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Late-night hosts discussed the White House chief of staff ’s shocking and revealing interviews with Vanity Fair
Late-night hosts reacted to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s revealing interview with Vanity Fair.
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© Photograph: Youtube
© Photograph: Youtube
© Photograph: Youtube
© Silver Screen Collection/Archive Photos, via Getty Images
With a blend of retro-futurism, moral ambiguity and monster-filled wastelands, Fallout became an unlikely prestige television favourite. Now there is something a bigger, stranger and funnier journey ahead
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The Fallout TV series returns to Prime Video today, and it’s fair to say that everyone was pleasantly surprised by how good the first season was. By portraying Fallout’s retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic US through three different characters, it managed to capture different aspects of the game player’s experience, too. There was vault-dweller Lucy, trying to do the right thing and finding that the wasteland made that very difficult; Max, the Brotherhood of Steel rookie, who starts to question his cult’s authority and causes a lot of havoc in robotic power armour; and the Ghoul, Walton Goggins’s breakout character, who has long since lost any sense of morality out in the irradiated wilderness.
The show’s first season ended with a revelation about who helped cause the nuclear war that trapped a group of people in underground vaults for a couple of centuries. It also left plenty of questions open for the second season – and, this time, expectations are higher. Even being “not terrible” was a win for a video game adaptation until quite recently. How are the Fallout TV show’s creators feeling now that the first season has been a success?
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© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video
© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video
© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video
Apple’s smash hit sci-fi drama has confounded and compelled in equal measure and provided hope for small screen innovation at an underwhelming time
In many ways, it feels like 2025 was the year that television gave up. Old favourites such as The White Lotus and Severance let us down, with gaping plotholes and a total absence of forward momentum respectively. New shows have failed to break through, too, largely due to an expectation that television shows are now the things people put on in the background while they scroll on their phones.
All in all, it seems like there hasn’t been a show that people could really get their teeth into this year. That is, until Pluribus came along.
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© Photograph: Jeff Neumann/Apple
© Photograph: Jeff Neumann/Apple
© Photograph: Jeff Neumann/Apple
This precision-crafted Belfast police drama is a tense, thrilling watch that’s rich with detail. Has there ever been a more terrifying cliffhanger than it served up this season?
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There haven’t been many police dramas quite like Blue Lights. While it might feel as if you’re simply watching a superior spin on a generic format – the gritty, urban cop show – Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s Belfast-set thriller is actually an outlier. Paradoxically, police procedurals usually work as entertainment because the police defy the procedures. The rule-breaking maverick cop is among the sturdiest of all TV archetypes. Blue Lights is the opposite. It works so brilliantly because it’s a stickler for the rules. It has to be.
Rule-breaking mavericks generally come a cropper in Blue Lights. Shane (Frank Blake) nearly loses his career because of some shady evidence-gathering via a mobile phone. When Aisling (Dearbháile McKinney) pays an after-hours visit to a domestic violence suspect, catches him abusing his wife and arrests him, she doesn’t get a pat on the back; she is suspended for behaving like a vigilante.
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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Two Cities Television
© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Two Cities Television
© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Two Cities Television
The video game-derived thriller series should be terrifying, but it’s often side-splitting. Its second outing adds excellent guest spots from Justin Theroux, Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin
The west doesn’t get much wilder than in Fallout. The show takes place 200 years into a post-nuclear apocalypse where most humans are scratching out an existence in a stricken wasteland California of sand dunes, outlaw gangs and mutated monsters. Resources are scarce. Life is cruel. Death is a constant. It should be terrifying. Instead, it’s often hilarious.
A wicked sense of humour elevated the first season of Prime Video’s well-received, no-expense-spared adaptation of the long-running video game franchise. An early episode opened with one faction dumping newborn pups into an incinerator – in case you were wondering who the bad guys were – and those flashes of satirical glee gave Fallout an edge over gloomier post-apocalyptic shows such as The Walking Dead or The Last of Us.
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© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Courtesy of Prime
© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Courtesy of Prime
© Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Courtesy of Prime
© Mario Tama/Getty Images
Annual UCLA study finds declines in cultural diversity behind and in front of the camera since last year
Popular scripted series on streaming services showed a marked decrease in cultural diversity both behind and in front of the camera last year as Hollywood inclusion programs waned, a new study from the University of California at Los Angeles concluded.
The latest edition of the school’s Hollywood Diversity report, published Tuesday, found that of the top 250 most-viewed current and library scripted series in 2024, more than 91.7% were created by a white person, with white men accounting for 79% of all show creators – both increases from last year. Diversity also slipped for performers, with white actors cast in 80% of all roles.
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© Photograph: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
© Photograph: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
© Photograph: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
Late-night hosts also discussed a horrific news weekend and the president’s strange Christmas story about snakes
Late-night hosts reacted to the murder of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as well as Donald Trump’s 10-minute tangent about Christmas snakes.
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© Photograph: Youtube
© Photograph: Youtube
© Photograph: Youtube
We would like to hear about your television highlights of the year. Share your thoughts now
The Guardian’s culture writers are compiling their best TV shows of the year – and we’d like to hear about yours, too.
What was your top TV show of 2025, and why?
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© Photograph: Apple TV+/PA
© Photograph: Apple TV+/PA
© Photograph: Apple TV+/PA
© Ted Dayton/WWD/Penske Media, via Getty Images
Oly and Santi take their newborn on a hellish cruise halfway around the world. But amid the torture there are beautiful moments to treasure in this much-loved Aussie drama
As a teenager, Oly Chalmers-Davis weathered her fair share of motherhood-related horrors. For a start, the high-achieving 16-year-old went into labour in the school toilets, having not even realised she was pregnant. Not long afterwards, she was forced to tell her boyfriend he wasn’t the father – the baby was the product of a fling with another classmate. Then, unable to entertain the prospect of her perfect grades slipping, she decided to juggle studying with looking after a newborn, all the while navigating mastitis, mockery from her classmates (including some inventively mean-spirited memes) and a rocky on-off romance with her child’s dad, Santi.
After five series following Oly (Nathalie Morris) and Santi (Carlos Sanson Jr) as they struggled to adjust to parenthood, hit Australian comedy-drama Bump wrapped things up last December – yet we were left on a cliffhanger. Recently married and with little Jacinda (Ava Cannon) well into primary school, the pair were preparing to welcome another child. Now the show is back for a feature-length festive special, picking up the story eight weeks after the birth of their son.
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© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Stan/John Platt
© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Stan/John Platt
© Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/CREDIT LINE:BBC/Stan/John Platt
© ABC Photo Archives/Disney
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