Television

Bill Maher slammed the GOP, the ACLU, MTV, Tucker Carlson and Playboy magazine in a Real Time segment Friday that took aim at how companies change their brand but keep their name. Maher opened his nine-minute “New Rule: Stand By Your Brand” by decrying how TLC, a.k.a. The Learning Channel, and A&E, short for Arts & Entertainment, have long deviated from their original mission statement. After noting how the former lived up to its Learning Channel name, Maher listed some of TLC’s current programming: “Cake Boss, Gypsy Sisters, Toddlers &...

Alexander Burchardt doesn’t look anything like Michael Hutchence. Yes, he’s handsome like the INXS singer, and has a similarly defined jawline, but the resemblance stops there. But through happenstance and Hollywood magic, the 29-year-old web developer from Copenhagen recently became an unlikely stand-in for Hutchence in the second season for HBO’s wildly popular show Euphoria. Like many other teenagers and twentysomethings, Burchardt had been binging the viral teen drama. He was a few episodes into the recently concluded Season Two when he saw one of the show’s most tragically romantic...

In one of the wildest cases of life imitating art, seven people in France have been charged with robbing the set of the Netflix heist series, Lupin, the French news agency AFP reports. The robbery took place Feb. 25 while Lupin was filming in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Some suspects were detained on March 9, but prosecutors didn’t file charges until today, March 18. The seven suspects, who are aged between 13 and 21, are accused of carrying out an armed robbery as part of an organized gang, as well...

In HBO Max’s new comedy series Minx, Ophelia Lovibond plays Joyce, an idealistic young writer who has spent most of her life dreaming of launching a magazine dedicated to trumpeting her feminist ideals. She pitches this idea to members of the magazine publishing elite but her invitation for them to “be on the right side of history” — the show takes place in 1971 — is not well-received. One of them looks at the woman on Joyce’s mocked-up cover and asks, “Why is she so angry?” Joyce does manage to...

Mike Myers returns — in eight different roles — in The Pentaverate, an upcoming Netflix comedy series about a secret society. According to the new teaser, the series takes place over 1,000 years in the future after a plague wipes out the population; the titular group works behind the scenes to orchestrate world events.  After spending the past decade and a half sporadically appearing in supporting parts and hosting game shows, The Pentaverate marks Myers’ first time in a starring role — and in many roles — since his disastrous...

Superhero-obsessed Kamala Khan winds up with some superpowers of her own in the new trailer for Ms. Marvel, the next Marvel Studios series arriving on Disney+ on June 8. The trailer for the new series offers a glimpse at Kamala’s Ms. Marvel origin story, as the Muslim American teen from Jersey City tries to navigate the general minefield that is high school, on top of juggling family commitments with her love of video games, fan-fiction, and superhero obsession, Captain Marvel. It’s a balancing act that grows even more complicated once...

Yalitza Aparicio is heading to the small screen thanks to the first all-Spanish-language series on Apple TV+. The Mexican actress, who starred as the beloved Cleo in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, takes a lead role in Familia de Medianoche. The series is based on the documentary Midnight Family, according to Variety. The cast includes Joaquin Cosío (Narcos: México, Gentefied), Óscar Jaenada (Luis Miguel: The Series), and Renata Vaca (Dale Gas). The drama series will follow Marigaby (Vaca) who’s studying medicine during the day but helps her family’s private ambulance business by night. Alongside her...

This week’s Please Don’t Destroy sketch reunited host Zoë Kravitz with one of her co-stars from The Batman: Paul Dano. The sketch kicks off with Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy planning to give Kravitz, who plays Catwoman in the film, a kitten. But as she enters, the feline disappears and sends the group on a wild cat chase throughout the room. After destroying everything in sight, they finally find the cat in a drawer. But it disappears again shortly thereafter. There’s a brief panic when the group hears a...

Zoë Kravitz got a Catwoman-themed surprise during her SNL hosting debut this week: more Catwomen. After joking about how she “watched the movie musical Cats every day for a year” to prepare for her role as Catwoman in The Batman, Kate McKinnon appeared in a leather dominatrix suit asking, “Somebody out here talking about cats?” McKinnon quickly revealed that she was “the Catwoman from the ’90s, the one with the whip.” She then revealed her origin story to Kravitz. “Okay, I fell out of a window onto a pile of cats....

Weekend Update tackled Russia’s fake news law, the country’s ban on car exports and Disney’s response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live. “Russia has passed a fake news law that makes it illegal for any organization to report information that contradicts what the government says,” co-anchor Colin Jost said, “which explains the recent headline, ‘Six-foot-five Putin Not Insane.'” After discussing President Biden’s refusal to step into World War III and the rising gas prices nationwide, Michael Che quipped, “Russia has responded to...

A review of this week’s Winning Time, “Is That All There Is?” coming up just as soon as you come back with a real business plan… Among the many conflicts that Winning Time established in its series premiere was incumbent Lakers coach Jerry West’s opposition to drafting Magic Johnson with the first overall pick. West mostly argued in basketball terms regarding his belief that a six-foot-nine man handling the ball as much as a point guard (a position traditionally played by guys at least a half a foot shorter) would...

The Kardashians found a new home on Hulu with The Kardashians following the series finale of Keeping Up With the Kardashians less than a year ago. Now, as they make their return, they’re leading with a mission statement… or a warning: “Never go against the family.” In the official trailer for the fresh series that puts the cameras back on the Hollywood family, Kourtney and Travis Barker, her fiancé of Blink-182 fame, explore having a baby, while Kylie Jenner details having her own highly publicized pregnancy. Meanwhile, Khloe, entwined in...

Evan Rachel Wood responded to Marilyn Manson’s defamation lawsuit against her during her Monday appearance on The View. Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, alleged that the actress defamed him in conversations with other women who have accused him of sexual abuse. “I can’t obviously speak about any of the specific allegations of the lawsuit, but I’m not scared,” she said ahead of the release of her upcoming doc Phoenix Rising. “I am sad, ’cause this is how it works. This is what pretty much every survivor that tries...

Apple+’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s historical-fiction epic Pachinko bounces back and forth between several phases of its heroine Sunja’s life: growing up in Korea under the yoke of Japanese rule, where she’s played as a girl in the 1920s by Yu-na Jeon, and as a young woman in the 1920s played by Minha Kim; then her late-Eighties retirement in Japan (where she’s played by Youn Yuh-jung), reflecting back on her life’s many triumphs, tragedies, and compromises. In one scene in 1989, Sunja and her banker grandson Solomon (Jin Ha)...