Television cameras tend to bring out the performer in the president, no matter how inappropriate the context
As we look back at the Trump presidency, it often feels like America has endured four years of reality TV – with its leader as a main contestant.
Related: Infinity culture war: what now for Trump's Hollywood supporters?
Continue reading...Top US infectious diseases expert tells Sesame Street event Father Christmas is ‘good to go’ for present-delivery duty
Children around the world should not worry about the logistics of Christmas present delivery while the coronavirus pandemic rages, Dr Anthony Fauci said – because he vaccinated Santa himself.
Related: US sets new record for daily Covid cases as Moderna vaccine approved
Continue reading...A break-out star of the documentary series Cheer, Jerry Harris, already facing federal charges related to child sexual exploitation material, has been indicted on new charges that allege he solicited sex from minors at cheerleading competitions and convinced teenage boys to send him obscene photographs and videos of themselves.
Related: Cheer star Jerry Harris arrested on charges of child sexual abuse images
Continue reading...She hit the big time playing the high-powered political fixer Olivia Pope. In real life, she has spent years campaigning for Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats. So what’s someone who lives and breathes politics doing in Ryan Murphy’s musical The Prom?
In a rational world, somewhere deep in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a small staff would be hard at work planning Kerry Washington’s presidential bid. “Washington 2028: Tough on Scandal” or “2032: Ms Kerry Goes to Washington” – the slogans just write themselves. Whether Washington could be persuaded to run for office is another matter. She is, she insists when we meet via a video call, too self-effacing for politics. “I feel you really have to decide that you’re the one, like: ‘I’m the one to solve this problem!’”
She is much more comfortable directing attention elsewhere. “For most of my career, I was really a character actor,” she says. “People didn’t connect that the girl from Ray was the same girl from Last King of Scotland, was the same girl from Save the Last Dance. And I loved that, because I got to disappear into these other people and it wasn’t about me.”
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges boats lacked safety equipment and that there were no warning signs around California lake where she died in July
A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed over the drowning of Glee actor Naya Rivera, who died in July while boating with her four-year-old son on a lake in California.
The suit was filed on Tuesday against Ventura County and managers of Lake Piru over her accidental death on 8 July at the lake north-west of Los Angeles. It was filed on behalf of her son, Josey Hollis Dorsey, by Ryan Dorsey — Rivera’s ex-husband and the boy’s father and guardian — and also on behalf of her estate.
Continue reading...MSNBC anchor Brian Williams stopped broadcasting Donald Trump's remarks after the US president falsely claimed 'If you count the legal votes, I easily win'. The anchor's interruption came less than a minute into Trump's news conference, with Williams saying, 'Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States'
The most diverse field in Emmys history garnered several awards for black actors and a full sweep for a Canadian sitcom
It was uncharted waters for the 72nd Emmy awards – the first major acting awards show held since the pandemic began, a strange and subdued ceremony in which stars accepted awards on Zoom. But unwelcome new methods (the telecast required more than 100 live feeds), and the end of former Emmys juggernauts Game of Thrones and Veep, ushered in a celebration of new series and talent: Canadian comedy Schitt’s Creek swept the comedy awards, HBO’s Succession dominated in drama and the evening’s most-nominated show, HBO’s prescient, eerie Watchmen, cleaned up in the limited series category.
Related: Emmy winners 2020: the full list
Continue reading...Officials in Danbury, Connecticut, say they will name their sewage plant after the comedian John Oliver, in retaliation for an expletive-filled rant about the city on his HBO show.
Related: John Oliver: US is 'making a mockery of the phrase a jury of your peers'
Continue reading...The acclaimed HBO graphic novel adaptation leads the pack with 26 nominations, with the Amazon period comedy following behind
HBO’s acclaimed graphic novel adaptation Watchmen leads this year’s Emmy nominations with 26 nods.
Related: Lorde and Mick Jagger urge politicians to seek permission before using music
Continue reading...Authorities have released footage of the former Glee star renting a boat with her four-year-old son before she went missing on 7 July. The search for Rivera has switched from a rescue to a recovery mission, with the authorities saying they presume the 33-year-old drowned while boating on Lake Piru north of Los Angeles.
Rivera played the high school cheerleader Santana Lopez in the TV series until 2015
Continue reading...California sheriff’s department launches search after actor’s four-year-old son found alone on boat at Lake Piru
The former Glee actor Naya Rivera is missing and feared to have drowned at a lake in southern California.
A search operation at Lake Piru was suspended on Wednesday evening and was due to resume on Thursday.
Continue reading...The star of Young Guns made his name as one of the Brat Pack. Three decades on, while others have crashed and burned, he is dreaming of ‘reopening’ the entertainment industry after lockdown
In a quiet corner of his Los Angeles home, Dermot Mulroney grapples with a question that many actors’ egos would not allow them to entertain: why isn’t he a bigger star?
“Well, I had some alcoholism. That slowed me down. And I ... wasn’t six feet. Does that work? No, that’s a little flimsy. Let’s keep thinking.”
Continue reading...Move comes amid widespread reckoning for American pop culture following mass protests after George Floyd’s death
The Simpsons is ending the use of white actors to voice characters of colour, the show’s producers have said.
“Moving forward, ‘The Simpsons’ will no longer have white actors voice non-white characters,” they said in a statement on Friday.
Continue reading...From Birth of a Nation to Watchmen, the big and small screens have tried to wrestle with racial tensions within law enforcement with mixed results
As we’ve all seen, when it comes to American police brutality, the gloves are now off and the masks too. Faced with yet more incontrovertible evidence of brutal and racist policing – both the killing of George Floyd and others, and some forces’ response to the public protests – it has become virtually impossible to maintain the image of American law enforcement officers as straightforward protectors and servers of the people.
Related: George Floyd protests: fired officer to appear in court as calls to defund police sweep US – live
Continue reading...Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich synthesizes legal information with first-person testimony of the billionaire’s abuse and bought immunity into a shocking watch
It’s difficult to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-hour Netflix series on the now-deceased convicted sex offender without a choking sense of outrage. How many girls had to suffer to get attention? How perversely twisted is the American justice system that a Gatsby-esque billionaire, friends with such powerful figures as Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump, a longstanding donor to Harvard and MIT, could buy his way out of an almost certain life sentence for child sex abuse and trafficking?
Filthy Rich arrives, of course, less than a year after Epstein, 66, died, officially by suicide, in a New York jail last August. “There’s no justice in this,” Shawna Rivera, speaking publicly for the first time about Epstein’s alleged abuse starting when she was 14, says in the final episode. “There was just so much more to be said that will never be said.”
Continue reading...It’s easy to let standards slip during the lockdown but unlike Will Reeve not all of us see our pantless selves broadcast to the nation
Almost two months into the US shutdown, things are starting to get a little wild in quarantine. Perhaps you’ve stopped brushing your hair or started working in pyjamas. But a Good Morning America reporter took it a step further yesterday – he “went” to work without pants on for a nationally televised broadcast.
I have ARRIVED*
*in the most hilariously mortifying way possible https://t.co/2NQ85QEJVr
Dr Phil, Dr Oz and others appearing on cable news now exist in a bizarre realm halfway between fiction and authenticity
Last week, a group of actors known for their roles as fictional medical professionals on television released a video on Instagram thanking the real doctors on the frontlines fighting against the pandemic, raising money on their behalf.
Olivia Wilde of House, Scrubs stars Zach Braff and Donald Faisona, Nurse Jackie’s Edie Falco, Julianna Margulies and Maura Tierney of ER, and others, came together to share a message of support for doctors and nurses, and joked in a way best summed up by Neil Patrick Harris: “I’m not a doctor, but I was paid to be one on TV.”
Continue reading...The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?
Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
Continue reading...The phenomenally successful docuseries about tigers, criminals and polygamy has led to memes, celebrity fans and a newly awakened legal case
In the century since March began, one series has emerged as the go-to distraction for the millions now sequestered in their living rooms: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. The bizarre documentary series on a feud between big cat owners, as well as about 95 other things, has been the No 1 program on Netflix’s US platform since it premiered less than two weeks ago. And though the news and social media remain dominated by coronavirus coverage, the five hours of drama between outlandish characters in the disturbing American trade of private zoos has proved to be strange and fittingly unhinged counter-programming. Everywhere (online) you look: if it’s not about the pandemic, it’s probably Tiger King.
Related: Murder, madness and tigers: behind the year's wildest Netflix series
Continue reading...The groundbreaking model, restaurateur and lifestyle guru Barbara B Smith, known to many as “the black Martha Stewart”, has died, her family announced on Sunday. She was 70.
Smith died on Saturday evening after suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s disease, which she was found to have in 2013. Following her diagnosis, Smith and her husband, Dan Gasby, raised awareness of the disease and particularly its impacts on the African American community.
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