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).
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...The veteran American actor, star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, has died aged 85. We look back at his 76-year career, from early roles alongside Errol Flynn and Katharine Hepburn to later award-winning TV work
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.)
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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?
Continue reading...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’
Continue reading...Will Ted Lasso sweep the comedy awards? Will it finally be I May Destroy You’s time? How will The Crown, with 24 nominations, fare?
Nominees: The Boys (Amazon), Bridgerton (Netflix), The Crown (Netflix), The Mandalorian (Disney+), Lovecraft Country (HBO), Pose (FX), The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu), This Is Us (NBC)
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...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...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.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
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...