Category Archives: US television

Grammy awards 2022: Olivia Rodrigo wins big and Ukraine’s Zelenskiy makes cameo

Posted on by

The specter of Oscars chaos loomed over the music awards – a mega-concert which included a message of hope from the Ukrainian president

Teenage pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo and R&B duo Silk Sonic dominated the major categories, and Jon Batiste won album of the year at the 64th annual Grammys – a three-and-a-half-hour mega concert that mostly steered clear of politics or the pandemic, save for a virtual message from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and an emotional tribute to victims of the Russian invasion.

A week after one of the most chaotic Oscars in recent memory – during which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage – the Grammys seemed to revel in its technical proficiency and lack of controversy. “We’re gonna be listening to some music, we’re gonna be dancing, we’re gonna be singing, we’re gonna be keeping people’s names out of our mouths,” said host Trevor Noah in his opening monologue, acknowledging the elephant in the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

Continue reading...

Stacey Abrams made president of Earth in Star Trek cameo

Posted on by

Candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan makes appearance in season four finale of Star Trek: Discovery

The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.

The honour was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.

Continue reading...

‘Good times? I was out of it’: The Dropout’s Naveen Andrews on booze, drugs and baffling the world in Lost

Posted on by

He found fame in The English Patient before becoming a huge TV star. Now he is tackling the Theranos fraud scandal. But addiction in the 90s nearly cost him everything

If your abiding image of Naveen Andrews is as Sayid from Lost – the soulful Iraqi officer whose sad eyes, powerful biceps and luxuriant hair set many mid-00s hearts a-flutter – you might be in for a shock seeing him in The Dropout. Paunchy, bespectacled, greying, with shockingly normal-length hair, he is less a strapping man of action and more a middle-aged man of business – and not a very good one at that. Andrews portrays Sunny Balwani, the partner and alleged co-conspirator of Elizabeth Holmes, who was once the world’s youngest female billionaire and is now a convicted corporate fraudster.

On a video call from his home in Santa Monica, California, Andrews, 53, looks more Sayid than Sunny. His black gym vest exposes reassuringly well-toned biceps; the hair is returning to its trademark resplendence. He gained 9kg (1st 6lb) for The Dropout, he explains, to make his face fuller and his belly paunchier. He also modified his movements to seem slower and older. “Well, I did at least want to resemble the character I was playing,” he says, a little sting of sarcasm in his inflection.

Continue reading...

Patrick Stewart: ‘I’d go straight home and drink until I passed out’

Posted on by

As he beams aboard another Star Trek adventure, the 81-year-old actor talks about playing Picard as an intergalactic Prospero, hitting the bottle during an exhausting Macbeth – and reaching page 310 of his memoir


Patrick Stewart is slightly surprised to be talking about the impending second series of Star Trek: Picard, during a break from shooting the third in California. The reason is that he so firmly turned down the first season. After playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard, 24th-century hero of Starfleet, in 176 TV episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and four spin-off movies, Stewart was convinced that “I’d done everything I could with Picard and Star Trek”.

But the producers – Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys), Kirsten Beyer (Star Trek: Discovery), Alex Kurtzman (The Mummy) – persisted. And Stewart “took a look at the names, and there were Academy award and Pulitzer prize winners. So I thought the most courteous thing to do would be to have a meeting to tell them face to face why I was going to turn them down.”

Continue reading...

How did Euphoria become the most loved and hated show on TV?

Posted on by

The HBO teen drama’s second season is either a glorious mess or an excessive fantasy of high school. Either way, it’s a record-breaking hit

If you were anywhere near social media this past Sunday night, you probably at least glimpsed the divisive mess that was the second season finale of Euphoria, HBO’s technicolor, gleefully excessive soap on the outsized trials and tribulations of suburban California teens. After a buzzy and acclaimed but modestly watched debut in 2019, the show’s second season has blown up: HBO announced Tuesday that Euphoria, with help from its new streaming home on HBO Max, is now its second most watched show since 2004. It averaged 16.3 million viewers an episode this season, behind only OG HBO juggernaut Game of Thrones, which drew an average of 44.2 million viewers during its final season in 2019.

But perhaps more impressive, and telling, than its 2022 viewing stats is Euphoria’s digital footprint. According to Twitter, the drama is the most tweeted-about show of the (still young) decade, with 34m tweets in the US alone. This is by design: Euphoria, adapted by Sam Levinson from the Israeli show of the same name, is audacious in style, almost pugnaciously provocative in substance, with imitable peacocking fashion and easily memeable cutaways. In other words, catnip for the online crowd.

Continue reading...

Screen Actors Guild awards 2022: Squid Game, Will Smith and Coda win big

Posted on by

Netflix phenomenon and Apple’s deaf family drama make history at this year’s SAG awards ceremony

The indie drama Coda has won big at this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards, picking up best ensemble in a movie and best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, who is the first ever deaf actor to win an individual SAG award.

The Apple drama about a deaf family was bought for $25m from last year’s Sundance film festival and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.

Continue reading...

AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colour

Posted on by

‘You’re a creep, bro,’ says New York congresswoman after Carlson attacked Ocasio-Cortez in Fox News segment

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.

“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.

Continue reading...

The Tinder Swindler fallout shows the dark side of Netflix fame | Adrian Horton

Posted on by

The subject of the hit documentary, who conned women out of hundreds of thousands, is trying to launch a celebrity career, a depressing but inevitable next step

When I first watched The Tinder Swindler last month, in anticipation for an interview with director Felicity Morris, I was, like many viewers, completely absorbed by the story.

Several women meet a man on Tinder who claims to be the billionaire heir to an Israeli diamond fortune, lavishes them with attention, flies to them on actual private jets, then swindles them for hundreds of thousands of dollars? I’m a single woman in my late 20s in New York: of course I ate it up. The documentary was also much, much better than it could have been; I appreciated that Morris didn’t have much interest in probing the psychology of its swindler, Simon Leviev. Instead, she foregrounded three women’s first-person accounts of getting conned – why they believed him, why they cared for him, what such manipulation and confusion does to someone – as well as the journalists at the Norwegian paper VG who unspooled his lies for an initial exposé in 2019.

Continue reading...

Exploiting the exploited: the problem with Pam & Tommy

Posted on by

The much-hyped show about the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape offers a screwball meditation on consent – without the consent of one of its subjects

Pam & Tommy, the Hulu series on the story behind the most infamous sex tape of the 1990s, is disconcertingly fun. The eight-part series created by Robert Siegel, half of which has aired, is front-loaded with 90s iconography and zany gags designed to provoke online discussion. There’s the brain-scrambling transformations of actors Lily James and Sebastian Stan into mid-90s rock it-couple Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, and a mulleted Seth Rogen as Rand Gauthier, the stiffed carpenter who pulls off an impressive heist of the couple’s safe, played for suspense. There’s nostalgic needle drops from Nine Inch Nails to Fatboy Slim, a conversation between a high Tommy and his animatronic penis, and plenty of sex, drugs, videotapes and characters asking, with winking naivety, what the world wide web is.

It’s a confusing, often entertaining watch, one that wants to have its fun and interrogate it, too, at best a heady blend of screwball comedy, madcap romance, expensive nostalgia and serious retrospective of a public scandal in which a woman’s privacy was invaded, her intimate moments exploited and judged without her consent. But there’s one detail that, for me, turns this whole palate sour: the real Pamela Anderson did not want this story retold. While Stan has confirmed that he spoke with Lee, who has praised his portrayal, Anderson did not respond to producers’ overtures. She has not spoken publicly about the series, but sources have expressed her discontent and disappointment in multiple outlets.

Continue reading...

Super Bowl: the ads, the music and everything but the football – live

Posted on by

While the game rages on, there are several major ads and movie trailers and a much-anticipated half-time show from some hip-hop and R&B legends

After the success of last month’s Scream, the legacy sequel – aka the one that brings back the old to mingle with the new – continues with force this year with our first real look at the inevitable greatest hits sequel Jurassic World: Dominion. The last film brought back BD Wong and a cameo-ing Jeff Goldblum to join Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard but this time they return with both Sam Neill and Laura Dern, an exciting prospect for hardcore fans. The trailer has some promising moments but there’s an awful lot here to be juggled – despite the familiar faces, it’ll be the lesser-known DeWanda Wise who leads – so whether all balls can be kept up in the air remains to be seen.

Continue reading...

The Soup Nazi on Marjorie Taylor Green’s gazpacho police: ‘I knew I was in trouble’

Posted on by

Larry Thomas, the actor behind the Seinfeld character, gives his take on the viral gaffe: ‘You can’t write this shit’

The extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously alerted the US to the dangers of space lasers, issued a new warning to the American people on Thursday: the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has unleashed “gazpacho police” to spy on Greene’s colleagues in Congress.

It is, of course, possible that a clandestine network bent on the regulation of cold soup operates deep under the Capitol cafeteria. But Greene was presumably confusing “gazpacho” with the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

Continue reading...

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children | Sam Wolfson

Posted on by

Trump’s lawyer was revealed to be a contestant on The Masked Singer – and when Robin Thicke storms off in protest, you know you’ve got problems

It’s like something from a Guillermo del Toro film: a grotesque fantasy creature disrobes, only to reveal an even more horrifying monster underneath. But that’s what viewers will see when the US version of The Masked Singer, Fox’s incognito singing competition, returns at the end of this month.

The show, in which a panel of judges and the audience try to guess the identity of celebrity vocalists dressed in furry theme-park costumes, is taped in advance of airing. But Deadline reports that at the first episode’s climax, when the eliminated singer reveals their true identity, it was Rudy Giuliani whose head popped out of the costume. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set in protest. Quite a good reflection of how bad a guy you have to be when rape-culture chanteur Thicke, the singer of Blurred Lines, decides you’re beyond the pale.

Continue reading...

Coming down: why has shock teen show Euphoria become such a drag?

Posted on by

In its second season, the hit HBO drama on drugged-out and love-crazed teens has finally tipped into too much style over substance

Euphoria, the slick, explicit, high-budget teen drama halfway through its second season on HBO, has from the start been a soap layered in heady seriousness. The show, adapted by Sam Levinson from an Israeli series of the same name and co-produced by Drake, took on a near encyclopedia of Today’s Teen Issues – sex shaming, drug addiction, body insecurity, web personas, revenge porn, pregnancy and abortion, emotional abuse, toxic masculinity, self-harm and depression, and more – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).

By its first season finale in 2019, in which main character Rue (Zendaya, who won an Emmy for the role) nearly dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of fans (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and became HBO’s most second-most tweeted-about series ever, behind Game of Thrones) and managed to balance shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – in particular the fragile, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – as well as a distinctive visual palette: saturated color, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming show with a small hint of irony and a large dollop of excess.

Continue reading...

Kiefer Sutherland: ‘I said: I can do a really good Donald Sutherland for half the money’

Posted on by

Answering readers’ questions, the actor and musician talks about how he tried stealing a job off his father, his favourite item from Greggs and his Mickey Mouse tattoo

Hi, Keith … What’s your favourite English expression? ClassicMacGruber

I’m sure they meant to say Kief? Or maybe not? I get called Kief in England more than any other place. I met some young parents in about 2001 who had named their son Kiefer, but I’ve never met anyone called Kiefer that is my age. As for my favourite British expression, there’s “bit and bobs”, which is really sweet and reminds me of my grandma, and “Oi!” which is not technically British, but any time I go “Oi!” it stops the room.

Does your twin sister have as many middle names as you? emzsam

Continue reading...

‘Free Nichelle’: protesters want to liberate Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols from conservatorship

Posted on by

The actor has been diagnosed with dementia but campaigners believe the legal arrangement is not in her best interest

In the wake of Britney Spears’ emancipation from her long-term conservatorship, some of Britney’s fans have turned their attention to the Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols. Last week a dozen protesters, a mixture of Free Britney activists and fans of Nichols, demonstrated outside the Stanley Mosk courthouse in Los Angeles, chanting “Free Nichelle!”

Nichols has been living under a conservatorship since 2018. Her son Kyle Johnson successfully petitioned to be his mother’s conservator after her former manager, Gilbert Bell, was accused of abusing Nichols financially. Protesters believe that Nichols is of sound mind and wants to be released from the arrangement.

Continue reading...

‘I stayed at the party too long’: Ozark’s Jason Bateman on Arrested Development, smiling villains and his lost decade

Posted on by

Forty years after his breakthrough role in Little House on the Prairie, the actor is thrilling TV audiences as a drug cartel money launderer. But he almost threw his career away

Jason Bateman appears on a Zoom screen from Los Angeles, bespectacled, calm and in uncluttered, butter-coloured environs. It’s as if Michael Bluth, the character he played in Arrested Development, had dressed up as a therapist for some hilarious purpose. To fans of the show, its entire cast will always have traces clinging to them, as if they have all been, well, arrested in that dysfunctional family. But today we’re here to talk about Ozark, a drama with a reputation that has been climbing each season (it’s now in its fourth and final) and so has, arguably, become even more defining for Bateman.

Tense and lingering, Ozark has the dizzying pace and visual sumptuousness that the modern long-running box set demands. What was haunting about it from the start were the subtle performances of Bateman and his co-star, Laura Linney; just a regular, affluent, middle-aged couple, except he was about to launder $500m for a drug cartel and she’d just watched the murder of the lawyer she was having an affair with. They were on the run, but only sort of. They hated each other, except they didn’t. What passed between them gave such propulsive energy to their characters that from the very beginning you could trust one thing: it might be improbable, but it was never going to be boring. But all that nuance was a double-edged sword. “Marty and Wendy are really intelligent characters,” Bateman says. “Sometimes that narrows your options as a writer, trying to keep things plausible. They can’t do really stupid things. The smart thing to do is to turn yourself in. Then the show’s over.”

Continue reading...

Dare I whisper it? I’m really enjoying And Just Like That

Posted on by

The Sex and the City sequel has taken a while to settle into its new skin. But, despite its many flaws, it is developing new charms of its own

And Just Like That did not have the smoothest of landings. The Sex and the City sequel found itself draped in controversy from the moment its return was announced. There would be no Samantha Jones, with the core group reduced to a trio, after Kim Cattrall did not return to the franchise. (Was she invited? Did she decline? I look forward to an inevitable Ryan Murphy dramatisation of events – Feud: Cosmos and Cupcakes.) The films had been middling, then terrible, then a third thankfully ditched before it got too far. Could a series that was built on being so brassy and brash survive in the tetchy 2020s?

Then it finally arrived, and the drama rolled on. The big twist, or the Big twist, at the end of episode one was briefly a moment, controversial largely for the fact that instead of weeping and hugging her still-conscious husband as he had a heart attack, Carrie might have considered calling an ambulance instead. To think that the reputation of Peloton was the main topic of conversation. Shortly after it aired, allegations of sexual assault were made against Chris Noth by multiple women. He issued a denial, but his co-stars published a message of support for his accusers, and a rumoured cameo at the end of the season was reportedly scrapped.

Continue reading...

All Creatures Great and Small gently conquers America

Posted on by

Tender-hearted show about travails of Yorkshire vet in 1930s seen by more than 10 million viewers in US

Rolling Stone magazine has called it “incredible balm”, and the New York Times extolled its “cheerful optimistic tone”. American viewers are enthralled by its bucolic setting, the small, everyday dramas and its old-fashioned sense of community. And, of course, the animals.

All Creatures Great and Small, the small-screen adaptation of a series of novels by James Herriot, the pen name of Yorkshire vet Alf Wight, has become a surprising hit in the home of fast-paced thrillers and warring dynasties.

Continue reading...

Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

Posted on by

Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association

The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.

Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.

Continue reading...

Girls5Eva review – Tina Fey’s gags are so good they should be revered

Posted on by

There are shades of 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt in this hilarious show about a one-hit-wonder girl band reuniting after 30 years. No wonder, given it’s by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock

If you didn’t know beforehand, it would not be long before you realised that Girls5Eva (Sky, Now) came from the school of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, who gave us those perennial delights, 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The new show, about a manufactured 1990s girlband of the same name (“We’ve been best friends ever since we auditioned for a man in a New Jersey hotel room!”), is the brainchild of Kimmy writer and producer Meredith Scardino, in collaboration with Fey and Carlock. It provides a similar cocktail of laughs. There are parodies (this time mostly of music videos rather than TV shows or characters), “proper” jokes so densely packed you’re still unearthing more on third and fourth viewings, call backs, and throwaway gags so good they would be revered treasures anywhere else. The chemistry among its leads recalls – even if it doesn’t quite get there, because nothing can or will – the chemistry between Ellie Kemper and Titus Burgess in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In short, it is a joy.

Under the aegis of their sleazy manager Larry, Girls5Eva had one hit (Famous 5Eva) three decades ago but fell into obscurity after their follow-up tanked. It was called Quit Flying Planes at My Heart and was released on 10 September 2001. Since then, one of the girls has died (Ashley – “The one who got us all through our breakups with Moby”) and the remaining four members have drifted apart. We first meet Dawn (Sara Bareilles) as she is listening to the radio while having a mammogram. She has the perfect breasts for it, her doctor says – “Already so smooshed!” The Fey spirit, unable to know of a physical female indignity without leaping to embrace it for comic effect, remains strong throughout. Dawn herself is the mother-figure of the group. Always the responsible one then, she is now married with one child, constantly stressed (“Fireworks or terrorism?” she shouts when woken by a strange noise at night), and works long hours at her idiot brother’s restaurant (Dean Winters, essentially reprising his 30 Rock Dennis Duffy role). Hearing Famous 5Eva sampled as part of hit rapper Li’l Stinker’s latest moneymaker, she goes to pick up her royalty cheque from Larry and is coaxed into delivering the rest to her former bandmates, too.

Continue reading...