CBS programme has caused a social media storm for its crass choice of format and ill-qualified judges
Producers have billed it as an exciting new twist on reality television: an X-Factor style competition between campaigners that will give them the chance to lobby world leaders at the G20.
But The Activist, a show announced last week by the American network CBS, has already learned to its cost that people power can be unpredictable, ruthless and highly effective.
Continue reading...The singer has spoken about about Jagged, premiering at the Toronto film festival, for its ‘reductive take’ on her life
Alanis Morissette has spoken out against a new HBO documentary about her life and its “salacious agenda” as it premieres at the Toronto film festival.
The 47-year-old singer had agreed to be interviewed for the film Jagged but has released a statement to express disappointment in how her story has been told. She said she was interviewed “during a very vulnerable time” during her third postpartum depression amid lockdown.
Continue reading...In the streaming age, sleeper hits such as Schitt’s Creek and The Morning Show have replaced quick successes, confirming culture is a marathon not a sprint
If one thing guarantees a TV hit in 2021, it’s a lukewarm reception. Take Ted Lasso, a sitcom about a perky, naive American football coach transplanted on to British soil. Its first season premiered last summer to barely any fanfare – but little by little came mass critical reconsideration. The show ended up a smash hit, breaking the record for most Emmy nominations for a first season of a comedy. Its second series, concluding next month, has made it one of the most talked-about shows of the year.
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Continue reading...A new study reveals the terrifying truth that too much television lowers your volume of grey matter. But TV is the defining art form of our age – so I refuse to quit
Until now, claims that television makes you stupid have only been backed up by anecdotal evidence. True, at a certain point it does seem that people who watch vast amounts of TV do become so intellectually impaired that they start involuntarily clapping along to theme tunes like imprisoned sea lions performing for fish, but that isn’t anything you could write a medical paper about.
Now, sadly, science has trundled along to back it up. According to Dr Ryan Dougherty, from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, the more television you watch in middle age, the lower your volume in grey matter. Examining the viewing habits of 599 American adults between 1990 and 2011, Dougherty found that those who watched an above average amount of television showed reduced volume in their frontal cortex and entorhinal cortex. Basically, your mum was right: TV really does rot your brain.
Continue reading...Her big break in Doctor Who led the Scottish actor to Hollywood. She talks her new film, Gunpowder Milkshake, the Jumanji hotpants furore – and why she worries she might be a bit, well, boring …
Karen Gillan’s house in the US is, she says, “like a little piece of Scotland in Los Angeles”. She is sipping coffee in her living room. The wallpaper behind her is a forest of brown, beige and mallards. When Vogue shot here last year, it described Gillan’s taste in interiors as “quirky”. “Yeah,” she sputters. “It’s all old trinkets.”
A piece of Scotland in Los Angeles is not a bad description of Gillan herself. Born in Inverness, she has lived in LA on and off for years. It’s a love-hate relationship. “I never feel settled here. It’s a real issue of mine.” Whenever she’s in LA, she gets the feeling that it’s not where she’s meant to be. Then she flies off and makes a film. “I come back and think …” – she does a cartoonish swooning sigh – “… It’s nice to be home. Then in a week I’m like: I’ve got to move.”
Continue reading...Once seemingly a fast track to cancellation, TV shows are again dancing around the censors with almost-curse words in their titles. But do they still make viewers go WTF?
When Eugene and Dan Levy were first pitching their idea for a comedy about a wealthy family who go broke, there was one major stumbling block: the name. When several channels asked them to change the title from Schitt’s Creek to something less vulgar, the Levys doubled down. They pulled out pages from a phone directory to prove that there were actual people with the sweary surname. “If CBC was doing a news broadcast with the name Schitt, would you not use it?”, Eugene Levy told the Toronto Star. “They said: ‘Yes, we would air the name.’” After throwing it at the network’s wall, they finally got Schitt to stick.
But when it aired in 2015, the series was not without its issues. NPR had to spell out the word when talking about it; some channels, such as CBS, had to flash up what’s known as “the lower third” – subtitles literally spelling it out – every time they mentioned it on air. Some TV and radio stations were reduced to simply calling it “Creek”, presumably confusing both Dawson’s Creek and Jonathan Creek fans in the process.
Continue reading...He was the terrifying stick-up man who loved his gran, shopped in his pyjamas and tenderly kissed his boyfriend. We remember Omar’s great scenes – and pay tribute to Michael K Williams, the actor who brought him to life
Playing stick-up man Omar Little on The Wire, Michael K Williams was tough, frightening and brutal – his face scarred, his smile wide, toting a shotgun and wearing a long trenchcoat. So viewers of David Simon’s intricate TV portrait of Baltimore’s streets, docks, schools and politics felt the rug pulled from under them when they first saw him kiss his boyfriend in episode four of season one.
It was a moment that subverted audience expectations and signalled the complexity, ambition and depth that The Wire – which is often placed at or near the top of lists of the all-time greatest TV shows – was aiming to achieve. This is not a character you’ve seen before, the show seemed to be saying. These aren’t your usual stereotypes and cliches. A similar moment saw Idris Elba’s drug chief Stringer Bell attend a business studies class.
Continue reading...The actor was best known for his role as Omar Little in the HBO series, and also starred in Boardwalk Empire
The actor Michael K Williams, best known for his role as Omar Little in The Wire, has died at the age of 54.
Confirming his death to the Hollywood Reporter, Williams’s representative said that it was “with deep sorrow that the family announces the passing of Emmy-nominated actor Michael Kenneth Williams. They ask for your privacy while grieving this unsurmountable loss.”
Continue reading...She won a Bafta for Alma’s Not Normal – and that was just the pilot episode. As the full series launches, the ex-standup talks about growing up in care, getting the comedy bug in Ibiza and finally hitting the big time
Earlier this year, Sophie Willan went through an extraordinary run of extreme highs and lows. She was filming her sitcom Alma’s Not Normal, a project she started working on years ago, when her grandmother died. She had brought Willan up for part of her childhood and inspired a character in the show. The day after, Willan found out she had been Bafta nominated for comedy writing.
A few weeks later, while she watched the ceremony on a laptop on a picnic bench outside the converted barn she was staying in, Willan was named the winner. Her response, posted on Instagram by castmate Jayde Adams, is the most joyous thing you may see all year: Willan takes off on a victory lap, magnificent red sequinned dress matching a tractor in the background, sprinting and shouting “What the fuck?” over and over. “I woke up all the kids that had been put to bed in the house next door,” says Willan, laughing. “It was fabulous. It was surreal.”
Continue reading...Fans and figures from show business pay tribute to pop star who was diagnosed in August 2020 and wrote memoir during her illness
The pop singer and TV personality Sarah Harding, who had 21 UK Top 10 singles as a member of Girls Aloud, has died aged 39 from breast cancer.
Her mother, Marie, announced her death on Instagram, prompting a flood of tributes from fans and figures from show business. Geri Horner, the Spice Girls singer and a judge on the TV talent show that created Girls Aloud, wrote: “Rest in peace, Sarah Harding. You’ll be remembered for the light and joy you brought to the world. X”
Continue reading...On the 20th anniversary of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, we consider how artists, writers, film-makers and comedians have attempted to grasp that momentous day and it’s legacy
As the world clustered, transfixed, around television screens, watching and rewatching footage of a plane gliding into the top of New York’s twin towers and a tiny, anonymous man plummeting to earth, another scene was unfolding on the ground, as panic-stricken families stumbled through the smoke and rubble to gather up their children from schools and kindergartens.
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly stood four blocks away with their daughter, watching the second tower fall “in excruciatingly slow motion”. As art director of the New Yorker magazine, Mouly knew that she would have to come up with a rapid response. “I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened. The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all – an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality,” she later recalled.
Continue reading...Edgar Wright’s time-travel film plays like a 60s pop song building towards a big climax
The nostalgia gauge is code-red on Last Night in Soho, a gaudy time-travel romp that whisks its modern-day heroine to a bygone London that probably never existed outside our fevered cultural imagination. It’s the era of Dusty Springfield and Biba; great music, cool threads. British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable. To misquote William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it’s propping up the bar at the Café de Paris.
“You like that retro style, huh?” a classmate remarks to Eloise Turner, a 21st-century design student – and you can bet your house she does. Eloise is up from deepest Cornwall to attend the London College of Fashion, still haunted by her mother’s suicide and struggling to find her feet in a city that’s not like the one she expected. Thomasin McKenzie plays her as your classic fairytale ingenue, guileless and wide-eyed, entirely out of her depth. She’s eyeing the future but her feet are stuck in the past.
Continue reading...Ahead of the release of prequel The Many Saints of Newark, a look at how David Chase’s classic mob drama saw the world in a grain of parmigiano
In 1999, a 40-year old Italian-American man started a course of therapy and created a new template for prestige television. The Sopranos, David Chase’s smash-hit TV series, was about the nasty inner workings of the DiMeo crime family. It was also about a mafioso’s midlife crisis, his children and his marriage, his debilitating anxiety and lurid nightmares.
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Continue reading...The new reality show on Charli and Dixie D’Amelio attempts to transfer one kind of gargantuan fame into another with mixed results
“I get asked why I’m famous a lot,” says Charli D’Amelio, the most followed person on TikTok, early in the third episode of her family’s new Hulu reality show. Just two years ago, she was a high school sophomore in suburban Connecticut posting snippets of dances and jokes with friends to the app. Now 17, she has 123.6 million followers on the app; she and her sister Dixie, 20, are two of the most recognizable faces among Gen Z, superstars on the most culturally influential social media platform in the country right now.
Yet “I don’t consider myself famous,” she says. “I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason. I think it was right place, right time. I think it was a vibe, maybe, that I give off.”
Continue reading...Broadcasters ordered not to promote ‘sissy’ men in attempt to reshape country’s entertainment industry
China has banned some reality talent shows and ordered broadcasters not to promote “sissy” men, in the latest attempt to reshape the culture of the country’s huge entertainment industry that authorities believe is leading young Chinese people astray.
“Broadcast and TV institutions must not screen idol development programmes or variety shows and reality shows that feature the children of celebrities,” China’s broadcast regulator, the National Radio and Television Administration said, in new regulations announced on Thursday.
Continue reading...His new HBO series has been re-edited after backlash over featuring 9/11 ‘truthers’ – but a thread of distrust remains
Spike Lee is no stranger to controversy, but pre-emption is new for him. His incendiary work has inspired scandals both righteous (Do the Right Thing frightened a complacent America with its vision of urban unrest) and regrettable (the Jewish club owners in Mo’ Better Blues attracted charges of antisemitism), and now, his new docuseries NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½ has landed him in the same hot water that never seems to cool.
Related: Two decades after 9/11, the real threat to the US is our own far right | Harsha Panduranga
Continue reading...He played some of the most memorable characters of all time on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street - then became a brilliant comedy director. What is he most proud of?
I ask Frank Oz if he feels like the Paul McCartney to Jim Henson’s John Lennon, the one left behind to carry the flame after his revered creative partner suddenly and shockingly died. Oz takes a deep breath and turns his head to the side, thinking.
If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, your childhood was shaped by Henson and Oz and their work with the Muppets, just as the kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s did so in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney. Even if you weren’t a devoted fan of the Muppets themselves, you couldn’t help but take in their influence osmotically, what with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, the Muppets movies and Labyrinth swirling in the atmosphere. I was pretty much raised on the Muppets, just as I now raise my own kids on them, and I cannot remember a time when Henson and Oz’s creations were not stamped in my mind’s eye.
Continue reading...Ed Asner, a burly and prolific character actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later in the drama Lou Grant, died on Sunday. He was 91.
Related: Ed Asner obituary
Continue reading...As the high school comedy returns for a third series, its Bafta-winning star talks about stage fright, embarrassing scenes, and the torment that lay behind her desire to please people
In June, Aimee Lou Wood, 26, won a Bafta for best female performance in a comedy programme for her role as another Aimee (a teenager) in the hit Netflix show Sex Education, about a set of sexually active high school students, now returning for a third series. Even before the Bafta, Wood was always being stopped in the street. Fans wanted to talk to her, about Sex Education, about everything, because they related to her so strongly. Wood is naturally so friendly, she’d engage in conversation and make herself late. Then she starred opposite Bill Nighy in the forthcoming Oliver Hermanus film, Living: “Obviously, every single person recognises Bill Nighy, and he handles it with such grace,” Wood says, when we meet to talk in a north London photo studio. “With people in the street, I was like [she mock hyperventilates]: ‘Did I say the right thing? Was I nice enough?’ Now I’m learning to be: ‘Thank you so much!’ and carry on walking.”
It’s easy to see why fans relate to Wood: never mind the dazzling prettiness, she’s sparky, warm and expressive. She comes from a working-class family in Stockport, Greater Manchester, and although, following her parents’ divorce, her mother’s new partner paid for her to attend a private secondary school, she kept her rich Mancunian tones: “I sound like my mum and I like that. I like that I sound like where I’m from.”
Continue reading...Many shops plan to open early for the arrival of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You next month
When they were children they lined the streets in their witch hats and capes, keen to pick up the latest Harry Potter title as bookshops opened their doors at midnight. Now they are a little older, the prospect of a tussle with some millennial emotions could see them queuing around the block again on 7 September, as dozens of bookshops plan to open early for the arrival of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.
In a nationwide promotional push, prompted by signs of big public demand, freshly printed copies of the Irish author’s third novel are to be served to customers with special commemorative merchandise as they enjoy a coffee and pastry.
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