Category Archives: US television

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

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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.”

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

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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.

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All Creatures Great and Small gently conquers America

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Sex and the City stars respond to sexual assault allegations against Chris Noth

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Statement came as CBS said Noth will no longer be part The Equalizer ‘effective immediately’ following allegations by two women

The leads of Sex and the City’s recent reboot And Just Like That have responded to sexual assault allegations made by two women against their fellow castmate, Chris Noth.

Cynthia Nixon – who plays Miranda in the series and its reboot – shared a statement on social media, signed by herself, Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie) and Kristin Davis (Charlotte).

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Why it’s time to say goodbye to Tiger King

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Netflix’s continued obsession with the pandemic hit has brought a follow-up special, a second season and now a spin-off but enough is enough

To think of Tiger King is to immediately transport yourself to the heady days of lockdown 2020. Remember it? Remember how filled with artificial purpose we all were? We did Zoom quizzes with all our friends! We made banana bread! We clapped for frontline workers!

Looking back, it seems relatively clear that all those things were stupid. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to. Nobody likes banana bread. The clapping didn’t change anything. And as for Tiger King? With the benefit of hindsight, Christ, we chose the wrong show to obsess over. Looking back, Tiger King was grubby and exploitative. Once you’d crossed the “Are these people for real?” hurdle, you found yourself sitting through a carnival of monstrous behaviour. Tiger King was the documentary equivalent of that old Black Mirror episode: as fun as it sounds to watch someone have sex with a pig, at the end of the day you actually have to watch someone have sex with a pig.

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Chris Cuomo fired by CNN for helping brother Andrew fight sexual misconduct charges

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  • Primetime anchor was suspended on Tuesday
  • Network says ‘additional information’ has come to light

CNN has fired the primetime anchor Chris Cuomo for trying to help his brother, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, fight accusations of sexual misconduct which resulted in his resignation.

Announcing the firing on Saturday, CNN said “additional information” had come to light.

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Edie Falco: ‘Alcohol was the answer to all my problems – and the cause of them’

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One of TV’s most admired actors, she is now playing Hillary Clinton on screen. She discusses overcoming addiction, her adoration for Sopranos co-star James Gandolfini and the pure joy of adopting two children

Edie Falco has never been the type of actor to demand entourages and encores. Fanfares and fuss are just not her bag, and she has little time for pretentious thespiness. When other actors talk about their “Process,” as she puts it – with a capital P – she thinks, “What are you talking about?!” With her open, thoughtful face and wide smile, she looks as if she could be your friend from the local coffee shop, as opposed to one of the most accoladed American actors of this century, having accumulated two Golden Globes, four Emmys and five Screen Actors Guild awards, plus a jaw-dropping 47 nominations. This impression of straightforwardness and – oh dreaded word – relatability has made her subtle performances of self-deceiving characters even more powerful. As the mob wife, Carmela, in The Sopranos, she could tell Tony (James Gandolfini) what she thought of him staying out all night with his “goomahs”, or mistresses, but she couldn’t admit to herself that he does much worse to fund the life she loves. Similarly, as Nurse Jackie, in the eponymous TV series, her scrubbed clean face and sensible short hair belied her character’s drug addiction.

So it feels extremely right that, when we connect by video chat, Falco, 58, is sitting – not in a fancy hotel room, or a Hollywood mansion, but in the endearingly messy basement of her New York house, where she lives with her son, 16, and daughter, 13. Power tools hang off the wall behind her, and she is leaning on a table strewn with what she describes as “God knows, some stuff”.

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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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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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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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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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Curb Your Enthusiasm review – Larry’s back, and funnier than ever

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The return of the angriest yet most comforting comedy on television brings the perfect formula of celebrity cameos, snark and screaming

After the 10th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm debuted in January 2020, it seemed like all anyone could talk about was Larry David’s deployment of a red Maga cap as a tool to conveniently repel people in liberal Los Angeles. Surely season 11, the first of the Covid era, would feature a spin on pandemic life no one could see coming, right? Well, there’s never been anything about this show that’s been predictable; you can practically hear Larry David shrug an “eh” at the thought of tackling such an obvious issue.

Which isn’t to say the season premiere, airing 21 years after the series premiered as an hour-long HBO special, won’t be considered an instant classic to many. Indeed, we now live in a world where Jon Hamm has spoken Yiddish on television, a true hallelujah moment for an admittedly small percentage of the world’s population, but a gift wrapped in a bow to Larry David’s most dedicated core. (We knew Hanukkah was coming early this year, but not this early.)

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William Shatner in tears after historic space flight: ‘I’m so filled with emotion’

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Star Trek actor, 90, says ‘I hope I never recover from this’ after becoming oldest human in space on Jeff Bezos rocket New Shepard

The Star Trek actor William Shatner declared himself “overwhelmed” at becoming the oldest human in space, at the age of 90, during a brief but successful second crewed flight on Wednesday of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship from the west Texas desert.

The Canadian, who for four decades played Captain James Kirk, the fearless commander of the USS Enterprise, broke down in tears at the landing site as he described to the private space company’s founder, the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, the profundity of his almost 11-minute leap to the stars.

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‘His rage, his pain, his shame, they’re all mine’: Jeremy Strong on playing Succession’s Kendall Roy

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Strong’s role as the self-destructive media heir takes commitment – and the actor goes all in

• Plus: inside the Succession writers’ room

Earlier this year, Jeremy Strong left his apartment in Brooklyn, walked across the bridge to Manhattan and headed towards the far west side of the island, where he was filming the third season of the feverishly adored and heavily accoladed HBO series Succession. Strong plays Kendall, the alternately bullied and rebellious son of the vilified, Murdoch-esque media tycoon Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and Succession follows the jostling among the patriarch’s four children for his affection and respect, both of which he generally withholds. None of them is as visibly crushed by this as Kendall, who bears more than a slight resemblance to James Murdoch, even down to the dabblings in hip-hop. With every timid step Strong makes on screen, every apologetic dip of his chin when he starts to talk, he captures the pain of a son who knows he has failed to live up to his father’s expectations from the first time he cried. He won an Emmy last year for the role, beating, among others, Cox, in neatly Freudian style.

Strong likes to walk while learning his lines, so on that day in New York as he was walking he was also talking, reciting a speech he would soon be saying to Cox, in which Kendall tries to curry favour with his father, but also to be seen as his own man. “Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghost-grey Tesla rolling to a stop, so I looked in it, and there was James Murdoch,” Strong says when we meet in a London hotel. “He looked at me and I looked at him, and there was a flicker between us. Then he was gone. So we had a moment.”

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The Many Saints of Newark review – Sopranos prequel keeps it in the family

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Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs

Maybe it was inevitable that the greatest TV show in history should spawn a feature-length prequel that is somehow disappointing: it is watchable but weirdly obtuse with a tricksy narrative reveal that doesn’t add much. The Many Saints of Newark, co-written by the Sopranos’ legendary creator David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor, gives us the childhood of a leader: the teenage Tony Soprano, growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, specifically the time of the 1967 Newark riots, which caused the “white flight” racism that explains the older Tony having that palatial home way out there in the suburbs that he drives up to in the opening credits each episode.

Young Tony is portrayed with goosebump-inducing deja vu by Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, who played the role on TV. Tony’s sleepy-eyed sensitivity, his melancholy, his glowering resentment and dangerous hurt feelings are there in embryo. His father, Johnny, is played by Jon Bernthal, and his terrifying mother Livia by Vera Farmiga who gives a superb rendering of Livia’s own haughty mannerisms. But you could spend this entire movie hanging on for the first sign of those all-important petit mal fainting fits that the TV show said originated in Tony’s dad. Is history being rewritten, or misrememberings corrected?

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Chris Rock says he has Covid-19 and urges doubters: ‘Get vaccinated’

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The comedian Chris Rock on Sunday said he had tested positive for Covid-19 and sent a message to anyone still on the fence: “Get vaccinated.”

Related: Tate Reeves: Biden vaccine mandate an ‘attack on hardworking Americans’

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