Peacock

Making a spin-off of a spin-off is the trickiest task on television, not least because it assumes that the audience is sufficiently fond of the original and the reinvention alike to be happy to go steady with the third round, too. In all fairness, the new workplace-themed sitcom (although on the evidence of this first season, comedy-drama is probably a more accurate designation) The Paper is only a callback to the US The Office, in that its premise is that the same documentary crew that captured the bewildering banality of life at Dunder Mifflin has headed to Toledo, Ohio, there to follow the travails of a once-proud, now-flailing newspaper, the Toledo Truth-Teller.

Mrs. Davis, currently streaming on the Peacock network, is my favorite show. It is quirky as all get out, featuring a quest for the Holy Grail, an imprisoned Pope, a journey inside the intestines of a whale, an exploding head (don’t ask) and a rollercoaster of death. The lead character is a committed religious sister who regularly communes with Jesus and who manages, more or less, to save the world. Now if you’re looking to Mrs. Davis for theological precision, you will be severely disappointed (and please don’t write me letters reminding me of how weird its theology is; I know), but there is indeed a spiritual motif of supreme importance that stands at the very heart of the show, and it is well worth plowing through all of the intense oddness to grasp it.

A neo-Western drama set on a vast ranch in Montana run through with trashy romance plot lines and violent disputes about land and legacy — "who owns the West?" — has made Yellowstone the most-watched TV series in America. The season four finale drew over 11 million viewers. And yet, while millions of Americans are lapping up the epic sprawl of violence, lust, family and wilderness, many — particularly the coastal intelligentsia — don’t watch it. One vocal exception is Joyce Carol Oates, the Pulitzer-nominated author of fifty-nine novels and one of the great chroniclers of the last American century.

It certainly raised eyebrows chez Cockburn, that’s for sure. A few weeks ago Peacock announced an original news program: The Mehdi Hasan Show. Peacock is NBC’s new streaming service. And who is Mehdi Hasan? Well that’s where things get really interesting. Like Cockburn, you may have noticed Mr Hasan’s cloudless upwards trajectory through the media firmament in recent years. He moved to DC in 2015, fronting news shows for Al Jazeera English, and from 2018 until earlier this year, a podcast for the Intercept. The precise moment Mehdi’s move to the big-ish leagues became inevitable almost two years ago. Watch: https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1062706401804455937 Whoa! Who is that guy?