Jason Segel’s new AMC anthology “Dispatches From Elsewhere” is having its first audience screening at NeueHouse Hollywood, the newest of the exclusive-ish members-only workspace clubs with which Los Angeles is being overrun. The mid-December crowd is intimate, mostly friends of Segel. Since the end of “How I Met Your Mother,” on which he starred for nine years, the
Television
January 2, 2020 2:02PM PT RuPaul’s eponymous daytime talk show is not moving forward after last summer’s three-week trial run, a source familiar with the matter tells Variety. “RuPaul,” which mixed celebrity and newsmaker interviews and focused on empowering and aspirational messaging, was produced by World of Wonder and Telepictures, and distributed by Warner Bros.
She already has more than 30 Emmy Awards, a star on the Walk of Fame, a Peabody, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now Ellen DeGeneres is adding another trophy to her list of accomplishments: the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s Carol Burnett Award. The honor, which was created
The Golden Globes aim to surprise, so predicting winners should always be taken with a grain of salt. That’s especially true with a voting body as small as the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., which boasts fewer than 100 members. Nonetheless, there are certain quirks to be found among HFPA voters that might give a hint
The 20-year-old son of “Orange Is the New Black” creator Jenji Kohan died in a skiing accident in Park City, Utah, on New Year’s Eve, according to local authorities. Charlie Noxon, a junior at Columbia University, was on an intermediate trail near Canyons Village at the Park City Mountain Resort at the time of the
January 2, 2020 11:26AM PT The former head of HBO, Richard Plepler, has made it official with Apple TV Plus, inking a five-year production deal with the entertainment streaming arm of the iPhone maker. The agreement between Apple and Plepler’s newly launched production company, Eden Productions, spans original series, feature films and documentaries. “I’m excited
Netflix has renewed superhero drama “Raising Dion” for a second season, the streaming service announced on Thursday. The Season 2 order includes eight one-hour episodes, and production will begin in 2020. Netflix revealed the news with an announcement video featuring Senegalese painter Bou Bou painting a portrait of Season 1’s lead characters, Nicole and Dion.
January 2, 2020 9:53AM PT Following a decent ratings debut on Sunday night, Fox’s ‘Flirty Dancing’ stumbled in the ratings on a New Year’s Day that was mostly filled with reruns. The Jenna Dewan-hosted series, which combines dancing and dating, pulled in a 0.4 and 1.8 million viewers on its regular Wednesday time slot, down
Laura Jarrett’s first day on the job started early this morning, well before you could even think about returning to the one you’ve held for months. She joined co-anchor Christine Romans Thursday for the first time on “Early Start,” CNN’s entry in what has fast become a serious business matter: catching TV-news early birds. Despite
Belgian actor Mehdi Dehbi is best known for appearing in “Mary Queen of Scots” and “A Most Wanted Man” on the big screen, as well as stage work in plays including “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Just Assassins.” But his very first role, at age 3, was playing Jesus when his parochial school staged scenes
Pepsi hopes to follow its decades-long history of placing a motto on everyone’s lips. The beverage giant today is unveiling five different commercials all aimed at burnishing its latest slogan, “That’s What I Like.” In two of the spots, crafted with Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Alma, an ad agency that specializes in
David Stern, the longtime NBA commissioner who transformed the league through television deals and other media partnerships, died Wednesday, three weeks after suffering a brain hemorrhage. He was 77. “For 22 years, I had a courtside seat to watch David in action,” current NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. “He was a mentor
You could call it 2020 vision. Disney Plus rang in the new decade by announcing that “WandaVision,” its upcoming series about Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), has been bumped up from 2021 to 2020. An exact release date has not yet been announced. The news was included in a Twitter video
Chuck Lorre wanted to write a show about aging guys with old-guy problems. The streaming revolution allowed him to do so. Lorre, one of the most successful producers in television history, offers his thoughts on how the dawn of the commercial-free binge-watching age has changed the nature of television storytelling in the latest episode of
Many films and television shows use choreographed routines to express a character’s emotions or push them forward to a new place in their arc, but more often than not these are dance routines on solid ground. Netflix’s “Spinning Out” puts its characters, and audience by extension, on ice. In “Spinning Out,” Kat Baker (Kaya Scodelario)
Reality shows such as MTV’s “The Real World” and CBS’ “Big Brother” have boasted about being social experiments where strangers are shoved into the same house and forced to live with each other 24/7. They are known for delivering a lot of literal in-your-face drama, as the close quarters and high-intensity of differing opinions, let
When your job entails watching several new shows a week, overlapping themes are inevitable. Still, similarities between shows are rarely as stark as those between the first seasons of Netflix’s “Spinning Out” (out Jan. 2) and USA’s “Dare Me” (which premiered Dec. 20). Both dramas focus on teen girls as restless as they are talented,
December 31, 2019 12:53PM PT The rights holders to some of TV’s biggest hit series set themselves up in 2019 to cash out big time as media companies committed enormous sums to license properties that will eventually help their streaming services stand out. First up was “The Office ” — a pillar of Netflix’s library
Steven Zaillian is getting ready to start shooting his “Ripley” TV series in September 2020 in Italy. The eight-episode Showtime series stars Andrew Scott (“Fleabag,” “Sherlock”) in the titular role. “Ripley” will mark the multi-hyphenate Zaillian’s return to television after creating HBO’s award-winning miniseries “The Night Of.” He is currently on the Italian island of
MADRID — Movistar Plus, the pay TV/SVOD arm of giant European telecom Telefonica, is upping the ante. On New Year’s Eve, it announced a first 2020 release line-up – more titles may be added – that has two big swings, more emphasis on action, and a larger number of comedy and non-fiction plays. 2020’s 14
Plenty of questions have been raised over the stability of NFL TV ratings across the last few years, but this season, the league has been a mainstay among falling live event ratings in other departments, with “” closing the 2019-2020 season at a four-year viewership high. The final “SNF” between the Seattle Seahawks and the
Reality TV has faced no greater existential threat — not the rise of prestige cable, not audience attention span, and certainly not good taste — than the rise of social media. The genre that habituated 21st-century Americans to the rancorous, odd, and simply gross ways their countrymen might behave on camera generated a taste for
December 30, 2019 2:31PM PT Making a TV show whose plot hinges on miracles is a challenging thing. Perceived miracles are startling in our world because of their divergence from universally accepted reality; events diverging, instead, from a reality a writer is creating are less mind-blowing. It takes a carefully balanced, well-constructed world in order
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, “Deputy” premieres on Fox, and Ricky Gervais hosts the 2020 Golden Globes on
December 30, 2019 9:30AM PT Surely there has been a show more reliant on cliché than “Deputy,” Fox’s new cop drama. But none springs to mind. What’s worse, those clichés tend to move only in one direction — towards an argument in favor of cops as uniquely insightful, and on any restraint on police power,
An NFL dominated night saw the premiere of Fox’s “Flirty Dancing,” which posted a decent TV ratings debut. Fox debuted the Jenna Dewan-hosted dancing-dating show on Sunday to a 1.0 rating among adults 18-49 and 3.5 million total viewers. It’s worth noting, however, that the premiere aired live across all time zones and a substantial
December 30, 2019 8:28AM PT Say this for “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist”: The expansiveness of its music-rights budget is to be admired. In the pilot, Zoey (Jane Levy) hears the inner thoughts of those around her, as expressed through a group performance of the Beatles’s “Help!” It’s a splashy statement of purpose for a show whose
Zac Efron’s morbid title for his new reality series “Killing Zac Efron” hit dangerously close to home when the actor was forced to receive medical treatment while on location in Papua New Guinea. Efron confirmed on Instagram Sunday that he had gotten sick in Papua New Guinea, but “bounced back quick and finished an amazing
Bill and Joe Smith, who appeared on Channel 4’s “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” in the U.K., have been found dead in Sevenoaks, Kent, according to numerous reports. They were 32. A spokeswoman said in a statement to Mirror Online that “Kent Police was called at 11.34am on Saturday after the bodies of two men
December 29, 2019 9:43AM PT Barack Obama has released his favorite movies and TV shows of 2019, which includes some top awards contenders as well as his own production company’s “American Factory.” While mostly dominated by dramas, the list also includes a few documentaries besides “American Factory,” like “Apollo 11” and “Amazing Grace,” the concert