#107: Netflix has some new men for you to hate
Leave the men of "Outlast: The Jungle" in the jungle forever!
Death by Consumption
6/16/26 - 6/22/26
Between last weekend’s visit from my sister and her family, and this weekend’s visit from my cousin and his friend, I have walked the Brooklyn Bridge twice in 7 days. I have also, for the same reasons, completely fallen behind on Love Island, and we all know when you fall even 3 episodes behind on that show, it’s nearly impossible to catch back up. It’s become a show I’m watching entirely via out-of-context clips on social media now, which might be the preferred way to watch it. But please let me know if those two curious boys actually start doing full-blown gay stuff, because then I will pick it back up immediately.
This week: I binged the perfect new season of Outlast, I tragically wasn’t high enough to enjoy RuPaul’s stupid movie, I watched the insane new movie about meteorologists in WWII, Adam Scott infuriated me but it’s not his fault, I gave my sensitive data over to a mysterious new app, and I read a book about the fact that culture sucks now.
Outlast: The Jungle, season 1 (but also it’s Outlast’s 3rd season?… confusing) — on Netflix
The first two seasons of Outlast, Netflix’s Survivor/Alone ripoff have been a mixed bag. The first season was somewhat of a revelation, a no-holds-barred survivalist contest featuring literal criminals going feral in the woods. I hadn’t seen a reality show in which contestants tried to actually, literally kill each other since, like, Bret Michaels was forcing unstable women to compete for his attention on Rock of Love. Season 1 of Outlast saw cast members burning shelters down, stealing sleeping bags to give other players hypothermia, and even holding producers hostage in order to watch back footage of the other players. It was mayhem! I loved it. Season 2, on the other hand, was more of a straight-up survivalist game, and forgettable. (This is where I have to be a good journalist and report my conflict of interest: my good friend Greg is the casting director for Outlast. I will not let that make me biased, I promise!)
Season 3 (or, confusingly, season 1 of Outlast: The Jungle?) made a few changes. First, as the stupid subtitle suggests, they relocated from frigid, miserable Alaska to tropical, beautiful Panama. Secondly, they seem to have de-emphasized finding real survivalists, and instead cast a bunch of hot people. (Which is probably why they relocated to the jungle — let us ogle those body-ody-odies!) And third, they’ve added a few twists to the game that make it more of an actual game than an outright survivalist show. The new emphasis on a social-strategic game means the players’ personalities are the focus rather than their skills out in nature, which means heroes and villains can emerge. And, I have to warn you: you are not prepared for how much you are going to hate some of the people on this season.
Outlast: The Jungle features some of the most unbearable, misogynistic, arrogant incels ever filmed — the show slowly transforms into Outlast: The Manosphere. Halfway through the season, things got so bad, I was kind of hoping for actual violence to break out against a couple of these guys. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve seen reality TV characters this obnoxious, and I found myself unable to stop hitting “next episode,” desperately hoping to see one of them get their comeuppance, or worse. (In my darkest moments, I may have shouted, “STAB HIM” at one of the women, as she was being berated by one of the awful men.)
Sure, you may say there’s no need for yet another show that gives us bad men behaving badly, but I will argue that this is what Netflix does best: between all its dating shows and now Outlast, Netflix is, one by one, making a list of literally the worst straight men in all of America. They are doing a public service for women everywhere! If you meet a guy and he says he was on a Netflix reality show, you need to run.
Stop! That! Train! (2026) — at Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn
A warning: a 5mg edible is not enough THC for this movie. I suggest starting with at least 10 and going up from there, if you want any hope of genuinely enjoying this film. Stop! That! Train! clearly intends to be one of the stupidest movies you’ve ever seen, which it does succeed at, but unfortunately it rarely succeeds at being funny. I laughed possibly 4 times (there are a handful of good jokes, which begs the question: why not write good jokes the whole time???), which averages out to a laugh about every 25 minutes. That’s not a good ratio, Ru!
To be fair, we were in the minority, as the rest of our theater was having a great time (they probably took 20mg). The people were clapping like seals at even the most basic Drag Race references, and screaming with laughter at anything pretty much anyone said. There is a Lea Michele joke in this movie that is so tragically tame, and yet that didn’t stop the woman in front of me from screaming, “HOLY SHIT!” She simply could not believe that RuPaul would have the nerve to playfully and gently tease Lea Michele!!!! Over the past few years, Drag Race has turned more and more from an edgy, boundary-pushing show into, basically, Gay Cocomelon, and Stop! That! Train! shows there’s, unfortunately, no stopping that train.
Pressure (2026) — on Apple TV
As a guy who loves both history and weather, there was no way I wasn’t going to watch the movie about the weather on D-Day. And, even after watching the whole thing, I’m still a little bit like… wait, they made an entire movie about the weather on D-Day??? This was a deeply strange experience, and yet I kind of enjoyed it? I love my girl Kerry Condon (someday we’ll get you a role that lets you do more than just tell the male characters how inspiring they are, queen!), and there are several sequences in which people are frantically looking at charts and maps while shouting things like, “Get me those barometer readings from Ireland!” or whatever, and none of it seems like things actual weatherpeople would say, but who cares! This is a silly, stupid movie designed for you to be able to throw on whenever you’ve run out of things to talk to your dad about. Happy Father’s Day to ME.
Hokum (2026) — on Apple TV
Hokum is a pretty standard horror movie — a man (Adam Scott) goes to a haunted Irish hotel, where haunted things happen — that’s actually secretly a comedy, thanks to a thing I think of as the Barbarian effect, where the plot can only continue if the main character consistently makes some of the worst decisions you’ve ever seen. Oh, what’s that, a terrifying ancient clawed hand just closed that door over there? Let me go open it as slowly as possible and see who’s behind it! I spent half this movie screaming at Adam Scott to stop being such a fucking idiot, which is really all I want from a horror film. Just get in your damn Hertz and go to a non-haunted Marriott, you stupid bitch!!!
332 blocks — on the WalkNYC app
This stupid new app tracks your walks around NYC, and tallies up how many of the — apparently — 86,638 blocks in the city that you’ve walked. It’s extremely dumb, and I do not know why I downloaded it, or who I’m giving my data to, but it’s not like Palantir doesn’t already know where I am at every given second, you know? Yesterday I mentioned the Guggenheim within earshot of my phone, and today all I’m getting are Guggenheim ads! So, like, we’ve lost the data privacy wars already — fuck it, might as well see how I stack up against all the other walkers in the city. (As I started typing this, I was ranked #906 on the leaderboard, but I’ve already dropped to #913. There are walkers out there passing me right now! I need to go outside!)
This is an app I will probably completely forget about within 3 weeks, and yet I will also forget about rescinding its access to my location data, which means whichever nefarious government agency designed this honey-pot app will have the ability to precision drone-strike me anywhere I go, in perpetuity. Oh well!
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx (2025) — library ebook
I think I’m probably too online for this book. I thought it would be more of an analysis of its central thesis — that cultural progress has stalled in the 21st century because financial success is more celebrated than artistic risk now — but it was, instead, 250 pages of a mostly straightforward listing of everything that happened culturally over the last 25 years. Wikipedia: the book. Maybe a lot of this would be news to people who spend less time online than me, but I unfortunately already knew almost everything covered — I really didn’t need to sit through a step-by-step recounting of Kanye’s journey from The College Dropout to full-blown Nazi, I already lived it! You don’t need to spend a paragraph describing the humiliations of Bianca Censori when I can close my eyes and picture it all as if it just happened yesterday, you know?
The only interesting parts of the book were the intro and conclusion, when he actually made his point and offered the analysis that was lacking in the rest of the book. But even that was fairly expected: late capitalism and consumerist culture have made artists seek profits over genuine creativity? You don’t say! But again, I’m probably not the audience for this — I mean, I’m literally writing about an anti-consumption book in a newsletter devoted to consumption. W. David Marx and I are actually on the same side of this argument, but me reading this book was a bit like trying to describe shit to a pig. I am already very familiar with the concept, thank you!