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Past Gas is an automotive history podcast whose gearhead hosts cover everything from highflying daredevils to the political origins of lowrider car culture. In this episode, the team is absolutely baffled as to why the subject they’re covering hasn’t already been turned into an Oscar-winning motion picture. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany had become an unbeatable force in the motor racing world; Hitler’s Silver Arrows, the nickname given to the Mercedes-Benz racing team, were held up by the Third Reich as international poster boys for Aryan superiority. In 1938, an unlikely group of people would come together to put a stop to the Nazi winning streak. Racing driver Lucy O’Reilly Schell became the first woman to ever establish a Grand Prix team when she partnered up with French carmaker Delahaye. Schell chose Jewish driver René Dreyfus to represent her new team at the Grand Prix De Pau, where he delivered a humiliating defeat to Germany on the world stage. It’s a s
While it seems impossible that there are more than a few dozen people around the world who legitimately enjoy listening to Barenaked Ladies’ 1998 single “One Week,” there’s still a lot of love for the snotty pop-punk stylings of Blink-182. Thus, Alex Melton’s recent Barenaked Ladies cover, titled “If Blink 182 Wrote ‘One Week,” offers a sort of litmus test for when, exactly, a song that combines these two influences crosses the line from unremarkable or even enjoyable to the sonic equivalent of having fire ants nest in your ears.
There’s no shortageof Blink-182coversout there already, but Melton’s decision to invert the usual process and instead channel their essence through one of Barenaked Ladies’ wretchedest tracks creates something unique: A test that determines your tolerance for bouncy pop punk, Barenaked Ladies lyrics, and the intersection of these two polarizing sounds.
Photo: Craig Sjodin/ABC
This season of
The Bachelorette has been deeply, often uncomfortably, weird. Most of this is for an obvious reason the COVID-birthed safety precautions that eliminated most of the scenery, date possibilities, and interactions that normally lend color and drama to the series but some of it was also badly engineered bullshit on the part of the show. Shoving the first older bachelorette (poor, maligned Clare Crawley) out of the spotlight as quickly as humanly possible was a bad look for
The Bachelorette, and made the producers and creative team behind the reality program look like way bigger assholes than usual. So while the younger, admittedly more telegenic Tayshia Adams was a charming and interesting replacement, the bad taste had already been left in viewers’ mouths, knowing they couldn’t trust the show any farther than Clare could throw it.
God, that was a weird one, huh?
As a rule, gaming took fewer hits from 2020 than most other aspects of the entertainment industry a few delays here, the occasional massive, discourse-destroying trainwreck there but overall, pretty smooth sailing. As such, our annual list of the year’s most interesting games takes two fairly divergent paths: Those games that gave us comfort and connection in this most bizarrely hermetic of years, and those that pushed the boundaries to provide something fascinating and new. The push-and-pull there has been endlessly intriguing, as a two-year-old mobile game suddenly became the topic of congressional interest, old franchises learned some shockingly new tricks, and
Photo: James Minchin/CBS, Colin Hutton/HBO Max
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Thursday, December 17. All times are Eastern.
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Top picks
The Stand (CBS All Access, 3:01 a.m., miniseries premiere): “A character-based approach is appropriate given that King’s characters are often cited as his greatest strength. But
The Stand is so big, with so many characters King’s expanded version, generally considered the definitive text, runs more than 1,150 pages that an adaptation’s emphasis on one plotline is likely to come at the expense of a half-dozen others. Garris’ four-part version wasn’t enough to contain King’s story, and neither is this nine-part effort. Will those unfamiliar with the story be able to enjoyably process the complex narrative and abundant character arcs with the added challenge of navigating a peripatetic, time-hopping structure? The pilot, the cleanest and most efficient of the six episodes available for review