Category: Entertainment

While globally, Soho House recently completed a $2.7 billion deal to once again become a private company, domestically, the members’ club is focusing on refreshing its art. Since the brand began acquiring and curating art in 2009 at Soho House 76 Dean Street, its growing collection has become one of the biggest connection points with members, leading programming and driving interaction. Rooted in each House’s location and featuring both emerging and established artists from that city, the Soho House Art Collection has grown over 17 years to more than 11,000 works.

“It will hit 15,000 artworks in the next five years,” says Kate Bryan, Soho House chief art director. Since she joined the company in 2016, Bryan has been focused on growth, taking the collection from 2,000 pieces to where it sits today. The acquisition strategy revolves around direct relationships with artists and galleries. Once their work is selected for a House, they are invited to become a member. Bryan does not purchase art at auction; every work is owned by Soho House and stays within the collection. Her team has created a proprietary database with geographic tags (birthplace, base, education) to catalog artists for specific House openings. Now, pieces are even being loaned to major museum shows, such as the Tate’s spring/summer exhibition on Hurvin Anderson. A coffee table book is also in the works.

“Galleries are very supportive of our collection, because it’s a public showcase for the artists. It’s not disappearing off into a home that no one ever sees again,” Bryan says. “Artists come in and see their work, see people interacting with it. We use our collection. We don’t put things in storage. If we acquire it, it’s for a place and it’s going up.”

Soho House West Hollywood and Soho Beach House in Miami, both opened in 2010, recently unveiled new art that has significantly shifted their aesthetics. L.A. artist Eric Uhlir created a monumental commission for the West Hollywood club, the largest in Soho House’s history at 65 feet long and 6.5 feet high, a four-panel site-specific painting wrapping around the grand entry staircase. Uhlir is known for blending pop culture references with his love of classical painting, abstracting history, nature and contemporary visual clues onto canvases of cinematic scale.

On the opposite coast, when Soho Beach House came up for an overall design refresh, the art team took the opportunity to ask: “What story do we want to tell now?” With a curatorial focus on photography, the Miami House’s original collection has been refreshed by an international roster of artists that reflects the city’s cutting-edge spirit and place in the art world as host to its flashiest yearly gathering, Art Basel. Blue-chip and internationally known artists such as Isaac Julien, JR, Laurie Simmons and Marilyn Minter collide with niche and emerging artists such as Sarah Maple, Cornelius Tulloch, Anna Carey and Marcus Maddox, working with polaroid, performance-based imagery, collage, cameraless photography, solarisation, digital manipulation, hand-printed works, lenticular, fabric and wood-based prints. All of these Soho Beach House artists are also represented across the 32 Soho Houses worldwide. “Try and think of another city that welcomes as many people for art in a gargantuan international moment. We thought we should reflect that spirit in this collection,” she says.

While Miami’s art scene has catapulted into the pop culture stratosphere, Los Angeles has shifted from “secondary market” to global center of contemporary art, powered by film, photography, design and studio culture and arts fairs like Frieze L.A. (Feb. 26 to March 1 at Santa Monica Airport). Soho House has mirrored that rise with the art collections at its network of four L.A. properties. West Hollywood, co-curated by Kate Bryan and Anakena Paddon between 2023 and 2025, highlights artists born, based or trained in Los Angeles. The collection is anchored by blue-chip figures including Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari, alongside high-visibility contemporary names such as Walead Beshty, José Parlá and Hebru Brantley. The Luckman Club collection, installed in late 2024, features Los Angeles painters John Reagan, Erin Wright, Greg Ito, Pui Tiffany Chow and Emily Ferguson. “L.A. is now an important center for contemporary art with Frieze, major museums and so many artists having moved to town. The California art scene has always been staggeringly important, but it feels like the spotlight has come back onto it in a new way,” Bryan says. Soho House will host Frieze events at both its West Hollywood House and Holloway House throughout L.A. art week.

Bryan’s curatorial philosophy reveals how the collection comes to life. Her approach deliberately departs from the traditional gallery or museum model in favor of a more immersive, member-informed style.

“I don’t have a white box. It’s a different way of curating but one of the benefits that I have is that I’m spending so much time with the members and I can sound them out on something a year before I do it,” she says. “When we build the permanent art collection, it becomes a jumping-off point for the House. We invite the artists to come and do talks and the artists are in the Houses, because they’re part of our membership.”

In turn, that member-first approach has helped shape a collection whose influence extends well beyond the Houses themselves.

“Some of the works that were acquired at the beginning are from artists who are impossible to get work from now,” she says. “There’s so much in the early collection that is still really powerful now, and all those artists have gone on to staggering fame but it is not as if we’ve sat around going to be a star in the future. We don’t worry so much about prices rising or longevity. We think about relevance to the here and now, and artists we believe in, want to support and have around. Then, as a happy byproduct, the collection starts to have a legacy and more cultural value.”

Soho House is making other significant changes throughout its portfolio with new Houses planned in Palm Springs and Soho Ranch House Sonoma, as well as Soho Farmhouse in upstate New York and Soho Flatiron in New York City. In Europe, Milan, Madrid, Lisbon and Soho Farmhouse Tuscany will join the family. The group will open its 50th House — Soho House Tokyo in the Minami-Aoyama neighborhood — in April 2026. Soho Beach House is currently renovating its bedrooms and will debut a Soho Health Club, which will host the first international Wellness Summit across both Miami Houses. Miami Pool House adds four padel courts, a Health Club Café and an indoor-outdoor gym. Soho House West Hollywood features a new garden restaurant by Nancy Silverton. Persian restaurant Berenjak made its Los Angeles debut at Soho Warehouse. Soho House Holloway will add pickleball courts. When it opens, Soho House Los Cabos will feature club spaces, a Soho Health Club with a pool, Cecconi’s, a Sunset and Cabaret Bar and 15 bedrooms.

 

Taylor Sheridan can do it all, I guess.

Simon & Schuster revealed on Tuesday that it will publish the debut book from the Yellowstone creator, How to Not Die in Prison. Up until three years ago, Paramount owned Simon & Schuster; until recently, Paramount also had Sheridan securely under its corporate umbrella.

How to Not Die in Prison is described by the publisher as “a no bullsh*t, darkly funny survival guide to life in a maximum-security prison.” Sheridan has never been to prison — but his co-author has. How to Not Die in Prison is cowritten with “prison-hardened ex-con” Tom Nelson, and will publish on June 23, 2026.

“There is no book of rules for life in prison — until now. How to Not Die in Prison teaches readers everything they need to know to make it out alive, from how to survive a prison riot, a lockdown, a stabbing, a hit, and solitary confinement to how to get a job, not go insane, make prison ramen, give a prison tat, and (allegedly) make a shiv,” the description continues.

Sheridan’s personal association with anything close to all of that is his Jeremy Renner-starring series Mayor of Kingstown.

“You might wonder what in the world gives me the knowledge or wisdom to write a survival guide to prison,” Sheridan writes in the book’s introduction. “Well, I’ll tell you — absolutely nothing. I’ve never been to prison. But, like every man, I’ve certainly wondered how I would survive if circumstances ever put me there. That morbid curiosity sent me on a journey to understand the politics and dangers of prison. When researching for Mayor of Kingstown, I learned very quickly it’s way better to avoid going to prison than figuring out how to survive one.” 

“I wish I could’ve heeded Taylor’s advice all those years ago and read the F*cking Book, but that’s exactly the point: there was no Fucking Book to speak of because I hadn’t yet been spit out through the system and gained the knowledge that my co-author currently refers to as wisdom,” Nelson wrote. “Hey, one of us has written hit TV shows and Academy Award-nominated movies, and the other has spent much of his adult life behind bars in medium and maximum-security prisons. If that’s what makes for good wisdom and entertainment, I’ll take it.” 

DANIEL FIENBERG It’s time for another of our seasonal face-offs! This winter has given us the premiere of the Canadian hockey romance Heated Rivalry on HBO Max and the launch of the fifth season of the Canadian hockey romance Shoresy on Hulu. In between, we had action from the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, an odd rush of ice dancing programming on Netflix and more. Winter sports were big these past few months!

HBO didn’t appear to know what it had in Heated Rivalry, even though the source books by Rachel Reid came with a burgeoning fan base. The announcement of the Crave production’s HBO Max premiere came just nine days before airdate, and critics were only sent the first two episodes. That meant I reviewed it without knowing about Scott and Kip, the cottage and other highlights. Those two first episodes introduced the show’s unapologetically steamy sex, but the emotional sincerity of the love story took a little longer to reveal itself. Angie, was it a power play that HBO Max let this one develop as a word-of-mouth smash or was it just dumb puck … sorry … luck?

ANGIE HAN Can it be a bit of both? The rollout strategy suggests HBO Max was caught off guard by just how popular Heated Rivalry turned out to be — surely if they’d had an inkling, they’d have promoted the show and its stars a little bit harder — but in retrospect, I wonder if it worked in the show’s favor.

Through the (American) Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and into this year, I’ve watched the conversation evolve from, “There’s a gay hockey show?” to, “OMG, you have to watch the gay hockey show,” as friends turned each other on to this seemingly out-of-nowhere hit. The series’ initial obscurity meant fans came to it at different times, stretching the buzz way past what you’d expect from a slim six-episode run. Leads Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie went, seemingly overnight, from two dudes no one had heard of to the hottest young stars in the biz, in the sort of Cinderella story that tends to get fans personally invested in their ascents. (It also, unfortunately, seems to have sparked no small amount of parasocial toxicity, but that’s another conversation.)

People love to feel like they’ve discovered something new, especially at a time when networks can seem desperate to cram more of the same-old down our throats. More Stranger Things, several seasons after that saga ran out of creative juice? Obviously! More heavily hyped Ryan Murphy FX extravaganzas? Have two: The Beauty and Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette! More murder mysteries? More ’80s IP reboots? Peacock’s gone so far as to resurrect, for some reason, The ‘Burbs!

It’s not that those shows are bad. I’ve enjoyed many of them more than I expected to. Disney+’s Marvel spinoff Wonder Man and HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms made two giant, well-trodden franchises feel fresh again by finding the smaller, more intimate stories within them. The new Muppet Show special gave people what they wanted by just giving them the old Muppet Show back, after years of trying to reinvent the wheel.

But — to circle back to Heated Rivalry — it’s just more fun to tell your friends all about the gay hockey show no one saw coming. (Pun not intended.)

FIENBERG The toxicity within the Heated Rivalry fandom is connected to the discovery of the show. There’s no point, for example, in getting possessive about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms; it already belonged to everybody. But with Heated Rivalry, it felt like the people who had read the books got irritated with the people who discovered the show in its first weekend, and those people got annoyed at the people who only found it at the end of its run. And nearly everybody got annoyed with Saturday Night Live for making Heated Rivalry its entire personality, even bringing in Storrie as host in one of the fastest “unknown to SNL host” rises in memory. Gatekeeping is often the gateway to toxicity, and Heated Rivalry had multiple gates being vigilantly kept.

Fortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that at its best — Ilya’s Russian monologue to Shane and their shared shock at Scott’s championship “moment” made the fifth episode the peak — it was simply a very good show.

Heated Rivalry was easily the biggest wholly off-radar success (I wish the TV Academy could reconsider its rules so that Storrie and François Arnaud could at least be in the Emmy conversation). More frequently, though, my winter surprises have been confirmatory rather than revelatory. I’d already seen Mia McKenna-Bruce in the 2024 indie How to Have Sex, so Netflix’s serviceable whodunit Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials just reiterated that she’s a star worth following. I adored Derry Girls, so creator Lisa McGee’s latest Netflix offering, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, just proved that when her dialogue is in the hands of gifted actors — Roisin Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne all shine — she can do almost anything.

I’d put A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Wonder Man in a different sort of “pleasant surprise” category. It’s not like either show snuck up on anybody. Instead, both thrived by discarding all the fanciest trappings of their branded siblings. Knight was basically a two-hander, carried by the charm of Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell rather than dragons, exotic locations and epic mythology. Ditto Wonder Man, which worked because of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley, often forgetting entirely that it was a superhero show.

Oh, and I didn’t hate The Beauty! That was a surprise. It isn’t good, but it’s silly in better and more provocative ways than the other recent Ryan Murphy output. It’s a show that’s designed to be shocking and provocative for people who have never seen a film or TV show before, but … at least it had things on its mind.

HAN How to Get to Heaven From Belfast is enough like Derry Girls and the un-McGee-related Bad Sisters that I’ve been recommending it to people who like either, but it’s different enough that it doesn’t feel like a retread. Mysteries may be a dime a dozen on TV, but it’s rare to see one whose perspective and personality feel so fully formed from the jump or that flits between tones — it’s hilarious and tragic and dark and sweet — so nimbly.

I’ve also been suggesting people check out NBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins if they’ve enjoyed the Tina Fey-Robert Carlock constellation of sitcoms. It’s not the brightest star in that system, and the first episode is pretty rough. But it’s much improved by the second! Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe, playing a disgraced NFL player and the documentarian trying to film a project about him, are the buddy-comedy pairing you didn’t know you needed, and Erika Alexander, as Morgan’s ex-wife, is a delight as the requisite “most normal person who still isn’t all that normal” character.

Then there are returning shows. No one needs to be told at this point to watch HBO Max’s The Pitt, which is back for a second season that ought to please anyone who liked the first. But maybe they could use the reminder that HBO’s Industry remains perhaps the sharpest exploration of power, sex and money in recent memory — and that its latest outing might be its nastiest, most ambitious yet. Then there’s Peacock’s The Traitors, the fourth season of which has delivered what is sure to be one of the most satisfying scenes of TV in 2026: the banishment of Michael Rapaport.

FIENBERG You know what would have been even more satisfying than the banishment of Michael Rapaport on The Traitors? The absence of Michael Rapaport on The Traitors. Between the Rapaport of it all, the strange bullying of the socially awkward Ron Funches and a surplus of Housewives I don’t care about, this season has mostly had me looking forward to the upcoming all-normie season.

The Pitt deserves credit for meeting the hype that comes from Emmy domination and saying, “Yes, it’s possible to do this every year and deliver, just like TV shows used to!” I’ve thought this season has occasionally tried to do too much, hitting its topical targets — encroachment of AI in medicine, crippling health care costs, lingering effects of the Tree of Life tragedy in Pittsburgh — with the level of subtlety it reserves for its goriest surgeries. Man, though, I love this ensemble.

AMC’s Dark Winds, which just returned for its fourth season, offers still more proof that while brilliance is nice, reliability is underrated. Look at all the shows this winter that have either failed, or struggled, to live up to previously hyped chapters. Is anybody talking about the second season of Fallout or the fourth season of Bridgerton? Compared to the evidently successful tawdriness of His & Hers — a series that has split audiences between those who found the ending jaw-dropping and those who found it to be intelligence-insulting idiocy (I’m the latter) — the Bridgerton buzz has seemed muted, while Fallout‘s sophomore season mostly made me realize that the parts of the show I like (Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, basically) are overshadowed by what bores me.

But I’ll close with positivity. In their respective third seasons, Apple’s Shrinking still makes me cry, and Adult Swim’s Primal still astonishes with its brutal animated audacity. I loved Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson in Peacock’s uneven Ponies, endorse Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti’s scenery-chewing in Paramount+’s uneven Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and thought Patrick Dempsey’s hair looked great in Fox’s Memory of a Killer. Angie, your final takeaways from the Winter of Shane and Ilya?

HAN I could rant about how Hollywood has underestimated romance lovers, hockey lovers, Canadians and Jacob Tierney at their own peril. Or how Heated Rivalry is proof of how essential a great sex scene can be. But if we’re talking the most surprising thing I learned this season? It’s that between Shane Hollander and Bridgerton‘s Benedict, no one seems to have any idea what the hell a “cottage” is.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.