The Five Spot: Rascal Dogs, Cussing, And Bad Decisions

Hello and welcome to The Five Spot, the weekly Friday newsletter where I run down my top five favorite and/or notable things from television and film and occasionally local news or sandwiches. Starting next week, the whole thing will be an exclusive for paid subscribers, from top to bottom. I did not come to this decision lightly. I am always trying to create value for people who give me actual money they earned and I really want to try to build this newsletter into a fun community full of people who are looking to have a good time. I think this will help do both things. I hope it will. 

This week’s edition is fully unlocked, though, in part to give you an idea of what we’ll be doing in here going forward, and in part to celebrate the newsletter’s move from Substack to Ghost earlier this week. If you read it all and like what you see and think it’s all worth a little less than a buck a week, you can sign up…

This week, we’re covering the following:

• Superman’s dog
• HBO Max breaking my heart
• The new Bosch spinoff saying the line
• Peter Jackson trying to kill us all
• A historic moment in television profanity 

Off we go.

FIVE: I love this little demon

Have I seen the new Superman movie yet? No, but I’m hoping to go this weekend, as reviews from people whose opinions I trust seem positive.

Do I care about Superman as a character, generally? Also no, for a litany of reasons that mostly boil down to him being kind of a dork.

Have I been reading every article I see about his dog? Yes, of course I have.

This isn’t even the first time I’ve mentioned the dog. I got all excited back when he first appeared in the trailer a few months ago. I had no idea Superman had a dog, and that the dog had decades of lore in the comics, and that the dog’s name was Krypto, which I imagine they would not have selected if they were just choosing it in 2025, for various homonym reasons. I learned a lot about this dog very quickly, in part because I was curious and in part because a few people yelled things at me on social media about how dumb I was for not already knowing Superman had a dog. Fans of comics are an intense group of people. As a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, I can relate.

I am still learning about Krypto. I was not joking about clicking on articles about him. I’ve been doing it all week. There was this one about his long history as a character and this one about his marketing potential as the next Baby Yoda if the franchise takes off and this one about all the work that went into making his little cape. 

My favorite Krypto thing I clicked on was this one. I actually just saw it this morning. It’s an article by Esther Zuckerman that reveals the origins of his look in the movie, specifically that he’s modeled on director James Gunn’s own rescue dog. The whole thing contains a number of good quotes from Gunn, a man who appears to have been giving interviews every waking moment for the last month, but this is the one that jumped out at me…

“The universe we normally see Superman living in in movies is usually this lone, serious superhero and then people and then that’s it,” Gunn said. “This Superman exists in a different sort of universe where there are flying dogs.”

See, I think this could have solved my issue with the character of Superman many years ago. I’m not a complicated person. Add a flying dog to any movie franchise and watch me start wagging my figurative tail like a little helicopter. Looking at you, Vin Diesel.

FOUR: THEY CANCELED DUSTER

I was all ready to do a fun little section about Max changing its name back to HBO Max. Oh, the jokes I was going to hell. Ha ha ha and lmao, etc. But then, the same day that news became official and the "HBO" no one ever stopped using was put back into the name, these same monsters went and released this statement to a slew of trade publications.

“While HBO Max will not be moving forward with a second season of ‘Duster,’ we are so grateful to have had the chance to work with the amazingly talented co-creators J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan, and our partners at Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. We are tremendously proud of this series led by Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson and we thank them along with our cast and crew for their incredible collaboration and partnership.”

I am furious. I am so, so mad. I am almost mad enough to be so delusional that I say completely unhinged things like “The whole name change was just a distraction to flood the news so they could cancel the show quietly!” I know that’s not true. But still. They canceled Duster! Come on! 

I won’t sit here and try to tell you Duster was the best show out there, but it really was fun. It had fast cars and a funky 1970s soundtrack and Keith David strutting around as the coolest crime boss you’ve ever seen. I’ve written about this before. I don’t need to go through it all again. Duster was a fun summer show. We need more fun summer shows, just attractive people doing cool stuff for an hour a week while we drink iced tea in front of a fan. This is an important genre of television to me.

The end of the first season set up a potential second (and third) that could've been interesting. It’s a bummer I won’t get to see where it all goes. It’s a bummer I won’t get to keep calling the main character Duster even though his name is Jim. But mostly, it’s a bummer because I won’t get to see its kickass opening credits before every new episode going forward.

I will miss you, Duster. Max never would have done this to you.

THREE: Ballard said the line

Ballard is a new Bosch spinoff that debuted on Prime Video this week. It stars Maggie Q as a detective named Renee Ballard who works in the cold case unit and takes no crap and loves to surf and, look, I think we all know I was going to watch this show. The character was created by Michael Connelly, the author of the Bosch books, so the general vibe is pretty similar. I can dig it.

The trailer featured a brief moment near the end where Ballard looked up and frustration washed over her face as she grumbled “Harry fucking Bosch.” This made me very happy. It continues the long tradition of characters in this universe grumbling Bosch’s name immediately after the f-word, with a frequency that could make you think it’s his actual first or middle name. The only question I had was where in the series they would drop it. A little scavenger hunt for me.

I did not have to wait long. At the very end of the first episode, Ballard is flipping through case files for an unsolved murder. She expresses surprise at how well-organized the paperwork is. That leads to this…

"Say it," I muttered excitedly.

"SAY IT," I shouted, possibly alarming the neighbors.

Ladies and gentlemen...

We did it.

TWO: Stop! No! Reconsider!

Too much money and too much free time can be a dangerous combination. I mean, I assume. It’s a problem I would love to have. I imagine I would do a lot of very stupid things, like buy up billboards all over America that just say “The Dallas Cowboys Stink” or maybe throw a bunch of money out of a helicopter every now and then. What I do not think I would do is this, which I read about earlier this week and have been terrified of ever since.

Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species.

A few things:

• The phrase “one of the largest” implies there are other, possibly larger collections of bones of this extinct bird out there, which is a peek into a hobby I never dreamed of
• Has… has Peter Jackson never seen Jurassic Park?
• Someone needs to stop him before it’s too late

The biotech company he’s working with is called “Colossal,” which somehow makes it sound worse. They have a history of playing god.

Colossal used a similar process of comparing ancient DNA of extinct dire wolves to determine the genetic differences with gray wolves. Then scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used CRISPR to genetically modify them in 20 different sites. Pups with long white hair and muscular jaws were born late last year.

Imagine how mad you would be if you got eaten by a wolf that had been extinct for many years but was brought back to life by bored scientists who worked for a company that has a name so ominous it feels like Jeremy Irons would play its CEO in a movie.

I would be livid.

If the Colossal team succeeds in creating a tall bird with huge feet and thick pointed claws resembling the moa, there’s also the pressing question of where to put it, said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who is not involved in the project.

Talk to me, Stuart. Comfort me. Make me feel better about all of this.

“Can you put a species back into the wild once you’ve exterminated it there?” he said. “I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that they could do this in any meaningful way.”

Okay, good. That actually does make me feel a little better. I was worried this might be, like, an extremely dangerous ani-

“This will be an extremely dangerous animal,” Pimm added.

DAMMIT, PETER JACKSON. YOU'LL KILL US ALL.

ONE: Huge cussing news

The crossover between Abbott Elementary and Always Sunny was one of my favorite things to happen to television even before the first part aired on ABC. I just liked that they did it. That they went for it. That they looked at something and thought “that might be cool” and then followed through with it despite what I can only assume were numerous logistical hurdles. It was ambitious and silly and I would have appreciated the effort even if it ended up sucking.

It didn’t suck, though. The first half of it was great, bringing the degenerates from Paddy’s Pub to network television in a way that felt authentic. The second half debuted this week as the premiere of the 17th season of Always Sunny and was somehow even better.

The premise here was simple but genius: We basically saw everything that happened in the first episode from the perspective of the Always Sunny characters. It tossed a twist into it all. It got mean and inappropriate and Dennis made coffee. It also featured a lot of cussing.

Here is where I confess that it had not even dawned on me that the characters from Abbott might cuss in an episode free of network restrictions. I didn’t even flag it the first couple of times Ava cussed, only because the filth rolled off her tongue so naturally that it felt normal. Where I did notice it — extremely — was in this scene where Janine is talking about Sweet Dee. I would very much recommend you have your headphones in before you click play on this video.

I am not joking at all when I say I gasped a little and then let out a kind of forceful, gurgling laugh that sounded like I was choking. I kind of was. I legitimately had no idea she was going to go there. I don’t even know how the people at Disney signed off on one of the faces of their whole broadcast network going there. I would read an entire oral history of the process that led to this moment. It might be my favorite thing that has happened on television all year so far.

Congratulations to everyone involved.