New York subscribers got exclusive early access to this story in our Gold Rush newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. In the nine years that Outstanding Talk Series has existed as an Emmys category, having spun off from Outstanding Variety Series in 2015, only two shows have won the award: The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. But this year, ahead of the trophy’s tenth birthday, Emmy forecasters are looking at a new late-night host whose unconventional, six-episode pop-up-season show could bust up the hegemony.

John Mulaney in Baby J. Baby J, the latest stand-up from John Mulaney, is a herculean effort, but what exactly that effort aims to achieve is not entirely clear. After his highly public, intensely tumultuous past several years — an intervention, a long period in rehab, a divorce, a sudden new relationship, a new baby — the special is both a presentation of who the comedian and actor was during that period and an attempt to align that person with who he is now.

John Mulaney spent a considerable portion of his recent stand-up special, Kid Gorgeous, telling his Radio City audience about a former Chicago police detective namedJ.J. Bittenbender. Bittenbender used to come to Mulaney’s grade school every year and talk about “street smarts” and “stranger danger” safety tips, and as Mulaney told it, those talks still “haunt” him to this day. According to the comic, Bittenbender wore three-piece suits, sometimes with a cowboy hat, and advised children to ward off potential robbers by carrying a money clip filled with $50 to throw at criminals as a diversion tactic while they ran away.

Reddit’s mods have unionized, protesting the company’s proposed changes to its API. Reddit wants to charge third party apps for access to the site, a move which may for some beloved third party apps to shut down. In response, some of the site’s most popular subreddits went dark for 48 hours earlier this week. Some subreddits remain inaccessible. Others have returned to business as usual, save for a pinned post from mods explaining why the blackout happened.

If the return of flares didn’t already clue you in, the 2000s are back in a big way. And one of the most recent trend revivals in comedy comes courtesy of Apple TV+. Jon Stewart is gracing our screens again, this time in a biweekly format. The Problem With Jon Stewart debuted this week, and it is bringing to light a problem that late night has had since Stewart was on the air the first time: What the fuck is a late-night talk show?

This piece was originally published in December and has been updated with roles from 2022. We first must acknowledge his face, as there is nothing quite like it. Or perhaps there is — you’re just more likely to see it covered in grease in an auto shop or dirt and dust behind the wheel of a bulldozer at a construction site. Faces like Jon Bernthal’s rarely make it to the silver screen: craggy, imperfect, and sporting a nose clearly broken more than once.

We hate to break such difficult news to you so early in the morning, but sometimes, a blogger’s job requires iron resolve. So it is with great sadness that we pass along the news that sometime between the January 25 New York Rangers game and whenever these new SNL promos that you’ll see below were recorded, Jon Hamm’s beard shuffled off this mortal coil. We have yet to hear an official statement as to the cause of death from either Hamm, NBC, or AMC, but we have our suspicions that the tragic demise of what was quickly becoming an iconic beard may have been thanks to America’s general uncomfortableness with facial hair.

If there is one thing people in need … well, need, it’s definitely a celebrity-benefit single talking about how much they need stuff. If there are two things, however, the second would definitely be a huge punch bowl full of eggnog that Patton Oswalt put his hands in. The comedian lent his nog-stirring fingers and vocal chords to Full Frontal With Samantha Bee’s Christmas on I.C.E. special, alongside Jon Stewart, Jon Cryer, Eric Andre, Molly Ringwald, Olivia Munn, Matthew Broderick, Jonathan Van Ness, and more of the finest voices fit to coat with a thick gloss of nog.

Surfer Sarah Brady posted a series of screenshots on Friday, alleging emotional abuse from her ex Jonah Hill. “This is a warning to all girls. If your partner is talking to you like this make an exit plan,” she wrote on Instagram Stories in a video that featured various photos that she claimed Hill asked her to remove because she was in a bikini, despite her being a surfing instructor.

Lucas Hedges and Sunny Suljic in Mid90s. On the surface, aside from a brief shot of someone watching Goodfellas on a TV, there’s nothing remotely Scorsesean about Jonah Hill’s Los Angeles–set coming-of-age skater drama Mid90s. (Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this.) The austere style, the oblique plotting, the understated performances — this isn’t exactly Mean Streets we’re talking about here. But look a bit deeper and you might notice this: Mid90s, when you get right down to it, is about our ability to take abuse — physically, mentally, emotionally.