📺 Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials (2026) turned one of Christie’s more pulpy novels into an equally pulpy miniseries — with franchise potential! What is there not to love, other than the camerawork which was performed by someone with an essential tremor and no stabilizing equipment?

First things first: The Pitt (2025) is miles better than two other era-defining medical shows, ER and House MD. The conceit — one hour per episode, one shift per season — makes for a more realistic pace. The case selection is good, if on the extreme end of any possible presentation. The medical staff personality types are spot on, ⊕ They are all good, but I would like to highlight the charge nurse and the neuro-atypical first-year resident as commonly encountered phenotypes that TV shows never seem to get right.if not quite representative of the variety of English accents one would hear during rounds. And the battle between administrators and clinicians hit all the right notes, even if having the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer hover over ER staff at all hours of the day would be considered atypical for the role.

Kudos are also due for the use of prosthetics, sometimes quite grizzly, with an abundance of open wounds and mangled extremities. With so much exposed tissue I wondered why no one was wearing a mask during procedures even while, in a mid-season episode, admonishing an anti-mask patient about their beliefs. But that is, of course, another conceit, otherwise we would never be able to tell who was saying what. A more believable move was to have one of the medical students ⊕ More kudos for making the two students smart, competent and lovable all at once.present for most of the cases, requiring everyone to explain what they were doing at an 8th grade level (our own 8th grader who was watching with us also appreciated this). Granted, the historical reminiscences and calling out different healthcare-related statistics were much less plausible: they reminded me of the most self-important parts of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that its then-arch rival 30 Rock so successfully parodied.

Admittedly, it is an unusual hospital. More than 20 ORs and so much house staff with only one attending physician during a day shift sounds… implausible. It does make for great tension-building, and it was no wonder that Noah Wiley’s character — spoiler alert — by the end of the season gets burnt out to a crisp. Another oddity is how competent and unflappable all of the staff were during — another spoiler — a major traumatic event that no one wanted to experience but everyone was prepared for. Color me skeptical that operations would have been that smooth.

Still. As fanciful as they were, ER and the less-remembered Chicago Hope were, to me at least and I suspect to many others of similar age, ⊕ The less I say about House MD the better. a large part of the draw of medicine. It is good to know that there is a half-decent show out there that may keep the flame going.

📺 I will have more to write about each season of Stranger Things after the holidays. But how refreshing was it for a show to clearly distinguish between good and evil, for that evil to be cosmic not personal, and for the ending to be unambiguously happy and satisfying? Bravo, brothers Duffer.

Our Stranger Things rewatch reminded me that one of the main character’s sexual orientation has been telegraphed since the very first episode, and in seasons 4 and 5 we learned that it is in fact crucial to the whole story. I have bones to pick with those two seasons, but having a main character who is gay is not one of them. Those Internet trolls who are giving the penultimate episode one-star reviews because of a very plot-appropriate if not very believable coming out scene are way out of line, so I dusted off my IMDB login to give the episode 10 stars, even though it is at most an 8.5.

I praised the acting and cinematography of Pluribus, but should not have left out the music! There are long stretches without dialogue that could have gone terribly wrong, but are instead on my re-re-rewatch list. At the top is Manousos’s drive up South America towards the Darién Gap to the tune of Esperanza (and the extended version on Apple Music), which led me to the Tiny Desk Concert by Hermanos Gutiérrez of whom I am now a faithful listener.

📺 Pluribus (2025) was a perfectly paced masterpiece of cinematography and acting that raised questions which were at once urgent and eternal. Would it surprise anyone that so many people online identified with the hive mind and thought Rhea Seehorn’s character was the villain?

Season 2 coming 2027!

HBO not renewing Scavengers Reign was bad enough, but I recently learned that the news was even worse. Netflix, too, had passed on the opportunity even with the Season 2 teaser being everything I could have hoped for.

Time for Apple TV to pick it up! How do we make it happen?

📺 It breaks my heart that Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building immediately descended into toilet humor and pointless self-parody. Five episodes in and we are out — life is too short to spend it on drivel.

• Michael DePeau-Wilson for Asimov Press: Why the FDA Is Slow to Remove Drugs. And more importantly, why this is bad. You can’t accelerate drug approvals without also doing more culling on the back end. Symmetry, please.
• James L. Olds: Why Transformational Science Can’t Get Funded: The Einstein Problem. I disagree with most of it, but it is in fact the institutional point of view.
• Anonymous for the Good Science Project: A Top Scientist’s Ideas as to NIH. Did AI write this? Not great, but again, an institutional point of view masquerading as call to reform.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Physician authority and influence. An important distinction, and kudos to Dr. Vartabedian for coping that he has more influence than authority. I, on the other hand, have neither.
• Joe Boudreau: On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads. I have been doing it for at least 15 (13 of those in English) and it is in fact wonderful.
• Todd Vaziri: The “Mad Men” in 4K on HBO Max Debacle. The best and most concise review of this royal screwup of one of my favorite shows.

📺 Notes from re-watching the first two seasons of Stranger Things with my 13-year-old:

• Wow, it really took a while for Steve and Dustin to meet.
• I underrated Season 2 in my memory, I suspect because of the poorly timed and too on-the-nose episode 7.
• Will this be their generation’s Harry Potter?