Television

Aline Brosh McKenna has signed a three year overall deal with ABC Studios. Brosh McKenna was previously under an overall at CBS Television Studios, where she and Rachel Bloom co-created the Emmy-winning CW series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” on which she also served as showrunner in addition to directing the season finales of all four seasons. She

Welcome back to Tune In: our weekly newsletter offering a guide to the best of the week’s TV. Each week, Variety’s TV team combs through the week’s schedule, selecting our picks of what to watch and when/how to watch them. This week, Super Bowl LIV hits the turf, “Masked Singer” season 3 premieres, and both

Swedish series “Caliphate” begins in Syria with Pervin and other women being corralled into a square. A man is dragged to a table, his arm then stretched across it; the women are told to look away. Then a man standing beside the table produces a meat cleaver, raises it,  and chops off the man’s lower

“Interrogation,” a new drama on CBS All Access, depicts the aftermath of a gruesome murder, with a young man imprisoned, perhaps wrongfully. But it is really all about its unusual hook — that, after the pilot, episodes two through nine can be watched in any order ahead of episode ten’s finale. And it’s regrettable: There’s

“The Iron Lady” and “Shame” writer Abi Morgan has revealed she is battling breast cancer. The 51-year-old British writer shared news of her diagnosis during a screening of the second season premiere of BBC One and Sundance TV drama “The Split,” which is produced by “Chernobyl” outfit Sister Pictures and Little Chick. Highlighting that it

Comcast’s pay TV service Sky is adding two new channels to its U.K. portfolio, the company announced on Monday. Sky Documentaries and Sky Nature will launch this spring and will be available as linear and on demand channels and also on Sky’s streamer NOW TV. Originals on Sky Documentaries will include “Tiger Woods: The Comeback”;

Nominated for YJR Best Nordic TV Drama Screenplay Award at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival, a second season of “Happily Never After” is already in the works – a clear indication of a shift in audience tastes, in what was just a couple of years a Nordic Noir dominated market. It’s also a sort of rarity

“The Cave” director Feras Fayyad has finally made it into the United States, weeks after he was denied entry into the country. According to National Geographic Documentary Films, which is behind the Oscar-nominated “The Cave,” “we can report that Feras arrived safely this evening in Los Angeles.” Fayyad’s arrival comes after he missed a Television

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Lapse in Judgement,” the first season finale of “The L Word: Generation Q.” Sometimes a title says it all. In the first season finale of “The L Word: Generation Q,” many of the characters take big — potentially controversial, depending on your perspective —

Within hours of the news of Kobe Bryant’s death breaking, a fast-growing crowd of about two hundred people had gathered outside of the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon to mourn the Lakers legend, who died earlier that day in a helicopter crash. Chants of “Kobe! Kobe!” broke out spontaneously outside of the

January 26, 2020 1:30PM PT James Corden is taking the carpool lane to Comedy Central. In the latest example of newly found synergy inside the recently merged ViacomCBS universe, Comedy Central will start airing repeats of CBS’ “The Late Late Show with James Corden” starting on Monday, Jan. 27. The “Late Late Show” repeats will

Kobe Bryant’s shocking death forced major TV news and sports outlets to scramble on Sunday to cover the helicopter crash in Southern California that took the life of the legendary 41-year-old basketball star,  his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others. From the BBC to Fox News, Bryant’s death dominated coverage as soon as word surfaced

In the history of the Academy Awards, only three films have won the Hollywood equivalent of the royal flush — collecting statues for best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay — and it’s safe to say all have held up fairly well: “It Happened One Night,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Silence

The race is on for the Grammys’ best new artist with Lizzo and Billie Eilish positioned as frontrunners in an exceptionally exciting 2020 category. Survey the odds for all eight of the year’s contenders below. Black Pumas Eric Burton and Adrian Quesada have been a duo only since 2017, but they sound as if they’ve

When Adam Driver hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 2016 he went viral for a “Star Wars”/”Undercover Boss” mashup sketch that saw his Kylo Ren put on a disguise in order to observe his employees ala the CBS reality show. Four years later, he has done it again. While hosting the Jan. 26 episode of “SNL,”

With the 92nd Annual Academy Awards just around the corner, “Saturday Night Live” devoted a segment in its Jan. 26 “Weekend Update” to cast member Melissa Villaseñor’s thoughts about a number of the nominees — and one notable snub. Clad in an Oscar gold dress, Villaseñor sat next to Colin Jost at the anchor desk,

The 45th season of “Saturday Night Live” has been on hiatus for a month, and what a month it has been. The last episode aired just days after Donald Trump was impeached, and this week alone saw House impeachment managers presenting their case on why it would threaten the country’s security for him to stay

As both Hillary Clinton and the team behind “Hillary” know very well, it’s nigh impossible at this point for someone to approach her with total objectivity. Throughout her life, Clinton has been a uniquely polarizing figure both in her own right and because of her marriage to former President Bill Clinton, himself a perpetual lightning

GÖTEBORG, Sweden  All3Media is to handle international rights on Icelandic crime series “Black Sands” which, currently in development, is to be pitched at the Göteborg Festival’s TV Drama Vision confab on Thursday. “Black Sands” marks the first crime thriller to be created by Icelandic helmer Baldvin Z (“Trapped”) since the hit series “Case.” Commissioned by

Fox declared in November that it had sold all the advertising time available in its looming February 2 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV. But just this week. it found a little more. After holding nearly two months’ worth of discussions, Fox and the National Football League have devised a way to add commercial inventory to

January 24, 2020 6:00PM PT NBC has given out its fifth drama pilot order for the 2020-2021 season. The broadcaster has commissioned “Ordinary Joe.” It explores the three parallel lives of the show’s main character after he makes a pivotal choice at a crossroads in his life. The series asks the question of how different

Gabrielle Union appears to have addressed “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews’ comments questioning her allegations of racism and sexism on the set of the NBC series. Union did not mention Crews by name, but in a series of tweets posted after the host’s appearance on “3rd Hour of Today,” Union praised the “multiple witnesses

The Oscars are just two weeks away, so it’s time to start making final predictions about who is going to win. On this week’s episode of “The Big Ticket,” Variety and iHeart’s movie podcast, I invited the magazine’s deputy awards and features editor (and my “Pick of the Week” co-host) Jenelle Riley onto the show

Marvel Television’s remaining slate continues to dwindle. Variety has confirmed that the animated shows “Howard the Duck” and “Tigra & Dazzler” — two of four animated Marvel projects set up at Hulu — are no longer in the works at the streamer. The other two shows, “M.O.D.O.K” and “Hit Monkey,” are currently still on track

The issues on Disney Plus’ Obi-Wan Kenobi series are either a minor stumble or a portent of trouble ahead, depending on who you ask. It was reported on Thursday that series writer Hossein Amini was no longer attached to the project as Disney wished to overhaul the scripts. The move led to pre-production in London

In today’s TV news roundup, HBO released a teaser for “The Undoing” and Showtime dropped a trailer for “The Trade” Season 2. FIRST LOOKS HBO released a teaser for its forthcoming limited series “The Undoing,“ which will premiere in May. The six-part series based on the novel “You Should Have Known” by Jean Hanff Korelitz,

Sean Hannity has talked with President Donald Trump many times, but never quite like this. Hannity is the latest TV-news personality to take on what has in recent years developed into a Super Bowl Sunday tradition: a pre-game interview with the President of the United States. Savannah Guthrie, Gayle King and Bill O’Reilly are among

January 24, 2020 12:15PM PT CBS is developing a project that takes a comedic look at the age-old “12 Angry Men” dilemma of how does a jury come to a unanimous verdict? The network has issued a pilot order for “We The Jury,” a hybrid series from “9JKL” co-creator Dana Klein and Stephanie Darrow. The

Taylor Swift has bowed out of a possible performance on the Grammy Awards program Sunday night just as stealthily as it appeared she might have bowed into it, multiple sources tell Variety. Her possible appearance on the show had been kept a secret — albeit not an extremely well-kept secret —  so her exit won’t

Aiming to reduce its waste and emissions, London-based “Idol” producer-distributor Fremantle has formed a partnership with Albert, a collaborative industry-backed project aimed at tackling the environmental impact of the entertainment sector.  Founded in 2011, Albert is governed by an industry consortium that includes BAFTA, independent companies and broadcasters.  Fremantle is working with Albert to develop