Renewed or Cancelled

Let me be straight with you. The Hunting Party had a premise strong enough to run for years, and everyone in that building treated it like a summer placeholder. A secret prison for the most dangerous criminals alive. A specialised team hunts them the second they escape. That is not a soft pitch. That is a loaded gun.

You do not walk away from a loaded gun after one season. You do the work. You sharpen the writing. You make the consequences real. You give the audience a reason to lose a Saturday to it. NBC didn’t do the work. They pulled the plug and called it a business decision. It was not a business decision. It was a failure of nerve.

Netflix should have picked this up in an afternoon. They have the machinery. They have the audience for dark, high-concept crime. They know how to take a bruised first season and turn it into a franchise. And they let it die on someone else’s slate.

Here is the truth. The show had two problems and both of them were fixable in a writer’s room. Sharper cases. Harder consequences. That’s it. The premise never needed rescuing. The people around it did.

What lingers is not the loss of the show itself. It is the shape of what it might have become. A series like this needs patience the way a long novel needs patience, time to let the institution reveal its own secrets, time for the characters to accumulate weight, time for the audience to develop the sort of quiet trust that keeps a thriller from feeling like a stunt.

The Hunting Party had the raw material for that kind of trust. The prison, the team, the moral compromise sewn into every case, none of it was exhausted. It was barely opened. A second season could have deepened the ensemble, complicated the institutional hierarchy, and let the mythology breathe rather than announce itself. That kind of development rarely happens quickly. It happens through care.

The frustration, then, is not that the show was imperfect. Every promising series is imperfect. The frustration is that patience is now considered a luxury on prestige-adjacent networks, and craft has to prove itself faster than craft can reasonably move. The Hunting Party deserved more than a verdict rendered on a spreadsheet. It deserved a hand willing to shape it, and it never found one.

Let’s not pretend. Most possession shows are noise. Loud house, loud priest, loud demon, roll credits. The Exorcist refused to be that show and it got punished for having standards.

Season one respected the film without cosplaying it. Season two went colder, tighter and meaner. Real dread, not jump-scare bingo. The performances landed. The writing trusted the audience. That is not something you cancel. That is something you protect.

Fox looked at a series that had just found its full voice and decided the numbers were more interesting than the work. Wrong call. Elevated horror on television is announced constantly and delivered almost never. When you actually have it, when the atmosphere holds, when the cast can carry silence, when the writers understand that faith is a knife, not a decoration, you back it. You market it. You make it the reference point for the whole genre.

They didn’t. They folded. And every possession series since has had to try to reinvent the same wheel that The Exorcist had already built, tuned and driven onto the highway.

The quieter loss is what the show was becoming. By its second season it had begun to treat evil as a slow inheritance, something passed down through families, institutions, the small betrayals of a life. That is not a horror device. That is a moral argument, delivered in the register the medium reserves for its most serious work.

A third season could have deepened that argument. It could have moved further from the film’s gravity and closer to its own thesis: that possession is only the visible symptom of choices made long before the demon arrives. The series had the discipline for it. The cast had the range. The tone had the confidence to hold silence without flinching.

What we are left with is a rare object, a television horror series that treated dread as an intellectual matter rather than a mechanical one, and that ran out of runway just as it earned the right to a longer view. It is not a tragedy. It is something more particular. It is the reminder that television, at its best, requires the same faith it so often depicts, and that networks will fold that faith the moment a quarterly figure asks them to.

Let me tell you what reality TV actually is. It is people on their worst day, filmed by someone paid to make them look worse still, edited by a room full of producers whose job is to find the fight and cut everything else out. That is the product. That is the whole product. Everything else is marketing.

The defence you hear most often is that it is entertainment. It is not entertainment. Entertainment used to mean the writers wrote something, the actors performed it, the audience turned up and clapped. Reality TV means the producers set the trap, the cast falls in, and we film the injury. Then we sell yoghurt against it.

Look at what these shows reward. Not skill. Not craft. Not the years of work a real actor puts into a scene. They reward volume. The loudest voice in the villa. The one who cries best on cue. The one who will start the fight the producers need for the mid-season promo. That is not casting, that is recruitment for a public breakdown.

And the aftermath. Four Love Island contestants have taken their own lives since 2018. Four. If a room I ran had that kind of body count I would be shut down by the licensing board before the year was out. But because it is ITV or Channel 4 or whichever streamer bought the format, we call it a genre and give it a summer slot. That is not a business. That is a licensing failure with a soundtrack.

The industry that made The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, shows that took eight, ten years off writers’ lives to make properly, that same industry now spends its budget on twelve people in swimsuits and a re-coupling ceremony. Cancel the lot of it. Put a scripted comedy in the slot instead. The audience will find their way. They always do.

The dismissal is the easy move. It has always been the easy move. Every generation of critic thinks the current popular thing is the one that finally broke television, and every generation has been wrong. The sneer directed at Love Island in 2024 is the same sneer that was directed at soap opera in 1985, at the variety show before that, and at the novel itself before there was a television to look down on.

What Love Island actually is, if you watch it with any patience, is a serialised character drama with a rotating ensemble, filmed live, with the audience holding one of the editorial keys. It is genuinely one of the more formally interesting things happening on screen. The fact that the characters wear less clothing than the characters in Succession does not make it a lesser text. It makes it a different text, being read by a different audience, in a different register.

The craft argument, that scripted television is craft and reality TV is not, collapses the moment you look at how the shows are actually made. There are showrunners. There are story producers. There are edit suites in Manchester and Los Angeles running twenty-hour days shaping arcs across a twelve-week broadcast. That is craft. It is exactly craft, applied to non-fiction footage instead of a script, and the industry pretending otherwise is the same pretence Hollywood used to sneer at television before television made everyone rich.

On the welfare point, which is real, which is serious, which nobody serious should wave away, the answer is a duty-of-care standard written into every commission, not the abolition of the form. Scripted television has its own body count. So does music. So does theatre. The response to a workplace that is failing its people is a better workplace, not the closure of the industry.

And the sneering, the sneering is the ugliest part of the argument. Forty million people worldwide watch these shows. Mostly women. Mostly young. Their taste is not the enemy of good television. Their taste is what pays for the eight-year scripted drama the critics all love. Without the ITV cash cow, there is no ITVX platform for the smaller, weirder shows to live on. Renewed. And renewed properly, with the care attached.

Say what you want about Flanagan’s later work. Oculus is where he laid the foundation, and it does not get the credit it earned. This is a haunted-object film that respects your intelligence. No filler. No cheap misdirection. A mirror with rules, a family with damage, and a dual timeline that isn’t a stylistic flourish, it’s the trap.

By the end you realise the past and the present were never separate. The mirror had already won before the movie started. That is craft. That is a writer who knows what he’s doing sitting in a chair for the time it takes to actually build something. And Hollywood, in its infinite courage, looked at that and said, “let’s not do it again.”

Wrong. You do it again. You give the audience the sequel the mythology already promised. Not a reboot. Not a franchise-flavoured dilution. A continuation. New people. Same rules. Same discipline. Same refusal to explain everything to the cheap seats.

The reason this hasn’t happened is not creative. It is corporate. It is a business that would rather greenlight three shrug-shaped horror films a year than commit to a hard, patient sequel to a film that already proved itself. That’s not caution. That’s cowardice with a marketing budget.

What makes the original quietly extraordinary is how much it withholds. The mirror is never over-explained. Its history is sketched, not diagrammed. Its previous victims exist as photographs and unfinished sentences. The film understands that the most durable dread is the dread that is only partially named.

A sequel could honour that restraint. It could resist the modern impulse to catalogue every rule, expand every backstory, and translate mystery into franchise architecture. It could instead follow the mirror into a new household, a new inheritance, a new set of people who believe, reasonably, intelligently, that they can master an object that has already mastered them.

The reason to make it is not commercial nostalgia. It is that the original left a room deliberately unfinished, and there is a specific kind of art that exists precisely to complete rooms of that shape. Whether that art will ever be commissioned is a separate question. But the room is still there. It is quiet. It is waiting. And it deserves the film that was always implied by the first.

Two records in one sleeve. petal is the album Ariana Grande needed to make and half of it is the album her label wanted her to make. They are stapled to each other on the same running order and you can hear the seam every time it lands.

The good half is very good. “Kiss Me” opens the record like a door closing quietly, vocal held back, drums brushed rather than hit. “hate that i made you love me” follows and is exactly the lead single a proper pop record needs: slinky, mean, and confident enough to leave the hook alone. “oh well” is the moment the album finally shows its teeth, a three-and-a-bit-minute kiss-off carrying the sharpest line on the album: good luck on your way to hell. That is a pop star making decisions.

Then the middle sags. “big feelings” and “never get over me” are salon filler, pretty, polished, weightless. If you sold this record as unfiltered you cannot then hand the audience two ballads that sound left over from the last cycle. That is not restraint, that is hedging. And pop punishes hedging faster than any other room in the building.

She recovers late. “like i do” has actual bass. “bad thing (bunny hop)” is the closest she gets to fun. Total run time is thirty-six minutes and change, which sounds tight until you notice three of those tracks did not need to be here. Cut to nine and keep the teeth in and you are looking at her strongest since Sweetener. She didn’t. Twelve tracks. Three too many. That is the whole story.

What makes petal genuinely interesting is not the anger, which the press cycle has already flattened into a headline. It is the register beneath it. Grande has spent a decade being the most vocally athletic pop star of her generation, and this record is the first time she has consistently chosen not to reach for the ceiling. The runs are shorter. The falsettos are held closer to the chest. The mixing keeps her breath in the frame. That is a real artistic choice, and it is the reason the strong songs feel adult in a way her earlier work rarely did.

The album also has a quieter thesis beneath the sneering one. Almost every track can be read two ways, as a break-up song, or as an argument with fame itself. “warning signs” makes this explicit, and the lyric it lands on is the sharpest thing she has ever written: you don’t deserve me, you know you don’t, you never have. That is not a song about a boyfriend. That is a diagnosis of parasocial pop stardom delivered in the register the medium reserves for confession.

Where the record loses its nerve is in trusting the audience to sit with that idea for a full album. The label-friendly ballads are there to soften the argument, and they undercut it. A more confident sequencing, and a braver A&R conversation, would have let the darker songs speak without cushioning. Grande has done the hard work of writing the album. The remaining work is learning to release the album she actually wrote.

British rock in 2003 came in two flavours. Half the bands wanted to be American, the other half wanted to be famous, and Hell Is For Heroes wanted to make a record. That is the difference. It is also why The Neon Handshake still sounds like something twenty-three years later.

“Five Kids Go” opens the album the way an opener is supposed to open an album, not with a hook, with an intention. Justin Schlosberg is not singing a chorus at you. He is asking a question. By the time “Night Vision” hits, the band has already told you what the record is: melodic, muscular, restless, and completely uninterested in your permission to exist. Rock Sound called it Album of the Year for a reason. It was the only debut that year that actually sounded finished.

Every track earns its place. “I Can Climb Mountains” is a top-three British single of the decade and if you disagree you were not listening properly. “You Drove Me To It” is a band recording live in a room and mixing to preserve the room. “Retreat” is the moment they let themselves be quiet and it is bigger than anything else on the record. You do not get an album like this from a group of session musicians. You get it from four people who have actually rehearsed.

The reason nobody talks about it enough is the reason we should. It was released between the Strokes second album and the first Franz Ferdinand record, and the British music press was busy pretending American revivalism and Glaswegian art-pop were the only conversations worth having. The Neon Handshake was too heavy for one crowd and too melodic for the other. Landed in the crack. Stayed in the crack.

What is worth saying, all these years later, is how carefully constructed the record actually is. Recorded at Sound City in Los Angeles and mixed in Umeå by Pelle Henricsson and Eskil Lövström, the same production lineage that gave us Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come, the album carries the kind of dynamic range that most guitar records of its era compressed out of existence. You can hear the drums breathing. You can hear the space between the guitars. That is not accident. That is a band that understood the difference between loud and heavy, and chose heavy.

The record also holds up because it never mistakes energy for meaning. Underneath the melodies there is a quieter argument about self-belief without arrogance, the possibility that you can make something worthwhile without needing to be told, at every stage, that you are permitted to. That is a rarer subject in rock music than the genre likes to admit. It is what “I Can Climb Mountains” is actually about, once you strip the anthem varnish off. It is what “Retreat” is about, without needing to say it.

Twenty-three years is a long time to keep playing a record. This one earns the miles. It has the discipline of a band that recorded it once, mixed it properly, and let the songs decide the running order. The industry has since produced hundreds of British rock debuts that sold more and mattered less. The Neon Handshake is the one that was made with real care, and it rewards being played with the same care in return.

Most soundbars are furniture that lies to you. They promise cinema and deliver a wider television. The KEF XIO does not do that. It is the first single-unit soundbar in years that treats the phrase ‘home theatre’ as an instruction rather than a slogan on a box.

The reason is Uni-Q. KEF has been putting its concentric driver into stand-mount and floor-standing speakers for thirty years and it has always been the best trick in domestic audio, a single point-source that makes the room disappear. Bolt that principle into a soundbar and you get something none of its competitors can match: dialogue that sits exactly where the mouth is on screen, effects that place in the room instead of smearing across it, and a stereo image that behaves like a proper pair of speakers rather than a bar pretending to be one.

You want detail. Atmos height channels that actually work in a room with a normal ceiling. Bass that lands without a separate subwoofer having to lie about what ‘.1’ means. Enough headroom that a heavy action mix does not compress into mush the second the score kicks in. All of that is here, and all of it is here in a single box, which is the point.

Is it expensive. Yes. It is a flagship. If you are shopping for the cheapest way to make your television louder, buy something else and stop pretending. If you are shopping for the correct way to run a stereo, a film mix, and a music service through one piece of furniture without a rack of amplifiers, this is the object that finally justifies the category.

What is quietly remarkable about the XIO is how much of KEF’s engineering culture has survived the compression down into a single form-factor. This is a company whose reputation was built on Reference-series floor-standers designed for dedicated listening rooms, and there was every commercial reason to arrive late to the soundbar category with a compromised product. Instead they arrived late with a product that reads as a genuine attempt to solve the format rather than exploit it.

The listening experience is closer to a small pair of monitors than to any soundbar we have heard. The soundstage extends past the physical width of the unit in a way that suggests careful attention to phase alignment rather than DSP trickery, and the tonal balance holds together at both very quiet and very loud levels, the two points at which cheaper systems reveal what they were built to do. That consistency is what makes it useful for music as well as film, and that dual-purpose competence is what most of the category has never quite managed.

There is a case to be made that this is the first soundbar to which the word instrument reasonably applies, a designed object that behaves the same way for a dialogue-heavy drama, a densely mixed film score, and a live album, without asking the listener to switch modes or preset. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between a piece of equipment and a piece of furniture, and it is the reason a properly built room, a good television, and this soundbar now amount to a genuine home cinema rather than an approximation of one.