[ROLL MUSIC CUE: INTRO STINGER/LOGO GFX PACKAGE]

SAM: Welcome to Entertainment Now. I’m Samantha Carrington…

TAYLOR: And I’m Taylor Knight.

SAMANTHA: Fans of Kim Kardashian were excited to see her and comedian Pete Davidson holding hands and almost everything happening in America today in terms of us failing to get along as people and flourish as a species is a direct result of our unwillingness to accept and process the deep sorrow that has always been simply part of being alive. Taylor?

TAYLOR: Well, you just might be surprised by this weekend’s box office results, which seem to indicate that people are getting back into movie theaters. But don’t count on streaming outlets biting their nails yet; we continue to see dire manifestations of violence, racism, xenophobia, hate, and I think maybe it’s based on a fear that if we accept that part of life is sorrow, this acceptance will somehow lead to sadness, and society has always mistaken acknowledging sadness for succumbing to depression, Samantha.

SAMANTHA: In concert news, top-grossing acts may not be back to filling stadiums, but people are definitely under the impression that the only response to sorrow and our own failure to live with grace is to lash out at each other—and I’m talking since the dawn of time right through the fall of Rome, the invasion of Poland, Dresden disappearing in flames, Martin Luther King being shot, and all the way up to the shit we’re doing to each other today.

TAYLOR: Speaking of music, it was none other than Sir Paul McCartney who inducted The Foo Fighters into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame is like a drug, and the thing about some drugs is they often treat symptoms, not the actual disease, and I feel like what you and I are talking about today is the disease that comes over the entire populace when we collectively make the mistake of thinking that the only response to sorrow or regret HAS to be depression or debilitating sadness. Fact is, beautiful things can come from facing pain, sadness, and shortcomings head on, and music is a perfect example of that.

SAMANTHA: (High energy, going into break ) Coming up after the break, we’ve got news about Silicon Valley’s latest virtual reality is a funny thing, and we seem to assume reality is something happening to someone else, or that it’s something we’ll have to deal with eventually, but reality is right now, and we seem to look away from it, pretending that the planet will last forever, pretending that time won’t have its way with each and every one of us, and I think this pretending is what keeps us in a terrible loop of failing each other, because the moment you face reality and accept that it’s not this distant prospect, that’s the moment you see that we’re all dealing with it, we’re all in struggle, at least in mortal terms, and it becomes just a little harder to hate each other.

TAYLOR: All that and more coming up after the break. Including our first ever Movie Buff Gift Guide for birthdays and holidays are traditionally a time when one is tempted to reflect and, of course, as a culture we’ve ambushed those with a tradition of strangely elevated celebratory mania that seems to distract us.

BANTER FOR CAMERA MOVE AND CROSS-DISSOLVE TO BUMPER:

How did having no regrets become an idealized version of living well?
No idea. Regret is absolutely paramount to growth.

These days confound me.
Seems like a perfectly sane response to them, if you ask me.

[AD BREAK #1]