Author: business

Theater composer and lyricist William Finn, best known for his work on the Tony Award-winning musical “Falsettos,” has died. He was 73.

The acclaimed playwright died Monday following a battle with pneumonia, Finn’s literary agent, Ron Gwiazda, confirmed to USA TODAY on Tuesday.

He made his off-Broadway debut in 1979 with the one-act musical “In Trousers,” a loosely autobiographical piece about a man named Marvin who struggles with his queer sexuality. The show spawned two sequels, 1981’s “March of the Falsettos” and 1990’s “Falsettoland.”

Finn graduated to Broadway in 1989 with the musical “Dangerous Games,” for which he composed the lyrics alongside Argentinian arranger Ástor Piazzolla. His breakthrough came three years later with 1992’s “Falsettos,” a sung-through musical that combines the stories of “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland.”

The emotional musical, which takes inspiration from the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, won Finn a pair of Tony Awards for best original score and best book of a musical.

“I hope it’s a show that will rise above the horribleness of the time,” Finn told the Lincoln Center Theater in 2016. “Do you not want to see ‘Angels in America’ again because it’s about a horrible time?”

Finn’s other works include “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “A New Brain,” “Love’s Fire” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” the latter of which was nominated for best original score at the 2005 Tony Awards.

The playwright’s final show, “The Royal Family of Broadway,” premiered in 2018 at the Barrington Stage Company in Finn’s home state of Massachusetts. The musical was an adaptation of the 1927 play “The Royal Family” by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber.

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‘I like to write songs that tell you the story of a life in three or four minutes’

In February 1952, Finn was born in Boston to Jason and Barbara Finn, and the Jewish couple raised him in the neighboring town of Natick, Massachusetts. Finn developed an early love for the world of musical theater, dancing around his family’s living room to the Frank Loesser-penned “Guys and Dolls.”

“I was always interested in the theater and just gravitated there,” Finn previously told The Cultural Critic. “And I was always smart, so my parents figured I wasn’t doing anything stupid, and they were supportive. I must have been an obnoxious child, always singing and always — well, dancing is not the word. Moving is more accurate.”

During his adolescence, Finn took up the guitar after receiving the instrument as a gift for his bar mitzvah, per The Cultural Critic. Inspired by folk singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel, the self-taught musician began writing his own songs and later learned the piano.

Michael Hurley dies: Singer known as ‘Godfather of freak folk’ was 83

Finn honed his craft as a theatrical composer while attending Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he wrote three musicals and studied the work of college alumnus and Broadway icon Stephen Sondheim, according to his interview with the Lincoln Center Theater.

“When I began to get personal, my songs got better,” Finn told The Cultural Critic. “I like to write songs that tell you the story of a life in three or four minutes, where a panoply of emotions is expressed, and also where real craft is demonstrated.”

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Accurso took a hiatus from YouTube, with her last video being posted in January. In March, she said it was due to “family things.”

Ms. Rachel is officially a mom of two.

Rachel Accurso, best known for her popular toddler learning videos, announced on social media that she and her husband, Aron, welcomed a baby girl via surrogate on Tuesday.

“We welcomed sweet baby Susannah into the world!” Accurso wrote on Instagram. “We are so in love! Sometimes timing isn’t what you plan and the road to get there is bumpier than you expect, but when you hold your little ones you know… I’m meant to be your mama.”

Accurso, who was unable to carry the pregnancy due to medical reasons, praised the surrogate for giving the couple “the most precious gift possible.”

“We are now all family forever,” the YouTube star wrote. “We have immense gratitude and a deep bond. It’s been a truly beautiful experience. I’m in awe of her.”

Accurso also gave her partner, Aron, a special shoutout for “being the best husband and dada.”

‘Ms. Rachel’ is coming to Netflix: When, what to know and how to watch

Who is Ms. Rachel?

“Ms. Rachel” is a popular YouTuber who makes content, described as “toddler learning videos” and “baby learning videos” for young children.

“Ms. Rachel uses techniques recommended by speech therapists and early childhood experts to help children learn important milestones and preschool skills!” according to Ms. Rachel’s YouTube channel description. “You can trust Ms. Rachel to provide interactive, high quality screen time!”

Accurso’s free “Songs for Littles” series went viral on YouTube in 2020, catapulting her and her channel into stardom. Over 14 million people are currently subscribed to her YouTube channel, not to mention the hundreds of millions who tune in regularly.

Accurso has become something of a quintessential figure in children’s media since her come up, partnering with Netflix for a television special based on her videos and with Spin Master for a toy line.

Accurso, who began writing the songs used in her clips alongside Broadway director and composer husband Aron Accurso, is especially popular for her cheery demeanor, kind disposition, inclusivity and signature overalls and headband look. She is also praised for her degrees and background in music education and early childhood development.

Accurso has taken a hiatus from YouTube, with her last video being posted in January. In March, she said it was due to “family things.”

Contributing: Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY

The 2010s had E!’s “The Rich Kids of Beverly Hills.” Now, the next generation of famous children is set to star on Bravo’s upcoming series, “Next Gen NYC.”

The Bravo reality show, which premieres June 3, will feature adult children of cast members from the “Real Housewives” franchise.

The show will follow the friend group, all in their 20s, as they navigate business pursuits, personal drama and their own goals in New York City. While some were raised by reality TV royalty or hail from a famous family, others are starting their empires from scratch.

The trailer, released Tuesday, proved the drama doesn’t end on “Housewives.” In one scene, Ariana Biermann appeared to reference a past family controversy for fellow cast member Ava Dash. “Excuse me, Becky with the good hair? I want Ava” with the attitude, Biermann quipped in the trailer.

In 2016, Dash’s mother, Rachel Roy, was the subject of tabloid rumors about an affair with Jay Z following the release of lyrics from Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album that referred to “Becky with the good hair.” At the time, Roy denied the speculation, saying there is “no truth to the rumors.”

During a double-decker bus ride around the city, some friends get hit by tree branches and in select trailer scenes, tension turns into comedic relief. “This friend group is honestly a beautiful hot mess,” newbie Georgia McCann said in another clip.

Who’s in the ‘Next Gen NYC’ cast?

The “Next Gen NYC” cast includes New Jersey titan Teresa Giudice’s eldest daughter Gia Giudice alongside Ariana Biermann and Riley Burruss, the respective daughters of former Atlanta housewives Kim Zolciak and Kandi Burruss.

Brooks Marks, the youngest son of Salt Lake City star Meredith Marks, is also a cast member alongside Ava Dash, who’s the daughter of music mogul Damon Dash and designer Rachel Roy. Brooks’ sister, Chloe Marks, will appear as a friend of the cast.

Teddi Mellencamp has numerous tumors, will undergo emergency surgery

The cast also includes influencer Emira D’Spain and newcomers McCann, Charlie Zakkour, Shai Fruchter and Hudson McLeroy.

“Next Gen NYC” premieres June 3 at 9 p.m. EDT on Bravo.

For a few brief moments, the entrance to Toru Shimokawa’s home in Kurume looks, smells and feels recognisably – almost classically – Japanese. The mixture of light and dark woods; the waft of cedar and plum blossom, the hard-fought quest for insularity amid the tight jostle of neighbouring houses. No traditions feel in immediate danger of being broken. Shoes are removed at the tiled genkan entranceway before the high, deliberately disconnective step onto tatami; a knee-level ikebana arrangement has been set to honour the guest; an uneven pillar of sanded mulberry softens the corner into a shoji screen-lined entrance room.

But the illusion of familiarity is brief. Once I am up on the tatami – and now officially “inside” the home – the first of Shimokawa’s gentle architectural ambushes is triggered: “1,950mm high,” beams the 42-year-old architect, raising his hand to the room’s low wooden ceiling and clearly enjoying both the engineered sense of confinement and the visitor’s instinctive duck of the head. “This was my first home,” he says of the house he was born in, “so I wanted to experiment with it.”

In fact, this house is not the actual building he was born in but another, completed in 2015, that sits on the same site. The house makes for a far more conservative take on many of his more radical creations, but still bears the hallmarks of a design practice that marries traditional architecture with modern interventions in a career that first made its presence felt in 2009 when he was named in Wallpaper* magazine’s architects directory as one of the 30 most exciting names to have emerged around the world. This is now the 20th year since he decided, with no formal training, to start an architectural firm. “I was never taught about architecture,” he explains. “But looking back now at the things I was sketching as a child and a teenager, what I was drawing was architecture,” he says. 

Current and past projects include an art gallery in Fukuoka, a buckwheat soba noodle restaurant, a little nirvana of thatch and waterfalls a 30-minute drive away in Dazaifu, a hot-spring project at Niseko Weiss and the reconstruction of a shrine. His work is increasingly concentrated on high-end private homes around the country whose owners, from tech entrepreneurs to psychiatrists, share his view that classic Japanese architectural styles are there to be simultaneously cherished and tweaked. And yet, even as his new commissions arrive from the wealthy playgrounds of Karuizawa, Niseko and elsewhere, he is unmoved by the magnetic fields of Kyoto or Tokyo. Shimokawa remains resolutely committed to being a Kyushu-bred architect in Kyushu.

Shinichi Takaki is the owner of the Yasutake Soba noodle shop, in Dazaifu, which was completed in October 2024. “My impression of Shimokawa is of a pure person in terms of architecture,” he says. 

“When we first met with him at his home, I had the impression that his architecture would not deteriorate, but just become more beautiful. So I asked him to design my restaurant. He is very passionate in his pursuit of beauty, and how to move people’s hearts in various different ways. He is a maniac for beauty.”

“Toru Shimokawa has managed to reconcile the craft techniques of carpentry and the use of traditional and historic materials with an aesthetic that is clear, crisp and contemporary,” says Edwin Heathcote, the FT architecture critic. “In a nation still in thrall to the fetish of the new, where houses often last barely a generation, Toru Shimokawa traces a line between past and present, retaining existing fabric where possible but also acknowledging that history can be embodied in the process and knowledge of making, as well as in the finished object. His approach to landscape, the flow of space between interior and garden and the subtleties in the architectural delineation of those barely visible boundaries create an exquisite architecture in which history is profoundly present, even if his buildings appear utterly and elegantly modern.”

Shimokawa’s home has proven the perfect fulcrum for his tweaking. The confined Japanese-style room at the entrance, for example, is a calculated onslaught of the very traditional: it is influenced by the dimensions and scale of Japanese tea houses. It feels low by modern standards. He opens the small door into the main living room, and suddenly all that temporal and physical constriction is released. Minimalism has sped through the epochs. The ceiling, no longer flat and low, sweeps upwards to the full, glorious height of the house. The floor is tiled. The windows are huge. The airflow feels entirely different. There is no downlighting, only standing lamps with cords that vanish into the floor. Decades of evolution in Japanese home design gust along the floor and up into the ridged wooden rafters. A large ceramic hibachi squats at the heart of the room, subtly aglow.

Shimokawa’s home sits on a residential street a few hundred metres from the broad, winding Chikugo river in northern Kyushu. This the most southern of Japan’s four main islands – a stunningly beautiful part of the country known for its food, hot springs and as the main producer of Japanese green tea. Kyushu’s most famous architectural son is Arata Isozaki, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner of 2019. Kurume is a large suburb of Fukuoka city: potentially forgettable if it did not punch so far above its weight as the home of Seiko Matsuda, the “eternal idol” pop superstar, and Kiyonori Kikutake, a founding member of Japan’s Metabolist architectural movement and designer of the iconic Edo-Tokyo museum.

And yet Shimokawa grew up in a world unconnected with architecture. His father and mother, he says, had unrelated jobs and, unlike most others, Shimokawa did not go to university. Entirely self-taught, he did not have the resources to tour Japan looking at architecture, and so he looked more locally around him and learnt what he could from books. “When you are in your teens or 20s, you look at the things that are closest to you,” he explains. “If you don’t have money you just see as much architecture as you can. So after doing what I could on a small budget I would study in books. But the more I studied, the more I began to see the difference between good and bad. If you know what is good, you already have a base, so you can build on that.”

By the age of 21, he decided to set up an architectural design firm. “At first, I didn’t have any work, because there was no way anyone was going to commission a 21-year-old who didn’t know anything and hadn’t studied architecture,” he says. “But then someone suddenly invited me to do a small job and that turned into more interior design work, and then houses and so on.” He is reluctant to acknowledge that his style has been shaped by any particular influence. “I don’t think there is an architect who thinks completely originally,” he says. “Everyone – Tadao Ando or Kazuyo Sejima – is imitating someone else. When I think about what is the basis of good architecture in Kyushu or Kyoto, I realise that old temples and shrines are the purest form. I learnt from visiting temples, shrines and Japanese architecture, and that has become my natural style. But that alone is not enough for the modern age.” 

Shimokawa is married to a formally trained architect who has worked with him since 2008. Although the architectural firm bears his name, in the house next door, which the pair have converted into a design studio and office, the husband and wife’s desks sit side by side. 

Within the Shimokawa story, the rebuilding of homes close to the architect’s heart holds a particular importance. His first great formative project was the house his parents eventually moved to, which he radically rebuilt in concrete in 2007. On that front, Shimokawa is in excellent company. Many Japanese architects cite the rebuilding of their parents’ home as being among their most significant projects – for many it is the first moment they are handed full creative control.

That pattern is common because one of the great defining features of Japanese home ownership in the postwar period was the expectation that most residential homes would at some point be torn down. “In the past, Japanese people used to scrap and build over the course of 20 to 30 years – completely different from Europe and America,” says Shimokawa, who says that Japanese housebuilding was dominated historically by the idea that a house’s value would automatically fall. He now sees Japan’s economy pushing its architecture to a critical turning point where gradual improvement is replacing this instinct. “The Japanese way of thinking is changing. We are now in an era when we have no choice but to renovate, because the costs are higher. My own mind is also changing. Young people think about fixing things, or making things that last.”

Back in the living room, one experiences the second of Shimokawa’s ambushes. The roof of the main living room extends out and back towards the genkan to cover a large external terrace. This sets up, he says, a visual ambiguity between inside and outside, purposefully playing on what has always been a diamond-hard Japanese distinction between the two. Inside is you and yours, outside is everything else. But with the shoji screens opened, there isa view from the entranceway through three zones of the house into the garden – a Japanese-style rockery punctuated with plum and other trees. The effect of the through-view is heightened, he says, by having elevated the house about 1.5m above ground level. “You are inside, then you see outside, then you see the living room, and then beyond that the outside,” he says, relishing the idea that this builds what he calls an “endless relationship” between the garden and house.

He leans back on a chair and sips tea from a cup designed by Takayuki Watanabe, a ceramicist who also fashioned a spectacular sphere that perches on the piloti as one passes along the serpentine garden path. 

“I have done a lot of experimentation,” he says, in evident joy at the home he has created for his young family. Along the way, he has attained a quintessentially Japanese feel for detail. For example, sliding doors are generally moved by gripping a small oblong indentation. Shimokawa has replaced that oblong with a brass ingot with an inset figure of eight of his design that perfectly guides the fingers to the optimum location to move the door. “I spend a lot of time thinking about things during the design and construction period,” he continues. “But once I hand it over to the client, that’s the end isn’t it? It feels good to look at this and know it is your own home.”

It is easy to forget that this is, for all its overwhelming minimalism and power to surprise, a family home. His wife accepts a compliment about the lack of clutter by indicating an austere cupboard in which she says everything is hidden away.

The third great architectural trick of the Shimokawa home is its kitchen, which is sunken 60cm below the living room and separated by a broad wooden counter. On the garden side of the counter are four low wicker stools  – this is the family table. On the other are the sink and cooking surfaces. Whoever is cooking is not only at the exact eye level of any inhabitants of the stools, but is able to look back across the living room in a way that creates an infinity-pool garden view. 

The effect of all this is both subversive and inclusive. And, in its purity of execution, a triumph of design. Food is served comfortably from the kitchen and cleared instantly down into the sink. Yes, it may sound odd to organise a family table like a panel, but the practical reality of Japanese family life is that one adult is generally busy in the kitchen as the children eat. “I thought it would be better if we were closer to each other’s eye level,” explains Shimokawa simply. A traditional family table may feel inclusive, but lived reality tells you it isn’t always so. Shimokawa’s sunken kitchen admits something of modern life that traditional architecture has pretended is otherwise. 

torushimokawa.com

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George R.R. Martin, author of the saga adapted for HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ series, invented dire wolves in his fantasy world. Thanks to Peter Jackson he got to meet the dire wolves in the real world.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when George R.R. Martin visited Colossal. It was in 2025.

George R.R. Martin made fictional dire wolves integral to his books in the “A Song of Fire and Ice” saga, which spawned the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”

Little did he know he would eventually get to hold a real dire wolf – well, as close as one likely ever produced – and he would have “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson to thank.

Jackson is among the investors in Colossal Biosciences, a private company which has seen its value increase to more than $10 billion since 2021 when it was founded by George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm with the goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth.

What Jackson had learned – and Martin didn’t know yet – was that Colossal’s gene editing advances had made it possible to produce offspring born from surrogate mothers. They had a breakthrough allowing them to create dire wolves, which were actual Ice Age predators until they died out as many as 13,000 years ago.

So Peter Jackson says to George R.R. Martin …

Martin detailed how he got to meet the dire wolves in a post on his official website.

It started with Jackson calling him “with a mysterious suggestion that I phone this guy named Ben Lamm, who had something huge he wanted to share with me. Peter had taken an oath of silence, so he could not share the secret with me, but I could hear the excitement in his voice, so I made the call. And damn, I am sure glad I did.”

Subsequently, Martin visited Colossal in February 2025, more than four months after the biotech company’s researchers oversaw the birth of two male dire wolf pups and one month after a female pup was born.

“I’ve been holding my tongue for months now, sworn to silence yet dying to tell the world,” he said on the site, which had a picture of him holding one of the wolves.

How did George R.R. Martin come up with dire wolves?

A visit to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where the remains of hundreds of dire wolves have been found, sparked inspiration for the author. “When I saw their direwolf exhibit, four hundred skull arrayed on a wall, something stirred inside me,” Martin said.

“Most of my readers will have heard the story of how I (was) writing a science fiction novel in the summer of 1991 when a scene came to me, the first chapter of GAME OF THRONES where they find the direwolf pups in the summer snows. Where did THAT come from? Why did it seize me so powerfully? I have no idea,” he continued. “But it grabbed hold of me so hard that I put the other novel aside and began to write A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. The direwolves were a huge part of it. Without them, Westeros might not exist.”

Martin went on to muse that “maybe I was remembering a past life, when I ran with a pack in the Ice Age. … Whatever the reason, I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.”

Martin had prepared his followers for an upcoming special bit of news, ahead of Colossal’s dire wolf reveal, saying it was not going to be an update on “The Winds of Winter,” the long-awaited next novel in the Game of Thrones series.

The news, he said, “had nothing to do with that. But it was going to be something very cool, something astonishing.”Remembering Martin’s visit, Lamm said, “George R.R. Martin called us wizards, which is pretty cool.”

Not all fans were as excited. “We got Dire Wolves back after 10,000 years before we got the Epstein Files or Winds of Winter,’ one person posted on X.

We got Dire Wolves back after 10,000 years before we got the Epstein Files or Winds of Winter

— FEDORABLE THE HORRIBLE (@FedorableL) April 8, 2025

This story has been updated to correct an inaccuracy.

Mike Snider is a reporter on USA TODAY’s Trending team. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider  &  @mikegsnider.bsky.social  &  @mikesnider & [email protected]

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• Beyoncé’s album “Cowboy Carter” is inspiring fans to create handmade fashion.
• MakerPlace by Michaels is holding a sweepstakes for one fan to win tickets to a U.S. show and a $3,000 Visa card.
• To enter, fans must style a Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin Circuit Tour outfit using finds from MakerPlace by Michaels.
• The sweepstakes ends April 11.

Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album isn’t just reshaping music, it’s also inspiring a new wave of handmade fashion ahead of her tour. Now fans can enter their tailor-made outfits for a chance to win concert tickets through a new sweepstakes.

As “Cowboy Carter” sashes and other Beyoncé-inspired items continue to trend, MakerPlace by Michaels is looking for one lucky fan who “embodies the Cowboy Carter spirit through their own handmade look” to win two “Cowboy Carter” tickets to a U.S. show through its sweepstakes. The winner will also receive a $3,000 Visa card.

To enter, fans must style an Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin Circuit Tour outfit using finds from MakerPlace by Michaels, a marketplace place to buy and sell handmade crafts.

One of MakerPlace’s sellers, Kenjah Crafts, who has been making waves with her own handmade “Cowboy Carter”-inspired sashes will serve as a judge. Entrants will be judged based on creativity and originality, craftsmanship, style and narrative.

Some merchandise from featured sellers includes a Bey Haw tank, a Beyoncé Bowl shirt and an embroidered Beyoncé bandanna.

As fans know, the 35-time Grammy winner first announced “Cowboy Carter” during a surprise Super Bowl commercial in February 2024 when she released singles “16 Carriages” and “Texas Hold ‘Em.” The 27-track project has been huge catalyst for the recent spotlight on Black country artists and the genre’s roots.

Beyoncé first announced her Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour the night before this year’s Grammy Awards, where she took home best country album and album of the year.

The tour will kick off in April 28 in Los Angeles and include 32 stadium shows across the U.S. and Europe. Since the initial announcement, Beyoncé has added a handful of concerts including final shows in Las Vegas. She has already made history with her scheduled tour dates.

Of course, Beyoncé’s shows are known for being just as much about fashion as they are about music —from the singer’s own looks to the outfits worn by her fans in the crowd.

The sweepstake ends Friday. More details can be found on Makerplace by Michaels official site.

Follow Caché McClay, the USA TODAY Network’s Beyoncé Knowles-Carter reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @cachemcclay.

LAS VEGAS– Ana de Armas has a tense faceoff with Keanu Reeves in the action-packed “John Wick” flick “Ballerina.” It’s not the first time they’ve butted heads on camera: Ten years ago, she was making his domestic life hell in the thriller “Knock Knock.”

Even in those early days of the Keanussance, de Armas felt a connection with Reeves. “I’ve always admired him so much. just the way he approaches the business and his career, and just mostly how he treats people,” she says. “I met him when he had just done the first ‘John Wick.’ We never imagined this is what the franchise was going to be.”

“Ballerina” (in theaters June 6) marks the first big-screen spinoff for the popular “Wick” series. While she does share the screen with the main man himself, de Armas – the first female winner of CinemaCon’s action star of the year award – is very much the star of the movie. Her character Eve Macarro is a rookie dancer/assassin who comes up, like Wick, in the Ruska Roma organization, and Eve irks the wrong people when she goes on a mission of revenge.

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“The opportunity to have my movie and actually just go for it, go crazy, it was a no-brainer,” says de Armas, 36, an Oscar-nominated actress who’s had action roles in “Ghosted,” “The Gray Man” and the James Bond movie “No Time to Die.” “I knew I wanted to be a part of that world, and that specific tone of ‘John Wick’ was really cool.”

“Ballerina” marks de Armas’ third movie with Reeves – they also co-starred in the 2016 thriller “Exposed” – and he’s as inspiring a presence as ever, she says. “Keanu is just relentless. It’s never enough. He’s very perfectionist, he wants to get it right. During rehearsals, every step of the way, he was down for everything. Any idea, he’s happy to try everything. That kind of just giving yourself to the process and the project, it’s just remarkable.”

‘John Wick 5’ is officially happening: Keanu Reeves confirmed to return

They share multiple scenes in the movie, as Eve asks for advice from Wick in the early days of her killer career, but Wick warns her of the “consequences” of her actions. De Armas teases a sequence glimpsed in the trailer where Wick is sent after her and he walks quietly through a snowy town at night.

“I think this is the first time in history that no one is trying to kill him. He is actually looking around like, ‘I’ve never been so calm walking down the street,’ ” de Armas says. “When they face each other, you can tell that these characters have so much in common. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen, who’s going to hurt who.”

How much will you lie for life-changing money?

Hosted by Peter Serafinowicz, “Million Dollar Secret” follows 12 strangers competing in what’s billed by Netflix as a predator-prey game show.

Each individual is given a brown welcome box. The kicker is that one of the guests secretly has $1 million inside, forcing them to try their best to keep that information under wraps. The other players must follow clues and observe odd behavior throughout the game to sniff out the millionaire among them.

At the formal dinners, those on the chopping block must state their case on why they’re not the millionaire, or else face elimination.

“Each time a millionaire is booted from the game, the money moves to someone new,” Netflix explained. “Strike too soon, and you become the target, but miss your window, and you lose any hope of cashing a check. And should the millionaire catch too much heat, they can ditch the cash to survive another day in the competition.”

Here’s how to watch the last episodes of “Million Dollar Secret.”

When are the final episodes of ‘Million Dollar Secret’?

The final two episodes of “Million Dollar Secret” will be released on Netflix on Wednesday, April 9, at 3 a.m. EDT.

The first six episodes are available on the streaming platform.

Episode list

• Episode 1: “Instant Millionaire”
• Episode 2: “The Five Suspects”
• Episode 3: “Going to Hell on a Scholarship”
• Episode 4: “Hot Seat for Three”
• Episode 5: “The Kill Shot”
• Episode 6: “911, Misdemeanor, Handcuffs”
• Episode 7: TBD
• Episode 8: TBD

Where does ‘Million Dollar Secret’ take place?

Contestants meet up at The Stag, a luxurious estate in Kelowna, Canada, according to Netflix.

‘Million Dollar Secret’ trailer

‘Million Dollar Secret’ contestants

• Corey
• Cara
• Harry
• Chris
• Kyle
• Jaimi
• Lydia
• Lauren
• Samantha
• Phillip
• Se Young
• Sydnee

Taylor Ardrey is a news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at [email protected].