Television

You could not ignore Yaphet Kotto when he came on the screen. There was his sheer size: 6’3″ and broad as a barn in a business where most actors are much smaller than the camera makes them seem. There was that voice: hard as gravel, but also with an unmistakable lisp that lent just the right degree of vulnerability to the characters he played. And there were those eyes, so often red with a mix of rage, regret, and sheer weariness about the many travails his characters had been through....

Kid Cudi and St. Vincent have been tapped to perform on Saturday Night Live in April. St. Vincent will perform on April 3rd, with Daniel Kaluuya set to host, while Kid Cudi will be the musical guest on April 10th with Carey Mulligan hosting. Saturday Night Live is set to return March 27th, after a month-long hiatus, with previously-announced host Maya Rudolph and musical guest Jack Harlow. 🔜🔜🔜 pic.twitter.com/9JDXA3hJWD — Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 16, 2021 This will mark Kid Cud’s first time performing solo on Saturday...

When Cynthia Erivo was cast as Harriet Tubman in the 2019 biopic Harriet, the internet lit up with criticism. Erivo is English, the outcry went, how could she possibly do justice to a uniquely American hero? Her answer was a muscular, wrenching performance that earned her an Oscar nomination. Backlash surrounding her casting as another all-American icon, Aretha Franklin, in the National Geographic series Genius: Aretha (premiering March 21st), was barely a whisper. Perhaps people are finally learning not to underestimate Erivo. Or perhaps it’s just that anyone who’s heard...

Tiffany Haddish was shooting an episode of her Kids Say the Darndest Things revival series when she got the news that her Netflix comedy special, Black Mitzvah, had been awarded Best Comedy Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. In a heartwarming video from the show’s set, which Haddish shared on Monday, the comedian is in the middle of explaining to her kid co-hosts that she’s been nominated for the Grammys a few times, before her producer (speaking to Haddish through an earpiece) tells her to say, “But I just won a...

Among the the music biopic’s many tropes is the inevitable recording-session scene, where we watch a recreation of the artist at work — or, if the subject is a band, see them quarrel and throw drum sticks at each other. Rare, though, are the sequences where you feel as if you’re truly witnessing art emerge — which is precisely what happens about three-quarters of the way through Genius: Aretha, the eight-part mini-series that debuts on the National Geographic channel on March 21st, and will be streaming online next day on...

On the one-year anniversary of the last pre-Covid lockdown Late Show, Dr. Anthony Fauci visited with Stephen Colbert Friday to discuss America’s path back to “normal.” During the interview, the host asked Fauci to pick his favorite between the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. “I would pick the one that was the most readily available to me,” Fauci said. “All three of them are highly efficacious. They have different characteristics: Cold storage, one dose versus two doses, but if I walked into a clinic and I wanted to...

Soleil Moon Frye became the ultimate Eighties child star on Punky Brewster, at the age of seven. She played America’s favorite wise-cracking moppet, wearing mismatched high-tops and extolling the virtues of Punky Power. The show was eventually cancelled in 1988 — and that’s when Frye started toting a video camera around, filming her other child-star friends, just in time for their awkward teen years. Kid 90, a new documentary that begins streaming on Hulu today, turns her home-movie footage into a time capsule of show-biz kids growing up in Nineties...

Late in the premiere episode of the new HBO Max dramedy Generation, high school classmates Chester (Justice Smith) and Nathan (Uly Schlesinger) are cuddling together at the end of a very tough day for the latter. Chester promises Nathan that he’ll never feel this bad again, but Nathan is too distracted or drunk to hear the pep talk. “Will you remind me tomorrow?” he asks Chester. “It sounds like something I’d want to remember.” Like a lot of things teenagers say both in real life and on TV, the conversation...

The first Marvel TV show on Disney+ was bound to be big, but Wandavision‘s combination of emotional depth, loving sitcom homages, campy comedy, and movie-level action made the show a genuine phenomenon. Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making of Wandavision — which debuts Friday, March 12th, on Disney+ — takes a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show, from its conception to the intense filming process. The documentary digs into the endless work that went into keeping Wandavision‘s decades-spanning sitcom segments authentic to their inspirations. Most strikingly, the first, Dick Van...

Welcome to Too Long; Didn’t Watch, the new TV podcast produced by Rolling Stone and OBB Sound, presented by Google Assistant, and hosted by yours truly. In each episode, we attempt a new method of scaling Peak TV, by pairing a celebrity guest with a series they’ve never seen and showing them only the pilot and the finale, to see if they can figure out what in the world happened in between. This week’s installment concludes our 10-episode first season, though Too Long; Didn’t Watch will be back in a...

There are few directors better qualified to helm every episode of WandaVision than Matt Shakman. As a kid in the Eighties, he was a working sitcom actor, appearing in multicam hits of the day like The Facts of Life, Webster, and three seasons as a regular on the Growing Pains spin-off Just the Ten of Us. As an adult director, he’s worked on psychologically intricate dramas like Mad Men and Six Feet Under, epic action like Game of Thrones, and self-aware single-cam comedies like You’re the Worst and It’s Always...

Little Marvin and Lena Waithe revealed a teaser for their upcoming anthology series Them, and, yes — it’s insanely creepy. Set in the Fifties during the Great Migration, the trailer features a black family moving from North Carolina to an all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles. As Dusty Springfield’s “Windmills of Your Mind” plays, the idyllic suburbia becomes menacing and frightening. Neighbors — including Alison Pill — stare at them through their windows, while closets reveal a threatening presence. Them arrives on April 9th via Amazon Prime Video. In addition to...

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers (with some help from Amber Ruffin) busted out the tea and crumpets as they broke down Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey on their respective late-night shows Monday, March 8th. On The Late Show, tea kettle full of popcorn in hand, Colbert offered a comprehensive look at all the major moments, like when Markle said she had no idea what marrying into the Royal Family would be like because she didn’t look up her husband online. “Let me...