The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 2

TV #13 of 2026:

Homicide: Life on the Street, season 2

A very short season at only four episodes, reportedly because NBC wasn’t confident the series had enough of an audience to justify making any more of it. (Contrary to those concerns, the show would ultimately last for another five standard-length seasons, followed by a capstone film conclusion.) The network also again meddled with the production order, airing what was intended to be the finale at the start to better capitalize off a high-profile appearance from guest star Robin Williams. He’s joined by Wilford Brimley and Julianna Margulies as other notable visiting actors this year, along with a preteen Jake Gyllenhaal in one of his earliest roles.

Otherwise, not much has changed from the debut run. Our returning Baltimore detectives continue investigating murders in their community, in a police procedural spin that goes deeper into the main cast of characters, rather than following through every step of their investigations. A lot of time is spent in the interrogation room, including an electrifying scene where Andre Braugher, disgusted by himself but doing what the bosses apparently want, convinces an innocent suspect to confess to killing his friend by needling him over getting the victim involved in gang life in the first place.

It’s good stuff, but way too brief. Still, three-and-a-half stars rounded up sounds about right.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

Book #43 of 2026:

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

There’s a raw edge in author Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel that makes sense if you’ve read her autobiography I’m Glad My Mom Died, adding up to some very striking passages illuminating a young protagonist who likewise doesn’t have the support structure of a caring parental figure that every child should. In this case it’s more neglect than outright abuse, but the end result is still a girl forced to grow up and shoulder adult burdens far too early in life.

Like the writer’s memoir, it’s an intentionally discomforting read. As our seventeen-year-old heroine embarks on an affair with her high school English teacher, her narrated perspective pushes us to see her as the obsessed initiator and him as the reluctant innocent. Objectively, of course, we know that he’s the responsible authority who holds all the blame here for creating the opportunity and not rejecting her juvenile advances firmly enough, but in her own mind, he’s the prize that she wants and gets for herself, the only thing besides her compulsive shopping habit that makes her feel a modicum of control. It’s a reverse Lolita of sorts, and McCurdy excels at crafting clinically unsexy descriptions of the ensuing sex, lest we think for one moment that the intent is to titillate.

All of this provides a great character study, but I don’t really love it as a full story. The plot is pretty repetitive, and there’s not much of an arc beyond the teenager gradually realizing just how tawdry the relationship is (and to a lesser extent, how her older lover has taken advantage of his power and status to manipulate her after all). No emotional climax ever kicks the drama into a higher gear, and no individual decisions stand out as particularly important ones. The eventual ending comes quickly and perfunctorily, at least in my opinion, with no real sense of lasting consequences for anyone’s actions. I’m not asking for a melodramatic soap opera, but this flat neutrality isn’t especially satisfying, either.

[Content for ableist slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Movie #13 of 2026:

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Even after it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature last night, I sort of assumed that this musical fantasy cartoon was being overhyped on the basis of its ubiquitous breakout track “Golden” (which also won Best Original Song). As it turns out, however, the rest of the film around that single is actually pretty great too, and the earworm itself is even better in the context of the full story.

I do wish the supporting characters and worldbuilding concepts were a little more fleshed-out, and I think the movie overall would have benefitted from a longer runtime. On the other hand, this is a picture aimed predominantly at younger audiences, and I can’t fault the main plot beats here. Our heroine Rumi is a singer in a popular vocal group and also a secret warrior against evil, which is a fun Buffy/Miraculous/Animorphs-meets-Hannah-Montana kind of premise even before we get the additional twist that she has demonic ancestry herself and is hiding that from her friends, whom she imagines would turn on her if they learned the truth. It makes for a neat allegory about queerness or self-harm or anything else that a person might want to keep private, and it builds to a transcendent moment when her armor is symbolically ripped away and she finds that her bandmates love her all the more once she’s able to share her whole identity authentically in front of them.

In the meantime there are villains in the form of a rival act who are demons in disguise, although their powers and exact motives are again a bit undefined and I’m not a big fan of how one of them is positioned as the morally-ambiguous romantic interest for the protagonist. (A young human falling for a centuries-old immortal has got to be one of my least favorite genre tropes, and though there are titles that manage to sell it reasonably well, this one doesn’t get there for me.) Still, their maneuvering back and forth whenever the cameras are off creates some nice bits of action comedy, and the soundtrack on both sides is full of catchy tunes that deliver solid emotional breakthroughs.

I’m not familiar enough with either K-pop or Korean culture in general to pick up on all of the background that’s clearly informing the production, but it all feels like such a specific #ownvoices perspective and body of reference material, which I always appreciate. The end result isn’t flawless, but it’s distinctive as heck and easily deserving of its various accolades.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Creed (2015)

Movie #12 of 2026:

Creed (2015)

An unexpected franchise spinoff that swiftly establishes its own unique vision around a different protagonist played by an outstanding Michael B. Jordan. The Rocky movies ended for the natural reason of the titular character’s advancing age, and it was already silly in 2006, thirty years after his debut, to see him climbing into the ring again. This next installment wisely looks to a new generation instead, casting the 70-year-old Italian Stallion as the trainer and mentor figure he was initially supposed to be back in Rocky V, rather than a still-active boxer.

It’s a nice extension of his previous character arc, but the real genius of the film rests in the new hero that’s set up in his place. Adonis is the son of Rocky’s old friend Apollo Creed, but he was born out of wedlock and after the former champ had already died. As we see in the short prologue that launches this picture, he didn’t even know who his father was until the man’s widow found him as a child in a juvenile detention facility and offered to bring him home with her, and although there’s a resulting chip on his shoulder about the Creed name — which he at first rejects and is pressured into adopting professionally, before finally embracing it — the script offers no doubt that he’s the rightful inheritor of that legacy. He was a fighter even before learning the truth, and despite wanting to follow in Apollo’s footsteps now that he’s grown, he’s not trying to coast on someone else’s reputation.

To that end he moves from L.A. to Philadelphia, where he corners Balboa at his restaurant, reveals his identity, and asks the septuagenarian to train him. The scenes between the two of them are electric throughout, which is a particular achievement given that it’s all the brainchild of writer-director Ryan Coogler and his cowriter Aaron Covington, the first time that Rocky has been penned by anyone but Sylvester Stallone (or directed by anyone but him and John G. Avildsen). So Rocky starts training Don, who’s meanwhile falling for his cute neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, and their partnership gets media attention that soon provides the hotheaded athlete with his own chance to compete for a title championship.

There are the inspiring training montages you’d expect, but also a left-field lurch when Rocky is diagnosed with a serious cancer requiring immediate chemotherapy treatment. In the end he and Adonis push one another to keep fighting, and the climactic bout is as thrilling as anything from the original series. This Creed is neither Rocky nor Apollo, but he brings a young, modern energy that’s just what their story needed to continue on. He’s moreover a channel for Coogler’s meditations on Black culture and men who grow up fatherless, which is obviously a theme that none of the Balboa-centered predecessors could remotely have handled. Both stylish and fun, it’s almost automatically one of the better entries of its saga.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1

TV #12 of 2026:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1

A reasonably successful merger of the larger Star Trek franchise with the rhythms of a CW-ish teen drama. This is a Discovery spinoff by means of Jett Reno and Admiral Vance in the supporting cast, but the main focus is on a small cohort of cadets (and their chancellor, played by Holly Hunter) who have genre-typical coming-of-age moments as they navigate their particular difficulties and learn to pull together as a team. It also features the holographic Doctor from Voyager and Prodigy as one of their teachers, although it never quite gets around to exploring what it’s been like for him to have survived the last eight centuries.

In truth, there’s a lot about the logic to the premise here that’s unfortunately underdeveloped. What exactly is the relationship between the central institution and the nearby War College, which seems to share some of its facilities and instructors? What drew our protagonists to join the one and not the other? What are their regular classes like, in between the inevitable crises? I’m often taken out of the action by such questions while watching, which is never a great sign for a program. (On the other hand, my favorite episode is the Deep Space Nine retrospective “Series Acclimation Mil,” which practically demands that you set all practicalities aside and yet soars regardless. So take this criticism with a grain of salt vampire, I suppose.)

As for the teens, well, they’re the nervous and hormonal bunch you might expect. Our primary viewpoint character is a streetwise criminal recruited from prison against his better judgement, who clashes nicely with a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti as his archenemy but is otherwise a bit too prominent over the rest of the ensemble. There’s the resident Spock/Data/Odo/etc. outsider who doesn’t understand human emotions — in this case a bubbly photonic Black girl who quickly latches onto the Doctor for guidance — alongside an overachiever with daddy issues, a Klingon who eschews his people’s traditional violence, and so on. None of these archetypes are radically new for Trek, but the younger bent at least provides a slightly different window into them.

As usual for a modern TV series, the short season length cuts against the effectiveness significantly. The cast is still gelling and the writers are still perfecting their approach after only ten episodes, but since the second season finished shooting before this one even aired, they’ll have no chance to incorporate critical feedback on what elements are working or not anytime soon. I’m satisfied enough to keep tuning in, and this is certainly lightyears stronger than late-stage Discovery or the lousy Section 31 movie, but it’s not winning me over just yet.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, genocide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 24

TV #11 of 2026:

Classic Doctor Who, season 24

One of the last real times of change for the old British series before its long hiatus, introducing us to the final classic TV Doctor and (eventually) companion. The transition is bumpy and short, spanning only four stories and fourteen episodes in total, which is down from a height of eight and forty-two respectively back in the debut season of the show. Given that smaller size, let’s examine them each in turn:

TIME AND THE RANI (24×1 – 24×4): The titular villain was introduced two years before, but she’s more fun in the sequel now that she’s not playing second fiddle to the Master. She also spends half her screentime imitating Mel to fool an addled post-regenerative Seventh Doctor, which is a broad performance but a generally good time. The main thing to note about this serial is that we do have a new star, and rather suddenly, too; whereas every previous outgoing Doctor had regenerated at the end of an adventure that taxed them to their limits, Six merely trips and falls at the start of this one and changes there on the TARDIS floor. He’s furthermore clearly played by Sylvester McCoy in a wig, in a case of the production team making the best of a bad situation: Sixth Doctor Colin Baker was fired between seasons, and although he was invited to return and film a regeneration scene, he understandably declined. Those circumstances cast a pall over the story that follows, but McCoy’s Seven makes a decent first showing even if he is a bit more clownish than he’ll soon grow to be. The writing quality isn’t quite there yet, but it’s a breath of fresh air and an improvement over much of the Sixth Doctor era already. ★★★☆☆

PARADISE TOWERS (24×5 – 24×8). This one gets knocked some by critics, but in my view the campy acting and costumes are a part of the charm. It’s a heady social satire placed in a superbly original dystopian setting, a highrise apartment building that was supposed to be the next elevation of fine living but has instead become a graffiti-filled squalor populated with killer robots, cannibal matrons, and teenage gangs. This came out the same year as the Schwarzenegger version of The Running Man, and if you cross that movie with The Warriors, you’ll be in the right general ballpark for the tone. The worldbuilding is full of neat details like the particular slang the kids use, which hilariously from a 2026 perspective includes “unalive” as a synonym for dead. The Seventh Doctor is really coming into his own, too, and I love any premise where that errant time-traveler is aiming somewhere but winds up wildly off-course. Quite a few of the later Virgin New Adventures books would seem to take their inspiration from this serial directly, and it’s pretty easy to see why. ★★★★☆

DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN (24×9 – 24×11). I can just about glimpse the potential here, and I appreciate a few elements like the futuristic spaceship that’s been painstakingly remodeled to look like a beat-up old bus, but it needed several more rounds of rewrites for it to develop its ideas properly. As is, the scripts aren’t sufficient to sell the scope of the conflict or the different characters and cultures that populate it, and though it’s meant to be funny, the comedy suffers as a result, even before you consider the genocide plot. It’s largely a drag, in my opinion. ★★☆☆☆

DRAGONFIRE (24×12 – 24×14). Another story that feels half-baked throughout, which is a shame since it’s our introduction to Ace, who will remain by the Doctor’s side through the rest of the classic era and beyond. She’s fine, and it’s unexpected but welcome to get a repeat dose of the rogue Sabalom Glitz from the previous season, but the plot around them never really comes together in a satisfying way. Mel exits the TARDIS rather perfunctorily too, which is the wrong sort of throwback to how companions used to come and go without any sort of drama and cements her as one of the more boring main characters on the program. The writers would begin pushing and developing her replacement after this, making Ace in effect the first “modern” companion, but we get the mere glimmers of that here. And don’t even get me started on that literal cliffhanger at the end of episode 1, in which the Doctor climbs out on a ledge for no clear reason and gets stuck. The writing was probably already on the wall, as the show would last just two more seasons in this form, but the production thankfully only improves from this point onward. ★★★☆☆

Overall season rating: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Book #42 of 2026:

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Horror screenwriter Misha Byrne is having a hard time lately, even besides his upcoming twentieth reunion in the hometown where he hasn’t come out of the closet yet. Either someone is playing an elaborately cruel trick on him, or he’s experiencing a psychotic break, or somehow the very monsters that he’s dreamed up for various blockbusters have now come to life to stalk him. Meanwhile he’s being pressured by studio executives to kill off the main characters of the TV show that he writes, or else avoid his planned reveal that the two women are in love with each other and make them straight instead.

The result is a gory thrill ride (with an eventual sci-fi bend) that holds a bloody mirror up to Hollywood and still finds space to celebrate its own queer joys. If you crossed Stephen King’s The Dark Half with Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians and Michael Crichton’s Prey, you’d be in the rough neighborhood of the plot here, although it functions as an obvious satirical commentary on the entertainment industry as well. Sometimes that can get a little preachy, especially in the sections about the protagonist’s asexual friend, but it’s overall a great read.

I also feel like I owe an apology to author Chuck Tingle, whom I’d previously known only as the mind behind such ludicrous self-published paranormal romance titles as ‘Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt’ and ‘Open Wide for the Handsome Sabertooth Dentist Who Is Also a Ghost.’ I’ve never read any of those stories, but I know that his rambling online persona matches their eccentricities, and I went into this one half-expecting a similar joke. Instead it’s entirely on the level, to the extent that if it had been released under a different name I don’t think anyone would have ever linked it to the man. So while I still don’t really understand his whole deal, I’m glad to find that this particular novel isn’t one of his typical “tinglers.”

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and amputation.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja

Book #41 of 2026:

Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja

Although I’ve generally enjoyed the short stories in this collection, I have to admit that I don’t quite get the point of it as a project. Lilja’s Library is a website dedicated to the writing of Stephen King, a one-man operation run by editor Hans-Åke Lilja in his native Sweden where he’s posted news about his literary idol for thirty years now. A decade ago, for the site’s twentieth anniversary, he decided to put out a commemorative anthology, but it’s not clear to me what the criteria for inclusion are supposed to be, beyond the broad genre of horror. Are these works all in some way similar to King’s? I would guess that maybe the authors are just friends or fans of Lilja’s, but since one of them is Edgar Allen Poe with “The Tell Tale Heart,” that obviously can’t be right.

Regardless, it’s an interesting mix of obscurities. Per the introduction, six of the twelve pieces have never been published anywhere before, and a few of the others have previously appeared in magazines alone. That last category includes the sole entry by Stephen King himself, “The Blue Air Compressor,” which can only be found collected here. (Unfortunately, you’ll understand why when you read it — while I’d love to call it a hidden gem, it’s in fact one of the weaker things I’ve ever seen from him.)

Grading as a whole, the book still has more hits than misses, I’d say. My favorite titles include “The Net” by Jack Ketchum and P. D. Cacek, in which an online flirtation goes horribly wrong, “An End To All Things” by Brian Keene, in which a man contemplates the bleakness of his future after his son’s accidental death and his wife’s subsequent suicide, and “The Keeper’s Companion” by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Marlaine Delargy), in which teens getting into Lovecraftian role-playing games discover they’ve opened a link to true cosmic terror.

Do these and the rest really all belong in a single publication honoring a fansite for one of the writers in particular? Perhaps not. But I like them well enough overall to give this a Goodreads three-out-of-five star rating.

[Content warning for child sex abuse, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu

Book #40 of 2026:

The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu

Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a realm beset by dragons, while her counterpart Denny is dealing with a former best friend who’s thrown her over for the cooler class bully, not to mention a mother struggling with alcoholism and depression and a father who’s too worried about that ordeal to pay much attention to his lonely daughter. These are heavy topics, but handled sensitively enough for the younger readers who might pick this title up.

Each heroine is overwhelmed by the new situation before her, along with thoughts of the challenges waiting back home, but both eventually find the inner strength to triumph in age-and-genre-appropriate ways. Although I wish the protagonists could have actually met and interacted, I’ve found their respective dynamics really appealing, and I think the mundane problems of fitting in at school in particular have a bracingly lived-in authenticity to them. I might have wanted more complex worldbuilding in a work aimed at an older audience — or a closer interrogation of the idea that everything in Sorrowfeld was created by the ex-friends writing about it over the years — but the fairy tale setting fits the tone here while still providing ample stakes and dangers. Overall, it’s just outstanding.

★★★★★

Movie Review: The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

Movie #11 of 2026:

The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

I came into this movie pretty skeptical — did The Sopranos really need a spinoff prequel, over a decade after the show went off the air? — but it grew on me a little by the end. Although I didn’t think there were any mysteries remaining to the series besides a few that were intentionally left ambiguous, it is genuinely interesting to see the late 60s / early 70s era of mob boss Tony Soprano’s childhood, which was often mentioned and occasionally depicted on the program, but never at such length. The end result is no Better Call Saul in terms of enriching our understanding of any major arcs or anything, but it’s not a bad way to spend two hours, either. And it does ultimately resolve the lingering question of who killed Dickie Moltisanti, at least.

The audience is presumably self-selected for existing fans, but it’s still an odd choice for one of the characters who died in the original run to narrate the story as a ghost, immediately spoiling the circumstances of his death for any viewers who do decide to start here. For the rest of us, we bring our knowledge of particular details like who’s going to survive to the present day, as well as our memory of the performances from different actors. That recasting was probably necessary due to the long years separating the two narratives, but the results are mixed, in my opinion: Corey Stoll is outstanding at channeling a recognizable young Uncle Junior, for example, but John Magaro feels like a caricature parody of Silvio Dante. The remainder of the cast falls somewhere between those two extremes, including unfortunately Michael Gandolfini inheriting the role of Tony from his late father. (I can suspend my disbelief that they’re portraying the same person, much as I can for William Ludwig as the child version or the various other boys who played him in flashback on the show. But his mannerisms don’t leap off the screen as clearly as Stoll’s do for me.)

Another neat thing that this title achieves is depicting the historic 1967 Newark race riots, which would have roughly coincided with this period of Sopranos backstory and offer an obvious parallel to the George Floyd protests of our time. Along with Leslie Odom Jr. as an associate of the Mafia who eventually strikes out on his own, this element brings a welcome Black perspective that was largely minimized in the franchise before. It does so at the cost of rearranging the timeline and certain people’s ages a bit, but I’d say the benefit is worth the slight retcon there. Overall, however, I’d liken this piece to the Breaking Bad sequel El Camino, telling an unnecessary yet generally solid addition to the familiar main series plot.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism including slurs, gun violence, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆