News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Mountain Goats in Print, Teen Wolves on Netflix Plus: 100 Nights of Hero and crossword puzzles. By Molly Templeton | Published on December 5, 2025 Photo: MTV Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: MTV Welcome to December! I’m not at all sure how we got here, to the land of year-end lists and best-ofs and people stressing about gift-buying and ticking things off their to-do lists. In my contrary way I have mostly been trucking around Hyrule doing side quests, which is kind of a good metaphor for taking it easy for a little while. (The big projects—and the stressful dungeons—can wait a minute.) But my own personal list of things to watch and read never stops growing. This week, we have new TV shows, old TV shows, a book of lyrics, a book of crosswords, and a movie based on a book. Pick one, or try all five—whatever you do, don’t forget to call your reps! All of Teen Wolf Lands on Netflix. Who’s the Alpha Now? The one thing I know about Teen Wolf is that people who love Teen Wolf really, really, love Teen Wolf. No, just kidding, I know two other things: One star of Teen Wolf went on to be small-screen Superman, and the series also featured Arrow’s Roy Harper, Colton Haynes. (If I first see an actor on Arrow, they are forever “from Arrow.” Yes, this absolutely includes Austin Butler.) I have the distinct sense that experiencing Teen Wolf is a cousin to experiencing Vampire Diaries, a bananas supernatural show (which I love) which is full of teens who never act like teens. I could be wrong, having not yet watched Teen Wolf. But perhaps my time has come: All of Teen Wolf is now on Netflix.  We Are Gonna Make It Through This Year If It Kills Us: New Books for Mountain Goats & Sci-Fi Fans This was a surprisingly good week for books—at least if you like finishing up epic SF trilogies and also The Mountain Goats. I am perhaps unreasonably excited about both Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon and John Darnielle’s This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days, which I am positive more than earns the double semicolons in its title. At this point I have been listening to the Mountain Goats for something like 30 years, and yet I know, when I pick up This Year, there will be songs I don’t know, don’t remember, had no idea existed. Darnielle’s prodigious songwriting output is like that: full of surprises (and wise and beautiful). It’s going to be very hard to read this book one song at a time, but I’m going to try. It seems like a really perfect way to start each day in 2026. 100 Nights of Hero: Stories About Stories About Stories Is it just me, or has Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero been flying a bit under the radar? It comes out this weekend—yay!—and yet I have hardly heard a peep about it (boo!). Based on the graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, the film tells the story of a woman whose husband makes a very weird bet: that a houseguest can’t seduce her in 100 days. Coming between the would-be seducer and the chaste wife is Hero, who plays something of a Scheherazade role, distracting the wife with her tales. The movie stars Emma Corrin as Hero, Maika Monroe as Cherry, the wife, and Nicholas Galitzine the seducer; Richard E. Grant and Charli xcx are also here, because why not? All this takes place in a strange place that is definitely not our world, though certainly bears some resemblance. IndieWire called it “a layered, playful, and poignant reminder that stories themselves can be acts of resistance.” Excellent. Go West With Middle-Aged Women In The Abadons Until Pluribus started, it felt like it had been a million years since I had a TV show to be obsessed with (it had, in fact, only been a number of months since the second season of Severance wound up). But now there’s a new one: Netflix’s The Abandons. Reviews seem to be, uh, not great, but I don’t care. There are two simple reasons why I don’t care: Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson. These two queens play matriarchs in the American west in the 1850s. In my head, that means this show is like Deadwood but not. I am probably very wrong about this. But like I said: I don’t care! I will watch these two slice bread or sweep porches or brush horses or whatever people did for fun in 1854. Though probably they’ll be doing a lot more than that; The Abandons is described as being about two families, led by Headey and Anderson, who “find their fates linked by two crimes, an awful secret, star-crossed love, and a piece of land over a silver lode. Their collision in a place just beyond the reach of justice echoes the perpetual American struggle between the haves and have-nots.” Sure, yes, I’m in. Now if I could just find the time to binge this. If I Were Cleverer I Could Come Up With a Crossword For This Section: A New Book for Puzzle Lovers I am absolutely not going to admit here how long my current crossword puzzle streak is. It’s my little daily habit (well, right after I do the daily Clues by Sam). My interest in the puzzles started way back in the days when people would buy papers from the ubiquitous machines and discard them around any and every cafe. If you were lucky, you’d find one with an untouched crossword. (I would do the Cryptogram, too, in a pinch.) My mom used to make fun of me for not knowing the regular crossword vocabulary (neap tides! Asta the dog!) that is by now engraved in my brain. But only once have I given in to the temptation to buy one of those books of crosswords (it was for a very long flight. I think I did like three). Over at LitHub, an excerpt from a new book, Natan Last’s Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, focuses on a piece of the history of publishers and crossword puzzles—which turned out to be quite the moneymaker back in the day. A single fun fact from the piece: “Simon & Schuster has never, in the century since its founding, not had a crossword puzzle book in print.” If you are interested in publishing and/or puzzles, this is fascinating.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Mountain Goats in Print, Teen Wolves on Netflix appeared first on Reactor.