Speaking at Comic-Con on Thursday, Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed they spent days negotiating with producers to show the US president’s genitals
South Park co-creator Trey Parker had the briefest of responses on Thursday to anger from the White House over the latest season premiere, which showed a naked Donald Trump in bed with Satan.
“We’re terribly sorry,” Parker said, followed by a long, deadpan-comic stare.
Continue reading...Show begins 27th season covering Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount and cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show, depicting Trump in bed with Satan
South Park has kicked off its 27th season with a blistering episode taking aim at Donald Trump and its newly minted parent company, Paramount, just one day after signing a $1.5bn deal with the network.
The premiere episode, “Sermon on the Mount,” sees Trump in bed with series regular Satan and covers topics including Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount, the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, wokeness, Trump’s attacks on Canada and more.
Continue reading...Actor’s Theo Huxtable provided an entire generation of Black youth and teens a relatable character
For Black youth and teens growing up in the mid-1980s, The Cosby Show offered something rarely seen on television up until that time: a sitcom that placed characters who looked like them in a positive light.
And Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s Theo Huxtable was the character generation X most related to. Fans took quickly to social media on Monday as news of Warner’s accidental drowning in Costa Rica spread.
Continue reading...Firm says technology used in El Eternauta is chance ‘to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper’
Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company’s boss said will make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality.
Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) is the first it has made that involved using generative AI footage.
Continue reading...The host of the 1980s cooking show, Come and Get It, died peacefully on Friday with his wife and children at his side
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
TV chef, artist and “talented rogue”, Peter Russell-Clarke, has died at the age of 89.
The host of the 1980s cooking show, Come and Get It, died peacefully on Friday with his wife of 65 years, Jan, and his two children, Peter and Wendy and their families, by his side.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle and Mike Leigh among signatories to letter criticising Jewish Chronicle ties
More than 400 stars and media figures including Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh have signed a letter to BBC management calling for the removal of a board member, Robbie Gibb, over claims of conflict of interest regarding the Middle East.
The signatories also include 111 BBC journalists and Zawe Ashton, Khalid Abdalla, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and the historian William Dalrymple, who express “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine”.
Continue reading...The Argentinian composer also wrote the scores for Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry, and wrote one of the biggest-selling works in the history of classical music
Lalo Schifrin, the composer who wrote the endlessly catchy theme for Mission: Impossible and more than 100 other arrangements for film and television, has died aged 93.
Schifrin’s sons, William and Ryan, confirmed the composer died on Thursday of complications from pneumonia.
Continue reading...Managing director Hugh Marks to unveil changes at public broadcaster on Wednesday
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
The ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, is expected to unveil his first tranche of changes at the public broadcaster on Wednesday morning, including a new round of redundancies and the axing of Q+A after 18 years.
The weekly flagship discussion program was launched in 2007 by executive producer Peter McEvoy and host Tony Jones and was highly influential in its early years.
Sign up to get Guardian Australia’s weekly media diary as a free newsletter
Continue reading...Groundbreaking commercial news and entertainment program to air final time on 27 June
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Channel Ten’s The Project, a groundbreaking news and entertainment program which made a success of “news done differently” in prime time has been cancelled by the network after 16 years and 4,500 episodes.
It will air for the last time on Friday 27 June and will be replaced by a new national one-hour 6pm news, current affairs and analysis show after Channel Ten’s local 5pm news bulletin.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...ECJ advocate general condemns ‘stigmatising’ law that bars such content from schools and primetime TV
A Hungarian law banning content about LGBTQ+ people from schools and primetime TV has been found to violate basic human rights and freedom of expression by a senior legal scholar at the European court of justice.
The non-binding opinion from the court’s advocate general, Tamara Ćapeta, issued on Thursday, represents a comprehensive demolition of the arguments made by the Hungarian government defending its so-called childprotection law, passed in 2021.
Continue reading...Emmy award-winning TV, stage and film actor also known for her role in Young Sheldon died of cancer
Valerie Mahaffey, the Emmy-award winning actor known for her roles on Northern Exposure, Desperate Housewives and Young Sheldon, died on Friday. She was 71.
Her husband, actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement to Variety: “I have lost the love of my life, and America has lost one of its most endearing actresses. She will be missed.”
Continue reading...Couple was found guilty in 2022 of conspiring to defraud community banks out of more than $30m and tax evasion
The White House said on Tuesday that Donald Trump plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, the couple famous for Chrisley Knows Best, which followed their tightly knit family and extravagant lifestyle.
A jury in 2022 found them guilty of conspiring to defraud community banks out of more than $30m in fraudulent loans. The Chrisleys were also found guilty of tax evasion.
Continue reading...Just $1.75m spent on genre across free-to-air networks as advocates warn of ‘broader erosion’ of cultural investment
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Australian commercial television networks have all but given up on creating local children’s drama, advocates say, with just $1.75m spent on the genre across all commercial free-to-air networks in 2023-24.
But that’s $1.75m more than the previous year, according to the latest report card by the communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma).
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...The prolific performer played varied roles – from arms dealer to baseball star – and made the rare switch from Bond villain to Bond good guy
Tough-guy actor Joe Don Baker, a prolific performer in movies as varied as GoldenEye, Cape Fear and Mud, as well as the BBC TV series Edge of Darkness, has died aged 89.
Born in 1936, Baker grew up in small town Texas, and studied business administration at North Texas State College. After a period in the army, Baker moved to New York and joined the Actors’ Studio in the early 1960s, where he was a contemporary of Rip Torn. Baker made his Broadway debut in 1963 with the Actors’ Studio company, appearing in Marathon ’33, about the dance marathons of the Great Depression, and made his film debut in an uncredited role in 1967 in Cool Hand Luke. He also appeared in numerous TV series, including the pilot episode of a western show called Lancer in 1968, the making of which was fictionalised by Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Baker’s role.
Continue reading...Queen of pop will partner with the streamer and Deadpool & Wolverine film-maker for a project on her life and music
A television series on Madonna is in development at Netflix – with participation from the trailblazing pop star.
The 66-year-old singer is partnering with Netflix and the Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy for a limited series about her life and music.
Continue reading...Actor tells BBC about his relationship with the playwright, his ‘mentor’, and how he went ‘off the rails’
The actor Danny Dyer said the death of his mentor, the Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, triggered a “spiral of madness” in his life.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Dyer reflected on how he had stayed at Pinter’s home while performing in his play Celebration. The play opened at London’s Almeida theatre in 2000, before transferring to the Lincoln Center in New York.
Continue reading...Aomar Aït Khedache, 68, has admitted involvement in armed robbery of reality TV star but denies being ringleader
A retired restaurant owner alleged to have been the ringleader of an armed robbery of American reality TV star Kim Kardashian in Paris, has told a court he was in part driven by a taste for easy money.
Aomar Aït Khedache, 68, known as “Old Omar”, has admitted to police that he took part in the robbery in which Kardashian was tied up and held hostage at gunpoint in her Paris hotel bedroom during Paris fashion week in 2016. But he has denied the prosecution’s accusation that he was the organiser or ringleader of the jewel heist in the early hours of 3 October 2016, which was the biggest robbery of an individual in France in 20 years.
Continue reading...‘Nobody has been harder … about Donald Trump than me,’ Maher says after fellow comedian compared his meal with US president to meeting Hitler
Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.
Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”
Continue reading...Slow TV is attracting viewers with hits such as a knitting marathon, burning firewood and swimming salmon
Most of the time, nothing much happens. A wide Nordic river, melting snow still lining its banks, meanders peacefully through a pristine forest of spruce and pine. But this spring, as every spring for the past six years, a lot of people will be glued to it.
When Den stora älgvandringen – variously translated as The Great Moose Migration or The Great Elk Trek – first aired on the public broadcaster SVT’s on-demand platform in 2019, nearly a million people tuned in. Last year, it was 9 million.
Continue reading...ITV drama set in aristocratic house in Edwardian London explored class and social change, and won many awards
Jean Marsh, the actor and writer best known for co-creating and starring in the 1970s TV show Upstairs, Downstairs, has died aged 90.
The film-maker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was a close friend of Marsh, said she died of complications with dementia in her London home on Sunday.
Continue reading...