Should You Subscribe to Paramount Plus?

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.

This week:

• Watch these good movies!
• Lololol another streaming service.
• The TV montage video of the week.
• Martha Stewart, icon.
• Maya Rudolph, ICON!

It’s at the point that I honestly can’t bring myself to do another one of those “should you subscribe to this new streaming service?” pieces. It would be like the 15th in this last year.

Do you have unlimited funds and a remarkable ability to remember countless log-in passwords? Then sign up for them all! Or sign up for none! There’s so many now it’s the equivalent of that joke from 20 years ago around the cable/satellite boom. “Three hundred channels, but nothing’s on.” Now literally everything, of all time, is on...and yet also nothing at all.

The impetus for this existential spiral is the flurry of announcements made by Paramount+ this week, the new version of CBS All Access that will avalanche in content from channels like MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon; scores of past Paramount movies; sports stuff; and, based on the number of press releases in my inbox, about six billion new TV series. It launches March 4, and has tiered pricing with $9.99 being the monthly rate for the premium subscription.

Is it worth it? Is anything? The short answer is that CBS All Access was already worth it for airing The Good Fight alone, and thus Paramount Plus is, too. But I still have to laugh at this rollout strategy of “we’re going to be everything for everybody, and thus for nobody at all!”

Among the TV shows and movies that Paramount+ is rebooting, reimagining, or producing sequels of: Flashdance, The Italian Job, Fatal Attraction, Love Story, Inside Amy Schumer, Beavis and Butthead, Rugrats, RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Challenge, Workaholics, Spongebob Squarepants, Star Trek, The Daily Show, Yellowstone, and Reno: 911!

There will be a prequel to Grease titled Rise of the Pink Ladies, and that is not a joke. Kelsey Grammer will star in a Frasier reboot. Who, in 2021 and after all these failed revivals, is demanding a Frasier reboot? Doesn’t matter—you’re getting one!

Paramount+, truly the tossed salad and scrambled eggs of streaming services. (Obviously I will be subscribing.)

This is a Kelly Clarkson Show household, a deeply religious choice that is held sacred and thus we don’t dabble often in other daytime TV options. However, we are occasionally tempted by the unhinged lunacy of whatever in the world is going on at the set of The Drew Barrymore Show, and we’ve got to say, it can be quite titillating.

Barrymore celebrated her birthday this week with an episode filled with surprise guests who played significant roles in her life, including David Letterman, Cameron Diaz, and Steven Spielberg. It was an hour-long escalating emotional meltdown, as if someone found out they were in the audience of Oprah’s Favorite Things episode, won the lottery, and secured a vaccine appointment all in the same 60 minutes. (Watch it here.)

The truth is that I’ve only ever seen montage clips of The Drew Barrymore Show that have gone viral on Twitter, like this one did. And yet I am still certain that, outside of Queen Kelly’s daytime hour, no better TV show has ever existed.

In an excellent profile of O.G. Influencer Martha Stewart that broke huge news—Martha only gets contact high with Snoop, and does not partake in the weed herself—it was revealed that one of her only regrets in her life is that she had to turn down an offer to host Saturday Night Live because her parole officer at the time wouldn’t let her do it.

NBC

In the name of Ana Gasteyer and all that is holy, why has SNL not asked her again? It’s not too late, Lorne. Give the people what they deserve. (We’re a pretty shitty people. A mediocre episode of SNL with Martha Stewart hosting really is all we deserve.)

If we all looked at this photo of Maya Rudolph in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue just once a day, I can’t stress enough how much better a place this world would be.

The Father: Gotta get your weekly cry in somewhere. (Friday in theaters)

Minari: Watch! This! Movie! (Friday on VOD)

Below Deck Sailing Yacht: There is no better mindless pandemic programming than the Below Deck franchise. (Monday on Bravo)

Ginny and Georgia: “It isn’t the new Gilmore Girls. It’s a mess.” - The Daily Beast (Now on Netflix)

Tom & Jerry: These characters/my childhood don’t deserve this. (Friday on HBO Max)