Well, TV fans, the die is cast. Last week, The CW green-lighted The Carrie Diaries, that Sex and the City prequel network television has been threatening to inflict on us for years. Set in the ’80s, the show will follow Carrie Bradshaw’s high-school years in Connecticut, where we’re sure she’ll be asking a whole new, teen-focused slew of pseudo-profound questions (“What does ‘going steady’ really mean?”) and lusting over shoes at Contempo Casuals. But forgive us if we don’t intend to watch the show for long enough to find out. Like Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, we’ve had our fill of Carrie. In fact, the only good thing we can imagine coming from the prequel is that it inspired us brainstorm some adult TV characters who already have kid equivalents on other shows. Find out who Zack Morris grew up to be, and which kid reminds us of Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess, after the jump.
Right now, Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson from Glee are arguably the sweetest, most talented young couple on television. Often celebrated as paving the way for gay teens on TV (don’t worry, we didn’t forget about you, Billy Douglas), the duo has defied the odds of Glee couple failure to prevail as one of its most functional long-term pairs. Indeed, other gay teen characters sometimes find similarly successful matches within their respective series, but we’ve never seen a pair never quite as Entertainment Weekly cover-worthy as Kurt and Blaine. So, we’re reprising our role as trans-series matchmaker with some LGBT high schoolers we’d like to see together. Check ‘em out after the jump, and hit the comments to let us know of any other pairings you’d like to see.
As we may have mentioned, we are pretty excited to see Absolutely Fabulous back on TV. We missed Patsy and Edina, we missed Saffy, we missed Gran, and we especially missed Bubble, Eddy’s walking acid trip of an assistant. But it wasn’t until we read Tom & Lorenzo’s great blog post about the show’s return that we realized we had been longing for more than just the characters. As they note, Eddy has one hell of a kitchen, and it feels great to watch the cast sip coffee and chug champagne in it again. The Monsoon kitchen and 14 others that we wouldn’t minding owning are after the jump.
The recent news that Hilary Mantel’sWolf Hall will be adapted into a television show doesn’t surprise us too much. We can only add it to the growing list of book-to-small-screen adaptations that we are anxiously awaiting, joining the planned HBO series based onA Visit From the Goon Squad, and the one on Eugenides’s Middlesex, which HBO seems to have optioned and then forgotten about. However, there are no promises that any book to TV adaptation, even those with great books as starting points, will be any good, and there are hundreds of shows created in this way that aren’t — but in our minds, that just makes the great ones even greater. To get ourselves pumped for the adaptation of Wolf Hall, we’ve collected a list of the ten all-time best (according to us, that is) TV shows adapted from books. Click through to see our picks, and be sure to let us know your own favorites in the comments!
When word spread that Gossip Girl was going to set an episode at New York’s cultish “immersive theatre” production Sleep No More, fans of the show — who have been known to develop wallet-crippling addictions to it — were not happy. Would their favorite secret spot soon be overrun by teenyboppers keen on re-enacting Serena and Blair’s melodramatic intrigue? Would Gossip Girl give away any of the Macbeth-inspired experience’s secrets? Well, the episode aired last night, and we learned far more about Chuck Bass’s libido (or newfound lack thereof) and Ivy’s ex-boyfriend than Sleep No More. To commemorate this supremely odd moment of convergence, we’ve rounded up some of the best and strangest moments that have found TV shows appropriating cult, underground, and indie culture, from Saved by the Bell‘s rave to Roseanne‘s riot grrrls, after the jump.
Most scripted television strives to mirror contemporary life with at least some level of precision. Producers spend months, sometimes years, meticulously surveying target audiences and researching subcultures in order to accurately reflect the humor, taste, attention span, fears, politics, and self-image of a particular demographic or scene. But sometimes, they end up forecasting and setting cultural trends rather than reflecting them.
That’s clearly been the case with the 1920s fashion craze brought on by Martin Scorsese’s Emmy-winning Boardwalk Empire, still young in its second season. The fascination with the Roaring Twenties may have already begun in 2009, when faux speakeasies began popping up in every city across the US, but the show has repackaged the Prohibition image for a wider audience and spoon-fed it to designers, whose catwalks are now crowded with flapper-inspired frocks and feathers.Boardwalk Empire isn’t the first, though, and it won’t be the last. We’ve rounded up the television shows that, for better or for worse, catalyzed the fashion fads of their eras. Which current shows do you hope turn out to be trendsetters? Read More »
Besides the fact that they’re both set in New York and air on Monday nights, there aren’t many similarities between Gossip Girl and Bored to Death. So we were surprised and amused to see that recent weeks have seen each show shake things up with the same type of new character — a shrink. While Chuck tries to seduce (and then get some real help from) the pretty therapist on Gossip Girl, Sarah Silverman guests on Bored to Death as a woman whose idea of mental health care involves demanding foot rubs from patients. This serendipitous convergence of Brooklyn and the Upper East Side got us thinking about some TV’s most memorable administrators of the talking cure, both real and fictional. Our top 10 are after the jump; add your picks in the comments.
While Hollywood still sits on top of a celluloid empire, TV production is rapidly moving east. New York may not have the temperate filming climate that Los Angeles boasts, but it does offer producers a 30 percent tax credit, instated in 2008, and of course the authentic New York City backdrop against which many shows are set. This season, 23 prime-time series are being filmed in New York, up from a measly nine in 2006.
But flying a film crew out east and renting out a Brooklyn loft doesn’t ensure that a show will get the aura — or the facts — right. New York shows have tried and failed to accurately portray New York City on screen, often apparently because they were too busy collecting a library of picturesque Central Park shots to pick up on the kinds of food New Yorkers eat, how much rent they pay, the way they talk to their neighbors, and the fact that most of us actually don’t spend all that much time in Central Park. We’ve rounded up our favorite Big Apple shows and ranked them from realistic to laughable. Which city show do you think is most representative of the real New York?
As you may have heard, Gossip Girl star Penn Badgley is down with Occupy Wall Street. Earlier this month, before a Katy Perry or an Alec Baldwin or a Kanye West was popping up in Zuccotti Park every few minutes, our very own Dan Humphrey (one of the show’s few 99 percenters) was marching with the occupiers and dispensing such self-aware commentary as, “I mean, listen, it’s cheesy, but I want to do whatever I can. Let’s be honest: I’m on fucking Gossip Girl. It’s absurd that celebrity power is what it is, but, like, use any tool you have, you know?”
Well, the protesters must have appreciated Badgley’s contribution, because yesterday they paraded right through the Gossip Girl set during a march in solidarity with Occupy Oakland, where police fired tear gas and possibly rubber bullets at demonstrators Tuesday night, leaving one veteran in critical condition. Although Lonely Boy is nowhere to be found in the footage, other personnel on the shoot seem to have taken the interruption in stride. Meanwhile, we’re left with a heightened sense of guilt over lying slack-jawed on our couch every Monday at 8pm, watching Blair negotiate the difficulties of becoming a princess, when we could be taking part in the revolution.
1. Entertainment Weekly has your first look at stills from Tim Burton’s reanimation of his 1984 short film Frankenweenie — which Disney executives originally found “too weird” and actually fired him for making at the time.
2. Patti Smith, Ke$ha, and Adele are among the artists contributing Bob Dylan covers to a new charity compilation album that will benefit Amnesty International. [via NME]
3. Watch Beyoncé throw an amazing, technicolor trailer park party in her newly-released music video for “Party,” which features cameos by Solange, Kelly Rowland, and a dumpster swimming pool. [via Vulture]
4. Oliver Stone has signed on to direct a movie for HBO that will be based on Robert Caro’s 1974 Pulitzer-Prize winning book about how famed urban planner Robert Moses reshaped the face of New York. [via THR]
5. Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked the question that many of us following the Occupy Wall Street movement have been wondering: What the fuck happened in Oakland? [via Gawker]
