July Comedy Binges: Murderbot, Stick, Too Much, Overcompensating

Looking for your next summer TV binge? I've got four comedies for you, all very different from each other, so there should be something for everyone!

Murderbot: Created by Paul and Chris Weitz and based on a series of novels by Martha Wells, Alexander Skarsgard stars as a SecUnit, a robot designated to protect a group of researchers who are on a mission to an uncharted planet and have been forced to hire this robot as a bodyguard for insurance reasons, even though they are a bunch of hippies who think that owning a robot is tantamount to slavery. What they don't know, however, is that the SecUnit has hacked his infrastructure so that he can be fully autonomous. But rather than going rogue and becoming some sort of violent, sentient, Terminator-esque AI, this robot is interested in far more prosaic things - he has downloaded thousands of hours worth of trashy television episodes and just wants to be left alone by the crew so he can watch reruns of his favorite space dramas.

It's a fun premise, but I'll confess, I never paid much attention to this show as I was watching it, treating it more as background noise while I did other things. The cast is great, the production design is excellent, all the right components are here, and most people have been raving about how much they love this show. But for some reason, the humor was always too one-note for me and never became much more complex and engaging than this one joke about this robot that just wants to binge TV. There's a ton of action, a lot of encounters with villains and alien creatures, and plenty of excitement for people who are genuinely looking for some science fiction adventure packed into easily digestible 30-minute episodes. It wasn't for me, but it absolutely could be for you!

Stick: Created by Jason Keller, this show stars Owen Wilson as Pryce Cahill, a washed-up golf pro who is barely getting by and still stinging from his divorce and the loss of the cushy life he used to have. However, one day he discovers Santiago Wheeler (Pete Dager), a teenager who seems to be a golf prodigy. He persuades Santi and his mother, Elena (Mariana Trevino) that they should hit up the amateur circuit, and after a lot of persuasion, they agree. The reason I watched this show, however, is because the other person joining them on this adventure is Pryce's friend and former caddy, Mitts, who is played by Marc Maron. I've been hearing Maron talk about this show for months on his podcast, so obviously I tuned in. If you're a fan of WTF, you're probably going to enjoy this performance.

This is a cute show. Watching it one week at a time was the perfect pace because you didn't get too invested but were still curious enough to see what these characters would end up doing the next week. I don't know how well it will hold up as a binge, but each episode is only 30 minutes long so it will go down easy. The writing does suffer a little from the fact that the show was created by a white guy in his 50s, so there are occasionally some painfully awkward conversations about pronouns and social justice that simply don't sound quite right when coming out of the mouths of the younger characters. But this mostly seems like a well-intentioned, sweet show about found family and picking yourself up after grief, loss, and heartbreak, all wrapped in a gentle comedy that has some very exciting golf montages, if you're into that sort of thing. Give it a try!

Too Much: This show is created by Luis Felber and Lena Dunham, so that's probably all you need to know if you're wondering if this show is for you. I am not a Dunham person by any means, but this show did still have some appeal for me, so let's discuss the good parts, i.e. the cast. Megan Stalter stars as Jessica, a woman living in New York City, who can't stop stalking her ex and his beautiful new girlfriend (played by Michael Zegen and Emily Ratajkowski), so she decides to leap at the chance to move to London for work and get a fresh start. As a romcom and Austen enthusiast, her expectations of London are mostly that she's going to be stepping into a Regency period drama and meet Mr. Darcy, but instead, she quickly discovers that it's simply another big city, just filled with people with different accents.

Jessica wastes no time in striking up a romance with Felix (the charming AF, Will Sharpe), a musician wastrel, who is extremely sweet and seems to be the polar opposite of the toxic ex she left behind in New York. Of course, Dunham can't just let things be, so we end up with a lot of drama, a lot of complications, and a lot of bad behavior. This show really gets by on the strength of Megan Stalter, the most lovable and dynamic woman on the planet that you will root for 100%. She makes Jessica such a sympathetic character, that you will never accuse this woman of doing anything wrong - it's just everyone around her who's being a tool. I did not love how the show finally ended, and while I was promised a romcom in the first episode, what I got was a little too dark and dramatic for my liking, though there is one episode that chronicles Jessica's past relationship and is a very accurate portrayal of how women can get suckered in by terrible men. Your mileage may vary, but watch this show to support Stalter, who I hope gets to be the leading lady in many more (better) things to come.

Overcompensating: Remember how when I watched Adults I felt like I couldn't relate to any of it because Gen Z is so foreign to me? Well Overcompensating, created by and starring Benito Skinner, is a story of a freshman who was the valedictorian, Homecoming King, and football all-star in high school, and is trying very hard to maintain that image in college. But he has been harboring a secret all his life...he might like boys? From the very beginning, when Britney Spears' "Lucky" is playing in the background and we see how little Benny's hormones were first set aflame by watching Brendan Fraser in a loincloth in George of the Jungle, it's clear that this is a show for millennials. So even if it's ostensibly about college, settle in my fellow 30-40-year-olds, because you're going to have a blast watching this show.

Besides Benny, the other main character we follow is the delightful Carmen (Wally Baram), a woman who is also trying to figure out her college identity. She and Benny become fast friends (after an initial attempt to be more than that), and it's lovely to see the two of them bumbling through college together. Then there's Benny's sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone), an ice-cold bitch who thaws out beautifully over the course of the season as we delve deeper into her many layers. And of course, there's Peter (Adam DiMarco), Grace's horrible frat boy boyfriend who embodies the worst that the patriarchy has to offer. Every character on this show is fleshed out and complex, with everyone having some redeeming features, and plenty of flaws, and making plenty of mistakes because that's what we all do in college. It is extremely funny, but also extremely heartwarming and I binged this show with a big smile on my face all the way through. Also, this show has some wildly good cameos sprinkled throughout that will give you a real jolt as you make your way through the season. Everything ends on a massive cliffhanger, so I am definitely clamoring for Season 2. But until then, binge this first season to your heart's content. It's an absolute winner.

July Movies Part 3: Eddington & KPop Demon Hunters

I can't think of a blog post where I have reviewed two more different movies. Settle in readers, it's gonna be a wild and bumpy ride!

Eddington: Written and directed by Ari Aster, watching this movie is like reading a David Foster Wallace novel (or what I imagine that must be like, since I have never read one). It's long, winding, and pompous, and doesn't seem to have any kind of point. 90 minutes into this movie, I thought it was fantastic and one of the better things I'd seen in 2025. But then, it went on for a whole other hour, and by the end of it, I was thoroughly fed up with this meandering mess of a movie.

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal star as Joe Cross and Ted Garcia, the sheriff and mayor of a fictional small town in New Mexico called Eddington. The movie begins in May 2020, so we're right in the middle of pandemic panic and a new mask mandate, that the liberal mayor has fully embraced, but the conservative sheriff is completely against. The two of them have a past, and now their political differences are fueling even more resentment and angst. Emma Stone plays Joe's wife, Louise, a woman who is suffering from mental illness and unable to put up with her husband's drama, while her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), is living with them and filling Louise's head full of online conspiracy theories. That's not going to end well.

The first 90 minutes of this movie perfectly capture the craziness of 2020, and the heightened anxiety, anger, and anarchy that seemed to fill every waking moment of our lives. There's also a look at the protests following George Floyd's murder, and some rather humorous commentary on white teens trying to support the BLM movement without any clear action plan. It's a perfect time capsule of that moment in history. But then things take a violent and bizarre turn and escalate into a horror film that is simply exhausting and relentless to watch. There's no point to any of it, and it has nothing interesting to say, which is a huge disappointment considering how well it all began. Who is this movie for? Certainly not me.

KPop Demon Hunters: Directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan, this is an animated movie about a K-pop girl group called Huntr/x that are world famous for their singing ability, but are also secretly using the power of their voices to create a protective barrier that keeps demons from invading the human world. So yeah, this movie is nothing like Eddington.

Unless you're living under a rock, you're probably aware that the songs from this movie are currently blowing up the global music charts and people are listening to these songs on repeat. The songs are extremely catchy, and while I can't say I was a fan of all of them, I'm certainly humming a couple of them and doing the little shoulder dance to "Soda Pop" as we speak. The animation is gorgeous, and while the plot is fairly straightforward (well as straightforward as a movie about K-pop stars hunting demons could be, I guess), this is a movie that's executed with flair and panache. And it's only 100 minutes long, so it goes down easy, and you're never bored for a minute of that runtime. 

KPop Demon Hunters is an unusual movie because the premise is so wildly unexpected and unique. And yet, it still manages to be a predictable and tropey animated movie that makes for a great comfort watch. So, hop on the couch and fire it up on Netflix. You'll be bopping along to some great tunes in no time. And then you'll be jonesing for a visit to your closest Korean bathhouse.

July Movies Part 2: The Friend & Friendship

Obviously, I could not resist a post about two movies I recently caught up with on streaming that are similarly named but bear no similarities to each other otherwise. One is a gentle drama about dealing with grief, and the other is an examination of one man's insane spiral as he tries to make new friends. Neither is a film I would have wanted to go to the theater to see, but they were certainly intriguing enough for a couch watch.

The Friend: Written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez, this is a movie about what happens when Iris's (Naomi Watts) best friend, Walter (Bill Murray), dies and leaves his giant Great Dane, named Apollo, to her to take care of. Of course, she lives in Manhattan in a rent-controlled apartment with a very strict no-pets policy, so this is going to be problematic. 

Iris and Apollo have a somewhat testy relationship at first, particularly as he seems to be a rather unbiddable creature who won't let her sleep on her own bed, won't take the elevator, and won't eat anything. But both of them are grieving the loss of Walter, and as you can imagine, they bond over their shared loss and find comfort in each other. There isn't much more to this film - it's a rather vibey movie about New York intellectuals and their general aesthetic, but dog lovers will probably really enjoy watching Apollo, as he's a rather magnificent beast. There's a lot of side plot about Walter and the womanizing and somewhat disappointing human being he was, but none of that seems particularly relevant and I'd be hard-pressed to say I paid much attention to any of it. Overall, this film makes for a perfectly adequate streaming experience on a slow afternoon.

Friendship: Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, there is a LOT that happens in this movie, most of which I can't quite claim to understand. Tim Robinson stars as Craig, an awkward man with a wife and teenage son, who have a weirdly Oedipal relationship and don't seem to care much about Craig. He is too weird at work to have any friends and is mostly a lonely man seeking connection. A casualty of the male loneliness epidemic, if you will.

But then Austin (the charismatic Paul Rudd) moves into the neighborhood, and unusually, Craig strikes up a friendship with him. The two of them become really close and go off on strange adventures together, sometimes late at night, or sometimes in the middle of the workday, and everything seems rosy. But when Craig goes over to Austin's house for a party with some of Austin's other friends, his oddness becomes too much for the group to handle and he finds himself ostracized. Which of course, means that this man completely loses his mind and spirals out of control in increasingly frightening fashion for the rest of this film. This movie is kind of a comedy, kind of a horror, kind of a mess? I'm not a Robinson person, but I imagine that if you are a fan of his work, this movie would be right up your alley. It's weird and genre-defying and while I didn't much care for it, I'm sure there are many lonely middle-aged men who would. So, give it a shot, I guess?

July Movies Part 1: Jurassic World Rebirth & Superman

July means summer blockbusters and plenty of action. I checked out the two big franchise movies that have come out so far this month, and one of them was good and one of them was atrocious. Place your bets before you read any further!

Jurassic World Rebirth: I'll be honest, apart from the original Jurassic Park, I would be hard pressed to tell you anything about what happened in the subsequent sequels and reboots of this franchise. In this film, directed by Garthe Edwards and written by David Koepp, we have a greedy pharmaceutical rep (played to perfection by Rupert Friend), who needs the DNA from three different types of dinosaur species, to help him perfect a drug for heart disease that could potentially extend human lifespans by several decades. He hires Zora (a buff and action-ready Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary-for-hire as a bodyguard and general facilitator for an expedition to the Equator, where dinosaurs currently roam free in an area that is off-limits to humans. Henry (the delicious Jonathan Bailey), also joins the crew as the paleontologist who is needed for his dino knowledge, and Duncan (the always wonderful Mahershala Ali), a former colleague and friend of Zora's, steps in as their team lead and boat captain. There are other members of the crew, but the fact that they are not famous Oscar-winning actors should clue you in that maybe they're not going to last long on this expedition...spoilers!

The cast is excellent, but this script is an absolute dud, and it just keeps going and going. This is not a good movie, but I guess it's a good AC movie, i.e. it's worth it on a hot day when you really need to spend two hours indoors in an air-conditioned theater. I'd like to think that the actors had a fun time swashbuckling around the jungle, pretending to be awed by majestic dinosaurs, and collecting ridiculous paychecks, but otherwise, this is a very paint-by-the-numbers exercise where you can see every story beat coming from a mile away. There is an unusual twist involving some people they pick up on the way to their expedition, but it's really funny how some members of this team are so unlucky, while others seem to live a perfectly charmed life among these carnivorous dinosaurs. Go to this movie for a thoroughly mindless time, but please don't go into it with any expectations whatsoever.

Superman: If you're a Zack Snyder fanboy, this movie is emphatically not for you. But if, like me, you appreciate the humor that James Gunn brings to comic book movies and have a fondness for the original Guardians of the Galaxy, this movie will check a lot of your boxes. Written and directed by Gunn, this movie stars the very square-jawed and anodynely handsome David Corenswet as our titular hero, and Rachel Brosnahan as the intrepid Lois Lane, the journalist who works alongside his alter ego, Clark Kent, at the Daily Planet newspaper in Metropolis. This movie does a great job of not belaboring his origin story or their love story - the action picks up right in the middle of Superman suffering his first ever defeat at the hand of Lex Luthor (a brilliantly demented performance by Nicholas Hoult), and we then follow along to discover what's been going on in his life and fill in all the gaps in his biography along the way. It's a great "Show, not tell" script, and bypasses a lot of the tiresome tropes we can sometimes fall into when rebooting a superhero franchise for the umpteenth time.

There is a lot of plot, involving many cameos from weird fringes of the DC universe, so I won't get into all of that. The production design is beautiful and it genuinely is a very funny movie that has just the right amount of Superman earnestness that makes it feel wholesome without being impossibly corny. But like Guardians of the Galaxy, the lasting impact this movie will have on my memory involves the music. There is one action sequence set to a song I love that I would never have imagined would be in the background of a fight scene. And the end credits song is a perfect callback to a seemingly innocuous conversation between Superman and Lois halfway through the film, and makes me certain that Gunn first thinks about what songs he wants in a movie and then writes the entire script around how he's going to get those songs in. 

This movie is silly, fun, and perfectly captures the essence of Superman without being all gloom and doom about it. And while there has been a lot of talk about it being some sort of woke anti-Israel movie, I honestly felt like it was merely an anti-war movie that would apply to a war being fought in any era of modern history. If anything, this movie felt like more of a commentary on anti-immigration policies and ICE raids, with all the rhetoric of Superman being an alien who didn't deserve to be on our planet. So yeah, this movie can mean anything you want it to mean, but at the end of the day, it's simply a great comic book film that understood the assignment and fully delivered.