I don’t know about you, but I’ll be happy to leave the bad weather and worse news of January 2026 behind. One thing I did appreciate this month, though, as I hunkered down? Television, which greeted the new year with fresh entertainments of all shapes and sizes. Among the highlights: a Marvel comedy you don’t have to love superheroes to enjoy, a Ryan Murphy freakout that’s actually fun, a four-hour audience with the great Mel Brooks, a cozy mystery that’s more than meets the eye, and two very different takes on aging musicians.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The Beauty (FX)
In The Beauty, Ryan Murphy and co-creator Matthew Hodgson have concocted a genre-hopping oddity that sounds unlikely to work. The big surprise is that, unlike so many of Murphy’s recent projects, it does. The series proceeds from a premise that immediately calls to mind the darkly comic horror movie The Substance, an underdog 2024 Best Picture contender that earned Oscar nominations for both its director, Coralie Fargeat, and its star, Demi Moore. A revolutionary biotech product called The Beauty catalyzes—through a grotesque process involving a sort of flesh cocoon—radical physical transformations, turning the old, the sick, the ugly, and the merely average into young, healthy, stunning specimens of human perfection. Most creators would presumably want to downplay the resemblance between their new show (which is based on a decade-old comic by Jeremy Haun, an executive producer, and Jason A. Hurley) and one of the most prominent movies of the last few years. But brazenness has always been Murphy’s M.O. Of all the people he could have cast as The Beauty’s yassified mastermind, he chose Ashton Kutcher, a man equally famous for his career as an actor turned venture capitalist and for marrying a 42-year-old Moore when he was 27. [Read the full review.]
Bookish (PBS)
One of TV’s most giggled-about series of late is the Fox medical drama Best Medicine, whose main character is named Dr. Best. To that, the British cozy-mystery factory says: “Hold my teacup.” Behold Bookish, a detective show set just after World War II in London, whose bookstore owner hero is called Gabriel Book (creator Mark Gatiss, who also co-created Sherlock). When a new employee, Jack (Connor Finch), suggests that a sign reading “Book’s” is grammatically incorrect, the exchange that ensues is “Who’s on First?” for literary pedants. Book’s whole bookseller-by-day, gumshoe-by-night deal is adorable, as is his chummy marriage to his childhood friend Trottie (Polly Walker, also seen this month in Bridgerton).
But all isn’t as saccharine as it initially appears to be. Gabriel has secrets hiding beneath his professorial veneer. Jack has a past—and, unbeknownst to him, a connection to his new employer. Mr. and Mrs. Book may not be as comfy together as they seem. And as the season progresses, divided into two-part mysteries that leave plenty of time for sharp character work, viewers discover that Gatiss has much more on his agenda than tweedy self-parody.
Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man (HBO)
What’s left to say about Mel Brooks, one of the past century’s most celebrated voices in comedy? A lot, actually. The obligatory army of A-list funny people (Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle operating at minimal annoyingness) assembles to praise him in this two-part doc from directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio. More fascinating, though, is what Brooks has to say for himself. Not just lucid at 99, but also insightful and open, he talks Apatow through a career longer than almost any other in entertainment, from his teenage gig as a Catskills busboy slash Borscht Belt understudy and big postwar break as a writer for Your Show of Shows to Brooks and best friend Carl Reiner’s signature 2000-Year-Old Man routines and his influential spy-spoof series Get Smart. That, of course, was all before he changed the face of comic filmmaking with 1967’s then-divisive The Producers, followed by an astounding run of classics in the ’70s and ’80s: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World Part 1, Spaceballs. Incredibly, he’s still working, with plenty of success.
Especially for comedy nerds, the behind-the-scenes anecdotes about working with legends like Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder might be familiar. But Brooks is a delightful storyteller, as quick with punchlines as he was in his prime. His reflections on the controversies and critical snubbings that greeted movies that have since become consensus masterpieces are nuanced without descending into false modesty. In that sense, The 99 Year Old Man reminds me of another recent docuseries about a once-polarizing, now-sainted filmmaker: Apple’s Mr. Scorsese. The projects also share an honesty about how tough life can be for the families of ambitious men; Brooks unequivocally takes the blame for the dissolution of his first marriage, to Florence Baum, and his kids speak freely about his inconsistent parenting. Yet there’s also a lot of love in the doc, particularly in the generous passages that explore his friendship with Reiner (who died in 2020) and his singular bond with second wife and sometime leading lady Anne Bancroft, who’s been gone for more than two decades. Brooks isn’t too macho to tear up during these reminiscences. And if that doesn’t make you weep, the frequent presence of beloved, recently deceased associates, from Carl’s son Rob Reiner to David Lynch, probably will.
Riot Women (BritBox)
Riot Women, a revelatory series from the feminist-minded Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack creator Sally Wainwright, casts an empathetic eye on the rarely acknowledged struggles of older women: loneliness, invisibility, menopause and the stigma that surrounds it, caretaking fatigue. That might make it sound like a downer. In fact, this six-episode series about women of a certain age who form a punk band to compete in a local talent competition—and accidentally change their lives in the process—is totally gripping. Raucous, insightful, and darkly witty, it’s a portrait of belated liberation sure to invigorate viewers at any stage of life. [Read the full review.]
Stayer (Viaplay)
Once you’ve watched Riot Women, why not try another European import about over-the-hill rockers? In truth, Pia Lykke’s Norwegian drama Stayer has less in common with Wainwright’s show than it does with 2025’s many films about penitent fathers of daughters who have good reasons to resent them: One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Jay Kelly, The Phoenician Scheme. As in some of those movies, our protagonist, Even Elstad (Aksel Hennie), is a successful artist—in this case, a cantankerous rock star still touring on the strength of a massive hit that he hates. That relatively minor problem fades into the background when he’s suddenly called back to his hometown to raise an estranged teenage daughter (Hannah Elise Adolfsen Fjeldbraaten) who doesn’t want to know him. I found Even’s earnest music pretty grating. Yet an outstanding cast, scripts that are perceptive about grief and remorse, and Hennie’s impressionistic directing more than make up for it.
Wonder Man (Disney+)
A filmmaker auditioning leads for his next project has a philosophical insight. “Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” the eccentric Eastern European auteur Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) lectures the actors assembled in his home for a day of offbeat dramatic exercises. “It’s too difficult to comprehend them. So, let’s get past them. Let’s find the human underneath.” This might not seem like such a profound realization for a lion of the festival circuit. But it feels downright revolutionary when you hear him say it in the new Disney+ Marvel dramedy Wonder Man. The MCU isn’t exactly known for getting past lofty ideas about heroes and gods.
What is this guy even doing in this world, you might ask. In fact, he’s a key character in a show set not on a distant planet or in a grid of skyscrapers doomed to topple in a superpowered melee, but in a mostly realistic Los Angeles where the entertainment industry is still (and here you might have to suspend your disbelief) based. Wonder Man is not like other Disney+ Marvel projects. Nor is it like the other Disney+ Marvel projects that were hyped as being not like other Disney+ Marvel projects (see: Wandavision) but ultimately abandoned ambitious storytelling in favor of generic, VFX-heavy fight scenes and choppily integrated teasers for the next MCU movie. This alone might’ve made it the platform’s best Marvel show yet. But smart casting, witty writing, lively directing, and artful character development have also yielded the rare superhero riff that, as Kovak puts it, finds the human underneath. [Read the full review.]
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