Category Archives: Television

What can we learn from the Janet Jackson Super Bowl documentary?

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The New York Times and FX special Malfunction revisits the ‘Nipplegate’ scandal of 2004 but adds little new understanding

In January, the New York Times documentary team released Framing Britney Spears, a succinct and bruising retrospective on the pop star’s career and the shadowy legal arrangement that governed her affairs. The 75-minute documentary, which included virtually no new information but offered a cohesive, damning portrait of her treatment by the press, launched a grenade in pop culture. It triggered widespread calls to end her conservatorship, which Spears, 39, later championed (a judge terminated the 13-year arrangement last week); as well as meditations on punishing cultural commentary, callous treatment of mental health, or the hollow, deceptive empowerment proffered by Spears’s sexy teenage image; and a queasy wave of Britney Spears content (including an NYT follow-up, Controlling Britney Spears, that was part retrospective and part, uncomfortably, true crime.

Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, the latest New York Times documentary for FX on Hulu, aims for the same type of cathartic reframing through an infamous episode of early 2000s pop culture: the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast for nine-sixteenths of a second at the 2004 Super Bowl, and the subsequent cultural firestorm. The 70-minute film follows a similar format to its predecessors – archival footage (including plenty of gag-worthy early 2000s fashion) synthesized with first-person interviews and commentary from cultural critics.

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Too much bosom: why The Wheel of Time is far from ‘great for women’

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Rosamund Pike, who stars in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming take on Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, says his female characters are role models. Really?

What is going on with Amazon Prime’s characterisation of The Wheel of Time? I ask this as a fantasy fan, someone who not only adores the classy stuff (NK Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay etc) but has also devotedly ploughed her way through The Belgariad, most of Terry Goodkind (until it got too crazy even for me) and Simon R Green. And how many people involved with the forthcoming adaptation have actually marathoned their way through all of the books?

My eyebrows were first raised back when the deal to adapt Robert Jordan’s extremely long series was announced in 2018, when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke praised its “timely narrative featuring powerful women at the core”. Now, I read these books in my late teens, but my resounding memory of them was not of “powerful women”. In fact, I remember thinking Jordan’s depiction of women was pretty dismal – he might have packed in far more female characters than Tolkien ever did, but they’re constantly objectified, forever hoisting their bosoms around, adjusting their skirts – even getting spanked as punishment.

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Succession recap: series three, episode five – catastrophe strikes as Logan loses his grip

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As the patriarch succumbs to a meltdown brought on by health woes, Shiv tries to save the day at the shareholder meeting. What a hilariously excruciating hour

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Succession season three, which airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched episode five.

The long-awaited shareholder meeting played out like a blend of anxiety dream and boardroom farce. But who would emerge victorious? Here are the minutes from episode five, titled Retired Janitors of Idaho …

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‘Meeting Barry White took the sex out of his music for me’: Jane Krakowski’s honest playlist

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The Ally McBeal and 30 Rock star on her love of Ed Sheeran, singing Lady Marmalade and knowing all the words from Grease

Lady Marmalade. “Back in the day”, quote unquote, I would just sing it as it was done by Labelle. Now I quite enjoy doing all three parts of the Moulin Rouge version, and the tricky bits, and adding in the rap by Lil’ Kim.

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Rob Delaney on love, loss and married life: ‘No, my wife is not having an affair with her karate teacher’

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The star of Catastrophe and Home Sweet Home Alone answers your questions on everything from family tragedy to the value of comedy

Rob Delaney – comedian, actor, writer, tweeter, activist – co-wrote and co-starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe with Sharon Horgan. Now he has a starring role in the film Home Sweet Home Alone. He has also written and spoken movingly about the death of his two-year-old son, Henry. Here, he answers questions from readers about all of this, as well as being an American in London – and how he keeps his hair looking so great.

When you were offered the role in Home Sweet Home Alone, did you hesitate and think that maybe another remake of a successful movie would be pointless? Bernard Hautecler, Brussels, Belgium

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Sesame Street debuts first Asian American muppet as show ‘meets the moment’

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The landmark children’s television program introduces Ji-Young, its first Korean American puppet, inspired by a desire to counteract race hate

What’s in a name? For Ji-Young, the newest muppet resident of Sesame Street, her name is a sign that she was meant to live there.

“So, in Korean traditionally the two syllables they each mean something different and Ji means, like, smart or wise. And Young means, like, brave or courageous and strong,” Ji-Young explained during a recent interview. “But we were looking it up and guess what? Ji also means sesame.”

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Weight loss, deadlifts and divorce: what we learned from Adele’s One Night Only special

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In her TV concert special, the singer got personal in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about her dreams of a nuclear family, fixation with her weight loss and how much she can deadlift

Adele opened up about the pain of her divorce, losing the dream of a nuclear family, commentary over her weight and her strained relationship with her late father in a candid, ranging interview with Oprah Winfrey.

During the sit-down in Winfrey’s rose garden, recorded prior to her first concert in more than four years for the CBS special Adele One Night Only, the singer revealed she felt “embarrassed” that she couldn’t make her marriage to Simon Konecki “work”.

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Will Smith: now Hollywood royalty, the star’s rise has been far from painless

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From Fresh Prince to King Richard, personal upsets have so far failed to derail his childhood goal to be the world’s biggest film star

There’s a seemingly offhand quality which is central to the appeal of Will Smith: an innate magnetism and loose-limbed, casual coolness. But the career path from teenage rap artist to TV actor to superstar status was anything but effortless; it was the result of a self-described “psychotic” work ethic and meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, planning.

For a while, at least, he was one of the most bankable film actors on the planet – a planet that he saved on a regular basis in summer blockbusters. But while that kind of success rate is hard to sustain, Smith has shown himself to be extremely adaptable compared to his contemporaries. From film actor/musician, he has evolved into a multimedia phenomenon. He has adopted a very marketable openness and accessibility, and embraced personal failures as teachable moments.

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Irvine Welsh: ‘We’re heading for an anarchist paradise where we play football and make love’

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The notorious author is breaking new ground with his TV debut. He talks about messed up cops, exorcising Sick Boy … and writing the tunes for Trainspotting: The Musical

‘I like the way you call me Irvine,” says Irvine Welsh to a young woman who’s just offered him a cup of tea, and pronounced his first name to rhyme with wine. “I’ve been living in Miami and it makes me feel like I’m back there.” The so-called Magic City is his happy place, “the polar opposite of Edinburgh. All people do in Scotland is fucking talk, they rabbit in each other’s faces. Miami is nothing like that. At the start, I found it so vacuous, but you can get all your stuff from Edinburgh and London, then take it away to Miami and write in peace.” The world is one long, warm bath to this man, it seems. He is “happy everywhere. All the shit comes out in the writing. In normal life, I focus on the good things: the beauty in life, romance, friendship.”

The undisputed king of the 1990s, of swear words, of Scottishness, is here to talk about Crime, in which he breaks new ground with his first script for television. It’s a riveting and quite surprising move from him – it starts off looking like a classic cop show, although I’ve only been allowed to watch the first three episodes. “I know this sounds like what everybody would say, but episode four is when it really kicks off, and five and six go absolutely fucking mental.” It really doesn’t sound like what everybody would say. It’s hard to figure out what is more charming about Welsh – how much of a one-off he is, or his conviction that he’s exactly like everyone else.

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Inside the world of foley artists: ‘Watermelons are brilliant for the sound of brains hitting the floor’

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They are film and television’s unsung heroes: the people who create sounds, for everything from crunchy snow, kissing and horses’ hooves. Just don’t mention coconuts

Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.

In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It’s Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It’s a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears’s upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park.

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Banksy artwork deliberately destroyed by Christopher Walken in BBC comedy show finale

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Hollywood actor paints over original work, which was created for Stephen Merchant’s TV series The Outlaws

A piece of art created by Banksy was painted over by Hollywood actor Christopher Walken in the final episode of BBC series The Outlaws.

The six-part comedy-drama, which Stephen Merchant co-created with US writer and producer Elgin James, and also directed, follows a group of misfits renovating a derelict community centre in Bristol, as part of community service for crimes they have committed.

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Dean Stockwell, Quantum Leap and Blue Velvet actor, dies aged 85

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Versatile actor had worked in Hollywood since childhood, and was Oscar nominated for his role in 1988 comedy Married to the Mob

A life in pictures: Dean Stockwell

Dean Stockwell, the former child star who became a key figure in the Hollywood counter-culture and enjoyed late success in popular TV shows, has died aged 85. According to Deadline, his family said he died at home “of natural causes”.

Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Stockwell had become a major name while still in high school, starring in the anti-racism parable The Boy With Green Hair in 1948 and alongside Errol Flynn in the 1950 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. However, Stockwell found the transition to adulthood difficult and after dropping out of university he re-established his film career with a lead role in Compulsion, the 1959 crime film based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, for which he won a best actor award at the Cannes film festival alongside co-stars Orson Welles and Bradford Dillman.

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‘I had to watch it with my therapist’: when real-life horrors get turned into TV

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From The Shrink Next Door to Dr Death, true-crime podcasts are being snapped up for TV. But how does it really feel when your worst nightmare becomes a bingewatch?

The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation penned by one of Succession’s writers, Georgia Pritchett, Will Ferrell plays the patient whom many assumed was the handyman in his own home, while Paul Rudd is the smarmy shrink turned cuckoo in the nest.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because the show is based on the hit podcast of the same name. The Shrink Next Door is the latest in the podcast to TV trend, which includes Julia Roberts’s Homecoming, Dirty John, with Connie Britton as the gaslit victim of “Dirty” John Meehan (Eric Bana), and Dr Death – based on the terrifying tale of sociopathic surgeon Christopher Duntsch – starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.

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Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung: ‘I’m very strange-looking, in a good way’

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As the London Korean film festival kicks off, Youn Yuh-jung, talks about how her portrayals of racy grannies and scheming maids scandalised the nation

In her Oscar-winning turn in last year’s Minari, Youn Yuh-jung played the mischievous granny you wished you’d had: the one who ignores your fun-sucking parents, takes you on wild adventures and teaches you to do your own thing. “You’re not a real grandma,” her Americanised grandson tells her. “They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!” In real life, Youn is pretty similar: lively, funny, unpretentious, and, she admits, not all that good at cooking. The 74-year-old actor has had an unconventional life and career, and most of us in the west know only a tiny fraction of it.

“My problem is, I don’t plan anything!” Youn laughs over Zoom from Los Angeles. Unlike her character in Minari, she speaks fluent English, although she apologises for it not being good enough.

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David Chase: I was annoyed that fans wanted Tony Soprano dead

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Series showrunner tells podcast that ambiguous ending rankled with viewers who wanted to see the character ‘face-down in linguini’

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, has spoken about his irritation at viewers’ desire to see Tony Soprano die at the end of the hit series.

Speaking on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the 76-year-old said he had been “bothered” by people’s obsession with the blackout ending of the 2007 finale, which stopped short of confirming the fate of its lead character.

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Gemma Whelan: ‘Sex in Game of Thrones could be a frenzied mess’

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She had one of the most notorious sex scenes in TV history. But the actor is now making waves as an upstanding cop in The Tower. She talks about intimacy coaches, on-set innuendo and cracking America


Deadlines meant I saw ITV’s twisty police corruption drama The Tower as a rough cut, featuring on-screen notes about final editing perfections, computer-generated backgrounds, extra lines of dialogue – and the instruction: “Hide pregnancy bump.”

This related to the increasing evidence of Freddie, now four weeks old, and sleeping between feeds in a pub garden near the London home of his mother, Gemma Whelan, who is amused to hear of this prenatal technology. “Wow!” she says. ‘“How are they going to do that? Paint it out? Or cut in a waistline from earlier?”

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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Succession’s Nicholas Braun: ‘I feel better being honest than hiding’

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He’s the reluctant sex symbol who is now partying with the Clintons. But actor Nicholas Braun is only just coming to terms with his life-changing role as Cousin Greg, TV’s favourite antihero in Succession. He reveals how he is learning to embrace his newfound fame

Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession, in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived.

By this point, Braun had filmed just one series of Succession, the HBO juggernaut, which revolves around and pillories the Roy family, a venomous media dynasty in the mould of the Murdochs. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) Braun plays Greg Hirsch, a distant cousin and Roy family satellite who, as the show progresses, finds himself increasingly surrounded by powerful and prestigious people and the mucky opulence in which they operate, and becomes both seduced and confused by his new surroundings, often to comic effect.

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Aisling Bea: ‘I was completely burnt out – I definitely became less nice’

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Irish actor Aisling Bea on writing This Way Up in lockdown while filming the new Home Alone movie reboot, women’s inner lives and her abiding love of potato waffles

When it comes to comedy, there is little Aisling Bea can’t turn her hand to. After training as an actor, she began performing standup in her mid 20s and quickly became a rising star of the scene, winning the Edinburgh fringe’s So You Think You’re Funny? competition in 2012 and landing a nomination for best newcomer at the festival the following year. The Kildare-born comic’s chatterbox charisma readily translated to the screen; Bea soon became a panel show fixture, while continuing to land roles in sitcoms on both sides of the pond. In 2019, she wrote and starred in her own Channel 4 comedy-drama, This Way Up, playing Áine, an exuberant and quick-witted EFL teacher who struggles with her mental health. The show’s combination of giddy humour and emotional heft was a winning one, and a second, pandemic-crafted series aired this summer. Television mastered, the 37-year-old is now segueing into film – specifically the new Home Alone reboot, Home Sweet Home Alone, in which she takes on the role of panicked matriarch Carol.

Updated versions of beloved family films from the 1980s and 1990s tend to elicit a strong response online. How have you found the reaction to Home Sweet Home Alone so far?
Everyone’s like: “You’re remaking it, you’re going to ruin my Christmas!” Oh yeah, because Disney deleted the old one so you’ll never see it again and then they force you to pay money to watch this on Disney+. I’ve found the reaction to it really heartwarming and funny. It was sort of what Twitter was created for: people to complain about things that don’t matter.

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