Costumes for the dolls. Despite Halloween being less than a week away, the internet has been dropping and snapping their best pop culture-inspired looks. While actors and content creators can’t dress up as Hollywood characters due to the new SAG AFTRA rules, it doesn’t mean civilians can’t. Everything from what we looked like when we were a baby to Spongebob and Glinda hooking up has been fair game for the holiday.

Before he hits the big screen as Richard Pryor, Mike Epps has a new standup special heading to Netflix this month, and the streaming network just released the first trailer. Filmed at a sold-out show at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, Mike Epps: Don’t Take It Personal covers “everything from sex and relationships to deadbeat stepdads, generational differences and more.” The special hits Netflix on Friday, December 18th.

Hasan Minhaj fans who were disappointed the comedian was not named the permanent host of The Daily Show will no longer have to endure a political climate without his commentary. The once-leading candidate for the job — who was taken out of the running in 2023 after a widely discussed New Yorker article set off a public debate about factual inaccuracies and exaggerations in his Netflix stand-up specials Homecoming King and The King’s Jester — is back with a new self-produced digital series, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know.

Every once in a while, Richard Linklater gets stuck on an idea for a movie that he can’t quite imagine filming in live action. In 1998, he had all but given up on one such idea when his longtime friend and collaborator Tommy Pallotta showed the filmmaker what his roommate Bob Sabiston was working on. An animator and software engineer, Sabiston had developed a program to speed up the process of rotoscoping — an animation technique that involves tracing over live-action footage frame by frame.

Gina Rodriguez in Jane the Virgin. You’ll know the most incredible scene in Jane the Virgin’s fifth season premiere when you see it. After four years of mourning her dead husband Michael (Brett Dier), Jane (Gina Rodriguez) has discovered that he’s actually still alive, but suffering from amnesia. Before Michael’s sudden reappearance, Jane was on the verge of getting engaged to her boyfriend Rafael (Justin Baldoni), she’d just figured out what she wanted her life to look like, and she’d had a breakthrough about how to structure her new novel.

Babadook eye for the straight guy. June is the month of Pride and the LGBTQ community has a new queer icon to celebrate: The Babadook. You may know this Dada-esque mouthful as the title character of the 2014 horror film by Australian director Jennifer Kent. In the movie, the Babadook is a monster that haunts the house of a widow and her 6-year-old son. The father died in a car accident while the mother was in labor, and his death hangs over the family.

I like teen shows. I like shows about women and girls. I like shows about people who like each other and treat each other decently. I like family-set shows that aren’t about misery. I like Switched at Birth. I like it a lot. I like it so much, I’m pretty sure it’s teaching me American Sign Language. I like other kinds of shows, too, but there’s a part of my soul that craves stories about mostly happy families.

In the opening scene of the pilot episode of Alone Together, a new comedy produced by The Lonely Island, a guy picks up a girl from her one-night stand and they talk about getting “smashed,” the walk of shame, and Boko Haram. There’s nothing entirely unusual about that for a cable sitcom, but it is a little surprising when you consider the “Disney ABC” logo in the bottom right-hand corner.

Tan France is denying that he gave the Queer Eye lineup a makeover. On February 27, Netflix announced that Jeremiah Brent — who is also France’s friend — would be replacing Bobby Berk as the show’s new interior designer. Rolling Stone later published a report on March 5, claiming that France (with alleged support from Antoni Porowski) had campaigned for the Berk-Brent switch, with one source describing what happened as “mean-girl antics.

Deadmau5. The New York Times published a fun interactive video and story earlier Tuesday, explaining how Jack Ü’s “Where Are Ü Now” came to be. Interspersed with clips of the song, as well as clips of unreleased rough demos of the song, the video portion features interviews with all of the artists involved — Justin Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo — letting everyone give their own mini oral history of what happened behind the scenes.