patti harrison

The Five Spot: Danny DeVito, Patti Harrison, And Beyoncé

The Holy Trinity

brian grubb

18 Jul 2025 — 8 min read

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Welcome to The Five Spot, a Friday roundup where I run down my top five things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers so if you want to get involved, you can do that by upgrading…

… riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight here.

This week, we are discussing the following:

Patti Harrison running wild in Poker Face
Christopher Nolan sending dads into a tizzy
Danny DeVito being cool when he doesn't have to
The Colbert thing
Beyonce and/or John Malkovich

Off we go.

FIVE: What a maniac

Patti Harrison showed up in the home stretch of Poker Face’s second season and promptly helped solved a murder involving Method Man and unregulated breast milk. If that’s all she had done, it would have been more than enough. But then she showed up in the following episode as a wedding oyster shucker dressed like a gondola captain and proceeded to get herself tangled up in a mob-related assassination that featured Justin Theroux and Haley Joel Osment and a fake eye. (And a fake fake eye.) And if that was all she had done, it would have been more than more than enough.

But then, and please note that I am going to spoil the season’s main twist and that your knowledge of this twist will decrease your enjoyment of what happens very little (and might even increase it, just because you’ll be able to see things develop with the knowledge of where it’s going), she revealed in the season finale that she had been the assassin all along and she was a raging thrill-junky sociopath and everything that happened before that — well, almost everything – had been part of her plan. It was great. I sort of figured out where it was all going earlier in the finale and I still howled like a nut when I saw it play out. This is because Patti Harrison rules.

Maybe you knew that. Maybe you, like me, watched Patti Harrison steal full sketches on I Think You Should Leave and wondered if another show could unlock that wild energy. It’s a very specific thing she does, dark and dry but with raging fire in the eyes. It turns out the secret all along was “let her play a supervillain and let her cook.” God, she ate up that entire finale, especially when she revealed her true identity and explained her whole plan. She was crawling across the floor at one point for no real discernible reason. Again, cackling.

My biggest takeaway while watching it was that she seemed to be having about as much fun with it all as any performer can have in a role. This is why I don’t think it matters that much if you know what’s happening before you watch. You still need to see it happen to understand. And my suspicion that she was having the time of her life was confirmed shortly after in this wonderful and increasingly weird interview over at The AV Club. A sample:

I got to try the craziest shit, like all the snow outfits we put on were so fucking cool. That black outfit, in particular, was great. Up until that point, I’d been wearing girl dinner universe clothes, if that makes sense. So to get to wear a knife holster on my arm and feel the weight of that, wear the driving gloves and fucking Louboutin combat boots made me want to do a flip, wrap my legs around someone’s head, and then flip backwards and slam their head on the ground.

See what I mean? She’s the best. That’s not even the funniest part of the interview. It reads like she started out trying to be serious but anarchy bubbled up inside her body like a pressure cooker until it just shot out all over the wall. Please read it. The last few questions and answers, especially.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned here:

Patti Harrison‘s energy probably doesn’t work on every show but when it does it is very special
Poker Face appears to select its guest stars by burrowing into my brain to extract things I would like
I would love to see Patti Harrison on Taskmaster next giving it the full Mantzoukas

Please make this last thing happen.

FOUR: Christopher Nolan fans go full Swiftie

Notes:

Tickets to Christopher Nolan’s new sweeping epic, The Odyssey, went on sale Thursday for IMAX 70mm screens across the country
If you saw that and thought, “Whoa, he finished it already? It was just announced a few months ago,” lol don't worry, it doesn’t come out for a whole year and he’s still shooting it
It seems insane to me, a person who has no clue what he’s doing this weekend (the one that starts as soon as I hit publish on this newsletter), to buy a ticket to a movie that doesn’t come out for a year
I bet you you'd feel realllllll stupid if you spent money on this ticket and then an asteroid hit the planet in like February
I mean, it probably wouldn’t be your biggest concern, but still
Due to a combination of dorky dads with disposable income and cinema aficionados and the fact that there are only a few dozen IMAX 70mm screens in the country, tickets sold out immediately and are already reselling for hundreds of dollars
There is a 100 percent chance someone is setting up a scam to trick people into buying fake tickets on a secondary market
Getting duped with a fake ticket and finding out a year later when you show up to see a movie and having to drive back home and explain it to everyone is its own kind of odyssey in a way
I would watch a movie about that, actually
I would still buy my ticket at the last possible minute, though
You never know with these asteroids

Lots to consider here.

THREE: Danny DeVito rules

This is not the first time I’ve brought up how cool it is that Danny DeVito is still doing Always Sunny. I bring it up a lot, actually. I might bring it up too much, if I’m being honest with myself. But I’ll probably keep doing it anyway because it fascinates me. Danny DeVito does not need to be doing this. Danny DeVito is an 80-year-old man who has been working in Hollywood for decades. He has acting credits out the wazoo. He directed Matilda. His production company was responsible for movies like Pulp Fiction and Erin Brockovich. He has hoagie money coming in. Various Internet estimators put his net worth in the $70-80 million range. He does not need to — from a career or financial perspective — be out here peeing in lockers in a crossover with a network television show about an elementary school. He does it because he just really seems to enjoy it.

I say this again today because, again, I like saying it, but also because he brought it all up again in a new interview with Collider about doing more seasons after this one.

“I'm looking forward to it. Who knows what they're going to do, because you never know. I mean, Charlie [Day] and Rob [McElhenney] and Glenn [Howerton] get into a writers room and, you know, it's probably like, in the Wizard of Oz, you know, but reversed, hurricanes on the inside of the room. They're on brooms. There's shit flying by them, ideas and all kind of crazy stuff. And they know anything they want to do to Frank, they can.”

“Anything they want to do to Frank, they can.“ This is what I mean. A lot of actors spend their golden years cultivating and protecting their legacies. Maybe doing bit parts in prestigious movies or silly cameos in studio comedies, a day or two of work on a set and a round of interviews from their co-stars about what an honor it was to work with them and what a good sport they were. Danny’s portraying a depraved cretin on a long-running sitcom and giving its writers carte blanche to make the character even less redeemable. There’s something noble about that, in a way.

I mean, as noble as one can be while urinating in an elementary school student’s locker.

TWO: Uggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

News broke Thursday evening that CBS had canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert despite the show being number one in the time slot by a significant margin. The network put out a big statement where it put phrases like “purely financial decision” in prominent places, which would be an odd thing to say if they weren’t in the midst of negotiating a merger that has to be approved by a FCC under the guidance of a man they just paid a $16 million settlement to that Colbert described on-air as a bribe. The fact that they felt the need to say the word “purely” only makes it all more suspicious.

So, yes. It sucks a lot, both for the suspicious reasons outlined above and for what it means for late-night shows going forward, in general. Viewership is going down every year as people consume them more and more as YouTube highlights and if a network is willing to just cut the top-rated show for any reason, the other guys can’t feel great about their job security going forward.

I was planning to write more about this today, but frankly, it bums me out a lot and a bunch of smart people already wrote great stuff I can link to, so I’m just gonna do that:

Sepinwall connecting the dots
Josef Adalian at Vulture with an in-depth analysis of the moving parts
Liz Shannon Miller working the video of Tom Holland’s Umbrella performance into it all

Ugh. Let’s end on a more appropriate note.

ONE: You fools!

To Atlanta!

Beyoncé’s choreographer and one of her dancers said thieves broke into their SUV and stole numerous items, including jump drives containing unreleased music, footage plans for her show and past and future set lists.

Oh, buddy.

Oh, you messed up.

You crossed the Beyhive.

You should not have done that.

The police are at most the second or third biggest concern you have now.

They will hunt you.

Beyonce might do a whole relentlessly catchy song about what a scoundrel you are.

Everyone will be playing it in their car for months.

She knows Raylan Givens, dude.

You will never know a moment’s rest again.

You really should not have done that.

An arrest warrant was issued on Monday for an unidentified suspect who allegedly broke into the rental car on July 8, stealing jump drives containing unreleased music, footage plans for her live show, and previous and upcoming set lists. According to WSB-TV Atlanta, choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue reported that the thieves also took clothes, designer sunglasses, laptops and a pair of AirPods Max headphones.

Okay, reading this follow-up in Variety, I see two potential possibilities…

ONE: This was a targeted hit by a group of organized thieves who wanted to steal unreleased music and try to ransom it back to the label or maybe just look very cool at their next cookout.

TWO: This was a dumb guy who smashed a random window to grab a computer and sunglasses and realized very quickly what he had done and how much trouble he was in.

After a great deal of thought, I have decided to pretend this is actually a combination of these two situations and that we have a Burn After Reading situation on our hands.