Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, October 14th, 2025:
PRODUCTION NOTES
This is probably only going to apply to a very small group of you, but I wanted to make sure I let everyone know about a recent change at Substack. The company recently added Apple Pay to its payment options and it's not one that they allow anyone to turn off. Why would I want to turn it off? Well, there are a couple of important reasons.
First, if you have a problem upgrading to a paid subscription or have some issue once you are a paid subscriber, I am not able to help you. And neither can anyone at Substack. Apple Pay is a closed system and if you have any questions or difficulties, you have to contact Apple directly.
But more importantly from my perspective, Apple takes a 30 percent cut off the top when you pay through Apple Pay. Even worse, they hold the money for up to a month before it makes its way to me. Which isn't ideal.
So if you want to upgrade to a paid subscription and can't figure out a way to work around Apple Pay (and I have recently heard from a couple of people who had that problem), please reach out to me directly and we'll figure out a workaround. It's a pain in the butt all the way around and I wish Substack would let me turn off the option. But I assuming that is part of their deal to keep Apple happy and the Substack app available in the Apple App store.
WHY DO I HAVE THE FEELING SOME BRANDING COMPANY RECEIVED A LOT OF MONEY TO MAKE THIS DECISION?
Apple TV+ has dropped the plus sign and is now simply Apple TV, “with a vibrant new identity.” The news was announced in its press release announcing the F1: The Movie streaming date with no additional details.
Aside from the discussion of whether this is a good idea, I'm flummoxed by Apple's decision to announce the change in a press release, with no explanation behind the move. I know that Apple has a strong need to control the messaging for the company and in general doesn't like to discuss the reasons behind its strategic decisions.
But it wouldn't have been hard to have an executive give a target interview to some outlet in which they explained the reasoning behind the move. Or at the very least, Apple could have released a statement with more context.
This news-with-no-details release just ensures there will be a lot of snarky comments about the decision, which doesn't seem ideal from a public relations standpoint.
THE TOO MUCH TV BOOK CLUB: 'BROKEN ARROW'
While the book Broken Arrow isn't strictly a book about television, it does deal with issues that resonate with the challenges facing Hollywood in 2025: the struggle to tell authentic stories and the difficulty in balancing commercial sensibilities with efforts to highlight diverse points of view.
Broken Arrow is a 1950 film by Delmer Daves that is seen as the first sound film to depict the Native American sympathetically. Author Angela Aleiss writes about the production of the film and its impact on Hollywood, telling a story that includes everything from the challenges of accurately portraying Native Americans to a fascinating tale of how the film's screenplay was secretly written by one of the screenwriters banned from the industry during the Red Scare.
Aleiss has been writing about Native American images in Hollywood for more than thirty years. And like her earlier books Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies and Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance, Broken Arrow does a nice job of telling a complex story in a nuanced and compelling way.
The book also touches on the struggles for authenticity in television westerns, including on the show based on the film Broken Arrow:
Like its movie predecessor, TV’s Broken Arrow emphasized a pro-liberal agenda and promoted tolerance between Apaches and whites. The
series also showed the Apaches’ perspective of the Old West, which included indictments against greedy settlers, foolish government agents,
and ignorant military officials along with accusations of the Army’s genocidal policies. But while the film had opened with Jeffords’s narrative point
of view, the television series initially introduced each episode with Cochise and Jeffords as “equals.” The early opening sequences of Broken Arrow intercut both characters approaching the other on horseback from opposite directions, with Cochise riding from the right and Jeffords on the left.
The distinctive ridges and tilted formations of the Vasquez Rocks (northern Los Angeles County) provide a picturesque backdrop as the two men
meet in the middle ground then grasp each other’s forearms against the western sky.
Like Daves’s original film, TV’s Broken Arrow reinforces that good Indians follow white peace plans while bad Indians do not. Cochise, a friend to the whites, personally eliminates the bad Indians often led by Geronimo, who refuses to stay on the reservation and prefers to raid homesteads. “Geronimo insults me by raiding so close to my land,” Cochise complains when the renegade warrior and his party attack a wagon and kill a man.38 The dichotomy between good and bad Indians is clear, and Jeffords convinces Cochise to trust the U.S. government to mete out justice rather than rely upon vengeful warriors.
The book is a fascinating read, even if you aren't a fan of classic Western movies. And it's a reminder that the battle over the best way to tell authentic stories in Hollywood has been going on since the earliest days of the industry.
Broken Arrow is available on Amazon and at many other book sellers.
TWO IMPORTANT TAKEAWAYS FROM THE RIYADH COMEDY FESTIVAL
I have mentioned before that Seth Simon's Humorism newsletter does an amazing job of tracking the things that this generation's knucklehead stand-ups are saying when they think no one in the media is listening. His latest newsletter is no exception, in which he talks about some of the public blowback after many very well-known comics accepted large amounts of money to perform at the recent Riyadh Comedy Festival:
Indeed, some of these comedians have already run cover for outright authoritarianism here in the US. When the Trump administration deported immigrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador, Andrew Schulz called for the construction of even more concentration camps where the US could send “homegrown” criminals. Tim Dillon, regrettably fired from the festival for his comments about the regime’s abuses, has spent the last year or so explicitly endorsing white nationalist immigration policies, and helped JD Vance make the case for mass deportations before the 2024 election. It’s been almost a decade since Dave Chappelle made it his job to turn the public against trans people, and Whitney Cummings—who has lately become an anti-vaccine, anti-China conspiracy theorist—recently argued that Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension wasn’t a violation of his civil rights because “nobody has free speech at work.” (I’m not sure she thought that one through.)
SOME THOUGHTS FROM SEAN PENN
No matter what you think of Sean Penn as an actor or a person, he is a thoughtful person and when you catch him in the right mood, he can be a great interview. This extended conversation in The New York Times (gift link) is really good, but these thoughts about what it means to be an artist in troubled times really jumped out at me:
You’re a politically involved person. You help run a humanitarian aid organization. You’re fully aware of the challenges we’re all facing right now. Given that, do you ever wrestle with the utility of making art? This is going to go a little sideways, but maybe in a good way. I’d always kind of felt intuitively that it’s all the same thing. Your work as an actor is exactly the same job as your work as a craftsman or a welder or a CORE representative. It’s just, which hammer are you picking up on that day to make a contribution? So it could be said that if an audience member goes to a movie and recognizes something from the story or from a character that is familiar and leaves them feeling less alone for a moment, that’s no different than to rebuild housing for someone. It’s all kind of one thing.
ODDS AND SODS
* Brad Pitt's F1: The Movie will premiere Friday, December 12th on Apple TV+.
* The stand-up comedy special Jay Jurden: Yes Ma'am will premiere Friday, November 7th on Hulu.
* Taylor Swift has two projects coming to Disney+. The Eras Tour | The Final Show, featuring the entire Tortured Poets Department set, and the first two episodes of The End of an Era, a 6-episode behind-the-scenes docuseries will premiere Friday, December 12th.
* After facing off on The Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship, Minnesota baker Megan Carroll channels her creativity into a new venture close to home.
* At this weekend's New York Comic-Con, Paramount+ premiered the first look at the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Here is a first look at the trailer. And here is a photo gallery of images from the series. This is the official logline: "This thrilling new chapter follows a fresh class of cadets as they train under the watchful, demanding eyes of Starfleet’s finest. Together, they’ll face the highs and lows of academy life: forging unbreakable friendships, clashing in explosive rivalries, experiencing first loves, and stepping into their destiny as the next generation of Starfleet officers. When a mysterious new enemy threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself, these cadets must rise to the challenge or risk losing everything they’ve just begun to fight for."
* Here is a teaser for the upcoming Peacock series The Copenhagen Test, which will premiere Saturday, December 27th. Here is the official logline: "This espionage thriller series follows first-generation Chinese-American intelligence analyst Alexander Hale (Simu Liu) who realizes his brain has been hacked, giving the perpetrators access to everything he sees and hears. Caught between his shadowy agency and the unknown hackers, he must maintain a performance 24/7 to flush out who’s responsible and prove where his allegiance lies."
* Marvel Television's Wonder Man premieres Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 on Disney+. Here is a first look at the series, which looks very....strange.
WHAT'S COMING TODAY AND TOMORROW
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14TH:
* American Masters: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (PBS)
* Beyond Paradise Season Three Premiere (Britbox)
* Customer Wars Season Premiere (A&E)
* Everybody Loves Me When I'm Dead (Netflix)
* Guts & Glory Series Premiere (Shudder)
* Mother, May I Murder? (Investigation Discovery)
* NCIS Season Twenty-Three Premiere (CBS)
* NCIS: Origins Season Two Premiere (CBS)
* NCIS: Sydney Season Three Premiere (CBS)
* Obituary Season Two (Hulu)
* Road Wars Season Premiere (A&E)
* Splinter Cell: Deathwatch Series Premiere (Netflix)
* 7 Little Johnstons Season Premiere (TLC)
* The Hanko Murder Series Premiere (MHz Choice)
* Wife Swap: The Real Housewives Edition Series Premiere (Bravo)
* With You, Our Love Will Make It Through Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15TH:
* Electric Boom Part Two (Disney+)
* From Rails To Trails (PBS)
* Ghost Adventures (Discovery+)
* Inside Furioza (Netflix)
* Loot Season Three Premiere (Apple TV+)
* Murdaugh: Death In The Family (Hulu)
* No One Saw Us Leave Series Premiere (Netflix)
* Nova: Human: Building Empires (PBS)
* 106 & Sports Series Premiere (BET)
* To Cook A Bear Series Premiere (Hulu)
SEE YOU EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING!