IKEA Monkey

The Wrestling Episode is our cleverly-named feature wherein we watch non-wrestling shows with wrestling episodes and try to figure out what the hell’s going on in them. You’d be surprised how many there are. You can watch the episode on Netflix here. If you have any suggestions on shows that need to be featured in The Wrestling Episode, let us know in our comments section below.

I’ve Never Heard Of GLOW. What Is It?

Back in 1986, a sports announcer with a penchant for getting niche sports onto the Real Sports Channel used what he learned from working with Dick the Bruiser in Indianapolis to create G.L.O.W., the “gorgeous ladies of wrestling,” a televised women’s wrestling promotion that leaned all the way the hell in on stereotype and lowest common denominator entertainment. He brought in a film director to direct the show — a real film director, who’d done everything from blaxploitation pictures to filming United Nations informational videos to working with Orson Welles — who more or less turned the show into foxy boxing plus lowbrow Vaudeville comedy sketches. Incredibly the show was a hit, capitalizing on the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling boom of the day and even working in the most 1980s thing in history, the Chicago Bears’ ‘Superbowl Shuffle’ rapping, on literally every episode.

Back in the long long ago of the mid-2010s, a pair of writers and producers from shows like Weeds and Nurse Jackie watched a (really great) documentary about the promotion and, somehow, decided to turn it into prestige television. It worked, and now the very best original show on Netflix is a fictionalized account of a women’s wrestling Hee-Haw from the ’80s from people who never watched the old show but created a three-dimensional, pitch-perfect understanding of everything about it and the people who performed it. Just an absolute gem.

And There’s A Wrestling Episode?

I mean, technically every GLOW is a “wrestling episode,” but we’re going to focus on the creative Inception that is season 2 episode 8, ‘The Good Twin.’ Netflix’s GLOW is about the production of the real-life G.L.O.W. TV, but this episode is an episode of G.L.O.W. inside an episode of GLOW. Matches, vignettes, music videos, commercials, all of it.

Since this is still a new episode of a show not everyone has watched but might like to, I’m going to approach it based solely on the characters as portrayed in the episode, avoiding a lot of spoilers from season 1 and 2 for the characters playing the wrestlers. There are some incidental spoilers we can’t avoid, but mostly you’ll be fine reading ahead whether you’ve watched the show or not.

There are two matches and two major plots for the episode: Britannica, the smartest woman in the world, being turned into an idiot for love by the voodoo priestess Black Magic, and southern American hero Liberty Belle dealing with the abduction of her daughter, Savannah Rose, by the evil Russian Zoya the Destroyer. Honestly, now that I typed that out, it sounds like more like an episode of Lucha Underground than an episode of G.L.O.W. TV. The only real story arc that show ever got was “there are good girls and bad girls and they’re all kinda the same.”

But yeah, the first and easiest to explain story is that Britannica has a science lab because she’s smart, and she’s trying to turn a mannequin into a human being — “from hunk of plastic to hunk of man” — because that’s the only way she’s going to find love. She’s able to bring a rubber chicken to life but not Thomas The Mannequin … that is, until Black Magic teleports in. Black Magic offers her a deal: she’ll bring Thomas to life if Britannica gives up her brains, because to find true love with a man you have to give up all your other talents, skills and ambitions.

Britannica tries to safeguard herself by “downloading her brain” onto a very 1986 floppy disc and tying a string around her finger to remember. The only problem is that now she’s too stupid to remember anything, and she’s so busy having corny romantic love montage fun around scenic 1980s Los Angeles with Thomas that she mistakes it for an engagement ring.

How In The World Do You Book This?

… was that you throwing extremely dated shade at the World Book Encyclopedia for being the dumbed down version of Encyclopedia Britannica for Americans?

… Maybe?

All the clicks!

But to answer your question, a helpful neighbor — “It’s me, Lisa, the teenager who lives next door.” — notices the string on dumbed-down Britannica and reminds her that people tie strings around their fingers to remember things! Britannica’s robot assistant (who may or may not be full of drugs at the time of filming) presents the floppy, and Britannica “downloads” her brain by, uh … shoving the disc up her vagina.

Black Magic returns and realizes Britannica has reneged on the agreement by being smart enough to have crotch brains, or whatever, and turns Thomas back into a mannequin. Now they must have a wrestling match about it!

This Is The Best Wrestling Show Ever.

I know, right?

Britannica kicks Black Magic’s ass until Magic rips off Thomas’ mannequin arm and starts beating her up with it. When the referee tries to break it up, Black Magic possesses him with EVIL VOODOO MAGICKS and makes him believe he’s a cat. I love that these paragraphs just keep escalating. But yeah, there’s no way to come back from that, and another mystical voodoo dust cloud stuns Britannica and sets her up for a goddamn Dominator.

Black Magic is victorious, love is dead, and all Britannica’s left with is a literally broken ex-lover and some A+ wordplay.

So What Was That You Said About Russian Kidnapping?

In an attempt to rehab top babyface Liberty Belle after a really horribly booked angle with the Welfare Queen, Glow (again, the show based on the real show being adapted into a new show that is technically neither) had the evil Russian Zoya the Destroyer kidnap Liberty’s daughter, Savannah Rose Belle. In a scene with imagery straight out of the original show, Zoya calls home and tells her identical (and “good”) twin Olga about the kidnapping, saying she is keeping Savannah Rose “in fortress guarded by minion” and plans to “indoctrinate her into Marxist thought and sell her highest bidder.” My favorite thing of the entire episode may be them getting Zoya to say the word “minion,” since her Russian voice is basically Gru from Despicable Me.

Olga — whose “only discernible difference” from Zoya is a “foot deformity” and a pretty hilarious wig — decides that since she’s the good twin, she has to travel to America (via goat) and let poor Liberty Belle in on these new bits of information.

What’s Liberty Belle Up To?

Oh my God, I’m so happy you asked.

She’s leading her fellow GLOW Good Girls in a round of “Griefercize,” a grief-based aerobics program that looks to “sweat those sorrows away.” I just want to take a second to mention how fucking hilarious Betty Gilpin is in this episode. It’s seriously one of the best one-episode comedic performances I’ve ever seen. Here she is Griefercizing the pain away in what might be the best GIF I ever make:

Magical.

After a brief infatuation with the United States and our storied culture, Olga randomly confronts Liberty Belle in the shower and lets her know what’s up: her daughter is being held in a suspiciously familiar looking fortress filmed from very far away, guarded by Asian stereotype “Fortune Cookie” and Arab stereotype “Beirut the Mad Bomber.” It’s ONE VERSUS ALL, in case getting booed for beating a heel didn’t already make Liberty Belle seem enough like Roman Reigns.

So Liberty Belle Has To Break Into Griffith Observatory To Save Her Daughter?

Yes, but before that the entire cast of G.L.O.W. within Glow within GLOW literally band together to record a ‘We Are The World’-style super-song PSA about how you shouldn’t kidnap. It’s called ‘Don’t Kidnap.’ I’d say the best part is the fact that Zoya’s there singing with them for some reason, but the best part is ALL THE PARTS.

♫ Don’t kidnap
Kidnapping is wrong to do
Don’t kidnap
Kidnappers, we’re beggin’ you!
Let the children run and play
And the ones you’ve got, let them get away
Then go find something else to do ♫

Here’s the best version of the song currently available on YouTube, because those monsters at Netflix don’t have money in the budget for an HD upload. Keep an eye out for Liberty Belle once again hilariously killing it with her singing mannerisms.

But Then The Fortress

Liberty Belle manages to sneak past the guards when Fortune Cookie has to use the bathroom, and Beirut gets sleepy and daydreams about how she used to want to be a dancer. Inside, we find out that it’s been a trap, all along. Like kidnapping! Liberty Belle runs into Vicky Viking, who teams up with Fortune Cookie and Beirut to beat her down 3-on-1.

Of course, the heels make a crucial mistake when they tear up Liberty Belle’s “only picture” of Savannah Rose, causing her to use a Mother’s Love like Spartan Rage. Cue the entrance theme. Belle’s able to choke out Vicky, get the combination to the “safe” containing her daughter — a gym locker with the word SAFE written on it — and the greatest character on fictional television on a real television show you watch on your phone and computer runs away like the perfect mix of Disney princess and complete maniac.

Give her a damn Emmy, seriously.

Is That It?

Give her an Academy Award too, fuck it.

I Meant On The Show

Oh, not quite. To thank Olga for helping her rescue Savannah Rose, Liberty Belle gives her money to have foot surgery and fix her horrible deformity. But wait just a minute, folks, it turns out the doctors performing the surgery are EVIL and RUSSIAN and one of them is Zoya herself. That’s what you get for loving America, stupid!

This scene sets up the actual end reveal of the episode and carries some big emotional weight for the characters on the actual show, so I’ll leave it there and let you catch up and watch it for yourself.

Don’t Forget The Loose Ends!

Two, less important side stories:

1. While Olga’s reveling in American culture, she buys tickets to the Broadway show Cats. Since she can’t go because of the whole “remembering she came here to help a lady with a kidnapping,” Olga’s goat instead goes with GLOW girl Sheila The She-Wolf, who complains about there not being any actual cats in the show. The goat then attempts to sexually harass her into sleeping with it, so she kills and eats it. I’d joke about how absurd that entire paragraph is, but you read the rest of the column, didn’t you?

2. The other fun bit is a music video for Melrose, a “rip-off of Madonna” who sings about how she tried to take her friends to a club, they got turned away because they were ugly, so she gave them all makeovers. The highlight here is a billion percent Marc Maron as Sam Sylvia dad-dancing in the background for two seconds.

So What Have We Learned?

• GLOW is the best show on TV and it’s barely close
• Netflix should greenlight a GLOW spinoff that’s just every episode of the wrestling show they make
• Betty Gilpin is a national treasure who deserves all the awards
• You aren’t getting into a 1980s dance club if you don’t tease your hair and cover yourself in glitter
• You shouldn’t kidnap people
• seriously, don’t

Before Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan was a leader among far-right House Republicans, he was an assistant coach of the Ohio State men's wrestling team. During that period—from the late 80s to early 90s—the athletic facilities at the since-demolished Larkins Hall reportedly served as a hotbed of furtive sexual activity, including men having sex in stairwells and touching each other in the showers. One former wrestler told the Associated Press that "creepy people" lingered in abundance; another said that he faced "a gauntlet of sexual deviancy" after practice. Worst of all, team doctor Richard Strauss (who killed himself in 2005) allegedly sexually abused many athletes across many sports, groping them during exams, hitting on them, and staring at them while they showered. (Ohio State is investigating these allegations.)

Jordan is not accused of anything like that. Instead, he has been accused by several former wrestlers of knowing about what was going on and failing to act. But even more than the abuse itself, it's how Jordan—and the Republican Party more generally—has responded to the questions about it that has created the deeply disturbing scandal hanging over Congress.

"He knew about it because it was an everyday occurrence,” David Range, the seventh wrestler to speak out publicly against Jordan, told the Washington Post of the abuse. Some former wrestlers have defended Jordan, but even one of those admitted that Strauss's misconduct was so widely known that wrestlers would joke about it in the locker room: "If someone said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go see Doc Strauss,’ it would be like, ‘Oh, prepare to drop your pants.’” Two wrestlers said that a team member had come to Jordan directly and complained that Strauss tried to pull his pants down when he came to see the doctor for a thumb injury.

If these accounts are true, they paint a portrait of an institution that was failing these young men, an institution that Jordan was a part of. Of course, that does not make him singularly responsible for the wrongs done to them. He was in his 20s when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State, a young man himself, and it's not clear his failure to report the talk he heard would doom his political career. Paul Waldman at the Post suggested that Jordan could have ended the story by saying, "I wish I had understood then what I understand now. I and many other people didn’t take what was happening with that doctor seriously enough."

Instead, Jordan, the far-right Freedom Caucus that he is a part of, and the GOP more broadly have accused the wrestlers who have come forward with harrowing accounts of abuse of lying. House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose office initially said he would wait for the results of the Ohio State investigation, called Jordan “a man of honesty and a man of integrity” on Wednesday while rejecting calls for an ethics investigation into him. "The ethics committee here investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress,” Ryan said.

That argument may make sense, but other Jordan allies have gone much further. On Wednesday, Matt Gaetz, a trollish pro-Trump congressman from Florida, showed up on Lou Dobbs's Fox Business Network and declared, "There are people that have some loose affiliation with the deep state that are out to get Jim Jordan." Improbably, he linked the accusations to Jordan's ongoing work to discredit the FBI investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia. "These attacks against him are a direct consequence of the outstanding oversight work that Jim Jordan is doing," Gaetz said to a sympathetic Dobbs. "If Jim Jordan was not after the Department of Justice and the FBI, he would not be dealing with these allegations. They are totally false. I am confident in that to my core."

Jordan himself doesn't appear to have used the words "deep state" to fight the allegations, but said in a Fox News interview that “the timing is suspect” since he may run to replace Ryan as speaker. And a host of right-wing media outlets and fellow wingnut Congressman Louie Gohmert have thrown around accusations that the whole thing was was engineered by a Democrat-linked DC law firm. The over-the-top response has reached the point where Jordan came out on Twitter to attack CNN for a routine act of journalism:

Both parties instinctively defend their allies in times of scandal, but there really is a difference in how Democrats and Republicans act in these situations. Al Franken's resignation from the Senate is still controversial among Democrats, but there was a lively public debate about what he should do in the face of allegations he had groped and harassed women over a long period of time. There were conspiracy theories that Franken was being targeted by a right-wing smear operation, but that unfounded speculation was mostly confined to Twitter, not blasted out on cable news by sitting congressmen. In Jordan's case, Republicans have largely closed ranks and refused to admit maybe Jordan messed up as a young man.

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This should come as no surprise after the GOP backed Roy Moore in last year's Alabama Senate race even after he was accused of sexual assault. Still, the hyper-partisanship is strange here because it seems so unnecessary. Even if Jordan had admitted he was at fault all those years ago, he would have likely cruised to reelection in his very conservative district—he's still likely to win, actually. So why has the right turned this into such a firestorm? Why deny these allegations so aggressively when an ongoing investigation could still very well find more evidence Jordan did in fact know about the abuse?

One explanation is that the Republican Party now believes that extremism in defense of the conservative movement is no vice. Even if it is conclusively proved that Jordan lied, the same people crying "deep state" will simply cry "fake news." The right-wing base will not punish politicians for pushing despicable conspiracy theories about sexual abuse victims in the same way they did not punish Donald Trump for spreading a racist birther conspiracy theory about Barack Obama for years, or for being accused of serial sexual violence himself. There will never be a "Have you no decency, sir?" moment because duh, people like Gaetz clearly fucking do not. They may think that this kind of insane full-court-press response to the scandal helps them, because it allows them to paint powerful conservative politicians as the real victims here. The lesson Trump has taught Republicans is that there is no reason to apologize for anything ever. It's nothing but grievance and bad faith all the way down.

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Art director Yuni Yoshida has created these pixelated food photos by manually cutting up the foods in question into little cubes. Love these.

See also censored fruit.

Tags: food   Yuni Yoshida

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A woman who was found dead Tuesday inside a trash compactor near an upscale New York City apartment building -- where Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner lived -- fell down the chute while intoxicated, police said.

My friends, I’ve had this dream for more than a decade now—a dream which I’ve invited you all to share with me. In six months we begin construction of Delta City, where Old Hollywood now stands. Old Hollywood has a cancer. The cancer is unfamiliar intellectual property. It must be cut out. At MGM, we believe James Bond movies are only part of the solution. We need a 24-hour-a-day movie franchise. A movie franchise that doesn’t need to eat or sleep. A movie franchise with superior firepower and the resources to use it. My friends, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the future of cinema: another RoboCop movie!

The entertaining rooms meant to make us social actually foster isolation

For a recent study, UCLA-affiliated researchers in fields ranging from anthropology to sociology used cameras to record in great detail how 32 dual-income families living in the Los Angeles area used their homes. Their findings link real data to something about which I have been yelling into the void for years: Nobody is actually using their formal living and dining rooms. Families actually spend most of their time in the kitchen and the informal living room or den.

Yet we continue to build these wastes of space because many Americans still want that extra square footage, and for a long time, that want has been miscategorized as a need.

Any big-house ethnographer can see this in episodes of shows like House Hunters, where the prospective buyers will say infuriating things like, “I like having Thanksgiving at my house every other year, so I’m going to need a chef-level kitchen and a two-story deck.” This claim has about as much substance as another common House Hunters trope: “I like this house, but that easily repaintable green half-bath is a deal-breaker for me.”

TV hate-watching aside, it’s important for us as homebuyers, -builders, and renters to be able to discern a need versus a want (or as my mother says, an “I cannot” versus an “I don’t want to”) when looking for a potential home. “Entertaining space,” as it is marketed by builders, realtors, media, and popular culture, is, more often than not, a want that has been rationalized and internalized, and thus feels like a need. But now that science proves that nobody uses their formal living and dining spaces, it’s time for us to sit down and have a struggle session with “space for entertaining.”

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Elite houses, from the domus of a Pompeian politician to the Palace of Versailles, from Biltmore to McMansions in subdivisions named Biltmore, have always maintained a separation of formal and informal space. The absence of all that extra space (combined with the standardization and mass production of building materials) is what made detached single-family housing inexpensive and accessible to different classes in the first place. One of the simplest reasons so many clamor for formal spaces is because they are a signifier of wealth and prestige, a sign of having “made it.”

These spaces are frequently articulated in a house’s architecture, partly for their symbolic value. These elements show up in exaggerated forms: The irregular massing and enormous windows of two-story foyers and great rooms, as well as formal dining rooms (often nested in a separate mass or articulated with wall-to-wall windows) facing the street, are such common McMansion features that yours truly has, over the past three years, immortalized them with a series of pejorative terms (Lawyer Foyer! Dining Turret!). If these rooms were designed for their actual practical purposes (entertaining) instead of being architectural megaphones for their owners’ money, they wouldn’t be cavernous spaces where it takes 50 steps to walk from the refrigerator to the oven, where the windows are so large that the heating/cooling bill is hundreds of dollars with an added bonus of being able to get a sunburn inside, and where the mere clinking of plates (much less a conversation) mercilessly reverberates through 3,000 square feet of pure echo.

The ironic inefficiency of hyper-exaggerated high-end entertaining spaces belies a truth: These spaces aren’t really designed for entertaining. They’re designed for impressing others. And not just impressing others: After all, it’s general politeness to compliment a host on their home no matter how impressive it is. The real goal, deeply embedded in these oversized, over-elaborate houses, is not for guests to say, “Oh wow, this is nice,” but to make them think, “Oh wow, this is nicer than what I have and now I feel jealous and insecure.” In true American irony, these giant “social” spaces (and McMansions in general) are birthed from a deeply antisocial sentiment: making others feel small. Considering that so often our guests are members of our own family adds another layer of darkness to the equation.

Of course, keeping up with (or surpassing) the Joneses isn’t the only motivation for designing homes with formal entertaining spaces. Most people don’t consciously want to crush the self-worth of their visitors. This is where the concept of “want” versus “need” comes back into play.

Entertaining space is very cleverly marketed and popularized by home and garden media entities like Houzz, DIY, and HGTV in a way that makes it feel like an essential. It’s no coincidence that most of the ads on these sites and channels are for mortgages, home decor, builders, real estate companies, and Home Depot. All of these entities benefit from your insecurity about the efficiency and worthiness of your home, and they also benefit when you make your home bigger or buy (and furnish) a bigger home.

Entertaining is emotional, as anyone who has fretted about getting the house “presentable” for guests—or seen someone else fret about the same—can attest. When we allow others into our space, we become vulnerable. We want to be good hosts, for everything to go as smoothly as possible, and for our guests to be happy and comfortable. Often, this is because they are our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family—people we care about and respect, and whose care and respect we want in return. But in all the hubbub of hosting, we sometimes forget that friends and family already care about us—they’re there to see us, not our houses, nor our stuff. Besides, even if we’re hosting work events or fundraisers where some of the guests are strangers, nobody is going to be so impolite as to call out a lack of specific home features like high great-room ceilings. Even if they were to do such a thing, fear of isolated rudeness hardly justifies building thousands of square feet of entertaining space or going into debt getting a bigger house.

At the same time, many of us feel compelled to entertain. We all want to feel like power hosts, extremely likeable and sociable people who are the life of the party. We need that second dining room because it is an architectural manifestation of our above-average social lives and unnaturally large circles of friends and admirers. But not all of us were built for entertaining in the first place, and perhaps we should examine ourselves and our social preferences before building massive spaces for people we most likely won’t ever see. We think our spaces will create the lives we want: If only we had a great room with an expansive deck, we could finally host big, sophisticated, straight-out-of-Mad Men parties. That built-in Tiki bar will definitely make us reconnect with all of our friends from college, and maybe if we had that massive kitchen, Aunt Jane and Dad would finally stop arguing about politics at Thanksgiving and peace would descend upon the entire world. These sentiments reflect two commonly held American cultural beliefs: that we can solve our problems (or at least feel better about them) by simply buying things, and that the best social lives are ones that involve hosting grand parties. But we can entertain where and how we want to. It can be as simple as inviting a few people over to hang out in the spaces we already have.

Even if we do use our great rooms and formal dining rooms to host Thanksgiving and entertain those circles of friends, we’re still designing our spaces for maximum occupancy instead of the average family of three to five people who actually live in them every day. If you build a 4,000-square-foot house for a family of four, that’s 1,000 square feet per person, and if the house were being used to its full potential, nobody would ever see each other. There’s a reason why the UCLA study showed that the most-used common areas are the kitchen and the informal living room: People like to spend time together eating and watching TV, without the glare from those two-story great-room windows. Large, unused spaces designed for social functions foster isolation instead.

Designing our homes for the worst-case scenario—a hundred people are all at our house for a party and the party is also a tribunal where all of our guests publicly judge us—prioritizes guests who spend a very short amount of time in our houses over our own daily needs. As the UCLA study indicates, we vastly overestimate how much we will be entertaining, and this is especially true for houses in neighborhoods where a 30-minute drive is required of anyone who wants to visit in the first place.

When planning or searching for your next home, prioritize (and be honest with yourself here) the spaces you and your family will use every day. More often than not, a dining room is all the extra space you’ll need for major holidays. If your living room, dining room, and kitchen are designed for heavy and practical use, they will easily accommodate a few extra people.

And no matter the layout of your chosen home, if you want to entertain, entertain! Nobody is stopping you from being the savvy socialite you want to see in the world, and you definitely don’t need 1,000 square feet of otherwise useless space to have your friends over for drinks. In college, you likely hosted great parties where everyone managed to fit in your tiny and probably much more rundown apartment. Channel that earlier self, and you might find that your house has very little to do with it.

Kate Wagner is the creator of the viral blog McMansion Hell, which roasts the world’s ugliest houses. Outside of McMansion Hell, Kate is a guest contributor for Curbed, 99 Percent Invisible, and Atlas Obscura. In addition to writing about architecture, Kate has worked extensively as a sound engineer and is currently a graduate student in Acoustics as part of a joint program between Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory, where her focus is in architectural acoustics.

Remember when someone, somewhere, for some godforsaken reason, decided it was a good idea to make The Handmaid’s Tale-branded wines? I know days feel like weeks now, and weeks feel like years, so in case you’ve already forgotten, that was yesterday. We were mad about it. Lots of people were mad about it. It was deeply…

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A 48-year-old woman’s body has been found stuffed inside a trash compactor outside an upscale apartment building in New York City.

It’s more than likely that were it not for the blessings of the TV gods, Nailed It! host Nicole Byer and head judge Jacques Torres would have never met. She’s a raunchy comedian best known for her (hilarious) semi-autobiographical sitcom Loosely Exactly Nicole, a series about an aspiring young actress that was canceled after its debut season on MTV and now streams on Facebook Watch. He’s a legendary French pastry chef and chocolatier who has as many awards and distinctions as there are ways to mix flour, butter, and sugar. Their unlikely pairing—and breezy pseudo-flirtations—is the secret sauce that gives Nailed It! much of its charm and watchability long after the Netflix show wears out its core gimmick.

American soybean farmers are fretting about becoming a casualty of Donald Trump’s brewing trade war with China, which happens to be their most important export market. Prices for the crop took a dive after tensions between the U.S. and Beijing began to flare up earlier this year, and in June, the People’s Republic finally placed a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans and other agricultural products in retaliation for the White House’s duties on Chinese goods.

I love terrible movies. Partly, this is a matter of convenience: Most movies aren't great, and this is especially true of movies on Netflix. As I write this, there are ten movies recommended to me in the Netflix "trending now" section. Of those, only three (Deadpool, Ghostbusters, and Maggie's Plan) have "certified fresh" ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. But while I could easily while away a couple hours watching a movie I don't care about, this seems like a waste. Why watch something mediocre when you can watch something bad enough to be entertaining?

But it's still tricky to find those truly terrible turds in the giant punchbowl of mediocrity that is Netflix. We've run list after list of "good" movies available for streaming—from documentaries to films to bone to—but where are our lists of absolutely dreadful failures?

To help rectify that inequity, I decided to spend an entire day, from waking to sleeping, exploring the depths of Netflix in an effort to find the worst movie on the service. Here's how that went.

Before We Go

I started my day with Before We Go, which had been suggested by a coworker when I asked for bad movie ideas in our office group chat.

Directed by and starring (always a red flag) Chris Evans, the movie tells the story of an interior designer and a trumpet player who fall in love over the course of a night in New York. It is somehow less interesting than that description makes it sound.

The two leads are more uncharismatic than I knew it was possible for people to be. They are whirling black holes of charisma who, once in range of each other’s gravitational pull, form a binary black hole, sucking all charisma out of the surrounding galaxies and sending out powerful waves of non-charisma to radiate across the universe for billions of years.

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According to IMDb, Evans wanted to learn to play the trumpet for this movie, but stopped when he learned how difficult it was. Which is a perfect metaphor for this entire thing. It feels like it was made by people who had an idea, then immediately lost all interest once they realized there'd be effort involved.

But, unfortunately, it exists in that extremely unfortunate spot between “good” and “bad enough to be interesting.” It was definitely not a serious contender for worst movie on Netflix, so I turned it off about 40 minutes in.

The Bomb

I decided to have a google around to see what the internet thinks the worst movie on Netflix is, which took me to a subreddit called the Worst of Netflix. I went with a movie called The Bomb, as it was at the top of the page. The person who posted it described it as “an hour long of imagery of [sic] nuclear devices set to shitty music.”

The movie is an art film made up of archival footage relating to nuclear weapons set to ambient music. About 15 minutes in, after watching footage of the Earth from space, North Korean soldiers goose-stepping, and missiles being launched, I realized I was kinda into it.

As there are only so many hours in the day and I had a mission, I turned it off and went back to the Worst of Netflix subreddit.

But my quest hit a snag. Though there were many truly awful sounding movies listed, every single thing I looked up seemed to have been removed from Netflix.

InAPPropriate Comedy, a sketch comedy show directed by the Shamwow Guy that was widely accused of being racist? Gone. Avalanche Sharks, a horror film about, well, what it sounds like it’s about? Also gone.

I was beginning to worry that, due to the constant reduction in the number of movies on Netflix, all the real garbage had been purged. Was the worst movie on Netflix really just a tedious Chris Evans movie, rather than anything earth-shatteringly awful?

But then a miracle came along.

Leo the Lion

Via the Worst of Netlix, I found Leo the Lion, an Italian animated movie that was distributed in the US by the Weinstein Company. Despite looking like it was animated using a Myspace layout editor, the movie amazingly came out in 2013.

It appears to be a piece of propaganda relating to vegetarianism, but I’m not sure what side of the issue it comes down on. Leo, the movie’s main character, is a vegetarian lion. And I think we’re meant to like Leo. But Leo also appears to be extremely malnourished, with ribs that poke out and a mane that’s scragglier than the other lions.

The basic plot is that Leo embarks on a journey to find something called the Heart of the Jungle, which his mother told him to find right before she was swept over a waterfall to her death. Along the way, there are time jumps that make no sense. Scenes and characters lifted directly from the Lion King. A zebra that breastfeeds several of the movie's non-zebra main characters. A subplot involving tangled elephant tails that is resolved without ever being introduced. Somewhat problematically, there are monkeys wearing Rastafarian beanies. At several points, characters speak in rhyming couplets for no reason. In one part, as you can see in the embedded video below, Leo sings a song about vegetarianism while riding a mine cart through space.

Towards the end of the movie, Leo finds the Heart of the Jungle. But I’m not entirely sure what the Heart of the Jungle is. At first Leo yells, “I’m not afraid anymore! The heart is within. The heart is within!” Which suggests the Heart of the Jungle was actually inside of him all along. But then he adds “Come on, everyone, get on the rainbow! We all have the Heart of the Jungle inside of us!” and the whole gang boards a rainbow to enter a completely unremarkable cavern that he also refers to as the Heart of the Jungle. So which is it, Leo? Is the Heart of the Jungle in all of us? Or is it a cavern? Is it both?

The movie ends with Leo fathering some elephant/lion hybrid babies with an elephant (!!!).

According to the end credits, the film was made with the assistance of the Italian Minister of Culture. Which suggests this movie was partially funded by Italian taxpayers? If that is the case, thank you for this gift, people of Italy.

Make sure you stick around until the end. There’s a short post-credits sequence that shows two monkeys running from Leo in fear. Leo then looks at the camera and says “shh” before it fades to black. The only possible interpretation I can think of is that Leo isn’t actually a vegetarian, and was about to eat his monkey friends. Chilling.

Bitcoin Heist

Bitcoin Heist is a Vietnamese movie that is, unsurprisingly, about a heist of Bitcoins. I started watching it because it sounded silly from the title.

But, somehow, the filmmakers achieved the impossible task of making Bitcoin transactions interesting to watch. About 20 minutes (and several gunfights) in, I decided this movie was actually kind of fine, and moved on to shittier things.

Hot Bot

After clicking around Netflix's menus for a few minutes, I ended up on Hot Bot.

I haven't fact-checked this, but I am 100 percent certain the movie was written by a very horny, very annoying teenage boy who time-traveled from the mid 80s. There is no way an adult of normal horniness levels in the 2010s could have generated a movie as far removed from the zeitgeist as this one.

There are three main female characters in the movie: A hot sex robot that wants to fuck the male lead, a shrill Christian mother who wants to stop the male lead from having sex, and a hot teenage girl who is obsessed with Star Trek and wants to fuck the male lead.

The majority of the jokes in the movie aren't really jokes per se, as much as acknowledgements that things like dildos, merkins, and anal cavity searches exist.

There's also a little girl in the movie, and it's mentioned that she likes Care Bears and Rainbow Brite—references nobody would make if they'd been alive in the last 30 years. A true mystery.

Outcast

I watched Outcast because it showed up on a couple of “worst movies on Netflix” lists, and it stars Nicolas Cage. As Cage is a kind of beloved mascot of bad cinema, I figured I should watch at least one of his films so I could put him in the thumbnail of this article.

The movie stars Cage and Hayden Christensen, of “I don’t like sand” fame. It’s set in ancient China, where, for some reason, everyone speaks English. It’s not clear if they’re meant to actually be speaking English or if they’re speaking a different language and it’s just presented as English for the benefit of the viewer, like on Rugrats.

Anyway. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is bad about this movie. The acting was fine. The production design and sets were fine. The script was fine. Minus a couple of extremely questionable lace fronts, the costumes were fine.

But for some reason, it didn’t work. It was unremarkable in every conceivable way. I could feel my brain deleting it from my memory as I was watching. Without the notes I made while watching, I wouldn’t be able to begin to describe what the plot is. I might have even forgotten I watched it.

There’s a scene towards the end of the movie where Nicolas Cage launches into full-on Nicolas Cage mode, and hammily screams lines like “Blackguards are as thick as flies on a farting goat’s arse because of you!” while wearing an eyepatch and rubbing a snake against his face. That has some camp value. But it’s not worth sitting through the whole movie just to get to that.

Check Point

I clicked on Check Point because its description—"Check Point exposes real life terrorism and the sleeper cells they represent in America”—sounded promising.

It took me to a part of Netflix I had no idea existed. A genre of films with identical thumbnails and near identical plots. I can only describe it as “aspirational masc.”

The movie was, thankfully, bad enough to be fun. It tells the story of a group of terrorists attempting to take over the US via a small North Carolina town, and appears to have been shot for about $100. The acting is terrible. Everything looks like shit. The exposition is some of the laziest ever committed to film—one scene starts with a character saying, “Roy has been my best friend for years and tonight we’re celebrating his going-away party.”

It's relentlessly and hilariously manly. The soundtrack consists of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and cheaper bands that sound like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Men call each other "brother" like the Rock and ride Harleys. For reasons that are never specified, the female lead strips down to her underwear to assemble her rifle before the movie’s final battle. Goldberg is in it. There are lengthy, wistful speeches about the honor of Marines and the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In the special thanks section of the end credits, “God almighty” and “all the men and women in uniform” are thanked. It is a feature-length adaptation of the phrase “no homo.”

I also found it almost impossible to follow, because the filmmakers made the very bizarre choice of casting multiple people who look almost identical. At several points, it gave the illusion that characters were fighting their clones:

In one of the most incredible sequences in cinematic history, the movie ends with a terrorist shooting down an American flag with a bazooka, which the good guys hoist back up before the screen fades to a Ronald Reagan quote. Perfection.

Contract to Kill

Continuing with the laughable manliness, I moved on to Contract to Kill, a movie produced by and starring Steven Seagal.

The movie starts with Seagal in a bar in Juárez, Mexico. The bar, which is seedy, is literally called Seedy Bar. Seagal, as always, looks like an erection with Dracula drawn on it. Seagal’s character has a conversation with some guy from the US government, who explains the evil scheme that he needs Seagal’s assistance in stopping. Which is… a lot of things. There are many, many, many different elements involved. The government guy says things like “As you know, the CIA, in concert with the DEA and the FBI, have been after these animals. Each belong to different groups, though, split between Al-Nusra Front and Hezbollah.” And he keeps expanding it to include more people. The DoJ is thrown in there. And al Qaeda. And ISIS. And Native American trackers. And ICE. And the Sonora Cartel. And only Steven Seagal can stop the very convoluted thing they’re trying to do.

Despite being set in a variety of locations around the world, the movie was shot in Romania. No expense was spared in recreating the film’s exotic locations, though. For instance, in a scene set in Istanbul, there are little signs on the doors that say “Istanbul” and framed photos of Istanbul landmarks on the walls.

Perhaps the least believable thing about this movie is the way it treats Seagal. His character is never shown as having anything even resembling a flaw. He’s perfect. Every character is in awe of him and/or wants to fuck him. Throughout the film, he’s shown dispatching goon after goon, rarely moving anything other than his arms, and never being hit himself. Despite his lack of movement, you can feel the exhaustion radiating off him through the screen. At one point, there’s a scene of him running that I’m pretty sure was shot with him standing still in front of a green screen.

I say this is unbelievable because outside of the confines of Steven Seagal movies, Steven Seagal truly fucking sucks. He’s known as a frequent liar. He’s been accused of physically assaulting his co-stars. He was once accused of killing a puppy and a bunch of chickens with a tank. He was involved with an alleged pyramid scheme. He makes dancehall music where he unironically uses the word “punani.” He hangs out with Alexander Lukashenko, Ramzan Kadyrov, and Vladamir Putin. He’s a shill for an arms company. And, most importantly, he’s been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple parties.

I know movies are meant to be an escape from reality. As a viewing public, we’re normally able to suspend our disbelief to watch dinosaurs come back to life and alien races battle in space. But expecting a viewer to look at Seagal and see anything other than a bulletproof kimono-wrapped pile of shit is probably too much for the medium.

The Ridiculous Six

I went with this one because I figured this list wouldn’t be complete without Adam Sandler, and this has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the Sandler movies on Netflix (0 percent).

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that watching The Ridiculous Six was an extremely unenjoyable experience. But calling it a bad movie feels unfair, because I don’t think any of the people involved were trying to make a movie. They were trying to make an Adam Sandler movie. Judging this thing by the usual standards you’d judge a movie by would be like writing a video game review about a McFlurry. And I’m not sure I’m qualified to judge whether this is a good Adam Sandler movie or a bad Adam Sandler movie, because I’m not who Adam Sandler movies are made for.

I would rate it a strong ??? out of 10.

Superfast!

I came across Superfast! while poking through Netflix categories. When I learned that it’s a parody of the Fast and Furious franchise from the directors of Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Disaster Movie, I knew it would be fucking awful. I also knew that by this point in my day, it was last thing in the world I wanted to watch.

I was grumpy and tired and had cabin fever. Thanks to the stuff I was watching, every minute felt like it lasted ten. And I knew Superfast! wasn’t going to be bad enough to be funny or inadvertently entertaining. I knew it would just be bad bad bad bad bad.

I attempted to form an argument to myself that, as a parody, it didn’t qualify for this article. I also considered pretending I hadn’t noticed its existence. But. In the interest of journalism, I knew I had to watch. And I was right. The movie is bad bad bad bad bad.

Almost all of the humor in the movie comes from men doing things that are not traditionally thought of as being masculine. There are jokes where male characters talk about skincare, refer to their ballet training, complain about pillow softness, and listen to Justin Bieber. The rest of the movie's jokes are jarringly obvious pop cultural references. There are two scenes where a character dances the Robot.

This was the first movie that actually made me angry with its shittiness. My fists clenched into balls several times. I could physically feel the movie on top of me, like a weighted blanket.

Toward the end of the movie, my boyfriend got home from work and made several enquiries as to whether I was mad at him. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You just seem kinda off.”

Yoga Hosers

This is the movie that pushed me over the edge.

It's a Kevin Smith movie about two girls who work in a Canadian convenience store and have to save Canada from Nazi bratwursts that kill people by crawling up their asses. I hope that description doesn’t make it seem like it’s some kind of wacky romp. Despite a lot of effort to make it exactly that, the end result is a painful, austere slog.

The movie apparently stemmed from someone jokingly saying the term “yoga hosers” on Kevin Smith’s podcast while talking about a Canadian yoga studio. Smith apparently found this so funny, he used millions of dollars and the time of thousands of people to adapt it into an entire movie.

If you don't find the previous paragraph to be hilarious, this movie is not for you. People saying “yoga hosers” is as funny as the movie gets. The term is said over and over again. Each time it is meant to be funny. Each time it is not.

The money and time was all I could think about while watching it. It would be one thing if you’d made something shitty and everyone was happy with it because it made them a ton of money, but this movie cost $5 million and made back less than half of that.

I couldn't stop thinking about how it would feel to be Kevin Smith. So much is tied up in you, as the creator of a movie. You’re responsible for the time and energies of everyone involved. And then you make something like this. And everyone involved in it sees it. And everyone reads the reviews. And everyone sees the box office numbers. And all of these people—the prop designers, the foley mixer, the extras, the production accountants, Haley Joel Osment—are all tied to your failure and the money and time you wasted.

I genuinely don’t think I could take it. I’ve had meltdowns when thinking about the money I was wasting when I’ve over ordered at fast food restaurants.

Had I made this movie, I would find it impossible not to think about the other ways the money and time could have been spent. The homeless who could’ve been fed, the refugees rehomed, the sick animals treated, the young filmmakers funded, the literally anything but an unfunny movie about Nazi bratwursts.

The faces of the impoverished people of the world would haunt my dreams until my dying breath.

But, luckily for Kevin Smith, it seems his ego is as big as his jorts. Towards the end of the movie, it’s revealed that the whole thing is a shot at his critics. It ends with a monster being unleashed upon the world to kill critics because, as Johnny Depp’s character explains, “Haters have to hate; douches have to douche.” Smith seems to genuinely believe that critics are responsible for the negative reviews his films receive, rather than the films themselves.

Which is a good energy to go through life with, I guess.

Killing Season

By the time I started Killing Season, a 2013 film about a Serbian war criminal starring John Travolta and Robert De Niro, I was desperate to throw in the towel and turn off Netflix. But I felt like I needed something enjoyably bad to end my day on, rather than the anxiety-inducing nightmare of Yoga Hosers.

Thankfully, Travolta made the unusual choice of going with the world's weirdest beard for this movie. It immediately lifted my spirits. It's wonderful. It looks like he fell asleep at a party and someone drew it on him with a Sharpie.

The film opens with Travolta speaking in what the subtitles identifies as Foreign Language. I missed most of the exposition that sets up the plot because I couldn't stop staring at Travolta, who looks like a Wooly Willy owned by a neat freak.

We’re introduced to De Niro’s character at the cabin he lives at in the woods of rural America. While out for a drive, he encounters Travolta, whose beard looks like the chin strap for a wrestling helmet.

Some stuff happens, and Travolta starts trying to hunt De Niro with a bow and arrow. Throughout this process, he looks like that mugshot of the guy who got arrested for huffing spray paint.

The movie is unbelievably and hilariously violent. There’s an amazingly grisly scene where De Niro gets shot through the leg with an arrow, and is then forced to thread twine through the wound before being suspended from the ceiling by the hole in his leg by Travolta, who looks like Playmobil.

In another unintentionally hilarious act of violence, De Niro shoots Travolta through the face with an arrow, then ties him to a table and waterboards him with a mixture of lemon juice and salt. His face is covered on account of the waterboarding, so you can’t see his beard. But it’s safe to assume he looks like his eyepatch slipped down.

Then a bunch of non-beard related stuff happened, and the movie ended.

Conclusion

By this point, I had been watching awful movies for over 18 hours. I was annoyed, delirious, and beginning to lose faith in both art and humanity.

I was also not any closer to finding the worst movie on Netflix. How can you rank these movies against each other when they're all awful in their own unique ways? Is it fair to judge something starring Oscar winners that cost millions of dollars by the same standards as a no-budget film about North Carolinan terrorists?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, perhaps the Heart of the Jungle was inside of us all along. (And is also possibly a cave or something?)

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Instagram.

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All you need to know about this year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

1:20 p.m.: IT’S 74 DOGS. Your final standings:

1. Joey Chestnut, 74 hot dogs and buns
2. Carmen Cincotti, 63 HDB
3. Darron Breeden, 43 HDB

DNP: Eater X, due to cowardice. PROVE ME WRONG, TIM JANUS.

1:10 p.m.: As the cornhole wages on, we anxiously await the official results from the MLE. Did Joey Chestnut win dominantly? OR SUPER DOMINANTLY?

1:00 p.m.: Whoa. Turns out the judges on the scene were WAY OFF. ESPN pegs him at 74 dogs, breaking his own world and Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest records in the process. Will it stand? The broadcast is going off the air. There is not streaming option. We’re now forced to watch professional cornhole. WHAT A CLIFFHANGER.

12:57 p.m.: Joey Chestnut cruised to victory and his 11th mustard yellow belt in 12 years, but he failed to break his Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest record. His 64 HDB was 19 more than second-place Carmen Cincotti

12: 52 p.m.: At the halfway point, Joey Chestnut has taken the lead with 38 hot dogs and buns. No one else is within eight HDB. Carmen Cincotti, the world’s No. 2 eater, has barely cracked the top four.

12:48 p.m. Through one minute, Matt Stonie leads with eight dogs. Five other men have eaten at least six. This is the peak of athleticism. Prove me wrong.

12:47 p.m.: Everyone’s out on the stage, most expertly feted by George Shea. WE ARE UNDERWAY WITH THE GREATEST SPECTACLE IN SPORT.

12:38 p.m.: George Shea has taken the stage and our introductions are underway. I cannot recommend watching these enough. Graham is a poet. Notable commentary:

“Competitive eating it the crucible through which greatness is formed, and the evidence lies before us now.”

“The difficulty in his marriage began after he named his children mild, medium, and hot, but he will not let his domestic issues get in the way of the issue at hand.”

“His good cholesterol is low. His bad cholesterol is high. And his BMI is borderline presidential”

“He stands before us like Hercules himself. Albeit a large, bald Hercules at an eating contest.”

“When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only. Then we drink it with black. Then we drink it decaf. Then we die.

Our next eater is at decaf.” - on 74-year-old Rich LeFevre

“If he succeeds here today, we will credit the Tallahassee Two-Hand, a technique so dangerous it was outlawed in the 1930s. He’s bringing it back.”

“He was born on the 4th of July, but to him this day is a vessel of pain...today he will repay one crime with another.”

“When all the world’s languages are poured into a single bowl, the word that unites us will be freedom.” [Ed. note: ...what?]

and, of course, a rap battle with Eric “Badlands” Booker, who was out of breath after walking up exactly 14 steps to the stage.

12:31 p.m.: The focus now shifts to Japanese debutant Max Suzuki, who simultaneously looks both 13 and 93. He claims Kobayashi is his hero and ate 42 hot dogs to qualify for the 2018 event. I am very, very excited by his enthusiasm.

12:25 p.m.: Joey Chestnut: “If I’m going out there to eat hot dogs, I’m not going out there to get third or fourth, I’m going out there to win.”

Well, yes, Joey. That’s the point of a competition. I assumed you knew that.

12:17 p.m.: Time for a puff piece on Carmen Cincotti. It’s fine. We’ve got an hour-long broadcast for a 10-minute event. The Cincottis seem nice. Like they can eat a lot.

Noon: The ESPN2 broadcast is live, and the greatest spectacle in sport is about to begin. The contest itself won’t start for another half hour, but that just gives George Gray more time to hype up this year’s field, which features 20+...well, I don’t like to throw the word “hero” around that often, but...

heroes.

21 heroes. And not that coward Eater X, who slunk away into retirement rather than face the crowd at Surf and Stillwell one more time and come up short. FACE ME, EATER X. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

11:19 a.m.: Miki Sudo is champion once again, but Sonya Thomas’s 45 HDB record will stand. Sudo kept a furious pace throughout the 10 minute competition to leave a talented field in her dust to claim her fifth-straight Nathan’s title. She ends her day with 36 dogs. Michelle Lesco took home second with an unofficial 27, while Sonya Thomas took third at 26.

The win entitles Sudo another year of calling herself the greatest American alive. God bless.

11:14 a.m.: After five minutes, four-time champion Miki Sudo could be in trouble. She’s in a jousting battle with Michelle Lesco, Juliet Lee, and Sonya Thomas, who are each within three HDBs of the reigning champ.

11:10 a.m.: We’re off, and the men flipping the scorecards behind the women aren’t living up to expectations. One cannot figure out which side of his flipboard is “ones” and which is “tens,” so Sonya Thomas takes a quick, very unofficial lead at 40 hotdogs after one minute (it’s actually four).

11 a.m. In our first three female competitors, we have the superintendent of Montville, NJ public schools and a mother-daughter team. What a time to be alive. UPDATE: The Superintendent is PART of the mother-daughter team. INCREDIBLE TALENT.

Meanwhile, Sarah Reinicke comes out for her introduction by dropping her shorts and showing off some underpants that just say “BIG BUNS” across the back. Awesome. Veterans Juliet Lee and Sonya Thomas follow. While the screen suggests they are a combined 104 years old, they each look approximately 25. Hot dogs are good for you. Lee and Thomas are proof.

10:50 a.m.: The women are set to come out and a bunch of Jersey Shore-looking meatheads are hyping up the crowd at Surf and Stillwell with Super Soakers. Happy 4th of July, y’all.

Before the dogs

The greatest spectacle in sports is upon us. The Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest is here.

The annual hour-long tribute to athleticism, perseverance, and, uh, gluttony will capture the world’s attention Wednesday afternoon after the World Cup saw it coming up on the schedule and wisely decided to suspend games for July 4 and then July 5 as well to allow fans across the globe a full day to recover from the battle between legends Joey Chestnut, Matt “Megatoad” Stonie, and Carmen Cincotti on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues.

Chestnut, with no exaggeration, is the greatest American athlete to grace the face of the earth. His dominance on his sport’s brightest stage includes 10 of the last 11 titles at Nathan’s, the Super Bowl of the Major League Eating contest. In the last 11 years, LeBron James has only won three NBA titles. Serena Williams only has five Wimbledon championships. The New England Patriots have hoisted the Lombardi Trophy just twice.

But while those overhyped failures have hogged the spotlight too long. Chestnut has toiled away, mastering his craft in relative anonymity after winning back the yellow mustard belt from Takeru Kobayashi and putting the U-S-A back in “hot dog.” Er, “weiner.”

No, wait. “Frankfurters.” Can’t spell “frankfurters” without U-S-A. Nailed it.

Chestnut’s reign has only been challenged by California upstart Stonie, the YouTubing millennial here to challenge the old guard of competitive eating with his livestreams and emojis and hatred of Applebee’s. Stonie claimed the crown in 2015 by downing 62 dogs, enough to light a fire under a complacent Chestnut. The veteran came back strong after the defeat, shattering his own records with 71 hot dogs and buns (HDB) in 2016 and then 72 HDB in 2017 to set a new standard for American accomplishment.

Stonie fell to third last year, supplanted by Cincotti. Can Cincotti, the world’s No. 2 competitive eater, make his name on July 4? Or will America celebrate its independence once again my watching our unofficial president Joey Chestnut wear the mustard yellow belt once more?

How to watch

The annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest will take place on Tuesday at Coney Island in New York City. The contest will be televised on ESPN family networks, starting with the women’s championship followed by the men’s.

Chestnut and Miki Sudo, 2017 winners, will return to defend their hot dog eating title. Chestnut consumed 72 hot dogs in last year’s contest. Chestnut was close to beating his personal and all-time record of 73.5 hot dogs, which is a record he set in 2016.

Sudo, who has won four straight Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, ate 41 hot dogs last year. She was close to beating the all-time record of 45 hot dogs, which is held by Sonya Thomas.

Watch the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

Date: Wednesday, July 4

Location: Nathan’s Famous Corporation, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Women’s event:

Time: 10:50 a.m. ET

Online Streaming: WatchESPN, ESPN App

Men’s event:

Time: 12 p.m. ET

TV: ESPN2

Online Streaming: WatchESPN, ESPN App

Joey "Jaws" Chestnut extended his reign as champion eater at the Nathan's Famous July Fourth hot dog eating contest Wednesday, downing a record 74 wieners and buns in 10 minutes to take home the coveted Mustard Belt for an 11th time.

Miki Sudo held onto her title as the top woman's competitor at...

Two people were struck by lightning along the lakefront Wednesday night in Chicago shortly after Fourth of July fireworks, and two others were hit by lightning about 65 miles southwest of the city.

As more thunderstorms rolled into the city Thursday afternoon, professionals warned those outside...

"He had his margarita, he had his Jacuzzi," said Mark Hough of California.

She's the best.

The most radical thing Hannah Gadsby does in Nanette is simple: She stops being funny. It’s about 35 minutes into her 70-minute comedy show, filmed live at the Sydney Opera House, and Gadsby, a 40-year-old Tasmanian comic, has riffed on the gay pride flag (“six very shouty, assertive colors stacked on top of each other”), the pointlessness of bald babies wearing pink headbands (“Would you put a bangle on a potato?”), and her home island (famous for “our frighteningly small gene pool”). Her jokes are riotous, but they’re laced with something darker, more caustic. There’s an anecdote about a man who called her a “fucking faggot” and threatened to beat her up before bragging that he doesn’t hit women. (“What a guy,” Gadsby quips.) She states, out of nowhere, that she thinks she has to quit comedy. After she delivers each joke, she smiles, winningly and with a glint in her eye, like a demented cherub.

And then she stops. She doesn’t just put her jokes on hold, she excavates them, showing the audience the rotten holes in her humor. She doesn’t indict people for laughing, but the subtext is clear. She indicts herself. Her entire 10-year career, she explains, is based on self-deprecation, but she doesn’t want to do that anymore. “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins?” she says. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore.”

As a genre, comedy is accustomed to meltdowns, to public cries for help. But Nanette is different. What’s made the special such a striking word-of-mouth hit for Netflix (if you’re reading this, you’ve likely either watched it or been told by someone that you have to) is how precise, how surgical Gadsby is as she skewers comedy’s structural inability to make things better. Comedians like her, she explains, take their trauma and feed it into humor. But in doing so, they crystallize their lives within that moment of tension, that particular punchline, rather than allowing themselves to reach an endpoint of (unfunny) catharsis. “You learn from the part of the story you focus on,” she says. “I need to tell my story properly.”

Until now, Gadsby has been relatively unsung outside of Australia, where she won a national comedy contest in 2006 and has combined tours and TV work ever since. But Nanette, which has won multiple festival awards since it debuted last year, is arriving into a culture that’s more receptive to learning from stories about misogyny and abuse than it might have been a few years ago. What makes it so powerful, though, is that Gadsby barely alludes to topical events at all. The stories she tells, the instincts and hatred she unravels, predate them by so many years they’re impossible to count. In the second half of Nanette, Gadsby utilizes her self-mocked degree in art history to analyze how centuries of Western art have conceptualized women as objects.

The grist for her show, though, is her art. Here, it melds stand-up and storytelling in a way that makes Nanette one of the most extraordinary comedy specials in recent memory. Gadsby flips between moods and modes again and again, lining up jokes and then pushing them beyond the point of comfort. “I love Tasmania,” she says, “but I had to leave as soon as I found out I was a little bit lesbian.” Her vernacular is comical, as is her delivery. Then she explains that homosexuality was a crime in Tasmania till 1997, and the tenor shifts. A story about the “feedback” she gets from her lesbian fans turns into an recounting of the unsolicited “advice” she gets from men on the street, which is profoundly ugly and brutal in tone. No joke is allowed to simply land.

Toward the end of her act, Gadsby takes an anecdote from earlier on and reveals that she lied about it. Comedy is about balancing humor with the tension in the room, she says, and “in order to balance the tension in the room with that story, I couldn’t tell the story as it actually happened.” Because what happened isn’t just unfunny, it’s horrific and painful just to hear about, let alone to experience. “This tension,” Gadsby concludes, “it’s yours. I am not helping you anymore.” It’s a confrontation with the audience that asks a question: What is comedy for? Watching Nanette, I kept thinking about Trevor Griffiths’s 43-year-old play Comedians, in which an elderly stand-up, Eddie, tries to teach budding comics to aspire to more than racist, sexist humor. A true joke, Eddie explains, “ a comedian’s joke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation.”

Gadsby’s similar desire to change comedy, to maybe even change the world, is what leaves Nanette ending on something like hope. She acknowledges the damage that’s been done to her. She communicates how badly it still affects her. She owns, and expresses, her anger. But she also owns her power. “My story has value,” she says. “I will not allow my story to be destroyed. What I would have done to have heard a story like mine … to have felt less alone.” Laughter, she says, “is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure.”

Nanette is the kind of work that leaves you shaken. Not because it’s really funny (it really is), or because it’s equally heartbreaking, but because it finds a fusion of those two modes that’s incandescent. It feels not coincidental that some of the most beautiful, innovative works of art of late have similarly balanced light and dark. In this moment, where news feeds oscillate back and forth between dog memes and human-rights atrocities, we’re used to shifting moods in a heartbeat. In Nanette, Gadsby shows how full of power and potential the space in between can be.

It is very transparent that Netflix is trying its darndest to get the most out of the Queer Eye hype, and I’m living for it. First, they sent our five beautiful baby boys to be crowned in their spiritual home of Yass, Australia to, now, this: a literally perfect crossover episode with another Netflix show, Nailed It,…

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Maybe you, like me, are that person at a party. You meet someone with an interesting job or a head full of specialized knowledge, and you grill them (in a friendly way!) about their experience or expertise. “Tell me all about that!” you exclaim, totally meaning it, but eventually interrupting them to ask how the subject at hand relates to your own interests and pet theories. What a relief it is sometimes to listen to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.