For our summer video series, we asked Inkoo Kang, the New Yorker’s television critic, to name three of the best shows of 2026. Check out her answers, edited and condensed, below. Or watch her respond on Instagram or YouTube. Plus:

• Max Miller’s victim mentality
• The godmother of the “conspiracy mom”
• The lost art of getting lost

Inkoo Kang Television critic

“The Comeback”
Where to watch: HBO

My first choice is “The Comeback.” It first débuted in 2005. It came back, in 2014, for its second season, and its third season is out now. It stars Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish. When we first check in with her, she is kind of dabbling in reality TV. In the second season, she is trying to remake herself as a prestige actress. In the third season, it’s sort of Valerie versus A.I. I think that there is something incredibly special about being able to follow a character for twenty years, as the industry constantly changes around her—as the nature of fame constantly changes around you.

“DTF St. Louis”
Where to watch: HBO

My second pick is “DTF St. Louis.” This is a year in which we have been hearing a lot about the masculinity crisis, and I think that this is a really wonderful show that channels those anxieties. It’s a midlife-crisis drama about two men, played by Jason Bateman and David Harbour. They meet at work, and decide to go on an app to find hookups. I guess that is what straight guys do with each other. I don’t know anything about that. It’s not a straightforwardly feel-good story. But I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a male friendship like theirs on TV before. It sort of exists in this, like, weird liminal space. It allows them to get incredibly close. Perhaps too close.

“Beef”
Where to watch: Netflix

My third pick is the second season of “Beef.” The show’s story starts at a Montecito country club. The manager is played by Oscar Isaac, and his character is married to Carey Mulligan. When they’re at the club, they are surrounded by people who have more money than God. A Gen Z couple, played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, freshly affianced and working at the club, think that they can blackmail their boss into a sturdier financial footing for themselves. I think that the millennial-versus-Zoomer-feud angle is a really fun one, but, in the end, both generations are kind of financially screwed. I love that the season stayed unpredictable and intense and messy, in a good way, all the way to the very end.

For more: Read Kang on the age of broke TV.

Thousands of people in Nigeria have been held for ransom by bandit groups. One professor escaped his captors—only to be abducted again. Alexis Okeowo reports »

• The G.O.P. congressman Max Miller’s bitter domestic dispute—in which he’s accused of physical abuse by his ex-wife, the daughter of an Ohio senator—is testing his Party’s willingness to defend the indefensible.

• The godmother of the modern “conspiracy mom” archetype was a J.F.K.-assassination buff from Oklahoma.

• “ ‘Pretend, for just a little bit, that you don’t exist,’ she’d whisper, promising to be back soon.” Kyle Edwards’s haunting “Tributaries” is the latest in our summer Flash Fiction series.

• The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was about how Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything he knows.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted today along party lines to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt, a week after the public-health official declined to answer lawmakers’ questions during a congressional hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment right. The chair of the committee, Senator Rand Paul, has said that he will refer the matter directly to the Justice Department.

Earlier this week, the New Yorker staff writer Molly Fischer did a close read of Fauci’s diary from the pandemic years, which became public ahead of his testimony:

“Fauci reached the summit of his career only to become the kind of cultural figure that’s simultaneously a kitsch object and a political lightning rod: a resistance hero. This was a familiar type by the end of Trump’s first term. A story in the Washington Post, from March, 2020, reports on Fauci doughnuts sold at a Rochester bakery, and compares his following—and its merch—to those of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Mueller. Fauci, like Ginsburg and Mueller before him, had been drafted into a Manichaean battle between good and Trump. It’s a role that sits oddly alongside the reality of Fauci’s working life, which involves a lot of respectful and even friendly hobnobbing with the denizens of Trump world. Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence, and Katie Miller are all treated warmly in the diary; Trump himself is scrutinized and managed, not ‘resisted.’ Such, after all, is the life of a bureaucrat.”

Hanif Abdurraqib joins the Critics at Large to discuss Camp Lo’s cult-classic hip-hop album “Uptown Saturday Night.” Listen and follow »

• A book: In “Queen Mab,” by Emily McBride, a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student decides, to the shock of the other academic women in her life, to have a baby. It’s one of the best books of the year so far.
• Another book: “Little Blue Dot,” by Katherine Dunn, traces our dependence on G.P.S., raising questions about the unintended consequences of knowing where we are.
• An exhibition: You have until August 18th to catch the lovely Fairfield Porter show at the Art Students League.

• Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Sound of a reception-desk bell—four letters.

• Catalogues: Can you sort the items into the correct order?

• Shuffalo: Can you make a longer word with each new letter?

P.S. Robert Pattinson does an uncanny Chris Hansen impression, on display in the trailer for “Primetime,” the forthcoming film based loosely on the “To Catch a Predator” host. Read Naomi Fry on the show’s enduring popularity. 📺