(L-R) Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe attend The Screener premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Yarrow Theatre on January 23, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival)
By Erik Adams
“We made this thing to support the filmmakers,” says Jim Cummings after The Screener debuts in the Episodic section at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. “Some people might say we hate the industry. It’s not true. We love filmmakers more than anything.”
You couldn’t be blamed for thinking otherwise when watching the latest project from Festival alums Cummings and PJ McCabe, though. The first three episodes take aim at modern-day Hollywood, where Cummings and McCabe set the saga of Minnie (Shereen Lani Younes), a promising young filmmaker whose new movie is accidentally leaked to the internet by her agents. Corrupt executives, cynical marketing, and interchangeable streaming services all go boom in The Screener’s scripts. The only thing more explosive is the laughter that filled The Yarrow Theatre on Friday night.
This is more than your average showbiz spoof. When the case of Minnie’s pilfered movie gets the attention of the Los Angeles district attorney (Cummings), the second and third episodes seamlessly transform into a legal thriller. The question of who uploaded an unauthorized digital copy of the movie — the “screener” of the title — and how consumes a pair of delightfully realized workplaces populated by ace supporting players. There’s the DA’s grubby, wood-paneled office, where he spars with assistant DAs played by Shaun J. Brown and B.K. Cannon about how they should be investigating a bus crash, whose grisly details were the source of the premiere’s most shocked laughs.
Across town, there are the gleaming open-floor-plan spaces of talent agency IBG, where Minnie’s agent (Boni Mata), her skeezy colleague (Jon Rudnitsky), and their meek assistant (Nicolette Doke) try to cover their tracks and/or throw one another under the bus. Cummings says the nuances of these settings and the work done there are the result of painstaking exploration.
“We talked to the district attorney’s office, U.S. Attorney’s office, FBI from San Diego to Sacramento, and did a year and a half, maybe two years of research trying to see how you would do this. And while that was happening, there were all kinds of leaks [in the industry], and that was terrifying.”
The Screener is also the product of numerous artists working independently of any studio, network, or streamer, making the creative choices they and they alone wanted to make, and making them together. In that spirit, Cummings invited anyone involved with the show who was in the audience to join in the Q&A, a “clown car” (his words) that numbers at least 25 members of the cast and crew.
“They really let me fucking pop off,” says Rudnitsky of Cummings and McCabe — and boy does he ever, bringing a twitchy electricity to IBG’s least dependable agent. Younes, primarily a writer-director, expresses how glad she was to make her acting debut in such a supportive environment.
“We never had to cast somebody based on their IMDb STARmeter,” Cummings says. “We got to cast people who were perfect for the part. Some of these people had never really acted before. We spent two months finding exactly the right people — finding people from Japan who were perfect, [people from] Canada.”
Now all that’s left to do is to find a home for the show. When asking a question about what comes next, an audience member quotes The Screener back at its creators, referencing one character’s tossed-off remark, “At least it’s good for Netflix.”
Cummings responds, “They’re seeing it on Monday. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Here’s hoping they have a sense of humor.
