Hidey ho, Thingers! Threebees? Newsies? I’m still trying to settle on what to call fans of this newsletter. We’ll workshop it.

In this edition, I’ll be covering two new shows and, since it’s been a beat since I last covered music, a couple of cool new tunes.

I was very late to The Night Manager, having never seen the first series until after the second series premiered a couple of weeks ago. It’s a little surprising I missed it since I am always down for shows involving Britain’s MI5 and MI6 agencies.

The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston (Loki) and Hugh Laurie (House), first premiered nine years ago. It was an enjoyable international romp but not as tightly plotted and scripted as something like The Day of the Jackal on Peacock, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I had an issue with the love story (such as it was) being crammed into the first 25 minutes of the series because it sets up everything that follows. Everything after “Four Years Later” is pretty solid, but I’m not sure I ever fully bought Jonathon Pine (Hiddleston) seeking vengeance on Richard Roper (Laurie) over a woman he knew for five minutes and slept with once. I also thought Roper should have been MUCH more suspicious of Pine than he was. (“Wait… so the manager of the remote hotel I stayed at in Switzerland just popped up out of nowhere in Spain and saved my son? Nothing suspicious about that at all.”)

If you can set those two quibbles aside, the rest of the show is a good deal of fun, especially Laurie’s scenery-chewing villain and his appropriately suspicious right-hand man played by Tom Hollander.

Season 2, so far, is a little weaker. It has more of a South American flavor than European, and a villain who seems to be riffing on Scarface a little. Camila Morrone plays the femme fatale, and my guess is that she’s a former model because her acting is on par with someone who may be better suited to being a model.

If all this sounds as if I’m daming The Night Manager with faint praise, I suppose that I am. We all need filler shows— something to pass the time until better shows come on. The Night Manager fills that void. It doesn’t achieve greatness, but it does achieve goodness. If you’re looking for something to watch… it’s something to watch.

Game of Thrones is back, baby!

Game of Thrones was one of the great TV series of all time… until it wasn’t. The trouble with the last two seasons happened for two reasons. One, the show ran out of source material. Author George R.R. Martin has been working on “The Winds of Winter” - Book 6 in a 7-book series - for more than 15 years now. The other reason is because the showrunners - and they’ve admitted this - simply got bored and wanted to move on. The last two seasons were rushed, the quality dipped, and the ending was botched. The contrast in quality is glaring because the first five seasons of the show were peak TV.

The spinoff GoT show - House of the Dragon - had a promising start thanks primarily to two spectacular performances from Milly Alcock and Matt Smith. The second season, however, meandered, giving Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen virtually nothing to do but tread water and mope. Season 3 comes out later this year, and we’ll see if the show is able to get back on track.

In the meantime, we have a new show - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - based on Martin’s “Dunk & Egg” novellas. The show is Game of Thrones done small, and I’m happy to say done right. At least based on the premiere episode.

Instead of a sprawling cast, we have just two main characters - Ser Duncan the Tall and Egg, whose real name I won’t spoil but one that’s not hard to suss out if you think about it for a couple of seconds. It’s also a story focused on the commoners rather than the elites we’re used to seeing. And the show is better for it as it’s easy to root for the people who get trampled by the various schemes and machinations of the great houses.

The show stars two people who have never acted before, but you wouldn’t know it based on their performances and great chemistry. Duncan is played by Peter Claffey, a former professional rugby player. Egg is played by child actor Dexter Sol Ansell. Because they are the focus of virtually every scene, the show hinges on their performances, and they both knock it out of the park. There’s one more scene stealer I should mention, Daniel Ings, who plays Lyonel Baratheon (grandfather or great-grandfather to Robert from the original series). My wife and I both had the same thought, and it’s one I’ve found shared by many online - that Lyonel sure does look and feel a LOT like Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister. I don’t believe there’s supposed to be any in-story relation between the two characters, but Lyonel is absolutely a stand-in for Tyrion. A show like Game of Thrones needs a character poking fun at all the absurdities, and Ings fills that role nicely.

The show is just six episodes long, all running around 30 minutes in length aside from the first one. Considering the novella (1 of 3) the first season is based on is only a little over 100 pages long, this is appropriate. There’s nothing worse than a show or movie that stretches things far beyond the source material (I’m looking at you, Hobbit movies).

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms reminds me of the glory days of Game of Thrones, just on a smaller scale. If you need to scratch that GoT itch, this is the show for you.

This Is Lorelei is a solo project from Nate Amos, half of the indie duo Water From Your Eyes. His new song “SF & GG” gives off throwback George Harrison vibes, especially the harmonizing slide guitar part that shifts from major to minor chords. At just 1:40, it’s a short little tune that leaves you wanting more, which frankly is what more songs should aspire to.

One of my favorite trends in music is Gen Zers embracing the soft FM sounds of the 1970s and 80s. The jazzy bossa nova riff of “It’s So Easy (To Fall in Love)” will definitely remind you of Burt Bacharach as well as Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, who penned “The Girl from Ipanema.” I have an entire playlist dedicated to this kind of music, so it’s definitely in my personal wheelhouse.

And speaking of playlists, in this issue I’m going to debut my “Best of 2026” playlist on Spotify. At present, it’s 30 songs encompassing 1 hour and 39 minutes worth of music. But I add to it every week, so check back frequently!

Issue No. 12 is in the bank. See you next week for lucky No. 13!