NBC to Make Show About Lesbo
Finally, television is directly addressing the lesbo community. Also today: Candace Bushnell will never go away, Keira Knightley sets out to do another prestige project, and Michael Keaton has been found.
- NBC, the fabulous big gay rainbow peacock of network TV, is looking to develop the memoir My Best Friend Is a Lesbo into a TV show. It's about two friends, one who is a straight girl, the other who is a lesbo. They go on dates (not with each other, only one of them is a lesbo) and have laughs and do other things. So that's great! We probably need more lesbos on TV. Obviously NBC will have to change that title, maybe to My Best Friend Is a $h*! or $h*! My Lesbo Says. Y'know, something that will fly with the advertisers. But the fact will still remain that the show is about a lesbo, or at least about a straight person being friends with a lesbo, and that is progress. At press time, NBC had offered the role of the lesbo to Nevel Papperman from iCarly. [Deadline]
- Yohhhh god. Because either we're not done with lady business or lady business is not done with us, ABC is hopping into bed with Candace Bushnell to make a TV version of her book One Fifth Avenue. The plot? A columnist (NATURALLY) named Cassie Bingham (Cassie! NATURALLY) lives comfortably (OF COURSE) on the Upper East Side until her husband asks for a separation and she's forced to move back downtown to her shabby digs at 1 5th Ave. Ohhh heavens to Bellevue, downtown? By Washington Square Park? What a misery! What a shameful, shitheaping terror. But also how liberating! To be out of the stuffy confines of the Uppered Eastern Side and down with the boho boys of fucking Fifth goddamned Avenue. Good grief. But hey, Cassie (terrific!) at least gets to go back uptown when she starts investigating "a scandal" that involves people in her old UES scene. So it's a little upstairs/downstairs kinda thing except everyone's way upstairs and has no idea what downstairs looks like at all. Sounds about right. Hopefully the show will also feature an elderly woman who can make her vagina say puns, as is traditional in Bushnell's work. [THR]
- The skin suit filled with warm gases and itch powder that we've given the human name of Chris Harrison will soon be diversifying his resume beyond hosting the extremely dramatic Bachelor rose ceremonies. He's now also going to host a new game show called You Deserve It, about everyone responsible for The Bachelor being thrown into large buckets of poop and laughed and screamed at and then put in jail, because they deserve it. Well, no, sadly, that's not going to happen to everyone involved with The Bachelor. Instead You Betcha or whatever the heck it's called is about people competing to win $500,000 for someone else. Yeah! For someone they think deserves it, like a family member or Chris Harrison. Or maybe the Put Everyone Responsible for The Bachelor In Poop Jail Fund. That is a very deserving charity! [EW]
- Here's sumpin' classy to clean all those terrorspiders out of your brain. Joe Wright, what done directed them Britty movies like Pride & Prejudice and Atonement (and the totally gonzo, totally underrated Hanna), is teaming up with his P&P and Atonement star Keira Knightley to make a big screen version of Anna Karenina, a story about how every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but mostly they are unhappy because they live in Russia. That could be good! While Atonement was sort of a disappointment, Wright's Pride & Prejudice, while not quite the Ehleian ecstasy of the classic BBC series from 1995, was quite sparkly and fun. So good for you, you two beautiful British bastards. Don't fuck it up. [Deadline]
- Terrence Malick has maybe landed on the next unknown he hopes to make something of a star by filming her in dreamy, woozy light. Haley Bennett, previously known mostly as the titular character in The Haunting of Molly Hartley (haha JK nobody knew her from that because nobody knows that movie, it is a garbage movie made solely so Chace Crawford could launder the money he earned by playing Tommy Twink in a gay oil emir's sex musical he wrote, produced, and staged in his emirate palace), might have the lead in Malick's next film, which will also star Christian Bale. Malick has previously worked with unknowns like Sissy Spacek, Jessica Chastain, and Q'orianka Kilcher. While at least one of those people certainly went on to stardom, let's not go nuts here. This is not necessarily a path to huge Hollywood success. But it would still be cool to be in a Terrence Malick movie! Plus Bennett is playing one of the leads on FX's upcoming Outlaw Country, so she's probably doing just fine either way. I say aim Spaceky, hope Chastain, and expect Kilcher. [Variety]
- Yesterday as we read the terrible news about the Beetlejuice sequel, some of us might have scratched our heads and wondered, "Hey, just what the hell is Michael Keaton up to these days?" (You sometimes think in bold.) And now we know! Other than a supposed collaboration with HBO, Keaton is busy getting cast in a psychological thriller (has there ever been a more meaningless phrase?) called Penthouse North alongside Michelle Monaghan. He'll play a total creepo who is terrorizing poor sweet Monagahan. So now you know. Michael Keaton, asked and answered. [THR]