1. The Wire’s Michael K. Williams isn’t the only beloved star joining Season 3 of Community; John Goodman will also appear in at least six episodes of the show as the new Vice Dean of the School of Air Conditioning Repair. [via Vulture]
2. James Franco, who General Hospital fans know as performance artist and serial killer Robert “Franco” Frank, is returning to the soap this September in a long-term story arc that is being called his character’s “most twisted plan yet.” [via TV Guide]
3. There’s a “grittier” remake of Bonnie and Clyde in the works, with Limitless director Neil Burger at the helm and Up in the Air co-writer Sheldon Turner working on the screenplay. While we’re not sure this reboot is at all necessary, it should be really fun to cast. [via Deadline]
4. Last night Stephen Colbert debuted a pine-fresh, male version of those controversial “talking vagina” Summer’s Eve ads. Watch the macho madness unfold here.
5. Care to buy The Dude’s Venice Beach bungalow? The Big Lebowski house is up for sale, and it will only cost you a cool $2.3 million (rug not included). [via AV Club]
Bonus link: 15 Places You Can No Longer Go As An Adult
Today at Flavorpill, we celebrated yesterday’s historic weddings by collectively swooning over 60 awesome portraits of newly-married gay couples in New York. We got our first glimpse at the plans for the Apple Store in Grand Central. We appreciated Laura Goode’s thoughtful piece of writing on Amy Winehouse’s life (and role in our lives). We were excited that Omar from The Wire (aka Michael K. Williams) will be playing a biology professor in the last three episodes of the upcoming season of Community. We were very curious as to what deep fried fluffernutter tastes like. We watched Sean Bean do what he does best — die. We found the idea that your fingerprints can reveal a coke habit kind of strange (it’s because of the sweat). We wanted to sail around on this crazy yacht that doubles as a private island. We were kind of creeped out by these paper eyelashes, but at the same time we really want to wear some. And finally, we were scandalized by how much Elizabeth Taylor’s old-school drama with Debbie Reynolds resembles Angelina Jolie’s modern-day “romantic feud” with Jennifer Aniston. Evidently, tabloid history really does repeat itself.
Today at Flavorpill, we vowed to try every drink on this list of 20 alcoholic beverages inspired by the Harry Potter series. We discovered that bee wearing is a competitive sport. We argued over which bad cliche we’d like to see banned for good. We wondered if anyone watching iCarly has ever seen The Wire. We witnessed the Olsens trying their best to sell us overpriced t-shirts. We wondered how the British teen in this nutty photo managed to make it look like he was biking on water. We remembered a time when Comic-Con was actually about comics. We were proud that a New Yorker (Rep. Louise Slaughter) topped The Awl’s list of members of congress who have totally metal names. We wanted to warn Robin about this statue of Batman and Superman getting cozy in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens. We pitted Jordan Catalano against Tim Riggins — and decided that Riggins totally wins. And finally, we were both impressed and slightly horrified to hear just how far Bridesmaids star Melissa McCarthy will go for a laugh.
Now that we’ve gone to the trouble of compiling our lists of the most memorable TV themes of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it would seem irresponsible (not to mention totally at odds with our obsessive-compulsive nature) not to carry on into the 2000s — in spite of the fact that TV theme songs all but disappeared in the decade, replaced on most shows by a quick title hit (though sometimes an ingenious and musical one) and credits rolling under the opening scenes.
However, a few shows (particularly on cable) managed to keep the opening theme song alive, while others took the fifteen to thirty seconds allowed by their networks and made something special of them. As before, it’s not just about an appropriate theme for great show (enough about the Buffy theme already); it’s about a catchy tune that fixes itself in your cranium, one that you not only sing along with when the show starts, but that even pops into your head during the day, or works its way into your shower-crooning repertoire. Our playlist is after the jump, and you can drag and drop your picks into the comments.
Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we had a hard time deciding which one of Woody Allen’s many muses is our favorite — but it’s probably a toss up between Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton. We discovered ShelfLuv, a new website that allows you to manage a virtual reading list of your favorite titles and connect with friends and other like-minded readers. We tried to decide who had the best Civil War facial hair. We got a good look at the single most valuable piece of American comic art ever to sell. We watched five minutes of The Lion King recut into something that vaguely resembles The Wire. We got a peek at the script for HBO’s now-scrapped Nikki Finke-inspired pilot Tilda. We laughed out loud as we streamed the full Book of Mormon original cast recording — it’s so good! We celebrated author Roger Hargreaves’ 76th birthday with sixteen Mr. Men and Little Miss-themed Google Doodles. We were jealous of Mark Zuckerberg’s $7 million croquet lawn. We downloaded The Very Best’s Super Mom Mixtape. And finally, we considered making “Believe It Or Not” Salad — just one of the really odd dishes from the 1933 Congressional Cook Book — for dinner. It definitely sounds better than the Cheap Chicken (which is inexplicably made out of ham).
Treme, the quietly brilliant HBO musical drama that examines New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, debuts this week on DVD and Blu-ray, and if you haven’t seen it, you should rent or buy it post haste. (If there is one takeaway from this post, that’s it.) The series was co-created by David Simon, the journalist-turned-TV genius behind the show that launched a thousand blog posts, the late, great The Wire. And in addition to the many things that are somewhat miraculous about Treme, there is this: It is a rare case of a follow-up television show that measures up to its iconic predecessor.
TV is a tricky business, and more often than not, the creator or primary creative force behind a big hit will go into their next series, guns a-blazing, only to find that television audiences are more fickle than they thought. Steven Bochco followed Hill Street Blues with Bay City Blues; Garry Marshall and Thomas L. Miller followed The Odd Couple with Me and the Chimp; West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s next show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was a costly one-season flop for NBC; M*A*S*H show runners Gene Reynolds and Larry Gelbart’s Karen folded after five months; Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls follow-up The Return of Jezebel James lasted a mere three episodes; and Mitchell Hurwitz’s Running Wilde reunited him with Arrested Development stars Will Arnett and David Cross but ran only spottily on Fox last fall before disappearing altogether. However, there are occasions when a TV series manages to equal (or even surpass) the critical and popular success of its predecessor. Join us after the jump for a look at ten television shows where lightning struck twice.
Read More »
It turns out you’re not the only one who sees the Dickensian qualities inherent in The Wire. As Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson explain, “There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia.” Visit The Hooded Utilitarian for their complete (and rather genius) “history” of The Wire, along with additional sample pages. [via Lapham's Quarterly]
It’s been all over the news that 30-year-old Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, the Baltimore resident who played a character of the same name on The Wire, has been arrested in a large-scale drug raid similar to the kind carried out on the show. Pearson, whose legal troubles predated the show, apparently slipped back into her old habits when the show went off the air. This seems to be the latest in a perhaps not-so-strange tendency for the lives of actors to be in some way affected by their art, whether for good or for ill. Sure, we know lots of actors fall in love with each other on set, but what about actors that are inspired to more interesting ends? Click through for our list of actors whose lives have mirrored those of their own characters.
Read More »
Time for a confession that should thoroughly alienate a good portion of our readership: I don’t like The Lord of the Rings. Okay, let’s be fair: I don’t really know The Lord of the Rings. I never read the books, and only saw the first movie— and that was the original theatrical cut, which was only, what, six hours long? Point is, that was enough. Not my cup of tea. So I’m as surprised as anyone to be genuinely excited by the new trailer for HBO’s upcoming medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones, based on a series of books by George R.R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire, which (no surprise) I haven’t read. But the show’s pedigree is top-notch: it is co-created by David Benioff, who wrote the novel and screenplay of one of our favorite underrated dramas, Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, and the writing staff includes Jane Espenson, five-year vet of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s got a terrific cast as well — Red Riding vets Mark Addy and Sean Bean (the latter of whom appeared in the aforementioned Lord of the Rings pictures), the great Peter Dinklage from The Station Agent, and Aidan Gillen, aka The Wire’s Tommy Carcetti. Being an HBO drama, it will also apparently have naked people in it. At any rate, check out the trailer after the jump, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Read More »
Full disclosure: Matthew Perry was always our favorite Friend. So it was with unbridled enthusiasm that we tuned in to last night’s premiere of his new ABC series Mr. Sunshine, and y’know what? It’s pretty good. It has a bit of that fumbling-for-our-comic-voice thing that plagues just about every situation comedy pilot (including the aforementioned Friends — ever watch their first episode? Not promising!), but the writing is snappy, it’s an ideal vehicle for Perry’s dry wit, and it sports our new favorite TV theme song (watch the episode here). Best of all, the supporting cast includes Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) and Allison Janney (C.J. from The West Wing) — so it’s a show full of people we’re glad to see back on TV.
And that got us thinking about other actors we miss from TV shows past. Some TV folks graduate to movies (George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jim Carrey) while others bounce from one series to the next (Edie Falco, David Duchovny, Kelsey Grammer, Betty White, Peter Krause). But some kind of disappear from sight — either by choice (Jerry Seinfeld), by making poor choices (most of his co-stars), or by never flipping from recognizable character actor to name brand. Whatever the reasons may be, we’ve compiled a list of ten of our favorite TV actors who are overdue for a comeback vehicle.
Read More »
