Claire Danes reteams with Homeland co-creator on Netflix / Olivia Colman exits Heartstopper / Futurama turns 25
PLUS: Netflix's animated Good Times reboot trailer roasted on Black Twitter.
Claire Danes reteams with Homeland co-creator Howard Gordon for Netflix limited series The Beast in Me
Conan O'Brien and Jodie Foster are also on board as executive producers on The Beast in Me, which was created by The X-Files vet Gabe Rotter with Gordon serving as showrunner. Here's the official logline: “Since the tragic death of her young son, acclaimed author Aggie Wiggs (Danes) has receded from public life, unable to write, a ghost of her former self. But she finds an unlikely subject for a new book when the house next door is bought by Nile Sheldon, a famed and formidable real estate mogul who was once the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. At once horrified and fascinated by this man, Aggie finds herself compulsively hunting for the truth – chasing his demons while fleeing her own – in a game of cat and mouse that might turn deadly.” Danes won two of her three Emmys starring on Showtime’s Homeland, which Gordon created with Alex Gansa.
Olivia Colman won't return for Heartstopper Season 3
“I couldn’t do number three. I couldn’t fit it in," Colman tells Forbes apologetically. "I feel awful about that.” She added: “I feel like I was part of one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever been part of.”
9-1-1 creator Tim Minear on The Bachelor crossover: “It was Jennifer Love Hewitt’s idea"
“She’s a huge Bachelor fan, just like Maddie is on the show,” Minear tells The Wrap. “She called me after hanging out with some of the Bachelor people and she’s like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the 118 had to respond to an emergency at the Bachelor mansion?’ I was like, ‘No brainer.’” Love Hewitt was in attendance of The Golden Bachelor's live finale in December. ALSO: 9-1-1's Season 7 premiere draws 10.1 million in delayed viewing.
FX delays Welcome To Wrexham's Season 3 premiere
The soccer docuseries from Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds was supposed to return on April 18. Season 3 will now premiere on May 2. No reason was given for the delay.
Giancarlo Esposito's Parish to debut on AMC ad-free
Esposito's crime drama will debut at 10:15 p.m. after The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live on Sunday after a brief “presented by” message from Crown Royal, the episode’s lone sponsor. It will then air without commercial interruption, followed by a preview of The Book of Carol, the second season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
Karamo renewed for Season 3
Karamo Brown's syndicated talk show will return for a third season in national syndication.
Netflix's animated Good Times reboot trailer roasted on Black Twitter
Black Twitter had nothing good to say about the Seth MacFarlane-produced animated reboot of the classic 1970s sitcom, starring Yvette Nicole Brown, J.B. Smoove, Jay Pharoah, Marsai Martin and Gerald “Slink” Johnson. "If this were just another adult animated comedy that subverted expectations and took a satirical tone, it wouldn’t be so egregious," says The Root's Stephanie Holland. "However, it fails at its most basic requirement, which is to be funny. Since the trailer elicits literally no laughs, its exploitative nature feels more pronounced. Producers and writers could’ve made this show without using the familiar name of a TV classic to pop a number. Connecting this to Good Times was unnecessary and unwanted, according to many on social media. And as you’d expect, using a groundbreaking piece of Black culture in this manner got Black Twitter riled up, and no punches were pulled."
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Yvette Nicole Brown defends Good Times reboot: "This version of #GoodTimes is edgier and more irreverent than the Good Times of our childhood, but it’s still a show about family, fighting the system and working to make things better despite where you start out in the world," she tweeted. "That 100% lines up with my values."
Bomani Jones questions why Good Times reboot was even greenlighted: "it's very rare that i find online outrage to be in line with what's deserved," he tweeted. "holy sh t, this is one of those blue moon moments. not a single person with power thought this was a bad idea?"
Jon Stewart mocks New York Post story that questionably compares his 2014 penthouse sale to Donald Trump’s real estate dealings
The Post tried to equate The Daily Show host selling his New York City penthouse for $17.5 million in 2014 to Donald Trump inflating his property values. According to the Post, the property’s assessor valuation for Stewart's penthouse was under $850,000. "OMG!! I've been caught doing something not remotely similar to Trump!" tweeted Stewart. "I guess all I need to do now is start a fraud college, steal classified docs, bankrupt casinos, pay hush money, grab pussies, discriminate in housing, cheat at golf and foment insurrection and you'll revere me!" Meanwhile, The Wire creator David Simon slammed The Post article, tweeting: "If I were still a newspaperman and I wrote this as a serious comparison to any form of fraud and it was then published, I would go to the center of my newsroom and ask for an old manual Royal typewriter to be dropped on my head in an act of reportorial seppuku."
Futurama turns 25
When the sci-fi animated comedy from Matt Groening and David X. Cohen premiered on Fox on March 28, 1999, “it did so almost a decade after Matt Groening had broken open the gates of modern mainstream TV animation with The Simpsons," says Josh Spiegel. "The intervening 10 years had seen more mature animated fare on the small screen, from the edgy Ren and Stimpy to the cult favorite The Critic. Though The Critic was created by two longtime Simpsons writers (and led to a moderately controversial crossover between the two), Futurama marked Groening’s first new series since The Simpsons. Now that we’re a quarter-century removed from its premiere, you can draw some rough lines between the comedic style and character development of the two series, but the strengths of Futurama lie in something that The Simpsons deliberately never featured as its foundation: a hook-driven high concept that was both immensely appealing to eventual diehard fans, and yet not enough to draw in the same wide audience as the show about a town called Springfield."
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Futurama's stupid portrayal of the future is secretly brilliant: "Sit a young viewer down with Futurama today and they’ll be baffled by guest stars like Rich Little, Pauly Shore, and Ron Popeil (yes, the Ron Popeil)," says Mark Hill. "All futuristic sci-fi, even the comedy, is tied to the era that created it, and the fact that Al Gore guest starred twice (his head is conveniently kept alive, alongside so many other celebrities, with 31st-century technology) speaks to the year Futurama debuted. But those confused viewers will still quickly grasp every sci-fi idea that makes the future seem wild yet predictable. It’s all very silly, but the mundane, workaday concerns perfect for comedy haven’t changed a bit. In some ways, Futurama did presage the future. Clicky articles like ‘Times Futurama Freakishly Predicted The Future’ mostly just express shock and awe at basic joke construction, but what Futurama really saw coming was anarchical sci-fi comedies like Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites. Meanwhile, that some of its running subplots were teased with Easter eggs was a preview of a burgeoning internet fandom’s exhaustive Lore obsession. ‘Space Pilot 3000’ hid secrets that would pay off later, and it was fun to learn the truth in the days before YouTubers immediately picked every facet of pop culture to bloody scraps."
Billy West celebrates Futurama's 25th anniversary by praising its cast and crew: "You make me better than I am"
San Diego Comic-Con is getting the documentary treatment
Titled See You at San Diego: An Oral History of Comic-Con, Fandom, and the Triumph of Geek Culture, the documentary will tell the story of how "a scrappy group of teenage fans, zinesters, illustrators, stoners, hippies, weirdoes, bookworms, and science buffs in the late 1960s joined forces with an unemployed thirtysomething comic fan to create what has now become one of the most influential pop culture events ever," per Deadline.
NFL to auction off TV rights to its two Wednesday Christmas Day games
According to the Front Office Sports, the NFL's first-ever Wednesday Christmas Day games will be up for auction with bidding starting at $50 million.
Love Is Blind eclipses Avatar: The Last Airbender to take No. 1 on Nielsen's streaming charts
From Feb. 19 to 25, Love Is Blind received 2.1 billion viewing minutes, which was slightly down from the week prior but enough to claim the top spot. The Last Airbender’s viewership, meanwhile, fell to 1.9 billion viewing minutes.
The Real Bros of Simi Valley goes from Facebook Watch series to Roku movie
Roku has greenlit The Real Bros of Simi Valley: High School Reunion, a spinoff of the Real Housewives parody series that previously aired on Facebook Watch. Created by Jimmy Tatro and Christian Pierce, The Real Bros of Simi Valley "started as a web series on Tatro’s YouTube page before moving to Facebook after Tatro broke out as one of the stars of Netflix’s American Vandal. It aired two seasons on the short-lived video service, running for a total of three seasons, ending in 2020," per Deadline. "Now the gang is back with Tatro, Nick Colletti, Tanner Petulla, Cody Ko reprising their roles."
Jenna Lyons will be back for Real Housewives of New York Season 15, but her girlfriend will be kept off camera
In a video shared to social media Thursday, Bravo announced that the former J.Crew executive would be returning to the franchise in season 15, alongside costars Jessel Taank, Sai De Silva, Ubah Hussan, Erin Dana Lichy and Brynn Whitfield.
Hulu with Live TV adds MLB Network
Hulu’s subscription TV service has added MLB Network to its core channel lineup in time for Major League Baseball opening day.
Robert Downey Jr. is touted as "Academy Award Winner" four times in HBO’s new The Sympathizer trailer
Watch the Oppenheimer Oscar winner’s different characters get funky in the official trailer for the HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-winning novel. The Sympathizer premieres April 14.
Jeremy Renner makes his triumphant return as Paramount+ teases Mayor of Kingstown Season 3
The Renner-led crime drama series returns on June 2, nearly 18 months after the actor's snowplow accident.
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous stars return in Netflix's trailer for Jurassic World: Chaos Theory
Paul-Mikel Williams and Sean Giambrone are reprising their Camp Cretaceous roles of Darius and Ben for Chaos Theory, which premieres 10 episodes on Netflix May 24. "Set six years after the events of that first series and shortly before the 2022 film Jurassic World Dominion, the kids — dubbed 'the Nublar Six' by the media — are entering adulthood and struggling to find their footing on the mainland, which is now teaming with dinosaurs as a result of what went down in 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," pew EW.
Watch Amazon's trailer for Them: The Scare
Deborah Ayorinde returns to lead the new season of the horror anthology series, playing the new role of Detective Dawn Reeve, a character whose life is turned upside down by an unsolved murder. Them: The Scare premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 25.
HBO releases the trailer for Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion
The documentary that "uncovers the toxic origins and culture of the teen brand and the global ramifications of mass-produced clothing" premieres April 9.
Neal Brennan reveals trailer for his third Netflix special
The Chappelle's Show co-creator's Crazy Good standup special premieres April 9.