Happy 2026, y’all! This is also going to be a shorter newsletter, since we’re kind of in the breath before the guild award stuff, winter TV, and whatever is going to happen in “Primate” pops off. I’ve had a fun week, mostly not thinking about movies and television, and replaying Lucy Dacus singing “Bread and Roses” a [redacted] number of times. 

But I have been catching up on the “Pluribus” official podcast now that the show’s wrapped. It’s the kind of thing that should be called out in a Craft newsletter because it’s hosted by editor Chris McCaleb, who has been doing these making-of podcasts since the “Better Call Saul” days and has it down to a science.

Even insightful Official Podcasts™ will mostly be about actor reactions/showrunner reflections on character and plot, and that’s wonderful, sure. But the Vince Gilligan crew really seems to love and respect the team effort that goes into making things. There are standalone episodes with the “Pluribus” sound team, with the DPs, the costume designer, and the choreographer, in addition to the roundtables that really try to guide listeners from what ideas were important in the writing to how they’re realized through prepro, production, and post. It’s great stuff. 

The comedy streaming service Dropout, actually, is very good about this, too. I have mentioned “Very Important People” in this newsletter, and you should go watch some of the new episodes. But it feels like what completes that series is the “Last Looks” mini-episodes about the making of each outsized character, which host Vic Michaelis must confront within the show itself.

Getting to hear directly from director Tamar Levine, makeup department head Alex Perrone, and prosthetics wizard Bruce Spaulding Fuller about the details of their work is fascinating, from baby teeth dental applications to exactly how one should do alien goo. I’m sure not everybody watches them, but it’s smart that Dropout does these short making-ofs for “VIP” and “Game Changer” as part of those series’ release schedules. It really deepens your appreciation for the shows themselves, and creates a sense of them being handmade by people who care — not something we can often take for granted in the age of IP. 

There’s a lot of bemoaning (by me, as much as anyone) about the fact that we don’t have DVD commentaries as a default part of how we consume media outside of the theatrical experience, but the DVD commentary/BTS featurette hidden in the menu is still out there, in different guises. It would be great to see more streamers think about their ancillary materials in this way and integrate them as closely as possible into their main feeds. If I can watch “Frankenstein” in Spanish, Netflix, I should be able to watch it with GDT’s commentary. C’mon now. 

The Craft side of IndieWire’s been pretty quiet this week, other than Jim Hemphill sneaking one last “Avatar: Fire and Ash” piece in — he simply cannot be stopped — and a really fantastic Hugh Hart piece about the music of “Song Sung Blue.” I’m excited about some of what we have coming down the pike in January, though: Some long-overdue love for some of the best international films of last year, and Chris O’Falt and I have been scheming about some fun we can have talking about casting as a discipline, in honor of the first year of the Oscar category.

We did not conduct our “The Best Cast Movies According to Casting Directors” survey this year. But we may be conducting another one soon… and then, of course, Sundance is about to hit before we know it, and we’ll be digging into our usual cinematography survey and a whole lot else there. It’s nice to have things to look forward to. Don’t fuck it up, 2026.