Bill Hader, Jake Johnson, The Dink Review, “Lincoln”: Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness Episode 5 & SPOILER ALERT: Big Brother 28 Week 3 Live Feed Update
Sugar: Inside the Neo Noir Mystery That Hides an Alien Detective in Plain Sight, The Hawk: Will Ferrell’s Absurd Golf Comeback Comedy Is Splitting Critics and Conquering Netflix’s Charts, Jake Johnson
The Dink Review: Jake Johnson Is the Reason This Pickleball Comedy Works, and Mary Steenburgen Is the Reason It Stays With You
The first thing to understand about The Dink, Apple TV+’s pickleball comedy that arrived July 24, is that it is doing exactly what it is trying to do and that what it is trying to do is not particularly ambitious. The film is genuinely enjoyable despite being formulaic in ways that are visible within the first ten minutes, and why the people who walked out of the premiere with tears running down their faces from laughing are not wrong, and why the critics who called it a “pleasant streaming diversion” rather than a fully realized sports comedy are also not wrong. Both responses are accurate about the same movie.
What The Dink gets right, and gets right consistently across its 102-minute runtime, is the specific texture of Jake Johnson doing Jake Johnson things in a context that makes those things land. If you know his work from New Girl, where he spent seven seasons building Nick Miller into one of the more beloved slacker characters in recent television history, or from Drinking Buddies, the 2013 Joe Swanberg brewery comedy where Johnson worked almost entirely off improvisation and built a performance of real naturalistic charm out of a loose structural outline, you know exactly what you are getting in The Dink. I'm not saying that he ad-libbed a lot in The Dink, but many of his natural nuances came through during the performance, and they remained in the final edit. You are getting a middle-aged man with a complicated relationship to his own pride, a vocal pattern that sounds like he is making it up as he goes along even when the script is fixed, and the specific ability to make a character’s defensive immaturity sympathetic rather than simply annoying. He has been doing this for years, and he is genuinely exceptional at it.
Dusty Boyd, Former Prodigy, Current Problem. The setup is efficient enough that the film earns its third act by getting through the first act quickly. Dusty Boyd is a former junior tennis champion whose promising career was derailed in two specific ways, a humiliating defeat against a young Andy Roddick, who plays himself in the film with the kind of good-natured self-deprecation that former elite athletes sometimes find when they get far enough from their competitive peak, and a wrist injury that became chronic. If there was any hesitation regarding his acting ability, I don't think it showed at all. He appeared in several scenes and delivered a convincing performance. Dusty now works as an instructor at his father Chuck’s prestigious racket club in what the film deliberately frames as the specific indignity of a man who was going to be great and is instead teaching forehands to people who will never be half as good as he was, in a building he will never own, under the authority of a man who raised him for greatness and cannot entirely hide his disappointment.
I will say that this movie, along with its cast, went through the entire laundry list of everything people say is wrong with pickleball. They covered every stereotype and every criticism of the game, including the rivalry between tennis and pickleball, the attitudes of tennis players toward pickleball players, and even the competition between the sports themselves. This movie checked every box.
By the way, I don’t play pickleball. In fact, I’ve never even tried it. I honestly don’t think it would take me very long to become one of the better players in the country and so I never even tried it. I grew up playing tennis and competed regularly. I either won or finished as the runner-up in the University of Maryland intramural tennis tournament every year in doubles and singles, and I played competitively throughout my childhood. We played almost every day, especially during summer camp, where the level of competition was extremely high.
From what I’ve seen, I understand how pickleball works, and I can also see that hitting the ball as hard as possible is not only acceptable, but often an effective strategy. Since it’s played with a lightweight plastic ball, you can hit it remarkably hard without sending it out of bounds. The ball simply doesn’t travel as fast or as far as a tennis ball.
Anyway, Chuck is played by Ed Harris, which is either the most inspired casting decision in the film or the most over-qualified deployment of a four-time Oscar nominee depending on your tolerance for serious actors in light material. Harris has never been known for comedy. He is known for the specific intensity he brought to performances in films like Apollo 13, Pollock, The Hours, A Beautiful Mind, and The Truman Show, and for the quality of his presence in even minor roles, a kind of gravity that the camera registers regardless of what he is given to do. Chuck hates pickleball with the specific contempt that lifelong tennis devotees reserve for a sport they see as both derivative and insufficiently demanding, and Harris delivers every anti-pickleball line with the conviction of someone who has found the enemy and intends to defeat it in a huge way. Johnson, who was asked directly in an interview whether it was challenging to play comedy opposite Harris, said, “Your instincts are right; he hasn’t done a ton of comedy. He’s very intense and viewed the process much differently than I. He brought seriousness and gravity that was nice; a different actor would have made the scenes worse.” Watching Johnson work off Harris’s absolute refusal to play the material as a joke is one of the film’s genuine small pleasures. Harris never breaks. The comedy comes from the gap between his gravity and the inherent absurdity of the situation, and Johnson navigates that gap with timing that is natural enough that it never feels like he is working.
The plot mechanism that forces Dusty into pickleball is another wrist injury, after which his doctor, played by Ben Stiller in one of his supporting appearances, suggests pickleball as a lower-impact rehabilitation option. Stiller produced the film through his Red Hour Films banner alongside Jake Johnson and John Lesher, among others, and his on-screen appearances function as the kind of friendly cameo that a producer who also acts deploys when the project is one he genuinely believes in and wants to be part of even in a limited capacity. The scenes are brief, the role is not the film’s engine, and that is exactly as it should be. Stiller let Johnson and Harris and Steenburgen run the narrative, and the film is better for it.
Mary Steenburgen and the Reason the Movie Has a Heart. The element that separates The Dink from a straightforward sports parody is Candace, played by Mary Steenburgen, the pickleball-playing older woman whose errant ball landing on Dusty’s court in the film’s early scenes sets everything in motion. Candace is the person who introduces Dusty to the community he has been dismissing, who shows him what it looks like to play a sport for pure joy rather than for championship points, and who becomes, improbably and movingly, the person he develops genuine feelings for across the second act.
The age gap between Johnson’s Dusty and Steenburgen’s Candace is addressed directly by IndieWire’s critic as “obviously designed to trace Dusty’s growing detachment from his lifelong self-image,” which is the accurate reading of what the script is doing but undersells the specific warmth that Steenburgen brings to the material. She is 73 years old in the film’s internal logic, and her casting makes the connection between her and Johnson feel completely plausible because if not for nothing I thought about wanting to be with her character and also, I did see her on Morning Joe two weeks ago which is how I found out about the film. She is simply that watchable, that naturally charming, and that adept at finding the texture of a character in moment-to-moment choices rather than in scripted declarations. Her real-world love of country music found its way into the production, with the film’s second act featuring sleepovers, country songs, and the “will they or won’t they” energy of two people who have both given up on the version of themselves they thought they were going to be and have found in each other a reason to stop mourning it.
This is where the Drinking Buddies comparison becomes most apt. That 2013 film, which worked from a structural outline rather than a traditional screenplay and required Johnson to generate his best moments in real time opposite Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, built its performances out of the specific grain of human conversation that you cannot manufacture in post-production. Johnson’s ability to listen, to respond to what is actually happening in a scene rather than to what he anticipated before the cameras rolled, is what made that film work, and it is what makes his scenes with Steenburgen in The Dink feel like genuine exchanges between two people rather than two actors delivering their marks. She is a formally trained performer with a career spanning decades, and she plays opposite his looser style with the ease of someone who has been doing this long enough to know that the best scene partners are the ones who make you feel like you are actually talking to someone.
The Ensemble and the Sports Cameos. The supporting cast around Johnson and Steenburgen includes Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, Chris Parnell, Aaron Chen, Fortune Feimster, John McEnroe in what appears to be a cameo role playing himself, and Andy Roddick as the shadow presence from Dusty’s past whose very name functions as shorthand for his greatest humiliation. The ensemble is broadly deployed in the service of the film’s central “save the tennis club” plot, in which Chuck must decide whether to build additional pickleball courts or maintain the club’s tennis-exclusive identity, with Dusty’s tournament performance against a representative of the pickleball community serving as the mechanism by which the decision is made. The bylaw that requires a formal “duel” between a tennis representative and a pickleball representative is the kind of narrative contrivance that these films require and that works best when you simply accept the premise and let the characters run with it.
The film does not dig particularly deep into pickleball as a sport. Multiple critics have noted this, and it is accurate, beyond the basic concept of staying out of “the kitchen,” a roughly seven-foot non-volley zone near the net, and the strategic importance of the “dink” itself, a soft drop shot played close to the net that shares its name with the film’s title, The Dink does not build a rigorous portrait of the game as a competitive discipline. It treats pickleball primarily as the vehicle for Dusty’s second act rather than as the subject of a genuine sports film. This is what separates it from the Dodgeball comparison that several critics have reached for, because Dodgeball, whatever its other qualities, actually understood the mechanics of dodgeball well enough to make the sport feel both absurd and real at the same time. The Dink is less interested in making you understand pickleball than in making you understand Dusty.
What the Film Is and What It Is Not. Director Josh Greenbaum, who previously made Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and Will and Harper, brings a clean, accessible visual style to the material that serves its warm, accessible tone without calling attention to itself. The film has no interest in deconstructing the sports comedy genre or in doing anything formally surprising with its 102 minutes. It is, as the CultureMap San Antonio review noted, “very predictable but enjoyably so,” which is the correct description of a film that knows exactly what it is making and makes it competently and with genuine affection.
The critical consensus across Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Collider, and Empire is broadly consistent, The Dink is charming and watchable and held together by performances that are better than the material strictly requires, and it does not fully commit to the comedic ambition implied by its cast and its producer. The Hollywood Reporter called it “watchable but entirely vanilla.” Empire described it as “a pleasing popcorn movie” whose script does not fully capitalize on the chemistry of its leads. IndieWire, which was most enthusiastic, noted that it “serves to the best of Johnson’s sweetly cantankerous strengths” and that Steenburgen’s casting makes the central relationship “plausible enough that the movie never feels like it’s playing the age gap for cheap laughs.”
Premiere audiences were less restrained. The Instagram post from a premiere attendee who described tears rolling down her face from laughing reflects something the formal reviews do not fully capture, the film plays exceptionally well in a room full of people, which is what the early-2000s sports comedies it is evoking were designed for. You are not watching it to be challenged or surprised. You are watching it because Jake Johnson is doing the thing he does better than almost anyone, because Mary Steenburgen is as warm and naturally funny as she has ever been, and because the pickleball-versus-tennis premise is inherently funny in the way that all sports hierarchy arguments are inherently funny, which is to say, completely, once you accept that anyone has strong feelings about it.
The Dink is streaming on Sunset.
Sugar: Inside the Neo Noir Mystery That Hides an Alien Detective in Plain Sight
Few television premises have managed to pull off a genre switch as audacious as the one buried inside Sugar, the Apple TV series that spent its opening episodes convincing viewers they were watching a classic Los Angeles detective story before quietly revealing something far stranger underneath. Now heading into its second season, the show has become one of the more distinctive entries in the current streaming landscape, anchored by a lead performance from Colin Farrell that has only grown more assured as the story around him has expanded. What began in 2024 as a moody homage to old school noir has evolved into a genuinely unusual two season arc that blends detective fiction, science fiction, and a surprisingly tender meditation on grief and belonging. Read More!
SPOILER ALERT: Big Brother 28 Week 3 Live Feed Update: Kamu Wins HOH, Devens Has a Diamond Veto Nobody Knows About, and the Veterans Are Running a Game Within the Game
Stop reading immediately if you are watching Big Brother 28 exclusively through the CBS broadcast and want to be surprised when Sunday’s episode airs. This piece covers everything from Thursday night’s eviction through Saturday’s live feed activity, including the most significant hidden power unlocked so far this season. Also, if you do not watch Unloaded on Friday Nights, we find things out there now too. The CBS broadcast will catch viewers up on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, but for feed watchers who want the complete picture of what is actually happening inside the house right now, here is the full accounting.
Rome Seymour is gone. Kamu Kirk won the HOH competition. Rick Devens is sitting on a Diamond Power of Veto that six-week window and that nobody in the house knows about except Dee Valladares, with whom he made a private pact the moment he won it. The veteran alliance is not just ahead of the newbies in this game. They are playing a completely separate game from the newbies, with better information, better powers, and a puppet HOH who believes with full conviction that he is a core member of their operation.
Rome’s Exit and the Thursday Night Competition. Rome Seymour was evicted on Thursday by a unanimous vote, confirming what the live feeds had telegraphed since Devens pulled him off the block as the backdoor replacement nominee at the veto ceremony. The house’s assessment of Rome, which had been forming since he bragged openly about throwing the Wild West HOH competition, produced a consensus that was rare in its completeness for Week 2 of a Big Brother season. Nobody but Lala voted to keep him. Not even Lyric.
Following the eviction, the houseguests competed in a quiz-style HOH competition hosted by former Big Brother player Jessie Godderz, who competed on both Big Brother 10 and Big Brother 11 and has maintained a connection to the franchise across the years since. The competition tested the houseguests on their recall of specific information, a format that rewards players who have been paying close attention to the details of their environment and their fellow houseguests. Kamu Kirk won. The former MMA fighter and coach from Phoenix, who had been building social connections across the first two weeks without drawing significant attention as a threat, converted his competition win into the Week 3 HOH title with the directness that his athletic background would suggest.
Kamu’s win is genuinely impressive on its own terms, and the irony embedded in it is that he has worked hard to be a loyal and trustworthy alliance member, approached the game with the honesty and directness of someone who takes sportsmanship seriously, and is being completely manipulated by the people he is most loyal to. He named his side alliance “The Red Corner” himself, a reference to the champion’s corner in MMA competition, because he genuinely views his alliance with Dee and Devens as a champion’s partnership. The metaphor is exactly wrong. He is not in the champion’s corner. He is in the position of taking all the hits while the people managing him from outside the ring keep their own record clean.
The Nomination Ceremony: Mallory, LaTrice, and Lyric Are on the Block. Kamu’s Week 3 nominations are Mallory Aurichio, LaTrice Verrett, and Lyric Medeiros. The three-nominee block, which is the structural innovation this season introduced, means that the veto competition this week involves all three nominees plus additional drawn players, and whoever remains on the block after the veto ceremony and the BB Blockbuster competition will face Thursday’s eviction vote.
The nominations are not Kamu’s actual agenda, and the live feeds have made this clear throughout Friday’s activity. His real target for the week is Jason De Puy, the Los Angeles drag queen and RuPaul’s Drag Race alumnus who has been surviving on the edges of the house’s power structure since his confrontation with Angela Murray at the Week 2 nomination ceremony. Kamu intends to use the veto ceremony to pull one of the current nominees off the block and replace them with Jason, executing the backdoor plan that gives him maximum control over the outcome.
The critical variable in whether this plan succeeds is whether Jason’s chip is drawn for the veto competition and, if drawn, whether he wins it. If Jason does not get to play, or plays and loses, the backdoor is fully executable and Kamu controls the week. If Jason wins the veto and uses it to pull himself or any nominee off the block, Kamu’s plan collapses and an entirely different set of calculations takes over the weekend.
The Alliance Architecture: What Kamu Does Not Know. The most important context for understanding Week 3 is the gap between the alliance structure Kamu believes he is operating within and the alliance structure that actually governs the game’s power dynamics. That gap is significant enough that it essentially describes two different games running simultaneously.
Kamu’s understanding of his position is that he is a core member of “The Red Corner,” a dominant alliance with Dee Valladares and Devens as his primary partners, alongside Chuk Anyanwu and Haley Thogmartin. He believes this group is operating with shared goals, shared information, and mutual commitment to protecting each other across the game. He treats The Red Corner with the genuine loyalty that his MMA background and personal sense of honor would produce in a legitimate partnership. The Dee and Devens he is working with are the same Dee and Devens who are walking him through his HOH decisions and helping him identify his targets and confirming his instincts about the week’s strategy.
The reality is that Dee, Devens, and Angela Murray are the core of a separate and tighter alliance called The Crossovers, which also includes Barrett Pfeiffer and Drew Campbell. The Crossovers is the real locus of power in the house. The Red Corner is a management structure designed to give Kamu a sense of belonging and purpose while the Crossovers use his HOH reign to take out players they want removed without spending any of their own political capital doing it. Kamu is taking all the blood on his hands for moves that benefit the people who are, by every available indicator from the feeds, laughing about how cleanly the arrangement is working.
This is not a subtle manipulation. Feed watchers have watched Dee discuss openly, in the HOH room with Devens and Angela, how effectively Kamu is absorbing the pressure of the nominations while the veteran core sits entirely untouched. The specific entertainment of watching an MMA fighter who named his alliance after the champion’s corner being operated as a temporary asset by Survivor’s most recent double winner is considerable, and it is the dominant thread of the current week’s live feed activity.
The Diamond Power of Veto: The Move Nobody Inside the House Knows About. The most consequential development of the past 48 hours did not happen in the nomination ceremony or the alliance meetings. It happened in the BB Time Capsule competition, which is a hidden challenge format where viewers vote for a houseguest to participate and the outcome produces either a power or a punishment depending on how the task is completed.
In Week 1, America voted for Angela to compete in the Time Capsule. She lost and received the Egg Detective costume punishment, spending the week walking around in a hard-boiled egg detective outfit while conducting her game business. In Week 2, America voted for Rick Devens, whose combination of Survivor celebrity and Bravo universe recognition has produced a significant fan base voting in his favor. Devens competed in the Time Capsule challenge on Friday, July 24, immediately after Kamu completed the nomination ceremony, and he won.
His prize is the Diamond Power of Veto, and it is active for six weeks. The Diamond Power of Veto gives Devens the ability to remove any nominee from the block and, crucially, personally name the replacement nominee, stripping the HOH of that decision entirely. It overrides Kamu. It overrides any future HOH for the next six weeks. It is the most powerful individual weapon currently in play in the house, and it belongs exclusively to a man who already has the structural backing of the season’s dominant alliance.
Devens and Dee formed a blood pact to keep the existence of the Diamond Power of Veto completely secret from the rest of the house. Their reasoning is straightforward: the power is most valuable when nobody knows it exists, because its surprise deployment can be used to protect the Crossovers at any moment without advance warning. If the Red Corner ever begins to fracture, or if Kamu’s game becomes a liability rather than an asset, or if the nominations go sideways in a way that threatens the inner alliance, Devens can activate the Diamond Veto and control the outcome regardless of what the HOH intended.
The practical situation inside the house right now is that Kamu Kirk is performing the role of Head of Household, making the visible decisions, absorbing the attention and resentment of the houseguests he is targeting, and genuinely believing he is doing it in partnership with his closest allies. Below that surface, Devens holds a six-week nuclear option that Kamu has no knowledge of and that the people he trusts most deliberately chose to hide from him. This is not standard Big Brother alliance play. This is a level of information asymmetry that rarely exists in a game where secrets have a natural half-life, and it is currently held by the people who are best positioned to use it.
Saturday’s Veto Competition: The Day’s Critical Question. As of Saturday morning, the live feeds show the house in the stage between player selection and the veto competition itself. The central question of the day is whether Jason De Puy’s chip is drawn for the veto player selection, because his participation or non-participation in the competition is the determining factor in whether Kamu’s backdoor plan is executable this week.
If Jason is not drawn to play, the plan proceeds and the week is largely settled. If Jason is drawn and wins, the entire Week 3 strategy requires recalculation in real time. Given that Devens holds the Diamond Power of Veto for six weeks, a Jason veto win does not necessarily destabilize the Crossovers, because Devens could theoretically deploy his power if the situation required it. But using the Diamond Veto this early, and in circumstances where its deployment would immediately reveal its existence to the full house, is not the ideal use of an asset that derives most of its value from being secret. The Crossovers would prefer the backdoor plan to execute cleanly, without Devens having to expose his power in Week 3 of a six-week window.
Sunday’s CBS broadcast will show after Rome’s eviction, Kamu’s HOH win, and the formal nomination ceremony. The veto competition results, and the full picture of how the week’s strategy plays out, will appear on Wednesday’s episode before Thursday’s live eviction. Feed watchers who want the outcomes before television will be tracking the Saturday afternoon updates from the competition itself, which will determine whether Kamu’s plan holds or whether Week 3 becomes one of the season’s first genuine chaotic pivots.
Big Brother 28 airs Sundays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, with live feeds available on Sunset, Paramount+ and Pluto TV and limited free access through the official Big Brother YouTube channel following each broadcast episode.
The Hawk: Will Ferrell’s Absurd Golf Comeback Comedy Is Splitting Critics and Conquering Netflix’s Charts
Every so often a show arrives that perfectly illustrates the widening gap between what critics want from comedy and what audiences are actually showing up to enjoy, and Will Ferrell’s new Netflix series, The Hawk, has quickly become the defining example of that divide in the summer of 2026. Since premiering on July 16, the ten episode golf comedy has rocketed to the top of Netflix’s global charts, pulling in a staggering 4.8 million views in its opening days and settling comfortably into the number two spot on the platform’s United States Top 10, outpacing established catalog favorites in the process. It is, by nearly every measure of raw viewership, one of the biggest streaming success stories of the month. It is also, according to a wide swath of professional critics, one of the year’s more disappointing comedic swings. Both things appear to be true at once, and that exact tension is precisely why everyone is talking about it. Read More!
“Lincoln”: Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness Episode 5 Is the Season’s Best Hour, and Bill Hader Is the Reason
The fifth episode of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, titled “Lincoln” and airing July 25 on HBO, is the one that critics who screened the full season in advance were most reluctant to discuss in detail before it aired. The Hollywood Reporter, in its season review, named Bill Hader “the best of the group” among the series’ guest stars while declining to specify which episode or which historical figure he plays. The restraint around the episode’s specifics was, in retrospect, completely appropriate, because “Lincoln” is the episode where the show’s format becomes something richer and stranger than a series of historical comedy sketches. The "Lincoln" sequence works because Bill Hader commits to it without ever winking at the audience. His deadpan delivery and impeccable sense of timing make the entire segment laugh-out-loud funny. Rather than relying on cheap historical jokes, the scene finds comedy in ordinary human pettiness, quick deliveries, and with Hader grounding the absurdity so convincingly that the premise becomes both hilarious and strangely insightful.
The episode also contains, in its opening sketch, one of the funniest sequences the series has produced, Larry David wandering into the gunfight at the O.K. Corral to complain about spatial efficiency.
A Correction From Samuel L. Jackson and the Gunfight That Was Not Where You Think. Samuel L. Jackson’s narration opens the episode with a piece of genuine historical housekeeping before the comedy arrives. The famous confrontation involving Wyatt Earp, his brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Clanton-McLaury faction on October 26, 1881, did not actually occur inside the O.K. Corral. It happened in a vacant lot behind Camillus Fly’s photography studio, approximately six doors west of the corral itself. The O.K. Corral name stuck to the event not because of geographical accuracy but because it entered the historical and cultural record that way, through dime novels, newspaper stories, and eventually film, and by the time anyone wanted to correct the record, the correction was irrelevant. Jackson makes this annotation with the dry authority of a narrator who is not going to let a small geographic inaccuracy pass when he has the platform to address it.
What follows this correction is the first sketch of the episode, in which Timothy Olyphant plays Wyatt Earp and Don Johnson plays Doc Holliday, and in which the legendary showdown is disrupted before it begins by a man carrying a bag of flour who has decided that the dusty thoroughfare between the two armed factions is the most efficient path back to his shop. This man is played by Larry David, and his objections to the confrontation’s logistics are both specific and escalating.
Olyphant’s Earp, who has arrived at this moment with every intention of conducting a historic firearms event, attempts to explain to the flour-carrying interloper that there is a gunfight about to happen and that standing in the middle of it is inadvisable for obvious reasons. David’s character looks at the distance between the two groups, calculates what the range implies about the accuracy of the shot, and diagnoses a fundamental operational inefficiency. He does not move because he is scared. He does not move because he thinks the gunfight is wrong. He does not move because he has any interest in disrupting anything. He does not move because, by his assessment, the Cowboys are positioned too far away for the standoff to work properly, and he would prefer to offer some feedback before everyone commits to a suboptimal arrangement.
The argument about spatial efficiency between David’s character and Don Johnson’s Doc Holliday, a man whose tuberculosis has left him coughing into a handkerchief and whose reputation for lethality has historically been sufficient to discourage this kind of negotiation, is the episode’s purest expression of the season’s central comedy principle. Holliday attempts to deploy his deadly reputation. David is not impressed by his deadly reputation. What David is impressed by is the obvious clumping problem on Earp’s side of the standoff, where the lawmen have arranged themselves in what David characterizes as a “spatial nightmare.” He recommends a staggered diagonal line for better defensive coverage. The argument about tactical positioning is genuinely instructive even as it destroys whatever dramatic tension was building. Eventually, driven entirely insane by the interruption, Olyphant breaks from the stoic cowboy character he arrived with and delivers his frustration in a register so contemporary that the anachronism itself becomes the joke. The Cowboys across the lot, who have been waiting for some kind of signal, look at the chaos unfolding, put their guns away, and leave. The most famous gunfight in American frontier history is canceled because of a disagreement about sidewalk boundaries.
The O.K. Corral sketch is the season's funniest cold open, and it works because Timothy Olyphant brings the unmistakable authority of a seasoned Western leading man to the role. He completely commits to the stoic gravitas of the legendary lawman, making it all the more hilarious when David's character refuses to acknowledge any of it. Watching Olyphant transition from an unshakable frontier hero to someone increasingly exasperated by modern absurdity is another one of the episode's first truly standout comedic performance.
Bill Hader as Abraham Lincoln: The Season’s Best Guest Performance. The second sketch of the episode moves to Washington, D.C., in 1863, and it announces itself as different from the season’s earlier Lincoln-adjacent material by the simple visual fact of Bill Hader in a stovepipe hat and period-accurate beard that is so meticulously constructed that it takes a moment to confirm you are looking at Bill Hader.
Hader plays Lincoln with the specific quality that makes him the most versatile performer of his generation in comedy, the ability to generate genuine emotional sincerity within an absurd context without the sincerity making the absurdity collapse or the absurdity undermining the sincerity. His Lincoln is under genuine pressure. The Battle of Gettysburg, which produced approximately 51,000 casualties over three days in July 1863, is the historical event the sketch positions as Lincoln’s primary preoccupation. He is pacing the office. He is drafting. He is trying to find language adequate to the weight of what has happened and to what he believes the war is ultimately about.
David’s Lawrence Butterfield enters as Lincoln’s Chief of Staff, a fictional role that gives him access to and authority over the President’s working process, and he immediately begins treating the Civil War as a workplace management problem. When Lincoln reads aloud the opening lines of what will become the Gettysburg Address, including the phrase “four score and seven years ago,” Butterfield’s response is to categorize the phrasing as unnecessarily oblique. His actual note is “Just say eighty-seven. Why are we doing math, Abe? People are tired. Give them the number.” This is both the funniest line in the sketch and, in its own way, the kind of editorial note that a copy editor would make and that Lincoln’s actual advisors probably had the wisdom to suppress.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg, who reviewed the full season before it aired, named Hader as the episode’s, and the series’, defining guest performance, describing him as “the sort of spirited performer who gives the impression he could riff with David for hours at a stretch.” That assessment is visible in every exchange between the two in this sketch. Hader’s Lincoln processes each Butterfield intervention with a bubbling exasperation that never fully surfaces because Lincoln was famously deliberate and controlled in his public affect, and the comedy of watching Hader contain an entirely justified explosion while David continues delivering advice about ghosting the Confederacy is the sketch’s sustained comedic pleasure. When Butterfield suggests that Lincoln simply stop responding to telegrams from Jefferson Davis and characterizes this as “the ultimate power move,” Hader’s physical response is the kind of specific, full-body suppression of emotion that only performers who have spent years doing live sketch comedy at the highest level can execute with that precision.
The running joke about a yellow scarf that Butterfield believes someone stole from him, a thread that the episode carries across multiple scenes without the show ever fully resolving it, functions as the most purely Davidian element of the Lincoln sections. The entire weight of a nation in crisis exists in the same room as a man who cannot move past a missing accessory, and the show never prioritizes one over the other because David’s worldview, transferred wholesale into Butterfield, genuinely does not recognize the hierarchy.
Kathryn Hahn as Mary Todd and the Eviction Scene. The third major sequence of the episode moves to the period immediately following Lincoln’s assassination, and it introduces the episode’s darkest and most daring comedic territory, the difficulty of removing a grieving widow from the executive residence she has no legal obligation to vacate quickly, and the specific impracticality of assigning that task to Lawrence Butterfield.
Kathryn Hahn plays Mary Todd Lincoln, and her performance is the episode’s most emotionally demanding piece of work. Mary Todd’s psychological history was genuinely complicated, she had already lost two sons before the assassination, struggled with what contemporaries described as emotional volatility, and was devastated by her husband’s murder at a level that left her unable to attend his funeral. The new president, Andrew Johnson, played by Seth Morris with the specific energy of an administrator who has inherited a crisis he did not create and wants it resolved with minimum personal exposure, is working out of the Treasury Building because Mary Todd has not left the White House. He needs her to leave. He cannot fire her publicly for doing so because she is a grieving widow. He needs someone who will get the job done without caring about the social cost of doing it. He calls Butterfield.
David’s Lawrence Butterfield enters Mary Todd’s candlelit bedroom and offers a condolence that is technically accurate and emotionally inert: “Look, it’s a shame about Abe. Great guy. Terrible theater-goer, but a great guy.” Hahn’s Mary Todd absorbs this and determines that it is, by some margin, the worst condolence she has received in a week full of condolences. What follows is a sustained attempt by Butterfield to pack up the White House’s contents while Mary Todd weeps on a velvet sofa, with Butterfield periodically pausing his work to ask whether specific historic artifacts belong to the government or to the first family personally, and whether her hoop skirts are going to require specialized folding because he cannot figure out the fabric.
The sketch resolves in the way that the show’s best moments resolve, not through sentimentality or a conventional comedic punchline, but through the specific logic of David’s persona applied to an unusual situation. Mary Todd Lincoln’s grief turns, under sustained Butterfield pressure, into pure rage directed at Butterfield specifically, and she storms out of the White House entirely to escape him, achieving the objective through accident rather than design. Butterfield, surveying the now-empty residence, appears entirely satisfied. The yellow scarf comes up again.
The Episode in Context and What It Says About the Season. “Lincoln” arrives as the series’ fifth of seven episodes, with two remaining before the August 7 finale. It represents the clearest evidence so far that the show’s creative team has been building toward something more substantive than a comedy sketch series with good guest casting. The episode uses its historical material not just as a frame for David’s persona but as the specific testing ground for a question the show has been asking all season: how much of history’s gravity was produced by people who were fully present to the importance of what they were doing, and how much was generated despite people who were distracted, petty, or consumed by concerns that had nothing to do with what the moment required of them?
Butterfield’s advice to ghost the Confederacy is absurd because it misunderstands the scale of what Lincoln was managing. It is also, structurally, the same advice that David has been giving people about their problems all season, and it is not always wrong on its own terms. The episode’s final movement, in which Butterfield’s presence at the Ford Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination is suggested as a possible contributing factor to the events of that night, is where the show commits to its most uncomfortable implication: that the petty human irritations David’s character generates wherever he goes are not separable from the historical events those irritations touch, that history and annoyance exist in the same space and sometimes the annoyance matters.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, with episodes streaming on Max. Episode 6 airs July 31, and the season finale airs August 7, 2026.
Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller Serve Up Apple TV’s Pickleball Comeback Comedy
Pickleball has spent the past several years quietly taking over the American backyard, and now the sport finally has the big, broad, unapologetically silly comedy it deserves. Apple Original Films is set to premiere The Dink globally from Apple TV on Friday, July 24, 2026, a summer sports comedy built around the collision of old school tennis pride and the paddle sport that has been steadily eating its lunch. Produced by Ben Stiller, who knows a thing or two about turning an underdog sport into a cultural moment after his work on Dodgeball, and led by a cast stacked with reliable comedic talent, the film arrives with the kind of pedigree that suggests Apple is treating this premise with far more care than a quick punchline about middle aged suburbanites and their paddles. Read More!