Published Jun 30, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT
Ryan O’Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided’s CubbiesCrib. Whether it’s taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what’s going on. Outside of entertainment, he’s a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor’s in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
Sign in to your Collider account
Netflix’s red-hot 2026 hasn’t shown many signs of slowing down halfway through the year. Within the first three months of the season, the streamer released a series in the Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson-led His & Hers, and a film in Alan Ritchson’s War Machine, that would go on to crack its all-time top-ten rankings with 98.2 million and 139.9 million views, respectively. The hits have kept rolling in since then, with Apex, starring Taron Egerton, and the latest Harlan Coben series, I Will Find You, among the other recent titles soaring to the top of the charts upon their debuts. Season 2 of the platform’s blockbuster live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender also just made its debut and seems poised to rack up quite the audience.
Not to be lost in the shuffle of streaming favorites is Nemesis, the new heist crime thriller co-created by Power mastermind Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole. The series is a battle of wills between an immovable object, Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law), and the unstoppable force he’s obsessed with finally thwarting, master thief Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel), as their game of cat and mouse turns into a life-or-death chase in which only one of them can come out on top, assuming they don’t destroy themselves. It took a very brief moment to find its footing, but the tense and twisty tale quickly gained momentum, taking over the top spot on the English-language television charts in its second week and ending its first week with more than 830 million minutes watched by Nielsen’s measure. Such a strong performance, coupled with a solid 76% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, proved more than enough for Netflix to continue the duo’s tango.
Nemesis has officially been renewed for a second season, with both Kemp and Marole set to return to determine what’s next for Stiles and Wilder. Season 1 closed on a gut-wrenching note for both men as their respective lives were torn apart. Stiles’ determination to stop Wilder at all costs led him to hire the Alvarez cartel to kidnap his foe’s wife, Ebony (Cleopatra Coleman), and lure him into the open, but it backfires when his son is shot in the crossfire. In a final moment before the curtain closes, they each make a decision to choose their families for once, **as Wilder runs off to find Ebony, while Stiles cares for Noah **(Cedric Joe). Marole teased in a statement that the goal is to get answers and go bigger with Season 2, saying:
“Season 2, we’re very grateful to have it… We’re going to make sure those questions get answered — and even more questions are available for you to answer… Make no mistakes, season two is going to be bigger and better.”
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Season 1 of Nemesis featured an extensive ensemble and slate of guest stars, including a couple of Power alumni in Domenick Lombardozzi and Jonnie Park, alongside Tre Hale, Ariana Guerra, Gabrielle Dennis, Michael Potts, Sophina Brown, Jeff Pierre, and many more. Veteran director Mario Van Peebles, who previously worked on both Power and Power Book III: Raising Kanan, also reunited with Kemp to helm a pair of episodes for the series and lead a talented team of directors with Millicent Shelton, Rob Hardy, and Ruben Garcia. Collider’s Jasneet Singh was more mixed on their work, giving the series a 6/10 in her review. Despite its flaws, she wrote, “*Nemesis *is still enjoyable and offers some unforgettable action sequences with daring performances; it just needs some more fine-tuning to pull off the perfect heist.”
In her own statement, Kemp was thankful for the chance to get to build off Nemesis’ foundation with Season 2 because of the fans and Netflix’s belief in the show.
“I feel blessed to get a Season 2. We thank the fans…it’s because of them — there’s no other reason. It’s them showing up, them talking about it and their huge social media response…We are grateful to Netflix for recognizing the power of our audience and bringing us back for the fans.”
Nemesis Season 1 is now streaming in its entirety on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for updates on Season 2 now that the series is coming back for more.
](/tag/tv-show/nemesis-2026/)
](/tag/thriller/)
Courtney A. Kemp, Tani Marole