DECEMBER 18, 2025

By Devon Ivie

“It’s like the teacher of the class and you wonder if your class listens to you, and half the time they don’t.” Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty

Everybody has an opinion on who the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should induct each year. Go on, state your case: The organization has heard it all. “Even your readers are like, ‘What about so-and-so?’” says chairman John Sykes. “We’re like, ‘All right, how do we do our best?’ We’re always going to leave some great artists behind who we hope will get inducted in the coming years. That’s always been the challenge.” Few would argue, though, against the merits of the 2025 class: Bad Company, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, OutKast, Soundgarden, and the White Stripes were honored as performers at the November ceremony with Warren Zevon, Salt-N-Pepa, Thom Bell, Nicky Hopkins, and Carol Kaye joining the septet through other meritorious categories. It was a fun night full of many decent surprises — Meg White was there in her own way — and it will soon be broadcast as an edited-down special on ABC on New Year’s Day.

Shame on me for thinking Ryan Murphy could keep the fizzy airlessness of All’s Fair going. With its two-episode finale, he found a way to make a fun show unfun with obsession-with-murder bullshit. Sarah Paulson’s Carr has hounded Grant, Ronson, Greene & Associates all season, and her venomous insults, spit out by Paulson with real pig-in-shit zeal, have been a series highlight. But when Carr’s implied to be an actual sociopath whose plan to bring down the law firm seemingly involves framing her former mentor Dina (Glenn Close) for murder, All’s Fair takes a turn away from silly legal drama and toward the “monster” fascination from which Murphy can’t seem to break away. We could have had Barbie lawyers doing a zestier and raunchier version of Legally Blonde — but there wasn’t even one court-set scene this season! All’s Fair kills whatever appeal it once had by going in a homicidal direction that is totally disconnected from the promise of this show. A second season is coming, but my defense of it rests. —Roxana Hadadi

Nothing about Landman, now Taylor Sheridan’s signature post-Yellowstone series, makes any more sense this season. After the death of boss Monty (Jon Hamm), Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton’s oil-patch fixer) finds himself at the top of the independent oil driller he once merely tolerated as a working stiff. Sam Elliott turns up as Tommy’s father, despite being barely ten years older than Thornton. Meanwhile, Tommy’s son Cooper is building his own oil outfit with financing from a cartel front led by Andy Garcia’s Gallino. The show’s worldview remains unchanged: Tommy still rants about society; the women are still written as fools; Sheridan still devotes long stretches to dudes being dudes. This is id television, and network notes have been left to die on the side of the road. Yet I can’t look away. A fitting metaphor for Landman is one of its oil pipes caught ablaze: horrifying in itself and for everyone involved, yet arresting in its elemental force, as if you’re glimpsing something primal about the world. —Nick Quah

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