News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Librarian, Watcher, Legend Plus: Doctor Who, Steven Spielberg, and the New York Knickerbockers By Molly Templeton | Published on June 12, 2026 Image: 20th Television Comment 0 Share New Share Image: 20th Television Hello, and welcome to a world in which the Reactor staff chat has been talking about sports more than usual! (We’ll get to that.) It’s a great weekend to make history, wouldn’t you say? And there are ever so many ways for that to happen (positively, I mean). Get some popsicles, call your reps, load up some Spielberg movies on the ol’ streaming platforms. Summer doesn’t officially start for another week and change, but no one told that to the weather! I Could Really Use a Wise Librarian to Turn to These Days It’s been a really rough couple of years for members of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast. Both Michelle Trachtenberg and Nicholas Brendan died far too young—and then, last week, we lost Giles. Anthony Stewart Head died at 72, which is still too young, to be honest. He was in a lot of things before and after Buffy (famous coffee commercials! Merlin!) but for a lot of us, he was Giles. He was long-suffering, tweedy, dry, wise, and supportive. When the news of his passing broke, I thought first—and continually—of the end of “Innocence,” when Buffy blames herself for what happened with Angel. Giles won’t join her: “If it’s guilt you’re looking for, Buffy,” he says, “I’m not your man. All you will get from me is my support… and my respect.” And Head played it perfectly. Just like he played it perfectly when he muttered about “bloody Americans” and their pretty masks that raise the dead; like when he did something terrible that Buffy would never do; like when he turned into a rebellious teen again in “Band Candy.” There are so many Giles moments to revisit. Were I more emotionally capable, I’d watch “Innocence,” and “Band Candy,” and “Lie to Me,” and probably “Once More, With Feeling,” but then I’d just want to do a whole Buffy rewatch, and … yeah, actually, that sounds like a really good idea, to be honest. RIP to one of the best fictional dads ever to do it.  It’s Fun to Find New Excuses to Revisit Doctor Who The news from Who-land isn’t great lately. Christmas is canceled, and the show’s future seems uncertain. But, on the plus side, most of modern Who is now on AMC+. And June 18th—that’s this coming Thursday—is, apparently, the 21st anniversary of the first appearance of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. He turns up, of course, when Christopher Eccleston regenerates in “The Parting of the Ways.”  This is probably, technically, a UK anniversary, but who cares? A ton happens in that episode, including the resurrection of Jack Harkness (I miss Jack Harkness) and Rose seeding the words “Bad Wolf” across time and space as a message to herself. And then Ten shows up. And then a whole small army of Doctor Who fans revisiting this episode remember how the Rose and Ten story ends up, and has a lot of feelings. It’s big feelings week this week, I guess? And there’s nothing wrong with that. Let’s Learn Something New About Steven Spielberg I’m breaking my own (loose) rules here and recommending something I haven’t finished reading yet: Bilge Ebiri’s “Raider of a Lost Art,” at Vulture, in which dozens of people tell the Story of Steven Spielberg. If you are of a certain age—a lot of certain ages, really—Spielberg’s movies are synonymous with childhood viewing. I saw almost no movies as a kid, and even I saw E.T.! He was inescapable, and definitive, and while his career has veered all over the place in subsequent decades, he has never been less than iconic. “How do you tell the story of Steven Spielberg?” Ebiri asks in his intro. “The director has, over the course of his career, told much of the tale himself, not just in his semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans but also through the intensely personal elements that infuse all his work, whether it’s about sharks, Jets, aliens, dinosaurs, soldiers, con artists, or Lincoln.” This is long, and it has a lot of Vulture’s delightful side-notes. I’m certain that it’s going to be worth your time. The Only Thing We Are Planning for is Game 5, Sorry In an unexpected turn of events, the only thing just about anyone cares about watching right now is Game 5 of the NBA playoffs. Sorry, I don’t make the rules! I wasn’t even paying all that much attention at first; my time as a basketball viewer was years ago. But on a whim, I went to a neighborhood bar, and asked them to put on Wednesday’s game for the last quarter, and then a miracle happened. So we’re all Knicks fans now. People who I have never known to care one jot about basketball are Knicks fans now. And you know what? I get it. Everyone needs something nice. We really, really, really need something nice. The Knicks haven’t won a championship since 1972. That game was literally the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. Also, personally, I’ve had a grudge against the Spurs since 2005. We all have our reasons for feeling the way we do about sports. They don’t have to be reasonable. Game 5 of the NBA Finals tips off at 8:30pm (EDT) on Saturday; you can watch on ABC.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Librarian, Watcher, Legend appeared first on Reactor.