The Brief

In the world of the combination cable watching and streaming, television has become more accessible. It offers some good and some bad, since the number of shows on your favorite platforms can be overwhelming.

Each week on AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, we're joined by television critics who help parse through notable releases and tell us what's worth a binge. This week we were joined by Inkoo Kang, TV critic for the New Yorker, and Cristina Escobar, tv critic and co-founder of LatinaMedia.Co.

Listen to the full conversation for a rundown of the variety of shows they hit on. I’ll dig into three of them a little further to offer added insights.

Listen to the full conversation here

This week’s shows/topics include:

• Hulu's This Fool canceled after 2nd season
• Episode counts & return of written network TV
• Abbott Elementary [Season 3] (ABC & Hulu next day)
• Will Trent [Season 2] (ABC & Hulu next day)
• Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional (Amazon Prime Video)
• One Day (Netflix)
• The Traitors [Season 2] (Peacock)

This Fool [Season 2]

Streaming on Hulu

Taking place in South Central Los Angeles, the show follows Julio, who's struggling in his personal life but goes out of his way to make his community a better place. He spends most of the show with his cousin Luis, previously gang-affiliated, recently released from prison, and trying to adapt to life back home with Julio.

Overall take: Despite the show’s cancellation announcement last week, it’s still streaming for the foreseeable future and is worth checking out if you haven’t already seen the show. A great deadpan comedy that happens to include witty social commentary and a fresh look at South Central L.A. that younger Angelenos and old heads will appreciate.

Worth noting: When The Hollywood Reporter broke the story about its cancellation, it was mentioned that this fits an industrywide trend of TV production downsizing. As our critic Cristina Escobar noted, studios and streamers would need to spend as much money and time marketing Latino-led shows as they do on other shows in order to get them to last more than two seasons.

When and where: All 20 episodes for This Fool’s first and second seasons are streaming on Hulu.

Will Trent [Season 2]

Airing on ABC & Streaming on Hulu

Based on the series of crime novels written by Karin Slaughter, this police procedural set in Atlanta follows Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Will Trent.

Overall take: Despite being a show that focuses a lot on police work and crime, there’s still plenty of humor added in that won’t keep viewers feeling completely drained or bummed out at the end of each episode. It’s also not a complete glorification of law enforcement, with the second season offering some leveled criticism of police.

When and where: Episode 1 is out now; Episode 2 releases on ABC on Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 8 p.m. and streaming on Hulu the next day.

Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

In her second stand-up special, comedian Jenny Slate talks about becoming a mother, loving your therapist so much that you want to stalk them, and a whole host of bits taken from her life.

Overall take: For those who haven’t seen her first special Stage Fright and need a bit more understanding of Slate’s humor, it’s the kind of raunchiness that you'd get with a really close friend. Her humor fits in perfectly with Gen-Z and millennial audiences and she expertly mixes her sense of comedic timing with ironic existentialism. Especially in a live setting, her background in improv and time with the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade shines through with her well-timed quips.

Fun facts: Many people were first introduced to Slate as the voice of the adorable talking shell Marcel in a series of web shorts called Marcel the Shell with Shoes On that she and Dean Fleischer Camp developed over a decade ago. The two spun the web series into a feature length documentary that released in 2022, and received an Oscar nod for Best Documentary Feature.

When and where: The stand-up special is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s falling enrollment and fiscal challenges are fueling conversations planned for later this year about potential school closures and consolidation.

District leaders presented a snapshot of LAUSD’s finances Tuesday, showing steeper enrollment declines and lower state revenue and reserves than previously projected. The board adopted a $3.5 billion savings plan alongside the most recent budget in June that, among other cuts, envisions saving $30 million a year through school consolidation and repurposing in the 2028-29 school year.

“Our goal is not simply to have fewer schools; our goal is to have stronger schools, schools that are better resourced, schools that offer more programs for our students,” said Superintendent Andrés Chait.

LAUSD staff project that the district will run out of money during the 2027-2028 school year if it does not implement the cuts in the fiscal stabilization plan.

The L.A. County Office of Education assigned a fiscal expert to the district in July and warned LAUSD was at risk of losing the power to govern itself without further changes to its spending. The district eliminated more than 600 jobs in May, largely in its central offices, as part of a prior savings plan.

Almost 4% fewer students than expected are attending LAUSD schools this academic year compared to last year, according to preliminary data. The district’s chief financial officer said that each 1% drop in enrollment is a loss of about $20 million a year because California funds schools based on how many students show up to class each day.

Chait said the district will start holding community conversations related to school closures in the next few weeks and will share more details during a Sept. 22 meeting.

The leader of a congressional panel warned Tuesday he would use “every tool” to get Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to testify after she skipped a hearing that put L.A.’s homeless services system in the hot seat.

It came as multiple audits, reviews and court rulings have found L.A. has failed to ensure proper tracking of large-scale spending on homeless services — particularly through the joint city-county L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA. Much of the money is federal dollars authorized by Congress.

Bass had declined to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, saying she was unavailable and that it would be a “politically motivated” attack. Her public schedule showed she planned to attend a groundbreaking of a shopping and community center in the Pacific Palisades two hours after the hearing was set to start.

Rep. Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee's DOGE subcommittee, said she won't get off that easily.

Bass "seems intent on evading accountability, but she knows we will not let her off the hook," Burchett said at the hearing. He added that he and the Oversight Committee’s chair would "use every tool at our disposal to secure her appearance if she does not cooperate.”

House committees and subcommittees can issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify or provide documents.

Just before the hearing got underway, Bass called it "the latest attack on Los Angeles by the Trump Administration and his allies in Congress.”

"I don't run LAHSA," she said, adding that she was the first mayor to sit on its board and that street homelessness has dropped since she took office. The latest official count for the city showed a 8% year to year jump in street homelessness.

Bass stepped off LAHSA’s governing commission last week, after LAist reported she had missed most of its meetings since she appointed herself to it in 2023. The mayor cited “time and all” as her reason for stepping down. She continues to appoint — and has the power to remove — half the commission’s members, including its current chair.

What happened at the hearing

Much of the hour-and-a-half hearing focused on Republican members’ criticism that Democrat-led cities distribute drug paraphernalia and don’t require unhoused people with addictions to get treatment as a condition of living in publicly funded housing.

Some proposals raised Tuesday would change how money reaches Los Angeles.

Burchett said he will introduce the Recovery First Housing Act, to require federally funded housing to offer substance abuse treatment. He has also introduced a bill restricting federal housing dollars to only support U.S. citizens.

LA's fights on a national stage

Burchett noted LAHSA’s audit committee chair, Justin Szlasa — who was proactive in rooting out wasteful spending — was demoted by Stephanie Graves, a Bass appointee who has declined to give her reason for doing so. The move was first reported by LAist.

Burchett also made claims that don’t hold up. He said 50,000 people are homeless in the city with "another 75,000" in the surrounding county. The latest official count found a total of 73,000 unhoused people across L.A. County — a figure that includes the city.

Burchett also said, “ LAHSA recently doled out funds to an L.A.-area nonprofit whose CEO had just been indicted for fraud.” LAist recently investigated LAHSA’s awarding of funds to that nonprofit, Abundant Blessings, and found no indication that LAHSA awarded it any funds after the fraud indictment. However, the review did find that long before the indictment, LAHSA kept awarding millions in contracts to the group even after it was flagged internally as high-risk for failing to do its job.

Burchett, however, was correct in saying “a court-ordered independent assessment of LAHSA's finances found alarming financial control weaknesses that leave the door open to rampant fraud.”

On Tuesday, street safety advocates and families of victims of vehicle collisions demanded that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declare a state of emergency on traffic violence in the city.

Sandra Sanchez Loulakis’s son died last year after she said he was hit by a negligent driver.

“I’ve been struggling just to survive daily,” she said at the news conference organized by traffic safety nonprofit Streets are for Everyone. “This is what happens to a parent when they lose a child.”

The city has seen 8% more fatal traffic collisions this year than during the same period last year, according to LAPD data from the end of August.

Advocates said an emergency declaration would better coordinate resources to respond to traffic fatalities, which have exceeded the rate of homicides for the last three years.

“ This is not a matter of we don't know what to do,” Damian Kevitt, who leads Streets are for Everyone, said Tuesday. “This is a matter of we know exactly what to do. We’re just not making this a priority as a city.”

Kevitt said more than 1,250 people signed an open letter delivered to the mayor and L.A. City Council. One of the demands listed in the letter is for the city to restore transportation department staff.

Earlier this year, the city gave up $100 million in state grants to make streets safer because it did not have the personnel to complete the projects in compliance with state-mandated deadlines.

Draft executive directive on Vision Zero

It appears there had been momentum from the mayor’s office earlier this year to issue an executive directive recommitting the city to its Vision Zero goals of reducing traffic fatalities to zero.

According to emails from May shared with LAist, the mayor’s senior director of transportation told an activist that a draft executive directive was “under review” and expected to be released “within the next three weeks.”

The email was sent to Jonathan Hale, who organizes community members to paint crosswalks where there have been pedestrian-involved collisions.

The executive directive has yet to be released.

LAist submitted a public records request for drafts of the executive directive, but on Sept. 14, the mayor’s office responded saying it could not disclose any records.

“[The records] include drafts and/or deliberative process for which the public interest served in nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public interest served by the disclosure,” the office said.

The mayor’s office has not responded to requests for comment about the draft executive directive.

A new report commissioned by Olympics organizers estimates that the 2028 Games will generate at least $20 billion in economic output across Greater Los Angeles.

The analysis, prepared for LA28 by the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics, looked at the economic effects of L.A. hosting the Olympics and Paralympics. It includes organizing committee spending, capital investments, publicly funded transportation and security investments, and tourism. 

In total, the report projects that new economic activity across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties could total somewhere between $20.5 billion and $25.4 billion and add around 126,000 and 152,000 jobs to the economy.

A second less conservative methodology employed by the researchers estimates the overall economic output could be even higher, between $35.4 and $40.6 billion and up to 224,000 new jobs.

“ Together, they provide a responsible range, not an exaggerated promise,” Stephen Cheung, CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, said at a news conference announcing the report on Tuesday. “ If we work together with intention, the Games can leave Los Angeles with more than unforgettable memories. They can leave us with stronger businesses, greater opportunities, and a more connected regional economy.”

Despite the 2028 Games being advertised as a "no-build" Olympics, the biggest chunk of spending laid out in the report is on capital projects, including the $2.6 billion L.A. Convention Center renovation, billions in LAX improvements, major transit projects like Metro ExpressLanes on the 105 Freeway, and venue renovations, such as upgrades to Rose Bowl Stadium.

The report also estimates that around $5.7 billion of LA28’s spending will be in the five county region. LA28 has a $7.1 billion budget and has pledged to keep 75% of its spending in the Greater L.A. area, and put 25% toward small businesses.

“ That economic impact is going to be felt far and wide and across Los Angeles, as well as the Southern California region,” LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover said Tuesday.

The report is the second economic analysis forecasting the effects of the 2028 Games to come out this month. A separate report submitted to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in early September estimated that the Games would produce more than $13 billion in direct spending and a total economic output of $19.2 billion in Los Angeles County alone.

The same report also laid out the potential uneven distribution of economic benefits to the region, including limited benefits for Olympic venue sites that are not tourist destinations and parts of Los Angeles being excluded from the Games altogether.

HR&A Advisors, the consultant group that put the report together, identified Carson, Pomona, the City of Industry and Exposition Park as locations that are hosting Olympic events, but that could end up being “passthrough areas.”

“Although these areas may be active during the day, they may struggle to capture spending from visitors who pass through but do not spend money outside the venue,” the report states.

The county report also questioned what economic benefits will flow to parts of L.A. County that will be disconnected from Olympic and Paralympic activities, like Antelope Valley and Southeast Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the analysis found that L.A.’s typical tourist destinations — including downtown L.A., Old Town Pasadena, downtown Long Beach and the Venice Boardwalk — can expect to be active areas for economic activity during summer 2028.