Vice laid off around 15 staffers today in a “reorganization” of their video news division, The Politico first reported this afternoon. As part of the shuffling, ex-Bloomberg bigwig Josh Tyrangiel has been promoted to a position in which he will oversee the entirety of Vice’s video news operation, from its HBO programming on down. Via Politico:
Actually, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s weakest album since I Am...Sasha Fierce.
Sesame Street’s 46th season premiered on HBO today, with back-to-back half-hour episodes (the shortened run time, down from hourlong shows, is “is viewed as a more manageable amount of time for children to focus,” according to a recent New York Times piece). With the new episodes’ controversial move from PBS to a premium cable network comes ground-level changes, some of which are reflected in the clips above from the first two episodes—Elmo’s in his brownstone (which overlooks a bridge that resembles Philadelphia’s Walt Whitman), Oscar’s got his recycling bin, and Hooper’s Store now looks a place where you can buy a bunch of kale, Stumptown Coffee, and a stick of butter. Muppets, after all, have always been artisanal, through and through.
George R.R. Martin has had it up to here with you Game of Thrones freaks bullying him.
“Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from,” rang out Iris DeMent’s jubilant voice every week during the opening credits of HBO’s second season of The Leftovers. She continued: “Everybody is worrying about where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done / But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me / Think I’ll just let the mystery be.” DeMent’s voice—a happy medium between a screech and a honk—and the words it carried over her bluegrass ditty were inevitably the most joyous part of every episode. Hers was a point of view almost entirely missing from a show obsessed with people’s points of view: blissful willful ignorance.
For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.
Once Game of Thrones came to an agreement with a Croatian church to lock down the filming location for Cersei Lannister’s naked walk of shame, and secured a body double for Lena Headey, there was only one thing missing from one of the most important scenes of the season 5 finale: a guy to flash his dick and shout “I’m a Lannister, suck me off!”
Well, she got it. After enduring more humiliation than previously imaginable, after alienating virtually everyone in her immediate circle, and after ignoring the Greek chorus of their collective repulsion, Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) got her happy ending on last night's Season 2 finale of The Comeback. Her hairdresser/confidant Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) survived another cancer-related scare. She reunited with her estranged husband Mark (Damian Young), who was taken by her willingness to leave the Emmys to rush to Mickey's side in the hospital. And she ended up winning the Emmy she was nominated for, definitively proving her worth in Hollywood, a town that will only have her if she openly debases herself (she did so this time by playing an exaggeratedly unflattering version of herself in an HBO show based partly on her life).
Vincent Chase, you mad dog. You're making the movie? You made the movie. We made the movie, bro. For everyone who has been waiting, here is the trailer for the forthcoming Entourage movie, directed by Doug Ellin. We made the movie.
"Well, reality TV has had quite the evolution," Valerie Cherish tells us during the first episode of The Comeback in more than nine years. "It's a different reality. And I should know, because I was there at the beginning with The Comeback. Back then, it was just me and people eating bugs on Survivor. 'Uh, what's this? This is entertainment?' Well, as it turns out, yes. Yes it is. I was right."
The upcoming season of The Comeback will dive further into the wormhole of meta-television as an HBO show about an HBO show. Per this first extended look at the second season of the brilliant Lisa Kudrow/Michael Patrick King faux reality series, Kudrow's Valerie Cherish is cast in an HBO series called Seeing Red, written by her former Room and Bored adversary Paulie G (Lance Barber) about their relationship.
Well, nerds, your favorite show is about to get favorite-r. While the current cast of HBO's Game of Thrones pranced around San Diego's Comic-Con on Friday, HBO took the time to announce all the new characters and cast members who will be appearing in season five. Exciting!
On the morning of January 11, 2010, before he testified as a plaintiff in the case then known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Jeff Zarrillo addressed the press.
Last night, HBO premiered Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr., a 45-minute documentary about the father of Robert De Niro. De Niro, Sr., was an abstract impressionist painter who struggled with his lack of recognition for most of his career. He was also gay. De Niro, Jr., appeared throughout the documentary, discussed his parents' split and his dad's sexuality candidly, albeit tersely.
"Did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who's responsible for winning World War II?" asks Mark Ruffalo's Ned Weeks during one of many emotional high points in Ryan Murphy's HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart. "His name's Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code. After the war was over, he committed suicide because he was so haunted for being gay. Why don't they teach any of that in schools? A gay man is responsible for winning World War II. If they did maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are."
