So, I was thinking about the fact that we’ve not had a really good, new monster in a while. A long while. For a long time, you had your classic monsters - vampires, werewolves, mummies, Frankenstein’s monster, the Blob, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc. - the “Universal” monsters.

There were also the giant monsters - essentially King Kong, Godzilla, and a few lesser-known offshoots.

The 1970s brought us Alien - the monster first created by H.R. Giger in his painting Necronomicon IV and then made famous in Ridley Scott’s movie.

In the 1980s, we got one of the great monsters of all time - Predator. (Side Note - the Predator was originally played by Jean-Claude Van Damme until disagreements over how the creature should move and the fact that he looked ridiculous led to the now iconic Predator created by Stan Winston and played by Kevin Peter Hall.)

The 1990s gave us the first on-screen iteration of Pennywise the Clown (really a cosmic space demon). The scary clown trope has now been played to death, but it was a relatively new idea when Stephen King came up with it. And Pennywise resonates today as evidenced by the success of HBO Max’s Welcome to Derry. We also got Terminator, but he quickly went from monster to sidekick.

But what have we gotten since? I’m hard-pressed to come up with a truly iconic 21st-century monster. Both Alien and Predator have been neutered in recent incarnations by being forced to “team up” in some capacity with a main character, betraying what they’re all about. There’s the Cloverfield monster, but you barely see it, and it’s just a variation of Godzilla. A Quiet Place? I couldn’t describe the Quiet Place monsters if you put a gun to my head other than fast and loud. The Babadook? Meh. The Host? Really just a deformed fish. We’ve gotten TONS of takes on zombies (including one I’m going to cover in the next section), but they’re nothing new.

I maintain that there hasn’t been a TRULY great, iconic, post-2000 monster. And someone needs to come up with one. Maybe it’ll be me. I have an idea for a new type of monster that would make an appearance in the final third of my story, “Dungeoneers.” Dungeoneers started life as a screenplay (which made the semifinals of The New Voices in Animation Screenwriting Contest), but I’m now in the process of converting it into a novel. The barriers to it ever becoming an actual animated series are just too steep, and if I want to get the story out there (and I do), novel form is the best way.

So stay tuned! Because the world needs a great new monster. And if no one else is going to do it, I suppose it’s up to me. Now, onto this week’s THREE NEW THINGS!

There’s really only ONE rule and it’s this - new means RELATIVELY NEW. I’ll cover a lot of stuff that just came out the previous week. But I’m also going to cover things - video games especially - that may have come out in the last few years. It’s completely at my discretion to decide what qualfies as NEW so consider this newsletter a “seantocracy” in that regard. With that out of the way, let’s get to it!

There are a handful of creators out there who’ve earned “I’ll Watch Anything They Make” status. And it’s a pretty short list.

Christopher Nolan. Dennis Villeneuve. Seth Rogen. Vince Gilligan.

For me, that’s the list. So when Gilligan announced he was following up Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul with a show that would be a return to his X-Files roots, I was automatically in. Add Rhea Seehorn (don’t get me started on how she’s never won an Emmy because we’ll be here all day) and I’m doubly in!

The trouble with lofty expectations, however, is that there’s nowhere to go but down. Ahh, the burden of creative greatness. But from the three episodes I’ve seen so far, it feels like Gilligan has hit another home run. Check out the trailer.

At its heart, Pluribus is a zombie show. We’ve had the classic George Romero / Walking Dead slow zombies. We’ve had the 28 Day/Weeks/Years Later and World War Z fast zombies. But Pluribus gives us something new - the helpful zombies.

Seehorn plays Carol, one of a handful of people on Earth NOT possessed by an alien hive-mind virus, and seemingly the ONLY one who’s truly upset about the whole state of affairs. The hive mind wants nothing other than to make Carol happy… until, that is, it can figure out what’s “wrong” with her and absorb her into the hive mind. ANYTHING she desires, the hive mind will deliver for her - including an atomic weapon, if she wanted one. But Carol resists. Instinctively, she knows that indulging the hive mind is a slippery slope. Other “survivors” have no such qualms, including one man who hilariously comandeers Air Force One because, “he was the first one to ask.”

One of the great games Pluribus plays is, “What would YOU do?” If you had virtually the entire planet devoted to giving you anything you desired, would you resist or indulge? Carol is keeping herself occupied with DVDs of the Golden Girls. I’d be tempted to tell the hive mind, “I LOVE Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy. Go make it into a streaming series for me.” Hell, I might even tell it to build me my own personal replica of Cedar Point’s Steel Vengeance roller coaster in my backyard.

There are much thornier ethical issues that I wonder if the show will dare to get into. For example, if you wanted to have sex with Margot Robbie or Glen Powell, presumably the hive mind would make them available to you. But that feels DEEPLY wrong since neither is in control of their minds or bodies. (The show has yet to explore what happens to individual consciousness when one enters the hive mind, but I’m assuming it ceases to exist, essentially equaling death.)

There’s a theory that, at its heart, Pluribus is really about AI. Spend any amount of time with ChatGPT and you’ll quickly find how agreeable it is, telling you how amazing even your worst ideas are. And Gilligan is on record as absolutely despising AI. Maybe that’s where this show is going. Maybe it’s not. But I’m confident Gilligan has a destination in mind. He knew exactly how both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were going to end before he started writing, so I’m confident we won’t get into a “Lost” situation where a tremendous premise flounders because the showrunners had no plan. (A problem J.J. Abrams ran into again with the Star Wars sequels.)

Apple+ has the lowest numbers of any of the major streaming services, but for my money it’s the new HBO. It doesn’t have anything close to the output of Netflix, but its awesome to crap ratio is exceptional. Pluribus is the latest impressive show from Apple+, but time will tell if it sticks the landing.

The Happy Fits has been one of my favorite bands of the last decade and the only one that I know of with a cello-playing lead singer.

The Happy Fits fit into an indie rock category that I call “Former Music Majors Who Quit College to Form a Band.” Vampire Weekend may be the most notable of these types of bands. Whether they actually were former music majors who quit college to form a band, I don’t know, but they sound like they are.

In 2024, the Fits went through a lineup change and refined their sound a little bit. Founding member and guitarist Ross Monteith left the band mid-tour. Drummer Luke Davis temporarily left the band to enter rehab. And frontman Calvin Langman bounced around between Brooklyn and Philadelphia in the aftermath of leaving what he called, “a toxic relationship.”

With the band essentially broken up, Calvin and Luke reformed and added guitarists/vocalists Nico Rose and Raina Mullen. Their new sound - while still sounding very much like The Happy Fits - features more guitar and layered harmonies.

They describe their new sound as “pop-rock with cello.” Langman was especially excited to explore the two male / two female four-part harmony possibilities, thinking immediately of bands like Fleetwood Mac and ABBA. This is also the first of The Happy Fits’ albums he co-produced, leaning into bigger and more layered production values of bands like Queen and ELO.

Personally, I’m a fan of the new bigger sound and I can’t wait to see them when they play Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit this December. Check out The Happy Fits and hundreds of other great artists on the THREE NEW THINGS Spotify Playlist!

Rather than featuring a single game in this week’s THREE NEW THINGS, I’m going to cover FIVE games - the nominees for The Game Awards “2025 Game of The Year.” The six games nominated are:

I’ll only get into each game briefly as six is a lot to cover and I always aim to keep this newsletter as tight as possible.

Clair Obscur is the frontrunner and the game I’m virtually certain will take home the big prize. It’s a third-person, party-based, RPG (role-playing game). You spend your time exploring, uncovering the mystery, and engaging in turn-based combat. What makes the game exceptional is its gorgeous, Belle Époque, dark fantasy-style art direction, its excellent voicework (including Charlie Cox [Daredevil] and Andy Serkis [Gollum]), and its narrative hook (local residents being “erased” when they reach a certain age that is getting younger with every passing year). The game isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but rather exceptional on all levels of everything it’s trying to deliver.

If you know video games, you know Hideo Kojima. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a household name when it comes to video games, but in video game circles, Kojima is a renowned auteur. His sequel to Death Standing does what the best sequels do - improves on the original in nearly every way. DS2 is a large, open-world game where you deliver cargo across a post-apocalyptic Mexico and Australia, encountering absurd, supernatural, dynamic environments as you go along. DS2 pushes the boundaries of open-world design, hence its 2025 GOTY nod. (It also stars Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead fame.)

Bananza is one of the first games for the new Nintendo Switch 2. It’s a 3D platform sandbox game, which means you can pretty much wander off in any direction you want, doing anything you want, in whatever order you want. But it’s also level-based, which gives the game a narrative structure. What makes the game especially fun, and GOTY worthy, are the environments which are, not only destructible, but with which you can interact in unique and inventive ways (a specialty of Nintendo).

Hades II is an action-heavy roguelite game. What distinguishes a roguelite from a rogue-like (aside from the one letter) is that roguelites are much more forgiving, giving you upgrades and abilities between runs. In a roguelite (and roguelike), once you die, you go back to the beginning, but you do it with new knowledge and powers. You play as Melinoe, an immortal princess of the underworld, who has to defeat Chronos (the Titan of Time) and restore her family’s (her parents are Hades and Persephone) rightful place in the Underworld.

There’s generally one indie game entry in the Game of the Year category, and this year it is Hollow Knight: Silksong. The original Hollow Knight was made by just three people, and Silksong, also made by Team Cherry, isn’t much larger. Hollow Knight fits into the gaming genre known as “metroidvania” - a mashup of Metroid and Castlevania. Both games are iconic side-scrolling adventures that allow you to explore relatively freely and double back to places you’ve been before. Straight-up side-scrollers don’t allow this level of freedom, which is what makes metroidvania games unique. In HL:SS, you’ll run, jump, and fight your way around a beautiful and inventive 2D environment. Hollow Knight harkens back to an era when video games could just be games and not fully immersive, 3D, open-world, hundreds-of-hours, AAA experiences.

And now we come to the game I’m currently playing. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is essentially a 3D, open-world, fantasy RPG… minus the fantasy. Kingdom Come drops you into a realistic and historically accurate medieval world (Bohemia in 1403) and essentially leaves you there to figure things out on your own. This game does not do a lot of handholding. Everything is grounded in realism, which isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, because all the creature comforts of modern fantasy games are gone in favor of letting you TRULY experience medieval times. The game’s humor and darkly comic approach help to mitigate just how brutal Deliverance II can be. It’s not Elden Ring difficult… but that’s a topic for another day.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “I thought this was three NEW things?” It is. But there’s a little more leeway with the Bonus Thing. Also, what’s NEW about Fleetwood Mac’s iconic album Rumours is that it was the biggest-selling rock album of 2024, probably will be again in 2025, AND is the No. 1 most streamed album on Spotify from the 20th century. More than any Beatles album, more than Appetite for Destruction, more than Nevermind, more than The Chronic.

Is it Boomer and Gen X nostalgia that continues to fuel Rumours’ success? No, it’s Gen Z. Gen Z loves the album but also loves the drama around it. During the making of Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks split up, Christine McVie and John McVie ended their marriage, and Mick Fleetwood split up with his wife. But from drama comes art and, apparently, an album destined to live on throughout the generations.

If your only problem with THREE NEW THINGS is that it’s not long ENOUGH, then this was the issue for you, clocking in at a thousand more words than I typically write. What can I say, there was a lot to cover. Will there be a Thanksgiving issue? Yes, there will. Because at THREE NEW THINGS we don’t break for the holidays! This little newsletter that could keeps picking up new subscribers each week, so I plan to keep the content coming! See you next week with more streaming, more music, and more games!