She got to torment Don Draper in Mad Men and has just won an Emmy for DTF St Louis. But nothing prepared the star for all the gore as she switched to horror with the Friday the 13th prequel

‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.

Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)

Lena Dunham has announced a surprise reboot of the cult TV show Girls, which had its finale 10 years ago. The news was broken via a fake Zoom call with all four female leads, which went viral and raised questions about what a show depicting millennial struggles would look like as the women enter their 40s. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian writer Rebecca Nicholson – watch on YouTube

From Coronation Street to It’s a Sin, Davies’ memoir of a career in TV is also a rallying cry for creativity

Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history soap spin-offs, making a splash with the pioneering gay series Queer As Folk, or reviving Doctor Who to great acclaim, he makes it feel as if you’re at the pub with him, settling in for the night, ready to hear his best stories.

This warm and gossipy autobiography offers a peek behind the curtains of the British TV industry, and as such, it goes light on Davies’s own life story. Instead, he gallops through five decades in the business, using the framework of his TV shows to propel the book forward at great speed. He was born in Swansea in 1963, to a family who loved watching TV. While he was studying English at Oxford, a friend suggested that, as he thought television was so great, he should consider doing it as his job.

From Carrie’s bullies to Cathy Ames, sympathetic backstories have made villains boring. It’s time to bring back truly awful villains – in all their deliciously sinful glory

The new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden largely sticks to the plot of the John Steinbeck novel. There are tweaks – the introduction of a wedding photograph, for example, which becomes a significant item – but otherwise, it is faithful to the book. That is, in terms of the plot. There has already been some discussion about what it has done to Cathy Ames, played with considerable ferocity by Florence Pugh. Cathy, who later changes her name to Kate, kills her parents by burning down the family house. She shoots her husband, Adam, and leaves her baby sons wailing and alone. She slowly poisons the brothel madam Faye, a woman who acts as a mentor to her and treats her as a daughter, while simultaneously tricking her into leaving her everything in her will. In the book, Steinbeck lets Kate reflect on killing Faye. She finds that she has “no feeling” about it at all.

She is a brilliant, brutal character, but on television, she becomes something else: complicated. Her cruelty remains intact, but Pugh and showrunner Zoe Kazan have fleshed her out and given reasons for her fury. They invent a scene that implies Cathy was abused as a child by two men in the woods, and when she takes her final bow, the series returns to this moment in flashback, suggesting that her campaign of destruction has been shaped by a life of trauma and pain. In Steinbeck’s hands, Cathy is cold and unfeeling. In the 2020s, Cathy is more sympathetic and less of a brute.