Welcome to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, Where We Discuss Movies, TV Shows, and Ryan Phillippe’s Butt

Sometimes, Katy Perry throws a slice of pizza into a crowded club, and you can’t stop thinking about it. A movie like Nope comes out, and it’s all you want to talk about for two weeks. Maybe you saw Real Housewife Teresa Giudice’s wedding hair—a true marvel—and need to vent. Or Che Diaz is unleashed into the world, and you need a safe space to work through it.

With that in mind, I’d like to welcome you to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, a new destination for pop-culture fans to indulge in content about all the TV shows, movies, and wild celebrity behavior that, for better or worse, dominate our thoughts. (Definitely the better.)

We’ll have reviews! We’ll have interviews! We’ll have an impassioned argument for why Pete Davidson should join the reality series FBoy Island! We take these matters seriously, in all of their goofy glory.

The Daily Beast’s Obsessed began four years ago as a weekly newsletter that I launched with Marlow Stern, senior entertainment editor/fearless leader/the Beast’s culture czar/the mother I never had, and the sister everybody would want. This new site is a culmination of an incredible amount of work conducted by every department at The Daily Beast, one of the biggest and, if I do say so myself, most fun undertakings in our publication’s history. We’re thrilled to have its debut presented by Paramount+. (I choose to believe Christine Baranski and RuPaul cut the check for it themselves. Let me have this.)

This is a place to find the content that we’ve always excelled at producing at The Daily Beast—sharp insights with vibrant writing from some of the most entertaining critics and reporters in the industry—all under one umbrella, with more resources, more enthusiasm, and, as you can see, a gorgeous design.

There are new initiatives that we’re introducing, including a new culture-themed crossword and the “Obsessional” feature on the new homepage, a one-stop shop to access all the stories we’ve produced about the major entertainment preoccupation of the moment. That might be a hot TV series, like Stranger Things, Euphoria, or And Just Like That..., or a major news story, like a certain slap that took place at a high-profile award ceremony. And, trust, our team had lots to say about that.

This is a living, breathing project. We’re already expanding with a new newsletter, called “See/Skip,” written by Coleman Spilde, that you should absolutely subscribe to if you want a hilarious rundown of what you should be watching based on our critics’ recommendations. The Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter, the Gremlin we’ve added water to in order to create this whole new venture, will still be alive and well. (If you don’t get that reference, you just age-shamed me.)

And, of course, you should absolutely follow and subscribe to our new social media handle, @beastobsessed, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Yes, they finally convinced this old man to download TikTok. How do you do, fellow kids?

We want to be in conversation with all of you, because, if you’re anything like us, you know that the way we engage with pop-culture is more all-encompassing now than it’s ever been.

There are 357 scripted series that premiered... in June. That's not a hyperbole. It's a real number, and doesn’t account for reality TV, docuseries, and sports. Add to all of that the movies debuting not just in theaters, but across all 137 streaming services (OK, that's not a real number), and it’s a lot of great content—but also a lot of noise.

You want to know if a series or a movie is good or bad, and we’re ecstatic to be providing that service. Consider us your pop-culture spirit guides. The See or Skip section on our new site is our way of shepherding you through the chaos towards the projects that are worth your time. We consider making sure you enjoy yourself our civic duty, which means we're not only going to make recommendations, but deliver them with the sass and bravado you expect from the Daily Beast.

And, like you, we also are interested in what actors are saying, tweeting, or doing on talk shows. We care about that fabulous coat they wore in that one episode of their new show, we care about whether they pulled off their American accent, and we care about the embarrassing TikTok they made to promote it all. We think that, in turn, you’ll be interested in what critics like ours are saying about that.

It’s fun to be a fan. When you come here, you’ll meet fans. Our writers, editors, photo team, social squad, and everyone who works on this are fans of entertainment, so everything you see on this site will come from that place.

You’ll find out what we loved, and hope you will, too. You’ll be warned off what we couldn’t stand. And you’ll be a captive audience to our rants, raves, and indulgent screeds in the names of the most ridiculous things that have been taking over our brainspace. (We couldn't not run a tribute to Al Pacino’s Shrek-themed phone case, for example, or stand firm in our stance that the new season of Bridgerton needed more butts. We have an agenda, and we’re not afraid to wear it on our sleeve.)

This is the silliest beat in the world, and we plan on driving recklessly in the clown car. But it’s also one of the things in our lives that we should take the most seriously, and we promise to do that, too.

At any moment, some of us are lost, grieving, or distracted. We’re joyous, hopeful, or, maybe, just plain horny. We have people in our lives who we miss, who we want to know better, and who we admire. There are people who we don’t understand. There are people who make us feel seen. There are people who inspire us, enrage us, entertain us, mystify us, and put our lives into perspective. There is Oprah.

Pop culture helps us process all of these things. Sure, it’s TV, it’s movies, it’s music, it’s Instagram, and it’s the paparazzi photos of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck that we’ll spend hours analyzing and gabbing about. But it’s also so human. It connects us, and that’s huge—especially now, what do we need if not community? More importantly, it moves us. These are the things that break open our hearts and set our worlds off their axes. We think about life, about people, about beliefs and what’s right in new ways.

Before sitting down to write this, I looked back at many of my Obsessed newsletters. They’re a remarkable diary of my life, through the meaningful and powerful lens of pop culture. My own highest highs and most painful heartbreaks—and those of our society—in these last years are refracted through the projects, news, and events that helped us both to heal and, perhaps more importantly, really feel it, so that we understood its impact and maybe who we really are.

There are things we watched and experienced that brought us such joy, the celebration we desperately needed. There was music that imprinted on all kinds of memories—new track listings on the soundtrack of our lives. And there were ridiculous, silly, just-plain-fun stories and moments to gush over. With this site, we'll do all of this together.

It is equally important to me that we spotlight an underrated TV show or documentary that deserves your attention, and that we make sure you’re aware of the most urgent news in the world, such as the fact that Ryan Phillippe posed with a painting of his nude scene in Cruel Intentions.

We want you to be excited to read our content. We want you to have watched every single episode of a series or each frame of a new movie multiple times and then think, “I want to see what Obsessed has to say about this.” We also want you to click on our stories and have not a clue about what the thing is we’re writing about, yet still be thoroughly entertained—and maybe even a little educated—by what you read.

Come here for fun. Come here to go on a deep dive. Come here to feel—to be happy, to laugh, to be sad, and to feel like you’ve found the people who think about pop culture just like you. Come here to be obsessed.

Keep obsessing! Follow the Daily Beast’s Obsessed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

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