Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, and this is Cord Cutter Weekly, my newsletter on how to save money on TV and make the most of streaming. Sign up here if someone shared this newsletter with you.

What it takes to stream this century’s top 100 shows

Jared Newman   |   October 2, 2026

If you have five years, four months, and $1,138 to spare, you might be able stream every one of the New York Times’ top 100 TV shows of the 21st century.

As you’d expect from any authoritative listicle, the Times’ plaudits have prompted plenty of debate about the honorees and snubs. But it’s also a reminder of how much great TV already exists, and how much time you could spend watching critically-acclaimed shows from the past instead of trying to keep up with the present.

To that end, I made a little interactive page for plotting a course through the list, including:

  • A searchable, filterable list of the Times’ picks and where they’re available to stream.
  • The total cost and time commitment if you subscribed to one streaming service at a time and methodically went through all 100 shows.
  • Different time and cost calculations depending on whether you watch with or without ads.

Check it out here →

Also, if you’re curious how I made these calculations, a longer explanation is here →

Weekly rewind

New Fire TV Stick 4K: Amazon is replacing two of its streaming dongles with a new Fire TV Stick 4K. The company says it’s faster than “a similarly priced 4K stick from another leading brand,” but won’t say which brand that is. The device also includes a new remote that’s easier to use without looking, with an asymmetric design and more variety in button shapes.

For now, you can still get the existing Fire TV Stick 4K Select and Fire TV Stick 4K Plus on deep discount. The new model will replace both, splitting the difference in price at $50, while the $85 Fire TV Stick 4K Max becomes Amazon’s sole dongle with Dolby Vision and Atmos support. If you want backlit buttons and a remote finder function, Amazon plans to replace its current Voice Remote Pro with the same updated remote design early next year.

Paramount-HBO Max plans: Remember back in March when Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison said he wanted to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one streaming service after acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery? Not so fast.

Casey Bloys, who will likely head the combined company’s streaming business, is now hinting at a soft bundle instead, pointing to the success of Warner’s HBO Max bundle with Disney+ and Hulu. “[C]ould you see something like that happening? That would make a lot of sense,” he said at an industry event.

Paramount never laid out much of a plan for the two services, other than to get bigger for bigger’s sake, and forcing them together would create many complications. Being able to choose will probably be good news—at least until Paramount pulls a Disney and makes the standalone savings negligible.

Fubo’s new regional sports option: Fubo is now offering a regional sports add-on for its Sports + News plan. The base plan still costs $65 per month, while the cost for regional sports varies by market and depends on regional sports fees.

Fubo and DirecTV are still unique in bundling regional sports with their live TV packages, though Fubo had left them out of its skinnier sports-focused package until now. While most regional sports providers now offer their own separate streaming services, the bundle route makes sense if you want the majority of your sports coverage through a single app.

More catch-up

Save more money

This part of the newsletter has some affiliate links, which earn me a commission if you wind up buying or subscribing to something.

$1 Paramount+ is back: After a brief absence, you can once again get two months of Paramount+ Premium for $1 per month with promo code 26ZCSP2PRM3QZ.

As before, this is for new and returning subscribers. You can’t add the discount to an already-active subscription. Make sure to sign up from the main landing page, not your account page, otherwise you’ll get charged full price.

Other notable deals:

Head to this page for my full list of streaming deals, updated every Friday.

A wild way to protect your personal info

This week for Advisorator members, I wrote about using AI tools get my personal info off the public internet.

Data brokers and people search sites don’t make this info easy to remove. Each site has its own process for delisting your data, and there are so many to deal with that most people don’t bother. Services like DeleteMe and Incogni get away with charging upwards of $100 per year to handle these requests because doing them yourself is a pain.

So I decided to try automating the process instead. While it did save me a lot of time and money, it also required a healthy amount of human supervision and awareness …

(Learn more about joining Advisorator to read the full story.)

Thanks for reading!

Got cord cutting questions for me? Reply to this email and I’ll do my best to answer.

Until next week,
Jared