Sugar: Inside the Neo Noir Mystery That Hides an Alien Detective in Plain Sight, The Hawk: Will Ferrell’s Absurd Golf Comeback Comedy Is Splitting Critics and Conquering Netflix’s Charts, Jake Johnson

The Dink Review: Jake Johnson Is the Reason This Pickleball Comedy Works, and Mary Steenburgen Is the Reason It Stays With You

The first thing to understand about The Dink, Apple TV+’s pickleball comedy that arrived July 24, is that it is doing exactly what it is trying to do and that what it is trying to do is not particularly ambitious. The film is genuinely enjoyable despite being formulaic in ways that are visible within the first ten minutes, and why the people who walked out of the premiere with tears running down their faces from laughing are not wrong, and why the critics who called it a “pleasant streaming diversion” rather than a fully realized sports comedy are also not wrong. Both responses are accurate about the same movie.

What The Dink gets right, and gets right consistently across its 102-minute runtime, is the specific texture of Jake Johnson doing Jake Johnson things in a context that makes those things land. If you know his work from New Girl, where he spent seven seasons building Nick Miller into one of the more beloved slacker characters in recent television history, or from Drinking Buddies, the 2013 Joe Swanberg brewery comedy where Johnson worked almost entirely off improvisation and built a performance of real naturalistic charm out of a loose structural outline, you know exactly what you are getting in The Dink. I’m not saying that he ad-libbed a lot in The Dink, but many of his natural nuances came through during the performance, and they remained in the final edit. You are getting a middle-aged man with a complicated relationship to his own pride, a vocal pattern that sounds like he is making it up as he goes along even when the script is fixed, and the specific ability to make a character’s defensive immaturity sympathetic rather than simply annoying. He has been doing this for years, and he is genuinely exceptional at it. Read the Review on the Sunset Daily Substack!

Sugar: Inside the Neo Noir Mystery That Hides an Alien Detective in Plain Sight

Few television premises have managed to pull off a genre switch as audacious as the one buried inside Sugar, the Apple TV series that spent its opening episodes convincing viewers they were watching a classic Los Angeles detective story before quietly revealing something far stranger underneath. Now heading into its second season, the show has become one of the more distinctive entries in the current streaming landscape, anchored by a lead performance from Colin Farrell that has only grown more assured as the story around him has expanded. What began in 2024 as a moody homage to old school noir has evolved into a genuinely unusual two season arc that blends detective fiction, science fiction, and a surprisingly tender meditation on grief and belonging. Read More!

SPOILER ALERT: Big Brother 28 Week 3 Live Feed Update: Kamu Wins HOH, Devens Has a Diamond Veto Nobody Knows About, and the Veterans Are Running a Game Within the Game

Stop reading immediately if you are watching Big Brother 28 exclusively through the CBS broadcast and want to be surprised when Sunday’s episode airs. This piece covers everything from Thursday night’s eviction through Saturday’s live feed activity, including the most significant hidden power unlocked so far this season. Also, if you do not watch Unloaded on Friday Nights, we find things out there now too. The CBS broadcast will catch viewers up on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, but for feed watchers who want the complete picture of what is actually happening inside the house right now, here is the full accounting.

Rome Seymour is gone. Kamu Kirk won the HOH competition. Rick Devens is sitting on a Diamond Power of Veto that six-week window and that nobody in the house knows about except Dee Valladares, with whom he made a private pact the moment he won it. The veteran alliance is not just ahead of the newbies in this game. They are playing a completely separate game from the newbies, with better information, better powers, and a puppet HOH who believes with full conviction that he is a core member of their operation. Read the Review on the Sunset Daily Substack!

The Hawk: Will Ferrell’s Absurd Golf Comeback Comedy Is Splitting Critics and Conquering Netflix’s Charts

Every so often a show arrives that perfectly illustrates the widening gap between what critics want from comedy and what audiences are actually showing up to enjoy, and Will Ferrell’s new Netflix series, The Hawk, has quickly become the defining example of that divide in the summer of 2026. Since premiering on July 16, the ten episode golf comedy has rocketed to the top of Netflix’s global charts, pulling in a staggering 4.8 million views in its opening days and settling comfortably into the number two spot on the platform’s United States Top 10, outpacing established catalog favorites in the process. It is, by nearly every measure of raw viewership, one of the biggest streaming success stories of the month. It is also, according to a wide swath of professional critics, one of the year’s more disappointing comedic swings. Both things appear to be true at once, and that exact tension is precisely why everyone is talking about it. Read More!

“Lincoln”: Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness Episode 5 Is the Season’s Best Hour, and Bill Hader Is the Reason

The fifth episode of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, titled “Lincoln” and airing July 25 on HBO, is the one that critics who screened the full season in advance were most reluctant to discuss in detail before it aired. The Hollywood Reporter, in its season review, named Bill Hader “the best of the group” among the series’ guest stars while declining to specify which episode or which historical figure he plays. The restraint around the episode’s specifics was, in retrospect, completely appropriate, because “Lincoln” is the episode where the show’s format becomes something richer and stranger than a series of historical comedy sketches. The “Lincoln” sequence works because Bill Hader commits to it without ever winking at the audience. His deadpan delivery and impeccable sense of timing make the entire segment laugh-out-loud funny. Rather than relying on cheap historical jokes, the scene finds comedy in ordinary human pettiness, quick deliveries, and with Hader grounding the absurdity so convincingly that the premise becomes both hilarious and strangely insightful.

The episode also contains, in its opening sketch, one of the funniest sequences the series has produced, Larry David wandering into the gunfight at the O.K. Corral to complain about spatial efficiency. Read the Review on the Sunset Daily Substack!

Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller Serve Up Apple TV’s Pickleball Comeback Comedy

Pickleball has spent the past several years quietly taking over the American backyard, and now the sport finally has the big, broad, unapologetically silly comedy it deserves. Apple Original Films is set to premiere The Dink globally from Apple TV on Friday, July 24, 2026, a summer sports comedy built around the collision of old school tennis pride and the paddle sport that has been steadily eating its lunch. Produced by Ben Stiller, who knows a thing or two about turning an underdog sport into a cultural moment after his work on Dodgeball, and led by a cast stacked with reliable comedic talent, the film arrives with the kind of pedigree that suggests Apple is treating this premise with far more care than a quick punchline about middle aged suburbanites and their paddles. Read More!