Stuff I’ve Watched, Read, Done – January 2026 – Blue Towel Productions

The first month of 2026 has been a pretty busy one. It started off with my wife tripping and injuring her knee, and thus spending the night at a crowded emergency room. Super fun.

The next day the family (my wife, three daughters and one son-in-law, plus me) driving to a town called Pemberton, a town a few hours south of us which amongst other things has some really beautiful tall trees lurking nearby. We spent a few days there at an Airbnb–my wife couldn’t do all the things she would have liked because of her hurt knee, but we still had a nice time together with all six of us.

Then it was back to work after having had the previous three months off on a sabbatical. My big focus was for a trip I took to Asia for a week later in the month, where I helped with some smartphone filmmaking training. I’ve done a few of these before but I had to step up a bit for this one as I was covering a bunch of topics that were new for me, on top of the material I normally do (about dramatic stories and filmmaking).

Anyway, that all went well, but when I got back I was a bit sick for a couple of days (stomach stuff from all the travels) and we also had a couple of new houseguests–a friend of ours and her baby who are going through a bit of an unexpected crisis, and are staying with us until they figure things out. So all that to say, life has just been a bit all over the place.

In that process, I of course still watched things (as I have always done) and read things (as I’ve been doing a lot more recently). Some of it was quite good, which is always a plus.

Spoilers Ahead

Pluribus

So, full disclosure, I didn’t watch most of this in January, and possibly I didn’t watch any of it in January (the last episode dropped on Christmas Eve); I can’t remember. But either way, I forgot to write about it last time, so I wanted to mention it here.

Pluribus is new science fiction series created by Vince Gilligan, the writing brain behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I have never watched either of those, but Pluribus has left me pretty impressed. The concept is fascinating and original–the whole earth becomes connected into a giant hive-mind that values above all things peace, tranquility and the expansion of its own psychic interconnectedness. Only a small handful of people find themselves to be immune to this effect, and the series focuses on one of these, a successful but cynical romantic fantasy author named Carol Sturka, who finds herself the only person in the United States to not be “joined” with everyone else.

Of course the series is about Carol seeking to understand and undo what has taken place, but in many ways it’s really about what living in this world is like for her. Carol is largely a self-centred who doesn’t seem to have any significant people in her life except her partner (who dies in the joining process), and so she’s a very reluctant an ill-equipped “hero” for a story like that. But watching her navigate her new reality, watching her confront her loneliness, seeing her waver between remaining fiercely independent and giving into the overwhelming convenience of the fact that the whole earth wants to make her happy…this is all endlessly fascinating.

Rhea Seehorn is outstanding as Carol, and the series is one of the most unique things I have ever watched. It takes a bit of patience–things develop slowly, both over the course of the nine episode season and also in the midst of individual sequences. But for my money, it’s worth it.

Drops of God

Also on Apple TV+, Drops of God is a French-Japanese-English language series that has the most ludicrous premise of anything I have seen that is not science fiction or fantasy. Camille Léger, the estranged daughter of an outrageously successful wine collector / teacher whose father dies after an illness, and finds herself in a will-dictated competition with one of her father’s former students (Issei Tomine, part of a renowned business family) over her father’s vast fortune. Complicating things is the fact that due to unresolved trauma her father, Camille has a violently allergic reaction to the taste of wine–when she forces herself to drink a sip for the competition, the glass explodes in her hands.

From this outrageously silly foundation, Drops of God tells a gripping story that is buoyed up by compelling conflicts and strong character moments. For me, there’s a standout sequence right at the end of the first episode, when a bitter Camille is about to leave the competition. It’s clear from everything that has gone on with her character that there is no good reason why this woman would stay and put herself through the public humiliation of this competition for money from a father who she feels abandoned by. But we know, in the audience, that if she doesn’t stay, then there’s no show. So as we approach the end of that episode, the challenge for me was, “Can this show give her a strong reason for staying, make me believe it?” And if you can’t tell by the tone of my comments, the answer is yes, it did. I was impressed.

As goofy as the core concept of the show is, when you realize that the whole thing is adapted from a manga comic book, suddenly the concept makes a lot of sense. I can totally imagine some of the sequences (ie the exploding glass) in a Japanese comic.

Drops of God finished its first season with a pretty satisfying conclusion. A second season has just came out, and my wife and I started it as soon as we finished the previous one, and found that that first episode was really having to work hard to justify why there is still a show that bears paying attention to. Sneaking a peak into my February viewing, I will say it’s not until the third episode of the second season that I feel like there is a compelling reason to keep watching.

The Diplomat – Season 3

In my family, we have too many streaming services. It’s just one of those things. Amongst them is Netflix, which we only have because my daughter has been paying for it. She’s dropping that one soon because she wants to swap over to something else and is holding on to her sensible convictions that she shouldn’t pay for more than one of these things at once. I need to learn a lesson from her.

Anyway, I was grateful that she was paying for Netflix because it meant I got to watch season 3 of The Diplomat, the political drama-thriller starring Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a political genius who finds herself unexpectedly as the US’s ambassador to Great Britain. At the end of the last season, the US vice president (played by Allison Janney) with whom she has a very fraught relationship is unexpectedly elevated to the presidency, setting up a lot of potential conflict.

This season starts from that position and movies in some pretty unexpected directions. I won’t go into all of it here but suffice it to say it’s surprising, dramatic and generally very good. There were a couple of beats here or there that struck me as a little off-balance, but overall I’d rank the season as being perhaps a bit weaker than the last two, but still in the same ball park. It’s well written with a good cast, which is lead by not just Keri Russell but also by the amazing Rufus Sewell as her extremely difficult husband Hal, and includes both Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford from The West Wing, a bit of fun stunt casting to represent the US president and her husband. And I have to give a special shout-out to Rory Kinnear who really stands out as the obnoxious and immature Nicolas Trowbridge, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom–a truly hate-able character that he plays with loads of personality.

Stranger Things – Season 5

By far the worst of the major shows that I finished last month was the long-awaited final season of Stranger Things. Once one of the best science fiction shows that you could find, Stranger Things has devolved into an overwrought series far too enamoured with its characters to tell a solid story. Still, I had fun watching through this last run around the block with this unwieldy group of characters unpacking the show’s lore, fighting monsters and saving the world, while also finding time to graduate high school. I genuinely like many of the characters and am invested in their journey–it’s just that I have to just accept the show’s many flaws in order to enjoy what is going on.

Chief amongst those flaws is probably just how often the action grinds to a halt so the characters can talk…and talk and talk…about their relationships or their feelings or whatever. Like, it’s not just the narrative pacing that gets disrupted, it’s the literal action that the characters are in the midst of dealing with at that moment. Things always take long enough to fit in endless conversations–this most famously takes place with Will’s big “coming out” scene, but that is just one example. It is especially frequent whenever the characters are walking, or rather meandering, to wherever they need to be for the next plot point. When this sort of thing is broken up between five or six groups of characters, the effect on the story momentum is just lethal.

Still, like I said, I happily watched to the end, and especially liked seeing my favourites (Max, Steve, Dustin) facing down the bad guys. But unlike a lot of people, I’m happy it’s al over and done with.

Everyone in this Bank is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson

I almost finished up this post without mentioning this book, because it feels like so long ago. But I got it for Christmas and definitely finished it early January (during that trip down to Pemberton, I think). Anyway, it’s the latest in a series by this Australian author which are all narrated by mystery-fiction enthusiast Ernest Cunningham, aka the series’ detective. The gimmick of it is that Cunningham is always relating his experiences according to the rules of classic “fair play” detective stories (no clues hidden from the reader, nothing supernatural, the killer introduced in the books’ early chapters, etc). In this one, Cunningham is writing down the story not after it’s all resolved, but whilst trapped in a safe in a bank with only a short time left to live, so it’s even more intense.

This story, like the previous ones, is funny while also telling a good mystery, so I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. The plot involves a mysterious figure someone taking people in a small bank (including Cunningham) hostage, all of whom are also thieves in their own way. Of course, murder also comes into at some point, and the plot movies in some crazy directions. At one point Ernest makes a decision that is so staggeringly bad you can scarcely believe it (the character himself points this out, so it’s not an oversight at all) and yet you can understand his motivations in the moment. So it’s ridiculous, but lots of fun.

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Over in the book-world, I came across this Anthony Horowitz mystery in my house after returning from my trip to the United States, after having read a couple of his other books on that journey. I ended up finishing it on the way to Asia and then during my first day there…at least, I think I did. More on that in a minute.

The story takes place in a little sheltered neighborhood called Riverview Close, and spends the first several chapters just introducing us to the various residents and making clear why they all seem to have a good reason to hate one family amongst them in particular. To the surprise of none of the readers and one of the characters, the husband in that family is murdered. It’s only here that the story shifts perspectives and I realized this book was actually part of a series that I already read the first entry of: The Word is Murder (see last months round-up post here.)

I should have realized this already, of course. The detective of that prior book is named Daniel Hawthorne, and he’s mentioned right there on the cover of this one, but somehow it all escaped me. I guess it’s a good thing that nobody is looking at me to be the detective here!

Anyway, the gimmick of this series is that fictional detective Daniel Hawthorne, a disgraced former police officer, has turned to a fictional version of Anthony Horowitz himself to follow him around and write books based on his adventures, so that he can make some easy money. In this book, it turns out Hawthorne hasn’t had an interesting case recently so they resort to the idea of writing up and old one, which Hawthorne tells Horowitz about in the same basic order that he experienced it, so that Horowitz has to write the book without knowing where the story is going.

Where the story ends up going is pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the ideas that were being tossed around here. I also find the characters and investigative process to be engaging, even if there was one particular bit of critical context which I don’t think was given to the reader particularly clearly, or if it was I totally missed it (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but it has to do with a detail about a particular type of car).

The reason I say at the start that I think I finished the book is that the very last page of my copy has a tear at the bottom. I can read the whole page but the story continues to bottom of the very last piece of paper in my book before the back cover, and while the mystery is solved there is a major plot point that ends kind of ambiguously, and in some ways the whole final moment of the story is pretty abrupt. Examining the book, I cannot rule out that there is actually a page or more missing from it; I haven’t been able to find out with any certainty how the book ends by looking it up online, and I haven’t gotten around to searching out another copy yet. So I probably read the whole thing, but I’m not completely sure.

Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada

So, in Close to Murder, a murder takes place which the fictionalised Anthony Horowitz realises amounts to a “locked room mystery”–a murder that seems impossible, often because it takes place in a room that was locked from the inside, which nobody but the victim could have had access to, but yet in which a cold-blooded murder has taken place nonetheless. Horowitz states that he doesn’t particularly like this kind of mystery, but references a couple of famous ones that he admires in the process. One of these is Murder in the Crooked House, which happened to be the other book I had with me on my trip to Asia! Trippy coincidence!

Anyway, I read this book mostly on my way home, and boy what a thing it is. It is the third Japanese murder mystery or thriller which I have read recently that is built around a particularly bizarre house of some sort (I describe the other two here). In this case it’s a big luxurious but bizarrely designed palace called the “Ice Flow Mansion” which has multiple levels which are often divided in half by staircases (you have to go down to the ground floor and then back up again to go from one side to the other), it’s got a giant tower that can only be accessed by an elevated drawbridge, and the it’s all built on a bizarre tilt that makes walking around a bit treacherous.

More than a bit treacherous, it turns out, as multiple deaths of the “locked room” variety begin to take place. The detectives show up and begin to investigate, which comes with it an astounding amount of exposition. I mean, all mysteries have a lot of exposition–in some ways, this is the point–but this book has just got pages and pages of the police unpacking all the details of the house, its floors, its windows, its ventilation shafts, its staircases, its everything.

It was actually making me feel kind of annoyed for a while but then, when the conclusion dropped, it all pays off in such an astounding way that I was pretty amazed. It’s the sort of answer that seems so utterly ludicrous at first but the more I thought about it the more I was blown away by the utter audacity of it all.

And I really like the detective character here. He’s a guy brought in by the police Kyoshi Mitarai, an eccentric goofball who reads to me like a Japanese version of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. He comes barrelling into the situation, looking like a fool and spouting a whole bunch of utter nonsense, but his brilliance and cleverness made clear at the end in a way that is as satisfying as that of the mystery itself. I really liked this one.

Archie volume three

After finding the second volume of Mark Waid’s Archie series from 2015 or so at a used book store in America, I got a hankering for more and included volumes 3 & 4 along with some other comics that I bought recently. They arrived in the mail and I’ve read parts of several of them, but the only one I actually finished last month was volume 3 of Archie. When we join our characters in this book Veronica has been exiled by her father to a private girls’ school in Europe, where she runs afoul of Cheryl Blossom.

Cheryl Blossom is a newer character in the Archie-verse, having been introduced sometime after I grew up and stopped reading these books. Where the dynamic between friends / rivals Veronica and Betty (the rich brunette and the sweet-as-anything blond next door) has been the stuff of Archie-legends for decades, Cheryl breaks all that up as a red-haired, flirtatious and manipulative force of nature, and this “updated” approach to the Archie characters takes full advantage of that.

Of course, Veronica gets the better of her in the boarding school setting, but it all ends up with Cheryl finding her way to Riverdale in order to get her revenge by taking Archie away from her. With the help of contributor Lori Matsumoto (whom Waid credits with helping to nail the private school dynamic in Veronica’s part of the story) and artist Joe Eisma, Mark Waid does his typically outstanding job with melding plot, character and tone into a truly enjoyable all-ages romp of a story. This series is some of the most fun I have had with comics in recent memory, and I’m both looking forward to the fourth volume as well.

Rare Leadership by Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder

Finally there is this, the latest in a string of reads I’ve been doing over the last year which come from pulling a book, semi-randomly off of my shelf at home. There are loads I have never read (so I presume most of them were my wife’s from before we got married), many of which are “Christian” books of all descriptions. In this process I’ve read a variety of theology books, Christian living books, missionary biographies, and others. Some of have been good, some have been tedious, but this one, Rare Leadership, is the first one I’ve read which I felt like I genuinely want to apply to my life, and which I feel like I probably need to go back and re-read sometime, and maybe sometime soon.

The book has a bunch of foundations in neuroscience which I found hard to grasp (about two different sides of the brain which operate at different speeds, one of which, broadly, governs decision making and problem solving, and the other of which governs identity). But the real meat of it was about four habits to develop in the face of conflicts or difficult situations, in orderto be “RARE” leaders. In this case, RARE is an acronym which stands for

R – Remain relational
A – Act like yourself
R – Return to joy
E – Endure hardships well

Of course it all sounds a bit pithy, but the book unpacks it all in a way I found helpful. In my Christian missions life I don’t lead nearly as many things as I used to, but I still do function in leadership roles, and of course challenges in relationship aren’t limited to leadership anyway. I found that remembering the book’s concepts was useful for me even in the only moderately-stressful process of flying home from overseas. And since I got back and have gotten into the thick of life again, I’ve found that remembering the habits is a bit harder, lets alone developing them–hence my interest in returning to the book sometime down the track.

Incidentally, if you are still looking for the cat in the second picture up above, it’s on the right, stretched out on what appears to be a concrete slab.