After a weekend of people yelling, “Oh my god it’s Doug Stamper,” Michael Kelly, an actor on a TV show about a fake president, finally asked a group clamoring to take selfies with him at the Thomson/Reuters White House Correspondents Dinner pre-party if any of them knew his real name. One man, after checking his phone—probably for something unrelated—said yes.
Speaking on a Netflix-organized panel, before the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, on Sunday, the two directors of Making a Murderer, Moira Demos and Laura Riccardi, revealed that convicted murderer Steven Avery’s request to watch their documentary about his trials and tribulations has been denied
On Making a Murderer, Steven Avery’s former fiancée, Jodi Stachowski, was portrayed as his rock (you also may remember her Ski-Doo jacket, her “Warning: Does Not Play Well With Others” T-shirt, and that time she left her purse on the bed). She conducted herself as devoted to Avery up until the point when her probation officer ordered her to move away from the Avery property and issued a “no contact” order (which she got in trouble for violating at least once).
In recent days, nearly 130,000 Making a Murderer fans have signed a petition on the White House website asking President Obama to pardon Steve Avery, who was found guilty of the murder of Teresa Halbach in 2007. But Avery was convicted of a state crime, not a federal one, meaning Obama couldn’t even pardon him if he wanted to.
First, let’s toast to Netflix’s impeccable timing. It’s hard to imagine a better moment when the platform could have released Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s series Making a Murderer. Its target audience of socially conscious liberals with the kind of disposable income that can fund a Netflix subscription and the devices to use it with is, at this point, fed up with the mishandling of power by the police (generally in the form of racism, though Murderer is entirely about whites). Capping a year when Serial and The Jinx were the talk of the internet, Murderer is as familiar and definitive as every single end of year Top 10 list attempts to be.
If you, like many of us, devoted a large portion of your weekend to watching the second season of Orange Is the New Black on Netflix, you probably have a lot to discuss. There are new inmates, new teeth, new plants, new drugs, but still a lot of the same old shit in Litchfield. Some of that shit is even in the showers.
Streaming video services are a blessing and a curse. Trying to choose from among the documentary you swear you'll watch someday, a campy horror remake, one of Tyler Perry's 50 Tyler Perry movies starring Tyler Perry, and Cocktail is hard enough when you're alone. Throw another person into the mix, and you don't stand a chance.
Don’t worry, it’s very PG-13. Otherwise, beware of spoilers ahead.
Did you watch all of the second season of Netflix’s House of Cards this weekend? Good. So did I. Let’s talk. Spoilers ahead.
Have you ever had one of those incredible customer service experiences that you just had to share with the whole world? No, of course you haven't.
It's hard to say which is rarer: meaty, star-making roles for trans actors or careers that cross over from reality TV to acting. Laverne Cox has both. She competed on VH1's I Want to Work for Diddy, developed/starred in that network's makeover show TRANSform Me, and now she steals scenes as Sophia on Netflix's phenomenal women's prison comedy-drama Orange is the New Black. In case you are behind, OITNB is so compulsively captivating that it feels less like a show and more like a life event: I didn't so much watch it as I felt it happening.
