James Gunn sets ‘Man of Tomorrow’ as his ‘Superman’ follow-up

Hello. Welcome to a crisp fall edition of Popculturology. (I don’t care what the calendar says. It’s fall. I’ve already had both a pumpkin beer and a pumpkin spice cold brew. Football’s back this weekend. Go Bills.)

Ready to dive into the premiere of The Paper, a bunch of new trailers and James Gunn’s plans for his Superman follow-up? (Scroll down to the Deep SNL Thoughts section for a rumor about the dumb reason Heidi Gardner won’t be on SNL next season ...)

Does The Paper cut it?

After feeling like it was in the works since The Office itself signed off, our first spinoff of the iconic NBC sitcom made its debut on Peacock this week. The Paper dropped all ten episodes from its first season on Thursday.

I haven’t watched the show yet. Something about Peacock switching from a weekly release schedule to the binge model feels imposing now. (Yes, I know I don’t have to watch them all at once, but that’s the implication.) Peacock upped The Paper for a second season, announcing that it had been renewed moments before the review embargo lifted on Wednesday.

Did you watch The Paper? Is it a worthy successor to The Office?

• 📖 Yesterday’s Fishwrap (Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture): “As the first few entries of this ten-episode season play out, we get the sense that, as Leonard Cohen once sang, the war is over and the bad guys won. It was never easy to hold a corporation, institution, or government agency accountable for decisions that harm a community, but it has become nearly impossible now that the media, the only independent watchdog with any real power, has been rendered nearly irrelevant.”
• 📖 The Paper Review: I Have Good News and I Have Bad News (James Poniewozik, The New York Times): “The series doesn’t romanticize the news business exactly; its title sequence, over a jaunty Office-like theme song, is a montage of people using newsprint to wrap food and train puppies. But it has affection for the workers willing to go down with the leaky paper boat. Ned describes editing a paper as ‘like having homework every day forever, until the paper fails and I lose my job.’ He smiles as he says it.
• 📖 The Paper Is the Methadone Version of The Office (Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone): “Daniels trying to revive the brand of The Office in a much more fraught sitcom environment isn’t that different from Ned believing that he can resurrect the Truth Teller at a moment when local papers everywhere are bleeding to death, and when the only way he can beef up the staff is to get employees from other Enervate divisions to volunteer their time and learn how to be reporters as they go.”
• 📖 The Paper review: Peacock’s Office spinoff needs to iron out a few wrinkles (Kristen Baldwin, Entertainment Weekly): “The bigger problem is that the writers can’t seem to decide if Ned is, to put it in Office terms, a Michael Scott or a Jim Halpert. Sometimes, Ned is the level-headed voice of reason, serving as the competent foil to his ridiculously inept staff. Just as often, though, he’s a gaffe-prone bumbler whose impulsive, foolish actions create more problems than they solve.”

Rebooting Babish

If you became a fan of the YouTube channel Binging With Babish back in the pre-pandemic days but were disappointed to see Andrew Rea’s channel devolve into ranking slop (complete with the MrBeast-esque “fOoD cOnFuSeS me??” thumbnails), there’s some good news: The Rochester, New York, native is working to return his channel to its roots.

“Eagle-eyed viewers might’ve noticed that, over the past three years, the channel has undergone some tiny changes. Heh. I’ve had a lot of fun with the new content we’ve been making, but I’ve missed cooking, I’ve missed our dialogue, and I’ve missed being ... well, Babish,” Rea wrote in a Reddit post. “So in a couple weeks, we’re flipping the channel over and pressing a thumbtack into the little hole next to the battery compartment. In other words, we’re hitting reset. We’ve spent the past couple weeks filming an all-new format that’s true to the DNA of what started this whole thing: an instructional, vibey, dulcet, beautiful, and wry cooking show. We’re getting back to Babish.”

Hopefully a tiny victory against the enshitification of everything that we once loved. (Andrew Rea)

Book nook

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week …

• Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
• Moon Knight by Lemire & Smallwood: The Complete Collection (Jeff Lemire, Gregg Smallwood and Francesco Francavilla)
• Sphere (Michael Crichton)
• Hi, It’s Me Again (Asher Perlman)
• Ascension (Nicholas Binge)

Yes, I read both of Nicholas Binge’s most recent books over the past week. Ascension was great, but Dissolution really, really stuck with me. One of the best books I’ve read this year. I’m excited to see what Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer does with his adaptation of the story. (Heisserer also just signed on to adapt The Earthling, an unpublished short story from Jonathan Marty.)

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

Man of Tomorrow, movie of 2027

OK, when James Gunn repeatedly claimed that his Superman follow-up wouldn’t be Superman 2, he wasn’t kidding. He was serious, folks. It’s not Superman 2. It’s Man of Tomorrow.

I would expect this level of semantics from Christopher Nolan, but even he never tried to play word games when it came to the titles Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Anyways, Gunn revealed on Wednesday that Man of Tomorrow is heading to theaters on July 9, 2027. Based on the promo art that he posted, not only are we going to see David Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult together again, but Hoult’s Lex Luthor will now have his green-and-purple armor. (James Gunn)