SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Wednesday,” now streaming on Netflix.

After more than a few near-death experiences, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) came out of Season 2 triumphant — mostly.

By the finale of Season 2, Wednesday had identified her newest foes to be Francoise Galpin (Frances O’Connor) and Isaac Night (Owen Painter), the mother and uncle, respectively, of Season 1 monster Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan). Like Tyler, Francoise is a Hyde, and Isaac is the fully regenerated version of Slurp, Pugsley’s (Isaac Ordonez) pet zombie from earlier episodes. Together with Tyler, Francoise and Isaac kidnap Pugsley, planning to use his ability to generate electricity to power a machine to save Francoise. Her monstrous transformations are killing her, and the device Isaac invented will take her powers away and give her her health back.

This isn’t Francoise and Isaac’s first attempt at the procedure. Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) reveals to Wednesday and Hester (Joanna Lumley) that Isaac tried to carry out this same experiment as a student at Nevermore, using Gomez (Luis Guzmán) as the electricity source. (Before hearing this, Wednesday and Hester both thought Gomez had never had powers.) Morticia, however, disrupted the process by chopping off Isaac’s hand, leading the machine to blow up and kill Isaac. Gomez and Morticia buried him, but kept his disembodied hand, which eventually became Thing (Victor Dorobantu).

Wednesday first tries to save Pugsley from Isaac’s clutches by positioning Thing out of sight, ready to shoot. But Isaac catches Thing’s dart, then reattaches Thing to his arm and buries Wednesday alive. Agnes (Evie Templeton) and Enid (Emma Myers) manage to dig her up, but Enid endangers herself in the process. She has just learned that alpha wolve

It’s hard to be a movie star and a dad at the same time — just ask Channing Tatum.

On the latest episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Daniel D’Addario, Variety chief correspondent, details his reporting for Variety’s Sept. 2 cover story featuring Tatum and director Derek Cianfrance discussing how they brought a stranger-than-fiction true crime story to life in Paramount Pictures’ “Roofman.”

Tatum and Cianfrance came together as collaborators at a time when both of them were regrouping in their careers. Tatum is extremely open in discussing the challenges of juggling movie shoots around the world with his most important job of being a parent to his 12-year-old daughter.

Tatum, D’Addario notes, is at a key transition point in his career as he reaches his mid-40s. “Roofman,” which premieres Saturday at the Toronto Film Festival, tells the story of a blue-collar North Carolina man, Jeffrey Manchester, who wound up living secretly in a Toys R Us store and robbing McDonald’s fast food restaurants in order to provide for his daughter. Manchester was sentenced to 34 years in prison after being convicted of several robberies in 2000.

“I think of [Tatum] as the guy from ‘Magic Mike’ or ’21 Jump Street’ — a fun loving, a goofball. He’s lived a lot of life since then,” D’Addario says. “Those movies were almost 15 years ago, and at 45, he is extremely reflective about the kind of career he wants to have and the kind of work he want

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “Your People Are in Danger,” the Season 1 finale of “Countdown,” now streaming on Prime Video.

Over the course of the last three decades, Jensen Ackles has quietly built up one of the most notable TV careers of his generation. After breaking out as Eric Brady on the long-running NBC soap opera “Days of Our Lives” — which earned him three consecutive Daytime Emmy nominations — in the late ’90s, Ackles carved out a niche for playing tortured heartthrobs in all kinds of broadcast dramas: high-concept sci-fi (“Dark Angel”), teen (“Dawson’s Creek”), and superhero (“Smallville”). In 2005, he debuted as Dean Winchester, one-half of a dynamic duo of monster-hunting brothers, on The CW’s “Supernatural.”

Since saying goodbye to the long-running series which transformed him and his onscreen brother Jared Padalecki into icons of fantasy storytelling, Ackles has spearheaded a short-lived spinoff about the Winchester parents (he was the narrator and an executive producer of “The Winchesters”), played a charming county sheriff (“Big Sky”), voiced Batman in a series of DC animated projects and reunited with “Supernatural” creator Eric Kripke in “The Boys” as the hyper-masculine anti-hero Soldier Boy.

Ackles’ latest show, “Countdown,” by comparison, feels just a little more grounded in reality. Created by Derek Haas, who oversaw the inception of NBC’s venerable “One Chicago” franchise, the new crime drama stars Ackles as Mark Meachum, an LAPD detective who is recruited to a covert task force to investigate the deat