Sugar: Inside the Neo Noir Mystery That Hides an Alien Detective in Plain Sight, Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller Serve Up Apple TV’s Pickleball Comeback Comedy

The Challenge: Cutthroat Season 42 Is Back, and the Opening Episodes Waste No Time Getting Vicious

I had no warning that The Challenge was returning, and even less warning that it was returning in its Cutthroat format, yet here we are two episodes into Season 42 with an already loaded cast, a brutal new prize structure, and enough personal history bubbling under the surface to carry an entire season on its own. This is also the first season of the flagship series to leave MTV behind for good and live exclusively on Paramount+, following the lead of this year’s All Stars spinoff, and based on what the first two episodes have delivered, the move to streaming has done nothing to slow the show down. Read 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!

Ted Lasso started back up in Kansas City Missouri or Kansas?

I am a total pushover when it comes to sports and sentiment mixed together, and I’ve known this about myself for a while. Years ago I stumbled onto highlights of the 1980 US hockey team winning gold, the Miracle on Ice, and they had this song playing under the footage, Quincy Jones, “Just Once.” I’d never heard it before, or if I had, it never registered. Next thing I know I’m sitting there crying, looking around like, why am I like this. Nothing about my actual life was even happening in that moment. Just a song and some old footage and I was gone.

I bring that up because it’s exactly what happened watching the Season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, titled “Home.” I knew the whole thing was engineered to get me right in the chest. I could see the machinery working the entire time. And I cried anyway. Read The Sunset Daily Substack!

Below Deck Mediterranean Season 11 Has Officially Fallen Apart at the Seams, and Somehow That Is Making It Better Television Than Ever

There comes a point in every season of Below Deck Mediterranean when the crew stops functioning as a crew and starts functioning as a group of exhausted people barely holding a very expensive vessel together, and Season 11 has now arrived firmly at that point. Between a stunning midseason departure, a serious medical scare, and a leadership scramble that has exposed just how thin this deck team’s margin for error really is, the back half of this season aboard the M/Y Akira One has become appointment viewing for reasons that have very little to do with the usual charter guest antics and everything to do with the crew itself falling apart in real time. Read The Sunset Daily Substack!

The McBee Dynasty Went to Vegas, a Secret Wedding Happened, and the Fallout Is Still Rippling Through Bravo

There is a certain irony in admitting you had stepped back from a show only to find yourself pulled right back in the moment it delivers one of its biggest episodes yet, but that is exactly where The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys finds itself this week. Season three, episode eight, titled “What Happens in Vegas…,” sent the extended McBee clan to a joint bachelor and bachelorette trip that was clearly billed as a lighthearted send off before a wedding, and instead turned into one of the more consequential hours the family has filmed. A marriage happened that almost nobody in the audience saw coming, at least one relationship got a long overdue jolt of intimacy back into it, and the fallout from all of it has already started spilling into the real world in ways that connect this show to the wider Bravo universe more than it ever has before. Read 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!