the night of the robberies. We had a moment where we went outside and talked. I told her, “This can’t be a fluff piece where I can’t ask you about what happened. We have built enough trust.” We had to go through it, and you talked about the high you’ve gotten and the clarity you got after it. She’s been told by her family, by the media, to not talk about it. But for people to understand this and for it to feel like a definitive piece about your story, we need to know what it felt like in the house.

Do you feel like you’ve changed?

Lee: Of course. I was honestly not considerate of other people’s feelings, and that’s something I really had to work on. I’ve become a more mindful person. Even when my friends joke about stealing to this day, I’m like, “Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever talk about it. Don’t ever steal. Just don’t joke around about stuff like that.” Growing up, after the Bling Ring happened, some people would say, “Oh my god, that’s so cool.” And I’d ask, “How is that cool? I did something so terrible. Ruined my name and people’s lives.” All I had to do was learn from it, and I’m really grateful I did. 

If Erin had not approached you about this documentary, do you think you would you never have spoken about The Bling Ring?

Lee: For the rest of my life, never. In my mind, I was like, “I’m gonna go the rest of my life and never say anything, ever.”

Why not? You wouldn’t want to clear your name?

Lee: Clearing a name is for ego purposes. I was always afraid to open up to somebody who had power through media, and they could twist the story, and then it would be more messy. For me, every time an article comes out about the Bling Ring, every time a new documentary comes out, I keep in the back of my mind that these victims are still here on this earth triggered by this, so I didn’t want to be a trigger.

That’s a very selfless way of looking at this.

Lee: I would say that is one of the things that Bling Ring gave me is a lot of selflessness. I’m very humbled and was humbled at a young age.

What do you both hope the audience takes away from the documentary?

Carr: I’ve spent such an obsessive, obscene amount of time on these films, so every thought I’ve ever had gets put into the film, and I don’t want to say what my thoughts are; I want the film to speak for me. As a journalist, I want there to be all sides to the story, and you’ll see throughout the films that I work on you can sometimes know my opinion, and sometimes it feels a bit more ambiguous. I try to keep people guessing a little bit.

Lee: I just hope that they just see me as a human and that I’m not perfect, but that I’m trying, in this life, in this current moment. I really hope that the victims know how sorry I am. There will never be a time in my life when I’m not sorry and guilty about it.

As of 12:01 a.m. this past Wednesday, the writers’ strike is over. But even if the actors’ contract is also settled within the next few weeks, TV schedules throughout the fall will be full of stopgap programming meant to tide us over until the production machine starts spitting out new episodes. Documentary series and Anglophone imports, in particular, have dominated streaming. Which isn’t such a bad thing. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a relief to see fairly compensated writers back at work. Still, considering the quality of September’s best new shows—two scripted titles from the UK and three quintessentially American docuseries—I wouldn’t say I’m clamoring for the 21st season of NCIS.

Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court (Showtime)

If you want to understand American politics, especially in a 21st century defined by legislative gridlock, you have to understand the Supreme Court. And if you want to understand the Supreme Court, this four-part series from distinguished documentarian Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble, Philly D.A.) is an excellent place to start. Beginning with Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure in the 1950s and ’60s, when issues of individual rights began to dominate the docket and cases like Brown v. Board of Education helped pave the way for a more equitable democracy, Deadlocked traces the Court’s devolution into a morally compromised tool of partisanism.

Roe v. Wade, United States v. Nixon, Bush v. Gore, voting rights, same-sex marriage, the very public sexual misconduct inquiries that preceded Clarence Thomas‘ and Brett Kavanaugh‘s ascent to the bench, are all integral parts of this story. But Porter, drawing on interviews with legal scholars and former staffers of justices on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide, also follows trends in the Court’s relationship to party politics and the public square, from the rise of the Federalist Society to the advent of confirmation hearing as spectacle to the shifting tone of SCOTUS coverage in the media. Deadlocked isn’t the most entertaining of documentaries; expect plenty of archival footage and talking heads. Yet it’s fascinating, if also depressing, because it synthesizes so many worrisome political and cultural shifts into a single striking narrative. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. As one expert sums up our current predicament: “The only power the court has is its legitimacy. And if it loses that, well then, the question becomes: Well, why obey?”

Dreaming Whilst Black (Showtime)

Kwabena wants to kick off his filmmaking career with a short that dramatizes his Jamaican-immigrant grandparents’ love story. But the project is easier conceived than executed for a young, broke Black writer-director with few connections in the industry and an excruciating day job to make rent on the apartment he shares with his cousin and the cousin’s pregnant wife. A perceptive comedy of errors ensues, as Kwabena—played by co-creator and co-writer Adjani Salmon—navigates the many indignities of fundraising, meets powerful creators who steal his ideas, and encounters all manner of racism within an overwhelming white industry that believes itself to be progressive. Meanwhile, his friend Amy (Dani Moseley) questions why she ever left a nascent producing career in Nigeria to take an assistant job at a British production company where she’s the only Black employee and her bosses would rather see her fetch coffee than make movies.

In its depiction of a Black protagonist’s struggle to make headway in a creative marketplace controlled by white gatekeepers, Dreaming Whilst Black shares many themes with another worthwhile September release: Hulu’s adaptation of Zakiya Dalila Harris’ publishing satire The Other Black Girl. But Salmon’s series is the sharper, funnier, more concise and stylistically confident of the two, balancing a deeply pessimistic read on the British film industry with characters whose ambition, frustration, and talent feels authentic.

The Gold (Paramount+)

On the morning of Nov. 26, 1983, six armed South London gangsters broke into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse, near Heathrow, expecting to make off with around £1 million in currency. What they found in the facility’s vault, instead, was £26 million worth of gold bullion (which would today be the equivalent of about $137 million). That surprise jackpot presented a major problem: How would the robbers transform so many bricks of solid, serial-numbered gold into money they could actually use? The solution opened the door for decades of financial crime to come.

The Gold, a kinetic, six-part BBC crime drama that’s currently rolling out on Paramount+, fictionalizes the heist and its long aftermath. Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville leads the expansive cast as DCI Brian Boyce, a tenacious, incorruptible veteran lawman following the money. His white whale is Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden from Slow Horses), the wily fence who connects the robbers with white-collar money launderers. Fascinating characters abound, from an ambitious detective (Charlotte Spencer) who’s the daughter of a gangster to a social-climbing solicitor (Dominic Cooper) who’s increasingly disturbed by his own soullessness. At the heart of the story is the tension—and affinity—between the “old London” of smugglers and outlaws, and the Thatcher-era, greed-is-good Establishment types busy gentrifying it. If creator Neil Forsyth presses a bit too hard on British class dynamics, in earnest monologues that spell out themes viewers can easily glean without them, it’s all in service of a stylish procedural that’s gripping from beginning to end.

Savior Complex (HBO)

In 2019, a devastating news story ricocheted around the digital-media echo chamber. As one headline summarized it: “American Woman Accused of Letting Hundreds of Ugandan Kids Die at a Fake Clinic.” Her name was Renée Bach, and she faced a lawsuit on behalf of two Ugandan mothers who alleged that their children died after being treated at a malnutrition clinic where Bach practiced medicine without a license. (The case was settled in 2020.)

The three-part HBO docuseries Savior Complex—premiering Sept. 26, with the remaining two episodes set to air the following night—revisits the thorny affair, previously dissected by The New Yorker and in the podcast The Missionary, adding updates, on-camera interviews, and nuance without sacrificing accountability. Filmmaker Jackie Jesko’s disinclination to paint Bach as a bloodthirsty butcher or her detractors as heroic racial-justice crusaders is sure to rankle some viewers. But what emerges instead are revelations more astute and more disturbing, forged in a crucible of race, religion, money, and global politics. [Read the full review.]

Wrestlers (Netflix)

Greg Whiteley’s riveting seven-part documentary follows the regional pro wrestling league Ohio Valley Wrestling through a pivotal season, as CEO and WWE alum Al Snow clashes with new co-owners and the future of the league hangs in the balance. Whiteley is known for the humane Netflix community-college sports docuseries Last Chance U and Cheer. Yet his latest project for the streamer frames its subjects less as athletes than as outsider artists, devoting their lives to captivating their dwindling audiences and preserving what might be a dying lifestyle. Each match skillfully combines choreography and improv. The line between self and persona blurs. Wrestling may not be your passion—it isn’t mine—but Wrestlers resonates beyond the ring. It’s about the scrappy vitality of independent entertainment in a world where it’s direly undervalued. [Read the full review.]

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The only explicitly spooky book on this list of October releases is Out There Screaming, edited by John Joseph Adams and Jordan Peele. This anthology of new Black horror spans from the supernatural, like a girl searching for the demon that killed her parents, to the all too real, like traffic stops and lynch mobs. Other books on this list, though, border on the uncanny: Walter Mosely’s Touched personifies death as a pale man with white hair and a dapper suit, and in Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, the titular protagonist enters other people’s dreams to scrub out the bad parts. Also arriving this month are the hotly anticipated memoirs from Jada Pinkett Smith and Britney Spears. Here are the best new books to read this October.

Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, John Joseph Adams and Jordan Peele (editors) (Oct. 3)

First, Jordan Peele co-created and starred in the sketch comedy series Key & Peele. Then, he made a string of films—Get Out, Us, and Nope—that fuse horror with the realities of Black American life. Now, alongside editor and publisher John Joseph Adams, he has collected and edited short stories by 19 Black authors into an anthology of contemporary Black horror. The likes of N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, P. Djèlí Clark, and Rebecca Roanhorse are featured alongside emerging writers like Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, and Justin C. Key. Real life (traffic stops) and real history (Freedom Riders, lynch mobs) meet speculative fiction and the supernatural in this bone-chilling collection.

Buy Now: Out There Screaming on Bookshop | Amazon

Brooklyn Crime Novel, Jonathan Lethem (Oct. 3)

In 2003, Jonathan Lethem wrote the New York Times-bestselling novel The Fortress of Solitude, set in Boerum Hill, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was raised. Two decades later—and with six novels, three short story collections, and a MacArthur Fellowship in between—he has returned to the New York City borough. Brooklyn Crime Novel, organized into six sections, traces the crime of gentrification through a series of stories in the style of oral history. This time around, Lethem spoke with the people he grew up with, of all races and backgrounds, to craft a story about memory, community, race, and privilege.

Buy Now: Brooklyn Crime Novel on Bookshop | Amazon

How to Say Babylon, Safiya Sinclair (Oct. 3)

Safiya Sinclair burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with the award-winning debut poetry collection, Cannibal. Her glimmering debut memoir, laced with poetic voice, arrives with self-possessed power. How to Say Babylon is a liberatory memoir in which Sinclair tangles with her past, patriarchy (“I would watch the men in my family grow mighty while the women shrunk”), and tradition and colonialism in her home, Jamaica. Babylon, in this case, refers to the oppression that the author’s father, a strict Rastafarian, sees in the Western ideology. When Sinclair eventually moves to the U.S. for college, she reckons with the gap between her worlds and tries “to write the ache into something tangible.”

Buy Now: How to Say Babylon on Bookshop | Amazon

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, Nathan Trail (Oct. 3)

Nathan Trail—a journalist and former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group—conducted extensive interviews and research to reconstruct the tragic February 2012 day when seven people were killed in a traffic accident near Jerusalem. He tells this story through the lens of a father, Palestinian phone company worker and political activist Abed Salama, and his frantic quest to find his five-year-old son, Milad. On that day, Milad had been on a school bus traveling to a theme park field trip, but he would not survive the journey. His death, as Trail illuminates through exhaustive reporting, was largely due to the systemic inequities of being Palestinian in Jerusalem: the wall dividing the communities, poorly maintained infrastructure, and an oppressive bureaucracy.

Buy Now: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama on Bookshop | Amazon

The Leftover Woman, Jean Kwok (Oct. 10)

At 14, Jasmine Yang married her husband Wen in a rural Chinese village. Then, she gave birth to a girl and was told the baby had died. But that’s not what happened. As Jasmine learns in a devastating twist, Wen, who wanted a son and was all too aware of the One Child Policy, gave their daughter away in an informal adoption. Upon finding out, she flees to America to escape her marriage and search for her daughter. She juggles two jobs to repay the smugglers who brought her: a cocktail waitress at a strip club, and a nanny for a white family with an adopted Chinese daughter. In The Leftover Woman, Jean Kwok weaves a riveting drama about motherhood and belonging.

Buy Now: The Leftover Woman on Bookshop | Amazon

Touched, Walter Mosley (Oct. 10)

Walter Mosley, distinguished by a laundry list of literary awards, is best known for his crime fiction—especially for his series about Easy Rawlins, a Black private investigator in Los Angeles. He has dabbled in science fiction before, and now he’s back with Touched, an alternative fiction novel that is, in fact, very alternative. Touched follows Marty Just as something inside of him, an entity called Temple, takes over. Suddenly, Marty has strange new powers including super strength and the ability to resurrect the dead. But when Tor Waxman, an embodiment of death and a harbinger of white-on-Black genocide, begins stalking Marty’s family, the story takes on a dystopian tone.

Buy Now: Touched on Bookshop | Amazon

The Hive and the Honey, Paul Yoon (Oct. 10)

The seed of Paul Yoon’s third short story collection is the movement of Korea and its people. The Hive and the Honey comprises seven masterful short stories that span 500 years of Korean diaspora. In 17th century Japan, a samurai escorts an orphan to find fellow Koreans, and in 19th century Eastern Russia, a soldier writes a ghost story about a Korean settlement to his uncle. Around 1980, a North Korean maid travels from Barcelona to Russia to reunite with her son, and in the present day, a South Korean immigrant builds a new life after being incarcerated. Yoon’s grandfather escaped North Korea, and the author’s works deal fittingly with belonging, home, immigration, and identity.

Buy Now: The Hive and the Honey on Bookshop | Amazon

Tremor, Teju Cole (Oct. 17)

Teju Cole’s first novel in 12 years is worth the wait. Tremor begins as seeming autofiction: Both the author and the protagonist, Tunde, are Nigerian, were raised in Lagos, teach at Harvard, and are cultural critics, photographers, and writers. Butitbecomes more nebulous, a tapestry of perspectives, art and artists, race, and history. The title refers to the omnipresent threat of something—a strained marriage, casual racism, colonial atrocities—shattering the illusion of a less complicated, more carefree reality. Through an address to a late friend, a lecture at an art museum, and the voices of 24 Lagos residents, Cole sculpts commentary about life and art in an age of uncertainty.

Buy Now: Tremor on Bookshop | Amazon

I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, Elena Kostyuchenko (translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and Bela Shayevich) (Oct. 17)

I Love Russia might be the last piece of work that journalist and activist Elena Kostyuchenko publishes from her homeland of Russia. She has been assaulted and arrested multiple times in retribution for her journalism and activism, and I Love Russia, while true to its name, holds that the greatest form of patriotism is criticism. It’s a mixture of Kostyuchenko’s reporting—on the 2014 war in Donbas, Ukraine, the contract killing of six of her colleagues, the Russian government’s grim denial of the fighting in Donetsk in 2012—and her deeply personal essays. And the author makes a point to foreground the overlooked and oppressed: sex workers, queer people, especially in remote areas, the homeless, and Indigenous Nganasan people facing alarming rates of suicide.

Buy Now: I Love Russia on Bookshop | Amazon

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee (Oct. 17)

After her mom passed away in 2020, author Molly McGhee was saddled with 20 years’ worth of debt. She began having nightmares about a man who was constantly trying to pay off his debt by entering other people’s dreams and trying to ease their sadness at his own expense. This is, in essence, the plot of her surrealist debut novel. In Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, the eponymous character is also mired in debt—until he gets a job with a government contractor that sends him into the minds of workers while they sleep to scrub away anything that might be making them unproductive. It’s a scathing critique of capitalism that holds onto the humanity of its characters.

Buy Now: Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind on Bookshop | Amazon

Worthy, Jada Pinkett Smith (Oct. 17)

Jada Pinkett Smith feels like she’s surrounded by misunderstanding. Her highly anticipated memoir, Worthy, is meant to change that. The book traces her journey from involvement with drugs as a young person in Baltimore to her close friendship with Tupac Shakur to her move to Los Angeles, where she would pursue acting and later meet and marry Will Smith. “Adventures of my youth, meaningful friendships, marriage, motherhood, self-betrayal and self reclamation are mere reflections of the adventures so many of us have taken in search of happiness,” Pinkett Smith wrote on Instagram. “It’s a harrowing ride of reclaiming my self-worth while unraveling unspoken truths.”

Buy Now: Worthy on Bookshop | Amazon

The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng (Oct. 17)

Tan Twan Eng’s third novel is based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 short story “The Letter.” Maugham’s story, in turn, was inspired by the real-life Ethel Proudlock case, in which Proudlock was charged with the murder of a man who tried to rape her. In The House of Doors, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Proudlock is a side character, a close friend of Lesley Hamlyn, wife of Robert Hamlyn. Lesley and Robert welcome Maugham, who goes by Willie, to their home in 1921 Penang, Malaysia, then colonized by the British. Tan effortlessly fuses fiction and fact as he paints a portrait of Maugham’s trip to Malaysia, his desperate search for a new writing subject, colonialism, and the restraints of heteronormative marriage.

Buy Now: The House of Doors on Bookshop | Amazon

A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel (edited by Nicholas Pearson) (Oct. 24)

This posthumous collection of more than 70 of Hilary Mantel’s essays, talks, and reviews, spanning 31 years of her career, does the beloved writer justice. Her work runs the gamut from the personal and poignant—like the surgery she underwent for endometriosis in her 20s, which left her post-menopausal and infertile—to the irreverent and clever—like her assessments of Princess Diana and Kate Middleton and her experience with a hypnotist. As the author of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy(a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power), she also imparts plenty of knowledge about history and writing: “Ink is a generative fluid. If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.”

Buy Now: A Memoir of My Former Self on Bookshop | Amazon

Tupac: The Authorized Biography, Staci Robinson (Oct. 24)

The author and screenwriter Staci Robinson (also an executive producer on the series Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur) and hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur met at Tamalpais High School, outside of San Francisco. They stayed in touch until Tupac’s death at age 25. Tupac’s mother, the activist Afeni Shakur, reached out to Robinson and asked her to write this authorized biography. Because of that level of familial access, the book brims with material: conversations with his loved ones, handwritten lyrics, album track lists, and liner notes. While Robinson doesn’t speculate on Tupac’s unsolved murder, she does stay true to his “revolutionary vigilance against a system complicit in keeping Black Americans powerless and poor,” as she writes in the book.

Buy Now: Tupac: The Authorized Biography on Bookshop | Amazon

The Woman in Me, Britney Spears (Oct. 24)

Other people have been telling Britney Spears’ story for a long time. The iconic pop star was confined in a conservatorship, in which her father was her conservator, for over 13 years, until 2021, when a court agreed to terminate the arrangement. Now, Spears has decided to tell her own story on her own terms. The Woman in Me will document both her trajectory toward superstardom and how that journey shaped her.

Buy Now: The Woman in Me on Bookshop | Amazon

When the Saw series killed off Jigsaw Killer John Kramer at the end of its third installment, 2006’s Saw III, it put the horror franchise in a peculiar position. While Tobin Bell continued to appear as Jigsaw in flashback sequences of later films, Saw no longer had its main baddie.

Now, the series is jumping back in time for a new movie that centers on Jigsaw while he was still alive and eager to test his victims’ wills to live in remarkably gruesome ways. “Listen, we’re the idiots that killed off the lead after Saw III,” franchise producer Oren Koules told Entertainment Weekly. “[But] how long can we suspend disbelief when the guy has terminal cancer?”

Saw X, in theaters September 29, picks up after the events of Saw but before Saw II, a period of time when Jigsaw had already established himself as a sadistic torture master but was still trying to find a cure for his terminal brain cancer. The movie sees Jigsaw travel to Mexico for an experimental medical procedure—only to realize the entire operation is a scam.

“This film opens with that cancer diagnosis and John Kramer learning that there is some kind of experimental, semi-outlawed treatment that’s available in Mexico City,” director Kevin Greutert told EW. “He gets his operation and finds out, after thinking he’s been cured, that maybe it’s not all what it seems. And we go from there.”

When Kramer discovers he’s been swindled by a team of con artists with a penchant for preying on desperate patients, he rounds them all up for a one-night-only Saw trap extravaganza. And so the games begin.

Read more: The 14 Most Anticipated Horror Movies of Fall 2023

With the story set after Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) wake up trapped in the bathroom from hell but before the nerve gas house of Saw II, Jigsaw has his right-hand woman Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) at his side to aid in his revenge plot. A former heroin addict, Amanda joined up as Jigsaw’s apprentice after becoming the first person to survive one of his traps—the infamous “reverse bear trap” we see in Saw. Like her master, Amanda also died during the events of Saw III.

This time around, the story will be told from Kramer’s perspective rather than that of his targets, according to franchise veteran Greutert. “[Saw X] is an emotional journey that you go on with John Kramer, and less a slaughterhouse that you experience from the point of view of the victims,” he told Empire. “Obviously there will be people that can’t handle it, but I think it has a good chance of appealing to people beyond gore freaks.”

Veteran actor Michael Gambon, who was known to many for his portrayal of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in six of the eight “Harry Potter” films, has died, his publicist said Thursday. He was 82.

A statement by his family, issued by his publicist, said he died following “a bout of pneumonia.”

“We are devastated to announce the loss of Sir Michael Gambon. Beloved husband and father, Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside,” his family said.

No matter what role he took on in a career that lasted more than five decades, Gambon was always instantly recognizable by the deep and drawling tones of his voice. He was cast as the much-loved Dumbledore after the death of his predecessor, Richard Harris, in 2002.

He once acknowledged not having read any of J. K. Rowling’s best-selling books, arguing that it was safer to follow the script rather than be too influenced by the books. That didn’t prevent him from embodying the spirit of Professor Dumbledore, the powerful wizard who fought against evil to protect his students.

Although the Potter role raised Gambon’s international profile and introduced him to a new generation of fans, he had long been recognized as one of Britain’s leading actors. His work spanned TV, theater and radio, and he starred in dozens of films from “Gosford Park” to “The King’s Speech” and the animated family movie “Paddington.”

Gambon was knighted for services to drama in 1998.

Born in Ireland on Oct. 19, 1940, Gambon was raised in London and originally trained as an engineer, following in the footsteps of his father. He made his theater debut in a production of “Othello” in Dublin.

In 1963 he got his first big break with a minor role in “Hamlet,” the National Theatre Company’s opening production, under the directorship of the legendary Laurence Olivier.

Gambon soon became a distinguished stage actor and received critical acclaim for his leading performance in “Life of Galileo” directed by John Dexter. He was frequently nominated for awards and won the Laurence Olivier award 3 times and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards twice.

A multi-talented actor, Gambon was also the recipient of four coveted British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards for his television work.

He became a household name in Britain after his lead role in the 1986 BBC series “The Singing Detective,” written by Dennis Potter and considered a classic of British television drama. Gambon won the BAFTA for best actor for the role.

Gambon was versatile as an actor but once told the BBC of his preference for playing “villainous characters.” He played gangster Eddie Temple in the British crime thriller “Layer Cake” — a review of the film by the New York Times referred to Gambon as “reliably excellent” — and a Satanic crime boss in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.”

He also had a part as King George V in the 2010 drama film “The King’s Speech.” In 2015 he returned to the works of J.K. Rowling, taking a leading role in the TV adaptation of her book “The Casual Vacancy.”

Gambon retired from the stage in 2015 after struggling to remember his lines in front of an audience due to his advancing age. He once told the Sunday Times Magazine: “It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do it. It breaks my heart.”

The actor was always protective when it came to his private life. He married Anne Miller and they had one son, Fergus. He later had two sons with set designer Philippa Hart.

In 2018, my agent informed me that two acclaimed screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman, who had co-written the Star Trek movie-franchise reboot starring Chris Pine, and Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar winner for Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, wanted to meet with me about a new TV series they had in mind. Its premise? It revisited Jean-Luc Picard as he was now, in his later years. My instant reaction? “No, definitely not interested. Sorry.”

Fifteen minutes later, perhaps hedging a little, I called my agent back and told him that I would meet with Alex and Akiva, but only to explain why I was not interested in reentering the Star Trek realm. It was the polite thing to do, after all.

I met with Alex at the Hotel Bel-Air for lunch. For some reason, Akiva was not present, but Alex had brought with him Kirsten Beyer, a prolific author of Star Trek novels, and screenwriter James Duff, who co-created the Kyra Sedgwick show The Closer. I sighed inwardly—clearly, I was about to be pitched.

By way of a preamble, I made it clear to my lunch hosts that I was proud of the work we had done on The Next Generation and the four feature films that followed. I had very much enjoyed being Jean-Luc and kept him close in my heart. But. I was done with him. I had said everything I wanted to say about him. His journey, as far as I was concerned, was complete, and for the remainder of my life, I was eager to find work as far away from Star Trek as possible, to keep moving forward as an actor. I thanked Alex, Kirsten, and James for their time and interest, but that was that.

It will not surprise you that they pushed back.

They all said, in different ways, that they did not feel that Picard’s story was over. Seventeen years had passed since Nemesis, the final movie featuring The Next Generation cast. That was a long time ago, but Picard’s life had not ended. In fact, his life might very well have taken a radically different course post-Nemesis.

“How so?” I asked.

My hosts were ready for this and bombarded me with questions. Was Picard still a captain? Was he still in Starfleet? Had he been promoted? Had he retired? Did he still have his château in France? Did he have a wife or partner? What was his relationship with the Borg after all this time?

But mostly, they raised questions about Picard’s emotional state. He was an older man now—was aging changing him, as, perhaps, it was changing me? 

Whew. I needed to think about all of this.

When we adjourned, we agreed that they would get me a memo presenting their ideas and that I would give it some consideration.

The memo that arrived was over 10 pages long, and I studied it very carefully. I had a series of talks with my wife Sunny because committing to such a project would have a big impact on us, tethering me to a fixed schedule and a return to L.A. after our wholehearted embrace of Brooklyn.

Read More: Sir Patrick Stewart: The Photo That Influenced Me Most

We decided that revisiting Picard was worth considering, and I asked for another meeting. This time, Akiva Goldsman was in on the discussion. He spoke compellingly of his personal vision for a new series and mentioned that he was keen to involve Michael Chabon, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay I had loved. That really got my attention.

I told Akiva and his team that I would return for Star Trek: Picard, as the series was to be called, if they met the following conditions:

1. The series would not be based on a reunion of The Next Generation characters. I wanted it to have little or nothing to do with them. This was not at all a mark of disrespect for my beloved fellow actors. Rather, I simply felt it was essential to place Picard in entirely new settings with entirely new characters. Perhaps Picard might encounter Riker or Dr. Crusher in the second season, but such encounters were not to be the series’ raison d’être.
   
2. Picard would no longer be serving in Starfleet, and he was not to wear any kind of uniform or badges.
   
3. The series would run for no more than three seasons.

It was clear to me that the writing team was not entirely thrilled with these conditions, but basically, they were all agreed to. The no-uniform rule was the toughest one for them to stomach, for some reason, and more than once, I was asked to reconsider my hard line. I stuck to my guns.

But once I committed to being Jean-Luc again, I committed fully. I told the new program’s producers that I wanted to announce Star Trek: Picard with a splash—by making a surprise appearance at the 2018 edition of the annual Star Trek Las Vegas convention.

I wanted it all kept hush-hush, with no mention whatsoever of my being in Las Vegas. Somehow, the secret never leaked. When I strode out to center stage, dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, I was greeted with a thundering round of applause that I took a moment to enjoy. I told the audience a few familiar stories of my early days on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which were received appreciatively. I talked about how I had long thought that our four feature films marked the end of the line for Jean-Luc. That elicited a few groans.

Then I sprang it on ’em: “Jean-Luc Picard is back.” Whoooo! Hoots of joy, more applause, lunatic shouts of glee. That moment alone made returning to the Star Trek universe worthwhile, and we hadn’t yet shot a scene.

Once we started filming, I was relieved and pleased to find myself discovering a new gear in which to play Jean-Luc. Having reviewed my work in Blunt Talk, I’d come to recognize that at times I was being a bit heavy in my delivery, hitting words too firmly and delivering my lines too theatrically. I was determined to remedy that. Also, my voice has grown more ragged with age. So for the Jean-Luc on the precipice of turning 80, I found a tone that was softer and gentler, and it really worked.

My whole career had been, to a degree, defined by my speaking voice and its power. Yet now, in acknowledging the limitations that Picard and I faced as older men, I found my voice more full of expression and spontaneity than before. I could also hear my brain and my feelings connecting to this voice, bringing forward a nuanced, autumnal Picard who was new to me and, I hoped, the show’s viewers.

Read More: Patrick Stewart on That Logan Scene, the Poop Emoji and American Citizenship

The writers did a remarkable job of inventing new characters, such as Picard’s former Starfleet first officer Raffi Musiker, who struggles with substance abuse, and Agnes Jurati, a cybernetics expert who ultimately gets assimilated into the Borg. The producers did an equally fantastic job of landing the blue-chip actors Michelle Hurd to play Raffi and Alison Pill as Agnes. I couldn’t wait to share our show with the world. 

The first season premiered in 2020. We shot the second and third seasons of Star Trek: Picard back-to-back, making up for lost time after COVID-19 shutdowns. Little by little, as the producers wore me down, I softened on my hard-line conditions regarding how I would participate in the series. Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes had reprised their characters in the first season, and Marina Sirtis, whose character Deanna Troi is now married to Riker, made a one-off appearance. By our second season, Q had reared his head, meaning a return for John de Lancie, and Whoopi Goldberg put in a couple of very valuable appearances as Guinan. For good measure, throughout the series we were also joined by the brilliant, beautiful Jeri Ryan, reprising her role as the ex-Borg drone Seven of Nine from the late-1990s TV series Star Trek: Voyager.

For season 3, our last, Terry Matalas, by then Picard’s showrunner, told me that the studio wanted a full Next Generation reunion. Ugh, just what I had firmly said I didn’t want. But that had been three years ago. Now I was less resistant, having enjoyed working with Jonathan, Brent, Marina, John, and Whoopi. As an executive producer, I had a say in how we might go about achieving such a reunion. I told Terry, “I like the idea, provided that we don’t bring them all back at once. Let’s trickle them back in.”

It was essential to me that each TNG character came into the picture because he or she had a specific contribution to make and it wasn’t just sentimental window dressing. If Jean-Luc had changed so much over the years, so, too, surely, had the other members of the Enterprise crew. The writers, bless them, took this to heart.

Read More: How Star Trek First Made It to the Screen

The final season’s premiere episode, written by Terry, Akiva, and Michael Chabon, found Picard in a relaxed state of post-Starfleet life, proclaiming to his Romulan minder, Laris, played by the fine Irish actress Orla Brady, “I’m going to sip Saurian brandy and think about writing my memoir.” (Hey, I could relate to that!)

Then, out of nowhere, Jean-Luc receives a distress call from none other than his former chief medical officer and occasional lover, Dr. Beverly Crusher. Hello and welcome back, Gates McFadden!

And as he plots to rescue Dr. Crusher and ward off an unknown enemy who is keen to abduct her son, Jack—who is also, we learn, Picard’s child—Jean-Luc gradually rounds up the only people he can trust: his old Enterprise gang. Hello and welcome back, Gates, Brent, Jonathan, Marina, LeVar Burton, and Michael Dorn! (I especially liked Worf’s pacifist reappearance with a white goatee.)

And also, a grudging hello and welcome back to Starfleet badges and uniforms. Everyone else wore them, but Terry Matalas, knowing of my reservations, worked out a compromise. Picard’s outfits had the same silhouette as the Starfleet uniform but looked more like everyday street clothes, with no two-tone color scheme.

The third season came off magnificently. But its final scene, in which the reunited crew is gathered around a table with drinks, sharing a toast, is not how it was originally supposed to end. I had a different idea, which I brought to the writers a few months before we wrapped the series.

“What I’d like to see at the end of the show,” I told them, “is a content Jean-Luc. I want to see Picard perfectly at ease with his situation. Not anxious, not in a frenzy, not depressed. And I think this means that there is a wife in the picture.”

You see, the line between Jean-Luc and me has grown ever more blurred. If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?

The writers came up with a lovely scene. It is dusk at Jean-Luc’s vineyard. His back is to us as he takes in the view, his dog at his side.

Then, off-screen, a woman’s loving voice is heard: “Jean-Luc? Supper’s ready!”

Is it Beverly Crusher’s voice? Laris’s? Someone we don’t know? It isn’t made clear. But Sunny was set to record the lines.

Heeding his wife’s call, Jean-Luc turns around, says to his dog, “C’mon, boy,” and heads inside. Dusk fades to night, and Picard fades into history.

But this scene was never shot. And I am sort of to blame. Our final day of shooting season 3 was a bear, with a very long to-do list. About eight hours in, I realized we were in for a 14- or even 16-hour day. Brutal. And I was booked to fly to New York the first thing the following morning. So I made a suggestion to the production team.

“Look,” I said, “the scene with the dog will take no time to shoot, but it will take hours to set up the lighting and the green screen and all that. We don’t have those hours. So let’s not shoot that scene today. I can come back at any time you like and take care of it. Just me and the dog.”

The production team was grateful and relieved. And I was assured that we would take care of the final scene upon my return from New York.

But I never got a call. When I made a few inquiries, I kept getting put off. Finally, someone told me, “The studio doesn’t want to do it. It’s too expensive and they think it’s unnecessary.” Unnecessary? I thought it was crucial to the completion of Picard’s arc. But so be it: the TV series ended with the toast, which is a warm, emotional send-off to my favorite Starfleet crew. Either way, you now know of my original intent.

So is that it for Jean-Luc Picard?

Most probably, but never say never. I am gently pushing Paramount to let us do one single Picard movie. Not a Next Generation movie, as we have already done four of those. This would be an expansion and deepening of the universe as we’ve seen it in Star Trek: Picard. I’ve discussed this with Jonathan, Brent, and LeVar, and they are all game. Jonathan is my first choice to direct it.

Copyright (c) 2023 by Camm Lane, Inc. From the book Making It So by Patrick Stewart to be published by Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Ahsoka episode 7.

Ahsoka‘s first season could be headed for a less-than-happy ending.

Despite Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), and Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) finally reuniting in the closing minutes of episode 7, titled “Dreams and Madness,” the show appears to be foreshadowing a heartbreaking twist.

Since Sabine located Ezra on the extragalactic planet of Peridea in episode 6, he has mentioned repeatedly how eager he is to return home, to a conspicuous extent. Sabine has also yet to reveal how she risked the fate of the galaxy in order to find him—a choice that goes against everything Ezra sacrificed himself for in the first place.

Plus, with Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) set to make his return to the galaxy far, far away with or without mercenaries Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) in tow, the threat of Thrawn taking his place as heir to the Empire while the Spectre trio is left stranded on Peridea is looming large. All these factors, combined with the fact that Ezra refused to take his lightsaber back from Sabine in order to fight, seem to hint that Ezra will not make it off Peridea.

Read more: Everything You Need to Know About the Star Wars TV Show Ahsoka

There has been much talk about Sabine’s decision to hand the map of Peridea over to Baylan rather than destroying it, with Ahsoka lamenting that Sabine was “fated to make that choice” because “there wasn’t enough time to prepare her to make the right one,” and Huyang (David Tenant) surmising that, “Perhaps, for Sabine, it was the only choice.”

In the world of Star Wars, things usually tend to come full circle—think Anakin’s fall to the dark side leading to his eventual redemption. Considering Ahsoka is the show’s lead and Sabine her still-learning apprentice, the character whose story arc is most likely to come full circle on Peridea is Ezra. That could potentially mean that he will have to once again sacrifice himself, this time for good, to prevent Thrawn’s return and save his friends.