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ABC's new talent show, Rising Star, just secured the final members of its judging panel: Ludacris and Kesha. They'll join Brad Paisley and host Josh Groban. Just what is Rising Star and how does it differ from American Idol, The Voice, The X-Factor (R.I.P.), and America's Got Talent? In case you forgot:
Three years ago, the playwright and activist Larry Kramer stood outside the Golden Theatre during the Broadway run of his 1985 AIDS play The Normal Heart, which Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy has made into an HBO movie premiering on May 25. As teary theatergoers exited, he handed them a one-page “Letter from Larry Kramer,” which began: Please know that everything in The Normal Heart happened. These were and are real people who lived and spoke and died, and are presented here as best I could. Several more have died since, including Bruce, whose name was Paul Popham, and Tommy, whose name was Rodger McFarlane and who became my best friend, and Emma, whose name was Dr. Linda Laubenstein.
Not only did Oprah surprise Barbara Walters for the host's final day on The View, but so did Hillary Clinton and a crew of women Walters called her "proud legacy," including: Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, Joan Lunden, Connie Chung, Elizabeth Vargas, Robin Roberts, Amy Robach, Juju Chang, Savannah Guthrie, Natalie Morales, Tamron Hall, Hoda Kotb, Kathie Lee Gifford, Maria Shriver, Mika Brzezinski, Paula Zahn, Gayle King, and Lisa Ling. This was on top of yesterday's View host reunion and the star-studded send-off Walters received the other night. Babs, turns out we're not the only ones who will miss you.
To love Grey's Anatomy is to love schmaltz. Bring me the montages; give me the sad songs. I want to cry. Hell, I want to sob. This is a show that's basically a Viking funeral of emotions, and restraint is not part of its vocabulary. So yeah, I got a little misty with Cristina Yang's Farewell Episode last night — but not as misty as I expected to or wanted to. This is Grey's Anatomy, for God's sake, a show where more is always more. I wanted more.
On Orange Is the New Black, maxi pads are slippers, Kool Aid is lipstick, and a screwdriver can achieve any number of personal tasks. Resourcefulness in prison is key. So last night at the premiere party for season two, which will be on Netflix June 6, we asked various cast members what tricks they would use should they ever find themselves in a similar situation. Here are their suggestions.
“It’s like Barbara f*cking Walters in here,” said Ringo Starr once, in a non-Walters interview, tearing up over discussion over the death of George Harrison. And with Walters officially retiring today (today's episode of The View will be her last), whether you like her oft-deemed "pushy" or "random" questions or not ("If you were a tree, what tree would you be?"), you've got to admit that she can skillfully make her subject tear up in a snap. Babs and Oprah will forever be neck-and-neck in the Make a Celebrity Cry Game, but through the glossy lens of yesteryear, Walters did it first. Let's look over some of her most notable conquests:
The night when they air all the hometown-visit footage tends to be one of the better episodes in any season, as it’s when American Idol accidentally shows some human moments. Our top three kids are just kids, after all, and they were regular kids just a few short months ago. An experience like this can fundamentally rearrange your entire life, and you often don’t know how much has changed until you get back to where you came from and you see the way people are looking at you. Suddenly people get nervous in your presence. Or yell shit at you to impress their friends. Or yell shit at you to impress you. It’s weird what sudden fame can do, and it’s nice to see the occasional raw moments that display the new ground these kids are suddenly walking. Our top three is for sure the scrappiest, least ready for primetime top three this show’s ever seen, so I’m curious to see what happens here. (My prediction is that of the three, Caleb is the most likely to let it all go to his head.)
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Challenge wrapped up its first season on Syfy earlier this week, and it has proven to be one of 2014’s most delightful surprises. The eight-episode reality competition premiered in late March to over 1.1 million viewers, making it the network’s highest-rated unscripted premiere since 2013. Each week, contestants are challenged to design and build mechanized, camera-ready creatures, which are then put through screen tests to determine a winner. Their creations are imaginative and original, but they also trigger nostalgia for Jim Henson productions of yore: films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth are brought up frequently, as are TV series like Farscape and Dinosaurs. Which got us thinking: Is the Jim Henson Company dropping hints about rebooting these franchises?
“What’s up with Labyrinth?” and other questions you didn't think we'd ask today.
My yoga teacher talks a lot about the unconscious versus conscious mind. Your unconscious mind is responsible for feelings and emotions; your conscious mind, for thoughts and rationale thinking. You need both, but the trick is not to let either one do all the heavy lifting? Like, you cant rely 100 percent on fact, because facts are often wrong, and life is more dynamic than that. You also can’t make every decision based on emotion, because then you would never leave your apartment. Why am I telling you all of this? Because just as you need both to get through life, you needed both to get through last night’s The Vampire Diaries season finale (and the ensuing summer). My conscious mind tells me that Ian Somerhalder will be back, that they cannot do a (contracted) season six without Damon, that the CW is not stupid. But my unconscious mind saw him and Bonnie go into the light, watched Elena sob and scream “don’t leave me,” and believes, really and truly, that he’s gone. And this, my friends, is the genius of TVD. A show so fearless it makes you fucking terrified.
As the weather warms, wedding season is upon us. Last night on Late Night, Seth Meyers reminisced about his. No, not his recent marrying of his wife — Meyers looked back at when he married Stefon about a year ago. It really is a touching story. Again, we are talking about a wedding between Meyers and a fictional club promoter that had everything ...
Here's a trailer for E!'s first scripted series, The Royals, created by One Tree Hill's Mark Schwahn. The hour-long drama follows a fictional British royal family led by Queen Helena (Elizabeth Hurley), a liquor-swilling, table-dancing, fancy hat-wearing modern matriarch who will do anything to protect her family's reputation. The 20-second teaser features Hurley playing to type — read: posh and sassy — as well as plenty of the debauched antics that you'd expect from a show by the OTH creators with the tagline "anarchy in the monarchy." Unfortunately it's not slated to premiere until early 2015, so in the meantime, you'll have to get your faux royals fix from I Wanna Marry Harry, whose premiere date just got bumped up to May 20th. Spiffing!
On the Tonight show Thursday, Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lawrence played a game called "Box of Lies," in which one of them had to describe the contents of a box containing a random object while the other guessed if the description was the truth or a lie. After this week's Mad Men shocker, we were understandably a little squeamish about a game involving sealed boxes filled with mystery items, but thankfully the game yielded no severed body parts, just a bunch of excuses for the pair to ham it up and do goofy voices like the overgrown schoolchildren that they are. Naturally, as this was J-Law playing a game involving boxes, there were some vagina puns too. Enjoy!
Bored to Death showrunner Jonathan Ames has yet another new series up his sleeve. In addition to Blunt Talk, the Patrick Stewart comedy he's co-producing with Seth MacFarlane for the Starz network, THR reports that Ames will be adapting the Icelandic dramedy World's End (Heimsendir) as a half-hour series for Showtime. World's End is the very Nordic-sounding tale of a high-school English teacher who loses his mind and ends up in a mental institution, where he eventually becomes the leader of an inmate revolt. It is not to be confused with World's End, Simon Pegg's 2013 comedy about an alien invasion during a pub crawl. Although knowing Ames, there's probably going to be some boozing in this one too. White wine, anybody?
Was the trial by combat cliff-hanger of Tyrion Lannister's trial not satisfying enough for you? How about an unexpected dance break? YouTuber xerograde added an alternate ending, making the entire thing a bit lighter.
To celebrate the retirement of longtime host Barbara Walters, The View brought back every single host the show has had over its 17 seasons. In case you lost count: that's Star Jones, Debbie Matenopoulos, Lisa Ling, Joy Behar, Meredith Vieira, Rosie O’Donnell, Elisabeth Hasselbeck (and the show's current hosts, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, and Jenny McCarthy). The 11 women (plus Babs) sat around an elongated "Hot Topics" table to reminisce on the camaraderie and the crosstalk.
Here's your first extended look at The Flash, the CW's upcoming companion piece to Arrow, and one of what feels like dozens of comic-book shows debuting this fall. Grant Gustin stars as Barry Allen, a forensic investigator already on a quest for justice when he's struck by lightning, granting him the power of super speed. (And super abs. And super hairlessness.) Superhero stories are everywhere right now, as are shows about cops and vengeance, but The Flash still looks surprisingly fun and fresh.
On last Sunday's episode of Mad Men, Don Draper took a half-court shot, crashing a meeting and offering a desperate pitch in an attempt to save his floundering career at Sterling Cooper. It wasn't anywhere near the most compelling case he's made for a product over six and a half seasons. How well do you know his pitches? How well do you know Peggy's? Or anyone else's, for that matter? Try your luck at our Mad Men Pitch Quiz. For each question, we'll give you a pitched slogan (successful and not) and four brands. You just have to pick the correct product. Good luck, and remember: "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons."
It’s the 500th episode! What an accomplishment! But it gets me thinking: If you laid this show out by its individual elements, how do you think it would break down? I figure there are 227 episodes’ worth of Ryan and various judges saying how important everything is. 193 episodes of montages, recaps, and Ford Music Videos, 42 of gay-panic jokes, 18 of judges’ intros, 11 of Randy Jackson saying dawg or yee-uh. That leaves us 9 episodes of actual Idol action over the last 13 years.
What I’m saying is that this show has completely worn me down. I’m exhausted after season 13. I’m a nub. I’m Reek on Game of Thrones. I am limping across the finish line and all I did was watch and try to find new words for tedious. What if we all took next year off and, like, backpacked around Europe or something?
There will be three rounds: Randy’s choice, judges’ choice, and hometown choice.
One of the most-discussed entries of last year’s Cannes Film Festival was James Gray’s New York–set period piece The Immigrant. The film was divisive — winning rapturous acclaim as well as a few sneers — but most viewers agreed that it featured a fantastic performance by Marion Cotillard, giving her her first leading role in an American film, after years of headlining French films and taking on supporting parts in American ones. In The Immigrant, the Cotillard plays Ewa, a recent Polish émigré who finds herself taken in by a shady nightlife impresario (Joaquin Phoenix). The film was picked up by the Weinstein Company — prompting many to expect to an awards-season push — but then seemed to vanish for a while. Now it’s finally in theaters, just in time for a new Cannes Festival (which features another Cotillard performance, in the Dardenne Brothers’ much-speculated-about Two Days, One Night). The actress sat down with Vulture recently to discuss having to act in Polish, what she looks for in a director, and the unlikely event that brought her and Gray together.
CBS unveiled its new fall programming yesterday, but only a few new shows made it to the lineup — CBS is all about returning favorites, so there aren't a lot of open slots. In fact, there's only one new comedy for fall (Odd Couple is scheduled for mid-season), and the new dramas are pretty by-the-book CBS shows. Behold:
Can we vote to keep Georgia the puppy and send everyone else home?
This is going to be a long summer.
It’s the 500th episode! What an accomplishment! But seriously, this show is killing us.
We're glad that last night’s season finale didn’t end with a car crash or some other calamitous event.
Tensions are rising, and toupées are being acknowledged.
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