One headline summation of this latest edition of The Newsroom could read: A riveting new subplot unfolds and a previously unsympathetic heroine—associate producer Maggie Jordan (played by Alison Pill)—emerges transformed. Another might be: That hair color spells trouble (both Maggie's old blonde and new red. Not to mention that the new cut is awful).
Did you know: in 2010, someone uploaded a clip of Kanye West's improv sitcom HBO pilot to YouTube, and nobody noticed? Three full years and four Kanye albums have passed, and we haven't made fun of him for this. Let's do that riii-iiight now.
Consensus regarding last night's premiere of The Newsroom seemed to be that the only thing worse than the episode was the Will McAvoy as Christ figure trailer than preceded it. The second season debut appeared to elicit a collective groan from everyone on Twitter except a certain subset of journalists. Which ones? The ones who just happen to be paid by HBO.
Here's the trailer for Larry David's upcoming HBO movie, Clear History. Basically, Larry David's character has a crazy frizzed-out hair-beard combo. He works for Jon Hamm who is sporting a suit, also so wild. Anyways, David's character quits because he thinks Hamm's character is dumb and then he loses out on millions and Hamm is rich and happy and married to Kate Hudson. After a decade of bitterness, David's character launches a madcap revenge plot.
Veep is an HBO comedy of political ill-manners, currently in its second season. It was created by mastermind architect of vicious profanity, Armando Iannucci, about Vice President Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Meyer presides over a staff—including actors Anna Chlumsky, Tony Hale, and Reid Scott—that spends their time leaping and bounding from one political fuck-up to another.
All of this arrived Tuesday in a box so big I thought maybe someone was sending me a suffocated animal. I asked my boss John Cook if I could keep it and he said, "Do you even want it?" An iPod and a bottle of Moët? Yes, that is an instant Friday/living Mariah Carey song. Whatever. I was going to watch Soderberg's Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, anyway (I wanna see Michael Douglas and Matt Damon fuck!). Now I'm gonna watch it in class, like Liberace would if he were alive today and used headphones for the sound on his TV. Anyway, this is the sort of shameless shit that networks do to try to buy positive coverage. We'll see if it works.
Christopher Guest's new TV series Family Tree, which premiered last night on HBO, is similar to but less pointed than his best known works. Starting with 1996's Waiting for Guffman, the director-actor has orchestrated a string of improvised farces in a mostly pseudo-documentary format that roast specific, unexamined cultures: Midwestern community theater geeks (Guffman), dog-show people (Best in Show), folk singers and their groupies (A Mighty Wind) and indie actors with Oscar buzz (For Your Consideration). Repeatedly, you get the feeling that Guest thinks he is smarter than the people that he and his repertory hypothesize, but these characters feel so lived-in that they are endearing regardless. Their doofiness is an asset for everyone involved, at least until they're punished for it in Guest's characteristically dark codas of dashed dreams and ruined lives.
Today, we are thinking about inconsistent regional accent use in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones.
HBO has renewed Veep for a third season. This is wonderful news! Created by curse-generating genius Armando Iannucci, Veep follows Vice President Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and her bumbling staff, helmed by Anna Chlumsky, as they narrowly avoid an endless onslaught of political catastrophes.
Christopher Abbott, better (and forever) known as Charlie on Girls, has just announced his abrupt departure from the HBO series, which follows a group of youths with undiagnosed personality disorders as they careen wildly around New York's Brooklyn borough.
I never realized how not pregnant Beyoncé might have been until the Saturday premiere of her HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream. Since announcing her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (in August of that year), there have been naysayers, referred to with tongue in cheek as "Beyoncé birthers." There was that footage of her apparently pregnant belly folding in on itself when she made an appearance on Australian TV in the fall of 2011. Months later, Beyoncé addressed it with a pithy explanation: "It was a fabric that folded - does fabric not fold? Oh my gosh, so stupid."
Good news for the entirety of the internet, which it turns out is an entity solely supported by people arguing about "Girls": HBO has picked up another show to be helmed by Lena Dunham hired Dunham to write a new pilot. It's called "Harlem," and will see Dunham profiling the lives of those in New York City's worst projects in a show that insiders are likening to "The Wire." Just kidding.
