Appointment Viewing: The shows you’ll always want to pencil in on your calendar and unpack in your group chat.
Scrolling through 12 streaming platforms but still can’t find something to watch? You’re not alone. Our television columnist Michel Ghanem, a.k.a. @tvscholar, watches over 160 seasons of television each year, and he is here for you. Perhaps you’re in the mood for a hidden gem that’s sitting undiscovered on a streamer or a series with mysteries so tantalizing you can’t stop thinking about them long after the credits roll. It’s all about carving out time for the shows that are actually worth it — your appointment viewing. Fire up that group chat, because we’ve got some unpacking to do.
Late last month, we hit the streets of Park City for the final Sundance Film Festival in Utah before it starts anew in Colorado. For many years, the festival celebrating independent filmmaking has screened television, like Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake back in 2013. After launching its official episodic slate in 2018, indie TV has been a staple of its yearly programming. The Screener, a five-episode satirical miniseries with an investigative true-crime tone, is a highlight of not only Sundance’s television offerings but the festival as a whole — and absolutely worth bookmarking for when (not if) it gets picked up for distribution.
In Hollywood, screeners — or advanced copies of shows and films — are doled out to journalists and executives using a precarious honor system. We receive these screeners sometimes through secure two-factor authenticated portals, sometimes as a seemingly unprotected link. Shrouded in secrecy, embargoes and “do not spoil” lists are often sent to critics with the screeners to make sure no details of the content are inappropriately leaked. These leaks can happen frequently; millions of dollars worth of intellectual property might be uploaded to the Pirate Bay in grainy quality weeks before a film is made available in theaters. (Remember the 2014 Sony Pictures hack?) But what are you supposed to do if your film is stolen and uploaded online? That’s the premise of writer-director duo Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s new five-episode miniseries The Screener, which premiered its first three episodes at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
In The Screener, Cummings and McCabe thoughtfully tease out a satirical version of Hollywood, playing with archetypes that everyone in the industry has interacted with before: the macho, obnoxious agent; the overly nice yet impersonal rep whose phone is constantly vibrating with notifications; and the working-class artist who is just trying to execute their vision without being bulldozed by money-hungry executives. Naturally, no screeners of The Screener were made available, and once I watched the episodes in a crowded Park City movie theater, I understood why. “We’re not doing screeners, for fucking obvious reasons,” Cummings told me over the phone in the last days of Sundance. “It’s strange that people lock their cars at night even though it’s only worth $8,000 on the resale market, but then they’re sending out multiple millions of dollars worth of IP in their screeners to people.”
The Screener occurs in a version of Los Angeles that actually cares about the consequences of leaking of an artist’s intellectual property. Minnie Akhman (Shereen Lani Younes) is a gay Iranian filmmaker with a buzzy indie film. After a private screening arranged by her talent agency, the X-rated uncut copy of the film provided to the projectionist ends up online, sending her into a tailspin. Her well-meaning agents, Sadie (Boni Mata) and Charlotte (Nicolette Doke), try their best to damage-control the situation. Another agent who may have played a role in the leak, Mark (Jon Rudnitsky), brushes the whole incident off. Who cares about an indie film when its budget is “only” $5 million, right?
Minnie’s nude scenes from the film are all over the internet by the time she teams up with a lawyer who argues the issue could be considered a RICO case (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, typically used to prosecute less glitzy organized crime), implicating the entire talent agency for its culpability in the leak. They place the case in front of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, a skeleton crew of three who we meet in the second episode: District Attorney Tony (Cummings) and his two subordinates, Katherine (B.K. Cannon) and Bridge (Shaun J. Brown). Tony initially writes the whole thing off as frivolous — they usually deal with the mafia and bus crashes that kill children, and he wouldn’t dare piss off Hollywood while trying to apply a criminal framework to a case with little-to-no precedent. Eventually, they pursue the case after meeting Minnie in person and hearing how the leak has impacted her personal and professional life.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
So is this too much inside baseball for a show titled after an industry term I inevitably have to define when I tell someone I’m a TV critic? To the creators, the David-versus-Goliath sentiment translates the niche idea into something more universal. “There’s this Zeitgeist of watching people in suits try to fuck over the little man and fail, and that is deeply satisfying for most general audiences,” Cummings said. “What if it’s a queer independent Muslim filmmaker living in her van who ended up tearing this legacy corporate powerhouse a new asshole?” From my perspective, if The Studio can resonate for broad audiences, The Screener is well positioned to grab viewers who crave that satirical bite with a dark perspective à la Succession.
As is often the case for independent productions, who knows when The Screener will actually make its way to our screens. Cummings and McCabe told me they have hosted private screenings for buyers including Netflix and Independent Film Company — I can personally see it somewhere like HBO Max, existing in the Hacks extended universe. But it could end up anywhere, or stay in purgatory for a while; such is the nature of independent filmmaking. “We’re on the world stage at the No. 1 film arts organization in North America, but I don’t know if the system will work and support independence,” Cummings admitted. Mark Duplass has spoken extensively about using his paychecks from The Morning Show to fund his television projects like his coming-of-age series Penelope, and last year, Cooper Raiff teamed up with Lili Reinhart to produce his indie series Hal & Harper. It’s a relief to know there are creators making television at the margins with scripts that haven’t been filtered through the lens of corporate interests. At least The Screener’s screeners won’t leak before its release.
Embargoed until further notice:
- One scene depicts one of the idiotic suits trying to climb an out-of-service escalator. I was in stitches.
- The cast also includes Kumail Nanjiani as Parker, the ruthless head of the talent agency.
- Some of my earliest exposure to independent television were through Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl on YouTube, which got HBO’s attention and led to Insecure, and High Maintenance on Vimeo, which was also picked up by HBO and featured early performances for actors who went on to have huge careers, including Britt Lower and Greta Lee. Indie aesthetics have been very influential to contemporary television, especially on HBO (just look at the Emmy-winning Girls and Somebody Somewhere).
- If you’ve got an academic mind, you might be interested in reading Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity, the first edited collection published in 2023 that interrogates television made outside of the system, edited by James Lyons and Yannis Tzioumakis.
- Other highlights from the episodic slate at Sundance include Riz Ahmed’s Bait, about an actor auditioning for James Bond, and the Nicole Holofcener–directed pilot for Worried, about two anxious zillennials in New York, which feels like the successor to Girls we need right now. I would also easily watch a full-season order of the other two pilots that premiered, Soft Boil and FreeLance.
