TV

Food shows have a way of capturing people's attention, regardless of age, race, or culture. Watching and learning how to cook new meals alongside comedy, fun, and adrenaline-rush scenes is naturally captivating. Netflix has for years brought such shows, both in holidays and other seasons, to keep its viewers constantly entertained. This post presents some of Netflix's best food shows you can stream as the year ends.

Netflix is back with more of its Filthy Rich collection two years after the first project, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. In May 2020, the streamer released the documentary series as the first project for the Filthy Rich collection, showcasing a case against Jeffrey Epstein. He was charged with sex trafficking and procuring children for prostitution in 2008.Jeffrey Epstein initially served thirteen months in jail before he was re-arrested for sex trafficking in 2019. He committed suicide by hanging during his second jail term, leaving his longtime partner and ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was also arrested for similar crimes. Ghislaine was sentenced to 20 years in jail, triggering the collection creators to produce the second project of Filthy Rich.

Disney+ announced it would launch an episode of Marvel Studios Legends: Drax & Mantis, just days before the debut of another Marvel Studios television film, Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special. Guardians of the Galaxy is a 2014 superhero film produced by Marvel Studios. It is followed by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) featuring Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Gamora, Nebula, Mantis, Drax the Destroyer, Rocket and Groot.

After the series finale, the franchise will be moving forward with an adaption of The Testaments, the sequel to Margaret Atwood's original book. It will follow an elderly version of Aunt Lydia during the middle Gilead period, a time when piety, radicalism, and obedience have become the norm. It's difficult to reconcile the Lydia we read about in the novels and the Lydia in the series. Some fans believe it's impossible, and in many ways it is. Their backstories are different. Testaments Lydia was a family court judge who believed in liberty, equality, and democracy. After congress was slaughtered, a group of young men burst into the courthouse and threw her into a van. They broke her down with forced confinement, sensory deprivation, and starvation until she felt a sense of loyalty to her captors. It was a common brainwashing technique--one that she herself seems to have mastered. Once she had proven her loyalty, she was introduced Aunt Vidala, Aunt Helena, and Aunt Elizabeth--a group that she quickly dominated. They became the founding aunts, tasked with building a separate women's sphere of government. They came up with uniforms, laws, prayers, and rituals--the groundwork for much of the female system we've come to know in the franchise. The reason Commander Judd was credited for this work in the novels was because he claimed their ideas as his own and used them to gain clout with the other commanders. They had as much influence on the formation of the system as the rest of the Sons of Jacob. Lydia was proud that she had accomplished so much in so little time, but she was wholeheartedly ashamed of what she was doing. She didn't sign up for the task of indoctrinating and oppressing her own gender.  She was never blinded by rhetoric. She wrote much of that rhetoric herself, and she took great pleasure in the fact that she was able to slip in references to female empowerment and paganism. It was her own personal form of humor.

Season 5 began as a dream, blood swept across a washcloth, shower water pouring into a standalone bathtub--June covered in Fred, smiling, stuck in a moment of pure catharsis and elation. In the latter portion of season 4, we see an obsession beginning to form. Everyone around her has moved on with their lives. Rita had been in Canada for months. She identified her Stockholm syndrome dynamic with Serena, and she made a conscious choice to step away from it. Moira had spent several years learning to heal and help others. She was at a place where she could counsel women and show them down the path toward normalcy. Emily had taken that path herself. She was trying to go back to work, ease her wounds surrounding sex and relationships, and quell some of the anger she'd built up inside. They lived the way we live. That was their gauge for normalcy, a return to the time before, where things like guns, violence, and vendettas were considered pathological signs of trauma, not a reaction to the world around them. They didn't look back, and they didn't put up a meaningful resistance. June saw that. She understood what they were doing, and she knew what it meant to move on. But that wasn't her normal. For years she'd faced salvagings, men violating women, brainwashing, and intimidation, and she couldn't just leave that behind. She tried their route. She spent time with Nichole. She would have night-ins with her friends, sipping wine and talking. They'd all laugh, go over the specifics of their time-before lifestyles, and then she'd say something awkward, and it would pop their bubble. She was overcome by guilt--a sense that there were other women out there who didn't have the life that they had. It hurt, living so well, while there were slaves toiling in commander's homes. She was in pain. She had gone through too much to just kick her feet up and ignore the rest of the world. She couldn't live in the quiet moments, rest, laugh, and be with the ones she loved, because she wasn't with them. She was being waterboarded, cattle prodded, herded by attack dogs, and manipulated in Fred's office. That had to end. She knew it needed to end, and her best way to do that, she believed, would be to trust in the authorities. She gave her testimony to the ICC court, where she talked about her enslavement, and she waited for Fred's sentencing. Laying it all out there should've had a relieving effect; his sentence should've been the last nail in his coffin. Once she found justice, she thought she would find peace. But she didn't find justice. The American government made a deal with a man who had more blood on his hands than any man alive today. It was a bitter betrayal, part of a chain of events that would lead her to believe that she couldn't trust them to help. If she wanted revenge, she would have to get it her own way. She put her skills as a leader to use, gathered a group of handmaids, and they tore him apart with their bare hands in No Man's Land.

Netflix has added to its sports category with a new film, The Swimmers, joining others of that genre, such as Hustle, Home Team, Skater Girl, The Game Changers, and Rising Phoenix. The Swimmers is an inspirational sports movie starring two Syrian siblings, Manal Issa and Nathalie Issa, on their undefined journey, which lands them in Rio, Brazil. The film released its theatrical release on November 11th, before the Netflix premiere date was acquired.

In the early 2000s, my parents had a falling out, and we were forced to move from forested Oregon, where we had countless hiking trails and a jungle of temperate rainforest to explore, to rural Arizona, which hung somewhere around 105-110 F during the summertime. Everything was prickly, dusty, dry, and hot. Regardless of how high we cranked the air conditioner, which we had to sneak, we'd still feel like we were on fire. We were trapped in the house. We had nowhere to ride our bikes. All music was banned. We were told that our favorite TV shows were sinful, and we were shamed if we read books. Life was meant for work, picking up after the dog, shoveling gravel, mopping, vacuuming, scrubbing countertops, toilets, and dishes. Church was absolutely mandatory. My grandparents attended the ultra-extremist Church at Safford, an ancient brick building with 70s shag carpet that smelled like sweat and tar. It was Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Bible class on Tuesday nights. If we refused, we were told that we'd either be forced into the car, or the cops would be called, even if we were sick. We could puke in the tiny bathroom outside the sanctuary if it came to it. There was an actual polygamist compound across the street, some neanderthal Mormon sect, not unlike the FLDS we've all heard so much about, but they weren't as stringent about their uniforms. Sometimes we'd see the kids working in their fields, moving from one row to the next in cheap Walmart jeans and plain, raggedly T's covered in the dust that seemed to collect everywhere. They weren't much different from the congregation, who seemed a little off. All of the women had stringy Brady Bunch mom hair, 90s rat tails, and country western outfits, complete with tassels, turquoise, and bolo ties. The men were usually dressed as cowboys, shell-shocked ex-soldiers, or a combination of the two. They'd have giant pistols on their hips, and those gigantic Peggy Hill glasses we've all come to associate with the elderly. The style was too pervasive. Normalcy was rare, and when it did show up, it was never fully complete--just a little more progressive than your average cattle rancher like, 'I know he ain't gospel, but I think it's OK to listen to a little Ted Nugent.' It was unreal to think that a hundred people like that could be condensed into a single room, but they were.

Trevor Noah is a South African writer, producer, and comedian known for his impressive performances in The Daily Show, Son of Patricia, Jon Stewart: The Mark Twain Prize, Stand Up to Cancer, Afraid of the Dark, and many more. The U.S.-based comedian recently unveiled an addition to his projects with Trevor Noah: I Wish You Would, a stand-up special scheduled to launch in late November. After seven years, Trevor Noah had previously announced his exit from The Daily Show. 

We all know how much the Mickey Mouse family has been there for several generations. Since its launch in the 1930s, the Walt Disney creation has managed several franchises, shorts, films, and more. Disney+ recently unveiled a new adventure of the Mickey Mouse family, with The Wonderful Autumn of Mickey Mouse, as the fourth and final special of the series.The previous three special shorts premiered in February, March, and July of 2022. The Wonderful Autumn of Mickey Mouse special has attracted massive positive reviews from critics, triggering the creators to make more shorts.

Jeffrey Dahmer has been a hot topic of discussion for more than three decades now. Quite recently, the Dahmer talk has been on everyone’s lips, sparked by Ryan Murphy’s controversial documentary series about the serial killer, which landed on Netflix in September. The question on people's minds from the moment Jeffrey Dahmer was apprehended in 1991 is how the hell did he manage to keep up his killing spree for more than ten years?Well Dr. Phillip C. McGraw unveiled more spine-chilling revelations about the cold-blooded savage on his CBS talk show Dr. Phil, covering interviews with Lionel Dahmer, Jeffrey's father, some family members of Jeffrey's victims, as well as two veteran soldiers who served alongside Jeffrey.

At its height, the Falwell family was a theocratic machine, so influential that their endorsement could make or break a presidential candidate. They'd hoard billions from collection plates, corrupt business practices, and various enterprises and funnel those funds into building a vast Christian empire. They had influence, wealth, and a voice that reached the masses. But they were sloppy and bigoted, and they loved their vice. In the end, all it took to bring them down was a single Miami pool boy with a story to tell. It's all chronicled in the recently released Hulu documentary 'God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty.' In 2012, Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki were staying at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach Hotel, where 20-year-old Giancarlo (pronounced 'jon-car-low') Granda worked as a pool attendant. He had been flirting with a group of girls when he looked back to see a middle-aged woman filming him with her phone. She reportedly told him, 'Don't bother with the young ones. They don't know what they're doing.'They struck up a conversation, and he agreed to meet her at another hotel for sex. She said that there was one caveat: Her husband wanted to watch. Her husband just happened to be the son of one of the most popular televangelists in the nation--and also a cuck, who jacked off in a dark corner while Giancarlo had sex with his wife.

History is filled with the forgotten accounts of great women. Since the beginning of time, men have stolen their ideas, demeaned their intelligence, and built statues in their own image. Gilead excelled at this practice. Serena Joy Waterford, their philosophical founder, wasn't mentioned in any records after the fall of the regime. Historians speculated that her name might have been a parodical pseudonym, created by June when she made the audio cassettes recording her experiences as a handmaid. It was the same with Aunt Lydia, a formidable political figure, credited as a founding aunt. Her picture hung in the back of every classroom. By the time the regime had fallen, and the world had moved on, there was very little proof of her existence. Historians knew the names of the Sons of Jacob and powerful commanders. But women's records were purged, burned in an effort to erase the crimes of men. There's no way of knowing how many stories have faded, what those women's lives were like, or what they might have accomplished. They could have lit the first fire and invented the wheel, the bow and arrow, and the sword. Perhaps they created the first spyglass or ship sail. If the legacies of women like Lydia and Serena can be destroyed, anything is possible. It's time women were given the credit they deserve. Let's right countless wrongs, restore dignity and justice, and delve into the bloody tapestry of female life in Gilead.

This festive season, Disney Plus hosts a reimagined The Nutcracker that retains the plot of Tchaikovsky's classic ballet version but is more upbeat and fun.Some of the greatest hip-hop dancers from the dance competition show So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) will showcase their undying talent in this holiday special. Below is everything you need to know about the Hip Hop Nutcracker, soon to premiere on Disney+.

Netflix is preparing to launch its new documentary series Our Universe, covering different nature stories. The six-part series is narrated by Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman. The trailer, which came out almost a week ago offers a glimpse of the many epic events covered, from the birth of the sun, and the survival of wild animals and deep-sea creatures to the genesis of a human pre-birth.

Robert Downey Jr., Marvel's Iron Man, is about to release a heartfelt documentary film Sr. that examines his late father's life and legacy. Documented over three years, Sr. unpacks the themes of creativity, fatherhood, mortality and others as it showcases the relationship journey between Downey Sr. and his identical younger version. Like father, like son indeed.