I’d like to have ended the year with several posts on recommended viewing and
reading, but I should know by now that making plans is how you get the universe to laugh at you. Which is actually not a bad segue into talking about North of North.
The delightful series’ first season of eight half-hour episodes debuted in Canada last January and globally on Netflix in April. It’s happily been renewed for a second to bow in 2026. Pretty much every critical review or discussion online when it premiered all but apologized for pushing it, comparing its premise and vibe to some of the brightest stars in the constellation of great television while cautioning that it was merely, to repeat my own self, delightful — and for those averse to the unfamiliar it might be a tough sell considering the only recognizable face in its cast for most viewers will be
24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub.
How I hadn’t come across “A Stranger Things Christmas” before this week, I’m not sure.
The video dates to 2016 but we’re in better late than never territory since the penultimate episodes of the series at hand drop today (and the grand finale on New Year’s Eve). While I’m unfamiliar with the work of co-creator Leigh Lahav, I look forward to exploring her channel further because this is absolutely perfect. [3:15]
Related: Happy Feet • Lead the Wild Rumpus, Stark • Coffee and Synchronicity
I realize we’re roughly mid-year between Passovers, but having spotted this amusing typo in a tech article on Apple News the other day I couldn’t rest until I was riffed out. Which did not take long, thankfully, so in a tie for the shortest of these lists ever you’re getting…
My Top Five Conjectures about Unknown Seders
Mere weeks after rewatching 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel as part
of the personal film festival I’d assembled for my 50th birthday, which I’ve neglected to dig into here for literal ages now, I was surprised and delighted to see its Billy Batson pop up on a 1974 episode of Shazam!
The CBS show was a staple of Saturday mornings during my childhood, as I noted in April of this year (and long before that). I’m hoping to write about the Republic serial at greater length the near future, but I first checked it out in high school — on a set of VHS tapes from West Coast Video — having read praise for it in Comics Buyer’s Guide; on both viewings, it lived up to its reputation as one of the finest of its kind. Even if Frank Coghlan Jr.’s Billy and Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel don’t perfectly mirror their comic-book inspiration any more than do their Filmation counterparts — the serial gives us sparks and smoke in place of magic lightning, although it does have the ancient wizard himself rather than six Immortal Elders — we get some genuinely thrilling superheroics for the era.
The record that won its namesake 2001’s Grammy for Best New Artist, I Am Shelby Lynne wasn’t actually her first album but her sixth.
