Way back in September 2022I noted that Prime Video’s addition of Thursday Night Football helped make it one of the most versatile streaming services out there. Yes, the package was expensive – almost $67 million per match—but it feels like the gamble has paid off for Prime Video in terms of activations and viewership. According to Entertainment Strategy Guy’s latest streaming grade reportThursday Night Football streamed six million more hours in a single night than the next post (nine section of Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story on Netflix) and more than twice as much as third place (six episodes of Netflix The perfect couple).

As I noted in that 2022 newsletter, live sports was one of two legs still supporting linear cable. That leg is about to snap: Prime Video has also picked up the rights to the NBA; regional sports networks are collapsing; and in the world of professional wrestling, WWE’s Monday Night Raw rights have gone to netflix while AEW rights is on the way to Max.

The second leg was live news. Many people stick with cable because they want to be able to watch MSNBC or Fox News or CNN, and aren’t quite sure how to replace that experience. But Amazon’s latest move — the hiring of Brian Williams to anchor election night coverage— is another blow aimed directly at the heart of the cable bundle. Reports Amount:

Williams, who left NBC News in 2021 after nearly three decades, will host a one-night special called “Election Night Live with Brian Williams.” The show, which starts at 5pm Eastern on November 5th, will be made available to all Amazon customers via Prime Video, regardless of whether they subscribe to the streaming outlet itself.

I’m intrigued by this move because it indicates a willingness on Amazon’s part to get into the live news game, which most streaming companies have avoided. (The big exception is Max, which is where I personally watch CNN on big news nights; Peacock has some MSNBC coverage, including the aforementioned Kornacki Cam; Fox I think is only available via cable and cable light packages like Hulu Live and Sling. I guess Paramount Plus will rely mostly on CBS?) This is a move that is not without risks.

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The biggest of which, of course, is that news coverage tends to be incredibly polarizing. People want to be told what they want to hear, and they tend to get angry if they don’t hear what they want to hear. This creates a whole host of problems for even strictly impartial news outlets, and any attempt to create “balance”—especially in the age of Trump, an incredibly unbalanced figure in his own right—is likely to invite more vitriol. Amazon has a great reputation among consumers of all classes and ages, and I’m a little surprised they would risk that with election night coverage.

But I also wonder if it’s just too late for streamers to really break into the live news game. YouTube – where I imagine many Bulwark readers and viewers and listeners will watch JVL, Tim, Sarah and Sam (maybe even me, occasionally) on election night – have created an entire ecosystem for people to find news and opinions that align with their own . Voices and faces they trust, streaming live; communities are found and strengthened in the comments and live chats. As Nielsen reminds us every month, YouTube’s audience is huge—at 10.6 percent of total TV streamingYouTube’s audience is almost half of all broadcast TV and by far bigger than any single streaming service – and getting bigger.

Anyway, I’ll be curious to see what Brian Williams has up his sleeve on election night as I jump from Jake Tapper on CNN to Steve Kornacki on the Peacock to Sam Stein at The bulwarks YouTube page. Let us know your plans in the comments.

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In this week’s episode of Across the Movie Aisle, we reviewed a book, not a movie. Oh! Neal Stephenson Poland. That’s good! You should read it. And listen to our podcast! That’s good too! In today’s bonus episode, we talked about scary books that we enjoy. Shocker: Stephen King gets a mention. But so do some other interesting names!

A good rule of thumb is that if a movie repeats very basic information to the audience three times, then that movie has had a … rough time on a basic narrative level.

I mention this because there are three (3) different sequences in the Venom: The Last Dance where we are informed that the alien “symbiotes” (basically: sentient, parasitic goo that grants superpowers) have a god called Knull, this Knull guy lives in some kind of interdimensional prison created by the symbiotes, and that a key to to free him is known. because the “codex” has been discovered and exists on Earth. In two of these sequences, we are told in almost identical language that the “codex” resides in Eddie Brock/Venom (Tom Hardy), and was created when Eddie died and Venom brought him back to life.

Now. If you’re making a big deal out of a shadowy villain who’s been imprisoned in a terrible place and could potentially escape to make our hero pay for his sins…whatever the symbiotes are, you’d think we’d possibly see this villain wreak his terrible vengeance. You’d be sure that the film wouldn’t build to a terrible anticlimax that teases more adventures from this shadowy figure that no one recognizes and has never appeared on screen before. And, dear reader, you would be wrong about this. Oh, so wrong.

I guess what I’m saying is Venom: The Last Dance is a bit of a mess, structurally – it feels like the entire film exists to promote future installments with characters no one cares about, given that this is nominally the last film in the Venom trilogy, which I don’t think anyone realized it was a trilogy until we started being told it was a trilogy during the marketing of The last dance. Lord knows there’s no coherence from the first entry (where a group of alien symbiotes crash to earth and Venom/Eddie has to fight them for some reason) to the last (where Eddie teams up with a bunch of symbiotes who can or might not be the same symbiotes from the first movie, I couldn’t really tell, to fight near-invincible creatures sent by Knull to, well, capture The Codex).

That said, I’m not sure about that questions that the story is almost entirely superfluous to the plot on the screen, because the attraction of these films has never been the plot. We don’t watch these movies to see if Venom can hit the other aliens hard enough to win his fight. We watch them because they’re frankly bizarrely fascinating acting exercises by Tom Hardy, who plays the Brock/Venom relationship as a schizophrenic battling inner demons while learning to love himself for who he is.

There’s just something so charmingly strange about whatever it is he’s doing in this movie that you can’t help but admire it. It’s a one-man buddy, where he gets to do two distinct voices and plenty of physical humor. He clearly has a whisper, even though the footage doesn’t make sense and has no connection whatsoever to reality. I mean, at one point Eddie/Venom beats up a guy and steals his tuxedo because a doorman at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas informs him that they have a dress code, and let me tell you, as someone who has spent a lot of time at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, nothing could be further from the truth. Crocs and a t-shirt and $150 gets you ten hands of blackjack, seven nights out of seven.

Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance is not very good; like its predecessors, though, it’s strange to look at. And that counts for something.