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Thank forking God: The Good Place has been renewed for a second season. NBC announced today that Michael Schur’s afterlife comedy will get 13 more episodes, meaning that Kristen Bell and Ted Danson won’t have to look for work this fall. Plus, more Janet!

The show—which had a stellar, mind-bending season one finale earlier this month—wasn’t a huge hit for NBC, but did better than what the network had airing in its slot last year. The show’s season one finale, for instance, drew about 5.2 million viewers within three days of its first airing.

According to NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke, the network “absolutely can’t wait to see where these characters go, literally, in season two.” We’re going to take a wild guess and say they’ll probably just go to more frozen yogurt shops.

Every now and then a GIF comes along that does more than slow down the speed at which a webpage loads—it takes you on a journey. It teaches you something not just about yourself but about the nature of the moving image and its capacity to tell emotionally resonant stories through the presentation and elision of visual stimuli.

For example, this GIF, sent to us by press representatives for Health2blog.com, is ostensibly a commentary on fitness or something. And yet it begs intense attention, asking the viewer: When did you first meet Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Where were you—what were the smells and sights of that moment? Who were you, in that moment? Did you love him? When did you last see The Rock? Where is The Rock right now?

As the GIF takes us through the years, we see first the wily recession of Johnson’s ...

Could we have another Fast & Furious on our hands? xXx: Return Of Xander Cage seems to think so. Boasting the same sort of multiracial, mixed-gender casting that’s a hallmark of Vin Diesel’s other gleefully over-the-top action franchise, Return Of Xander Cage brings together a motley crew of good-looking, gun-toting lawbreakers—a squad, if you will—on a mission that’s pure suicide, if you catch our drift. Throw in some Kingsman: The Secret Service-style cheekiness and the flashy bullet-time effects popularized by The Matrix three years before xXx’s 2002 debut, and you’ve got a basic idea of what director D.J. Caruso is working with here. Does he take any of these elements seriously? Hell no. And thank goodness, because otherwise it would be unbearable.

Presiding over all the extreme sports action and thumping electronic beats is Diesel’s Xander Cage, a lunkhead James ...

Say what you will about Scott Baio, but he had the foresight to hitch his wagon to the Trump train back at the Republican National Convention and it has simply done wonders for his career. He probably hasn’t gotten any new roles out of it, and it’ll probably make it harder for him to get more roles in the future. But his name is in the news these days.

Anyway, with Baio now enjoying a surge back into relevancy, the media is now obligated to pay attention to his stupid opinions on shit. That brings us to Variety, which recently put together a story on how celebrities feel about the upcoming Trump presidency and decided to include Baio among the mostly liberal participants (the cover features Lena Dunham putting an arm around Michael Moore, if that tells you anything). Naturally, Baio is pretty hyped about the next four ...

The CW’s Riverdale is shaping up to be one of the strangest new shows of 2017, blending good-old all-American Archie comics with a lot of good old all-American sex and murder. Still, the Twin Peaks-quoting teen soap—which debuts on January 26—could have been even stranger, according to creator (and Archie chief creative officer) Robert Aguirre-Sacasa. During a panel at the TCA winter previews today, Aguirre-Sacasa listed some of the plot ideas that he had to fend off from at least one presumably well-meaning (and unnamed) entertainment executive during the show’s creation:

“We go to the kickoff meeting and he said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about this and I think you guys need to something a little more high concept, a little bigger than a coming-of-age [story],’ I said, ‘Yeah, great. We’re open to that.’ He goes, ‘I want you to think about ...

Look, no disrespect to Doctor Strange. It was a fun movie, full of dazzling special effects that require repeat viewing if only to fully absorb the CGI pyrotechnics director Scott Derrickson put together during those amazing city-transformation fight sequences. But the story was far from equal to the imagery. Aside from the paint-by-numbers origin story, Benedict Cumberbatch’s titular doc was basically Tony Stark lite, a character lacking rich interiority, as the script performed Marvel’s standard “sketch out the broad strokes and move on” approach to its heroes’ identities. So when greeted with a bizarro take on Doctor Strange from SNL Korea (and featured by Tor), there’s a fighting chance to make the alternate version of the Sorcerer Supreme a more iconic one, and the show just may have pulled it off.

This sketch from the Korean version of the late-night comedy program takes the Marvel superhero and ...

In 5 To Watch, five writers from The A.V. Club look at the latest streaming TV arrivals, each making the case for a favored episode. The reasons for their picks might differ, but they can all agree that each episode is a must-watch. In this installment: It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the first 11 seasons of which are now streaming on Netflix. (New episodes air Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern on FXX.)

When it airs its pre-ordained 14th season in 2019, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia will tie the record for America’s longest-running live-action sitcom. Befitting the band of miscreants at the show’s center, that distinction is a bit of a cheat: The current longevity champion, The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet, aired upwards of 30 episodes per season, and Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Mac (Rob McElhenney), Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson), and ...

The CW’s new Archie-adaptation Riverdale is wearing its influences on its letter-jacketed sleeves, apparently, with the latest trailer for the show dropping a ton of references to David Lynch’s classic Twin Peaks. There’s the opening shot of the Riverdale town sign, for a start, followed by a dead teenager being pulled out of the water. (Plus, a bunch of rampant sex and violence and the like.) Of course, it remains to be seen how far Riverdale is willing to commit to its homage to Lynch’s soon-to-be-revived cult classic: a long digression on silent drape runners? Jughead, trapped forever in a wooden end table knob? A supernatural explanation for Archie’s weirdly vibrant hair? We’ll know more, presumably, when Riverdale comes back into style on January 26.

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Sunday, January 8. All times are Eastern.

Top picks

The 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards (NBC, 8 p.m.): The role of award show host is a largely thankless one, but it seems like this year perfect synergy is achieved with the Golden Globes and Jimmy Fallon. On one hand you have an award show often mocked for the disjointed and arbitrary selection process exercised by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and on the other you have a talk show host who tousled Donald Trump’s hair instead of calling him on his bigoted campaign messages and came across as a spineless twit. (His defense didn’t do much to change that impression either.) As such, don’t expect hard-hitting and controversial picks out of tonight’s award show, just the usual flippant banter and random-skewing list of nominees ...

Former Pedro The Lion frontman had a rather public falling out from Christianity. While Pedro was together he was a devout believer, but the release of 2009’s Curse Your Branches under his own name saw that change. The album highlighted Bazan’s struggle with his faith, and it’s remained a talking point years later. But even as Bazan worked through his feeling about religion, he never stopped releasing music that was decidedly not-secular. On November 11, Suicide Squeeze will release Dark Sacred Night, a collection of Christmas-themed covers courtesy of Bazan.

The A.V. Club is streaming all of Dark Sacred Night ahead of its release this Friday, which sees Bazan offering up takes on standards such as “Away In A Manger” and “O Little Town Of Bethlehem,” and even a previously released original, “I Wish My Kids Were Here.” In typical Bazan fashion, his performances are distinctly ...