Late-night TV musical performances look a lot different now than they did a couple months ago. Instead of taking the stage in front of a studio audience, artists have been forced to perform from their homes as the coronavirus pandemic is keeping people inside. So far, this has typically resulted in simple videos of artists performing a song on acoustic guitar or piano, but Dua Lipa decided to do something different for The Tonight Show yesterday.

She virtually guested on the program and performed the song seated in front of a blank wall. As the song began, though, her backgrounds started changing. Lipa was backed by time-lapse footage of city activity like cars driving and people walking, and she was sometimes flanked by her backing band or dancers. At one point, she even found her way onto the Tonight Show set.

Aside from the performance, she also chatted with Fallon, discussing why she decided to release Future Nostalgia early, the pressures of making a second album, and the merits of dance-crying.

Watch clips from Dua Lipa’s appearance on Fallon above and below, and read our review of Future Nostalgia here.

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Ryan Reynolds is best known for playing two comic book characters, for better or worse: Deadpool (for better) and the Green Lantern (for worse). But did you know that in the same year that the Merc with the Mouth made his mouth-less debut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds played another superhero? I didn’t, because the movie only made $13,514 at the box office, which makes sense, as it only played in three theaters.

Paper Man is (this plot synopsis takes a turn, hang on) an “inspirational comedic drama about an unlikely friendship between Richard, a failed middle-aged novelist who has never quite grown up, and Abby, a 17-year-old girl whose role in a family tragedy years earlier has stolen away her youth. Both are unsure, both are afraid to take firm steps forward, and both are looking for that special friend – that connection – to help guide them into the future. Since his childhood, Richard has mostly relied on the imaginary one that resides in his head – a costumed superhero known as Captain Excellent.”

Reynolds plays Captain Excellent, as Lifewire editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff recently discovered. “I randomly selected a movie called Paper Man on Amazon Prime. I have so many questions for @VancityReynolds,” he tweeted, tagging Reynolds, who responded, “I have zero answers.” He looks looks a cross between Superman and Victor Zsasz in Birds of Prey, with a dash of Ken from Toy Story 3, as a treat. It looks… yeah.

Reynolds isn’t the only big-name star in the cast, though: there’s also Jeff Daniels, Emma Stone, Lisa Kudrow, and Succession favorite Kieran Culkin. But at least they didn’t have to dress up like this. How long before Captain Excellent joins the MCU?

The white whale for anyone whose humor censors and set-up detectors are fried from overuse is a joke that cannot be explained. Music, at its root, is just math, and comedy is mostly just a surprise-generating engine. We can know these things intuitively and still enjoy them, the job of the artist is to make us temporarily forget. To lose yourself in a joke or a song is a kind of leap of faith, an act of willfully seeing the ghost in the machine. In those few moments you belong to the spirit world.

The best joke is a coincidence of cosmic proportions that feels like it could only have happened in just that way, and only just the once, where the mechanisms behind it are either impossible or pointless to explain. I think that’s why I was so obsessed with Nathan For You, a show that felt like the ultimate anomaly. It was a show that was elaborately planned and meticulously staged and yet everything funny about it only seemed to happen by accident. It stands as one of the most weirdly edifying television experiences I’ve ever had.

Nathan For You followed comedian Nathan Fielder as he “helped” apparently real struggling businesses, by designing elaborate, convoluted solutions to their business problems. In the show’s intro, he pitched himself as the ideal consultant because he had “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades.” This as the camera flashed across a transcript showing three Bs, an A, and a C, in classes with comically vague titles like “strategic management.”

Some of his early episodes showed him helping a yogurt shop by creating a buzzworthy “poo-flavored” yogurt, designing a fake viral video for a petting zoo, and creating a “rebate” for a gas station that was impossible to collect — even after the patrons ran up a hill. Along the way, it introduced us to a series of fascinating oddballs, like a foul-mouthed private detective who seemed to hate Fielder, several celebrity impersonators, and an obese ghost expert who described an incubus as an entity that “basically has sex wid em until they died.” The ghost expert died during the show’s run, becoming a ghost himself.

Nathan For You wasn’t the first comedy ever to mix documentary segments with scripted, to introduce us to oddball characters, feature a host who was awkward and dry, or be funny in a way that was hard to explain. Jackass, the Ali G Show, Tim & Eric (who produced the show), and Tom Green (often unfairly left out of discussions like these) all feel like spiritual precursors, to varying degrees (with Eric André running in parallel). Yet Nathan for You was singularly itself, and I’d like to think was perfect for its cultural moment.

Subtly underpinning every gag was the idea of late capitalism as a dehumanizing hellscape. Succeeding at business in Nathan For You almost always required treachery (faking viral videos, exploiting fair use to create a coffee shop that would compete with Starbucks by looking like Starbucks) and disdain for the customer (making them run up hills for a few cents, assuming they’d be too dumb to know Johnny Depp from a bad Johnny Depp impersonator). His “solutions” turned what should’ve been intuitive interactions — eating chili or buying yogurt — into rube-goldbergian attempts to extract profit. Whether those attempts even succeeded or not was almost beside the point; the point was to try.

Creating these elaborate, quasi-inept business plans, meanwhile, required an expert’s grasp of LA Craigslist and how to exploit it, and an intuitive understanding of what people would be willing to do. Without desperation and the gig economy, Nathan For You couldn’t have existed.

In playing a more awkward, desperate version of himself (a running gag was Fielder creepily hitting on women), he cast himself as the ultimate parody of a McKinsey consultant, some snot-nosed preppy virgin sent to “fix” a business he knew nothing about, the banality of evil made flesh (pre-empting by years the rise of Pete Buttigieg). When Fielder’s solution to fix a yogurt shop was to design a flavor that was deliberately inedible, the joke was on the market. The way to make money is to literally feed your customers shit.

Critics love to find our own worldviews reflected back at us in other people’s art, but I don’t think I’m projecting here — in a 2015 LA Times profile, Fielder said his show had been partly inspired by the mortgage crisis:

“I was really obsessed when the mortgage crisis happened and how it came down to these personal moments between people where someone senses something’s wrong, but they don’t want to speak up,” Fielder told Libby Hill.

“For Nathan on the show, ethics are not on my radar as much,” Fielder said of the version of himself he portrayed on the show. “Risk and effort don’t seem to register and it’s inspired by that modern Wall Street mindset of finding loopholes.”

Which is to say, the Nathan Fielder that Nathan Fielder played on his show was overtly a parody of amoral capitalism. It doesn’t matter how you do whatever you thought was your job, it’s how you game the system.

The show had a clear format, but not really a formula, and for the finale, it threw out what rules it did have. In place of joke-Nathan trying to joke help a business for a half hour, there was a slightly less contrived version of Nathan helping a Bill Gates impersonator from a previous episode try to reconnect with a long lost love — in a two-hour finale, “Finding Frances.” It’s hard to overstate what a surreal thing this was to be able to see on basic cable television.

It was a wonder that Nathan For You ever got on the air in the first place, but the finale was its swan song — brilliant, strange, empathetic, hilarious, and occasionally creepy. It stands as one of the greatest, strangest, most heartfelt and funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV. Legendary documentarian Errol Morris called it “unfathomably great.”

“Finding Frances” took what was normally a sub-theme in Nathan for You and made it the theme — an attempt to make genuine a human connection in a world that seems designed to thwart them. And like virtually all the other episodes, that attempt turned quixotic. This was a show that asked not only why we can’t make more genuine connections but whether we even deserve to.

It ran just four short seasons, but considering the kind of coincidences and candor it took for it to work, it’s a wonder we even got that many. It was a show about strategic planning whose appeal rested on plans going awry. That’s hard to plan for. Nathan For You manages to stand as both the show we deserved and a show we didn’t deserve.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

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Netflix’s Brews Brothers is raunchy, ridiculous, and right up the alley of folks who’d love to go out and have some beers right now, but given our current situation, are wise enough to stay home and live vicariously. The set-up is exceedingly simple. The show hails from brothers Greg Schaffer (That ’70s Show) and Jeff Schaffer (The League), and it’s loosely based upon their relationship. Alan Aisenberg steps up as the Greg-like character, Wilhelm, and Mike Castle picks up the Jeff-like character, Adam. They’re estranged, warring beer snobs — each insufferable in their own way — who are attempting to resurrect a struggling LA brewery. As one can imagine, the two very much step on each other’s nerves in the process but must learn to work together. In that way, it’s a very predictable show, but it’s surprisingly charming in the process.

Honestly, I could stop right there because that’s enough to sell the show to people who are predisposed to refreshingly breezy comedy that’s absolutely soaked in pee jokes, but that would be too easy. There’s an audience for that kind of series, no doubt, but there’s also added value here. The show manages to surreptitiously delve into human relations and emerge with a fair amount of insight without getting preachy in the process.

It’s a strangely endearing show, but oh my god, there’s so much pee. I should probably reflect a little bit on why Brews Brothers brings more than lewd and bawdy jokes to the table, and it’s useful to say that the sweetness isn’t forced. A lot of the jokes are disgusting and verge on going overboard. Buckets full of bodily functions go down in public. There’s a straight-up masturbation obsession (although it’s a claimed non-obsession), a character referred to as the “Picasso of Dildos,” and something called “Taking A Growler” that prompts an extended gag that won’t quit. Chances are decent that you’re not fully prepared for the shenanigans that go down in these eight episodes.

Well, I take that back. If you’ve been mainlining late 1970s comedy movies during these self-isolating times, you won’t be shocked by what transpires. Brews Brothers reminds me, in some ways, of films like National Lampoon’s Animal House, but there’s a key difference: a lack of sexism and homophobia. It’s remarkable, really, how this Netflix show manages to gleefully dive into raunchy waters without coming off as racist or sexist (given that a lot of that ’70s-’80s comedy did not age well), but somehow, the show pulls off that feat. And the real kicker is that the show doesn’t even exude a politically correct aura — it simply crafts its jokes about other subjects.

Mainly, the humor revolves around the Rodman brothers as caricatures of personalities. The other characters, as banal as their actions might be (including a sexed-up couple of food-truck operators who don’t do sanitation practices), bounce off the brothers and reflect the Rodmans’ faults. As a result, the stakes of truly offending people are relatively low here — making this a stress-free comedy — and every party on this show knows how to hold their own. That includes the right-hand woman of the brewery’s operations, Sarah. She’s portrayed by Carmen Flood in an admiringly punchy way.

As far as the brothers go, Mike Castle is appropriately slimy as Greg, who’s gone through the conventionally accepted schooling that one can expect from someone making a career as a braumeister. Castle’s so convincing that he might actually struggle to shake this role off in the future, whereas Aisenberg’s return to comedy feels refreshing. Folks will remember him (even with a beard) as Orange Is The New Black‘s naive CO, Baxter Bailey, whose fate became hopelessly intertwined with the tragic outcome for Poussey. That was a tough arc for viewers to stomach, but this is where Aisenberg can cast away the Bailey vibes. He’s having a blast, and so will viewers.

Is the show authentic about inner-brewery workings? Well, it was crafted with on-set experts around every day during production. Whether or not that aspect succeeds, I’ll leave the judgment up to the true cicerones out there. What I can say is that I appreciate beer but didn’t have to feel silly about a lack of in-depth beer knowledge under my belt. Further, the show’s vulgar and heartwarming while also knowing its place. It never pretends to be serious, which is a welcome approach at any time but especially these days. There’s already too much stress in this world, so why add to it, right?

If you want to watch some booze-loving monks (who doesn’t?) and a story where a key obstacle is how to recreate an IPA that a distributor loved without knowing that someone peed in it (why not?), then you’re probably gonna dig Brews Brothers.

Netflix’s ‘Brews Brothers’ beings streaming on April 10.

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Make your food last SO much longer, cut down on your utility and clothing bills, *and* replace a bunch of disposable plastic.

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Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has told international students to “return to their home countries” but for many people on student visas it isn’t that easy.

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“The bins are out tonight….jealous isn’t even the word, hope they all enjoy their night anyways”.

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