The Update- August 7th

In today’s edition of The Update Journal, AMC has apparently decided that our emotional stability was becoming a little too comfortable, because The Queen Has Awakened: Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned has officially been confirmed as the successor to The Vampire Lestat. Which means the Summer Watchlist may be approaching the finish line, but the psychological damage has already been renewed for another season. Fantastic. Wonderful. Somebody hide my blood pressure cuff. Speaking of emotional damage, The Vampire Lestat, Season 1, Episode 6 arrives with a friendly reminder about that drink I previously recommended for Claudia-related emergencies. Yeah… make it a double. Maybe reinforce the glass. Possibly have a trusted friend nearby. I continue to encourage responsible drinking, of course, but this episode seems personally committed to testing the limits of responsible coping mechanisms. Just when you think the Claudia situation has finished rearranging the furniture inside your brain, the show walks back in carrying another couch and says, “Actually, we’re putting this over here.” And finally, The Last Word — “Not Every Season Feels Finished When It Ends” takes us into the strange emotional purgatory of reaching the end of summer while feeling like somebody forgot to write the final scene. Camp is over. The watchlist is nearly over. The calendar says it’s time to move forward. Meanwhile, mentally, we’re standing in the middle of the season finale yelling, “THAT’S IT? WHERE’S THE REST OF THE EPISODE?” In the headlines on #TheUpdate this Friday, welcome to the concrete jungle. Hot, humid weather and intense thunderstorms will make New York City feel like a Caribbean island through the end of the week — prompting the city to activate its emergency plan. A Manhattan deli worker took a bullet to the buttocks during a struggle with an armed butthead who was trying to rob the place early Thursday morning, cops and sources said. And out in the American West, a New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial.