Television

After more than a year of at-home shows during the pandemic, Stephen Colbert finally returned to his desk at The Late Show with a live studio audience on Monday night. And since one of his earliest quarantine guests last year was Jon Stewart, it felt appropriate that Colbert invite the former Daily Show host back to the studio to recap what a whirlwind of a year it’s been. “When I interviewed you , you were talking about how little progress we’ve made in science in combating pandemics,” Colbert said. “Because...

Following his participation in the long-awaited Friends reunion last month, James Corden has shared behind-the-scenes footage of the cast on the Warner Bros lot. In a clip on The Late Late Show, Corden joins the six actors on the set of Central Perk to discuss their experience getting back together. In the 11-minute video, Corden drives Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer on a golf cart through the WBR studio lot. Onboard, the cast shares what it’s like being back and the group...

At some point, you’ve probably made fun of one of those cheesy sitcoms about an oafish man with a beautiful, impossibly patient wife. That’s because those kinds of sitcoms have been around for our entire lives, going back practically to the start of television itself. Some of these shows have been great (The Honeymooners), some have been fine (Still Standing), and some have been According to Jim. They are, like cop shows, one of TV’s most renewable resources, enduring perhaps because viewers see more of themselves than they’d like to...

Season two of Netflix’s hit series Never Have I Ever will answer the question: How does a high school nerd juggle two boyfriends? Netflix has released the trailer for the Mindy Kaling-created show’s upcoming second season, which premieres July 15th. It jumps right back into the action after the events of the first season finale, with Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) forced to pick between two possible love interests, Ben and Paxton. The synopsis notes, “In Season 2 of the coming-of-age comedy Never Have I Ever, Indian American teenager Devi continues to...

Steven Canals, the co-creator of FX’s award-winning drama Pose, has already changed lives. The groundbreaking series on New York City’s ballroom scene in the 1980s and Nineties has the largest LGBTQ cast in television history, earned Billy Porter an Emmy for best actor in a drama, and has trans and people of color as writers and producers. More than a TV show, it’s also a form of advocacy for trans, queer voices, Latinx, black and marginalized people. For the Rolling Stone Interview: Special Edition, we spoke with Steven Canals about...

Everything’s “fine” in the first trailer for The Shrink Next Door, Apple TV+’s dark comedy starring Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd about the bizarre relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient. Based on a true story that was later turned into a 2019 Wonderly podcast, the limited series focuses on Ferrell’s stressed-out Martin “Marty” Markowitz and his seemingly good-natured shrink Dr. Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, played by Rudd. While the trailer focuses on the “breakthroughs” the two enjoy during their sessions, Apple+ hints at a darker side of the relationship in...

In the fall of 2019, when Chris Gethard was recording his latest comedy special, Half My Life, he was a few months shy of his 40th birthday, and the world was a few months shy of being plunged into the Groundhog Day nightmare of the Covid-19 pandemic — not that anybody knew that second part. Full of self deprecations about the size of his forehead, gripes about life on the road, and earnest declarations of love for his wife and baby waiting for him at home in northern New Jersey, the...

A review of this week’s Loki, “The Variant,” coming up just as soon as your salad is Asgard… The Loki series premiere at times felt like a challenge: How much could the fundamental charms of the show’s two leading men overcome ream after ream of exposition about Loki’s past and how the Time Variance Authority works? “The Variant” still has some TVA info-dumping to do, plus more of this version of Loki catching up on MCU events he missed. But there’s not nearly as much of that as in the...

Joe Exotic, the incarcerated former zookeeper of Tiger King fame, is auctioning off several non-fungible tokens. The sale was created in partnership with the cryptocurrency members club More and is being hosted on Minitable. The sale comprises NFTs for several animated images, like one of Joe and a chimpanzee and another of Joe and the Dogecoin dog. There’s also a handful of NFTs tied to audio recordings, including Joe’s song, “I Saw a Tiger,” and a message he recorded this past April from prison in which he defines NFT as...

The new Apple TV+ series Physical opens with verve. It is 1986, and we are in the dressing room of a TV studio where a woman — who has her back to us for this whole opening sequence, but whom we’ll soon get to know as Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) — sits quietly in front of the makeup mirror, psyching herself up with Heart’s “Straight On” playing on her Walkman. She then (in a mostly unbroken take) struts out to the stage to record the aerobics workout show she apparently...

Former alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein speak out in the trailer for Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, an expansion on Ronan Farrow’s bestselling book and hit podcast of the same name. The six-part documentary series premieres July 12th on HBO Max. Catch and Kill features on-camera interviews between Farrow and some of the interviewees featured in his investigations against Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, including former employees of the Hollywood producer as well as Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, the woman who wore a wire that caught audio evidence of his misconduct. “Even...

Blindspotting isn’t the most obvious candidate for a film-to-TV spinoff. The 2018 movie, co-written by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, who star as best friends in Oakland, made less than $5 million at the box office. It was well-reviewed but not a major awards player. And its stories — Diggs’ ex-con Collin finishes out his probation, while Casal’s Miles rails against gentrification — didn’t leave lots of open questions demanding a sequel, on the big or small screen. But Blindspotting the series, debuting this weekend on Starz, is less a...

Hulu has released the first look at Nine Perfect Strangers, the latest suspenseful drama series from David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, Big Sky, The Undoing) that stars Nicole Kidman. The eight-episode series premieres August 18th exclusively on the streaming platform. Set at a boutique health-and-wellness resort, Nine Perfect Strangers brings together nine stressed-out city dwellers for a 10-day retreat that promises healing and relaxation. Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Bobby Cannavale, Regina Hall, Samara Weaving, and Melvin Gregg make up the cast of unsuspecting guests who, as their stay goes on, begin to realize that...

With all due respect to Poltergeist (They’re her-rrrre!”), you don’t need to live in a haunted suburban house to get sucked into the terror of your television. From the short-story-like psychological shocks of Sixties name-brand anthology shows to today’s streaming-abetted scarefests, many of the medium’s most memorable series have centered on things that go bump in the night. It doesn’t have to be Halloween to enjoy: We’re counting down the top 30 horror shows in TV history. Vampire slayers and sexed-up bloodsuckers, brainiac serial killers and brain-chomping zombies, paranormal activities...