Mamiya Shotaro leads a Japanese remake of CJ ENM‘s Korean hit drama “Quiz From God,” which will stream exclusively on Prime Video from Dec. 4.

The Prime Original series casts Mamiya as Hatsushima Haruto, a neurosurgeon turned forensic pathologist whose brilliance has earned him a reputation as a heaven-sent genius.

Having quit neurosurgery for reasons that remain unexplained, Haruto now works at the National Forensic Autopsy Center, where he reads the clues the dead leave behind. The cases that land on his table are among Tokyo’s strangest: a divisive underground idol who dies during a performance, a young man who ends up dead after accepting illegal side work, and someone who dies without warning on a first date.

Each investigation leads Haruto to uncommon diseases concealed behind deaths that at first seem to defy explanation, and to the social problems that sit beneath them.

Haruto has a puzzle of his own to solve. He lives with a rare illness and never knows how much longer his body will hold up. A secret buried in his past could also turn everything on its head.

The Korean original, fronted by Ryu Deok-hwan, was a major success at home and got viewers talking. It went on to run for five seasons. The Japanese version keeps the elements that made the original popular while giving the story a new setting, a different mood and its own point of view.

Mamiya said his manager had first floated the idea of him starring in the drama more than a decade ago, when he was in his early 20s, prompting him to seek out the Korean series. “After many twists and turns, the project finally began moving forward last autumn, and before I knew it, we were already filming,” he said.

“I’m especially happy that we were able to bring this project to life with the three producers, all of whom have known me well for many years,” Mamiya added. “This was my first time working with the director, but we were able to build a relationship of trust through our meetings, script readings, and filming. I hope you enjoy watching the drama.”

“Saturday Night Live” alums Jay Pharoah and Cheri Oteri, as well as “Workaholics” star Adam Devine, are among the guest stars set to appear on the upcoming Season 3 of Fox’s animated series “Universal Basic Guys.”

Also set to join in on the universal basic fun this season: Thomas Lennon (“Reno 911!”), Brandon Wardell (“Wonder Man”), David Alan Grier (“In Living Color”), Joe Lo Truglio (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) and William Stanford Davis (“Abbott Elementary”).

The news was revealed Thursday at the SCAD Animation Fest in Atlanta, where “Universal Basic Guys” creators Adam Malamut and Craig Malamut teased the show’s Season 3 and screened the season premiere episode, “Rhoda.”

On the show, which comes from Sony Pictures TV and Fox Entertainment, Pharoah will play “Hugh Truckner,” Oteri appears as “Renee,” Devine is “Chase Waters,” Lennon plays “Antoine Shmegmin,” Wardell shows up as “Darren,” Grier plays “Ferris,” Lo Truglio is “Bouchard” and Davis plays “Earl.”

Pharoah’s credits also include “White Famous,” while Oteri is additionally known for “Scary Movie” and Devine is also known for “Pitch Perfect,” among other projects.

Additional guest voices this season include Brian George, Dana Snyder, Taylor Ortega, Matt Dusk, Chris Elliott, Carlos Alazraqui, Will Sasso, Jon Glaser, Echo Kellum, Kimberly Brooks, Krizia Bajos, Rachel Kaly, Eric Ladin, Rose Abdoo, Jimmi Simpson, Jessica McKenna, Leon Chen, Secunda Wood, Holmes, Eric Bauza, Brianna Gentilella, Tommy Pope, Susie Essman, Liam Cullagh, Will Angus, Anthony Gorgano, Jorge Garcia, Reid Scott, Rob Corddry, Ken Jeong, Retta, Michelle Ortiz, Joe Conklin, Danny Trejo, John Early, Lou Diamond Phillips, Yamaneika Saunders, André Sogliuzzo and Matt Dusk.

Season 3 of “Universal Basic Guys” premieres Sunday, Sept. 27, at 9 p.m. ET on Fox, streaming on Hulu the next day. Adam Malamut and Craig Malamut are the creators and executive producers.

“Universal Basic Guys” centers on two brothers, Mark and Hank Hoagies (both voiced by Adam Malamut), “who lose their jobs to automation and are given $3,000 a month in a new basic income program,” per the show’s logline. Now, they’re using their free time and free money to find purpose in a world where they’re no longer needed. This season, the Hoagies face their most chaotic chapter yet when the arrival of a new family member turns their lives upside down.”

Besides Adam Malamut, the show also stars Talia Genevieve as Tammy Hoagies, Ally Maki (“Wrecked”) as Andrea and Fred Armisen (“Saturday Night Live,” “Portlandia”) as David.

Fox Entertainment, via its animation studio Bento Box Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Television are the production companies behind the show. Besides Adam Malamut and Craig Malamut as co-creators and executive producers, Shane Kosakowski is also an executive producer.

Here’s a first look at the guests:

Amid more layoffs and contraction and renewed going-discless discourse, we are facing no shortage of opinions about what strategies will finally rightsize the global-gaming-industry ship. Apart from relying on the highly anticipated release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” to solve for the nearly $350 billion industry’s problems, a new book by Xsolla president Chris Hewish has a few clear suggestions.

Titled “Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business,” the book debuted last month at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, the annual meeting of the minds for the bigwigs in the gaming industry. In the text, Hewish outlines a handful of areas that, when utilized to the fullest, make up a healthy gaming business: relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust and time.

“Not just great games, but they’ve really built up this business around these five framework pillars,” Hewish tells Variety. “They are governing those pillars when it comes to their business. They’re not completely reliant completely on somebody else for all of those. So the direct analogy is companies that are only working through platforms like the app stores are completely reliant on them for the relationships with their players, for the commerce, for the business, behavioral intelligence on the players and it can slow down building trust with the players because of all of that.”

As current president of a fintech company that makes payment software for video games, including its PayStation payment-integration tools and former exec at Activision and DreamWorks, Hewish wants those in the gaming industry to examine their first-party vs. third-party models and ask, “Are they actually owners or are they just renters of all of the different parts of their business?”

When considering the “intelligence” pillar, Hewish says the gaming industry can “get off that hit-driven hamster wheel of always just being reliant on the next big hit” by taking a deeper look at more-informed data. This also requires looking for gaps in intelligence created when a company doesn’t have proprietary numbers for all aspects of its business, including monetization.

“Companies all have dashboards,” Hewish says. “They know the number of active users. They know the revenue from those users. They know the revenue per user in a particular country. But right now, if they’re only looking at a dashboard, they haven’t really governed all of the intelligence of the data because if you put everything through another platform, the payment data, the commerce data, it stays with the platform, it doesn’t come through.”

An example Hewish offers is a company noticing revenue dropping in one country and making incorrect assumptions based on its own incomplete data.

“You may assume, oh my gosh, we need to make more content for that country because it’s just not relevant or we need to localize more in that country,” Hewish says. “And so you spend resources in that direction. The intelligence pillar is saying, well, hold on, you need a complete picture of what’s happening because what you have missed is the fact that there was a new payment method that was introduced in that country and it blew up. Like, Venmo came on the scene and 20% of your players have moved over to that new payment method, but your platform has not integrated it. So they literally have stopped using their old payment methods. They can’t use the new ones, so you see a drop in revenue and you erroneously think it’s a content problem and spend resources on that content.”

“You rarely see a movie now where the big question is, ‘How the fuck did this get made? Who let them do this?’”

Tony award winner WIll Brill asks this aloud over a meal with Variety at West Hollywood’s Canter’s Deli. Brill starts with a steaming bowl of soup at 11 a.m. before joyfully moving on to French toast. The Broadway vet is rail thin, but as hungry for diner classics as he is to discuss “The Musical” — his darkly comic Sundance gem that’s now rolling out in limited theatrical release.

Brill plays the nebbish Doug, a middle school theater teacher smitten with his colleague Abigail. When he learns that his beloved has taken up with the school’s principal — a smug “Chad” played expertly by Rob Lowe — Doug sets off on an absurd revenge quest. Lowe’s principal is out for a blue ribbon prize from the school district, and to sabotage his ambitions Doug stages an original musical in secret starring his earnest, talented young students. The titular musical is a recounting of the 9/11 terror attacks, with original music and cardboard Twin Towers ablaze.

While audacious and almost surely offensive, Brill and his director Giselle Bonilla pull off the impossible: a broadly comic look at obsession and bitterness, laced with a healthy dose of sunshine thanks to its innocent cast of kids. Here, he discusses revenge, risky cinema and the jokes left on the cutting room floor.

I understand you have a deep connection to student theater.

Will Brill: What’s cool in a holistic sense about this movie, is that I came from doing children’s theater. I started when I was six years old. I was in “The Velveteen Rabbit.” I remember distinctly the auditions and the chaos and the friendships built — and the gunning for the same roles and never getting them. Some kids were always ahead of you. What’s so funny about this movie is [my character] is the one experiencing the petty highs and lows, and he’s the adult in the room. A lot of my comedy specifically comes from never getting cast as the leading man in anything. I was always the kid playing the old man or having to do funny voices. I was the badger in “The Wind and the Willows” and the king in “Cinderella.”

Why do you think those were the parts you got?

They put me in those roles because I was so obsessed with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey and was trying to emulate those guys. And still! When Robin died, I couldn’t — I still haven’t really watched his movies because I think of him as a part of who I am.

This film is about revenge, which is one of the more human tendencies to make a movie about.

Anybody can identify with having lost a person with whom they were infatuated, or a job that they thought was going to change the course of their life. We did a marketing push for this movie where we asked strangers, “What is the pettiest thing you’ve ever done?” It helped me remember that in my sophomore year of college, there was this girl I had an ongoing flirtation with, but she wanted to keep it secret. Another guy was love with her. We come back from break and she’s dating this other guy. She asked me how my summer was, and I just said, “Oh, I started dating someone. I have a girlfriend back at home.”

Which directly mirrors the plot of this movie. You were lying when you said that?

It was a lie! I pulled the name of a close friend of mine at home. And it makes me think — my character in “The Musical,” Doug, is so obviously a villain. There are people who will watch this movie and say, “I can’t get behind this because he’s so wretched, and because what he’s doing is so bad.” But I think most people will realize, “He’s doing the thing that all of us have fantasized about, and none of us have the cojones to do.”

They should come work in Hollywood for a day.

That’s a good point. Doug wants a kind of [creative success], but he wouldn’t last a day here. He’d never survive what most of us have been through in this industry.

It was a creative risk, incorporating 9/11 so heavily into this story, especially involving a kids theater troupe. It illustrates how far you character is willing to go to embarrass his nemesis. Were you ever nervous about how it would play?

[Our screenwriter] Alex Heller and I were talking about this last night. I was obsessed with the character from the start, and Alex said he watched the original “The Producers” and “Election” when writing this. After, he just wrote in his notes app, “Fuck it: 9/11 musical.” It’s so funny because it’s a really insane thing to do. It’s so callous and despicable. What’s interesting is that some of our kid actors had done plays about 9/11 in school. But this movie [takes a shot] at everyone. You see the snowflake liberal school administration people get so overwhelmed about anything off color. But something about putting that concept for a musical in the hands of children defangs it. The musical’s audience in the film are all horrified, but you also see them gasp and crack up because the kids are so winning.

You’ve done a lot of Broadway and a lot of drama. Was it hard to lobby for such a broad comedic part?

Well, the proof of concept for this film starred an Instagram-famous performer. My first question to [director] Giselle Bonilla was, “Why didn’t you hire that guy?” She told me it was the same reason she’d offered the role to Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver before me. It’s the person [behind the character]. They initially offered me [Rob Lowe’s part of] the principal.

Once again, they cast you as the old man in the play.

There was a cycle of actors this went through before [I got the lead] and Gillian Jacobs was cast. 10 days before we started shooting, the previous leads dropped out. Coincidentally, our producer had a meeting with Rob Lowe and gave him the script and he was obsessed. Especially when he found out we were filming in L.A. He felt it was the kind of comedy he’d been dying to see for ages. You rarely see a movie now where the big question is, “How the fuck did this get made? Who let them do this?”

Rob is incredible in this film. The most smug – you describe him as a “Chad.”

My girlfriend and I were just talking about the people you meet in your life who are really performatively sincere. Typically, about veganism or human rights. She relayed this story to me about Cristin Milioti being at a table read. She was eating a hardboiled egg and one of her costars asked her, “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” And she said, “Uh, yeah.” He was like, “So you don’t have a problem eating female animals?”

Stop.

But Rob was incredible. He’s such a good improviser. There was a line they cut, when he sees the musical for the first time, it was: “You turned the gymnasium into Ground Zero. Are you fucking mental?” There was also another point where he said, “My brother was a first responder … in Burbank.”

You had a really strong premiere at Sundance, but it took a minute for a deal to get done to release this movie. I heard distributors were nervous about this.

I have definitely come to the to a reconciliation that my taste is not everyone’s taste, and my taste is especially not corporate America’s taste. I was listening to Andy Richter talking about the corporatization of the entertainment industry, and he’s so right. Nobody is able to go out and take chances anymore because people don’t want to support that. Rob has a list that he goes through of stuff that he can’t believe people funded. One of the OG’s is “The Book of Mormon.” You watch that and you’re like, “This is so inflammatory. This is so crazy.” You can say that they’re punching down, and there’s a whole talk that we can have about like the Church of Latter Day Saints and what they’ve earned and what they haven’t. But there is also there is also an element of love in that play for Mormons, which is really cool.

Supporters of a federal film incentive are preparing an all-out push to pass the legislation by the end of the year, looking to take advantage of momentum before Congress potentially changes hands next term.

A bipartisan group of senators and representatives unveiled the bill on Thursday. It would provide a 20%-30% federal incentive for films and TV shows that would stack on top of state incentives, instantly making states like California, Georgia and New York among the world’s most generous film locations.

“Windows of opportunity to pass legislation open and close very quickly,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., at a press conference on Thursday. “You have to really strike while the iron is hot.”

The House of Representatives is out of session, and will not return until after the November election. But lawmakers expect that the lame-duck session will include a significant tax bill, into which the U.S. film incentive could be incorporated.

“It is the goal and it is realistic,” said Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, in an interview. “When the right opportunity strikes, you’ve gotta jump at the opportunity. The stars have aligned where we have bicameral, bipartisan support, and we have a president who is very supportive of this.”

The bill introduced on Thursday has yet to get a cost estimate. As proposed, the incentive would cover a wide range of productions, including animation and reality shows. It would also cover salaries for actors and other above-the-line talent. A separate visual effects and postproduction credit would also apply to projects that are filmed abroad but completed domestically.

Asked whether the bill is a starting point for negotiations, or whether it may pass in something close to its current form, Moran said that time will tell.

“There is a long way to go,” he said. “One of the things that’s important is to get a score on the bill, to look for pay-fors that might offset any cost associated with the bill … Whether or not it changes a little bit or a lot will be determined by the feedback we get.”

The proposal includes a benefit for rural areas like Moran’s district — a 5% bonus for rural “opportunity zones” — as well as something for Los Angeles, in the form of a 5% bonus for filming in a federal disaster zone. (Due to last year’s fires, L.A. County qualifies through January 2030.)

“It was important for me to have that in there,” said Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Calif. “Film is very unique in terms of its ability to stand up a lot of jobs quickly.”

As written, the credit would stack on top of state-based incentives — with no reduction in qualified spend due to state credits — which would push the total subsidy into the 50% range in several states.

“The state tax incentives are separate and apart from the tax incentives here,” Moran said. “We see this as an additional incentive for the companies to benefit from to stay here.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democratic sponsor of the bill, said he is eager to get it done this year, rather than let the momentum flag.

“The iron is very hot right now,” he said. “We’re all very focused on this, the president is focused on this. I wouldn’t want to see that bleed into next year.”

Still, Friedman cautioned, it’s not a sure thing.

“There’s a lot that has to happen for that to be a reality,” she said.

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” the Season 4 finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,“ now streaming on Paramount+.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” brought its fourth season to a close this week, with an episode that firmly sets up the show’s fifth and final season and teases the show’s entry into “Star Trek: The Original Series” territory. (Or as Trekkies call it, “TOS.”)

The finale is anchored by the newly promoted Lt. Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). She returns to the Enterprise after a Starfleet conference as the ship is preparing to observe a white hole, which is believed to be the counterpoint to a black hole.

Uhura hears music coming from the white hole, when in true “Star Trek” space phenomenon style, a sudden energy burst strikes the ship. Uhura is knocked to the ground, but then hears what sounds like her own voice trying to save Scotty (Martin Quinn) from some kind of emergency.

As it turns out, she is not going crazy. We see that on the other side of the white hole, the Enterprise, one year in the future, is investigating a black hole. In this future timeline, Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) is now the captain, Spock (Ethan Peck) is his first officer, Pike (Anson Mount) has been promoted to admiral, and La’an (Christina Chong) is mysteriously absent for … reasons.

Future Uhura is in a romantic relationship with Scotty, and the two fly out on a shuttle with Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who is now a flight instructor at the Academy, to investigate the black hole. But the same sudden energy burst hits the shuttle. This Uhura manages to make an emergency transport back to Enterprise, but Scotty is killed. Uhura is then told that Scotty had died a year earlier, setting up some fun “Star Trek” timey-wimey paradox stuff.

The episode establishes that “Strange New Worlds” Uhura and “TOS” Uhura are able to communicate across time, but perhaps most importantly the episode sees Gooding rocking the classic “TOS” Nichelle Nichols hairdo. According to Gooding, it took her a bit of adjusting to settle into the new look.

“I was a little insecure about it at first, because I thought I looked just different, and the human brain takes a minute to understand that different doesn’t mean danger,” Gooding tells Variety.

The two Uhuras (Two-hura?) must work together to save Scotty without disrupting the timeline any further. That proves to be tricky, especially since “TOS” Uhura has to guide her past self without getting into too much of what is to come in the intervening year.

“The hardest part was making them talk to each other and having ‘TOS’ Uhura speak on experiences that ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura hasn’t had yet, and to live in that sort of liminal space,” Gooding says. “As a recovering control addict, it was hard for me to live in that space and not immediately feel like I need a a point in ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura’s mind to leap off of and talk on.”

“I crave an answer, and to be met with yourself saying, ‘Hey, that’s not going to help you,’ it was a struggle for sure in the character,” she continues. “She had a hard time being told, ‘You’ve just got to trust me. You have to trust the me, that is you.’”

Past and future Uhura figure out a way to balance out the timeline using a dilithium diamond, but just when they are set to use it, another energy pulse sends them the opposite Enterprises. Meaning “TOS” Uhura is back in the past, while past Uhura is now in the future.

But past Uhura in the future is able to unlock the secret of the music she heard at the beginning of the episode. It turns out it was an alien entity within the white hole/black hole, telling the Enterprise to stay back, because a child is about to be birthed from it. The energy blasts, in other words, have been “contractions.”

The two Uhuras will be able to rebalance all that has gone awry if they can successfully birth this “space baby” using specialized drones that they can control from outside the ship. They both venture out and end up meeting each other face to face in space as the birth is happening — and Gooding says that shooting that was a mind-bender in and of itself.

“There were three different Uhuras on the call sheet at any given time,” she says. “It was me, my stand-in Lisa, and my stunt double Sammy. There were times in which I was having a conversation with a tennis ball on a stick, and there were times where I was having my conversation with Lisa, but we recorded my dialogue so mt stand-in wasn’t saying it — it was me having a conversation with my voice so the timing was right. So it was me looking at her, but hearing the voice of God, as we call it, as my voice.”

The space baby is successfully born, and the two Uhuras are transported to the bridge of the Enterprise and thanked by the alien midwives. They also get a chance to talk to each other, which Gooding calls a “passing of the torch” between “Strange New Worlds” and “TOS.”

“‘Strange New Worlds’ has done all the work that we are gonna do,” she says. “We have told the stories. They are written, recorded, edited. ADR is done. All we have to do is share it with the world. And I think what we have done with the series finale of ‘Strange New Worlds’ is tee up a series of opportunities. We could veer off and have more conversations about Kirk’s captaincy, or we can launch right into the original series.

“We found a way to close this chapter for the legacy characters, but we’ve also been able to say goodbye to characters that only exist in ‘Strange New Worlds,’” Gooding says. “And we’ve done it in a way that I think is really satisfying.”

New, mysterious and cryptic clips of Dakota Johnson flanked by another woman and man have taken rhe internet by storm, but this time, they aren’t part of her latest movie, “Verity”; they’re part of a Taylor Swift music video. Swift announced Thursday that she will unveil the music video for “Patient Zero” at the MTV VMAs on Sunday, and in the meantime, gave Swifties a very short (13-second) sneak peek, revealing Johnson as one of the stars.

Johnson opened about her role in the video at the “Verity” red carpet premiere in London on Thursday.

“Working with your friends is like the most fun thing on the planet because we’ve known each other for so long, we respect each other’s creative minds, and to be able to work alongside her and support and assist and be a person whom she tells what to do is wonderful,” Johnson said.

Johnson emphasized her excitement on Ambar Lee and Leah Briars’ Fangirl Nation podcast on Thursday.

“Taylor and I have been friends for a really long time and we’re very close, and we decided to work together and it’s great,” Johnson said. “Normally I would say ‘Don’t work with your friends,’ but we work really well together. It was so fun. So fun. It was the best. We just had the best time.”

Their decades-long friendship was further confirmed with Johnson’s attendance at Swift’s star-studded wedding at Madison Square Garden this July.

Swift announced the single on Tuesday, followed by the news of “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” on Wednesday. The album, an expanded version of last year’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” includes four new tracks: “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon.”

“About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing,” Swift wrote on social media. “Something that completely blew my mind… You gave ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ the biggest first week for an album in history. I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really, we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs. I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made. ‘The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore’ including four new songs, is out on Friday and available to preorder and save now.”