News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: All Along the Binge-Watch Tower—Battlestar Galactica Returns to Streaming Plus: All the animated animal films you could be watching instead of Animal Farm By Molly Templeton | Published on May 1, 2026 Photo: Universal Content Productions Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Content Productions Happy May Day, folks! If, like me, you only learned about May Day in terms of maypoles and general springiness as a child, there is much more to this particular date, which is also known as International Workers’ Day. If you are out there taking part in May Day events and rallies, please look out for yourself and your fellow humans. I hope the skies are clear and the future is … at least visible. It’d be nice for the future to be visible rather than cloudy and murky and mostly alarming. Hug your friends, give skritches to your favorite animals, call your reps, and get some sun, yeah? So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica is Back on Streaming Yes, Vanessa already told you about this, but it’s worth mentioning twice. At least twice. As of today, you can watch all of Battlestar Galactica and its assorted spinoff shows and movies on Paramount+, and most of it on Pluto TV, which also has an all-BSG, all-the-time channel, if you’d like to return to that cable-TV era feeling of just watching whatever happens to be on. (Unless it’s “Black Market.” I speak as a completist when I say: Do not waste your time on “Black Market.”) I suspect you’ll still have to dig up some DVDs if you want to watch my favorite episode in its extended form (that’d be “Unfinished Business,” aka “Everyone boxes out their feelings and it gets super awkward”). You can, though, watch Caprica, a show I started rewatching recently and then simply forgot to continue. But I meant to, at the very least for Magda Apanowicz as a teen struggling with literally everything including, maybe, the fate of the world. (There are maybe too many things out there to watch?) Anyway. BSG universe. On Paramount+. I’m so happy about this. You Should Watch Literally Any Animated Animal Movie Except Andy Serkis’s Animal Farm Watch Chicken Run. Watch Flow. Watch fricking Bambi. The Land Before Time? An American Tail? Ratatouille! That’s a good one. Just don’t watch the new Animal Farm. Yes, this is an anti-recommendation. It’s a warning. At first, it was just that the trailers looked dubious. But then Andy Serkis went and gave Animal Farm a happy ending. An entire new third act, according to a USA Today piece. The world is just too bleak for George Orwell’s story as written. “So we wanted the next generation, the kids who we hopefully are going to be watching this film, to at least have the ability to question what they should do next time around. History will inevitably repeat itself,” Serkis said. It appears not to have occurred to him that if he wanted to tell a hopeful story, he should have picked another dang story. But it’s okay! There are so many other animated animal movies to watch. If you’d like something hopeful, how about Paddington 2? Paddington 2 is perfect. Time to Get Back in Bed With The Vampire Lestat It’s just over a month until rock-god Lestat has his say about things in the rebranded Interview with the Vampire—now, in its third season, called The Vampire Lestat. This is, of course, the name of the second volume in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. And now is a very good time to read it. Or reread it. Or re-re-read it. You know. If it’s been a while. I really need to get my hands on a nice mass market paperback with the iconic red ’80s cover. But any cover will do. If you would prefer to go into the show without knowing anything, I respect that. But as someone who spent high school rather immersed in this world—quietly, secretly immersed, though in crushed velvet leggings sometimes—I feel I owe it to Book Lestat to revisit his version of things before TV Lestat (Sam Reid) takes over everyone’s imagination.  The first page of the book is basically Lestat telling you how awesome and hot he is: “Right now I am what America calls a Rock Superstar.” He’s on MTV! Bless. On the second page he explains, “But in spite of my French accent, I talk like a cross between a flatboatman and detective Sam Spade, actually.” God, I cannot wait to hang out with this ridiculous man again. A Treasure Trove of Wondrous Randomness In the process of writing these weekly posts, I have developed a small obsession with Wikipedia’s wonderful, absolutely baffling selection of speculative fiction anniversaries. Sometimes you find things that kind of make sense, and/or are very strange bedfellows, like the fact that May 3 is the 20th anniversary of the publication of Rick Riordan’s The Sea of Monsters, but the 30th anniversary of the Pamela Anderson movie Barb Wire. May 4 isn’t just Star Wars day; it’s the 25th anniversary of The Mummy Returns! But then there are other things. Other TV shows and books and authors and dates in speculative fiction history that just seem … random. The esoteric loves and foibles of those editors who keep this list really show, and it’s beautiful. Somehow May 1 is the publication date of both a two-part Deep Space Nine tie-in novel and a Michael Chabon essay collection. May 2 is the date that both The Magician’s Nephew and X2 came into the world. Also, there are so many more strange SF TV shows than I ever knew existed. May 1, 1991: “My Secret Identity, a Canadian science fiction television series, finishes airing on CTV.” You know how long you can go down rabbit holes thanks to this one Wiki portal? Actually, let’s not talk about it. But also: have fun. And Featuring David Bowie: The Prestige One last note: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is now streaming on Hulu. Is this movie perfect? Absolutely not. Did I go see it a second time the very day after I saw it the first time, because I wanted to figure out how it worked? Absolutely yes. And frankly I will never get David Bowie as Nikola Tesla out of my head. If you would like to complete your set of 2006 magician movies, you can also watch Edward Norton in The Illusionist on Prime and Netflix. It’s just not quite as good, though. Maybe just not as … magical. I’ll see myself out.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: All Along the Binge-Watch Tower—<i>Battlestar Galactica</i> Returns to Streaming appeared first on Reactor.